Chapter Text
Sometimes, Eddie considered that everything would have been a lot easier if he’d just gotten eaten to death by demonic fucking bats.
The government wouldn’t have had to throw together some dumb fucking story about how he’d really helped stop a serial killer and was some kind of hero, actually. The doctors and nurses in Hawkins General wouldn’t have had to spend weeks carefully putting him back together. Wayne wouldn’t have had to share the new trailer he bought with government hush money.
And Eddie’d have gone out a hero to basically everyone that really mattered. He had to believe that the party would have told Wayne that he’d stood his ground, done something brave. It could have been… Narratively satisfying.
But no one got that neat little ending.
Instead, Eddie’d hung onto consciousness long enough to watch Harrington drop down beside him under a backdrop of dissolving red and black, patches of blue showing through as he struggled to keep his eyes open – he’d learn later that the Upside Down had come apart around them, depositing them in the real world without even the need of a portal, thanks to on-the-other-side-of-the-country superhero girl El burning out Vecna’s mind while their group destroyed his body – Harrington’s mouth forming words that Eddie’s brain had decided not to share. He’d passed out sometime around when Harrington worked an arm under his shoulders and legs and lifted him, pain rising up in a great dark wave and pulling him under.
He’d woke up in a hospital hooked up to a dozen machines. And he’d stayed there for weeks, doing what the doctors told him to do, watching the lies on the news with a numb feeling of disconnect, and nodding when he had visitors and they asked him questions.
Everything felt distant. Far away. He tried to explain it to Wayne, once, who looked at him with his sad, tired eyes, and said, “You’ll feel better once you get out of here.”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, nodding along like the good little bobble-head he’d become. He hoped it was true. And then he got out of there, and he found out that it wasn’t.
#
Wayne took him to the new trailer after the doctors released him from the hospital.
Eddie looked at the outside – slate gray, with black shutters and a metal storm door – and felt as though the world had tipped sideways under his feet. He ignored that and followed Wayne inside, disoriented by their old mugs and Wayne’s hats hanging up on the walls, neatly transplanted, just like the flesh on his stomach; the doctors had removed huge swaths of skin from his thighs and put them across his stomach and the terrible wounds there that they hadn’t truly understood, the flesh reacting as though it had burned though Eddie, at least, couldn’t recall that happening in the attack.
He heard himself make some vague, unimportant conversation with Wayne, but the words felt fuzzy and distant, disconnected from his body. He drank some water out of one of their old cups in a new kitchen, disoriented by the placement of the sink and the color of the fridge.
The strange disconnected feeling got worse when Wayne showed him to his room. Most of his things had been carefully arranged in the space. His guitar hung on the wall. He had a mattress on the floor. All of his favorite singers – the men who’d been his favorite singers, anyway – stared back him from posters carefully tapped up around the space.
“Is it… alright?” Wayne asked, lingering in the doorway, turning his hat in his hands.
Eddie thought about Wayne carefully moving their things, cleaning them, trying to put everything where it belonged, in a world where nothing fit right anymore. He thought, once upon a time, not even that long ago, he would have thrown his head back in despair at each minor mistake, wailing out complaints about this or that, dropping down on the bed and pulling on the sheets just to make a mess.
That felt like what the boy he’d been would have done.
He looked back at Wayne and said, “Yeah, man. Thank you. It’s great. Perfect.”
And he wished, for a moment, that those words had done something, anything, to relieve the tense worry all over Wayne’s face, because they were true. The room was good, really. Better than he had any right to expect.
It was him that was all wrong.
#
Wayne left for his shift at the factory, eventually.
Eddie stayed behind in the trailer that felt familiar and completely unrecognizable at the same time. He took himself into the narrow bathroom, looking at new toothbrushes on a shelf and their old shower curtain pulled across to block the tub. He shuddered down his back before he finally looked in the little mirror on the cabinet over the sink.
The perusal felt like looking at the trailer all over again.
He recognized… parts of himself, but everything felt wrong and unfamiliar. Those were his dark eyes, probably, but the tremendous dark circles under them were new. His hair was the right color, but flattened and smashed down, greasy from so long without a real shower. His cheeks looked almost concave. He had a new scar that ran over his jaw and down his neck.
He tugged open the buttons on his shirt. He hadn’t worn a t-shirt since he woke up and the doctors had told him to stick to button-ups for the time being to avoid pulling the still-healing wounds on his stomach. He had no idea where the new clothes had come from, but he had what seemed like an endless stack of shirts in pale colors, all slightly too big for him.
He couldn’t see much of his body in the mirror, just his shoulders, pale and bony. They looked mostly familiar. He’d been protected there from digging, hungry teeth. Or maybe there just hadn’t been enough soft tissue to draw the attention of the bats. He looked down his body, dropping the shirt to the floor, and braced a hand on the wall against the rush of vertigo through his head because the rest of him…
Well, the rest of him might as well have been someone else’s body.
Bandages, thick and white, covered huge swaths of his chest. But some of them had come off already, revealing skin that looked not-quite-the-right-color and thick lines of stitches where he’d been patched back together like Frankenstein’s Creature. He swallowed bile and looked away, reaching blindly towards the cabinet and opening it to turn the mirror toward the wall.
He wished he could do the same thing inside his head, turn his thoughts sideways into blankness, because it wasn’t just his body that felt like it no longer really belonged to him. He stood in the bathroom, breathing hard and shivering, because he felt the same way inside, as though he’d been shaken up and had pieces taken out and swapped with new bits.
He had no idea who he was, not on the other side of the fight with Vecna.
He had a terrible, creeping feeling that, maybe, he never really had.
#
Eddie wondered, after clumsily leaning over the side of the tub, his chest resting on cheap plastic so he could wash his hair under the spout, if he’d ever been anything but a costume, worn for so long and so aggressively that he’d convinced himself that all of his pathetic trappings formed some kind of actual person.
He’d had a lot of time to think about it in the hospital, hours and hours crawling past slowly after his visitors left for the day. He’d had to lie there, his body a mass of injuries and his head throbbing, and he’d had to look dead on at what he’d done with his life.
And he’d mostly found that he’d made himself… a clown. He’d built a mask for himself, because he’d had to do something in the face of what the world wanted to make him, what his father and mother and the school and society had wanted to turn him into. The world had looked upon Eddie Munson and labeled him things like: poor, stupid, trailer trash, drug addict, failure, waste of space.
And he’d thrashed back, trying to make a space for himself in all of that; in the face of everything in the world trying to crush him down small, he’d made himself big.
He’d started being loud all the time. He’d started jumping on tables and looking for ways to either scare people or make them laugh, because then at least he was in control of how they perceived him. If they were afraid, it was because he wanted them afraid, not because there was something wrong with him that he had no control over. If they were laughing, it was because he’d made them laugh, not because their derision was all he deserved.
He’d stopped trying to succeed at anything, because then when he failed, it was his choice, and not a reflection of his actual abilities.
He’d talked a big game about getting out of shithole Hawkins, making it big, getting famous, but he’d never really left the city limits. Because if he chose to stay, then he’d never have to worry about what would happen if he left and everyone outside Hawkins saw the same things that everyone inside Hawkins saw.
He’d been rude and casually cruel and excused it because, hey, that was just how life was and it wasn’t like anyone was going to treat him any better. Not if they had a choice.
He’d stuffed a black hankie in his back pocket, shouting to the world about sexual preferences that he’d never even touched in reach life. Hell, he’d never had any sexual experiences in real life outside of those involving his own hand – hard to find other queer folk in Hawkins – and if there were others, he assumed they’d been smart enough to steer clear of him.
He considered, leaning there against the tub, his hair dripping and heavy all around his face, that he couldn’t even remember anymore if, when he’d come upon the first magazine with whips and chains, with leather harnesses and gorgeous young men with wet eyes, he’d actually found the ideas appealing, or if he’d just – just wanted people to think that he liked hurting other people, that other people liked him hurting them.
He had no idea if he’d worn that mask for so long that it just felt like the truth. He had no idea if there was anything at all under it.
The truth was, he’d built a shell for himself and tried so hard to expand to fill it, and he no longer had any idea what parts of it were him and which parts were fake.
He had an awful, sick feeling that maybe he was just hollow all the way down, because the truth was – the truth was that when everything had happened, when his world had fallen apart, that explosion had torn his mask apart.
And he hadn’t been some cool and uncaring badass when everything went to hell. He hadn’t been tough and brash and brave. He’d run away. He’d huddled up and he’d cried himself to sleep after watching poor Chrissy fucking Cunningham get turned into a broken doll in his living room. And he’d kept running, over and over.
He’d proven himself a coward, desperate to save his own skin. He’d even – he’d even kept right on being a coward once he’d found people willing to help him for no reason at all other than that he’d needed it and they were just the kind of people who decided to throw in with fugitives from the law, they were the kind of people who heard about demons attacking their town and just shrugged and got on with saving everyone.
He almost hadn’t gone into Lover’s Lake that night on the water. He’d almost huddled there in the boat, even though he’d known that Harrington was being attacked – likely drowned – by some unseen monster. Only his greater fear of staying on that boat alone had gotten him into the water, regardless of what he’d later told Harrington.
He’d been embarrassed by himself, by the pale, shrinking core of him exposed by the cruel removal of his shell. And he’d tried to make up for it. He really had. And he thought he’d succeeded, even, standing with his guitar and making the sacrifice play, but even that had been an act of cowardice.
He hadn’t run from the trailer, drawing the bats with him, out of bravery.
He’d done it because, looking through the portal in his living room ceiling, looking at Henderson, he’d known what was waiting for him on the other side: accusations that he was a satanic cult leader. Charges that he’d brutally murdered Chrissy, charges that he had absolutely no way to defend himself against; what would he say, a monster had done it? He’d known there’d be mobs out for his blood. He’d known he wasn’t going to graduate that year, or any year after.
And he hadn’t been brave enough to face any of that.
So he’d run, again, and he’d stopped and he’d turned to face what he knew was an impossible horde, counting on them to kill him, because that way at least he got to die on his own terms. And then he’d lived, instead. And living meant he had to somehow move forward with his mask and shell in pieces all around him.
He had no idea how. He had no idea what that made him, anymore. He felt hollowed out. Cored. He had no idea what he even liked, really. He had no idea who Eddie Munson was, or what he wanted to do with his life.
He had no idea what percentage of the things he’d used to want were faked.
He sank down alongside the tub, pulled his legs up as far as he could with the aching wounds all over his chest, and cried some more.
#
Eddie knew, distantly, that he had to get himself back together.
Figuring out how to patch himself back into a cohesive whole just felt impossible as the days slid by one after the other. The rest of the party visited him, often. They brought him news from the world outside of his trailer and groceries. Sometimes Steve took bags into the kitchen and made meals and Eddie watched him and decided, at least, that he really did like guys, that being gay wasn’t just some mask he’d pulled on in an attempt to push back on society’s expectations of heteronormativity.
It was nice to know something about himself, to know for sure that he was gay and what kind of person he was attracted to now that he had no masks in the way: he wanted someone strong and determined, someone who never gave up, someone who dove headfirst into danger without looking twice, someone who could get pieces eaten out of him and still keep going like some kind of fucking Terminator, someone who got bitchy about the most unpredictable fucking things and who bickered with fourteen year olds, someone beautiful and so far out of Eddie’s league that even if Steve had been into guys, he’d have never looked twice at Eddie.
His guests sat and talked or darted around outside the trailer and he tried to make sounds in all the right places. He learned some other stuff about himself over the course of their visits. He learned that Dustin actually wasn’t his favorite: Max was, once she got released from her extended hospital stay and started coming around.
He learned that he didn’t like them messing with his stuff, going through his books or digging around in his minis, even though he lacked the energy to tell them to stop.
He learned that he liked them all throwing themselves into a pile on his living room floor and watching some movie that they’d brought over from Dustin’s house, arguing over each other throughout the entire thing while some sad looking dark-haired kid named Will who had arrived with the influx of the western team sat off to one side and chewed his thumbnail, the only one trying to pay attention besides El, the superhero who he’d finally met, who leaned her head on his shoulder. He liked having them around, even if he had to pretend he didn’t always see them in his head overlaid with filth and grief and hurt.
He learned he liked baked macaroni and cheese and cooking hot dogs outside over a fire that Nancy somehow built with a couple of sticks and a lighter; what were they teaching teenage girls in school these days?
The pieces of knowledge he gained about himself felt small and pathetic.
But at least they were real. He held onto that realness as hard as he could on all the long, sleepless nights that dogged him.
#
Eddie never went back to school, but they gave him his diploma anyway. The principal came all the way down to the trailer on a random Monday to give it to him and shake his hand. The man said it had been earned; apparently the story around town was that he’d helped stop a serial killer along with Steve, Nancy, and Robin, that they’d protected the kids, and that kind of bravery made up for his near-failing grade in English.
He wasn’t sure how the conversion system worked there, but he had absolutely no desire to go back to high school and, well, having a diploma made Wayne smile at him, anyway.
He’d learned that he loved Wayne.
He had no real idea what to do with himself, regardless of that love and his new status as official high school graduate. None of his past diversions truly appealed.
He’d been playing around at being tough and so edgy with selling drugs for the past few years, and that all felt pathetic on the other side of Vecna. Besides, he couldn’t stop thinking about Chrissy and spiraling down into sour fear and panic if he even thought about selling. So… he seemed unlikely to deal anymore.
He couldn’t tell if he’d ever liked doing it, but he thought he hadn’t. It had just been a way to make a few bucks and horrify everyone he wanted to horrify.
He went through the trailer one day, looking for shit to throw away. He had a sudden vivid need to toss out any baggies, any powders or pills, any rolling papers, hell, even any lighters. He collapsed down on the couch after tearing the place apart and without finding anything.
He figured Wayne had decided some things shouldn’t join them in their new home.
Wayne had always been smarter than him.
#
Eddie tried to get down his guitar one day, but playing even a few notes left him shaking so badly he almost dropped it, his skin crawling all over with the memory of so many hungry teeth, the smell of sweet-sour rot in his nose and the taste of his own blood bubbling up the back of his throat.
Honestly, he had no idea if he’d-- if he’d even really liked metal. He wondered, sometimes, if he’d just picked it to be difficult. He listened to his old tapes, lying on his floor and staring at his ceiling and tried to feel anything about them and just… just couldn’t.
The emptiness just stayed inside of him, gaping and hungry.
He couldn’t even tell if he liked music.
The realization made him nauseous and desperate to do something, anything, to try to push it to a safe distance. He rolled to his feet – hissing at the throb of pain all across his stomach at the movement – and stumbled his way to the kitchen, grabbing a trash bag.
He barely breathed on his way back to his room, dropping to his knees by his cassette player and ripping out the current tape, ignoring the way that he ended up pulling it’s guts out, tape unraveling all around his fingers as he shoved it into the bag. He grabbed the cassettes he’d already tried up off the floor and dropped them in and reached for the shoe boxes full of tapes he’d been collecting since he moved in with Wayne.
They all went in the bag. They’d been useless when it counted, anyway, just like him. The party had counted on him to have some way to save Nancy when Vecna took her and he’d—
Been a failure, then, too.
He shuddered, his breath coming out shaky and wet as he sat there on the floor, looking at the posters on his wall. They all looked blurred, distorted. He’d thought they were all so fucking cool, the baddest of badasses and he’d tried to absorb some of that through osmosis, but fuck, he’d never been a badass at all.
The real badasses in Hawkins had turned out to be the popular assholes, the preppy kids, and the fucking nerdy weirdos, who’d all been bleeding for the town for years while Eddie playacted his way through life and—
He tore the first poster off the wall before he even registered what he planned to do. He shoved it roughly into the trash bag, too, reaching for the next and the next, until he’d gotten them all. He stood there, breathing fast and shaky, like he’d run for miles, staring at his guitar, which had somehow stayed untouched on this side of reality.
He’d never spent more money on anything in his life. She was shiny and beautiful and perfect. And he had no idea what he felt when he looked at her, his head just buzzing. He grabbed her off the wall, too, and hefted up the trash bag, and carried it all out the front door, across the short grass, dropping them by the trash cans sitting out by the hard-packed road.
He stood beside them for a moment, swaying, and then turned on his heel and stumbled over to his van. He pulled himself inside, slammed the door closed, and had peeled out of the trailer park before he’d really registered what he was doing, it was just—
He could hear, over the sound of the engine and the road noise, Robin and Steve screaming, looking desperately for the music they’d needed to save Nancy and not finding it, not finding anything even remotely acceptable, and they’d just gotten lucky that Vecna had wanted to play with his food.
Eddie parked ugly in front of the music shop in town, a little one that had sprung up after the mall burned to ashes, and tripped his way in, his heart beating double-time in his chest, cold sweat covering him, because it had been weeks and he hadn’t done anything to fix a clear problem, and El said Vecna was dead, but, hey, apparently everyone thought this stupid problem went away every year and it kept coming back, so—
He started digging through the boxes of tapes, waving away a clerk who tried to come over to help, vaguely aware that this was his first trip into town, really, and he probably wasn’t doing much to convince anyone that he wasn’t some kind of maniac.
But he couldn’t bring himself to care about that.
He found some Kate Bush and grabbed one and then two cassettes, because shit, he should have one of those for the van and the trailer, right? In fact, maybe he should get two of everything, just in case. He scrambled around, found some Madonna options and tossed them onto the pile. No one else had shared their musical preferences, so he guessed at the others.
Dustin liked metal well enough. Or at least he had, when they were in the Upside Down. Most of the other kids probably listened to Top 40 shit, surely. He grabbed some of those, and a The Cure cassette because he didn’t know baby Byers very well, but he and his older brother both had a vibe and if they hadn’t already started listening to dreary, depressing music it seemed like it was only a matter of time.
He had some idea what Steve might like, only because Steve had a tendency to hum under his breath when left to his own devices. Sometimes he even muttered little snatches of lyrics, and Eddie had been forced to listen to the radio outside of his own power enough to recognize some songs. So he added some Springsteen tapes to the mix, figuring odds were decent that, if Steve liked the Boss, Robin would find him acceptable, too, since those two shared a fucking brain, or something.
That covered everyone, but he felt itchy all over, like he’d forgotten something. He moved down the rows of neatly lined up cassettes, grabbing options from across genres to add to his pile. Sure, it seemed unlikely that anyone in the party was a huge fan of the blues, but what could it hurt, right?
He left the store still feeling shaky and with a considerably thinner wallet, but it was all government money, anyway, the dollars thrown at him and Wayne as some kind of thank you or an apology, he wasn’t really sure.
He dropped the bulging bags of the passenger seat and drove home in a blur, noise just rushing in his ears. Probably he shouldn’t have been on the road, it felt a little bit like driving stoned and he’d promised Wayne he’d stop doing that.
But he made it anyway. He parked and looked, helplessly, out the window and towards the patch of dirt where he’d left his guitar and all his music, and felt another terrible lurch to find it all missing, even though that was what he’d wanted, surely. It must have been, because he’d done dragged it all out of the trailer.
It was hard to focus on the loss, anyway, because Steve’s fucking BMW was parked in front of the trailer, too, and Steve was there, leaning against the cheap siding.
Steve looked… perfect, of course. He had his hair swept up and wore a pale shirt that made the golden tan on his skin seem to glow. It had long sleeves, which seemed weird for the summer weather, but Eddie barely noticed, because by then he’d opened the door and stumbled out, grabbing his bag, and Steve said, “Hey, man, what’s up?”
“Not much,” Eddie said, after too long a delay. He asked, trying to bring his mind up to proper working speed, “Is everything okay?”
Steve stood there, looking at him with a strange expression on his face, and then shrugged, and said, “I was going to ask you that.”
Which, right, was fair. Eddie probably looked like a mess. He always looked like a mess. He scrubbed at his face like that would somehow help, and snorted, “Yeah, man, no, I’m – you know.” He gestured down his body, figuring that served as explanation enough of how he was.
Steve made a little sound, nodded, and said, “You want to go inside? Sit down? I’ll get you something to drink.”
And he just sounded… so normal. He’d shown up out of the blue, ready to just sweep in and get Eddie a drink for some reason. Eddie nodded, abruptly out of words, and unlocked the door. He waved Steve in and then stood by the door, ignoring the suggestion to sit. He tossed the cassettes on the couch and watched Steve putter around his kitchen, watched him come back with a can of soda, and asked, “How are you so – fine, now?”
God, he wanted to be fine.
Steve looked across at him, blinking a few times, like he had no idea what Eddie was talking about. His regard had Eddie shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot and adding, “I mean, after – after everything, how’d you just – how are you, like, okay?”
Something around Steve’s mouth twitched, just for a second. Eddie couldn’t tell what it meant, but then he smiled and said, “Practice.”
Eddie blinked, unsure how to take that, and Steve shrugged. “I don’t know, man. You fight demons enough times and I guess you just…” He waved a hand. “And I guess, I don’t know. I was so young when this first happened.” He’d been a junior, if Eddie’d done his math properly, which didn’t feel young to Eddie, but, hell, maybe when you piled constant trauma into a few years, it changed your perception of time. “I guess it kind of just feels normal, now. Like, oh, of course, the yearly attack of demonic monsters on the town, time to go handle that, rinse and repeat.” Steve shrugged again, “And, you know, personally, for me, this wasn’t— I mean, at least no one tortured me, this time. I got off pretty easy. This was hardest on you and Max and Lucas and Erica. The rest of us just, like, had to go on a few shitty hikes, or whatever.”
He pressed the can of soda at Eddie again. Eddie took it, turning all of that – including Steve’s massive downplaying of the shit he’d personally gone through – over in his head. He said, trying to will the shake out of his voice, “So, what you’re saying is, I just have to go through this like, three more times, and I’ll be normal like the rest of you?”
Steve frowned over at him, gave a little shake of his head, and said, “Hate to break it to you, Eddie, but you’re the normal one. Not the rest of us. This – all of this, everything that happened – you’re the only one of us that acted like a – a normal person. A sane person. The rest of us, we’re all just…” He shrugged and looked to the side. “We’re all kind of... broken, man. We’re fucked up.”
Steve laughed, then, a tight little sound and started to turn.
Eddie reached out without thinking, because he hadn’t really thought about anyone else being broken after what had happened, about Steve feeling anything other than fine and too strong to be touched by all the horror. Eddie caught his wrist and felt him jolt, even as Steve blinked over at him.
When Eddie thought about Steve, which he maybe did a lot, he always pictured Steve as taller. It just… seemed right, to his head, he guessed. Steve felt larger than life and maybe always had. But they were really of a height with one another, and it meant he could look right across into Steve’s dark eyes.
He said, the admission feeling ugly and misshapen in his mouth, “I feel pretty fucked up, Steve.”
Steve kept the eye contact, gaze stupidly soft, really, and said, quietly, “Well, then, see? You’re just like us already.”
Eddie choked out a little laugh, and swayed forward, just enough to bump into Steve’s shoulder because he needed something, some grounding touch. “Yeah,” he said, scrubbing at his eyes. “Yeah, fair.” He glanced down at the soda in his hand, and felt abruptly dissatisfied with it. He asked, still looking down, “Hey, you want, uh, to join me for something stronger?”
“Why not,” Steve said, and by the time Eddie came back from the kitchen with two beers, Steve was sitting on the couch, going through the bag of cassettes. He looked up and asked, “Branching out?”
“Uh,” Eddie said, and popped one of the beers open, holding it out. “I just. You know, I didn’t have, with Nancy, I didn’t – and I thought, if that happens, like, again, I just, I—I wanted to be ready.” After all, everyone kept telling him this shit kept happening.
“Shit,” Steve said, looking back into the bag and then up with a smile. “That’s fucking genius.” He took the beer and a long drink, fishing one of the cassettes out of the bag. “Glad you’re with us, now, man, to think about that kind of stuff. And that you got the Boss. Come on, you want to listen before my shift?”
Which was how Eddie found himself lying on his floor again, this time with Steve stretched out beside him, listening to Springsteen croon into the mic about the darkness on the edge of town, rolling his head to the side to look when Steve said, at the end of the song, “Sometimes, I feel like maybe he saw it, too. The Upside Down. I know that’s stupid. But.”
And Eddie said, “Yeah,” even though he wasn’t sure he heard what Steve did.
They laid there until Steve said he had to get to his shift at the video place, rolling up and patting Eddie twice on the middle of his chest, promising to lock the front door when Eddie stayed put.
After he left, Eddie put his hand over the spot where Steve had touched him, pressed down, and stared up at the ceiling.
#
The kids started making noise about wanting to get back into D&D at some point, but, in honestly, he couldn’t string together a plot to save his life. He tried to sit down at the kitchen table, notebooks and dice in front of him, and just… Nothing came. He sat there for hours, and nothing came. The idea of playing felt… both too big and too small at the same time.
He’d made being the big mean dungeon master who delighted in campaigns where every character died most of the time so much a part of his personality. And then he’d fought actual monsters and watched his companions struggle and suffer and bleed and the idea of tormenting fictional characters sat sour and wrong on his tongue, even though he knew they weren’t real.
It was just—
He tried to imagine disintegrating one of Dustin’s clever characters, or crushing Lady Applejack, or—
He managed not to retch down into the toilet, but it felt like a close call. So he dodged and evaded when they asked about starting a new campaign and he put all his minis in a box and slid them under the bed.
He couldn’t tell if he’d ever liked D&D, either.
He took the time he might have put into designing a new campaign into cleaning out his van and gathering supplies. Well, weapons. He stashed a baseball bat and a tire iron back there, and an old set of his dad’s brass knuckles that he’d kept less out of nostalgia and more because he’d thought they made him look tough.
Maybe they’d actually be some use on Steve’s hand.
He tucked a couple of bottles of cheap vodka back there and rags and lighters. He added a pack of matches, just in case the lighters decided to crap out. He tossed in a few bottles of hair spray, too. Jeff had claimed you could set the spray on fire, once, and Eddie figured that was worth a shot, next time they got overrun by monsters.
And he filled a box with first-aid supplies, with band aids and rubbing alcohol, with aspirin and tweezers and so, so many pressure bandages. He stuffed some blankets in the back, too, and a few changes of clothes and found a place for the van cassettes, and, sometimes, when he felt like he was going to fly apart in the middle of the night, he could make it better by going out to the van and going through all the supplies.
#
Eddie’d stopped wearing his black hankie after getting out of the hospital.
He threw away the four or five he had, that he’d been wearing for the past three years, one day towards the middle of summer. He’d never actually even-- hurt anyone. He’d had no idea if he’d really have liked it. He’d just-- wanted to. Because if he was hurting someone else, no one was hurting him. He’d wanted to be cool and dangerous and suave and now he knew he wasn’t any of those things, not really.
Besides, the idea, now, of-- hitting someone, smacking them around or taking a belt to them felt--
It left his queasy and tasting vomit in the back of his mouth. He didn’t want to be like Henry Creel.
He felt emptier without the things that had filled so much of his time before – even just through time wasted on imaginations – but he felt empty most of the time.
Sometimes, on particularly empty nights, he found himself grabbing that first cassette he’d listened to with Steve while lying on the floor, listening to everybody’s got a secret, Sonny, something that they just can’t face, some folks spend their whole lives trying to keep it, they carry it with them every step that they take till some day they just cut it loose, cut it loose or let it drag ‘em down, and when the song ended he rewound it and listened to it again and again and again, wondering what happened after you cut all the secrets loose, and if you couldn’t get dragged down, anyway.
Chapter Text
Eddie kept healing.
The bandages came off.
The stitches came out.
Doctors poked and prodded him and declared that he’d reached the point of maximum medical recovery, whatever the hell that meant. He still had scars all over his torso, pale lines from the stitches and dark blotches from a few bites that the skin transplant hadn’t covered.
The kids kept coming over, even as the rest of the party started to drift away. Nancy and Robin started spending all of their time preparing for college; they’d told him all about their majors and the schools they were going to while he was laid up in the hospital, but Eddie had a hard time holding onto information anymore. The words had slipped in one ear and out the other. He guessed Big Byers, who he’d barely ever talked to, was planning to do the same.
Steve kept coming by. The one time Eddie asked him about college, some tight ball of something in his gut, Steve snorted a laugh, rolled his eyes, and said, “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, Munson,” and Eddie’d been too tired to try to figure out what that meant, so he’d just dropped it.
He was glad, selfishly, that if one of the other adults was going to stick around Hawkins, it was going to be Steve.
He also, when he thought about it, wasn’t surprised. Steve had been the first one to jump in to protect the others during the entire Vecna mess. From the stories Eddie had picked up since his recovery, that habit had basically held true for every previous near-apocalypse in Hawkins.
Eddie couldn’t image him leaving.
He took some comfort in that thought.
#
Eventually, Eddie got a job just to fill the empty hours, since he couldn’t fill up his own emptiness, following Wayne to the factory and standing on the line for hours of mindless work five nights out of seven. He actually felt, well, not good, but less bad there. He thought it was because he got the feeling that everyone else in the plant felt just as hollowed out and empty as he did.
He went back to the trailer and stared at himself in the mirror after his first shift, his healing scars and the tattoos and the mess of his hair, hating, abruptly, that he’d started to look, physically, like himself again, like nothing had changed, like he was still the same asshole hiding behind his own skin.
It felt like – backsliding, like time was moving him back to who he’d been: a pathetic coward wearing a dozen masks, instead of a pathetic coward exposed to the world for exactly what he was.
He couldn’t bear the feeling and yanked the cabinet open, rifling around until he found a pair of scissors tucked in by the band-aids. He stood there over the sink, hacking through all the heavy curls, breathing hard and shaky, refusing to pause even as his arms started feeling like limp noodles.
He stared down at the mess when he finally finished, feeling oddly lighter and shivering at the touch of air on the back of his neck. And then he gathered the whole mass up and dumped it into the trash, strands sticking to his hands and tangling around his fingers.
He pushed the cabinet closed again and stared at himself, at the curls hacked uneven all around his ears, his face red and splotchy and his eyes shiny. The change felt shocking, like a jolt of electricity through his bones, but at least he’d stopped looking like the person he’d come to hate so much over the past few months.
He went out and sat on the couch beside Wayne, who jerked to look at him and dropped the cigarette he’d been holding.
“What?” Eddie asked, chin tilted up, and Wayne blinked twice before shaking his head.
“New look,” he said, finally.
And Eddie resisted the urge to tug at the shortened strands. “Yeah,” he said, and that seemed to be that.
#
The others reacted to the change with somewhat more dramatics.
Dustin walked into the side of the doorway the next time he came over, Max stared at Eddie hard for nearly ten minutes and then asked if he’d been possessed, and Lucas just kept looking over and shaking his head, over and over. El seemed unmoved by the change, Will softly told him it looked nice, and Mike… well, Eddie doubted Mike ever noticed anything about someone else’s appearance.
Steve gave him a nod, said, “Hey, big change,” and then went into the kitchen with his arms full of groceries; Eddie wasn’t actually sure he could name the last time he’d gone shopping for food, but that was probably for the best. He tried to avoid going out amongst the general public as much as possible.
Eddie hadn’t expected Steve to hang around after the kids decamped to Max’s place for the rest of their all-niter, but he did. In fact, he leaned over the back of the couch, nodded at Eddie’s hair again, and said, “Hey, you want me to, like, clean up the back for you? Hard to reach back there, I know.”
“What?” Eddie asked, boggling over at him.
“Relax,” Steve said, rolling his eyes, though Eddie hadn’t been worried or complaining, just-- mystified. “I know what I’m doing. What, you think anyone in this shitty town could pull of this haircut?” He gestured towards his own coif. “Come on, I can clean up your neckline.”
And the old Eddie, the Eddie that Eddie no longer wanted to be, would have said something cutting about how Steve doing his own hair explained how shitty it looked just to hide how much he wanted, suddenly, to have Steve’s fingers in his hair, even though the words would have been a lie. Steve’s hair always looked great. It had looked great after he got dragged through a lake and attacked by bats. It had looked great after fighting Vecna, when it had been one of the last things Eddie saw before his world went black. It had even looked great while Steve sat in a hospital bed, recovering from his own injuries.
Eddie shook himself, bit his tongue for a moment, and then said, “Yeah, okay.”
“Come out to the kitchen,” Steve said, and Eddie followed him, for a lack of anything better to do, and sat on a wobbly kitchen chair while Steve filled a glass with water out of the tap and dug through kitchen drawers until he found some scissors. “This would’ve been better if I brought my hair scissors,” he said, because apparently that was a thing people had, “but we’ll manage.”
Eddie opened his mouth but any reply he could have made short-circuited when Steve ran his fingers up through the back of Eddie’s hair, humming thoughtfully. Eddie clenched his fingers into the fronts of his jeans, swallowed back the sound that tried to rise out of his throat, and did his best to hang onto his sanity as Steve just—
Dove right in.
He was vaguely aware of the little snicks of the scissors opening and closing and the fall of tufts of hair all around him – Steve had clearly not stuck to just cleaning up the back – but mostly he felt captivated by the feeling of Steve’s fingers, warm and sure and moving through his hair.
“There we go,” Steve said, eventually, brushing some hair off of Eddie’s shoulders and stepping back. “What do you think?”
Eddie thought standing up might not be the best idea he’d ever had, but he did it anyway. He leaned over toward the microwave and peered at his reflection. Steve had done a good job. At least, he’d fixed the parts of Eddie’s hair that had been clearly the wrong length, cleaning it up and making it look more like something intentional.
And making Eddie look even less like the Eddie who’d been such a coward.
Eddie swallowed that thought down, the burn that came from having Steve stand there and cut his hair while knowing that, hey, Eddie probably would have let him die not too long ago. That he hadn’t cared enough to dive in just to try to save Steve. That—
“Eddie?” Steve asked, tone gone soft and cautious, and Eddie jerked to look at him.
Steve looked worried, head cocked to the side, fiddling with the scissors. “If you don’t like it—”
“I like it,” Eddie said, and found he meant it, even. “Thank you. Sorry. Just…” He waved a hand by his head. “Tired. Had a long shift last night.”
“Right, yeah,” Steve said, some stiffness going out of his shoulders. He turned to pour the water out, setting the cup aside, and Eddie watched too intently, frowning when he noticed scabs and bruises over the back of Steve’s knuckles.
“Hey,” he said, unthinkingly stepping closer, curling his fingers around Steve’s wrist. “What happened there?”
“Oh, that?” Steve snorted and rolled his eyes. “I don’t even know. Banged it on something, I guess, you know me. Anyway. You want to watch a movie or something now that the children are out of the house?”
And Eddie knew he ought to say no. He had no right to linger in Steve’s company. But he said yes, instead, and they ended up tucked together on the couch, watching a movie he failed to care about at all, too busy feeling ghostly brushes of Steve’s fingers through his hair.
#
The morning after Steve fixed up Eddie’s hair, Eddie looked at himself in the mirror and realized he’d run out of masks to try to claw off of himself.
He’d expected to feel… something, if he ever got that far. Better? It only seemed fair that he’d feel better after scratching and clawing every disguise off of his skin. But he didn’t. He felt the same way he had, since he’d woken up in the hospital, with only brief variations here and there for bursts of tight panic or slivers of relief.
He felt tired. And empty. And cold. Actually, he thought maybe he felt worse, which seemed unfair.
He looked at himself and made himself face the cold truth of the matter: that he’d been right at the beginning, when he’d thought there was nothing to him, nothing more than skin deep. He was hollow, all the way through.
At least he knew, now.
#
Eddie picked up extra shifts at the plant.
He might as well, he figured. He had nothing else to fill his time with; back at the trailer he mostly alternated between lying on his mattress or checking all of his supplies over and over unless some of the kids came over, and they did that less and less as days flitted past. That suited Eddie fine.
His brain felt like mush most of the time, even as his body got stronger. Probably stronger even than he’d been before the attack; he’d never cared much for physical labor if he could avoid it. Now, he exhausted himself if at all possible and sometimes that meant he could sleep through the night, which he guessed was kind of nice.
The only two people he saw with regularity outside of work were Wayne and Steve, who did keep coming over. Eddie almost asked him why, sometimes, but a part of him feared that the question would make Steve realize how pointless the visits were, would make them stop, so he just swallowed the words back.
He’d gotten in the habit of swallowing a lot of things back.
That was probably for the best.
#
Eddie woke up on one of his days off and stared up at the ceiling of his room for a long time, squinting at a cobweb and wondering if it looked strangely dark, if it was starting to crawl and curl outward. He decided, eventually, with the early afternoon sun coming in and beating on him, that it was just a sign that maybe he should consider dusting for the first time in his life.
He dropped his arm across his eyes, instead.
He had no real idea how long he laid there, tangled in the blankets because he’d always been a restless sleeper and that had only gotten worse, lately. His mouth felt dry. Thirst itched at his throat. He needed to piss and he’d dropped onto the mattress without showering, so he should probably get clean, too. His stomach rumbled.
He stared at spots on his eyelids and would have kept right on doing so, maybe indefinitely, except Wayne knocked on his door.
Eddie sighed. He rolled off the bed and up to his feet, scrubbing a hand back over his hair, which still felt strange and jarring each time he touched it. He pulled the door open with a quick look at his bedside clock; it had gotten to nearly four in the afternoon.
“Sorry if I woke you,” Wayne said, looking up at him all worried, the way Wayne always looked at him, these days.
“I needed to get up anyway,” Eddie said, which was a lie. He had no reason to get up. But it seemed like the thing to say. He scrubbed at his face and gave Wayne another look, since he was just lingering there in the hall, holding a cardboard box under one arm. “What’s that?”
“Oh,” Wayne said, looking down at the box and then back over at Eddie and rubbing at the back of his neck with his free hand. “Parts. For a – Bronco. Friend of mine called me earlier, asked if I had any, and I knew a guy on A-shift that did and…” Wayne blew out a breath and shook the box a little, making it rattle. “Anyway, he needs ‘em, but I’ve got work tonight. Was wondering if you could do me a favor, take these to him?”
Eddie blinked down at the box. Wayne had barely asked him for anything since… everything. He’d just kept right on going, doing his best to take care of things, the way he’d always tried to do.
Eddie had a feeling that he’d done a shitty job of appreciating that before.
“Sure,” he said, even though the idea of hauling a box of parts somewhere felt exhausting. Everything felt exhausting. The chore wasn’t special. “Give it here. Where’s he live?”
“Well, see,” Wayne said, scrubbing at his neck again and looking off to the side. “That’s the thing of it. He’s not exactly a local. He used to be. But he – moved away. Out to Indianapolis. I know it’s a bit of a haul.”
Eddie’d never even been to Indianapolis. He’d never been more than a few miles outside of town.
He stared at Wayne, but, hell, he could be tired and cold in Indianapolis just as well as he was tired and cold in Hawkins. “That’s fine,” he said, shrugging and reaching for the box again. Something metal moved inside of it. “Do you have directions?”
“Yeah,” Wayne said, relief breaking across his expression, his whole visage brightening. “Yeah, I got directions. He expects you around seven. That’s – with his work schedule, that’s when you gotta be there, alright?”
“Sure,” Eddie said. His schedule was not exactly bursting at the seams. “Let me shower. I’ll be ready in a bit.”
“Right, of course,” Wayne said, clapping him on the shoulder. He seemed oddly excited about giving a friend some parts, but, hell, maybe he had to take his wins where he got them, just like everyone else.
#
Eddie showered. He got dressed, pulling on one of the button-ups just because he’d gotten used to them, even though he could raise his arms above shoulder height again.
Wayne had a meal ready when he came out and insisted that Eddie eat, so he shoved what seemed the acceptable amount into his mouth before grabbing the box again and the directions that Wayne had neatly written out.
“You be careful, now,” Wayne said, following Eddie out to the van, like something might jump out at him on the way, which, well. That was a valid worry in Hawkins.
“See you tomorrow,” Eddie told him, and pulled him into a one-armed hug, before tossing the box onto the passenger seat, climbing behind the wheel and getting on his way.
He felt a creeping sense of… something across the back of his neck when he passed the city limits sign and tightened his hands on the wheel. He grabbed the directions and blew out a breath. He had a ways to go, the wheels eating up the miles as the wooded area around town gave way to rolling fields and the traffic got heavier and heavier.
By the time he finally got to Indianapolis, the traffic had, in fact, become nightmarish. He’d never had to navigate more than a two-lane road before. Rush hour in Hawkins meant you might see a line of five cars. Driving into Indy meant packed roads, with people happy to cut you off and drivers behind you seeing how close they could creep up to your bumper.
Eddie swore under his breath, trying to keep an eye on the road while finding the next turn and the next and the next until he ran out of directions just as he pulled into… some kind of arena.
He looked around the huge parking lot – currently almost full – as though expecting it to turn into the old garage where he’d thought he was going, wondering where he’d gone wrong. He swore again, pulling into the first available spot he found, reading back over the directions and determining that, no, he’d definitely followed them correctly.
“Shit,” he muttered. Maybe Wayne had written something down wrong. He’d have to find a payphone, try to figure it out, though, double shit, Wayne’d be in the middle of his shift, so that plan wouldn’t work.
Eddie ran a hand up over his head, looked around the surrounding cars as though they had a solution to his current problem, and froze when he got a look at some of the people climbing out of vehicles around him. They all had… A certain style.
He recognized it. He’d immersed himself in it for years: all dark clothes, leather, and denim, with chains galore and heavy boots. He said, into the quiet of the van, “What?”
And then, with an itching suspicion, he reached for the box of parts and pulled it open. It did have some parts in it, but they were buried under one of his old Dio shirts, a denim vest, and his rings. An envelope sat on top the mess. Eddie lifted it with shaking hands, opened it, and pulled out a note that simply said Have fun, kid. A couple of twenties waited inside, alongside a single ticket. For a Dio show. For tonight. For—
“Oh, Jesus,” he said, feeling gutted.
He’d never actually even been to a real metal show. He’d never really been anywhere. He’d just talked about how much he wanted to go and then he’d huddled down, instead, taking refuge in the safety of familiarity, but there was nothing safe about the familiar, not really.
He scrubbed at his face, trying to will away the burn in his eyes, thinking about Wayne probably coming all the way to Indy himself to buy this ticket, about finding some of his old clothes and putting them in this box, coming up with a lie to get Eddie out here, when Wayne’d never been good at telling anything but the truth.
It was a kindness that Eddie knew he hadn’t done anything to deserve, but turning it down would have felt like cruelty even though – even though he wasn’t sure he had any real desire to walk across the parking lot, into the stadium, into the stands packed with fans and true believers.
He wasn’t sure he believed in anything, anymore.
But Wayne had done all of this, he’d clearly tried and—
And so Eddie gathered up the ticket and the money and – after a long moment of hesitation – pulled off his shirt and put on the other clothes. After all, maybe this was – the thing he needed. Maybe he’d go in there and find out that, yeah, he really had loved this music, maybe it hadn’t just been for show, maybe it was real, maybe some part of him wasn’t bullshit.
“Okay,” he said, slipping the rings on, one after another, frowning a bit when two of them refused to slide on; he’d developed new calluses at work. He left them, in the end, looking at himself in the rearview mirror once and muttering out, “Okay,” one more time before he pushed open the door, exhaled, and marched forward.
#
Eddie handed over his ticket when he got to the gates.
He walked into the arena – probably they played some kind of sports there, he guessed; Steve would know – and the movement of the crowd drew him forward, past bathrooms and stalls selling food and beer and merch. He bought himself a beer and did his best to avoid dumping it all over himself as he got jostled, moving with the crowd to the standing area.
Wayne must have spent a ton on the ticket; Eddie supposed it had probably come from the government pay-out.
He made his way out onto the arena floor, listening to the roar of sound and smelling the stink of thousands of bodies all pressed into one space. Music played over the noise and techs moved around the stage, pulling instruments into place, testing the mics and the lights and everything else.
Eddie had dreamed about coming to shows like this, once upon a time. Or he’d said he dreamed about it, anyway, he couldn’t remember where the truth ended, anymore.
He looked around and tried to fall into that dream, tried to feel something at the realization of it.
And as the lights went down he realized, with a sickening lurch, that he couldn’t.
#
Eddie stayed for the whole show, trying.
He wandered out into the dark night afterwards, feeling hollowed even more than before, because everyone inside had been wearing masks, too. Dressing up like kids on Halloween, trying to yell louder than everyone else in a futile attempt to make themselves matter. He’d been afraid for so many years that he’d go to a real show and they’d all know he was a fraud, somehow, but instead he’d felt like he was the only one seeing clearly, from a distance, and it felt terrible – like losing the last part of who he’d been that he hadn’t realized he’d hung onto – to find that he hadn’t enjoyed it, not at all.
He stumbled away from the gate and the flood of people out into the night, his blood pounding inside his head and nausea swimming up his throat, wondering how he had not just dissolved and blown away in the wind with so little of himself left.
He meant to turn to the parking lot, but his feet just kept carrying him forward, stumbling with his breath rattling in his chest.
He felt… aimless. Adrift. Lost and empty and what did it matter, really, if he just wandered into the streets of this strange city and never came out again? What did any of it matter? What—
Eddie’s thoughts derailed all in a rush as his body jerked to a stop, something catching his attention and pulling him up short before it registered consciously. He blinked, trying to figure out what had hooked him in the middle of a near-empty street beside a 24/7 laundromat and across from a lot filled up with wrecked and rusting cars.
It took him what felt like a long time to realize that he’d, in fact, recognized the man leaning against the brick wall of a nearby alley.
He’d recognize Steve anywhere, apparently. Even in the middle of a strange city in the dead of the night, even though Steve was holding himself oddly and wearing strange clothes: a filthy white t-shirt that stretched across his chest, wet with something, and torn jeans. Even though Steve a cigarette in his hand – what? – and had a huge bruise blossoming across his cheek, red under the flickering lights from the laundromat.
“Shit,” Eddie hissed out, unthinking as his body lurched into movement again. He sprinted across the distance separating them, his heart clenching hard and sudden in his chest. “What happened?” he demanded, and Steve jerked his head up, staring at him with deer-in-the-headlights wide eyes as Eddie reached him, grabbing for him and trying to figure out how far they’d have to run to get back to the van, to get back to safety, maybe it would be a better idea to try to hole up in the laundromat, maybe— He hauled Steve forward a step. “Nevermind. Where is he? How did he get back? Jesus, are the kids alright? Are—”
“Hey, hey, whoa,” Steve said, trying to catch at Eddie’s arm as Eddie dragged him another step toward the laundromat, scanning the road around them, looking for vines, for movement in the air, for red light and monsters and—
“I have weapons in the van,” Eddie told him, getting a better grip on Steve’s wrist, because, yeah, that fact made it a better choice than the laundromat, if Steve had some distance on whatever had done this. He must have, he wouldn’t have been leaning against the wall with a monster right on his heels. “Come on, it’s just—”
“Eddie, listen – listen to me, hey.” Eddie was listening, but he’d also spotted a beer bottle rolled up against the door to the laundromat. He jerked towards it, and Steve swore, grabbed his shoulder, pulled Eddie around to look at him, and said, “Eddie, take a breath. This wasn’t— this isn’t from Vecna. Or anything else like that, I swear. I just got into a little scrape, is all. It’s fine, you’re fine. Everything is – fine. I promise, okay?”
Eddie stumbled, the words hitting like a blow. He stared across at Steve, at his big eyes, and the worried expression on his face, right under the bruise that stretched from his temple to his cheek. His bottom lip had a shiny, swollen look to it, stained red with blood. Someone had hit him in the face, more than once.
The filth on his shirt was dirt and more blood, Eddie could see, now that they’d gotten so close. Steve had drops of blood splattered across him and a smear down by his side. He dropped his hand away from Eddie’s shoulder, and Eddie could see his knuckles, battered and split, blood drying in the creases of his skin.
Eddie took it all in and asked, scoffing, “You – got into a little scrape?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, and shrugged, drawing a little further out of Eddie’s space, one corner of his mouth quirking up. “Nothing serious. But, uh, you don’t look so good, man.” Eddie didn’t feel so good. Nausea had his gorge rising in his throat and he felt like he needed to go run five miles or something from the sudden rush of energy surging through him. “Do you need to, like, sit down?” Steve looked around, as though he expected to find a nice bench, or something.
“I don’t need to sit down,” Eddie said, vaguely aware that he was probably lying, but he wasn’t the one who’d just gotten beat on.
Steve looked like he heard the lie, narrowing his eyes and shaking his head. “Hey, actually, look, there’s this diner not far from here that I know. Let me get you a coffee or something, man, okay? I could use one, too, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Eddie said, because maybe the diner would have some ice or something for Steve’s face. And maybe getting some water or something would help with the burning under Eddie’s skin.
“Great, that’s great. Okay, come on, this way,” Steve said, and took a step back, and Eddie only realized then that he still had a hold on Steve’s wrist, his fingers closed hard over sweaty, bloody skin. He let go, hurriedly, shocked that Steve hadn’t complained. He wiped his palm clean, thoughtlessly, on his jeans, and followed Steve through the streets of a city he didn’t know.
#
Eddie followed Steve a few blocks down and one block over, right through the door of a grungy looking diner with a sign outside announcing it as Your Local Diner.
Steve walked right through the doors without even a beat of hesitation and Eddie followed him. Inside, someone had some song about being a miner for a heart of gold playing on a jukebox in one corner. A counter, with plenty of stools, stretched most of the way across the restaurant. A few booths were tucked in by windows. All of it had a plastic-and-vinyl look, all in faded pinks and cream.
Steve headed right for one of the booths, plopping down. There were a few other people holding down stools at the counter, drinking coffee and eating their way through food that smelled greasy.
“They got good burgers,” Steve said, when Eddie cautiously lowered himself down into the booth. “And fries. Like, the usual stuff, I guess.” He rolled his eyes at himself.
Eddie wanted to ask how do you even know about this place, what are you doing here, what the fuck is going on, but a waitress strolled up to their booth, then, wearing an outfit just as pink and cream as the rest of the diner. She looked about Wayne’s age, with teased out hair and blue eye shadow that didn’t really work with the outfit.
“Was wondering if you were coming in this week, sweetheart,” she said, her voice the raspy purr of a chain smoker. She seemed singularly unsurprised by the bruises on Steve’s face, and, in fact, she offered out a bag of ice, which Steve took with a smile that pulled the split in his lip. “How’d you do?”
Steve shrugged, holding the bag up to the bruise on his cheek, and said, “Guess you’ll find out when I tip.”
She snorted a laugh, rolled her eyes, and said, “You always tip good, sweetie. It’s why you’re my favorite. Just a coffee?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, and tilted his chin over at Eddie. “What do you want? It’s on me, go wild.”
“Uh, just a coffee, I guess,” Eddie said, because his stomach felt tight and cramped, not in the mood for food. The waitress hummed some kind of reply to that, but Eddie was too busy watching Steve hold ice to his face, too busy trying to figure out what the fuck was going on to pay attention.
He opened his mouth and Steve said, before Eddie could get a word out, “So, man, like, what are you doing in Indy?”
Eddie blinked. “What?”
Steve scrunched his nose up and gestured around the diner with a little roll of his eyes. “What has brought you to the fine city of Indianapolis on this wonderful Saturday night, Eddie Munson?”
“Oh.” Eddie looked to the side when their waitress came back with two cups of coffee. She set them down, along with a little container of cream, and left again with a wink. He fiddled with the cup and said, “I was at, uh, a concert. Dio.”
“Cool, cool.” Steve poured so much cream in his coffee that it turned almost a beige color. He dumped in a big pour from the sugar container on the table, too, and then, after a moment, added some more. “Was it good?”
“Not really,” Eddie said, and then winced, because he should have lied, probably. Or, more accurately, it should have been good. Wayne went to so much effort and Eddie felt gnawing guilt that he hadn’t actually liked it, and—
“Sucks,” Steve said, prosaically, like it wasn’t that big a deal that Eddie had completely failed to have the night of his life, the way he should have done. “Do you like the city, though?”
Eddie blinked at him and then shrugged. He still felt jumpy, half-sure that bats were about to burst out of the kitchen and swarm them. But the pink booth and the fluorescent brightness of the lights overhead were helping to beat that feeling back. He took a sip of his coffee and said, “It’s fine, I guess.” And then he admitted, looking out the window, “It’s different than I thought it’d be. I’ve, uh, never been here before. I was always, you know, afraid to come.”
Not like he had to hide his cowardice from Steve. Steve knew.
Steve made a little sound. When Eddie looked back, he found that Steve had dropped his head back against the booth, eyes closed and ice pressed to his temple. He seemed...relaxed, despite being banged up. He’d seemed pretty relaxed when everything was going to hell with Vecna, too.
“There’s this big museum I thought Dustin might want to see this summer,” Steve said, the curve in the conversation making Eddie blink again. “And, like, this big zoo? But he wasn’t interested.” Steve sighed, leaned away from the booth and took a long drink of his coffee; he looked tired for the first time that evening.
“Henderson didn’t want to go to a museum?” Eddie asked, fiddling with his cup some more; the harshness of the coffee wasn’t actually helping with the acid in his stomach.
“Too cool for that now, I guess.” Steve flashed him a crooked smile; it pulled the split in his lip. “He’d have probably liked the concert idea, though. Anyway, man, I’ve got to get going. It’s a long drive and I’ve got, you know, a shift tomorrow. It was good to see you, though.” Steve slid out of the booth, then, dropping the melting ice on the table and reaching for his wallet. He pulled out a twenty – which had to be at least nineteen dollars more than they owed for two coffees – and put it by his cup. “Oh,” he went on, looking over at Eddie and furrowing his brow, “do you, like, need a ride back?”
“No,” Eddie said, even though a part of him wanted to take Steve up on the offer, if only because maybe that would give him more time to figure out what the fuck was going on with him. “I, uh, I drove.”
“Right. Well, I’ll see you around, okay? Drive safe.” Steve smiled at him, then, lip so shiny and red, and strolled out through the dinner.
Eddie watched him walk by in front of the windows, heading back the way they’d come. Steve tossed him a little wave as he went by, and another smile, and Eddie sat there for a long time, not drinking his coffee, and wondering what the hell that had all been about and feeling, for the first time since Vecna had upended the world, a spark of something inside of the empty pit of his chest.
#
Eddie made it home without issue. He showered and puttered around the kitchen, thinking again and again about Steve just… hanging on in some dirty alley in Indianapolis, fresh from some kind of scrape, and then just going to a diner where he clearly spent a lot of time, having a coffee, and shooting the shit.
He supposed that Steve might have gotten into a fight with some random asshole. Fuck knew, Steve had gotten into fights before, though Eddie had mostly heard about them secondhand through the school’s gossip network. Everyone knew that he’d got his shit kicked in by Jonathan Byers and Billy Hargrove, anyway.
So, you know, maybe Steve had just been in Indy for some unexplained reason, and he’d pissed the wrong person off with his good looks and charm. He’d done it before. Multiple times.
Except the longer Eddie paced around the kitchen and thought about it, the less that felt like the truth. And he couldn’t help but remembering that Steve’s hands had been banged up, only a few days ago, when he’d cut Eddie’s hair.
He’d hissed with something like pain when Eddie had grabbed him the day they’d laid on the floor and listened to Springsteen together. That all made some kind of weird pattern.
And their waitress had known Steve. She’d been ready with a bag of ice, like she was used to him rolling in on a Saturday night with fresh bruises. She knew what he wanted to drink and she’d brought the cream without asking if he wanted any.
Something was going on. Something that went beyond Steve getting into a random brawl. Eddie had no idea what that something was, and by the time the sun started painting the world in the pinks and purples of sunrise, he’d decided he was going to fucking figure it out.
It was a strange feeling, realizing he cared, that something in his life finally felt… real, again.
He pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, eventually, pouring himself a bowl of cereal and trying to come up with some kind of plan to figure out what the fuck was going on, buzzing under his skin and feeling, well. Alive, in a way he hadn’t for a long time.
Eventually, Wayne got home, expression so nakedly hopeful as soon as he came through the door that Eddie couldn’t bring himself to do anything but lie about how much fun he’d had, even though it felt like pulling on a mask again. He enthused about the music and the show, and Wayne grabbed his shoulders and stared into his face, looking for… something.
He must have found it, apparently Eddie was still a good liar even with his face, because eventually his expression cracked with relief, and he pulled Eddie into a crushing hug and they both pretended like Wayne’s eyes weren’t wet and shiny when he pulled away.
Chapter Text
Eddie had work the night after the show. He managed to snag a few hours of sleep and then he packed up his lunch, drove to the factory, and stood on the line.
For once, he had something besides white noise inside his head. His thoughts kept spinning around to whatever the fuck was going on with Steve and plans that might help him solve that particular mystery. Obviously, he couldn’t just ask Steve. Steve had already lied to him.
After his shift, he went home, showered, got dressed, and, after blowing out a breath, went to the Henderson house. Dustin looked shocked upon opening the door, and then delighted, the emotions bleeding together even as he excitedly herded Eddie inside, mouth going a million miles an hour as he bounced around and eventually all but dragged Eddie into his room.
Dustin never really asked why Eddie had come over. He just started explaining a project he’d been working on over the summer, and showed off a picture of his girlfriend who, apparently, actually existed, and offered Eddie a soda three times in a row.
The overall effect felt overwhelming.
Eddie hadn’t been the sole focus of Dustin’s attention since the hospital. He’d showed up at the trailer mostly with the other kids and, usually, Steve had been there, too, serving as a buffer, and Eddie had faced challenges figuring out what he was supposed to say even then.
Fatigue pulled on him. He pushed back against it for the first time, drawing in a breath and waiting for a lull in the onslaught of information and then giving up and just interrupting to ask, “Hey, what does Steve usually get up to on Saturdays?”
Dustin kept talking for a moment, continuing some kind of explanation for a big information sharing network, and then clicked his mouth shut to blink over at Eddie. “Steve?” he asked, looking baffled. “You want to know what Steve does?”
“Yeah, on Saturdays,” Eddie said, tucking his hands up under his arms and looking around the room to avoid looking at Dustin.
“I think he, like, works,” Dustin said, sounding utterly confused, and then shaking himself. “You could just, you know, ask him. But first.” And he pivoted then, grabbing Eddie and pulling him over toward something he had covered with a sheet near his bed. He pulled the sheet off to reveal a keyboard, exclaiming, “Look what I’ve been practicing!”
#
So, Dustin proved a poor source for information. Really, Eddie should have expected that. He doubted any of the other kids knew more and, anyway, by the time Dustin finished his impromptu concert, Eddie had a headache and was running on fumes.
He went back to the trailer. He fell onto his mattress. He slept, and woke in the throws of a nightmare. All normal. Then he rolled up off the mattress and to his feet, breaking the trend of the past few months. Technically, he had no reason to get up for a few hours, yet, but…
He felt itchy, almost, with a need to do something besides lie in bed.
He wandered out through the trailer, squinting absently out the window against the early afternoon sun while he got the coffee maker started. He frowned when, a moment later, he realized he was squinting at Steve’s car, parked across the way at Max’s place.
The trunk was open and, as Eddie stood there, just holding a coffee cup and staring, he watched Steve come out of the trailer, bend, grab an armful of grocery bags, and head back inside. Eddie leaned against the counter, frowning; he saw no sign of the bruise that he knew stretched across Steve’s face, so he supposed he’d just learned that Steve was pretty good with concealer.
He watched Steve come back outside after a moment, calling something over his shoulder to Max, who stayed in the doorway, a crutch tucked under her left arm. She was getting around better, these days, but the broken bones in her legs had taken longer to heal than the soft tissue damage to Eddie’s guts.
She rolled her eyes at something Steve said, he wasn’t quite being loud enough to allow his voice to reach through the thin walls of the trailer, and then he swung into his car, pulled the door closed, and disappeared a moment later.
The entire thing had the smoothness of a ritual carried out many times. Eddie wondered, tapping his fingers on the counter, how many grocery deliveries he’d missed while he curled up on his bed like a desiccated leaf or some kind of dying insect. He thought he vaguely remembered Max saying something about how her mom had lost at least one of her jobs after the accident, how she’d needed more time to stay home and help with Max’s recovery.
He sipped at his coffee, frowned, and wondered what else he’d missed.
It felt nice to wonder about anything.
#
On Wednesday, Eddie made a trip into town.
He’d decided it was unlikely that any of the kids knew anything about Steve’s weird extracurricular activities, if Dustin didn’t, but that didn’t mean no one did. So he drove over to the Family Video, parked, and stared at the store front for a long moment before blowing out a breath and making himself wander inside.
He found Robin immediately. She was draped half-over the front counter, fanning herself with an open VHS case. “Hey,” she said, lifting her head and glaring over at him, “don’t let the hot air— oh, Eddie! Hi!”
He waved at her, unsure how to take the enthusiasm of her greeting. He took a shuffling step into the store, letting the door fall closed, though, honestly, he thought it might have been cooler outside, even with the heat of summer fully hitting Hawkins.
“How are you doing?” she asked, sliding fully up and over the counter and rolling awkwardly to her feet so she could face him. She vibrating with the same nervous-small-dog energy that she did all the time, apparently, except when facing monsters from alternate dimensions. “Are you okay?” She fluttered her hands. “Wait, are you looking for – do you need Steve?”
“Uh,” Eddie said, because that was a lot of questions all at once, and some of them that he had no idea how to answer. “I’m fine. Just, uh, looking for a movie,” he lied.
“Oh, sweet, we’ve got plenty.” She gestured around the store. “What are you looking for?”
“Not sure,” he said, looking around the front desk area, vaguely hoping there’d be a schedule or something sitting out, so he could see if Dustin were right about Steve working. “Kind of missed some recent releases, you know, with,” he gestured at himself, “all this. Give me some recommendations.”
She hummed, bounced on her toes, and then said, “Well, normally for the like, testosterone squad I might recommend the new Rocky or Rambo offerings, but you don’t strike me as a Stallone kind of guy.”
“Not so much,” he agreed, though, hell, maybe he was.
“Hm.” She turned and wandered off, talking over her shoulder about other possibilities as she went. He assumed that meant he ought to follow, so he shoved his hands into his pockets and trailed after her, grateful that the store seemed otherwise empty.
Apparently, four in the afternoon on a Wednesday wasn’t the busiest time for people just desperate to grab a movie.
Finally, she made a noise of delight and said, “Ah, here we go.” She darted a hand out and plucked a case off the shelf, shoving it directly into his chest and then letting go. He fumbled to catch it, looking down at the case, which featured a bird, a sly looking young man, and Michelle Pfeiffer’s face in gray scale. “You like all that fantasy crap,” she said, and he blinked up to find her beaming at him. “So, voila, Ladyhawke.”
“I do like fantasy crap,” he said, though who knew if that was the truth.
“She shoots, she scores,” Robin said, which probably meant she’d been hanging around with Steve too much. She grabbed his arm, then, and started pulling him over to the counter. “Do you even have an account here?”
“My uncle might,” Eddie admitted, putting the video down on the counter. She hummed and started clicking things on the computer and he cleared his throat, because he actually had come here for a reason. “Hey, so, listen. Now that we’ve got the, uh, movie sorted, do you know if, uh, Steve is working this Saturday?”
Her hands went still above the keyboard. She shifted her eyes to the side to look at him without turning her head, expression doing something he couldn’t decipher before she whispered, “Okay, be cool, be cool, be cool.”
He frowned at her. “I am being cool.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” she said, which failed to make a lot of sense. He opened his mouth to say so, and she rushed on, “Yes, he is, uh, he is working this Saturday. But he gets off at seven! So he’s done pretty early, really, plenty of time left in the night to do other stuff after seven. Stuff you could ask him about, if you wanted to! Because he’s just, like, on a break right now? He’ll probably be back in, I don’t know, like five minutes, maybe.”
“No, that’s fine,” Eddie said, because he felt sure that if Steve saw him, he’d immediately know that Eddie was, frankly, trying to get into his business and he should probably try to avoid that realization. “I was just curious. Making conversation.”
“Right, sure,” she said, bobbing her head and scanning the movie. “Of course. Well, like, if you change your mind, you could call him. You have his number, right? Actually, I can give you his number—”
“I have his number,” Eddie assured her; man, this conversation had gotten weird. “Anyway, thanks, Buckley.” He reached over and took the movie from her, when she made no effort to hand it over. “See you later.”
#
Eddie took the movie back to the trailer and didn’t watch it.
It sat by the VCR and he stared at the case while he tried to figure out what the fuck to do. He’d exhausted the limited sources that might have had information about Steve’s weird activities, and he’d gotten absolutely no where.
He tried to feel surprised about that, but, honestly, of course he hadn’t. He wasn’t like – like Dustin, or Nancy, or even, clearly, Robin, who could look into something and figure out what mysteries meant and then exact some kind of useful change on a situation. He’d never been much good at anything and, clearly, that hadn’t changed.
And he was just… so fucking tired.
Eddie ended up curled up in his bed, staring at the wall, too tired to sleep and with a cramp of worry settled deep inside his gut. Eventually, he passed out for a few hours. Got up. Went to work. Came home and went right back to bed, feeling empty and useless and so, so tired.
#
Eddie woke up in bed on Saturday and stared at his ceiling for a long, long time. He could hear Wayne moving around out in the kitchen, and he rolled over onto his side, meaning to close his eyes again. He hadn’t figured anything out to help Steve. For all he knew, Steve had gotten into a scrape the previous night, and, hey, even if Eddie had figured it out, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, clearly, and—
He closed his eyes, but only saw Steve, leaning against a brick wall, with a bruised up face and a bloody lip, wearing filthy clothes, all alone.
And Eddie couldn’t fix anything. He couldn’t help. He’d probably run away if the situation actually warranted action, but—
“Shit,” he said, when the pressure in his chest got too big to ignore. He sat up and then rolled to his feet, scrubbing his face. Yeah, he’d probably be useless, just like always. But he thought about Steve, all alone and beat up and he swore again and started pulling on his clothes.
Wayne looked shocked and then delighted to see him out of his room, even though Eddie barely hung around. It was already past six. He had to get moving if he had any chances of… well, he supposed, any chance of following Steve to wherever he went when he got into scrapes and then…
He had no idea what and then would mean. He grabbed his keys, swore one more time, and headed to his van.
#
Steve’s car was still parked outside Family Video when Eddie rolled past. He made a u-turn, pointed his van in the direction of Indy, and settled in to wait, chewing on his bottom lip and bouncing his fingers on the steering wheel, over and over. He was being an idiot. A fool. He was wasting time. He should just go home.
He was still sitting there when Steve finally came out of the store at seven on the dot. From a distance, Steve looked fine. He opened the door, got in his car, pulled out. Eddie let him get a few blocks ahead and then merged out into the light traffic; a part of him expected Steve to turn toward Loch Nora, to put an end to the evening before it even began.
Probably, Eddie had made a big deal out of nothing. Probably Steve had just bumped into someone at a bar or something. Probably he’d head home and—
Steve took the turn out of town, and Eddie felt the pressure in his chest get tighter.
#
Steve only drove for five miles down the road – not long enough to merge onto any of the bigger highways going to Indy – before pulling off into an old, shut down gas station. Eddie swore, and had no choice but to roll past, hoping that Steve somehow failed to notice the van and figured that, well, he’d been wrong. Whatever was going on clearly had nothing to do with Indy, it was just… some weird little bit of strangeness.
He took the next turn and swung wide so he could get the van positioned to go back into the main road. It was a little country lane, all gravel grown through with grass; it looked like no one else had used it for years.
From his position, he could see Steve’s car, so he saw when, a moment later, Steve got out, shrugged his work vest off, and then pulled off his shirt, throwing it into the back. He bent over, momentarily obscured, and then straightened, pulling a plain white t-shirt over his head.
He was wearing beat up jeans.
Steve dragged both hands back through his hair, looked skyward for a moment, and then bounced twice on this toes before getting back in his car, completely unaware of the chill that swept through Eddies’ blood because holy shit.
Holy shit, he hadn’t been imagining things. Something was going on.
Steve drove by the side road without glancing over. Eddie counted to ten and then, jittering in his skin, pulled out to follow him.
#
Eddie’s brain buzzed all the way to Indy, hands locked on the wheel, his elbows and shoulders tight, paying probably a dangerous amount of attention to Steve’s car and not enough to other drivers, because losing sight of him now would have been a nightmare.
He sweated through the underarms of his shirt and his back stuck to the seat, his entire body just… clenched. Before the Vecna debacle, he’d had no idea his heart could beat so fast for so long without it killing him. It felt like it should.
The tension got worse when they finally reached Indy. He pulled off the exit, feeling exposed and in the open as he trailed behind Steve, making turn after turn after turn through unfamiliar roads in the dark, buildings looming on either side of the road like monsters, with people clustered on sidewalks, or pushing carts, or even calling things at the vehicle, the words blurred by the pounding of Eddie’s heart in his ears.
Eventually, Steve pulled into a parking lot in front of what looked like a shut-down grocery store. He parked far away from the boarded-up building while Eddie slammed the brakes and swerved to park out on the road, panting just from the racing of his heart, palms sweating on the wheel.
Steve walked up to the store and leaned close to the boards, like he was reading something, though Eddie had no idea what could possibly interest him, there. Nothing about any of this made sense. He had no idea what was happening and found he hated that, maybe more than anything else. It left him feeling the way he had in the trailer, watching Chrissy rise in the air with her eyes glazed over, her limbs snapping one after another in defiance of what Eddie had always known about the world and how it worked.
After only a few beats, Steve spun around, tucked his hands into his pockets, and started walking off.
He, apparently, failed to notice Eddie just sitting there, bold as brass. God, they needed to do something about his situational awareness.
Eddie’d worry about that later. For the moment, he needed to scramble out of the van, trying to keep an eye on Steve the entire time. He started to lurch across the road and a car that he hadn’t even noticed – so much for his situational awareness – nearly clipped him.
By the time the driver raced off, cursing at Eddie through the window, Steve had disappeared, just… gone, as effectively as if he’d been plucked off the earth.
“Shit, shit, shit, fuck,” Eddie hissed between his teeth, sprinting across the road with acid in his gut and his heart in his throat. He found no sign of Steve. Looking over the boards across the front of the store did nothing for him, no one had helpfully written something like: Looking for Steve Harrington? Go three blocks east and one north.
“Oh, Jesus fuck.” He turned in a little circle, reaching up to pull at his short curls, and then, not knowing what else to do, ran forward in what seemed like the most likely direction, feeling like an idiot and a failure. He sprinted down unfamiliar alleys, got turned around, felt his lungs burning and seizing in his chest, everything kind of… blurred around him.
He swore again, raggedly, coming to a jerking stop when he turned a corner and found himself staring at his van, parked right where he’d left it.
Eddie scrubbed a hand over his face, tugging hard at his hair and trying to do something about the pressure crushing around his ribs, wondering why he’d thought he could do anything to help, why he’d even bothered to get out of bed, why—
The sound of some kind of… cheering broke through the noise in his head.
Eddie blinked and pivoted to the sound, more a roar of shouting that sounded mean than anything else. He couldn’t make out the words being yelled, there were too many voices, but it was… it was something.
He’d had nothing before.
And he knew that Steve tended to gravitate towards trouble.
“Shit,” he said, again, and, gathering himself, ran across the road and toward the noise.
#
Eddie tracked the noise – loud music started accompanying the shouting in short order, something pounding and heavy that reverberated through Eddie’s bones – to some kind of old abandoned warehouse, the building huge and looming and dark, close to a bunch of train tracks; Eddie had to awkwardly step over several tracks just to get close to the building.
The warehouse had some filthy windows high up on the walls, a few of them were broken out. Flickering reddish light – someone had fires going inside – licked out at the night.
Eddie couldn’t actually imagine Steve existing inside the warehouse. The image just made no sense, trying to superimpose Steve fucking Harrington into such a place felt like it should split the world into two, or something. But…
Well, Steve had gone somewhere, and Eddie hadn’t found any other options. Yelling and music echoed through the walls. As he watched, someone – a man, hard to see in the dark of the night – pulled open a door and stepped quickly inside the building.
Eddie swallowed, wiped his sweat-damp palms down the front of his pants, and found the wherewithal to walk forward, grabbing the shutting door and stepping inside.
The atmosphere inside felt like stepping into a different world. Someone had lit barrels of… trash, apparently? They’d placed the barrels around the space, providing light and making it uncomfortably hot inside, especially with the press of bodies. There must have been two hundred – maybe three hundred – people in the warehouse, all of them gathered around a central area.
Eddie took it all in, trying to make sense of it. Someone in the crowd held a boombox on one shoulder, the source of the pounding music that reverberated upwards, echoing in the distant rafters. A haze of smoke hung over the crowd, cigarette and weed, by the smell of it. He smelled alcohol, too, and the stink of sweat.
And blood.
God, for a moment he swore he could taste blood again, disoriented by the flickering of the reddish light and the dark corners. He flinched, reflexively, sure that something was swooping down towards him, the shadows moving in strange and threatening ways. He lurched a step sideways, heartbeat jackhammering, and ran into someone, who shoved him off, into the crowd.
The world felt full of sharp edges. He tasted something strange and bitter in the back of his mouth. He shook his head, hard, trying to clear it, getting jostled by the crowd and feeling a sense of suffocation swimming up over his head.
And then, just like that, the movement of the crowd opened a gap in front of him, leading all the way to the central area of the warehouse, and he got eyes on Steve again, and everything narrowed down.
Steve was – shirtless, his skin sheened with sweat, hair plastered down. He had something on his hands, wraps of fabric, or something. He’d torn out the knee of his jeans. He had splatters of blood over his skin and the fabric. He was bouncing on his toes, his hands up in a guard, eyes bright and focused.
Eddie followed the line of Steve’s gaze reflexively and felt a noise get caught in his throat as he lurched forward, shoving against the crowd before he even really registered what was happening. Because – because there was another man, also shirtless, heavier-set and with a bloody mouth, and he was charging right at Steve.
Eddie watched Steve dance to the side and heard the thunk of flesh against flesh a second later, before the roar of sound from the crowd – approving – swallowed it up entirely. He elbowed a body in the crowd, heart beating so fast he thought it might explode, and someone grabbed at his arm, yelling in his ear, “Hey, man, you still got time to get in on the action, you want to put something down on the pretty boy while you still got a chance?”
Eddie turned to look at the speaker – a guy, young, with a big smile and a missing tooth – and tried to make anything in the world make sense.
And then another roar of sound went through the crowd, cheering for the most part, with some jeers thrown in, and the guy said, “Oh, nevermind, man, too late for you,” and faded back into the mass of the crowd, clearly aware of some way of moving through a crushing mass of people that Eddie had never learned.
Eddie’s attention jerked around, back to Steve. He shoved and pushed, trying to create a gap through the crowd and—
He succeeded in opening enough space to see what was happening, jerking a step forward and then freezing as it registered.
Steve had, apparently, taken the other guy to the ground while Eddie was distracted. The world felt like it tipped over sideways again as Eddie stood there, doing absolutely nothing while Steve – straddling the guy’s body – slugged the guy in the face and then sort of… grabbed both sides of his head, reared back, and then—
Jesus, slammed the guy’s head down onto the concrete.
The violence of the movement made Eddie jerk back a step. He imagined he could feel the impact up through the soles of his boots, even though that had to be impossible. He could see the muscles standing up under Steve’s skin, he could see the bright flag of blood running down Steve’s chin, he—
He could see the almost distant, faraway look on Steve’s face as he slammed the guy’s head into the ground again, the other man flailing an arm out to the side and smacking at the filthy floor. Around them, the noise all-encompassing, the crowd roared, hungry and vicious and almost lustful.
Eddie’d imagined people screaming like that for him, once.
Someone whistled sharply, off to one side. Steve froze in the middle of pulling the guy’s head up, apparently for a third blow, his expression still some distant thing, before he blinked, visibly shook himself, and dropped the guy, instead.
Eddie saw it all in bits and snatches through the continued movements of the crowd. Steve rolled up to his feet, either unaware or uncaring of his injuries, of the blood. Someone moved forward out of the crowd: a woman, beautiful, wearing a short skirt and heels. She strutted right up to Steve, grabbed his arm, and pulled it into the air, while the crowd cheered and the injured guy tried to roll himself onto his side and Eddie had another jarring realization that he had no idea what the fuck was going on.
Steve stood there, in the midst of the cheering masses, beat and bloody and shirtless, the strange woman releasing his arm and stepping away. He spat, bloody, down onto the ground and dragged the back of his wrist under his nose, a little furrow forming between his brow before he looked up and right at Eddie.
Something electric ground down through Eddie’s head and right to his heels. He watched Steve’s eyes get wide, watched him jolt, too, straightening and shifting to face Eddie through the crowd and—
And then someone, some man, came bustling up to Steve through the crowd. Eddie watched, too stunned to do anything else, while the guy handed Steve what was clearly a wad of cash and slapped him on the shoulder, twice, hard. Other people had peeled out of the crowd and were helping the guy Steve had beaten into the ground to his feet. In the background din, hard to make out over the ringing in Eddie’s ears, he thought someone was yelling something about another fight.
“Shit,” Eddie said, finally shaking some sense into his head, as Steve shoved the cash into the back pocket of his torn jeans and started moving to one side. “Shit,” he repeated, hissing, because what if Steve tried to bolt off somewhere, what it he’d decided he needed to avoid Eddie, what if?
He shoved his way through the crowd, keeping his focus on Steve who had… paused to bend over at the edge of the circle. As Eddie pushed his way between two guys with the judicious application of his pointy elbows, he found Steve pulling his shirt on, obscuring the wounds scattered all over his torso. Sweat and blood stared soaking through the fabric immediately, making it cling and catch in odd places and drawing Eddie to a jerking stop once more.
Steve drew in a deep breath, his shoulders rising and falling, and then shoved his sweaty, still amazing, hair back, turned, crooked his bloody mouth up into a smile, and said, “Hey, Eddie.”
“Steve,” Eddie said, the noise of the crowd pressing in all around them and Steve standing there, bloody and hurting and— “What the fuck is going on?”
Steve heaved out a sigh, scrubbed at the back of his neck, and winced. Someone walked by behind him, pausing to shove a threadbare towel into his hands. Steve grunted something that sounded like a thank you and used it to wipe the worst of the blood and sweat off of his face. He said, after, throwing the towel over his shoulder and setting to unwrapping the fabric around his hands, “I mean, I could say this isn’t what it looks like, but, uh, clearly it is, so.”
Eddie barked out a sound. Maybe it was a laugh. He asked, “What the fuck does it look like?” because he honestly had no fucking clue, for all that Steve seemed to think he ought to.
Steve paused in unwrapping his hands, looking up and blinking with a soft, confused frown. He gestured around at the crowd; that other fight had started, apparently, by the sounds, but Eddie had no attention left over to spare for it. “Uh,” Steve said, that little furrow between his brows again, “like I’m… fighting people for money? Clearly.” He scoffed and rolled his eyes. “Anyway, whatever, surprise. I didn’t know you were into this kind of thing or I’d have told you about it before.”
Someone jostled Eddie. He shoved them back, reflexively, and took a step closer to Steve, demanding, “What?” because that about summed up his feelings at the moment.
“Did you come to see someone in particular?” Steve asked, apparently having some whole other conversation that Eddie hadn’t been invited to. “Oh, man, is this your first fight? It must be, you said you’d never been to Indy before.”
Eddie wanted to grab him and shake him to try to get him to start talking sense. They were close enough for him to do it. He—
“Are you going to stay to watch some more? I don’t usually hang around. Someone always calls the cops, eventually, and, uh, I need to…” He gestured at himself, in some kind of explanation that Eddie couldn’t follow. He wasn’t following much at the moment, and he hated it. “So, like, I’ll see you around, if you’re staying, and—”
“Steve,” Eddie managed, finally, reaching out and catching his arm in a spot that looked less bruised and bloody than everywhere else. Steve’s skin felt burning hot and slick, sticky, under his palm and fingers. He had no idea where to start, what to say, and what came out of his mouth was, “You’re bleeding.”
Steve snorted and flashed him a smile, red and wide. He had a black eye, partially obscured by the fall of his hair. “Can’t get anything past you, Munson.”
“Jesus Christ.” Eddie needed to get his shit together. He needed to figure out what to do. “You’ve – you’ve done this before.” Clearly, Steve had done this before. He’d been doing this for weeks. Maybe months. Jesus, it was— Eddie shook all that away; he had to focus up. “Where do you get patched up?”
Steve blinked at him, blankly, like the idea of getting patched up was some alien concept that failed to even register with him, with that smile still teasing at the corners of his mouth.
“Jesus Christ,” Eddie repeated, with more feeling, and with something like relief washing through him in a wave because, finally, he knew what to do. He knew exactly what he had to do. “Shit, alright, come with me.” He still had a grip on Steve’s arm. He used it to pull Steve forward a step, half-expecting a protest or for Steve to try to shake him off.
Steve just followed him, instead, only asking, once they escaped the press of the crowd and the noise that had required screaming to communicate, “So, wait, aren’t you going to watch the rest of the fights?”
“No,” Eddie bit out, some kind of emotion growing through his chest with each second he got away from watching Steve beat some guy’s head against the ground. He walked fast, tightening his grip on Steve, feeling his shoulders and back get tighter with each step.
Steve was getting into fights for fucking money.
Steve was driving to Indianapolis on some kind of semi-regular basis and fighting.
Steve was—
And apparently, none of them had even noticed. Apparently, Eddie’d been too lost in feeling sorry for himself to pay attention to Steve showing up with weird bruises and battered knuckles. Apparently, he’d been just as selfish as he’d ever been. Apparently—
“Hey,” Steve said, at some point, as storm clouds filled up Eddie’s head, “you okay, man?”
Eddie scoffed out a sound, relieved when they turned a corner and he found the van. He’d been so in his head, he hadn’t even been thinking, really, about where they were going. He felt briefly grateful to whatever part of his brain had got them to their destination.
He let go of Steve, finally, in order to pull the rear doors open. “Sit down,” he said, pushing aside the noise in his brain because he had to focus on the necessities of the situation, first. Steve was beat to hell. Eddie had a van full of supplies. Everything else could wait until he fixed what needed fixing. He reached for the box of bandages, and added, “And take off that shirt.”
Steve heaved a sigh, but immediately pulled his shirt up and over his head, dropping it over his legs as he sat down on the back of the van. Eddie’d half-expected him to fight the orders, but that had been stupid of him, probably. Steve had, in Eddie’s experience since his life went to hell, pretty much always listened to what people told him to do.
Mostly Nancy, but also Robin and, hell, even Dustin, and—
“Let me see how bad it is,” Eddie said, and Steve stretched his arms out a little with a huffy little noise of impatience.
“It’s not really anything,” he said, like Eddie couldn’t see bruises darkening up across his ribs; he’d taken blows to his body, then, more than a few.
Eddie found his jaw locked up too tight to make a reply to that, a jarring feeling all on it’s own; he’d always been able to find something to say, before, even if he was only trying to make an ass of himself.
He just… pressed his mouth thin because he had to – to help, somehow. And he had gotten ready to help. The time he’d put in suddenly felt worth it, even if the attack hadn’t come from Vecna. It didn’t fucking matter.
He grabbed for the radio he’d tucked between a box of bandages and the wall of the van. He fumbled the cassette deck open, reached into the box of cassettes – he’d organized them by person, instead of genre or artist – and grabbed the first one in Steve’s section.
He pushed it into the player, shut it, and, a moment later, the first notes of Badlands filled the air.
Steve said, “Oh, hey, nice,” as Eddie grabbed some rags and the bottle of rubbing alcohol, too raw to pretend that he didn’t feel the song in his bones. Something grew and shifted in Eddie’s stomach as he listened to I’m caught in a crossfire I don’t understand and, moments later, I want control right now.
He forgot to warn Steve that the alcohol would sting before wiping at an abrasion on his side, but Steve only barely twitched and said nothing in complaint about the pain. Eddie also remembered that from the Vecna nightmare; Steve hadn’t ever really complained about the wounds from the bats, despite the fact that he’d been gored and nearly strangled to death. He’d just gotten up, brushed himself off, and started running through the woods, content to bleed freely all over himself.
It had taken Nancy stepping in before he even tended to the wounds, and he hadn’t said anything about her pressing on them, though Eddie knew, first hand, how much the bites hurt.
Eddie shook the thoughts away. He had no room for them in his head at the moment, so he needed to put them aside. And he could do that, he discovered. He could wipe the wounds clean and disinfect them. He could run antibacterial cream over torn flesh and cover the open wounds with bandages.
He worked methodically, starting with the wounds on Steve’s side and working across his chest, before checking his hands.
He expected, at some point, for Steve to demand to know what he was doing, but Steve just sat there, letting Eddie manhandle him around. Eddie only risked a look at his face when he needed to check the wounds there, and found Steve with his eyes heavy-lidded and his expression soft and relaxed as he breathed slow, in and out, through his mouth while the Boss sang on around them.
The expression felt so at odds with the injuries littered across his body that it drew Eddie up short.
He asked, unsure, “Steve? You – are you okay?” Shit, maybe he had a concussion. Maybe—
“Hm?” Steve tilted his head back a little, opening his eyes enough for Eddie to see his pupils; Eddie had the vague idea that he was supposed to look at them for some reason. “Yeah, fine.” He lifted one hand and waved it a little by his hip before setting it down again.
“You sure?” Eddie definitely felt unsure, sudden tension tightening all the muscles down his back; shit, he was such an idiot, he should have just taken Steve to a hospital instead of trying to put him back together in the back of a van, he was—
“Yeah.” Steve curved up one side of his mouth, shrugging. “Feels nice.”
Eddie opened his mouth, shut it, and blinked twice, waiting to process that. He said, carefully, “It… feels nice?” Steve hummed. “Getting bandaged up? That – feels nice?”
Steve nodded. “Yeah, man. You’re good at this.” He hummed and added, “There’s even good music.”
And Eddie felt… something warm and shifting inside his chest. He had no names for it, but it pushed out gently at his ribs, easing some of the biting pressure under his skin. He felt like he’d breathed in something magical, almost, and somehow kept it inside his flesh.
“Oh,” he said, feeling dumb. “Good. That’s – I’m going to check your face now.”
“Okay, man, whatever you say,” Steve said, shrugging, and Eddie fumbled with the rag at the way that kicked at something in his gut and he jerked to look at Steve, making eye-contact with another jolt. He had to suck in a little breath, feeling something tingle in his fingertips.
“Hold still,” Eddie said, because he had to say something to break the sudden sparkling tension between them.
Steve’s eyes fluttered, lids dropping, and he stayed still. Eddie bit the side of his tongue, something shivering down his spine, and used one hand to grip Steve’s jaw so he could wipe away the blood and sweat, revealing bruises and scrapes. He patched them up, too, and then said, “Good, okay, turn around.”
Steve made a soft sound and complied. His back looked as battered as the rest of him. He had scars, under the more recent damage, ones that Eddie had noticed briefly in the Upside Down. He assumed they’d come from some past misadventure with demons, but hadn’t found a good way to ask about it.
He tended the current injuries, feeling… calmer the more he covered.
At some point, his head had gotten quiet. The sour burn of fear had disappeared completely. He felt almost peaceful, except for the way his heart still raced and he felt a tingling awareness of each inch of his body and the places where he touched Steve, which wasn’t… completely unfamiliar.
He remembered having a… hard time keeping his hands to himself, even when they’d been fighting demons together. He’d known he was probably being too obvious about it, but no one in the party had called him on it. Besides, at the time, Nancy had been all over Steve just as much. Eddie knew most people wouldn’t have ever believed that he had anything in common with Nancy Wheeler, but he thought the two of them knew the truth. They’d met each other’s eyes in that boat, after all, after Steve peeled off his shirt and jumped into the water, and he couldn’t convince himself that she hadn’t seen reflected in his eyes exactly what he’d seen in hers.
Maybe she hadn’t wanted to do the relationship thing with Steve. Maybe she preferred, for some goddamn reason, Jonathan Byers.
But she’d wanted Steve.
Eddie wanted Steve, running a hand over his back, gaze slipping down the line of Steve’s spine before he caught himself and cleared his throat. “Alright,” he said, shaking himself. “I’ve got, uh, like, clothes that aren’t covered in blood. Let’s get you changed.”
#
Steve agreeably pulled on the shirt Eddie gave him: one of his old Hellfire shirts, he’d had plenty, and a pair of loose sweatpants. He even sat agreeably when Eddie peeled off his old socks and replaced them with a mismatched pair that Eddie had pilfered from the laundromat in town.
After they took care of that, Eddie grabbed one of the bottles of Gatorade that he’d stashed – people needed electrolytes, or whatever – twisted the lid open, put it in one of Steve’s hands, and said, “Drink.”
Steve blinked at him and then lifted the bottle and took a deep swallow. He asked, sounding confused, “How much stuff do you have in here?”
“Not that much,” Eddie lied, even as he realized that he, honestly, didn’t have everything he needed. He hadn’t really gotten much in the way of food. He had some crackers and shit, but he could try to find the diner, only—
Only the idea of being out in public, around other people, put his teeth on edge again. So he grabbed the crackers, instead, pulled the pack open, and said, “Here, eat some of this.”
Steve made a curious little noise, took one of the crackers, and popped it in his mouth. He seemed unbothered by chewing, even with his bruised jaw and split lip. Eddie wondered, watching him, if he even felt pain or if his tolerance had just grown to unspeakable levels after multiple head-to-heads with demons.
He was still wondering when he noticed that Steve had started to shiver, his second cracker wobbling in the air from the force of the tremors. “Shit, you’re cold.” Eddie frowned, some part of him noting that it truly wasn’t cold outside, even in the night, the summer had taken care of that. That part of him was in the backseat at the moment.
Steve made a questioning sound, looked down at his hand, and said, “Oh, yeah, that happens sometimes,” which, of course it did, when he was cold.
“Get in,” Eddie said, agitation thrumming through him in a rush because he needed to get Steve warmed up, clearly.
Steve complied, at least, swinging his legs up into the van and going with it when Eddie put hands on his shoulder and side, nudging him further in and over towards the side. “You should have said you were cold,” he said, though he should have been paying attention, Steve had clearly trusted him – for some goddamn reason – to help him out, and Eddie had screwed that up, so he frowned and added, “but it’s fine. I’ve got it. Come here.”
He climbed up into the van, pulled the doors shut, and sank down beside Steve. It already felt significantly warmer with the doors closed. He grabbed one of the ratty blankets he’d stuffed in, shifted to sit alongside Steve, logistics taking over everything in his head for a moment. They were of a height, so he said, “Lean forward,” and, when Steve did, put an arm behind his shoulders and tugged.
Steve made a… little sound in his chest, something Eddie’d never actually heard from anyone before, so he had no way to interpret it, but the noise didn’t sound like a complaint, and, anyway, Steve folded into him with the sound, his body sort of radiating heat, actually, as he slouched and tilted sideways. Eddie tossed the blanket across him and then rubbed lightly up and down his upper arm, over bandages and bruises, trying to warm him up, Steve’s dirty, sweaty hair pressing against his cheek, the tension that had been building inside him easing down again, fading away as they sat there in near-blackness of the back of the van, music and the sound of their breathing filling up the space.
“There we go,” Eddie said, inane, as he felt Steve stop shivering. He exhaled and felt… good, again. Better than he could remember feeling in months. Since Vecna’s attacks, at least. Maybe since long before that.
Maybe, he considered, gathering Steve a little closer, better than he’d ever felt in his life. He decided he’d think about that later.
Chapter Text
Eddie had no clear idea of how long they sat there in the back of the van, really. Long enough that the cassette ended, anyway, the player clicking as it reached the end of the tape and started an automatic rewind.
Steve hummed into the resultant quiet. He’d slung an arm over Eddie’s stomach at some point and Eddie’s eyes had adjusted enough to the dark that he could see Steve absently plucking at the fabric, though he couldn’t really feel it; Steve’s hand must have been over one of the spots on his stomach where, thanks to the scarring, his nerves had pretty much given up doing their job.
“This is nice,” Steve said, quiet in the darkness, and that weird something in Eddie’s chest that he’d become increasingly aware of shifted and stretched, filling more of him with warmth, even as Steve went on, “But, uh, I don’t understand what you’re, like, doing here?”
The question dragged Eddie out of his thoughts and the sense of… quiet, almost, that had stolen over him.
“I followed you here,” Eddie said, automatically, and then realized exactly what had come out of his mouth and winced; way to sound like a fucking weirdo. He added, before Steve could react to that bit of creepiness, “Uh, because I was worried about you.” He’d been worried, it had consumed him for the past week, allowing him to feel something besides self-loathing and misery.
The realization tingled through him, though he had no idea what to do with it, not really.
“You were worried,” Steve said, sounding more confused than anything else, and distracting Eddie from pinning down his exact feelings about feeling something again. “About me?”
Eddie narrowed his eyes. He couldn’t really look over at Steve, who’d kept his head tucked down. “Yeah, Stevie, I found you randomly beat all to hell last week. Of course I was fucking worried. About you.”
Steve said, “Oh.” He shifted, moving enough to look up through his eyelashes – a gut punch of a move, especially in the dim light of the van’s interior, it made Eddie feel other things – and said, “I’ve been worried about you, too, you know.”
Eddie had to take a moment to even sort those words out, and then he snorted with a little shake of his head, because no one had any reason to worry about him, he hadn’t even been doing anything since Vecna’s defeat, he’d been— “I mean it. Like, super worried, if we’re admitting to being worried about shit,” Steve said, interrupting the spiral of Eddie’s thoughts.
Eddie shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said.
Steve groaned, dropping his head back down, all the way to Eddie’s shoulder, this time, slouching to allow the move, and said, voice going bitchy with complaint the way that Eddie probably shouldn’t have liked as much as he did, “Hey, fuck, come on, you can’t lie to me after you like, followed me all the way to another city and like, bandaged my wounds. We’re, I don’t know, connected now. So, spill it. What’s going on with you?”
Eddie snorted, something… fond stirring around inside him, more feelings, which apparently he could have freely when he was around Steve. He should have realized that earlier, probably. Attraction was, after all, a feeling, and he’d never had any problems experiencing that around Steve, even in his most pathetic moments.
And he found, sitting there in the dark, too hot and with the air gone stuffy around them, with his head feeling calm for the first time in months, that the words didn’t feel so hard to say. In fact, after he started, they began to just pour out, like a liquid rushing from a glass knocked on it’s side.
“I really am fine,” he said, continuing, when Steve made an irritated, protesting noise, “I just—after Vecna, I kind of realized that I’d been, you know, kind of a piece of shit my whole life? Or more like – like I wasn’t sure anything about me was really… real. Like it was all just… bullshit, you know? The jumping on tables and the yelling at people, the – the refusing to move a fucking stupid game – just all of it, all of me. It was all bullshit and actually I’m not sure there ever was a me. So I guess I’ve just been, I don’t know, trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with that, you know? Or what I’m supposed to do without...all that.”
The words stopped all at once, Eddie breathing hard at the end and prickling all over with sweat and a vague feeling of relief to have them out, only to realize that Steve had tensed against him as he spoke.
Eddie could feel the rigidity in his shoulders and down his back, and had a moment to realize that maybe he’d spilled too much, that of course Steve would be disgusted by the admissions, anyone would be, before Steve exhaled and all the tension went out with his breath.
Steve said, quiet, “Well, I mean, shit, okay… the good thing about the world, uh, I don’t know, striping you down to nothing, the good thing about that is that, you know, when it happens you get to pick what you want to be, going forward.”
Eddie blinked at the far side of the van. He hadn’t expected that as a reply. He heard himself say, from a distance, “What?”
“Yeah,” Steve said, and heaved a sigh. “That’s – you get to pick what you want being you to mean. And I’m not saying that’s like, easy, but. But, yeah. If you feel like – like everything was bullshit, and now it’s all gone, that means you get to decide who you want to be, instead. Instead of the bullshit. You get to pick what matters to you and, I don’t know, what kind of man you want to be and – and all of that. So it’s not – it’s not so bad, really. If that’s what you feel like happened. It’s just a fresh start. It means you can be anything. Anything you want to be, now.”
Eddie kept staring across at the far wall, the words settling over him like a balm for all the injuries on the inside of his skin that he hadn’t even known how to go about tending. He’d felt… powerless, since he watched Chrissy floating in his trailer. He’d hated it, the lack of control over even himself.
And Steve had just… just offered out a path forward, as easy as that. But.
He swallowed, something bitter in the back of his throat, and said, “Isn’t that – isn’t that just putting on a mask again? Pretending to be – be someone?”
Steve shrugged against him and said, “Only if you don’t make it real.”
Eddie snorted. “And how do you make it real?” He tried to make the words come out mocking and thought he failed, hearing a hint of desperation in the tone, instead. God, he so badly wanted to have something real about him. Anything.
“Man, you just live it,” Steve said, and Eddie didn’t know if it could really be that easy, but, at the same time… He found he’d like to be the kind of guy who could successfully patch up a friend and then sit with them and have quiet conversations. He thought he’d like to be the kind of guy who could take care of people. Who could plan for the worst and step in to help, instead of running away.
And he had done all those things, hadn’t he? He’d found Steve and he’d patched him up, gotten him to stop shivering and taken care of him, hadn’t he? So maybe he could just decide to be that guy. Maybe, instead of being Eddie Munson, ne’er-do-well shit-stirrer extraordinaire, he could be Eddie Munson, guy who solves mysteries and helps his friends and then has a heart-to-heart.
“Okay,” he said, because maybe it could be that easy, and, anyway, nothing he’d done in the past few hours had felt fake. None of it felt like he was acting from behind a mask. He’d wanted to find Steve, he’d wanted to patch him up, he’d wanted to hold him, and he’d done all of those things, without pretending at anything.
So, maybe this was what he’d been, all along, just buried under all the bullshit, and maybe he could keep being this, maybe he only had to choose to accept that path going forward.
He liked that idea. He really liked that idea. “Okay,” he repeated, and tilted his head sideways to rest his cheek on Steve’s filthy hair, and they just sat there in the van, for a while, in the silence.
#
At some point – Eddie had lost all track of time – Steve sighed and said, “Man, I gotta get home. Someone’s gonna steal my hubcaps.”
Eddie snorted a laugh; Steve worrying about someone taking his hubcaps after he abandoned his car in a parking lot to go beat someone up for money seemed amusing at the moment and nothing had really felt funny to him in a long time. He shook the amusement off when Steve shifted away from his body, eyeing him in the dim light and asking, “Are you even safe to drive?”
Steve twisted to shoot him an unimpressed look. “I’ve been managing for months. I’ll be fine.”
“Right,” Eddie said, not liking the reminder that, apparently, everyone had missed this for months. “Okay, well. Home, then.”
He popped open the rear doors, doing his best to ignore the sudden awkwardness as they climbed out. The flickering streetlight over the van buzzed a little while Eddie hurriedly gathered up bloody rags and decided to shove them into a nearby overflowing trash can.
He managed to say goodbye, itching with a sudden urge to insist that Steve stay close, even though that made no sense. They couldn’t very well just abandon Steve’s car in Indy. Eddie reminded himself of that, repeatedly, as he climbed behind the wheel, turned the van on, and then sat there, watching Steve cross the parking lot.
He kept sitting there and watching while Steve got into his car, got it started, and then pulled out with a little wave in Eddie’s direction.
And Eddie just… pulled out to follow him. He had no real solid idea how to get out of town, anyway. So it made sense to follow Steve’s taillights, and it made sense to stick behind him once they hit the interstate, and by the time they reached Hawkins, Eddie had decided to tail Steve all the way home. He’d taken some big hits. Someone ought to make sure he made it through the front door.
So, Eddie followed his tail lights through Loch Nora and he idled at the bottom of the driveway while Steve parked, climbed out, and looked over to wave, still wearing the Hellfire Club shirt. Eddie waved back and sat there, watching, until Steve made it through the front door.
Then he sat another few minutes, just to make sure that everything was okay, watching lights go on and off, tracking Steve’s progress up the stairs and down a hall into what was, probably, his bedroom.
Eddie tapped his fingers on the wheel a few times, blew out a breath, and, finally, turned for home with the first purple-pink edge of dawn staining the horizon.
#
Eddie got home nearly at the same time as Wayne, who looked openly delighted to see him up and about and who insisted on making him breakfast, frying up eggs while cutting Eddie looks out of the corner of his eyes the whole time, as though he half-expected Eddie to disappear at any moment, perhaps to teleport back to his bed.
Eddie leaned back against the counter and stayed put. His stomach actually grumbled, hunger he hadn’t felt in ages stirring around in his gut. He felt… present in his body, in the world, in the moment. Somehow, the night had given him that. He had no idea how, but he wanted to hoard the feeling and never let it go.
Wayne asked, while stirring the eggs, “You get up to something fun last night?”
Eddie almost said no, tasted the word on his tongue, even, because no, it hadn’t been fun, watching Steve fight some guy. Nothing about the warehouse had been pleasant. It had been terrifying, but… The aftermath had left Eddie peaceful in his skin. He ran his tongue over his teeth and said, picking the words carefully, “I went out to Indy with, uh, with Steve.”
Wayne straightened, gave him a long look, and then said, “Oh. Good. He seems like a nice kid.”
Eddie knew for sure that Steve wasn’t a kid; he thought Steve had probably stopped being a kid years ago, the first time he fought a monster. He wasn’t particularly sure that Steve was nice, either, not in the way that most people used the word. He wasn’t sweet and kind to everyone he met, certainly, but, fuck, he was always there to help, and maybe that mattered more.
He asked, to avoid saying any of that, and because if anyone would know for sure, it’d be Wayne, “Do you think people can just decide what they want to be?”
Wayne heaved in a breath and sighed it out, grabbing up the skillet to start dishing up eggs. He said, “Don’t see why not. Get the ketchup.”
Eddie got the ketchup. And the mayonnaise, while Wayne grabbed the bread, and they stood there in the kitchen, eating egg sandwiches, while the sun finished coming up.
#
Eddie went to sleep after the sandwich, curling up on his mattress with his stomach full and his head surprisingly peaceful. He actually fell asleep easily, for once. Unfortunately, with sleep came nightmares.
He dreamed himself back to the Upside Down, back into the forest around the lake. He dreamed himself all alone, running from something as vines and roots did their best to snag and trip him as he screamed and shouted for help, his own voice echoing back at him, mockingly. He ran until his legs felt like jelly, until his lungs burned and each breath hurt, he ran until something – a bat – flew down at him from one of the trees and, when he jerked to avoid it, screaming, his feet went out from under him.
He lay there on the ground, feeling the dirt move and pulse under him, feeling wounds open all over his body all at once as blood pooled in his mouth and soaked into the unnatural earth around him. He gurgled, staring up at the sky until someone leaned over him, and he knew – with the cold, terrible knowledge of dreams – that it was the thing that had been chasing him.
He stared upwards, helplessly, as a terribly familiar face eclipsed the sky, with long, dark tangles of hair falling forward and brushing his cheeks before a hand slid over his face, palm pressing over his nose and mouth, cold and familiar rings pressing into his skin, and he heard himself say, “Sh, sh, sh, Eddie, it’s better this way, we both know it, just—”
He woke shouting and thrashing in his blankets, clawing at his face to try to remove a hand that only existed in his head.
He stumbled to his feet, still half in the dream, and managed to jerk his door open, half-falling down the hall and into the bathroom where he threw the lights on and tripped over to the mirror over the sink, staring at himself, desperate to make sure that – that his hair was still short, that he wasn’t that man anymore.
“Jesus,” he panted out, spitting down into the sink, a cold feeling creeping all over the back of his neck.
“You alright?” Wayne asked; Eddie had probably woke him up.
“Yeah,” Eddie said, shuddering all over, scrubbing a hand over his face and then back through his hair. “Just a bad dream.” Jesus.
#
The nightmare had shattered whatever strange peaceful feeling had followed Eddie home from Indy.
He felt jittery and out-of-sorts, pacing around the kitchen in the early-afternoon light and trying to bury the thought of suffocating himself and the syrupy sweet words of his dream-image as they curled like thorned vines around his heart; maybe it would be better for everyone if he’d died, he’d certainly thought so for months and—
“I’m going out,” he called to Wayne, because he had to do something or he knew he’d head right back to his bed, curl up on his side, and go back to willing himself into the ground.
He told himself he had no real idea about where he was going, but couldn’t really muster surprise when he pulled up behind Steve’s car in his driveway in Loch Nora and turned off the engine. He sat behind the wheel for a moment, one knee bouncing up and down, because, really, what the fuck did he think he was doing? He’d never just shown up at Steve’s house before. But…
“Fuck it,” he muttered, and got out. He got to choose what kind of guy he wanted to be, right? He could choose to be the kind of guy who checked on friends the day after they got into a fight.
Steve answered the front door – Eddie felt weird and exposed standing on the stoop – after only a moment. He still wore the Hellfire shirt – rumpled, now – and his hair stood up at all angles. The bruises on his visible skin had come up vividly over the past few hours. He yawned behind a hand and said, voice roughened with sleep, “Hey, man, what’s up?”
Eddie decided not to answer, shouldering past him, instead, because clearly his injuries were bad enough that they required further treatment, and if Eddie was busy helping with that, he wouldn’t be thinking about his nightmare, or how much better it’d be for everyone if he just sunk into nothingness and disappeared.
“You look like shit,” he said, once he was inside, glancing around the house; he’d been inside before, but only in what might be termed a business capacity. Parties at the Harrington house had been good for business before they’d unexpectedly stopped during his first go-round of senior year. In any case, he already knew where the living room was and frowned at the crumpled mess of blankets on one of the couches.
He thought about Steve just limping through the door, over to the couch, and folding down all alone and didn’t like the cramp that image sent through his gut.
“Wow, so nice of you to say,” Steve drawled, making to shuffle past him. “You want a coffee, or something?”
“I want you to go sit on the couch,” Eddie said, the words catching him by surprise, even as he realized that, yeah, that’s what he wanted. That was why he’d come, to check on Steve, because no one else was, and Steve clearly needed it, and maybe – just maybe – helping would… settle Eddie down, the way it had the previous night.
Steve froze into place at the words, and Eddie had a moment to wonder if he’d gone far enough to get Steve to wheel around and give Eddie shit for trying to boss him around in his own home. Instead, Steve let out a little breath, and changed direction.
He ambled into the living room, over to the couch, and dropped down by the nest of blankets before gesturing at himself and lifting his eyebrows in a clear well? The entire movement kicked something over inside Eddie’s gut, the same tingling feeling from the previous night. The relief of it almost made him dizzy.
“You got a first aid kit in here?” Eddie asked, to hide his reaction and because he needed supplies. He’d go out to the van again if necessary, but…
Steve rolled his eyes. “Yeah, of course.” Which, fair enough. Probably anyone who’d been through Upside Down shit stayed well-prepared afterwards. “In my room. It’s upstairs and—”
“I know where your room is,” Eddie interrupted, because hey, he’d never claimed not to be a nosy motherfucker. He added, turning for the stairs, “Stay put.” He resisted the urge to sprint up the stairs, something prickling along under his skin with each step he took.
Steve’s room looked nearly the same as it had two years ago, when Eddie’d ducked inside to poke around, touch things, and pilfer a few bills from the wallet that Steve had left lying on his dresser, considering it a tax for the joy and drugs he’d brought to the party. There hadn’t been a bat leaning beside the bed, then, though, or a walkie on the nightstand.
There probably hadn’t been the huge first-aid kit that Eddie found under the bed, either. It looked expensive and official, all red and white and bigger than a cooler. When he dropped it down onto the mattress and flipped open the lid, he discovered it was also well-used. Half the sections were emptied completely and, at some point, Steve had clearly spilled Betadine everywhere; the smell clung to the plastic and the liquid had left behind orange stains.
Eddie’s gut cramped, painfully, and he clicked the case shut to avoid thinking about Steve getting himself beat up and then, what, dragging himself in to sleep on the couch before slumping upstairs in the morning to patch himself back up together?
Eddie shook the thoughts off; clearly, it wasn’t better for everyone if he just rolled over and died. No one else seemed even aware that Steve needed help, much less prepared to provide it. Eddie could step in and be that guy. He wanted to step in and be that guy.
Just live it, Steve had said. Eddie could do that.
#
Steve remained on the couch when Eddie came back down the stairs, his head tilted back against the cushions and his eyes closed. The angle made the swelling along his cheek and jaw really stand out; his face looked strange, momentarily made unfamiliar in it’s asymmetry. The angle also revealed the strange, thin scar left around Steve’s throat, a present from the Upside Down.
Eddie cleared his throat and dropped the kit by Steve’s hip, standing close enough to bump their knees together and assessing him. He said, “You didn’t even put ice on any of this, did you?”
Steve shrugged with one shoulder, keeping his eyes shut. He said, “I was kind of tired, man.”
Eddie heaved a sigh, shook his head, and went to the kitchen, which was almost big enough to fit his entire trailer inside. He found some ice waiting in the freezer, dumped it out onto a nice kitchen towel, brought it back, pressed it against the worst of the bruises, and said, “Hold this here.” Steve hummed something, hand coming up – fingers briefly brushing Eddie’s – and taking over the ice.
Eddie went back to the kitchen and dug through the fridge, finding not a lot of food inside. He grabbed a Gatorade and decided it would do for the moment. He twisted the lid off on his way back in, put it in Steve’s free hand, and said, “Drink. And then we’re going to check your injuries.”
Steve heaved a sigh, but he shifted around and drank, eyeing Eddie afterwards to say, “I didn’t know you made house calls, Doc Munson.”
“Only for you, tough guy,” Eddie said, without thinking, the words just slipping out in a way that felt natural and – and, alright, so maybe he knew that about himself, now, too. Maybe the urge to banter with the guy he had a crush on had nothing to do with his masks, then. Or maybe it didn’t have to, anymore, or—
“Oh, yeah, what makes me so special?” Steve asked, before Eddie could get tangled up in his own head about it, and his distraction almost had him blurting out a truthful answer: God, what didn’t make Steve special?
Eddie bit the reply back before it could slip free and said, instead, “Well, no one else got into a brawl last night.”
“That you know about,” Steve shot back, and Eddie rolled his eyes.
“Alright, enough Gatorade for you. Come on, shirt off, let’s see the damage.”
The damage looked worse in the light of day, not better. All kinds of new bruises had come up over the past few hours, standing stark against Steve’s skin, looking tender. Some of them were dark enough for Eddie to make out the shape of individual knuckles imprinted against skin. He couldn’t do much for those, but he could check under the bandages, so he did, Steve just… letting him do it.
He’d made it most of the way across Steve’s chest when he finally asked, “So, like… why exactly are you beating guys up in shitty old warehouses, anyway?”
Steve shrugged under his hands. “Why not?”
Eddie frowned up at him, but Steve had his eyes closed and his head tipped back and to the side. He looked so relaxed and that, for some reason, made Eddie relax, it was— He shook that off. “I mean, I don’t know. How’d you even – end up there?” Steve sighed, and Eddie added, nudging him to turn so Eddie could get at his side and back, “Tell me.”
“It’s not an interesting story,” Steve said, head bowing forward as Eddie peeled an old bandage up. “Just, I mean, I got my ass kicked a few times. You know. Super hard.” Eddie frowned; he wondered if anyone had bothered to help Steve after those fights. He seemed to remember him wandering around the school looking like ground beef after the thing with Hargrove, anyway.
“And,” Steve went on, before Eddie could ask, “you know, monsters kept showing up in town. So, I thought, you know, maybe I should get… better at it. At fighting. You know? Since it seemed like I was gonna have to keep doing it. And my dad, he, you know, he was actually pretty happy that I wanted to learn some boxing? He did some in college, back in the day, I guess. It’s a real… like, manly sport, I guess. More than basketball and swimming.”
There was a lot to unpack there, things Eddie had no idea where to even start to consider. He’d never met the Harringtons; they’d never been around for the parties and Eddie’d had no other reason to cross paths with them.
Fortunately, Steve kept going without expecting a comment. “So, yeah, I… did that, for a while. Boxing. Went to a gym two towns over a few times a week and…” He mimed throwing some punches; Eddie paid too much attention to the way it made the muscles in his back move. “Turns out I’m pretty okay at it? And it did help. Even beyond like, making me better at hitting guys. Or monsters, whatever. It, um, made me feel better.” He heaved out a breath.
Eddie said, when he stayed quiet, “You weren’t boxing last night.”
“Yeah.” Steve sighed again. Eddie had stopped adjusting bandages, but he stayed there, close, a hand on Steve’s back by one of the bigger bruises because it...felt nice and probably it was comforting for Steve, right? He wasn’t complaining, anyway. “Well, see, the thing is that… it’s that boxing is fine, or, was fine. But it wasn’t really, I don’t know, it, after last time, after Vecna, it just – it stopped helping.” He waved a hand, vaguely. “But someone at the gym mentioned the fights in Indy, said I might like them, and I thought, you know, why the fuck not try that? Why not see if that helped, and, you know. It does. So.” He shrugged.
Eddie chewed all of that over, thumb absently stroking across skin; there was something fascinating about watching his touch move from tan, undamaged skin to a red-purple bruise, feeling the skin hot and swollen and—
He lifted his hand away when Steve made a little sound, something like alarm running through him because what the fuck had he been thinking? Not the thoughts of a guy who just wanted to help his friend, that was for fucking sure, what the fuck—
“Helped with what?” he asked, desperate to distance himself from...whatever that feeling had been. He grabbed one of the blankets on the couch and wrapped it up and over Steve’s shoulders; the bandages all looked fine for the moment and maybe it’d be better if Eddie wasn’t, well, looking at Steve’s body. Maybe that’d be safer for Steve. Jesus.
“I don’t know, everything, I guess,” Steve said, looking over with his eyes all big and trusting when Eddie pulled the blanket up a little higher around his throat, completely unaware that Eddie had touched a bruise and got a jolt of something, fuck— “I don’t know, man. Sometimes, with all this, it’s like my head just gets really, you know, loud?” He pulled a face and then dropped his head back again, while his words snapped Eddie out of the spiral of panicked shame. “It makes everything suck. The noise.”
“And fighting helps with that?” Eddie asked, after it became clear Steve wasn’t going to further elaborate. Shit, maybe he should try it, then? He’d like to other ways to quiet the noise in his head, too – tending to Steve after someone beat him up didn’t seem like an effective long-term solution to the problem – and, also, damn, he needed a minute to sit and reckon with the fact that someone else had the noise in their head, that he wasn’t as alone as he’d felt.
But that would have to wait, because Steve shrugged and sighed. “Parts of it help, yeah. So.” He shrugged again.
Eddie stared at him while Steve kept his eyes shut, face tilted up. He heard himself ask, tense and hopeful, “Does anything else? Help?” Because, in honesty, he couldn’t imagine himself getting into some kind of brawl in a crowded warehouse, not even to quiet down his head, but, fuck, he’d like to know all about ways to deal with the noise, and Steve had years more experience than he did with it, apparently.
Steve made a face, scrunching his noise a little. He did something with his hands under the blanket, the gesture obscured, and said, “I mean, sex, sometimes?”
Oddly enough, those words made Eddie’s head go completely quiet. He kept right on staring, feeling his body freeze into place all over, attention locked onto Steve’s expression. He felt like he’d found himself standing right on the side of a cliff, tingling all over with a sudden desire to jump. Before he could, Steve continued, with a twist of his mouth, “But, like, anymore, it’s like, man, I barely even feel like I’m the same species as other people half the time, you know? Like, I try to talk to a some girl and it’s just like all I can think about is that she doesn’t know. She’ll never know. She thinks the world is something it isn’t. I couldn’t talk to her about it, or explain the scars, or make her understand, so…”
He shrugged, sniffed and then scrubbed at his eyes, once, harshly.
Eddie swallowed, the timely reminder that, hey, Steve liked to fuck girls like ice down his back and into his stomach, dampening out the strange heat that had been trying to spread. Eddie tried to feel grateful for that.
He cleared his throat, abruptly not sure what to do with himself, and asked, “Have you eaten anything?”
Steve rolled his head to the side and cracked his eyes open, they were shiny wet, and said, “Only those crackers.”
“Alright,” Eddie said, pushing to his feet and wiping his hands on his thighs, because he could fix that, if nothing else. And if he was fixing that, he wouldn’t be thinking about sex helping, sometimes, or Steve and the bruises on his skin, or—
“I’m going to order some pizza and you’re going to eat some.”
#
Eddie ordered pizza. He got Steve to eat more than half of it, told him he needed a shower, and then re-bandaged his scrapes and got him all the way up to his actual bed to sleep, since Steve admitted that he had the day off at work.
Eddie found he didn’t want to go to work after he got Steve sitting on the side of his bed, his hair still damp and the Hellfire shirt off.
He looked soft and tired and getting him sorted had quieted the noise in Eddie’s head, the way that he guessed fighting and sex quieted the noise in Steve’s, which he was very carefully not thinking about. “You gonna be alright for the night?” he asked, in an effort to keep right on not thinking about it.
Steve shot him a look, jerked the blankets to the side, stretched himself out along the mattress – Jesus – and said, “I think I can manage sleeping.”
“Alright,” Eddie said, and then wished he’d cleared his throat first, especially because Steve jerked a little to look at him, head tilting to the side, mouth opening to say something. Eddie rushed on, before he could, “I’m going to check on you again after work.”
Steve stared up at him for a moment, and said, “See you later, then, I guess.”
“Right,” Eddie said, painfully aware of the dryness of his mouth and the heat prickling over his skin. He reached out, grabbed the blankets, and heaved them up over Steve’s body because the alternative was joining him in that bed, and Steve—
“Later,” he said, turned on a heel, and fled.
#
Eddie made it through the shift, somehow.
Hard to say how, exactly, because his thoughts wandered off away from the line and never came back. He kept thinking about Steve having the same – or similar, anyway – noise in his head. He kept wondering, while fitting parts together, the same ones, over and over, why it was that some parts of fighting and some sex helped quiet the noise for Steve.
He should have asked which parts of fighting, clearly. He should have asked when sex helped. Though, actually, clearly that would have been a terrible idea; he wasn’t sure he could sit and listen to Steve talk about fucking without doing something drastic.
It was just that, clearly, fighting had some serious downsides as a way to make the noise stop.
Eddie’d found something that worked for him, oddly enough, and patching Steve up wasn’t going to end up causing him serious long-term damage if something went wrong, and, now that he knew Steve had the same problem, the same static in his head, he wanted to find a way for Steve to quiet it without all the risks and—
The bell for the end of the shift made him jump. The hours had passed in a distracted haze and left him with no solutions; he supposed he could try to get Steve back together with Nancy – she knew everything about the Upside Down, she could meet Steve where he stood – but he had a feeling that ship had fully sailed. And, anyway, a tight, dark, ugly thing in the pit of his stomach didn’t want to.
He drove back to Steve’s place after the shift, vaguely noting that he’d still seen no sign of the Harrington parents.
Maybe they’d gotten eaten by a monster; Eddie should probably check on that at some point.
But he felt disinclined at the moment, letting himself in with the set of keys he’d lifted on the way out as the morning sun crested the horizon. He found Steve still sleeping, passed out in the same position he’d been in when Eddie left, bruises on his face and his hair falling softly on the pillow and—
All the tension and swirling worries eased back, like a wave pulling away from shore in Eddie’s head.
He heaved out a breath, wandered over, sat on the side of the bed, and said, to himself, “Man, this is a bitch of a situation, huh?”
#
Steve woke up, eventually.
Eddie made him eat and drink and learned he had a shift at Family Video. Eddie watched him cover over the bruises on his face – the swelling had gone down significantly, maybe hadn’t been as bad as Eddie thought to begin with – and knew the whole time he ought to go home and get some sleep of his own.
He lingered around until Steve left for his shift, even though they hadn’t really talked about anything. And then he went back to his trailer, showered, dropped onto his bed, and stared at the ceiling, trying to figure anything out with minimal results.
Eventually, he slept.
The noise – the pressure – that had kept him in bed and outside of the world for so many months had started to come back by the time he woke up, but he’d figured out a way to fight it back, now. He took himself to Steve’s house. It helped.
God, fuck, it helped.
It kept right on helping, except then the marks started fading fully off of Steve’s skin, not even necessitating concealer to hide them, and each day kept bringing them closer and closer to Saturday.
Eddie never bothered to ask if Steve planned to go back to Indy to get into another fight.
He clearly did. Asking would be a waste of time. Besides, he wasn’t enough of a shithead to try to get Steve to stop doing one of the two things that, evidently, helped him manage. Eddie felt sure he’d kill anyone who tried to take that balm away from him, so he couldn’t very well do it to Steve.
So, instead of asking about anything, Eddie barely slept on Saturday and showed up outside of Family Video at a quarter to seven. He felt jittery, unable to settle, so he got out and leaned against the side of the van, crossing his legs at the ankles and fidgeting restlessly, spinning his keys around and around and around his index finger.
Steve came out of the store at seven on the dot, again, steps faltering for just a moment when he spotted Eddie, before he tucked his hands into his pockets and strolled over, head tilting to the side as he asked, “Here for the newest release?”
“I’m here to give you a ride,” Eddie said, his heart beating too fast in his chest for no good reason, really. Steve straightened a little, expression puzzled, and Eddie rushed on, “You shouldn’t be driving yourself home after— after. So.” He drew in a breath, caught the keys, and pushed away from the van, feeling more sure as he spoke. “So, get in.”
A part of him expected that order to be the limit, even though Steve had just spent the last week agreeably going along with what Eddie said, but that had all been relatively small stuff, and it had all, clearly, been to Steve’s benefit and in his best interests to go along with each thing Eddie requested.
Instead, Steve’s shoulders dropped, some looseness coming into his posture and his expression, and he said, “Alright, cool, thanks. Let me grab my stuff.”
Tingles spread down Eddie’s arms and spine. He thought he ought to be getting used to that feeling by now, but he hadn’t. Not even a little. He swallowed, told himself he knew exactly what he was doing, and turned to climb in the van and get it started.
#
They drove to Indy.
They went to the fights, Eddie tagging along a step behind Steve, who moved with purpose, a man who knew where he was going and was buzzing to get there.
And Eddie stood there, in a different warehouse that smelled the same, full of flickering red light and yelling, and felt sick to his stomach throughout the entirety of Steve’s fight, nausea rolling up into his throat and something burning inside his veins that he recognized, belatedly, as a reflexive urge to wade into the brawl himself, to pull Steve out and away and—
He resisted. He watched, instead, as Steve thrashed some other guy and got paid.
And then he was there to wipe some of the blood off of Steve’s face, to put a hand on his arm and to hurry him out, out and back to the van, where Eddie put in a cassette, pulled out the medical supplies, and felt his head go quiet.
“Hey, Eddie?” Steve said, eventually, when they’d ended up inside the van again, curled up close to one another, Eddie absently stroking his hair. Eddie hummed an answer, so Steve knew he was listening, and Steve shifted a little closer to him, and said, “Thank you.”
“Anytime,” Eddie said, reflexively, and because he meant it. He’d help out anytime Steve needed him. Hell. He needed it, too, didn’t he? So maybe – maybe this could all be alright, then. Maybe, if they both needed… all of this, it could be just fine. Maybe he could keep being the kind of guy who made things better.
He closed his eyes, wrapped an arm further around Steve, and hoped so.
Chapter 5
Notes:
Please note that I updated the tags, because they're both a little messy about everything
Chapter Text
Eddie got them home, eventually.
The drive back felt different from the trip to Indy, quiet and peaceful, settled, where the drive up had passed in a blur of acidic tension in Eddie’s gut. On the drive up, his hands had sweated relentlessly around the wheel and he’d wished every other second for a cigarette, though he hadn’t even touched one since getting out of the hospital.
On the drive back, cool air blew in through the cracked windows and other vehicles felt few and far between once they were a half-hour out of town. Steve leaned the passenger seat back and curled towards the door and fell asleep, even; he hadn’t taken as many hits as he had the week prior. Eddie had thought he might even get out of entire thing mostly unscathed until close to the end, when he’d…. somehow carelessly opened up his guard and taken a few brutal blows to the body.
Something about that itched at Eddie’s head, but it felt far away during the drive, held distant by the quiet stretch of the road and Steve’s expression, relaxed and peaceful in sleep.
They reached Hawkins too quickly, somehow. For a moment, as they reached the outskirts of town, Eddie struggled with the urge to just take the next turn, to take them south, instead of into town, to prolong the ride and the timeless moment of peace. He shook the thought out of his head, and took the turns to Loch Nora, instead.
He’d already promised to take Steve into town for his car later in the day.
Steve stayed heavily asleep when they pulled into the driveway, even after Eddie shut the engine off. Eddie sat there, listening to the engine pop softly as it cooled, watching the moonlight come down over Steve’s face; God, it was kind of insane how peaceful he looked, actually.
Eddie spent a gut-wrenching moment wishing he was strong enough to have a chance of successfully scooping Steve up and carrying him into the house without waking him up, the way Steve had managed to carry him out of hell, but he hadn’t spent years swimming or throwing basketballs around or just running for the hell of it and then further years punching things for fun; he had no delusions about how effectively he’d be able to manage Steve’s weight.
Unfortunately.
Eddie scrubbed a hand over his face, doing what he could to shake away the desire, and swung out of the van. Steve hadn’t woke up by the time Eddie pulled his door open, nearly listing out of van. Eddie braced him up – his body warm and solid and gone soft in sleep – and said, voice unexpectedly hoarse, “Hey, man, c’mon, we’re home.”
Steve hummed something, eyes barely crooking open before he yawned and fumbled at his seatbelt. Eddie stood there, feeling stupid and in the way, until Steve slid out, blinking drowsily and making no effort to head towards his house.
“This way,” Eddie said, and put a hand on his elbow to make sure he didn’t sleepwalk off in some other direction. He got Steve through the front door and ignored his grumble about going to the couch, guiding him up the stairs, instead, and back to his room. He got Steve all the way to his bed, in fact, still unmade from the morning, and nudged him down onto the mattress.
Steve groaned, a little sound that hit Eddie somewhere in his gut and made him prickle with heat, and Eddie said, “Right, okay. You sleep, alright, and—”
“Hey,” Steve said, stirring around a bit and reaching a hand up, managing to grip at the hem of Eddie’s shirt, tugging. He blinked up, sleepily, and said, “Stay. Like in the back of the van.”
Eddie stared down at him, trying to make that request make sense, and Steve tugged on him again before dropping his hand, patting the mattress beside him, and rolling onto his side. “Uh,” Eddie said, because he knew what he wanted that to mean; fuck, he’d like to curl up there on Steve’s bed, even though he knew it was a bad idea, but—
“C’mon,” Steve mumbled, face mostly buried in his pillow. “You gotta drive me to town later, anyway. You gotta be tired, too.”
Eddie wasn’t actually very tired and was, in fact, getting less tired by the moment. He held onto that and a faint sense of self-preservation – crawling into bed with Steve felt like a very bad idea, no matter how much parts of him wanted it – but then Steve grumbled, “Hey, please, it feels nice,” and he felt himself cave.
Eddie shoved off his boots, tingling all over, and sat on the edge of the bed. “You better not kick me,” he said, heart beating way too fast. Steve never even replied, just lying there, looking soft and warm and tired and – and alright, Eddie could be the guy who curled up beside a friend who needed some company after a rough night.
Of course he could. And he wanted to be.
He slid down, curling onto his side, arm tucked under his head, blinking across at the back of Steve’s neck. There was no way he’d be able to sleep, not with his heart racing, not in Steve’s bed, what the fuck did he think he was doing? Except then he started listening to the steady in-and-out of Steve breathing, there in the pre-dawn stillness of the room, and sleep came and swallowed him up without any warning.
#
Eddie woke up uncomfortably warm and disoriented.
He cracked his eyes open, the grogginess of waking from a deep sleep slipping everything slightly out of focus and softening the world. For a moment, he stared at a softly rising and falling expanse of white, bathed in golden afternoon sunlight, and couldn’t put together what he was looking at, and then he realized that he was staring at Steve’s chest because, at some point during the night, apparently Eddie had migrated over to him, thrown an arm and leg over him, and snuggled in close.
“Shit,” Eddie muttered, trying to blink more wakefulness into his head.
Steve was still asleep, sprawled out on his back, with his head flopped to one side, beatific. The sun – streaming through the windows that they’d, evidently, forgotten to cover with anything so useful as blinds or curtains – glowed on his skin, which was largely exposed, because he’d kicked off all of his blankets, probably because the two of them, pressed together, were generating an insane amount of heat.
He was so fucking pretty, a fact that, apparently, Eddie’s sleeping mind had really appreciated. He’d plastered himself against Steve’s side, his dick – unfortunately, paying a lot of attention to the situation – pressed against the hard bone of Steve’s hip, which seemed like it shouldn’t feel as nice as it did, but shit, turned out that touching anything person while interested actually did feel as good as everyone said. He had a leg fully hooked over one of Steve’s and his arm over Steve’s stomach – he hoped he’d avoided any injuries – and the only saving grace to the whole situation was that Steve was still dead to the fucking world.
Eddie mouthed another curse, awake enough by that point to realize that he ought to be quiet if he wanted to avoid having Steve wake up to discover that Eddie had clung to him like a drowning man to a piece of driftwood in the night. He tried to retrieve his arm and grunted in surprise when something caught at his wrist, pushing up on his other elbow to try to determine how he’d entangled himself and—
And discovering that Steve had wrapped his hand around Eddie’s wrist, fingers curled in a loose hold, as though he’d wanted to keep Eddie’s arm around him, though, of course, that was Eddie wishing for things that made no sense. He also discovered that he’d been using Steve’s outstretched arm as a pillow, and that his thigh didn’t look as skinny as he’d thought it would, hooked over Steve’s.
And then he discovered that, apparently, Steve wasn’t the heaviest sleeper in the world.
“Hm?” Steve murmured, stretching on the bed, which pulled the shirt over his chest in interesting ways, shit. Eddie yanked his wrist free of Steve’s hold, which made Steve jerk the rest of the way to wakefulness, and led to a few confusing moments where they both reassured the other that everything was fine, all while blinking groggily and trying to make sense of the waking world.
Eddie recovered first; he’d been awake longer.
He needed to get the fuck out of the bed, clearly. That had to be his priority. He grabbed onto the first excuse to make that happen that he could find, one that, fortunately, also aligned with their greater needs for the day, and said, as he rolled up to his feet, “I’m making us breakfast.”
“What?” Steve asked, pushing up onto his elbows and blinking, still looking mostly asleep.
“You need to eat,” Eddie said, grabbing onto the excuse he’d found with both hands and pointedly not looking at the splay of Steve’s thighs or – or anything else on the bed. Jesus. “And shower,” he added, because Steve did need to clean off the rest of the previous night’s blood and it’d give Eddie a few moments of space. He let out a breath, feeling more settled. “Yeah. You go shower, and I’ll have breakfast ready when you’re done.”
Steve made a vague noise of agreement. Eddie left the room without waiting to see if he’d comply; in truth, he had no doubt that Steve would. He was – consistent about being agreeable.
“Shit,” Eddie muttered, under his breath, once he was out in the hall, still tingly all over from how he’d woken up, and then he shook his head and took himself down to the kitchen.
#
Eddie expected to have plenty of options for food in Steve’s kitchen; he had no idea why. Every time he’d pulled open the fridge over the past week it had been nearly barren. The situation had not improved miraculously.
He scowled at a suspect pack of breakfast sausages sitting all alone on a shelf; they’d been there since the previous week. He grabbed them for lack of better options, tore open one side of the plastic wrapped over them, and shrugged after giving a cautious sniff; they didn’t smell spoiled.
He dug around through cabinets until he found a pan to put on the stove, turning on a front burner while he went searching for any other food options. He found some bread, eventually, in a cabinet. It only had a little mold on one of the end pieces. He threw that piece away and dropped the rest by the fancy-ass toaster on the counter and then hunted around until he found some butter, a container of sugar, and some cinnamon in an oddly well-stocked spice cabinet.
Apparently, the one thing the Harringtons definitely had was spices.
He threw himself into being the kind of guy who made breakfast for a friend after sleeping over. He knew enough about cooking to keep himself fed – not like Wayne had been able to do much in the kitchen when he was growing up – and set to getting the sausages nice and browned.
And he thought he could make something nice out of the other available supplies.
He toasted some bread while the sausages cooked, fished a knife out of a drawer, and smeared butter across the toast. He hadn’t actually had cinnamon sugar toast for ages, not since the last time his mom had made it, before the car accident that had snatched her, all at once, out of his life a decade ago. The act of making it brought back a sudden rush of sense memories, of the simple, giddy joy he’d experienced at the smell of butter melting into toast and the warm gladness and delight filling him up, the feeling of being loved when she’d split a piece with him, smiling at him between bites with the same smile he saw when he looked in the mirror, these days.
He shook his head, trying to clear away the sudden onrush of emotion, forcibly, reaching his fingers down into the container of sugar and grabbing some of the tiny crystals, sprinkling them over the butter and then grabbing the cinnamon, shaking some out over the top of the sugar.
To him, the result smelled like decadence, like a rare treat.
He stared down at the toast, listening to the sausages pop and sizzle on the stove, still full of warmth, and Steve said from behind him, still sleepy, “Mm, what smells so good?”
“Breakfast,” Eddie told him, after clearing his throat. He tried to set the memories aside, not feeling totally successful when he turned to watch Steve cross the room, his hair wet from the shower and his shirt sticking to his damp skin, a bruise darkening one side of his jaw, accented by a few red scrapes. The warm, sticky feeling in Eddie’s chest shifted and bloomed, feeling dangerously large, and like it might just bubble right out of his mouth, somehow.
He had no idea what it was about Steve – about being around Steve, or tending to him, or… whatever – that let him feel things besides like shit, but it seemed to be growing in intensity. He wondered if he’d get back all his emotions if he managed to steal enough time with Steve.
He turned and jerkily turned off the stove in an attempt to manage those feelings and considerations and, when that didn’t really work, he grabbed one of the pieces of toast, lifted it up and held it out towards Steve with a flourish that probably dropped some sugar onto the floor, and told him, “Have a bite.”
Steve blinked at him; he still looked more asleep than awake, despite the shower. After a beat, Steve looked at the toast and then he shrugged, took another step closer, leaned forward, and—
Took a bite right out of the corner of the toast, making no effort to take the bread from Eddie’s hand. Eddie felt his entire body go still, not… freezing, really. It felt more like every nerve in his body came to attention at once, realigning to fixate on the crunch of Steve’s teeth down into the toast, the little pleased sound he made when he pulled away to chew, the scattering of sugar crystals on his upper lip, and the way his eyes fell half-shut.
Eddie stared, feeling the intensity of his own attention, while Steve chewed and swallowed, Eddie’s eyes following the movement with a wash of helpless hunger that had absolutely nothing to do with food.
“Mm, that’s good,” Steve said, glancing over with his expression all pleased and easy, and heat prickled all over the inside and outside of Eddie’s skin.
He wasn’t thinking, not really, when he took a step closer, into Steve’s space, shivering when Steve leaned against the island at his back. He had no idea what he was doing, he felt almost drunk when he put his free hand on the island close to Steve’s hip and said, voice gone far too thick, “Yeah? Try some more.”
Steve’s eyes did something like a flutter, something that Eddie felt in his gut and lower. He had a moment of clarity to wonder what the fuck he thought he was doing – friends didn’t normally crowd one another up against kitchen design elements to feed them by hand, did they? – but before he could apologize or step back, Steve exhaled, leaned forward, and took another bite.
Eddie managed to force down the sound he felt in his throat, barely, his skin tingling all over while Steve chewed and fuck, Eddie probably should have been saying something, but he had no room left over inside his head to think about things like words, not when he was filled up completely with the urge to either surge forward and cover Steve’s mouth with his or keep feeding him every single bite of the toast.
Eddie considered that he could always kiss Steve after he finished the toast, decided the compromise worked with a hot rush of satisfaction, and then caught up with wildly derailing train of his thoughts.
Jesus fuck, he couldn’t kiss Steve. Steve liked girls. Steve was his friend who he was taking care of on a bad morning. Steve was swallowing again, with his eyes heavy-lidded and a pink tinge across his cheeks and crumbs scattered on his incredibly kissable bottom lip and it was so easy for Eddie to bring his other hand up, brushing his thumb across plush skin without a thought.
Steve made a little noise, something in the back of his throat that Eddie kind of wanted to investigate with his tongue, and he realized, abruptly, what the fuck he was doing.
Shit.
“The sausage,” he blurted, some part of his brain throwing a life preserver of a distraction into the moment. “I need to get it,” he added, stumbling over his words and managing to put the half-eaten toast down on the island by Steve’s hip. “It’s—” He gestured, wildly, because he couldn’t actually think of a single other thing to say about the sausage, too busy thinking about Steve’s mouth and heavy-lidded eyes and the feeling of his lips.
Fucking gods, he had crumbs from Steve’s lip on his thumb.
For a moment, that realization brought Eddie to a stop, short-circuiting something inside his head. He looked down at his thumb, bit back a noise, and knew he ought to wipe the crumbs off on a rag or his pants or something.
He brought his hand to his mouth and sucked the crumbs off, instead, shivering down his back with a throb he felt all over, and then, with an effort of will he thought he probably deserved an award for, he made himself get the sausages off the stove.
He valiantly avoided feeding Steve anything else. In fact, he did his best to avoid looking too long in Steve’s direction, not sure what had gotten into him. He’d never had a problem controlling his – well, his rampant attraction for Steve before. Sure, he knew his eyes wandered sometimes, but that was hardly a problem unique to him.
But he’d never almost kissed Steve before, so he supposed that he’d learned that, while he apparently wanted to be the kind of guy who, fuck, who made his crush breakfast and then fed it to him, he couldn’t actually be that guy without also being the guy who took everything two steps too far.
He still had a tingle in his skin and a simmering heat in his gut when Steve said, on his second piece of sausage, “Oh, hey, I meant to ask, are you gonna be kind of...around again? This week?”
Eddie looked over at Steve’s mouth – shit – and then appropriately redirected his eye line.
He had a moment to worry that he’d been underfoot too much. He had, in fact, spent nearly every hour he wasn’t working or sleeping over at Steve’s place. But Steve didn’t look irritated, just curious and painfully attractive. Besides, even if Eddie had been around enough to irritate Steve, someone had to look after him, and clearly no one else was, so he shrugged and said, “Until you’re, uh, feeling better. Yeah. I’ll be around.”
Steve nodded, finishing off the last of the food he’d taken and leaning his hip against the island; they’d never managed to sit down. He said, “Cool, okay. Well, in that case, I mean, you’ll have to come with me tomorrow, then. Over to the new Byers-Hopper place.”
Eddie had no idea that were even was a new Byers-Hopper place; he wasn’t sure if there’d been an old Byers-Hopper place, but felt almost sure there hadn’t been. He knew that the old police chief had returned from the dead, and Dustin had tried to explain how he was connected to the whole alternate-dimensions-full-of-monsters thing as the adopted father of their local superhero, but, honestly, the explanations had come at a time where Eddie hadn’t been… exactly connected to what was going on.
The lingering shame over those dark months, where he’d just laid there, barely alive – and the fear that he might slip back into that place at any time – kept him from admitting his confusion over any of it, even Hopper’s connection with, he guessed, Joyce Byers. If he just pretended he knew what was going on, it’d probably all become clear, eventually, and no one would have to know how vacant he’d been.
He cleared his throat, and asked, side-stepping all those bigger questions to ask, “What? Why?”
Steve waved a hand, rolled his eyes, and said, while Eddie fought not to look down at his mouth again, “El wants to play that nerd game of yours, apparently. I’m supposed to drop off all the little assholes for the evening. It’ll be easier to fit them all in the van, so I’m glad you’ll be around.”
Eddie processed that, apparently, a superhero wanted to play D&D. He couldn’t decide how he felt about it, if he felt anything about it. Maybe it didn’t relate closely enough to Steve to trigger whatever let him feel something other than sick and miserable and ashamed.
He said, because he had to say something, “Oh. They’re, uh, playing a new game?”
“Yeah.” Steve turned, then, grabbing his plate and heading toward the sink. He said, as he started washing up from breakfast, “Will’s in charge of mastering it, or whatever.” He grabbed the skillet off of the stove. “Hey, you know, you should play with them. You like all that…” He waved a soapy hand. “Counting and dice stuff. And you’re gonna be there, anyway.”
Eddie watched him scrub at the pan, feeling… something shift inside of him at the invitation, which was in itself odd enough to feel almost like an attempt to trick him into playing, but he dismissed that out of hand; he couldn’t image that Steve would care enough about whether or not he rolled some dice to attempt such a thing.
He hadn’t played since before Vecna, since the night of the end of his last campaign. He hadn’t wanted to. He hadn’t even wanted to think about playing.
But, standing there in the kitchen, thinking about it, he felt…
Like maybe sitting down at a table and playing wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe even fun, and he’d never really gotten to play, before. He’d been stuck as a DM since the first time he saw a set of dice. He could use one of the ideas he’d scribbled down on character sheets over the years and never had a chance to explore, he could—
“Eddie?” Steve asked, and Eddie realized that he’d just sort of been standing there, apparently. He scrubbed at the back of his neck, trying to rub away the embarrassment of getting caught up in trying to come up with an answer when he should have just said no, surely, if – if D&D had been nothing but something he did at the world, if—
He cleared his throat, because Steve had frowned over at him, and said, “I don’t think I’m invited, Stevie.”
Steve turned off the water and turned towards him, grabbing a towel to dry his hands. His rolled his eyes and wrinkled up his nose, the way he did when Dustin said something he found ridiculous. He said, with nothing but surety in his tone, “Don’t be an idiot. You know the entire hoard of them want you there.”
Eddie blinked at him, taken aback by the confidence. He knew Dustin, at least, had adored the masks he’d worn, but he hadn’t spent very much time around any of the kids lately, and he doubted they’d find him interesting anymore. He shook his head, opening his mouth to refute it all, and Steve heaved a sigh, held up one finger, and just… walked out of the room.
Eddie followed him, lost, and ended up trailing Steve up the stairs, all the way back into his bedroom, where Steve grabbed up the walkie off of his nightstand, holding it up to his mouth while planting his other hand on a hip he popped out and oh, fuck, Eddie really shouldn’t have liked any of that as much as he did, but he couldn’t stop the kick of want in his gut when Steve frowned at him – fuck he was so hot when he got bitchy – over the walkie and said, into it, “Hey, Henderson, you there, over?”
“Here but busy, Steve, over.”
Steve gave an even more dramatic roll of his eyes, tilting his head back to show the whites of his eyes to the ceiling. “Whatever. Listen, is Eddie invited to your nerd game tomorrow? Over.”
Eddie made an abortive and too-late move to grab the walkie, listening to Dustin make a wordless noise before shouting, “What? Of course he’s invited, that’s – Steve, don’t ask stupid questions. We want him to play, nay, we need him to play. Can you get him to come? Shit, you have to get him to come, Steve, we need you to do whatever it takes, use your—”
Steve switched the walkie off, abruptly, tossing it onto the mattress and then cutting Eddie a look, his chin up and set, a hint of redness on the tips of his ears. He said, both hands on his hips now, “See: they want – nay, need you.”
Eddie looked between Steve and the walkie, opened his mouth and shut it again, too tangled up suddenly to even think of the words he wanted to say. He took too long to figure it out, apparently, and Steve cocked his head to the side and asked, “Hey, what’s up? I thought you, you know, loved dice and modifiers and tiny monster toys, or whatever.”
Eddie blew out a breath and said, probably more truthful than he should have been, “I thought so, too.”
Steve narrowed his eyes, tapped both his index fingers against his hips, and said, “But you… don’t think that now?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie admitted, but he’d already spilled all his guts to Steve before, so what was the point of resisting doing it again, just in a lesser way? They had a bond, Steve had said, and he’d let Eddie hang around even after Eddie broke down about all the stupid shit in his head, and— “I – what I said last week – I don’t know if D&D is just – I don’t know if I liked it. Or just – pretended to, or—” He cut off, dragging a hand back over his head and feeling helpless.
He’d have liked to rewind the day back to feeding Steve a piece of toast. He’d been being an idiot, then, but at least it had made him feel blazingly alive. Now he just felt vaguely nauseous and unsure about everything and—
“Well,” Steve said, cutting through the noise, the way that, apparently, he could just do, “why don’t you just play tomorrow and see if you like it or not?”
Eddie stared over at him, his hand still curled around the back of his head. When he stood there, silent, Steve shrugged, and added, “Then you’d know, right? Problem solved.”
Eddie stared another moment, testing the suggestion for flaws and not finding any. He let his hand drop, taking an easier breath, and said, “Uh, yeah. I guess that’d work.”
“Good.” Steve flashed him a smile, all at once. He should have to have a permit or something for the brightness of his grin. “Well, make sure you bring your weird dice tomorrow, then. But, like, for now, I have to start getting ready for my shift, so…”
Eddie nodded, forced himself to focus, and said, “Alright. Let me see if we need to change any of the bandages, then.”
#
Eddie checked Steve’s injuries – he’d taken fewer hits than the previous week and the blows had mostly resulted in bruises, though those had turned a purple so dark it looked nearly black – and drove him into town after he carefully hid the bruise on his face, dropping him off in front of Family Video and waving at Robin through the window, where she was standing and staring with her mouth open.
He took himself home, afterwards, to find Wayne absolutely delighted that he’d spent the night out with a friend. They talked for a while, not really about anything, before Wayne stepped out for a smoke and Eddie drew in a bracing breath and went back to his room.
He’d kept his D&D stuff shoved under the bed for the past few months. For a long time, he stood in the doorway, tapping his fingers against the wall and chewing on his lip, feeling as though he were balancing on… something inside his head.
And then he blew out a breath and said, “Fuck it,” and went over, dropped beside the bed, and pulled everything out. He flipped open one of the boxes, looking down at his minis and a mountain of dice that he’d poured into a corner. He had another box full of loose-leaf notes, character sheets, and notebooks full of campaign ideas.
He stared down at it all for a moment, and felt something overwhelming threatening to rise up within him – doubt and uncertainty – and fuck but he didn’t want to end up back in bed, curled in the dark, he wanted quiet in his head, he wanted warmth, he wanted—
He found himself out in the kitchen, punching numbers into the phone without even thinking about what he was doing, his body reacting automatically, going right for the one thing that he knew helped.
Steve answered the phone on the second ring, saying something pointless about Family Video that Eddie missed due to the wave of something like relief that swelled up through him, pushing back the tangle of noise, the twisting snarls of doubting that he’d ever liked something he thought he’d loved. “Hey,” he said, trying to make his voice normal. “Hey, it’s me.”
“Eddie,” Steve said, sounding surprised. “What’s up, man? Did I leave something in the van?”
Eddie heard Robin saying something in the background, but couldn’t make out the words. He ignored that, and said, “Uh, no. No, you – listen, I have some questions. About the D&D game. If I’m going to play I need, uh, I need some information.”
Steve was quiet for a beat, and then said, sounding confused, “Sure, yeah. You probably want to ask Dustin about all that, though, I’m—”
“I don’t have time to ask Dustin,” Eddie interrupted, which was true enough. He needed to start getting ready for work, and, as much as he loved Dustin, there was no getting a concise answer out of the kid. And, more than that, he… wanted the reassurance of getting the answers from Steve. He decided not to share that piece of information. “But if you could, I mean, I know it’s – if you could ask him for me…?”
Steve heaved a sigh, Eddie heard some kind of shuffling on the other side of the line, and then Steve said, “Okay, I’ve got a pen. What do you need to know to play dungeon games?”
Eddie exhaled. Steve dutifully took notes while Eddie explained that he needed to know what level they were starting at, and what classes everyone else had picked, and if they were playing a high or low magic campaign, what the general tone was supposed to be. “Got it,” Steve said, when Eddie finished explaining, out of breath from rushing. “I’ll, like, leave you the information on your machine?”
“Yeah,” Eddie agreed, fidgeting with the phone cord, twisting it over and over his fingers. “Hey, Stevie,” he started, with a cramp in his gut at the thought of hanging up, of trying to play again. “I’m not sure—”
“Just try it,” Steve said, tone gone unexpectedly soft. “It’s fine if you like it and it’s fine if you don’t, you know? Just, like, give it a go and see.”
Eddie made a noise in the back of his throat, not sure if he was disagreeing or not, and Steve sighed. “Listen,” Steve said, “how about this, I’ll be stuck there, too, right, since you’re my ride? So, if you get into it and figure out you hate it, you just like, give me signal or something and I’ll come up with a reason you have to take me home. Alright? I’ll be your eject button.”
Warmth blossomed, small and bright and wonderful, in the middle of Eddie’s chest. He leaned his shoulder against the wall by the phone, felt himself smile, and said, “Oh, yeah? What’s this signal going to be?”
“I don’t know. Like, wink at me, or something. Anyway, man, I’ve got to go, we’re getting slammed.” Eddie could hear an awful lot of noise over the line. “I’ll call back with your game details, though. Um, have a good night at work. Bye!”
“Bye,” Eddie said, to the dial tone, still smiling, and then hung up the phone.
And then he shook himself, put it all to the side, and went to get ready for work.
#
Eddie worked, his mind elsewhere. Frequently, his thoughts ran back to waking up that afternoon, curled up against Steve’s strong, solid body, or to the kitchen, the way Steve’s expression had gone soft and sweet when Eddie fed him, or to the thought of playing D&D again after so long without so much as touching a dice.
He made it through the shift, somehow, and all the way back home, to a long, long message from Steve on the answering machine. Eddie played it once to get the details: they were starting at level one, it seemed the group needed a healer, and Will wanted to play a high magic campaign. He played it again just to listen to Steve’s voice. He let himself play it a third time and then made himself go shower and go to bed.
He ended up lying in bed for a long time, staring up at the ceiling, wondering how the hell he’d managed to fall right to sleep the previous day, until he finally managed to drop into unconsciousness for a few hours.
He woke up, frowned up at the ceiling for another long moment, and said, “Alright, Munson, come on. You can do this. Time to see if you want to be the kind of guy who plays D&D.”
That got him out of bed and dressed and – when he might have faltered – remembering that Steve needed someone looking after him got Eddie out to the van and across town to Loch Nora.
Steve’s bruises looked alright; they’d darkened fully to black and felt hot under Eddie’s fingers, but there wasn’t much he could do for them, besides fuss a bit, which was just as well, because they barely had any time to spend on medical care before they needed to start making the rounds to pick up the scattered members of the party.
Eddie made stop after stop, loading up Dustin, Lucas, Erika, and Mike – Max still refused to have anything to do with D&D, apparently – and doing his best to match their level of excitement as they piled in, one after another.
Dustin shoved himself up between the driver and passenger seats, effusively talking about his character and shaking at Eddie’s shoulders, beaming as though he’d captured the sun inside his skin. His hair, Eddie noticed, had gotten significantly longer over the course of the summer.
By the time Steve directed them to the Byers-Hopper place – an older split-level in town with a pile of bikes by the front porch and what looked like the attempted start of a garden off to one side – and the kids scrambled out, still talking, Eddie’d almost worked himself up to dropping the kids off and then speeding off toward the horizon because he had no idea how to match their sheer energy and excitement, though he knew he had managed it, once, and—
“Ow, shit,” Steve muttered, and Eddie jerked to look at him, blinking and reflexively loosening his death grip on the wheel. He found Steve frowning down at his hand, blood welling up – shocking and dark – from a cut near the base of his thumb.
“What the fuck?” Eddie demanded, reaching over and grabbing his wrist, tugging to get a better look at the injury; not deep, but ragged. “How—?”
“I don’t know, man, there’s something sharp by the seat belt,” Steve said. “Ugh, I’m going to get blood everywhere.” He made to cover the wound with his free hand, and Eddie batted him away, frowning.
“Don’t touch it,” he snapped, because fuck, Steve had a singular ability to get himself hurt. “We’ll go inside, wash it out, and see how bad it is. Keep it elevated, come on.” And then Eddie’d have to figure out what sharp thing was lurking down by the passenger seat belt; he doubted anyone had bothered buckling it before he started giving Steve rides.
By the time he came around the side of the van, Steve was holding his hand up above his head and watching the blood start to trail down his wrist. Eddie huffed – Steve had some kind of dysfunction related to appropriately reacting to his own hurts – and took his other elbow, tugging him toward the house and right through the front door, like he owned the place.
The kids yelled out, trying to get him to head through a door, and he ignored that, vaguely aware of Steve calling something back as Eddie continued down the hall until he found the kitchen. He brought Steve over to the sink, turned the water on, and pulled his hand down to rinse the wound clean.
“Oh, Steve!” someone said, off to one side, Eddie glanced over to see Joyce Byers in the doorway, looking flustered as she hurried over. “What happened?”
“It’s not that bad,” Steve said, which wasn’t really an answer, waving his free hand. “I just need some paper towels.”
Eddie rolled his eyes, ignored Steve, and turned to Joyce. “Do you have some hydrogen peroxide? Bandages?”
“Of course,” she said, immediately moving over to one of the cabinets alongside the sink, overfull of supplies because, of course, she’d gone through all the same trauma as the rest of them and then some extra, if Eddie understood correctly even a fraction of what had gone on in town over the past few years. “Here, I can—”
Eddie shifted his weight reflexively to get his back between her helpful approach and Steve’s hand, his jaw locking up all at once at the thought of someone else stepping in to try to help. Steve salvaged the weirdness of the moment by saying, “Oh, Eddie’s got it. He’s good at this. Hey, are you and Hop hanging around today?”
Eddie paid little attention to their conversation as he cleaned the cut – ragged but not very deep at all – and smeared antibacterial cream in it, and covered it, all while feeling warm inside from Eddie’s got it, he’s good at this.
That warmth remained, even after Steve examined his hand and declared himself all patched up, and Dustin appeared, grabbing at Eddie’s arms and hauling him off, shouting something about how they’d gotten Eddie’s stuff from the van and gotten him set up, and he just needed to come and sit down so Will could get started.
Eddie felt a moment’s instinctive urge to run out of the front door, something inside of him flinching away from the chance that he’d play and discover that he actually hated it—
And then he took a breath. He could try it, he could. He’d done harder things and made it out the other side. And, besides, Steve was right. He had to try it to know for sure if he liked it or not. So he allowed Dustin to herd him into the living room and down onto the couch, right by the papers they’d arranged for him and his dice, and he drew in a deep breath, and he waited to see what would happen.
#
After all of that, all the worry and sickening stress and confusion, Eddie sat down to play and discovered he loved it.
Will had clearly planned the campaign carefully and everyone had come to the table excited, the energy filling up the room and spreading from person to person as they fought monsters, came together as a team, and made a few insane decisions along the way.
Eddie caught himself slipping into a DM mindset a few times, opening his mouth to answer a question not directed his way, but it wasn’t so hard to bite his tongue. He found, more often, that he was just… having fun, playing his uptight know-it-all of a cleric and even whipping out an accent – snotty and British – to the delight of the rest of the party.
By the time the session finished – right after they’d realized that the village they’d spent the game exploring was almost certainly cursed – his face hurt from grinning and he felt… light, almost. Relieved. Giddy.
He had liked D&D, all along, and the realization felt like it took a weight right off of his shoulders; not everything about him had been a lie and a fabrication, then. He could be the guy who liked to hang out and play tabletop games and, in fact, he always had been and—
He was pulled back from the cresting relief inside his head by Dustin clapping his hands and bouncing from foot to foot while asking, “Alright, so, when are we playing again? We can’t just leave it there! We need to rescue the fine folk of Woebeshire. What about Saturday? We could get in a long game on Saturday, you have that night off, right, Eddie?”
Eddie shook his head without looking up from gathering his notes and dice. “Sorry, kid, I can’t play Saturdays.”
Dustin sputtered, “What? Why? What are you doing that’s possibly more—”
“What about Fridays?” Mike interrupted, and Eddie felt grateful to him for possibly the first time in their acquaintance. “We could do Fridays just as easy until school starts. Is that enough time for you to get ready for the next game, Will?”
In the end, they settled on Friday. Eddie finished gathering his stuff and stood to find Steve leaning against the door to the living room, hands in his pockets, expression all soft fondness as he looked over the party. Just the look on his face made something pang in Eddie’s chest, warm and bubbly, and that feeling stayed there all the way out to the van; they left on their own, the kids had plans to stay up all night with each other, apparently.
He’d pulled out onto the main road, heading toward Loch Nora, when Steve broke the comfortable silence that had fallen between them to ask, “So, have fun?”
Eddie thought about it for a moment, just… testing his emotions and ensuring that they hadn’t drastically changed in the past three miles. He nodded, then, feeling his mouth curve up into a smile. “Yeah.” He shivered a bit, feeling something settle inside him. “Yeah, I did. I had so much fucking fun.”
“Good.” Steve sighed and added, “You know, you could play on Saturday. If you wanted.”
Eddie cut him a sideways look; he hadn’t known Steve had been in the house to overhear that part of the planning process. He’d spent most of the afternoon outside with Joyce and Hopper, talking about who knew what; Eddie seen them clustered together on the back porch when he went into the kitchen to get a drink.
Steve stared out the side window, profile lit by the last rays of the setting sun with his arms crossed loosely over his chest. He looked beautiful, and that probably should have gotten less noteworthy at some point – Steve always looked beautiful – but somehow it kept being just as striking every time Eddie looked at him.
Eddie gave a shake of his head, turned his attention back to the road, and said, because it was true, because, yeah, in fact he did love D&D, but not enough to make him abandon looking after Steve, “Nah, I got standing plans for my Saturdays, big guy.”
“Oh,” Steve said, and he sounded surprised and maybe pleased, or maybe Eddie was just reading too much into a brief noise. “Okay, well, that’s—if you change your mind—”
“I’m not going to,” Eddie said, startling himself with his certainty. He shot Steve a smile, trying not to let the enormity of his determination to – to provide the care that Steve clearly needed show through. “You’re stuck with me, now.”
Steve blinked back at him, no longer staring at the window, and then ducked his head, and said, “Right, that’s – do you want to listen to some music?”
Eddie waved a hand towards the radio, feeling good and magnanimous and, shit, well, he just liked giving Steve things he asked for, clearly. Steve twisted around, into the back, rifling around through the cassette box and sliding something into the radio.
Eddie didn’t recognize the music, but he tapped his fingers against the wheel along to the beat, and they drove in peace all the way back to Loch Nora. He sat in the driveway until Steve disappeared inside with a pang in his chest of wanting to follow – ridiculous – and then, feeling like… less shattered than he’d expected he would after playing, he went home.
He checked for the sharp spot down by the passenger seat belt as soon as he pulled in, and spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out what the hell Steve had even cut his hand on. He eventually found a sharp edge down past the latch, and, though he had no idea why Steve had stuck his hand down so far, he wrapped it well with duct tape and called it a job well done. He got dressed, went to work, and the world seemed a little more manageable, somehow.
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