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Eddie looks exactly the way he should for someone who’s just battled an inter-dimensional demon and its plague of flesh-hungry bats with only a gun and a guitar. He’s covered in blood and bruises, missing entire patches of his jacket and jeans, and sprawled across a waiting room chair like he owns it, fast asleep. He’s the last one in the waiting room, his battered foot deemed the least critical injury. One of the luckiest.
When Chief Powell walks down the hall with a cup of coffee Steve looks away from Eddie, feeling inexplicably like he's been caught red-handed at something.
“You should get home, kid," Powell says. He looks almost as exhausted as Steve feels. "You need a ride? We’re just about done here, I can get someone to drop you off.”
Steve musters as polite a smile as he can but even that feels weak on his face. “No, thanks though. I’m waiting for my friend.”
The chief glances across the room at Eddie. The agency that accompanied El to Hawkins gave the police answers and a cover story to clear Eddie’s name in the public eye, but Powell clearly doesn’t believe them the way he’s eyeing Eddie like someone who should be behind bars.
“Well,” he claps Steve on the shoulder, “don’t wait too long, kid, you look dead on your feet.”
Steve tries not to bristle too much at being called kid twice in a minute long conversation and throws him a two finger salute. “Yes, sir.”
He leaves and it’s quiet again, almost peaceful. A couple of nurses click away quietly behind the reception desk and the occasional doctor walks by, and it almost seems like it could be any ordinary night, the chaos from earlier efficiently tidied away.
Steve should go home. He wants to burn the grime off his skin in the shower and hibernate for a year, but the pull of Eddie is magnetic, overpowering the north of what he should be doing like Dustin’s stupid compass that led them to stupid watergate. He gravitates closer and sits in the chair next to Eddie. Except he’s exhausted, and he flops into it more than anything, startling Eddie from his sleep.
Eddie is still wired like a wanted man and his anxious eyes fly around until Steve says, “Relax, man, you’re fine, everything’s fine.”
Eddie slumps back down, his eyes slipping closed again. Steve thinks he’s gone back to sleep that fast but he says, “All done? What’s the verdict, you gonna make it?”
“Ha, yeah.” Steve glances down to his arm in a sling and tunes in to the pulsing pain of the bites on his legs. The back of his head’s been stitched up but he managed to avoid a concussion, unlike Will, and he hasn’t been impaled by a Vecna demon tentacle traveling faster than a bullet like Nance, so it could’ve been worse. He thought he was a goner four hours ago, that this time saving the world would finally be his last, but somehow he survived.
And so did Eddie. Eddie, who was sure it would be his last night on Earth. Eddie, who said I’ll be dead by morning so I’m gonna make you my last will and testament, baby, and kissed Steve square on the lips before running into the fray.
And really, who does that? Leaves a guy so stunned he almost gets taken out by a stained glass window flying through the air from demon-conjured gale force winds. It wasn’t even a good kiss, just a hard and desperate and good luck see you on the other side maybe kiss and. It was. Well. Steve’s been thinking about it every spare moment since. When the fight was over, he thought about it. After they rushed to Emergency and waited for news of Nancy and Robin, he thought about it. When his body was tempting him into sleep he was thinking about it. Like a curse, always lingering in the back of his mind.
“So. Can we.” Steve clears his throat, realizes how dry it is. He vaguely recalls a nurse giving him a bottle of water but it was like a magic trick, in his hand one minute, gone the next, guzzled so fast half was lost down his neck and into his tattered shirt. He tugs his collar, still a little wet, and looks across the empty waiting room. “Can we talk about it?”
To his credit Eddie doesn’t play dumb, just heaves a deep breath and shifts up from his slouch so he’s shoulder to shoulder with Steve. “Not sure if I’m awake enough, but yeah, we can,” he says, and dutifully pulls his eyes open, blinking wide to wake himself up.
“I, uh…I…” Jesus where does he even start? Steve asked for this, needs it, and now he doesn’t know what to say. He dug his own grave here, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that if they didn’t talk now then they never would.
Then Eddie starts, and Steve wonders how he ever thought of himself as not brave. “I knew it was a shot in the dark, dude. Even if I did make it out of there.” He folds his arms across his chest, and Steve looks at his fingers—bruised—and his knuckles—bloody raw. “Just. Forget it happened, okay?”
“I don’t want to do that,” Steve blurts. “I mean even if I did, which I don’t, I don’t think I could, because it’s just always there, and it’s the first time that I’ve—I mean, I never—but what if I—and I can’t just—” He sighs, and gives up, and wonders if he’s been temporarily possessed by Robin’s consciousness drifting from her medically induced comatose body, but even she would be able to string together a complete sentence better than that. No it’s all Steve, down to the last stutter.
He chances a glimpse at Eddie, meets his dark-enough-to-get-lost-in eyes for a second, bleeding hope so visibly Steve doesn’t know how he didn’t see the kiss coming, and looks down at his unbroken hand.
He lets his head fall back against the wall and tells himself to just fucking say it, Harrington, Christ. It’s easier with his eyes closed. “I have to think about it more after I sleep for a century, but I…I think I might want to try it again.”
He opens his eyes again so he doesn’t miss Eddie’s face lighting up like he’s seen the sunrise for the first time, and marks the humming, head rushing feeling it gives him under the mental list of Things to Contemplate Later. Later when he’s rested. When he feels brave.
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah, I…” Steve lifts his head off the wall, meets Eddie’s gaze straight on. “I can’t promise you anything, and I…I don’t know. I like girls.”
That’s what trips Steve up every time he tries to wrap his head around it. He likes girls. Always has. He’s never had anything to hide, anything that made him think what he felt wasn’t real. He’s never looked at a guy and wondered what it would be like to get closer, to touch, to kiss, to run hands through his hair or take his clothes off. Not like he has with girls.
Not until he met Eddie.
Eddie shrugs like he hasn’t just single-handedly made Steve question his entire reality. “You don’t have to be like me. You can like both.”
Steve blinks. Blinks again. Feels the world shift beneath his feet, or maybe he’s back in the upside down somehow, everything in his brain going haywire and alien. The back of his head buzzes like a live wire, and a sudden spell of dizziness has him leaning forward over his knees.
"Really?"
He can almost see Robin in his mind rolling her eyes, and even against this imaginary Robin he feels the need to defend himself. I’m not an idiot (sure, she’d say, heavy with sarcasm), how was I supposed to know? Before Robin, he never heard anyone talk about being queer unless they were insulting someone, and it all seemed like black or white. They are, I’m not.
"Yeah, I once met a guy who said he swung both ways, which would be hilarious for you considering you'll swing anything around as a weapon."
A light touch on Steve’s arm cuts through his frantic thoughts and the dizziness fades. He looks back at Eddie's hand brushing his skin, bloody knuckles and filthy skull rings, thinks about how often he's thought of those hands.
"But I've never even thought about it before you,” Steve says. It’s raw, and more honest than he’d normally be, but he doesn’t regret it when Eddie flushes beneath the dirt and grime, and looks away with a shy smile. “Wouldn’t I just know?”
"Maybe not. Look, think of it like…" Eddie waves his hands about, snaps his fingers as he thinks. "Uhhh, walking through a forest. At night."
"Not sure where this is going but… okay."
"The path you're on is all lit up, but there's another one, except it's not lit up so you don't even know it's there, you just walk right by it."
Now Steve’s more confused than he was before. "Are you saying…it's a choice?"
"What? No, no, no, it’s not—” Eddie glances up at the sound of footsteps, a young woman carrying her baby to the reception desk to check in. He lowers his voice. "It's not a straight path or a queer path, it's just like what people expect from you. If I show you that you could be different, maybe you’ll discover that you are.” Eddie frowns. He moves to run a hand through his hair, but stops and makes a disgusted face at the blood and dirt and upside down goo fusing it into clumps. “Sorry, that was terrible. It made more sense in my head.”
“Actually. I think I see what you’re saying.”
He imagines a trail lit by the orange glow of intermittent lampposts—the expectations of everyone in his life—and he’s holding a candle in his hands. Robin. She was already shaping him into someone new, someone better, a best friend the kind no one expected him to have, but her light wasn’t quite enough to help him see the hidden parts of himself. Now Eddie’s carved a new path through the foliage with a single kiss, bathing the forest in moonlight.
Like some sort of mind reading wizard, Eddie says, “Talk to Robin about it.”
“I will,” he says absently, then thinks wait, shit. “So you…you know she’s…?”
The corner of Eddie’s lips pull up in a smirk, and there’s an undeniable smugness in his eyes. "Oh, we flock together, baby.” Steve feels a little shiver at the word, thinks he might want to hear it again, and Eddie definitely notices because he leans closer. “We can sense each other in the wild. Plus, she has a giant obvious crush on Nancy.”
“No way,” Steve breathes, even as the evidence is flashing through his mind. Robin, a self-reported babbler around people she likes, unable to shut up around Nancy. Robin diving to push Nancy out of Vecna’s way, heartbroken when she wasn’t fast enough.
“Mhm, yeah. See it? Looks like you two have a lot to talk about when she wakes up.”
"Yeah, no kidding."
The first time Steve battled something from the upside down, he was flung into it without warning, and he thought if he didn’t die then his life afterwards would be forever changed. But then the next day came, and the next, and his life didn’t change much after all. He went to school. Worried about college. Made new friends. Dropped old ones. Even with this new knowledge of this other world, he still continued on. He has the same on edge feeling now, this scary new oh-my-god-what-the-hell-is-happening feeling, and he thinks this might change him more than the monsters ever did.
Eddie chuckles, drawing Steve out of his thoughts. "Shit, dude. I still can't believe I made you—of all people—question yourself." He shakes his head with an unstoppable grin. "I can die happy."
"Shut up."
"No way, man, that's a lifetime achievement right there. Put it on my tombstone. Write it in fucking lightning. Here lies Eddie Munson. Cause of death: Steve Harrington. And if it doesn't say that I'm haunting your ass."
Steve laughs, and shoves his shoulder gently into Eddie’s so he remembers the concept of personal space, especially here. Eddie’s grin lights up his face, and despite looking like he just lost a cage fight with the devil, Steve can’t keep his eyes away for long. His eyes, the darkest Steve’s ever seen, are like pools of the obsidian stone he once saw in an exhibit. The planes of his face, curves and edges of his lips, the feathering of his eyelashes, frazzled mane of hair, every inch of him down to the rings on his battered fingers is so much Steve doesn’t know what to call it other than magnetic. The words he would use for girls don’t seem to fit right, or maybe he’s not used to it yet. He wonders how Eddie would react if Steve called him beautiful, or pretty, or cute. He wonders if he’ll want to call Eddie those things eventually, or if he’ll always just be mesmerizing.
“See, that’s the look that got me in trouble,” Eddie says.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Eddie raises his eyebrows. You’re full of shit, Harrington.
“There’s no look, I’m just…looking.” And oh god he is. They’ve just fought off an evil demon and he’s sitting here checking Eddie out. Steve is doomed. If Robin could see him she would have to go straight back into emergency surgery, dying of laughter with no cure.
“Yeah, and the way you do it’s like no one else.”
Before Steve can think of a response to that, a nurse rolls an empty wheelchair into the waiting room and gives them a tired smile. “Eddie Munson?”
Steve helps him hop into the chair, careful not to jostle his broken foot held above the floor. Before the nurse turns the chair around Eddie looks at him, a question on his face.
“I’ll keep your boot safe,” Steve says as an answer, grabbing the abandoned boot from the floor where Eddie had peeled it off earlier to let a different nurse look at his foot. It’s falling apart from demobat bite marks and it might end up in the garbage anyway, but it doesn’t matter because Eddie gives him a small smile, knowing what he really means. I’ll wait for you.
If it was before last night, and Steve was still actively Not Thinking about his feelings, he might’ve told himself it was because Eddie had no one. His uncle was still gone, secreted away by the mysterious agency they’d learned, and Eddie had no one else around who knew what he was going through.
But today is a different day, and Steve’s holding a mirror up to himself, taking a hard look. And he won’t lie into it anymore—he just wants to be there for Eddie. To make sure Eddie knows everything is going to be okay.
“See you in a bit,” and then Eddie’s gone.
Steve reclaims his seat and curls up as best he can with his legs across the armrests, the shoe tucked against his chest. Time to start on that century of sleep, and maybe soon all of the answers he needs will find him.