Chapter Text
I am the bad one
Distant and cruel one
I am the dream that
Keeps you running down
With distraction
Violent reaction
Scars of my actions
Watch me running out
The Devils’ Rejects - Rob Zombie
It’s so small now. It’s so blurry and distant and almost irrelevant after that week; it was probably less than a week, if Eddie thinks about it too hard, and he does. He thinks about it every damn day almost every hour until he can’t think about it anymore, and he runs out of the new trailer, not home but new, and into the field behind the trailer park where the grass meets the trees and he disappears into the trees until he finds one he can climb, and he climbs and climbs and climbs like he only ever did when he was little and was never afraid of anything, and he climbs until he’s above it all. He settles into the crooks of the branches and breathes air only birds can get to; only birds and Eddie. Then, shaking, he pulls out his crushed pack of Camels and lights one up.
No one can see him up there smoking enough to kill himself twice, and he watches all the cars that roll through the gravel between the trailers and the dog that yaps so much the whole neighborhood has started taking care of it just to shut it up and sometimes he sees Max carrying her skateboard away to hop on the back of Lucas’s bike to cycle her somewhere she can really skate.
Then it brings Eddie right back to how small it all is. How small and insignificant his preconceived notions of everything are. Sometimes he even forgets there was a before, so strong are the newer memories that they wipe out everything else and Eddie succumbs to them, lost and adrift wondering why everything had been hiding from him in the first place.
He thought he knew Max. Maxine “Max” Mayfield. Red flaming hair and real hell of an attitude. She used to hang with Lucas and Dustin and Mike, from what he’d heard, until something happened and she moved into the trailer across from him. She fed the damn dog first. Her mother works two jobs, Eddie’d see her come and go in different uniforms when he’d hear the sound of a car pulling through and wonder if it was his uncle. He didn’t know a damn thing about Max.
Lucas Sinclair. Bench warmer for the basketball team and Hellfire member. He has a little sister with a tongue sharp enough to cut diamond. He used to date Max until something happened. He’s been best friends with Mike since elementary school, and they’ve always lived next door to each other. Eddie didn’t know shit about Lucas.
Dustin Henderson. Weird Al t-shirt wearer. Self-proclaimed and very true nerd. He knows too much about My Little Pony and moved to Hawkins in the fourth grade. He has a Mormon girlfriend he met at some camp last summer, and she apparently knows Planck’s constant which Dustin also knows but can’t always remember. Dustin’s also apparently best friends with Hawkins High graduate Steve Harrington. Eddie didn’t know any-fucking-thing about Dustin.
It gets smaller and blurrier the further away he has to reach in his mind, drifting away from the people he spent lunch and club with to those less familiar; faces in a classroom, people who laughed at him even when he was the one telling the jokes.
Robin Buckley. She plays trumpet in the Hawkins High band. She had classes with Eddie, but he never looked her way because he always sat in the back and she always sat somewhere in the middle like she hoped no one would notice her. She was weirder than some of their classmates, just quiet enough but talked just too much if he was paired with her on a group assignment. She was normal enough. Eddie thought he knew Robin.
Nancy Wheeler. She’s prissy and always has well styled hair. Her brother, Mike Wheeler, plays D&D with him. She works on the Hawkins High newspaper. She has straight A’s and was never in a single one of his classes. She dated Steve Harrington her sophomore and junior year before she dumped him. Her best friend died a few years ago. She lives in a cul-de-sac with two very normal parents and two younger siblings. Eddie didn’t really know Nancy.
Steve Harrington. King Steve. His parents are lawyers, and he’d throw parties when his parents went away on business. He dated Nancy Wheeler his senior year of high school and lost her to Jonathan fucking Byers. He was friends with Tommy Hagan and Carol Perkins. He was on the basketball team and co-captain of the swim team before he graduated. Eddie knew more of Steve than he’d actually known him.
And somehow, the less he knew about them the more they changed. It seemed contradictory, to Eddie. The less he knew the less should change, there were less notions to overwrite only empty files to be filled. And yet the people he knew the least were the ones that blurred and shifted right in front of his eyes until it was stomach turning to think about a time when they had been anyone except who Eddie knows them to be exactly as they are.
His stomach flips in on itself just imagining anything that happened before that spring break. Or during. But he can’t stop. He thinks about it every day almost every hour until he can’t think about it anymore without making himself sick.
His uncle—who doesn’t know shit by the way, Eddie thinks to himself—says he should try doing what he used to. Pretend things are normal. Then they’ll eventually go back to normal. Eddie thinks that’s the sort of shit your guardian tells you when they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Eddie tries though, because his uncle wants him to. He thinks everyone else wants him to too, and for the first time Eddie is willing to do whatever anyone else wants him to. If it’ll just bring him back to normal.
Eddie wakes up every morning with no time to eat, just like he used to, yanks on some jeans he hasn’t washed in a week or a month and a wrinkled tee and runs to his car. He pulls into the school parking lot and grabs his backpack, mostly empty except for a few crumbled and forgotten assignments he never turned in. He asks his seat mate for a pencil and then he has to ask the person in front of him because his seat mate won’t lend him one. Eddie eats lunch—school cafeteria slop—with the remains of the Hellfire club. When the bell rings, he loiters around with some of the older students and gets high in the forest behind the school before driving back to the new trailer. He rifles through the pantry for a snack and then dinner and forgets about his homework when he turns on the TV.
But Eddie isn’t late anymore because he’s up late working out new chords on his guitar, he’s oversleeping because he can’t fall asleep until four AM. He wakes up every half hour sweaty and too hot and too cold. He opens his window and downs a glass of water before closing the window again. Sometimes, he’s awake but he pretends to sleep through his alarm just because he wants to make his uncle feel better. If Eddie’s normal, then maybe his uncle is too.
But when Eddie eats lunch he just picks the shitty bun bread off his burger and rolls it into tiny, mushy balls. He drinks his chocolate milk until the lip of the carton gets too soggy, and he uses the plastic fork to poke holes in the burger patty.
When he goes out back to the forest with the other students, he holds the smoke in his mouth when he’s passed the joint instead of inhaling and every grin and giggle and laugh makes him think about the girl he made smile right before he sold her weed without knowing any damn fucking thing about her or the shitty, upside down world that was already eating its way through her body.
Eddie tried getting high, just once, after spring break. He’d heard bad things from other people before; sometimes, some poor souls were prone to hallucinations just from smoking. Not Eddie though, he thought, not Eddie Munson. Eddie Munson was built like a garbage disposal, he could suck in anything and come out just fine, he thought. He was already strange enough, nothing could make him worse. Maybe it was the weed because he had sold it to Chrissy Cunningham before she was murdered on his ceiling worse than in the fucking Exorcist. Or maybe he was a part of too much over the past week, maybe being in a different world had altered his brain chemistry or twisted his insides so bad he was worse than strange.
He was unfixable.
Eddie got high once and never again. He shook so bad he thought Vecna had come back for him. He cried and his nose wouldn’t stop running. When he stood up he felt so nauseous he ran to the bathroom and expelled his bologna sandwich dinner. When he was certain nothing else was coming up, he flushed the toilet and washed his mouth in the sink. His mistake was looking up.
She haunted him in every reflection he passed. He ran to his car, throat aching from screaming and gasping in huge mouthfuls of harsh night air. He wretched open the van door and scrambled into the driver’s seat. He tried shoving the keys in the ignition and dropped them from fumbling. Eddie dived down and felt for the keys in the dark, but when he came back up her mouth gaped, crooked and ugly, in every mirror and glimmer of glass. He shook and threw open the door again, falling and his knees hitting gravel and up came clear bile from his throat right there beside the wheel.
He didn’t know where to go so he went to the only person he could think of.
He didn’t even knock, he was lucky the door was unlocked when he threw it open and that her mother was working a closing shift.
Max jumped up from the couch, her face drained and so pale he thought she was going to be sicker than him.
“She’s back,” He gasped. “He’s back—fucking shit—Vecna’s here!”
“What?” Max exclaimed, throwing herself at the front door that Eddie left ajar and locked it behind him with too much force. “What do you mean? What do you mean? How?”
“Shit!” Eddie screamed and started jumping in place before he took off for every window, yanking the blinds shut with his eyes closed until he had to open them just to move around and finally every blind was drawn and when he looked at Max her eyes were red. Her eyes were red and glossy with tears, but he had to tell her. “Fuck, Max, there!” He pointed at the dead screen of the TV reflecting the living room back at them and her bleeding eyes he could feel watching him even when he didn’t look. “She’s right fucking there!”
“Eddie,” Max’s voice wobbled. “There’s no one there.”
Eddie’s hair was wilder than usual, and he could feel the tears running salty down his cheeks and his eyes showed every bit of white, and he was scaring her but he couldn’t stop pointing at the blank TV.
Eddie looks back on it and thanks every star he’s seen that Max is resilient. She threw a blanket over the TV and pressed down on his shoulders until he fell onto the couch. She stalked to the kitchen and filled up a glass with water before shoving it, shaking, into his hands.
She threw another blanket around him before she finally spoke.
“You smell like weed,” Max said. It wasn’t accusatory, only factual, and her voice wobbled only slightly less now that she had something to do.
Eddie just nodded.
“Y’know,” she said, sitting beside him. “My mom doesn’t smoke weed because it makes her hear things. It’s, um. It’s why she drinks instead.”
Eddie nodded again.
“Let’s…let’s wait a few hours, and if she’s still here,” Max spoke softly, terrified of what her words might make her imagine. “We’ll call—we’ll call Steve. And Nancy and Mike…and…”
“Okay,” Eddie whispered.
They waited on the couch. Max read Wonder Woman and watched the door, and Eddie sipped water, sniffing and wiping his nose. He closed his eyes and listened to the hum of the generator outside the trailer and knew he couldn’t hear the clock.
When some hours had passed, they both stood nervous around Max’s TV waiting for her to pull the blanket off.
“Are you sure you aren’t high?” Max asked, fist clenching the fabric.
“Yes, just,” Eddie squeezed his eyes shut before opening them. “Just do it.”
She pulled and the blanket fell to the floor, and Eddie stared back at himself.
“So?” Max said.
“So.” Eddie said, voice thin. “I’m full of shit.”
Max stared at her own reflection. “You’re not full of shit. Shit happens.”
Eddie snorted.
“I’m serious,” Max told him firmly, gathering the blanket. “I know what it’s like. Being caught by Vecna is…You’re not gonna bounce back in a day. My counselor says when bad things like this happen our brains have to change to deal with the stress.”
Eddie snapped his gaze away from the TV to look at Max’s back as she shoved the blanket away in a closet. “She told you that?”
Max shrugged. “I dunno, something like that. My point is that we all have problems. But there’s a lot of us, so we’ll, like, look after each other. Having others makes it easier.”
“Counselor tell you that too?” Eddie asked.
Max glared at him.
“Jesus,” Eddie rubbed his face roughly with his palms. “Okay. Okay. It’s supposed to be the other way around. I look after you. I’m too fucking old for this.”
Max shrugged again, picking up the empty glass and taking it back to the kitchen. “I think my experience with the upside-down makes me older than you. Like, in mental age or something.”
“Fuck you,” Eddie said.
Max grinned, unbothered. “If it bothers you, I won’t tell anyone. Also, you could get me a pack of beer next weekend.”
“How old are you?” He asked incredulously. His palms were still clammy, and his throat was raw.
“I won’t be drinking, not really my thing, but,” Max said. “It’s gonna be Mike’s birthday, and my gift would totally be the coolest if, y’know…”
Eddie huffed again. “Sure. Fine. One time though, I don’t want your group of goblins begging me for alcohol every time I sit down for lunch.”
Max grinned again. “Like I said, I won’t tell anyone.”
So he bought her beer. It wasn’t really to keep her quiet. It probably had more to do with watching her feed a dog that wasn’t hers for the better part of a year or seeing her skate by after Hellfire meetings claiming she wasn’t waiting for Lucas she just happened to be around or maybe it was the whole saving the world together bit. Eddie doesn’t mind that she knows, he cares more about what he is or isn’t going to see every time he passes his reflection.
So normal really isn’t on the table for Eddie.
It’s Robin and Nancy who convince him to go to prom.
His uncle tries every year with a half-hearted, “So, prom,” and when Eddie rolls his eyes, the conversation is over. Eddie’s always been above it, anyway. Prom is for normal shmucks who thought dressing in fancy clothes once and dancing for a couple hours by the age of eighteen made them adults or something. Eddie knew real stuff that’d make you an adult, things he could fit in a black, metal lunchbox and sell behind the school. But after Vecna, even that felt a little childish. It just didn’t matter.
“It’ll be fun,” Robin said, which was a little weird because Eddie thought she’d be on his side about the whole ordeal.
“You have to come with us,” Nancy added. “We’re graduating, we’ll never get this chance again.”
“And it’ll be normal,” Robin tacked on, excited and sounding a breath away from desperate. “Like, total high school level normal. No secret Russian spies or upside-down flaying things or real life nightmares or giant clocks. Nancy’s on the prom committee, so definitely no giant clocks.”
Nancy smiled with held-back laughter like she wanted to laugh but couldn’t find it in her. “No giant clocks, just glitter and balloons and punch.”
They seemed so in need of camaraderie or routine that Eddie had to say yes. Besides, no one’s asked him to prom before.
Now he feels like an idiot. It’s no one’s fault except his own, he thinks. Eddie knows what works for him, and prom has never and will never work for him. People like Eddie aren’t supposed to be at prom, he knows that. He should’ve taken his own advice, the one he told his club members and bandmates every year and stayed home. He should be learning a new cover to a song or trying to write lyrics or drinking beer or vandalizing some park benches with spray paint and rude words. He should’ve taken the advice of his bandmates when they spit his own words back at him—dude, what the hell? Who the hell goes to prom?—but Eddie’s never managed to listen to anyone, not even himself, apparently.
He’s standing in the gym. The fluorescent lights are off and instead there’s a dim glow coming from small lights along the floor that are plugged into outlets around the wall. It glows soft whites and pinks and blues. Streamers hang in whimsical designs from the ceiling, and pastel balloons litter the floor. The dance floor has a cheap disco hanging above it casting square flecks of light over the dim room. Pop music blasts from a corner where the DJ has a long list of requests ranging from risky, upbeat music to sappy, sweet songs. Nancy really outdid herself with the preparations.
Speaking of, Eddie’s eyes seek out Nancy where she’s on the dance floor with Jonathan Byers who, Eddie doesn’t really know the whole deal, to make up from their shit show of a spring break had skipped out on his own prom in California to be in Hawkins, Indiana with his girlfriend. It was kind of sweet, Eddie thought, in a teen romance movie sort of way, the kind that ten years from now he can imagine mothers showing their children with nostalgia and saying, ‘oh, I remember my prom…’ He wonders if Nancy and Jonathan want kids.
There’s Robin who had, for all intents and purposes, said she was just going to prom with a friend. Just like how she was also going to prom with Eddie. Eddie’s not an idiot, contrary to popular belief, and he watches, with barely any more interest than he watched Nancy and Jonathan, as Robin takes to the dance floor with another girl by her side. She’s just a friend from band, she had said, and Eddie had shrugged because he didn’t care anymore than he cared about anyone else’s love lives. Eddie’s been a freak since as long as he can remember and looking the other way when it came to something like this had long grown standard for him; his bandmates did it for him, and he did it for them, after all.
So Eddie is just standing there watching people he’s only just really known and breathing the same suffocating air of all the people he’s pressed shoulders with for over four years, all the people who don’t know he holds smoke in his mouth instead of inhaling to get high or that he wakes up late because he can’t sleep or that he can’t just hang out with his bandmates anymore because they don’t know shit just like his uncle doesn’t know shit or that he sold weed to Chrissy Cunningham the afternoon before she died.
His grasp around his cup of punch is sweaty and clammy from the chill of the ice. He thinks if he wasn’t wearing so many layers everyone would be able to see the sweat stains through his white dress shirt, and his neck feels damp. He’d buttoned it up all the way to his neck because his uncle told him the tie would look better that way, but now he wants to run his fingers around the edge to loosen it up.
He’s an idiot standing there knuckles white around his punch and dressed in a rented suit he’s never worn before in his life, and his friends are on the dance floor because they were actually able to get dates, and everyone else is so normal, and normal means that he’s still Eddie the Freak. Eddie the Freak who never wears rented suits or goes to prom or has friends who actually get dates. Eddie the Freak who everyone expects to make some sort of scene or just get the hell out of there because no one wants him there anyway.
So he does.
He can’t stand it in the gym anymore feeling absolutely and utterly alone among the hundreds of students he’s known since he was in elementary school.
Eddie slips out of the back door. He wants to lean against the wall and let the cool, rough brick ground him and then when he’s had enough of the tinny noise coming from inside the school he’ll walk along the highway back home; Nancy and Jonathan had given him a ride there, and Eddie’s sure he won’t be missed.
But just as he slips out the door Eddie notices a figure standing where the cars are parked along the entrance to the gym. The door behind him closes shut with a clang, and Eddie’s plans of escape fall shut with it as the sound startles the other person.
Steve Harrington jumps and snaps his head around just in time to see Eddie Munson standing there with his mouth open like a hooked fish.
Eddie doesn’t know what to do, so he plays it cool like he always does except he’s not cool because he came out here to cool down and he’s definitely not going to get any cooler under someone else’s scrutiny, but Eddie has a title to live up to so he’s going to at least try even if he lost any chance at maintaining his reputation when he held a broken beer bottle to Steve’s throat a few months back. He’s already lost everything.
Eddie walks across the grass to the pavement where Steve’s car is parked. He’s leaning against the driver’s door watching Eddie like he’s never seen him before, and Eddie leans his back against the car door beside Steve like this was his plan all along. He pulls his crushed pack of Camels out of his back pocket along with a lighter.
With a cigarette hanging between his lips, Eddie tries nonchalantly to answer a question Steve never asked. “It was just getting a bit much in there.” He shrugs before his cigarette lights and he draws in a breath.
Steve doesn’t answer, but when Eddie looks at him he’s watching the cigarette in between his lips. Eddie holds the cigarette between his fingers with an exhale of smoke and gestures with the cigarette towards Steve.
Steve blinks as if he’s been fast forwarding through a VHS and has only just caught up to the part of the film he was looking for when he shrugs and says, “What the hell. They can’t expel me if they catch us.”
He takes the cigarette from Eddie’s grasp and lifts it to his mouth, inhaling when suddenly his nose scrunches up and his eyebrows furrow and he starts coughing up puffs of smoke into the night air.
“Fuck me,” Steve hacks.
Eddie laughs. It doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t double over gasping for air with tears in his eyes. It’s not some long, breathless laugh that gives him a wriggling thought in the back of his head that he may have actually broken a rib, but he’s laughing. It feels good. Watching Steve Harrington try to look cool smoking on school grounds and choking like an inexperienced freshman kind of feels good.
“I thought you’d smoked before, Harrington?” Eddie grins, taking the cigarette from Steve’s extended hand as Steve blinks through teary eyes.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, his voice rough and dry as he inhales clean oxygen. “It’s been a minute. And not usually cigarettes.”
Eddie watches Steve with a little, gleeful smile as he gathers himself while Eddie breathes silently through the cigarette. After a few moments of silence, he gestures again.
“Think you can handle it now?” He teases, waving the cigarette towards Steve.
Steve snatches it from him. “Oh, shut up, Munson.”
Eddie does. It surprises him, and he wonders how he became so willing to do what others asked him to. He falls silent, not without a smile, and watches Steve take another, smoother drag. He holds the smoke in as he passes the cigarette back to Eddie like he’s worried if he breathes out too early the small high will escape him. Eddie’s feeling generous tonight though, and he’d be willing to burn through his whole pack for Steve to chase that high if only he’d find the words to ask.
A thought occurs to Eddie suddenly, and his brow furrows. “What the hell were you doin’ out here?”
“Uh,” Steve casts his gaze around the empty lot. “I was dropping Robin and her friend off. Guess I’m giving ‘em a ride home too.”
Eddie watches him out of the corner of his eye while they continue to pass the cigarette between each other in silence. He’s not sure if he should press—he would have a couple weeks ago, he would’ve flown by all the warnings and stop signs telling him to lay on the brakes and make a U-turn just because he’d have the power to make someone squirm—but Eddie’s starting to learn who should be allow a reprieve, who he wants to give the opportunity of respite in his company. A few weeks ago Eddie would’ve scoffed and said no one was worthy of his mercy; either someone would manage to deal with him dialed to one hundred or they could forget it, and he always made it an impossible battle. He’s learning now—with speed bumps and potholes—that no one can win impossible battles, not even unstoppable, garbage disposal Eddie Munson.
Steve sighs beside him, and Eddie, whose eyes had slipped away to stare at the road, brings his gaze back to him.
“I dunno why I’m lying to you,” Steve says without looking at him. “I should’ve left half an hour ago. I guess I kind of just got used to making excuses.”
Eddie cocks his head and says, “Excuses about what?”
Steve gestures vaguely with the cigarette like that explains everything, and it sort of does, Eddie thinks. At the very least, it encompasses the greater something that plagues them so thoroughly like a rot that fruit flies escape their mouths every time they open and makes it unbearable to tell anyone lest they see and make fun.
“It’s just weird,” Steve mumbles. “Seeing all those people getting ready for prom. Lining up with their tickets. The music. The excitement. They have no idea. I dunno, maybe I’m…”
He shakes his head just a little refusing to look anywhere except straight forward, and Eddie lets him.
“Maybe I’m thinking about it too hard but being here, it just reminds me of last year. Or, like, how it had started and then stopped and started again,” He rambles. “I remember trying so hard to act like nothing had happened. I would think up ideas of how to make it feel like it used to. Parties and alcohol and dates and all that stupid shit. That was what mattered before. I think that’s what, uh, drove a wedge between me and Nance. She wanted to adapt, and I wanted…”
“The same old song and dance,” Eddie offers helpfully, plucking the cigarette from Steve’s fingers.
Steve laughs but it’s short and humorless like there’s too much truth in Eddie’s words that he doesn’t want to face. “Yeah. When prom rolled around…we’d already broken up. I mean, we were—are—friends, but shit just kept getting crazier and I—I felt so helpless. Not just with the Mind Flayer, which was its own can of worms, but my grades were shit, I lost all my friends the year before because I wised up, I guess. I knew I wasn’t getting into college and my dad was pissed and my mom acted like I didn’t exist, and I just. I thought by pretending prom was important it might make me, I dunno…”
“Normal?” Eddie asks.
Steve sighs and takes the cigarette back from him. “Yeah.”
“But then you went to prom, and it was too normal, and everyone expected you to be normal too,” Eddie guesses. “Which is pretty much impossible when you’re the only one who’s fought nine foot tall man-eating monsters and know a girl who has telekinetic abilities and there’s a super secret government lab right here in Hawkins, Indiana. I guess being prom king doesn’t really hold a candle to all that.”
Steve snorts and says, “Yeah. I tried though. Like I needed it or something. I needed everything to be normal, or else, I dunno, I felt like things would fall apart. Like maybe—this sounds dumb—like I wouldn’t be me if things weren’t normal. Like they used to be.”
“I don’t think it sounds dumb,” Eddie admits quietly. “We all have our roles, and stepping away from them is scary…especially when it’s been ripped from us. We don’t know how to act when, um, for lack of a better phrase, everything turns upside-down. Everyone wants you to be normal like you’ve always been because they don’t know anything else, and you want to do what’s right. So, normal it is then. But it’s pretty impossible to be something you aren’t.”
“You don’t think I’m normal?” Steve says and finally looks at him, cocking an eyebrow. There’s a playful shine in his eyes despite his serious tone, and Eddie grins, tilting his head towards him.
“I think,” Eddie says, “You’re a freak, Harrington."
“I guess that’s the only explanation,” Steve shrugs humorously. “Freaks get along with freaks.”
“So I’ve heard,” Eddie says with mirth.
Some of the tension is lost, but Steve’s shoulders tense like he’s coming up on something he wants to admit but hasn’t said before and he’s no longer looking at Eddie. He misses his gaze already. “I guess when something reminds me of, like, the beginning, or, I dunno, any of it, it kind of makes it hard to go back home sometimes. I wasn’t close with her—“
“The girl who died,” It’s the first time Eddie really interrupts and it’s too blunt, he knows.
“Barbara,” Steve says. “Yeah. I wasn’t close with her. We weren’t friends. She was just someone I knew. I guess that’s what made it easy to pretend a little more that things were okay. Like, nothing monumental in my life changed because she died. I didn’t miss a friend or anything. But…”
“You can’t ever really forget someone who died in your backyard,” Eddie says and thinks about the abandoned trailer down the street from him that burns a hole in the back of his mind no matter how many times he passes by it and tries to forget the girl he barely knew who twisted into a living nightmare right in front of him.
“Nope,” Steve says, the p popping with a dejected emptiness. He brings a hand down his face like he’s trying to scrub away his words. “I guess I just get in my head about it sometimes. I feel pathetic and hopeless. I know more than they do—“ he gestures blindly to the gym full of students. “—but nothing compared to scientists or the government or whoever the fuck ran those experiments. I have no idea when or if it’ll end, and I’m not sure how long I can keep doing it, y’know?”
Eddie stands silently for a beat staring down at the black of the road while smoke wreaths around him.
“Yeah,” He agrees softly. “I’ve been doing this for a hell of a lot less time than you has. I guess, like, I always admired you or, um, I was jealous, of how capable you seemed. Y’know, douchebag Steve with his perfect girlfriend who graduated prom king turns out to be a pretty good guy who spent high school deep in government and Russian spy plots and knows how to fight a mean monster or two. That’s pretty unreal.” Eddie’s leaning in towards Steve much too close, but it’s easy to bridge the space when there was so little of it to begin with. He grins at Steve who eyes him nervously, and Eddie is familiar with the feeling of controlled craze rushing through him. “He complains but throws himself head first into danger, and at first you think it’s some stupid chivalry thing but then you realize no. He’s just that fucking crazy. This guy is just as suicidal as the rest of them.”
Steve opens his mouth to say something, probably to refute Eddie’s statement, but Eddie doesn’t let him. He plows on ahead, a wild gleam in his eyes and an excitable bravado. It’s easy for him to let the words tumble out, a bigger and bigger avalanche as he finds the words and runs.
“But me? I only got roped in because I didn’t have a choice. I wouldn’t have turned back around to help someone. I would have ran. I did run. I left my uncle and the cops to clean up a dead girl.” Steve winces, but Eddie ignores him. “I’m only cool when I get to cower behind tabletop games and role-play. I’m not chivalric or crazy or suicidal. I’ll turn heel the minute the wind blows the wrong way.
And now,” Eddie punctuates his statement by pressing in further to Steve who pushes back into his side so Eddie wobbles and rights himself. He can’t stop grinning, and the theatrics build in his voice like a story that’s escaped him. “Here we are lamenting our tragic tales in an parking lot during prom thinking to ourselves, I’ll go absolutely batshit crazy if things don’t go back to normal, ‘cause we fuckin’ need it or we’ll fall apart but when they do go back to normal we’re madder than a bag of cats. We’ll find the fault in anything. So here we are. Wasting space. Breathing in toxins. Whining about our poor, unfair lives. Helpless, pathetic, stupid Steve and Eddie.”
Silence follows his speech. Crickets buzz in the distance all the way from the soccer field, and he can hear the hum of electricity from the street lights. It’s a familiar silence Eddie has grown to appreciate from years of jaw dropping performances leaving others in awe that someone could possibly be so unashamed as to do anything that Eddie Munson might do. That boy is nothing but trouble, people think, he’s a real freak. Eddie relishes in their imaginary thoughts because it’s better to earn a reputation you’ve created than be ostracized for something you couldn’t control. Eddie’d be a freak either way, but at least he was a freak he liked.
Steve laughs. It’s sharp and it’s quick and it’s delightful until he cuts off with a rough cough, doubling over with laughter and another round of coughing. He drops the cigarette—burnt to the butt anyway—to hold his stomach and take heaving gulps of air.
A giggle slips from Eddie’s lips, then he’s laughing too. Eddie’s face hurts from smiling, and he’s trying not to fall to the ground with how weak his knees are. It’s just too absurd to keep his composure, and as he thinks his laughter is coming to an end Steve is struck with another fit of coughing, and they lose it all over again until they’re a wheezing mess leaning on each other to keep from falling over.
“The smoke,” Steve croaks, tears in his eyes and he has to swallow another bubble of laughter. “Caught in my throat.”
Steve’s attempt to control himself fail when he and Eddie’s eyes meet and more peels of laughter greet the night air.
Eddie feels wild and dumb and like he should’ve felt when he was in the gym dancing with other students. But he thinks he’s much happier out here watching Steve Harrington fall apart and choking on smoke because of something Eddie said. It’s easier to be himself even if he doesn’t know much of who he is anymore. He can flit through every version of himself until he settles into a skin that feels most comfortable—or not. He can keep rifling through all the different versions of himself like rooting around someone’s cassette collection shoving tapes into the cassette player and ejecting them right back out before the intro can start just to be replaced with another tape.
He knows now Steve won’t mind. They can play those cassettes together for as long as they want or not at all. They’ll bring their own music, show off their favorite bands, and pinch each other’s arms trying to get to the player first.
Eddie might be going crazy, but Steve is probably crazier, he reasons. Time does that to a person.
At least they’ll go crazy together.