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Their bodies are riddled with bruises, unconquerable aches. In the yawning hours of night, it’s hard for him to be sure if he’s real or not, if he’s here or not, or if he’s still there , drowning in technicolor visions that maybe came from the vines slithering across his skin, from it, or maybe were just the creations of his own breaking brain, pain-addled manifestations to make the process of half-living and half-dying something more bearable. He thinks maybe he’s died more times than he can count now, brought back gasping by whatever bullshit runs through that place, but too weak to sustain it, and around and around and around. It was dark there. And it’s dark here now, and darker every day. And Eddie was dead, and alive, and dead, and nothing was real. And now he’s not there, but there is here, almost. So it’s confusing. So it’s hard to tell. In the quiet. In the night. What he’s actually holding onto.
But Steve, Steve is always real. And he’s sure as hell holding onto that.
The other shifts on the couch where they’ve settled, close, but not exactly touching, brushing, yes, but not touching, not yet. Their bodies are angled in because who knows what’s lurking in the shadows, if they turned themselves out, opened up the hunches of their shoulders and extended beyond the small circle of light the lamp throws. Eddie sure as hell doesn’t want to find out, doesn’t want Steve to find out. Even though technically, Steve has flicked on all the lights in the house, so there isn’t really a shadow or a hidden corner. And that’s for Eddie, because sometimes the dark comes dawning in anyway. And maybe it’s also for Steve, in its way. But it’s a quiet night, tonight, at least. And they’ve both drifted here, sleepless and exhausted so their shoulders can brush, and reality, whatever the hell that is, can be a little bit more real.
Goddamn King Steve. It’s an amused, exasperated thought, and it unwinds through his head with more weight than most of his thoughts do, just now, more heft than the usual manic whispers that turn into screams and float away before he can snatch them, organize them into place. He hates that his existence is spun of glass these days, prone to shattering, cutting him from the inside out. But this one. It’s a fond thought, one that he can keep, wrap his fingers into, let settle heavy, and a little bit warm, along the fault lines.
King Steve. King Steve and his touched-by-gold mane of hair, still perfectly ruffled at 2 am on some random fucking night at the end of the world. A regular white knight, a goddamn paladin blessed by the divine. He’s brighter than Eddie has ever been, at his best, even before there was Chrissy’s blood wrapped up in his soul, and Jason and murder and barbed hisses twisted up in his name, and the mud of the Upside Down twining into his body. King Steve and his stupid bangs and his honey-brown eyes which somehow managed to glimmer, even out there ---the only fucking thing he’d seen when he’d felt gravity shift around him for the first time in what could have been years, decades, maybe centuries, but turns out to have only clocked in at about a week. And it wasn’t Vecna, floating him into the air for one final doom, but instead stubborn arms wrapped carefully around his body and the fleeting sparkle of a familiar gaze before everything hard cut to black.
He’s not untouched, not unmarred, Steve. There are yellow-green bruises mottled around his throat, fading in slow inches, but the edges of which still purple in an ugly shade. And there’s a stiffness to his shoulders, a careful adjustment to how he holds himself, which Eddie knows because he watched then and he watches now, and he’s never claimed to be a saint. Not even once.
But Steve is holding it together. And Eddie is not, doing that. So he holds onto Steve instead.
There’s been something between them, ever since Steve pulled him out of the Upside Down. Carried him like a fucking damsel back into whatever passes for their world now. Something charged that flits across his skin and trembles over the small hairs on his neck. Some kind of unnamable frisson that Eddie figures will explode eventually, like everything else in his existence tends to do. But they hang in anticipation for now. Maybe too afraid to push yet. Eddie raw like this. And Steve only a little ahead, healing. And neither one of them quite sure what’s in the cards for tomorrow.
Still, their fingers twine in slow inches, creeping over the worn cushions of the couch, tangling thoughtlessly. And Eddie thinks maybe his skin has been starving for touch, or maybe only starving for Steve.
The other is watching him, and there’s something aching in his gaze, something that’s hard for Eddie to look at directly, some tender kind of sadness that makes him feel somehow small, but maybe not in a way he hates. It’s hard, but he meets it, even though if he didn’t, if he ran, Steve wouldn’t think he was any less brave. The corners of Steve’s mouth turn up and then widen, fall into an easy, lazy grin.
“You with me?” He gives over in that drawl of his, but there’s an undertone of something there, flitting through the syllables, soft on his tongue.
And inexplicably, Eddie feels the turn of his own lips come unbidden, reflexive. “Yeah.”
And it’s the truth. To the end of the world and whatever’s after that.