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Save for the occasional buffet of air gusting overhead, it’s all quiet on the home front. If he didn’t know what he knew now, Eddie would say the silence is peaceful, and not the beginning of the end. But then he flinches if he even so much as blinks for too long, and he’s reminded of just how fucking exhausted he is, how the thought of not having what little edge an alert mind can give scares the living shit out of him.
His head rolls against the back of the driver’s seat headrest with the motion of the RV as it takes another narrow, backroad curve. In the couple hours they’ve been on the road, Harrington’s managed to promote himself from driving it like he stole it to a nearly bearable defensive play, but it’s not like Eddie can complain either way. The car sickness is almost definitely better than the alternative of fending for himself.
Eddie shifts again, pulling one leg up and lacing his fingers around his shin to hold it in place. The bunk seat isn’t exactly anyone over four foot’s idea of a good time, but from here he can see straight out the back window without being in sight of the rest, he’s got something solid to press his back against, he’s got eyes on the rest of the team. The redheaded Mayfield kid from across the road and Sinclair make quiet goo-goo eyes at one another in the back, which is sweet, in a mind-boggling way. Who’s got the fucking time to look that smitten in the middle of the fucking apocalypse? Kids that do this once a year like having to go to a shitty family reunion, apparently.
Henderson and Sinclair’s kid sister and Robin-from-band have the right idea, heads tipped back at identical, infernal angles, mouths hanging open, scratchy snores only broken by the most jarring of potholes. With Harrington at his back and Wheeler the Eldest riding shotgun, it’s a pleasant postcard shot after Rockwell’s own heart. Mom, Dad, the kids, and him, the mutt. Jesus. He presses his fingertips over one eye, face scrunched up, scrubbing until he can’t bear the pressure. There’s dirt under his nails, gritty and persistent and painful, Upside Down shit in his hair, on his face, in his mouth. He feels oily and gross and like something much bigger than him has chewed him up and spit him out.
He doesn’t know how the fuck these kids are holding it together. He’s been shaking his foot with a mighty need since Harrington took the wheel, hands trembling since before that, teeth clenched since he saw—he saw, he saw, he saw. What these elven eyes have fucking seen. Chrissy’s fair face butchered beyond recognition, the pulsing tear at the bottom of Lover’s Lake that looked like the end of the goddamn world, nasty little beasties trying to tear Steve Harrington’s pretty head from his shoulders. This has gotta be what getting a bad batch of speed feels like. What cutting it with uppers and downers and the whole fucking medicine cabinet does to your head. Every piece of him is running on a different high, all twisted up, pushed out, desperate and like his heart is gonna slice his throat from the inside just to get some relief. He can’t stop shaking.
He’s thought about death in a general sense. Confronted it when his dad sat him down and told him Mom wasn’t coming home after all. Shirked it when Wayne sat him down and told him Dad had punched his ticket at last. He’s even thought about his own death, because he doesn’t exactly have the best head on his shoulders, when it comes to self-preservation. He’s a hopeless coward that’ll run before the starting gun, but he’s got a smart mouth and a shaky business and maybe one of these days the basketball team is gonna realize he’s been over-charging them for the fuck of it.
But to be confronted with it in an extra-dimensional wasteland that makes his shit little hometown look like the Twilight Zone is so far off his charts, he’s having just the slightest trouble in comprehending it. Nancy Wheeler jumped and Robin jumped and he didn’t want to get left behind so he jumped, but he hadn’t thought further ahead than breaking the water. Hadn’t truly thought about what was down there, even though they’d tried to tell him. In one ear and out the fucking other, just like his report cards liked to say.
The solid wood of a boat oar connecting with the very real, very dense bodies of irreconcilable winged horrors hadn’t done much to settle him down. Tripping through one forest after the other, each one deadlier than the last, hadn’t helped either. He looked at death and it looked back and now he’s banking on how real he can make sorry, I’ve just got one of those familiar faces sound when it so inevitably comes back around.
“Hey, man, you still awake back there?” Harrington’s voice breaks through, but only just. Between trying to keep it down for benefit of his weary caravan and the damage those bats did to his throat, his voice is rougher than usual. Eddie’ll think about it later, if later ever comes. Wonder if it rattles around in his chest, if he’d be able to feel it under his fingertips if he pressed them there, mouth against his pulse point—
He clears his throat, dragging a dirtied hand over his dirtied face and hoping Robin wasn’t right about fucking rabies because there’s a scratch on the back of his hand that burns. “Uh, yeah, present and accounted for. Sleep is no-ot coming for me any time soon.”
Harrington laughs, more or less, but it doesn’t sound like he’s blowing Eddie off, so there’s that. “Yeah,” he agrees, even though he sounds on the verge of conking out at any second. “What’s it look like back there?”
“The lovebirds fell asleep sharing headphones, so young love’s alive and well, in case you were wondering.” His mouth twists into a short-lived smile against his thumbnail. “The rest of them are out, man. Henderson looks like a fucking Ewok in his gear.”
Harrington hedges slightly, the sound of his fingers rattling on the steering wheel coming in loud and clear over the tires rolling right along. “Is Robin—like, does she look okay?” he finally asks, and it’s such a real worry that Eddie feels it like it’s his own pain. He’s still not entirely clear on what their deal is, just knows Steve-and-Robin come as a package deal, if Henderson’s to be believed. Unfortunately, he seems to be a fairly trustworthy disseminator, where Harrington’s honor is concerned.
Eddie tips his head back, looking down the line of his nose to where Robin is pressed against the window, Erica sharing the seat, Henderson across from her. “Yeah, she’s—she looks pretty peaceful, considering. I think she’s holding mini Sinclair’s hand.”
Which, in Eddie’s book, more power to her. The kid’s eleven, right? That’s what she’d said? If she can keep a cooler head than people nearly twice her age, she can hold someone’s fucking hand if it’s what she needs to get some shut-eye before they do whatever insane thing it is they’re headed for.
“What about Wheeler?” he adds abruptly, belatedly. Out of sight, out of mind has never made him feel like such a sleaze. He doesn’t know how they all keep track of one another, either. Not when everything in his head is going a mile a minute, not when, apparently, all of them aren’t even here. Mike and Jonathan Byers’ kid brother and some girl with superpowers and—he hasn’t known that many people in his whole life, honest to god.
“Out like a light.”
Eddie wonders if he’s supposed to say something else. That’s the other thing that’s so goddamn weird, there’s never a loss for words. A freaky alien hive-mind sinks its claws into the recesses of Mayfield’s mind, and suddenly everyone’s got something to say about it. This isn’t like last time and we know better now and we need weapons all said with this calm sort of familiarity as if Eddie isn’t still spinning out in front of the gaping fucking hole in his uncle’s roof. Last time? Last time? He needs a cigarette or six.
Harrington yawns hard enough to crack his jaw, but he keeps them steadfastly between the lines. “How you doing with all this?” he asks, unmistakably gentle, and it makes Eddie’s stomach roll. He of the weak chin and gold constitution. Steve’s bloodied and grimy—in his vest, no fucking less—and probably one wrong breath away from busting something important and he wants to know how Eddie’s holding up. There’s gotta be something wrong with this guy, because this is starting to get ridiculous.
“Million dollar question. Pretty fucking bad,” Eddie trills and has to shove his hand over his mouth so he doesn’t laugh until they have to pull the fucking RV over because he’s hyperventilating. He hasn’t cried since they shot Old Yeller, so all bets are off if and when he breaks.
He gasps on a breath, bites down on it with his molars, pulls himself back tight like he’s tugging on shoelaces. “C’mon, man, we gotta keep you awake. I don’t think Max’s feet’ll reach the pedals in this thing if you crap out on us. I’m, uh, yeah, not at the best vantage point for I, Spy, so tell me something about the great Steve Harrington.”
He huffs—maybe a little amused, if Eddie’s feeling generous with himself—and maneuvers them through another slim cutout that Eddie watches go by in reverse out the back window. The trees are electric yellow-green that hang, shaggy and shaking, over the road. It’s too much like vines and scorched earth, too far from a home he doesn’t really have, and it’s just about the most perspective he’s felt in twenty years.
“I hate driving this thing,” Harrington says sometime later. A reedy voice is spinning out fire and rain, low and steady on the radio, and it feels like a secret. Eddie closes his eyes and swallows hard and tries not to think about how they’re sharing a headrest.
“I used to have this idea that I wanted this, like this big family, right? Five or six kids, a pack of Harringtons. We’d get in one of these things every summer and just—drive. See the country. Like, I traveled for basketball, for swim, but I’ve never been anywhere, you know? So in this dream, or whatever, we’d go and see the Rockies, the Grand Canyon, end up in California, learn to surf. All the shit I wanted to do as a kid that my parents would never be caught dead doing.”
“That sounds…” Eddie trails, thinking before he speaks for once in his life. It sounds like hell. All those mouths to feed, all those opportunities to fuck someone up for life. There’s something about it that’s just sad, he thinks. It’s the exact surface level, Stepford-bullshit he’d expect from the kid of rich, WASP-y fuck-ups, but hearing it out of Steve’s mouth, in a voice nearly cut out of him by the world beyond, feels wrong in a way he can’t put his finger on. Maybe it’s the thought they’ll make it that long, or that they’ll survive unscathed enough to be able to acclimate to suburbia. Maybe it’s because he’s been on the run with this guy for a minute and he knows him just a little better now.
“Like a nightmare,” Steve finishes, matter of fact, and Eddie doesn’t have to see him to know the way his jaw’s set. “I thought it was gonna be me and Nance and a little league team’s worth of kids, but now I’m thinking, like, if I ever did really want that, it’s not—I don’t want that anymore. I don’t know what I want. If I should even try to figure it out, because, if it comes down to it—”
“You’re gonna lay yourself down for them. Blaze of glory and all that.”
“Yeah,” he sighs, weight of the world behind it.
Eddie’s next exhale is shaky. He’s pretty good at wanting, all things considered. Wanting to roll back over instead of trying to make it to homeroom by the second bell. Wanting to find exact change in the floorboard of his van to get something out of the vending machine. Wanting to survive long enough to get out of this shithole town. Let him die in the city, if he’s not gonna live forever. But the real things, people and places, details beyond a sky above and the ground below, he’s never made it that far.
“I never thought about it,” he says, eye for an eye, truth for a truth. “My old man used to tell me not to bother, ‘cause I wasn’t gonna make it past twenty anyway. I figured I’d last a little longer, just to spite him, go out like Hendrix and Joplin. I was, uh, I was starting to think maybe that was bullshit, before all of this.”
“Your dad sounds….” Steve shifts in his seat, audibly wincing when he tweaks his side.
“Like a nightmare,” Eddie echoes, pinching the corners of his eyes in toward the bridge of his nose. “Yeah, man, I know.”
They go quiet for a while, passing a few more mile markers and not a single other vehicle. He can’t decide if it’s lucky or unsettling or nothing at all.
“You should. Think about it, I mean,” Harrington murmurs, craning his head around for as long as he dares. Eddie can see his profile; the mole on his cheek, a small, pained grimace pulling at his mouth, the curve of hair he usually keeps so perfectly aligned to center. He sits still as he can and hopes for—something. “Like, my thing, it sucks, but after the first time, it was what kept me going. And I gotta figure out a new thing, now, but the kids, Robin, they’re there. Nance is there, if she wants.”
“You forgotten about me that quick, Harrington?”
“Fuck off. Yeah, you can be there if you want.” It’s Eddie’s turn to try and look, and when he does, he catches the crook of Steve’s smile in the rearview.
He gets now how Sinclair and Mayfield have time to make goo-goo eyes at one another. Steve Harrington quietly telling him he can be in his stupid dream future with all kinds of honesty is kind of, like, earth-shattering in a way he’s never experienced. And when you counterbalance it with all the other ways the world is broken, it pretty much evens out. Could be any other normal day.
Except how it’s not, not in the fucking slightest. It started with Nancy in the clutches of that thing, fear sharp and straight like a hit of caffeine, and Max Mayfield being the bravest motherfucker he’s ever witnessed by offering herself up as bait, and him hotwiring a Winnebago and spilling his guts and flirting, just a little, because someone’s gonna die and it’s probably going to be him, so why shouldn’t he have a little fun.
He twists his wrist back and knocks the wall with two knuckles, once, twice. “Yeah, all right. We make it outta this, and I’ll help you figure out your new thing, ‘cause I’m not playing babysitter to your pack of kids, man. Henderson’s plenty.”