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“Hey,” is the first thing Steve says, when Eddie is coughing and choking and coming back to life in his arms, “so I know you just got resurrected and all, but you’re still a wanted fugitive – so we sort of have to move.”
Eddie’s not really verbal yet – he’s mostly wide, shining eyes and hair matted with blood and naked fingers digging in hard to Steve’s biceps – but it doesn’t matter, because Steve doesn’t have time to wait for a response, anyways. Something’s screaming in the air behind them, Jonathan’s weird friend Argyle is yelling from the back of the pizza van and Dustin’s shoving at Steve’s back like Steve doesn’t already know they have to hurry, Jesus – so he hoists Eddie up into a bridal carry and books it back to the van, Dustin gimping along beside him. They hit the back bumper – Steve’s knees take the brunt of it, but he manages to get Eddie down on the thin mattress they brought along for him, into Nancy’s capable hands. Or Nancy’s Girl-Scout always-prepared overabundance of gauze, at least.
Dustin hauls Steve in by the shirt, yelling something about echolocation and triangulation and Don’t slam the fucking door, Steve! and Steve shoots back Stop fucking yelling then! and shoves him off and closes the back doors of the van very, very gently – which evidently still isn’t gently enough, because the demobats are on them in a second.
It’s fine, because they’re old pros at this by now – the pizza van’s outfitted with a triple-paned glass windshield, bars on the windows and spikes on the roof, nothing’s getting in here unless they let it in. But it’s still not any fun, listening to the bats throw themselves against the outside, the wet thumps of their bodies and their piercing screams, all of which sends Steve right back to – but Eddie’s got the market cornered on bat-related PTSD, so he balls his hands into fists and keeps it to himself.
Nancy’s working fast and focused, her face drawn, not even flinching at the sound of what’s going on outside, at Argyle yelling in the front seat – clean white goes around Eddie’s torso, again and again, soaking up the bright red blood of his wounds – they’re not as bad now, but judging by how Eddie sucks in a breath at every pass of Nancy’s hands they’re still not good. He’s shaking, Steve notices, hands open at his sides and held aloft like he wants to hold onto something. There’s nothing there but van and mattress, and Steve knows from long painful experience that it’s not what you need at a time like this, and he knows that when he picked Eddie up he felt like he weighed fucking nothing, and he knows that Eddie’s been trapped as Vecna’s fucking mind slave for almost half a year now – more than all that, he knows that Eddie looks scared, and that no one deserves to be scared alone.
So he slips his hand under Eddie’s, and grabs on hard. And Eddie meets his eyes, gritting his teeth to keep them from chattering, flinching under Nancy’s light fleeting touch, face manic at the edges like a man who’s seen his own death – and squeezes back.
Steve would like to say he did it out of the goodness of his heart. That he went with the team to find Eddie’s body after El pushed Vecna out of his head because he and Eddie bonded in those few short days they knew each other, or because there was honor among thieves – honor among dumb kids who got in way over their heads and kept having to save the world – but really he only does it because for a month, Dustin doesn’t get out of bed.
Strangely, he was okay for the first few days after the event, when there were nonperishable goods to be donated and trees to be cleared out of the road and Maxes to sit in hospitals with – but even though Max is still in the hospital and there are still gaping holes at the center of Hawkins, there’s not a lot to do, these days. The government blew into town the same day the ash started snowing and took everything over, established an exclusion zone around the rifted land and started doing their best to keep everyone behind a military cordon – Steve and Robin spent most of that night drinking, laughing about the good old US of A always showing up when the hard work was done to take all the glory, but Dustin couldn’t shrug it off. He didn’t do well on the sidelines, especially not when he knew more than everyone else involved. He wanted to help. He wanted it all to mean something – what they’d been through, what they’d lost. But the stooges who’d been put in charge of the newly-inaugurated “Hawkins Zone” weren’t willing to give a fourteen-year-old kid the time of day.
It was Susie who called Steve, on the second day of Dustin’s ritual mourning. “Dusty-bear’s not answering my transmissions,” she announced, without bothering to introduce herself first. “It’s been two days.”
Steve was fresh back from the ongoing construction project that was Hopper’s cabin, halfway to stripping out of his dirty clothes, standing in his empty kitchen in his boxers and his tube socks. It was dark, and he didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing him – his parents had cleared out with the first round of evacuations and no one had been here in a while. “Uh,” he said, “who – “
“Well, go over there!” Susie exploded shrilly. “I’ve seen the news. There was an earthquake! My Dusty could be dying!”
“Look, I’m sure he’s fine, he’s just been busy – ”
“Dusty-bear is not fine,” Susie interrupted. “Radio silence is not fine. If you won’t go over there, then I’ll find someone who will.”
“Alright, alright.” Steve pulled his pants back on one-handed. “I’m going, don’t get your pa – pigtails in a twist.”
He drove over to the Henderson house planning to give Dustin a good ribbing over how much his girlfriend referred to him as Dusty-bear, but when he got there Dustin’s mother answered the door with a pinched, sleepless look on her face – the look of a mother whose child had been missing for long enough that the police started to look grim. And standing on the front stoop, Steve’s heart dropped right down into his sneakers.
Dustin was burritoed up in his duvet, curled up with his face to the wall. The TV in the corner was off. The blinds were closed. There was no music on. Steve sat down on the edge of the bed, and Dustin didn’t even look at him. Didn’t give any indication that he knew Steve was there.
“Hey,” Steve started, and his voice broke a little. It hadn’t done that since he was a fucking kid, twelve or thirteen, with hair as big as his head. “Hey, buddy, you – you’re not alone, you know that, right? I’m right here with you. We’re all right here with you.”
Dustin didn’t say anything. If Steve couldn’t see his back moving he would’ve been checking for a pulse, and it was – the thought made his heart skip a beat, running.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he tried, almost begging. “Tell me what’s wrong, so I can fix it.”
Dustin did roll over, then, but the look on his face wasn’t any better. It was like he was numb. Like he wasn’t looking at the room or at Steve but right through it, back into some other realm.
“You can’t fix it,” he said. Even his lisp seemed paler, somehow. Diminished. “Eddie’s dead, and they’re still calling those three deaths the Munson murders. They think he’s the bad guy. But he’s not. He saved my life. And no one will listen to me when I try to tell them the truth, and it’s not fucking fair – ”
“Hey,” Steve said, because Dustin sounded like he was gearing up to a big snotty cry and he still hadn’t quite got the hang of those. “I’m listening. I know what really happened. What he did.”
Dustin just shook his head angrily, curling back into the burrito. “You can’t fix it,” he reiterated, to the wall. “Because you can’t bring him back.”
Steve spent the next few weeks scrounging up video games at the boarded-up stores in town and breaking into abandoned houses looking for tapes that had been rented out from the store and never returned. He sat at the foot of Dustin’s bed and watched the entire Star Wars trilogy, read Lord of the Rings aloud with the voices and everything, tried to entice him with a brand-spanking-new NES still in the box, but Dustin didn’t move from the bed. Didn’t even take his eyes away from the wall, except when he was asleep. He drank water when no one was looking and shuffled into the bathroom every once in a while, but he smelled rank and he wasn’t eating and once when Steve fell asleep on the floor next to him he woke to Dustin screaming through a nightmare, thrashing so hard he was going to hurt himself, and Steve had to climb up there and hold him because he couldn’t wake him, and even then when the nightmare was over Dustin just laid limp in his arms and cried and cried, silent tears in the collar of Steve’s shirt, and it was like having his heart ripped out and trampled on, because Dustin was right – he couldn’t do a goddamn thing.
And then one day, like magic, he could.
With the number of people they’re currently hiding – El who’s wanted by the government, Hopper who’s of great interest to the CIA, and at certain points Dustin, Mike, and Lucas who are still suspected to be part of a Satanic cult, depending on which agency happens to be poking around that day – fugitive real estate in Hawkins is at a premium. Which is how Eddie ends up in Steve’s house, peering into guest rooms.
“You’re like, really fucking rich, aren’t you?” he mutters.
He looks sort of alarmed – out of his element, like a cat that’s been dropped in the middle of a swarm of frogs. Since his trailer got sliced in half by a hellgate and his uncle left town, he’s wearing Steve’s clothes – and he really has lost a lot of weight, so he’s swimming in an old sweatshirt. Steve sort of wants to grab him by the waist, but he manfully represses the urge, mostly because he doesn’t know what the fuck to do with it.
“We were,” Steve hedges, “but I’m pretty sure good old Hawkins Savings Bank got swallowed up by the Upside Down, so right now I could be penniless. Haven’t really checked.”
“Not collecting on your mortgage, huh?” Eddie pokes his head into the guest room with all the doilies and porcelain and yanks his head back out so fast he stumbles a little. “Yeah, I wouldn’t check either. Jesus. That’s a lot of doilies.”
“Here.” Steve pushes open the door to the most normal guest room. “Take this one. My mom never had a chance to inflict her interior decorating on it.”
Eddie snorts, pokes his head in. “Yeah. This one feels less like I’m gonna get murdered in it.”
Steve expects him to say goodnight and crash for about eight days – they’d only spent a few minutes at the Byers’ getting a clean bill of health from the closest thing they’ve got to a doctor (Murray) before everyone had to split back to their own houses – rule number one of a Hawkins Zone cordon violation: make sure that if they catch you, they don’t catch you all in one place – but Eddie still looks like the malnourished ghost of a little Victorian girl, so Steve figures he’s exhausted. He doesn’t say goodnight, though – instead he stands in the doorway, staring at his feet for a minute in that disconcerting, eerily-still way Steve’s noticed he does now, then says, “You don’t have to do this, you know. I get that we don’t really know each other that well. I can – I don’t know, crash in an empty house, or something.”
“Hey, no, cut it out.” Steve goes to jostle him gently, like guys are supposed to when they’re comforting other guys, and ends up holding his shoulder instead. It feels right to be holding his shoulder. “Like you said, I’m stinkin’ fucking rich. I’ve got this whole house to myself. Actually you’re doing me a favor, staying here. I get real lonely.”
Eddie snorts again, but doesn’t look at him. Steve’s reminded of Dustin, and maybe later if anyone interrogates him about it, he can use that as an excuse for why he pulls Eddie into a hug. Because he looks sad, and he reminds him of Dustin, curled up for weeks in that burrito staring at the wall, and because Steve’s never been very good at repressing urges.
For a second Eddie’s stiff as a board in his arms, but then he breaks one piece at a time – a hand digging into the small of Steve’s back, fingers like claws, his cold nose tucking into the curve of Steve’s neck, his arms clinging, tight enough that Steve can barely breathe. It’s weird, for how tangentially they know each other – Steve doesn’t hug anyone like this, not even Robin and Nancy, like he’s falling off a cliff and they’re the only thing keeping him up – but he guesses if he’d spent six months as the mind-slave of a homicidal psychopath he’d probably want to feel something other than that endless fucking horror show, too. So he puts a hand on the back of Eddie’s bushy hair, and holds him tighter, and doesn’t say anything at all.
Then “Thanks,” Eddie says, after a long time, pulling back. He doesn’t meet Steve’s gaze, eyes darting around the room, twitchy and avoidant. “I, um – thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Steve croaks. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m right across the hall, if you need anything. There’s towels in the bathroom. I’ll, uh – see you in the morning, I guess.”
Eddie nods, hands on his hips, still not looking at him. Steve closes his door on the way out.
He goes into his own room, into the en suite. He showers, takes a piss, flosses just to have something to do and brushes his teeth, hyper-aware the whole time of someone else in the house, the same way he used to be hyper-aware of where Nancy’s hands were when they were out with friends, sitting in the booth at a diner, by the pool at a party. He goes to the end of the hall, into his parents’ abandoned master bedroom, which still looks like a tornado blew through – Call us! they'd shouted, while they were in the process of throwing random things wildly into the back of his dad’s Mercedes, single high heels and a food processor and a box of his grandmother’s china, dug out of the attic and more worth rescuing, somehow, than their son. Once we’re settled, you come and join! I’m sure Aunt Margaret would be happy to – only they hadn’t stopped to ask, really, why Steve had an infected stab wound, or where he’d been for the last week, or why it looked like he’d been crying. He picks up a picture of himself from his mother’s bedside table, a blond toddler with missing teeth clutching a football in the back yard, and wonders if that was the last time she really cared about him. Really loved him. It doesn’t matter now. Red light reflects off the glass of the frame – out the window, the glow from the rifts is just visible over the treetops. Steve can still feel Eddie in the other room, comforting warmth in his periphery, and he wasn’t lying before. He really does get lonely.
At 3:15, when Eddie starts screaming, Steve’s already awake. He’s in the kitchen staring at a bottle of his dad’s scotch and trying to tell himself sternly that he can’t do this when there’s another person in the house, someone who could theoretically catch him and judge him for having to drink himself back to sleep after a bad dream like he’s fucking five – and Eddie’s yell splits down through the house.
It's just one to start – shocking, abrupt, like a bucket of ice dropped on Steve’s head. And then it sounds like he’s being murdered, begging and sobbing and struggling so hard that Steve can hear the bed moving all the way downstairs, and he bolts, taking the steps two at a time and getting down the hall so fast that the second he feels the hardwood at the top he’s pushing open Eddie’s door, blood pounding. Eddie’s twisted in the sheets, bangs stuck to his forehead with sweat, his back arched – he looks like he needs a fucking exorcism, but Steve’s all he’s got.
“Jesus,” he mutters, climbing onto the bed like he’s getting into a wrestling match, elbows and feet flying everywhere, bruising, “jesus shit fuck what the fuck – Eddie – Eddie, Jesus Christ – come on, work with me, man – you’re okay, you’re alright – “ and he gets an arm around Eddie’s chest, the same grip you use on a drowning man. He can feel Eddie’s heart rabbiting in his chest, disturbingly delicate through his thin ribs, and Eddie still stuck in the nightmare grabs onto his forearm and digs his nails in. He’s still kicking, trying to writhe away, but Steve’s bigger and he’s played a lot of sports in his day – he throws a leg around Eddie’s hips and holds him with his whole body, repeating again and again, “you’re alright, you’re okay – you’re not there anymore. You’re here with me. Come back. Come back to me.”
Eddie wakes with a contained jolt, jerking in Steve’s arms. He keeps breathing like a prey animal for a minute, hard and fast, like his lungs are making up for lost air – and then all at once the tension goes out of his body, and he shakes.
“what the fuck,” he mutters, “holy fuck, jesus fuck – what – where am I, where are we – “
“Hey.” Steve loosens his grip a little, but Eddie clutches for his arm, pulling him back. “You’re at my place, remember? The doilies?”
“Doilies,” Eddie echoes, haunted. “Fucking doilies. That was your room, wasn’t it? You sick fuck. You get off on doilies, don’t you? You can tell me, Harrington, don’t be shy – “
“Who’s shy?” Steve says on autopilot, relieved that Eddie has the presence of mind to make fun of him. “We’re in bed together and you’re calling me Harrington.”
Still shivering like a hypothermic puppy, Eddie turns his head. The way they’re lying, his forehead ends up pressed against the side of Steve’s chin. “Steve,” he amends.
Steve swallows hard. He wonders if Eddie can feel it. His lips are almost close enough to be touching Steve’s throat. “Eddie,” he tries. It feels weird. “Eddie Munson.”
“Steven Augustus Harrington,” Eddie jokes.
Something Steve will realize about Eddie, later: whenever he finds himself in something resembling a serious moment, he always comes up with an out. The self-deprecating joke, the snide remark, the over-the-top declaration. It’s as much for the other person as it is for himself. And maybe Steve knows that even now, because he makes an offended sound and says, “That is not my middle name,” more for Eddie than for himself – and Eddie exhales hff in a way that could almost be a laugh, his fingernails retreating one by one from Steve’s arm, leaving red half-moon marks in their wake.
They settle into a routine. Well – Steve settles into a routine, and Eddie spends his days trapped in the Harrington house, vibrating around the empty rooms and remembering how it feels to let himself take up space.
Steve helps Jonathan and Hopper out at the cabin – not that they’ve got much use for a strapping young lad when they’ve got a girl with telekinesis – and volunteering at the disaster relief center that used to be their school, accompanying little old ladies back to their half-destroyed houses to sift through the rubble for family heirlooms, listening to stories about when they first moved to Hawkins, how they’d been Just Married, chasing dreams of families and picket fences and a simpler life than the one they’d left behind. My husband was in the war, one woman tells him, while he searches her upended kitchen, gathering shards of teacups in a box so she can glue them back together later, he flew B52 bombers. At night he’d scream and scream…he fell out of the plane once, no parachute. It was a miracle he survived. He used to wake up feeling like he was falling, and he’d have to change all his clothes because he thought they were soaking wet…
“How’d you help him?” Steve asks, swiping dust from a teacup with his thumb. It has a chunk out of it, but it’s almost whole – just sharp at the shattered edge. “Did he ever stop having nightmares?”
Perched in the opening where the other half of her family house used to be, leaning on her walker, the old lady shakes her head. “Never. But they came less and less, the longer we went on.”
Steve breathes out. “Yeah. They say time is distance, right?”
“Who says?” the old lady demands, smiling sadly. “Time is only distance if a tree a mile away can sometimes be right in your living room.”
“So what do you do?” Steve asks again. Maybe she doesn’t have the answers just because she’s old, but every time he wakes up to Eddie sobbing against his shoulder he gets a little more desperate, and it’s already happened four times this week. “What can I do?”
The tennis balls on the bottom of the old lady’s walker smear the dust on the ground as she totters across the room to nudge the box of shards with her foot. “This, my dear. You stick around, and you pick up the pieces.”
Steve tries to be more attentive to the pieces, after that. He scours every abandoned house in Hawkins for an electric guitar and comes up empty, finds a bass with the strings broken and stashes it in the boot of his car until he can find someone to fix it. He finds a bunch of those twenty-sided dice and slips them to Dustin to give to Eddie, because he feels like it’s less weird coming from him. He brings Eddie all the metal band t-shirts he finds at the relief center, ignoring his protests of man, these guys are sellouts, and this is a fucking Blondie shirt, Steve, and despite my waifish figure, I am not a youth size small – the last, Steve takes from him and holds up to his shoulders, stretching it over his chest while Eddie gives him a flat, unamused look from point blank range. “Hey, come on, this’ll fit,” he says, “I mean, you might show a little stomach, but isn’t that the style now?”
Eddie snatches the shirt back from him. “It’s the style for dumb jocks,” he grumbles, but Steve doesn’t fail to notice that he keeps the shirt, instead of throwing it back on the donation pile.
It might not actually fit, now that Eddie’s starting to put weight back on, filling out from sickly, near-death to normal, albeit still-too-skinny. He spends a lot of time in the kitchen – he’s surprisingly crafty with canned goods, like some sort of Busch’s beans gourmet. Steve’s come home more than once to find Eddie with his hair tied up and Steve’s mom’s apron over his clothes, which is ironic given how much he whines about being Steve’s housewife. More often than not Dustin is there too, sitting on the counter and swinging his feet, arguing with Eddie over dumb nerd shit while five can soup simmers on the stove, and sometimes Steve comes in through the front door, glancing through the pass-through into the kitchen, and just stands there for a few minutes watching them, Dustin laughing and smiling and out of fucking bed, with a feeling too big for his chest, like gratitude and relief and happiness – but the sort of happiness that’s tempered by the very real memory of how easy it would be to lose this, how fast it could happen, how much it would fucking hurt.
Sometimes he manages to blink away the hot pressure of tears behind his eyes, and sometimes he has to step into the hall bathroom and bite down on a towel while it all comes out and splash water on his face afterwards – and sometimes Eddie looks up and sees him before Steve can do any of that, his hair frizzy under a bandana that Steve may or may not have thrown down with a bitchy thirteen-year-old to get, and he’s mid-smile at something Dustin’s said but just for a second there’s a question in his eyes – You okay, Harrington? – and Steve nods, and drags a hand over his face, and goes to join them.
They always bully Dustin out the door and back to his own house before bed, because by unspoken agreement neither of them want him to know what goes on in this house after the sun goes down. They’ve cut out the middle man – Eddie starts the nights now curled up on the edge of Steve’s bed facing the wall, to save Steve the trip of running across the hall or back up from downstairs when Eddie starts screaming. If Steve had neighbors they’d either think he was an axe murderer or being haunted by a terrifying poltergeist, but Steve doesn’t have neighbors anymore. On one side of the house there’s a deserted cul-de-sac, a middle America suburban ghost town, and on the other there’s a hundred yards of forest and then the edge of the Hawkins Zone, identifiable at night by military-grade floodlights and low thwumping helicopters and the faint sounds of disconcerting, otherworldly creatures, swirling on the wind.
It probably doesn’t help Eddie’s nightmares at all, being so close, but he never says anything and Steve, stubbornly, for no reason he can figure out, doesn’t want to move out of his house. He thinks maybe it’s because he’s made so many other concessions, had to surrender on so many other fronts – he’s lost his town, lost his parents, lost his dreams for the future, lost Nancy, lost Max even though she’s lying a mile away in a hospital bed, lost who he used to be even if he likes his new self better. He’s not going to lose his house, he’s not going to lose his fucking bed, and he's not going to lose the guy in it.
For a long time, Steve used to think that love was two people and a bunch of kids in an RV, seeing the country. He thought it was a big wedding in a church and a car with cans clattering on the rear bumper and carrying his wife still in her white dress across the threshold to a house that looked an awful lot like the one he grew up in – but now he thinks maybe he only thought that because it was the only sort of love he ever saw. On TV, in Hawkins, his parents and his neighbors and the kids who’d graduated and gone off to college and met The One and moved back to do exactly what their parents had done, as if they hadn’t sat in the high school cafeteria at lunch and bitched and moaned about this place with the rest of them.
But now he knows better. He knows that’s just the kind of love people want you to believe in when they’re trying to sell you something. A material, consumerist, assembly-line kind of love, one size fits all, total fucking bullshit.
Steve sounds like Eddie even to himself when he thinks that, Total Fucking Bullshit, but the thing is he knows now that love is just two people who get stuck to each other and can’t ever get unstuck, even if it’s for their own good. Love is two people alone in a house, day after day, who talk even when they don’t have anything to say just because they want to her each other’s voices. It’s knowing someone so well you know the shape of them in the dark. It’s not what he felt for Nancy, because that was too gentle. It didn’t have teeth. Love is violent, just as strong as rage or lust or desperation – it builds up like a scream in his throat sometimes, how he wants to grab Eddie and bite him and make a mess of him, how he wants Eddie to treat his body like it’s his own body, roll over in bed and leave bruises on him, steer him around with his fingers through Steve’s belt loops, rake his hands through Steve’s hair snagging his rings and stick his fingers in Steve’s mouth and sit on the kitchen counter and pull Steve between his legs – love is needing someone so much that it would feel like having part of yourself tear off and walk away if they ever left.
Steve goes to the gas station for cigarettes and sees Eddie’s face on the front of the IndyStar with the headline HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER CONTINUES, and for a second standing there he’s so fucking mad that his hands shake, that he’s afraid he’s going to do something stupid – instead he buys the whole stack and takes them into the parking lot and sets them on fire. He drives over to Robin’s afterwards, still shaking, and bangs on her door until his hand hurts and then gives up, collapsing on her stoop with his elbows braced against his knees and his head in his hands, thinking of how Eddie looks when he’s asleep and how he sometimes smiles like the fact that he’s happy snuck up on him and how hard he squeezed Steve’s hand in the back of the pizza van, that very first night. Eddie standing at the kitchen stove in a pair of Steve’s jeans cinched around his waist and his mom’s apron, stirring chili. Eddie being thrown in the back of a police car, vilified in the press and renounced by the town, people yelling at him, calling him Satan-worshipper and murderer and freak – Steve balls his hands into fists, trying to lock the anger in his body, and looks up as he hears a car door slam.
Robin sits next to him on the stoop, so they’re knee-to-knee. “You want to talk about it?” she asks. “I assume because you’re here that you want to talk about it, whatever ‘it’ is, but – “
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Steve grits out.
Robin nods and reaches over to brush some ash off his shoulder. “Cool. Totally, totally cool. We can just sit here in – total silence, then.”
Even when Robin’s silent, she’s not really silent. She always has this energy buzzing off her, nervous and overthinking and hyperactive, like she’s humming even though she’s not humming, and it’s so familiar that it’s comforting, and Steve starts to unclench.
Finally he says, “Does it feel like this for everybody?”
Robin blinks. It’s warm, and the breeze brushes her hair out of her face. If there weren’t an ever-present red glow in the air it might even be nice out. “Does what feel like what for everybody?” she asks.
“Love.” Steve uncurls his hand, stretching the tendons back out. “It feels like it – like someone’s had a hand around my throat for months and I didn’t even realize until they started choking me.” He looks over, and Robin’s staring at him in that sharp, focused way she only gets when she’s presented with a puzzle. “Is that crazy? Do I sound crazy?”
“Little bit,” Robin says, but she smiles. “Look, I’m obviously not an expert. The most intricate courting ritual me and Vicki are currently capable of is making peanut butter and jellies and babbling at each other, so I think maybe you’re playing a whole different ballgame, here.” She hesitates for a second, then adds, “I’m guessing this isn’t Nancy we’re talking about.”
“No,” Steve says. His voice sounds shredded. “No, not Nancy.”
Robin puts a hand on his knee, squeezing. “Come on. I stole Fast Times at Ridgemont High from Family Video before the middle school looters could get it – boobs will make you feel better.”
Steve laughs – in this particular instance he doesn’t think boobs will make him feel better at all – but when Robin shoots him a questioning look, he just shakes his head and follows her inside.
Probably, he would’ve been perfectly content to never say anything. To go on living in a close circling orbit with Eddie, sharing a house, so in love with him that it felt like living with a chronic condition, sharing clothes and hiding children and trying not to think about the fact that sooner or later they were going to have to do something about the giant dimensional rip through the center of their town, because it sure as shit seemed like the government wasn’t going to.
Except Steve comes back one afternoon from his shift reading Stephen King to Max – he’d protested that they shouldn’t be reading horror stories to a girl who’d literally just lived a horror story, but Lucas insists it’s her favorite – and Eddie’s not in the house.
Steve’s been through enough at this point that he’s pretty calm in a crisis – but he does still feel a quick lurch of panic, right at the beginning. He can tell as soon as he comes through the door that the house is empty, the same way he can tell when he gets home whether Eddie’s in the living room or upstairs or under the sink in the kitchen, fighting with the garbage disposal again, but he calls out for him anyway, just in case.
There’s no reply.
He's already mentally making a list of people to call, places Eddie might’ve gone – the Hendersons’, the Sinclairs’, maybe the cabin to talk to El if he’s having aftershocks from Vecna, if he sensed something beyond the cordon – he could also be fucking under arrest but Steve’s not going to think about that because he’s not emotionally prepared to stage a jailbreak right now – but just when he grabs the phone off the wall he notices a note pinned to the fridge.
STIR CRAZY, Eddie’s written, in his spiky block letters, TAKING A WALK IN THE WOODS.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Steve mutters.
This is Hawkins – taking a walk in the woods in this town is akin to offering yourself up for ritual sacrifice. Not to mention the woods around Steve’s house are crawling with military patrols – if Eddie’s not under arrest yet, he will be soon.
Steve hits the back door before he’s even decided to leave and takes off running across the yard, heading for the treeline. He can’t yell unless he wants to draw the attention of the patrols, which he fucking does not, thank you, so instead he has to crash around through the underbrush, pine needles sticking to his sneakers, and pray that his eyes catch some glimpse – red bandana, bushy hair, a denim vest.
In the end, it’s Eddie who finds him.
A hand on his shoulder, and Steve jumps, turning, ready for a fight – except it’s Eddie. Eddie’s doe eyes and Eddie’s raised eyebrows, looking like he doesn’t know he just gave Steve the fright of his life – and that is really fucking saying something.
“Jesus,” Steve says, and seizes him in a hug. “Holy shit, Eddie, you fucking scared me – ” and Eddie was laughing before, he joked something like No, sorry, just me, but now he must feel how tight Steve’s hug is and how he’s still fucking shaking with adrenaline, because he puts his hands on Steve’s head, rings heavy against his skull, and pulls his face into his shoulder.
“Shit,” he mutters, “shit, Steve, I’m sorry, I didn’t think – I just needed some air, I’ve been cooped up in that house for weeks, I didn’t think it was a big deal – “ and Steve shakes his head, gearing up to brush it off – trying to urge himself to brush it off, not to make a big deal out of this, not to turn it into an argument, but then all of a sudden he has the strange frantic sense that Eddie’s going to disappear again, so he runs his hands over Eddie’s shoulders, making sure he’s all there, over his arms and up to his hands and back around his waist, one hand up the nape of his neck under his hair, holding the shape of his skull, and then he pulls him in and kisses him.
Eddie makes a surprised sound against his mouth, and then another – deeper, more insistent, when Steve doesn’t let him go. He grabs Steve and walks him back against a tree, biting into his mouth like Steve knew he would – and Steve’s hands are still moving across his body, mapping him out even though he knows him well enough now from their nights tangled up together that he could probably sculpt him from memory. The swell of his ass in Steve’s jeans, not as baggy on him now as they were when he first came back, the knock of his knees against Steve’s, his hands holding the sides of Steve’s face and his hair tickling and the warm planes of him pressed up against Steve’s front, sternum and ribcage and belly, close but still not close enough – not when there are clothes between them.
Eddie pulls away to mutter, “You’re going to fucking kill me, Harrington,” smiling, and Steve can taste his breath. Cigarettes, coffee, something else.
All the girls Steve ever kissed tasted like lipgloss and bubblegum, like they’d been planning to kiss him and prepped for it, and he never realized until now that what he was missing with all that was the person underneath – how this wasn’t supposed to be planned, or dressed up for, or staged like a performance. It was supposed to be real.
“Don’t call me Harrington when we’re in bed together,” he says, low.
Eddie smiles wider, thumbs tucked in the corners of Steve’s mouth. “We’re not in bed.”
“Yeah, well.” Steve slides his hands into Eddie’s back pockets. “We’re about to be, aren’t we?”
“Fuck,” Eddie says, like he’s been punched. The smile drops abruptly off his face, replaced by something dark and hungry. “Yeah. Yes, Jesus. You really are gonna fucking kill me.”
Steve laughs and tries to hoist Eddie up to wrap his legs around his waist, but Eddie’s clearly never been carried like he’s someone’s girlfriend, so he ends up wrapped around Steve’s back like a monkey, halfway back to the house until Steve twists his ankle and Eddie has to dismount and help him limp the rest of the way. There’s no talk of wrapping it, or getting Murray to take a look – the second they’re across the yard and through the back door, Steve hopping on one leg, Eddie catches him before he can fall and steers him back into a kitchen chair and straddles him, crashing their mouths together again.
“Shit,” Steve mutters, arms full of Eddie in a way they’ve never really been full of anyone before – he feels slightly panicked at how big this is, how enormous it all feels, like he’s being swept away by a tidal wave. “Eddie, fuck, I’m – “ but he breaks off to kiss him again, like he’s trying to take mouthfuls of his taste. Eddie’s all twitchy nervous energy in his lap, thumbs moving over Steve’s cheeks, kissing him like he’s worried he’s not going to get another shot, and Steve loves him. He loves him. He loves him.
“Don’t you ever fucking scare me like that again,” he murmurs, clutching Eddie tight.
“I make no promises,” Eddie whispers. Which is probably for the best, because Steve wouldn’t believe him if he did, anyways.
Three days later, they’re all crowded into Hopper’s cabin, and El is standing in front of them with a determined look on her face, patchy hair stuck in every direction, saying, “I know how to do it. I know how to kill Vecna.”
Something strange happens to Steve, then. He’s still standing in the room, leaning against the wall next to the door with his arms crossed, still surrounded by his friends and listening to what El and Mike and Dustin are saying, but he doesn’t feel like he’s present anymore. He feels like he’s floating above it all, watching it. Watching himself. When they break away into smaller groups, Joyce and Hopper going into the kitchen, Nancy and Jonathan pulling Dustin aside to talk logistics, Steve slips out the door into the night, closing it quietly behind him so no one will notice. Someone does notice, though, because after a few seconds sitting in the dirt driveway with his head in his hands, he feels a touch on his back.
It's Eddie. Of course it is.
He sits down next to Steve, knees pulled up. Voices drift out from inside, but they’re just noise. A rectangle of warm yellow light touches the edge of Eddie’s shoe, the front bumper of Steve’s car. Steve keeps his head in his hands and just tries to breathe.
“I’m okay,” he hears himself say. “I’ll be okay in a minute. You can go back inside, I’ll be – I’ll be fine. I am fine. I’m fine.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says softly. “I don’t believe that for a fucking second, Harrington.”
Steve just shakes his head. Eddie scoots closer over the ground and sort of wrestles him until he’s got Steve’s head tucked against his chest, his arms around his shoulders. Steve tries to fight it for a second, the urge to grab onto him, but then he gives in and wraps him up, squeezing his waist. Eddie tucks his lips against Steve’s hair, not saying anything, and Steve remembers coming home yesterday afternoon, Eddie hanging upside-down off the couch, the pale arch of his throat and how Steve had dropped his stuff inside the door and hurdled the couch to seize him and put his mouth there, the same way he’d put his mouth on Eddie’s scars when they’d finally made it out of that kitchen chair and up to bed, the puncture wounds still livid on his stomach, almost black. Steve still has clawmarks on his back, three days later, from Eddie’s fingernails, and last night he took those rings off with his teeth, tongue swirling around Eddie’s knuckles while Eddie reclined on pillows that were both of theirs and laughed and smiled down at him like the cat that got the fucking cream, and now – now –
“I can’t do it again,” he confesses, hidden against Eddie’s chest. “I can’t fucking – I don’t think I can lose anyone else, Eddie, I don’t think I can come back from that.”
“Yeah,” Eddie says, faintly tremulous - like his fingers shaking while he tries to light a cigarette. “Yeah, I know what you mean.”
He doesn’t say, you’re not going to lose anyone else. He doesn’t promise that they’re both going to come out okay, or tell Steve that they can let Vecna be someone else’s problem. He just holds him, sitting in Hopper’s driveway, woods glowing faintly red around them, and lets Steve listen to his heartbeat until he can breathe again. And it’s okay, Steve thinks. It’s okay, because he’s scared shitless over all of this – over Max who’s still in a coma and Dustin who wants to plunge back into danger and Eddie who’s already fucking died – but he’s not alone.
They put Eddie under a blanket in the boot to drive back to Steve’s house – can’t have the cops pulling him over for harboring a fugitive - and when Steve pulls into the garage and gets out to pop the trunk, he finds Eddie running his fingers over the green pearlescent finish of the bass guitar Steve had totally fucking forgot about. “Oh, right,” he says, giving Eddie a hand out, “yeah, I was gonna try and find someone to fix the strings for you – “
Eddie grabs him by the collar, shutting him up, and drags him down into a messy kiss. “I can fix it,” he says against Steve’s lips. “I’m good at fixing things. Trust me.”
And Steve tightens his grip, wrapped in the rat’s nest of Eddie’s hair, and says, “Yeah. Okay.”