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It’s been a saying around Hawkins for as long as Steve can remember - “Sometimes dead is better,” cops would solemnly remark, staring at the bloodied, mangled bodies of murder victims. “Sometimes dead is better,” Steve had muttered in some clumsy attempt to comfort himself after Barb’s death, convincing himself that her passing was merciful. It was one of those sayings that seemingly came from nowhere, that took outsiders off-guard - Max had, at her first encounter with the phrase, jolted as if she’d been slapped, seemingly horrified that somebody could insinuate such a thing in such a nonchalant tone.
But Steve was a Hawkins boy through and through, born and raised, and to him, it was just one of those things people said. Most of the time, it was offered as a shaky condolence, a reassurance that it could be worse, that the dead had not suffered. Sometimes, it was an admission of guilt from doctors who had given up, who had cruelly decided that saving someone was too much effort, that they’d rather deal with a corpse than a patient. Regardless of context, the words had never sunk into his bones the same way they had Max’s, never chilled or disturbed him - if anything, he was one of the poor saps who found comfort in those words, when everything else seemed futile.
Now, however, staring at Eddie Munson’s too-pale face, he has a moment of understanding - just a moment, a split second, as terror rips its way through his chest and sinks into his ribcage. It dissipates quickly, at the sight of Eddie’s wide, dark eyes and the familiar curve of his jaw, but it’s there, just for a moment, fleeting and fearful.
(It returns later that night. Steve’s trying his best to sleep, he really is - but Eddie is stock-still next to him, cold to the touch, eyes cloudy. He’s staring, Steve thinks, though he can’t bring himself to open his eyes and check. The hand crawling its way around his waist is cold, and stiff, and leaves a trail of dirt along the exposed skin of his midriff, pyjama shirt bunched up under his arms by his own tossing and turning. Eddie doesn’t talk, doesn’t even grunt or breathe - he simply rests his forehead on the back of Steve’s neck, eyes still wide open, and waits.)
Contrary to popular belief, Steve Harrington is not an idiot. Sure, he’s not the most academically gifted person on planet earth, and he graduated high-school by the skin of his teeth (and thanks to Nancy’s relentless - and deeply appreciated - nagging), but he’s smart in the ways that matter. He knows his way through the forest in pitch darkness (or, at least, to the make-out spots), and knows when to take a punch rather than throwing one back, and he’s actually pretty good at retaining information - it’s not his fault that words and numbers weren’t made for his brain, that everything gets jumbled and wrong the second he’s asked to put it to page.
But more than anything, he knows his friends - and okay, yeah, a concerning amount of said friends are fucking high-school kids, but it’s not his fault he keeps getting stuck on babysitting duty - and knows them well enough to tell when something’s deeply, terribly wrong.
And hell, even if he hadn’t spent the better part of a week hiding Eddie from the cops, it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to notice he’s not exactly being himself right now.
The first thing to strike Steve as wrong - unnatural - is the stillness. Eddie Munson has never been still in his life; he’s always rocking to imaginary music, waving his arms around, headbanging, playing with his hair. Eddie’s been a constant kinetic force for as long as Steve’s been aware of his existence, and he’s pretty damn certain he always has been, even before then.
So seeing him like this - sitting ram-rod straight in a dining chair, arms limp at his sides, expression flat - feels a bit uncanny. The only part of him that seems to be moving is his eyes, tracking Steve around the room, setting off his fight-or-flight reflexes - and fuck, his eyes. They’ve always been wide, and dark, and prone to moments of blankness, like his brain has switched off for a moment - but they’ve never been even close to glassy, or cold. The eyes that drill holes into his back as he prepares breakfast that morning are empty, ugly. It feels rather distinctly like he’s hanging out with a doll, dead-eyed and pale where it’s slumped at his table.
(He feels mean, in that moment, for demoting Eddie to ‘it’ in his head. He spares the other man an apologetic glance, convinced that somehow he’ll know what Steve was thinking - and does his best to repress the full-body shudder when Eddie wordlessly meets his gaze.)
Sometimes dead is better, Steve thinks distantly, trying his best not to wince as he dabs gingerly at Eddie’s newly-cleaned face. He didn’t think it was possible for something to look worse once the dirt was removed, but he’s been well and truly proven wrong once again - Eddie’s corpse-pale, face misshapen and discoloured by bruises that never got the chance to heal (and never will, he reminds himself). His hair, even when fully dried and doused in Steve’s best hair-care products, is limp and dull around his shoulders, and any attempt to touch his skin without a towel between them makes bile rise in the back of his throat. He hadn’t made it a habit to touch Eddie’s face when he was still alive (though maybe he should have, in hindsight), but he’s sure that the metalhead had never been cold and rubbery, or felt like he was going to rot and crumble under your hands.
The wounds on his stomach and chest - big enough to scar, and matching Steve’s own - are sutured shut, slowly and painfully. He whips out a bit of his babysitter expertise, talking Eddie’s ear off to distract him from the pain - Dustin won’t stop trying to drag me into that Demons and Dungeons thing you like, keeps telling me I’d enjoy it, like any normal person enjoys dramatic math, no offense - and is acutely aware that his rambling is for entirely his own benefit. Eddie hasn’t so much as twitched at the sensation of a needle through his skin, still openly staring at Steve’s face; he can feel his eyes on him, but keeps his gaze firmly on his own shaking hands, willing his voice to stay steady and calm.
He feels cruel for the relief he feels once Eddie’s been bandaged and helped to dress himself (which he can luckily seemingly do mostly himself, albeit stiff and awkward), but his torso is just as uncomfortable to look at as his face. Some part of him is distantly glad that he’d taken a bag or two of Eddie’s clothes home with him, back before the demobats had ruined him, in case he needed to change once they got back - after all he’s experienced today, he thinks seeing Eddie “The Freak” Munson in a polo shirt, regardless of dead-or-alive status, would well and truly send him into a breakdown.
Eddie talks, sometimes. If Steve didn’t know any better, he’d think the other man(?) was purposefully choosing to speak at the worst possible times, just to watch him squirm.
Steve will - as he sometimes does, regardless of undead presences in the vicinity - ramble. He’ll talk for hours, to himself, or Eddie, or nobody in particular, just to fill the air.
It’s in the pauses between these meaningless monologues - the moments when the air is left to hang dead and dry - when Eddie speaks.
“Steve,” he begins. He sounds strangled, like he’s taken a cheese grater to his vocal chords. His tone is flat and sharp all at once, and it sounds uncomfortable to speak, but he doesn’t react, not even when Steve visibly flinches at the sound of his voice. “Steve, take me home.”
Some part of him aches at the request, at the insinuation that Eddie would rather go back to his trashed, taped-up trailer than stay in Steve’s presence for another night; a quieter, more rational part of him offers up the reminder that Eddie isn’t quite Eddie anymore, and it certainly isn’t anything personal.
“You can’t go home, Munson,” he replies, as nonchalantly as he can manage with his heart jack-hammering in his throat, “you’re still wanted, and I don’t know how I’d explain what’s happened to you-”
“I don’t care,” he bites - and there’s something chilling about the venom in his tone, juxtaposed with the frozen blankness of his face. For the first time since his return, his eyes have sharpened, and holding his gaze feels like pushing pins into his own eyes. “Take me home. I want to go home.”
Steve rolls his tongue over his teeth, feels himself slowly tense under Eddie’s unrelenting stare. “Dude,” he tries weakly, “I would if I could, you know I would, but it’s not that simple-”
Munson laughs. It’s a terrible, choked, bitter sound that reminds Steve of the bile in the back of his throat, of the feeling of rot under his nails. His heart is pounding so violently in his chest that he can’t breathe - and if this had happened a week ago, he’d be wisecracking about Munson taking his breath away, laughing. As it stands, it’s all he can manage to stay upright, to clench his hands into fists at his sides to stop them from trembling so visibly.
“You killed me,” Munson says finally, once the grating sound of his laugh has finally, sharply cut off. “You dragged me to hell, and killed me, Harrington, but you won’t even take me home?”
The long-healed bite wounds on Steve’s stomach have started to ache from the tension in his muscles. Munson’s voice is so cold that it’s begun to sound wholly unfamiliar. He grins at Steve’s frozen unresponsiveness, and his teeth are rotten and bloodied, his smile lopsided and wrong. His eyes don’t change, pinned painfully on Steve’s own, uneven and rotten at the edges, and Steve’s legs shake under him, begging him to run.
“You said you’d fix me, Stevie,” the thing wearing Eddie’s skin continues, “so fucking fix me.”
Steve plays Eddie’s tapes in the car. He’s not super familiar with most of them - he’s only had a few days to listen, to try and mourn Eddie in the only way that felt right - but he drums his fingers on the steering wheel to the beat regardless.
It’s as still as ever, sitting beside him, and Steve can’t remember a single time that this music was playing and Munson wasn’t headbanging or thrashing around like a madman. The thing in the next seat over is only moving when the car jostles it, sprawled in the seat with an uncharacteristic lethargy that makes Steve’s skin crawl.
The intro to Master of Puppets plays, and Steve pulls over and fumbles with the tapes to change the song, pretending he can’t feel the ice-cold, empty glare burning into his temples.
The Munsons’ trailer is well and truly wrecked. It’s wholly encircled in police tape, the door left wide open, and even from the street outside, Steve can see the blood-brown stain on the carpet where Chrissy Cunningham met her horrifying end.
(Sometimes dead is better, he thinks, her gravestone far more appealing than the thing slumped next to him - and he hates himself a little more for it, for wishing that Eddie would’ve never come back.)
Wayne Munson is sitting in the shade, smoking. His face is tear-stained, his hand curled into a fist around Eddie’s guitar-pick necklace, slung tightly around his neck. Steve can tell the moment he spots them - he freezes, and physically recoils, and gains that oh-so-familiar look of a man trying to swallow his heartbeat long enough to speak.
“You…” he manages, stumbling to his feet - and all the grief in his eyes is replaced with outright terror as the thing with Eddie’s face and the not-right smile walks stiffly towards him. The shock of it all renders him motionless, and Steve watches in some painful mix of horror and pity as Wayne’s undead nephew stops haltingly mere inches from its uncle, and slowly, shakily winds its arms around his chest, smiling all the while.
“Uncle,” it croons, voice cold and wrong, “Steve brought me home.”
Wayne is frozen in its grasp, eyes welling with tears. His eyes are glossy and distant for a moment, before slowly, painfully locking onto Steve’s face. The terror he sees there, perfectly mirroring his own, is enough to strengthen the hard coil of guilt in his stomach.
“What…” he doesn’t move to return Eddie’s hug, swallowing the lump in his throat. “What did you do?”
Steve’s smile, in response, is shaky and fearful. Even through his blurring vision, all he can see is the rot clinging to Eddie’s hands, the sharp, hard terror in Wayne’s eyes. The tears running down his cheeks feel, in that moment, like blood, like his own eyelids are rotting and deforming to match Eddie’s.
“I brought him home,” he weeps, and stumbles blindly back to his car, leaving Wayne and his rotting nephew to stand motionlessly in the dark.