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Steve knows he shouldn’t do it, but no one ever accuses Steve of being particularly bright, do they? So if he’s gonna be branded stupid no matter what, well...
Besides, he can’t sleep (can never fucking sleep.)
It feels like there’s ghosts in the walls, and he guesses there kind of are, if the walls are Hawkins. Ghosts in the pool out back and ghosts out where the mall used to be. Ghosts on the highway and in Eddie’s trailer and out at Lovers Lake.
And then there's the most present ghost of all–haunting them all a short bike ride from Eddie’s trailer.
So yeah, Steve shouldn’t do the thing he can't stop thinking about, and he certainly shouldn't do it alone.
But Steve does.
It’s the middle of the night, Hawkins asleep at home or in the high school gym where the people without houses are all bunked together.
Steve pulls his old bike out of the garage and rides to the trailer park, choosing two wheels instead of four because his car is loud, and he doesn’t want anyone to catch him. Because if they catch him, they might stop him and he–
There is a denim vest hanging loose over his clothes. There is a wrapped-up shovel strapped to his back.
The trailer park is relatively quiet. A black cat hisses at him from under the Munson trailer when Steve leans his bike against it. He startles, says something soothing, and watches it sink back into the dark.
At the door, he ducks under the police line. He pauses with his hand on the door knob, inhaling deeply before pushing his way inside.
Eddie’s trailer feels so wrong without him in it. Without anyone in it. Like Steve’s already walking through the skeleton of someone’s life. He supposes that’s kind of what it is, to see all the little markers of who someone was still existing in a world they no longer occupy.
The bones of a life–reduced to posters on the wall, a stereo and an explosion of tapes, tattered DnD books with dog-eared corners, a guitar hanging from the mirror. Steve plucks at the strings, listens to them sing softly–a lament. He thinks that’s what it’s called anyway. A dirge? Maybe it’s both.
“I think you should go too,” Steve says, wrapping his hand around the neck.
There’s a version of Eddie’s guitar in the Upside Down, he knows. But this is the real one. If the trailer holds Eddie’s bones, this is his rib cage. Steve takes it, straps it over his shoulders. It feels so heavy coupled with the weight of the shovel. The strap digs in and presses the shovel handle against his flesh. It aches.
He wants it to.
On the way out of Eddie’s bedroom, he sees the open cassette case for Master of Puppets, and he pops it out of the tape player and shoves it in his pocket.
From there it's only a matter of climbing the bed sheet hanging from the ceiling. Steve gets to the place where they’d made a hasty repair that night, where Eddie had cut the sheet in half after deciding that his life was worth less than all theirs.
Playing the goddamn hero after he said he wouldn’t.
Steve should have been there. Steve would give anything to go back and just be there. He would’ve–Something. He would’ve done something. Maybe if he’d fought the bats with Eddie…
But there are different types of regrets in life, aren’t there? So many regrets piling up in Steve’s belly. For things he’d done on purpose. For things that just happened, that made him wonder if he’d just changed one little thing, done one little thing differently, what if?
He catches himself before he falls onto the mattress in the Upside Down and slowly lowers himself to his feet. He knows exactly where to go when he gets outside. He remembers that night viscerally.
Henderson had clawed at the ground when Steve dragged him away.
Steve would never, ever forget cleaning the blood off Dustin's cracked fingernails.
Biting his tongue, he walks past the bike Eddie abandoned. There’s a shield and a spear nearby.
There’s…
“I came back for you.” Steve takes the guitar off and puts it off to the side with the reverence it deserves. He unwraps the shovel next, uses the simple white sheet to cover Eddie over, the rope to tie it around him like a burial shroud.
All the while, he finds he’s oddly grateful for the way time works in the Upside Down. Other than the injuries and how alarmingly still Eddie is for someone who had always been moving, he hasn’t decayed. He even still smells a little like sweat and weed and hairspray. (And fresh blood.)
“You were one of us, man. You…” There’s an ache in Steve’s throat that feels like you’re bullshit and no we can’t make it back, honey, but we’ll send a card and we like Steve, but we don’t love Steve . But it’s so much worse, this ache.
It’s another type of regret. It’s grief over something that could have been. A guy friend his age who didn’t have the emotional baggage Jonathan did. A… A future, maybe. Not the six kids, picket fence future Steve had dreamed of, but something else.
Maybe.
He slams the shovel into the gray dirt and drives it in with a sneakered foot.
It’s so much harder to dig a hole than they make it look in movies. It’s so, so much harder. The ground resists and the shovel slips and there are roots from the vines and Steve hopes he isn’t waking them up.
But he keeps digging. And when his hands burn–when they blister and bleed, it feels good. It feels like he’s bleeding something else out.
He thinks about stopping a few times. He thinks that if nothing has disturbed Eddie by now, he probably doesn’t need to be six whole feet under.
But then Steve thinks about how Eddie had everything stolen from him, how Eddie was supposed to graduate in under a month, how Eddie isn’t getting a proper goddamn funeral and burial because the government assholes would never allow it. They’d whisk the body away somewhere and give them back cardboard with Eddie’s face and–
His brain reminds him of how Eddie leaned into his space and smiled and did it again and again. Like Steve mattered. He'd made him feel like Nancy had, once, something that made Steve want to grab hold with both hands and see what he'd find if he did.
God, Steve has to do it right. He has to. Eddie should get this one right goddamn thing.
Steve checks his watch when the hole is as deep as the shovel is long. It’s early afternoon in Hawkins, Indiana when Steve–as gently as he possibly can–pushes Eddie Munson into a grave.
He sits on the edge after, dangling his feet over, talking to ghosts. Eulogizing the best he can hope to.
“I was jealous of you in high school,” Steve says. “I never told you that. I would have, I think, eventually. I think I would have told you a lot of things.”
There’s no answer, of course. Eddie Munson will never give another answer, will never make another quip, will never say another thing for the rest of always.
But Steve can hope that Eddie’s somewhere listening, giving him shit, smiling and happy.
“I’d watch you get up on tables in the lunch room or stroll across the bleachers with a cigarette, and you weren’t popular and you weren’t even–you didn’t play sports or have a nice car or any bullshit people consider special in high school. But you were so alive, Eddie. Always. And I…”
Steve swallows, pushes the grief down his throat.
“I think I wanted to be like you a little. So free. Just free.”
Steve pulls the guitar into his lap and strums softly across the strings with his bleeding, aching hands.
“I think in another place, in another lifetime, we would have been friends.” And then, because no one’s listening, because Steve thought about it that whole day and after. “I think maybe I would have wanted to be more.”
He looks around the Upside Down. It’s quiet. Still doing its own fucked-up healing or whatever, Steve guesses. Silent, even as it bleeds through the megagate.
“I took guitar lessons for about ten minutes as a kid. I thought about telling you that after.” Another regret. Steve never saw Eddie play. “I wish I could play one of your favorite songs or something they play at funerals–Amazing Grace or some shit, though I think you’d probably hate that.”
Steve laughs, tears streaming down his face. He can imagine it in his head.
“Amazing Grace, Harrington, really? Do I look like I believe in organized religion?”
“But hey, you can respect Willie stoner-to-stoner, right?” And Steve plucks the few simple notes of Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain that he remembers. “You should have something better than this. You should have, I don’t know, a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden or something. The world whole world knowing your name.”
Steve keeps plucking, trying to remember the words.
“ Some day when we meet up yonder… In a land that knows no parting– Fuck.” Steve lets himself break for one moment, leaning his head into his elbow to keen softly, a broken mournful whine.
“God, God , I’m sorry I’m the worst person to do this for you. I’m sorry your uncle can’t be here. I’m just, I’m sorry some people are good and kind and still get screwed every time life can screw them, Eddie. But you were so brave, dude, and I know what you did, and I know you did it for Dustin. For all of us. I know you did. And you were brave the whole time. You were brave the whole damn time even when you thought–”
Steve strums a discordant note down the strings of Eddie’s baby. He clears his throat. He tries . For Eddie.
“So here lies Eddie Munson. He loved nerd books and Dungeons & Dragons. He loved metal and played guitar, and he would’ve been famous if the world wasn’t bullshit. He was so alive all the time and so brave and so Eddie. Always Eddie. He never stopped being Eddie. And he was a hero and a friend. He was the damn best.”
Steve lowers the guitar into the grave, resting it gently on top of Eddie’s burial shroud. It’ll be with him now, always, as it should be. Maybe it’s like the pharaohs or whatever. Maybe this means Eddie can take it with him.
A deep breath. An aggressive swipe at his eyes.
“Annoy the shit out of God, Eddie. Play Master of Puppets at 3 a.m. Blow weed and cigarette smoke in his face. He deserves it. Tell him he deserves it.” Steve takes the Metallica tape out of his pocket. He holds it over the open grave, but he can’t do it. His fingers just won’t get go. And they won’t shrug the vest off either. Steve pulls it tighter around his torso, hugging himself tight with well-loved denim.
Steve shakes the tape. “I’m gonna listen to this, man. And if I hate it, I’m gonna listen to it until I don’t. So wherever you are, you can laugh about getting Steve Harrington into metal. Because I know you’d think it was hilarious.” Steve puts the tape back in his pocket. “And I’m keeping the vest. Can’t fight a battle without armor, right? And I said I'd make him pay.”
Steve exhales and feels the pain settle into his bones, and he knows acutely that it will live there forever.
But it’s quiet right now. Calmer.
Calmer still when he shoves the first load of dirt into Eddie’s grave and hears it trike the guitar strings–the perfect first notes of a song that will never be played.
He likes to think Eddie had a hand in it.
It’s early evening when he gets back to Hawkins. He’s dizzy, and his head is spinning because he spent a good 16 hours or so with Eddie and without anything to eat or drink.
So he bikes to the grocery store with dirt under his nails and chokes down water and something from the deli in the parking lot.
Then he buys flowers from the shop down the street and puts them on a pretty unremarkable-looking patch of dirt in someone’s front yard. He hopes the ghost underneath likes them.
"I'll tell Wayne and Dustin and everyone else where to find you. I promise."
But for now, Steve goes home and bandages his hands and listens to Metallica.
Master of Puppets is a pretty good song.