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It starts like this - Jason shows up halfway through a Corroded Coffin show, drunk and looking for a fight.
Chrissy doesn’t even notice him at first. She’s focused on Eddie, like always - on the glint in his eyes on stage that she knows is for her, on his hands on his guitar, on the way the shitty lighting behind him still manages to frame him in a glow, like a halo around his untamed hair.
She’s watching Eddie in his element, carefree and wild and happy, and then she’s watching his face twist in anger, the spark disappearing from his eyes as he sets his guitar down far less carefully than normal. Before she has a chance to get closer to him, to ask him what’s wrong, there’s rough hands on her shoulders, spinning her straight into the smell of alcohol and Jason’s hardened eyes. She pulls herself out of his grip almost immediately, shoving him back so hard he nearly loses his balance.
Eddie is at her side before she can make another move.
“Get,” Eddie starts, his voice taking on a tone he uses only in moments like this, “the fuck,” another shove, “away from her.”
Whatever Jason says back doesn’t register. Chrissy’s too focused on standing her ground, one hand hovering above Eddie’s shoulder blades as he backs Jason up towards the door. There’s an angry set to his jaw, and Chrissy knows she’s the only one who’d ever notice the way his clenched fists are shaking. “I’m not going to say it again,” Eddie threatens as Jason stares him down. “Get out.”
Jason opens his mouth and then closes it. Because it’s not just Eddie standing in front of him now - it’s most of the Hideout regulars, who Chrissy knows would take Eddie’s side over nearly anyone else’s. More people, Chrissy thinks, who weren’t what she thought they’d be like. So instead of pushing back, instead of fighting, Jason just scoffs and stumbles out the door.
Chrissy wishes that could have been the end of it.
She knows Eddie in all the ways she could possibly know him. She knows that his fierce protectiveness comes at the cost of what ifs that bombard him every time something could have gone worse than it did, especially when those something’s involve Chrissy. She knows he flashes back to her floating above him, and that the torment his brain puts him through never includes what really happened that night - the way he’d held her on the floor of his trailer as she screamed through the pain of two broken arms, Uptown Girl floating over their heads from the radio in the corner of the room.
She knows that something like this is going to follow them, follow him, home.
So Chrissy watches him, the way she always does. She watches him compose himself, fists clenched at his sides, before turning to her and taking her face in his hands, asking, in an entirely different voice than he’d used a moment ago, if she’s alright. She watches the way he hesitates when she urges him to finish the set, and she watches the way he watches her through the last three songs, his eyes never straying too far from her.
And now? Now she’s watching his hands as he drives the two of them home, curled just a little too tightly around the steering wheel.
“Eddie?” she tries, reaching over to rest a hand on his knee. Her fingers find the skin beneath the rips in his jeans. “You okay?”
He turns to look at her, tension turning to softness on his face. He hums and nods at the same time before fixing his gaze back on the road. “I’m good, sweetheart. How’d we do tonight?”
Chrissy grins, and every bit of it is real. “Amazing. Guess who I saw singing along in the back.”
“If you say Stuart, I’m going to lose my shit.”
Chrissy’s grin gets impossibly brighter. “The man himself.”
“No fucking way,” Eddie laughs, and Chrissy feels something loosen in her chest. “My sworn enemy, hater of all things metal, singing along to a Corroded Coffin song? That’s it. I can retire.”
The rest of the car ride passes easily - Chrissy focuses not on Jason but on the sound of the van’s blinker, on the crickets outside as they turn down Eddie’s quiet street and up to the trailer. He hops out first, like he always does, to open the door for her. Chrissy doesn’t miss the fact that he leaves most of his gear in the back, though, grabbing just his guitar as they climb the front steps and close the door behind them.
Eddie takes more time than usual checking the lock. He looks around, like he’s trying to find something to wedge under the doorknob, and Chrissy knew that whatever spell had been cast on him in the van wasn’t meant to last. She steps up behind him, slowly, and puts a hand on his shoulder over the jacket he hasn’t taken off yet.
“Babe?” she asks, and he turns to face her. She doesn’t need to look away from his eyes to know that his hands have started to shake. “Jason isn’t going to come here. He’s probably passed out in his parents’ living room right now.”
Eddie nods, but Chrissy doesn’t think anything she’s said has really reached him. He lifts one hand to rest on the side of her arm, all of his focus on her. His voice trembles just slightly when he speaks. “Did he -”
“No,” Chrissy shakes her head quickly, her bangs swishing over her eyes. “He only had his hands on me for a second, I promise. I’m okay.”
“Okay,” Eddie nods. “You’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” she repeats for good measure, but now that the spiral has started, she knows there’s no stopping it.
Eddie backs up until his shaky legs hit the couch, and then he’s collapsing onto it, dropping his face into his hands. “Fuck,” he mumbles, just loud enough for Chrissy to hear, “fuck, Chris, what if he -”
“I know,” Chrissy soothes. They’ve done this dance enough times that she knows what he needs, as intimately as if she were the one who needed it. Her hands find his shoulders and she pulls his chest and head against her stomach, his breaths hot and ragged against the front of her dress. “I know. I’m safe. We both are.”
He feels so small against her when he gets like this, when he starts to crack around the edges. He’s such a different picture now than he was just a couple of hours ago, and if there’s one good thing about this imminent breakdown, it’s that Chrissy knows how to handle it.
She holds Eddie, right there in the middle of the living room, one hand on the back of his head and the other tapping a gentle pattern into his shoulder. He’s shaking all over now, and she can tell that she’s what’s keeping him from losing it completely. He’s holding onto Chrissy like she’s the only thing keeping him tethered to Earth, to the old carpet beneath their feet. Part of her can’t imagine what’s going through his head right now, and part of her can - instead of her floating above him, her eyes unseeing, it’s him on the ground beneath her, his blood soaking into her shoes.
He holds her, every single time she wakes up swearing her hands are covered in his blood.
She holds him, every single time he gets caught in what ifs and her almost-death plays on repeat behind his eyes.
“Eddie?” she asks softly, after a few minutes that feel like a few hours. She knows he needs time to just breathe her in, to ride it out, but they’re reaching that limit now, and Chrissy knows it’s time for the next part of their routine.
He looks up at her, and the combination of vulnerability and trust in his eyes nearly brings Chrissy to her knees. He nods before she can even ask her next question. So she steps back, reaches for his hands, and pulls him up, tugging him gently to the bathroom and closing the door behind them. He drops down onto the lid of the toilet and blows out a long, slow breath. Chrissy knows that by now the panic has morphed into a sort of numbness, a different kind of pain, but less frantic, at least, than it must have felt before. Eddie is quiet, but that’s okay. Chrissy is more than happy to fill the silence.
She steps up in front of Eddie and taps the side of his arm. He lifts it, bringing his left hand up to rest in hers. It’s something they’ve done before, a sort of code they’ve established without ever having to discuss it out loud. Chrissy slides Eddie’s rings off of his fingers one by one. It’s the same kind of gentleness she feels in the way he rubs her back whenever she gets lost in space for a moment or two, feeling like Vecna might still have some kind of hold on her. He doesn’t, so Eddie simply waits patiently, always, for Chrissy to come back to him.
She reaches for the leather bands around his wrist and unfastens them, resting them on the edge of the sink beside his rings. “So much work just to get your clothes off,” she teases, and he huffs out a laugh. Chrissy takes it as a win.
Eddie bows his head without Chrissy having to ask him to, and she slips the chain holding his guitar pick over his head, careful not to get it caught in his hair. “Shoes next,” she narrates as she kneels down beside him and tugs one of his sneakers off. She tosses it towards the door and reaches for the other one, pausing for a second when she notices the heart she’d drawn in pink glitter pen the week before, on the inside of the tongue beside one of Eddie’s doodles. The shoe joins its partner near the door, and when Chrissy stands, Eddie does, too. He’s a little unsteady, so it’s a slow process - him shrugging off his jacket, pulling his shirt over his head as Chrissy takes it and tosses it on the floor. She reaches for his belt next, and there’s nothing urgent about it. It’s comforting to Chrissy that Eddie knows there’s no pressure or expectation behind the simple gesture - that will be for another time, maybe sooner, maybe later, but right now, her intentions are clear. Eddie knows them, holds them close to his heart in moments like this.
The pile of clothes on the floor only grows in the moments that follow - Eddie’s belt, then his jeans, which take a little bit longer to take off than the rest of his clothes. “Why,” Chrissy huffs out as she tries to pull one leg over his ankle, “do these have to be so tight?”
“Because you like them that way,” Eddie answers, and Chrissy looks up at him with a soft smile. “And also because they look cool.”
“Thought so.”
Chrissy slips her sundress off in one smooth motion, and she loves the way it looks on the floor beside Eddie’s jeans, sunflowers beside shredded knees, black fabric against pale blue. She drops her earrings inside Eddie’s ring of jewelry on the counter. They rest nestled beside the band of his watch, along with the necklace that he slowly unfastens for her, and the bracelets carefully woven by her friends.
Then Chrissy’s pushing him gently towards the shower, stopping him with a hand on his arm as she bends down to turn the water on. She waits for it to be warm before she prompts Eddie to step into the spray. Her bra finds a home beside his boxers on the floor and she follows him into the shower, like always. Their world narrows to this tiny space - Eddie standing under the water, Chrissy standing in front of him, her fingers curled around his wrists.
She rubs her thumb over the back of his hand, waiting for a sign from him, an indication of exactly what he needs.
It’s just her. Always her.
Eddie takes a single step forward, and then Chrissy’s wrapped up in his arms, his head bowed and his face pressed into the side of her neck. The warm water seems to almost fuse them together. Eddie’s heart thuds under Chrissy’s ear as she runs her hands up and down his back, over memorized scars and the lines of his shoulder blades. Eddie’s always, always loved every bit of her - all the parts she could and all the parts she couldn’t. She does the same for him, loves his scars as much as she loves the rest of him, and she hopes that her fingertips tracing over them right now tell him that without words. The same way she hopes that her skin against his and the kisses she’s pressing into his bare chest tell him that they’re alive, and they’re safe, and they’re together.
Eddie hums contentedly against her neck. It’s a relieved sort of sound, one that tells Chrissy he’s slowly coming back to her. They stand pressed together for long enough that Chrissy starts to worry about the water running cold, so before it does, she steps back and reaches for the shampoo bottle perched on the edge of the tub.
She holds it up in front of Eddie’s droplet-covered face. He nods and then mirrors her movement from a moment ago, but instead of a shampoo bottle, he finds her rose-scented bar of soap that sits beside his generic one.
And while Chrissy washes Eddie’s hair, her gentle fingers sinking into his scalp and combing through the tangles, Eddie runs his soapy hands up and down her sides and over her hips. It’s more a gesture than anything else - he’s still fighting the half-memories, half-nightmares in his head, and he can’t see much of her with Chrissy scrubbing at his hair, but it’s enough. Chrissy can feel the callouses from countless guitar practices on the pads of his fingers, the steadiness and safety of his hands the moment he touches her, and it’s more than enough.
It ends like this - Eddie leans forward, wet bangs framing his eyes, and drops his forehead against Chrissy’s. He kisses her, deep and slow, and his voice is reverent when he speaks.
“I love you, Chris,” he breathes out, and Chrissy wraps her arms around his waist. “So damn much.”
“I love you,” Chrissy echoes, a soft smile on her face as she looks up at him. He smiles, too, and Chrissy knows that he’s fully in the present now. That she brought him back. Eddie kisses her again as the water runs cold, and it will always, always be enough.