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“Steve,” Eddie says as the car winds its way through the Tennessee woods. “You’re not paying attention.”
“I am,” is all the response he gets, even as Steve fiddles instead with the map, squinting down at it until the moment Eddie reaches over to pluck the phone from his hands, locking it with a little click against of Steve’s halfhearted hey! The maps app goes dark as he chucks it back into Steve’s hands. (What was he even looking for?) “This is classic horror cinema, Steve, but you’re already missing so much shit and it’s barely two minutes in.”
Ash and company are staring at the tumbledown cabin in the forest when it happens again, no time at all later. Eddie looks over from beneath his eyelashes to gauge how easy it will be to rib him in the tense moments, and he finds Steve flipping through Instagram, so fast that there’s no way he’s actually seeing the posts, liking the one of Robin and Nancy out at the sunflower field on what must be instinct. His eyes are still flicking back and forth between the phone and the TV screen, though, so Eddie lets this one go, but –
-- but he does start to get a little itchy about it when it’s still happening as the cellar door flies open. Eddie’s not mad, not in any real way, but he’s frustrated, stymied. Can’t shake the feeling that something’s happening here that he’s just not in on.
This hadn’t happened during The Lost Boys. But vampires were, after all, sexier, so maybe that was the kicker for Steve.
“Steve,” Eddie says again, this time stabbing at the pause button until it freezes on Bruce Williams’ face, lit sharply in the cellar. He deliberately keeps his tone light against it. “We can pick a different movie if you want, man.” Even though Steve was the one to put it on, Steve was the one to press play, Steve had been the one to ask him over to watch a bunch of horror movies after they’d silently agreed to bail on Robin’s proposed flower farm trip in hopes those two would get over their shit and kiss already. (By the looks of Instagram, they would, if they hadn’t already.)
Something plays over Steve’s face before he goes to answer – weighing something, Eddie thinks, though it’s hard to say what that is. It’s after a long beat that he says, “Sorry. I was just. Maybe we could keep watching Lord of the Rings.”
And how is Eddie supposed to say no to that. They’d made it partway through Two Towers, last time, right up until Viggo Mortensen breaks his fucking foot onscreen, and had only stopped there because Eddie hadn’t been able to resist talking about it, which led him down a spiral until they’d realized it was 2 AM and Eddie had to work a brunch shift in the morning. They start it over this time, on Steve’s insistence (not that Eddie’s putting up more than a cursory fuss), and soon enough the both of them are lost in the rolling plains of Rohan. (And the planes of Eomer’s face, intense under the helm.)
“You ever ridden a horse, Harrington?” They’ve made it safely past Aragorn’s funeral pyre moment before Eddie asks; he’d nailed down the urge to talk about the broken foot so successfully that he’d been unable to make any commentary at all until the scene was past, which made it a good thing they’d already watched part of this, already covered most of Steve’s questions and bursts of noble outrage.
Eddie’s head has slowly melted down to rest against Steve’s arm – not his shoulder, Eddie wants it noted, bony thing that it is aside from being a hazy gray no-man’s land of feelings both of them have yet to breach – over the course of the movie, and the question comes out mashed against the flat of Steve’s upper arm, the uncategorized meat between muscle groups. As such, he feels rather than sees Steve shake his head. “Nah,” Steve drawls, “and I’ve got enough head injuries now, anyway.”
“Can’t be that many, if you’re still with it enough to know that equestrianism is not a path for you.”
At the very top of his vision, Steve’s face contorts, probably in indignation, but he doesn’t contradict this. “I like horses, though,” he continues, like Eddie hadn’t commented on his head injuries. “There was a winter festival in Chicago a million years ago that Mom wanted to take us to, and there were horse-drawn carriage rides there. One tried to eat my hair.”
Eddie bolts upright, suppressing his laughter and pulling a face of overblown horror instead. “Not The Hair’s hair! On my life, Lord Harrington, I will not rest until justice has been done!” His eyes twinkle. He winks at Steve. He pulls an imaginary sword from an imaginary scabbard at his very real hip and brandishes it right into Steve’s blushing face, on a roll and gaining speed as Faramir decides the fate of the Ring in Ithilien onscreen. “Show me the knave responsible, my lord, and I will see that our house gains the satisfaction of a mane for a mane, as the old laws demand!”
Steve shoves at him. “Get your elbow out of my face, dick.” Eddie does not.
Instead, he clambers onto his knees, still on the couch so he towers over Steve, and brandishes harder, his offhand arm curled as if into the buckles of a shield. It’s an effort to not think of a trash can lid, studded with nails, matching Steve’s bat, but he shoves it resolutely out of his head in favor of making a scene. “This I do in your name, my King!”
Emboldened by Steve’s unwavering gaze on him, Eddie swings one knee over his lap and puts a lot of faith in his thigh muscles to half-crouch, knees and calves brushing Steve’s hips but otherwise not touching him, no real contact, just looking seriously into those big brown eyes, and shit. “If by my life or death I can protect you,” he quotes, “I will.” And is he imagining it, or does Steve’s sarcastic grimace get a little soft, mouth falling open just a bit?
He doesn’t stick around to find out – from behind him, onscreen, there’s the sound of a river running, and he finally cuts his legs some slack to shove himself away from Steve’s lap and back into his seat. “Wait, you’ll like this part, pay attention.” He’s not sure if his voice sounds as light as he means it to, but he also stops focusing on it and watches Brego save Aragorn’s battered ass (after a half-hearted attempt to eat his hair, at which Eddie ribs Steve mercilessly).
They turn in after Gollum leads Sam and Frodo into the eerie, thinning trees, Mordor lurking ominously on the horizon, because even though Steve doesn’t have to work in the morning, it is still well past one in the morning. Eddie, as he usually does, mumbles something about going home that’s total bullshit, because he never does, though he would if Steve asked him.
But Steve never asks. Never comments on Eddie’s half-coherent excuses.
Steve just rolls his eyes and grabs a fistful of Eddie’s sleeve and drags him up the rickety stairs of his shitty apartment and throws a t-shirt at him and all but manhandles Eddie into his own bed. Eddie remembers helping him bully the queen-sized mattress out of the Harrington house when he moved out while his parents were in – fuck, who knows, London or New York or fucking Grand Rapids or something. He remembers Steve’s first night in the new place, when he’d called Eddie at three in the morning because even though he’d left the frame behind and could shove the mattress to wherever he liked, he couldn’t find an angle in the room that got the neighbor’s lights out of his eyes, and that had made him tense and restless and that had given him one of those headaches and that had kept him from trying any further. The call to Eddie went out from a pile of blankets and bath towels in the tub.
Those calls almost never happened anymore, which was fine, because they found other things to talk about at 3 AM, and most of them were from across the pillows instead of across town.
“I think I like Sam more than I did in the last one,” Steve decides when the lights are out. “At first I wondered why he was so devoted to Frodo, but I think I get it now. He kinda makes me wonder about us.”
Eddie’s heart seizes, just a little. “About us?”
“Yeah.” There’s a shuffle of hair as Steve nods against his pillow and then settles back down into it. “Like. Everything that happened in the Upside Down. We can’t talk about it, but Sam makes me want to hear stories about Eddie the Brave, who got gnawed into a chew toy by mutant bats.” He pauses, and the light’s low, lower than when Steve first moved in and had all the headaches, but not pitch black, and Eddie can see highlights in his hair. “He was real courageous.” He blinks at Eddie, slowly, and Eddie thinks he hears a click in Steve’s jaw before he continues. “And the Lady Jane of House Eleven. Not that I ever want people to know about her powers, but they should know how brave she is, y’know? She’s just a kid.”
“They all are,” Eddie breathes, moment not broken but a different texture now. “But if you’re gonna talk about Eddie the Banished” - he can’t think of himself as brave, not right now, when for him brave has historically meant impulsive and right now impulsive is more than he can handle – “you have to include Steve of Hawkins.”
Steve scoffs, but Eddie plows on. “Noble Steve of Hawkins, who takes up a cause he isn’t sure about in defense of what he knows to be good,” he says in something that’s almost his DM voice. “Steve of Hawkins, who took a baseball bat full of nails and, what, three concussions for a bunch of kids he barely knew but loved anyway? And that’s not even counting the strangling, the tackling, and the fair amount of gnawing he took himself, too. All those arrows to the chest.”
“You did not just compare me to Boromir.”
“I did, my captain my king, but let’s stay on track here.” He can feel his own jaw quivering a little, now. “Eddie wouldn’t have gotten far without Steve.”
“Eddie –”
He shakes his head as best he can against the pillow. “Don’t go trying to argue, Steve, you know it’s true.”
“Eddie –”
“I know you’re thinking about the bats but I’d have been eaten alive by the town of Hawkins before I ever had a chance to pick up an oar if it weren’t for you, I’d’ve starved out in Rick’s boathouse or been beaten to a pulp at the school or –”
“Eddie.” Steve’s fingers come up to Eddie’s lips, an effective way to stop both his runaway mouth and his runaway heart. “Stop.”
And then Eddie just. He can’t. He just can’t help himself. He presses a soft kiss to Steve’s fingertips, just a gentle little pressure, something he could take back, explain away if he wanted to, but. He really doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to have to. But he doesn’t say anything else, because Steve asked him to hush and so he hushes.
Steve’s eyes are very dark, and his face is closer than it was a few minutes ago. “You’re talking too fast. If you’re going to keep quoting Lord of the Rings at me, you’re going to have to do it more slowly. I can’t hear you.”
Which. Was not what Eddie was expecting, but Steve’s still talking. “And if you’re trying to tell me something by leaning on Tolkien and Jackson, then I really, really don’t want to miss it.” He removes his hand, slowly, just shy of burning, like someone passing a lighter too close to Eddie’s lips. It floats, uncertainly between their chests.
That really leaves Eddie with only a few options, clashing in his head like ringing swords. He can either take Steve’s advice and just speak plainly, or he can ask why Steve can’t hear him from less than a foot away. Or. Or.
Options one and two are wiped totally from his mind by grabbing with both hands at option three, in which Eddie just eliminates those other problems by leaning in with the soft sound of hair on sheets and kissing Steve instead. Steve, who breathes out a rush of cool air against Eddie’s face, Steve, who takes the hand that was on Eddie’s mouth and places it now on his face, Steve, who adds ever so slightly a little pressure over Eddie’s jaw and his cheekbone to keep him as close as he’s just made himself.
And like, yeah, he’s thought a bit about kissing Steve Harrington. A fair bit. A good bit. Okay, a lot. He thought about it even with Vecna breathing down their necks, he thought about it coughing out his own blood after Nancy rolled him onto his side to clear his lungs. He thought about it in freshman year, with Steve in his history class, and in senior year, with Steve in his literature class, and in the other two senior years when there was a lot less Steve to stare at. He imagined it in sometimes painfully great detail, and this – is different than he envisioned. A lot less push-pull-shove and a little more give-take-give-give-give. Softer.
Which is to say, infinitely better.
He gets his hands in that trademark hair and finds it as fluffy as he’d imagined, that bit of wishful thinking spot-on. It’s like sliding his fingers into Falkor’s fur, thick and soft and layered with the exhilaration of touching something you thought you’d only ever get to imagine.
It goes on for a time that’s more than Eddie cares to count and less than he really wants, no matter what his lungs say. And for a moment, they just lay there, breathing mere atoms from each other, before the tension in their necks starts to get to them and they have to shuffle, not as close, but closer than before by a long road.
“Steve –”
“Shh,” Steve soothes, leaving one more kiss, just a brief sip, at his lips. His eyes remain closed as he pulls back. “Later. In the morning. I don’t have to work.”
Eddie mulls this over, thinks about getting the bit between his teeth and letting his eyes roll like the wild horse his heart has become, and then, like Brego, lets gentleness overtake him. A sharp, fond smile spreads across his face, but his own eyes are closed and he doesn’t know if Steve can see it. “Will you make waffles?”
A snort, one short puff of air. “If you handle coffee and eggs,” Steve bargains.
And. Yeah. Eddie will take that.
Steve Harrington makes a mean stack of waffles, so much so that he doesn’t even complain when Eddie’s coffee turns out to be strong enough to knock over an elephant and his eggs get a little too crispy on the edges. And because it’s a beautiful September morning and they’ve had the foresight to wrap up in a pair of Steve’s old sweatshirts and thick socks against the fading chill to the air, they take their plates out onto Steve's shoddy balcony, overlooking the building's gritty parking lot. They don’t bother with the deck chairs Steve may or may not have stolen from his parents; the concrete slab is slowly warming when they drop down to sit on it, cross-legged in shorts, facing each other and hips-up boneless to reach their breakfast.
They haven’t talked about it yet. They’ve teased each other over the stove and across the coffee pot and into the sliding glass doors. Elbows have been thrown, but hands have also lingered, traced over shoulders and arms and faces just to relish in the feel of them. Fuck, Eddie just about ascended to another plane when, first thing in the morning, tangled sheets and bad breath and all, Steve leaned over and kissed him very gently good morning.
Best morning, really. Eddie had caught himself thinking that they could do this same thing every morning for the rest of forever and the shine still wouldn’t wear off, then very quickly smothered that thought with a pillow before getting distracted by the way the very real version of said metaphorical pillow smelled like Steve. And also like Eddie. Like the two of them bound together, a thought at which Eddie had shooed Steve on into the kitchen on the promise of “five more minutes, you fucking morning person,” and taken time for the Herculean task of resolutely willing away the situation that image stirred up in his borrowed basketball shorts.
Ahem. Regardless. They haven’t talked about last night yet.
And Eddie’s not enough of a dickhead to ask Steve if he regrets it, or if he’d rather pretend it didn’t happen, not with the way Steve had kissed him this morning or the way he’s now pressing their kneecaps together, the way he’s intermittently tangling the fingers of their free hands when they’re not wrapped around coffee mugs. He seems pretty unphased about this, and Eddie is better than the disservice of assuming Steve doesn’t know his own mind.
He does, however, cut across Steve’s aimless musing about what they should do today before Steve goes to work in the evening. If he needs a little clarity, so sue him. “Steve, I think we should talk about last night.”
Which is like, the worst way to bring it up, but lucky him, Steve seems to get what it is he’s after and doesn’t judge Eddie for the way it spills out of his nervous, syrup-tasting mouth.
“Okay,” he says simply. “Shoot.”
Except that leaves the ball in Eddie’s court, and he’s had just enough caffeine that it all kind of. Breaks the dam. Releases the River Isen onto unsuspecting Orthanc. “I just – I really want to think we’re on the same page about this, but I’ve kinda had a crush on you since we were in high school, Steve, and oh my god is that embarrassing to admit but it’s true, I’m no different than any other twitterpated little fawn who trod the halls of Hawkins High, I couldn’t keep my stupid eyes off your stupid hair, and then you graduated and I didn’t and I kept thinking about you and I didn’t graduate again and I kept thinking about you and then the fucking world ended and there you were and.” He pauses to take a breath. “And here you are. Still. And I just don’t want it to be a hallucination or whatever, I don’t want to snap back into my body in two seconds and realize that actually, I’m still being eaten alive by demobats and this is it, one last dream to comfort a dying brain.”
Steve just blinks at him, the beginnings of a crease between his eyebrows, like he’s concerned or confused or both but only in the early stages, like he’s still going to be patient, but Eddie had probably better finish his thought.
It occurs to Eddie belatedly that if for some reason Steve isn’t on the same page, is a book or a chapter or even a paragraph behind him, that he might have just dumped a lot on a plate that isn’t prepared to handle it, like all those Dixie commercials. Spaghetti on the ground, blood-red sauce with chunks of Eddie’s heart in place of the tomato. (Ew, did he just think that?) Too late to back out now, though, and hadn’t he recently resolved to be braver?
“I guess just. Want to know how you’re feeling about all this. Whether you’re freaked out or not. What we do from here.”
It takes a second for that concerned expression to melt from Steve’s face, but when it does, it’s like spring breaking over the sky in April, warm and sunny and fresh. “Eddie Munson,” he asks, teasing. “Are you really asking ‘what are we’ right now?” There’s humor in his eyes, even if the rest of his face is unbearably fond. Mentally, Eddie slaps himself in the forehead, because yeah, he guesses he is. “Listen,” Steve is saying next, “I’m not gonna lie, you lost me a little there in the middle and I would love for you to go over all that again later,” Steve says, a definite prompt for another conversation, “but I caught the end loud and clear, and – It's not a hallucination, Eddie. It’s real.”
And golly, if that ain’t something. The words are such a balm to Eddie’s breathless, jangling nerves that he almost misses the next part. “And as far as I’m concerned, you’re stuck with me until we’re both just brains floating in jars, because I’m not letting you have any more death experiences, near or otherwise.” Steve’s still teasing a little, but there’s sincerity behind the image of them in matching Young Frankenstein jars that sounds a little bit to Eddie’s cynical ears like forever.
And that doesn’t even glance the surface of what his cynical eyes are taking in – an earnest Steve is a sight to behold, warm brown eyes radiating like fireplace embers. He’s been leaning closer with every word out of his mouth, like he can hardly help himself, and it fills Eddie’s head with smoke like a woodstove. Like Steve could be the thing that keeps Eddie warm through the bitter winter. Like maybe, even, Eddie could let him.
When he exhales, it’s shaky. “You can’t just say that, Steve,” he trembles, not quite able to meet the gaze that’s trying to bore so intently into his own, “unless you’re gonna back it up.”
And, lucky him once again, Steve seems to get what it is he’s after, and he meets Eddie’s nervous, syrup-tasing mouth with his own. His lips are soft and the action of his jaw is firm – and not that Eddie’s been drowning in kisses, but he’s had his share. He’s read The Princess Bride. The kiss he’s currently collapsing under blows fucking Buttercup and Westley out of the water. It tastes like coffee and maple and fluffy waffles, feels like the soft shape of his bottom lip between Steve’s own and the hook of his fingertips back into that spot on Eddie’s face, gentle pressure to hold Eddie close, and it smells intoxicatingly like breakfast and warmth and peace and Steve, whatever cologne he’s using or whatever’s in his hair or whatever intangible good he’d left in the sheets when he got out of his bed-Eddie’s bed-their bed this morning.
It also tastes vaguely of the same forever as the brain jars, but Eddie’s not going to make them address that yet, because he doesn’t want to stop kissing Steve and also he thinks he might cry if he has to talk about it.
“So,” Steve says into his mouth an eternity later. The words form themselves against Eddie’s lips and don’t get further than his tongue. “Go back to the part where you said you had a crush on me.”
And nothing could really make Eddie want to draw away, but he does so on reflex with a groan anyway. “Oh god,” he whines, “don’t make me go over that again. It’s nothing, forget I said anything.”
Steve’s face does something a little complicated at that, now that Eddie’s backed far enough away to see it. It’s not quite a grimace, not like he’s really upset, but there’s a little ghost of something that looks like fear. He goes all wide-eyed, one corner of his mouth flickers down just for a breath of a second, and then it’s gone. His shoulders move like he’s literally about to shrug it off, and no, actually, Eddie doesn’t like that. It stirs up that feeling from yesterday, that he’s missing something, now with added weight of making Steve squirm (and not in a fun way).
Eddie wraps his fingers in Steve’s sweatshirt, the one Steve is wearing, as opposed to the one Eddie’s borrowing. They’re both faded out and gray and soft, and Eddie grips Steve’s softly, firmly, a reinterpretation of Steve’s own hand on Eddie’s face when they kiss.
His brow furrows. “Wait, no, don’t do that.” He cuts Steve off gently, before whatever is on his face has time to will itself out of the conversation like it vanished from his face. “What’s wrong, Steve? I’ll go over it again, I’ll give you all the gory details, but tell me what that look is for first.”
Steve shakes his head; his hair flops down over his eyebrows. “There’s no look. This is just my face.”
“Steve. I’ve seen you fight off monsters and nearly die and drive incredibly stolen RVs. You can tell me what’s wrong.”
They’re still sitting, so Steve can’t really shuffle his feet, but he shifts his hips around on the warming concrete like he wants to. “I didn’t hear you. Earlier. When you were talking about your crush. And, I don’t know, man, I wanted to.” He shoves the hair over his forehead back over to the side and meets Eddie’s eyes. “I like you a lot, Eddie, I wanna hear all the embarrassing little details, but like.” He stops here, and his face does a thing again.
“Don’t get me wrong, I love your enthusiasm,” which makes Eddie’s heart do something funny, because he’s composed of mostly enthusiasm and Steve knows it, “but you gotta… Slow down sometimes. So I can hear you.”
Eddie blinks, processes, finds himself still missing something vital. “Just for the sake of clarity,” he says slowly, “when you say you can’t hear me…?” He doesn’t know how to finish the question in a way that doesn’t make him sound like an asshole who’s been missing that his best friend-crush-light of his life might be partially deaf.
“No, no, like, I can hear you.” Steve’s hand comes up to cover Eddie’s, still clutched in his sweatshirt. “The sounds are there,” he explains, “but I can’t always. Like. Process them? They think it’s an effect of all the head trauma.”
Something dawns on Eddie. “The subtitles.”
Steve nods. “The subtitles.”
And Eddie is suddenly furious that a movie made in 1981 still doesn’t have subtitles. It wanes, though, and fast, nothing more than a quick clench and release of his fist on Steve’s chest. “So, for conversations,” he starts slowly, “I’m guessing eye contact and not talking so fast probably helps a ton.”
Which Steve confirms, and so Eddie grins, all teeth, and moves their plates aside to make way for slinging his legs over Steve’s and putting his hands on either side of Steve’s stupidly square jaw, a detail he files away for later. “Steve Harrington,” he says, not seriously but with as much gravity as he can muster. “I, Eddie Munson, have had a stupid little crush on you since we were fourteen.” Steve’s eyes get real wide, delighted. “I’ve had a crush on you the whole time, because of your dumb hair and those goddamn doe eyes, and on top of that you had to go and get some growth after high school, so now you’re sweet, and loyal,” and fuck, is he laying it on thick, but he means it. “And you’re brave and kind, and wicked competent with a baseball bat full of nails, and also just incredibly sexy.”
(Steve also blushes prettily, another detail he adds to the file in his head marked “Oh, We Are Getting Into That Later.”)
“Okay,” Steve mutters, embarrassed himself now, “you’ve made your point. You gonna kiss me about it, or what?”
And, well. There’s only one answer for that, and it sure as hell isn’t or what.