Chapter Text
In the grand scheme of things, Eddie figures he knows enough about enough, and everything else is just gravy—and he doesn’t particularly like gravy, anyhow, so, that is to say there’s a lot he’d rather not know, or at the very least he’s perfectly comfortable not knowing, because biscuits and potatoes taste better with a little hot sauce, anyway.
Which, okay, beside the point.
The point, you know, is that he has no desire to actually know the truth behind UFOs and cryptids, because believing in that shit is all in good fun (the world has enough scientific fact and crushed dreams and the ever-present weight of capitalism that tastes like Frappuccino and free shipping, doesn’t it, for fuck’s sake let a guy believe in Bigfoot). He doesn’t want to know what a polynomial is (might be partially responsible for the fact it took him three tries to graduate high school, but here he is in college, anyway—he’s got a point to prove, okay—halfway through his four-year tenure and nobody’s said the word polynomial to him even once in all this time, so clearly it doesn’t fucking matter). And he doesn’t need to know what’s in hot dogs, because whatever it is it’s delicious and whatever it is will almost certainly bum him out, and frankly he’s got enough problems.
He knows the important stuff, though. Like, in general, how to write a sick-ass D&D campaign, how to nail a pain-in-the-ass guitar riff, exactly how many off-brand Red Bulls he needs to get through the day (off-brand because what is he, a millionaire? And the answer is two, morning and mid-afternoon, a marked improvement from his sixteen-year-old self’s insistence that it was four or bust).
He knows, too, precisely when and where and how he fell ass-over-tits in love.
Namely, an otherwise innocuous Tuesday at the start of last year, at an open mic night at the bar down the street from campus, because… Well, okay, so maybe he doesn’t know how it happened, just that it did and he’s been a certifiable dumbass ever since.
There are a lot of bars-down-the-street, but undergrads like this one for the so-cheap-it’s-probably-toxic drinks, and because the place doesn’t card. Not that it makes a difference to Eddie, he’d been legally able to drink at his high school graduation, so really the only difference is that this dive—Benny’s—is packed through the week, even on open mic nights when people read their shitty slam poetry and sing lousy covers and, occasionally, someone break-dances their drunk ass right off the stage. It’s only about a step off the floor, at least, so they walk off the twisted ankles with another PBR or paint thinner masquerading as a Long Island.
Eddie’s got a pretty good buzz going, before during after he plays a not-lousy cover with his band. Could’ve been better, if they had more room, more leeway with the sound system, all that, but all in all not the worst thing this stage has ever seen, and they’d been itching to do something outside of Gareth’s parents’ garage, anyway, so fuck it, right?
He’s crouched in front of the amp, muttering curses as he untangles his guitar cord—Jesus, it’s like headphones that got twisted in his pocket or some shit—when he hears someone clear their throat next to him.
“Um. Hi. You, um. You guys sounded really good.”
Eddie looks up and straight at a girl, and his heart promptly swoops down into his stomach and then back up into his throat. Because she’s a very pretty girl. Like, oh God very pretty, in her cropped Hawkins College sweatshirt and high-waisted jeans with the artfully torn holes in the knees. He’s never really noticed that before, pretty and all that—like, sure, objectively he knows a looker when he sees one, but it’s never been the kind of noticing that you feel.
But this girl… Jesus. She’s the kind of pretty that makes you say “Oh, holy shit” out loud, which is exactly what Eddie does.
She cocks her head, strawberry-blonde ponytail swaying, goddamn hypnotizing, and gives him a funny little smile. He’s probably confused her, which Eddie would say is fair since he, in turn, feels like he’s been walloped upside the head with a Tolkien collection.
“I mean—thanks. Thank you.” Eddie clears his throat, just like she had. “You, uh. You a metal fan?”
“Um, not—not really?” Her smile’s gone apologetic now. “But you were really good, on the guitar. Do you sing, too?”
“Nah. I’m alright, but Jeff’s got the pipes.” Eddie hooks a thumb over his shoulder at his bandmate. He gets his guitar unhooked, finally, wipes his suspiciously sweaty palms on his jeans, and hops offstage. “I’m, uh. Eddie, by the way.”
“Chrissy.” She has to tilt her head up to smile at him now, and he’s got no idea why he likes that so much. No idea what his heart’s still doing in his throat, what that warm squirmy feeling is in the pit of his gut, why he feels the urge to laugh like he’s balls-to-the-wall wasted, no way could a couple of beers explain away this feeling.
Should he ask if he can buy her a drink? But, no, that would be insane, she’s already holding a drink—something garishly pink with no ice and too many cherries and, Jesus, he bets it tastes better on her than it does in that glass and since when does he think about shit like that?
“So are you, um.” Chrissy lingers over her words, but at least she spares him from saying something probably stupid. “I might be off-base, but. Are you taking Music for Stage & Film?”
“I am, I am.” Eddie stuffs his hands in his pockets, rocks back and forth on his heels. “Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Y’know, a nine A.M. class doesn’t sound all that bad ’til you realize you gotta set your alarm for like, seven.”
“Not a morning person?”
“Maybe if morning started at noon.”
Christ, he likes her laugh. It’s bright and pretty and it—Jesus, it makes him feel proud of himself, that he could get that sound out of her. He’s probably grinning like an idiot.
It drops, a little, when one of her friends calls her name, because he is so far from ready for this to be over, sweaty palms or no. But Chrissy holds up a hand to tell them to wait, she’s still smiling at Eddie, and he wonders if she thinks she’s grinning like an idiot, too.
“Save me a seat tomorrow and I’ll bring you coffee?” she offers. “Maybe we can make a morning person out of you, huh?”
So he did, and she did—even brought a handful of sugar packets for him, because “You, um, seem like you probably have a sweet tooth?” (Correct.)—and Eddie hasn’t slept through his alarm since.
So, yeah. He knows all about falling in love.
He also knows that it gave him a goddamn panic attack.
“BUCKLEY!” He trips off the last two stairs to the admin building’s basement, and swings open the precariously loose door to the LGBTQ+ club room. “I’m having a crisis of sexual identity!”
Thank God Robin’s actually there, lounging on one of the seen-better-days couches with her overly-stickered laptop and, just for him, a raised eyebrow. “Again?”
Which, fair. Eddie had long since disclosed to Robin that he’d never felt anything for anybody, and she’d said he was probably asexual. Eddie had a vague understanding of what that meant and, as per ush, that had been good enough for him, so he didn’t exactly go Googling for more answers.
It was just nice to know, really, that he wasn’t some sort of freak of nature—barring, you know, the hair and his sugar-coma diet and the general chaos that was his whole raison d’être (no, he doesn’t know how that’s pronounced)—but rather there was a name to what he felt, or what he didn’t feel.
Now all of a sudden he’s feeling it, and what the fuck is he supposed to do with that?
When he explains this, facedown on the floor (pointedly not thinking about the last possible time it was vacuumed, but it smells like potato chips), Robin tells him, “So demisexual, then. Still on the ace spectrum. It just means you have to really feel it before you wanna feel ’em up.”
“That is. Outrageously unhelpful.”
“I was trying for wordplay. Swing and a miss.”
Eddie folds his arms over the back of his head, digs his fingers into his scalp, and groans. “I’m so fucking confused, dude, Jesus.”
“You’re overthinking it,” Robin says, all too familiar with his whack-ass train of thought. “Sexuality isn’t supposed to trap you in a box. It’s supposed to help you, like, chill out.”
“I have never been less chill in my entire life.”
“Yeah, well, a cute girl’ll do that to you.”
Eddie groans again, guttural and whiney, like he’s been stabbed. “She’s so fucking cute, man.”
Robin clicks her tongue and drawls, “Tell me about it, stud.”
He does, he spills his fucking guts, about last night at Benny’s and this morning’s coffee and how Chrissy’s hair was damp and her shampoo smells like green apples and it’s making him feel weird, because—
“But I thought—I’m asexual, right?” Eddie rolls over onto his back, throws his hands around. “And now I’m like, doing it wrong.”
“This is what I’m talking about, asshole.” Robin snaps her fingers, points at him. “You can’t be bad at sexuality. It’s just, fluid a lot of the time. And like, asexuality is hard to figure out, especially for dudes, probably, because of like, toxic masculinity. You’re supposed to want to fuck otherwise you’re not really a man, ugh, gross”—she snorts—“and fucking stupid. I don’t trust a man who’s wildly sexually experienced. Who has the time. Get a job.”
“Your best friend is Steve Harrington.”
“An outlier.” Robin waves it off, taps on her keyboard. “Look, Eddie, if you don’t want to have sex, you shouldn’t do it. Even if you were some basic-ass straight dude, I wouldn’t take you for a hook-up kinda guy, anyway. That scene’s a lot of posturing bullshit, honestly, you hate that.”
Hm. True, he does. The whole schtick about pretending you’re someone you’re not, that you want things you don’t, that you’ll text them tomorrow even though you won’t, all for what? A blowjob? Whatever. Eddie’s got two hands and a bottle of Lubriderm, alright, he does just fine for himself.
That still doesn’t explain the weird-but-good-but-weird-but-God-so-good feeling he gets around Chrissy, though.
“What’s that other thing you said? Demi… something? Demogorgon?”
“What the hell is that, some D&D shit? Shut up,” Robin says, as soon as Eddie opens his mouth to explain and for sure get off-track. “Demisexual. It means you can and might feel sexual attraction, you just need to establish, like, a deep emotional bond with someone first. And, hey, if you ask me, a cute girl with good coffee preeeetty much seals the deal.”
“It’s not just the coffee, man.” Eddie huffs, drags a hand down his face. “Like I talked to her for five minutes last night and immediately wanted to jump on her.”
“So she’s probably your soulmate, dingus.”
Eddie doesn’t know if he believes in soulmates. Just another thing he’d always been okay with not thinking much about. Never thought it would happen to him so, hey, chalk it up to another unknowable mystery of the universe.
But now? Jesus Christ. Now, he wants to know.
It’s a year and change later, though, and he really doesn’t know any better now than he did then. Sure, he knows he likes Chrissy—that deep emotional bond Robin mentioned? Yeah, they are so there. It might have started with five painfully shy and world-rocking confused-as-shit five minutes at an open mic night, but it got to be more than that, and they got there fast.
They just… clicked. Even when they don’t click, it somehow still works, like the first time Chrissy deferred to his universally superior musical tastes and scrolled through his online playlists, live-texting him all the while.
chrissy😍: how long do i have to listen to this?
eddie: until you see the error of ur ways, HANSON
chrissy😍: eddie, you have 34 playlists and they’re all just NOISE.
eddie: says the girl who plays fuckin “mmmbop” on a loop
chrissy😍: i don’t like to be SHOUTED AT.
eddie: MMMMMM BOP
BA DUBA DOP
BA DU BOP BA DUBA DOP
ASJDKSL;/“/!:@/djskldhsks
BA DU
OOOOOOH YEAH
eddie: i mean
what the fuck IS that
chrissy😍: dopamine.
eddie: i’d rather have depression
chrissy😍: eddie!! >:(
eddie: okay okay not cool, you’re right
i’m sorry
eddie: 💐
chrissy😍: oh, ha ha.
eddie: 🥰
chrissy😍: i still have better taste in music than you do.
eddie: WOMAN PLS
eddie: they’re not SHOUTING, bee tee dubs, MADAM.
that would be screamo. *this* is metal.
chrissy😍: it’s all very loud.
eddie: so turn ??? the volume ?? down???
chrissy😍: oh, i’ll turn it down, alright.
chrissy😍: all the way down.
until it’s OFF.
eddie: jesus ur a sarcastic little freak
chrissy😍: it’s your music, it’s a bad influence. i’m usually very demure.
eddie: DEMURE, she says
HA.
your high-kick could behead a man
chrissy😍: remember that next time you mockingly serenade me with hanson.
eddie: be still my heart, only Very Serious serenades from here on out
eddie: i’ll learn “uptown girl” just for you, even
chrissy😍: mmmm nice save. i guess that’s a truce, then.
eddie: ✊💯
So maybe there is something to that whole soulmates thing, like, color Eddie sold. But would Chrissy think so, too? Because he knows he likes her, he even knows he wants to… do stuff, with her.
But he doesn’t know how she’d feel about that, hitching herself to some guy with flat-rate zero experience, some guy with sweaty palms and nervous tapping feet who’d want to take things slow. She’d had a serious boyfriend, a real high school sweetheart thing, one she followed to college—before breaking up with him and transferring here, anyway, trading her marketing major for art, upending her whole life so she could make it into something she actually wants.
And Eddie fucking—he admires that, so much, she’s the coolest person he knows, with or without her fucking egregious collection of various eighties pop band concert tees and her insistence that there’s a place for the Bangles on every playlist and her favorite Pop-Tarts aren’t any of the chocolate ones (brown sugar cinnamon is sort of in the ballpark, but she’s on thin fuckin’ ice, and she giggles whenever Eddie tells her so).
And, yeah, okay, so she broke up with that guy, but she’d still had someone, they’d had a—a physical relationship. She knows what she likes, what she wants, right? So what happens if Eddie can’t give that to her, or if he’s not ready to give it to her just yet? Chrissy’s kind and she’s patient and she doesn’t judge (with the exception of that cute little nose scrunch she does when he tells a bad joke but it still makes her laugh), but as far as Eddie’s gathered it took her so long to get what she wanted out of her life, so who’s to say she’d put it back on pause? Why would she wait around again, least of all for him?
He just. Can’t seem to wrap his head around that one.
So, yeah, Eddie knows he has a crush on her (understatement of the century, probably). He just doesn’t know what to do about it.
But the thing about the whole tight-knit liberal arts college experience? Yeah, this campus has a guy for everything.
Buckley’s there for your bimonthly existential crisis. The Harrington house throws the best parties. Nancy Wheeler’s got blackmail on everyone, and the Bingham sisters can hack your ex’s phone to wipe incriminating photos. If you want some decent weed at an indecent price, you go to Eddie. And if you want better weed—and really fucking good homemade edibles, brownies cookies gummies fuckin’ personalized chocolates—you go to Argyle.
You also go to Argyle for, uh. Witchy shit.
He’s pretty… boisterous about it, really, which Eddie always thought was pretty cool. No shame, you know? Sure, every now and then someone says something stupid to him, and Argyle has to bust out his Men Are Witches, Too shirt (all tie-dye and fabric markers and it gets the point across) for the next week, but, all in all Argyle’s got no qualms about showing up as himself.
He wears a big, sparkly resin triquetra (which Eddie cannot for the life of him pronounce any better than he can speak French) around his neck. He carries crystals in his pockets and, in his backpack, a stuffed-full leather binder covered with more stickers than Robin’s laptop that he calls his grimmie (fair, because Eddie, personally, trips over the pronunciation of grimoire, too—call it the residual speech impediment he had as a kid, okay, who fucking knows, words are hard).
Argyle grows his own sage—“Can’t be buying that mass-produced stuff, my man, it’s very uncool, cultural appropriation of our indigenous brothers and sisters and they’re seeing none of those profits”—and his apartment is practically a damn greenhouse, all the plants have names and purposes and the kitchen always smells like some bomb-ass herbs.
Eddie’s pretty sure the whole witch thing’s got something to do with how fucking good Argyle’s edibles are, too. The guy knows his way around a kitchen like nothing else. Like, aside from the stuff you might expect from a witch, he also always cooks frozen pizzas juuuuust right, his instant coffee somehow tastes better than that hipster mocha frappé cappuccino bullshit joint in town, and the ratio of his rum and Cokes is like… otherworldly on-point, every time. Truly some sell-your-soul-to-the-devil type shit (though, Eddie has to remind himself, Argyle is always telling people that witches don’t generally believe in the devil; Eddie just doesn’t know how else you could possibly literally never burn your toast).
Hell, he’s a year into his mad crush on Chrissy, and Eddie would sell his soul to the devil just to figure out how he’s supposed to hit on her. He decides to call that Plan B, though, and shoots Argyle a text.
eddie: witches know shit about love, right?
argyle: witches know shit about it all, my brother
argyle: the question isn’t what do we know, the question is what do you need?
eddie: okay yoda
argyle: righteous little dude
eddie: i NEED to be PUT OUT of my MISERY
argyle: ah, so clarity is what you seek
(Honestly, Eddie would ask if he’s high, but Argyle usually is; this is seriously just the way he talks.)
eddie: a good right-hook might do it, actually
argyle: my man i am a pacifist
eddie: what kind of friend are you
argyle: peace and love, peace and love
argyle: speaking of!
argyle: it would be the utmost honor and privilege to assist you in the most excellent wooing of miss chrissy cunningham
eddie: typing…
eddie: typing…
eddie: AM I THAT OBVIOUS
JESUS
argyle: brochacho, there is no shame in expressing your feelings to your lady love
eddie: i HAVEN’T expressed them that’s the whole POINT
argyle: clarity it is, my friend
your aura is, truly, no shade, but truly Unsettling
eddie: just
banish me to the spirit realm man i can’t fckin do this
argyle: swing by mi casa tomorrow, i know just the thing to help you ride this wave of totally dope and true love
argyle: much cooler than the spirit realm, guaranteed
eddie: typing…
eddie: FINE
WHATEVER
eddie: typing…
eddie: THANK YOU
argyle: >[1 ATTACHMENT: LINK: “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” - Natalie Cole]<
eddie: jesus christ