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It’s only been May for two and a half days, but the sky has been cloudless enough to leave the bridge of Eddie’s nose burnt bright red. He’s been able to move his own arms for about a month give or take, but it’s not without issue. It’s been nearly four weeks since he was allowed out of the hospital and in that time he’s had maybe a handful of minutes to himself.
Every part of his body tingles with pain even with the wounds healed over and the bandages removed. The doctors at the facility said something about nerve damage, which makes sense. What more could possibly go wrong? He can’t even hold his own cigarette’s properly without random muscle spasms causing him to launch his darts across the room. Every sip of water is a gamble of whether his fingers will bend properly or keep their hold on the glass.
It’s kind of ridiculous, Eddie thinks, that his hands have become so sensitive. The worst bites were on his torso and legs. He’s got fancy arm crutches that give him blisters on his palms but help him get around without his leg muscles giving out. Physical exertion is even harder now. His lungs were shit before everything got sent to hell, what with the years of smoking, but now his core muscles have been torn through. There are chunks of his abdomen sitting in a hell dimension somewhere and now he can’t walk up two steps without having to sit down and focus on not keeling over.
His hands, however, are a special case.
Eddie’s memories of his not-final-final moments are extremely blurry. Mostly he remembers the pain, the wet blood on his neck and chin, and the sound of Dustin sobbing above him. If he really squints, he can remember the feeling of Steve breaking his ribs doing chest compressions and the flash of headlights in bursts behind his eyelids as he drifted in and out of consciousness in the back of a government SUV. How they explained it to him was that at some point, he’d either fall on something extremely sharp or been chewed through in just the perfect spots, arm-wise, to fuck his whole life up forever. Or at least for the long-term future. It might as well be forever, though.
Gareth comes over with Jeff, and Jeremy’s been over on his own once. It helps. It also makes him feel guilty. What’s a lead guitarist when he can’t even manipulate his fingers properly to hold a pick? What does he do when even the lightest touches to his guitar strings send stringing pain up to his elbow? What use is he to his friends when he can’t hold a pencil to write songs?
Steve takes him to physiotherapy twice a week in his Beemer, but he never sits up front with him. He and Max pile into the back together, both silent and mad at the world, feeling united in their similar yet dissimilar aches and pains. Max tells him one night, as they sit at the picnic table a ways away from their trailers, that sometimes when she wiggles her toes it feels like her legs are breaking all over again. Eddie’s pain lives in the areas where his nerves were torn apart, but Max’s aches throughout her bones.
Her eyes are clear and blue. Her hair has a single streak of white right near the crown that she’s had him dye back to her natural colour for her. The thick frame glasses help her make out more than just light and shadow, but she says it still makes everything look like it’s coming at her through a frost glass window. She opts to forgo the glasses more often than not. He doesn’t blame her.
There’s no way he’d be able to notice any differences from the physiotherapy yet. This is something he tells himself regularly. The voice in his head that reminds him that progress is a good kind of slow sounds suspiciously like Steve. They’ve made a habit of wandering into the woods together after dropping Max off from physio. Technically, Eddie shouldn’t be exerting himself by bushwacking, but the frustration that bubbles up in a physio session is too intense to ignore. It’s either walk into the forest or go do something stupid alone in his trailer. Steve makes a habit of coming along. Every time he follows Eddie he makes a point of declaring that he’s not babysitting he just wants to hang out.
Eddie doesn’t entirely believe him, but he does trust him enough not to make him turn back. the first time, they walked for all of two minutes, before Eddie collapsed, just barely caught in Steve’s arms. He’d screamed out of frustration, trying to thrash in Steve’s grasp, feeling childish but unable to think anything past the rage and grief that has been steadily building since spring break. Steve held him until the stars came out and Eddie’s shouts had petered off into sobs.
It was a little embarrassing.
Now he sits alone, back against the bark of a tree, listening to the sounds of the night. He doesn’t have any clue what time it is, but he’d left the trailer just before 11. The sky is dark, and the air is hot. The humidity has made his hair three times bigger. El had been over visiting Max when he’d wandered over to bring the banana bread Wayne had just baked. With the help of El’s untainted fingers, Eddie had left Max’s house with one long French braid trailing down his back.
There’s a pack of cigarettes semi-crumpled on the ground beside an open box of camping matches. They’re harder for him to snap when he randomly convulses. He’s gone through six by the time the cherry burns candy red and he sucks in his first lungful of smoke. It doesn’t feel as satisfying as he hoped it would.
Before sunset, he’d been quiet enough to catch sight of a fawn and its mother. They hadn’t seen him till his leg had twitched and rustled the grass. Up until that point, he got a good few moments to watch them as they chawed on weeds and small purple wildflowers. The fawn was small enough to still have its spots. When the mom noticed him she froze, staring him down so intensely that he felt like he was about to be charged. Instead, she nudged her baby and bolted, letting the small thing hobble after her on gangly legs.
Eddie’s dad phoned the house earlier that afternoon. It wasn’t a physio day. Max was with El, Steve was working with Robin, and the kids were busy. Wayne answered the phone pleasantly enough. The shouting started soon after. How are you two doing? Yeah, I heard about the earthquake. I wanted to check on my brother to see if he was doing alright, give a guy a rest. Is my kid still living there, Wayne? Can you put him on for me?
He heard all about Eddie’s “escapades” from the newspaper. As it turns out, the call wasn’t a check-up in the sense that he intended to pretend it was. He was phoning to see if the phones were still hooked up. Lord knows if he’d spent all that time in the hospital he’d be out on the streets with a medical bill longer than his list of known felonies. Say, how’d you pay for it anyways, kid? Got anything left over? I’m having some trouble in the city, and I just need a couple hundred–
Eddie’s hand cramps painfully around the cigarette so he clenches it between his teeth, smoking as he breathes while his hands hang loosely down in the cool dirt. Even in his muscle shirt and shorts, he’s sweating bullets. The braid helps, but there's a large chunk of curly hair to the left of his face that has stubbornly broken free of its confines and it’s now sticking to the sweat on his neck. The sweat makes his cheeks itch right under his eyes, but he’s worried to get his hand anywhere near there lest he stab himself in the eye with one ill-timed convulsion.
It hurts a little less to curl his fingers into fists, letting the convulsions press his blunt fingernails into the meat of his palms. His wrists twine slightly with each movement, but he’s just bored. He’d considered bringing a book out to keep himself busy, but it wouldn’t have done much good seeing as it’s pitch black out here anyways. The cigarette burns down to the filter between his lips and he spits it out onto the ground beside him. There’s a crack from somewhere in the woods near him. He distantly wonders if he should be more scared since learning that monsters are real, but he’s too tired to care.
It turns out, it’s remarkably hard to fall asleep when someone’s in perpetual pain. If it isn’t his torso it’s his legs or his hands or his neck or–
By the time Steve appears out of the brush with a flashlight in hand and a worried expression on his face, there are seven more busted matchsticks on the ground around Eddie. He sits in his own little fairy circle of broken sticks and one single cigarette butt. Steve steps over with his little flashlight like he’s approaching a wounded animal, all cooed words and raised hands. Eddie rolls his eyes and raises an eyebrow.
It’s nearly midnight, He informs Eddie. People have been trying to find him for hours. Why didn’t he bring his walkie? Why didn’t he tell anyone where he was going?
Instead of responding, Eddie bends his knees to his chest and thunks his head back against the tree trunk to stare up at the stars. It takes a minute or two for Steve to realize he isn’t getting any response. It takes another minute for Steve to actually plop himself down next to Eddie, back resting on the tree.
“What are we looking at?” Steve asks softly, but he’s not aiming for consoling anymore. The gentle tone his voice carries is just a Steve thing. He hates silence, but he can’t seem to break it. Eddie just shrugs, wishing he could give a better answer. At the nonanswer, Steve reaches down to pick up one of the longer bits of broken matches, inspecting the head before lighting it against the bark of the tree between their heads. “C’mere”
As gentle as his voice, one of Steve’s hands comes up to turn Eddie’s face toward him. The cigarette is still held between his teeth, the filter crushed and wet with saliva. Steve plucks that cigarette out of his mouth and pinches his jaw open till he can deposit a fresh one. Just before the fire runs down the match far enough to get his fingers, the cigarette lights. He smiles. He tucks the chunk of loose hair behind Eddie’s hair. He leans back against the tree and looks back up at the sky.
“All the stars are out,” Steve breathes, “It’s beautiful,”
Eddie continues watching Steve. He breathes in his cigarette smoke and exhales as is natural. Instead of turning back to the sky, Eddie leans his temple against Steve’s shoulder, bringing one twitching hand to rest on Steve’s leg.
“Yeah,” He breathes, voice wisping out alongside the smoke, “beautiful.”