Chapter Text
Steve smells him first.
It happens entirely by chance. He’s at a house party full of crossfaded humans. The room is filled with the stench of sweat and liquor and smoke and other disgusting things that he has trained his sharp nose to tolerate over the years. He can still pick out Robin’s soft soothing scent, even though she’d disappeared from his side a while back. It trails into the kitchen where she's currently leaning up against the granite countertops and commiserating with a blushing Vickie about pep rallies and classical music or whatever other boring stuff band geeks talk about.
Underneath it all, underneath Robin’s clean lavender and the rest of the gross human smells, there is something remarkably other; impossibly, it’s both familiar and a total mystery. He knows it, but he also doesn’t, because it’s different than anything he’s ever smelled before—it’s deeper, rich like tilled earth and smoky like leather.
Steve follows the unmistakable scent of werewolf out of the room and onto the back patio, sniffing and stumbling along right up until he happens upon a guy sitting in a rusted deck chair.
He’s chain-smoking cigarettes in the dark. His hair brushes his shoulders in frizzy curls and his eyes are a brown so dark and deep they look black. He grins with a mouthful of teeth when he first catches sight of Steve, and the canines that flash are impressively sharp. More sharp than Steve’s, for sure, which should be an alarming thought, but somehow isn’t. He could easily tear into skin and flesh with those, Steve thinks.
Something new sparks to life in his middle.
“Knew I smelled another one,” the guy remarks casually, before kicking out another chair with a busted old sneaker and gesturing for Steve to take a seat right beside him.
Steve sits. “I didn’t know there were others like me here.”
The guy shrugs. “Course there are. This town’s full of wolves, you know.”
Steve does know. His parents are wolves, and so are the cubs and their parents, all drawn together by their shared cursed blood; and Chief Hopper, of course, and the Byers family, too.
Steve shrugs. “Yeah, but nobody our age, really. Besides Jonathan Byers, but he doesn’t really talk about this stuff very much.” And Nancy, he doesn’t say, because they already tried the whole wolf-courtship situation and look how that turned out.
The guy hums. “I get that. Not everyone like us can cope with it. I didn't, at first. Not for a while.”
Steve considers this for a moment before asking, “Were you turned or is it in your blood?”
“Not a very polite question to ask. You don’t even know me,” the guy muses, after a brief pause where he doesn’t look Steve in the eye at all.
It’s an act of deference, if Steve cared to read into it, but he’s not attacking the guy, and there’s no social order to adhere to. No alphas or betas. Most of that shit is made up by humans, anyway, the crazy intense real-wolf hierarchy and social habits established in those bullshit studies. Like, sure, pack leaders are a thing when it comes to werewolves, but Steve happens to be one and his pack doesn’t really respect him at all. Well, okay, they might respect him, but they certainly don't listen to him.
They mostly use Steve as a home, in the literal sense but also figuratively, too. Whenever they have no other place to go, they wind up at Steve’s place, settling in his den. And whenever they feel lost, they come to Steve for help. Especially when it comes to humans and interacting with them. It’s tricky, convoluted, and there are so many rules that are so easy to break. It’s not as easy as being with others like them.
Interacting with other wolves is more like a dance than anything else, Steve thinks; there’s a layer underneath it all, something that can’t be put into words. There’s reciprocity, a rhythm to it, and it all flows naturally. It was easy with Nancy: they didn’t have to speak, most of the time. They just looked at each other. Touched. Nuzzled. Danced.
Most werewolves mate for life.
It’s typical that Steve couldn’t have been one of them.
He’s right, anyway, this new wolf. Steve’s never spoken to him before. He doesn’t know him. The guy is vaguely familiar in the way that everyone in Hawkins is, because small towns are weird like that. They were probably in some classes together when Steve was still in school. Back when all he cared about was fitting in, sticking to the popular crowd, and wooing Nancy with antiquated courtship rituals.
Presently, Steve doesn’t even care that he doesn’t know this other wolf’s name. All he knows is that there’s another werewolf his age who he hadn’t noticed until now. He wants to know him. Wants to—he wants—
There’s this strange pull that Steve hasn’t felt before. Maybe not even with Nancy; maybe only when the full moon is out. It urges him to be reckless. To let himself go loose, to set himself free.
The smell of the guy gets more and more enticing with each passing minute. Steve wants to shove his face into his neck and inhale deeply. He wants to leave his own scent all over him, rub his hands on his face and shoulders and press their cheeks together because that’s the only way it could get better, he thinks; if his scent was mixed with Steve’s. He wants to tuck him into his nest, into the mess of pillows and sheets and stray t-shirts, make sure he’s fed and clean and warm, then perch watchfully beside him. He’s way too skinny, too sullen. Skittish. And there’s an undercurrent of solemnity and sadness in every word that comes out of his mouth.
He looks like he needs to be taken care of.
“I’m Steve,” he says, instead of doing any one of the things he wants to do. It's a start.
The guy rolls his dark eyes. “I know who you are, Harrington. Everyone in this town does, wolf or not.”
“Okay, so you know that I’m from an established wolf family and that it runs in my blood. You know my name, and who my parents are, and my grandparents, probably, but I don’t know anything about you. How is that fair?”
The guy looks at him for a moment that stretches into forever. Then he laughs. “Fair enough. Eddie.”
“Eddie?”
“Eddie Munson. That’s my name.” He ashes his cigarette. “And I was turned.”
Steve knows his name. He's heard it in the halls before, never really said in any kind of positive context. He knows Eddie’s reputation: knows that people think he’s a burnout, a weirdo, a freak. He sells weed and was held back twice already. He’s a wolf, too. And now Steve knows that he was turned.
He straightens in his chair. He’d never really met anyone who was turned before, besides Max, and the circumstances of her turning were already highly unusual and extremely traumatic.
Steve wants to know Eddie’s story.
“How old were you?”
“Twelve,” Eddie answers casually. He looks up at the night sky. “My dad wasn’t all that straight-laced. Got caught up in some bad shit with some bad people. One of them was a wolf, and, well, you know how it goes. He got turned. Then he came home and turned me. My mom woke up in the middle of the night to me screaming bloody murder with my dad’s teeth in my neck. There was blood everywhere. Dad got spooked and left. Never saw him again. Mom stayed with me but she was never really the same after that. Then again, neither was I.”
It should be a touchy subject but it looks like Eddie has accepted it for what it is. Still, Steve says, “I’m sorry.”
Being born with the blood already coursing through his veins was painful enough. Being turned when all your body knows is how to be human must be sheer torture. A hurt so new and raw it howls.
Eddie shrugs. “It is what it is. You know, believe it or not, I don’t hate this.”
“Still,” Steve says, leaning back in his chair. “It must've been hard. I know there’s not a lot of resources for this stuff. Everything I know about being a wolf came from my family.”
Eddie hums, a rumbling sound that pulses from his chest. “I guess. But it gets easier. You learn how to manage on your own. Or at least I did.”
“And what about your pack?” Steve asks, because, well—
Werewolves are social creatures. Humans may not be right about the specific dynamics, the leaders and the runts and pack structures, but they got the general idea right. The idea that wolves have a distinct need for life, to be surrounded by it, sustained by it. There is no point in running beneath the glow of a full moon without people you trust. People who understand what it's like.
“Don’t have one,” Eddie replies stiffly. “Don’t need one. I have my uncle. And my friends. Even though they’re human, they help with the whole socialization thing.”
He’s a lone wolf, Steve realizes.
That’s the smell that rolls off of Eddie Munson in irrepressible waves: it’s loneliness. A sadness cut so deep it sings out from his bloodstream. Smoky and real, impossibly and profoundly beautiful.
Lone wolves don’t survive for very long on their own. Nancy told him that after they'd ended their short-lived courtship, like she needed him to know any kind of isolation he might impose upon himself in the aftermath wouldn’t lead to anything good in the long run. Your cubs need you, she’d said, even though they weren’t really cubs anymore, and they certainly weren’t his, at least not at the time; and you need them.
She had knocked some sense into him, though. And of course she wound up being right. Steve and his cubs need each other in a way he hadn’t entirely understood two years ago, inherent in quality and written in his genetic code. They made him feel whole again during a time when he didn’t know it was possible. It’s worth a lot. It’s worth everything, to have a pack like that.
“I get it,” Steve winds up saying.
He does, in a way. Maybe it’s not the same, because he has one now, but he didn’t grow up with much of a pack. Distant parents who later became absent and all. And then when him and Nancy broke up, his parents were still gone and he was alone. He’d never felt more alone in his life. That heartbreak hurt worse than his first shift, when his bones split themselves in two in order to shape into his true form.
He feels—it’s not pity, but something deeper than that, something a little more pure, and it tells him to latch on tight to Eddie and not let go.
Before his brain can catch up with his mouth, he finds himself blurting, “You should come meet my pack, sometime.”
Eddie stares at him blankly for a moment. Then he raises a thin eyebrow. “No offense, Harrington, but I have zero desire to mingle with a bunch of preppy wolves just because I feel a little lonely during the full moon.”
Steve can’t help but laugh to himself because Eddie doesn’t know what his pack is actually like. He has no idea that it consists of a bunch of emotionally stunted and devastatingly nerdy thirteen-year-olds.
He stands up from the deck chair. Eddie’s eyes follow him. “I think they’ll surprise you, actually. Knowing them, they’ll probably love you. Just, well. If you’re ever looking for more, I work down at the Family Video. You know, in the strip mall next to the arcade? So come find me, sometime, maybe. And I can introduce you to the rest of my pack, if you’d like. If all this ever feels like… too much. If you ever feel like you don’t wanna do it by yourself anymore. I’ll be there.”
Eddie smiles, a bright little thing. Still sharp but pretty, too. Like little shards of shattered stained glass. “It’s a little bold of you to assume that I couldn’t find you just by following your scent.”
“Do I smell that bad?” Steve asks, suppressing a smile of his own, but there’s something small and sad twinging within his chest.
Steve wants to smell good for him. Wants to be good for him.
He hadn’t known Eddie even existed until tonight. How many times has he passed him in the halls of Hawkins High and been too trapped in his own head to recognize the scent of a lone wolf? Too wrapped up in his own bullshit, in his own heartbreak, to catch it? How many times had he mistaken it for Jonathan’s, or Nancy’s after Barb’s disappearance? Now that his head’s officially out of his ass, he can tell that it’s different. This sorrow is richer, like the low pitch of an old blues or folk song. Acoustic guitar and creaky piano keys.
“Nah, Harrington,” Eddie says, and he sucks on his cigarette before breathing everything back out into the night sky and Steve can almost taste the ash of it. His voice is a little raspy and there’s a hint of an accent, something syrupy in its southern quality. Steve wants to feel the vibration of his purrs and grumbles against his skin, in his mouth, everywhere. “You smell like early morning in Memphis. Right after the sun comes up, when the air is still sweet.”
🌘
Hawkins already happens to be a supernatural clusterfuck of a town, what with the gates ripping into the earth and leaking into what could very well be hell, and monsters just waiting to spring out from the other side and kill. So it kind of makes sense that werewolves have been congregating there. At least, that’s what Steve thinks.
The grand majority of them belong to established werewolf families. Steve himself comes from a long line of wolves who were all born and raised in Hawkins, just like him, and his parents have always emphasized the importance of their pack and maintaining the pure Harrington wolf bloodline or whatever other elitist bullshit they typically harp on before flying off to God-knows-where.
There are other wolves who are born into it, too, like the Hendersons and the Wheelers and the Sinclairs. It’s all they know and it’s all they’ll ever know and it’s nothing out of the ordinary. It’s just everyday life: they go to school or work, sit down at the dinner table every evening, shift beneath the full moon and exist in their true forms well into the night, then shift right back come morning time and continue to live their relatively normal lives.
And then there are wolves that have been turned.
Steve’s been told that they’re exceedingly rare because they never survive for that long, if they survive their initial turning at all. But Max Mayfield exists as living proof that turned wolves are just as strong as those who inherit the gene, and she’s one of Steve’s cubs, so he quickly decides that everything he’s been told about turned wolves isn't true, and that the majority of what his parents taught him probably wasn’t to be trusted; their lectures on maintaining bloodlines and enacting proper wolf dynamics and how to be the ideal pack leader.
What a load of bullshit.
Except, well. As it turns out, they might’ve had a point about mates.
🌘
After a summer chock-full of trauma bonding in a secret Russian base miles below Starcourt, Steve adopted another member into his pack, although said person does not happen to be a wolf in any capacity beyond honorary.
Robin is Steve’s human. She’s his best friend, his platonic soulmate; above all else, she’s his person. As the months wear on from July to November they get even closer, and he’s learned to trust her with his life ever since they’d been tortured together, so he kind of tells her everything, and she listens and never laughs, even though she might want to.
As a human she really isn’t supposed to know about the whole underground werewolf population situation in Hawkins, but seeing as she’s already aware of and involved in the other paranormal bullshit of gates and demo-creatures, and the majority of the people also involved in said bullshit happened to be wolves themselves, he figures she has a right to know.
She took all of the information in stride, of course, because she is supremely strange for a human. All she did was tell Steve not to bite her because she has a phobia of rabies. The implication that he might have rabies because he is a werewolf is deeply offensive for multiple reasons, but it’s Robin, so he lets it slide. He does, however, pretend to nip at her fingers whenever she lets them wander too close to his mouth.
Serves her right.
Anyway, now that she’s officially in the know, she loves to participate in all of the typical pack bonding activities. She leaves Steve her clothes so that he can add them to his messy nest. She’ll rub her hands all over Steve and the cubs, who lean into the contact despite their protests because touch is important and she’s a pack member now, wolf or not. Her scent, despite its glaringly human quality, is ridiculously comforting. Lavender and eucalyptus atop a perpetual layer of anxiety. Mint, too, simultaneously sharp and calming.
She also has no reservations when it comes to offering insight, even though the whole wolf thing might not be something she’s necessarily well-versed in. She’s learning, is the bottom line. And she offers a point of view that is both different and valuable.
So he tells her about his whole encounter with Eddie not too long after the party. Eddie Munson, the lone wolf with the sad smell and no pack to return home to. She goes all quiet and contemplative while they’re sorting through their returns, ruminating on this.
“Sounds like you’d be good for each other,” is what she eventually settles on telling him, and Steve fumbles the stack of rom-coms he’d had in hand. They fall down to the Family Video floor in a compromising little heap.
Robin whips around to look at him. Her eyes flick down to the pile of tapes and then back up to him and she squints suspiciously. “What’s that about?”
“Huh? What? Nothing,” Steve says, deeply unconvincing as he sinks down to hastily pick the tapes up and organize them correctly on their respective shelves.
Her gaze drills into the side of his face. “You’re being weird, and I can’t tell if it’s wolf-weird or you-weird. Sometimes they’re the same which makes this whole thing a lot more difficult, you know.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Do you not want Eddie to join your little wolf pack? You shouldn’t have invited him, then.”
Steve gnashes his teeth together. “I didn’t say that.”
“So you do?”
“I didn’t say that, either.”
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Robin continues on cluelessly. “Don’t you need more adult wolves in your pack? It’s hard enough being a single teen dad of seven wolf puppies.”
“First of all, I’m not their dad,” Steve protests weakly. “Second, you can be in more than one pack at once, you know? Some of them have their own family packs and stuff, they’re just also in my little pack because they want to be as close to Max as possible. And El, too, although I guess now she’s officially a part of the blended Byers-Hopper pack. But then there’s Nancy and Jonathan kind of doing their own thing, and then the Wheelers and the Sinclairs run together sometimes, and Dustin’s family is a whole separate story ‘cause he’s got, like, a million cousins—“
“So confusing,” Robin groans. “Why can’t you guys just join together and form one huge mega-pack? You all know about the Upside-Down, it’s not like you’d be hiding anything from each other, really.”
Steve shrugs. “That’s just not how it works. It’d be too hard to manage and a lot of people would have to give up the pack leader title, which is hard. I don’t think I would want to. I like leading a pack. Even if everyone in it happens to be a child. It feels like—“
He stops himself short.
“Like?” Robin prods, her voice gone all soft around the edges.
He swallows. “Like I have a real family,” he answers. And it’s true. It doesn't exactly feel like he's their dad, and he's not sure if that's what he would want, anyway. If anything, he feels like an older brother. Robin’s like an aunt or a cousin or something. They have each other, is the point. Him and the cubs. And they always will. They can trust each other, rely on each other. It feels good in a way he can’t possibly describe. It feels right.
He’s finished putting the romcoms away and now he just stares at the VHS cases, all pink and purple and bright in the hopeless overwhelming beiges of the place.
“Steve,” Robin says helplessly.
He shakes it off in an instant and turns to her with a sharp smile on his face. “Let’s put away the horror movies, okay?” he says. Which basically means: this conversation is over. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.
She sighs, but still rubs her hands all over his face and neck later, right before she clocks out for the night. Her palms leave little traces of lavender and eucalyptus and mint all over his skin, all comfort and warmth, like a cup of tea right before bedtime.
🌘
Kind of like how human families have two parents, wolf packs typically have two leaders. Steve doesn’t really understand the science of it—he’s never been the best at paying attention in class, and even if he was, it’s not like the topic of werewolf social behaviors has ever been taught in a human classroom setting.
For the most part, normal humans don’t know they exist. Most wolves just go about their days like anyone else, shift on the full moon and fuck around in the woods a little bit, shift back and continue on as normal. They hang around with their packs, socialize, and ignore the scents of other wolves out in the wild, as is expected of them. They don’t bring attention to themselves. And they listen to their two pack leaders day in and day out. It’s just what wolves do.
Except Steve is the one and only leader of his tiny ragtag pack of cubs. His parents have expressed multiple times that this is not normal, that he should have a mate to help him in managing his pack because it’s improper and unseemly otherwise. They don’t even bother to disguise the disdain in their voices about it. But what the fuck do they know? They’re the ones who left him alone and forced him to go off and form his own pack in the first place. His childhood as a wolf was already unconventional enough. Why shouldn’t he have an unconventional pack, too?
He had decided sometime during the spring that he didn’t need another pack leader to help him out. Not since his parents left him and certainly not since he and Nancy broke up. He can absolutely do this on his own. He can be there for the cubs all by himself, coach them on how to be proper wolves and how to deal with the shift, protect them from humans and other territorial wolves alike and make sure that they’ll grow up feeling like they were brought up right from the start. Most importantly, he wants to make sure they never feel alone. Not like he had.
It would be nice to have someone else, though, the small irrational part of his wolf brain whispers, his hindbrain, the part of him that runs on pure instinct.
It would be nice to have a mate that actually lasts. It doesn’t even have to be a mate, just someone that he trusts. This would’ve been Robin, had she been like them from the get-go. Unfortunately, she’s still human. She has never alluded to wanting to become a werewolf; and even if she did, Steve doesn’t think he could ever turn her, or allow her to be turned. He doesn’t have it in him.
It would be nice to have another older wolf around to help guide and protect the group of six to seven shitheads he’s taken under his wing. The very same that only get more rowdy and unruly with each passing year. They respect Steve but they don't always listen. They come to him for comfort, mostly, for advice on how to talk to girls and what clothes to wear and how to style their hair. He can offer them that. But there are some things he cannot give them, some pieces of perspective that he isn’t able to provide.
He doesn’t know how to talk to Dustin about D&D and Tolkien and Dustin’s scent will go all sour and sad when he tries and Steve just sits there blinking stupidly at him, entirely lost. He doesn’t know how to break through the carefully constructed walls that Mike has put up, his aversion to touch that wolves need in order to function, or his discomfort with affection as a whole. He doesn’t know how to relate to Max when she’s feeling down and angry and scared, because he wasn’t turned. He doesn’t share that traumatic experience with her, so there’s little he can say that she won’t scoff at, or that won’t push her to shut down entirely and ignore any attempts at comfort he attempts to give.
He’s trying his best. But maybe his parents were onto something when they offered him unwarranted advice after years of avoiding being his pack leaders and generally being the world’s biggest hypocrites.
Maybe his stupid wolf hindbrain is right, too.
He’d looked at Eddie that night and saw a shining beacon of possibility. Something that could bridge the gap and fill the cracks of the pack where things have been falling through. He doesn’t know the guy, not at all, but he can smell him, his sadness and his longing; he can look into his black eyes and see goodness all soaked up in his insides, just waiting to be let out. Waiting for someone to see it and recognize it and pull it out of him gently, like an old splinter from a sore and aching wound.
🌘
A few days later Steve is behind the counter when Eddie walks into Family Video. Again, Steve smells him before he sees him, and can now recognize his scent, the unmistakably heady combination of leather and smoke from firewood and cigarettes. Something under that, too: a little bit of weed and a cheap deodorant, maybe. Sweat and laundry detergent. Lavender, not too dissimilar to Robin’s but fainter.
Steve has to force himself to stop scenting the air like a creep and greet Eddie like a normal human being, even though he isn’t one. Neither of them are. They could abandon the whole song and dance of being respectable humans in polite society and that would probably be okay. He won’t, though. He’s a little too nervous for that.
“Hi,” Steve says, kind of breathless.
“Hey,” Eddie replies, walking up to the counter cautiously. He looks like he’s ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. He stops just in front of it and places his hands flat on the surface. “So, uh, I’ve been thinking. You know, ever since our talk the other night.”
“Yes?”
“And you’re right,” Eddie says begrudgingly, eyes skating all over but never really meeting Steve’s for longer than a second at a time.
Steve blinks. “About..?”
“You know,” Eddie says. “Pack and all. That I need to be around more wolves. It’s just—when you’re turned like I was, nobody tells you shit, right? So I’m twelve and suddenly I turn into a fucking dog on the full moon and there’s this huge hole in my chest when I’m not an actual literal wolf, and it can be filled by people like my uncle and my friends, but never all the way, and never enough to last. I just always feel—” he huffs, frustrated. “I always feel like I’m running on empty, you know? Looking for people that aren’t there. People who know what I’m going through. So I’d like to, I don’t know, have that. Maybe. If you’re still willing to share your pack with me, even if they are all preps and jocks or whatever.”
Steve stares at him.
Eddie wilts. “Or not. That’s fine too. It’s your pack, and I really shouldn’t—I don’t want to step on your toes or anything. You probably don’t need a damaged lone wolf freak anyway, so I’ll just—“ he gestures towards the door. “I’ll see myself out.”
Steve reaches out to grasp his wrist before the guy can do anything stupid like run away with his tail between his legs. They both jolt, the touch all static, but kind of in a good way? Neither one of them pulls away so it has to be nice. Feels like being charged up. All electric.
“Swing by my place,” Steve says simply. “You can meet them then.”
Eddie gapes at him. “Yeah, sure, I can do that. Uh—when?”
“Whenever I’m not working.”
“…Okay, so when is that?”
“Wednesday through Sunday. I work the closing shifts so I’ll be home in the morning. And I always have at least one or two members of my pack at my place, so you’ll be able to meet some of them, at the very least. Your best bet would be Saturday or Sunday before noon. You’ll probably be able to meet all of them then. The fuckers love to sleep over on the weekend and eat all of my food.”
“Okay,” Eddie says, his expression settling.
He meets Steve’s eyes with his own. Steve likes his eyes. They’re really round and they scrunch up when he smiles. His smile is nice, too. His canines poke out from between his lips constantly, especially when he smiles. Flashing them like that would be considered rude by snooty wolves like Steve’s parents, but Steve’s not like them, and he runs a pack full of obnoxious high school freshmen that yip and bite and flash their teeth all the goddamn time, just for kicks. So he kind of likes it, and is comforted by the layer of awkward charm under Eddie’s poorly constructed facade of cool indifference.
“Saturday or Sunday before noon. Gotcha. Uh, cool,” Eddie says.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “See you then?”
“Yeah,” he echoes, and then he backs up to the door.
Steve raises a brow. “Did you want to rent a movie?” he calls.
Eddie snorts. “No way, man, I’ve got, like, five dollars in late fees I’ve gotta clear.”
He rolls his eyes. “Bring back my movies, Eddie.”
“You’ll never see them again, Harrington,” Eddie threatens, grinning again before taking his leave.
Robin chooses that moment to materialize out of nowhere and scares the ever-loving shit out of Steve. This never happens, because his hearing is ridiculously good and he should’ve heard her coming from a mile away. Her brows shoot up when he jumps but she ultimately decides not to address it, which is definitely for the best.
“So what was that about?” she asks, poking Steve in the ribs.
“Huh?”
“Eddie’s coming to your house this weekend?” she prompts, expression imploring.
Steve looks away. “I don’t know, maybe. He said he was interested and all. In meeting the pack and stuff.”
“Oh, nice. That’s good, right?” she asks.
Steve nods. “Yeah, I think so?” He settles. “I think so.”
He waits until Robin’s distracted helping a customer. Then he looks up Eddie’s name in the database and clears the late fees. He still has a movie checked out but it’s the animated The Hobbit movie so Steve figures nobody else is really gonna care, besides his own seven twerps. And if they give him any grief about it he has no qualms about scruffing them silent.
🌘
Eddie rings the doorbell that Saturday at around 10 AM, which is absolutely acceptable and is certainly within the agreed-upon time-frame that Steve had given him.
He still jumps in surprise at the sound of it. Erica eyes him warily. There’s something knowing in her gaze, like she can see right through him. Steve pointedly ignores it and gets up to stand in front of the couch, where all of the cubs are sprawled in a messy pile of gangly limbs. They still do these little puppy piles even though their parents say that they're maybe a little too old for it. Steve doesn't mind it. He finds all the cuddling and snuggling very adorable, although he can never say so.
“Okay,” he says, setting his hands on his hips. “Just remember what I told you guys, okay?”
“Don’t scare him off,” Lucas repeats.
“Be polite,” Will adds.
“Don’t overload him with questions,” Dustin says begrudgingly.
“And don’t ask anything that’s too personal,” Erica recites, even though she looks ready to ask a wide variety of extremely personal questions just to get on Steve’s nerves.
Steve sighs. “Be normal, please?”
“Normal?” Max scoffs.
“No,” Mike snarks at the same time.
“I will try,” Eleven says, and at least she sounds sincere about it. If anything, El will try. That’s one out of seven and it’s got to count for something, right?
Steve runs a hand through his hair, sighs, and goes to answer the door.
Eddie’s standing on the stoop, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his leather jacket. He looks the same; same messy long hair, same black band t-shirt and ripped jeans. He smells the same, too, and Steve just feels his shoulders relaxing in some incomprehensible combination of relief and excitement at the realization. He’s all smoke and ash, warm and autumnal. It’s comforting, how consistent his scent is.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi,” Eddie says back, lips quirking upward. He shuffles back and forth on his feet nervously. “I’m not too early, am I? Or too late? There aren’t any cars in the driveway so I thought—”
“I actually pick everyone up. And I drop them off, too. None of my pack members can drive,” Steve cuts in, and Eddie blinks.
“Oh. Okay. So they’re here already?”
“Yeah. All very excited to meet you, by the way.”
Eddie rubs his palms on his jeans. “Cool, cool. That’s not nerve-wracking at all.”
Steve steps aside, ushers him in and he toes off his Reeboks right at the front, and they settle right into the pile of the cubs’ shoes like they belong there.
“It’s not,” Steve reassures, grabbing ahold of Eddie’s shoulders from behind and steering him further into the house, through the foyer and hallway and into the living room. All the while, he rambles, “I promise they're not scary. Well, most of them. El is different—in a good way, of course—and Erica is a force to be reckoned with, and don’t even get me started on the many issues of Mike Wheeler—”
“Your pack is a bunch of cubs,” Eddie says blankly, as they come upon the couch to find the cubs in the exact position Steve left them in.
Dustin puffs up all self-righteously. “Uh, excuse me, we’re not cubs anymore, thank you.”
Eddie laughs in his face. “You’re like, what, twelve? You’re a fucking puppy. Jesus. You’re Steve Harrington’s pack?” They all nod, damn-near synchronized, and he laughs again. “What the hell are you all doing following him around?”
“He’s been our pack leader for, like, three years,” Dustin says. “And I just turned fourteen, asshole. Not a puppy.”
“We all follow Steve around against my better judgment,” Mike says over Dustin’s complaining. “I still think our pack leader should be Nancy.”
“Do you see Nancy around anywhere, dipshit?” Max says, smacking him upside the head. He growls, a soft little thing that he’s still learning to perfect, and smacks Max back. Before they can get into it Steve hums a warning and they both go limp and pouty but compliant.
Eddie’s brows raise. “Impressive. You’ve got them well-trained.”
Lucas shrugs. “We all just listen to Steve. Even though some of us refuse to admit to it.”
Mike scowls even harder.
“Anyway,” Steve says loudly, trying to diffuse the disaster of whatever the hell that was. “As you all can tell, Eddie’s a fellow wolf. And he wants to spend some time with us, okay? Get to know us all a little bit better. So everyone be nice. Maybe introduce yourselves.”
“I’m Erica. Are you a lone wolf?” Erica asks bluntly, coming right out of the gate swinging in her patented no-nonsense tone, which, Jesus Christ. Subtlety is a virtue, Sinclair.
Eddie doesn’t seem all that put out by it, shockingly. “Hi, Erica. I’m Eddie. And, well, yeah, I guess I am. More or less,” he answers, all nonchalantly, too, like it’s not considered almost taboo to be alone as a werewolf. Like it can’t hurt him as much as it might.
“Well, you shouldn’t be. It's not healthy. Are you gonna become our second pack leader?” Dustin asks as a follow-up; Erica nods in consideration. “Like we’ll finally have two parents?”
“What the hell, Dustin, what did I say earlier about all of the questions?” Steve sputters, his face feeling hot.
“You said not to overload him or ask anything too personal,” Erica points out. “That was a perfectly reasonable question to ask about the future of our pack.”
Eddie clears his throat. “I mean, I’d like to have a pack theoretically. Hypothetically. But I’m not about to step on Steve’s toes here. He clearly has it under control, and I’m not as well-versed in the whole… being-a-wolf schtick.”
Max’s eyebrows raise in surprise. “Were you turned?”
“Not polite to ask people that,” Steve reminds her, and Eddie just smirks.
“Think that makes you a bit of a hypocrite then, Harrington. Didn’t you ask me the same question the other night?”
“The other night,” half the cubs echo, all smug and knowing, the little assholes.
Steve flushes even further and vows to kick all their asses later when Eddie’s not around. Eddie just turns back to Max and continues, “Yeah, I was turned when I was twelve. What about you, Red?”
His eyes shine with a kind of perception that tells Steve he knows damn well that Max was turned, and Steve momentarily marvels at it, at how he can even tell in the first place, but also at how he can talk about it so casually even though Steve knows it was definitely traumatic for him. For the both of them.
“My name is Max. And me too. I was turned,” she shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, even though it is. “Just this past year.”
Eddie hums in sympathy. “It’s different for us, I think, since our bodies haven’t been preparing us for this our whole lives. My first full moon after I was turned was fucking rough. Let me know if you need anything, okay? Or if you just wanna talk about it.”
She squints, even though Steve can see she’s clearly warming up to him. So are the other cubs. “Fine, I guess.”
“Cool,” Eddie says. He rocks back on his feet. “Alright. So what do you guys usually do on a morning like this before Stevie here goes to work?”
They end up roping him into a tournament of Uno followed by Monopoly, of course. There’s a lot of ribbing, growling, and glares thrown this way and that, and Eddie takes it all in stride. In fact, he sinks easily into his spot at the head of the Harrington’s dining room table, on the opposite end of Steve, grinning maniacally and he slowly dominates the Monopoly board or continuously slings draw-fours Mike’s way. He joins in on their yelled arguments easily and even rumbles a low warning when Dustin gets a little too shrill and accusatory with Will. He immediately looks to Steve, either apologetic for stepping on his toes or searching for permission to continue to do so. Steve doesn’t really know.
He just smiles in response, flashing his own canines before hiding his teeth behind his deck of cards, and Eddie’s face kind of lights up. He glances away again. A small wobbly smile takes up his face.
It’s cute. He’s cute.
Max is the only one who sees any of this, of course, dragging her suspicious gaze between the two of them back and forth. She hasn’t stopped squinting all morning, like she’s trying to put together some kind of conclusion with information that’s just out of her reach.
Steve pretends not to notice. And he doesn’t say anything when he leaves for work later and Eddie opts to walk him out to their cars, even though he can feel all of the cubs’ unabashed stares from where they’re sitting stacked at the window, peering out at the two of them like their parting interaction is the most interesting thing in the world.
He’s raising a bunch of busybodies, apparently, but it’s nothing he didn’t already know.
“Hey,” he calls, standing next to his BMW, just as Eddie gets into his van. Eddie turns, tilts his head. “Thanks for coming. It was fun.”
Eddie’s eyes go wide. Then he laughs and shakes his head. “You’re something else, Harrington, you know that?” he asks. Before Steve can ask what he means, he’s saying, “Thanks for inviting me. I had a nice time. With you and your pack.”
“So… You should come back, then, right? I mean, it only makes sense. Since you had such a nice time and all,” Steve hedges.
Eddie’s smile spreads bright and beautiful like wildfire. “Yeah, Steve. I guess I’ll just have to come back.”
🌘
“So, Eddie, huh?” Max asks later, after Steve gets home from work and flops down next to her on the couch. She says it with a knowing tone that Steve immediately does not like.
He huffs, glancing at her. “Yeah. He was lonely. That’s all.”
“Sure, yeah,” Max says. Her eyes are still trained on the TV where Family Ties reruns are playing at a low volume. “And it has nothing to do with the fact that he happens to have been turned, same as me, and that you’ve also been looking for a mate since probably around this time last year.”
Steve sputters incoherently for longer than he’d like to admit. “No, it has nothing to do with either of those things, Max. It just—it just happened. We’re helping each other out, alright? He needs a pack and I need some help wrangling you little assholes. Two birds, one stone or whatever.”
“Sure,” Max repeats. She still hasn’t looked away from the TV. “Okay. Well, it’s important to me that you know that he was staring at you all day.”
“What?” Steve asks, suddenly feeling off-kilter. His face is feeling very hot all over again, which is so unlike him. Today’s just been so weird—when did he get this ridiculously uncool, he wonders, blushing about a guy who may or may not have been looking at him a little bit? “He—he was? Wait, no, he absolutely was not. He was just looking at all of us individually, for equal amounts of time.”
Max stares at him blankly. “What, so you’re just gonna ignore the fact that he’s clearly into you? Even though you basically propositioned him into playing house with you and raising a pack of cubs?”
“I didn’t—I didn’t proposition him into doing anything, Mayfield, the hell?” Steve says, and his voice is way too loud and high to be at all convincing. “You don’t even know what that word means. I just asked if maybe he’d like to meet my pack and he agreed. Okay?”
“Okay,” Max says, settling back into the couch. “I don’t do well with change, though, so I’d like to know if he’s gonna be sticking around, alright? So that I can adjust accordingly.”
“I highly doubt it,” Steve mutters, mostly to himself in a burst of insecurity and preemptive defensiveness. He hunkers down even further into his flimsy temporary nest of blankets and pillows and sighs. “He was probably spooked away by you little shits and all of your creepy invasive questions. He’ll probably never come back, much less stick around.”
🌘
Eddie Munson, against all odds, sticks around.
He loves the cubs. They learn to adore him. And he’s good with them, is the thing. It’s not like he’s putting up with them because he has to. It seems like he genuinely enjoys being around them, hanging out with them, talking to them or even just existing in the same room as them.
He ruffles their hair and pats their backs and play-fights with each of them regularly. They wrestle on Steve’s living room floor and he only gives in when they all band together to puppy-pile him. He talks about all things nerdy with the boys, especially D&D and Tolkien. He shows all of them music that Steve likes to say is rotting their brains, hard rock and metal that’s heavy on the guitars and the drums and the screaming. El is shockingly very into the whole metal music scene, and Eddie lets her borrow all of his cassettes while teaching her how to headbang properly without getting a crick in her neck. Steve thinks that maybe she’s secretly his favorite; they both share the same haunted look and sad scent. El’s never really goes away, no matter how much pack she surrounds herself with.
Eddie’s doesn’t either, although it does do something arguably more impressive.
It changes.
It’s not too different from the way it was before, but it’s also slightly to the left, like he made a detour down a sunny road. The smokiness is like a bonfire, now. The earthiness feels a bit like potting soil, fertile dirt that makes things grow.
Steve can't help but inhale deeply whenever he catches Eddie's scent lingering in the hall or the living room. It happens more and more frequently as the days wear on, too, because Eddie is slowly becoming a permanent fixture in Steve's home. He burrows himself into the couch during movie night, pesters Steve in the kitchen while he's trying to cook, joins the kids at the dining room table while they do homework.
He talks to Max privately, out in the back by the pool. She sits tucked on a deck chair and asks him quiet questions about his turning, about humanity and being a werewolf and how to reconcile the two. Steve doesn't listen in but he watches through the window, sometimes. Watches as Eddie answers easily, talks for a while, and gradually gets Max to relax. Eases her anxieties a bit. Lets her know she’s not alone. And she’s always so much happier afterward, brimming with a liveliness he hasn’t seen from her since before the summer.
Eddie gets closer to all of the cubs.
He gets closer to Steve, too, in the days that follow.
But that’s irrelevant, no matter what his pack has to say about it, the little dickheads. Especially Max, who has made it her personal mission to nose her way into Steve’s business and nonexistent love life at all times.
It doesn’t matter that Eddie keeps wordlessly presenting Steve with little shiny things, nickel-plated jewelry and bottle caps and cute tiny buttons. It doesn’t mean anything when he nips at Steve’s cheek and lingers, or when he wraps an arm around his shoulder and back, or when he forces Steve off of his feet and onto the couch to catnap when he’s feeling particularly worn-thin, weary, and migraine-prone.
It’s normal wolf behavior when Eddie begins to lean in and rub his hands and neck and face all over Steve’s arms and shoulders, like he’s trying to leave his scent on his skin for as long as possible; like he wants every other wolf in town to know that he’s Steve’s, now, and Steve is his. That they belong to each other in more ways than one. In all of the ways that matter, really.
He probably doesn’t see Steve like that. Wolves are supposed to mate for life, after all, and Steve’s track record is pretty shit right now, oh-for-one. He doesn't want to get his hopes up just for it to all come crashing back down again.
In all likelihood, Eddie is probably just looking for another wolf companion. Someone to relate to as a friend and nothing more. Steve will absolutely settle for that, for platonic partnership, even if his gut lurches with butterflies and his heart races anytime he even catches sight of the other wolf. Even if he still feels that horrible aching all-consuming longing anytime Eddie’s in his vicinity. The same one that compels him to stop and stare and linger and yearn.
Like he said, and like he will continue to say: it probably doesn’t mean anything.