Work Text:
There’s a demon in Hawkins.
At least, that’s what all the adults whisper about over immaculately set tables and potlucks and sun-dappled mailboxes.
Looking at the young man darkening the open back door of the church (propped open to let in any slip of breeze, and in the process letting in the filth, his Mother hisses to his Father), Steve doesn’t see it.
How does someone look at another and know?
Steve’s looking at him closer now, more shadow and bright light than boy. Metal winks all over him like a glittering midnight sky when he moves, and when his eyes find Steve’s, the darkness of them burns.
Steve jerks his eyes back to the pulpit, swallowing thick as his heart beats against his sternum in something one step to the right of fear.
When he looks out of the corner of his eyes, the exit is empty.
He doesn’t hear a word of the sermon after that. Maybe hadn’t heard any of it the moment he sat down.
Maybe that’s what his Mother meant, about demons and the handsome young men who house them, leading the weak-willed from holy light.
“—right trouble,” Mrs. Mitchell says. “He’s just not right.”
“His poor uncle,” Mrs. Roberts agrees. “Can’t decide if he’s a saint for taking that thing in, or wicked himself for letting it back into town.”
Steve tunes back into the conversation, bored and tired and hot in the stuffy church. Looks longingly out the window where some of the other boys are out throwing around a football, having shed their nice church jackets and unbuttoning their collars. But Mother has her arm twined with his, keeping him close and respectable.
“He was the sweetest little boy,” Mother muses, “if a little wild. Before all that… strange business, with his parents.”
Mrs. Thompson sniffs reproachfully. “If you ask me, he’s always been tainted. There’s something dark hiding in that boy.”
Steve doesn’t see how that’s Munson’s fault.
Steve had seen a statue of Satan once. When visiting his grandparents, they’d spent Sunday morning in their church. All familiar and alien at once. Like seeing your bedroom in a dream and not knowing if the layout is the same or if you’re just remembering it wrong.
He’d missed that sermon, too. Had been too fixated on carved stone outlining a fallen angel as pretty as a saved one; limbs elegantly muscled, demonic wings at odds with the strangely submissive pose of it, and hair a tumbling curtain that looked like it’d be soft if touched.
He couldn’t, obviously. Couldn’t be caught looking, either. Even if his grandmother had and told Father and—
He doesn’t remember the rest of the visit. But he remembers the statue.
Thinks about it now, weirdly enough, in the lunch room. Thinks about the curve of stone effigy as Munson perches on his chair, performing for his little band of weirdos. His dark curls tumbling around him like some sort of halo, hands up and hooked in parody of something more wicked.
Fingers snap in front of his face. “Earth to Hair,” a teammate says.
Steve can’t get caught looking. Snaps his eyes away, snaps up a rakish grin, snaps his hand into a soft stomach and laughing at the grunt and flinch it produces.
There’s a demon in Hawkins.
Everyone’s whispering about it.
Steve isn’t sure he really, truly believes that. But he leaves practice late—the sun already sinking, covering the campus in shadows—and he sees the shadowy figure sprawled along the field’s bleachers, ringed in lazy smoke. Like a character in a comic book. Regal and indolent at once.
He’s stopped to watch; breathes in the chilly evening air and grips his backpack strap too hard. There’s a sharp wanting in his gut, twisting and churning, that tells him to step closer. Instinct and something more primal flashes in danger. Growing up in the church pews has told him it’s wrong. Whatever it is, whatever Munson is, it’s wrong and he can’t.
Munson knows he’s there, even as his loose-limb perch stays easy, even as lips wrap around the smudged, damp papers. There isn’t any breeze to stir the thick silence between them, but smoke floats over to him anyway. Too skunky to be nicotine, but laden with sulfur undertones that ping as familiar and foreign at once.
Munson pushes a ringed hand through his hair; pushing it back frizzy and untamed.
Steve must be as stupid and vain as everyone teases, because the fear is replaced with distress at long dark hair that’s not being cared for properly. It needs moisture and some sort of heavy product. His hands twitch to get in there. To dampen it, twist it around his fingers—
Munson curls a lock around his finger, slow enough to watch, looking back at him with the sleepy heaviness of a large predator on a nature documentary.
Steve swallows around a dry mouth and turns for the parking lot quickly.
He spends too long in the bathroom that night.
Just because someone’s weird doesn’t mean they’re satanic. (He does not say this at the dinner table, but it gets him thinking anyway.)
Yeah, Munson’s dripping in occult symbols and spends his time locked up in dark basements weaving tales of magic and evil with his freak cronies.
And yeah, symbols have power. The letterman jacket he wears is a symbol that means something. It gives him a power in school and around town. A jacket like his means he’s good and popular and right. It’s all about fitting in the jacket and the box built for him; being the boy his parents expect and the church expects and the town expects.
But what even is goodness? The stuff they talk about at church, only achieved by following their set of rules and codes? He’s not sure that’s enough, because Johnny on the team doesn’t go to church, but he’s down at the soup kitchen on Saturdays and he helps old ladies across the street, so that should still count for something. And Mimi on cheer squad sits with girls in the nurse’s office and picks up litter in the spring, even though her family doesn’t celebrate Christmas.
Steve wears the jacket and goes to church and does as he’s told, but he doesn’t always feel good, either. Sometimes he slips on the jacket and squirms at the thought that he’s a fraud. That the jacket means more than he actually is. Something he can’t measure up to.
“Stop thinking so hard, you’ll burn up your last two braincells,” Chrissy teases, poking her knuckles into his temples to get him to relax his face.
Cheer and Basketball have to share the gym today and it means neither team is doing much of any practicing. He should be helping Coach get everyone back on track, but he’s too preoccupied to care about three pointers.
He grins and rolls his eyes, batting her hand away. “Just thinking about the new defense plays.” Not fully a lie.
Her laugh is high and bright. “But you’re too pretty to be thinking.”
Usually it’s an inside joke between them; both of them seen as too pretty, and pretty as in not good for anything else. No expectation for anything more.
Lately it just makes him shift somewhere inside himself, pushing his tongue into the inside of his teeth to stem it.
Is that really all he’s good for?
Is that enough?
Could that be enough for himself?
He huffs, ruffling his own hair as he speeds up to rejoin the guys in their cool down laps. Maybe everyone’s right—maybe he’s not made for thinking. He’s not even sure what he’d really been thinking about, what conclusion he was trying to puzzle out, except in circles.
Sometimes when Steve’s thinking too hard, his eyes drift over to land on Munson. Like some sort of tar trap. Or a magnet, stuck in his throat whenever he looks and tries to swallow.
Sometimes, when he does, Munson catches him at it.
Sometimes, Munson’s looking first.
It should mean nothing. It probably does mean nothing and he’s being the weird one. They’ve literally exchanged maybe a dozen words over the years. They were almost lab partners early in the semester before Rodney made a fuss and convinced everyone to swap. They’d done poorly on the assignments, but Steve was used to that, at least.
What would a demon even want to do with Hawkins, anyway? Even if Munson was one, so far all he’d done since he got back was start a band, go to school, and start the dungeons and dragons club back up. As far as he could tell, it was keeping Nancy’s little brother and his friends off the streets and out of trouble, so he wasn’t sure what the harm was in that, either.
Maybe he just didn’t get what the adults were so worried about. Maybe he didn’t get it and so that’s why he was just as at risk to fall into Munson’s demonic ways.
That was probably why Steve was looking at him so much these days.
There’s a demon in Hawkins.
He dresses in all blacks and reds and dangerous flashes of metal, and moves his body in weird ways. He plays satanic games and satanic music. He and his uncle never come to church—there’s hushed chatter about him still hovering around the church, probably up to no good and refusing to come inside. Maybe can’t? He and his friends (minions, Mrs. Thompson spits,) are always around town in a little pack up to no good.
He, also, catches Steve’s eye in the hallway, grinning brightly and mocking, flashing sharp canines.
He, also, chats animatedly with Chrissy, always slipping away whenever Steve gets closer.
He, also, sells pot at Steve’s basketball games, out back behind the building when everyone’s distracted. Steve knows because he can smell it when he leaves the locker room at the end of the night, the air heavy with herbs and sulfur. A calling card or a tease of some game Steve doesn’t know they’re playing.
He, also, lounges high up in the bleachers early in the morning when Steve’s swimming laps. Steve’s not sure how long that’s been going on, or why Munson’s picked there to haunt. He’d expected Munson to be the sort of “out all night, sleep all day” type that was popular with bats and horror villains.
But sometimes Steve pulls himself out of the pool, shedding water, and finds the glow of Munson’s eyes in shadows, hair curled around a finger and between his lips. Steve shivers before grabbing a towel and tries not to see those eyes every time he blinks.
Munson’s definitely weird, but ultimately harmless, Steve’s pretty sure. Mother’s book club-church-social ladies don’t know what they’re talking about. Munson’s just some guy.
Steve intends on finally confronting him about it. See what his deal is, why he’s skulking around, what he could possibly want. Maybe ask about the demon business so they can both laugh it off. If nothing else because Chrissy likes him and Jason’s starting to get weird about it, tight and angry somewhere behind his smarmy smiles.
But there’s never a good time, or there’s too many people who’d want to watch popular Steve talk to the school freak. (He doesn’t talk to him when he’s leaving the pool or basketball practice despite them being alone and the perfect time for it. There’s something taboo about it, when he’s bare and sweating and catching his breath, and Munson’s eyes are roaming him slow and heavy. Those times are for something else, something that Steve doesn’t understand but wants to keep just for them.)
(There’s no them.)
He must kick around too long, too loudly, because he swings back to his locker long after school to get a forgotten book, and Munson’s leaving detention with one of his ruffled, punky friends. He laughs loud and sharp, flinging his head back, uncaring of where he is. He drums his hands theatrically across his friend’s shoulders and then the row of lockers, pushing him off down a hall with a farewell (a literal farewell, like he’s trying out for the Spring Shakespeare Play.)
He keeps walking.
Steve keeps walking.
Dark, liquid eyes stare into his as Musnon reaches into a vest pocket for a crumbled box of cigarettes.
Steve inhales, should stop—passes him, and keep walking.
There’s a squeak on linoleum and then Munson’s walking at his elbow, bumping a little too close. He’s warm, putting out heat like a radiator.
Steve exhales.
A lighter flicks, flickers, catches in the corner of his eye glowing red and curling into smoke.
He doesn’t look.
He pushes the exit door out the back harder than he means to, stepping out into the bright sunshine. Squints.
A firm hand lands on his shoulder and pushes, spinning him back around a corner and into shadows. Brick scratches the back of the felted letterman jacket. Steve forgets to breathe.
Munson breathes for him, fingers digging sharp into his chest to keep him still and lips ghosting soft over his, open and exhaling smoke that Steve can’t help but draw in, shuddering.
His thoughts spin dizzy and his heart climbs and stutters; then he’s not thinking at all, foggy with smoke and sulfur and the curious prodding of a wet tongue.
Steve gasps, grabbing the edges of Munson’s vest with the intention to push, instead doing the opposite. Heat and want flares across his skin, coming out as a small whine and turning him as stupid as everyone says he is.
Guilt drops into his stomach like a stone, but his hands keep pulling, his tongue keeps reaching, his hips follow a press he knows like a second language. He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be liking this.
“Why are you following me around?” Munson asks against his mouth, low and raspy, his teeth catching Steve’s lip to pull.
Steve shudders and makes an embarrassing sound he’ll never admit to. It doesn’t feel like Munson minds, except—
“What?” Steve manages. He pushes, puts enough space between them he can gulp fresh air and try to clear his head. “Me? I was—I’d been—you.” He laughs despite himself, more panicked than amused, letting his head thump back against the wall. It stings, but the clarity is needed. “I thought you were stalking me.” Still thinks it, to be honest, because he has a lot more reason to be at the pool and the gym than the sixth-year senior slacker.
“What reason would I have to follow around the poplar pretty boy?” Munson asks, scathing enough that Steve’s pants go pathetically tight.
He tries to shrug instead, looking anywhere other than Munson’s eyes, deep enough to fall in like coaxing. “You tell me.” Does look, because he can’t help himself. Munson’s all dark temptation and promises of satisfaction.
Maybe he is a demon. Maybe that’s why Steve feels this way.
Maybe he’s something that’s mistaken for a demon: less supernatural and more dangerous.
Munson looks at him, and doesn’t say anything.
Steve’s too busy kissing him to say anything, either.
They don’t talk about it like Steve planned. He doesn’t get around to asking about any of it. They don’t talk at school or outside it. Nothing really changes except the stolen moments shivering in Munson’s burning hands and wicked mouth under the bleachers, or the quick and self-conscious fumble in the Munson trailer.
Steve doesn’t like anyone messing with his hair, but he likes it when Munson pulls on it.
Steve doesn’t like hickeys where anyone can see and ask questions, but he likes Munson’s sharp teeth digging in under his clothes.
Steve doesn’t like the thought of anyone catching them, but he lets Munson in through his window under the dark sky of a new moon. How can he say no to all the shadowed angles and flashing eyes of Munson softened immediately in the warm lamplight of his room?
It’s way too easy to let Munson in and then stay the rest of the night. Maybe he’s actually a vampire.
“Fussy,” Munson teases, biting at Steve’s hip, laughing at Steve’s stomach jumping at the touch.
Steve frowns and tugs at his hair in retribution. For such a wicked boy, his smiles look extra sweet in the early morning sunlight. Maybe that’s one of his tricks, too.
Footsteps echo up the stairs and down the hall, and Steve swears low. He scrambles to push Munson down, pull up the lumpy comforter over him. It won’t be enough. He pushes with his legs for Munson to shift behind him as he rolls over. Battles amusement at the soft thump and swear of Munson hitting the floor. Just in time for Father to knock and open the door without waiting, helping himself to every corner of his house without care to privacy.
“What are you still doing in bed?” There’s a queer suspicion in his eyes as they roam over Steve, looking for an answer neither of them wants to ask the question to.
“I—I don’t feel well,” Steve chokes out. Twitches at the fingers pressing into the back of his knees. Fakes a cough that turns distressingly real at teeth scraping at his backside.
“Your mother will be disappointed,” Father says in his own disappointment. In Steve. Not that he’s sick, but that he’s not obedient.
Steve shrugs, helpless and tangled up in his own bad decisions.
Father sighs, hand clenching around the door handle before relaxing. “Okay. No TV. We’re going to the Glenn’s after church. Mary will be disappointed you’re not coming.”
Steve doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t move until the door’s shut, Father’s gone, and the car’s pulled out of the driveway. Guilt and shame dig claws into him, slowly slicing down.
What is he doing?
“Stevie,” Munson sings, all rough and honey sweet at once. He grabs Steve’s ankle from the floor and tickles the bottom of his foot. Drags himself up onto the bed like some sort of alluring boogie man, smiling with teeth and glittering eyes; seeming to have too many hands as he crawls up and over Steve himself. Worms under the blankets and begins kissing down Steve’s chest.
Steve exhales, letting go of more tension than he realized he was carrying. It isn’t fair that Munson is so good with his fingers and his tongue, that he’s addicting and soothing both at once. The best kind of distraction, even though Steve can’t remember what he needs distracted from anymore.
Steve sinks his hands into thick hair, clutching rhythmically with every graze of teeth, every swirl of tongue. Thinks, blessedly, about nothing at all. Just skin and sweat and the warm, heavy weight of—
“Eddie,” he sighs, arching up into the tight heat of his mouth. Then shudders down, groaning into the flinch of a curl around Munson, through the shaking swell up and over.
Munson, who has enough nonsense going on in his brain to keep his mouth running ceaselessly, says nothing. He’s still alive, Steve can feel the damp wash of his breathing, but usually a conscious Munson is a chatty one.
When he looks down, he freezes, ice running through his veins and chasing out the murky afterglow. Munson’s open expression of awe and adoration is marred by the solid black of his eyes.
“You—” Steve starts, thighs tensing.
“You said my name,” Eddie says over him, rushed and delighted. His hands tighten, sharp nails pricking sensitive skin. His smile is bright—almost childlike—if it weren’t for the sharper points of his teeth. The tongue that was just somewhere very sensitive is forked.
He hadn’t felt that.
He’s pretty sure he’d have felt that.
“They were right.” Dread drops into his stomach.
Munson frowns. “About my cock sucking skills? Who was right? I haven’t been exactly going around tongue first.” Sticks it out in a tease.
Steve looks at his tongue again without meaning to. Still split.
“You’re a demon.”
Munson’s mouth slackens into an O as his eyes clear back into the warm brown Steve’s used to, wide and scared. Everything about him shrinks back in such a smooth transition that Steve’s brain can’t keep up with it. Knows he watched it happen, but couldn’t conjure up the image even if he wanted to. Knows only then, and now.
Muns—Eddie’s hands tighten, and then loosens in a panic when Steve flinches tight. Pets his hip bones like he’s a startled horse.
The thought is insulting enough to knock Steve out of his horror enough to glare. “What were you doing at the church that day?”
Eddie’s expression shutters guilty enough that neither of them has to clarify which day he means.
“I… I dunno. I’d just come back to town, was relearning it and then… well…” He licks his lips, glancing away. It’s all Steve can do to watch his mouth. Bruised and soft and so inviting. Demon echoes in his thoughts—all he knows about them (not enough) and what pop culture has taught him (probably fanciful exaggerations.) But they’re supposed to be harbingers of sin and temptation and leading the pure astray into damnation. Evil.
“Drawn by a higher power?” Steve asks dryly. He’s slowly relaxing. Some of the fear ebbs away. Eddie’s not evil, of that he’s certain. “Feeling repentant?”
Eddie rolls his eyes. Pinches Steve’s ribs. Steve flinches, swears, and swats at Eddie’s shoulders, but all that earns him is a sharp bite to the swell of his hip. “Drawn by something,” he grumbles.
Steve’s not sure he’s ever been considered pure, so they’re probably safe there. But Eddie’s soft brown eyes, open expressions, plush mouth, wicked fingers, tantalizing everything—
He flushes for no particular reason, distracts them both from it by ruffling his hands through Eddie’s sex-wild hair. Everything about Eddie seems made specifically to catch Steve’s attention, and maybe that’s what they’ve been talking about all this time.
“Do you want my soul?” Steve finally asks, huffy in his exasperation and impatience. The sooner they figure this out, the better.
Eddie’s face screws up in disbelief and disgust. “I don’t even know how to do that. What would I do with a soul, anyway? Eat it? Put it on a shelf? Trade it for Demonic Goods and Services?”
Steve flails the approximation of a shrug. “Well, I don’t know! It’s your whole,” gestures again, “deal. Couldn’t you use it to gain access to Hell or something?”
Eddie thinks about that for a long second. “Why would I wanna go there? It sounds terrible.”
Steve laughs. He doesn’t mean to, and it’s a little too sharp and too desperate. It clearly startles both of them. But once it starts, he can’t stop. Through watery eyes he catches Eddie grinning at him like they’re just two dumb teenagers, and also maybe like Steve’s the proof of a holy relic.
There’s a demon in Hawkins.
The congregation worry that he’s building a cult; leading all their impressionable youth into dark basements for sorcery and music that makes windows shake. He plays with fire and smoke, and peddles spirits and drugs to drag the town down to his level. Corrupting as many souls as he can so when he returns to Hell where he belongs, he has an army of the depraved at his back.
Mostly, though, he cuts class and loiters around the school and the church and too-nice neighborhoods he has no business being in. He smuggles his preppy boyfriend out of his suffocating house and into his trailer where they can neck on the old couch. More frequently now, Hell’s Best Uncle (they made him a mug and everything,) tells lame jokes they laugh and groan at easily. Better when Wayne pats Steve’s shoulder and asks about school and sports, and tells Steve he’s proud of him. Even when he hasn’t done anything.
The worst thing Eddie tempts him into doing is a little underage drinking, smoke a little weed, and indulge in premarital homosexual activity.
Steve’s pretty sure he’d be doing all of that anyway, so he can’t blame Eddie for those sins. But he can blame Eddie for the hickeys, the easy grins, the quiet of a home that doesn’t rattle his brain into anxious static. If those are considered unforgivable sins, Steve’s not sure he really cares what the pastor is peddling anymore.