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The days in the hospital blur together, a mélange of sleeping and waking and sleeping again. Monitors beep around the clock, nurses wake him for check-ins, medications and pain make him drowsy. The clock by the bed flashes numbers in bright red, but Eddie has no way of knowing if it's am or pm.
Besides the sunlight that sneaks through the cracks of the windows, Eddie's only way of telling night from day is Steve Harrington. Newly relieved of his job at Family Video, which didn't survive the earthquake (Eddie overhears Robin saying "We're bad luck now, every place we work at suffers a catastrophic disaster"), Steve spends all day by Eddie's bedside, until the nurses kick him out at night.
Steve slips in every morning as soon as the hospital doors open, sunglasses perched on his head, coffee clenched in his fist. When Eddie's awake, he updates Eddie on all the kids: Max is still in a coma, Dustin won't take off his Hellfire Club shirt, Mike's a brat, Will's a sweetheart, and Lucas's coach is mad at him because he keeps skipping practice to sit with Max. Besides, the whole season's been canceled since Hawkins has been walled off from the rest of the county.
It's for the most part light-hearted babble, easy conversation pieces to remind Eddie of everything that's going on outside of the four walls he's trapped inside. He doesn't say much in reply, his throat still sore from the respirator, his mind foggy with pain and fever and medication. But he likes to listen, likes to hear Steve ramble. It's sweet, the reliability of it. He could almost set his watch to Steve's schedule.
He tries to remind himself not to get too attached. Steve is still Steve Harrington even if he's no longer King Harrington and Eddie is still Eddie Munson, local drug dealer and devil worshiper. This won't last. One day Eddie will be discharged and will probably go right to jail for the rest of his life, and Steve will go back to doing whatever it is Steve does.
Eddie does his best to keep him at arm’s length, but it's hard, when Steve's right there, sitting in the chair besides the bed, day after day, like clockwork.