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Eddie didn’t really think his situation could be weirder, or worse, but Steve Harrington is here again with Dustin and the others, delivering him food. This has to be the most unexpected middle finger the universe has ever shoved at him.
Harrington is weird, too. He’s a lot more of a loser than Eddie remembers him being, kind of goofy all around with his wiggly finger waves and awkward attempts at explanation. Eddie looks at him and he’s still physically the same; Eddie can still see the outline of the King Steve that had all the girls swooning with his perfect hair and athletic build, asshole extraordinaire. But it’s like someone erased all the coloring from inside the lines, replaced it with something Eddie doesn’t quite recognize. It makes him wary - he doesn’t know how to process a Steve Harrington that’s weirdly attempting to be friendly, and it’s throwing his priorities all out of whack.
Steve Harrington should be the least of his concerns, right now. He’s wanted for murder. Monsters are real, apparently, and they’re here. And he has the specter of broken bones and empty eye sockets floating in front of him every time he blinks.
Wayne came home to that. Wayne had to see the blood splattered on the ceiling, the heap of Chrissy on the floor. Eddie doesn’t think he’ll ever forgive himself for any of it. He doesn’t understand how these people have been dealing with this for years. Just thinking of it in the abstract makes him want to shake apart.
He supposes though, a bit manically, desperate to not have a complete breakdown, that trying to puzzle out what is left of King Steve after the fall from grace Eddie only somewhat paid attention to his second go around as a senior is as good enough of a distraction from the rest of it as he’s going to get.
He can just hear Dustin’s smug voice saying I told you so, merely for being curious about it.
Eddie shoves cereal in his mouth and tries to swallow both the food and the fact that monsters are real, and in the back of his mind he pokes and prods at Steve Harrington to make his chest loosen a little. He’s always loved puzzles.
Steve ushers him through the woods by Skull Rock and Eddie has just decided to accept that bafflement might be his permanent state of being, now.
He lets it settle in him after a whole slew of things that are almost harder to swallow than the fucking monsters. Steve has, in the past half an hour:
- Held branches out of the way for most of the people in their little hiking party, Eddie included.
- Picked up Eddie’s canteen for him when a particularly loud and close crack of a falling branch startled the shit out of him. He didn’t even laugh. He looked, if anything, sympathetic.
- Put himself in front of the group next to Dustin with an attitude that Eddie can only describe as “extremely tired and reluctant mother who is supporting her son but refusing to let him die of stupidity.”
He’s done all of this rather mindlessly, like it’s second nature for him to put himself in between them all and everything else around them, to make sure they have what they need. Eddie watches Steve and Dustin wait for everyone to catch up to them with matching stances, hands on hips, Eddie almost laughs at realizing that’s where Dustin got it from.
It’s endearing, that’s the only word for it, but it’s a frustrating one, so Eddie slaps a big neon label of bafflement on top of it and calls it a day. He’s not sure he can handle more earth-shattering realities right now. Steve piquing his interest in any way beyond recognizing that he’s objectively hot - something Eddie accepted years ago, as he has eyes and a working dick - is a step above what his poor brain can take while on a quest to find Mordor.
Harrington is actually infuriating, Eddie decides. He takes back everything about him being a good dude who should totally get the girl. Because it’s infuriating, how he’s run around like an action hero, how he’s kind of still a huge bitch, but he’s humbled himself - or fucked himself up - to the point of thinking that being first in line at the demon bat buffet is no big deal. That succeeding in escaping said buffet via his own fucking mouth is just completely normal and something everyone could do and not something Eddie would have read in a fantasy novel. And then fantasized about.
This all makes his leftover bitchiness merely amusing rather than grating, and it’s also made Eddie laugh at a lot of things he’s said the past few days. Most of which aren’t even that funny.
Eddie’s reaction to Steve is, at this point, rather pathetic, even to himself. Even if it’s fair. He’d agreed to find Mordor, he just didn’t realize he’d be doing it with the real-life Aragorn. He doesn’t really think anyone could blame him for ending up here, even if here is a dead-end. Possibly literal.
Eddie figures, though, that since he will probably die in a few hours, there’s no reason to hold himself back when he turns around, stripped wires in hand. He gets an eyeful of grimy chest hair, half covered in his vest, and just says whatever feels like falling out of his mouth.
“Don’t ya, big boy?”
Robin’s face is so judgmental he almost cracks up and drops his tools, but Steve’s really takes the cake. Steve looks like his brain is trying to turn each of its gears one at a time and failing. He’s never seen Steve this confused in his life, even in high school. Even in Mrs. Click’s class.
In fact he’s so confused that Eddie files his expression away to dissect later, if any of them survive, and thinks: maybe.
Somewhere between hammering nails into trash can lids and driving back to the trailer park, Eddie feels a bone-deep dread wash over all the levity he’d scraped together to keep his head above water.
Eddie wants to vibrate straight out of his skin with nerves. He’s spiraling right up into the red sky, launching like a rocket from the force of his fear and anxiety. He’s trying so hard to keep both feet on the ground.
He curls his hands tightly around his shield and his spear and wills himself to put on a brave face for Dustin. For Steve too, because he’s staring at Eddie right in the face and Eddie doesn’t want to look like he’s scared, so, so scared that none of them will make it out of this. He wants Steve to believe that he is brave. That he’s a worthy member of this party he’s been adopted into. That he’ll keep Dustin safe.
He wants Steve to believe it and he wants Steve to come back, desperately, so that he’ll keep looking at Eddie the way he is looking at him right now, like he does believe it, like Eddie is worth something. Steve looks at Eddie straight in the eyes and Eddie feels his heart split in half, partly to land somewhere near his shoes in despair and partly to climb up into his throat in foolish hope.
Despair because he knows this feeling growing inside him is moving far too fast and far too beyond the lines of fleeting crushes; that it’s become a tangible weight in his hands and in his eyes and on his tongue.
Hope because Steve is looking at him, and Eddie thinks maybe again, maybe the weight he sees in Steve’s eyes is the same one Eddie is holding.
“Don’t be a hero,” Steve tells them, practically begs, and it looks like it physically pains him to turn around. Eddie wants to say something, do something, wants to lay this weight out between them and make sure Steve has something good he wants to come back to. Eddie launches himself after Steve without thinking, calls him back, but before he gets any farther he remembers that he is not brave, not really, and he shrinks in on himself. Swallows that weight to sit stone-heavy in his stomach and pin down the maybe.
“Make him pay,” is all Eddie says to him, but as he watches Steve nod he thinks something else passed between them anyway.
Steve holds his gaze again and then wrenches himself around. Eddie watches him walk away feeling like Steve is dragging his guts out onto the ground behind him, until Dustin shakes his arm and reminds him, a bit too excitedly, that they have a concert to put on.
He’s going to die. He knew this as soon as he left the trailer, but he’d had a choice to make: himself or Dustin. Himself or Robin, Nancy, Steve. Himself or all the kids on the other side, Wayne and the whole town above them, even the parts that hate him. It was a pretty easy choice, all things considered.
He doesn’t want to die, but he wants everyone else to live more. He doesn’t want to die, but he is, and it’s for a good reason, but he didn’t realize it would be this painful.
Eddie knows it’s stupid, that he didn’t realize that. In his defense, he’s never been eaten alive before.
He struggles against the tails holding him to the ground, he screams and cries but the bats keep coming, keep tearing skin and muscle from him. It’s funny almost, how easily his body parts with its flesh under the pressure of the teeth. Eddie feels that if it gives way that easily it probably shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. He tries to yank his hands off the ground, push the bats away, has half a mind to take his flesh back from them, out of their mouths and press it back onto his body. It’s his, he doesn’t want them to have it, he doesn’t want them to carry bits of him around in their stomachs in this place, even after he’s too dead to care about it anymore.
The bats rip into his sides, his chest, even his face. His hands stay anchored to the dirt. He almost wishes they would go deeper, poke holes in something vital, because he is dying, that’s inevitable, and figures this place would be cruel enough to make that take this long. Make him lie here while he chokes on his own blood from the wound in his cheek.
Eddie watches the tornado of bats above him swarm and swoop and make chittering noises that almost sound like laughter. He tries to think of the people he’s saving, hold them in his mind while he dies, so he remembers why he’s here.
He starts with Wayne. He feels immensely guilty for leaving him. He hopes Wayne knows how much Eddie loves him, how Eddie made it this far because of him and him only.
Dustin is next on the list, but he doesn’t get that far with the thought before the tornado stops and so does the chittering laughter, and the bats plummet to the ground around him.
Dustin is screaming his name from the door of the trailer, and Eddie lies on the ground, wondering if maybe this means that they’ve won.
Dustin hauls him to sitting, yells and berates him for being stupid, and Eddie coughs blood out of his lungs and grins with red teeth because in the end it doesn’t matter he was stupid. It worked.
Near-death survival euphoria, Eddie thinks, is the highest feeling he’s ever experienced. It’s better than anything he’s ever taken. If someone could make this into a pill it would either destroy society or cure every ill the world knows.
The adrenaline crash is going to be hell, he knows, because he’s still half-eaten, but he can’t even feel it anymore. Not when he sees Nancy and Robin and Steve on the horizon.
He gets to Robin first, spinning her in his arms, and he can’t wait to be friends with her after all of this. He’ll get that chance now; she’s alive and he’s alive and they’ve won, apparently, and he can tell she’s a kindred spirit. He can tell that there are things inside of him that match things inside of her, a bone-deep understanding Eddie has been waiting to feel up close for his whole life.
And he doesn’t mean to do what happens next, he doesn’t, but he’s so caught up in the joy of something going right for him for once and the infinite possibilities living gives him that he stops considering that anything could go wrong.
Only for a second, but it’s a second too long.
Eddie spins away from Steve, his lips tingling with the contact they’d just made, and he gets through about 180 degrees of an arch before reality crashes back into him. He remembers who he is and who Steve is and the fact that they’re in a hell version of Hawkins, Indiana, and it doesn’t matter that he helped save the world, he’s not going to get the boy.
The boy in question is a pipe dream that Eddie had been planning on thinking about alone in his room until he’d gotten over him, because all maybes aside, the risk was never going to be worth it. There’s a reason Eddie isn’t brave, normally, and it’s because being brave has never, ever worked out for him. This time is no exception, and the whole world, both worlds, come falling back on top of him all at once.
Eddie gets slammed with nausea and shame and pain, and he suddenly registers his abdomen pouring blood down the front of his jeans, hot and sticky.
Eddie looks at Steve’s face, searches it for his reaction. He thinks he sees some kind of anguish there, and Eddie swallows down bile. Dustin and Robin and Nancy are all staring at him, and he thinks this might be worse than being eaten. He doesn’t know how he could have torpedoed his future with these people so quickly.
He shrinks into himself against the growing agony in every part of him, fear thrashing through his veins. His heart is pounding, and he distantly registers that this is probably bad for him right now, with the amount of blood he’s losing. It’s just making it pour out of him faster.
Maybe he’ll still die down here. He’s almost thinking that would be better than any alternative he can come up with. His legs feel like jello, suddenly.
He half hears Nancy tell them that Venca survived, through cotton stuffed ears, and Eddie almost laughs at how wrong he was about this whole situation. Steve won’t even look at him, he just grabs Dustin’s arm to hoist him to the gate while Eddie tries to stay upright and conscious. It’s becoming more difficult by the second.
The ground shakes violently, then, and Eddie knows what this means, but it’s a distant devastation that gets slammed almost all the way out of him as he topples over into the dirt. Even his pain is distant now, and Eddie thinks he might be dying again for real this time.
Steve still won’t look at him and if Eddie had any energy left he might reduce himself to begging for it, so he could see Steve’s eyes again before he bites it completely, he’d take even the contempt he’s sure is growing there over nothing at all. He doesn’t want to die being shoved under the rug like some stain they all want to ignore.
Steve does not look at him, but he looks at a patch of cracking earth above Eddie’s shoulder while he lifts Eddie off the ground. He cradles Eddie to his chest, he drags him through the gate, and the last thing Eddie registers before it all goes black is Steve’s ragged breathing against his hair.
Eddie fades in and out, for the most part. He thinks he hears a lot of shouting, at some point. Some very bright lights and wailing cries.
He thinks he’s still being held. Until he’s not, until he feels his body being stretched out and he cries until he can’t feel anything, anymore.
There’s a doctor talking to him about his surgery and stitches and everything that’s now missing from him, and Eddie tries very hard not to brush his hand over his cheek, his chest. The stitches pull at his mouth when he opens it.
He processes very little about what the doctor says, and he can tell Robin is trying so hard to in his stead but she’s not having much luck either.
Steve is asleep on the bed across from him, restless. Dustin is asleep in a chair. It’s early dawn even though it doesn’t look like it out of the window. There’s black smoke and fire everywhere, the immediate aftermath of an earthquake.
Right.
The ICU is jam packed. Eddie tries very hard not to think of Max down the hall. He knows she’s down the hall because Dustin told him as soon as he woke up. He also told Eddie that he’s a free man, that somewhere in the however-many-hours since he almost died Nancy fucking Wheeler spun a fairly solid story painting him as a victim.
He is a victim, Dustin insisted, but something about being absolved from Chrissy’s death makes him feel like he’s choking, again, like his hands are covered in her blood and everyone is just ignoring it. He pushes his tongue against his stitched up cheek until the doctor scolds him for it.
Eddie falls asleep shortly after the doctor leaves, and when he wakes up again Steve is awake too, and he’s staring at the small TV mounted to the ceiling.
They’re showing what used to be the trailer park, and Eddie panics so badly the nurses almost sedate him.
Dustin’s mom is picking him up, he tells Eddie.
“I’ll be back later,” he says, eyes wide and a little watery. It almost looks like he’s pleading with Eddie. Eddie isn’t sure what he can give him outside of the apology he’d spilled all over the kid immediately upon waking.
Steve is asleep again, and so is Robin, her head resting on her arms over top of the bed railings. Steve had given her one of his own pillows, and something about that hurts to look at.
Dustin jiggles his knee, seems to draw himself up in that posture he has when he’s about to say something he feels is extremely important.
Eddie wants so badly for Dustin to leave this alone. He’s just been grateful, so far, that the kid is still speaking to him.
“I don’t care, you know,” Dustin says, uncharacteristically quiet, and trying to catch Eddie’s eyes.
Eddie stiffens. It makes all his wounds pull and burn. His mouth pulls down in a grimace that makes his face feel like it’s on fire.
“Like, none of us care,” Dustin insists. “Or will care. I think it would be a pretty stupid shift in priorities, if we did. Plus, the heat of battle or whatever.”
“Steve definitely cares,” Eddie can’t help but mumble, even though he’s reeling from Dustin’s words, the half-joke tacked onto the end, the small smile on his face. Eddie feels tears gather in the corners of his eyes, infinitely touched and filled to the brim with affection. He’ll never be able to put into words how much he appreciates Dustin Henderson.
Dustin looks over at Steve’s sleeping face, slack but not really relaxed, not even now.
“I’m not sure that’s what it is,” he says after studying him, with a tone of deep thought and a crease between his brows.
Eddie isn’t sure he buys it. He can’t quite reconcile a world where King Steve has reformed enough to be ok with what he is. To be ok with concrete evidence of it. But he’s willing to try it on, that Steve Harrington isn’t like that and was maybe just really caught off guard. It would be fair. Eddie shouldn’t have done what he did. He feels sick with guilt over so many things right now, and that’s just another added to the pile.
“I-” Eddie tries to say something, he tries, but he can’t get anything out.
“You’re one of us,” Dustin tells him, smiling wider. “Nothing can change that. It’s kind of a lifelong thing.”
The tears do spill over, then, and Dustin hugs him until his mom finds her way into the hospital room.
“Don’t you ever do that again,” Wayne tells him through tears, face pressed into Eddie’s hair. He’s rocking Eddie back and forth, and it hurts, it pulls all his stitches, but he feels calmer than he has in days with Wayne’s big palm cradling the back of his head.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie whispers. He's been saying that so much, lately. “I promise.”
He’s not entirely sure he can keep that promise, what with the world ending, but he’ll try his best.
Max looks so small in her hospital bed. Eddie knew she was small, but she never seemed it. Even plagued by Vecna she had fire to match her hair, stubborn and angry. She reminds him now of a match someone dropped in the sink, crumbling ash washing down the drain with all the color it used to be able to make. He thinks of Chrissy, when he looks at her, the whole ordeal overlapping Max’s pale face, and he didn’t run this time but it still didn’t matter. He doesn’t know what to do with that. It feels like his fault, that maybe if he’d ran out of the trailer sooner things would have been different.
He knows that’s stupid. He knows it wouldn’t have made a difference. He can’t shake it anyway.
He walks out of the hospital next to Steve with Chrissy’s death playing in front of his eyes, except when he looks at her face, it’s Max’s instead.
“Did something happen with the Harrington boy?” Wayne decides to have the audacity to ask him halfway to their new apartment, Eddie white-knuckling the door handle as every fucking bump on the road makes him feel like his guts are going to pop out of him.
Eddie lets out a short, almost desperate laugh. Of course Wayne noticed how weird he was acting, how weird they both were acting. Eddie can’t hide shit from Wayne. He never could, it’s both the best and worst thing about their relationship. And Eddie knows he got into the car with an expression like Steve Harrington had reached down into his throat and pulled his heart out through his mouth, just so he could hold it.
I care a lot, he’d said. Of fucking course he does. Eddie has no idea what he’s supposed to do with that, because it’s not overwhelmingly positive or negative, but it’s not even truly neutral, it’s got some kind of net charge on it that makes getting past what Eddie did and how he feels nearly impossible. How is he supposed to hold onto something like that? How is he supposed to drop it? I care has barbs to it, it’s dug itself in, it has substance, and Eddie has never been good at letting go of things unless they’re impossible to hold onto. Even then, he’s still been known to try.
“You know me,” Eddie finally says, falsely cheerful, because Wayne will wait all day for an answer and then some. “Got a little ahead of myself.”
Wayne doesn’t ask him to elaborate, which Eddie appreciates, but he does send him a sympathetic and comforting look, which Eddie also appreciates deep down but is angry at needing to receive it.
He wakes up screaming a lot now.
The nights when Wayne is home he holds Eddie every time, cradling his head like he did in the hospital, like he did when he was small, and shushes him until Eddie stops crying.
The nights Wayne isn't home Eddie stays awake until the sun comes up with all of the lights on and thinks that maybe if he hadn't messed everything up, he might have been able to call Steve.
Eddie really admires Nancy Wheeler for the absolute bull-headed tunnel vision with which she goes about this whole ordeal. The mission, their safety, those are the only two things she cares about, which doesn’t leave her any room to care about the fact that Eddie Munson is not only a fag, but a fag that has the hots for her ex. The same ex who tried to get her back very, very poorly at the start of the end of the world.
He’s working on the assumption that that went nowhere. He’s not sure if that makes him relieved or not.
Either way, he appreciates that she so clearly does not give a shit. He does not appreciate that this lack of shits means that he and Steve are apparently lumped together as a matched set almost as neatly as Steve and Robin are. He watches Nancy draw on maps and dole out assignments with Chief Hopper’s full support, and Eddie has at this point stopped expecting anything to make sense.
At the very least, she has enough sense to stick him with Robin on this first day of Total Apocalypse Prevention, which is less dangerous for him than being paired with Steve but still not home free since it’s Robin.
Out of everyone, though, he thinks Robin understands the best. He doesn’t think he was wrong about her. He sees her flash him a sympathetic glance when he stands from his spot beside Steve on the couch, because being next to him is the best-worst thing in the world right now.
Steve has, at this point, not mentioned the incident at all, and does not appear to want to do so any time soon. Which is. Fine.
Or it would be, if he didn’t do things like sit too close to Eddie and then follow him with his eyes when Eddie stands up, like he wants Eddie to sit back down but refuses to ask.
Eddie almost wants to ask Robin what the fuck is going on with that, with carrying him to the hospital - because he remembers that and then Dustin confirmed it - with saying he cares, with keeping him clamped at arm’s length, not allowed any closer but not any further either. It’s hard for Eddie’s heart to beat around, whatever this thing Steve is white-knuckling through and shoving into both their chests.
He feels kind of pathetic asking her, though. Does he like-like me? He’s twenty fucking years old. The world is ending. He needs to get a grip.
When he and Robin wander despondently around the aisles of the grocery store later, in the next town over, grabbing as many non-perishables as they can, she brings it up herself.
“He’s trying, I think,” she says, out of nowhere. “I’m not entirely sure what he’s trying but there’s a lot more going on up there than usual.” She’s attempting to make light of it, he can tell.
Eddie groans and tries not to chew on the stitches in his face. “Do we really have to talk about this, Buckley? Can’t we just discuss what flavors of bargain basement canned soup we want?” He swings his arms wide in front of the shelves.
Eddie had refused, point blank, to put any spaghetti-o’s into their cart. They are now therefore in the soup aisle, having, as Robin put it, a “woefully understocked canned pasta supply.”
“I’m just saying!” She says, even though Eddie wants her to stop saying. She wanders next to him and lowers her voice, whispering into his shoulder. She seems to brace herself to tell him whatever she’s planning. Eddie holds his breath.
“It’s not because you’re you, if that makes sense. It’s not because you’re that.”
Eddie turns his head halfway and meets her eyes. They’re determined but there’s a fear there he recognizes so immediately he wants to hug her in the middle of this grocery store. Eddie wonders if this fear will ever go away for them, some time in the distant future, if they’re allowed a distant future.
Robin takes a deep breath and speaks in a rush. “And I know this because he knows I’m like that, and he doesn’t care at all, Eddie. He loves me for it, even. He’s the first person I ever told.”
You’re the second, she doesn’t need to say. Eddie reaches down and holds her hand. She squeezes it back, moves to peruse the soups like she didn’t just give him something so big and important.
It’s a lot to take in - that Robin felt safe enough around Steve to let him have this part of her - but Eddie fights against it because it almost doesn’t matter for him. She’s a girl. She didn’t kiss him.
“Plus, I asked him,” she continues, like she read his mind. “And he said that wasn’t it.”
“What the fuck is it, then?” He asks, sharper than he means to.
Robin throws her hands up. “Even if I knew, I couldn’t tell you! That breaks like, every best friend code there is.”
Eddie didn’t think he’d be reduced to pleading about this, but he supposes that he’s lost any dignity he had in Robin’s eyes anyway when he called Steve big boy after hot wiring an RV.
“You have ideas, though.” He points to her nose, making her go cross-eyed. “ You can tell me those. There’s no rule against that.”
“I think there definitely is.”
“Robin.” He wants to draw the line before he starts saying please.
“Eddie.” She tosses random cans into their cart, smiling.
He jumps over that line immediately. “ Please, Robin. I’m going crazy.”
Robin’s expression crumples immediately in sympathy. She pushes the cart down the aisle with an air of concern and a sigh. “He won’t talk to me about it. But I don’t think he wants to reject you. I just don’t think he knows what to do with that.”
She turns back to him, grip tightening on the cart handle. “You know how hard that is. You know.”
She’s almost pleading with him, it sounds like. For Steve’s sake.
The level of love she carries for him will awe Eddie until the end of his days. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything like it.
Still, though, it doesn’t stop the guilt from clawing at him, the hurt from following at its heels. He did this, to the both of them. And now he can’t handle the fallout.
Story of his whole fucking life, honestly.
“Yeah,” he says, because what else can he say? “I know.”
Robin almost looks like she wants to say sorry. She dumps more cans in the cart instead, says: “Do you think we could justify blowing the rest of the budget on those giant bags of Easter candy that I saw at the front of the store?”
Eddie grins despite himself, putting his hands to his chest and affecting a voice that’s half a whine and half the weird croaky accent he does for the peasants and street urchin NPCs in his campaigns. He sounds like a Monty Python character, and he knows it. “But Nancy, the kiddies need some kind of happiness, it’s the apocalypse, you know.”
Robin laughs, stepping onto the back rung of the cart and pushing off towards the front of the store. Eddie runs after her, cackling, and he wants to keep her, so badly.
Patrol is. Well it’s patrol. They walk near the gates and kill whatever might come out of them.
There’s not much, right now. But there is Steve.
Nancy tries to help him learn how to use a gun, and it takes him all of thirty seconds to decide it’s not for him.
He doesn’t like it. He’s not sure if it’s the noise or the feeling of it recoiling in his hands, but it doesn’t make him feel powerful. He feels skittish shooting the bottles she lines up on tree stumps behind the Byers’ house.
“Shit ,” he shouts, jumping backwards and shaking his hands out the first time he shoots the pistol Nancy had loaded and handed him, after showing him the safety and the chamber and all the ins and outs. Eddie doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he remembers his dad showing him the same things, before he went to prison. He’s pretty sure that eventually his dad would have taught him to shoot, too.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t like it.
Nancy adjusts his shoulders. She smiles at him kindly, encouragingly. “You get used to it.”
Eddie stares down at the gun in his hand for a moment. “Do I really have to?” He asks, quietly. He cringes.
Nancy studies him thoughtfully. “You should learn, but you can try something else if you don’t want to use one regularly. Steve doesn’t like them either.”
Eddie feels odd about having this in common with Steve. It makes sense, though, in some way that he can’t explain.
“Give me a minute,” she says, a satisfied smile already growing on her face, and Eddie isn’t sure what she’s going to hand him, but he’s been around Nancy long enough now to know that he’s probably going to both be impressed and a little bit scared.
She comes back out of the shed with a fucking crossbow.
“Wanna try this?” She asks him, just shy of grinning.
“Oh fuck yeah,” Eddie says, grinning back. “That’s so badass.”
Nancy trades him for the gun. It pulls at his stitches to reload, but it feels so much better in his hands. It adds a bit of fantasy to the whole thing, a bit of natural born and worn-in heroism. He doesn’t possess that kind of heroism, or much of any heroism, but it’s nice to act like he does sometimes. It’s nice to hold something that adds to it.
“How are you doing, Eddie?” Nancy asks him an hour or so later, when Eddie is lying in the grass trying not to pant so hard. His entire everything hurts. He might have pushed it too far.
“Oh, you know, half eaten and all,” he says, rolling his head in her direction.
She sits down next to him. “Besides that,” she says, and Eddie almost laughs. Besides his ripped up torso. It’s almost funny. “It’s been a lot. You’ve never seen any of this before.”
He’s not sure a lot quite encompasses the shitshow they’re dealing with. The apocalypse, Eddie feels, is almost too small of a word to hold all the death and destruction he’s seen and will be seeing.
“Ah.” He says. “Wellll,” he draws the word out. “I have a crossbow now. So that’s something.” He stares up at the sky. His stitches throb. He doesn’t mention the nightmares.
“I’m not sure what you really want me to say, Wheeler. Haven’t exactly been rolling 20s around here.”
Nancy sighs. “No, none of us have. But you’re not dealing with it alone. Remember that. We all know what it’s like.”
Eddie looks at her, raises an eyebrow in a show of skepticism. “You really have time for therapizing little ol’ me and all of my nascent, burgeoning trauma.”
Nancy almost laughs. “Honestly? Probably not. But we’re here anyway.”
Eddie hums. He appreciates her candor about it. He knows they all have their ways of dealing with this, and he knows that there’s not a lot of time to help him find his. But he also knows that if he were to ask, most of them would still try. It’s a kind of support he’s really not used to getting.
“Thanks,” he says, after a minute. He means it.
She looks like she wants to ask him something else, is practically burning with it, and Eddie braces himself for questions he absolutely does not want to give answers to, before the look passes and she leaves him to go back inside. Eddie exhales in relief.
Aside from the singular remark about his opinions on guns, Nancy has mercifully not mentioned Steve this entire time. It was not quite as inconspicuous as he thinks either of them wanted it to be. Eddie assumes the weapons training had given Nancy’s brain some space to think about the whole ordeal, just enough for her to be exceedingly curious about it. He’d caught her staring at him a few times, that reporter look in her eyes, questions filling up her mouth. But she let it go, and he can’t tell if that was for his sake or for the mission at hand, but he stays on the ground for a little while longer and tries his best to become one with the dirt.
It’s peaceful, out here. He can almost pretend the world isn’t ending. He can almost pretend he doesn’t hear Steve’s car pull up the Byers’ driveway, picking him up for their shift.
The worst (the best) part about this is how easy Steve is to talk to, and how it keeps getting easier. It’s maddening. Eddie can’t help it, he wants to spend all his time with Steve, even though he doesn’t know where he stands. He wants every shift he can get with him.
“Your turn,” he says, poking Steve in the arm and smiling.
Steve looks at him, confused. “My turn for what?”
“Did I not just ask you twenty questions? What, don’t you want to know more about Hawkin’s resident freak?” Eddie has never wanted someone to get to know him the way he wants Steve to, immediately, and with fervor. He’s all spikes and loud noises for a reason. This is maddening.
“You’re not a freak,” Steve says with a frown, automatically. “Also, it definitely wasn’t twenty questions. You asked me, like, five.”
Eddie makes a very loud buzzer noise that Steve frantically tries to shush. “That’s where you’re wrong, Harrington, I totally am. Now,” and he spreads his arms wide. “Ask away. I’m an open book.”
He’s not, not really, but he’s almost willing to try for Steve. More than that, he wants Steve to try. He wants Steve to keep picking at all his walls until Eddie kicks them down from the inside.
Steve scrunches his face up in thought, before he snaps his fingers. “Ok, why do you like metal music?”
And figures Steve Harrington would go for the question that’s both the most obvious and possibly one of the most personal. Eddie has a myriad of answers to this question, depending on who is asking.
“Excellent question,” he says, really going in on the dramatics. He’s going to give an answer that’s real, he knows he is, but he wants it to be entertaining and a little bit distracting. “It all started many years ago, when yours truly had much less hair and a super uncool wardrobe.”
Steve snorts. “You mean less cool than what you wear now?”
Eddie pretends to stumble back with a hand over his heart. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this from someone who wears polos.”
The jab doesn’t land, though, because Eddie trips, and stumbles further, and Steve’s hand shoots out to grab onto the front of his shirt with an expression so panicked Eddie shuts up immediately.
Steve yanks him back, hard enough that Eddie slams into him.
Eddie glances over his shoulder. He didn’t realize how close he’d gotten to the rift.
“Don’t do that ,” Steve says, reaching up with his other hand to grip Eddie’s arm. Eddie’s heart is pounding, for so many reasons. “Christ.”
“Sorry,” Eddie says, and doesn’t miss the desperation with which Steve searches his face, the brief flicker down to his lips. He doesn’t miss when Steve realizes how tightly he’s holding on and lets go like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. It hurts. All of it hurts. Eddie’s story dies in his mouth.
Steve maneuvers him to walk on his other side, putting himself between Eddie and the rift, and the mood has shifted so far from what it was Eddie doesn’t know how to salvage it.
“Um,” Steve starts, and his hand keeps twitching towards Eddie’s arm. “So. Metal music?”
Even after all this, Eddie still wants to tell him. So he does. He just cuts out all the fanfare.
“It’s a lot of things. It’s loud, for one, used to help me drown a lot of stuff out. Still does. I remember the first time I heard it, one of the rare times dear old dad drove me to school, probably because he had some shady shit going on after he dropped me off.”
Steve is watching him, waiting for him to continue.
Eddie inhales. “He must have hit the radio at some point the last time he was in the car. Because he turns it on, and this song starts playing. Paranoid.”
Eddie looks to the side and sees Steve’s face scrunch up in thought again. “That’s Black Sabbath. It’s like, one of their most popular songs.”
“Black Sabbath,” Steve mutters, under his breath, before his face lights up again. “Oh! You’ve mentioned them before. Ozzy.”
Eddie grins, feels his heart swell. “Yeah, Steve. Ozzy.”
He takes a second to gather himself back up, to recover from the smile that’s so wide on his face his cheeks hurt.
“Anyway, I just remember thinking, holy shit, music can sound like this? Before my dad changed the channel talking about how shit it was. Damage was done already though,” Eddie chuckles.
Steve has his tiny smile on his face, something private and fond, and it’s a little much for Eddie to handle, so he looks at the ground instead.
“Beyond that, man, they’re all just freaks.” He says this with pride, almost puffing his chest out. “Every single one of them is a freak like I am. It’s nice, knowing there’s people out there like you. That they’re alive. ”
He doesn’t just mean living physically, and when he chances a glance at Steve’s face again it’s thoughtful, and Eddie thinks that maybe, maybe Steve understands what he’s trying to say.
It’s dangerous, that he understands. It’s wonderful.
Eddie, like everyone in this entire town, remembers Steve in high school. He remembers hating him, and he also remembers wanting to fuck him so badly he’d once entertained refusing to sell to Tommy Hagan just so Steve would have to come buy from Eddie himself.
He never thought that it would genuinely lead anywhere, but Eddie has always had an extremely active imagination, and Steve was the kind of hot that made you both want to punch him in the face and push him down onto his knees.
Eddie remembers watching him in class and imagining getting to mess him up. Getting to take him down a peg by being the best he’s ever had. Because while Steve has definitely had more sex than Eddie’s ever gotten the chance to, stuck with his small handful of back-alley, clothes-on hand jobs under his belt, Eddie has his imagination. And he doesn’t think, still, that Steve would have ever been able to visualize the kind of fuck Eddie had been jonesing for when Steve had ruled the halls of Hawkins High.
Eddie had wanted to ruin everything King Steve stood for. He’d had plenty of ideas as to how to do this. But for all that imagination Eddie never pictured being here, at the end of the world, meeting Steve again and only really wanting to hold his hand.
Eddie still wants to sleep with him obviously. There's just a lot more mushy stuff attached to that now. Like waking up with him the next morning.
“Alright, Harrington,” Eddie says, bouncing a pine cone in his hand. “Think you can whack this over the rift?”
Steve scoffs. “You’re on, Munson.”
“What do you mean, on? I didn’t say I was doing anything. Though, if you fail, I think I’ll revoke your sports boy card.”
“Sports boy card?”
Eddie laughs. “You heard me.”
“You’re so fucking weird, Munson,” Steve says. He says it like a compliment.
“So I’ve been told. Anyway,” he holds the pine cone aloft. “Batter up!”
Steve grins, waits for the throw, and smashes the pine cone completely when he hits it with his bat. The pieces fall to the ground in front of them, bits still stuck to the nails. They stare at the shattered remains by their feet.
“Well that was stupid,” Steve says. “Why didn’t we realize that would happen?”
“I have no idea,” Eddie responds.
Then they laugh so hard they almost miss the chittering start up a little ways in front of them. When Steve yanks the bat out of the demodog’s busted up head, he leaves pieces of pine cone behind in the mess.
Steve tries so hard to take care of him, sometimes. It makes Eddie want to cry. It makes Eddie so fucking angry. It also makes him guilty, because he doesn’t even feel like he’s allowed to be angry.
It’s his fault they’re in this mess. Steve doesn’t owe him anything, except it’s really starting to feel like he owes Eddie some Goddamn answers.
Eddie yanks his hand out of Steve’s grip and wipes his own fucking face, because he can’t let Steve do this to him. Not today.
"Uh, Harrington, my apartment is that way," Eddie jabs his thumb behind him. He has somewhat of a sneaking suspicion as to where they're going, but all the normal routes were obliterated with a number of streets, so he can't be sure anymore.
"Wayne says you haven't been sleeping well," is Steve's only answer. He is focusing perhaps too hard on the road.
"Since when do you talk to my uncle?" Eddie asks, even though he's seen them chit chat every time Steve picks Eddie up from their apartment for a shift. Steve always insists on picking him up, wherever he is.
Steve doesn't answer this either, not really. He just says, "He's on another night shift. I figured you could stay with me tonight."
Eddie is half tempted to jump out of the moving car. Possibly into a rift.
He does not, and they pull up to Steve’s big fancy house anyway.
“So where are these parents of yours?” Eddie asks, feeling the house echo around him as he moves from the threshold, traipsing through the first floor.
He is addressing another one of the elephants in the room, mostly to distract from the elephant that is him, here, having a sleepover with Steve. He’s fairly certain this is only an elephant for Eddie, though, because while he’s never heard the rest of the party bring up Steve’s parents to his face, they all seem to have some implicit understanding about the situation beyond what is pretty common knowledge.
He’d heard that tagline enough in school while Steve was still there and still throwing parties: big house, no parents. He hadn’t realized at the time that no parents was almost literal. As Eddie walks around the living room devoid of any life whatsoever, it really seems like they do not live here. Steve’s house looks like a magazine. Dustin said that in passing once. It hadn’t registered very deeply at the time.
“I honestly don’t even remember,” is Steve’s answer. “I doubt they’ll be back here for a while.”
Eddie frowns.
“I’ll make up the guest room for you,” Steve says, before Eddie can comment, and he can tell it’s a closed subject.
“Thanks,” he says. And then adds, because he can’t leave well enough alone, “You shouldn’t have to be all alone here all the time.”
Steve looks at him strangely, like the thought hadn’t occurred to him. Not that he didn’t want to be here alone, but that he shouldn’t have to be.
He recovers quickly, though, and smiles. “It’s a good thing you’re here, then.”
Eddie’s stomach erupts into butterflies despite himself. Eddie doesn’t think he’s ever been anyone’s cure for loneliness.
Later, when Eddie inevitably does wake up with nightmares, Steve bursts into his room, bat held aloft and turns on every single light. Once he triple checks every corner of the room, he holds Eddie's hand until his breathing evens out, and then he sleeps on the floor next to the bed.
Eddie sleeps better for the rest of the night than he has since he left the hospital. He tells himself he can never stay over like this again. He hates that Steve would probably do this for everyone, that it doesn’t mean anything. He hates that when he’s doing it for Eddie, though, it feels like it does.
If you’d told Eddie even a few months ago that he’d be helping Steve Harrington save the world, he’d have wanted in on whatever the fuck you’d gotten your hands on. Sell it, take it, it'd have to be some good fucking shit.
He’s not brave enough for this. He’s this close to having a breakdown every fucking day, and honestly he should probably be a little more focused on the whole saving the world part but half the time said breakdown is about the Steve Harrington part of it instead.
He’s falling in love. He has to hold that inside because Steve won’t let him put it anywhere. Not down, not in Steve's hands. He’s tried, and Steve won’t let him.
He knows if he wanted to he could probably talk to someone in their party about this, just to rest this feeling somewhere temporarily. Take a load off. There’s a few options. Robin. Dustin. Nancy fucking Wheeler, even.
Uncle Wayne is right there in their new apartment, just waiting for him to open up.
He doesn’t though. They can’t really do anything to help him.
“I’m not brave like you, Steve. I’m just here.”
It’s a bad night for patrol. There’s three bat corpses by his feet and he’s just apologized, profusely, to Steve for the tears that he can’t seem to stop. He was fine. He was fine right until the point the last bat dropped to the ground.
Steve goes to hold him and Eddie lets him today, because sometimes he needs to take what he can get.
“I’ve always thought you were brave,” Steve says. “Even in school, you were brave.”
Eddie cries into Steve’s shoulder. He doesn’t really believe Steve, but it’s nice to know how Steve sees him.
“Dude, no, you gotta - pull your leg up!”
“I am pulling it up!”
“How do you suck this badly at climbing trees? Are all you jocks like this? Should I have climbed more trees in high school to get away from you?”
Eddie heckles and laughs and swings his legs from the wide branch he’s perched on, arms resting on one over his lap, high up in a tree by Lover’s Lake. It’s around 3AM, and it’s chilly, the wind whipping his hair and the leaves around him. It’s supposed to be a lot warmer, this time of year, but it’s like the weather reached April and then just stopped.
The bugs are better all the way up here, though.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, Munson. I’ll get up there eventually.” Steve rolls his eyes, which is a little rich seeing as he is stuck several feet down and defying once again the Munson doctrine that Eddie really thinks he needs to just throw out at this point.
Steve climbed the rope no problem in gym class. He can do pull ups - an annoying number of pull ups actually. The fact that he can’t translate that to trees is objectively hilarious.
“Losing starlight, Harrington,” Eddie sing-songs. “Hurry it up!”
Steve sighs, so long-suffering, and it’s so funny how grumpy he is half the time. How grumpy he pretends to be.
It takes about ten more minutes, but Steve makes it up to Eddie’s level, and sits in the cradle of two branches forming a y on the other side of the trunk.
“Nice change of pace from the normal patrol, huh?”
Steve looks around him. “Definitely less bugs,” he says, before looking down. Eddie watches his eyes bug out of his head a little, color draining a bit from his face. “We’re really high up.”
Eddie is delighted. He doesn’t stop himself from saying “I’ll hold your hand on the way down, sweetheart,” because things feel a little less solid all the way up here. Like the consequences aren’t real.
Steve’s face heats, color returning, and Eddie feels the happy little lift that comes from flirting, for once, without the heaviness that’s carried for him lately.
They shoot the shit and watch the stars and the rift and Eddie shoots a bat out of the sky and Steve looks at him like he’s never seen anything quite like Eddie, like he doesn’t ever want to see anything else, and it feels good.
Steve’s brown eyes shine in the starlight and Eddie wishes, so very hard, that the world would be kind enough to let them get stuck in this tree.
Eddie thinks that if he ever told Dustin the extent to which he thinks Steve hung the moon, Dustin would rub it so hard in his face Eddie wouldn’t have any skin left.
Or maybe not, given the fact that he’s caught Dustin staring at both of them in some mild concern, but in a truly landmark show of tact, hasn’t actually brought it up.
But Dustin was so right about him. Steve is a badass. He’s also one of the most caring people Eddie has ever met. It’s like it’s woven into his DNA. He thinks he’s starting to understand why Steve buried that part of himself until an alternate dimension whacked him quite literally on the head and realigned his priorities. It’s soft and squishy and bruises easily. And Steve just lets it happen. Just lets the weight of everything pile on and on until he’s smashed underneath it.
He wants Steve to let him be the caretaker for once. He’s worried that Steve will get himself killed, one of these days, because he seems to have pinned human shield onto his chest like a name tag, like that’s what is printed on his birth certificate.
Any time Steve isn’t next to him Eddie’s walkie isn’t more than a foot away, because he’ll do the same thing again, he’ll feed himself to the bats or Vecna or what the fuck ever, again, if it means Steve won’t get another fucking head injury.
It’s still so strange to him how these people have, for lack of a better term, adopted him. Eddie lays in a pile of pillows and blankets and teenagers, staring up at the ceiling a little bit in awe of the fact that he’s not only alive but he’s here, and it’s cozy. His sides are healing over, still, and he’s a bit worse for wear than he used to be, but he’s not sure he’d give this up for much of anything.
Robin’s foot is rocking his knee back and forth absentmindedly while she whispers to Nancy on the couch. Supergirl extraordinaire had woken up with the shouting and the roughhousing that came with his and Steve’s Duck Hunt showdown, and is now braiding his hair from where it’s splayed out from his head. Her tongue is out in concentration, Eddie can see, when he cranes his head back and smiles at her. Dustin’s feet are shoved under his thigh.
“Bitchin’,” she says, quietly, and Eddie full-out grins.
He falls asleep while she’s still braiding it, and when he wakes up the next morning it’s to small braids dotting the crown of his head like a headband. He has Dustin’s curly hair in his mouth from where he’d shoved up under his chin, and El has curled around them both like a parenthesis.
Steve makes them all breakfast. It’s as rowdy as the night before.
Robin tries to help, but she’s terrible at cooking, and Steve shoves her away eventually. She does not leave, but at that point it’s clearly because she likes to mess with him.
Eddie follows suit, because Steve is incredibly fun to mess with, and he has this magnetic quality to Eddie that makes it impossible to be in the room with him without trying to be as close to him as possible.
At least, as close to him as Steve will allow until he pushes Eddie away. It always happens, eventually - he’ll get this spooked look in his eyes and reset himself, like he got lost in the moment and has to get himself back on track. Eddie just wishes he’d stay lost. Just like Eddie is.
He’ll take what he can get though, right up until that moment, and it makes him feel pathetic, but only afterwards.
Right now Steve is letting him push into his personal space, grab for the spatula, tease him, and it’s like the end of the world doesn’t exist. Like Steve’s hangups don’t exist, and Eddie gets to have what he wants. Eddie injects these moments into himself like they’re a drug. He’s addicted to them. He feels like shit after they’re over, like most drugs. All that does is make him wait for the next one.
He’s never been good at cutting out the things that are bad for him. He’s not sure he actually can this time, though, even if he wanted to. Apocalypses, he’s learning first hand, dole out pretty shit circumstances.
He’s not thinking about that right now, though. He’s trying his best to get on Steve’s nerves. Robin has actually deferred to him, at this point, and side-stepped out of the way to avoid getting batter on herself.
Pancake batter ends up on the floor in his endeavor, splattering loudly, and some of the kids crowding around the counter have the audacity to groan about it. Loud enough to drown out Steve’s exasperation.
“Can you losers actually make the pancakes instead of dropping the batter all over the floor?” Erica asks, unimpressed.
“Yeah, we’re starving here. Stop acting like children,” Dustin adds. Eddie pushes away all fuzzy feelings he got from waking up next to this child to flick the whisk he managed to steal in his general direction.
Dustin squawks. “Dude!”
“That’s what you get for heckling the cook, you little bastard. I’ll shove this whisk in your hair.” Eddie waves it around menacingly.
Steve yanks it out of his hand from behind. “Oh? Is that what you should get then?” He says, right next to Eddie’s ear. Eddie fights tooth and nail not to react to this the way his body wants to. He can tell he’s not that successful, because Dustin smiles at him, threateningly. He opens his mouth, presumably to encourage Steve to do something that will be extremely detrimental to Eddie’s clothes, hair, and sanity, but before he can say anything Will Byers pipes up to loudly and pointedly thank Steve for making breakfast. Like the complete angel he is.
Eddie has not known him long. But he is both exceedingly polite and, frankly, kind of bitchy. It’s a hilarious combination. Eddie adores him.
Steve points the whisk at Dustin and Erica. “This is why Will is my favorite,” he tells them, still standing maddeningly close to Eddie.
Dustin reacts to this exactly how Steve probably expected him to, with indignation and offense. Steve then lightly pushes Eddie by the small of his back towards the counter and away from the stove, before going back to making pancakes and resolutely ignoring the chaos around him.
Eddie flicks chocolate chips at Dustin to distract himself from the feeling of Steve’s hand on him. It works, marginally, and it’s worth it for Steve’s unimpressed glare when he turns around to see chips all over his counter.
Eddie shoves a handful in his mouth and smiles. He’ll do something that’s too much, soon, and he knows it. But he’ll try to enjoy himself, being where he is, until he gets flung out to the far end of Steve’s orbit. Far away, but never let go. Close, but not allowed to touch. Gravity is a bitch, Eddie knows, and he was stupid enough to get himself caught in Steve’s. Spinning around and around. Pulled close and flung out for always.
Steve looks up at him and Eddie watches his grumpy expression almost break, the corners of his mouth twitch into what wants to be a smile and his eyes warm, and Eddie knows that he never had a choice in the matter. He was always going to end up here, caught.
They’re by Lover’s Lake again. Steve is laughing at him. It’s hard to be mad about the bugs in his mouth when that’s the result.
Beyond the haze of pain that is his arm getting nearly torn right from his body by so many teeth - and Eddie nearly passes out from panic at the thought of how many teeth are embedded into him right now - some incredibly lucid part of his brain asks the universe how many fucking times he is going to have to get body parts torn to shreds. When is it enough? When has he given enough?
The demodog releases him immediately after he has this thought, but it’s not the universe telling him it’s done taking pieces now, thank you, all full - it’s Steve. It’s Steve telling it to fuck off with a nail bat and a well-aimed swing.
Several well-aimed swings. Steve doesn’t seem to register that it died after the first two. It’s nothing more than pulp, now, and it’s splattering in Eddie’s face. Eddie wants to throw up as swing after swing coats him in black goo and monster brains. He tries to drag himself backwards. Tries to sit up. Tries to get Steve’s attention.
“It’s dead Steve, let’s go!” He shouts. Eddie can’t feel his arm. He’s so close to losing himself in panic. He can’t feel his arm. It’s just all swallowed up in pain.
The blood sluicing red down his sleeve, though. That he can feel.
Steve finally turns towards him, half-crazed. He throws the bat to the ground and skids on his knees towards Eddie, hauling him up by the waist. It hurts. It hurts so bad. It’s like the Upside Down decided to remind him that he should have died there. That it’s just waiting to finish the job.
Steve pulls Eddie towards him, and distantly Eddie registers how nice it is to be held by Steve. He wishes Steve would do it more.
But this isn’t the time.
He tries to tell Steve they need to go, that he needs a fucking hospital - again - but Steve doesn’t seem to be listening. He grabs Eddie by the face, and Eddie notices that he’s crying.
“You’re not allowed to die before I know what to do about you,” he says, holding Eddie’s face like if he lets go Eddie will just die right there. Eddie thinks that might hurt less.
Steve shakes him. They’re crouched, bloody and covered in gore, on the fucking ground in the middle of the end of the world, and Steve Harrington is begging him through tears for Eddie to give him time.
“You have to give me time, but you’re not allowed to die. Please, Eddie.” Steve presses his thumbs just under Eddie’s eyes.
Eddie looks at his face, desperate and anguished, and he gives in. He gives Steve just what he asks for. He doesn’t think there will come a time when he doesn’t. Especially if he looks like this while asking. Like he’s the one dying. Like Eddie could kill him if he says no, just like he’s been killing Eddie for months now.
“Ok,” Eddie whispers. “Ok, Steve. You have time with me. I’ll make sure you have time.”
The doctor tells him he shouldn’t have any significant permanent damage, aside from stiffness due to scarring, which Eddie is honestly surprised about. All the way to the hospital he’d been trying and failing to come to terms with losing his entire fucking arm. Some of those teeth felt like they’d gone all the way down to the bone.
Apparently they hadn’t, but there were still a few chunks missing from him. A few more chunks.
But then the doctor starts saying that full range of motion, of course, depends on how well he lets himself heal and then how committed he is to physical therapy, which means that since they’re in the middle of the apocalypse and he also used to live in a trailer park he can kiss that goodbye.
Unless the shady government people that gave his uncle their new apartment want to front him some more money, which doesn’t seem all that likely.
No permanent damage. What a joke.
A big cosmic fucking joke.
Eddie thinks, frantically, of his guitar that Wayne managed to save. He’s forced himself to play it, these last weeks, through near paralyzing panic, because he’ll be bat meat again before he lets that place take such an integral part of himself. He thinks about how this is his fretting hand. He thinks about the range of motion he’ll need to be able to play the way he wants to, and tries not to cry. It’s a small relief when he comes to the conclusion that it’s really not all that much. He can get used to never raising his arm again, if he has to.
Eddie nods and makes jokes that fall flat and tries so hard not to freak out. He tells them not to call Wayne, either, because he’s put his uncle through enough. He’ll tell him tomorrow, when they kick him out of this bed.
He looks down at the new bandages on his shoulder, pictures the stitches under them. How much of his torso is scar tissue, now? It has to be most of it. Large swaths of ruined skin, torn tattoos, things he’ll never be able to afford to fix or cover. He’ll have to live with looking at them. He’ll have to look at them and remember.
He shifts his shoulder in its sling even though he’s not supposed to, crying out in pain to convince himself that it’s still there. He’s mostly whole. His arm is still there.
He moves it up and down against the bed, getting more violent with it as the seconds pass while tears streak down his face, until a nurse catches him and forces him to stop. They have to change his bandages, because he’s ripped a stitch or two. They tell him that if he’s upset they can give him something. They tell him that if he keeps moving they won’t have a choice but to give him something.
Eddie thinks being knocked unconscious right now might be even worse than sitting still, so he digs his fingers of his other hand into his wrist instead, leaving little half-moons that’ll be bruises the next day. His arm is there. His skin is there. He’s here.
He takes deep breaths. His tears don’t stop.
He makes them stop when Dustin shows up. He tells his jokes, puts on a show. It almost makes him feel better too, until he falls asleep and wakes up screaming.
Robin ushers a half-awake Dustin out of the room while Steve holds him down through his thrashing, grabs his face when a nurse shows up and tips their foreheads together. He tells Eddie to breathe while the nurse injects something into his IV, and then he’s out cold until morning.
At the very least, there’s no more dreams.
Steve drives him home the next day, still groggy from the tranquilizer and the pain meds he’s on, and they don’t talk in the car about needing time, because of course they don’t . Wayne is asleep, but Steve wakes him up and Eddie is treated to watching Wayne try so hard not to get upset right in front of the both of them. Eddie immediately feels bad for not letting anyone call him.
Steve puts on a brave face, cobbled together much better than the mess he was yesterday, and goes over all of Eddie’s new pain meds and wound-cleaning routines that he’d drilled the doctor for this morning. Eddie sits, silent but not still, couldn’t be still if he tried, on their ratty couch. He bounces his knee while he looks at his feet, guilty.
Wayne doesn’t deserve to worry about him this much.
Steve squeezes his hand as he leaves, and Wayne sits next to Eddie on the couch, on the side with his good arm. Eddie pulls his legs to curl up into his chest, lean halfway onto Wayne with his head on Wayne’s shoulder.
Wayne puts his arm around him, and as soon as Eddie feels it, he starts crying again.
Wayne pulls him practically into his lap, like he’s still a child, and circles both arms around him while he cries.
“Shh, Ed, you’re safe now,” he says into Eddie’s hair, rubbing his back. “I’ve got ya.”
Eddie just cries harder. They’re not safe. But Wayne does have him, always has, and that’s enough for now.
Eddie is more or less benched after this. No patrol. No Steve, either.
He tries not to let that get to him. He keeps trying, even as he starts to heal and takes on more shifts and he notices Steve take different shifts. He knows it’s on purpose. He knows Steve came to see him every day for the first five and then stopped. He doesn’t know how this fits into Steve getting time, but maybe this is his answer. Maybe it’s over.
The thought doesn’t make him feel as relieved as he thought it would. It makes him feel sick. Angry, too. Resentful. That Steve spent months hauling him around just to drop it.
But if Steve is dropping it, Eddie isn’t going to do anything to change it, because he can’t. So he doesn’t talk to Steve about it, he doesn’t talk to anyone. He just waits, and waits, and waits for something or someone to tell him what’s going on. For the world to end. For him to finally get eaten up.
He still keeps the walkie nearby, because despite everything Eddie is still in love with him.
These are the immutable facts: the end is nigh. Eddie loves Steve. And he’ll spend the rest of his life waiting.
Eddie is aware the rest of his life might be tragically short. Just like the rest of them.
He uses one arm and repairs the engine on their end-of-the-world-battering ram of a truck, over and over again, and he takes inventory, and he spends the rest of his life cut loose and floating out in space.
Or maybe he’s just been flung out again, making a home again in that farthest point of orbit, that oh-so familiar place. Maybe he’ll swing back around before all this is over. Eddie hates himself a little bit for hoping that he will. It’d be nice to die holding someone’s hand, even if that still wouldn’t be an answer.
He’s been taking his sweet time on inventory today, because why the fuck shouldn’t he. He’s got nothing else to do, and if he wants to take a few hours to count a couple of cans while his shoulder smarts worse than yesterday and he’s in a bit of a petulant mood, he’s gonna. He doesn’t think the Byers are going to bother him out here in any case.
What is more likely to happen is Will poking his head in around dusk and asking if Eddie will stay for dinner.
So he’s really not expecting it when the door to the shed flings open so hard the hinges protest, and the door itself bangs into the table situated next to it.
Eddie jumps almost a foot in the air, dropping his clipboard and grabbing for the closest heavy object he can get his hands on.
It’s a crowbar. Not bad, but Eddie is a bit clumsy by default - a symptom of always going somewhere fast, his uncle likes to say - and trying to swing it with one arm might cause him some problems.
He’s not sure what he’ll be swinging at, but there’s monsters everywhere now, so it could really be anything.
Apparently, it’s Steve.
“You didn’t check in,” he pants, and Eddie is both surprised and not that he has apparently been listening to the check-ins that intently to notice.
“Steve? What happened? What’s wrong?”
Steve doesn’t answer him, just rushes up to him, all out of breath, and gently pulls the crowbar from Eddie’s grasp before letting it clang, not-gently, onto the floor. He takes Eddie’s face in his hands, thumb resting into the spot on Eddie’s cheek that got torn into. His hands are warm. Eddie has no idea what’s happening.
“I was,” Steve tells him, practically shoves the words into Eddie's chest, and Eddie fumbles them, tries to connect the dots of that response. “I was wrong. I’ve been wasting so much time. You almost died.”
Steve kisses him.
Of all the things Eddie expected to happen today, this wasn’t on his bingo card.
Eddie is terrified. Every bone and nerve and strip of skin he has left screams at him to run, like always. But in his shock Steve deepens his kiss, and suddenly Eddie can't go anywhere. Knows it's impossible, he's stuck the way he's been stuck, every small taste and every time he's let close slowly wearing him down until there's nothing left, until Steve Harrington has eaten him whole. He’s going to let him, he knows. He already has. He might even thank him.
Eddie places his free hand on Steve’s waist, feels the messed up skin that matches his own under the fabric. Steve trembles under his fingers, and Eddie thinks that if this kills him at least it’ll be a nice way to go, for once. He curls his fingers harder into Steve’s side to yank him close, and halfway forgets that his arm is in a sling when he tries to throw it over Steve’s shoulders.
Forgets, until the joint yells at him, and Steve moves his mouth to rest on his shoulder.
Steve pushes his arm down and in between them, holds his hand. “Let’s not pull your arm out of its socket,” he says, lips moving against the skin of Eddie’s neck, and Eddie is so, so scared of what’s happening, whatever is happening.
Steve straightens up, and he’s still holding onto Eddie’s hand, and Eddie tries to figure out what Steve wants from him this time when something seems to occur to Steve, and he blurts out an apology.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says, and Eddie can’t fucking do this anymore.
“What?” He asks. He needs to get away. He can’t take Steve pushing him away anymore, not after this. He was wrong, this is the worst way to go, he thinks he’d rather throw himself into one of the rifts than stand here and listen to Steve tell him that he still doesn’t know what to do.
At least he’s starting with an apology, this time, Eddie thinks, and he knows it’s sort of unfair in the grand scheme of things but Steve has been exceedingly unfair for months now.
Steve clearly has no plans of letting Eddie leave though, with the death grip on his hand.
“For what I’ve been doing to you,” is what comes out of Steve’s mouth next, and it’s not what Eddie was expecting him to say, but it still isn’t quite enough to back him off the edge of the cliff he’s on. “To both of us. I’m sorry you had to wait for me.”
It doesn’t sound like a goodbye, or a pushback, or a request for time. But he can’t imagine what could have changed so immediately in Steve that he’s suddenly ok with this.
“So…I’m not still waiting?” Eddie needs Steve to spell it out for him. He thinks he deserves that, at least.
“Not if you don’t want to be,” and he says it like that’s so fucking simple, like it’s all up to Eddie, but it hasn’t been, this whole time. Like Steve didn’t kneel on the ground with Eddie bleeding and woozy and beg to keep stringing Eddie along. For Eddie to let him.
“You told me you had to figure out what you wanted to do about me,” he says, hurt and so, so tired. “That-” he wants to tell Steve how badly that fucked him up. How badly it’s still fucking him up, how the damage might be permanent and how he couldn’t have stopped it because he didn’t know how, and how that’s Steve’s fault. He wishes he’s angrier than he is, that he’d been able to be angry this whole time. It would have made it easier.
But it’s not like he doesn’t understand how hard this is. He understands on a level that’s drilled into his bones.
Eddie the Freak was Eddie the Fag when people got mean enough, and it took him a long time to not give a shit about whatever f-word they were tacking onto the end of his name. Eddie Munson is a queer. That is just a neutral fact about himself. It was not at all neutral when he started figuring it out.
And he dug this out of Steve in the first place, made him look at it when he clearly wasn’t ready, whether Eddie likes thinking about it that way or not.
“The thing is, I can’t really even be mad at you. I want to, because you fucked me up so bad, you’ve been fucking me up, but I get it,” he eventually lands on. Summarizes the whole of it as neatly as he can. He and Steve are going to have to talk, at some point, about all of this and what it put them through in far more depth than that, but Eddie doesn’t think that moment is now. Whatever this is, it’s fragile. And at the end of it, he still wants Steve to know he understands.
But this has to stop.
He’d let Steve have time because he didn’t have a choice, because he wasn’t going to say no to him, didn’t think he ever could. But Eddie thinks he’s found it, now, the threshold he won’t let himself cross. The thing he’ll say no to. And it’s letting this keep going, around and around and around. Steve’s jumped a line that he himself drew, with this new kiss, and Eddie is going to draw another.
“So I guess what I really want to know is, what do you want to do about me? Because I can’t do anything with you, unless you’ve figured that out.
Eddie finally looks at him, and Steve’s eyes are wide in his face. They’re so naked now, like Steve’s dropped every single wall he’d built against this.
“I want to let you have me. However you want to have me. If you want to have me.”
There is no universe in which Eddie doesn’t want Steve, he knows that much.
That’s only half of this, though. There’s two of them here.
“Can you have me, too? Are you gonna let it go both ways? Because that’s how this works, Steve.” It’s the only way it can work.
Steve nods at him, and this whole time, he hasn’t let go of Eddie’s hand.
Eddie lets everything, all the tension and the sadness of the last few months drain out of him all at once. He drops his forehead against Steve’s and lets the hope he’s kept locked in a box, the thing that’s been punching and kicking at him from the inside, bruising him up, finally make a home in his chest.
“Ok,” he says, cupping Steve’s elbow. “I’ve got you. It’s ok.”
Steve rolls his forehead a bit against his. “I’ve got you,” he tells Eddie, and he says it like relief, a cutting of strings.
“Come home with me,” Steve asks him, breaking the silence. It’s been maybe a few minutes, or maybe a few hours, or an entire age, Eddie doesn’t know and couldn’t give a shit if he tried. He’s had his head buried in Steve’s shoulder and Steve has just let him, has cupped the back of Eddie’s head with gentle fingers in his hair.
Eddie looks up, raising his eyebrows.
Steve doesn’t even bother looking embarrassed. He just looks determined, like he’s putting himself out on a limb he should have been dangling off of months ago, like he’s making up for lost time.
“I have patrol with Hopper in a few hours but - come home with me.”
Eddie can hear what Steve is asking under that - if they can, not start over, but take a different route now. Get onto the highway, maybe, where they’d been spinning their wheels on backroads before. Eddie glances out the window at the red sunshine that’s a bit lower than when Steve burst in here and thinks about open roads and breaking speed limits, how he’d like to feel comfortable doing that with Steve. Thinks the only way to feel comfortable is to press on the gas a little, to just start, to just go. To trust that Steve’s got both hands on the wheel, ten and two, and won’t drive them into more ditches.
I’ve got you, he said. Well. If he’s got Eddie, then.
“Ok,” Eddie says.
So Steve takes him home. Eddie does not have dinner with the Byers. Steve cooks, and Eddie tries to let himself relax into the knowledge that yes, this means something, the tentative euphoria of it.
“I’ll be back in a few hours,” Steve tells him after they’ve done the dishes together, achingly domestic. Steve had stared openly, fondly, wet hands dripping into the sink while Eddie placed the wet plates on the counter and dried them with one hand, tongue poking out to settle in the dip of his cupid’s bow. He’d struggled not to hide his face in his shoulder, his hair, when he’d noticed.
Steve kisses him goodbye on the cheek, like he’s not sure he’s allowed his lips just yet, again.
Eddie sits alone in Steve Harrington’s empty house, the walkie standing sentinel on the counter, and feels - not abandoned. He feels kept.
Steve checks in. He tells the whole channel he’ll be home soon, and he says it differently than he’s said it every day since the end of the world began. He doesn’t address Eddie directly, but Eddie knows that it is for him. It’s strange, to have it acknowledged so blatantly now, after so long, that they worry when they can’t see each other. That they deserve to have it assuaged. That they owe it to each other.
He’s asleep, already, when Steve comes back, moon high and hazy with perpetual smoke and the night in full swing. Right in the middle of its performance.
He stirs, slightly, and startles, when Steve crawls into the guest bed beside him.
“Is this ok?” Steve asks, whispering.
Eddie just shifts closer, and falls back to sleep. For once, his dreams are good.
Eddie wakes up with Steve Harrington in the morning. It fills all the fuzzy yellow and gold tinted desires he’s held deep in his chest. It overflows them.
The sky is more red, than yellow, in the mornings now, but Eddie doesn’t really care about the exact color. He just cares about Steve’s arm over his waist and his leg falling asleep under the weight of Steve’s thigh. The pillow he’d stuffed behind him to support his shoulder is probably on the floor now, and the soreness there is ramping up with each second he’s awake, but he’s ignoring that for now, too.
Eddie is on his back, with Steve curled up next to and around him, half on top of him, and it’s so warm. He doesn’t want to move, so he doesn’t, not until Steve shifts enough that his leg starts waking back up, and Eddie has to start rotating his ankle under the sheets to get the blood flowing, grimacing through the pins and needles.
Steve blinks awake, raising his head off the pillow and Eddie’s shoulder, crease marks pressed into his cheek, and he smiles at Eddie. It’s uncomplicated and almost non-comprehending, while his brain chugs and sputters its way to alertness. It’s automatic.
Eddie grins back at him. “Morning,” he says, and the word sweetheart wants to fall out next, because it feels wonderful and heavy in his mouth, threatening to roll right out like marbles. But it gets stuck behind his teeth at the last minute, because it’s been months of toeing a boundary that always seemed to jump back and forth, and he hasn’t quite recalibrated yet.
Steve just smiles wider, still sleepy, like morning is a term of endearment in and of itself. Eddie’s a little floored by his happiness right now, a little poleaxed by it, by the fact that he woke up like this and yesterday wasn’t some sort of fever dream. He half expects to blink and be back in the hospital, shoulder infected and high off his ass on meds.
Steve seems to have none of this disbelief, just blinks his big eyes and tracks them all over Eddie’s face. He moves to thunk his head back down onto Eddie’s chest before he notices Eddie’s lack of support pillow.
“Oh shit,” he mumbles, voice thick. “Here, sit up.”
He pulls Eddie to sitting and arranges the bed’s remaining pillows behind them, then pushes Eddie back into the nest, perfectly reclined.
Steve starts twisting at the waist. “Where’s your sling? You should probably put it back on-”
“Steve,” Eddie cuts him off. He’s endeared by the fussing, it’s very Steve. But he’s kind of thought about this moment before, tortured himself with it really, and there wasn’t a whole lot of room for fussing in it. “Just come here, for a second.”
He reaches out with his good arm and pulls Steve in by the shirt to kiss him. Steve makes a surprised, happy noise, and it’s so much better when Eddie doesn’t have to be afraid of it. He’s trying not to be afraid of it.
“This is real, right?” Eddie asks against his mouth. He has to. He has to check before he gets a little too deep.
Steve pulls back, and he looks so guilty that Eddie almost feels bad for asking.
He runs a hand over his face and through his sleep-mussed hair. “Eddie-” he starts, then stops, starts again. “I’m so sorry. Yes, this is real, it was always real, even when I didn’t want to accept that.”
Eddie feels that familiar burn build behind his eyes and his nose rapidly and he tries so hard to hold it in. “For what it’s worth, I meant what I said before. I really am sorry, too.”
Steve shifts onto his knees and reaches out with both hands to cup Eddie’s face. “And I meant what I said. I didn’t want you to apologize then. I still don’t. Timing wasn’t the best, I’ll give you that - “ and Eddie lets out a choked up laugh, Steve smiling in response and brushing tears from the corners of his eyes. “-but I’m the one that dragged it out. We could have been here months ago. That’s on me, because I wanted this. I wanted you. I just couldn’t let myself.”
“And you’re letting yourself now?” Eddie knows Steve answered this yesterday. He just - he has to. He needs it.
“Yeah. I’m letting myself.” Steve looks at him for a minute, before saying, a wry smile poking up a corner of his mouth, “You know it was El that knocked the sense into me?”
Eddie laughs for real then, a startled shout of a thing. “No shit? Supergirl pulled your head out of your ass?”
Steve keeps rubbing his thumbs back and forth on Eddie’s cheeks. It’s distracting. Eddie never wants it to stop.
“Yup, literally right before I drove over to find you. Well, not literally, I sat with Max some more first. But after that.”
That makes something in Eddie’s chest swell big and buoyant, even if it's tinged with the sadness that always comes from thinking about Max. “You know,” he says, circling one of Steve’s wrists with his fingers, feeling his pulse and the soft skin there. “I don’t think I’m actually surprised it was El.”
“Yeah, it was either gonna be her or Dustin. Or - or Max.” Steve chokes on her name a little, this time, and Eddie squeezes his wrist, tight. “I think if she'd been awake, she would have laughed at me.”
They sit with her name and her absence heavy between them before Steve sighs, resets, and twists himself back around to flop onto the bed beside Eddie. He turns his head to look up at Eddie, hair falling into his eyes. “You know, all that Nancy stuff was just grabbing onto something familiar. I think I had a real crush on you already, when you kissed me. I think, if you didn’t, I would have figured it out on my own, eventually. You’re kind of hard to ignore.”
Eddie looks down at him and raises an eyebrow. “That’s kind of the idea, sweetheart,” he says, finally letting that drop off his tongue. Steve swallows it up with a grin.
“Yeah, I think that’s one of those things I like best about you,” he says, again so simple, reaching a hand up to brush hair out of his face, tucking it behind his chewed-up ear. Eddie feels poleaxed all over again.
Steve watches his ears turn red, satisfied, and Eddie tries to wrap his brain around what it’s like, to be loved by a Steve Harrington that’s letting himself do so in the light.
“Aren't you terrified anymore? I’m terrified.” Eddie is wildly oscillating between a wild, uncontrollable, soaring sort of happiness, and the sheer cliff face drop of fear.
He has a hard time believing that Steve just suddenly stopped being scared. Of any of this.
“Yeah, no, I’m definitely terrified,” Steve tells him. They’re still in bed. It’s still early, and they’re letting themselves have this, just for a little. Just until they have to get up. Face the day. Face the world trying to gobble them up.
Eddie just stares at him, waiting for Steve to continue.
“I just figured,” he starts, trails off while he squints at the ceiling, pulling his words together. “I don’t have time to wait for that to stop. We don’t have time for that. Like look at it outside, dude. It doesn’t fucking matter, in the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t, and I’m honestly a little angry it took me this long to figure that out.”
“I mean, it’s allowed to matter,” Eddie hedges. “It’s allowed to be a big deal. Even now.” But he kind of gets what Steve is saying. Who the fuck cares when the ground beneath your feet is literally cracked open to hell.
Steve shifts onto his side to look at him. Eddie has sunk down a bit into the pillows, sling still off, shoulder throbbing gently. He’s still ignoring it, though, in favor of staying here.
“I know,” Steve says. “But that doesn’t mean I should have tortured you with it. I could have just let you help me. I could have let Robin help me. I used all of this,” and he waves an arm behind him out of the room’s window, “as an excuse for not dealing with it.”
Eddie hovers his hand over Steve’s hair before settling it deep into the strands, because he’s allowed to. It’s so soft. Eddie runs his hand through it, addicted to the feeling already. “No,” because he’s not gonna say Steve was in the right even though it was understandable, because it was torture. “Not really the worst excuse, though, all things considered. People have had worse ones than fucking monsters and shit trying to eat us.”
Steve looks up at him with his big, clear, eyes, half enamored and half frustrated, though that’s mostly directed at himself. He shoves his face into Eddie’s waist and wraps his arm around him. “Think you can give me a pass, then?” He asks, muffled against Eddie’s shirt.
They still have to talk more. They do, about all kinds of shit, but Eddie is just as enamored, and Steve is clinging to him like he never wants to let go, so he settles on teasing for now.
“Hm, what’s in it for me?”
Steve pries one eye open, grin cutting his face in half. He sits up, pushing his face close to Eddie’s. “I think I can make it worth your while,” he says, flirts, and Eddie has to work really hard to get words out of his throat.
“Yeah?” Is all he really manages, quiet and a bit strangled.
Steve leans in slow, like he’s giving Eddie an out, and kisses him.
“Is this ok?” Eddie asks, breathless and naked except for his boxers, with Steve on top of him. He tries not to, but he keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. The inevitable second freakout. He’s hard against Steve, and he knows Steve can feel it. Steve is hard too. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Steve says against his lips, just as breathless, a little nervous and jittery too, but it sounds like the good kind. His hands traveling down Eddie’s scarred chest to his waistband. “Show me - show me how.”
It’s almost funny, Steve Harrington asking him to help him through sex, like Eddie isn’t almost clueless, not quite a virgin but barely three steps beyond one.
It’s a little comforting though, them learning together.
“Uh, yeah, just. Just touch me.” Eddie knocks his head back against the headboard, raising his hips to help Steve ease his boxers down. He’s shaking like a leaf, he can feel it. He’s never done this with someone who’s mattered, before.
“I’ve got you,” Steve says against his throat. “It’s ok.”
Steve gets his hand on him and Eddie almost falls apart.
“Can I touch you?” He asks, half out of his mind.
“Yes, please, yes.”
It sounds like he already is, like he’s got his fingers around Steve’s dick already, like Eddie’s making him crazy just by asking for it. Steve shoves the front of his own boxers down, and his dick rubs Eddie’s where it’s caught in Steve’s fist, slips over it, wet at the tip.
Eddie tries to stroke him how he might like, tries not to lose it immediately. They pant into each other’s mouths, and he doesn’t think either of them are going to last like this. Steve doesn’t seem to care though, runs his hand up tight, thumb pushing over the ridge, seems like he’s trying to wring Eddie’s orgasm out of him.
Their knuckles bump against each other, and Eddie starts making these embarrassing, high-pitched needy noises that he couldn’t stop if he tried.
“Steve, Steve- ” is all he manages to get out before he’s coming all over both their fists, up his stomach.
Steve pulls back to look at him, looks down at the mess between them, says “Holy shit-” before his eyes roll back and he’s coming too.
Eddie still hasn’t stopped shaking, but Steve is now too.
“I’ve got you,” Eddie says, voice fucked out and small, and Steve collapses half on top of him, mindful of his shoulder.
They probably should get up now. It’s not really early anymore, and they’re a mess. They need showers, sticky all up their fronts.
Steve is curled into his side, and he doesn’t seem to be making any plans to move, though. He’s tracing mindless patterns all over Eddie’s chest. He’s starting to get a furrow in his brow, when Eddie looks at his face.
Steve rubs his thumb over one of Eddie’s ruined tattoos, the demon head that’s mostly missing now.
It upset him, at first, the tattoo more than even the nipple that’s gone right underneath it. It’s not that the nipple didn’t upset him, but it was funny, kind of. He could get over it if it was funny. The tattoo, though, was something he’d chosen to put onto his body, and it was taken from him. He’s got a few punctures through some of the others, too, some strips missing, but this one is the worst of them. Torn right off and mangled beyond repair.
It still - it still upsets him. All of his scars still upset him, if he’s being perfectly honest, as much as he shows off his jagged ear and jokes about his lopsided chest and pretends even to himself that they don’t. But he doesn’t want them to upset Steve the way they are definitely upsetting him right now. It’s not like Steve’s sides aren’t ripped to shit too.
“C’mon man,” he pokes Steve in the forehead. “These aren’t your fault.”
That seems to upset Steve more, actually.
Steve bats his hand away but his eyes are stricken, tracking every mark they can see, and Eddie fights not to curl into himself. He knows Steve doesn’t think they’re ugly, or anything, he knows it’s just Steve forming a guilt complex over his injuries. But it’s hard to remember that when he’s looking at Eddie like he’s devastated, like Eddie is ruined or something.
“I couldn’t protect you,” Steve says, quietly. “I should have.”
Eddie crosses his arms over his chest, wishes for his shirt. Winces when his shoulder pulls. “I’m still me, though,” Eddie insists. “I might be like, missing a few pieces, but-”
“I know,” Steve cuts him off. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m just saying, I should have protected you.”
“Who should’ve protected you, then?” Eddie says, settling a bit, stepping over that hiccup and remembering half a fight they had in the hospital, drills into what Steve is actually saying to him. He pokes Steve in the side this time, over his scars.
Steve has the audacity to look affronted. “That’s not-”
“I swear to fuck, Harrington, if you make some claim about how that’s not my job, I’m gonna push you out of this bed. What part of I’ve got you, aren’t you getting?”
He looks like he wants to argue, he opens his mouth to do so, even.
“Nope! Not hearing it. We both got torn to shreds. Let’s just agree to try and not let that happen to each other anymore.” Eddie puts his hands together and then spreads them. “‘Kay?”
Steve rolls his eyes, bitchy. “Yeah, fine.”
“Jesus Christ,” he throws a pillow at Steve’s head, but he’s smiling, actually, because Steve’s not wallowing anymore. He knows he’ll have to insist on this a lot more later, but that’s later. “Come on. We need showers.”
Steve grins, catches the pillow. “You trying to get me naked, Munson?” He says, with half-dried cum streaking up into his chest hair.
When Steve told him he didn’t think it mattered, not really, he must have really meant it, because he stands so close to Eddie now. Kisses him senseless when they’re alone. Grabs his hand whenever people are mostly not looking; he still has some caution, some fear, ingrained into him, but his need to be around Eddie seems to almost outweigh it.
It’s overwhelming. It’s incredible. Eddie could die tomorrow and he might just be fine with that.
Eddie really hopes he doesn’t die, he’s never really wanted to die young, just thought he might, that he had a higher chance than most.
But he faces down the end of the world and he wants to live, beat that expectation, because while he might just be fine if he doesn’t, what he wants is to have years and years and years of Steve holding his hand.
That’s an answer, now. It might even be the answer.
In the end - though it’s not the end, it’s not the end yet but it is close, something is brewing and they’re ready to fight - but in the almost end, Steve says it first. And he says it on a quiet morning filled with distant rumbling and chittering that they hear all the time, now, over shitty instant coffee with Eddie blinking blearily into the early red and hazed sunshine.
“I love you.”
Eddie blinks at him over his mug, arm sitting loose and sling-free on the counter, stretched out in Steve’s direction. Steve is puttering over by the toaster.
Eddie puts down his coffee, hops off his stool and walks around to meet him.
These are the immutable facts, most old, one new: the end is nigh. Eddie loves Steve.
Steve loves Eddie.
“I love you, too,” he says, and Steve’s smile is blinding, bright and clear, like the sky used to be. Like the sky hopes to be, again.