Chapter Text
Steve Harrington is dying in his arms.
Eddie has blood on his mouth, all over his hands, he’s had so much blood on him, all over him, this week, last week, however goddamn long it’s been – he has it everywhere, seeping into his skin, painting him a murderer, a killer, a freak, a monster–
Steve is dying in his arms, and he’s got blood on his mouth, and this was supposed to be his year, his goddamn year, he just needs – he wants –
“Ed–ddie,” Steve’s eyes are always dark, but now they’re nearly black, the light fading from them as he stutters on breaths, as the corners of his lips foam pink with blood and spit, “You’re… you’re okay?”
“Steve,” Eddie breathes, with a mouth that tastes like copper and rust and life.
“We’ll get out of here,” Steve manages, the words slurred and mumbled against Eddie’s arm, “I promised, right? We’ll make it. Don’t look so sad.”
“Steve,” Eddie repeats, and one of Steve’s arms comes up. Steve doesn’t look like he should be able to move, but he does, he puts one of his big, solid hands on the back of Eddie’s head and cradles the back of his skull like he’s one of those beautiful girls with the hairsprayed hair and the long eyelashes that Steve’s always dancing around with.
Steve pulls him down and kisses him.
And then Steve’s hand falls, thumps to the ground. His head lolls back, and Eddie’s nose bumps his chin, touches his throat as he doubles over, Steve sprawled across his lap, Steve not moving, not breathing –
Eddie screams, the sound torn from him in a way that was more monster than man, and the walls around them bend, twist, and crack.
Some Time Ago
There’s a horrible noise in the air that carries out of the trailer park as Nancy, Robin, and Steve approach from the direction of the Creel House. It’s like a scream, but guttural and wet. It’s like a sob, but too loud. It’s like grief made music, a wrenching, tearing wail that echoes through the gritty, toxic air of the Upside Down and threatens to wake all of the dead things that lay around, unmoving and cold.
The Creel House, on the other side of town, burns down. There isn’t a body inside, and Steve knows Vecna is alive, somewhere out there, like he knows Nancy and Robin know, and he feels sick.
They enter the trailer park, and the sound happens again - louder, now that they’re closer.
Steve sees Dustin in the distance. His throat seals shut and his chest goes cold, and his fingers feel numb and his legs are still moving but he can’t feel them, because his body knows what he’s looking at even before his mind manages to put it all together.
The bats crunch and crack, squish under their boots as they rush over. The world is silent except for the sounds of the dead bat bodies under their feet and the visceral, terrible noise that they can see, now, is coming from Dustin.
“Oh, no,” whispers Robin, the first spoken words in a long time, in like most of the fifteen long minutes it took the three of them to get back to the trailer park from the Creel House.
Nancy grips her hand tight, the color draining even further out of her already ashen face, and while they slow to a stop with grief Steve keeps moving, because he can’t do anything else.
He grabs the shaggy bits of the ghillie suit Dustin is wearing, and his hands are probably gripping too tight but Dustin doesn’t even seem to notice for a moment, his wracking, painful sobs not stopping in the slightest. Steve shakes him a little, grips him even tighter, tries to find some sort of thought in the whirling, angry noise in his head.
“The – the bats got in, and he – he led them a-away from the portal, and – and he’s–” Dustin’s voice is broken, shattered and torn in a way Steve’s never heard him sound before.
It’s shattered and torn like the body he’s leaning over. Eddie’s eyes have always been dark and deep – Steve noticed, okay, he noticed a few times, sue him, Eddie Munson had pretty eyes the color of charcoal and he knew that because he’d looked at them – but now his eyes are black, blank, looking at nothing as they stare just slightly past Steve and Dustin.
Steve spent so much of their very limited time looking at him, and now he can barely bring himself to glance. He pulls Dustin back, and Dustin fights him for a moment, clutching Eddie to him, but when one of Steve’s tugs makes his hand slide from Eddie’s shoulder, makes more red blood spill out of a wound on Eddie’s throat, he goes. Steve needs Dustin away, needs Dustin to stop cradling his dead big brother – because that’s what Eddie was, really, Dustin’s brother, his friend, his leader – and Steve needs him to move.
Eddie’s head bumps Steve’s arm, his lip and teeth against Steve’s army coat. Steve spent a lot of time these last few days looking at Eddie’s full mouth which now is red, so much of Eddie is red now, bloody, stained, and even though he pushed Eddie away constantly when Eddie was swaying into his space, now he feels the need, he just – he needs – he needs to check.
Robin cradles Dustin into her chest as Dustin crumbles into pieces and sobs, and Nancy hugs them both, tears cutting through the grime on her cheeks.
Steve trusts Dustin, knows Dustin is the smartest person he’s ever met by far, knows he’s a genius and brave and everything else, everything Steve wasn’t and Eddie said he wasn’t, but he needs to make sure, needs to be positive.
So he puts his hand over Eddie’s mouth, checks for breath as though he’s still a lifeguard like he was what feels like a thousand summers ago. He checks Eddie’s breathing like he just pulled Eddie out of the deep-end of the pool instead of out of Dustin’s arms, out of the fangs and gripping talons of a thousand demon bats. And when that gets him nothing, he lowers his head, presses his cheek and ear against the blood-stained demon’s face on Eddie’s shirt, feels lifeblood seep into his hair, smear across his cheek, and knows he won’t hear anything.
Except that he does.
Uneven. Stuttering, slow. Too slow, and faltering, and fading, but there.
Steve whips upright – pain , his sides ache – he doesn’t even really know what he says as he lunges into action. He tears off the bandana from around Eddie’s head, ignoring the teeth smiling at him like the skull knows something he doesn’t, and ties it around Eddie’s throat so tightly it would probably choke him if he was breathing.
“St-Steve–”
“He’s not gone!” Steve snaps, “He’s got a heartbeat. I’m getting him out of here. I’m saving him.”
He hooks his fingers into the scrap that remains of Eddie’s shirt and tears. He’s got the ones on his waist, above his hips, matching Steve’s, and small bites and scratches here and there, but he’s relatively okay, here, on his torso, which means the real damage is elsewhere.
The others might be in shock, or something, because Dustin just stares at him blankly, no recognition in his face. He probably held Eddie while life bled out of him, Steve thinks, he probably thinks Steve is insane, has lost it from breathing in lake water and this toxic air that fills the Upside Down. But he doesn’t care as he rips his belt out of his pants – tears a loop clean off but he doesn’t care, can’t care.
The most significant damage is the tear in his throat – handled by the bandana currently soaking up that wound and keeping pressure – and his thigh, which Steve deals with now. There’s an artery in the thigh, Steve knows, that can cause you to bleed out in seconds. As he slides his blood-soaked hands over Eddie’s leg he’s talking as he does it, both to Eddie and the others.
“If his heart is still beating, that means he’s still getting blood to his brain. As soon as it stops, we only have seven minutes before Eddie’s gone-gone, forever-gone, can’t be resuscitated even by a doctor, so we–”
“We need to go now .” Nancy says, as Steve finishes cinching his belt around Eddie’s upper thigh, crushingly tight. His hands should be shaking, because he’s not a combat medic, he’s not a soldier or a surgeon or a warrior, he’s just some stupid guy, almost a kid, that works at Family Video. But they’re not shaking, they’re steady.
Steve shrugs off his army jacket, wraps it around Eddie’s shoulders. “For your modesty, man,” he whispers, possibly hysterical, and scoops Eddie up.
His own wounds protest loudly, but he ignores them. Steve is used to carrying pain, to shouldering more than his fair share. So he ignores them, grits his teeth and bears it, and cradles Eddie to his chest. More blood makes his arms sticky, but it's warm - warm blood, that Eddie’s still-beating heart is pumping, so he takes it.
“He’s going to make it?” asks Dustin, sounding like a child, and Steve starts moving - one foot, the other, one foot, the other, a steady march towards Eddie Munson’s front door.
“We’re going to make him make it.” Robin swears, and runs ahead to open the door. Nancy follows, with Dustin limping at Steve’s side and panic-spilling his guts about every single thing that had happened since they left.
“The rope is gone!” Robin yells, which is the part of the story Dustin just got to as well, and Steve grits his teeth as the world darkens at the corners of his vision, but keeps going.
Steve carries Eddie over the threshold, thinks some bizarre thought like - happy honeymoon, sweetie - because Eddie’s obviously worse off but he’s lost a lot of blood and oxygen too. And then he watches as Nancy shows Robin how to throw her through, like a cheerleader, and Nancy falls hard on the floor of Eddie’s trailer, narrowly missing the chair Dustin used to get through.
She gets up, cradling her arm to her chest and rubbing her wrists, and goes to look for a solution.
It takes too long. Steve doesn’t have a free hand so he presses his mouth to the pulse point on Eddie’s throat to check – fading faster now, and his blood isn’t flowing right, it’s slowing. But they keep going, using sheets and bits of Vecna’s vine and their sweat and blood and tears to figure out a way to drag Eddie through the hole in his trailer.
And they do, they manage, and Steve scoops him back up, stumbles out of the trailer, into his car.
Nancy drives, pedal floored, high beams on, steering wheel sticky with blood and sweat, and Robin and Dustin both sit in the front passenger seat. Dustin sits on Robin's lap even though he’s way too tall for that, because Steve has Eddie stretched out along the bench seat in the back of his car, bleeding all over the upholstery in a way that he’s never going to be able to explain to his father when he sees, and he’s pounding on his chest.
The stupid Bee Gees song is playing in his head, keeping his hands on beat, and he thinks Eddie would sing it, actually, if he were the one doing CPR, if he were the one forcing someone else’s heart to beat. But maybe he wouldn’t, maybe he doesn’t know the Bee Gees, maybe he doesn’t know CPR, Steve doesn’t know what Eddie doesn’t know because he hasn’t had a chance to know him, not enough.
Hawkins is dead silent, still, ordinary. Robin voices that maybe that means Max is okay, since there’s no world-endingly huge gate tearing the city apart. Steve chokes on his own breaths, his hands faltering on Eddie’s chest, and adds another name to his prayers to a god he doesn’t believe in.
They get to the hospital and Steve’s carrying Eddie again, he’s spitting at nurses and snarling at doctors for help, help please, help him –
“Isn’t that the Munson boy?” sneers one nurse, with her mouth full of gum and an annoyed look on her face, and Steve whirls on her, Eddie’s blood and his blood running down his legs, and locks their eyes together.
“Yeah, he is, and I’m Steve fucking Harrington, and if you don’t get us in a room right now, I’m going to sue everyone in this building and make sure my dad burns it to the ground, do you understand me?”
He doesn’t play the Harrington card. Ever. But he’s here, and he’s desperate, and he doesn’t know what to do.
The nurse looks horrified, stumbling over herself nervously. She grabs a few clipboards, looks over her shoulder to peer down the hallway, then back at Steve, like she doesn’t know what to do.
“We’re with Owens!” Nancy shouts, “Owens, we’re with him, please, someone help–”
And the name Harrington got everyone moving, sure, but it’s Owens that causes two very calm men in white lab coats to stride forward, to reach out for Eddie. Steve grips tighter, afraid, but they wheel out a cot and this is what he’s here for, this is how they save him, so even though it hurts, physically hurts, he lays Eddie down and steps back.
And promptly doubles over, clutching at his wounds as it feels like they ignite, searing, white-hot pain causing him to nearly bite through his own lip as he bites down on it, trying not to shout or scream because this isn’t about him, this is about Eddie, Eddie who is dying, Eddie who is bleeding out, Eddie –
Eddie, on the cot, seizes. His back arches and he screams, not awake but somewhat close to it, and the veins on his snow-pale skin are black, not blue, and things are wrong.
The doctors strap Eddie down, shouting at one another things that Steve can’t hear over the pounding of his head. He thinks he might faint, and Robin grabs his shoulders, tries to steady him.
“Steve?” she asks, in a petrified voice, “Steve, what’s wrong?”
“Hurts,” he manages, as his whole body goes blazingly hot and then ice cold, and his vision blurs and tunnels. He slumps into her and she catches him.
A doctor reaches out, jerks Steve’s shirt up, pulls down his bandages, and says “Him, too.”
And then Steve is also being dragged away, stumbling along behind Eddie’s cot. “S’okay,” he says, because Nancy is screaming and trying to follow and being held back by a lot of cops, or security or something. Because Robin has blood all over her and reaches out desperately only to get shoved back. Because Dustin falls on the floor trying to reach them, his broken leg crumbling under his weight. “S’okay! We’ll be okay, we’ll find you after!”
“Sullivan says to keep both,” says one of the doctors, and Steve doesn’t know who Sullivan is, but he knows Sullivan isn’t Owens, and he knows he and Eddie don’t want to be kept .
He twists, half-blind, and spits blood in someone’s face as he tries to get to Eddie.
And then one of the doctor’s jabs him in the throat with a needle. He thinks of the Russians, panics, and then doesn’t think of anything at all.
—
When Eddie wakes up, it’s to a lot of glass and concrete.
Not the ideal scenario, probably, but he didn’t think he was going to wake up at all, so he’s attempting to keep an open mind.
Without moving, he takes stock – he’s in pain, but not too much. It’s like an ache, like he had a fever and it just broke. He’s breathing clearly. His head is clear, he can see. He thinks he can move his fingers and toes, which means he’s probably not paralyzed, but he’s reluctant to test that in case the bubble of not-terrible pops and he goes back to bleeding out, or something.
But he can breathe. He couldn’t breathe, those last few minutes when he was talking to Dustin. He’d been wheezing, feeling air flow through holes in his throat that shouldn’t have been there. I love you, man , he’d said, and meant it wholeheartedly. He’d thought those were good last words, kind ones.
He’s said a lot of kind things, actually, just nobody ever hears them. He had been glad Dustin could hear some, before he went.
Dustin isn’t here, he notes absently, and wonders what the fuck is going on.
He gathers up all the bravery he still has, which isn’t a lot, admittedly, because he doesn’t feel like being very brave right now. And then he turns his head, just a little, just enough to look around the room and stop staring at that glaring bare bulb above him.
His hair scrapes on fabric, something soft that smells like blood and gunpowder and sweat, something that’s folded beneath his head. And then he’s looking at someone’s back, in a dark gray and navy shirt that might be pretending to be some sort of camouflage. It’s so patterned with blood that Eddie can’t really tell.
“Munson?” the camouflage says, because Eddie must have made a noise. And it twists until it’s not a back, but a front, and Eddie rolls his eyes up, and there are brown eyes looking at him, wide and with way too much emotion.
Oh. Good. Steve Harrington is here, that’s good. Sure.
“H-Harrington?” Eddie’s voice is deeper than he remembers. Just a bit scratchier, too, but he thinks that might be the disuse. He hopes he can still sing, because he likes singing, and he’ll be pissed if the bats took that from him but left him alive. “What–”
“Jesus Christ,” says Steve, and then he hugs him. It hurts, actually, because Eddie has been chewed up and spit out, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as he’d have thought. Steve grips too tight but Eddie doesn’t even complain, just gets his knees under him and slings his arms around Steve in return, holds back just as tightly, frightened, confused.
Steve is a good hugger. Eddie thought he would be, all broad shoulders and strong arms. But he is, and he knows now, and Eddie hugs back.
He’s hugging Steve Harrington, which is wild in and of itself. The Hair and The Freak, hugging in some glass-and-concrete room with bare bulb lighting and terrible air conditioning. Who would have thought?
“What’s going on?” he manages, when Steve lets him go.
“We took you to the hospital. You almost died, so we had no choice. And then you and I got taken away,” Steve says, sitting back a little but keeping one hand on Eddie’s shoulder, bracing him when Eddie sways a little. “You’ve been out for two days. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s not good.”
“Great,” says Eddie, and his eyes fall to Steve’s belly, where he knows the bat bites were worst. His head hurts. His mouth hurts, his wounds hurt, everything hurts. “Is… are you okay?”
“You’re the one that almost died,” Steve points out, but he uses his free hand to pull the edge of his shirt up and show Eddie that he’s got two perfectly placed gauze bandages on his waist. They look clean and sterile, carefully applied. “There are a bunch of government types. They tried to put me in a different… uh, cell? Cage? Wherever we are. But I fought so much that they let me stay.”
Now that he’s semi-upright, Steve’s hand on his shoulders helping keep him steady, Eddie can look around a little easier. The room that they’re in is not big. Steve was right to call it a cell, because despite the two see-through glass walls, he feels like he’s in jail.
He spent the night in a prison cell once, when Chief Hopper caught him dealing at a party to a bunch of high school richy-rich kids. Chief Hopper let him go in the morning, but the night hadn’t been fun. This place feels like that but worse. It feels scientific, aloof, cold. Like he’s the frog spread out on a dissecting pan, or something.
There’s nothing else in the room, except a narrow door with a bathroom symbol on it. There’s a drain in the floor, and then the piece of hard foam that he’s sitting on that could possibly be mistaken for a cheap, three-inch-thick twin size mattress. His pillow had been Steve’s army coat, the one Steve wore to fight Vecna, which is much more blood soaked than he remembers.
“You wanted to stay with little ol’ me?” Eddie manages, falling back on teasing and batting his eyelashes to avoid dealing with everything else Steve just dropped on him, or confront the terrible room they're in. If this were a D&D module, he’d be much more sure-footed, looking for lockpicks or keys, but this is real life, and he’s so tired and pained and scared.
Steve snorts, rolls his eyes, “Duh. Trust me, in situations like this, splitting up is just asking for trouble.”
“I hate that you know that.” Eddie says, and finally looks down to inspect himself. He’s been avoiding it, because he’s terrified of what he’ll see.
He doesn’t have a shirt on, so he can see everything. It’s an intimidating thought, and he hates that Steve has a shirt but he doesn’t. He feels forced to be more vulnerable, but then, it isn’t like the shirt would have kept him from looking so pathetic. Steve dove underwater alone, fought off bats with his bare hands, went toe-to-toe with Vecna and came out okay. Eddie couldn’t ride a bike fast enough to lure bats away from his best friend, who was a fifteen-year-old dork, and then got torn apart by them and bled out on said child.
He expects to look like a green army man found at the Hawkins day-care, missing half his plastic from gooey toddler teeth. But he doesn’t.
He looks so much better than he should, actually. Especially if it’s only been two days. There are bandages wrapped around his waist, a bit more padding applied compared to Steve’s two gauze pads. He can feel the one around his neck, a thin cottony bandage that doesn’t scrape his stubble or make him feel suffocated. He remembers more wounds than he can see, remembers scratches across his chest and belly, remembers teeth catching his bicep. And there are marks, but they’re pale, faded, like they’re from months ago rather than two days.
He also doesn’t have pants on, which is – okay. Sure. Probably would have made hugging Steve a bit more awkward if he’d known that, but that’s fine. What’s weirder than not having pants is that he has boxers that he’s never seen before in his life, boxers that are bright fucking pink and designer brand , what the fuck –
“They cut you out of your jeans.” Steve says awkwardly, a hint of color in his pale face as he glances away. “They had to, because some of your jeans got caught in the wound and, uh, they were too tight to – well. Whatever. But they were going to leave you here naked, and I … I didn’t want you to – to be –”
He gestures. Eddie’s eyes fall to where Steve is wearing those jeans that he wore into the Upside Down, heavy denim pulled taut across his thick thighs.
“Uh,” Eddie says, looking back at his own legs and frowning at the stitches that go up and around his thigh. “And… you gave me… your underwear? Not your jeans?”
Steve does blush at that, and goddamn, maybe Eddie did die, because the concept that Eddie Munson could make Steve Harrington blush is wild and crazy. But it looks good on him, that faint pink like girls’ makeup, bringing out the green in his eyes and setting his freckles on display. Eddie knew Steve was handsome, hot even, but he’s also really cute.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Steve says, rolling his eyes, “I tried to give you my jeans, but they said the denim could get caught in your stitches and ruin them. So, yeah, you have my… uh.”
“Used underwear,” Eddie supplies, and pinches the edge of the pink boxers with his thumb and forefinger.
“You’re welcome, asshole.” Steve flicks a bit of uninjured skin on one of his arms, and Eddie takes a moment to be grateful that Steve didn’t punch his shoulder, like he’s seen Steve do, because Eddie probably would have just toppled over and gone unconscious again.
He feels delirious. He kind of wonders if this is some sort of fucked up purgatory or something. Why Steve would be in his hell, he doesn’t know. (He can think of a few reasons Steve would be in his Heaven , but those are reasons that Eddie has stuffed down, way deep down, under his bed or maybe hidden in his closet or something, whatever.)
“So… what have they asked you?” Eddie asks, after smoothing his thumb along the immaculate stitching on the waistband of these boxers. His own underwear usually have frayed threads, maybe a hole or two. These feel like they are brand new. Soft, too.
Steve frowns at him. “Asked me?”
“That’s what the evil science-government types do in movies, right?” Eddie says, scooting back very, very carefully to put his back against the wall. The stone is ice-cold against his spine, but it feels good , it feels so good. “They ask the prisoners a bunch of questions? Torture them?”
Steve winces and rubs a hand down his face. Half of it is blood-caked, and the gesture makes some of it flake off in rust-colored chunks. He sighs. “I hope they don’t torture us. It’s not like we really know anything… not that that stopped them last time, I guess.”
It’s Eddie turn to hiss out a sigh, and he stretches with the toes on his good leg, prods Steve’s knee. “Okay. Okay, no, this isn’t working. All these randomly dropped… traumatic experiences, or whatever, you have to – you have to give me some context, man. Please. What are you talking about?”
Steve lifts his head from his hands and looks at him, and then huffs a sort of almost-laugh. “Yeah? Where do I even start?”
Eddie runs his fingers along the edge of the stitches in his thigh. It hurts, which makes him think: I’m alive, and this is real. “At the beginning. That’s where stories start, Harrington, didn’t you know that?”
“Not always,” Steve says defensively, “What about that… that medium-res thing, or whatever?”
Eddie scrambles through thoughts in his brain and then gives a single bark of laughter, not unlike Harrington’s little huff. “In media res? That means it starts in the middle, right?” He gestures at his wounds and then around them, “I think we’re in the middle now, Stevie-boy. Might as well tell me the beginning.”
Steve inclines his head, and comes to join Eddie against the wall. Even though he’s just a few tiny inches taller than Eddie, his legs are shorter. Eddie’s got long legs. “Thought you failed English.”
“Not because I’m stupid or didn’t listen,” Eddie agrees, tipping his head back against the wall. The ice-cold concrete is soothing the heat of his skin. He hadn’t known he was hot, but now he feels like he’s burning up. “I just… don’t remember to do the work. Or go to class, sometimes.”
Steve hums, like he understands. “I hated English. I had Nancy or Barb write half of my essays. God, Barb hated me.”
“You knew Barb? The girl who went missing or died of gas leaks or whatever the hell? Our junior year?” Eddie looks at Steve and Steve winces, nods, drops his chin to his chest.
“Yeah. Yeah, she was Nancy’s best friend.” Steve says it like it pains him. “And she, uh, she died in my pool.”
Eddie stares at the side of Steve’s face. Steve’s chin is still tucked, he’s resting his forehead on his arms and his arms on his knees, now. He’s retreating, Eddie thinks, or hiding. Bracing himself, maybe, protecting all of his organs from the incoming fight that this conversation will be. And Eddie feels bad, a little bit, for asking to know.
But he also now knows that Steve has been tortured, and that they’re stuck in some government facility, and that there’s a whole other plane or dimension or whatever, right beneath their boots at all times, and he just –
“The beginning.” Eddie repeats, “Please.”
And so Steve tilts his head back, refuses to look at Eddie, and talks.