Chapter Text
PROLOGUE
JULY 1985
“Have you… ever been in love?”
Steve couldn’t really blame Robin for the question. She had her reasons, after all, which became abundantly clear as the conversation progressed, in their impromptu, drug-addled heart-to-heart on the grimy floor of the Starcourt Mall bathroom.
“Yep,” he’d said, “Nancy Wheeler,” and pushed away the way his bruised heart thudded, made himself sound self-deprecating and a little careworn. He could be James Dean. He could be Ferris Bueller. He could be Patrick Swayze in that movie about the greasers that Nancy made him watch and he fell asleep to. He could be cool. He could be aloof.
Robin let him be cool, but only for a moment. Then, the way she always could, she threw another hairpin turn in the conversation.
“Are you still in love with Nancy?”
No, because she slapped him in the alleyway before Jonathan Byers beat the shit out of him, and the shock of being wrong about their predestined fate was almost as bad as the actual sting of her palm against his face. No, because even though he replayed that moment — the sting of the slap, the wide shock in Nancy’s eyes, the muffled snickers of Tommy and Carol — over and over in his mind, he still pursued Nancy and she still let him, and that ended up being an even worse decision than if they’d just come to an understanding there in the alleyway.
It hadn’t been that Steve didn’t believe in soulmates — he did, obviously he did, it was a fact that soulmates existed, and denying that would be like denying water was wet or trees were made of wood — and it hadn’t been that they’d somehow misinterpreted things. Nancy slapped Steve, caused his brain to fire pain signals, and with that flash of hurt, the future that he’d been building in his head was swept away like a rickety bridge in a flash flood.
And it wasn’t that people couldn’t love each other if they weren’t soulmates. In fact, as Nancy would say in their defense as gossip spread (I heard from Tina that she slapped him, so obviously they’re not…), divorce rates for non-soulmate couples were lower than for married soulmate couples.
“It’s like,” she would say, and Steve memorized her words because they’d sounded so good at the time, so right, “if you choose to be with a person, rather than assuming you’re supposed to be with them because of some- some predestined fate that you have no say in, you’ll continue to put the effort in that is necessary for a relationship to work.”
And she’d turn to Steve and he’d smile dopily and say, “Totally, you’re totally right,” and that would be enough for her to smile back and then return to quizzing him on active versus passive voice for his English test the next day. And that had been enough, until it wasn’t enough, until they realized that they were kidding themselves — or, if Steve was being honest, until Nancy realized she was kidding herself, and left Steve on his own to sort himself out too.
It had been intoxicating, the idea that Nancy could love him without a soulmate bond coming into the equation, and then it turns out she didn’t. So no, he didn’t love her anymore, at least not the way he had. Unfortunately, something in him feared being left behind, and so even when he wasn’t in love with her anymore, he did still love her, and luckily at least in this case she loved him back in the same cautious, careful way, at arm's length.
“No,” Steve said to Robin, and his stomach ached in a fun new way as he continued, “I think it’s because I found someone who’s a little bit better for me.”
Robin let him talk, though her silence from the other side of the metal stall wall should have been a warning. Let him spill his guts, because she was kind but also maybe a little mean, just like Steve. That had to mean something, right? That they were so alike, even though he’d never known her before this summer? That they were on the same wavelength, that they were such a good team?
“I feel like, this summer, that I have laughed more than I have laughed in a really long time,” he said, “And she’s smart. Way smarter than me.”
He kept talking. It was easier, with the remains of the drugs in his system, with the only thing in front of him a graffiti-stained bathroom door. He stared at a little carved heart with initials too scratched-out to read and thought about how he’d like to like someone enough to deface a bathroom for their love. How maybe that could be the girl he’d faced down Russian terrorists for, the girl who’d been the first one since Nancy not to fall immediately for the hair and the car and his dad’s money and who, most of the time, seemed to like him for him. The girl in the next stall over, who was silent as the grave as he continued his rambling love confession.
“Robin?” he ventured, surprised she had nothing to say when it became obvious he was talking about her. At her confirmation of life but nothing additional, he slid under the stall wall so he could see her. She was sweaty and pale and wouldn’t meet his eye. His stomach, so battered and bruised already, dropped.
And then:
“Do you remember what I said about Click’s class? About me being jealous and, like, obsessed? It isn’t because I had a crush on you. It’s because she wouldn’t stop staring at you.”
“...Mrs. Click?”
A laugh, just a little one. A whisper. “Tammy Thompson.”
And then:
“But Tammy Thompson’s a girl.”
“Steve.”
“Yeah?”
And then:
“Oh.”
Henderson and Mini Sinclair had burst into the bathroom before the conversation could go too much further. But, later, much later, days later, after the Starcourt Mall was little more than ash and twisted metal, after Steve stood behind Max at Billy’s sparsely-attended funeral and she let him lay a hand on her shoulder, after Hopper was confirmed to be gone and they all fell apart in various ways because of that, after the Byers family packed themselves and Eleven up into Joyce’s car and left Hawkins in the rearview mirror, after all that, Steve and Robin picked that conversation up where they left off.
“We could still be…” Robin had hinted. They were in Steve’s living room, a Blondie tape playing quietly in the background as Robin half-heartedly filled out job applications and Steve flipped through an issue of Rolling Stone, which was difficult with Robin’s feet in his lap. “Just because I’ll never be, you know. Attracted to you. Doesn’t mean we couldn’t still be…”
Robin’s awkwardness, never far gone, was on full display, and Steve laughed a little to let her know it was fine. Because it was fine.
“Maybe,” he’d allowed. It wouldn’t be the craziest thing in the world. Dustin Henderson once had a pet demon that ate his mom’s cat. “Do you want to punch me to get an answer?”
“I always want to punch you,” Robin said, poking him in the knee with her pen.
“Go on, then,” Steve said. His face was still fucked from Russian torture and crashing a car and a building falling down around him, but he couldn’t hurt that much more than he already did. Robin swatted him lightly with her stack of applications, but didn’t sit up to give him a real smack.
“I’m not hitting you to prove a point,” Robin said. Then, staring determinedly down at her magazine, she said, “Plus, it doesn’t really matter. To me, at least.”
Steve shot her a look. “Yeah?”
Robin sighed. “Listen. I’m pretty sure I love you more than I’ve loved anyone, and even if it’s not, like, romantic, doesn’t mean it’s not important. You may not be my soulmate, but you’re still my soulmate. You know?”
And that was it, those were the words that had been eluding Steve. Robin wasn’t his soulmate, he was pretty sure, but she still owned real estate in his heart, just like Henderson and all his little asshole friends, just like Nancy and Jonathan, just like Tommy and Carol, because once Steve loved someone he had a hard time letting them go.
“I know,” Steve agreed, and then he and Robin both pretended not to see each other wipe away a couple of dumb little tears because of their eternal friendship or whatever, and then Steve fought Robin off for the rest of the afternoon as she tried to convince him to let her paint his fingernails.
“For practice, Steve!” she’d cackled, chasing him with a bottle of polish after he’d hit her in the face with a throw pillow.
“Fuck off!” he’d yelled, but when she tackled him and brandished her brush, dripping L’Erin Smokey Toffee onto his arms as they wrestled, he’d laughed until his newly healed ribs ached.
That was before the world ended.
JUNE 1986
Steve's walkie talkie crackles to life, and a familiar, curling voice says, "Hey Harrington, you up?"
Steve radios back: "Weird time for a social call, Munson."
Eddie pushes the button early enough that Steve hears the tail end of his laugh. "Yeah, alright. Hopper just walkied, he and Nancy need backup."
"Got it. Need a ride?"
"Nah, I'll meet you there."
"Copy," says Steve on instinct, then grimaces. Eddie doesn't disappoint.
"Oh, Henderson is going to be so proud of you for using protocol," Eddie teases. "See you in a bit, babe. Over and out."
Steve sets the walkie down by the door and jogs upstairs.
His father had wanted to sell the house when Hawkins split into pieces like a miniature Pangea. Steve understood that, honestly; he and his parents hadn’t seen eye to eye in years, maybe ever, but Steve really couldn’t blame them for what they did when Hawkins fell apart: they called once to confirm Steve was alive, checked to see if he wanted to join them in Chicago, where Steve’s dad’s firm had sublet an apartment off the Loop for them until they found a place of their own, and then told him to stay safe when he’d refused to leave town. They didn’t ask why. Steve doesn’t know if that’s because they truly don’t care, or if they care enough that they’re worried but know they can’t convince him to go.
So now he has the old Harrington residence to himself, at least in theory, though that’s never the reality. He hammers on a few closed doors as he runs the upstairs hallway — it’s a little past midnight, so most people are probably still awake or at least not too far into their REM cycle.
“Up and at ‘em, people!” he hollers. “Hop’s got one on the line!”
He hears grumbling, groaning, but no actual complaints. It’s the best Steve can ask for. Besides, he’s the nice one; if they get an alert when Nancy’s on call, she doesn’t ask politely if anyone would like to join her in killing interdimensional monsters, she just grabs them by the collar and hoists them out of bed.
“Just one?” Robin asks when he makes it back to his room, tying a torn scarf around the bottom half of her face. They have medical-grade masks that Dustin and Mike had procured from the hospital supply trucks and she’s wearing one of those too, but it never feels like enough. Steve grabs his own scarf (one of his mom’s, cashmere, he thinks, though the tag ripped off long ago) and his bat and his walkie and his spare batteries.
“That’s all Hop said,” Steve tells her. Behind Robin, in the hallway, the Byers boys are strapping on skateboarding pads to their elbows and legs over their extra layers, and Dustin is rustling around in the linen closet and yelling about someone taking his spear.
“No one took your spear,” Lucas shouts from downstairs. He’d already been awake, thanks to Max and her midnight walkarounds. Speaking of the red-headed devil, Max is fully geared as well, her crutches slung across Lucas’ shoulders as though she’ll actually use them.
She calls out, sounding annoyed, “Check under your bed, Dustin.”
“Oh, shit, that’s right,” Dustin says, running back into his room.
“Language,” Steve says.
“Fuck off,” Dustin crows, scrambling down the stairs, spear in hand.
“Fuck you!” Steve grins back, then hoists his nail-studded baseball bat over his shoulder and meets the group of miscreants who are waiting for him next to the door. He flicks the front porch light on and they wait the requisite ten seconds. No movement.
“Clear as it gets,” Steve says. “Robin up front, Dustin, Will, and Jon in the middle, Lucas and Max in the back. The Wheelers and Eddie are meeting us there. On my mark.”
Fifteen seconds later, they’re all breathing hard but safe inside the minivan, Steve jamming the keys into the ignition. The radio comes to life roaring like Frankenstein’s monster, from silence into a wave of sound: How Will I Know by Whitney Houston up at full volume. Erica must have been the last one to ride shotgun, because this is definitely her tape in the deck. Steve whoops, slams his foot on the gas, and the minivan rockets forward.
Loch Nora is the safest place in Hawkins. Always was, honestly, even before the Upside Down leaked into the Rightside Up and things went all screwy. When Steve had parties at his house, the cops would come and pat him on the shoulder and tell him to keep it down, son, and then meander back to their cars like there weren’t fully inebriated seventeen-year-olds they were having to step over on their way out to the street. There were never any break-ins or vandalism, no missing pets, even. Once, a bunch of football players TPed the Williams’ house down the street out of grief after they lost a game, and you’d’ve thought the team had tried to burn the Williams family alive, the way the neighborhood reacted. It was the kind of quiet, watchful place where everyone behaves because if you don’t, the whole town will know in a matter of hours.
So, of course, when hell rose up and swallowed the town, Loch Nora had somehow gotten off the easiest. Maybe because the yards are bigger, so there are fewer houses to lose along a fault line. Maybe because they’re farther from the center of town, so farther by default from the epicenter of the disaster. Or maybe, like Robin had speculated, God is a capitalist and punishes the poor like he’s the fucking Monopoly guy, while letting rich people get away with whatever they want.
Either way, Loch Nora is strewn with debris and the sky is filled with ash and red fire and the ground sometimes rumbles like a volcano is about to blow, but it’s safer than most of the rest of town, so it’s become the home base of operations. Well, technically, the Harrington house is the base of operations, but he’d seen the neighbors pack their cars and hightail it out of town in the days following the initial evacuation orders, so the group commandeered some of those houses too and now have a cozy little community here, nestled in the abandoned mansions of people who have enough money not to care about losing out on some real estate due to devilry.
So Loch Nora is the safest place in Hawkins. That doesn’t mean, though, that Loch Nora is actually safe.
“Right side, three o’clock!” Jonathan shouts to Steve.
“One on our tail, too,” Lucas calls from the back.
“Someone turn the fucking music down!” Max snarls.
“Live a little, Red!” Steve calls back, then sings along, “I fall in love whenever we meet!”
The windows are rolled down just enough to get weapons out and aimed. There’s the familiar sound of a cocked pistol, the too-familiar sound of bullet hitting flesh. “Got one,” Jonathan says. “Lucas, do you need-”
“We’re good,” Lucas says, and Steve flicks his glance up in the rearview mirror to see a large shape take one of Max’s glass shards — just pieces of broken windows she’s gathered up, like a never-ending collection of macabre art she throws like ninja stars or knives — and stumble, then fall away from them in the darkness.
Whitney is still singing at full volume. Steve steers the van around a corner, the chicken wire of the makeshift tunnel they’d created to keep out some of the larger creatures catching the headlights and sparkling with summer dew.
“Everyone good?” Steve asks. Even with the music blaring, it feels like silence as he waits for his answer.
“All good,” Will confirms.
“Same back here,” Lucas says.
“That wasn’t enough to kill them,” Dustin reminds them.
“It’ll slow them down,” Robin says. “Now hopefully we won’t miss and waste a Molotov on one at full health.”
The silence in the car is a grim agreement. They all know the score. “Right,” Steve says. “Almost there.”
They round the last corner onto a straight stretch of street, abandoned houses on each side. They’re not far from Loch Nora, so these are solidly middle-class homes, little ceramic gnomes in the gardens and cheerfully painted mailboxes and a kid’s bike overturned in a front yard like the kid might come back and go for a ride soon. Steve’s a little surprised that’s still there; since their last trip Upside Down, this gang hoards bicycles like they’re worth their weight in gold.
It’s not hard to spot their destination; Hopper and Nancy are illuminated by a streetlight, pumping their shotguns in near-unison, something dark and wild in front of them writhing with each hit.
“There’s more than one,” Will warns. No one questions him.
Steve screeches the van to a stop and they pile out. In the background, Whitney wails on, this love is strong, why do I feel weak?, and Mike Wheeler makes a bitchy face at Steve.
“About time,” he says. “Another one came out when we trapped this one.”
Steve nods, takes up his usual position to Nancy’s left and just a little forward, because she’s a long-range hitter and he’s the up-close-and-personal type. (One of the only Dungeons and Dragons things that has stuck in Steve’s mind after all this time is the way Dustin and Lucas had told him that “you’re the Party’s barbarian, dude, it’s so obvious. You just run in and hit things until they’re dead,” and Steve had said, “Yeah, of course, why would I stop before they’re dead?” and Dustin had said, “Exactly.” )
Robin has a hunting knife in one hand, but she’s mostly on lookout duty, same as Jonathan and Dustin, who edge around the group with their eyes outward, the monsters to their backs. Will joins Eleven, half-hidden in Hopper’s shadow, and his eyes never leave the half-formed creatures making terrible shrieking death noises. Lucas and Max stay in the back of the minivan in case there needs to be a quick getaway, because Max’s speed isn’t quite up to where it was before, though she’s doing better than anyone would’ve thought.
And then there’s—
“Evening, my liege,” Eddie says, standing to Hopper’s side in a mirror of Steve, his sword in hand. He’s got his leather jacket on and a cigarette hanging out of one side of his mouth and if Steve wasn’t craving a hit of nicotine so badly right now, he’d laugh at his antics. Actually, he still might.
“Hey there, Danny Zuko,” Steve says, and he hears Robin snort a laugh behind him, so he’s glad someone gets his reference. “Gonna race Grease Lightning later?”
“Why, you looking for a ride, daddy-o?” Eddie shoots back, though he grins, and rolls his shoulders.
“You’re both idiots,” Hopper cuts them off before Steve can start singing about not going to bed ‘til he’s legally wed, which is the only lyric from the whole movie that he can remember right now. “Run into any trouble?”
“Two in the neighborhood, but we got away easy enough,” Steve confirms.
“Shadows?” Hopper asks.
“Yeah.”
An exhale. “Alright.” Nancy takes that moment to reload, aim, and fire again, and a spray of buckshot tears holes into the creatures in front of them. They’re mostly taken care of, and in fact, Steve’s a little surprised that Hopper called this one in at all. Then again, caution has gotten them this far.
“Guys,” Will says behind Hopper, voice raised, “there’s-”
“One more!” Robin shouts, and the formation changes.
Steve swings around, running forward to put Robin and Jonathan at his back, staying on a straight-line track towards the slinking creature coming to join the fun so that Nancy has a clear shot.
The pump of a rifle action, the call, “Firing!”
Steve stays head on, the creature ahead of him wailing as the shotgun slugs connect. Before it can gather itself, Steve hauls up his bat and swings, connecting at its midsection with a horrifying crunch Steve feels all the way up to his elbows. Not far behind him, Dustin stabs the thing with his spear from a safe distance, and Jonathan and Eddie unfold a net.
Steve just keeps hitting, and hitting, and hitting, his bat growing heavy with whatever the fuck is squished into the nails.
“Alright, Steve, move back!” Jonathan calls, and Steve gets in one more good whack before pitching himself to the side, and the net flies over the monster’s head. It wriggles and protests in its terrible voice but can’t get out. Steve grabs two ends of the net, Eddie grabs the other, and they drag the creature over to its fellows, held in place by Hopper’s gun back where they started. Lucas has stepped up for backup and Max is holding one of her glass projectiles, but they’re almost relaxed. If that had been a demogorgon, or a flock of bats, or even a demodog pack, there might’ve been more excitement, but this has become almost routine.
“Come on, ugly,” Steve grunts, unrolling the net and kicking the monster out to join the others.
“They want to speak,” Eleven says, her eyes narrowed on the closest one.
“That a good idea?” Eddie asks, sword back out and ready. It’s a decent question. They’ve gotten nothing but trouble from these things, and none have ever given up anything helpful.
“They’re dead anyway,” Nancy says in that cold steel way she has when she’s tired and wants to be done with this day. “Maybe they’ve got something they want to share on the way out.”
The shadows won’t talk to just anyone. It’s something about the way they categorize humans, according to Eleven, who’s risked her sanity a fair few times trying to peek into their minds over the course of this nightmare. “Most are… prey,” she’d said, the slow unwinding of words she wasn’t quite sure she was using correctly, “and some are,” she’d wrinkled her nose, “pets.” Steve hadn’t liked that at all, and according to the faces of the people around him, he wasn’t alone. “But a few are touched. By the Upside Down. They see us as…” and that time she hadn’t tried to explain, because Will had gone ashy and Mike looked like he was going to start punching something. But Steve could guess at the rest of her answer: like them.
They’ll talk to Eleven, and Will. They’ll talk to Max. And they’ll talk to Eddie.
There are now three shadows there in the sickly yellow of the streetlight, held in place with a cobbled-together construction of chains and nets. They’re not all that strong, at least according to the group’s interactions with them. In fact, they’re not all that hard to beat in a fight. The issue has never been beating them, though. It’s been killing them.
Right now, the shadows look like weirdly-shaped dudes, shot to pieces and weakly fighting against their bonds. Their arms are a little longer than a regular person’s, their teeth sharp, their backs a little bowed. Their arms end in clawed hands that are always a little curled up, and their hands are black up to the wrist, where it starts to lighten; it looks like they’re all wearing horrible black gloves. Robin made Steve watch classic horror movies every weekend last October and these guys kind of look like the thing in Nosferatu. They move like snakes, though, their necks, heads, eyes always moving, flickering, one person to the next.
“What do you want?” Eleven calls out. She’s always been braver than anyone else Steve knows. The shadows flicker their gaze to her, their necks moving their heads in creepy, jerking motions.
“More,” one of them says. Its voice is barely more than a hiss, and Steve has always assumed that English probably isn’t what they speak back home in the underneath. Then again, apparently Henry-slash-Vecna-slash-One created a fair amount of that world. Maybe he taught some grammar classes to all the beasties when he wasn’t turning into a big squelch monster.
“More what?” Will asks them.
The eyes flicker to him, now. The first one widens its mouth — not a smile, but an approximation of one from something that doesn’t know joy. “More.”
“Kill it,” Eddie says.
Steve reaches back. Robin presses a bottle into his hand. He rears back, and throws. The Molotov cocktail is small, but it doesn’t need to be big to do its job.
The shadows screech and wail and jerk, and it’s awful, and the group watches with bated breath to make sure—
“Gone,” Hopper says with relief. “They’re gone. Let’s go home.”
All that’s left in the little circle of fluorescent light is a pile of ashes. Steve’s shoulders unwind. He drops his head back and sighs, and lets himself feel tired for the first time since his walkie crackled to life.
“G’job, kid,” he says to Robin, ruffling her hair.
“I didn’t do anything,” she complained. “You and Nance did all the work.” Nancy, unloading her shotgun and dropping the shells into her jacket pocket, looks over and smiles.
“C’mon, munchkins,” Steve calls. “Sleepover at my house.”
“Yay,” Dustin cheers weakly after a massive yawn, tumbling back into the minivan. Mike joins him in the middle row, while Lucas and Max are comfy in the back.
“Hey,” Steve says, catching Eddie's sleeve. “You okay?”
Eddie looks up at him from under his mess of curls, and grins. His cigarette is nearly down to the filter. “Obviously. It’s just the end of the world.”
“Not yet it’s not,” Steve says, and steals Eddie’s cigarette to kill it with one last drag. Eddie lets him, and his eyes catch on Steve’s mouth as he exhales smoke. Ash, or dust, or Upside Down-phlegm, or whatever the hell that shit is floats in the air around them. From a ways back, they might look like two figures in a snow globe, except they’re dressed for war in patchwork armor and one of them is carrying a goddamn sword.
“Breakfast?” Eddie asks. He’s standing too close, but he always is.
“See you in the morning,” Steve says, then leans in even closer. “Daddy-o.”
Eddie chokes a laugh, looking both delighted and pained. Steve jogs to the van with that as his last image, not bothering to look back at the smoldering ash pile that had once been three sentient creatures.
This is the best possible scenario, and even if the kids grumble and yawn during the short trip back to the house, he knows they’re glad they were there. It could’ve gone so much worse. It has gone so much worse before.
Steve thinks the name is stupid. Shadows. They aren’t shadows, they’re fully there. Like people, like animals. Like demogorgons. But apparently it’s another one of those D&D things, like all the rest of this nonsense. Names that half-fit, rules that only barely apply. In D&D, according to Dustin, shadows are undead monsters with a weakness to sunlight, who, if they hurt or kill an opponent and nothing is done to stop it, have the ability to create more of themselves.
Steve gets it. But he’d said it once already, out at Skull Rock, back when Eddie was a wanted fugitive and Max could still see out of both of her eyes, back before he knew what it was like to be eaten by bats. He’d said it then, and he’d been half-joking, but also half-serious. He knows why they don’t say the word, because it’s too close to home. These aren’t mythical beings that no one has heard of.
If they wanted to call the shadows what they actually are, they’d call them vampires.
Hawkins is overrun with fucking vampires.
Eddie drives in silence, for the most part. He has a tape in the deck, ready to roll — Dio, last he checked, though he hasn’t been able to listen to Holy Diver since Steve Goddamn Harrington accepted his vest and stained it with his own blood in an underground hellscape.
Silence is better on nights like tonight, anyway. Lets his thoughts bounce all over and find a place to live before he gets back to Wayne and his too-knowing eyes.
He follows Hopper’s tail lights back to Loch Nora, and when the Chief pulls into the once-abandoned house across from the Harringtons' (apparently formerly owned by a family called the Ericksons) on the left, and Steve’s goddamn minivan pulls into the Harrington residence on the right, Eddie pulls in next to Hop’s truck and shoots him a salute as he jogs around to the back of the house. Well, not a jog. A sprint. Nights are dangerous, even in these parts.
Hopper hates the Loch Nora houses more than almost anyone else. Spends his days either stockpiling ammunition or sleeping or watching the little ducklings that have absorbed his daughter into their group, but his constant refrain is bitching about “three goddamn stories of unused furniture and creepy angel statues.” Eddie’s got to hand it to him, the Ericksons had some truly abhorrent design taste before they packed up and fled town like a buncha scared birds taking flight.
But the guy living with Eddie in the Ericksons’ pool house might give Hop a run for his money.
Eddie hears the cursing before he even scrambles around the dark corner of the house and into the backyard. “Stupid fuckin’ palm trees, like we’re not in the middle of fuckin’ Indiana-”
Eddie’s Uncle Wayne is huddled against the side of their makeshift home, smoke pouring out of him like he’s trying to repaint the bright white building yellow with nicotine alone. He’s glaring at, you guessed it, a gaudy full-sized plastic palm tree, which is swatting the side of the poolhouse with its ridiculous plastic fronds, blowing in the stiff summer breeze and coated in Upside Down dust.
“Not supposed to be outside after nightfall, old man,” Eddie says, slowing his jog to a stop. Just like at Steve’s, the Ericksons’ pool has an automatic light that turns on for the evening hours, flooding the backyard with this unholy rolling blue that washes everything out to a flat, unrealistic texture and makes Eddie think about mirages and heat waves off of pavement. He kind of wants to incorporate it into a campaign. A show of wealth that seems to be inviting, only to be a trap — or a mimic? He could totally make a deck chair into a mimic. Might not fit the vibe of the generally medieval campaign, though? He’ll work on it.
Wayne shoots him an unimpressed look. “The suits can tell me where to sleep and where to eat and where to take a piss, but I’ll be damned if they can tell me where to smoke.”
“The suits aren’t telling you shit,” Eddie points out. “This is Nancy’s rule. And she’s much scarier than government officials.”
Wayne lets out a little chuckle. “Suppose that’s true. I’m finished anyway, come on.”
The poolhouse used to also be decorated in pseudo-religious baby angel statues and way too many columns and lots of baby blue, but Wayne and Eddie stripped the place on their first night here and took everything, down to the tiniest little Cupid figurine with its bare baby butt, to the middle school for the donation piles. Most of them are still there when Eddie goes on supply runs, but that doesn’t mean they won’t someday find a new owner. Eddie saw Gareth’s grandma eyeing them one day, maybe he’ll convince her they need a loving home next to her creepy porcelain dolls.
The pool house is one big room with attached bathrooms — “Like a studio apartment!” Robin had said when Eddie’d invited the Scooby gang over one night — with a small kitchenette in a corner and a mosaic tile floor that gets very cold now that the sun isn’t really out anymore. Wayne claimed one corner for himself, a spartan little area with a cot he refuses to let anyone replace with a real bed and his neat stores of extra clothes and a few of his novelty mugs he’d salvaged from the trailer before it had been police-taped off. He tucks his cigarette packages into his boots and makes his bed every morning.
And then there’s Eddie’s side. He had no issue accepting a bed — a nice one, too, one of the cushy full-sized mattresses from the Ericksons’ unused guest rooms and a set of cream sheets he’d found at the donation center — and has made himself a little nest of blankets and pillows and spare bandanas and maybe one of Steve Harrington’s sweaters snuck in there as well. Their trailer had been unsalvageable with a rift running through the center of it, and Steve and Dustin had teamed up to keep Eddie from sneaking over there to see if anything was left, so he’d had to start from scratch on a new collection of stupid little things that bring him joy. His corner’s walls are covered in magazine cutouts and drawings from Will and Erica and notes to himself and from the others, and then the dumbest little collection of tchotchkes and trinkets he could ever imagine.
He has a 1985 Garfield themed 12-month calendar, which is entirely unhelpful because it’s 1986, or at least it was last he checked. He has a Flock of Seagulls poster he has hung up entirely out of guilt, because Claudia Henderson had said, “Oh, Eddie, I found this at the donation center, and they looked like your type of band!” and Eddie had wanted to die but for a variety of different reasons. Wayne had been able to grab Eddie’s acoustic guitar — which had been Wayne’s before him — and that sits propped next to the bed, THIS MACHINE SLAYS DRAGONS as bright today as the day he painstakingly painted the words onto the old wood. He rests his sword next to the guitar, the irony not lost on him that now he does actually own something that could slay a dragon. He has a little pile of cassette tapes that he’s been hoarding like a pack rat, and Robin’s old Walkman covered in glitter glue hearts. A stack of cheap paperback books and magazines, a few VHS tapes even though they don’t have a TV.
There’s also a tiny pin, stuck through the boots of one of the Flock of Seagulls dudes, blink and you miss it — a little pink triangle on a black background. Eddie, Steve, Robin, and Nancy had been combing through the donation piles at the gym to find anything Eddie’s size after he’d been evicted from his hospital bed, when Robin had found something buried in the bottom of a box of hats and made a soft little squeak. She hadn’t said anything, just handed the pin to Eddie with a significant look and when he looked significantly back at her — are you?... are you? — they both laughed and wrapped each other into hugs and cried a little until Steve said, “Hey, I found this weird little lamp thing — whoa, what did I miss?” and then joined the hug without needing an invitation.
(Eddie had taken Steve’s “weird little lamp thing,” too, which had turned out to be a hot plate. Eddie thinks it’s hilarious, and sometimes makes s’mores on it with rationed chocolate and stale marshmallows.)
Eddie collapses onto his bed-nest, pulling his hair out of its hasty ponytail and bandana, because he doesn’t know how Robin and Nancy are doing, but his long hair holds onto the Upside Down spore-dust like he’s got gum stuck in there, and it’s a bitch to wash out if he doesn’t keep it covered. He should exchange tips with Nancy — she’s the only other one in their little bandit gang that has the curse of curly hair, and she must have some kind of routine to keep hers so shiny. Thinking of Nancy makes him think about Baby Wheeler, who makes him think about D&D in the theatre room at the high school, which makes him think about basketball practices they had to endure going on right next door to their most intense Hellfire sessions, and how the squeak of rubber-soled shoes always seemed to ruin the ambiance. Basketball practice makes him think about those dumb little basketball shorts. Dumb little basketball shorts make him think about Steve.
“Ugh,” Eddie says, then rolls back up to a sitting position, unlacing his boots (Doc Martens, and a nice pair too, but about a half-size too big so Eddie has to wear more than one pair of socks) and tossing those to the corner of the room, joining his jacket (covered in spores), a horribly green John Deere hat he wore yesterday (covered in spores), and his piles of extra masks that Robin always insists on adding to (not covered in spores, luckily, because that’s the whole point).
Wayne snorts at Eddie’s antics, settling into the lawn chair he’d brought in from outside and tuning his radio to a news channel. It’s a hand-crank radio because power is mostly reliable, but it had been spotty in the days after Apocalypse 2: Electric Boogaloo. The reports are depressingly ordinary — stock market down, gas prices up, Reagan being a dipshit, war, famine, death, disease, sports, etc. etc. etc. — and Eddie mostly tunes it out. The news hasn't mentioned Hawkins since those first days, and now it's like the town doesn't exist. Which makes sense — everyone was told that Hawkins was evacuated, so people don't even know there's anyone here to get news from. And why would they? It was just a bunch of earthquake damage.
He hates nights like this, interrupted from their new normal to go do something completely abnormal like set fire to a bunch of former-people. Not that he doesn’t want to be invited, he definitely wants to be invited. At least, he doesn’t want to be left out, even if the task at hand is gruesome as hell. The issue is that it throws his mind out of his carefully constructed routines, which are the only things that keep him from chaos on a daily basis. He hates feeling jittery and out of control, and that’s always how he feels after a late night run or patrol. He thinks this must be how soldiers feel in the quiet moments between battles, on-edge for a danger that might never materialize.
Thinking about soldiers makes him think about his own weapon of choice, the fucking two-hander broadsword that the mall fire victim(?) Chief Hopper had brought back with him from the dead(?), which also means Russia(???). Hopper had taken a single afternoon to hear the whole unabridged story of the Spring Break in the Underdark, and cornered Eddie later to hand him the sword he owned(??), saying, “This seems more your speed than mine, kid.” And Eddie had said, “It’s weird to hear you call me kid when you used to confiscate the drugs I sold and threaten to arrest me. Also, thank you?”
Thinking about the broadsword, which Eddie had named Andúril because he is, above all else, a nerd, makes Eddie think about demogorgons, and how the real things really don’t measure up to the plastic mini-figs he has in his D&D go box. The go box makes him think about Dustin Henderson’s wide, crinkly-eyed smile and his single-minded determination to get Steve Harrington to play D&D with them. And just like that, his mind is back on Steve, and the way his mouth curved around Eddie’s cigarette earlier. Daddy-o — fuck him, fuck him, and his plush goddamn lips and the sexy way he swings his disgusting goddamn nail bat.
Eddie huffs and pulls his blanket over his head, fighting the urge to scream into a pillow, because then Wayne would ask what was wrong and honestly, Eddie might just tell him. This is what the silent ride home was supposed to fix! To put all his pinballing thoughts into some semblance of order, so that he doesn’t end up telling his uncle how he can’t stop dreaming about Steve Harrington in a cutoff Iron Maiden t-shirt and nothing else splayed out on Eddie’s sheets!
“Hungry?” Wayne asks at a commercial break, and Eddie shakes his head, burrowing further into his blanket pile and hoping Wayne can’t see how red his face is.
“Nah,” he says, throat dry. “Breakfast isn’t that far off.”
“Breakfast,” Wayne snorts like it’s funny. “Interesting that you never used to care about the most important meal of the day before the world ended.”
“I’ve read up on the science and been reformed,” Eddie says primly, ignoring Wayne’s chuckles as he turns his back pointedly, swaddling himself in a blanket emblazoned with some kind of sports team. Something cow related. Houston Cowherders? Cincinnati Farmers? Steve could tell him.
He’s not thinking about Steve.
Breakfast really isn't all that far off — Eddie had gotten the alarm call from Hopper at about midnight, then a couple minutes to the location, then waiting for the minivan of monster hunters to arrive before any actions were taken. He needs to sleep. Soon enough, the weak sunlight that barely pierces the ever-present gray cloud layer will find its way into the poolhouse, and Eddie will spend another day telling himself it doesn’t matter that he’s in love with Steve Goddamn Harrington.
Steve gets up with the sun, a leftover habit from early swim practices and basketball practices and driving Robin to school before the world fell apart. He leaves Robin there in bed, half-sprawled and drooling, her hair plastered across her face. Steve snorts under his breath. She’s such an idiot. He loves her so much.
The rest of the house is quiet. He passes closed doors on either side of the hallway, and if he didn’t look too hard he could fool himself into thinking this is the Before time. But it’s not, and there are little signs of life here that make him feel like he can actually breathe in this house. Small scratches in the paint from hastily grabbed weaponry. A large teenage boy tennis shoe and a single dirty sock abandoned mid-step. A little bit of glitter that Steve is pretty sure matches the nail polish he saw Eleven putting on Erica a day ago. All of it careless and messy the way Steve was trained not to be, and he's so goddamn grateful for it all.
Steve is sorry that the world as they knew it is over, but he’s glad for this: those little sounds of life on the other side of each door when before it had only been silence. Rustling of blankets as people shift in their sleep, a soft susurrus of breath. Whispers. Giggles. Life.
Dustin has permanently claimed the guest room across from Steve’s bedroom, though he still technically lives with his mom and stays there about half the time. Which isn’t even that far — she claimed a few rooms with the Sinclairs in the house right next door to the Harringtons’, since they were already friendly and Claudia didn't need much room. Lucas sleeps wherever Max is and she’s here at Steve's more often than not, the two of them sharing the couch because Max hates stairs and Lucas hates Dustin’s snoring. The Wheelers have also moved into Loch Nora due to Nancy and Mike’s insistence, though those two are just as likely to crash at Steve’s or with Hopper’s group depending on the night. Will keeps some stuff here in the room next to Dustin’s when he wants to get out of Jonathan’s hair, and Mike stays with Will when he’s not out on patrol, and Erica has permanent dibs on the master bedroom when she stays after a Hellfire night, which Steve is perfectly fine with because if he had to walk past his parents’ untouched room every day now, he probably would have done something stupid like set everything on fire or maybe cut all his dad’s nice ties with Robin’s knife.
Mostly, people crash wherever they happen to be when the sun goes down to avoid the risk of being out at night, but there are a few guarantees. Wherever Steve sleeps, Robin sleeps, usually sharing a bed. Lucas stays with Max, and Max is wherever the fewest adults are. Mike is with Will who is with Jonathan who is often with Nancy, unless either of those last two are on patrol. Eleven is with Hopper. Erica goes wherever she wants and heaven help anyone who wants to stop her.
And, in Steve’s kitchen every morning, he finds Eddie.
“Morning, sunshine,” Steve says. Eddie grunts, rolling his head against the breakfast bar and opening one bleary eye.
“Fuck off,” Eddie says, and Steve chuckles.
“You know you can sleep in,” Steve says. “I’d save you breakfast so the wolves wouldn’t eat it all.” Feeding a half-dozen teenage strays on an apocalyptic food supply has been interesting, to say the least. At least Steve is inventive, and Dustin swears his scrambled egg-beef jerky-hot sauce breakfast burritos are genius.
“And miss seeing you in your apron? Never,” Eddie says, drawing himself upright with what seems like extreme effort.
Steve ties on said apron, a stupid frilly one that Dustin’s ma had given him when he’d ruined two different shirts with bacon grease. He loves the thing. It says, Kiss my grits! across the chest and Steve has no idea what that means but he agrees nonetheless. “Sleep okay?”
Eddie grunts again, this one different. He tangles his fingers together on the breakfast bar, constant movement. “You know the answer to that, man. It’s hardly a happy place in here.” He taps his temple.
“And you think this,” Steve mockingly taps his own forehead, “is a paradise? We’re all fucked, dude.” Eddie doesn’t say anything, so Steve turns to the stove, clicking on one of the burners and digging out a few potatoes. He hands one and a knife to Eddie, slides the big cutting board between them, and they cube potatoes in silence. “Offer’s still open, you know,” Steve says lightly.
“If my sanity deteriorates to the point of needing to join the Harrington-Buckley lovefest, you’ll be the first to know,” Eddie says, tongue poking out of the side of his mouth in concentration.
“It’s not a lovefest,” Steve says, wrinkling his nose. Now, nearly a year out from Starcourt and bathroom confessions, Steve couldn’t imagine anything that would be worse than being Robin’s soulmate. Not because she’d never look at him that way, but because she lives in his ribs in an entirely different way now, carved there like a promise. Robin is the other half of his brain who is good at puzzles and languages and emotions, and he’s her hands on a baseball bat, her legs to run away, her heart that doesn’t freeze up with adrenaline but instead pumps harder, keeping them alive. They’re permanent in a way that is an anomaly here in Hawkins.
“I know,” Eddie says. Steve knows Eddie knows, just as clearly as if he’d been there in the mall bathroom with them that night. “I know, Steve, just…”
Steve leaves it alone. They all cope in their own ways. It’s why the sleeping arrangements are a duck-duck-goose game of falling wherever you land for the night, not scrutinized too hard by the adults or each other. It’s why they all carry walkies like they’re a poison antidote, and extra batteries like they’re gold. It’s temporary, they all tell themselves. It’s temporary that they live in makeshift bunkers. Temporary that they get government check-ins once a week complete with care packages of food and bandages and promises that the Upside Down problem is being looked into. Temporary that it’s easiest to fall asleep next to a warm body because when you wake breathing the smell of spore dust and cold mornings at the height of summer and that never-clean feeling even if you scrubbed to the bone in the shower, it’s best to know you’re not alone.
It’s temporary, Steve reminds himself, turning to dump the potatoes into a pan with some oil and salt and a few peppers that aren’t bad just yet. It’s temporary that he has all the people he loves within shouting distance, sometimes all under the same roof, and all it took was the eruption of an alternate dimension to make it happen.
It’s temporary, he reminds himself, that Eddie will be here in his space, a presence as expected as Robin, as Dustin, as Max, as Nance.
“Bone appetite,” Steve says, butchering it on purpose to see Eddie grin, even half-heartedly.
“You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington,” Eddie says.
Yeah. He’s heard that before.
Daytime is safe, most days. The shadows don’t seem to do well in even the weak daylight through the ever-present cloud cover, so they don’t come out until night. There’s stuff to do but also lives to live, and that all happens in the daytime. Eddie has to admit, the world ending is about the only thing that could’ve forced him into being an early riser, but now he has to be to take full advantage of the relative safety of daylight.
Well. The world ending, and Steve Harrington cooking him a full skillet breakfast while wearing an apron. That’ll wake any man up, especially if that man is Eddie Munson.
Eddie sneaks out of the kitchen when the kids start to wake, starting with Max and Lucas on the living room couch. Eddie helps get Max to the dining table while Lucas grabs their plates, and only argues with her a little bit about which Stephen King movie is the scariest, since those two nuts had fallen asleep to Cujo the night before.
“It’s obviously IT,” Max says.
“Of course you think that,” Eddie says. “You’re a teenager with something to prove. When you grow up and gain some experience, you’ll realize it’s actually The Shining.”
“Gain some experience like playing board games in Wheeler’s basement?” Max snarks. “Not sure if that qualifies you for adulthood.”
“It does! And I do other things!”
“Things like being scared of empty hotels?”
“I’m not scared of the building, ” Eddie says, “it’s the isolation, the slow descent into insanity! Innocents at risk because of one man’s hubris!”
“Should we find you a teddy bear at the donation center so you’re not alone at night, little baby?” Max coos.
Eddie’s only response is an offended screech. “Maxine-”
“No debating during breakfast!” Steve shouts from the kitchen. “Max, leave Eddie alone.”
“Yes, Mom!” Max calls back, grinning maniacally.
“This isn’t over,” Eddie says, jabbing a finger at Max. He knuckles the top of her head, then slips back into the kitchen just long enough to shoot Steve a little finger-gun goodbye. The cacophony of Dustin and Lucas fighting over the food spread and Will trying to mediate would’ve covered up anything verbal anyway, and he’s got patrol with Steve this afternoon so they’ll see each other before the end of the day.
Still, Steve says over the noise, “Bye, Eds. Have a — what the fuck, Dustin, no pinching — have a good day!”
Eddie’s on food pickup and delivery this morning with Robin, according to the schedule pinned to Steve’s fridge. Eddie received a color-coded copy of his own at one point but he’s pretty sure he lost it immediately, so now he relies on other people telling him where he needs to be. He makes his way back over to the Hop-Byers residence and jumps into his van, starting her up and getting the warm air flowing. Normally Eddie would be regretting his preference for black clothing and heavy denims by this point in June, but the cold never really goes away anymore. The afternoons warm to something approaching a normal day, but nights are freezing and that chill lingers through the morning.
Robin joins him quickly, a plate of Steve’s breakfast balanced on her lap. “Morning,” she chirps.
“So it seems,” Eddie says. “Ready to rock and roll?”
“Ready,” she agrees, wiping her greasy hands on the passenger seat and grinning when he squawks his outrage.
The shady government outfit that keeps the Hawkins survivors stocked with food and ammo doesn’t have a name, as far as Eddie knows, and none of the faces are familiar. He knows there’s one high-up suit that the others called for help back in March, and a few doctors that apparently used to work on Eleven in some capacity, but none of them are here. Weirdly, the people who seemed to have caused all this don’t seem to want to be around as all their meddling bursts Hawkins open like a piñata.
But apparently it is someone’s job to take care of the problem, so every Monday there’s a truck pulled up to the very outer reaches of the town, like there’s some kind of barrier invisible to the locals keeping others out, or maybe keeping the remaining residents of Hawkins in. If Eddie thinks too hard about that, he’ll go insane, so he doesn’t.
It doesn’t take long for Eddie and Robin to load up the back of the van with supply boxes, having found a routine months back. It’s actually a genius pairing, the two of them; turns out that Nancy Wheeler is a pretty smart gal. Robin is scatterbrained but her mind likes puzzles, and order and sequences click in her brain faster than anyone else’s. Eddie doesn’t particularly care for order, personally, but he’s pretty good at creative problem solving, thanks to years of DMing. Between the two of them, they can get the most into the van and back to headquarters in one go, which is all that’s allowed; the first time, they only took about half the supplies, thinking the truck would be there when they came back for a second trip. That had not been the case. They’re more careful now.
“Updated reports,” says a man with a very nondescript black suit and dark sunglasses, handing over a stack of manila folders. Eddie has no idea if this is the same guy from the last pickup, or if they recruit the most bland motherfuckers possible at Secret Federal Bureau of Monsters and Shit, or whatever umbrella these guys fall under.
“Thanks,” Robin says, clutching the reports tight to her torso. They’ll go straight to Hopper and Nancy, who will update the maps with help from satellite images and comb over the research that the suits have been doing on the zombies and shadows that have been captured so far. It’s turned up nothing helpful yet, and everyone knows that the solution will likely rest on the shoulders of the Party, but outside eyes can’t hurt.
“Hey, any chance this’ll all be over soon?” Eddie asks the agent breezily, thumbing over his shoulder at the massive dark cloud that’s been hovering over their town for months. “Be cool to get a tan at some point this summer.”
If this isn’t the same suit as last time, he reacts shockingly similarly to Eddie’s commentary as the last guy, which is to say he doesn’t react at all. “We’ll keep you updated with any changes. Please do not let anyone cross the safety borders without prior notice.” It’s the same line as last time, down to the not-really-a-request please tacked into the middle.
“10-4, good buddy,” Eddie says, shooting the guy a little salute. “Suggestion for next time — can we get some fucking beer? I’m dying here, man.”
“Your request has been received,” the agent-man says.
“You have got to stop antagonizing them,” Robin groans as they clamber back into the van. “They are actively keeping us alive.”
“Incorrect, my friend,” Eddie says, turning the steering wheel so that the van’s tires churn up gravel and spit it at the suit on their way out. “We are keeping ourselves alive. They’re keeping us contained.”
They haul the boxes back to Steve’s house, where they spend an hour sorting through the food and dividing the spoils between Steve’s pantry and a dozen different smaller boxes. They have help, sort of, in the form of Max and Eleven, who are there mostly as moral support instead of anything constructive. Eleven does lift most of the boxes with her powers and float them back out to Eddie’s van when they’re done, which is highly appreciated.
“Well,” Robin says in the worst approximation of nonchalance Eddie has ever heard. She waves the stack of folders the Feds had given them, face going hilariously red. “I guess I should get these to Nance.”
“Right,” Eddie says, raising an eyebrow and pinching back the smirk that wants to form. “Better get over there immediately, she might need someone to stand really close to her as she reads.”
“You are a plague upon my house,” Robin says.
“This is Steve’s house,” Eddie says. “And he likes my brand of plague.”
Robin rolls her eyes and heads over to Hopper’s, where she’ll deliver the reports and add her eye for detail to the conversation about how to keep them all alive another week, and Eddie gets a new partner for his next job.
Dustin passes his handmade spear from hand to hand as he waits for Eddie by the front door.
“Why, Sir Dustybuns,” Eddie says. “What big spears you have.”
“Keep it up,” Dustin says brightly. “I’m all warmed up, I’ll sing the Neverending Story the whole ride if I have to.”
“I haven’t had to use Andúril in a few days, kiddo. Let’s not start our afternoon with blood.” Dustin grins, and Eddie grins back.
It could be any other day, pre-apocalypse, when it’s just Eddie and Dustin in the van. Dustin shuffles through Eddie’s tapes and slides in Motörhead, they head-bang and scream the lyrics to Marching Off to War. They argue the finer points of attack strategy for the Party to try after Eddie’s cliffhanger ending to the last Hellfire session, though Eddie refuses to give Dustin hints about what to expect. Dustin waxes rhapsodic about his girlfriend and Eddie lets him, if only because he knows Mike and Lucas give him absolute shit for it as though they aren’t also insufferable teenagers in puppy love relationships.
And, all the while, they make the circuit of Hawkins, avoiding the danger zones of heavy monster activity, the places where the road has collapsed and become impassable, the neighborhoods where no one now lives. At a few scattered homes they stop and drop off supplies, doing quick check-ins — or, Dustin does, at least. Most everyone left in town is okay with Eddie, knowing now there are things a little bigger than what they used to be scared of in the past, but he tends to stay out of the way just in case. They take a halfway break at Dustin’s house since his mom likes to spend her days there even if she sleeps at Loch Nora, and they let her feed them snacks and fuss over them.
“Eddie, dear, are you sure you’re eating enough? You’re so thin, and we can’t have you wasting away.”
“C’mon, Ma,” Dustin says through a gummy mouthful of cookie. “Steve keeps us all fed, and he always makes sure Eddie gets enough.”
“Yeah,” Eddie agrees, firmly ignoring the way his face gets hot at the image of Steve lovingly force-feeding him banana bread. Maybe pinning Eddie to the kitchen floor, sitting on his hips. Tying him to a chair with his apron strings. Christ. “I’m all accounted for, Mrs. Henderson. I will happily take another cookie off your hands, though.”
“Oh, call me Claudia, or call me Ma,” she says, fluttering her hands before passing the plate to Eddie. “I think, after all this,” she indicates the window out to the front yard, which is dusted with Upside Down spores like an early winter snowfall, “we can stand to drop the formalities, just a little.”
“Sure,” Eddie says, valiantly trying not to choke on his cookie. He hasn’t called anyone Ma in years, and the thought of it now has his eyes prickling in a way that he doesn’t want to deal with, especially with Dustin watching him knowingly from across the room. “Thanks, Mrs.- Ma. Thanks Ma.”
Claudia chuckles, sounding exactly like her son. “You boys and your manners. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it. Ask Steven, it took him ages to get comfortable with the idea, and now he’s basically one of my own.”
No one has ever accused Eddie of having manners, and if Claudia brings up Steve one more time Eddie’s going to self-immolate, so he just smiles and nods and hopes he doesn’t look as emotionally smacked around as he feels.
Eddie and Dustin’s food supply run finishes at about two o’clock that afternoon, which means Eddie has a little time to rest and recuperate before his patrol. He does not do that, of course, choosing instead to join Jonathan and his mom as they hand-wash the piles of dishes from the grab-and-go lunch that Joyce had made. Eddie firmly does not check the schedule to see where Steve is, because that would be ridiculous (plus he’s pretty sure Monday afternoons he and Nancy and Erica check in with the medical triage group and see if they need to radio for more supplies. Not that Eddie’s keeping track, or anything). He grabs a dish towel and dries as Jon and Joyce roll up their sleeves and scrub dried ketchup off the plates, and he joins in their light banter when it steers into territory he understands.
A half hour later, the trio of Steve, Nancy, and Erica tromp into the kitchen (it was a guess, Eddie reminds himself, he doesn’t actually have Steve’s rotation schedule memorized). Nancy waves hello, Erica ignores them all entirely, and Steve smiles at Eddie.
“Ready, Eddie?” he asks, and Eddie snorts.
“If you start singing Queen at me, I will refuse to go with you.”
Steve just smiles wider, and hums Crazy Little Thing Called Love under his breath as they head out, stopping only to grab their assorted weaponry from the ten-gallon bucket outside the front door. There’s a little cardboard sign taped to the bucket in El’s careful handwriting: No full sized weapons in the house please! Knives are fine. There’s a little smiley face in the center of a daisy at the corner of the note.
“Can’t believe Joyce won’t let me bring this into the house,” Steve says dryly, picking at the crusty nails on his bat.
“Yeah, well, demon blood’s hard to get out of the carpet,” Eddie says. “Or so I’ve heard.”
They don’t drive, choosing to meander by foot along the perimeter of the Loch Nora houses they’ve claimed as home base. They check the fence for its structural integrity and keep an eye out for movement out in the trees, but mostly they just talk.
Even with their shared breakfast time every morning, this is consistently Eddie’s favorite time each week. He and Steve are completely alone and, besides the overly-worn boots and patched, bloodstained clothing, the weapons belted to their hips, their too-long hair and the permanent twitchiness from all their near-death experiences, they could be any two guys out for a stroll.
This is where Eddie fell in love with Steve, and doesn’t that take the fucking cake? He fell in love walking in the woods with a boy like he’s Sleeping goddamn Beauty, like all the fairytales gone a little sideways.
It’s something about the way Steve is all the parts of him out here, with no one but Eddie as an audience: he’s prom king and protector, but he’s also the guy who frets over a bunch of teenagers and is learning to knit because most of the original donations at the center were summer clothing and he’s worried they’re all going to freeze when actual winter comes around. He points out shapes in the Upside Down spore clouds and hums insipid pop songs to fill the quiet, and then if anything moves he beats it to death with his baseball bat. And every facet of that personality is like a drug in Eddie’s veins, something addictive and fascinating.
Of course, it hadn’t started that way.
A week after the world had ended, before Eddie started inviting himself into Steve’s kitchen for breakfast prep and half-awake conversation, Steve and Eddie had been paired up to do a perimeter sweep and had absolutely nothing to say to each other.
Eddie didn’t know how to thank Steve for carrying him half-dead out of hell, and if he was going to do it, it probably should’ve been when he woke up in the hospital to Steve watching his chest rise and fall as proof of life. He didn’t know how to say, hey, man, this whole situation has been fucked beyond belief but if you hadn’t been there with me, I don’t think I’d’ve even made it to that guitar solo on the roof, and I definitely wouldn’t be alive now. He couldn’t find the words to get the point across that he had a small circle of people in his life, and somehow Steve had cemented his place in it and Eddie didn’t let go of the people in his circle. Not before he descended into monsterville, and definitely not after.
And Steve probably had things to say to Eddie, too, like an explanation for where he put Eddie’s fucking battle vest, or that he was sorry he made Eddie overhear that excruciating conversation with Nancy Wheeler in the RV about running off to be the Partridge Family or whatever.
But that day, that first day in the woods, they had just walked in silence. Eddie had swung his spear back and forth awkwardly (Hopper hadn’t given him the sword yet) and Steve kept putting his hands in his pockets and then taking them out again.
Finally, as they’d rounded the corner to the entrance to Loch Nora, where, off in the distance, they could see Hopper and Lucas and Lucas’ dad nailing together scrap metal to make a gate, Steve had cleared his throat and finally said something.
“What song was that?”
Eddie had cocked his head to the side. All he could hear was wind through the trees — no birdsong anymore — and the distant clanging of hammers on metal. “What song?”
“In the,” Steve had waved vaguely down at the ground. “When you and Dustin were the distraction. What song did you play?”
“Oh,” Eddie had said. “Metallica. Master of Puppets. Could you hear it from the Creel house?”
“Think the whole Upside Down heard it, dude,” Steve had said, smiling a little. “It was cool. I’d never heard that song before.”
“Yeah?” Eddie had said, bouncing on his toes a little. “It’s from the new album that came out, like, three weeks ago? It took me days to learn that riff, man, look,” he held up his hands, “my fingers are still a little fucked from it.”
Steve had grabbed Eddie’s hand and gave them a thorough once-over, and said, “Is that what these calluses are from?”
“Yep,” Eddie had said. “Well, and-”
“Don’t finish that sentence,” Steve had said, and Eddie’d laughed for the first time in days.
“I wish our trailer hadn’t been ripped to shreds, man,” he had said, “I had the tape, you could’ve borrowed it from me. I could make you into a metalhead yet.”
“Nah,” Steve had said, grinning at his boots. “I’m not metal enough for that, I think.”
“Well, we’d start you with something a little easier to digest,” Eddie had mused. “Maybe some Alice Cooper.”
“She sounds nice,” Steve had offered, and again, like a miracle, Eddie had laughter bubbling in his throat.
“Yeah,” he’d agreed, soft with stupid, stupid feelings. “She’s a doll.”
“You know,” Steve had said, “me and Rob were driving around earlier and noticed that the record store on Fourth is still standing. Maybe when things settle we can-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Eddie had said, delighted. “Steve Harrington, are you taking me record shopping?”
“Only if you promise not to make fun of my lack of music knowledge,” Steve had said.
“Deal.” Then Eddie, true to his form, had hopped closer and knocked his shoulder against Steve’s. “You know I’ll have to make fun of you a little bit.”
“Yeah,” Steve had sighed, like it was inevitable, like he did with the kids when they were being precocious. He slanted a grin at Eddie and knocked his shoulder back. “While we’re on the topic of things to make fun of me for, can you explain Dungeons and Dragons to me?”
Eddie fully stumbled to a halt. “What? Really?”
“It’s- Dustin’s always talking about it, especially before,” Steve waves at the ground again. His cheeks are pink. “And I know he thinks I don’t care but it’s like, I just don’t get it, man. What’s the story? What are the dice for?”
“Oh, Harrington,” Eddie says, clutching his hand to his chest. “Oh Steve. You’re going to regret this, because I’m going to tell you everything.”
“Try me,” Steve says. “First of all, what’s a barbarian?”
Eddie tucked that conversation away for rainy days, which in post-apocalyptic Hawkins means the days that the spores from the dark clouds overhead pour down even heavier and make the air smell like chemicals and decay, and pulled it out to examine it when he needed something to make him smile.
Two days after that first patrol in the woods, Eddie had woken from a nightmare so awful he’d stumbled outside to puke in the Ericksons’ pool, and that’s when he’d seen the distant light on in the Harrington kitchen across the street. He’d knocked on the patio door and Steve had nearly hit him with a toaster after screaming a little, and then they’d collapsed onto the stools at the breakfast bar together, pale and shaky.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Steve had asked hoarsely. It was nearly dawn, the sky the same dark purple as the shadows under his eyes.
“Slept a bit, regretted it immediately,” Eddie had said. “You?”
“Robin kicks,” Steve said. “But I was awake anyway, couldn’t stop thinking about- well, you know.”
There were a myriad of awful things that could entail, but Eddie had nodded anyway.
They sat in silence for another few minutes before Steve had said, “You know how to cook?”
“Boxed mac and cheese,” Eddie had offered. “Sandwiches. Oatmeal, I’m good at oatmeal. I hate oatmeal, though.”
“That’ll work,” Steve had said, grabbing Eddie by the wrist and pulling him off the stool. “Help me figure out what to make the munchkins for breakfast.” He’d paused halfway into the pantry, and smiled, tired but genuine. “No oatmeal, I promise.”
Eddie had helped cut fruit and cook gravy, his hands as unfamiliar on the knife as on the whisk, and Steve had corrected his grip and given him pointers. They moved around each other carefully, shyly, the kitchen warming with their activity, the dim pseudo-sunlight pushing its way into the room.
The next morning, Eddie had woken glued to his sheets with sweat and shaking, and he’d headed over to Steve’s to see if he was awake without a second thought.
And the next morning after that, and so the routine was born.
Today, the woods are quiet. The fence is as strong as it has ever been. The Upside Down dust softens their footfalls. There’s a soft whisper that Eddie assumes is the wind, following their steps.
“I can’t believe you would say that,” Steve is saying. “I’m horrified. I’m heartbroken.”
“C’mon, man,” Eddie says, “you know me, and you know how I operate. This cannot surprise you.”
“Not even mousse?” Steve says plaintively. “Mousse is so good for curls, it helps them hold their shape, keep them hydrated-”
“Nope, sorry babe,” Eddie says, shaking out his hair like a lion’s mane. “This is au naturale. Straight out of the shower, then go.”
“Conditioner,” Steve says desperately. “You use conditioner, right?”
“I’m sure that’s one of the four in my 4-in-1 shampoo,” Eddie says, and Steve gasps like he’d said he drove over turtles on purpose.
“I have so much work to do with you,” Steve says. He wasn’t even talking to Eddie anymore, rubbing at his own chin. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“If you’re going to offer to show me how to shower, I’ll hold you to that, Harrington,” Eddie says, and Steve laughs, ducking his head and ruffling at his hair.
“No, I’m sure you’ve got that under control,” he says, smile tucked in the corner of his mouth, then he pokes Eddie in the shoulder. “But I am finding you some hairspray.”
“It’s the apocalypse, dear heart,” Eddie says dryly. “Good luck.”
“Are you doubting my ability to find hair products in a wasteland?” Steve asks, raising an eyebrow.
“No,” Eddie says, pulling his hair across his mouth to hide his stupid, stupid smile. “No, never.”
Robin and Steve have an inside joke. Well, Robin says it’s not a joke, but Robin also doesn’t appreciate Steve’s knock-knock jokes and those definitely are jokes, right, like, it’s in the name and everything.
So anyway, Robin and Steve have this inside joke. It goes like this: they’re hanging out, shooting the shit, sharing deep feelings, whatever. They can be alone or in a group with other people, doesn’t matter. Steve will sometimes offer an anecdote about his life that he thinks is funny or charming or strange, and if they’re around other people, the group will go quiet, and if it’s just Steve and Robin, she’ll look at him with those big sad baby eyes, and he’ll know that particular story was not as funny/silly/relatable as he thought it was.
The first time it happened, they’d been at Family Video, and Steve had been rewinding returned tapes so Robin could shelve them. They’d thrown a random movie on, that Steve Martin one, The Jerk, and Steve had laughed at the parts with the cans and the phone book. After Steve Martin’s character lost his virginity, he’d said, offhandedly, “You know, I don’t remember my first time.”
Robin, huffing a little at trying to force the Conan the Destroyer case back onto a very full shelf, said, “What, like, sleeping with someone?”
“Yeah,” Steve said. “I was fifteen, I think? Anyway, I’d gone to a party with some older guys from the basketball team, and they kept handing me drinks, and I had shit tolerance, right? So they sent me upstairs to sleep it off. Then, apparently, they sent up this older girl and told her to take care of me. Don’t remember too much, just woke up with no clothes and a terrible headache.” He laughed a little. “Weird, I don’t even remember her name.”
About halfway through his story, Robin had stepped out from the aisle of shelves and approached the counter, and when he finished, she grabbed his hands, stopping him from popping one of the dozens of copies of Gremlins into the rewinder.
“Steve,” she’d said, sounding utterly heartbroken.
“What?” he’d asked, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“Steve,” she said again. “That was a really sad story. Are you okay? Do you want to talk about it?”
“No, it’s not sad,” he’d said. “It was stupid, but not, like- it wasn’t sad.”
“Steve,” Robin said, like the more she repeated his name, the more he’d understand. “You were fifteen, and some older boys got you drunk and let someone take advantage of you. That’s not okay.”
“No, it was fine, it-”
“Isn’t Dustin fifteen? Would you ever try to get him drunk and suggest someone have sex with him when he couldn’t refuse?”
“God, no,” Steve said, shuddering. “Henderson and sex are not allowed in the same sentence, let alone something I’d push to happen. That’s not right, he’s not old enough-” Robin’s eyes widened meaningfully. “Oh. I guess…” He runs a hand through his hair. “I guess that wasn’t good, was it?”
“No,” Robin said, still clutching Steve’s other hand. “No, not good.”
And that’s the joke. When Steve told the story about his mom sending him to the store on his bike to buy cigarettes for her when he was eight, and they’d locked the door before he got back home because they’d forgotten he was gone — “Not good?” “Not good.”
When Steve told Robin that he was glad they were able to be friends, but it must be because she’s a lesbian, because his father always said that men and women couldn’t be friends because men were never going to be able to help themselves — “Not good?” “Not good.”
And when Steve had said, in the cold middle of the night long after they’d both meant to be asleep, that sometimes he thought about driving over to Tommy’s house and setting it on fire, because sometimes he thought about the way Tommy used to use Steve as his shield to say the most heinous shit, often to people just like Robin, or Dustin, or Nancy or Jonathan, or Eddie, and Steve had just let him because he didn’t know what else to do — “Not good?”
“Not good,” Robin had whispered, the moonlight carving out her face, and a little feral grin, “but that one I understand.”
The next week, when Eddie and Robin get the supply drop off from the black-suited Feds and take their haul back to Steve’s house, one of the boxes is entirely full of beer.
Eddie doesn’t get it, at first, and then he does, and he laughs so hard he worries that he’ll bust one of his old bat bites back open.
“Thank you, Uncle Sam,” Eddie says, and makes space in Steve’s fridge for the first six pack of many.
Eddie flies up, swatting the air that had just been full of bats and the unsettling red-gray of the Upside Down. He’s panting, breath sticking with each inhale. He’s sweating like he’s been running from jocks with guns. He’s crying, because who fucking doesn’t cry when facing down nightmares like these?
He collapses back onto his mattress.
It’s early enough that it’s still technically late. The Batman watch Lucas had found for him in the donation center tells Eddie that it’s a little after two A.M. Steve won’t be up for breakfast for another few hours, and Wayne’s steady, even breathing across the poolhouse sounds restful enough that Eddie won’t wake him.
He shuffles through his mental schedule and tries to remember if it’s Wednesday — no, it’s Thursday, because they have Hellfire tonight. That means Nancy and Jonathan are on overnight patrol, and Hopper’s got the night to rest. Dustin stays with his mom on Wednesday nights so he’s not around. He doesn’t know the Sinclairs well enough to go B&Eing into their house, plus Erica would castrate him if he woke her up.
But he can’t stay here. He can’t stay in here.
He rolls out of bed and throws one of Wayne’s oversized denim shirts on over his Judas Priest cutoff, slides back into his jeans. Boots. Hair up, bandana on.
He plans to walk. Just, get out of the house and wear himself down with physical exertion until he can collapse for an hour or so. He grabs his spear, pretty sure his arms are too heavy to drag around the sword at the moment, and listlessly makes his way out of home sweet abandoned poolhouse.
The Ericksons didn’t cover their pool before they left so the water is murky with Upside Down dust and other detritus. The blue pool light still shines out like the place is sanctified or something, but it’s nowhere near the Harringtons’ pristine in-ground. Steve likes to scoff at the Ericksons’ bad pool ownership; on mornings when he and Eddie are up too early for it to be reasonable to start breakfast, Eddie sits on a pool chair as Steve skims the muck from the top of his pool, clearing the surface with strong, steady swipes. Steve claims it’s just habit, but Eddie’s seen the grin he tucks away when the kids beg to have a swim day.
Eddie kicks a rock into the pool and the sludgy water ripples with a gross sucking sound. Eddie kicks another rock, then shuffles out of the gate and around the house.
Honestly, this is stupid. Yeah, his brain is soupy with nightmares and he won’t be able to sleep, but there are monsters out here. At one point in his life that was not that long ago, that would’ve been enough to keep Eddie indoors as long as possible. But the shadows have seemed reluctant to intrude here in Loch Nora. All he can hear is the whispering of wind through the neighborhood, and he does have that shivery eyes on the back of his neck feeling, but that’s pretty much been a constant since he nearly died. He’s risking it, but he used to do that, right? Back when he was a small town drug dealer who sometimes carved pentagrams into things just to see if anyone would catch him?
He plans to wander, maybe do a quick perimeter check just to be useful, maybe radio over to Nancy and see where they are so he can join them. His feet seem to get another message.
He doesn’t knock on the Harrington house front door, and it’s not locked (“If anything has gotten all the way to the front door, a lock’s not going to stop it,” Steve had said. “And then if any of us are running away from something, we’ll able to get in with no issues.”) so he lets himself in. It’s never completely dark — most of their little band don’t like the dark anymore — so there are scattered lamps on in the living room and the stove light is a stark beam in the kitchen. Eddie plans to shuck his boots and make a nest on the couch, since it’s vacated tonight by its usual red-headed occupant, but he doesn’t get a chance to settle in.
“Whossat- Eddie?” comes Steve’s sleep-gravelled voice from the stairs. “Time’sit?”
“Not breakfast just yet, Steve,” Eddie says. His own voice sounds like the water in the Ericksons’ pool, thick and dark. “Go back to bed.”
Steve lives up to his stubborn reputation and continues down the stairs, a light patch against the shadows of the staircase. He’s rumpled and soft, wearing a pair of flannel pajama bottoms that are too big so he’s rolled the waistband, and no shirt. His scar tissue shines in the light from the lamps. Eddie doesn’t look, doesn’t think about how the scars would feel under his fingers.
“You going to sleep?” Steve asks.
“Nah, I’ll just read or something. Watch a movie.”
“Just come to bed,” Steve says, stifling a yawn. “We don’t bite. Well, I don’t. Can’t speak for Robin.”
Eddie’s dying. He’s done it before, it’s not that hard to do it again. Come to bed, Steve Harrington says, like he’s not dangled the only thing Eddie wants in front of him. Fuck’s sake. “No, man, I- I can’t do that.”
Steve just gives him a look, like he’s a puppy that keeps running into a glass door, sweet but stupid, and steps around him and makes for the couch.
“Steve, honestly,” Eddie says. “Go to bed, one of us should get some sleep, at least.”
“If you’re up,” Steve says, falling onto the couch with a huff of breath, “then I’m up.” He grabs the TV remote and waggles it. “Any preferences?”
“My preference is for you to go back upstairs,” Eddie says. “This is stupid!”
“It is stupid,” Steve agrees, “but you’re not going to sleep, and I’m not leaving you out here to panic after the nightmare you definitely didn’t have.”
“Panic?” Eddie says, and he feels himself go red when it comes out like a squeak. “I’m not panicking.”
Steve doesn’t deign to answer, which, fair enough. Eddie doesn’t want to give in, though, because Steve’s dark circles haunt him and he knows how hard-won a little bit of rest can be, but his erratic breathing still hasn’t settled from his nightmare and he really doesn’t want to try again.
“Fine,” Eddie says, pushing his hands hard enough into his eyes that he sees spots. “ Fine. Tuck me in next to you and leave me to rot.”
“Oh, you get the middle,” Steve says, standing and making his way over to Eddie, grabbing his wrist like he thinks Eddie will try to run. “Robin kicks, remember?”
The carpet on the stairs muffles their steps and the wind outside covers their breathing, except maybe Eddie’s heart is thumping so heavily in his ears that nothing else is getting through. This is a bad idea. It’s such a bad idea.
Steve pushes his bedroom door open and steps to the side, again like he thinks Eddie’s going to bolt. Eddie might bolt. He really wants to bolt. Instead, he pads over on socked feet and sits awkwardly on the side of the bed that Steve had vacated.
“Come on, man,” Steve says, grinning a little. Eddie hates him. “At least take your jeans off. Pretty sure sleeping next to someone in denim is just as bad as sleeping in denim yourself.”
Right. Sure. Eddie doesn’t think about it, just stands and gets his jeans off as fast as he can, kicking them to the corner. His legs are cold. This is fucked.
“And this,” Steve says, suddenly closer than Eddie was expecting, and his breath catches when Steve touches his hair. Steve’s fingers are gentle as he picks the knot of Eddie’s bandana, and Eddie clenches his teeth to keep any embarrassing noises from escaping when Steve pulls his hair softly out of its half-assed bun. “There,” Steve murmurs. Eddie’s hair slides to his shoulders. He feels like he stuck a fork in a socket. Every hair on his body is standing.
Eddie turns and buries himself into the bed next to Robin’s comatose form, shivering despite himself. This is why he hasn’t done this. Of fucking course he’d love to join the puppy piles and the sleep cuddles, but Steve touches him and he lights up like a goddamn Christmas tree. This night is going to ruin him.
Steve is slower getting into bed, knocking his pillow a couple of times to get it the shape he wants. He lays on his side, an apostrophe. Eddie turns to face him, a mirror.
“I know you know this,” Eddie whispers, “but I really do get nightmares.”
“Yeah,” Steve whispers back. “I know.”
“Bad ones.”
“S’okay. Wake me up, I’ll help.”
“Can’t punch the bad dreams, Steve.”
“Yeah?” Steve says, eyes already fluttering shut. “Haven’t seen me try.”
Eddie wants to stay awake out of self preservation, but soon his eyes get heavy enough to pull him under.
Eddie wakes, somehow, miraculously, slowly. He’s warmer than usual, his blankets softer than usual. There’s a leg tucked between his own, that’s new.
Holy shit.
His eyes fly open.
Steve’s rolled to his back but he’s facing Eddie, smile muzzy and sweet like the world hasn’t knocked the sarcasm into it yet this morning. His left leg, closest to Eddie’s, is pinned between Eddie’s knees.
“Not so bad, was it?” Steve says, morning voice rough like he had a hand against his throat all night.
Nope. Nope. Think of something else.
“Miracles happen,” Eddie answers.
“You seemed to sleep well,” Steve continues innocently. He seems well rested too, like the night had more hours in it than usual. Like the apocalypse calmed for a little while to let them have this.
“This will never happen again,” Eddie says, and Steve chuckles.
“Oh my god, shut up,” grumbles a voice against Eddie’s back. Oh, yeah, that arm around his waist must be Robin’s. “Take your morning person nonsense and let me sleep.”
“Can’t, Buckley,” Eddie says. “You’ve got me pinned.”
“Yeah, c’mon, Rob,” Steve says, reaching between Eddie’s head and shoulder to tug at her ear and then, just, stays there, his arm under Eddie’s head so they’re in a partial embrace. Eddie only half-hears him say, “We want to sleep in, too.”
Steve must catch the look of surprise in Eddie’s eyes at the touch because he smirks a little, just a little bit of King Steve shining through, and maneuvers even closer.
Eddie lets him. Of course he does. He’s going to take this morning for what it is, and what it is is fleeting. He, in a fit of lovesickness so strong he wants to choke with it, reaches out and touches one of the scars on Steve’s stomach. It’s cooler than the rest of him, smooth, and Eddie lays his palm flat so he can feel the bump of the scar and the softness of the skin around it. Steve inhales and holds it.
“Ticklish,” he murmurs.
“Probably shouldn’t have told me that,” Eddie says. “I could use it against you.”
“Nah,” Steve says. “I trust you.”
Eddie’s heart double-thumps in his chest, and he smiles helplessly down at his hand on Steve’s bare skin.
The peace, of course, will not stand. Only a few minutes pass of Eddie and Steve’s whispered conversation and slow-blinking perusal of each other in this new capacity, when the front door downstairs bursts open and bangs against the wall.
“Here we go,” Steve mumbles.
“I can barricade the door,” Eddie offers.
“No, don’t move, ‘m comfy,” Robin protests.
“He’s not on the couch,” Mike calls from what sounds like the living room.
“And where’s Steve?” Lucas says.
“He’s not making breakfast?” Dustin asks. “That’s where Eddie should be too.”
“I hate that we’re this predictable,” Eddie grumbles. Steve grins and tugs a strand of hair at the crown of Eddie’s head.
“I don’t,” he says. “I like that we have a routine.”
We. Eddie has no way to answer that, and he has no time to, either. Teenage footsteps thunder up the stairs and, a second later, the bedroom door flies open.
“Found them!” Dustin calls. “Hi, Eddie.”
“Dude, don’t you knock?” Eddie asks, lifting his head. “We could’ve been naked in here, or something.”
“Why- why would you-” Dustin asks, and Robin mutters, “Ew, Munson.”
“You know what, that’s on me,” Eddie says, rubbing his face. “It’s early. Ignore that. Forget I said it.”
Steve just laughs, throaty and low. He tips his head sideways so it rests against Eddie’s chest. “Make your own breakfast this morning, Henderson.”
“I’d sooner starve,” Dustin says.
“Fine, go ahead.”
Lucas and Mike appear in the doorway as well. “Morning,” Lucas says with a raise of his eyebrows.
Mike’s eyebrows, on the other hand, scrunch together. “Are we interrupting something?”
“Another word,” Eddie says, staring up at the ceiling and wondering how his life turned out this way, “and you roll at disadvantage for the whole next session of Hellfire.”
“Hm,” Steve says thoughtfully when the three boys disappear like cartoon characters in a cloud of smoke. “Gonna have to remember that one.”
“I’ll be honest with you, babe,” Eddie says. “Don’t think that’s going to be as threatening coming from you.”
“Oh, I know that,” Steve says brightly. He sits up slowly, stretches his arms above his head. His scars pull in fascinating ways. If he doesn’t put on a shirt soon, Eddie might actually combust. “I’ll just tell them that you’ll do the disadvantage thingy. And then you’ll back me up, right?”
“Yeah,” Eddie says. He was right; one night in Steve’s bed has ruined him. He’s never going to be the same. “Yeah, of course.”
It’s easier, after that. When the nightmares come, or the insomnia hits. It’s easier to convince himself that this isn’t tearing him apart, ripping his heart to shreds like a little girl with a flower’s pulled petals: he loves me, he loves me not.
He leaves his boots at the door and strips out of his jeans, his bandana and scarves. He pulls the blankets back and fits himself in the middle, Robin to one side, Steve to the other. They often don’t even wake, settling around him like a missing third that had always been wanted, been accepted. When one has a nightmare, they all wake and hush each other back to sleep. When one stays awake, unblinking and shaking, the other two trace soothing patterns on their arms and hands and tell quiet whispered stories until sleep creeps in like a fourth roommate. Eddie wakes in a warm cocoon of soft laughter and half-hearted grumbling. He wonders if this is how Midas felt, everything he touched turning to gold; he wonders how long until his touch lands wrong and everything changes.
But he won’t stop coming back, and it becomes a new part of the routine. When Steve or Robin has overnight patrol or if Wayne wants company, Eddie sleeps at the poolhouse, but otherwise he can be found right here, in this room sealed off from the bad things outside.
And in the morning, he and Steve make breakfast.
Screams and groans erupt from Steve’s living room, and if it wasn’t a Thursday he’d be a lot more concerned about it.
“Munson, you terrorist!” Dustin is shouting.
“-can’t possibly beat two of them!” Will is moaning.
“-pletely out of spell slots, and Erica’s down to just one healing potion-” Mike yells.
“I’ll be fine,” cuts Erica’s voice. “You losers need to get yourselves sorted, though.”
“Boy,” Nancy says lightly, turning the page to her magazine, “the children are rowdy tonight.”
“Yeah, well,” Robin says, “they’re being antagonized.”
Eddie’s voice cuts through the chaos, taunting. “You can always run…”
The eruption of screams is Mt. Saint Helens at this point. Steve leans back in his chair and grins.
Steve, Robin, Nancy, and Jonathan are in Steve’s kitchen, picking over the scraps of food that the vultures in the living room left behind, sipping his mom’s fancy wine from the cellar. Nancy’s reading an old copy of The Atlantic she found being used as a doorstop at the high school, and Robin’s painting her nails and listening to a book on tape through her headphones. Jonathan is reading as well, puzzling his way through a Kerouac novel, based on the way his eyebrows move with each page. Steve needs to find some friends that aren’t nerds.
“I’ll go check on the brats,” Steve says.
“Yeah, go save them from Eddie,” Robin says with absolutely no inflection, and Nancy and Jonathan giggle like she said something hilarious.
The living room is in shambles. The dining table has been dragged to the center of the room and covered in candlesticks dripping rivers of wax. There’s a skull in the center of the table, and Steve hopes that’s a prop from school because there are definitely real people skulls, like, all over town. In front of Eddie is a wide hand-drawn map of squares and colors, and five little figurines grouped around two larger figurines.
The kids are all in pajamas, and Will’s wearing his wizard robe and Erica’s in a plastic tiara, even though Steve’s pretty sure her character’s not a princess. He’s not going to question her, though. They’re all wrapped in blankets or have pillows tucked behind them because Steve’s parents’ idea of interior design is cold and unfeeling and uncomfortable, so the dining chairs suck, but the kids don’t complain too much. The map in front of Eddie is rumpled but carefully untouched, like a precious relic, while the rest of the table is littered with cups of soda, half-eaten bags of chips, spilled popcorn, and Steve’s half-hearted veggie tray he’d put out in case one of them got a wild hair to eat something healthy.
The Party is still furiously debating the end of the session, accusing and plotting, and Eddie’s doing his best all-knowing pose at the head of the table, his fingers tented in front of his mouth. He sees Steve in the doorway and winks, quickly, before the kids see. Steve grins and picks his way through the debris, settling on the arm of Eddie’s chair. He offers Eddie a drink of his wine glass and Eddie accepts with a brush of fingers.
“So,” Steve says jovially, “how’d the dungeoning go?”
Mike fully lets his forehead hit the table. Lucas is clutching his temple and doing math on his notebook. Dustin and Erica’s argument about… something — he thinks he hears the words “death ray” — is quickly escalating. Will smiles weakly at Steve, because he’s the only nice one.
“It’s fine, Mom,” Mike says, sounding just like Max when he does it, which is ironic because Max’s is sarcasm hiding real feelings, while Mike’s is to be mean because he thinks Steve hates it. But joke’s on Mike, because Steve kind of loves it. When Eleven found him a mug at the donation center that said World’s Best Mom, he almost cried. He drinks terrible coffee from it every morning.
“Yeah?” Steve asks. “Have you decided how you’re going to beat the beholders?”
“What?” Dustin shouts, torn out of his argument with Erica, and if they’d been loud before, they’re ear-shattering now.
“You knew ?” Lucas shrieks. “You knew and you didn’t warn us?”
“We walked right into a trap, completely blind!” Mike yells. “How did you know there were two?”
“I’m a good listener,” Steve says primly. He looks down at Eddie, who hides his grin behind Steve’s wine glass, taking another healthy sip. “Do they know about the-” Eddie raises an eyebrow, and Steve says, a little over the top, “Oh, they don’t?” He looks back at the kids around the table, who are staring at him in horror. “Well, that’ll be fun for you!”
“What?!”
“WHAT DO YOU KNOW, HARRINGTON?”
“Oh my god, I’ve had this character for four years and he’s going to die-”
Eddie, leaning into where Steve’s perched next to him, crunches a carrot from Steve’s vegetable tray, and laughs, and laughs, and laughs.