Chapter Text
Despite his overall appearance, the genre he preferred to play in, and the rumors that persisted about him all throughout his generally shitty high school experience, Eddie Munson was not actually a violent guy. He was a lot of things, for sure — too energetic, overly dramatic, decidedly dorky. But violent? Not at all. He’d never been in a real fight (mosh pit scuffles surely didn’t count), he teared up at those ASPCA commercials with the sad lady singing, and he never really wanted to hurt anyone.
Except Petey, in this moment, right now. Petey, he wanted to murder.
“Who the fuck goes BMX biking for the first time ever right before they’re set to go on a national tour? An idiot?” The question was rhetorical, as it had been the last fifteen times Eddie had shouted it into the room, but it still felt good to ask. Cathartic — he needed catharsis.
Dustin Henderson didn’t flinch from where he was sat cross legged on the floor of Eddie’s apartment, where he’d been for the past fifteen times the question was asked as well. He was starting to look a bit bored, which — okay, Eddie’s existential pain wasn’t interesting enough for him? Rude. “You know this affects you too, man,” Eddie pointed out. “Without Petey on bass, there’s no Corroded Coffin tour, and with no Corroded Coffin tour your little teeny-bopper band’s opening act is getting nixed too.”
Eddie knew well that Dustin’s band, The Party, was not exactly teeny-bopper — he’d basically begged for them to be the opening act of his tour, after all. He also knew that most of the kids in it were no longer, well, kids, were in fact now all legally old enough to drink, but Eddie had met Dustin two years earlier just a few weeks shy of Dustin’s 19th birthday, and liked to remind him quite often that Eddie was his elder, all around. Even if, by his own admittance, Eddie was rarely the more mature of the two of them.
The little shithead just rolled his eyes. “Dude. Are you, like, done being dramatic? The tour isn’t getting cancelled. You’ll be fine.”
Eddie stared at him, mouth open. “Dramatic? Petey has a broken wrist man! That won’t heal for like, twelve weeks! You can’t play bass with a broken wrist!” He realized his voice got a touch shrill on the end of that sentence but powered through regardless. Dustin winced as he approached fever pitch. “I wouldn’t call my very real, very serious problem being dramatic.”
Dustin, who was rapidly graduating from regular shithead to King Shithead of the Year, just rolled his eyes again. Eddie very nearly wanted to murder him too, which was putting him at two people in one day on the “to murder” list, which had up until this point been empty. The whole thing was an ordeal. He wasn’t sure he liked this new direction for his character.
“You’re being dramatic,” Dustin said, very slowly, like Eddie was stupid. It was not the first time Eddie had heard that tone — nor, he suspected, anywhere the near the last. “Because I know a bassist you can hire.”
Silence hung, for a long beat.
“You know a bassist,” Eddie said, flatly. “Who’s available, randomly, for a massive summer tour.” Dustin nodded enthusiastically. “And who knows the Corroded Coffin discography by, what, heart?”
Here the kid's grin dropped, but only slightly. “Well, no, he doesn’t know the catalog, but he can learn it fast.”
Eddie shook his head. “Dude, no one can learn that many metal songs that quickly, I don’t care how good they are. It’s three albums worth of stuff and we leave in a week and a half.”
“Steve can,” Dustin said.
And. Oh.
No. No, no, no.
“No,” Eddie said out loud.
“You haven’t even—”
“No, no, a million times no. Steve Harrington is your solution to my problem? That—” he paused to search for the right word. “Prep?” he ended with, which even to his own ears sounded a little lame.
Dustin was fully frowning now. “You don’t even know him! You’re basing this entire irrational hatred you have for him on a few gossip articles you read, like, ten years ago! Steve’s not who you think he is, I swear. I think you two will actually get along.”
Eddie very much doubted that. Because — ugh. Because Steve Harrington was just the worst.
Even if Eddie had never met him, fine. He didn’t have to. Regardless of whatever strange and inexplicable friendship Steve had maintained with Dustin over the years (they apparently met at a music camp where Steve was a counselor when Dustin was, like, fourteen, which made no sense whatsoever to Eddie), Eddie had heard enough about Steve Harrington to make up his mind.
The story went like this: when he was all but sixteen, bushy haired and bright-eyed Steve Harrington burst onto the scene as the lead singer and guitarist of Swim Team. Swim Team was one of those broad crossover bands — rock enough for the rock stations, pop enough for the pop stations, so it got play everywhere across the country, basically. Their first single, a frankly irritating number called “Smashed Cameras,” topped the charts pretty quickly. And Steve and his bandmates — Tommy and Carol — were suddenly the hot new thing, with a number one album and attention everywhere. They even got award nominations — the Grammy nod for Best New Artist (which they lost to some other, irritating pop-rock nonsense), and a few MTV awards, which they won handily and which Steve had accepted with a supposedly charming speech thanking all their fans.
Except, of course, the whole reason they even got a record deal was that Steve’s dad, Christopher Harrington, owned the label they were signed to. Pure, stupid nepotism baby shit — the type of stuff that made Eddie’s fingers clench into fists involuntarily.
Because, see, Eddie had been raised in a trailer and taught himself how to play on second hand guitars he bought with money he made selling drugs while his uncle worked a night shift to keep a roof over their head. He spent hours listening to Metallica CDs and playing along with them over and over again until his fingers bled and then calloused over but he could manage all the power chords. He played every seedy, sort-of-dangerous fire-hazard-heavy house show and dive bar gig he was offered until he started to make somewhat of a name for himself in a local scene, and then went and self-produced his first EP, a screechy piece of shit that sounded like it was recorded by the ghost of an 8track player but that he proudly declared lo-fi when he posted it on the internet and, eventually, managed to have cassettes pressed. (Cassettes because there was a cool collector thing that Eddie had encountered the first time he drove himself 3 hours to Philadelphia to play a house show and met other people in the scene.) And then he’d left his awful small town trailer park and moved to Philly, crashed on couches until he could scrape money for rent from a frankly terrible job at Starbucks, of all places. He lived in squalid punk houses, still playing shows, making no money but making a name, until Jeff and Gareth and Petey cornered him outside a gig and invited themselves to be in his band, and suggested they all move to Brooklyn, and well — that had been that, the start of something beautiful.
Eddie had poured sweat and blood into music for nearly ten full years and was only just now starting to have something to show for it — a real record deal, with a real record label (which, granted, was a Mom and Pop label, small but mighty, but Eddie always preferred small time indie to big name sell outs), actual well-maintained instruments, and now Corroded Coffin’s first real, grand tour, which wasn’t selling out stadiums or anything but which was, in fact, getting quite a lot of buzz where it mattered (metal magazines, goth blogs, and the occasional weird Tumblr where teenaged girls still shipped members of My Chemical Romance).
Eddie had done all of that and could still barely make rent, and meanwhile guys like Steve Harrington just walked into multi-million dollar careers because their dads waved their hands and made it so? That shit was not fair. Violently not fair.
(And, okay, Eddie wasn’t too proud to admit that he didn’t completely hate the Swim Team record. He hated “Smashed Cameras” and he super hated “King Of It All,” the other single, but some of the B sides and deep cuts were alright — like “Running Back Into Your House,” which had a guitar riff good enough that it almost redeemed the entire album. There was one track, buried just before the end, called “Barb’s Song,” and it had a weird, mournful sound that was admittedly a bit interesting. It wasn’t his thing, by a long stretch, but sure — it wasn’t like Steve was totally talentless. It was the principle of the thing, really, it was that he got to skip all the steps, that his talent was bought and paid for by his dad, that his career path was paved in gold like the yellow brick fucking road.
And, fine, if Eddie had perhaps spent a bit too much of his time and spare pocket change in high school buying and reading any magazine that featured Steve’s stupid, pretty face and his intensely perfect hair on it, that was nobody’s business but his own. He had also been a teenaged boy, and it wasn’t like his dead-end hometown had much in the way of other boys to look at without getting punched in the face, okay?)
Anyway — it was hard to miss Swim Team. They were everywhere, back then, and Eddie was perfectly within their target age demo except for the whole “metalhead D&D nerd” bit. Steve graced the covers of celebrity magazines every week with a new girl on his arm, although Eddie suspected at least some of those were PR relationships meant to sell movie tickets to whatever bland teen flick was hitting the screens that week. The press called him King Steve, with absolutely zero irony.
And then, well, it all sort of fell apart, it seemed overnight. There were rumors: discord between band members, drug use. Pictures of Steve looking coked out at clubs he wasn’t legally old enough to be in. Rumors that Steve had become belligerent and impossible to work with, and his poor Dad didn’t know how to stop his self-destructive streak.
And Swim Team never made another album. They never officially broke up either, they just sort of — stopped. Every once in a while someone would write a “where are they now” article, but the consensus was that they were sort of nowhere, really, and no one really knew why.
Steve Harrington had never written another song. No solo projects, no new band. When Eddie had met Dustin and Dustin had gone on and on about Steve and summer camp (and Eddie was convinced the camp was somehow community service for some cocaine bust even though Dustin got really offended when he’d said that) Eddie had looked the guy up. And he’d found work — Steve in the liner notes of what seemed like hundreds of albums, playing session music for bands in every genre from pop to reggae. But no songwriting credits. No projects that were his. Which was weird, for a dude at one point considered a total wunderkind.
So Eddie figured he was right. Steve was a real, true nepotism baby: Daddy paid big bucks to have one vanity album made, and then there wasn’t anything else behind that pretty little haircut. Which was why, again, this was a mistake — besides Steve’s indie pop/rock background, besides his clean-cut all-American image which any Corroded Coffin or metal fans would violently rebel against, there was just no way Steve was as good as Dustin thought. Hero worship was a hell of a drug.
As if he was reading Eddie’s mind, Dustin piped back up. “Look just give him a chance, will you?” The kid looked sheepish. “He’s, uh, maybe already on his way.”
Eddie blinked. “He’s already on his way? What, here? Right now? To my apartment?”
There was a pair of boxers draped lazily over the back of Eddie’s couch. He genuinely wasn’t sure who’s they were. There were dishes in the sink that had been there — well, frankly, long enough that it was probably a scientific mystery what was growing on them. There were empty beer cans everywhere. And while Eddie’s embarrassing teenaged celebrity crush had long faded into true and deep resentment for the unfair benefits of wealth in the industry, the idea of someone he once read about in Tiger Beat (again . . . not that he’d ever admit that) being inside his apartment was, well. A bit much.
“Oh, no,” Dustin clarified. Eddie’s heart slowed down to a much more normal rate. “I asked Robin to bring him to your practice space.”
“Buckley?” Robin Buckley worked for Eddie’s label, Upside Down Records. To be honest, her role sort of baffled him — half tour manager, half publicist, all motor-mouth. Mostly he thought she was around to make sure no one died on tour and that they kept selling t-shirts which, you know, fair enough. He’d only met her a handful of times but he knew Dustin and the kids in The Party were better friends with her, somehow.
“Yeah, she’s Steve’s best friend — besides me, I mean. Platonic soulmates or whatever,” Dustin said, rolling his eyes.
Oh, so the kids knew her through Steve. This day was just getting better and better.
“Buckley’s friends with Steve Harrington?” More than that, Buckley was apparently soulmates with Harrington, the “platonic” bit coming most likely from the fact that she was, quite frankly, one of the biggest lesbians Eddie had ever met. “But Buckley’s like . . . cool,” he finished, lamely.
Dustin raised an eyebrow. “That’s two people you like giving Steve a seal of approval, you know. More if you count Will, Lucas, El, and Max.”
Eddie frowned. “Not Mike?”
“Mike’s an asshole,” Dustin said, plainly. And, well, Eddie couldn’t disagree there. “Look, we’ll go to the studio, he’ll play some riffs, you’ll see he’s really good. And he’s willing! Besides, you need a bassist, and you’re right — no one else can or will do it this late notice except Steve. And it would be so so fun to have both of you on tour. Please?” Dustin whipped out the saddest set of puppy dog eyes Eddie had ever seen. Eddie tried to glare them down. Dustin just puppy-eyed even harder.
God damn, the kid was good. And Eddie did need a bassist.
“Oh, fucking — fine. I will hear him out. But if he sucks, I’m kicking your ass, Henderson.”
Dustin was too busy jumping up in glee to hear him.
Great. This was going to be just great.
---
An hour later they’d arrived at Eddie’s practice space, which was really just a windowless room in an old factory that had been gentrified into office space and that he’d shoved a few amps and a drum kit into last year when the noise complaints from his neighbors got him threatened with eviction. Dustin was, once again, sitting lazily on the floor. Eddie was pacing.
“They’re late, Henderson — you said 2pm, right? Is this going to be a thing, King Steve not arriving on time?”
Dustin didn’t even bother with an eye roll this time. There was no AC in the practice space, and even now in the mostly pleasant days of mid-May it was pretty unpleasantly hot, apparently enough so that it dulled Henderson’s most irritating tendencies. “It’s been fifteen minutes. The trains are probably screwy,” Dustin said. “Can you stop trying to find excuses not to hire Steve before he even shows up?”
“Lateness is unbecoming of a professional,” Eddie shot back.
Dustin sighed. “You know, it’s sort of hypocritical for you to hate Steve because his dad owns a label when you, like, love Joyce and Hopper. I mean, they signed us to their label, and our band has both of their kids.”
“That’s different,” Eddie said back. “Joyce and Hopper made Upside Down to produce your albums, one. And two, they aren’t millionaires.”
Dustin scoffed. “Right, because Steve’s a millionaire,” he said.
Eddie opened his mouth to retort that, yes, actually, having a platinum record did likely make Steve a millionaire, but as if summoned by the mere mention of his name, the door swung open. And there he was — Steve Harrington, walking into the practice space with a bass case slung lazily over one shoulder.
He looked better than he did at sixteen. His hair was less ridiculously poofy, for one, although it still had volume and presence, swooped gracefully over his brow bone. It also looked very soft. An insane part of Eddie wanted to reach out and touch it to see if he was right. Steve was wearing a polo shirt and dark blue jeans, which should have looked stupid, really, but actually somehow made his arms and chest look nice, well defined. And his eyes — that’s what all the magazines had always gone on about, Steve’s giant brown eyes, soft and warm and romantic. Those, well, hadn’t changed.
And right now, those eyes were looking at Eddie.
Life was deeply, truly insane.
“Hi,” Eddie said dumbly.
“Hello,” Steve replied.
Robin appeared suddenly from behind Steve’s shoulder, shoving him bodily into the room. Steve did a little flailing motion with his arms. “Christ, Rob—”
“Sorry we’re late!” Robin was already babbling. “The train got stuck at a station for like twenty five minutes because someone was sick, and then when it started moving it went so slow, god I hate this city sometimes—”
Dustin cut her off by leaping to his feet and nearly tackling Steve to the ground, like he’d just realized the guy had entered the room. “Dude! It’s been ages! How are you? My mom says hi and that you have to come back to visit soon so she can make you a real meal because she knows you’re never eating enough when you’re alone.”
Steve laughed good-naturedly, ruffling Dustin’s hair with affection. “Tell your mom I eat fine, but yes, I promise I’ll come back soon. Just been a crazy couple of months.”
The entire scene made Eddie feel — well, in all honesty, a little jealous. It was unfair, he knew that, but he’d always figured Steve was just another of Dustin’s mentors, and that was livable. Sure, the kid thought the sun shined out of Steve’s ass, but whatever. Steve was famous, after all, had been successful. Eddie had been willing to forgive the part of Dustin that was starstruck by that.
But this display, this whole song and dance — it made Eddie realize that Steve was way more than a mentor, to Dustin. He was basically the kid’s big brother. Dustin had never looked so excited to see Eddie. Claudia Henderson had never demanded he come over for meals.
The jealousy pooled into Eddie’s gut and seeped into his bloodstream. Which was his excuse, really, for the bad mood that was gathering, stormy, behind his eyes.
“He does not eat fine,” Robin cut in with an eye roll. “He had like two handfuls of peanuts yesterday and called that a meal.”
“Hey, we were in a rush, I was making do with that I could,” Steve said back.
“I’m pretty sure you spent the last six months in LA eating nothing but Lean Cuisine,” Robin said. “Which should be illegal, when you could spend six months getting fat on unbelievably delicious tacos.”
Steve rolled his eyes and looked away from her, clearly done with the topic of conversation. He stuck out his hand at Eddie. “Steve Harrington.”
“Yeah, man, I know,” Eddie said. He didn’t intend for it to come out as harshly as it did, but. . .whoops. The jealousy was clearly taking over the rational part of Eddie’s brain.
He did not reach out to shake Steve’s offered hand.
A beat passed. Steve retracted his hand and stuck it into his back jeans pocket. “Alright,” he said, raising a condescending little eyebrow, and it wasn’t a sneer but it felt close enough to one that Eddie’s hackles raised even farther. “Dustin says you need a bassist.” He took the hand not in his pocket and gestured lazily at himself. “And I am here to provide.” And then he smirked. He smirked!
Here to provide. Because, right — to Steve, this whole thing was just a favor to Dustin. Steve didn’t need the money. Despite Dustin’s scoff at millionaire, there was no way Steve wasn’t rolling in royalties, even still. Swim Team’s songs had been used in movies, sitcom finales, and at least one terrible old iPhone commercial, to Eddie’s recollection. Steve didn’t need money, and he certainly didn’t need exposure. He didn’t need a record deal, or to curry favor in an industry that already loved him, that he was the beloved prince of. No, Steve was here for one reason and one reason only. Because of Dustin. Most likely because he owed Dustin some sort of favor and Dustin, sweet but shortsighted, had called it in for Eddie, of all people. The whole thing made Eddie feel a bit sick. Everything in his life, everything in this band, he’d built from scratch with his bare hands. And now here was the king of nepotism babies, strolling in to save Eddie as a favor, as some sort of handout. Like Eddie was a charity case. Like Steve was one of those blonde women on Instagram who did mission trips to Africa and posed with all the kids for likes. And it was frustrating because if Eddie had more time, or, better yet, if Petey had been less of an idiot, he wouldn’t have needed the charity to start.
There had always been a part of Eddie that wanted to antagonize the people at the top of the food chain. Uncle Wayne had used to half sigh “just keep your head down,” or “let sleeping dogs lie,” but Eddie’d never been good at doing those things. Maybe it was a need for attention, maybe it was just that his survival instinct had always been slightly half-baked. Hard to say. But while it would have been easier to simply not draw attention to himself, he’d never been capable of it. The unfashionably long hair, the ripped denim, the D&D guidebooks — none of that would have been a death sentence, on its own, even in a notably Sperrys-and-Lacoste-only town like his. Hell, selling drugs should have earned him more respect, instead of less. But Eddie couldn’t stop himself. Would climb on the tables at lunch, would snarl in the faces of football players, would openly antagonize the dickhead teachers. That was just who he was.
And here was Steve, just like those football jocks in high school, standing tall and proud and thinking he was better then old trailer trash Eddie Munson, and maybe it was a strange, semi-jealousy fueled flashback to being 17 again and getting chased out of town by Jason fucking Carver, but Eddie wanted to hurt him, just a little. Eddie wanted to take him down a peg. A hundred pegs. “Dustin said you could play bass. Funny, though, because I always thought you were a guitarist, King Steve,” he sneered right back, perhaps with more malice than was strictly necessary. Steve flinched, which was sort of the point.
But Robin also flinched. And behind Steve, Dustin was openly glaring at Eddie.
Shit. Maybe too far — he hadn’t really meant for Dustin to get caught up in this little hate-on he was having.
Eddie cleared his throat in the awkward silence. “I mean, uh. You played guitar in Swim Team, right? Not bass?”
Somehow Dustin was glaring even harder.
Steve, to his credit, was making steady eye contact, although his expression had dropped to a very careful look of wariness. He looked like he was trying to read Eddie’s mind, figure out what, exactly, had provoked this line of questioning. “Swim Team was a long time ago, man. And I play guitar, yes — and bass, and piano, and if you wanted I could probably shake a tambourine on beat and look pretty on stage instead of doing anything actually productive.” He smirked again, although it looked a little practiced, like a piece of armor he was slotting on in defense of Eddie’s tone.
“Like Daphne in Scooby Doo!” Robin provided. “Does that make me Fred?”
“Exactly,” Steve said, grinning back at her, much looser with it now, “and you are very clearly Shaggy, Robs.” Then, back to Eddie. “But I’m guessing that Corroded Coffin doesn’t exactly need Daphne from Scooby Doo.” He said the band name like it was a joke, and Eddie felt his shoulders rise towards his ears involuntarily. “You need a bassist, right? So let me play you some bass.” Steve raised both his eyebrows.
Oh Eddie hated this fucking guy.
But he did need a bassist.
There were two wolves inside of Eddie, at all times: the one that hated rich-kid assholes who never suffered a day in their lives and the one that would literally saw off both of his arms if it, in some way, helped his stupid band that he loved more than anything.
The second wolf won.
He was going to kill Henderson when this was all over, he swore. Non-violence was overrated, officially.
“Fine,” he spat out. “Play something. But this is metal. None of your pop-rock shit here, okay.”
Steve shrugged, like this was no issue at all. “Okay.”
Eddie frowned. He’d sort of expected that to rattle Steve a little. “And actually, you know what — I’ll tell you what to play. Just to make sure you actually know what you’re doing. Gimme, uh — N.I.B. by Black Sabbath.”
“Dude,” Dustin interrupted. “How’s Steve supposed to play a song he doesn’t know?”
“How’s he supposed to be a bassist in a metal band if he doesn’t know Black Sabbath, Henderson?” Eddie shot back.
“I’m just filling in,” Steve said. It sounded strangely automatic, like he wasn’t even really thinking about it. Like it was just something he was obliged to correct — which, of course. No way King Steve would ever deign to be a real member of a band like Corroded Coffin. This was charity. Steve cleared his throat. “Play it. On your phone, the first, like, 45 seconds.”
This earned a scoff from Eddie. “Oh what, you’re saying you can hear it once and play it by ear?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, Munson.” Steve grinned again — all arrogance, but strangely boyish, this time. Another feeling in Eddie’s stomach that was less hatred and more — ugh — fluttering. If Eddie was going to continue to hate this man he needed to get over his dumb teenaged crush pronto. Yes, Steve was hot: objective statement of fact. Steve was also, clearly, an asshole who thought he was the best bassist in the world even though bass wasn’t even his primary instrument.
Eddie took his phone out of his back pocket, ignoring the spike of shame he felt at how shattered the screen was. He could afford to replace it, maybe, if he shifted some money around or put it on a credit card. It just didn’t seem like the most pressing issue at the moment, always got passed over for some bigger, more important expense.
(Steve Harrington probably never had a phone screen cracked for more than a day or two, always got it fixed first thing. Just another staggering difference between them.)
Eddie pressed play on the song, and it sounded from his phone’s shitty speakers. Steve furrowed his brow in concentration, staring off into a middle space. Eddie let the song get to a minute in and then hit pause. “That’s all you get, Harrington. Blow me away.”
Steve flashed that arrogant smile again. Eddie firmly ignored the way his stomach swooped a little bit, now for the second time. Focus, Munson.
Steve moved to take his bass out, humming the tune to N.I.B slightly under his breath. It took him a beat to tune, his back turned to Eddie. Then he spun around, looked Eddie dead in the eye, smirked again and—
And then he played N.I.B. The whole bass line. For a minute.
Fucking perfectly.
“Holy shit,” Eddie said out loud.
“Told you,” Dustin said, in his practiced King Shithead of the Year voice. “Steve’s the best. And he can learn Corroded Coffin’s whole discography in time.”
Steve nodded, just once, a slight jerk of movement. “It’ll be easier if there’s songs you definitely don’t play, and I might need some time to remember which song is which, so written set lists would be great. And we’ll need to practice, obviously. But yeah. I can learn your stuff in time. And I can even sing harmonies if you need me too.” He grinned, and unlike his smirk it was a bright, blinding thing. Eddie almost had to look away. “Come on Munson. You need me.”
God. Eddie hated when Dustin was right. He hated more that Steve was right. He’d walked in here prepared to feed a starving orphan and Eddie had, in fact, turned out to be the orphan. Or, no — god, these metaphors were getting confusing in his own head. The point was: he was pissed off. He wanted to scream. He wanted to tell Steve to fuck off. He wanted to unbreak Petey’s wrist, or maybe to break the other one, actually.
But he needed a bassist.
He turned around and shuffled through his backpack, pulling out a notebook and shoving it gracelessly towards Steve. “Here. There are liner notes for basically everything in this. We’ll play slightly different set lists each night, so learn everything on the albums. And maybe a couple covers too — Black Sabbath, some Ozzy. Master of Puppets by Metallica, we always play that one.” He sighed. “We leave next Tuesday morning. Meet me here. And do not be late.”
Dustin whooped loudly in excitement. Steve was still smiling. Eddie’s stomach still felt weird about that smile.
“I’ll see you Tuesday, then,” Steve said.
And like that, they were off.