Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

State Road 18 to Marion, Indiana
2018

The sun hangs low on a flat horizon, spinning this endless stretch of road into gold.

Steve follows it through farmland. He won’t be able to trust his eyes for another minute or so, the stubborn heat of afternoon rising off of asphalt in mirage-like waves, but he could drive in his sleep. It’s a shortcut home.

He settles back and sucks in a breath, letting the smell of sunbaked earth balm the twinge in his spine. Soon, he tells himself, the grassy mound that was Hawkins will be nothing but a green speck in the rearview mirror. It’s been a long day, and pain is just the price of convenience. 

Of course, in hindsight, his usual route would have been a better choice today in particular. The last day of school is never the relief he expects it to be—somehow forgotten every year, it’s always the opposite. He makes sure to remind them how far they’ve come since September and how proud they should be. They should expect the seventh grade to be harder than the sixth, but they’ve proven they’re ready for it. And even if they really haven’t, and even if he worries, he rewards their efforts with pizza and fruit punch and writes kind words in the margins of their yearbooks. The goodbyes are hard enough without knowing what they’re up against. 

The edge of his hometown is marked by a small, shaded cemetery cut off from the main road. Daylight sinks below a row of tall oaks. He holds his breath. 

Whenever he comes this way, he’s reminded of one of his quieter students who, at the start of some long-ago field trip, had waved for his attention across the aisle of the school bus. Her cheeks puffed and her face turned beet red, urging him to copy her. 

You have to hold your breath when you pass a graveyard, she had huffed. If you don’t, you’ll get thirteen years of bad luck!

But they were already passing it by the time he caught on. What do you think I got then, Tasha? About ten?

Yeah, she agreed. About.

As the highway leads him toward civilization—barbecue smoke, old diners, and gas stations—he supposes those ten bad years are far behind him now. Had they gone any better, he’d probably be driving home to the Chicago suburbs. Just past eight o’clock, Andrea’s normal shift at the restaurant should have been ending, and maybe it still does. She would have been instructing him to keep talking—about work, about the news, about that house and the spare room they ought to paint—or else she would nod off without getting a single chance to catch up that day. Most of the time, though, he would welcome a lull whenever it came, watching for the surrendering flutter of eyelids.

He finds his own reflection. Straightens his glasses. 

If his hindsight was good, then her foresight was perfect. It was only one morning after their drive home, when they had nothing left to say, that he realized he hadn’t bothered to mention that room.

So they had come to the same conclusion. Not only that, but they had cited the same reason: they didn’t know the person they had married. If they had ever wanted to, they didn’t anymore. And that’s all. And that happens. A few tears were shed, a few apologies were exchanged, and still, he can’t remember ever laughing that hard together.

Living here, he hardly has to introduce himself. There isn’t a thing about him that can’t be explained, for better or worse, in just three words: I’m from Hawkins. 

He counts the gas stations before his turn. The last for a few miles, with its yellow canopy, is Love’s Travel Stop. 

The parking lot is empty tonight, save the old pickup pulling in with a dead brake light. Poor bastard. The flash of a cop car trails swiftly behind. 

Steve watches the truck slow to a halt. He watches closely. Though he’s not far from Hawkins—never is—he is far enough to notice the dull ache between his shoulders. Out of place. It sharpens the senses until his gaze cuts straight through the shifting of red and blue, and then his eyes meet the driver’s. 

He’s seen those eyes before. Dark and glistening over the broken bottle he once held to Steve’s throat, a thin shred of moonlight had caught the edge of glass and tumbled down the boy’s cheek. How could he forget? Steve knows without thinking it, those eyes have seen him too. 

No longer an ache then, the phantom shards in his back twist into his muscles. Nerve by nerve, it’s a chain reaction that ends with his foot on the gas, a whiff of benzene, and the whoop of a siren. 

Eddie Munson. 

He’s not thinking about the officer, even as he hesitates to pull over, and even as the finger taps on his window.

“Sir.” The voice that greets him has the awkward warble of a teenager. “You know how fast you were going?”

Who could care when that was Eddie Munson? When no one had seen him since he had died? When that shouldn’t make any sense at all? 

Far off in the gloaming distance, the headlights wait. 

“I could’ve sworn it was still seventy out here.”

And as the deputy pops his gum, slaps the ticket into his palm, then answers a call, they never leave his periphery: two dots of light where the sky meets the gentle slope of the Earth. Eddie Munson.

Steve wants to reach him as simply as a button pressed, You’re safe, over. Anxious as he is for him, it’s probably for the best that he can’t say it yet. He won’t believe it until he sees it for himself. He might not see it, he reminds himself, and so he waits before letting the tires crunch over gravel. 

When he had caught that glimpse of him, barely, his memory had been forced to fill in the blanks. Now, standing in Love’s fluorescent gleam, he wonders if his certainty might have been divine intervention. Until the man removes his cap to swipe his sweat, Steve wants to apologize; he thought he was someone else. But choppy waves of brown and silver stick to the brow, to the lines deepened by age then smoothed by recognition. 

His eyes widen. 

It’s the eyes. 

“I thought it was you.” Then it’s the voice, low and deliberate, and as his mouth curves into a lopsided grin, any remaining doubts should be put to rest. The scars branch up the sinews of tattooed arms, under his shirt and along a scruffy jaw. They’re slightly lighter than the weathered ruddiness of the rest of his skin, and even so, without a smile tugging at one side and not the other, the difference would have been too subtle to tell.

An act of God, Steve thinks. He’s still stuck on that thought—Or is that a bad thing?— as his mind races towards the right question to ask. But his heart is racing too, and all it can force out of him is a weak sputter. “How?”

The man, Eddie, takes a small step forward. He speaks in a hush, his rasp hardly lifting over the breeze: “Anywhere we can talk?” 

Attention travels hesitantly from the creased corners of narrowing eyes, to their tall shadows joining and stretching across the pavement, to the truck.

He follows his gaze then lets out a laughing sigh. Though it’s an unambiguous vote of no confidence, he slides out of the way to let Steve into the driver’s seat. “Hunk of junk,” he laments, leaning on the rusted hood. His lips are pursing around a cigarette when he sighs again. “I’ve checked the fuse twice.”

Steve’s fingers fumble with the fuse box regardless. He tries to center his focus, keeping the tremor in his hands so as not to spread to his back. “You got a flashlight by any chance?”

Not wasting a second, Eddie winds around to search the glove compartment. A pile of napkins and CD cases forms on the mud-caked floor as he digs. With a quick smack and a steady hand, light streams into the cabin. “I should’ve figured it’d be something stupid. That’s what gets you.”

“Not this time,” Steve offers. It isn’t much of a consolation in the grand scheme of things; with just a few words, Eddie validated a dread he didn’t know he had been holding onto. There’s no way out for him. There never had been and never would be. As long as he’s alive, he can be found. 

Nodding thoughtfully through a veil of smoke, “Not this time,” he agrees. Haloed by the sulfuric yellow glow of the canopy, he’s obscured enough to be a dream.

Steve smiles at him, waiting for a reaction to prove he’s really there, living and breathing. “Someone upstairs must be looking out for you.”

“Yeah.” A smile returned. “My uncle Wayne, and he’d better. He left me the piece of shit.” 

He hopes that means they found each other. Lifting onto his feet, he gives the door an affectionate pat. “I’ll check back there,” he says, wind-rustled hair swept back with his arm. “Why don’t you hop in and–”

“Yeah, yeah! Sure, let me know when.”

Shooting him a thumbs-up, he pops open the tailgate. “She’s a good machine,” he hears himself ramble, scrubbing fingers clean on his pant leg before unscrewing the bulb from its socket. “What is it, a ‘90? ‘91?” 

“‘91, I think.”

Steve nods to himself. He really does hope that means they found each other. ‘86, ‘87, ‘88… “Alright,” he calls. Red light beams over his hands as Eddie pumps the brakes. He dusts off. Waves for the mirror. Ta-da.

“Son-of-a-bitch!” Jumping out of his seat and doubling over with pure relief, he barely holds himself back from crying out. “Thank you!”

“Came loose, that’s all! You would’ve figured it out.” The attempt at reassurance goes unheard. 

“What do I owe you? Hell, what don’t I owe you…”

Eddie drums his fingers over metal. A cool wind sweeps through the surrounding patches of grass and cornfields as if following the country road that divides them. Nothing but a whisper reaches the two men in the parking lot, and Steve can hear Eddie tapping. How he swallows hard.

Steve shakes his head. “I just want to know what happened.”

While he never saw himself as a religious man, he has to wonder after tonight. Potholes speck the way home, and he finds himself praying under his breath that the truck holds itself together for the last mile. He keeps an eye on the two dots of light in his mirror until they’re too close, illuminating his path down the driveway then plunging them both into darkness. 

Even then, the pinpoints have burned into his vision. 

“Watch your step,” Steve warns. Almost immediately, he hears sneakers scuff at the bottom of the stoop.

Not a beat missed: “Thanks,” his guest chuckles.

There’s a shakiness to the sound, but the chill descending over them could be to blame for that. Steve works the lock as quickly as his fingers allow. 

The door opens on a small mudroom. He had been using it as a staging area over the course of the month, collecting papers to grade and return. All that’s left are the empty folders that once carried them and the boxes meant to store them. He must have gotten distracted.

“Can I get you anything, Eddie?”

There’s a pause. “Steve Harrington’s house,” a mumble then replies—so softly, he couldn’t have meant to say it out loud. 

Steve tries to see it from that perspective: someone who had never been invited but who would have been, and should have been, assuming they would have kept in touch. 

They were never that close, so he doesn’t know why this is the assumption he makes now. Testing that twenty-twenty hindsight later on, he may not remember why he apologized for the mess, either. 

In the moment, Eddie certainly doesn’t. “Well, I think you’d have a heart attack if you saw mine.”

“And where is that?” As he leads him down a short hallway into the snug, lamplit den, he hangs a fallen raincoat back onto its hook. Sets his tote bag down. Glances over his shoulder. “Not to get ahead of you.”

“Good a place to start as any!”

Smiling at that, he tosses a blanket over the back of the couch then rearranges the throw pillows, making room. There isn’t much of it to be had: this is his home office during the school year, and he has to relocate the stack of history books on his ottoman before he can finally sit. 

“Ever been to Vermont, Steve?”

It had been easier to ignore his soreness before. He should have left the books where they were. Lowering across from him, leaning against the arm of his chair for support, “No,” he answers slowly. Questions pop up at the back of his mind, half-formed and held back. But Eddie watches him in silence, expecting his drawling to lead somewhere. “Lots of…trees?”

“More than people.”

“Right.”

His smile—crescent moon—waxes into a wide, white grin. “Plus,” he says, hands folding over the ripped knees of his jeans, “decently close to everything, not like here. Keeps me semi-sane. There was a while after Wayne died that I said, ‘Fuck it! If I’m gonna live, I’m gonna live.’ So I did the band thing for a while, and I don’t know how, but that turned into more of a studio thing. I’ll head out to New York for a couple of days, monkey around ‘til they have what they want, then it’s back to the woods I go…” 

“That’s great!” More of a relief than anything.

“It’s something.” When he shrugs, coarse frizz floats around a narrow face. It could be the easiness of the gesture, or the way he relaxes backward, but again, he convinces Steve that his presence here is a natural one. He could have always been reclining on that couch, studying the tchotchkes on the shelves and the pictures on the wood-paneled walls. Maybe, blinking tiredly but serenely, he’s thinking it too.

“Why come back then?”

He had been waiting for that. For a few quiet seconds, his eyes scan the ceiling as if he could pull the words from midair. “Ghost towns are safe. The road in is another story, but I haven't had a problem 'til tonight. So I come back,” he says, holding up a finger, “once a year. Any day. I just pick a good one and pretend it’s her birthday or something.” And he answers the blank expression waiting for him: “Chrissy.”

His reaction surprises him as much as the name, breath hitching in his throat.

“Hell, maybe she sees me coming and rolls her eyes! But I don’t know if anyone’s visiting her out there, and if it were me…”

“Sure.” He isn’t sure why, among the things he could say, that he lands on “Sure. That’s good.” 

Not until the long lost stranger on his couch does. “Are you okay?”

Steve doesn’t have to force a smile. Embarrassment does half the work for him. “Yeah,” he says. He’d be taking up time to explain it—time they don’t have, this fluke aside. “Just slept wrong. Old man.”

“You can’t be old. Then I’d have to be.” He winks. “What do you need and where can I find it?”

Though he calls after him, Eddie is quick on his feet. He disappears into the dark of the kitchen. “Next to the fridge. The clear bottle.” While he can’t see him, he speaks to the fresh indent in the leather cushions. “You haven’t reached out to Henderson, or–? Anyone?”

“You know, it took me five seconds to find him online.”

There’s the rattle of pills, footsteps soon following. Eddie crosses into the room, presenting the bottle in one hand and a glass of water in the other. “He looked happy.”

It takes him a moment to understand: that’s the answer to the question. 

Just that one. “So, should we get into the weeds? I’m warning you right now, I’m not gonna make a whole lot of sense.”

Steve grunts out a laugh. 

“Fair enough.” The corner of his lips perk. His eyes flicker past him. “But first, I’d be remiss not to ask about Textbook Mountain over there.”

“Oh, that’s–”

“No, wait, don’t tell me.” Miming deep thought, he rubs his chin then mouths the title on one of the spines. The World Wars. “You’re going into battle.”

“Well, it’s the public school system.”

“Damn! I almost said ‘teacher.’”

He nods, though he would have been impressed by that shot in the dark. At the time Eddie had known him, teacher wouldn’t have been the obvious path. He can feel the smile forming again. “I wish the little shits studied half as much as I do…” Though there’s a slight numbness as he rubs his face—exhaustion catching up with him—the smile stays. “You’re actually here.” 

It spreads beyond him, parting Eddie’s lips to acknowledge that he is, and that he can’t believe it either.

Steve can’t look away. 

Mount Sherman, Kentucky
1988

Eddie never dreamt of the Upside Down. The dark cloud blotting out a cold and distant sun, the thousand flapping wings, the stuff of real nightmares—that all stayed behind. He hadn’t.

Most nights, he dreamt of the hazmat suits that had huddled around him in the real world. Though they spoke in backwards mumbles, he could understand that they were discussing him and his speedy recovery. They cared about his health, and like a tick on a deer’s ass, they were bound to care until he dropped dead. 

His dreams were never haunted by the fangs in his neck or the blood in his throat, but by needles, wires, and iron bars. He would be lucky if he woke up before a once-familiar face would appear to him, distorted by rage or indifference. The night always knew how to rattle him best.

Sitting at the kitchenette, his uncle didn’t turn his head. He addressed the shadow moving across the linoleum: “There’s coffee.”

This had replaced Good morning at least a month ago, though they shared the motel room. Most mornings, he would be saved from his own subconscious by the sound and smell of a percolating pot, and he would have thanked him with a tired grumble and filled up a mug, but the dream wasn't really over. He couldn't pretend with the lump in his throat. 

The pause had lasted too long. Wayne sat pin straight, his eyes sharp under the brim of his cap.

“I’m good,” Eddie assured him. It was meant to relieve specific concerns: that he wasn’t in pain, that the coast was still clear. He sat across from him, hands scrubbing his face over the table. He was so used to his hair flopping over his brow that its absence still shocked him. His fingertips ran further and further back, following the prickly path of the razor towards his scalp.

“You look it.” 

Funny, so much had changed since Hawkins that he had to second guess the deadpan delivery. Jokes were barely perceptible on the older man’s face, but you could see them coming with a twitch of the whiskers. You’d just have to be paying attention. Eddie did, watching it come and go with a quiet sigh. “I should’ve just left on my own,” he heard himself say, slurred by sleep and dead muscle. “Sorry. I don’t expect you to agree with that, and I don’t know if I do. That’s just how I feel about it today, I guess.”

First, he was lucky to have escaped the Upside Down, then to escape the facility as it crumbled into ruin. He wouldn’t have been once they had transported him out of there or had Hawkins survived, but that didn’t matter right now. He was lucky—he knew he was—to be sitting across from the very person he had risked everything to find.

Distance was forced between them with the push of his chair. He watched his own hands then, scarred and trembling, as they steadied a clean mug under the spout. It would have broken the man’s heart to be honest: that he never would have left alone, anyway. That he should have just died when he was supposed to. 

“I’m sorry you been holding onto that.”

He wasn’t ready to face him when he nodded. 

“I’ll tell you something I haven’t. We’ll call it even.”

The room was too small to avoid him. Coffee poured for himself, there was nowhere left to go but out. He slid into his seat again, though, warming his lips against the rim of his drink. His eyes focused dully on the rising curls of steam. 

“The day they dropped you off at my door, I wanted that brother of mine dead.”

More than Eddie had heard out of him in a while, that alone should have convinced him that these were words that had never been strung together before. Never, at least, in his presence. “I know.” 

“You didn’t belong there with me. Any place would’ve been better, and I was gonna make sure you got there. You know what changed my mind?”

Maybe it was a smile, or maybe it was a tear brushed away. There had been plenty of both. He shook his head.

“I’d be no different than him.” As he leaned forward, his fingers wove together—one way, then the other. 

Eddie wondered suddenly if that weaving was a sign of nervousness. It stood out. “Honestly, Wayne, I don’t care why.” More than anything, he hoped his reassurance brought back the safe certainty of the man who raised him. It never did in his dreams, but here? “No one would’ve been happy that I showed up! It’s the fact you dropped everything just so I’d have a chance–”

A gnarled hand lifted, just barely, over the tabletop. 

Grasp tightening around his mug, Eddie noticed a clamminess that wasn’t there before. His gaze wandered to the frost-dappled window, where the night sky still lingered through the blinds.

“Look at me.” 

Of course, steeling himself with a breath, his nephew did.

The slightest quirk under white bristles—the beginnings of a frown—spoke for him in the silence that followed. He was confirming to himself that what he was thinking was worth saying aloud. 

But Eddie understood him before he understood much else. Wayne only ever said what needed to be said: nothing more.

“If you do go,” he told him, “then let it be your choice. Long as you know it would never be mine.”

Chapter Text

“How’d you find him?” Steve asks. It can’t be midnight yet, but his eyelids seem to be growing heavier with every blink. There’s a peacefulness to the expression it creates, softening discomfort. Now he sits folded at the waist, knee supporting his elbow, fist supporting his chin. “Half the town was gone by then.”

“Not Wayne.”

He shakes his head at that.

“I think he was waiting just in case.”

“Good thing.”

An easy smile finds its way onto Eddie’s face, mirroring without meaning to. 

Steve Harrington. Even when he claimed to hate him—couldn’t have known him well enough to hate him—he had taken a strange liking to that name. The way the sound almost forces a smile, and the way that stops being true halfway: it’s a compelling contradiction of a name, and he wonders if such a simple thing could have played a part in his all-too-swift liking of him. He wonders about the people who chose it for him, then whoever else he might have shared it with. His attention travels as he does, familiarizing himself with the faces in the photographs. One of them—the one he would expect to see and does, repeated—belongs to his funny friend, Robin Buckley. There’s a family picture, too small and far to make out. There’s Henderson, the Sinclairs…

Sitting with Steve in his living room tonight, Eddie knows he doesn’t have to wonder. Neither does the hopeless boy who shares his heart—such a soft, peaceful thought after all the time he had wasted doing just that. “What about you? After?”

He had taken off his glasses, maybe hoping that his tiredness could be buffed away with the fog of his breath. “Same as everyone.” A simple answer anyway, his shrug nearly distracted Eddie from its flimsiness. The continuation made it harder to ignore. “Making sense of it, or trying to.”

“I guess I meant more literally.”

“Ah.” Eyes narrow flicker behind his lenses, determined to stay awake. 

“But that’s fair. Hey, if you ever figure it out…” 

“You’ll be the first to know.”

“Thank you kindly.” 

“Just give me the time and the gas station, and I’ll be there.”

His smile falters. “Right.” Though it threatens the tempo of their banter before it can really begin, it only does so for a moment. Eddie finds himself snickering—“Passed by a nice new 7-Eleven on the way,”—inviting him to continue with the back-and-forth. 

Steve hums in reply. Whatever he’s thinking, it stays a thought. He swipes a hand through dulling waves of chestnut. 

“Never gets any easier to talk about,” Eddie says for him, sincerity betraying a deserved breeziness yet again. “Last thing I want to do is invade, by the way. But I guess I’ve already claimed your couch.” There’s something in the twang of his reply that earns him a smirk, and he’s grateful for stumbling into it: the cadence of a joke. 

Then Steve rises to stretch. It’s a relief to see the muscles tense and relax, and an even greater one to watch him move fluidly on, linens gathered from the closet in the hall. But in the way of a story, he offers very little. “I went to school, I graduated, I got a job.” Boom, boom, boom. “Boring stuff! I would’ve killed to get back to boring after all of that bullshit.” 

“I hope it stayed boring, then.”

“Pretty much did.” There’s a golden twinkle in his eye as he lingers near. He checks that everything is there before handing them off: sheet, pillow, pillow case.

Eddie accepts them, hugging their freshness against his chest. If he could accept the missing details as tenderly, he thinks, he would. 

“Pretty much did.” Gone is the twinkle as he returns to his seat. His face pinches to squint. “You know how to make an entrance, Munson.”

A low chuckle escapes from the depths of his chest. “Couldn’t let you forget about little old me.”

“Not possible.”

He shouldn’t be struck by that response given how he got here: through the dust kicked up by the tires of his truck and the flurry of light and sound, and through time itself and its many obfuscations, Steve had recognized him. It stands to reason that he remembered him too. Or—he dreads to consider the possibility—he had expected him. “How’d you do it?” 

His head tilts, propped by his hand.

“How the hell did you know that was me?” Lifting his chin, gesturing to the scraggle that hides it, “I’m thinking I need to work on my disguise.”

He scans him up and down, possibly trying to determine if he should laugh.

“Have you seen the cost of stage makeup these days? I can’t justify it.” Not entirely willing to move on once Steve snorts, there’s still that question. And there’s still that hopeless, wondering boy. “But seriously,” he’s the one asking, “how?”

Maybe his assumption had been wrong. Steve studies him again, his thoughtful, sleepy gaze always returning to meet his own. 

Eyelashes flutter at him. At best, he expects a Shut up, Munson or some such hangover from the distant past. He wouldn’t have questioned a snort.

“Well.”

Well. Eddie can’t make sense of it as anything other than a punchline. “Steve Harrington! That’s some romantic shit!”

His smile goes so wide it must hurt him. He rubs his cheek, and as he goes on, the ongoing war against fatigue can be heard as a crackle in his throat. “Whenever I drive through Hawkins, it’s the same thing. It always feels like I just got dragged ass-first through the Upside Down.” In his pause, his eyes close. They stay closed for a second or two, long enough to convince Eddie that the night would end right there—until lips purse, ruminating with himself. “I see your truck, and there’s this voice in my head screaming at me like ‘That’s someone! He was there!’”

Hadn’t he been? Had Steve not noticed him across the road, Eddie is confident that he would never have recognized him with his teacherly spectacles and his neatly trimmed hair. Though he should have understood his shorthand, he had taken him at his word. The pain was nothing and meant nothing. 

It never gets any easier to talk about. Hadn’t he said that?  

“So what does that mean?” Eddie asks. “Anyone who’s been down there, you can tell they’re coming?” Guessing again when Steve bobs his head no, “Just me.” There isn’t enough time to dissect it before his heart skips and jumps ahead to the next conclusion it can: “I’m making it worse, aren’t I?”

With the return of that brilliant grin, knuckles work against the side of his face. “Man, I’m the moron who left his pills on the counter. I was lucky you were here.”

That’s one way of looking at it, he thinks. It isn’t the first time he thinks it, either. When he had made his grand entrance into his life, Steve hadn’t blamed or cursed him for the chaos. Through the thickets of his memory, that young man had walked right alongside him. The glass had been half full even then: Thank you for saving my ass.

They stay up talking after the first suggestion of sleep is made, then the second. They steal another hour at least. 

Steve falls asleep too soundly to be moved. Eddie hopes that he’s comfortable enough where he is, his hope mangling into worry before he can allow himself to follow suit. He slides his pillow between him and the back of the armchair. Once the lights are turned out, the glasses placed safely on the table, he wishes him goodnight. 

The rain falls in heavy sheets, curtaining the garage and warding off its stuffiness with a cool breeze. Early in the afternoon, the sky is so dark behind the deluge that it seems the night had forgotten to end. 

Eddie taps the corroding bumper with the toe of his shoe, leaning without pressing his weight. His voice rises above the downpour: “Do I pass inspection?”

Rubbing the grime off of his hands, Steve closes the hood with encouraging gusto. Such movement would have been impossible yesterday, which instills about as much hope for him as it does the truck—until his tongue clicks against his teeth. 

“That good?”

An arm lifts to dab the sweat off of his brow. “There’s a few things I’d replace if it was me.”

“Damn.”

He chews the inside of his cheek, eyeing the curled peel of metal being budged impatiently by Eddie’s foot. “You don’t want a shot engine. We can go hunt down some parts ‘til you find something else. The thing is, you’re looking at a couple of orders at least, so if you have time to wait, I almost wonder…”

Though the suggestion drifts off before it can reach a confident endpoint, Eddie follows him there. “I’ve got nothing but time. I’m not gonna make that your problem.” A gust of wind makes it harder to follow his answer, though. “What?”

Stepping closer and speaking up—“No problem!”—his grin assures him that he means it. 

Eddie supposes they can steal a few days.

Two months is enough time to find the right parts, to make the repairs, and then to fix whatever their repairing broke. It takes less time for a house to feel like a home. 

Eddie is careful not to get too comfortable, which is easier said than done. Steve Harrington is a perfectly courteous host. On the very first morning, he had asked him what he likes to eat for breakfast and the half-hearted answer had been cereal. He doesn’t always have breakfast, in truth, but it was nice to be asked at all. His options that day had been Bran Flakes or Frosted Flakes, so he chose the latter—not without pledging his allegiance to sugar, dyes, and miscellaneous carcinogens. He wasn’t sure Steve had even heard the joke until that night, when the two boxes in the cabinet were joined by a generous assortment of brightly colored, candy-coated alternatives. 

Steve’s house is small but nicely decorated, lived-in but far from messy—especially after his insistence to tidy up the books and the school supplies scattered here and there. It wasn’t until the third day, after the storm had passed, that his guest could appreciate the exterior of the ranch as well. The front- and backyards are neatly trimmed and weedless. He has a bit of a greenthumb, that Steve Harrington, and it speaks for itself; good thing, because he doesn’t take credit. According to him, it was the rain making things look so lush and beautiful. Of course, he knows the names of all the flowers and shrubs in his garden, has his favorites and his problem children and a story behind each. Eddie couldn’t identify any beyond some vague memories of the meadow behind his old trailer park, but all he had to do was point them out and smile. They appeared on the dining table the next day.

Courteous indeed.

It’s almost exactly two months when he joins Steve in the garage, crunching on his bowl of marshmallow-flavored cancer puffs, that he becomes too aware of the routine. Every morning joining Steve in the garage, every morning sitting on the cement steps with his breakfast and the same two questions.

“Are you hungry?” 

“Nah,” Steve says as always.

“Is she like new?”

A smile finds him over the popped hood of the truck. “She is.”

That’s different. It startles a laugh out of him. “Get out.”

“Come see for yourself.”

He leaves his bowl on the steps and slinks over, noticing as he does—with an unexpected anxiousness—that even the rusted bumper has been patched up and polished. It isn’t skin-deep. The innards are shiny and new, freed of all the years of dust and gunk that Eddie had come to associate with the poor thing. 

“It runs great,” Steve says, the back of his hand leaving a greasy black trail over his eyebrow. They raise together in his giddiness. “We should take her for a spin!”

“I can’t believe you did it.”

“Me neither!”

“I mean,” Eddie corrects, matching his grin as he tears his eyes away from his hard work, “of course I can believe it. You were a mechanic in another life.”

“Or a geek in this one.”

His grin turns a little more crooked. Henderson might have said something similar, back in prehistory, but he would have had no reason to believe it. Now, two months with him: “Well–”

“Here!” He swings the door open for him. “Nice, huh?”

Incredulous, Eddie shakes his head. There had been crud stuck in the folds of those seats for half of his life. The man hadn’t even missed that. “Better than it ever looked…” He can feel the end of summer drawing near, hugging himself as the breeze brings in an early crispness. 

“And I know it’s all over,” Steve says, practically reading his mind, “but I hope you’ll stay for dinner.”

What’s one more dinner, after all?

Eddie doesn’t dream much anymore, so whenever he does, it’s as memorable as any real-life happening—though those are just as infrequent these days. What is there to do? What is there to work out at the back of his mind, fretting over and hoping for? Alone as he is, even the faceless bugaboos from the facility had stopped crowding his nightmares. If they ever returned, he knew they would be hurting no one. Just him.

Of course they would find him on a friend’s couch, paralyzed by fear and sleep alike. All he can do is scream. 

And he must, because as he’s shaken awake his throat still burns. Unable to see what’s right in front of him in the dark, he can feel: the burning, the spit pooling at the corner of his lip, the trembling arm lifting to dry it, and the sturdier one blocking his efforts. He tests the space with a clumsy hand, following the sound of his own name until it meets the source. His knuckles brush away from the loose fabric of Steve’s shirt once he realizes. 

His heart may not be heard under the laboring of his breath or the slowing of Eddie’s, but it can be felt. Steve’s panic still pushes him to ask if he’s okay, what’s wrong, and what can he do, through the deliriousness muddling those questions together.

There’s a dry click in Eddie’s throat. His palm meets Steve’s anchoring forearm, but just as quickly as it arrives, the warmth retracts again. 

All too soon. “You’re okay.” It’s a knee-jerk reaction, the question put to rest for him. “It’s over.”

If only it were that easy. “Steve,” Eddie breathes.

Still following impulse, he surprises himself when the next breath is taken so close to his ear. The first cautioning spasms flare along the arch of his spine, but he only holds Eddie closer to him, letting the pain build as it goes ignored. 

“Steve…”

“I know.”

Encouraged more by what isn’t said than what is—that Eddie will leave soon, that nothing will change this, and that this is what Steve should know—he stays that close as he pushes himself upright. 

The motion invites him into the empty space, and as Eddie’s hands finally find the angles of his jaw, he can see him. A bend in the blinds casts a single strip of moonlight over the cushions where Steve rests his head. It shivers in his eyes, and he focuses softly through it. Eddie’s thumbs ghost over his cheeks, staying—as he loses sight of him again—to remind his lips where they can trace without meeting. It isn’t until the kiss has already deepened that he understands how futile that effort had been. He’s suddenly aware that, had he ever been a dreamer, none of his wondering would have rivalled the comfort being provided to him now.

For the thousand coincidences it takes to create an eclipse, totality is brief by nature. True as that is, the moment seems to stretch on for them regardless, creating a chill in the air that the overlapping heat of their bodies promises to shut out. 

Eddie has to catch his breath. “Have you ever?” he asks halfway.

“On a couch?”

Thrown off guard by the levity—the curve of a smile so clear in the answer despite the teary-eyed expression lingering in memory—he doesn’t bother clarifying. As he’s led through the pitch black of the living room, he tries not to read into his sureness. It could suggest experience as much as love, as much as nothing at all. 

But as Eddie lowers back, held steady between the edge of the mattress and Steve’s straddling knees, he’s more shocked by the sheepish laughter of the admission than the admission itself. 

“Never,” Steve tells him. “Sorry, I don’t know–”

“It’s fine,” he says, hearing the impatience and swiftly correcting it. He runs a gentle hand through his hair, producing a sigh so sweet and pure that it makes his stomach flip. Slow down, he reminds himself. As he guides him movement by movement to lie beneath him, the reminder becomes a mantra. Without it, he wouldn’t be able to pull free from the magnetic force of him. He purses his lips as if keeping the kiss with him, as if it could apologize for making him wait. “Don’t you go anywhere.” It can't be in spite of the adrenaline still coursing through his veins that he finds the confidence. It must be because of.

It must be that.

Steve tilts his head back on his pillow, nodding in the pale light that streams through the sheers.

Eddie follows the moon across the carpet, through the door, until he has to retrace his steps. Slow down helps him breathe through his fumbling. His foot finds his suitcase, right where he had left it, which means there should be a side table and a lamp just another step away. That’s where Steve would have left his glasses. That’s where they are. Up and up his hand travels, up and up until that golden light makes the room real to him again, and with it, that nagging truth. 

From the suitcase, Eddie’s hand reaches upward again, settling over the couch cushion: still warm from his restless sleep. The mantra has changed, and this time it brings a cold sweat. Until they find a way to slow time itself, then he can’t stay here. He can’t be that selfish. 

When he returns to Steve’s bed, his eyes have to readjust to the night. 

“Okay?” 

He tracks the sound of his whispering until he can whisper back. “Steve.” It’s impossible to frown the name.

Leaving a trail of kisses along the length of his neck, Steve’s hummed reply sends a shockwave through him. It ends at the tips of his fingers, which hesitate to touch him now. 

“Steve,” he tries again, “you know there’s something about you, right?”

The smile can be felt against the skin. “What do you mean?” he mumbles against him.

“I mean… Listen.” He nudges him back, meeting his eyes. “I’ve never loved anyone. Trust me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried really hard, and in the end I just wonder about you. That’s for the best,” he assures him. Really, he wants to assure himself. “I’d rather wonder. I’m only telling you all that because I’m leaving tomorrow, and I think we should stop now if there’s even a slim chance you feel the same or, hell, the opposite! If you think I’m crazy–”

“Eddie, I don’t.”

He’s almost certain which part of that warning he’s responding to. Steve’s palms, rough but warm under his ears, make it difficult to feign ignorance with himself. He smells the daytime on him still—the woody musk mingling with the smoke of shared cigarettes—and he sighs into the crook of his neck. “I want to give you everything.” It shouldn’t need to be said, he thinks, that he can’t. 

Still, and hopefully with the same understanding, Steve slips his hands underneath Eddie’s outgrown t-shirt. He reads the strange textures of his back with a quiet curiosity, sometimes returning to the hills and valleys of his body with a measured deliberateness. He helps the shirt over his head, studying the ink on his arms with the same intensity before returning to his sense of touch, circling around his pocked ribs and over the wisps of hair on his chest. 

But what else can he do, Eddie realizes. Never, he had told him. Sorry, I don’t know. He hooks the blanket around his shoulders, keeping himself covered as he shifts down the bed. 

Steve knows that much. He lifts with some stiffness, letting Eddie tug the drawstring past his hips. He remembers to pace himself at the sight of him, meeting every gasp with a pause. It isn’t long before the pauses become too short, the grip on his arms tightening into urgency. “Don’t move,” he advises, only now with concern for that previous tenseness. He frees the sweatpants from around Steve’s ankles before shimmying out of his boxers, both of them landing in an unceremonious heap on the floor as he reaches for the end table. “You’ve been quiet,” he notices aloud. 

Steve hisses. “Have I?”

A chuckle is cut off as he lowers on top of him.

At the same time, as Eddie strokes him behind his back, the breath hitches in Steve’s throat. “A lot on my mind,” he quips. 

He smiles down at him through frizz. “Me too.”

“It feels like the first time.”

“Well fuck, no pressure!”

“Please,” he scoffs, then winces, apologies peppered along his temple as the swaying slows. “It should’ve been you anyways.”

“As if I would’ve known what to do with you…” He freezes altogether with the white gleam of his grin.

Then eyebrows tent in faux despair. “How do you think I feel?” 

“Not too bad after that beejay, I bet.”

Steve laughs. “Yeah.” It may be a trick of the light, but he could swear he sees some color rising to his face. “Eddie, wait…”

No illusion after all. Glancing at him again as Eddie eases them along, something like worry has replaced his lover’s boyish flush. His lips try to smooth the creases sharpening around his eyes and mouth. “Does it feel good?” Traveling downward, he snickers at the bobbing of his Adam’s apple. 

“You’re perfect.” And as the snickering grows into a near-cackle, his continuation takes on a more desperate timbre. He tucks his hair behind his ear and meets his gaze. “You are.”

“Far from it, honey.”

There isn’t enough time between thoughts for him to register Eddie’s remark, let alone answer it by doubling down. “I think you were it for me,” Steve says. “I think you always were.”

And Eddie is relieved, almost, to be spoken of in the past tense. That was his condition, however he had framed it. He knows it won’t last, though, so he shakes off his dizziness to work him in. 

Head falling back, a hand slides blindly from the base of Eddie’s hip. 

He spits into his palm and slickens under Steve’s friction. Bowing over him then, his arms struggling to hold the position, “Always?” he prompts. 

But they’re too close now. Maybe he’s lucky to skip the elaboration. 

With a final effort, Eddie jerks his wrists forward, bringing those hands to his waist and clamping hard around them. Once Steve is keeping the rhythm on his own, thrusting harder, muttering lower, he willingly forgets another guiding principle. Brow falling against his collarbone, “No,” he pleads, the tears falling heavy before they can well up. “Don’t stop!”

Steve predicts the rest, his free arm looping around the small of his back to hold him, numb and quivering, as he places a breathless kiss in his hair. Their silence is a comfortable one, broken only now and then by a steadying sigh or the rustling of sheets. Eddie wonders if it’s possible to be jealous of himself. 

Though his hand travels to Steve’s naked back for the first time, he recognizes the jagged scars as if they were his own. It’s that thought that lulls him to sleep—very nearly. A voice just as familiar, and just as comfortable as the silence, tells him not to go. 

So he won’t, he decides. Simple and easy. He just won’t. 

Chapter Text

Steve is awake long before Eddie. No light breaks through the trees, nor can it reacquaint him with the silhouette resting against his shoulder. He imagines what he can of him as if he has no choice, company kept in the dark: his eyes, round and heeding during the day, and his arms, all muscle and bone holding him in his sleep, almost as if he wanted to be here. 

He won’t pretend to know what the hell he had meant, dancing around the concept of love and what it isn’t—what wasn’t felt, what is, what evidently shouldn’t be—and so he spends his time with what he does know. 

When he wakes up, Eddie will take his first cup of coffee with sugar and his second black. If it’s another bright blue morning, then he’ll be sitting at the table with his mug and the newspaper, and the dust-specked sunlight will dance around his bedhead and cast a shadow over his expressive face. Steve will hear his reactions to the day’s headlines before he sees them, Ha, listen to this! What a joke, but he will sit across from him with an invitation or an excuse to study more closely: his bitter grin, his wrinkled brow, his hands—restless and vein-cragged—moving through shocks of silver, pounding a beat into the tabletop, flipping the page for him to read on. Eddie is more passionate about the town and its goings-on than any of its residents, almost certainly. All the world’s problems will be solved by his third cup of coffee. 

But he doesn’t get to live here. He doesn’t really get to live anywhere. Steve can’t know how he passes the time back home, but sometimes he will find him strumming a tune on the back porch, and it’s easy to imagine him at work. He plays beautifully, even if he’s only keeping his hands busy. It’s always a quiet contrast to his breakfast table speeches, and always—though realized much later than it should be—harmonizing with the starlings and goldfinches that flit around the yard. 

Do you do that on purpose? Steve once asked, and Eddie had shrugged. They were here first, he said. He recalls joking with him about fairy princesses and woodland creatures, and how they both must have needed the laugh. It wasn’t the first time he had to hold back tears and it wouldn’t be the last. 

There’s a small bouquet of evening primroses waiting for them on the table. He expects, as he has for days, that this is the morning he’ll have to toss them out. When they had been growing in his garden, Eddie had recognized them by their quirk: they were the only flowers that seemed to shut out the sun, balling their petals into little yellow fists until the night came. That was when they would bloom. It isn’t because of the sun, Steve had told him—surprised, even now, that he could tell him anything he didn’t already know. They’re only nocturnal because their pollinators are. They should thank the moths that beat their wings against the window and fly thwacking, bumping, and zapping into the porchlight. God knows the flowers in the vase won’t be thanking them again, so they should.

And if by chance it’s that nightly magic trick keeping Eddie here, then Steve should.

It isn’t long after dawn breaks, bringing its own warmth, that the hand finds his back. Eddie’s fingers brush over his skin, slowly and gently so as not to wake him; so slowly and gently that he can’t determine if it’s a conscious rhythm at all. Up and down the spine, it’s then that he takes a deeper breath in. 

A puff of quiet laughter can be felt next, and as Steve eases onto his other side, the kisses travel from shoulder to chest to cheek. Eddie’s face is lost in a sunny blur, but he can just make out the dark strands falling over his eyes. He sweeps back what he can, watching the smile stretch wide between his palms. 

“Steve Harrington.” His rasp is heavy with sleep. “I thought I dreamt you.”

It reminds him of what led them here: a moment of terror so familiar, it’s no wonder they had done everything in their power to deny its presence. Just a dream. “How’d you sleep?”

“Like a baby,” he drawls. “Comfy bed. I’ve been missing out.”

“Don’t act like I didn’t offer, man…”

“I don’t think you’re allowed to ‘man’ me anymore.”

What escapes him as a snort ends as a titter and a cough. 

“I was happy to save you from the couch.”

Steve hums. Though he clings to the feeling as if it weren’t an absence now, the hands trying their best to soothe, he only does so to distract himself from the shards of glass they left behind. 

“Happier to share, though.”

“Me too.”

Eddie brings himself closer, nodding as he nestles into him. “I have a theory,” he mutters. “About your sixth sense.”

The way he reads his mind, he thinks it might be worth pointing out his first. 

“Do you want to hear it?”

But given his delayed response, his head must still be swimming. He’ll have to develop that theory once he’s awake and medicated. “What is it?”

Eddie finds his hand over the sheets, weaving their fingers together as he guides him. His palm ghosts over the raised patches of skin: a trail of healed punctures that stretch from the lowest rung of the ribcage to the highest point of his hip bone. “You know what did this?” When Steve shakes his head, Eddie leaves his hand behind to reach around him—up and down the spine, burning then relieving. “You do.”

How could he not? He hadn’t reacted out of ignorance or curiosity, but to resist the elaboration. He should have used his words. A fast-spreading stiffness forces him to pull away too quickly, and at this distance, he watches Eddie’s eyes widen with fear or regret. If either emotion could make a sound, it would echo twice as loud in Steve’s chest. “Sorry,” he hears himself say, backpedaling so quickly that Eddie’s hair smothers his voice. 

“Don’t be.” There’s a noticeable gingerness to the reply. “I have no idea what I’m talking about, by the way. Pretty rare that I do!”

Steve can’t help but laugh. If nothing else, he hopes it does more to undo the damage. The way it’s choked out, though, he can’t be too confident. “No, I’m sure it is that,” he admits. “Just didn’t want to say it out loud.”

Eddie pauses, breath held until he sighs, “Oh.” His arms loosen around him.

“Doesn’t change anything, I guess.” Just as adamant as his silence, he realizes, had been his refusal to entertain the thought. “Can you do me a favor?”

The pills are where he left them yesterday morning, between the fridge and the coffee pot. He knows, better than he would like to now, that Eddie only has to leave the room. He’ll feel better for a moment, then far worse than before.

Ignoring his newfound belief in signs and omens, there may be a silver lining trying to shine through the throes. If he focuses on that negative space—at the same time focusing on the water circling the drain between his feet, not the way his neck cranes for any comfort it can find—then he can see this isn’t so bad. He can treat it as a lesson: that every day is like a drive through Hawkins, so he had better come prepared. 

One painkiller at night won’t be enough anymore. He might not beat the onset every morning, but now that he knows, he could certainly beat the paralysis that seems to punish heedlessness. School will be starting soon, and the pills make him drowsy, but he could try Tylenol in the morning and pray that he coasts through the afternoon until he comes home to him.

If he wants to come home to him, that’s just what he’ll have to do.

The next twisting of nerves is so intense that he has to press his hands against the bath tile. Sure enough, under the pattering of water and the ringing in his ears, there’s a knock at the door. 

“Can I do anything?” the muffled voice asks.

He can’t be honest with him, though. Not if he wants to come home to him. 

Eddie had warned him last night, though. Ignoring the signs, ignoring the sweet concern in his question, ignoring won’t change the fact that the past catches up every time. But as the pain of it fades, so do the worries distracting him from the sliver of hope—because by some miracle, Eddie is still there. 

“Let me know,” he says.

With the nearing and stopping of Steve’s footsteps, Eddie turns in his chair. He looks back at a slouched shadow lingering in the doorway—at the hair still dripping wet from his shower, and the bath towel keeping his shoulders dry, and the IU sweatshirt worn too soft to throw out—and as he does, the radio on the kitchen counter plays on for no one.

Eddie’s borrowed an old bathrobe. Tied loosely, it reveals the map of scars and tattoos that is his chest. Sunlight peeks through the ends of his long and unkempt frizz, haloing his face and, beyond him, the drooping buds of his latest bouquet. (Not the last one, Steve still hopes.) 

“Better?” 

Closing the distance, he can see a dark concern pinching between his brows. Then he nods, towel dabbing at a waterlogged ear. One thought interrupts the trance-like state he’s found himself in, too true to keep to himself. “I wish I knew how to paint.” In the silence that follows, he angles his thumbs in front of him, centering him on a canvas.

It helps. Returning his smile, Eddie slides the empty chair across from him with his foot. His attention lowers to the table as Steve accepts the invitation, between his hands and their drumming. Thinking. Protecting his heart, maybe.

“It’s okay.” That’s the assumption he answers at least. A chill courses through him as Eddie’s eyes dart to meet his. “I’m just happy I got to see you again.”

Lips crack into a grin, sudden and uncanny. It can’t be relief, he thinks, so it must be the opposite. Then the cause reveals itself, not without a somber lightness to his voice. “It’s not me, it’s you?” And not without a wink, either.

He laughs so quietly, he doubts it can be heard; he finds himself focusing on the fuzzy radio signal. He plucks his glasses off to rub at his face. 

“If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not.”

It could have been the way he mumbled, lacking conviction. 

Eddie doesn’t. “Look,” he says, “I don’t know if I have the right to worry about you yet. I can’t tell if this is happening too fast or too slow or where it’s gonna go from here. I have no clue.”

He peers over his fingertips, finding—approximately—his gaze. 

“All I know is I’m a stubborn son of a bitch.”

It calls their last farewell to mind. Resting his chin in his hands then, he smirks. 

“It’s worse than you remember. ‘Cause for the first time in a long time, I’m looking ahead and I’m seeing something good.” As his eyes wander to the window, and far, far beyond, he seems to be ensuring more than just him. “And dammit, Steve, I want to be right.” 

What would it take, he wonders. What was he seeing this morning that the night had obscured? Maybe a life of staying and hiding or maybe, instead, of meetings and partings. 

All he’s willing to do is wonder, though, concerned as he is by the fragility of that good thing. More certain than he is that too much is being overlooked, not accepted and embraced, he’s certain that Eddie could be painted in soft strokes of gold and blue. This corner of the kitchen was always in want of light and the sun will never be enough. It never was.

“That’s all I should’ve said yesterday. It doesn’t have to be so…” The words trail off, ending with a wince or a smile. 

He’s drawn to whatever it is, lost in the bright blur of his profile. The static of an old song pushes him forward until he’s standing in front of him. Leaving no time between the realization that, yes, it is a smile, and the possibility of frightening it away, he offers him his hand. “We’re not talking.”

“We’re not?” Though he asks, he’s already accepted—swept off his feet. The movement is a little clumsy, stumbling and grumbling into the embrace that catches him.

Steve is better. He’ll prove it too. “We’re slow dancing.”

“Oh!”

He chuckles at the breath tickling his neck, how the smile is even clearer to him now that it can be felt against the skin. 

“Can I just say, though? I wouldn’t have been able to leave after that line anyway.”

“What line?”

There’s a scoff, not tickling but burning as their swaying pushes them closer. 

“About painting you, you mean? That wasn’t a line.”

His nodding brings them closer yet, shoulder locked beneath his bearded chin.

“You looked so perfect sitting there, anyone would’ve thought the same thing.”

“Not anyone. I think you overestimate people’s opinion of Eddie Munson, spawn of Satan.”

That isn’t him of course, which—while it goes without saying—does not go without another burst of hot air. He doesn’t exist. How funny then, his laughter implies, that he’s still causing trouble. 

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.”

They had fallen into such an easy rhythm that the effort had been taken for granted, the gentle waters carrying and rocking them now freezing over. Hands stay anchored to Eddie’s shoulders as he lets the space form between them.  

He shakes his head knowingly. “Best thing that kid ever did for me,” he explains, pointing to the scarred side of his face. “Second best thing was playing dead. I go back and forth on that, but I’m pretty sure now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, falling into him again. And the tide ebbs and flows. “He’s the reason I’m your muse.”

Steve snorts into his hair. 

“I can still be that, can’t I? If it’s ever time to go?”

They drive that night to find open skies. Stars shoot over the bed of Eddie’s truck, and it’s from there that they watch them careen toward a purple horizon of grass, leaving thin trails of light that last longer behind the eyes. 

In the periphery, Eddie shakes his head. Lying on his back, his crossed arms serve as a pillow and a borrowed fleece as a blanket.

“Can you see this back home?” Steve asks him. 

“Not a chance,” he mutters out the side of his mouth. Sleepy. A little drunk. “Too many trees. Well, and I’d have to be looking. I don’t care when I’m out there.”

He rolls to face him, propped up by his elbow. 

Eddie is smiling. The stars shine in his eyes. “I don’t care about anything.”

“I know that’s not true,” he offers. “You care about your music.”

His lips twitch around a thought that isn’t voiced. As the decision is made, his gaze staggers to meet him in the darkness. “I meant to ask you something earlier.”

“Shoot.”

“We said a lot, trying to get into each other’s pants and what have you, so I won’t hold you to most of it. I just want to know about one thing…” There’s a pause. Another twitch. “Prithee, Steven.”

A lazy hand grabs him by the shirt, forcing a snicker before an elaboration. 

“What did you mean, ‘it should have been’ me?”

Steve lowers back onto his side.

“If you remember saying that.”

“I do,” he tells him. A sigh escapes through the nose. He’s so close to Eddie that he can feel the breath return to him, warming his face. “I’m trying to put it in a way that doesn’t sound insane.”

“Well!” This is something between a laugh and a grunt as he sits up, angling himself above him. “It’s like I said. Too fast, too slow–”

“Love at second sight.”

“Something like that.”

Steve nods, a wave of relief washing over him to say the word aloud. Not only that, he supposes, but for it to be accepted so casually. “It wasn’t an act with you,” he hears himself say. Eddie’s eyes shift, but they don’t move from him. They study the subtle changes of expression as he goes on: “It felt like it could be easy to know you. Like we already knew each other, or maybe like…” Catching a wondering smile, he has to cringe at himself. “Am I making any sense here?” he asks.

“Steve,” Eddie says, “nothing’s ever made more sense.”

Plano, Illinois
1991

Hands lifted from a cloud of heavy satin, shadowing the pearlescent gleam to let the candlelight kiss olive skin. With a one swift motion, she relieved the tightness around his collar, the fwip of his necktie following the drop of her arms. “You saw me earlier,” she said.

He couldn’t deny it. A laugh was already escaping, lured out by the smug red arch of a smile. “Caught me.”

“That’s bad luck.”

“I know, I’m sorry, it was an accident.” The answers trailed off into a whisper, through the undone tresses smelling of rain and hairspray, to the ticklish space beneath her ear. He felt her chest flutter against his before a playful smack replaced it. “Rain is good luck, right? That’s gotta count for something.” 

The weather had held off for them until the vows were exchanged, beginning with such hesitant drops that they could be mistaken for the tears that had already been falling. By the end of the night, he was carrying her over the grass and through the storm, the two of them laughing and laughing as they gathered what they could of her drenched gown. 

As she shifted beneath him, another dusky wave fell over the sharp angles of her cheek and jaw. She pushed it away with a breath. “True,” she granted. Once and twice more, the back of her hand brushed over his heart, lingering then staying. “It really was perfect, wasn’t it?”

“Every day with you is perfect.”

A small smile returned, the same candid look he thought he had seen through the crack in the door, between the fussing hands of her sisters and mother, his mother, and his best “man,” Robin, before reminding himself of his bride’s superstitiousness. He had covered his eyes and tried to forget what he had seen.

“I don’t know how I can make it up to you, but I swear I’ll try. Like it’s my job.”

Her nose crinkled at that. 

“No, listen! Some guys are born to build houses or sell cars, but not me. I was born to make sure Andrea Marchetti is the happiest—”

“Who?” she teased. “I’m Andrea Harrington now.”

Point abandoned, muscles starting to burn, he let himself lower beside her.

“Or we could be the Marchetti-hyphen-Harringtons. We can do whatever we want. We can be whatever we want! As long as it fits on our mailbox.”

“Ah,” he sighed. “You know what? That’s nice.”

“Isn’t it?” She rolled onto her side, her stiff gown hardly moving with her as she did. “The Marchetti-Harringtons. Our kids should have really long first names to match.” 

In the thoughtful silence that followed, Steve nodded. 

“Penelope,” she started.

“Uh, Ezekiel.”

“Maximilian.”

“Bartholomew.”

“That’s horrible,” she snickered. “I love it.”

The puff of her sleeve was obstructing half of a dimpled grin. He reached to pat and smooth. “That was my grandfather’s name.”

“No, it wasn’t.”

He could only hold her wide-eyed gaze so long before cracking. “It wasn’t.”

“Don’t make fun of me! Your family could easily have a Bartholomew… running amok.”

“Amok.”

“Stop!” But the command wasn’t necessary as her lips pressed to stifle his, and as her fingers returned to the collar of his dress shirt, working blindly from the top button down, neither was the next: “Help me out of this stupid thing.”

Once freed himself, he could try to outsmart the intricate system of bows, laces, and hooks running down the length of her back—though he would need one more hand and both eyes to do it. Pressured by an imagined impatience, he circled around to the other side of the bed. 

“Crowbar?”

“I got it,” he promised, kneeling as he carefully unwrapped, untied, and unlatched. “Any day now…”

“Rip it if you have to. I’m only getting married once!”

He wouldn’t do it any damage, he thought, but the sentiment did inspire him to move with a little more urgency and a little less care. 

Warm light traveled toward the curve of her spine. It was here, halfway down and to the top of her slip, that she rolled to face him again. Helped upright and chuckling at the awkward inelegance of it all, she wriggled and kicked until the gown tumbled between his feet. Then she pulled him close, tangling her fingers in his hair as he settled above her again. “I think we should try.”

He hummed, questioning.

“I love you,” she said under her breath. “I think we should try.”

Steve had fallen for her from afar, but within the first minutes of actually knowing her, he had a feeling it was true love. It had to be. She was honest from the start, taking a moment to sit across from him before flitting to the next table to take orders. I noticed you before, the young woman had said. I’m Andrea, I like park dates, and I don’t like wasting people’s time. 

He knew he would marry her. He knew they would start a family. He knew they would live in a little neighborhood like this, in a house with just enough space, but not too much, with a green lawn and a white picket fence, and he knew all of that before he had introduced himself. 

The first time she had called during his lunch break, the answer had been a breezy Let’s try again! The second time, Not yet, and the third time just a shrug as she opened the bathroom door. 

They were so young, Steve’s mother assured her, and they would have all their lives to change diapers and kiss boo-boos. They should enjoy their time alone, she said, while they still had it. But they shouldn’t wait too long, Andrea’s mother cautioned. They were so young, and they were so healthy, she had to wonder—out loud, had to—if they were doing something wrong.

Of course they weren’t, and rather than second-guess herself, she took her own advice and threw herself into work. Her shifts doubled and drew on until she was calling Steve at ten, then eleven, then midnight, and however late it was when they got home, and however exhausted, they would try. He hesitated to tell her what she already knew—that the added stress, whatever distraction it might have provided day-to-day—wasn’t much help in the long run. 

However many times it had been, he had long lost count. He couldn’t say when it had become a routine, either, or even if there was a when at all. So, one of those long nights, “Maybe we should take a break from it,” he said.

Her profile was watching the ceiling in his periphery. “Be honest. Have you changed your mind?”

His arms wrapped around her in reply. Her night shirt was still damp from her shower, warmed up quickly. “Maybe the timing just isn’t right yet, you know? Maybe we want it too bad.” He didn’t know if he believed it himself.

But she was superstitious. “Too bad.” The echo was muffled against his chest. “Maybe.”

“We don’t have to drive ourselves crazy.” Feeling her breath catch, “I’m not saying you are,” he added. “All I’m saying is I love our family as is. I’ll love however it looks in the future too.”

She nestled into their embrace. “We can be whoever we want.”

“Right.”

“Maybe,” she sighed, “Bartholomew is waiting for us to get our shit together!”

“That’s so Bartholomew.”

In hindsight, they probably should have let Mr. and Mrs. Marchetti host Christmas. Their house was better suited for gatherings like this—after all every gathering was a gathering like this—but they had been so grateful for the offer. 

Especially Mrs. Marchetti, who had actually teared up at the prospect of being hosted, no cooking or cleaning expected of her for the first time in a little over forty years. It was out of the goodness of Andrea’s heart that she would take on the burden that year—that, and because her older sister and golden child, Teresa, never had. The mere suggestion of a Christmas party was a resounding victory.

Early in the night, Steve had been assigned to eggnog duty. A Sisyphean task, he had come to realize: the glasses emptied fast and so would their last bottle of rum. On his next trip back to the kitchen, his wife caught him by the arm. She had been chatting with Teresa in the hallway for a while now, and he suspected that he was needed for moral support more than anything else. 

Andrea’s older sister resembled her more closely than any of their other siblings, having the same round eyes and high cheekbones. They took after their father, who was a tall and lanky contrast to Mrs. Marchetti’s shorter stature and rounded features. 

The two eldest daughters weren’t identical, though. While Andrea kept her long hair pinned back, black and silver curls floated stubbornly around Teresa’s face, straying from the large velvet bow loosely holding her braid together. As her daughter, Mallory, weaved between her legs, Steve noticed that the little girl had been styled in exactly the same way. 

“Steve,” she said with a frown. By now he had learned that the frown didn’t mean anything in particular. It was her resting expression. “Andi was just telling me you know a lot about cars. Ryan and I have been looking for something that would work better for us. Maybe you could help guide us in the right direction?”

He felt a nudge against his arm. Andrea shrugging.

Cars. Well, he supposed he knew enough. “Sure!” he laughed. “What are you looking for?”

“More space. More seats, though.”

“Who’s gonna drive it more often?”

“Him, probably.”

Steve rubbed his chin in thought. “Does he want to feel like he’s driving a car or a boat?”

“He hates our sedan.”

“Then you’re probably looking at a minivan.”

“I’m bored!” a little voice piped up. The girl tugged on her mother’s sleeve, ignoring the shushing that followed. “How much longer?”

“Mind your manners.”

“What if Santa skips us?”

Guessing correctly that Steve would have an answer for this, Andrea held his empty glasses for him as he crouched down.

“No way! Look,” he said, showing her his watch. “It’s only eight o’clock. But if you want to be extra sure, I might have just the thing.”

Her grip on Teresa’s arm loosened. “What?”

“Have you ever made reindeer food?”

The sisters, mirror images of each other, let their jaws drop in an exaggerated show of excitement. 

Mallory shook her head.

“Well, not many people know this, but it’s like catnip for reindeers. And we’ve got all the stuff here! Why don’t we make some for you to bring home?”

“Yeah!”

“Alrighty then,” he decided, hands clapping together to rub. “Follow me.”

They all did, winding between aunts, uncles, and cousins. None of the Marchettis seemed to mind that they had been packed in like sardines, the boom of their laughter following the four of them into the kitchen. It added a welcome liveliness to the traditional carol playing low beneath their voices. 

Steve lifted his niece onto the counter to sit. 

“Hey,” she said, staring under the collar of his sweater, “what’s that line around your neck?”

Under all the commotion, her question seemed to have gone unheard by the two women as they filed in.

“It’s a birthmark,” he lied. “I’ve always had it!” And really, that might as well have been the truth. Not even his parents knew where that scar had come from, assuming fairly that it had originated with the ones on his back. He had explained those away with a story about a burning building and falling sheetrock.

His answer tonight demanded no questions. Mallory’s eyes wandered around the kitchen as he collected supplies. “Hey,” she said again, stopping at the picture on the fridge, “Aunt Andi, is that you? I like your dress!”

“Isn’t she pretty?” Steve asked. He didn’t have to look to know what picture she was referring to. It was their wedding portrait.

“Yeah! You look like Cinderella.”

“Well, thank you!” Andrea laughed. She refilled one of the drinks, taking a sip before returning it to Steve. “Do you remember who had the other glass?” 

“Your dad.”

“Oh,” she laughed again, setting it in the sink. “Tessie, where’s yours? I’ll fill you up.” 

“None for me, thanks!”

Steve had barely set down the container of oatmeal before Mallory snatched it up. “Reindeers eat this? Yuck!”

As the faucet ran, Andrea glanced over her shoulder. “Ryan’s making you drive?” 

Teresa answered with a small smile. Shook her head no. 

“Oh–!” 

“Let’s put marshmallows in it,” Mallory instructed. 

Steve’s attention lingered on his wife’s face: the smile being returned, how it didn’t reach her eyes. 

“Uncle Steve?”

“Marshmallows.”

“Do you have any?”

“Let me…” He didn’t finish the sentence, opening the cabinet over her head and pretending to search as he listened to the whispered congratulations and follow-up questions, the revelation that it wasn’t a part of their plan, but how excited they were nonetheless. 

Finally, with a sharp breath, his wife centered herself on the other conversation being had. “Are you looking for something?”

“Marshmallows,” they answered in unison.

She turned on her heel, disappearing into the hall to check the pantry for them before returning with a box of Lucky Charms. 

“Perfect!” the girl chirped. 

Andrea poured a helping into their mixing bowl, her smile only fading as she stirred it into the oatmeal-and-sugar concoction.

Resting on his elbows, Steve looked up at her.

What could be said?

1992

They were working hard, of course, but working towards nothing. They had nothing in common outside of what they wanted—so badly, as if it mattered, and so badly that it had become pointless to talk about. It all culminated one morning, coffees prepared, shirts ironed, and that empty room in their house that would never be painted. Not ever by them.

“Wait,” Andrea said, stopping him at the door. They wouldn’t see each other again until that night, and they wouldn’t have the energy to talk then.

Steve let his shoulder rest against the frame, listening over the light drizzle pattering over dead leaves.

“My mom said it’s time we talked to a doctor about it. I told her we would.”

He nodded.

“But I’ve been wondering something. If they told us what was wrong and we solved the problem, whatever it is, do you think anything would change? Between us, I mean.”

His lip twitched, revealing what should have been shock. But this far in, knowing what they both knew, how could it be? She was just more honest.

“The day we met, I thought, ‘My God, he’s everything I’ve been looking for.’” As she continued, she looked down, staving off mistiness. “We still talk about the same things, Steve, over and over again. And if we’re not talking about that, then we’re not talking. Why don’t I know anything else about you?”

The twitch grew into a quiver, harder to hide when she glanced up at him again. 

“It’s almost like…” She swallowed dryly, prompted on by a reassuring squeeze of the arm. “This sounds terrible.”

“It’s fine.”

Her weight shifted from slipper to slipper. “It’s like I have to be looking right at you or you wouldn’t be there at all.”

The light shifted too, followed by a clap of thunder. Their teary eyes met. 

Just then, his tremble broke into hoarse laughter. 

“Good luck or bad?” she joked, drying one side of her face with her sleeve. 

He reached across their distance, helping with the other cheek. 

And after all, what could be said?

Chapter Text

“Hey, Steve?”

While tying his necktie in the mirror, their eyes meet in the reflection. “Hey, Eddie.”

“What if we played hooky?”

With a snort, Steve lets Eddie’s insistent hands finish the job—not without difficulty. He bites his tongue as one end crosses over the other, then the other way, then back again. “First day of school…” Sucking a breath through his teeth, “That might be frowned upon,” he says.

“Come on, live a little.” Sliding the knot toward his chin, it’s just a bit loose. He takes the opportunity to reel him into a proud smack of a kiss. 

“Eddie,” Steve mumbles against his lips. 

“Mhm!”

“Now’re jus’ bein’ mean.”

“Mean?” Scoffing, Eddie flops onto the foot of the bed. “Mean,” he repeats, pointing accusingly. “You want to talk mean? Mean is leaving me on my lonesome all day long, knowingly—dare I say, heartlessly—and not before waking me up at the ass crack of dawn, mind you.”

“You said–”

“I know what I said. What was I gonna do, sleep through the alarm? Why would I want to do that? Just look at you.”

Steve doesn’t. He stands with his back to the mirror, tall but slouched, hands on his hips in a show of impatience. His hair, combed away from his square face and showing off the salt and pepper around his temples, has dried as neat and feathery as if a Hollywood stylist had painstakingly prepped him for the silver screen.

Eddie settles back on his palms. “Cut me some slack,” he answers a waiting silence. “I’m hot for teacher.”

Despite his sour face, he catches the sprightly glimmer in downturned eyes—bashful, maybe, fluttering away from him.

The Steve he knew from Hawkins had been an illustrious flirt. On the days Eddie happened to roll into homeroom, he was all but guaranteed to overhear the sweet nothings oozing down the hallway; at some point or another, everyone was. It seemed the kid was incapable of actually whispering them. Eddie had eventually tried to beat him at his own game, teasing him for teasing’s sake the closer they got. He figured he wouldn’t have had much practice being on the receiving end.

He must have figured right.

As Steve steps into his loafers, Eddie is left facing his own reflection. He’s surprised to find that, despite the tangles in his hair and the bags under his eyes, he doesn’t feel as tired as he looks. He runs a hand over the grizzle of his beard, confirming the giddy smile hidden just beneath. 

Lost in thought, he doesn’t notice Steve drawing near again. Not until the mattress dips under the weight of his knee. Gravity pushes him hard into another stolen kiss, but it’s Steve’s hands—warm and sturdy around his face—keeping him there. 

As if they have to. 

“I’ll see you later,” he says, winded. He makes his way to the door slowly, feet dragged backwards over the threshold.

Eddie, struck by an invisible arrow to the chest, flings himself down. Hearing his snickering move further away, “Hey, Steve!” he calls.

“Hey what?” a distant voice answers.

“Have you thought about retirement?”

The house is a little emptier without Steve’s arts and crafts taking up space. Not only does Mr. Harrington study more than a sixth grade student, but he is exceedingly dedicated to his dioramas and poster board presentations, the last of which had finally migrated from his kitchen table to his classroom. Gone, too, are the piles of construction paper, gluesticks, and magic markers that—Eddie had figured—would sit in drawers until an assignment required them. It would be a miracle if they lasted that long. Steve was bringing them in, he said, to decorate his room for the big day. 

Eddie is probably more inspired than any of those kids will be. He tells himself it’s inspiration, not boredom, that has him searching for any art supplies Steve might have left behind—but who is he kidding. If the house feels any emptier, it’s because he isn’t there.

His guest looks in the obvious places to begin with: the junk drawer where he keeps his grocery lists and takeout menus, then under the table, chairs, and radiator that hide nothing but more space. If he were home—he isn’t attached to that word—at least he would know what he was looking for and where he had last left it. A chewed-up pencil on his nightstand. A spiral notebook under his bed. Nothing, nowhere. Checking Steve’s closet is a last ditch effort, but it isn’t until he’s found something that he realizes there had been another, secret purpose to his searching. Secret even to him.

The photo album fans open in his hands. As the faces from the past smile up at him, he pinches the edge of plastic film, refusing to flip to the next page before familiarizing himself with this one. It was raining so hard when that picture was taken, he expects the droplets to dribble out of frame and wet his fingertips, but those faces don’t seem to mind at all. Steve’s youthful grin is wide enough for his eyes to squint shut. Eddie has to assume both are, as half of him is hidden behind the white poof of his bride’s sleeve. The camera catches her mid-laugh, swept off of her feet against a dark sky. 

Closing the album against his chest, collecting the rest of the stack from his closet, he must be compelled by the same morbid curiosity that had allowed him to wonder before—only now, there’s a consolation prize. These may not be shared memories, but at least they were happy ones. His hunches had been good. 

He brings them into the light of the living room, letting the coffee table collect their dust as he compares against his own imagination. It’s a big wedding: lots of family and friends, and Eddie recognizes them by resemblance alone. Her father has the same tight-lipped smile, and his mother the same effortless charm that transcends sound and motion. He isn’t as quick to spot old friends as he should be, so used to relying on mental images and filtered profile pictures. Normally, tempted by the Follow button, he would have to make himself known to see more—but there, Dustin and Erica dance the YMCA, and there, Nancy leans in, one arm hooked with Steve’s and another with Robin's, to share a secret loud enough for Max to overhear, and for her to laugh and to nudge Lucas, who is dressed too sharply to look as nervous as he does. 

Eddie isn’t pleased with himself for guessing correctly anymore. Anger stokes itself in the pit of his stomach, burning hotter in his throat with every page he forces himself to take in. To know. To understand. There’s a picture of the newlyweds in painting clothes, rollers in hand. There’s a copy of their Christmas card, Season’s Greetings from the Harringtons, and a few polaroids he must have snapped while she chose the perfect tree. It seems Steve had held onto everything he could.

When Eddie hears the front door unlock, he has to check the time. Too early for a lunch break. He leans back as far as he can then, nearly toppling over his recliner as he does. 

The woman on the front porch sets a couple of gift bags down on the welcome mat, freeing a hand to let herself in. She’s dressed for a hike, her cargo pants tucked into colorful thermal socks and her short, sandy brown hair poking through the back of her baseball cap. The backpack slung over her shoulder is the next thing to be discarded, and there’s exactly one hook on the wall reserved, Eddie thinks, just for her. Who else but Robin? But caught in the orange headlights of her sunglasses, there suddenly isn’t enough time to think much else. Certainly not enough to hide. 

Painted fingertips drum along the edges of a cake box.

Just as he opens his mouth to explain himself, she turns on her heel toward the kitchen.

Eddie slinks down in his chair. His heart thrashes against his ribs, threatening to bust straight through him with every stomp of boots. Then, finally, the door slams shut. 

He eyes the bedroom and wonders, without daring to swivel, if he should make a run for it. The silence is promising. It lasts. 

And all that time—however many minutes, hours, or years—Robin had been waiting for him. Now, removing the final barrier between them, she lets her sunglasses hang around her neck. A piercing blue glare travels up his arm, to his band shirt speckled with bleach spots, to the bearded end of his scars.

He barely gets her name out.

“I’m assuming he knows you’re here,” she interrupts. Though her timbre is deeper than he remembers, emotion sharpens it. “Please tell me I’m right.”

His own voice sounds odd as he chokes out an answer: “You’re right.”

“For a while?”

He knows why the question matters—just not to her. Not in the moment. Like a guilty child, his shoulders roll to shrug.

“Since about…” As she does the math in her head, narrowed eyes scan the ceiling for emphasis. “Let’s see, I’ve been away since June? That’d be around the same time he forgot how to use his phone, right?”

He winces at that, lips pursed.

“I realize I don’t seem it, but I’m happier to see you than I am pissed off. Just–” She drops herself into a seat with a huff, her head in her hands. “Give me a second.”

He’s made himself small, one pajamaed leg hugged to his chest. If he could disappear into the leather back of his chair, he would—and he has a feeling that’s the source of her frustration. It’s his, after all. “I didn’t want anyone else to get roped into my bullshit.” Swallowing dryly around the frog stuck in his throat, “I didn’t want him to, either, trust me.”

She peers at him through her fingers. 

“I know you guys are close.”

“I thought.” While it’s only mumbled out, a flash of regret blanches the rosiness out of her face. “Are you in trouble?”

“No, no.”

“You’re not hiding out?”

“No.” His hands wring at each other as he grapples with the question. “Not exactly. I am dead.”

Her brow raises.

“All I mean is no one’s looking for me. Not why I’m here.”

Softening slightly as it falls, her attention lands just past his restless hands and settles on the mess they had left. Unsorted photographs burst out of albums and lie strewn across the coffee table.

“He was helping me fix my truck,” he says. “Then, I don’t know. We’ve been catching up.”

Robin sits forward, sifting through the collection between them. “Since June,” she deadpans.

“A lot to catch up on.”

“I can only imagine.” She chooses a picture to study more closely, a fond smile there and gone as she returns it. 

Upside-down at the top of the pile, Steve’s wife and best friend are attending a Halloween party. Their costumes bring an unexpected smirk to his own face—the meeting of Morticia Addams and the Log Lady—but what keeps it there is the blurry thumb at the edge of the lens. It’s enough to bring back an old habit, the expression concealed to chew on his fingernail. 

“There’s a blast from the past,” she mutters. “You must’ve caught up on everything else if he was willing to go there.”

“What do you mean?”

He can pinpoint the moment of realization: trust had yet to be earned, and clearly, Steve hadn’t told him a thing. Sinking back in her seat, “Eddie Munson,” she sighs. Rubs her face. “This is nuts. I honestly don’t know if I can wrap my head around it.”

“Well, hey.” Feeling a twinge of pain through his nervousness, he has to force himself to stop biting before the blood starts to pool. “I almost pissed myself when that door flew open. You’re cooler and collected-er than me.”

“Maybe,” she grants. “To be fair, I did think intruder until I saw you were sitting there in your jammies. Intruders typically don’t.”

Eddie glances over his shoulder. He had gotten a good look at her through the window. Who knows how long she had been doing the same, trying to decide if Steve’s house was being burglarized?

“Friends drop in sometimes. Case in point.” She gestures to herself. “Of course, they don’t usually duck and cover.”

“That was the giveaway, huh?”

“No, that was a clue. Your hair was the giveaway.”

He twists a split end around his finger, eyeing the dark grey blur. “Hm.”

Behind it, Robin holds back a laugh. “Eddie,” she goes on, “it is good to see you. I really, really don’t want that to get lost in this.”

Appreciative of the second attempt to reassure, he does let a quiet chuckle escape under his breath.

“It’s just fucking nuts.”

Ducking with ease beneath the colorful paper chain draped over the blackboard, Steve prints his name. Today is the only day he’ll write it out in full; Mr. Harrington never seems to stick anyway. Half of the kids in this room will have heard older siblings shorten it to Mr. H. A few familiar faces from Little League and soccer camp would struggle to break the habit of calling him Coach. His first year teaching, he had gotten in a bit of trouble for letting Steve slide, but to this day, the name on the board serves as a reminder to himself more than them. Please, he’d like to say, Mr. Harrington was my father!

He claps the chalk dust off of his hands. “So,” he says, taking a seat at the edge of his desk, “it looks like you’re all stuck with me!”

His last homeroom graduated from middle school in June. Like all the others, he’ll get to know this group in increments of ten minutes every day, every week, for three years.

Reaching back over a pile of papers, pleasantly surprised again by his lack of stiffness, he grabs a small red dodgeball. It’s one of many dollar store props this classroom has accumulated. “Let’s go around the room. Name, favorite food, best thing you did this summer.” He tosses to the back row, starting with a freckle-faced boy.

Though taller and gawkier than the others, he stands out as younger than the rest. Wrestling with the catch against his baggy t-shirt, his eyes go wide behind his thick lenses as he collects his thoughts. After a bit of stammering, he overcorrects with a boisterous “You all know me!” 

That seems to be the case. There are a few snickers and whispered asides before he skips ahead. 

“Grilled cheese. Best thing of the summer was the Teen Titans movie, but I saw the new Mission Impossible with my cousin, too, and that was pret-ty alright.”

“Hold it.”

He stops himself mid-throw. 

“Everyone gets to know your name but me?”

“It’s Aiden.”

“Follow-up question,” Steve says. “What’s a teen titan?”

“It’s a show–”

“My brother watches that!” Another voice pipes up. “He’s five.” It kicks off a round of snorts and giggles. 

He zeroes in on the source, unsurprised. “Hey.”

As the boy swivels around in his seat, his blond mop of hair reveals a fading grin. 

“Are you holding the ball?”

“No, Coach.”

The focus immediately shifts as he opens his hands. He catches Aiden’s pass, then a relieved smile on his face. “People,” he says, “let me tell you something. I know that three years seems like a long time, but one day you’re going to blink and it’ll be summer again. Then you’ll be moving on to high school, then maybe you’ll start college or your first grown-up job, and you’re going to look back on sixth grade and think one of two things: either That went by too fast or I’m glad that’s over.”

There’s a scattering of nods. 

“Who wants to have a good time here?”

The scattering becomes a ripple, the others understanding his meaning or fitting in with those who have.

But he trusts that it will click. If not now, eventually. “Notice how that’s all of you?”  

The next nine minutes go by without a hitch. He collects a recipe for something called pavlova, learns about the latest dance trends on TikTok and, in the wrong order, about TikTok. Sam attended a wedding in California, Nia won her summer camp’s archery tournament, and two girls who thought they had never met discover that they had been sitting in the same row at a concert in July. 

When the bell rings, Aiden makes his way to the door gradually, lingering lankily near the threshold without actually crossing it. Finally, he balances on one leg to read the blackboard. “Um, Mr. Har– Hair–”

“Aiden, my friend. What can I do for you?”

“Oh, I don’t need anything,” he replies, dropping back down into his natural mumble. “Casey’s always joking.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Oh, right, ‘cause he does sports. Yeah,” he sighs, leaning against the wall. He looks upward, avoiding eye contact as he cuts abruptly to the chase. “Thank you for that.”

And although he can’t see it, Steve smiles. “You got it.”

“Also,” he goes on, “what’s your favorite food and the best thing that happened this summer?”

When Steve sees the muddy car in the driveway, his stomach drops. Any relief he had felt for a day of painlessness is replaced in an instant by regret. He could have taken that shortcut. Knowing she would come home, not knowing exactly when, of course he should have. 

On his sprint to the door, his attention lags on—of all things—the sedan’s bumper and the new collection of stickers plastered across the length of it. There’s one for every landmark and tourist trap visited: proof that she had been gone for a while.

Eddie should have been.

“Hello?” Steve calls, his squinting eyes adjusting to the dim light of indoors. He pokes his head into the living room, but it’s the kitchen that answers.

“In here!” Robin announces.

It does no good to his racing heart. As if holding it in, he rests his hand over the violent thrum and forges ahead. 

They’re sitting at the table, nothing left on their plates save a few chocolate crumbs.

“I’m so sorry.” It’s meant for the both of them, and thankfully, the both of them refuse the apology outright, shaking heads, waving hands. He goes on regardless: “I should have thought– I didn’t think–”

“Breathe,” she reminds him. She hops out of her chair then, inviting him to sit. “Young man, you’re not in trouble. Have some cake!”

“What?” he pants.

“Happy birthday. I hope you don’t mind that we got a head start.”

Steve takes her place at the table. He looks between them, scanning for evidence of hurt feelings—and finding nothing on the surface, latches onto the obvious: “It’s not my birthday…” 

“I wasn’t here when it was, though, was I?”

 As she turns to cut him a slice, he meets Eddie’s gaze again. 

Smiling knowingly, he reaches a tattooed arm out, stopping short of patting Steve’s hand. Knuckles knock gently over the tabletop. Still sporting a sleep shirt and pajama pants, he must have been talking with Robin for a while before school let out. “Thanks for telling me, by the way,” he quips. “Made me look like an asshole.”

“I think that won out as the most shocking development of the day,” Robin says. “Steve Harrington not letting the world know it’s his birthday? Is this the Twilight Zone?” She slides a plate in front of him, then rotates it another inch clockwise. 

They had cut into the birthday greeting iced across the top, leaving him with the letters PP. 

“You’re the lucky wiener.”

Steve laughs in spite of himself. “Thanks.”

“I was just going to drop it in your fridge so you’d have a little after-work surprise,” she explains. “I guess you got one anyway.”

Pressured to break the silence, Steve clears his throat. “So, everyone’s good?” He glances from him to her again, picking at the frosting with the end of his fork. And as he watches them nod to each other—confirming it amongst themselves—he can’t help but smile. How complete this picture is. How the future should have looked.  “Good.” 

Eddie’s hand is tapping beside his again. There’s a smile in his eyes, assuring him that the warmth is there and waiting.

Chapter Text

Gate 4, Site 2
1987

He could hear them filing into the room before he could see them. If Eddie did look, he knew he would see a fanning of white coats, their wearers differentiated by little more than what they carried in with them: files, or medical instruments, or machines on rolling carts. On the days he was lucid, he could sometimes tell them apart by the shape or color of their eyes. They were human, after all, despite the cold detachment those eyes all shared.

They had different responsibilities when it came to Eddie, too, though he wasn’t made privy to them. He wasn’t their patient. He only understood that there were the observers and the examiners, and that they would occasionally talk to one another in a low, mask-muffled drone. One voice would bleed into the next, and the next, and so on, until his mind would wander away from itself and he would wake up to an opening door. The white coats. The eyes. 

The eyes he noticed first were always the closest to him, and more often than not, he could guess who they belonged to by how roughly he was handled under their watch. Shock would force him to look then, recognizing but never meeting a distant gaze. Deep-set and underlined by age, Eddie understood that those eyes were probably a pale yellow, but under such harsh light, they appeared to have no color at all. The black dots of his pupils reminded him of flies, dead and preserved by the ceiling fixture.

But they buzzed to life—an electric hum that built and built, plunging the room in and out of darkness. There was that sharpness under the skin that Eddie couldn’t ignore. There were those eyes, darting to focus through the flickering.

If he could have spoken, he would have shouted for them to get off; someone’s leg had landed crossways over his, trapping it against the sheets and grinding bone into bone.  

“Note that,” the examiner directed. He swiveled in his chair, his mask hooking under his chin to bark in perfect clarity: “Note that!” 

In the corner of the small room, the observers flipped through their notepads, their pencils scratching away so frantically that Eddie could hear them over the crunching of his teeth. 

His head lolled to the side. Finding no mercy among the group, his gaze set toward the source of his pain—from the foot, to the knee, to his own paper-thin robe. 

Pencils scratched as Eddie screamed for help. 

He had noticed the flowers last night. Though the moonlight poured in, their little heads could no longer lift to greet it. 

Steve would always wake up before him, showered and dressed and finishing his first cup of coffee by the time Eddie finally joined. But today, he is just sitting down. He had to replace the flowers first, and this new bunch is still speckled by morning dew. Blue petals glint against the slow-rising sun.

He slides the news across the table for him, where a second mug is already waiting. “Hi, honey.” The process is so natural that he hardly glances in Eddie’s direction. “Sleep good?”

Maybe it was the strange turn that yesterday had taken, the swift kick of reality to Steve’s door, but Eddie’s eyes sting as he rubs their crust away. He struggles to hold a smile through the familiar pattern that follows, squeezing his shoulder, kissing his freshly shampooed hair, then lowering across from him. He answers with a nod and a rasp. “How are you feeling?”

The question hadn’t come up in a while, so Steve’s puzzled grin is no surprise. He blinks behind his glasses. 

“I thought you flinched.”

“Don’t think so,” he says. “Come at me again.”

A puff of air is pushed out of Eddie’s nose. Into the swaying steam of his cup, his gaze retreats back to the vase in the window. “These ones are pretty. What are they?”

“Asters.”

“They’re late bloomers, huh?”

“Actually, I’m surprised they’re out this early! These little guys don’t usually pop up until the end of the month,” he adds. When Eddie looks at him again, he’s resting his head in his hands. “They were excited to see you.”

“Hush up.”

He snickers as Eddie rolls up the paper to bop him, lightly, on that shoulder—and he can’t help it. He imagines Steve laughing with someone else. 

“I love you.” It’s suddenly, vitally important to say.

Steve’s smile softens. “I love you, too.” But there was something in the timing of it—jealousy, fear, some combination of the two—that deepens a wrinkle between his brows. 

Eddie doesn’t break their gaze in time. While his palms only lift to massage the sleep out of his eyes again, that isn’t what any reasonable person would assume. 

“You’re worried,” Steve says, his voice low. “I get that it’s nothing personal. It’s just statistics. The more people who know you’re alive–”

“Sure,” he interjects, “but that’s not what you’re picking up on.”

Steve’s chair creaks as he sits back, his wide arms crossing over his chest. 

Eddie wants to wrap himself around him. It wouldn’t offer him much protection, though. If he’s guarding his heart, then he’s guarding it from him. He shakes his head, reassuring him, hopefully, that he had jumped to a worse conclusion. “You’re looking at a guilty conscience.” 

The wrinkle deepens until his brows have knit together. 

“As if I have any right to, I do try and keep up with everyone I can. I have for a while,” he adds. “Hell, now they make it easy! I’ll just Google some names and see what comes up. You know Erica Sinclair’s a lawyer?” It’s a rhetorical question, answered nonetheless by the chuckle of a close friend. Thank God, or whoever. “But never—not in a million years—did I think it would be as simple as pawing through some old photo albums…”

“Oh,” Steve says, as light and airy as he’d ever heard, thank you, thank you. “Shit, you live here, too.”

“I wanted to know more about you.”

“It’s alright!”

“I could’ve asked.”

He relaxes forward again, hands laid over the table for him. Of course, Eddie accepts. 

“Not that I’d be the first to tell you, but you looked mighty handsome on your wedding day.” It gets them there—and he’s glad if for no other reason than to see the blush rise up his neck and to his face. “It really was good to see that you again. I keep thinking, you know, if I’d have just been there. I wish I hadn’t let myself miss everything.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“Yeah.” Left everyone else with the mess. His laugh is mirthless as Steve squeezes his hands. There’s a finality to the gesture, reminding him that he’ll be leaving for work. He’ll have to reckon with his own foolishness then. 

Sure enough, one hand is freed to push in his chair. “Honestly,” Steve says, arms hugging loosely around his neck as he does, “you might not have wanted to stick around if you knew me then. The kid was a loser.”

“Don’t you talk about him like that.” His head tilts back, comforted by the softness of his sleeve against his cheek. He sighs, meeting his smiling eyes. “I hope you were at least a little happy.”

Watching that smile until he can’t, feeling it press into the corner of his mouth: “It was a long time ago,” Steve answers. It isn’t a direct answer, and perhaps it’s the catalyst of the conversation that coaxes out a better attempt. “I mean, we had a life planned out. Picked the baby names. If everything had gone the way it should have, then sure, we would’ve been pretty happy.”

“I’m sorry.” He isn’t sure if that’s the thing to say, however many years after the fact. 

“Don’t be.” The gentle curve reappears on his lips, followed by the twinkle in his eye. “I wasn’t trying to be secretive.”

“No–”

“It’s okay,” Steve cuts him off, “I know.” Had it not been for the correction, he would have stopped him with the wince as he straightened his spine. Eddie watches him more closely the further he moves away from him, placing his empty mug in the sink, running the faucet. “Aside from the obvious—” he waves to himself, “—the problem at the time was we couldn’t have kids. I’m sure I always knew it was me, but I probably figured if I could get far enough away from Hawkins then it would stop mattering as much as it did. Does.” Before Eddie can even begin to think of what to say to this, the words pour as the faucet is stopped. “That wasn’t the end of the world. We could’ve adopted, we could’ve just rethought those plans, we could’ve done a lot of things—she’d still never know what happened. I couldn’t lie to her.”

“So you couldn’t say anything.”

Straggling drops of water plunk into the sink. After two—three—Steve nods. “I’m still getting used to it,” he admits. “It’s nice.” Finally, turning to face him, his weight supported by the edge of the counter. 

Eddie notices. “It is nice.”

Roane Hill Cemetery
June 2018

The road in was nothing more than a jagged line of asphalt. 

Eddie kept his flashlight on the broken ground, testing its sturdiness with every cautious step forward. His first journey back had left him with a twisted ankle (dead though he was, he could feel that just fine)—and years of erosion had only made the path more treacherous, steepening its peaks and widening its valleys.

But he had no trouble finding her. The overgrowth had been freshly pruned by him last summer. Slanted slightly backwards, its granite surface gazed up at a full moon, holding all of its light against the empty horizon. He examined it for a moment, trying in vain to read the dates that had been worn away by the shifting of Earth’s crust. He picked a bit of dirt out of the engraving and then polished it with his shirt.

“I’m back.” 

Sitting in the grass, he couldn’t help but pluck at the weeds just beginning to crop up along her resting place. 

“Happy birthday. The big five-oh, huh? Or close to it, you know how it goes…” He heard himself trail off: too early in the conversation to see past its one-sidedness, but with a grounding breath, he would power through as he always did. 

Always would.

“On the bright side,” he told her, “he’s dead. I’ve got the damn obituary to prove it.” 

As he removed the slip of paper from his pocket to show her, he wondered if she would be disappointed, or sorry, or if she would laugh. What always kept him from committing fully, though, was the likelihood of indifference. 

Catching his frowning reflection in stone, he sat back on his palms and turned his attention to the night sky. 

“Guess I’ll head north tomorrow. Motel room’s got a frosty AC, a nice, big bed…” Shoot, he thought, I could swing by that dive again—see if Winky What's-his-name is still tending bar. All that bed was wasted on a lone traveler, and he wouldn’t be sleeping anyway.  

He leaned his weight until his fingers tore through paper, reuniting with the cool grass beneath. Closing his eyes, he imagined the silence draping its arms around him. But was it embracing? Was it strangling? 

It was silence. Death. It was him and whatever he made of that word. 

“Just think,” he went on. “If I’d have been a week earlier, I would’ve dragged him to Hell with me. You’d get some peace and quiet for a change.”

Instead, every year until he made up for his survival, he was here. He had never been closer. One week made the difference between shot down and passed away. That was all. 

“It wouldn’t have changed much, would it? Old man probably wouldn’t have known what hit him anyway. It wouldn’t have washed the blood off his hands. You don’t want to hear any more of this shit,” he thinks aloud, pivoting to dig into another pocket. “It’s your birthday! Here, I hope you like it.” 

Over the crooked top of the headstone, he set a beaded bracelet. 

He dabbed a finger over his eyelid. “Blue. The Girl Scout troop back home was selling them, and I thought, ‘Chrissy would love that blue one.’ I thought it’d be a nice match.”

If it was, if it wasn’t, he hoped she would let him know.

Chapter Text

Time marched on to the weekend. Up to the point that the blinds fell and the bedsheets tangled, Steve couldn’t be sure that he had lived the past week at all. Too quickly, it had marched on without him.

And he couldn’t care less. He’s never felt better than he does tonight, and with the clammy heat clinging to their legs, he wants to catch up just to settle in. He wants to find the right pace. He wants it to be easy, and it is. Despite the suffocating abundance of warmth between them, more than anything, what he wants is to get as close as he can. 

There’s a hitch in Eddie’s throat as he lifts him by the small of his back. A string of curses fade under the breath in his ear. They must want all the same things, he thinks, because with every trembling squeeze of the legs, he builds on the momentum.

Fending off a fever, Steve rests his brow into his neck. It’s just enough of a change in tempo to inspire a cautious loosening of Eddie’s grip, his hands inching evenly from the shoulder blades to the hips. 

“Woah there.” When their eyes meet, Eddie laughs. His grin practically glows in the dark, so clear in memory anyway. “Down, boy.”

Huffing and puffing, he simply can’t argue with the point being made out of habit, though it must be obvious that he shifts onto his back without a struggle. 

“Good?” Eddie asks regardless.

Steve crosses his arms behind his head. Winks.

He’s answered by a slow-motion swing of a slap that ends with a light pat on the cheek. Eddie follows it up with a tickling kiss before straddling him. “Wasn’t for you,” he says. “What ever happened to seven minutes in heaven? Give me at least two, Harrington.”

“Greedy bastard,” Steve sighs. His own acting forces a snicker until a hiss at Eddie’s touch interrupts it.

“If I am, it’s your fault.”

Steve watches his hands move over Eddie’s chest. Old wounds intersect with older lines of blueish ink. If he focuses, he can make out the black widow spider perched atop a web of scars and veins; under sweat-damp patches of grey, the gaunt, smiling face of a demon.

Eddie leans into his palms, steadying himself to go on. He sets a lazier rhythm. Holds Steve’s hands in place. “I saved room,” he says, tapping over his heart. “Whatever the stars looked like the night we drove out, that’s what I want there.” The other hand taps. “I want your flowers here.”

“Really?”

“I want your name on this arm.”

His thumb ghosts over Eddie’s bicep, where a viper winds its scaly body around. 

“I won’t be happy ‘til you’re all over me.”

Really. Airy laughter fizzles away against his lips. Through the layers cushioning his mind from overthought, he hopes this memory sticks. He can just barely recall the breaking point: the sleight of hand he had performed with himself and that half-empty pill bottle. Clicking, rattling, washing down. He wouldn’t have risked it during the week, and at least for now, he wouldn’t have to. It was the weekend that had worried him. 

Steve travels downward, palms coming to rest over the sharp peaks of his hip bones—towards one raised scar he hadn’t noticed yet, circling his thigh—until a simmering need tightens his grip. He’s redirected once again. The skin is softer along Eddie’s waist and stomach, and as fingertips lure out a shudder, they’re reminded not to stray too close to center. 

An arm braces around him as the other pushes them upright. Eddie breaks away with a gasp, clutching his hair for dear life as he’s rocked suddenly backward. Hands jerk down Steve’s spine. Even as control is being lost, the tender spots are remembered if not avoided altogether, lighter contact brushing past in search of friction. 

“Kiss me,” he says.

And like it’s the first time, Steve does.

The falling bedsheet not only offers some unexpected relief, but it forces him to notice the wetness between them. Pressing himself so tightly that he can’t tell which heartbeat belongs to him, he finds himself yearning for cold winter nights. One source of heat. 

“Touch…”

He slides his hand between them, just mimicking at first. The way Eddie does it. But Eddie would ask– “Good?”

His chin digs into his shoulder.

Kissing, touching, Steve leans him down. Black against white, his shaggy waves stick to his face and bob over the pillow. Nodding. A clumsy desperation reaches for his legs, his arms, the numbness grinding in his grasp, urging him on as he bows under the weight of delirium. 

They come down slowly. Eddie sweeps Steve’s hair back, letting his touch linger as eyes meet again. He relaxes. He grins. “They made you for me I think.”

Collapsing beside him, too winded to speak, Steve smiles back. He watches him, this man as beautiful as a new day, until he can’t see him through the swift descent of haze. If he could feel anything, he’s sure his throat would be burning.

It was already clear on his face, his jaw tense under the warmth of Eddie’s concern. “Hey–” A tear is caught but, just like the pain, there would be no proof of it without his concern. 

He shakes his head, fingers winding between fingers. No, nothing’s wrong. He’s never felt better.

Marion, Indiana
1995

Where the streetlight met the flash and buzz of LEDs, Steve sat with his head between his knees. Desperate for a distraction, he watched an ant march along the groove in the sidewalk, disappearing and reappearing under the strobe of faulty signage.

The door opened behind him with a jingle. While the voices that remained were also the loudest ones, only a few of them could be heard from the bar now that Robin was joining him outside. 

A hand found his shoulder and swayed him. 

She ignored the sound it produced, part laugh, part groan. “Have the demons been exorcised?” 

He poked a thumb out in reply. They hadn’t been far into the evening when he had reminded her of his prosperous rule as Keg King of Hawkins High. Dizzily, his head rolled to look at her. Though her eyeliner was a little smudged at the corners, it would have been impossible to tell that she had been out with him since happy hour. “You’re a good friend.”

Two Robins grinned back. “I know.” 

“Should’ve shut me up, though.”

“When it was just getting interesting?”

Groaning again, he crossed his arms and hid his face. 

“So who was your Tammy Thompson?”

This wasn’t her first time asking. He had been unwilling or unable about an hour ago, interrupted either way by his sprint to the men’s room. Praying to the porcelain god had never felt so familiar. “Do TV characters count?”

She hesitated to answer. Hummed. “Not really,” she decided. “But I don’t want you to pass out and die, so please carry on.”

He didn’t have the energy to argue the point: a good indication, among a million others she had provided that night alone, that his life was in her hands. “You’re right. I owe you a real one.”

“Well–”

What hope did she ever have in stopping him? Once he started… “I think it was Tommy H.”

“That makes sense.”

“When we were–” Her lack of shock sunk in slowly. “It doesn’t make that much sense.”

“I interrupted you. ‘When we were’ what?” She bowed forward, catching him at eye level. “I support you.” Bumping into him. “Lean on me.”

Bump.

Bump.

“When we were kids,” Steve finally continued, “he had this Greg Brady thing going on with his hair–”

“Ooh, is that our character? Groovy.”

He returned her budging with enough force to knock her off-balance. A sudden case of the giggles had her teetering in his periphery, conjuring the image of a Weeble and proving him susceptible to the laughing fit. 

“Of course it was about hair!”

“Wasn’t about personality.”

“Sure.” She dried a tear with her sleeve before it could leave an ink black streak. 

There was a good ache in his stomach now, and although the world wasn’t spinning out of control anymore, he was still drunk enough to be moved by the realization. His palm swiped at his cheek. 

“Listen.” With a final bump into his side, she slung an arm around his shoulder and squeezed tight. “Someday, you’re going to be relieved this happened. I know you don’t believe me.”

“I do.” He didn’t know why. He didn’t have to.

“You should! Better out than in. Guts have certainly been spilled tonight.”

“Don’t,” he warned, holding his stomach. Meeting her gaze again, he had to wipe his other cheek.

She beat him to it. 

“Ah, Christ.” It left him as another groan, eyes rolling at himself. “What’d I do to deserve a Robin Buckley?”

“I don’t know,” she told him. The corner of her lip twitched into a tender smile. “Being the dingus that you are, I guess.”

At the same time, and each with a sigh, their legs stretched in front of them into the street. 

“Birds of a feather,” she said. The Sharpie-fittied toe of her sneaker tapped against his.

He kicked gently back. 

It had been so long since he slept in this late, the light pouring in through the bathroom window is a shock to the system. Worse is the reflection that greets him over the sink, his skin a shade of grey-green that he knows tired eyes will correct; fearing this to be wishful thinking, he avoids the mirror long after drying his face. 

But the same fear had already crossed his mind. Awoken by the buzz of his phone, he had to wonder—before any other conscious thought could form—if he would have woken up at all.

He closes the door gently behind him, his feet moving in a slow shuffle to the dresser. The rustling of sheets makes him flinch. It makes him nauseous.

“Where?” Eddie half asks.

Steve pulls a t-shirt over his head, forcing a small smile before turning. “Lunch.” He comes close enough to whisper then, bending at his bedside. “Hungry?”

Through the mess of hair being brushed away, Eddie squints. His bristly beard conceals pursed lips.

“I’ll bring you something back.”

That’s the right answer. With a contented nod and a muttered “Love you,” he rolls over onto his stomach, fast asleep and snoring into his pillow.

In line now, Robin had texted. What do you want? That was two minutes ago. 

Steve chokes down a Tylenol and slaps on a baseball cap. Knowing better than to waste time typing, or struggling to: “Eight billion gallons of coffee and a bullet to the head.”

“You sound great!”

“And a BLT.” 

Hearing the chatter of a busy lunch rush in the background, he almost suggests they give up on the idea altogether and eat on his quiet porch. What stops him is the twinge in his lower back. It still wasn’t enough. Only distance would be. 

And what follows is that queasiness: he’d pinpoint it as pure guilt if not for the sense of dread accompanying it. 

“Hitting the road now!”

“You’re not still drunk, are you?”

Though he scoffs at the assumption, he can’t help but feel a little grateful for it. “Later.”

“Uh-huh.” She tuts. “There’d better be a later. I wanna know all about it!”

He mocks her with a croakier singsong. “You really don’t.”

“Meaning I called it.”

He should have known. But it’s here that she reaches the counter, her low and teasing lilt brightening to place their order. She makes sure not to hang up before he can hear his selection: one black coffee, one BLT, and if they could bring out a couple pitchers of water, that would be great.

In the end, mercy is shown in the form of two take-out containers. Her wife is working this weekend, she tells him, and April is out of town. No one can listen in but the jungle of houseplants surrounding them. 

Canopied by green elephant ears, hands folded under her chin, she sits across from him at her dining room table.

By now he’s gathered that “mercy” isn’t the word. The coffee burns on its way down—but cringing as it does, at least he can feel that. “Alright,” he huffs. “What do you know?”

She smiles.

“If you’re about to razz me like I did at Starcourt, just do it.”

“Stevie, Stevie, my dear friend Steve…”

He takes another stinging sip, eyeing her over the lid of his cup.

“We’re even! Not that I’d expect you to remember.”

Squinting, he searches his recent memory for breadcrumbs. Her face gives nothing away. 

“The last time you could have used a caffeine drip.”

No wonder he couldn’t catch on, he thinks. She’s talking about the distant past. At its mentioning, he can taste the cheap wine again, sweeter going down than it was coming up. “I remember.” Just enough of it. “So?”

“So what?”

He cocks his head, be serious, before the voice of his conscience ventriloquates. “So, Steve, you’re harboring a fugitive. And what’s worse, you let him smoke indoors.”

“Was that supposed to be me?”

Steve peers over his glasses: her again.

She pops her lips. “It did stink.”

When he laughs, the stiffness is allowed to spread up the rungs of his ribcage. He’s learning the subtleties of pain now that he can feel more of it: what he feels now is actually recovery, not aggravation. It’s no kinder. He eases back carefully.

“But I don’t live there. And if I thought it was a horrible idea, I’d let you know.” Tellingly, she isn’t looking at him anymore. His bloodshot eyes and five o’clock shadow are enough to prove a point that she’s being too kind to make.

She only glances up from her meal to confirm that he is nodding.

Only for so long. “I scared the shit out of myself today,” he admits.

Steve doesn’t speak in a straightforward language. The years after Hawkins had only made him less fluent and her more comfortable with reading between the lines. That must be why before any confession can even be made, she shifts uncomfortably in her chair. Restless hands set her coffee down slowly.

“So I need you to call me an idiot because I don’t want to do that again.” 

She sighs, all but rolling her eyes at his attempted retreat into lightheartedness. More for her sake than his that the Band-aid should be ripped off. “You overdid it. Slow down, stop blaming yourself…” All the things she’d be expected to say if he was a little hungover. He isn’t. He’s worse off than that. Grim recognition flashes across her face. “You are not still taking those.”

“Nothing else would’ve worked.”

She takes a sharp breath in, recentering herself; it’s clear that she hasn’t on the exhale. “It amazes me that with what they know, they don’t block the whole town off. I mean, God, you’ve been blowing the whistle for how long now? And what do they do? Pave right over it. Great idea.” Her finger points accusingly, no longer to a nebulous ‘they’: “Why you go near it is beyond me. Just leave a little earlier. You’ll kill yourself to save twenty minutes.”

He waits purposefully. 

Of course she understands. Teetering impatiently on the back legs of her chair, “Idiot,” she spits. 

“Thanks, Rob.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Steve shakes his head. “If all I had to do was avoid Hawkins…” The first tickle in his eye has his attention turning to the window, where Robin’s garden still bursts with summer colors. Purple hostas with their heart-shaped leaves, ferns, and astilbes—they make great friends, which is how she had explained it when he was a novice. Of course, in his mind and in her presence, he still is one. 

“You mean you weren’t even there?”

He doesn’t notice himself drifting into his own thoughts until, against his better judgment, his focus wanders from the lushness outside to her worry reflected in glass. The lump in his throat prevents him from going on. 

It often does; so often that she doesn’t press any further. For minutes, they sit in the deafening silence of a home that shouldn’t be. Hers isn’t like his—how it always used to be, at least. One of her family members is bound to walk through the door eventually, filling the space with more than quiet green life.

“I wish I’d never seen him again.” 

With the weight lifted from his chest, he should feel lighter. Either he isn’t being honest, or he regrets that he finally is.

Chapter Text

Eddie tugs a pair of jeans on, hopping for balance while he brushes his teeth. Steve’s promise to bring back lunch—whether a memory or a dream—had been the impetus for action. What made him rush through it wasn’t hunger, though. There was only so much time to waste; weekends couldn’t be for sleeping. 

Smoothing his bangs down and forward, tying the rest of his thinning hair back, he shuffles through the living room. No one is sitting at the dining table, and through the window, no one is watering the garden or moving the lawn. Only the pickup truck greets him in the garage. He wanders in a circle to the front of the house, where no car sits in the driveway. 

No dream then. “Good,” he sighs. It means he isn’t too late. 

And shouldn’t he be? Sleep-blearied eyes check the time on the oven clock. His stomach growls, echoing through an empty kitchen. 

Muscle memory finds the coffee, a mug, a bowl for his cereal, but it doesn’t get him a step further. Every day since he had barged into Steve’s life, a prescription bottle has sat at the corner of the counter, between the coffee maker and the fridge. 

Perhaps he had been overzealous in his optimism. Not only had Steve taken the medicine with him, he thinks, but it seems all too likely to him now that he needed an excuse to get away.

But optimism still has a hold on him. In his search for sugar packets, the bottle is found—shoved, buried, hidden—behind the loose batteries and takeout menus that live in the top drawer. Even as Eddie holds it against the daylight, he refuses to trust his eyes.

His mind skips back to a picnic table in the woods. The treetops softened the sun’s glare above the two sitting there, and still, she kept her gaze low. Behind a blue shimmer of eyeshadow, he could see the decision being made and unmade again, flickering between the tin lunch box and her fidgeting hands. 

Forgetting about breakfast—forgetting that he’s held hostage by a body at all—he grabs the phone off of its hook and eyes the list of numbers on the fridge. A new one had been added in at the bottom about a week ago, in case he ever needed to be reached at school. In case of emergencies. This surely is one, and the feeling beats out common sense as he waits for an answer: it is one, and Steve would already know that. Eddie should have. Last night was no miracle. 

While he waits, anxious fingers tap the bottle against the edge of the counter. As needed is the recommendation printed in bold, and it should have left him with plenty to spare. 

“Eddie?”

The bottle is tossed down with a much-too-light clatter of pills. “Jesus, man.” It rolls to the floor as he paces.

“What? What’s wrong?”

What else could he have expected from him? He lets out a mirthless laugh.

“Hey–”

“Where the hell are you?”

There’s a slight buzz of static—Steve taking a breath. The exhale is clearer, as if the radio had been adjusted to his frequency. After a final thump, Eddie guesses he’s closing the windows of his car. “I’m just leaving Robin’s now.”

“You know you fucking lied to me?” 

The shrillness of his anger had shocked even him. It’s no surprise when fear seems to spread through the line, bringing a sickening shake to the voice in his ear. “I’ll be home soon.”

“So I should go.”  

“Wait,” is the quick reply. Not so quick to be thoughtless, Eddie hopes. “Please just wait. We need to talk first.”

The honesty disarms him enough for guilt to take hold. With the last of his vitriol spat out, “Alright,” his answer tries to bridge the distance. “Be careful.” 

Adrenaline is slower to fade, leaving him nothing but that ache in his chest. He tries to busy himself through it, collecting the bottle at his feet. It keeps him down, though, legs hugged to his chest, plastic bending in his fist.

In just moments, its smoothness is replaced by Steve’s t-shirt. Standing in the open door, he finds himself pushing away as desperately as he had pulled him in. 

But Steve is holding him too close to allow it. Only enough room is granted for Eddie to loosen his grip, arms wrapping around him more naturally. With a sigh falling into the crook of his neck, not only can he hear that the tremble is still there. Long before that, he could feel it.

“Am I hurting you?”

Letting the door shut behind him, setting a paper bag aside—lunch, as promised—Steve shakes his head. Though his eyes remain downcast in the relative darkness of the hallway, Eddie can see what he hadn’t before. 

Had he only been looking. A guttural click escapes him as he notices, brushing his thumbs over the sunken upper edges of his cheekbones, once, twice, expecting a change each time. As he leads him into the living room, already stepping slowly but forced to stall even further, he wonders what’s to blame for that: the pain or the painkillers? 

“They’re wearing off.” That seems to be the answer. It’s accompanied by a rough squeeze around the arm as he sits down. “I’m done trying to make them work.”

“You’re gonna have to promise me. I won’t be here to–”

“Eddie, I swear.”

He lowers beside him then, careful not to shift his weight. 

“There’s got to be something else.”

He watches him through the mist, cheek resting on white knuckles. But he nods. 

“How am I supposed to say goodbye to you?”

“Steve.”

A new reason to feel guilty: he has to turn to face him, resting an elbow on the throw pillow between them.

“If goodbye means you get a chance to heal up…” Eddie finds him another pillow and arranges. When he’s done, he meets a small but thankful smile. “It’s just Vermont, you know? Not Mars.”

Suddenly, quietly, Steve laughs—and suddenly over, much too soon, Eddie wishes he had listened more closely. 

“I mean, shit,” he goes on, trying again with a sniff, “we outsmarted a fuckin’ alien hive mind once. I think we can figure out Spyke, or whatever it’s called.”

Music to his ears. The sound of laughter puts years of songwriting to shame. 

“‘Til we find another way.” 

A hand finds Eddie’s over his lap, knitting their fingers together in a gentle embrace. “My long-distance boyfriend from Vermont. What’s his name, you ask?” Steve jokes, fighting an exhausted rasp for this brief moment of levity. “Uhm…” 

He could tell him they’re too old to be using that word—that, furthermore, he’s too socially iconoclastic to be someone’s boyfriend—and if it weren’t Steve Harrington saying it, maybe he would have. In the moment, he recognizes that anything he could say would stray too far from the truth of what he feels.

Right now, what he feels is a warm hesitance to let go. 

“If anything happens to you,” Steve says, “I won’t even know it.”

He watches Eddie remove a silver ring from his finger. 

“What if nothing ever changes?”

A silent focusedness answers him.

At some point in his youthful, wondering days—when the fifty-cent estate sale treasure would have slid off with a little more ease—his imagination stopped centering around its previous owner. Like the battle vest he would have worn to the last thread, they probably knew it could only be cherished by them for so long. And while no amount of love would let them hang onto it forever, it would be theirs for safekeeping, for the kid with two quarters to his name and for whoever it would belong to next.

Just like the vest, he guessed it would suit Steve better.

Riverside, Vermont
1994

“Wayne Munson.”

Over the checkered flannel of his shirt sleeve, the old man’s eyes narrowed at him. 

Ice water dripped off the soda cans in his nephew’s hands, down an arm as he lifted one aloft. “I relieve you, sir.”

Nodding his thanks, Wayne traded his paint roller for a Pepsi. 

“This is it, isn’t it?” Eddie surveyed the three white walls and, squatting down to take Wayne’s place, the unfinished fourth. Only a small corner of mildew-stained wallpaper remained. With nothing in the room to buffer the sound, his whistle bounced across every surface and out the open window, into the untamed edge of the forest. “See? I told you it wouldn’t take that long.”

“Clown,” he quipped back. 

Eddie had taken one look at their new home—new only to them—and before any work had been done, had bemoaned the effort. I might as well move into the hardware store! He grinned up at him.

“Be quicker if you shut that trap once in a while.”

“Hey, my bedroom’s done! What’s your excuse?” 

At that, the brim of his baseball cap was flicked backward.

“Painting the other half,” Wayne reminded him.

Eddie would only continue the job once his hair had been secured. He tutted as he grabbed his hat off of the newspaper, the wood floor creaking beneath his knee. Two whole storeys. Years of motel-hopping hadn’t prepared him. “Thank you, by the way.”

Wayne pulled a chair up to the window and sat. The lack of reply was an answer in itself, Eddie knew, punctuated by a tranquil sigh. Though the setting sun couldn't be seen through the trees, it could be felt on the breeze. 

It struck him that he hadn’t seen his uncle calm before. If he ever had, it would have been a long time ago. Wayne’s eyes were either focused on the next thing to fix or heavy under the thought of what couldn’t be. This summer afternoon, far from the last home they knew, had more in common with a rose-tinted memory of Christmas morning than anything else. 

Maybe even a scene from a movie, stolen and remembered as his own. Eddie flipped the tab on his soda, his fingers recalling the feeling of surprise: a gift ripped free from its ribbons and wrappings.

“What was your house like growing up?”

The question turned his head and invited a small smile.

Eddie dipped his paint roller. Avoiding that corner to be recleaned, he continued with the second coat. “This is sort of what I pictured when Dad talked about it. Little farmhouse.”

“Nicer view here.”

He knew he meant beyond the woods. This house sat on a road that curved along the river and into the mountains. Through the cut in the trees, the round green peaks rolled beneath one lonely patch of sky. 

His uncle, like him, had spent most of his life in Indiana. He had no trouble conjuring up the image of a house standing flat against the endless blue. You could see anything with a view like that, but what he did would have been cornfields and grass. 

Only at night would that have changed. Just as he had when they were criss-crossing through Appalachia, Eddie wondered where they could see the stars up close like that again. Down the road, up a mountain…

He couldn’t miss Hawkins less, but he supposed there was that one thing about it—bigger than the world itself—that still meant something.

“Quieter,” Wayne added. 

“Well, living with Al.” The apple didn’t fall far from the tree in that regard. 

Wayne must have been thinking it. His long gaze returned to the window before eyelids fell. “Think that’ll be alright?” he asked after a moment.

“What? That it’s quiet?”

His uncle nodded.

Eddie sat back, considering in earnest. He would have answered positively, of course—that it felt good to settle somewhere, that he couldn’t wait to stop by the music store in town, that he’d make sure to have some work lined up soon—but it took him too long to decide.

Wayne breathed deep, the sound extending from a gust of wind rustling leaves. “You ought to be able to live your life.”

With a final stroke of the roller, Eddie set it aside, one knee hugged to his chest as he gave his full attention. 

“They knew ‘nough about Creel to do that,” he said, chin bobbing to Eddie’s leg. Outstretched, its perfect scars striped around his knee trail under frayed denim. “They know you should be walking free.”

“So you’re saying I should point the finger back at them?”

“I’m sayin’ there’s a case.” Wayne’s eyes lock onto his. “Whether or not you want to build one…”

“I don’t.”

With a tenuous sigh, his uncle accepted this answer with a nod. 

“I don’t want you to build one for me, either. I’m telling you it’ll never be enough.” Eddie could settle. Wayne had a nicer view. Chrissy’s family had closure. 

“Fine, Ed,” he assured him. “You’d know.”

Steve had packed him some snacks for the road, he says. They’re behind the passenger’s seat, in the same place he keeps his gun. 

“Right,” Eddie laughs. “Almost forgot.”

Maybe it’s just his soreness catching up with him, but Steve’s ashen face doesn’t seem to register the humor. He stands on the threshold of the garage and the kitchen, propped up crookedly by one shoulder. 

To bring himself close, to soothe what he can, to be at his beck and call until it feels right to leave—every instinct is lying to him, and as wrong as it is to do nothing at all, that’s just what Eddie does.

Nothing.

“Robin’s on speed dial if you need anything, right?”

Steve’s lip quirks. 

Turning on his heel before wiping a ruthless tear away, he climbs over the front seat into the back of the cabin. Sniffs. “Let’s see what we’ve got here…” 

“My dowry.”

Seeing through his deadpan now, Eddie chuckles in reply. Bag after bag of cookies, candy, and assorted junk are piled between his legs. “Because I need all this sugar like a hole in the head?”

“No,” he coughs. When Eddie cranes to peer around the headrest, he can tell that it was a laugh in the making. “Because you’re so sweet.”

“My God,” he replies. 

A proud puff of the chest has to be balanced out, and as his left hand supports his weight against the doorframe, the cold light of the garage glints off of his finger. 

Eddie wants to bask in the glow—and for a moment, he does, resting back with a sigh. With so little time left, he’d be a fool to waste any more than that. “Listen, I might’ve been scared shitless, but I had no right calling you a liar.” Out of the corner of his eye, he senses some movement. 

He hasn’t been here all that long, has he? But he can imagine how he shakes his head. 

“Hell, I haven’t exactly been honest, Steve.” He confirms his imagination with a frown, watching him closely this time. “Hawkins wasn’t even the destination. Colorado was.” 

“Why Colorado?”

Mindlessly, he packs the sweets back into place, in the same order they had been removed. “Wanted to thank the guy who saved my life.” A caustic smirk finds its way onto his face, gone as quickly as it arrives. He shows him the shotgun, then returns it to its place. “Doctor Wesley Bergeron. He died before I could get there. Funny thing is, the whole time he was making a jigsaw puzzle out of me—two, three years, however long—I never thought about him having a name.”

Slowly, almost too slowly to notice, Steve ambles toward him. It isn’t until he’s near enough to open the passenger door, sitting in front of him, that Eddie can react. Part sympathy, part protest, he hisses through his teeth as he turns to face him.

“You’re talking about revenge.” His voice is tight through a barely-stifled wince.

Hands hovering uselessly around his shoulders, never touching, Eddie finally eases back again. “Who knows what kind of sick shit all that research led to? And it’s because of me that it could. Because I lived,” he scoffs. “All the time I wasted playing dead, the least I could do was hunt him down.” A part of him hopes his uncle is listening in on this somehow. You hear that, Wayne? You were right and I was wrong. “Try to, anyway.”

“Weren’t you worried you’d get caught?”

“No.”

Their eyes cut to each other. The understanding is heavy enough for an odd sense of dread to set in: dread for what never happened. What very nearly did. 

“I was ready for it to be over.” Letting the thought settle like dust, he answers himself with a nod. “Wasn’t ‘til I saw you that things started making sense again.”

The cold light thaws behind glass, glistening before it can be blinked and swiped away. 

“And I know they don’t right now–” The touch shocks him.

“I know you’re stubborn.” 

Reluctantly at first, Eddie’s thumb rubs the back of his hand. He traces shape into memory. “That I am.” 

Steve offers a teary smile. There’s a finality to the squeezing of fingers—metal pressing, holding onto their warmth. Just for now. “You be good,” he tells him.

Before he lets go, Eddie crosses his heart. 

Chapter Text

Steve remembers growing pains. At the time, years before he would break an arm or take a punch, they were as close to the word excruciating as his little brain could fathom. His worst injury up to that point came when he fell down the stairs: more traumatic to the parents who recalled the incident than the toddler who wouldn’t have, concussion or no concussion. Had his father been a better liar, he probably wouldn’t have known about his brush with death at all. Had his mother not teared up while the family shared a laugh about his bell getting rung, he wouldn’t have known that she still blamed herself.

So he knew what he could get away with. More than once, she had let him skip school due to the cramps in his calves or the sleeplessness they had caused, not knowing that the growth spurt was already over. If anything, he was being awoken by expectation alone, letting his lanky legs dangle over the side of his bed and waiting for gravity to stretch out his bones. His disappointment was only matched by the winter mornings he spent praying to the radio while the announcer rattled off an alphabetical list of school closings. He wouldn’t surrender until the Es had skipped over into the Js three times.

His father finally saw through it. You should be ten feet tall by now. All that whining must’ve stunted you! Steve had been too embarrassed to keep up the charade after that.

The morning after Eddie left, he knew that the other side of his bed would still be empty. He was comfortable. Not painless, but comfortable. Halfway through the night when he should have been tossing and turning and resisting the urge to give up on sleep entirely, he realized that he was staring up at the dark ceiling of his bedroom, fine where he was. 

He scrolled through his phone for the number Eddie had left him, thumb pausing over the blurry shapes holding the place of a legal name: the letter E, a love heart, and with a snickering Steve can still hear as the phone was slid back to him over the table, a vampire bat. 

Foolproof. Genius. But of course he wouldn’t change it.

Alone and too comfortable, all he wanted to do was call that number. If Eddie picked up, Steve would make a point of saying his name out loud. He would ask him where he was in the country now, and if he was eating well, and if he had gotten enough rest, and he could pretend for a few minutes that this would all amount to something real. 

Until that has a chance of happening, Eddie is a collection of pictures taken in the garden, having a smoke in the truck, with a guitar on his knee or with a moonbeam smile peeking over Steve’s shoulder. Shadows of his lover’s existence stay in a digital album, waiting to be printed, framed, or displayed on his desk as a complement to the ring on his finger. 

And now, taking the place of a silent alarm clock, Eddie becomes a buzz in his ear. Steve is still asleep when he answers.

“Did I wake you up?”

“No,” he lies, sitting up against his pillow with a stretch. His back doesn’t protest. “It’s good to hear your voice. You’re up and at ‘em…”

“I’m still on Steve Harrington time. Hit the road at four!”

Now that he mentions it, the white noise of the road becomes a harsh rumble between them. All that distance. “You’d better have me on speaker, then.” 

Suddenly, Eddie has to shout over the rumble. “‘Course!”

“What time is it?”

“I knew you were sleeping, you dick.” He pauses, listening to him laugh through his teeth. “How many days off did they give you?”

As if he had asked the school for a favor, Steve thinks. Take my livelihood, too! Take it! Oh, please, take it all! “Won’t know for sure ‘til I get checked out.”

“Which is when?”

“Which is… what time is it?” he asks again.

“Six,” Eddie tells him.

“So in about five hours,” he says, “unless they send me to another guy.”

There’s the tires over asphalt. There’s the stalling hum he’s surprised to recognize as lips pursed around a cigarette. “Righ’.” The voice is strained by the interruption to his breath, in quick and out slow. “Hell, you’re getting in, though, that’s the important thing! Who’s bringing you?”

“Who do you think?”

“Tell her I said ‘Be careful with the precious cargo!’” 

Steve smiles. “How’s the–”

“How are–”

Distance. What a sick joke. “Go ahead.” 

“How are you feeling?”

He lifts from his pillow, tense but able. The smile fades as he stands. “I’m alright. Just miss you.”

“I don’t want you to miss me.”

“Then come back.”

Eddie sighs a chuckle.

Smelling coffee as he sniffs back some unwanted grief, Steve realizes he might have made enough for two last night. Ambling past the table and its two empty chairs, his hunch is confirmed by a full pot. “How’s the truck?” he asks.

“You’re wondering about the truck and not me?”

He holds his phone with his shoulder. “How are you?”

In quick and out slow. Steve blinks to watch the smoke.

“The truck’s in better shape now than it was when Wayne got it,” he assures him. “Shit, he would’ve loved you. I’d say I wish you met him, which is true—don’t get me wrong—but I think he might’ve tried to steal you from me. I would’ve hated to fight my own flesh and blood.”

“He had good taste in vehicles.”

“See? That right there. That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

Sugar stirred into his coffee, Steve hesitates to close the counter drawer. 

It’s as if he watched the smile falter. “Everything’s gonna work out, Steve.”

Better safe than sorry, Steve leaves the pill bottle where it is. “I know that.” A better version of himself might still need it later. 

Hawkins, Indiana
1986

Steve couldn’t remember leaving the lights on.  He usually checked on his way out the door, then double-checked in the rearview mirror. Usually, he wasn’t this tired.

Someone else’s vest hung over his shoulder, already dirtied and bloodied but saved from the ground regardless. Kneeling down at the front stoop, his fingers searched under the welcome mat for a spare key that were— yes, definitely still there. And it didn’t matter. If it’s an intruder, Steve thought, it’s a thorough one. That was the thought he settled on as he walked inside. 

The TV was on, too. Though the news anchor spoke in a murmur while he kicked his sneakers off, he knew she was either talking about the earthquake (rescues quietly turned into recovery missions) or the local cult of Satanists (that vest had been sitting in his car for days). He opened his mouth, ready to announce that he was here and didn’t want any trouble—it was getting dark, this house was big and empty, he wouldn’t blame them—but by then it was too late. The shadow emerging from the living room had a face, mascara-smudged and pink. She stopped beneath the tall archway, letting the space stand as a final barrier between her and him.

“You’re home,” Steve said. In case she wasn’t aware.

Her nails clicked against the wall, the last of her nervous energy escaping through her fingertips. They had been painted a deeper pink to match her pantsuit. 

“Mom, are you okay?”

She swiped a puff of blonde back as if assuring her hands of their steadiness. Once they were convinced, so was the rest of her. She finally nodded, her lips quivering into a tight smile. “Am I okay!” Still, she struggled to tame the waver in her voice. “I called and called all morning and no one picked up. I even tried the video store, but obviously…” She bobbed her head toward the end of the foyer. Connecting the dots, then: maybe some story displaying his strip mall’s shuttered windows? 

The news had ended just in time for the Jeopardy! theme to bounce through austere halls. Seven-thirty. 

“What’s this?” Time to cross that invisible boundary.

He refolded the vest and let it rest under his other arm. Somehow, the lie came to him just as easily. “My friend’s. He left it in my car.” 

She glanced again before her eyes narrowed on him. They traveled upwards, landing just short of his ruddy face. It’s getting a little too warm for turtlenecks, pointed out only with a hum. There was something else that needed to be said. “You know I hate dropping in on you like this, but with everything going on here and the stupid expo… I didn’t know what to do.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“No, sweetie, don’t be.” Her hand found his back this time, the heel of her palm rubbing knit into a fresh welt. If that hadn’t made him jump, her gasp would have. “What? What is it?”

He squirmed past her, backing up until his foot found the bottom step. “Slept wrong. It’s nothing.”

Slender fingers rake through her hair, uncertain again. 

Steve looked down at his hands. The denim cut-off had found its way into his grip, thumb running along a broken seam where softer t-shirt fabric had started to curl away from one corner. Now that he had noticed it, he kept his palm pressed there. Good enough.

Still, he was careful not to follow that line of thought any further. Then he would have had to wonder: good enough for who?

“So Dad’s still in Chicago?” He could hear his own voice, but it was miles away from himself. “Is that… okay?” 

On-again off-again. “Well,” she breathed, a hand to one hip as the other leaned against the banister, “it was. You should know he appreciates you holding down the fort, though.’” On and on, again and again. Her half-hearted imitation of his old man ended in an airy chuckle. Steve, letting this script play out, prompted her on with a laugh through the nose. “Both of us do,” she continued. “I was expecting the house to be in a total state. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I drove through town, I really couldn’t! It’s like a war zone.”

He was glancing over his shoulder when the silence caught him. “It’s really bad.”

“Have you heard from the Hagans at all? Tommy must be worried sick at school.”

Rubbing the side of his face, Steve forced some feeling into his tired numbness. It was hard to remember now: either he forgot to tell her when that should-be lifelong friendship blew up in his face, or she chose not to believe it had. “They’re okay.” He hadn't heard the name come up. Those days, no news was good news.

“Thank God.”

Steve nodded. A studio audience cheered from the living room.

“I should have been here.”

“You are now. And it’s fine. I’m–”

“No, no. It’s not. I’m sure the Board of Supervisors are having an absolute field day with me gone.” She waved a dismissive hand. “It’s the timing of it. I just know they’ve already convinced themselves I ran off. I can hear it now.”

Funny, he thought. All he could hear was his thumbnail scratching denim.  

“Would you listen to me ramble?” She let out a tremble of a sigh. “Why don’t you just catch me up in the morning, honey?”

“You sure?”

Although his mother seemed certain, smiling softly, Steve was slow to climb up the stairs. She hadn’t disappeared into the flicker-glow of the living room yet. Instead, she lingered in the foyer, arms crossed and eyes locked on an abstract painting.

Hi, sweetie, it’s me. Just checking in! I’ll try again before we head out for breakfast, okay? Thanks. Bye-bye.

Hi, Steve honey. Checking in again. Call me when you can, alright? 

I’m getting a little worried— 

The unheard messages waited to be erased another day. Tonight, there was nothing left to do but wait for sleep. 

Through his window, the pool cast a false daylight. Bleary eyes wandered from the popcorn ceiling to the criss-cross wallpaper, over the little blue waves that mimicked the real thing. If he listened closely, he could hear the hum of the heater as it steamed the crisp night air.

There was nothing unfamiliar about this, though it didn’t feel like his childhood bedroom until someone else was home. Usually, he’d come and go, fix a coffee and sit in his car, whatever he had to do to ignore the sting of those slow-healing nerves until he could bother Robin with his whining. But his mother would only hear him creaking his way downstairs, her empty room briefly illuminated by the glow of headlights.

He kept waiting, the waves swaying above him, his foot hanging over the side of his bed.

Lying down like this, he could feel the water—or maybe just the impression of it—stuck in his chest. Probably radioactive, right? Some bodiless voice was telling him he could scare off death with a good laugh. Did it work?

Guess we’ll know if I wake up.

Keep me posted.

Sure thing.

Anyway…

He found his mother at the breakfast table the next morning. 

“You never told me where you were yesterday,” she said.

Steve shook the last of the cereal dust into his bowl. He wasn’t hungry. It was probably stale. But he slept, so he felt fine enough to present the effort with a splash of milk and a smile. “Just checking in on friends. Driving around. Are you gonna eat?”

Elbows to the table, she rested her chin over folded hands, curlers jostling around her face. 

“Yeah,” he went on, spoon stirring, “it’s stupid. I wish I thought to check if you called. But I just figured, you know–”

“No, I know.” Frowning, she gave her head another subtle shake. “It isn’t as if I call every day.”

“Right.”

“Truth be told, I was ready to come home.”

Steve nodded along with her reasoning. The story hadn’t changed since last night, then. She was probably preparing herself for her rounds already, considering where she should show her face first: the municipal center or the school? The hospital? Door to door? She’d been in one place too long as it was. 

Turning to the window, her sleepy eyes fluttered shut. She hesitated for a moment, soaking in the sunlight, before taking a breath. “How are your friends?”

“What?” 

“Your friends. I don’t even think I know who they are anymore, so hard to keep up with you kids.” He could hear the warmth leaving her voice when she faced him again. “How old do I sound? Good lord.”

“Nah, it’s not–” He pursed his lips, dragging soggy bits of cereal down the sides of his bowl. Then he laughed, just as brittle. “It’s fair. We just, uh...”

“Steve, honey, I need you to tell me the truth now,” she said, leaning forward. The shift was so sudden that his heart wanted to escape through his throat. “Are you helping that boy hide?”

Now he watched her. She watched him, her sharp eyebrows angling concern. It looked as strange on her as it had yesterday. As strange as what caused it: the vest that had been propped under his arm. Where had he left it?

“I found it in the laundry room this morning,” she answered. He had no time to register that she had answered perfect silence—that this couldn’t even be true—before the next accusation: “It’s the same shirt from the posters sewn onto the back…”

“No, Mom,” Steve assured her. 

“Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

Steve found himself in the blue again, his mind barely settling into reality before he pushed himself to his feet. His hand met the cold of the floor, searching under his bed frame until his fingertips brushed against something soft. And because that wasn’t enough, he pulled the battle vest into his lap and examined it over crossed legs, front to back, as if it could have changed overnight. As if he’d ever be that careless. 

“Shit,” he chuckled, lake water rattling in his chest as he did. No longer dreaming. Even so, though he hadn’t said anything aloud for hours, there was a feeling that he had admitted to something horrific. It came back to him as he refolded and returned the vest—blood spatter and all—to its temporary home underneath his bed. 

He didn’t know Eddie all that well. Doesn’t, to be optimistic. He doesn’t know him well, which made this whole thing worse. There was the obvious, of course: what right did he have to grieve, even in private? 

Then, the three terrible truths he had kept to himself. The first: that Eddie dove in after his sorry ass. He didn’t have to. The second: that in spite of the circumstances, he arrived like a missing piece of the Hawkins puzzle. Like a counterbalance. Like a cure. And the third—looming in the backseat then hiding under his bed—Steve couldn’t keep that vest. He shouldn’t have taken it to begin with.

But even now, he knew there must have been something else to it. Another secret truth kept him pinned down, hugging his legs to his chest just to watch the projection dance across his walls. He had been here before—really been here, sinking to the bottom of the pool until all he could feel was weight. And all he could hear was the buzz of the heater, and all he could do was wait for the trigger point. Some instinct beyond himself would force him to surface, happy as could be that this wasn’t the end for him. It was just a new record.

And then there was yesterday. “Close one,” he mumbled to no one in particular. Though he did say it, which meant he could give it more credibility than that dream. This early in the morning, the logic seemed to track. 

So did this: Steve sliding himself toward the nightstand, reaching for the lamp. Once he filled the room with light, he rested his brow over bare knees for a second, his face still beading a cold sweat. “Blaming you if I cough up a tadpole, man.” 

He leaned his head back against the edge of the mattress, wincing into a comfortable position. “I, uh– went to see Max before that,” he told him, voice kept low. He gauged himself against the electric hum to be safe. “She’s doing a little better. Tried to talk this time, so that was good. It’s weird, though.”

Weirder than him talking to a lamp? She’d have a field day. He cleared his throat. “Just, like… I’ll joke about something and expect her to roll her eyes at me. But yeah. God. That kid’s tough, man. Seriously.” 

What else? Steve scrubbed at his face until the sleep was gone from his eyes. “Henderson said he saw your uncle? I guess he’s checked in a couple times now. I think he’s worried he’s annoying him or something, but like, I don’t know. Obviously I don’t know your uncle, but I just told him he probably appreciates it. I mean, he hasn’t told him to stop, right? So if you’re worried about him being alone, don’t be. It’s alright. Or it will be. And, um…” What else?

It wasn’t until he got a taste of metal that he realized he had been chewing on the inside of his lip. His eyes stung. At least there was something he could blame. He waited for it to pass, just long enough to say what he really meant.

“I thought there’d be time.”

The flicker that woke him up was only the silver daylight breaking through the trees. His mother was on the phone when he finally shuffled into the kitchen, her giggling anything but mirthless. He managed to remember the turtleneck sweater, but he was already regretting his secrecy. The kitchen was hot. It was threatening a headache. 

“Ah, John, here he is.” She held the phone out to him, uncurling the cord from her fingers. “Here. Morning, sweetie.”

He only blinked, watching her as she moved onto the next task. She was dressed all in grey this time, grinning from ear to ear as she cleared the remnants of her lunch from the table. Finally, he greeted the breath waiting on the line. 

“Steve-o.” He was putting on a voice. Still in conference mode. “How’ve you been, champ?”

More and more, he wondered when his parents had dropped down from the mothership. They spoke like they still hadn’t. How’ve you been? Lovely day! Any plans? “Fine.” 

“Getting a late start today?”

Steve pulled the receiver away from his face, almost laughing, almost scoffing. “Yeah.”

“Listen.” There was a rustling as his father switched ears, a click as he lit a cigarette. “The missus is telling me I should be worried.”

“Okay.”

“About you.”

He glanced once more at the human blur bouncing around the kitchen, then quietly backed into the hallway. The telephone cord stretched from its coil. “Why?”

“I think you need something to keep you busy. Some kind of routine.”

But he was only half-listening. The tick-tick of a wall clock met him in the dark of the hall. His eyes tried to find a better place for this—a safer place—where the phone could still reach. 

“Well, kiddo?”

“What?”

“What do you say?”

All he could do was retreat into the kitchen. He ignored the eyes on him as he did, thinking back a few seconds. Worried. Busy. Routine. “Sorry. Are you telling me to get a job?”

There was a beat. Steve imagined him at his hotel window, flicking ashes. “No,” he answered. “I’m offering you one. I’ll set you up in Indy! Obviously you’ll want to be working toward a diploma, so nothing full-time. But it would be a good stepping stone for you. A bit of a risk for me–”

“So why?”

“Why?” he laughed. “Why what? You are my son, aren’t you?”

“Oh, right, I’m your son. Duh.” Well, he thought, he had already broken ground. “So, just curious, how long did it take after Hawkins exploded for you to remember that?”

Across the room, a yelp of a breath caught in his mother’s throat. 

“Anyways, thanks for the offer! I get you’re worried about me being on payroll, but hey, it could be worse. I could be dead.” He dug himself deeper, dodging her hand as she lunged for the phone. “I hear funerals are pretty expensive!”

“Steven,” she hissed.

“Go to hell.” 

She had wrangled the receiver out of his grip and slammed it back onto the hook before that part could be heard. By the time she decided to follow, he was already halfway up the stairs. A new line had been drawn between them.

“What’s gotten into you?” she pleaded over the sound of his footsteps. “I thought you’d be thrilled!”

And maybe he should have been. To be fair to her, it wasn’t that long ago that he would have been. No future in sight—not even the one he’d been guaranteed. In a world that made any sense at all, he would have taken what he could get. 

Steve turned on his heel. He held his breath as he lowered himself to sit on the top step, not bothering to hide the pain. It was sharp in his voice. “You didn’t have to talk him into that.” 

“Steven.”

“I’m fine.”

Under the tall arch of the foyer, he saw her expression soften into a frown. Her arms crossed slowly, almost awkwardly over her chest. She looked at him until she was looking through him. 

He imagined telling her then, making good, maybe sitting her down in the living room like families do on TV. Max is in the hospital, but you don’t know her. It was hard to see her. Hard to see Lucas. Erica. Henderson. What the hell would I do without Robin? You don’t know her either. 

You must’ve seen Eddie Munson on the news. I thought there would be time. I guess that’s what killed him.

What else? 

2019

“Aiden, kiddo, put the Game Boy away.”

The end of the school year. At the end, even the well-behaved kids tended to develop a rebellious streak. Aiden pushes his hair away from a sweaty face. “It’s a DS.”

“For D-Straction?”

“For dual screen.” He seems to be surprised by the laughter that follows, unintended as the joke of nonchalance was. “See?”

Steve’s resolve isn’t what it used to be—not at the end of the year, and certainly not at the end of his last year. He winds around a row of desks, relieved to catch the breeze from the room’s box fan as he gets a closer look. It isn’t an unfamiliar sight. The things had been a nuisance about a decade back, too, whatever he had been calling them.

“One, two.”

“Why do you need two?”

Brooke turns in her seat to answer that, her braced teeth chomping away on a fresh wad of bubblegum. Another battle he wouldn’t bother to pick; the bell would be ringing any minute. “The bottom one’s a touch screen.”

“Yeah,” Aiden agrees, doodling as proof. He taps the nib of his stylus against plastic, and the scribble floats to the upper window. “I just sent that to my friend in one-oh-four. And he answered me back, see?”

If he squints, he can: another box of chicken scratched question marks appears beneath Aiden’s message. “You should save the texting for lunchtime.”

“It’s not texting, Coach.” Melted by the heatwave, Casey keeps his cheek pressed against the cool top of his desk. “The signal sucks. You have to be close to talk back and forth.”

“Yeah.”

“More like a visual walkie-talkie, then.”

“Pictochat,” mumbles Casey.

Really, Steve thinks, how could he pretend to be anything but proud? Aiden has his friend down the hall. It almost seems he has a friend in Brooke and another in Casey—that the class had been laughing with him earlier, not at. Proud Steve is, but not at all surprised.

When the bell does ring, he tells him to hang back. And despite his best intentions–

“I’m sorry! I’ll keep it in my bag! I don’t want to stay for detention!”

“Hey–”

“No!” The tears stream down his pimpled face.

“Buddy!” His laughter is nervous. “I should’ve prefaced this is good news. Here, Kleenex.”

Aiden accepts without a beat missed, snot blown into his tissue. 

Steve meets him at eye level, barely leaning against the edge of his desk. “All good?”

With a final cough and a sniffle, “What’s the news?” 

“They’re supposed to announce it at lunch, but I know you don’t like surprises. Guess I could’ve planned that a little better.”

The boy shakes his head.

“Well, all your teachers and I wanted to make sure everyone knew how great you are, so we nominated you for Student of the Quarter.”

He blinks at him, eyes glassy through thick lenses. “You did?”

“And you won.”

“I won?”

“Congratulations.” 

When Eddie asks if he’ll miss it, he tells him about that. On his laptop screen, he thinks he sees a little light gather at the corner of the eye. 

Steve rests his chin in his hands. “Are you crying?”

“No,” he answers. Whether he was or not, he makes a show of it now, ducking out of frame to let out a sob. 

He sees himself in the corner, a candid smile refusing to fade. “Ed–”

“Gimme a minute.” 

For a moment, suspicious in its length and accompanied by the sound of shuffling papers, he can only see the plaid back of his shirt bobbing up and down. Before he returns with his hands covering his nose, Steve tries to make sense of the room he never sees. It’s always so dark.

“That really got to you, huh?” he asks him.

Green slime dangles out of his closed fist. 

“You’d fit right in with the twelve-year-olds.”

“I’ve been told,” he says. The video lags on a proud grin, his voice moving on without him: “I hope you know how important that shit is. I wish you’d been my teacher.”

“You would’ve given me a hard time.”

“Yeah,” the frozen Eddie agrees. Once the rest of him catches up, Steve watches him squeeze the gooey concoction between his fingers. “But I would’ve shown up.”

“You say that–”

“I mean that!”

Shifting uncomfortably in his desk chair—painless, but aware of a perceivable attempt to fish for compliments—he nods. A change of subject is in order. Overdue. “You’re gonna be at my retirement party, right?”

Eddie comes so close to the camera, all he can see is his grin, and all he can feel is a tightness in his chest: readying for actual presence. “When is it?” the unmoving lips ask. 

“Whenever,” Steve laughs. “It’s just us.”

“RSVP me.”

He wants to slink under his desk to cry. He wants to make a show of it, too. He only nods. 

Chapter Text

Steve leaves his appointment with a prescription and a follow-up date. Both papers stay folded in his shirt pocket until he gets home, where they’re dropped into a junk drawer and forgotten for the day. Shots in the dark. What’s to be expected when the problem isn’t real? 

He grabs his baseball cap at the door. Gardening tools collected at the back porch, just waiting on him and the fresh pack of Reds to be plucked from his pocket next. He’s got all afternoon. 

And he’ll need it, he thinks, surveying the overgrowth through his smoke. Tomorrow he’ll be busy getting his blood work done for his new doctor who, like every new doctor bound to become an old one, will try their best to give the problem a name. Cancer, radiation poisoning, rule out the worst of them first. The symptoms aren’t the cause, and the cause can’t be named. 

It’s almost funny. All that fear over cults and curses only for the pendulum to swing too far in the opposite direction. Yes, something horrible happened. Something that was investigated, destroyed, and paved over. There are times when Steve can’t even trust his own memory. I drowned breathing, I fell up. Having gone so long speaking in code, he knows how easy it is for the truth to get lost in translation. 

I’m from Hawkins. In the end, nothing more can be said.

Rolling up his shirtsleeves, he gets to work. Weeds have steadily crept over the garden perimeter, the bricks meant to separate the flowerbeds from the lawn now overtaken by thorns and roots—and so he’ll start there, while he’s looking. 

Might as well. What kept him from catching up has been the culmination of tasks. The dead leaves of autumn, out of sight and out of mind in the winter, weren’t raked this past spring. The stormy season had left branches scattered across the grass—mowed, at least, but dry in parts. Other sections are speckled by dandelions and patches of thistle. 

Robin had been kind enough to check on things in the week he was out of commission. Kind enough to offer still, but he’d catch up eventually. He’d want company eventually, and the gardening needs to happen first.  

Sweat swiped dry under his brim, another smoke break taken, he moves onto the next square foot of soil. Swipes. Smokes. Repeats.

He’s sick of this house. As long as he’s lived here, he’s never been so bothered by the tedium—never thought twice about the chores unless it was to take pride in a job well done. 

Swipes. Smokes.

“Hey.”

“Two minutes late!”

Steve holds his phone out, checking the time. The sun high overhead had reminded him it was lunchtime. Time to call.

“That’s it, we’re through!”

Bringing the faint, false outrage close to his ear again, a laugh threatens to undermine the deadpan that follows: “Stop. Wait. I can change.”

“Save it, you! Cad. Fiend.” But Eddie isn’t trying as hard. Steve can already hear the smile in his voice. “Oh, I can’t stay mad at you…” 

“What’s for lunch?” 

“Gooood question.”

He can see him now: pacing around a kitchen invented by sound and speculation. Cabinet hinges squeak somewhere close to the fridge, a few steps away. Wood floors. They creak underfoot.

“So what have you been up to to keep me waiting?”

“Trying to save lives. This poor garden…” Meandering the edge, he nudges a holey leaf with his foot to examine it at a distance. Bugs or disease? “I can’t keep up with this shit anymore.”

“Don’t say that. You know what?”

“What?”

“You’re too hard on yourself. No one in the world bounces back as quick as you do.”

“Thank–”

“That’s not a compliment!” He’s scrounged something up, must be. A crinkling bag. A crunch. “You shouldn’t push yourself is all. Best make that garden a zen garden, boy.”

Steve scoffs. Swipes. Smokes.

Forced free eventually, his hands return to the cool of the earth, digging and ripping it loose. Frustration, then soreness, are enough to distract him. A few good plants are sacrificed needlessly; he’d only grieve them if they had been moving-in gifts, but those all live closer to home. And those are from Robin, as he walks through the door. Those, too, as he looks out the window. 

Not these. Digging, ripping, his hands push too easily through the soil. 

The cold is what shocks him, and the empty space that continues down—down, down, past the elbows, staining his sleeves with mud—is what he understands. At once, he has no choice but to remember the cold oozing of sap, the smell of death, the taste of blood, because he wasn’t there. He is. 

And yet his hands, trembling and dirt-caked, don’t come back with evidence. Looking down, he sees nothing but a trench in the clay. Clearing the foliage, dead and alive, reveals a gap extending from his garden and into the woods. It can’t be longer than half a yard and half as deep as that. 

He decides then that Eddie was right. He’ll leave the rest of his work for another day.

Brooklyn, New York
1998

At the end of the alley, something was waiting for him. 

Eddie kept himself pressed against the wet brick wall. Rain dripped from the ends of his hair, clouding his vision. He could pretend for a moment that the world had stopped spinning. Until he tried to move, his dizziness could be ignored. 

But there was still that dark figure blocking his way out. The glow of the streetlamps rippled around it. 

“Stop!” The sound was too shrill, too frenzied, to be coming from him. It must have been coming from the faceless thing that had followed him here, all the way to the city. For weeks, it had stalked him around every busy street corner, in broad daylight and into the throngs of nightlife. 

Eddie wiped the corner of his mouth, tasting blood and vomit. His. He could see it smeared on the back of his hand, mingling with chalky clumps of white. 

Out of the torrent, treading through puddles, it didn’t stop until every source of light had been blotted out. 

“No!” he gasped. Cold fear raged through his every nerve, freezing him from the points of impact. “No, no! Get the fuck off me!”

He expected pain. It never came. Two hands were gripping his arms, only hard enough to shake him out of paralysis. “You good, man?” 

Peering through the limp curls covering his face, he was shaken harder by the question. By the human voice asking it. 

This city had too many eyes. They only landed on him when he asked them to—when he was stupid enough to demand it, or desperate enough—yet there was always the chance that the past would catch up. He carried the knowledge on his own for now, that the eyes only needed to look backwards. That no amount of makeup would be able to hide him then.

His drummer. Yes, his drummer's eyes were searching for a trace of him, shifting behind a wet and hazy veil. Focusing, Eddie was relieved to make sense of his face—under long brown hair, his features were distorted by the bleary shapes of a skull as if seeing them through the skin. Eddie had been the one to paint him. All of them.

Yes, that’s right.

If his arms weren’t pinned down to his sides, he would have tried to unpaint him too. The rain would have made it easier. Maybe, if he was lucky, he wouldn’t even find his drummer underneath. 

His eyes were so kind.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

When the young man’s brow furrowed, the faux socket hollows beneath them rounded. 

If he could just reach, Eddie thought. If he could just smooth it out for him, then that familiar kindness would conjure a familiar name as well. Then he could apologize for ever worrying him. Then he could give him a reason to never worry again. Not over him. 

He bobbed his chin, gesturing for him to come closer. Closer. 

Closer, big boy, I won’t bite.

Once he had, lips brushing against his ear to whisper, all that escaped was a snort.

“Come on.”

“Like you don’t know! Everyone knows I did it.” If that were true, he wouldn’t be laughing. He held onto the single sliver of comfort with all he could, clutching his stomach at the same time. 

“Did what, man?” His bandmate watched him double over, too hysterical to answer.  “Come on,” he insisted, a strong arm now urging Eddie towards the curb. 

“I killed her!” Shouted into the night, barely penetrating the storm, the words slurred into each other until the shouting found a rhythm. “I– killed her! I– did it!” 

He would have to be gone until he got clean, they said. He never went back.

The farmhouse had been falling into disrepair before the Munsons moved in. 

Eddie didn’t know what he had done—personally—to keep the house from crumbling. It was only after coming back after months of true neglect, forcing him to repair what was absolutely necessary for survival, that he remembered thawing frozen pipes, patching up the roof, and tossing chemicals at black mold. 

Every window is open tonight, letting in the possibility of a breeze. Still, though the sky has been dark for hours, the smell of sun-baked pine pitch is hanging heavy in the stagnant air.  He fans himself with the paper in his hand before turning it. Back, back. In the dusty orange glow of the room’s single lamp, he’s read the same sentence at least ten times. The language is purposely difficult to parse, none of it meant for laymen’s eyes—and to be sure, he didn’t find it relevant enough to study before. Unlike the research that led Eddie in a direction, this study mentions the Hawkins Patient just once. 

But his mission isn’t the same as it was a year ago. That died with Bergeron, and now the papers are what’s left. Stacks and stacks, boxes and boxes filled, overflowing and impossible to move, with enough paper to warp the hardwood planks beneath them. 

He drifts in and out of sleep, reading here on the floor of this house. The heat leaves him too uncomfortable, then too exhausted. His dreams are fitful. The jolt of a nightmare is expected: a fall, a crash, a bite, a punch. Orange light.

The sounds of impact linger after a while. Though he isn’t in any pain, he can hear himself meeting the hard surface of a makeshift operating table. Of a brick wall. Over and over, his head never moving, it falls backwards again and again and again. 

At his door. In the present. 

Bang-bang-bang.

Rolling onto his stomach, Eddie crawls on all fours into the kitchen. He holds his breath as his gun is retrieved from the table. 

At his door, in the present, the demand persists. There was a time when he wouldn’t have flinched, he thinks; before thought would have gotten involved, his body knew how to protect itself. Now it worries over its own failure—over the man once close enough to touch, and what he’ll never know.

Close again. So close, somehow, he can recognize the sound of his breathing through the broken screen door. Steve can’t see him in the dark of his kitchen. Eddie can barely see him, his glasses catching the faint orange light as he looks in.

His finger stays on the trigger as he risks, in a whisper, “Steve?”

The next breath escapes as a relieved sigh. It breaks through the gloom and unease of the night. 

Without another thought, the door is flung open on shrieking hinges. It’s when Eddie’s arms are wrapping around him that he remembers they shouldn’t, though Steve is holding him too tightly to change his mind. 

“Sorry to scare you!” he pants out, heart racing against his chest.

Or it could be his own. He might not have noticed his own teeth chattering until he tried to speak again. “Lucky I didn’t take you out…” Nestled in the warm smokiness of him, he mumbles into his shirt, certain now that Steve is the reason he’s still standing. Fingers find the edge of the counter behind his back, carefully placing the gun down.

Laughter tickles Eddie’s ear. “Deja vu.” 

The dinner table is cleared for every candle Eddie can find, their unsteady light sending shadows across the moss-colored walls and wood-beamed ceiling of the kitchen. A creek bubbles nearby, obscured by a velvety curtain of black wilderness. It’s more comfortable here than the rest of the stuffy old house, he tells him—delaying the inevitable. 

Chair moved from across the table, he sits with his knees pressed around Eddie’s. Short as he leaves the distance between them, it’s hard to say if the smile on his face is apologetic or if it’s there at all. “I tried calling.” Cautious to interrupt the peaceful quiet setting in, his voice is low over the chirping woods. “No service, I guess.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you about the trees.” 

Hands are held up in surrender. Another trick, maybe, thanks to the pop-and-flicker of a flame: he seems to be shaking, too. 

“Not that you haven’t answered my every prayer tonight. But…”

“What the hell am I doing here?” Steve asks for him. 

Fingers weave between his—to hold, to pet under the table—to promise, more than anything, that he would only be asking out of concern. But Steve should know. He’s still wearing Eddie’s ring.

The wick sparks and disappears in a falling gaze. He’s removed his glasses now, free hand rubbing away sleepiness or sweat. “I just had to see you.”

Eddie cups his face. The makings of a beard scratch against his thumbs. 

“Because it’s not you. It’s the Upside Down and whatever it did to us. Whatever it left behind, I mean.” 

Eddie’s hesitance—broken, eventually, with a nod—would be hard to miss in the dark silence.

“Maybe there’s only a signal when we’re in range of the cell tower.”

I just had to see you. 

Can’t I just collapse here? 

 “Did they ever find something that works?” It isn’t worth questioning, of course. Eddie would have heard about it and Steve wouldn’t be speaking in hypotheticals. “Are you feeling better?”

“I drove here no problem.”

He sighs. “Good.”

“Then it’s okay?” Can’t we just collapse together?

Eddie knows the feeling. He purses his lips, staving off a relentless smirk. No use. “No way,” he jokes. “Get the fuck out of my house.” A grin is already being mirrored between his palms. “How about I show you around? Then you tell me.”

In the light, he resists the urge to look back. He wants to see Steve more clearly, not his reaction to the disaster—but despite his best efforts, he can hear the breath catching. Not a good sign, whatever the cause.

Eddie makes a path through the paper piles. Whatever can be moved is slid aside by his feet. Windows are closed tight, locked, covered.

“Going into battle?”

The reference stymies his will. At the bottom of the stairs, he leans back against the railing and faces his guest with an expectant grimace. 

Steve is cleaning his glasses against his t-shirt. Promisingly, he stands taller than Eddie remembers—but that could be helped by the long shadow of him stretching lengthwise from him and the stained glass lamp in the window, across the mess, hiding the glittering specks of dust as they float past. 

He blinks behind his lenses. His eyes are kind. They crinkle at the corners. “This is a nice old house,” he tells him.

“Ha!” Eddie jiggles the front door—locked—before pulling himself along the railing. Footsteps follow close behind. How long has it been since he heard that sound?

“Good thing you were even home.”

The top step creaks. “Where else would I be?”

“New York, right?” Creaks again. Steve laughs airily. “I only remembered once it was too late to turn around.”

Eddie only remembers now. 

Upstairs, the night is still allowed entry through the open windows. The blue moonlight guides him back against the cool of the wall. His arms extend to the shadow, inviting him to be held. They fall into each other too naturally. 

Without a word, they retrace the steps Eddie would take alone. Cold water dribbles down his arm as he tests the shower. He’s too hot to sleep, and so is Steve, but avoiding each other is out of the question if not out of the realm of possibility. They can’t avoid themselves. They do what they can, then, freeing each other just to fall into each other again.  

The silver in Steve’s hair is more pronounced. Eddie wonders if it’s the dim light catching the contrast as he wets his head, or if there is simply more to notice. A year has passed. 

“Is that…” He’s noticed the time between them as well. Smiling, he holds Eddie’s arm out to study the underside, thumb brushing over ticklish skin before he can rest against him again. “They did a good job.”

“You think I’d trust just anyone with your flowers?” He chuckles into his embrace. 

“Oh,” Steve sighs. 

The warmth of that sound envelops him. Eyelids fall as he listens through to the very end, but already, he wants to hear it again. “You’ll tell me, right?” 

There’s no need for elaboration. Steve tells him what he wants to hear and how he wants to hear it. A hum buzzes in the ear. He waits for it to be heard from beginning to end before moving aside. 

Eddie takes his place under the falling water.

Chapter Text

A vase of wildflowers has replaced the candles on the table. 

The man who arranged them has been awake for hours, his legs sprawling out from under the kitchen sink—fixing a leak that Eddie can only assume is there. He had never noticed it, but if anyone could, it would have been Steve. Nice old house. A promise more than an observation.

Eddie floats toward him, careful not to surprise. He raps at the counter, then hovers over him, parting hair to watch. “Morning.”

“Hello!” 

His spreading smile isn’t felt until Steve matches it. “How much you charging?”

A shake of the head then a curl of the finger answer him.

Eddie lowers knowingly, squatting over him to accept a peck on the cheek. 

The smile returns twice as wide, before—hands pulling himself backward—it disappears with him under the sink. 

Filling the room this morning is the smell of coffee mingling with mountain air, the latter inviting a briskness that will be gone within the hour. 

“Sorry about the AC,” Eddie says. It hasn’t turned on in weeks, but he’s survived this long without. “Maybe today we can venture out and find one. Put you to work like last time.”

“Is the living room a good spot for it you think?”

“Sure,” he answers, pouring himself a cup. Rubbing his eye. Yawning: “Wherever!”

“It’s in the truck.”

He hopes he’s kidding, unable to confirm that with a shared glance. 

“You’ll be happy to know I thought twice about installing it. The guy loaded it in for me.”

Eddie eyes the time on the coffee maker. Seven o’clock. Steve Harrington time is no joke. 

“Probably could’ve handled it, though.”

“Has anyone ever told you you’re batshit insane?”

Emerging again to find him at the table, a smirk forms on Steve’s face, tongue poking between his perfect teeth. From his full head of greying hair, wavy tufts stick up at odd angles against a beam of golden sunlight.

Looks okay. Better than.

“I’m serious. I’m sending you home if you’re not gonna be careful.” His heightened blood pressure is just payback, he realizes. Not malicious on Steve’s part, and maybe not even intentional—it’s cosmic payback for getting himself killed. A taste of his own medicine. Well-fucking-played. “In fact, leave the plumbing. Pull up a chair. I want to enjoy a peaceful morning with my husband.”

If anything is intentional, it’s his word choice, and it works like a charm. Eddie can hear the clank of a wrench being set aside. Their eyes meet. 

While someone must have broken first, the order is unclear as they set each other off in waves of winks, snorts, and nudges. 

“Did you like that? I can keep ‘em coming.”

Grateful, it seems, to be given a reason to stop, Steve takes in a refreshing breath and lands in a seat at the table. 

“That can be your chair.”

“All mine?”

He gestures regally, if vaguely, around their peaceful corner. “But wait, there’s more…” The dripping pipes. The smacking of the screen door as it’s pushed by a gentle breeze. The cobwebs and the dust bunnies and the papers. Leaning back in a chair that protests his weight, he sips his drink. Shrugs.

Just as nonchalantly, “I do,” Steve says. “For what it’s worth.”

Eddie spends the rest of their wedding day sorting those papers into new piles. Read, never read. Possibly relevant, never once relevant. Steve is forbidden from any heavy lifting, relegated to stoking the bonfire in the backyard while the house is cleared out box by box. When he thinks it might be the last, he returns with another offering. Countless trips are made up and down the gravel path before the question pauses his progress: “How long did it take to find all of this?”

His jeans, chopped short above the knees, collect the ink and dust from his hands as he swipes them pointlessly clean. “Not long once the ball was rolling. Full-time job.” Lips slant under black-and-white bristles. “Wish it paid.”

A few stray embers are poked back under the column of flames. The print warps and curls before disappearing into a bulging mound of ash. 

“Most people would’ve run for the hills. ‘This crazy fuck…’” 

Sparks are sent into the air with the pop of a log, unnoticed until Eddie reaches out to brush the debris off of Steve’s arms. The borrowed shirt is of less concern, swept last. 

“Still good?”

The question goes unanswered—traded for another: “You’ve been trying to find an answer, haven't you? That’s why you kept it.”

A hand still lingers over Steve’s heart. 

Anchoring it down, “Thank you, Eddie.” In his eyes, there’s a glimmer. Not all fire; there’s a wisecrack forming. “I hope it was a complete waste of time.”

The spared papers stay in a spare room, waiting to be read, sorted, and burned with the rest. Hope only goes so far. 

“Me too.” 

Dear Mr. H,

I just wanted to reach out and say thank you again for the letter! I know it was probably weird for me to ask, and you know me better through email now, but you’re the lucky guy who voted me Student of the Quarter. If anyone could get me that scholarship, I knew it would be you. No pressure…

You asked for an update. I’m trying to get some AV tech experience under my belt at the moment. I did get that contact info for your friend in Utah, so hopefully he won’t mind me picking his brain. I’m sure I’ll have about a million questions.

How have you been? Any fun plans for the summer? I’ll keep you posted on the school situation! If I’m East Coast bound, I’ll definitely come visit. It would be really great to see you again.

I guess that’s all I got for now, though. 

Thanks again for everything! 

Aiden

“I read your mail,” Eddie announces, interrupting the mad dash to clean. “Don’t call the cops.”

They hadn’t known until last week that company would be coming. They hadn’t known until yesterday that their company would be staying with them, meaning the papers and the boxes stowed away in that spare room would need to be addressed again. 

It wouldn’t take more than a day, anyway. Good news and bad news.

His husband lies horizontal on the old floral print couch, socked feet elevated over its arm. Aiden’s letter is handed to him first. Then, with an apologetic grin, a stack of research to sift through.  

“Oh, joy,” Steve quips. 

“I’d start with the mail.” 

They had tried being together, far from Hawkins. They had tried being apart, Steve staying home while Eddie’s one man band hopped from small town to smaller town. For the time being, choosing not to look too far ahead, they were making do. 

He listens to him muttering as he reads, each word warming his voice further. Refusing to leave anything to the imagination, he sits on the floor beside him, head resting to watch happiness in bloom. 

Finally, his arms fall, letting the papers drop into his lap. “I should go to graduation.”

As quickly as it had formed, the smile mirrored on Eddie’s face fades. 

One hand lowers, patting over a bushy cheek. Never mind. The other smooths back silver. Scratches in thought. 

“Need anything?”

Muted hazel flickers down to him behind his glasses. There’s a system to this. Before anything happens, the question has to be asked. Then half a dose can be cut. Then they can move on with their day. Then they can forget that ever happened. 

“How many we got coming?” Steve questions instead. He counts on his fingers as they’re named: “Robin, Mara, April, Erica, Lucas.”

“Buckleys in the living room, Sinclairs,” a whistle punctuates the rhyme, “upstairs.”

“I’ll take a cup of coffee,” he decides. 

“You got it.”

“And, uh–! Ugh.” 

One foot is already in the kitchen when he hears him debating with himself.

“I got it,” he says, waving off concern as he limps past. Buckleys in the living room. He’ll bring his papers and his smokes outside. The screen door swings and smacks back into the jamb behind him.

Eddie doesn’t like to be too far. Beyond that, when Steve isn’t close by, he will find himself searching for him regardless. Waiting for the pot to brew, he keeps his eyes on him through the kitchen window—how he props his elbows over the porch railing, how he continues to rake his fingers through his hair, and how he just can’t stop. A cool spring breeze shuffles the papers in his hand, carries his smoke inside, forces Eddie to count the seconds between breaths. When the coffee stops its trickling, he can just catch his own reflection in the glass before moving on, forgetting.

Counting for Steve. Counting for himself. No difference.

There hasn’t been an inch of the old farmhouse that Steve hasn’t altered and improved upon. There are moments, like this, when Eddie has nothing better to do than appreciate it outright. A recent retouch of paint can be smelled beneath the Pine-Sol, coffee, and afterstorm in the air. Moving through the kitchen, pouring him his cup, it’s the pots of fresh basil on the windowsill that he notices. The comforting aroma follows him onto the porch—comforting if only because they’ll get to cook with it later. Later is only one step ahead. He can let himself predict that.

He slides him his drink, leaving his palm up between them. When Steve’s lips curl into a smirk, he waggles his brows expectantly. 

A slap on the palm.

A scratchy kiss on the cheek. 

Ashes falling into the grass, he passes his cigarette along before accepting his coffee. 

“This nasty fuckin’ shit…” 

After all of this, Steve’s hoarse laughter is enough to bring a tear to his eye. He’s lucky he’s returned to the study by then, not noticing—or at least not addressing—the swiping sleeve. 

It’s only because he watches him so intently. Because he can’t help but do so. The second his brow creases, Eddie notices. Widening eyes move back and forth over the paper, rereading. 

“What?” 

He holds it further out. Rereads again, just to be sure, before handing him the papers. “Hold on.”

In his absence, Eddie tries to find the word or line causing the commotion. Without knowing if the shock is good or bad, he doesn’t try too hard. He smooths the papers over the railing. Returns to the letter. Reads that.

“Where’d you put them?” Steve asks from the kitchen.

“Where’d I put what?” What else? Why would he be looking? He turns over his shoulder. “If you need–”

“Can you find them?”

Eddie stands straight, balancing himself. 

“I just need to see the label.”

His hand, clammy, wrinkles the packet and smudges the ink as he tries to spot it again. 

“Eddie?”

He reaches into his pocket, the pills rattling through a tremble. 

“Is it the same?” 

Gate 4, Site 2
1987

“Note that!” 

It was a result of the venom. The organic matter of the fourth dimension reacted in ways that were mostly predictable, excepting the venom. The venom was unique.

“Support,” was the next demand. In just two weeks, the supporting substance would be lost under the rubble of the research facility. It wouldn’t be needed, it seemed. The gates themselves would be destroyed, stopping all exploration and rendering once-vital tools—like this one—useless. 

Not the cause for alarm, though. Not the reason for the cure to exist. That would find its own purpose in time.

As the examiner feared, this injection would have an adverse effect on the Hawkins Patient. The venom hadn’t run its course, and perhaps it never would. The advantages of it would be understood once it had been tested, and those advantages were immediately clear despite the disadvantages. Eddie Munson had a negative reaction, his cells screaming to be rejoined with the source of their infection: a communication network which now spanned multiple dimensions. That was predictable. 

Until that day, no one would have known that the treatment could soothe the very pain it caused. It allowed the Patient to be gently pieced back together, then—unbeknownst to anyone—to return to the world as if nothing had happened.

The antigen then the antidote. It was the combination, carefully calculated, that had prevented overdose in the only victim of his kind. No one else in the world had been bitten directly.

As a painkiller, the antigen alone would be determined safe for use. The antigen alone would change lives.

Dr. Wesley Bergeron would die a rich man.

The toilet flushes. 

Steve, so close to being sick, waits for Eddie to finish the job behind a closed door. The sight of the bathroom—tidied to perfection for their house guests—would have given nausea a nice place to stay. 

But he should be glad. That’s the thought. That’s all he should think, regardless of the damage done. It’s not Eddie. It doesn’t have to be.

They reunite in the dark of the bedroom. Steve sniffs.

“Are you okay?” 

He half laughs. “Man–” His husband’s arms close tight around him, less cautious than they have been in years. “I’m so sorry,” he thinks he says next. It’s hard to hear, stifled by the closeness of him and racked by a sob. “It’s my fault!”

“No.”

He must have said it out loud, then. Eddie holds him back by the shoulders, his hands only leaving him to remove his glasses. To dry his eyes. 

“Don’t start. No, it’s not.”

“If I hadn’t–”

“Steve.” He means it. His head shakes only once, a sharp gaze piercing through the haziness. “You were doing what they said. Leave it.”

Lost, found, like a child led safely home, he nods. That’s right. He was only doing what they said to do. And Eddie knows better. And Eddie always does. 

They settle on the sofa like they do every night. Eddie rests his head on his shoulder. He makes sure the blanket is covering both of them as Steve decides on a channel. 

There’s a whisper near his ear. “Okay?” 

He’s used to it now. He can’t get comfortable. He focuses on the warmth of him instead, the closest thing he can find in the absence. Maybe, soon, that won’t be the case. “Yeah,” he answers. “I’m sor–”

“No.”

“Just let me.”

It’s their last night alone for a while. He looks up at him in his periphery, his dark eyes made of melting ice.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t have to put you through it.”

Eddie sits up then. His hand finds his cheek, guiding gazes to meet. “How do you feel,” he asks, “right now?”

Steve has to think about it. The pain is no kinder—but it is recognized. It feels more like hope than anything he’s felt in a long time. “Better.”

“That’s good,” Eddie tells him.

And it could be. And it is.

A vase of wildflowers sits on the kitchen table.

Chapter Text

Their guests wouldn’t know the significance of the fire or the papers it burns. It lights their faces with more than easy laughter, keeping them warm long after the chill of night has nestled itself among the trees.

They only know their friend, Eddie reminds himself. Nothing matters more. Not only would it have been unnecessary to warn them about his quietness—about his stubbornness in the face of this—it would have been unhelpful. Behind them, the farmhouse glows against the black woods, its sturdy walls and candlelit windows inviting them to rest their heads once they’re ready to let this day end. The house Wayne Munson left his nephew is only standing because of stubbornness. 

Eddie could have told them not to come—unnecessarily and unhelpfully. They could have rescheduled, fingers crossed that the timing would be perfect again someday. 

“Fuck that,” Steve had said. The work they had done wouldn’t go to waste. All the cleaning, all the food they had prepared. But Eddie knows him pretty well, too. All those empty words just to say I need to.

So here they are. Among them, only Robin and her wife have stayed with them before. Mara is cool and collected, and surprisingly aware in spite of this. Her work in the wound center must have prepared her for the horror stories Robin would inevitably share—that Steve hadn’t, of course, and that Eddie would hear for the first time in passing, over breakfast, by a fire.

He isn’t alone. April is Robin’s step-daughter from a previous relationship. What she knows has been misconstrued by childhood or filtered through the mouths of her doting parents. Almost thirty now, the same level of protection can’t be guaranteed. More than once, in the midst of the baffling nonchalance that surrounds them, she’s looked to the other odd man out for confirmation. Are you hearing this, too? When her uncle mentions Russian truth serum and banana splits in the same sentence, it happens again, her eyes cutting to him through the smoke.

Eddie shrugs.

About five years ago, when the Sinclairs would have been told the truth about Eddie Munson, they wouldn’t have been told by him in the flesh. Certainly not over the phone. Brother and sister sit in camping chairs on either side of Steve, pointing fingers and exchanging jabs as if time had stopped one March night in Hawkins, Indiana. It hadn’t taken long for the hard cover of the present day to turn over, moving beyond the mature sincerity in their voices and the age marking their faces, beyond the histories they won’t share, towards the one they do and the one they still could.

And out of everyone, old friends and new, the one he studies most closely is Steve. He lounges backwards, his head resting on his knuckles, his shoulders still shaking with aftershocks of laughter. He seems to be a little stiffer than he was an hour ago, and quite a bit more than he had been at dinner. With his gaze kept on him, Steve can answer the question as wordlessly as it’s posed: I’m fine, until he can’t. 

“Well,” Eddie interrupts a sleepy lull in the conversation, stretching his arms before rising to his feet. “I think I’m gonna hit the hay!”

“Not a bad thought.”

“Nighty night, Grandpa,” April quips, earning an emphatic nod from Erica.

Steve grabs tight to Eddie’s hand, all of his strength pushing him out of his chair. His breath is stifled and caught. “Make sure the other geriatrics get to bed then, will you?”

It earns him a chorus of protests, their booing waved off as he’d led inside. 

“Sorry,” Eddie prefaces, a white tablet offered with his glass. Nothing more. 

Steve shakes his head over the pillow, preparing himself with a wince as a shoulder is offered next. He leans against him, a huff turning seamlessly into a chuckle. 

“What?” Eddie asks.

There’s a smirk on his face as he swallows the Tylenol, growing into a true grin in the time it takes the pillows to be fluffed and arranged behind his back. “Nothing,” he says. Meaning everything. Everything about it is funny, or else nothing could be. Fingertips tap softly at Eddie’s chest. “I really think we’ve got it now.”

A smile answers him as he burrows under the covers. “Me too.” He plucks Steve’s glasses off of his nose, reaching over to set them down on his nightstand. To turn off the light.

“And I hope that guy’s rotting in Hell.”

“Oh, he is.”

“And–”

His hand finds his cheek in the dark. Thumb smoothing over the corner of his mouth, he can feel the expression wavering. 

“Anyways,” he says, “today was really fun. I’m glad we could do that.”

“Yeah,” Eddie whispers back. All the hell he’s put himself through to avoid it. All the life he’d missed out on. 

Life with.

It has to be a little funny. It has to be the reason Steve’s lip quirks. 

Before Eddie can let his hand fall, it’s held in place, palm kissed. 

“I love you,” Steve says. “Not at second sight. At first.”

He laughs, warm against the back of his hand. “At first?” Terrified and on the run? A broken bottle held to his throat, ready to kill him?

“At first.”

He has no choice but to believe him.