Chapter Text
Steve first notices it two days after they emerge from Hell for what he can only pray is truly the last time.
A milky haze hangs over the sky as they pile up donations in his trunk and haul them out to the makeshift relief center that’s sprouted in the Hawkins High gymnasium. Not a single break in the clouds, but the light hits his eyes like an icepick. A migraine on the rise, he assumes, and slips on his sunglasses.
An itch latches onto his hands the second he steps out of the car, and it leaps onto his forearms when he pushes his sleeves up and gets to work. Maybe not a migraine, then. But it’s small enough, in the grand scheme of terrible things happening around him, to be easily dismissed, easily ignored.
So that’s what he does, dismisses and ignores.
For as long as he can.
His mother calls on the third day, when the phone lines go back up. They’ll book the first flight and come straight home, she tells him. Because a birthday, a holiday, a big game are fine to miss in the name of business, but to leave your son alone in the wake of an earthquake would appear far too callous and cruel. He gives her the excuse she’s fishing for, slips it right onto her hook, right on cue, and breathes a sigh of relief when she eagerly reels it in.
He can’t sleep that night. But that’s hardly a surprise. The blissful, blunt club of physical exhaustion has lifted from his beaten body, satisfied with its work on his mind and his muscles. And with the game over, the security already funneling out through the tunnels, his thoughts are free to storm the field and wreak their favorite havoc. He gives up after an hour—once he grows sick of tossing and turning, turning and tossing—and sludges down to the kitchen, heeding the bead of hunger that’s embedded beneath his ribs. Under the incessant buzz of the fluorescents, he makes himself a sandwich, washes it down with a glass of water, starts another, and another after that, and carries them out to the couch.
The blue light of the TV sears against the dark collected over the living room.
Sleep never comes.
The bead of hunger only grows.
The morning stretches up from the horizon, lugging a dose of fog and reality with it. He unpeels himself from the dent lodged in the cushions, but his head doesn’t come with him. Untethered from reason and ration, he works his way around the house, closing the blinds and drawing the curtains, reinstalling the night bit by bit before it can fully escape. It’d never occurred to him before now how stupidly, uselessly big their house is: far too many rooms with far too many windows.
But once he has them all sealed up tight, he collapses back into the enticing divot still carved in the over-plush cushions. Every synapse in his brain knows that he ought to make the small effort to drag himself upstairs, to his waiting bed. Every fiber in his body knows he’ll regret it for days if he allows himself this one indulgence of laziness. But exhaustion has come home to roost again, coiled on his shoulders, and its stuffy weight bears him down, down, down into the pillows.
Sleep finally follows, quick and merciful as a bat to the back of the head.
Keith calls, a little past eight, a mere forty minutes later, and instructs him to be at Family Video by nine-forty-five. They’ve got inventory to do before they open, he says. And a few spilled shelves to set right. Bring Bird Girl too, he adds just before the line drops dead, just before Steve can get a word in edgewise to tell him exactly where he can stick his inventory.
I’ll let Bird Girl know you called her that again, he thinks as he jams the phone back into the receiver, and maybe she’ll finally crack and give you the kick in the balls you deserve.
He turns the shower up, as hot as it will go, but the heat does nothing to dissipate the pea soup roiling in the bowl of his mind; it only relocates the murk onto his skin. Even as he steps out of the shower and towels himself off, the moisture clings to him, pooling afresh every time he scrubs it away.
He swings by the kitchen on his way out, just long enough to grab two packets of Pop-Tarts from the box on the counter. He takes three steps toward the garage, then turns back and grabs two more.
The bead of hunger is a quarter now.
Customers flood Family Video the second Rob unlocks the front doors. They arrive in glugs and gushes, gobbling up videos by the armful, forcing Steve time and time again to tap the sign beside the register: limit three per customer. A lull never comes, but still, he finds himself drifting, unmoored from his body and struggling to return, several times. The customers notice. Keith notices. Robin notices.
The clock only just ticks past noon before she’s herding him to the break room and snagging the first aid kit from atop the fridge. She picks the old gauze off, careful but quick, as if she’s done it a hundred times, not three.
“It…doesn’t look too bad,” she announces. But her tone is far from confident and her expression is less than reassuring.
She weaves the fresh roll around his waist, tucking the tail in, nice and snug, and he happily, hurriedly pulls his shirt back on. She knows something’s wrong, and he knows that she knows. He can feel her concern digging at him as he stretches up, biting back a wince, and replaces the first-aid kit. But they’re still deep enough in the shadow of the fallout that I’m fine can translate as I’m not ready to talk about it yet. So, she takes him at his word, for now, but her eyes stick to him for the rest of their shift.
He doesn’t sleep that night, either.
The next morning, he rises with the sun, though he can’t see it, and dutifully tows himself to the bathroom. While the shower warms up, he spares himself a moment to rest his weight against the vanity, palms flush to the cool countertop. The man who greets him in the mirror is a shell. His dim eyes are bloodshot, rimmed with punch-deep bags. His hair is lank, lackluster, bordering on unkempt. And his skin has crossed over the line, leapt onto the wrong side of chalky.
The quarter is a fist now.
But he just has to push through.
To the next hour, next break, next day, next whatever. He just has to push through and things will get better.
Things don’t get any better on Thursday.
By Friday, he admits defeat.
His sheets are damp with sweat, and yet he’s barely opened his eyes before a shiver racks his spine, raring to break him apart. A glass shard of light barges through the curtains he forgot to close, and drives straight through his temple. His vision swirls when he tries to sit up, then cuts out altogether, harsh stars popping in the purple-brown-black-green void. Even the movement of lifting his comforter scrapes at the already hollowed pit of his chest, whittling his tenuous ribs and yanking at his frailed shoulders. Wrong, that voice he’s tried so hard to ignore screams, wrong, wrong, wrong! Everything is wrong! You’re fucked!
The fist is a hailstone now.
The sort that destroys cars and punches holes through homes.
One day, he tells himself as, on jellied legs, he hobbles over to the phone. He can give himself one day. It’s not much, it won’t be enough, but it’s all he can afford.
Keith’s annoyed but hardly surprised when Steve shovels his excuses and half-sincere apologies across the line. Get some rest, dude, he says before he unceremoniously hangs up. It’s probably the nicest thing he’s said to Steve in the nearly six months since he reluctantly hired him at Robin’s request.
He really ought to call her too, leave a message on the machine and let her know he won’t be there when she gets in, put her fears to rest before they can sprout and spread. But his fingers give out, then his hand, followed by his arm. The phone drops, saved from an unpleasant run-in with the carpet by the spring of its cord, buoying it up at the last second. It sways, back and forth, dial tone droning from the speaker. If he bends down to fetch it, he’s pretty certain he won’t get back up. Not for a while, at least.
It’s all he can do to shuffle across the room, cross his fingers in the vain hope that whatever bug’s gotten into him will have the decency to crawl out sometime today, and collapse back in bed.
He’s asleep before his face hits the pillow.
His hand flies out, fingers closing around his bat and swinging it out before he’s even sat up.
His heart thunders in his chest, dragging his breath along for the ride. It’s ragged, wretched and wet, disrupting the pressing silence and taut stillness of his room. A quick scan reveals nothing but the ordinary: no grisly beast waiting to pounce, no masked man rifling through his drawers, no cause for panic, not a single knick-knack out of place. Still, the hairs on the back of his neck refuse to stand down.
Then, it comes again.
A knock.
An innocent, innocuous knock.
Innocent, innocuous but insistent, intense. Intruding through the foyer, ricocheting around his walls, through his head, in one ear but never out the other.
Insistent, intense, and impatient too. Only a handful of seconds pass—nowhere near enough time for even Carl Lewis to get to the door—before the next round of knocking starts. And this time, it doesn’t stop.
Three seconds, five seconds, ten seconds on.
No part of him wants to move, feels capable of moving, but for the sake of maybe making the pain stop, he hauls himself up, towing his blanket with him. On his way down the stairs, he stumbles over the fabric bunched around his feet no less than four times, and he can’t help but think how pathetic, how ironic it would be if, after everything, he were to trip and meet his death at the hands of his own clumsiness.
Or maybe it would just be funny.
But he reaches the bottom of the stairs in one piece—for better or worse—and hikes his blanket up over his head, into a floppy hood. Even the thunk of the deadbolt sliding back is enough to make him wince, and his hand hesitates over the knob. The knocking has finally relented, blissful silence caressing his abused ears. He could just walk away, go back to bed, stay there until he feels less like over-microwaved shit.
The door cracked open, his eyes struggle to cope with the sudden stab of light, throwing up a cavalry of spots in defense. Squinting, he can just make out a dark, human-shaped blob: opaque and hazy at the edges. And yet, he knows, immediately, it’s not Robin standing on his doorstep.
He’d assumed it would be Robin.
“Well, that’s not good,” the blob says. A voice that could only belong to one person.
“What?” He shoves the blanket off his head, scraping a futile hand through his sweat-strung hair. For the sake of his dignity, he prays that, at the very least, he wasn’t cheek-deep in a pool of his own drool for the past eight and a half hours. Or that it isn’t noticeable if he was.
“You’re alive,” Eddie clarifies, “which means Buckley’s gonna kill you.”
He doesn’t ask to come in; he just breezes past Steve and into the foyer, fiddling his fingers through the bowl of potpourri on the hall table. Like he belongs here. Like he’s been here a hundred times before. But, ill-mannered or not, Steve gladly takes the excuse to slam the door shut and seal out the foul sunlight seeping past the jamb, into his sanctuary.
A second later, he’s hit by a blast of Old Spice.
Figuratively, but in the moment, it feels quite literal. As if someone spritzed the whole bottle up his nose. But hidden between the cedar and the citrus—like a rose between the thorns—lies a single swirl of the warm vanilla body wash Robin uses.
“She’s freaking out, man,” Eddie says, and Steve blinks, holding his breath as he tunes back in. “Been calling you every ten minutes for the past hour and a half and pulling a new chunk of hair out every time she got the busy signal. She was about to abandon ship and bike over here, but I told her I’d go in her stead and report my findings.”
He lobs a grenade of a glance over his shoulder.
Steve hikes the blanket back up on his shoulder. “I told Keith I wasn’t coming in today.”
“Yeah, well, I guess you left a little too much to the imagination.” Eddie’s eyes abandon him to run from the glossy hardwood up to the dusty crystal tears of the chandelier looming lavishly over his head and over to the shuttered windows, curtains buttoned up as tight as Fort Knox. “Fucking hell, Harrington. It’s like a goddamn cave in here.”
He turns to face Steve, and it’s remarkable, really, the difference a few bits of clothing can make.
The red flannel layered over top of his Iron Maiden t-shirt must be at least two sizes too big, and his light-wash jeans, slightly frayed at the cuffs, don’t exactly scream big bad metalhead. His high-tops have certainly seen better days, more grey than black at this point, but they’re littered with drowsy doodles and patterns. In the back of his head, he’d known that Eddie had other clothes, obviously. But seeing him without that scuffed leather jacket, that grubby Hellfire shirt, those waterlogged Reeboks, it’s like seeing a dog without its fur or running into a teacher at the grocery store. This Eddie is quiet. Pared. Real. Almost…soft.
Or maybe he’s just the man between the lines, behind the veil of adoration thrown over Dustin’s eyes.
A little too late, Steve spits up an answer. “I had a migraine.”
“Oh, shit. Sorry.” Eddie’s faces drops along with his voice, quieter than a pin, and a useless pang of guilt joins the circus of aches gallivanting around Steve’s body.
“It’s alright,” he says, “really. The worst of it’s passed.”
“You got anything you can take? Like Advil or—” Eddie stops, lifting his nose up in the air, apparently doing his best impression of a bloodhound on a scent. “Is it super hot in here or is it just me?”
“It’s definitely not you.” He tries to laugh when Eddie, his sympathy chucked out the window in a heartbeat, shoots him a succinct middle finger, but it’s feeble, not strong enough to survive in the stalled air. “I caught a chill last night, and I haven’t been able to shake it.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but have you tried a shower?”
“Yes.”
He’d tried when he woke up drenched in sweat around eleven. And it felt like he was being burned alive, liquid flame pouring across his skin, chewing his flesh. He’d only been able to stand it for a handful of seconds before he threw himself out, where he slammed into the counter and stamped a nice bruise on his hip in his haste to grab a towel to wipe away the boiling pain.
Somewhere in their secluded niche of Loch Nora, a car door slams.
Steve ducks, all thoughts dumped from his head as his hand fly back and clap over his ringing ears. It takes all of two seconds for his brain to catch up and pump the brakes on his panic, but the damage is already done. He can feel Eddie’s eyes like a hive of fire ants on the back of his neck.
“Jesus, what’s got you so on edge, man?” He asks, torn somewhere between concern and confusion. “Is somebody after you? You know something you shouldn’t?”
Steve straightens up, pulls his blanket closer around himself, as if that’ll help claw back even an ounce of his hemorrhaging pride. “I’m not on edge. I’m sick, see—” He spits up two pebbly coughs into his fist.
“Yeah, you don’t have to convince me of that,” Eddie retorts, a less-than-flattering gaze dusted across Steve’s admittedly pitiful state of existence. “Anyway, I know you’ve got a phone around here, even if you don’t know how to use it. Care to point me in the right direction?”
“Upstairs and to the left, in my room.”
Dramatic as ever, Eddie sweeps down in an ornate bow and tips an invisible hat. “Muchas gracias, señor.”
It’s still there, the slight hitch in his step, as he tramples up the stairs. He must be the luckiest of them all. It’s like the universe suddenly had a change of heart and felt bad for everything it’d put him through in such a short amount of time. Because leading a pissed-off swarm of demobats on a bike chase might just be the stupidest, bravest thing Steve’s ever heard of, and by all rights and logic, he shouldn’t have made it out in one piece, if at all. And yet, thanks to the magic of leather and denim, he’d staggered away with nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a bit of clean-up and a handful of stitches.
At least, on the outside.
God knows how he’s holding up, after everything. Witnessing a murder is bad enough on its own. But being publicly accused of that murder and hunted down like a dog and villainized by the entire town and sucked into a hellish underworld and dumped into a horror movie right at the climax? Well, frankly, Steve’s shocked that Eddie’s still standing, let alone smiling. He ought to have checked in on him sooner.
He follows at a much more sedate pace, his fleecy cape trailing behind him, collecting lint and dust and God knows what. He’s only just reached the landing when Eddie’s already at his door, greeting it with all the same hesitation with which he greeted the front door: none. Manners still be damned, he barges right in. A full fifteen seconds later, Steve drifts through the doorway, just in time to see Eddie set the photo strip of him and Robin back on his dresser before bounding over to the desk in the corner.
Fishing it up by the cord, he props the phone between his ear and his shoulder and punches the buttons with his pointer finger, brows bunched together as his mouth silently echoes each number. The look he shoots Steve—six numbers in, his finger poised over the seventh—is nothing short of grim.
“Brace yourself,” he says before keying in the final ‘3’.
The line’s barely rung before a tin-canned version of Robin’s voice shoots across. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah.” Eddie, with the subtlety of a neon sign, steals a glance at Steve from the corner of his eye. “He looks like shit, but he’s breathing and in one piece. Here, ask him yourself.”
Head bowed by the chains of guilt lashed around his neck, Steve shuffles the rest of the way across the room and accepts the phone Eddie holds out to him. The beige plastic creaks under his grasp. His voice deflates, punctured by a thorn of his own making. “Hey, Rob.”
“Steven Alexander.”
He sighs; his shoulders sag. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
He’s answered by the blunt ca-thunk of a VHS case being shut, with quite a bit of force. “Well, you did, asshole.”
The blanket finally gives in to gravity as he reaches up to pinch his nose, a trip hazard pooled around his feet. “I know. I’m sorry,” he says again. “I took some NyQuil, and I guess it knocked me out pretty cold.”
Like a hammer to the temple, he can feel it when Eddie’s eyes whip over to him, lobbing suspicion at the side of his head by the handful. But he’ll deal with that later, if ever, because right now—
“What are your symptoms? Do you have a fever? Headache? Any weakness or discomfort? Itching or tingling? Nausea, vomiting? Cramps? Light sensitivity?”
Her words blur together, tripping on each other’s heels. A common habit of hers, one he’s long since adapted to, but even he’s struggling to keep up right now. “Rob, slow down—”
“There’s no time to slow down, Steve!” She insists in a tone that tells him, were there not a handful of miles between them, she would be viciously shaking him by the shoulders right now. “Time is of the essence in a situation like this!”
“There is no situation. It’s just a cold,” he lies. “I promise.”
It takes over half an hour to talk Robin down.
Half an hour, a handful of white lies, a dozen more promises, two more apologies, and a standing invitation for whatever time she manages to escape work. Plus an additional three minutes to say goodbye, despite the customers he can hear in the lulls between her words, their faceless, shapeless murmur growing more agitated with every reiteration of I’ll be there as soon as I can and are you sure you don’t need anything? But when she does hang up, his sigh of relief could blow the third pig’s house down.
The act falls from his shoulders as eagerly and easily as the blanket had.
He’s only delaying the inevitable, he knows that. She’ll see straight through him the second she looks him in the eyes, but ten tons of extra worry is the last thing she needs during a Friday night shift.
The second he sets the phone down, Eddie is on him.
“What the hell is actually going on with you?” He asks. His eyes narrow down to twin barbs of flint as he circles around Steve, scrutinizing him from all angles. “And don’t try and feed me that ‘it’s just a cold’ line. Because that was and is clearly bullshit.”
“I’m fine, Columbo.” He leans back against the desk and prays it comes across as ‘casual’ instead of the desperate bid for support that it is. “I just—Haven’t been sleeping well. That’s all.”
“Bullshit,” Eddie repeats, round on the ‘b’ and spitty on the ‘t’. He steps back, arms crossed over his chest, and if Steve hadn’t seen him take a wedgie from the puny likes of Dustin, he might actually look intimidating. “Lift up your shirt.”
Steve’s hands jump to his hips, grasping at his hem, tugging his t-shirt down further. “What? Are you out of your—”
“Look, if you’ve got rabies or scabies or some shit, and I just leave you here to wallow without doing my due diligence, Buckley’s gonna kick my ass to kingdom come and back. And frankly, I’ve had enough of my life being in peril. Now, upsy daisy, big boy.”
It’s easier at this point to just do as he’s asked. And if there’s a chance it’ll get him back into the sweet embrace of his bed even a moment sooner, he’ll take it. So, like or not, he pops his top and lets Eddie take a look at his undercarriage.
He’s the opposite of Robin: his movements come in jerky bursts, imprecise and insecure, his fingers pecking at the wilted strands of gauze. As if he’s afraid of being burned, being infected. His teeth gnash at his bottom lip, and Steve can practically hear his heartbeat thud-thudding against his ribs.
He keeps his eyes on the opposite wall, tacked to the photos and tickets and good memories plastered on his bulletin board. As far from himself as he can get. He hasn’t looked for a reason. Because he knows it’ll be ugly. Because he knows the bits of gauze and bandage he spared himself were about as good as closing his eyes and wishing for the Tooth Fairy to heal him with a flick of her wand. It was only a matter of time until his careless confidence caught up with him, but he’d hoped he could keep running for a little bit longer.
The last layer of gauze falls away.
“What the fuck,” Eddie whispers. Not the most reassuring response, but not entirely unexpected either. Same goes for the slack-jawed, wide-eyed shock that takes over his face. What is unexpected, though, is how his fingers absently inch toward Steve’s stomach, shaking ever so slightly. But they flinch back almost immediately, curling in on themselves as they retreat. “How—”
Steve looks down then, the morbid curiosity too much to ignore any longer.
He’s become reluctantly accustomed to strange, inexplicable things over the last three years, but this takes the cake.
Two scabs.
That’s all that’s left of the wounds where he was eaten alive, the only reminder of the worst pain he’s ever endured, the only evidence of how close he came to dying. Two scabs: rusty red and about the size of a quarter. No pink puckered skin, recently knit back together. No gut-turning peek of blood and muscle. No scars.
The bruise from this morning is nowhere to be seen, either.
He blinks. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume the week-long drought of sleep might be affecting his vision. But no amount of blinking changes what he’s seeing. “I don’t know,” he says in answer to Eddie’s unfinished question.
Those three little words are enough to shatter Eddie’s shock, snapping him out of his stupor and into a screech. “What the hell do you mean you don’t know? It’s your fucking stomach, man. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!” A bit belated, Steve pulls his shirt back down. “I haven’t even changed the bandages since Tuesday when Rob put them on.”
“I’m telling Buckley that.”
“Please don’t.”
“Nah, I’m gonna. But first—” With a gentle but firm jab of his elbow, Eddie nudges him out of the way and reaches for the phone again “—I’m calling Nancy.”
“No, you don’t need to—”
“Yes, I fucking do. Dude, this—” He jangles his hand in the general vicinity of Steve’s waist “—is weird shit. It’s not normal. And if anybody’s gonna know what to do and how to do it without losing their fucking mind, it’s a helluva lot more likely to be Wheeler than me.”
The last thing Nancy needs is another problem dropped onto her overcrowded, overused plate. The world’s already demanded far too much from her, far too quickly and frequently, and she’s already gone far above and beyond the duty of an ex-girlfriend for him. Sick as he is, he doesn’t have the energy or strength to wrestle the phone away, but that doesn’t stop him from trying.
The eighth time Eddie effortlessly evades his grasp, he tosses in the towel; he wishes it was a real towel, soaked in septic water, that he could ball up and chuck at Eddie’s smug face, but he settles for rolling his eyes.
“Fine,” he says, as if he’s the one with any control here. As if his permission means a damn thing to Eddie. Hands on his hips, he stands back and watches Eddie’s finger poke its way around the keypad and— “You know her number?”
“Chill out, Casanova. We haven’t been carrying on a sordid affair behind your back.” He taps a finger to his temple. “I have all my little sheepies’ numbers memorized. Just in case.”
“That’s not what I—” His knees give without warning. It’s only by sheer luck that he manages to catch himself with a hand planted against the wall rather than collapsing on the floor, embarrassing himself even more than he already has.
Well, luck and Eddie, who lunges over just in time to get a hand shoved under his armpit.
And it’s by sheer opposite of luck that the heel of his palm drives straight through the drywall, biting a crescent into the hideous wallpaper his mother spent weeks dithering over.
“Alright, you know what?” Eddie’s other hand hops, skips, and jumps around Steve’s hips, chest, waist, never landing. “You’re on bed rest starting now.”
Steve’s a little too busy staring at the dust, the tiny crumbs of plaster clinging to his palm, to put up a fight. Numb, he lets Eddie herd him over to his bed and ease him down onto the mattress. It must been a freak accident, he tells himself, there must’ve been some defect, some weakness in that part of the wall, that’s all.
The dreary toll of the phone cuts through the room. Once, twice—
“Hey, Nance. Yeah. Sorry to call outta the blue here, but uh…” Eddie’s voice drops, and he turns away, hunching into the corner, phone cord winding around his finger. “I need your help. It’s Steve.”
Is he okay? What happened? Nancy’s voice. But he must’ve just imagined it.
Eddie sighs. “I don’t know, man. He keeps saying he’s fine, but the guy looks like he’s been hanging around Death’s door. And the fucking really weird part is—The bites are gone.”
What? His imagination plants a heap of shock in that little word, though he’s not sure anything could surprise her anymore. Like, gone-gone?
“As good as. I’m not exactly well-versed in this Upside Down shit, but I think…” Eddie trails off, mulling his words while mauling his thumbnail. “You said when Will got lost in there, he, uh—Got infected, right? A piece of it came back with him?”
He must feel Steve’s stare on him, because he tucks the phone in closer to his mouth and lowers his voice even further, down to a whisper that most people in Hawkins probably would’ve argued he was incapable of; it doesn’t make a difference. Steve can still hear every word, but he politely tunes out, closes his eyes, lays back, ignores his pounding heart, and prays the Sandman is in the neighborhood and feeling generous.
A minute later, the phone jangles as Eddie sets the receiver back in its cradle.
“Nance is on her way,” he announces. “You hungry?”
Steve opens his sandless, bleary eyes. Facing the blank stare of the ceiling, it occurs to him that he hasn’t eaten all day. “Starving.”
“What’re you in the mood for? I don’t wanna brag—” Almost certainly a lie “—but I make a mean PB&J.”
“I’d eat sauerkraut and bologna sandwich right now.”
“Noted,” Eddie says, and with a snappy salute, he ducks out of the room.
He returns, a suspicious six minutes later, with an unprecedented knock, two plates in hand, and a paper towel draped over his arm.
“Monsieur, your dinner is served,” he declares in what Steve can only assume is supposed to be a French accent, but it comes out more like a mouthful of bees. He passes the plate in his left hand over, barely giving Steve time to get a hold of it before he launches himself onto the mattress, mercilessly jostling the whole bed. “Hope you don’t mind,” he adds, “I helped myself.”
Installed on top of the commandeered Winnebago as the world raced towards its certain end, they’d spent half a night trading a cigarette and idle chatter back and forth. They were supposed to be on watch, but aside from a few slowpoking deer and a pack of coyotes who didn’t spare them a single glance as they trolloped from one tree line to the next, the field they’d parked themselves in remained just as empty as they’d found it. Their attention had drifted. Out there, under the stars, in the open air, the conversation had come easily. Smooth as melted butter.
But now, holed up in his room, sat across from each other on his bed, mulching their way through double-stacked sandwiches, peanut butter plastered to the roofs of their mouths, it’s a bit more…well, sticky.
Steve forces a particularly stubborn wad of bread down his esophagus. “So, how’s Wayne doing?”
“Just as cranky and stubborn as he’s ever been.” Eddie pauses, licking a rogue glob of jelly from the side of his finger. “Tried to tell him he oughta be quieter about supporting me, at least in public. Figured folks of Carver’s ilk might take it easier on him if he played the blindsided uncle, wondering how he missed the warning signs, drowning in regret.”
He stuffs another honking bite of PB&J into his mouth.
“But the bastard won’t listen. Keeps saying he’s got ‘morals’ and ‘a backbone’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.” The words are brutally garbled, accompanied by a spray of crumbs, but he waves the matter off with a flippant swish of his sandwich. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m damn lucky to have him, and there’s nobody else I’d rather have going to bat for me, I just—Fuck, I feel guilty, you know?”
Steve’s not sure if that’s an actual question, but he answers it anyway. “Yeah, I know. I’m pretty familiar with guilt, so I can tell you there’s no point.”
“Huh?”
“Feeling guilty for things you can’t control. There’s no point to it.” He tears a curve of crust from his sandwich. “You’re not gonna change anything, you’re just gonna make yourself feel like shit.”
“Jesus.” Eddie scoffs, but it trips over his growing smile. “Who knew Steve Harrington was a secret sage? When did you start dipping your little piggy-wigglies into the fount of wisdom?”
“You’d be amazed the kind of places your mind’ll go when you can’t sleep at night.”
“Yeah…” The corner of his smile tips up higher, into wry territory. He seems, suddenly, quite preoccupied with the structural integrity of his sandwich. “How long does that last?”
“I’ll let you know when I find out.”
And God, he hopes it is a ‘when’ and not an ‘if’.
“No, no, Stevie.” Eddie shakes his head, hard enough that his hair fans out, a few strands slapping him in the face. “This is the part where you lie and tell me what I wanna hear and guarantee it’ll all get better in just four to five business days.”
A smile of his own bumbling out of left field, Steve shrugs. “I’m not a very good actor.”
“I’ll take a Golden Raspberry performance, man. I’m desperate. I need any good news I can get. Come on,” he pleads, his hands clasped together, his eyes even more doe-like than usual. “I’m begging you. Give me your best Bogart.”
It’s only thanks to Robin’s continuing, concentrated reeducation efforts that Steve actually recognizes that name. God knows what possesses him to actually indulge Eddie, though.
“Alright, fine. Here goes nothing…” He clears his throat, straightens his shoulders, and pries open the back files of his brain, rifling through all those old movies Robin constantly insists they put on. Then, he jams his voice down deep and adds a scoop of gravel. “It’s the, uh…stuff dreams are made of. Trust me, you’ll be back on the sweet side before you know it, kid. So, here’s looking at you. This is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”
It works.
Eddie laughs, laughs so hard that he rocks back, clutching his stomach, and nearly dumps his sandwich on the sheets. It’s far more than what’s warranted for a subpar impression, but Steve joins him, eagerly. He forgets, for a moment, that the world around him is turning on its head, that his body is turning against him. For a moment, he’s nineteen, and he’s in his room with a friend, and their knees are brushing, and he’s laughing, and that’s it, that’s all, that’s enough.
Then, his stomach lurches.