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‘Will you hold that one too?
The version of the story that never learned
to consider sound? and the one where sound
is only the opposite of metal? and the one
where the sound of metal is never enough
to quiet the dead?’
— from ‘Introduction to Quantum Theory’ by Franny Choi
Sometimes, Eddie pretends like they’re normal. Pretends like they move together and apart the way normal people do, in and out of each other’s spaces, sex that means no more or no less than they might intend it to, each time —
Sometimes, it even works.
And sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes like now it’s Eddie counting the drips from the faucet in the kitchen as he tries to keep a hold of his throat because Joyce came back smelling of hospital from going with Hopper to his check-up and he’s thinking shaver he’s thinking hospital gown he’s thinking brain scans and corpus callosotomy and he’s thinking of a death he didn’t die–
They’re different, now, he’s heard Nancy saying to Robin, when she thinks no one else can hear. Steve and Eddie. I don’t know what to do with that.
And Robin, darling Robin, Eddie fucking loves her sometimes — Robin going I don’t know if we’re meant to do anything with it at all, to be honest. Like–
“Shit, I smell like hospital, don’t I,” Joyce says, tugging at the collar of her shirt. “God, I hate that smell.”
Eddie is sitting cross-legged on the counter, smoking a cigarette with twitchy fingers. It’s warm in the house, close to hot, but he’s in a pair of Steve’s sweatpants. “You said it, not me.”
She looks at him. Steve’s house is where they come for a shower — hot water not quite rigged up enough for five in the cabin just yet — but she doesn’t move off upstairs, standing quietly and staring at him instead. He hasn’t been able to work her out, really, is the thing. What she wants from him.
(And the way Steve would tut at him, has, for that kind of question. She doesn’t want anything, man, that’s the point. Except Eddie’s willing to bet Steve’s had the same thoughts, himself, just not stupid enough to share them.)
“Can I bum one?” she says, reaching out her fingers.
Eddie shrugs and hands one to her; when he tosses her the lighter, she doesn’t catch it. It skitters off across the floor.
She smiles at herself, unabashed, as she crouches to pick it up: “Y’know, I once tried to help Hop against a Russian assassin by throwing him a gun. I missed.” Eddie’s eyebrows climb. “We Byers leave the athleticism to the Steves of this world, I think.”
He snorts. “I’m pretty sure Jonathan can throw a mean punch.”
Something changes in her face. He sort of regrets saying it, though he’s not really sure why. He knows Jonathan once hit Steve. He’s pretty sure Steve deserved it, though he wouldn’t have done it himself. He lets them dislocate his shoulders and still comes back for more; he sort of admires that about Jonathan, his intolerance for bullshit. Eddie just falls in love with the bullshit. Addicted to whatever kills him.
(Enough to die thirty-one times.)
“How are you doing?” she asks, after a silence, and the question’s almost painful. Because it’s not something he talks about. Not to anyone but Steve, and even then–
He wonders what they would say. If they knew it all. If she knew it all. But they do know he died thirty-one times and there’s something in that, isn’t there, something that says he wasn’t really trying not to. Something that says you really have to want it, to die that many times. Don’t you.
“Okay,” he says, taking a long breath of smoke and letting hot ash line his throat. “Y’know, it’s–”
Another silence. She’s not going to take pity on him, he sees, and he wonders at that, that she’s not the pitying kind. Aren’t mothers meant to be pitying? He wouldn’t know.
“Steve helps,” he admits, the first time he’s said anything like that out loud. “And I think I– I help him.”
She smiles faintly. “That’s good,” she says. “I’m glad.”
And he hates it, suddenly. That she’s glad. That she smells like hospital and she’s smoking his cigarette and she’s glad, why is she glad, when Eddie’s the reason Steve’s fucked up in the first place–
He becomes aware that the twisting of his rings around his fingers has become something close to frantic, and he’s made aware of it by Joyce’s heavy gaze, eyes on his hands, and he doesn’t know how to read that gaze. He’s never been able to read any look, pitying or otherwise, when they learn something about him– not even from Steve–
(The two times he said Yeah, they’re what they look like, Harrington–)
It hurts, he thinks, when she looks at him. Not a good hurt.
“So he’s good to you, then?” says Wayne, when it comes to it, when Eddie can’t hide the feelings all over his face and the rawness to them, the things no one but Steve will understand. So he’s good to you, then?
“He is,” Eddie allows, though that’s not even the point, and he thinks Wayne knows that, actually, knows that that’s not even the point. The point is something more like does he make you want to be good to yourself, and it feels sticky and codependent and like they’d each die without the other, which–
they have done, let’s face it–
and yet it is. The point.
“Yes,” Eddie repeats, reaffirms, and the question is answered.
“I died a lot, didn’t I?” Max asks them one night, staying over at Steve’s with no intention of sleeping because everyone knows Steve and Eddie don’t really sleep anymore, just another little thing about them. They’re different, now.
“Yeah,” Eddie says, breathing out more smoke. They’re lying on the roof, side by side, the three of them, looking at the stars winking out from a haze of cloud. “Don’t get it twisted, Red, you’re still way behind in the rankings–”
“I knew you’d turn it into a competition,” she says, smile in her voice. Steve isn’t saying anything. Eddie turns his head to find his profile, lit silver in the starlight, watches his throat dip as he swallows down some emotion he’s not going to talk about, and Eddie regrets it, the joke. He’s doing that a lot, lately. Regretting things. Because that’s what they never tell you, isn’t it, about coming back to life. All that time you spent knowing about death and preparing for it and intending it and then–
Things go back to mattering again. And he’s got a surplus of nihilism left, just sort of weeping out of him, dripping from his bones, and it’s gotta come out somewhere and it comes out in the worst places, the wrong places, where it rots at other people like acid. Because something in the universe just doesn’t want him to die.
“I don’t, anymore. By the way. In case you were– if you were wondering.” Max looks between them, hair colorless in the dark. “Want to– yeah.”
Steve doesn’t say anything, just moves a hand to her arm and squeezes, and Eddie gets a sort of sinking feeling, because Steve only gets like this, all quiet and deep and tactile, when there’s something wrong, and why else would there be something wrong if not because of–
When Max goes to bed Eddie can’t hold it in, the acid, it comes pouring out and he’s grabbing at Steve, at his taut arms, his scarred torso, hipbones, grabbing and bowing his head over him and sort of hissing it out as he does it, as he touches him, “I’m fucking this up,” the head bowing more like a prayer than anything else, though what he’s praying for he doesn’t know–
“You’re not,” Steve says, hand coming to tangle in Eddie’s hair, pulling his head down close into Steve’s chest, skin to skin, so he can feel Steve’s heartbeat through his cheek.
“It feels wrong. Like– not fitting. Like we– like we never made it out. Or we shouldn’t have made it out. Like the world where I died is the real world. Like I’m dead right now.”
“You’re not,” Steve says. “You’re not dead. I know what it feels like when you’re dead.”
“Maybe I’ve been dead this whole time. Maybe you’ve never known me alive.”
“I mean, if that’s the case, then does it– does it really matter?”
Eddie can feel Steve’s heart pounding. Steve is definitively alive. Steve has always been alive. Even when Vecna got him, alive. And how much that matters to Eddie makes Eddie sort of regret everything a little more, because if this is how it feels to care about someone so permanently alive — like walking on his hands on the edge of a painfully sharp knife — then what must it feel like to love someone who’s already dead?
But Steve is taking his wrist, holding it up, thumbing a line over his pulse point. Eddie feels it tremble under the touch. “See? Alive.”
“But I’m fucking this up.” It comes out a whisper, plaintive like a fucking kitten. But then again, Eddie’s always felt small around Steve, fragile. Tender. I’m fucking this up even by saying it, he wants to continue. I’m fucking it up by not wanting to fuck it up. I’m fucking it up by being in it. I’m fucking it up by– I’m fucking you up too–
The twentieth loop, Steve cuffed him to a radiator and he broke his own wrist to get free. It hurts sometimes, as all the wounds hurt, a phantom pain because they never really healed, did they, just erased from existence, turned back with the clock. He knows Steve gets it too — migraines from when he was shot in the head, the strange itching across his torso from the bats — but Steve never says anything. Suffers in silence. Lies down in a dark room and lets Eddie tilt the glass for a sip of water, and no one else sees it at all.
Eddie is icing his wrist in the kitchen one day when Robin comes in and pulls herself up onto the counter and says, “I’m worried about Steve.”
Eddie feels a drip of icy water run down his forearm, past the bats that Steve’s suggested he cover up with crows, something he probably will do, when he’s less afraid of going out into the world again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean–” she huffs and drums her fingers on the granite “–he won’t talk to me. Like, really talk to me. And I know you have each other to– to talk about the stuff only you guys remember, and that’s fine, really it’s fine, but don’t you think it might be healthier to–”
“Probably,” he says, feeling cold numbness sink into his bones. When it begins to hurt he drops the icepack in the basin and leans back on his hands, flexing his broken-not-broken wrist, remembers Steve’s tortured eyes, remembers I’m sorry– I had to– it’s the only way to save you– “It’s not something you want to hear.”
“He told me he decided to remember. Everything that happened, in the loops. The Raven Queen gave him a choice.”
He knows what she’s asking. Does he regret it? Do you? He shakes his head. “That’s not the problem, here. The remembering, it isn’t– it’s shit, but it’s–” He pulls his hands back and looks at them. “It would be worse if we didn’t.”
The thing is, this whole time loop situation has him thinking about that, really, because that’s the sort of person he is. DnD and Tolkien and Cthulhu and shit. The way that out there is a world in which he does not remember — and in such a world, did any of it happen at all? Does a tree fall in a forest if no one remembers it? Does Eddie Munson die over and over?
“Well, I think Nance is about two days out from an intervention, so I’d talk to someone about it all before she gets the chance. Maybe Joyce. Joyce is good at that stuff.”
Which, yeah, she probably is, but Eddie is sort of scared of her. At the kindness in her eyes that comes with a side of wariness, the little flinch she gave when Eddie talked about Jonathan throwing a punch — Eddie knew the name Lonnie Byers once, he remembers — wariness she turns outward, not inwards. She could deal him some damage, Eddie recognises, the way no one except some demon fucking bats and Henry Creel have been able to deal him damage in a very long time. Something about the rawness of not having a mother.
So it’s Nancy, in the end. They sit cross-legged on the patio by the pool, not touching the water — he forgot about the whole landing in the water watching Patrick’s bones cleave in two if not for Vecna he’d have been murdered and isn’t that fucking ironic– until he tried to swim and had a panic attack the second the water closed over his head — and he figures it really makes him part of the gang, now, the water thing. The pool.
“I feel like I’m fucking it up,” he says, more to the pool than to Nancy. She’s got a faintly surprised look on her face, semi-permanent, like she doesn’t really understand what’s going on here. She’s a good actor, he’ll give her that. He knows Robin told her she talked to him.
“Fucking what up?”
“Steve. Me and Steve. Just– life. Being alive again. I don’t know how to do it.”
“Does anyone?” she murmurs, the surprise melting from her face like it was never there at all, and she looks at him seriously. “Barb died here. In this pool. And it completely– it completely changed who I am. It sounds stupid, maybe, but a version of me died here too. The version that could love Steve the way he deserves, and also the– the version that could love myself the way I deserve. Y’know? And I– I let that ruin me, for a while. Blaming myself, holding all that guilt, wishing I hadn’t–” She exhales. “I think regret’s a sort of pointless emotion. But I think I– I think I regret what it did to me, all of that. When it wasn’t my fault. And I convinced myself it was.”
Eddie brings his legs up and puts his head between his knees. “What do you do with it? The regret?”
“I’ll get back to you on that,” she says. When he looks up, she’s smiling a little. And he realises then, oh. I’m worried about Steve. So that was a fucking lie. Scheming shits, the two of them, scratch that, three, because Steve’s definitely in on this–
He doesn’t need their looking after him. He doesn’t need– he needs–
He remembers, suddenly, the thirtieth time. Starting to remember, sitting himself cross-legged on the dusty floorboards in the Creel house with the strangest sense of deja-vu, I can’t even die right. I keep coming back. He regrets saying that in front of Dustin. He’s glad the kid doesn’t remember it.
It’s with further deja-vu that he looks at her and says, “I think something snapped, that night, inside my head. With Chrissy. Watching her– and then running–” He exhales through his teeth. “And if that– if that thing hadn’t snapped, then maybe none of the rest would have happened.”
“We don’t know what would have happened,” she says, honestly. “We don’t know anything.”
And that’s the rub, isn’t it? Because there are thirty-one different iterations of Eddie Munson, floating out there in the aether, and not a single one of them doesn’t want to die. None of them except the thirty-second. This Eddie Munson. There’s no test case for this, no precedent he can rely on. Nothing to know. A fresh start; when he looks ahead of him, there are no footprints to follow.
That night when his skin starts to itch he picks up his pen and does a loose sketch of the way Steve looked under the lab fluorescents in hospital scrubs. It’s not a nice memory, but then, few of the things he finds himself drawing are. He’s sitting up in bed; he feels Steve’s sleepy arm wind its way around his waist, face burrowing into his side, and his pen stills. (He’s taken to drawing in ballpoint, each time, as if to remind himself he’s real, that he isn’t going to be erased.)
“You okay?” Steve murmurs.
I’m never gonna be the same as I was, Eddie thinks about saying into the dark. (Drawing by dim light, feeling out for the lines of Steve’s face.) We’re different, now, aren’t we?
He doesn’t say this. He says, “Yeah.”
Thinks, does that really have to be a bad thing?
(It’s the last loop he dreams of most of all. Playing Master of Puppets with Max counting down the time next to him, retreating down to the trailer when it comes time for it, looking at the door at the gate at the rope and thinking No. Not this time. This time, choosing life. Doing what he couldn’t do thirty-one other times.
It’s these, the recurring dreams, that make him certain he meant it.)
He’s drawing again, in the kitchen this time, when Byers junior wanders in. Something shy, closed-off about the kid, something Eddie could maybe relate to, five or so years ago. Will stands there awkwardly for a moment, hovering in the doorway, until Eddie sets down his pen and beckons him forth. They sit opposite each other at the breakfast bar and after a while of silence Eddie raises an eyebrow and says, “So what can I do for you, young Byers?”
Will gets a sort of deer-in-headlights look. His eyes fall to Eddie’s sketchbook, where he’s etching in the shadows in the Creel attic as the crows come too late to save him, the thirtieth loop — “Wow,” Will says. “You’re a really good artist.”
Eddie itches the inside of his wrist and smiles lopsidedly. “Thanks, kid, but from what I’ve heard you’re the real talent around here.”
Will flushes and taps his fingers on the countertop. “Are you– are you drawing what happened? In the loops?”
“Yeah. It kind of– helps, I guess. To get it out.”
“Yeah, it does,” the kid says, and wait, shit, this is Will Byers, this is the one that died and came back to life, the one that was possessed, the one– “I used to– when they called me Zombie Boy. At school. I used to draw what that would look like.”
“Pretty metal, probably,” Eddie says, and Will lets out a laugh like it was startled from him.
“If you say so, I guess.” He scratches the back of his neck. “Yeah, I guess it is, like, kinda cool, to be Zombie Boy.”
Eddie wonders if he also qualifies for the title of zombie boy. He and Will have both died and come back to life, haven’t they– not to mention Hopper– really there’s a whole gang of them now–
(None of them wanted it, though. None of them but Eddie.)
“You and– you and Steve,” Will starts, and oh, that’s the real reason he’s here, isn’t it? Eddie shifts on his chair, leans forward a little. “You’re– um. Because no one will tell me if you’re actually– and, like, I need someone to–“
Well, that’s hardly surprising. Hardly surprising that Will Byers is gay; also hardly surprising that no one’s told him about Steve and Eddie. Or just, like, skirted around it. Because no one has a problem with it but also no one knows what to do with it, and that’s the thing, here, the way they don’t know what to do with Steve and Eddie at all, more generally. The gay thing aside. “Well, turns out getting stuck in a time loop for a month is enough to turn even Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington gay, so.”
Will’s eyes go large.
“Bisexual, more accurately. So yeah, you’re right about whatever you think’s going on between us. He’s my–“ boyfriend? Partner? Person? Eddie doesn’t know how to describe it. There’s something cosmic to it, all freaky soulmate-y shit that he’s never believed in and still doesn’t, really, but clearly the Raven Queen does, so. And what she says goes.
“I didn’t think that could– I didn’t think that could happen in Hawkins,” Will mumbles.
“Yeah, well, the dead can come back to life in Hawkins, so really what can’t happen here?”
They look at each other for a long moment. Eddie sort of regrets what he just said. He clicks the end of the pen a few times, fidgets it around his fingers. But then Will lets some of the nervous tension in his face fade, and he smiles through it with some sense of relief. “That’s cool,” he says. “Like, when someone saves you, it’s, um– yeah. I can see why you like Steve.”
And oh, isn’t that interesting? Mike, Eddie realises, without much thinking required. Yeah, it makes sense. Then everything else catches up with him — when someone saves you — and he has to go upstairs and lie on the floor of the bathroom, leaving Will behind in the kitchen. Because fuck. Because– Steve wouldn’t have had to save him– not if–
Does that mean Eddie wanted to be saved? That he fell in love with the guy who saved him? Or was it something stubborn, dragged out of him reluctant, unwilling, the way each painful waking on the couch in Max’s trailer was?
(Again? he remembers thinking, the first time he remembered dying. I have to do it again?)
This bathroom. He remembers this bathroom. Remembers showering in it, marvelling at Steve Harrington’s ridiculous collection of hair products, the can of Farah fucking Fawcett spray on the counter — only a few minutes before he and Steve fucked for the first time. Before Eddie showed him the secret hurts at the tops of his thighs — twice — and fuck, the razors disappeared after that, didn’t they, he realises now, Steve goddamn–
“Fuck, I’m in love with you,” he says, when Steve comes in and finds him lying on the floor, not all that unusual a position, anymore, but still.
Steve’s concerned frown softens. He sits down on the floor beside him. “I mean, I’m in love with you too, but why–?”
“I couldn’t have done it. What you did. I couldn’t have–“ Eddie doesn’t know what he couldn’t have done. He wasn’t there, was he? He wasn’t in Steve’s place. We don’t know what would have happened. We don’t know anything. “I guess I feel like I cheated.”
“Cheated?” Steve’s frowning again, fingers tracing the inside of Eddie’s wrist like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. “Cheated how?”
“By– by getting you to love me. Each time. Instead of hate me. Because it was my fault, that you were stuck there. Because I refused to live. Because I– because I lied about the curse, because I got cursed in the fucking first place because I–“ He stops. “It was sort of freeing, being a dead man. Y’know? And I did things I shouldn’t have done. Like, kissing you, knowing I was gonna die–“
“I knew you were gonna die too,” Steve reminds him, voice quiet.
“But I didn’t know you knew that and I did it anyway. I cheated. Because I wouldn’t have– I wouldn’t have done it, without knowing what was gonna happen, and I shouldn’t have done it knowing that and that’s what this is based on, me cheating, me– me wanting to–“
“I kissed you. Every time. That was me, knowing what I was getting into.”
Eddie looks at him for a moment. There are purple shadows under his eyes, from the nightmares. Last night Steve had a panic attack so bad he nearly passed out; the night before, Eddie’s memories of pain were so intense he could only lie there, still, crying silently, awake all fucking night. Halfway through it he lied, told Steve he was feeling better, and it did make him feel better, to hear Steve’s tired breathing even out into sleep. But today he looks at Steve and eventually moves closer, pushing his head onto Steve’s knee, letting Steve’s hands trace through his hair.
(Nice to have hair, again. He thinks perhaps the loop at the lab was the worst.)
“I’m sorry,” he says, eventually. “For not trying to live. For not wanting to.” He’s not sure who he’s saying it to — to Steve, or to himself?
Steve is silent. For a moment, again, Eddie thinks he’s said the wrong thing. Like he’s always fucking doing. But Steve’s hands don’t still in his hair; they keep going, teasing out the knots, soothing Eddie’s jumping heartbeat. “You want to now, right? Isn’t that what matters?”
But that’s the problem, he thinks. Now things matter. Now I want them to matter. Now the things I say or do will carry over and that’s what I want but I can’t stop doing it wrong–
“Coming back to life fucking sucks,” he says to Will, a couple days later.
Will smiles. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
He gets drunk one night, really drunk. Mostly because he has no access to his stash, right now, and he needs something to take the edge off because it’s been too fucking long but it just sort of sharpens the edge, actually, hones it until it cuts both sides, inside and out, until he’s sitting fully clothed in the bathtub drinking Harrington wine from the bottle wishing none of this had ever happened to him, wishing the precarity of his mental health had never been precarious, wishing he was someone different, someone whose mind wouldn’t snap in tune with Chrissy’s bones.
“Where’re your parents?” he asks Steve, when Steve comes in from his late night run (something he does, these days, they’re all trying to have mundane habits) in a t shirt soaked in sweat and pristine white sneakers flecked with mud. “Shouldn’t they be–“ Eddie waves a hand, thought dissolving from his mind.
“Probably,” Steve says mildly, unlacing his sneakers, stripping his t shirt off, pulling down his shorts. “C’mon, I want to shower.”
Eddie doesn’t move from the bathtub. His head lolls back against the smooth porcelain and he remembers the time Steve pushed him against the RV, tongue searching out something lost inside Eddie’s mouth. Cheating. That was cheating. They should have done this the honest way. The way where Steve realised things about himself at the slow, suburban pace most people do, the way Eddie didn’t want to die so loving him was never about saving him, and the way that would have been better, how maybe then Eddie could still talk to other people without feeling the deaths of Steve and himself weighing down between his ribs.
“Eddie,” Steve says, laying a hand on the side of the bath.
Eddie takes his wrist. Steve has nice wrists, strong, wider and firmer than Eddie’s. Eddie has the sort of bones that divorce from each other at the slightest opportunity. “I’m scared,” he says, slowly and deliberately, because his mouth is thick and drunk, “that all this is just because of– because of what I wanted to do. What I was doing to myself. Because of the loop, which is because of what I– and I can’t. Can’t have this be– because of that. You can’t– love me because you wanted to save me. Can’t have this based on the worst thing– the worst thing about myself.”
“Eddie–“
“Can you tell me it isn’t? Can you– can you tell me you would’ve–“ he’s crying now, isn’t he, that’s why the words are coming out cloggy and sad, like wet rotting leaves “–would’ve loved me anyway, if we’d just won? If the universe hadn’t told you to love me?”
Steve goes cold. He pulls his wrist out of Eddie’s hand, still gentle, but there’s something distant about him now, closing-off. He paces a circle around the bathroom and Eddie’s vision is too blurry to appreciate the way he looks like this, flushed from his run, in nothing but his underwear, but Eddie doesn’t need to see to know what he looks like. The image of Steve is burned permanently into his eyelids.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, regretting that he said these things, regretting that he feels them.
“Don’t– shit, don’t apologise. Please. Stop apologising.”
Eddie takes another swig of wine to swallow the urge to say it again. It tastes sharp and acidic running down his throat; he’s never been a wine guy, really. More a sixpack/blunt/key of K kinda guy. Running from his problems. Wine seems to hold a magnifying glass to them.
“The universe didn’t tell me to love you,” Steve says finally, passing a hand over the scars on his torso, as he often does. “It told me to save you. They’re– they’re two different things.”
“Are they?” Eddie mumbles, sinking lower in the bathtub. He’s tired, suddenly, so tired, but when he closes his eyes the room starts to spin. He’s never been in love before. He wouldn’t know.
“Come on,” Steve says quietly, patiently, holding out a hand. Eddie takes it, lets Steve pull him up out of the tub, hold back his hair when the spinning gets a little too fast and he throws up a mix of stomach acid and wine in the toilet bowl, pressing his forehead to the basin’s cool pedestal, not having thrown up from drink since he was eighteen.
I feel like I should apologise for struggling, he wants to say. He wants to say, but then again, I’m not convinced that’s not why you’re here.
Because Steve is a Protector, isn’t he? A regular paladin. It’s how he stops himself struggling, looking after everyone else. Which is something Eddie loves about him.
Hates that he loves about him.
Because it’s fucking cheating.
Perhaps the thing, here, is that it makes too much sense. And Eddie doesn’t know what to do with things that make sense. He’s used to his dad going out to buy onions for a family dinner after dislocating his shoulder; he’s used to not knowing where his mother is. But this? The world ending and not ending because Eddie wanted to die and Steve wasn’t going to let him? And not wanting to, anymore? Why does that make sense? Why does he hate that that makes sense?
The earlier him, the thirty-one versions of him, they would have said because he deserves better, and I deserve worse. But he can’t quite convince himself that’s true anymore. He’s got this little unassailable truth in his chest, like a nugget of gold, the disbelieving belief that he’s a real person, just like anyone else, and that entitles him to love and life, just like anyone else.
And yet–
“It wasn’t fair, what I said to you last night,” he says to Steve in the morning, when he’s nursing a hangover that has his every nerve jittering with anxiety. “I shouldn’t have said it.”
Steve’s making a pot of coffee, looking out at the mist drifting over the pool, slowly burning away in the coming summer sun. “Did you mean it? About– about not wanting this to be based on you wanting to–” He looks at his hands. Eddie sees him swallow. “Because it– it is. And that’s not our fault, yours or mine. It’s just– what happened. With Vecna and the Raven Queen and everything — we can’t undo that. And maybe in another world, where that isn’t what happened, then maybe– I would have started loving you in a different situation. I don’t know. But I started loving you in this situation and that’s not–”
There’s pain in his face, Eddie glimpses, as he turns away to look out away from Eddie.
“If that’s something that’s gonna hurt you, in the long run, then it’s okay. If it’s maybe better that we don’t do this.”
And oh, god, no. That isn’t– fuck, that isn’t–
He feels a little like the ground’s tilting underneath him. He has to try very hard not to let his breathing quicken into panic; he reaches out for Steve, desperate, ringing in his ears, fuck, he’s not going to have a panic attack now, that just fucking makes it worse–
But he is, so he goes and locks himself in the bathroom to do it, though his every cell is screaming at him to just let Steve help but he’s let Steve help enough. So he breathes through it and feels like screaming and doesn’t scream, wishes he had his stash, wishes he had Steve, wishes he wasn’t losing Steve. Wishes he wasn’t pushing Steve away.
When he goes out, Steve is gone. His car’s gone too. Which maybe shouldn’t send the thrill of resurgent panic through him that it does, frankly, since this is Steve’s house, he can’t be gone for good — but still. Eddie’s never been very good at getting left. He’s better at doing the leaving.
But there’s someone else’s car here, someone else sitting at the counter.
Joyce.
“Steve’s gone to see Robin,” she says. What she doesn’t say — but he hears anyway — is he asked me to come check on you. And Eddie feels like screaming again.
But he doesn’t scream. He just says, in a small, pathetic voice, “Is he going to come back?”
Joyce lights a cigarette. He remembers 1983, remembers watching her shout something like I don’t care if anyone believes me! I am going to find him and bring him home! at Jonathan in the street, uncaring who was watching, uncaring what anyone thought. If he had a mother, he thinks, he’d want her to be something like her. “Only if you want him to, I think,” she says. She holds her cigarettes like they’re joints, pinched between thumb and forefinger.
“Do I want–” Eddie leans his elbows on the counter and buries his face in his hands. “Fuck. I feel like I’m going insane.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Well, you’re talking to the town’s resident expert on that score.”
He smiles thinly at her. “He, um, saved me from myself, really, and I sort of hate myself for needing to be saved. For putting us in this situation. And I hate that that’s where we started– I’m embarrassed, fuck, everyone knows there’s something wrong with me and is it so– is it so wrong to wish there wasn’t? To wish that me and Steve could be– could be apart, from that? Something different?”
“Hey,” she says, voice softly firm, “it’s not wrong. Okay? It’s not. But equally — it’s not going to get you very far. Because these things did happen, and these things are wrong with us — believe me, I know — and wishing that they didn’t, that they’re not, is just–” She closes her eyes. “It just makes it worse.”
“But I can’t help it,” he whispers. “That’s why I feel insane.”
“Listen. I’m not gonna say I get it completely, because I don’t. Of course I don’t. I’ve never been through a time- a time-thingy. But I’ve been through a hell of a lot of other things, and those things have given me the worst things in my life but also the– also the best things.”
And he knows that. Of course he knows that. You hold onto the good stuff, he remembers saying to Steve, the day he realised he wanted to live. He supposes he just wishes he hadn’t needed to realise that. Wishes he’d always wanted to.
“You’re good for Will,” she says, an apparent digression. “You and Steve.”
He blinks at her. “Really?” because he hasn’t spent all that much time with him, really, not relative to Dustin and Lucas and Mike. Max a lot more now too, since the whole… thing. She gets him and he gets her the way few of the others do.
“Really. He needed someone who–” She gestures with her hands vaguely. “Who gets it. Who’s… the same.”
He supposes this is her sweet, awkward way of telling him she approves. And oh, if Will Byers isn’t a lucky fucking kid. Despite the various disasters.
“There’s nothing I can say that will make it better,” she says softly. “There’s nothing anyone can say. You’re just gonna have to square with it, what happened, how you felt, and the consequences of that. Of how you felt at the time. I have two kids out of a shitty relationship; I know all about consequences. Sometimes– sometimes those consequences can be good. Just because a thing starts in something bad, doesn’t mean it’s bad through and through.”
He takes a deep, shaky breath. He’s got nothing to say to that; she’s sort of right, actually, when she puts it like that, and fuck her for putting like that, because it makes goddamn sense and as he’s established he hates things that make sense.
“Now, I’m not gonna try to be your mother. God knows I got plenty of kids to be getting on with.”
He looks at her. “Well, good, I guess, because I wouldn’t know what to do with a mother.”
She inclines her head, eyes closing, face a little pained like she doesn’t like what he’s just said, but hey. It’s true. “But,” she says, when she opens her eyes, “you ever need anything, you know where to find me. Okay? I mean it. Just because you’ve gone on so long just you, and now just you and Steve — doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help from other quarters. Y’know? None of us have to be alone in this.”
“Okay,” he says, a little breathlessly. She gives him the other half of her cigarette.
“If you’re here to break his heart, Eddie Munson, there are a lot of frying pans in my kitchen and I am very handy with them, if need be.” This is what Robin says when she opens her door; Eddie’s slouching on the porch, ducking his face into his collar even though he’s allowed out now, even though his name’s been cleared. This is the first time he’s been outside. He hates being outside, now.
“Not here to break his heart,” he says, quiet, desperate, “Please.”
She takes another look at him, a once-over, a twice-over, and then she tugs him inside. “I mean it. He may have spent thirty-two days trying to save your life but I have absolutely zero qualms about undoing all that progress right now.”
“Duly noted,” he mumbles, scuffing his shoes on the doormat, glancing around her hallway, which is small and dimly lit and full of family photos. She has a big family, he sees. Lots of different faces.
She directs him up the stairs — “Try to keep it down; my Nana’s here,” — and leaves him there, outside her closed bedroom door. He sort of wants to bail. He’s itching, afraid, eyes darting back down the stairs to the front door. But he can’t, can he, not now. No more running away.
“Steve?” he says, knocking, hesitant.
After a moment, Steve opens the door.
His eyes are red-rimmed, is the first thing Eddie notices, and Eddie hates that. The fractured pain in Steve’s face. Steve opens the door wide enough so Eddie can come in and then retreats to where he seems to have been sitting before, on the floor with his back to Robin’s bed. There’s a Joan Jett poster on Robin’s wall above him which, hey, Eddie can respect that.
Eddie sits down on the floor opposite him. Resists the urge to light a smoke, since he knows Robin hates the smell.
Steve tilts his head back and looks at Eddie and he’s so– god, he’s so attractive. God, he’s so– everything. And Eddie can’t lose him. He can’t.
“What you said. About this hurting me, because of the way we, um, we started it. I think it would– I think it would hurt me more if we didn’t do this at all.”
Steve looks at him. Eddie looks at Steve.
“I need us to keep doing this. I want us to keep doing this. I’m– sorry, I’ve been so fucked up. Fucking it up. Because I’ve been scared of what I used to be. Of what I wanted, before. I guess I just– regret that everything happened to us. Regret that I sort of– made it happen. Haven’t been able to bring myself to enjoy what we have, because of why we have it. But– that’s not fair. On either of us. So, um. I’m gonna do better.”
“Eddie–“ Steve leans forward, something torn apart in his eyes. “If this is gonna–“
“You spent thirty-two loops worrying about me hurting, Steve. Why don’t you trust me to worry about it myself, for a little while?” Eddie offers him a little smile, a hopeful smile, a smile that says please take this, please take what I’m offering, let me try to be happy with what we’ve earned–
Steve takes the smile, and his hands. “Shit,” Steve says, exhaling, bending his forehead close to Eddie’s. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if–“
“You wouldn’t have had to. Robin was ready to gut me like a fish.”
Steve snorts a laugh. “Y’know, early on one time, she figured out I liked you because I got you Honeycombs and fucking chocolate milk for breakfast in the boathouse.”
“What can I say? You’re a true romantic.” They smile at each other. Then Eddie drops his head into Steve’s shoulder and says into his shirt, “I kind of– need you, a lot. Maybe that’s not healthy. Maybe that’s what happens when a guy tries to save your life thirty-odd times.”
“I need you too,” Steve says. “Maybe that’s what happens when a guy dies thirty-odd times.”
Eddie thinks about what Joyce said, about None of us have to be alone in this. “But maybe we could– maybe we could let the others help. Some of the time. Right? We could do that?”
Steve’s arms come up around him and tug him close. Eddie feels chronically safe in that hold. Always will. “Yeah,” Steve says, roughly, like he’s crying. “We could try.”
(“Wayne,” he says, on Wayne’s doorstep, and his uncle looks at him for a long time.
“What’s wrong, kid?” he says, drawing Eddie inside, and Eddie sits on the couch and lets a tear or two fall and feels like the day he ran away to Wayne’s all over again, newly relocated shoulder throbbing, breathless and panicky and half scared he deserved it–
“I’m sorry,” he manages to say. “For what’s always been wrong. For being– wrong. I’m trying to get better.”
Because he’s had a sneaking suspicion that Wayne’s always known, is the thing. The way bandaids would run out so fast, razors getting used up, Eddie coming out of the bathroom lighter, dizzy, almost high. Wayne’s always known.
Wayne grasps his shoulder. Eddie’s half expecting it to hurt. “It’s them that’re wrong, kid. Not you. Fuck ‘em.”)
(Dustin’s quiet, now, around Eddie and Steve. Like if he makes too much noise he’ll startle them off, like their presence on this mortal plane is only fragile, only temporary. Eddie looks at Steve sometimes and wonders if there is something about them, something strange now. But whatever that thing is, it’s not fragile. It’s so far from fragile. It’s the thing that bound him to this earth, desire or otherwise to leave it be damned.
“We should start a club,” he jokes one time to Will, who smiles over at Hopper and says, “If you can get him to wear a custom t shirt I’ll give you twenty bucks.”
A little bit of trickery later — involving a spilled coke and a strategically placed spare shirt — Hopper’s grinding out “Why the hell does this shirt say Hawkins Zombie Support Group on it, Munson–!” and Eddie’s elbowing Will, saying “Pay up,” which Will does, as Lucas falls over laughing in the background, Lucas who’s been normal for all of it, really, accepting the Steve-and-Eddie weirdness as a facet of the larger weirdness generally, and that’s cool of him. That’s sweet.
Dustin opens back up, slowly. He raises some interesting (here having the meaning of ‘incomprehensible’) questions about the metaphysics of an extra thirty-two days stepped out of time; Eddie knows things are okay when he says something condescending to Steve and Steve steals his hat.)
(If this were DnD, Eddie thinks, he’d probably script it as a touch of destiny. As it is, when El looks at him with those big serious eyes and says, “You’re different, now, you and Steve,” in the night outside the cabin when he’s having a smoke break from the movie night, there’s no magical realisation, no unfurling of ancient lore. It’s just them, flailing blindly in the dark. Aware of something deeper and larger out there that they can’t see or touch. (Resisting phrases like Make him pay.) Not knowing what they’re doing.
“You’re different,” she continues, “like me. And like Will. And like everyone, a little bit, really. I just wanted you to know that that’s okay. It’s not that bad.”
He stares out into the dark. He’s not sure what to say to that. A little while ago, recently, he would have thought to himself but they didn’t choose that. I did. But y’know, he’s working on not thinking like that anymore. On forgiving himself for it. So he nods, and reaches over to ruffle her hair. “Thanks, kid.”)
(“I’m working on it,” Max tells him. “Letting– letting Lucas back in. Letting people back in. It’s hard, isn’t it? Like retracing your steps, only you can’t see them anymore. After making a decision you–”
“–you thought you couldn’t take back,” Eddie echoes softly, and she nods. But they can. They can take it back.)
At the tattooist’s in Indianapolis — a real tattooist this time, no shitty kitchen scraper in his trailer — the guy raises an eyebrow at what he wants to do and says, “Sure you want to cover these up? The bats are pretty metal.”
Eddie doesn’t look at him. He looks over at Steve instead, who looks so utterly out of place here and yet not uncomfortable at all, not when he’s looking at Eddie. “Sure,” Eddie says, smiling. “But the crows are the thing. Aren’t they, Steve?”
Steve smiles too. “The crows are the thing.”