Chapter Text
They were named Steve and Eddie in that time, but that's not who they've always been.
It’s true.
Steve Harrington and Eddie Munson of Hawkins, Indiana were only small pieces of who they were.
Against the ever-long expanse of history, they have spent considerably more time as other people than they have as themselves.
Well, all those other people were themselves as well. Just different versions. Each with different names they were given in their different times as they lived in different places. They met in different ways as very different types of people. So much changed between each "them" that it was almost difficult to compare.
But there were constants. Because, every time, without fail, they found each other - both wearing the same faces they’d seen each time - and they fell in love.
Sometimes it went well and lasted decades. Sometimes it didn’t. They usually only figured out that it hadn’t been their first time coming together after a few months caught in each other's familiar current. If they remembered at all. Sometimes only one would realize, and the other thought them a lovesick fool making up tall tales. But each and every time, they loved each other. For however long they got.
Steve’s remembering them now. All the past “thems” they’ve been together. It comes back as these echoes of memories. Traces of lives they used to share.
Because the very matter of their souls were interwoven so deeply that he felt something that first time they really met as Steve and Eddie. When he found his other under a tarp in a drug dealer’s boat house. When Eddie all but threw him back and held him against the wall, the edges of a broken bottle against his throat. That first time they touched and connected their gaze… something happened.
Steve felt it.
Like a tingle in his fingertips.
This faint, barely there knowledge that the stranger before him was important. He couldn’t place it, of course. Couldn't name what that change was or what it meant. Not there at the very beginning. But as their fight against Vecna waged, it started to come back to him. The stories of their love affair that spanned centuries.