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It’s silly, really, what sets Steve off. Something small, something he wouldn’t have given a second thought to, normally.
It’s the ceiling.
The room is dark when Steve wakes, just barely lit by a flickering light that he can’t see the source of, and as he squints up at the ceiling, he realizes that it isn’t his ceiling. The texture is wrong, and it’s hard to tell for sure, but he thinks the color is off, too. It isn’t his ceiling, and he isn’t in his bedroom, and suddenly–
Suddenly Steve has no idea where he is.
He doesn’t even remember falling asleep, and now he’s woken up somewhere strange, somewhere unfamiliar. His heart starts pounding as he turns his head, trying to figure out what’s going on. Everything is in shadow, looming and strange, blurry – Steve realizes that he isn’t wearing his contacts, that he doesn’t know where is glasses are, and what the hell is going on?
Where is he?
It looks like the only source of light is coming from a TV, the screen a smear of flashing colors that Steve can’t decipher, and it doesn’t help him in the slightest. Had he passed out at a party? Is he at someone else’s house?
But no, he doesn’t do that anymore. He hasn’t in a while.
He tries desperately to remember what he’d been doing before he fell asleep (passed out?), but his brain has spun out a hundred miles ahead of him, no longer accepting rational input, because the last time he’d woken somewhere unfamiliar he’d been at the mercy of his violent captors, and the time before that he’d been trapped in a car being driven by a thirteen-year-old, and his mind is trying desperately to jam a square peg into a round hole and make his surroundings make sense.
“Steve?” Someone speaks, and a hand lands on Steve’s shin.
Steve yells wordlessly, scrambling upright, away from the hand, panicked, feeling utterly stupid for not having even thought to check for other people, for someone who could hurt him, for whoever might have taken him here in the first place, except– except when Steve finally gets a look at whoever it is, the wild curls and wide eyes ping as familiar almost immediately.
Maybe he doesn’t know where he is, but he knows that face, even without his contacts, even in the dark, even in his panic.
“Eddie?” Steve manages, hoarse and breathless.
Eddie moves, reaching out behind himself, and suddenly the room explodes into light. Steve scrunches his eyes shut against the initial flare, but when he opens them again, everything has changed. He recognizes the dark fabric of the couch he and Eddie are sitting on. He recognizes the lamp on the end table behind Eddie. He recognizes the coffee table and the scatter of books and papers sitting on top of it. He recognizes the pale carpet and the TV stand and the blurry shape of the doorway he knows leads to the kitchen even though the light in there is still off.
He recognizes all of it because he’s seen it dozens of times before, because he is in the Munson’s goddamn living room.
Steve sags a little against the couch, heart still pounding, breath still wheezing in and out a little too quickly to be comfortable, and he shakes his head against the buildup of anxiety that now has nowhere to go.
“Hey,” Eddie calls softly, and Steve looks up at him. “What happened there? Are you okay?”
Eyes scrunched shut again, Steve runs a hand over his face, nodding his head, then shaking it, unable to decide.
“I got…” He looks back up at Eddie, suddenly feeling small and out of place, uncertain even though he knows exactly where he is now. “I got lost, for a minute.”
He can’t quite tell what expression takes Eddie’s face at that, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Eddie is sitting forward, reaching out again, not touching this time, but offering.
“C’mere, sweetheart,” Eddie says, and Steve finds he doesn’t want to do anything but exactly that.
He moves across the couch and crashes into Eddie’s open arms, burying his face in his neck as his arms come around Steve’s back, stroking up and down as Steve rides out the shakes of adrenaline, and here – here, at least, Steve knows he will never feel lost.