Chapter Text
A flurry of claws and teeth. Skin shredding. Blood pooling beneath him. Arms swinging wildly, shoving and grabbing at the creatures, growling and snarling back at them. Eddie screamed beside him—desperate, broken sounds—as the demobats consumed his flesh.
“Steve!” Eddie’s voice rasped, barely a sound at all, and Steve jerked his head toward him, struggling to pull a bat off of his own chest. A dark splash of liquid blinded him—Eddie’s blood, a fountain of his life, spraying over Steve’s face. Steve sputtered, blinked, called his name. The red cleared, and Eddie’s big eyes stared emptily at him, neck limp as a bat gnawed on his jugular.
Steve wrenched, twisted, and writhed away from the clutches of the demons, dragging himself toward him. His breaths came in sobs that brought mucousy blood to his lips; it spilled out of his mouth in a slimy trail as he made his way towards Eddie.
“Leave him!” he choked, punching at the bats swarming around Eddie’s body like ants on a piece of old candy. “ Leave him alone! ”
The sky thundered, crimson lightning dividing the sky; within the boom, he heard one last—
“Steve?”
Steve shot up so fast stars scattered across his vision. Cold sweat drenched his body, had him trembling violently as he scrambled across the mattress, fumbling for the source of the sound.
“Steve?”
Eddie’s tinny voice petered through the walkie-talkie sitting on the pillow by Steve’s head. He grabbed it and pulled the antennae up, huffing into the mic breathlessly. “Yeah?”
“I, uh—fuck, I need your help.” He sounded weak, distant. Steve checked the digital alarm clock by his bed. It flashed red like the lightning in his nightmares. 3:04 a.m.
Shit. Steve missed a dose of Eddie’s painkillers.
“I’m coming, hang on.” He only swayed a bit when he climbed to his feet, disoriented, grabbing his bedside table for support before making his way down the hall towards the guest room.
Inside laid Eddie—very much alive, despite how Steve’s dreams tried to paint him. Practically immobile from the scabbed wounds across his torso, chest, neck, jaw, and cheek, he grimaced up at the ceiling. Bandages wrapped over wounds that still oozed—the best patch job Steve and Nancy could manage with the first aid supplies Joyce scrounged from Melvald’s General Store. Steve found narcotics in his parents’ bathroom, left from when they hightailed it out of Hawkins after the “Great Crackening,” as Dustin called it, and had been using them to keep Eddie’s pain at bay.
He grabbed the bottles and counted out two pills. Eddie’s big, bright eyes, the only thing the demobats considered sacred enough not to touch during their feast, glanced over him, glassy and hazy. For a moment, their gazes met, and Steve froze, remembering the jet of blood that poured over his face from Eddie’s severed jugular, the emptiness behind those doe-like eyes.
“What’s up, Harrington?” Eddie wheezed, cracking half a grin with the uninjured side of his mouth. “Forget about me during your beauty sleep?”
Steve pulled himself back to the present and leaned over him, holding the pills in his palm. “Shit, I’m sorry, Eds. I forgot to set the alarm.”
“No worries.” Eddie’s voice floated as his eyes rolled. He clenched his muscles through another grimace. “I get it, you’re probably tired from waiting hand and foot on lil ol’ me—”
“I’m not tired.” Touching his cheek as a warning, Steve slid the pills between Eddie’s lips and trickled some water in his mouth to wash them down. “Swallow.” The bloodied patch of gauze on Eddie’s neck rolled as he did so. “How’s your bandages? Need a change?”
“Tell me again why I can’t go to a hospital?” Eddie groaned.
“You’re still a wanted man,” Steve murmured, peeling back one of the bandages on Eddie’s side to peek at the raw, glistening flesh beneath it. “We can’t let you be seen around town until Hopper figures out a way to clear your name.”
“Right,” Eddie sighed. “That fun little detail.”
“Mhm.” Pressing the bandage back in place, he brushed off his hands. “These look okay. I’ll sit with you until the pills kick in.”
“Such a gentleman,” Eddie rasped, smirking at him again.
“You know, you’re really not as cute as you think you are.”
“You think I’m cute?”
“ No . No way.”
Eddie cackled, something rattling deep in his chest. “You’re so easy .”
“Just—shut up and try to sleep, okay? You need to rest if you ever want to heal.” Steve rubbed a hand over his face, still trying to shake off his nightmare, still convincing himself that Eddie was here, alive . That the bats did not kill him.
“M’kay,” Eddie sighed. Finally, blessed silence allowed Steve a moment to breathe and remind himself that he left the Upside Down for good weeks ago. Eddie’s death was just a bad dream. But then, Eddie spoke again, faintly. “Gotta say…would never have imagined King Steve worrying so much about me. Or anyone, for that matter.”
Steve shook his head. “I haven’t been King Steve for a long time, man.” The name felt strange rolling off his tongue.
“Heh,” Eddie rolled his eyes, then closed them, seemingly for the last time that night. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
🦇
Dustin visited in the morning—well, he visited every morning, at 7:00 a.m. on the dot. Steve had only just rolled out of bed and slid his glasses on his face—flimsy wire frames, the first one’s he’d grabbed when Robin forced him to go to the optometrist after the sixth (seventh? eighth?) hit to the face left him unable to read the labels on the ice cream tubs at Scoops Ahoy. He’d barely even pulled a robe over his bare chest and boxers before he heard the telltale knock of his little squirt friend on his front door.
Dustin created this new ritual so that he could spend a half-hour with Steve and Eddie (but mostly Eddie) every morning before school started. School didn’t begin until September, but he’d been following his little routine for two weeks now anyway. Still, Steve almost spilled his coffee mid-pour in surprise when Dustin pounded on his front door.
“Jesus, Henderson.” Steve met him in the entryway. “Remind me to get you a key made since you’re just gonna barge in here every morning anyway.”
Dustin pushed past Steve with a loud, “Jesus yourself, Steve, it’s 7:00 a.m., get a move on!” He dumped his backpack and a very full-looking binder labeled “D&D STUFF” on the couch, glancing back at Steve with a wrinkled nose. “Also, gross, tie your robe. Nobody wants to see your hairy old man chest.”
“Oh, so I’m an old man now?” Steve set his coffee down to pull his robe closed. “I turn twenty and suddenly I’m an old man?”
“You’ve always been an old man,” Dustin informed in the know-it-all tone he’d adopted since entering his teens.
All things considered, Dustin was adjusting well enough to…well, everything , Steve thought, stirring several mountainous spoonfuls of sugar into his coffee while Dustin dumped the contents of his backpack onto Steve’s couch. Before he started visiting every day, Dustin used to call Steve in the dead of night sobbing so hard he could barely talk, but that had become a mere weekly occurrence now. Still, Dustin’s mom never seemed surprised that Steve would pop in late at night to remind Dustin that he was still alive. And she always had a hot cup of tea waiting for him when he came back downstairs after Dustin fell back asleep.
Steve leaned a hand on the counter. “You really think Eddie is ready for you to remind him of how much of a nerd you both are? He might bust a stitch. He already almost had an aneurysm watching Star Trek the other night.”
“Okay, but that episode was crazy .” Shuffling papers in his binder, Dustin grinned up at him. “I was hoping to cheer him up. Doesn’t he seem bummed lately?”
“Dustin,” Steve laughed wryly. “He’s fucking—trapped in bed. Trapped in this house , technically, with me , until he can at least start limping around by himself. And until Hopper clears his fucking murder accusations . Of course he’s bummed.”
Dustin blablabla ’d at him silently, rolling his eyes. “You know what I mean . Come on, let’s just go see him already. Is he awake?”
If Steve was a fucking liar, he would tell anyone who asked that Dustin’s clear eagerness to see Eddie and his complete disregard for Steve didn’t sting at all. He grumbled under his breath as he jerked his head for Dustin to follow him down the hall. Before the kid could duck away, though, he smacked a hand on top of his curly head and ruffled his hair roughly.
“Ow,” Dustin complained, but otherwise didn’t protest. He actually head-bumped Steve’s shoulder a bit, which made Steve feel better about the favoritism.
“Lemme go in and make sure he’s awake before you bombarde him.” Steve slipped past Dustin and into the guest room, peering into Eddie’s bed.
Eddie peered back, wide-eyed, a smile twitching at the intact corner of his mouth. “Is that a visitor I hear?” he whispered.
“Mhm. Guess who.” Steve checked the bandage on his neck again. Still okay. Careful to avoid pressure on the gashes across his torso, Steve slid a hand behind his back and helped him prop himself up on the pillows.
“Dustyyyyy,” Eddie called, and like an overexcited dog, Dustin bounded in.
“Hey! Hi! Hey!” The binder plopped down at the end of the bed as Dustin leaned in to carefully half-hug his idol. Even Eddie grinned, seemingly unaware that he already split the scab on his lip.
“Hey, Dustin. Wow, it's been such a long time.” He pretended to count on his fingers. “Like…24 hours, on the dot.”
“I’m punctual,” Dustin said, already dragging the binder over. “I was thinking—if you felt up to it, I planned out a D&D campaign that I feel like you could do from bed—” The binder clicked as Dustin held it up to show him scribblings that Steve couldn’t understand even if he wanted to. “—I was thinking we could bring in Erica and Will and Mike and Lucas and even Max if she wanted—she’s been so down since getting out of the hospital, I thought it might cheer her up, too—”
Leaning on the doorframe, Steve called, “Slow down, kiddo.”
Dustin shot him a hopefully fake glare, then turned back to Eddie. “I made it more of a slower, exploration-based story. Something doable. Right?”
Eddie’s stupidly soft bambi eyes glanced over the page Dustin held out for him. His grin grew even wider. Steve thought he might have even seen a film of tears over his eyes, and felt an unexpected pang in his chest. “Dustin,” Eddie said seriously, grabbing his knee and squeezing. “You are the best co-leader of the Hellfire Club a man could ask for. That sounds amazing .”
Dustin might as well have launched off the bed and up into the sun with how bright his face glowed. “Really?!” He twisted toward Steve. “Steve, you could play too! I made you a character and everything so you won’t have to figure out how.”
Jarred by being pulled into a conversation that felt so private, Steve hesitated. “Eh—are you sure? I’m not really a…” He gestured vaguely. “D&D type.”
“There’s no such thing as a D&D type,” Dustin said slowly and clearly, like he was talking to a stupid person. Which, granted, Steve probably was. “Come on, it would be so fun. Like a dream come true. My two favorite people.” He pointed a hand at Eddie, then at Steve, fluttering his eyes innocently. “Coming together for a common cause.”
“Fighting monsters,” Eddie murmured, smiling to himself and glancing towards Steve. An inside joke, he realized.
“We’ve done that already. In real life,” Steve pointed out, throwing Eddie a half smile. The look they shared caused something deep in his gut to flutter.
Dustin flopped his arms exasperatedly. “Have an ounce of personality in you outside of being a babysitter, Steve.”
“Yeah,” Eddie chimed in. “You should join. It would be so fun to watch King Steve fumble through a D&D session, if nothing else.”
Steve scowled, pushing off the doorframe and shaking his head. “You two are so convincing. Maybe , okay? Just—focus on having your own fun with your nerd friends.” He flapped a hand towards Eddie. “I have to get to work. Dustin, let’s go. I’ll drive you home.”
Dustin groaned dramatically, but relented, gathering his papers back up. Steve leaned over Eddie, reaching for the painkillers and shaking them in his face. “Joyce will be over in a bit to top you off and stay with you for a while, m’kay? I’ll be back around six. Robin’s closing.”
Eddie fluttered his eyelashes prettily. “Thank you, dear. Love you. Have a good day.”
Steve just flushed and rolled his eyes.
After dropping Dustin off at home and receiving a freshly made breakfast sandwich from Dustin’s mom, Steve pulled into the Family Video parking lot. He had a few hours to himself before the store opened and before Robin’s shift started. Since being promoted to full-time assistant manager not too long ago, early mornings shelving new stock had become a nice buffer of alone time before his usually-hectic days began. He savored today’s opportunity, stacking VHS tapes and picking out a movie to put on the TV while nibbling on the sandwich Dustin’s mom made him.
The moms always did stuff like that—made him sandwiches if they knew he was stopping by, gave him hugs unprompted, asked him how he was doing, made sure he was included in the collective concern and care they shared for the kids. As if he was one of them, even though he was twenty years old now. It struck Steve as a bit strange—he felt closer to relating to the parents, the caretakers and protectors, than to the kids, the innocent victims.
Robin’s knocking on the storefront derailed his train of thought, so Steve moved to unlock the doors and welcomed her inside. She bounced in with her usual cheer, punching his shoulder and exclaiming, “You look like shit !” In one movement, she ripped Footloose out of the TV and put in The Goonies instead. For the third time that week. “It smells like egg in here. Did you have eggs?”
“Good morning to you, too,” Steve said amiably, catching the Footloose tape Robin threw aside and putting it back in its case. “You have a thing going on with The Goonies right now?”
“Ugh, yeah,” Robin sighed, pushing her short hair back behind her ears with comically wide eyes. “Vickie is really throwing me for a loop right now. We haven’t talked in like two days and I dunno why and The Goonies is just really soothing my anxious thoughts.”
Steve raised his eyebrows, elbows resting on the counter. “Vickie hasn’t called back?”
“Nooooo,” Robin stressed, pacing the romance aisle. “Does that mean something?” She paused, then twirled and grabbed Steve’s arm, shaking him violently. “You’re good with relationships, you tell me!”
“I’m sorry ?! Last I remember, you told me the reason I keep getting broken up with was because I was ‘a dingbat with no personality outside of being a mom!’ A catchphrase which, b y the way, Dustin has adopted readily, so thanks very much for that.”
“That was yesterday. This is today. You dated Nancy for a while. What would you do if she just stopped calling?”
Steve rolled his head on his shoulders, trying to dig up a response that would appease her. “Um…I’d probably be kinda pissed.”
“Right?!” Robin threw her arms over her head. “Thank god, I’m not crazy. Like, I know she’s not dead, I totally walked by the bookstore last night to see if she was working and she was .”
“Eek. I think you have an incoming breakup on your hands, Rob.”
Robin groaned, flopping face first over the counter. “God. I can’t have any good thing.”
Steve patted her back. “Sorry, man. Have you not met anyone at college yet?”
“It’s so hard to tell if bitches be gay, Steve,” Robin informed knowingly. “Surprisingly hard. Especially at community college, and it’s not like there’s a huge gay population in Indiana.”
Steve nodded, attempting to share her pain. Honestly, he didn’t know how Robin could worry about relationships right now; finding a girlfriend was so low on his to-do list that he’d pretty much given up on it altogether. “You’ll find someone better. Vickie was cute and all, but I think you two were, like, too quirky together.”
“Don’t use past tense already , Steve.” Robin buried her face in her arms. “Why do you look like shit, anyway?”
“I was up and down all night with Eddie.” Steve ran a hand through his hair, attempting to tame it in the reflection of the cash register.
Robin quirked her eyebrows at him concernedly. “Is he okay?”
“If planning a D&D campaign with Dustin is ‘okay,’ then yeah, he’s doing just fine.” He shook his head dismissively. “I just forgot to set an alarm to give him his pain meds and then couldn’t go back to sleep when I finally woke up to do it.”
Robin sighed. “It’s really nice that you’re doing this for him, you know.”
“Well I’m not gonna not take care of the guy.”
“I mean, you didn’t have to. You literally carried him out of the Upside Down yourself.” She gestured towards his middle. “And you got eaten up, too. Nobody, like, expected that of you, it’s not like you guys were close.”
“I’m not hurt as bad,” Steve said lamely, which was a true excuse. He’d managed to fight off the demobats before they’d done a ton of damage to him—just surface wounds, a few chunks of flesh from his sides and some gashes from their claws. He’d pretty much healed completely already, aside from some gnarly scarring of his own. Eddie’s wounds were objectively worse. He’d been alone. He didn’t know how to fight. The bats had half eaten him by the time Steve found him. Entire sections of flesh had been chewed out—from his sides, his chest, his shoulder. Adrenaline and pain did a number to Steve’s memory, so he didn’t remember much of the rescue, but he recalled the sensation of Eddie’s flesh giving just a little too easily under the press of his fingers, squishing under his palms. Carrying him out of the Upside Down had been a slippery, gooey mess purely from the sheer amount of blood and loose flesh.
“You were hurt, too,” Robin repeated slowly, as if attempting to drive it into his brain. “You didn’t have to.”
Steve swallowed. Shifted uncomfortably. Didn’t know what else to say. Didn’t know how to explain to her that seeing Eddie half-dead made something inside him break, that helping him felt like balm on his bruised and beaten heart. Something strangely familiar, yet new and fun—that was Eddie. Having him around made Steve’s chronically panicked, overactive brain quieter.
Probably just from all of Eddie’s blabbing, honestly.
Robin sighed again and pushed off the counter to turn the volume up on The Goonies . “Anyway,” she said loudly, as if to chase both of their thoughts away with the sound of her voice. The door dinged as a customer walked in. “Let’s rent some movies, shall we?”
🦇
Joyce’s car still sat in the driveway of Steve’s house when he drove up after work. He’d told her she could leave around 3:00 p.m., that Eddie would probably sleep off the pain pills most of the day anyway, so he couldn’t stop the jolt of anxiety that quivered between his lungs as he got out of his car. Did something happen that forced Joyce to stay? Was Eddie okay?
However, when Steve opened the front door with Joyce’s name on his lips, he stalled. The house smelled like lemons. She had tidied up the piles of clutter that had been collecting since Steve started caring for Eddie, cleaned the pile of dishes Steve didn’t have time to worry about, mopped the floors of the splashes of coffee spilled over the past few weeks. A basket of clean laundry sat on the couch. Steve stared at it all for a full minute before Joyce emerged from the hall, saw him, and rushed over to take his bag.
“Heyyyyy, Steve,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind—I know you have your hands full working and taking care of Eddie and all that, so I just did a little bit of cleaning up.” She wiggled her fingers to gesture at the spotless house.
“Ms. Byers—”
“I told you to call me Joyce. You’re an adult so it’s allowed.”
Steve swallowed and tried again, a hard lump of unidentified emotion in his throat. “Joyce—you didn’t have to do that.”
“Oh, shut up,” she nudged him into the house, closing the door behind him. “It’s my pleasure. You take care of all our kids and nobody takes care of you. Not even your parents! Ugh, I still can’t believe those motherfuckers —excuse my language—hmph, leaving you behind like that—” She trailed off in a murmur to herself, angrily folding Steve’s underwear. Steve watched uncomfortably as the band of his Calvin Klein briefs flopped over Joyce’s fingers before she piped up again, as if remembering. “Oh, I made dinner for you and Eddie, too. Just a casserole.”
The lump in Steve’s throat rose, and he desperately hoped that he wasn’t about to cry over Joyce doing something as simple as making him dinner and doing his laundry. “Thank you,” he said. “Really.”
Joyce smiled at him, setting the Calvin Kleins on top of the folded pile and then turning to grab her keys. “I gotta go pick up Will from school—he had that club meet and it always runs late. You’ll call if you need anything?” She raised her eyebrows at him, halfway out the door.
Steve nodded sincerely. “Yeah, ‘course.”
And then she was gone. Steve clicked the door shut behind her.
He stood in place for a long while, trying to source the reason behind the sting in his eyes. It’s not like he missed his parents, or that his parents ever did shit like this for him anyway—there was something deeper, some tug of longing, an unfamiliar pain, like he missed something he’d never had. Didn’t think he ever would have.
Eventually, he moved into the kitchen, found two plates, loaded them with casserole, and climbed the stairs to the guest room.
Eddie fed himself that night—an improvement from other days, when the scars on his arm were too tight to bend. He did most of the talking, too, but that was typical. He always found a way to be chatty, even through the haze of industrial-grade painkillers. After they ate together, Steve watched reruns of Star Trek with him, forcing himself to pay attention to the deep lore Eddie wouldn’t stop explaining. Eddie fell asleep in a few hours, the blue light of the TV flashing over his pale face, making the scars forming on his cheek and the sweep of his long eyelashes look dramatic, almost haunting.
Only then did Steve drag himself back down the stairs, dig a beer out of the fridge, and pull a cigarette out of his pocket. He sat by the pool and smoked until he finished his drink, watching the reflection of the water dance over the back of the house.