Archive of Our Own

“But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

— Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Eddie wasn’t sure how he got here. Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely accurate: he got here through a frankly Aristotelian confluence of events that began with a drug deal out behind the school, a middling bit where Eddie learned that the mother fucking plane of shadows did in fact exist, and ending with him crammed into the bathroom of a motor home trying to clean Steve Harrington’s goddamn darkside-looking bat bites because apparently Eddie was the only one of them who knew basic wound care in the group.

Only it wasn’t quite wound care so much anymore, and that was what Eddie was having trouble wrapping his head around — how he’d gone from a little backwoods field surgery between polar opposites to, well, Steve’s teeth digging sweetly into his bottom lip and two of his fingers up Steve’s ass. It was a real puzzle, in fact.

Not that he was complaining, of course. Eddie was more than happy to be there. He had eyes, man, and Steve Harrington, even before his abrupt one-eighty into good-dude territory, had been a regular guest star in Eddie’s spank bank. Half the town of Hawkins was gagging for the guy and, fine, okay, he hated to be mainstream but some things were mainstream for a reason, right? It was harmless, it was fun, it wasn’t going to go anywhere, and, anyway, did it even count if it was hate sex? And yet —

He’d corralled Steve into the bathroom of their stolen RV when the kids had collapsed into a heap of naps after the War Zone and Nancy and Robin had sat guard outside in the field. He’d peeled back the shitty stop-gap bandages from when they were below, dug out every single butterfly bandage from the emergency bag he’d brought with him and the kit he found under the sink, and even steeled himself to use the old suturing supplies Uncle Wayne had added, just because you never knew. Steve had sat on the sink and took it all like a fuckin’ champ, biting at the meat of his palm to stifle the noises that wanted to tear from his throat. He let Eddie do what he needed to do with minimal flinching — even the deeply questionable whipstitch along his stomach that would no doubt scar like an absolute bitch — and it was only when Eddie was finishing up on his neck that he noticed the odd look in Steve’s eye.

It was something — strange. Sad, almost, but also like Eddie had something in his teeth, maybe. He couldn’t make heads or tails of it, and he’d snorted under the other boy’s gaze, said, “What, do I have an Upside Down spider in my hair?”

“No,” he’d said. His voice had sounded a little off too, but Eddie didn’t know him well enough to comment on it, and sure, he’d thought, he really would like to know him well enough, and then he was saying, “I just — you have pretty eyes.”

Eddie had blinked. Then he had blinked again. He’d never heard of anyone in his family having a stroke this young but, shit, there had to be a first for everything, right?

“Thanks?” he’d said, with a disbelieving little scoff, and Steve had pulled back from him, just slightly. His shoulders bumped into the mirror as they raised, almost defensively.

“I mean it.”

“Okay?”

“I just,” he’d started again. He’d shaken his head, then winced when the movement pulled at the butterfly bandages and Eddie had reached out without thinking, his hands cradled against Steve’s face, the handsome cut of his jaw. They’d stared at each other and Steve had said, “I think you should kiss me.”

“I’m having a stroke,” Eddie’d said, wide-eyed.

“You aren’t,” Steve had said. “I think you have pretty eyes, and maybe I read the room back there wrong, when you’d called me, uh, or maybe I read the room now wrong, but, like, this might be our last afternoon on Earth, right? And I like your eyes. And your hair, and, like, your whole everything if I’m being honest with myself, and I think you should kiss me. If you’re into that. Please.”

It had been the fucking please that did it. The compliments were nice, he couldn’t tell a lie, but it had been the please, and the almost shocky look of surprise and want in his eyes, like even Steve couldn’t quite believe the words coming out of his mouth. It was working for Eddie, was what it was, and so he’d be helpless against it, holding his face in place while surging the rest of the way into him, their mouths meeting with a sharp clack of teeth.

But Steve had almost, sort of been gasping into it, his mouth parting, and Eddie had shoved his tongue down his throat without preamble, impolite and desperate. But Steve’s hands had gone to his hair, tugging, and it had all sort of blurred together after that. They’d shushed each other in between frantic kisses, and Steve had slid off the sink to rock against Eddie’s thigh until he was hard and panting and, sweet fucking fuck, so was Eddie, straining against the zipper of his tight, why the fuck were they so tight, jeans.

In the hush and humid air of the cramped little room, Steve had whispered, “I’ve never done this with a guy before.”

Eddie had been pretty busy sucking a hickey the size of Lake Jordan into the column of Steve’s pretty throat, hoping everyone would think it was a bruise from those deranged bats now that the blood was washed off but too far gone to stop himself. Still, he’d pulled back to look at him dead in the eye. “I have. Couple of times. More than a couple. But I don’t have a condom, and we don’t have to go any farther than this, if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t want to have any regrets,” Steve had said then. His eyes were wide and dark and sad, and Eddie had smoothed his thumbs along the hollows of his cheeks, into the corners of his mouth. He’d sucked one in when it got close enough, laved his tongue around it, and Eddie’s dick had jumped in his jeans like a fucking circus act. He’d pulled it back with a groan and Steve had told him, “Don’t give yourself anything to regret, either.”

The words had lit a wildfire beneath Eddie’s ribs, and he’d been helpless in the wake of it. He’d yanked his shirt off, and they’d torn at each other’s pants, Steve fumbling with the clasp on Eddie’s belt and mumbling into his mouth, “I’ve tried on my own, before, but it wasn’t — I want your fingers, I’ve been watching them — I want to know,” and that had been around when Eddie’s brain had fully shorted out into nothing but static and the taste of Steve’s spit, his sweat and skin.

He’d bent him over the sink, Steve’s body moving practically before he even needed to direct him, and Jesus tap dancing Christ, look at him, ass like an prize-winning apple, Eddie had never wanted to eat a guy out so bad in his life. Maybe later, he’d thought, fuck, he hoped and prayed and begged for a later, but for now he’d put his fingers back in Steve’s mouth. He sucked on them while maintaining eye contact through the mirror and then Eddie had opened him with one finger, than two, and here there were now, kissing sloppily over Steve’s shoulder, and thank God Eddie was a horndog of the worst order because there was some lube in the emergency kit too and he wanted to make this so good for him, fuck, wanted him to come back again and again —

Steve shifted, just so, pressing to brace one hand against the mirror, the other reaching back for a fistful of Eddie’s hair, and Eddie was resting his free one against it, fingers splayed; it was almost like they were holding hands. 

He slipped him a third finger and, then, when he was red in the face and biting his lip so hard it was turning white, he added a fourth.

“Fuck you,” Steve hissed. “I’m ready, I’m ready —” 

“You’re ready when I say you’re ready, baby boy,” said Eddie, watching Steve’s eyes blow wider and his cock, not as thick as Eddie’s but a little longer, a beautiful, furious red, twitched against the cool faux porcelain edge of the sink, “and not a moment fucking sooner.”

He breathed hard, bore down on Eddie’s fingers. “Oh shit, oh, what, uh, what happened to big boy?”

“I knew you liked that,” he said, pistoning his hand, pressing his thumb into the thin skin behind Steve’s balls as he went, just to watch him shudder. God, he hoped he wasn’t about to blow his load the minute he was inside Steve; he wanted this to last and last. “But I think maybe you like me calling you baby better, huh? Huh, baby?”

Steve blushed from the tips of his ears all the way down to his chest. “Um —”

“Don’t worry,” he said. He squeezed the fingers under his, crooked the other ones and was rewarded with a breathy moan. “I like it too.”

“Do you like this?” he asked, almost — shit, almost shyly, and fuck him running if this wasn’t the sexiest thing that ever happened to Eddie, he was going to lose his goddamn mind. How was he even real? Steve fucking Harrington, he thought, asking if Eddie fingerblasting him was good for him too. Like he wasn’t hard enough to cut glass right now, and would happily commit any number of real ritualistic satanic murders to be inside him until the heat death of the fucking universe.

“Baby,” said Eddie, slipping his fingers out to grip at his thighs and push them together just slightly, tucking himself along his back so close that he could feel his heartbeat like it was coming from inside his own chest. His dick pressed into the tight space between Steve’s legs and he fucked it in and out, once, twice, three times, said, “You feel how much I like this?”

“Yeah, fuck, yeah,” he said. “C’mon, give it to me.”

Eddie asked, “You sure? I’m clean, get tested when I can, but —”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I want this. Do you want this?”

“I do —”

“So why not get the show on the road? C’mon, Eddie, put your back into it.”

“Harrington,” he said, lowly. “What a brat you are.”

He gave him a moment to grin, proud of himself, in the mirror, before Eddie was lining himself up and pushing into the slick, warm heat of him in one slow drag, pushing him up onto his toes just a little. Steve’s grinning mouth dropped open wide, a broken gasp that might’ve been Eddie’s own last name, and they locked eyes through their reflections. He pumped in and out of him, just as slowly as he entered, a handful of times.

“Do you like this?” he echoed.

Steve breathed, “Yeah.”

“I’m gonna make it so good for you, baby,” said Eddie.

“For both of us,” he said. He still had his other hand in Eddie’s hair, and he tugged, gentle, and then again sharply at the face Eddie made in the mirror. “No regrets.”

“Yeah, baby. No regrets.”

He fucked him slowly and steadily from behind, at first, their eyes still locked in the mirror and their left hands with their overlaid fingers pressed there too. Eddie used his other hand to keep Steve’s thigh slightly raised, searching for the perfect angle, moaning quietly when he did and it prompted Steve to tug on his hair again. Then, he began picking up speed, hips snapping and tipping his head into the sweat-slicked curve of his neck, mouthing at the tendons there so he wouldn’t be too loud.

“Hey,” said Steve, pulling. “Eyes on me.”

Eddie looked up and met his huge, dark eyes in the mirror again. His jaw was clenched, one corner of his mouth sunken slightly because he was biting it, Eddie could tell. The kids were crashed out from exhaustion and adrenaline just beyond the door, and Robin and Nancy awake outside, last afternoon on Earth, and Eddie had never felt so insane or depraved in his life, fucking Steve Harrington in the bathroom of a stolen RV, each of them desperate to be quiet.

“Whatever you want, baby,” he said.

“I wanna see your face when you come inside me,” he said.

“Jesus H Christ,” Eddie said, and who was he to deny a request like that? He hitched Steve’s thigh a little higher and Steve, in a display of flexibility that made Eddie want to get launched into the center of the fucking sun, lifted it further to rest his right knee on the edge of the sink. Their mouths dropped open in tandem, and Eddie put his into Steve’s neck again, biting, but still keeping his eyes on Steve’s in the mirror. He raised his now free hand to quickly muffle Steve’s moan, and he finally dropped his hand from Eddie’s hair to grab at his ass, urging him faster and faster. Eddie left his hand where it was and Steve made no effort to remove it.

Suddenly, on a particularly sweet and brutal thrust, Steve bit the center of Eddie’s palm and, eyes wide, came untouched all over the mirror. Eddie followed just seconds behind, because Jesus H Christ indeed.

They stayed like that for a moment longer, then another, before Eddie backed away and slipped from Steve. He helped him pull his leg off the sink and, wordlessly, they cleaned each other up, Eddie checking between Steve’s legs and wiping him down while Steve blushed and rolled his eyes. He pulled Eddie’s jeans up for him from where they were still, lord almighty, still hanging around one of his ankles and Eddie helped him step back into his own. Then, he wiped down his backwoods sutures, wrapped them in some sterile bandages, and zipped Steve into the jacket he’d bought at War Zone.

After wiping down the mirror, the sink, and disposing of all the evidence, only Eddie’s tangled hair, Steve’s bitten mouth, and the smell of their sweat remained to tell the story of what happened. Steve cracked the window then turned back to the door, unlocked it; Eddie couldn’t remember seeing him lock it in the first place, the smooth bastard.

“No regrets?” he asked.

Something passed over Steve’s face, so fast it might have been a trick of the light, and then he was pressing a kiss to the corner of Eddie’s mouth. He said, “No regrets.”

Looking back on it, Eddie realized maybe he should’ve started paying attention earlier.

Back in tenth grade, he’d done his final report for World History on prophecies. The Greeks were kind of the last people who’d really made a big deal about it, even though there’d been recorded True Prophecies well into the 19th and 20th centuries. It was more that people had gotten weird about it — didn’t want to believe in predestination and a concrete future, even though it was something like a one in a billion chance you’d get a True Prophecy about yourself or even someone you knew; people just liked to feel special, Eddie thought, and hated when they weren’t — and so it had slid to the fringes of society and anyone who might have Sight got swept into the insular embrace of the Priestesses of the Quiet Sisters.

It had been an interesting project, one he got to pick himself, and maybe one of the last projects he ever truly invested himself into, academically. He’d gone to the town library for it, even, spent a whole Sunday afternoon in the stacks instead of working on the plans for the summer break Hellfire campaign, bent over a spread of books that detailed the record True Prophecies. 

Eddie had always dreamed, in the way that kids dream, of meeting someone with Sight. A character with Sight was one of the most popular types in media, especially in fantasy or sci-fi — though the ones in horror flicks were always the best — and there was so much romance (but romance with a capital fucking R, Gothic style, he thought) around it. It could get so dark and deep and interesting, and having a character who was wrestling with the visions Sight brought them, not knowing if they would come to pass but were instead a Branching Fate — it was way more interesting than a True Prophecy about someone Eddie would never meet.

He’d wanted, in fact, to do the paper on Branching Fate, but that was even more controversial than True Prophecy, mainly because you could prove a True Prophecy: it either happened, or it didn’t. A Branched Fate was more concerned with what happens if a True Prophecy didn’t come true, or if they could have multiple outcomes — and who was to say those outcomes could be proven?

Anyway, Branching Fate theorists tended to be more scientific types — they talked more about the theories of alternate universes, of course, and he’d heard a rumor Carl Sagan was one, which was metal as all hell, he’d thought — and the True Prophecy ones tended to be more historical, as well as religious — hence the rise of the Quiet Sisters in America during the late 18th Century and then its decline into some obscurity after World War Two.

And because this was for World History, Eddie focused on the Greeks and their own obsession with Sight and True Prophecies, how the Oracle of Delphi had been the basis for the founding of the Quiet Sisters and how the Sisters had a brief period of influence before they fell out of vogue. A misnomer, he was careful to note, because there were plenty of dudes in their order as well; the Sisters were just more visible since Sight, after all, was more commonly found in women, if found at all. He got distracted at that point by researching the Salem Witch Trials as well, wondering if any of those accused were women with Sight.

One of the librarians, Eddie discovered as he did his research, was fascinated by True Prophecy and she brought him tons of articles and books, even if they weren’t quite what he needed. (They’d talked for an hour about the Salem Witch Trials.)

She was the one to hand him a bit of microfiche about the most recent recorded True Prophecy, one handed down close by in Indy, back in ‘67. It didn’t have any details on the Prophecy itself, mainly because it hadn’t yet come to pass and the Sisters tended to keep mum on them until they did, not wanting people to speculate, and they’d only come out to tell the family of the person affected, like usual. So it was an article mainly about people reacting to see a Priestess of the Quiet Sisters out — very rare, the article noted they hadn’t had a public sighting since the 50s before that — and while it wasn’t the most helpful thing, or even that interesting to Eddie himself, it was a kind of local color and he figured he’d throw it in. Maybe it’d get him extra credit for relating world history to little ol’ Indiana.

Eddie was proud of the paper, when he turned it in, and it was the last B Plus he ever got in his academic career, before classes got boring and he got bored with them in turn. What was the point?

He handed in the paper, collected his B Plus, and promptly put everything he’d ever learned about True Prophecies, Branching Fates, and the Priestess of the Quiet Sisters coming to Indiana the year after he was born to the back of his mind. He focused, instead, on the new campaign for summer, and that shit was going to be epic.

In hindsight, there’d been a few other warning signs for Eddie to pick up on, but, in his defense, they’d been small and he was pretty busy not unpacking all the trauma he was going through — if he didn’t think her name, if he didn’t think about her pressed against the ceiling, if he didn’t think about her laughing at him in the woods, if he didn’t, didn’t, didn’t, maybe he’d be okay — and also Robin and Steve were clearly fucking weird already, how was he supposed to know they were being weirder than usual? Maybe Nancy’s participation in the weirdness, the way she’d aided and abetted it, was another clue, and, sure, you apparently bonded fast with people when you were facing demons from another dimension, but — right up until the moment he was knowing Steve quite biblically in an RV bathroom — he was in a group of almost complete strangers.

The first one was the way Robin looked at Steve when he’d been about to jump into the lake, the way her jaw had clenched and her eyes had darted back and forth across his face, searching; and then there had been the way he’d looked back at her, steady, the almost imperceptible sad turn of his mouth. They’d both looked a little like they wanted to say something to each other and Eddie had been somewhat confused, because he thought he’d clocked Robin back before this moment even — like attracted like and all that. But then Steve had been flashing eyes at Nancy, and tossing his shirt directly at Eddie’s face, and the moment was gone, gossamer thin and fleeting as Steve’s body broke through the water in one glorious, moon-pale line.

Their conversation as they’d walked had been strange and stilted too. But, again, Eddie didn’t know the boy from Adam and he’d brushed that off too. They were jealous of each other for their respective places in the lives of a bunch of fourteen year olds, and that was embarrassing enough without bringing Eddie’s own hate-sex adjacent hang-ups into the picture and whatever clear self-worth issues Steve grappled with on the daily.

It was the moment in Max’s trailer that would stand out later, when Eddie would take out his memories of that week and examine them turning them over in his hands and looking for clues to see if he could’ve read Steve more clearly, solved the puzzle sooner and gotten them all out of the dungeon faster. It was a little after Nancy had explained what she’d seen when she’d been under, and they’d been talking in circles around each other for what felt like hours as they worked to come up with a plan.

They got pretty far too, and it sounded good — well, as good as anything that involved fighting monsters in a fucking shadow realm could sound — up until Eddie’s red-headed next door neighbor and possibly the most badass person he’d ever met had offered herself up as bait for Vecna.

Predictably, there was an explosion of protests, mostly from Dustin and Lucas. Nancy, the most cold-blooded and practical amongst them, had looked thoughtful if slightly conflicted by the notion. Erica had looked horrified, and Robin had a strange look on her face that Eddie couldn’t read. He raised an eyebrow at her, she shook her head with a frown, and Max was saying that it was the best plan they had, the only plan they had to distract Vecna, and —

“It’s not,” said Steve. All eyes snapped to him now, even Eddie, twisting a little in his seat to look at him.

“It is,” protested Max hotly.

“It’s not,” he repeated. Someone hissed in a breath and he couldn’t tell who, busy staring at Steve as he said, “I can be the distraction. For Vecna, that is. You’ve got your Walkman, Max, it’ll keep you safe as long as you keep listening to it, and I can be the thing that Vecna looks for instead.”

“How’s that supposed to work?” she demanded. “I’m the one he wants.”

“Yeah, you’re not hiding anything from us, right Steve?” asked Dustin. His eyes had gone wide. “Like, you don’t have the symptoms, right?”

“I don’t.” He crossed his arms over his chest and, to his credit, he didn’t even wince when it pulled at the sad-ass bandages around his chest. Eddie’s fingers twitched toward the bag at his feet, the one that made up his and Wayne’s emergency medical supplies and various other sundries, wondering when he’d be able to corner Steve to get them seen to as best they could. Nancy’s shirt wasn’t going to cut it much longer, he figured.

“But I don’t need any symptoms,” he was saying while Eddie was caught up in the act of staring at the blood in his chest hair from the corner of his vision. “I have something Vecna wants more.”

Nancy narrowed her eyes. “What does —”

Robin stood with an abrupt clatter. She said, strangled and not at all a question, “Steve, can I talk to you,” before booking it to the back of the trailer.

He watched her go; all of them did. Because Eddie was man enough to admit it, he spent most of his time around Steve watching Steve and so before he’d turned to watch Robin, he had a split second view of his face that, later, he would identify as another warning sign. Now, it just looked like an exasperated eye roll. He dropped his arms to his side and followed her back with nothing more than a “Nance, you should come too,” tossed over his shoulder.

Eddie stared at their backs. The kids were murmuring amongst themselves, Max grumbling about how Steve needed to let her be her own person for once in her goddamn life — which Eddie personally thought was grossly misreading the situation — and stop being such a goddamn martyr for once in his — which was, well, that was actually probably very true. Eddie thought the guy would make a great paladin, if Dustin ever got him to crack.

After about ten minutes, during which Max popped her head phones back on and Lucas hovered nervously at her side (and Dustin and Erica rolled their eyes and broke off for their own mini planning session), he stood, clapping his hands together, and asked, “So does anyone want a sandwich or anything?”

(Ten feet away, in the back of the trailer, Robin paced, clenching and unclenching her hands, and Steve sat on Max’s little bed. Nancy stared out the window and asked, “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

“I didn’t think there was a point,” he said. “I never thought we’d be back here. I thought they got it wrong. Anyway, I never told anyone, except Hopper and Mrs Byers and that was because I’d gotten my fucking bell rung by Hargrove and couldn’t tell up from down and, anyway, it seemed relevant at the time.”

“And Robin?”

“The Russians,” she said. She was trying very hard not to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw up. “He, uh, he didn’t really have a choice there either. Just — slipped on out.”

“But it’s relevant now,” said Nancy slowly. “Because you think Vecna would go after you if he knew, or if he thought the prophecy meant something slightly different.”

Steve wouldn’t look at either of them.)

When they emerged another half hour later, both Robin and Nancy pale-faced and Steve resolute, Eddie had a plate of peanut butter and banana sandwiches on the coffee table and was engaged in a vaguely threatening staring match with Max until she cracked and ate one. All the others had had at least two, and Erica had even deigned to tell him that it was “acceptable,” which he knew was high praise coming from that one.

The older teens looked at Eddie’s offerings and Steve immediately tucked into one, while Nancy picked one up and held it and Robin just looked vaguely sick to her stomach. Nancy picked at the crust and ate it slowly that way, announcing between bites, “Plan stays the same, except Steve is with Max and Erica, and Lucas is with me and Robin.”

Somewhat predictably, this was followed by another shitfit, this time thrown by Lucas. He didn’t get very far, though, only spat out, “No, I’m not fucking leaving,” before Max was rolling her eyes and turning her Walkman up loud and Steve was shoving his sandwich in his mouth, grabbing Lucas around the shoulder, and saying through a sticky mouthful of peanut butter, banana, and bread, “Sinclair, with me a second.”

This pair was gone for a significantly shorter amount of time, and only went to one corner of the room, so they all averted their eyes to give them space. Eddie could hear Lucas’s vague hissing, but none of the words, and Steve’s own quiet whispers back, unintelligible. He saw, from the corner of his eye, Steve put both his hands on the boy’s shoulders and caught a glimpse of his grave mouth, Lucas’s firm nod.

“Okay,” said Steve as they returned to the fold, Lucas calmer but sullen, clearly still angry with them — with Steve, in particular — but no longer prepared to fight them on the issue. “So, what’s next?”

What was next was Eddie getting in touch with his heritage and stealing the RV a few doors down, and Eddie giving in to reckless abandon and hitting on Steve just to see what his face would do. It was the end of the world, after all, so he figured he deserved to have a little fun, and nothing was going to come of it until it actually did.

It wasn’t long after that they were splitting up and Eddie barely had time to readjust his world view — already going through the ringer as it was, thanks for asking — to include it being one where Steve Harrington, the Once and Future King of Hawkins High, was apparently extremely on board with letting Eddie the Freak dick him down. He saw him off at the steps of the Creel House with the blurred edge of the imprint of Eddie’s mouth creeping out from beneath the line of bandages and his come still inside him, which was actually probably going to make Eddie go insane, to be honest.

He couldn't kiss him goodbye, didn’t know if that would be wanted or welcome, didn’t know what all of this fucking meant, what either of them wanted, what after was going to look like for the both of them, but Steve was touching his wrist, just the once, and Eddie said, “Keep her safe. Both of them.”

“I will.” Steve gave him a grave nod and Eddie may have been imagining things, wishful, but he thought he saw his eyes trip down to his mouth before he turned to pull Robin into his arms. Eddie looked away, strangely choked up, and started making his way back up the steps of the RV to give them some semblance of privacy. Still, he watched them from the corner of his eye, knew they were all doing the same, Dustin and Lucas watching wide-eyed from a window after they’d said their good-lucks to Max and Erica.

They held each other for as long as they could, outside, curled against each other like little kids. Her hands, Eddie could vaguely see, were fisted in Steve’s jacket, white knuckled, and his eyes were tightly shut. His mouth moved, another whispered conversation that Eddie couldn’t — and shouldn’t — hear, and Robin just held him tighter, pulled him closer for a few more long seconds.

He dropped a kiss to the crown over her head, her hair, and pulled himself away with what seemed to be monumental effort on his part, Robin’s fingers tangled in his jacket. Then, he was turning his back, lifting up a bat with nails — the spiritual son, Dustin had said back in the field, with a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, of Steve’s firstborn, still in the trunk of his Beemer out by Lover’s Lake — and two little girls at his side as they walked into the Creel House.

Nancy took the spot Steve had vacated behind the wheel and got them back on the road again, her own knuckles white and her mouth a painfully straight line. Eddie sat on a bench in the back, between Dustin and Lucas, and all three of them pretended to not see Robin crying in the passenger seat, her hand tangled with Nancy, another harbinger of the shape of things to come that Eddie would examine later from a final exile in the woods.

But the thing was: he wanted to examine it now, some small part of him aware and watching and the curl of some dreaded unknown wrapping around his heart. He knew something was wrong, that there was something he couldn’t put his finger on, and he felt strangely out of control at the thought of it: it was the first time in years, he thought, that he wasn’t controlling the pace of the mystery, spinning the clues out before a rag-tag group of small town heroes to put together before the final big bad.

Instead he was among them, a bard between a dwarven cleric and a ranged hunter, their fighter and another bard ahead of them and two rogues and a paladin left behind. He didn’t know how the story was supposed to end, and there was no dice roll and deus ex machina that would save them if things went wrong. He felt sick to his stomach, terrified and alone, but then they were back at the trailer park and Eddie had to focus up, on the present, on keeping Dustin safe, on being the distraction that they need to end this fucking thing.

They shadow-walked into the realm below, and, as Nancy and Robin and Lucas began to walk away into the life-threatening forest just beyond them, he called, “Hey, Nance.”

She turned, her pointed, heart-shaped face as resolute as Steve’s had been.

“Make him pay,” he told her.

Nancy nodded, and they disappeared into the night.

Like with Steve, Eddie watched them for as long as he could before turning back to Dustin. He had a trailer to fortify, and then a concert to start and a boy to protect, and it all happened so fast, after that. It felt like — one minute Eddie was shredding for his life atop the dark dimension version of his trailer, promising Chrissy’s memory the retribution she deserved and watching Dustin headbang from the corner of his eye, and then they were racing inside, barricading themselves within.

But the bats were getting through and Eddie was pushing Dustin up through the gate, and, fuck fuck fuck, there wasn’t going to be enough time. He knew, within his bones, he knew that Nancy, Robin, and Lucas needed a little more time and he stared up at Dustin, who stared down at him. He cut the sheet.

“What are you doing?” he screamed.

“Buying them a little more time,” he told the boy before turning on his heel and running from the trailer.

It was, he admitted, suicidally dangerous, but so was Steve diving beneath the surface of Lover’s Lake with nothing but a plastic bag wrapped flashlight; so was Max taking off her headphones in the cold dark of the Creel House; so was Nancy and Robin and Lucas going up against the shriveled nightmare meatsack of Vecna slash Henry slash One on his own turf. Sometimes running was the brave thing; sometimes it was the smart thing. But Eddie had been running for days, and, even if it hurt, he knew now that there was nothing he could’ve done for Chrissy, but everyone else — what else was Eddie supposed to do? What else could he do to protect these people that protected him, even when maybe they shouldn’t?

What more shouldn’t Eddie give?

He ran into the blue-gray dark of the plane of shadows, snatched up a bike they’d left behind, and pedaled as fast as his legs would take him, screaming all the way. The bats followed and, when he couldn’t pedal anymore, Eddie crashed to the ground. He got back up, swinging his spear and shield, and made his own last stand.

Somewhere, a clock was ticking.

(Right side up and a thousand miles away, from the still waters of something that once was a pizza dough freezer, Eleven begged, “Steve, don’t do this. Please, I can — I can do it without — I can —!”

“Steve?” said Mike, bewildered. “What the fuck has he got to do with this?”

“I thought the Max girl was supposed to be bait,” offered Argyle.

Jonathan, his arms around Will, recalled a half-heard conversation between Mom and Hopper after their first run in with the Mind Flayer, Steve half-conscious at the kitchen table with Mom’s arms around his shoulder, Mom’s eyes wide and horrified and Hopper, pointed finger jabbing at nothing in particular, hissing, “Just because some jumped up religious crackpots said he was going to die saving the girl who would save the world —”

Oh, he thought. Oh, Steve.

He pressed his cheek to Will’s head and shut his eyes tight.

“Steve, no!” )

Yet, by the skin of his teeth, Eddie lived.

He was in the middle of the cyclone, his spear and shield dropped under the onslaught of overwhelming force, and he had his arms over his head as he tried his absolute damnedest to bat, ha, them away. He had his eyes shut tight and was thinking about Chrissy, felt like he was letting her down somehow, and then he was picturing Steve’s face as it looked back at his in the mirror just that afternoon, one last good thing before he went, and —

All at once, they dropped from the air and Eddie let his arms fall back to his side, heedless of the bleeding bite wounds that they gnawed into his skin through his layers. In the distance, he could see Dustin bursting out of the trailing and hobbling towards him at speed. He rose, met him halfway, and was allowing the kid to work up quite a head of steam as he berated him for living him behind and doing dumb shit without him when a chime rang out.

They froze, staring wide eyed at each other, and then there was a second and a third and —

Silence, complete and total. Dustin stared at Eddie, and Eddie stared at Dustin. They waited.

“No fourth chime,” he said, eyes huge and wet looking. Eddie slung an arm around the kid’s shoulders. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” he said slowly, “it’s time for us to go wait for Nancy and the others at the trailer and hope they’ve got more info.”

Dustin inhaled shakily and nodded. “Okay.”

“Okay.” He dropped down into a crouch. “Hop on board, Henderson, don’t think I didn’t notice you Weebles wobbling all the way over here.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have to,” he huffed, all indignant rage once again, even as he draped himself against Eddie’s back, “if someone hadn’t been a total shithead and ran off on his own to play the big damn hero.”

“Well,” he echoed, “I can’t let Steve get all the glory.”

“Ugh. Not this again!”

He gave Dustin a piggyback to the steps of the trailer, half listening to him complain about his two older male friends all the while. They sat among the ruins of their makeshift shark cage and cautiously kept watch as they waited for Nancy, Robin, and Lucas to return. Dustin kept chattering, clearly a nervous tic, and Eddie didn’t have the heart to tell him to cut it out, turning the spear he reclaimed on their return journey over and over in his hands. 

“He’s a good guy,” he said abruptly, cutting Dustin off mid-sentence about — something, Eddie honestly wasn’t that sure. He felt bad about it but not bad enough to apologize and he continued, “Harrington’s actually kind of a good guy.”

“Yeah, I’ve only been telling you since like fucking September,” the kid said, rolling his eyes so hard he was surprised he didn’t sprain anything. “Steve’s, like, true neutral good, dude, even if he spent years trying to hide it. You know he did my hair for me in middle school for a dance?”

Eddie rolled his eyes and only meant it a little. “Yeah, you’ve only told me like a hundred times.”

“Well he did and it was awesome and he’s awesome,” he said, “and I’m glad my two older male friends have decided to bury the hatchet—”

“You have got to stop saying it like that, Henderson, it’s not doing what you think it is —”

“—but, like, why the change of heart?”

He was saved from trying to find a kid-appropriate way of telling him that his presumed dislike of Steve was actually jealousy and an angry boner turned into a rather positive boner and an admiration for Steve’s better qualities — heart of gold and perfect ass, among others — by the arrival of Team Flambé. They were worse for wear, with strange bruises on their throats and the smell of gasoline and charred flesh clinging to them, and Nancy had, oh sweet baby Christ, Nancy had the head of Vecna clutched in her hand like a trophy.

She jerked it at them as they stared wide-eyed and she said, “Lets get the fuck out of here before anything new tries to kill us.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” said Eddie as Dustin said, “Eddie cut the rope down though so it’s gonna take a minute.”

“Dude,” he hissed.

“You did what?” demanded Lucas.

“He grew a set,” said Dustin, quite airily for someone who was still goggling, horrified, at the bloodied head of their nemesis, “and decided he needed to one-up Steve and ran into the night like he’s the group’s paladin.”

“I am not a paladin, you take that back,” he said over a strange sound from Robin. He glanced at her but her face was unreadable, maybe too pale and grave for someone who just helped save the world, and he thought about the three chimes, about Max in the Creel House. So he stood and helped Dustin to his feet as he went, said, “Any idea about the chimes? You guys heard those too, right?”

Lucas glared at the head in Nancy’s hand.

“Yes,” he told them tightly. “And we don’t know. One second we were lighting this asshole up like a Christmas tree, and then he just — dropped, out of nowhere, like his strings got cut, and then so did everything else. El, I think, somehow. I could almost hear her voice.”

“Eleven,” said Nancy, at Eddie’s questioning look. They were inside now, trying to stack tables and chairs together so they could get out easily. All of them were beat to hell, to be frank; Eddie couldn’t wait to get back to the RV to clean the various bitey wounds on his arms — they were finally starting to make themselves known, stinging something fierce. She was saying, “Eleven must’ve known something was happening and intervened somehow. We heard the three chimes go then, when he was on the ground, like Lucas said.”

One by one, they helped each other up onto the table and through the rift in the ceiling, kids first, then Robin, then Nancy with her gorey trophy, and Eddie taking up the rear while Dustin glared down at him like he thought he was going to try to stay behind again. He rolled his eyes and flung himself through.

As soon as he was through, there was a weird slurping noise and Eddie looked up to see the gash above him closing itself. They all watched, varying degrees of horror and interest, and the thing disappeared like it had never been there before.

Eddie whistled. “What the fuck.”

“Anyway,” Lucas was saying, “whatever it was that El did, it incapacitated Vecna long enough for Nancy to get in there and chop his damn head off.”

She held the head aloft again with a shrug. “Figured it was the best way to make sure he stayed down.”

“Wheeler,” Eddie said, “if women did it for me, I swear — ”

He cut himself off with a blink. Dustin and Lucas stared at him, Nancy rolled her eyes, and Robin gave a hysterical little giggle that set Eddie off too. Soon, they were all laughing, Dustin collapsing to the ground, and Eddie was trying to figure out if this was a positive or negative reaction to him accidentally coming out to all of them when the walkie talkie that had been silent in the Upside Down suddenly squawked to life.

“Code Red,” came Erica’s hysterical voice. She was clearly in tears, and had been for a while. “Code Red! Code goddamn Red, Henderson, would you pick this shit up! Code Red!”

“Relax, Sinclair, I’m here,” said Dustin. “Over.”

“Carver,” she gasped. “Carver and his damn cronies showed up and he broke Max’s Walkman!”

Lucas immediately sprinted from them, not waiting to hear more, banging his way out of the trailer and into the night. The rest of them followed behind, Eddie putting his arm around Dustin from one side and then Robin from the other as they all hurtled their way to the RV. They threw themselves into it, Erica sobbing unintelligibly over the walkie talkie.

As Eddie got behind the wheel, started the thing, and began to drive it like he did in fact steal it, Nancy snatched up the walkie from Dustin and settled herself into the passenger seat.

“Erica, I need you to take a breath,” she was saying calmly, only the fine tremor in her fingers betraying her. “Breathe with me real quick, okay? One, two, three. Good. Now, tell me what happened.”

Haltingly, still gasping, still crying, Erica said, “They fucking ambushed us. Then Carver went up stairs and started yelling because Vecna had Max, started shaking her, yelling about Eddie and Lucas and Hellfire, and he broke Max’s Walkman! But then Steve was there and he just punched that jock bitch right in the temple, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes and then Max — and then —”

She sobbed again.

“And then what?” prompted Nancy in that calm voice.

“She started floating,” she whispered. From the back, Lucas made a strangled noise and Eddie fought the urge to look back, eyes on the road, tearing down the streets of Hawkins. Erica said, “She started floating and Steve grabbed her, he started pulling at her and shouting about a prophecy and — I don’t know what he was talking about! He was just saying all this stuff, about a boy without — without love, and how he was supposed to help a girl save the world, and then Max wasn’t floating anymore — ” 

“She’s okay then?” whispered Dustin. “Max is okay?”

“ — and Max was on the ground, and she broke her arm, we think, and then it was, it was Steve , Steve was in the air and his legs — Nancy, his legs started breaking — and he never told us his song, I told him my song, I said, it’s Prince, it’s With You, and he said I shouldn’t be listening to Prince because it’s too grown up and I told him — I told him — but I didn’t know what I should sing, because he never told us, so Max just started singing Head Over Heels because he’d played it in the car a bunch but that wasn’t it, it wasn’t it, and his legs kept breaking —”

Eddie’s hearing cut out to static. Or, at least, he wished it did. He could still hear Lucas, saying, “What? What? Steve?” over and over; he could hear Dustin start to cry; he could hear Nancy breathing as she tried to keep herself calm for the hysterical Erica; and he couldn’t hear anything from Robin at all, and that was worse somehow.

He watched the road before him, blurring in and out of focus, his hands tight on the wheel in his peripherals, white knuckled. He couldn’t think about her, couldn’t picture her, because then he’d be seeing Steve on the roof of the trailer too and he grit his teeth. His eyes, he thought, then — Steve’s eyes, staring back at Eddie’s in the mirror of this very RV, wide and dark and sad, a sadness he thought was for Max, for Eddie himself, for the fight ahead, not — not —

All he could think about were his eyes, and how he’d pressed himself backwards into Eddie’s warmth, pushing, wanting, trying to get him closer, a part of him —

Her eyes, white, then his, after, fathomless, and how he’d kissed the corner of his mouth like that, said, No regrets, like he’d —

A prophecy, he thought, and then, his eyes, and he thought, wow, what an unsatisfactory bitch of a situation, couldn’t even cry because he was the one behind the wheel, because no one knew what had passed between them just a few feet from here, just a breath from here.

Fucking bastard knew, when he’d asked him to —

Eddie bit the inside of his cheek so hard he could taste blood. Good, he thought, indistinct. Good.

“He’s hurt so bad,” cried Erica. “Please, please, where are you? He’s hurt so bad, Max is trying to get help, she’s trying — but he’s hurt so bad, he’s — he wasn’t breathing, Nancy, you have to come back, where are you, please —”

“He’s alive?” asked Robin in a small voice. She was behind Eddie now, and he fought hard not to flinch, her fingers gripping his headrest tight. “Steve — he’s, he’s alive?”

“Please,” Erica was saying. He wasn’t sure if she could even hear them over the sounds of her own tears and breathing, beyond the ability to acknowledge them. Nancy couldn’t even say anything anymore, couldn’t interject, because the girl had a death grip on the walkie’s buttons over at the Creel House, and so they could do nothing but listen to her sob Steve’s name hysterically, begging nonsensically. Before it abruptly cut off a minute later, he could hear running footsteps, a shout from Max of Erica’s name and then Steve’s, and an unknown woman say, “Oh, my God —”

By the time they got to the Creel House, Eddie slowing down on his approach because the closer they got, the more distinct the sound of sirens had become, it was to watch the taillights of an ambulance peel away from the curb and speed into the distance. Eddie crawled the RV through the street and everyone took a window to get a different angle on the proceedings. There was a strange fissure through the house, like an earthquake had cracked it in two, but it stopped halfway down the front walk. There were police cars everywhere and Max and Erica were sitting on the bumper of another ambulance, wrapped in blankets. An EMT was looking at Max’s left arm while her right was holding Erica tight to her side, and Chief Powell was crouched in front of them.

“Keep driving,” said Nancy, putting the walkie aside finally. She clenched her hands into fists. “Eddie, keep driving. We’ll go back to the lake, ditch the RV there, and get our cars. Me and Robin and Lucas will go back for Max and Erica. Dustin, you’ll go with Eddie in Steve’s — in Steve’s car, and you’ll show him the way to Hopper and El’s cabin in the woods. Once we — once we know what’s going on, we’ll join you there, regroup and — and we’ll figure it out, okay? We’ll figure it out.”

(Nine thousand miles away, Jim was helping Joyce into history’s most questionable helicopter, while Yuri and Enzo grinned from the front.

“Do you think the kids are okay?” she asked.

“More okay than us,” said Murray with a snort. He was still holding the flame-thrower, cradling it like a baby; he’d refused to be parted from the thing, said he was naming it Francine. “If anyone lands on their feet like a cat from a tree, it’s those little rugrats of yours.”

Joyce laughed but Jim stared out the window, pressing one hand to his breastbone, and it was funny, he thought, how dread could sometimes feel like heartburn and lingered so long. He shook his head, took Joyce’s hand and settled in for the journey. Murray was right, he told himself. The kids always landed on their feet.)

(And in an ambulance doing eighty down a residential street much closer than that, two miles away, then three, then four, and more and more, two EMTs bent over the broken body of a teenage boy. One put an oxygen mask over the boy’s mouth and tried not to gag at the messy place where the kid’s left eye was—

“Fuck,” said the second, a hand on the boy’s wrist and tracking his faint but surprisingly stubborn heartbeat. “What the fuck happened to this kid? Looks like that girl —”

“Creel,” said the driver quietly from the front, to no one in particular. “I remember Victor Creel.”

Silently, the driver began to pray for the boy on the gurney behind him.)

They followed Nancy’s plan to a T, all of them frankly too shell-shocked to do anything else. They’d ditched the RV and split into their respective groups, Distraction and Flambé once again, and Eddie had carefully driven Steve’s precious Beemer a cool five under the speed limit with Dustin in the passenger seat numbly and tearfully giving him directions up to the cabin lately owned by Jim Hopper and apparently still abandoned in the wake of his death.

When they’d arrived, Eddie had put the car in park and turned it off and they just — sat there, in the silence, staring up at a building that looked like it had recently gotten the absolute shit kicked out of it.

“Mind Flayer,” Dustin had offered, which meant fuck-all to Eddie beyond the obvious and he assumed it was some other Upside Down bullshit the kids had christened with a DnD moniker. So he’d just hummed, and they’d sat, and eventually Dustin said, “Why wouldn’t he tell me?”

“Hmm?”

“Steve,” he said. He scrubbed a hand across his face; he hadn’t stopped crying since Erica told them Steve had started floating. “Erica said something about a prophecy. If he had a prophecy, why wouldn’t he tell me? We’re like brothers.”

Seemed like he was playing it close to the vest with a lot of people, Eddie didn’t say, thinking about how Steve had touched his wrist when Eddie had told him to keep the girls safe. He hadn’t told him to keep himself safe. Why hadn’t he? 

Instead, he reached across the console and took Dustin’s hand in his. 

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” he said. He was proud of how bitter he didn’t sound.

They relocated to the porch steps after a while, sitting quietly, and making no move to go inside. When they’d left the car, he’d taken Dustin’s hand up again, ostensibly to help him walk, but then, when they’d sat down, neither one of them let go.

He wondered, vaguely, what secrets this place had borne witness to, Mind Flayer and familial alike. 

Eventually, Nancy and Lucas joined them at the cabin. Robin was no longer with them, but they had Erica and Max in tow; Max had a broken arm and dark circles beneath her red-rimmed eyes but was otherwise physically fine. They were clearly shaken, however, even if Erica’s hysterical sobs — sounds Eddie would maybe be hearing in his nightmares more than the screeching of demobats — had transitioned to something stoney-faced and white knuckled, her jaw clenched tight. Lucas had been riding in the back seat with them both when Nancy pulled up, and emerged still holding Max. Erica made an immediate bee-line for Dustin, who enveloped her in his noodle-arms and held her close.

Nancy shut her car door and motioned for Eddie to join her. He pressed a hand into both Max’s and Erica’s heads and left the four kids huddled together on the stoop, Max murmuring quietly to the boys and Erica, filling Dustin in.

“We went to the hospital, to get the girls, and Steve’s alive,” said Nancy, like ripping off a band-aid. “But he’s — it’s bad, Eddie. It’s really bad. Both his legs are broken in multiple places, and one of his arms, and Max and Erica said his heart stopped for a whole minute, after. And I know there’s other stuff they weren’t telling me, they only let Robin in to see him and —. The doctors don’t know when he’ll wake up — if he’ll wake up.”

Eddie put a hand over his mouth. “Fuck.”

“Robin refused to leave,” she told him. “Which may or may not — apparently, he made her his power of attorney after the whole Russian thing, which honestly is good because I’d have no idea how to get in contact with his parents, Steve barely knows where they are most of the time and — I don’t know. Fuck them, whatever. Hospital was crawling with people, apparently there were mini quakes all over town when Steve — anyway, I ran into some of Doctor Owens’s people at the hospital that recognized me.”

He stared at her blankly. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

She blinked. “Owens? You — oh my God. I actually forgot that you haven’t — sorry, it’s the government cover-up people that come to town whenever any of their shit goes sideways like this and they have to make all the weird stuff we fixed for them make sense to the general public.”

“Oh,” he said. “Neat.”

Nancy snorted and then looked like she felt bad about it. “Yeah. Anyway, I’m not sure how they knew — well, I guess they probably always knew about Henry Creel and figured what happened to Chrissy and Fred were connected to the Upside Down. But they’re working on a story for Steve, she told me, the lady from Owens’s team, that is, and for you. Something to do with a serial killer, maybe Victor Creel escaping after all these years. She said they’re still working on it, and told me to tell you to keep laying low for a while. Once they have everything together, they’ll have some stuff for you to sign but — but, then, it’ll be over.”

“Over,” he repeated. He watched the kids on the porch, curled around each other for comfort and warmth and safety. He could feel Nancy staring at him from his side. He said, “I get the feeling this is never over. Not really.”

“I think it is this time,” she said. “I’ve got the head in my trunk to prove it.”

“Yeah, I guess you do,” Eddie said.

“I won’t ask if you’re going to be okay,” said Nancy slowly. “Because I know how bullshit that is. But it gets easier.”

“Does it?”

“I think so,” she told him. “Little by little. It helps having people around who know, who’ve been through it. Don’t, uh, don’t shut us out. Or try to pretend. That makes it worse. For you — for, for everyone.”

“Speaking from experience?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

He hummed. After a moment, he screwed the rest of his patchwork courage together and asked, “Do you know what it was?”

“What?”

“His prophecy,” he said, surprised at how the words didn’t get caught in his throat. “Steve told you, right? When the three of you sidebarred in the trailer. That was what convinced you to send him with Max, instead of coming with you and Robin.”

Nancy nodded, just once. “Steve was born in Indianapolis, and a priestess of the Quiet Sisters had showed up in the hospital a day before, like she was waiting for something. For him.”

1967, he thought. It had been July, July Nineteenth, actually, the hottest day of the month. It got up to ninety-five degrees, and it had rained heavily two days later, breaking the worst of the weather. He remembered reading the microfiche from the library back when he was fifteen and had no concerns bigger than that paper and the next campaign.

“The Priestess had said,” she was saying, “that one of the sisters had had a vision of the hospital, and so she’d come to relay the message to the parents. It was that there would be a brown-eyed child without love, born under the midday sun, on the hottest day of the month, and that that child would die so that a girl, all shaven and shorn, would save the world.” She bit her lip, lost in thought for a moment. She said, more to the middle distance beyond them than to Eddie or even herself, “Most babies are born with blue eyes, and then they change eventually, if they’re meant too. But he was born with brown eyes. That’s how they knew. He, uh, he said that the love thing was probably self-fulfilling after that. Why love something that you know is going to die?”

Eddie shut his eyes tight.

“He thought it was supposed to happen twice before, when we went up against the Upside Down for the second and third time,” she continued. “I remember — the Chief was always kind of weird around him, more than the rest of us, and it makes sense. It was the Chief’s kid he was — anyway. When he didn’t die after Starcourt, and Eleven lost her powers, he thought it was over.”

“It wasn’t,” he said.

“No,” Nancy agreed. “It was his idea. Of course it was his idea, he’s always — he thought that if he told Vecna about the prophecy, but lied about what exactly it meant, it would make Vecna leave Max alone. If he thought that Steve living was what was crucial to stopping him.”

“So we just let him sacrifice himself,” said Eddie. “Great plan.”

“Eddie,” she said quietly. “I know — I know you didn’t know him like I knew him, or like Robin knows him — no one, I think, knows him like Robin knows him — but you had to — if this was what Steve was going to do, if this is what Steve thought he had to do to protect the kids and us, what makes you think we could’ve stopped him from finding a way to do it?”

“Yeah,” he said again. He didn’t see the Creel House in the Upside Down, or even here, but Eddie had always had a great imagination. So he could picture it behind his tightly closed eyes,  the vines from the forest, the way the rift looked in the trailer, wet and bleeding like an open wound, creaking steps and broken windows and horror-movie walls, and he could picture Steve among it, waiting for Nancy and Robin’s backs to be turned before he took matters into his own hands, one of Nancy’s guns, maybe, to his temple. Was there a world out there where he had? He thought about the school of thought behind Branching Fates, and how it didn’t matter, because the clock had sounded and Erica said he stopped breathing, Vecna was dead and the prophecy was true either way, and he wanted to throw up. 

Once again, he said, “Yeah. Sure. Anyway, he’s alive right?”

There was a featherlight touch on his cheek and he finally opened his eyes back up. He’d begun to cry, he realized, and Nancy was brushing the tears away. She looked like she might be about to cry too, and what a picture they must’ve made together, huddled by her car in the rising light of dawn, outside dead Jim Hopper’s derelict cabin, four kids crying on the porch ten feet away.

“He’s alive,” she agreed.

Both of them didn’t say: for now.

Eddie spent the next two days in Chief Hopper’s busted cabin, but he didn’t spend them totally alone. No, Nancy came by with food each morning, and updates on Steve and the government agents trying to clear his name — apparently they were now maybe thinking about throwing Jason Carver under the bus as well; plus he’d gone full One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when Steve started floating, and frankly it couldn’t happen to a worse person, as far as Eddie was concerned, absolutely fuck that guy — and Dustin, Lucas, Max, and Erica, the little scamps, even managed to smuggle Uncle Wayne to see him on the second day. Eddie had burst into a round of truly mortifying and vaguely hysterical sobs, and they’d held each other for something like an hour before they’d even gotten around to talking.

The kids were quieter than normal, when they’d swung by with Uncle Wayne, but Eddie didn’t blame them. They’d stayed for dinner before Wayne had to go back to the hotel room he’d been put up in — the trailer had been descended upon by the Feds once again apparently — and he’d watched all of them with careful eyes, wondering. They’d told him snatches of the cover story the government was workshopping, about Steve, comatose in his hospital bed now, protecting Max and Erica, and Wayne’s eyes had lingered on Eddie’s bandaged forearms, the bruise high on Erica’s cheekbone but hadn’t commented.

Dustin walkied him later that night that, when Wayne had dropped them all off at the Sinclair house — they were rotating through each house, apparently — he’d hugged each of them close and told them they could talk to them about anything. And, Dustin had said, he said to let him know when they were all allowed to start visiting Steve, because he’d like to stop by if he could.

Robin had yet to be torn from Steve’s bedside, of course, though Nancy brought her food too, and several changes of clothes, and Robin’s own parents hovered nervously about. They liked Steve, he imagined, and he wondered if they knew just exactly what his relationship with their daughter looked like; he wondered if it mattered, as long as they didn’t try to pry her from his side before she was ready to go. Eddie liked Robin, and he wanted her to be okay, and even if he didn’t want Steve to be awake for his own sake, he’d want it for hers. He told Nancy to give Robin his love, and Nancy said Robin said to give him her own. Eddie wondered if Steve had told her, or if she just saw him like he saw her.

But mainly Eddie just existed in the cabin, curled up in the remains of what the kids told him was Eleven’s old bedroom — Supergirl, Eddie had taken to calling her in his head, because he didn’t want to call her by a number and El felt too familiar still — and trying to patch things up around the cabin. It was just polite, he figured.

He daydreamed about a mixtape to bring to Robin in the hospital, one for her to play for Steve, and tried to ignore how many awful, pop-drivel, au courant fucking love songs he wanted to put on it.

Because as mad as he was at Steve — “no regrets,” seriously, that mother fucker — he still — he still  —

He could taste him, still, almost. He could feel his heartbeat beneath his fingertips, the softness of his hair, the coarseness of the stuff on his chest and on his thighs as he’d gripped them, moving within him. He could feel his warmth and smell his skin, and he could picture his eyes on his, locked. Eyes on me, like he was trying to memorize him, like he wanted one last thing for his own, because he’d never —

When Steve Harrington woke up, because he had to, he had to, Eddie wasn’t sure if he was going to kiss him or strangle him. Maybe both.

At the start of the third day, just as Eddie was starting to go a little stir crazy, Nancy showed up with his daily breakfast, lunch, and dinner options. The kids were with her, in surprisingly good spirits considering, and Eddie quickly realized that this was because there were more kids than usual and an inexplicable pizza van following her tire treads.

Introductions passed in a blur, with Wheeler excitedly introducing him to Supergirl herself and little Will Byers, who was, in fact, little no more. Will was excited to meet a fellow DM and Eddie would be lying if he wasn’t excited to meet the center of so many of the boys’s stories, and El gave him kind of a sidelong glance, a little funny and unreadable, but he chalked it up to the fact that he’d spent the last two nights curled up under her little girl afghan and, oh, shit, were they going to have to share? He’d need to ask Wheeler senior to pick him up a sleeping bag from somewhere when she had a minute.

He got introduced too to the elder Byers, who Eddie had already known in passing, and a delightful creature called Argyle, owner of the pizza van — maybe, no one answered when he asked, and honestly he knew he was hyper-fixating but it was this or give into the madness, he felt — and who was most certainly going to be Eddie’s new best friend when all this shit was finally fucking over.

They’d been read in on the situation, clearly, because no one batted an eye when Nancy mentioned going to join Robin at the hospital, and did anyone want to come with her? Supergirl, standing next to him on the porch, raised her hand immediately.

“I want to see him,” she said. “I have to see him. I think — I saw him, back there, and I need to try to find him again.”

The kids all nodded seriously, and so did the rest of the teens; only Erica looked as confused as Eddie felt, but he figured it must have something to do with the girl’s superpowers and Lucas’s working theory from a few days ago that she’d somehow known what was going on in Hawkins, despite being something like two thousand miles away in California at the time.

“We expecting anyone else, bros?” asked Argyle. Jonathan raised an eyebrow at him before his face went pale and then Eddie heard it too: a car, making its way up the dirt path to the cabin where at least one fugitive — possibly two, there was definitely something afoot with little El, he thought — was hiding out.

Mike and Will immediately started trying to push Eddie and El into the cabin when a black town-car appeared between the trees. They all froze, and then Joyce Byers was popping out of the back seat, a relieved smile stretching her face as she took the kids all in.

“Mom!” shouted Will, and he darted down the steps to embrace his mom, Jonathan joining a moment later.

“How are you?” she was asking, running her hands through one boy’s hair and then another’s. “They couldn’t tell us anything, other than you were all mixed up in this —”

“It’s okay,” Jonathan said quietly. “It’s — we’re okay, mostly.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Mostly?”

Two more car doors opened, the far side, and then also emerging from the backseat was — 

“Dad,” screamed El, joyous, and blissfully unaware of the severe damage she’d just dealt Eddie’s eardrums. She launched herself down the porch with what had to have been psychically enhanced speed, he thought, and into the waiting arms of a miraculously undead Chief Jim Hopper.

Chaos descended in short order.

The shouting from the kids went immediately to a fever pitch as they all demanded to know what was going on and how he was alive, they thought he died underneath Starcourt when the Russians were trying to open their own mother gate —  which, what? — broke just enough for Eddie to hear Hopper say something about “fighting demogorgons and communism through the power of love and flamethrowers” and brandish a whole ass broadsword — seriously, what? — and then quickly ratcheted up to levels that only dogs could hear, though that was mainly Henderson and his endless scientific curiosity about fucking everything.

Meanwhile, a woman in a severe pantsuit emerged from the driver’s seat and stalked her way over to Eddie, frozen on the porch, and produced an ominous looking Filofax and equally intimidating fountain pen, brusquely informing him that his name had been cleared of all charges relating to the Henry Creel Murders, details on his cover story within, that he and his uncle would be moved into an apartment on main street purchased in their name by a division of the US government that did not require naming at this juncture, and if he would just sign here, here, and here on this NDA, they could all be on their respective ways.

Eddie blinked at the papers. Nancy — along with some bearded mother fucker, who the Cinnamon Toast fuck was he? — was reading over his shoulder and eventually pronounced, “That looks the same as the ones we’ve signed in the past.”

“It should be fine,” agreed the bearded guy. “But he’d like a copy for his records, if you don’t mind.”

The woman in the severe pantsuit rolled her eyes but produced a copy, alongside the promised cover story, and stepped away as soon as Eddie had signed where she’d indicated. She snapped her Filofax closed with zero fanfare, disappeared the fountain pen into her breast pocket, and, after a quick word with Mrs Byers, was in her car and reversing her way out of the woods. The whole interaction took less than ten minutes and Eddie felt like he’d been dragged backwards through a bush in a rainstorm and just left to lay there on his fucking back.

“What just happened?” he asked. He didn’t even mind how plaintive he sounded.

“The Federales,” said the bearded guy, clapping Eddie on his shoulder once and wandering away.

“No but seriously,” he said to Nancy. “What the fuck was that? Who the fuck was that?”

Nancy snorted.

From inside the gaggle of kids, Hopper seemed to have finally regained control of the situation — or, at least, got them all to shut the fuck up for five seconds so he could breathe, and Eddie was unsurprised to learn that was how Hopper talked to all kids, not just him when he was arresting him for petty vandalism. Not that he’d been doing much of that lately, no sir — that was seventeen year old Eddie’s preferred pastime. Twenty year old Eddie avoided cops much more religiously, and for obvious reasons.

He looked over the circle of bickering children and outward, glancing at Jonathan and Argyle, who’d joined Nancy and Eddie on the porch, and Eddie watched as his eyes flicked from them to the kids and back again. He glanced to the left, then to the right, before returning to eye Eddie suspiciously. He’d been doing a headcount, he realized with a sweeping sort of realization. He felt sick.

“You’re not Harrington,” Hopper said. There was something, suddenly, a little wild about his eyes. “Where’s Harrington?”

Erica burst into tears.

They piled into the three separate vehicles that were surrounding the cabin, a strange echo of the days before. Nancy loaded up her brother, Dustin, and Lucas into her car, while Argyle settled behind the wheel of the pizza van — which Eddie still hadn’t gotten an answer about — with Mrs Byers, her boys, and a shaking and upset Erica, who Mrs Byers was keeping close. Eddie was once again behind the wheel of Steve’s beloved Beemer, with Hopper in the backseat with his daughter and Max, and the bearded guy — Murray, apparently — riding shotgun.

Eddie had never been so conscious of his skills as a driver as he was with the former — still? Maybe? How did it work if you only lost your job because you died but then it turned out, surprise, you were alive? Eddie was asking for a friend — Police Chief of Hawkins and his daughter in the backseat. But they were wrapped up more in their own world, with Max telling El, Hopper, and Murray what had been going down in Hawkins and what Steve had done to save Max.

Hopper had known, apparently, about Steve’s little prophetic secret. He’d spilled it two years ago while concussed out of his mind and surprised about having survived not only a brutal fistfight with BIlly Hargrove but also some sort of dust-up with demodogs in a series of tunnels beneath Hawkins. Hopper, and Mrs Byers, had been the first people outside Mr and Mrs Harrington and the Quiet Sisters themselves to know about the prophecy surrounding Steve.

So he was unsurprised to be in a caravan of cars headed to Hawkins General to see if Supergirl could work her mojo with his unconscious, broken body. But Eddie could see in the man’s eyes that he was also livid, and terrified.

But the kids hadn’t known about the prophecy, he thought, and, while they clearly knew now, it looked like they didn’t have all the details. Eddie had exchanged a fraught look with Hopper through the rearview mirror.

El was near tears, huddled closely with a furious Max, confused and upset by what she had somehow seen of Steve, how she’d been locked in some sort of mind battle with Vecna slash Henry slash One and Steve had been saying that he had to kill him to stop El from stopping him . She whispered about how nice and kind he’d always to her but how careful, and now she knew why; and how she’d begged him not to, that she could defeat One herself — 

“It’s not your fault,” said Hopper. “He believed he was protecting you.”

And ain’t that Steve, thought Eddie, the self-sacrificing shithead, in a nutshell.

“But he didn’t have to,” she said, plaintive. “He said One had to kill him to stop me.”

“He lied, kid,” her dad said softly. “He lied to, to One, about what his prophecy actually was. He knew what he had to do to help you stop him.”

“But he didn’t have to,” she repeated, her brow drawn. “I saw it, the Prophecy, what it — what the woman said about him, and he did not have to.”

Hopper looked pole-axed. “You knew?”

She nodded. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears.

Max darted a look back and forth between them. “What? What was it?”

“It does not matter anymore,” said El. “Because I am going to fix it.”

The rest of the ride passed in a blur, and then so did the trek through the hospital, Hopper in the lead with a steely-eyed glare that cut their path through the staff who stared at their rag-tag group. Eddie got the most whispers, and then Max at his side, and he caught sight of a TV in the corner of the nurses station showing a press conference with Chief Powell and an FBI-looking guy, Eddie’s own name on the ticker tape.

Steve’s room was a private one, up on the third floor, the finest, presumably, that government hush money could buy. There was a single vase of flowers, daffodils from someone’s garden, at his bedside but no cards and the blinds were pulled shut, keeping the early morning light at bay. Robin was curled up in a chair at Steve’s right, holding the hand of his unbroken arm. She had on a big green and gold sweatshirt that Eddie was positive would have Harrington scrawled across the back if he looked.

She was tear-stained and pale, and then wide-eyed when she looked up at the movement in the door. Fresh tears spilled over her cheeks as she took in Hopper and breathed, “What the fuck?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. He was staring down at Steve as he said it, something complicated and terrible and sad on his face while he took in the boy in the hospital bed. He looked so small, thought Eddie, much smaller than he was in life, his legs, white plaster and linen from ankle to hip, stretched out in traction, a blanket thrown over his middle, the left arm splinted and braced too, a bandage taped over his left eye and no one had told Eddie about that, no one had told him about his eyes, oh fuck, baby boy — 

Hopper leaned over Steve’s supine form, brushing his hair — lank and greasy, so flat and unlike him —  carefully back from his face. He said, as if to himself, “Oh, buddy.”

El stood frozen at the foot of the hospital bed, eyes huge and wet, and Robin broke out of the spell of stillness she’d fallen under at Hopper’s appearance. She stood and went to the teenage girl, wrapping her arms around her.

“Hey, Eleven. He’ll be so happy you’re okay,” Eddie heard her whisper. El buried her face in Robin’s neck.

Bodies were beginning to pile up in the doorway behind him and Max, who was slipping around him to join Robin and El in their embrace. Mrs Byers brushed past him next, gasping softly at the sight of Steve and moving to join Hopper, who’d collapsed into a chair and had one trembling hand clenched in the fabric at Steve’s hip. She ran her hand through his flat hair, her mouth twisted in a grimace.

Someone took Eddie’s hand and he looked to see Nancy on his right, her eyes shiny, and Jonathan at her other side. The boys and Erica pushed through then and froze in a huddle just behind Robin, El, and Max, Dustin and Erica pressed close as they had been ever since Steve ended up here, comforting each other. Eddie wasn’t sure, really, what the story was there and he was honestly a little frightened to find out. How long, exactly, had all of them been doing this?

“Jesus,” whispered Murray from behind him. 

He thought, then, about the prophecy and what total bullshit it was, calling the boy in the bed a “child without love,” when every single person in that fucking room would have run through fire to be by his side so he wouldn’t have to do it alone. He wondered if he knew how loved he really was, wondered if all the love in the room and in Eddie’s own fucking heart was enough to restart Steve’s. He chanced a glance at Supergirl and thought that maybe it was.

“The doctors say he’s like a six on the Glasgow Coma Scale,” Robin was saying, voice hoarse from constant crying, “because he doesn’t have eye or verbal response, but he does have normal flexion of, what, like, they can get to and test or whatever, but they don’t know if he’ll wake up, because six is still severe, I mean it’s not a three, which is like the worst, that’s no response, that’s, that’s kind of, like, almost brain dead, and —”

“I want to try,” said El, pulling away from Robin's embrace and moving to sit in the chair she’d vacated.

“Try what?” someone asked. Eddie wasn’t sure who.

“Finding him,” she said. “When I knew Max was in danger from One — when I was piggybacking from the pizza dough freezer —”

“What the fuck,” he said under his breath. Nancy patted him on the shoulder.

“— I first found Max in a happy memory,” she was saying, “but then she disappeared. I thought maybe she had gone to another, and I needed to find her, but when I looked again it was — it was Steve who had One’s attention. So I went after him and he was not — he was not trying to hide, like Max had, like he should have, to give me time, and he was — it was — bad, bad memory. I told him, you need to run, go to a happy memory, because I could do it, I had done it before, I could do it again, I could, and he said — he said — ”

El clenched her fists.

“It’s okay, honey,” said Mrs Byers softly. “It’s okay.”

“He wouldn’t leave,” she whispered. “He wouldn’t — he wouldn’t let me do it alone. He said — he said it had to be him.”

“I don’t get it,” said Mike. “Why did it have to be Steve?”

Hopper’s eyes flicked between Steve and his daughter. He looked pained.

Robin quoted quietly, “A brown-eyed child without love will be born under the midday sun, in Indianapolis, on the hottest day of the month; that child will die so that another, a girl, all shaven and shorn, may save the world.”

They all stared at her. She said, clearly holding back tears, “His Prophecy from the Quiet Sisters. He did it to save you, El.”

“I know,” she said, like she had back in the Beemer.

“But he’s still alive,” said Eddie from the doorway. Everyone turned to look at him now, and he repeated, “He’s still fucking alive. Does that mean the world isn’t saved?”

“It is,” said El.

“So — how is he alive then?” asked Mike. “The prophecy said he had to die so El could save the world, and he did, and she did. So was it a real prophecy or a fake one?”

“It was real. He had to die,” she said. Across the room, at Steve’s bedside, El cocked her head to the side, studying all of them. She locked eyes with Eddie and, then, like the sun peaking out from behind a cloud, she began to smile. “But it did not say he had to stay dead.”

The room descended into chaos, just like back at the cabin. But once again Hopper quickly gained control, with Mrs Byers helping to strong arm them all into silence lest they all were to be forcibly removed from the hospital. El then outlined the rest of the story, and then the plan she’d been keeping to herself: when Vecna slash Henry slash One had been occupied trying to make Steve the last gate and prevent El from beating his ass like a steel drum, she’d learned about the prophecy from the depths of Steve’s mind, and realized, in a flash, that there was a loophole. Steve had told her it was okay, that he was doing what needed to be done, and she’d grit her teeth and let him die for her. His heart had stopped for a ten seconds, enough for Vecna to get cocky as his gates began to open, but also enough time for El to wipe the floor with him when he was distracted with a classic bad guy gloat session. She’d used her powers to school Vecna mentally while Nancy was taking care of his corporeal body; El had then resealed the gates and restarted Steve’s heart in one fell swoop. 

However, she hadn’t been quick enough to bring him back to full consciousness, or repair the damage Vecna had done to his body, but they were all gonna take the win on the heartbeat, as far as Eddie could tell. Now, her working theory about the coma was that he was hiding somewhere in his happy memories, like she’d been urging him to do before, or maybe even his bad ones; she wasn’t sure. Either way, she needed to go in and find him, and she was convinced that that would wake him up.

She’d said all of this with a hard set to her jaw, afraid but defiant, the world’s most determined child soldier, and Eddie wanted to scoop her into his arms and keep her safe from harm. The kids had filled him in, a little, on Eleven, during their earlier adventures and over the last two days, and frankly he was now Team Hopper on keeping her locked in a cabin in the woods, safe from harm.

But her mind had been made up and Eddie would be lying if he said he didn’t also want her to work her magic and wake his — no, their boy up.

So Hopper kicked everyone but himself and El out of the room, despite vocal protests from Mike and Robin alike. He’d clenched his fists right alongside them but draped his arm around Robin’s shoulders and steered her from Steve’s bedside to a waiting room just down the hall. They sat together, hand in hand, and watched as Nancy, Mrs Byers, and Jonathan got the kids settled into the room.

They waited.

The kids started up a game with a deck of cards that someone had left behind in the room at some point, the rules impossible to follow from a distance, and Robin sank into Eddie’s side, her head pressed against his shoulder. They kept holding hands.

Mrs Byers and Murray talked quietly in one corner of the room, while Argyle and Jonathan disappeared after five minutes to go roundup food for everyone. Nancy stood by the door, pacing and watching out the small opening there, until Mrs Byers forced her to sit down, and she took the seat to Eddie’s left, leaning into him as well.

They waited.

And they waited.

And waited —

And waited —

(Twenty feet and a world away, El walked through a mall bathroom, entered a stall door, and then made her way through Family Video until it turned into an empty RV. There was a closed door. If she listened closely, she could hear breathing, someone’s name. She pushed the door open slowly and stared at Steve, sitting on the edge of the sink. He looked terrible, bandages around his throat and his torso, a denim vest on his shoulders she’d never seen before. His left eye was sunken and shut. That wasn’t part of the memory, she thought.

“Hi,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. He looked startled to see her. “What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” she told him.

“Oh,” he said again. “Here I am.”

El looked around the small bathroom. “Happy memories?”

“Some of the best,” he said. He hopped off the sink and stood in front of her. He put one hand on her cheek. She felt like crying. He smiled, said, “I don’t regret it, Eleven. What I did for you. I’d do it again, and again.”

“I know,” she said. 

“Then why are you here?”

She cocked her head. “I told you. Looking for you.”

“But why?”

“Home,” she said. “I want you to come home.”

He stared at her. “That’s not how my story is supposed to end.”

El raised her chin. “It is now.”)

Jonathan and Argyle returned with food from the vending machines and coffee they’d been given by the group of nurses that ran the floor and had, of course, already developed an enormous soft spot for Steve. They distributed their snacks and settled in on the same row of uncomfortable chairs as Eddie, Robin, and Nancy just as there was a flurry of activity from the hall.

Nancy shot up immediately, went back to the door and its window out, but no one entered the room and the sound of movement quieted down quickly. She returned to her seat and settled in again, leaning this time into Jonathan. Argyle, on his other side, tipped his head back and immediately began to snore.

“Neat trick,” muttered Eddie.

Jonathan snorted. “Yeah, he can pass out pretty much any where, any time.”

The waiting continued. The kids grew tired of their game and broke up into small groups, talking: Lucas and Max, Dustin with Will and Erica, and Mike glaring daggers at the door as if it would make things go faster. He got pulled into the conversation with Dustin, Will, and Erica shortly.

Eventually, the door to their waiting room opened. Hopper shut it behind him with a sigh and Robin shot to her feet. Eddie leapt up as well, and would tell anyone that questioned him it was because he was still holding her hand, pulled along in her wake, and not because he was just as eager to receive an update. He was aware of eyes on him — Nancy’s, and Murray’s from across the room — but no one said anything and Hopper sighed again.

“She found him,” he said. He held up a hand to forestall the questions, cutting off Dustin’s sharply inhaled breath, and continued, “She found him, and led him out of the memory. But when she came out of his mind, he was still unconscious. The docs say his brain waves spiked, right when El was coming out of it, it looks like, and while they’ve settled now, there’s more activity than there was before.”

“What does that mean?” Dustin blurted out.

Hopper shrugged. “They don’t know. They say it’s a positive step, but they don’t know.”

“Shit,” the kid said with feeling. No one reprimanded him.

Robin sunk back down into her chair with a sob, finally pulling her hand out of Eddie’s so she could cover her face with both. Behind his legs, he could feel Nancy shift to wrap an arm around her shoulders and Eddie opened and closed his hands a few times in quick succession.

“And El?” asked Max. Mike nodded at her side.

“She’s fine. She’s asleep now,” Hopper told them. “She was under for a while, and it took a lot out of her. But before she conked out, she said she’d done what she could — it’s up to him now.”

Steve remained unconscious for the rest of March, then April, then longer and longer, and life went on in Hawkins around them, with them. 

Eddie, name freshly cleared, helped Uncle Wayne move the meager belongings the government hadn’t considered contaminated — almost nothing, just a handful of Wayne’s mugs and hats, some clothes for each of them, Eddie’s guitars, thank god — into the apartment on main street the hush money had purchased them. He had his own bathroom, which was wild but welcome, and the kids helped replace all his DnD stuff with spares from their own collections before promptly informing him that Hellfire would now be hosted there on Friday nights, rather than at the school.

Because, yeah, while his name may have been cleared, Eddie was still persona non grata in town. No one gave him or Wayne shit but also no one would look them in the eye either, and the guys from the band were included in that number, which stung like all fuck, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to care, in the end. He wasn’t quite sure how to relate to people who hadn’t been through the Upside Down ringer; Wayne had clearly picked up on more than he was letting on, Eddie knew, but everyone else? Fuck, man.

He had the kids, though, and Robin and Nancy, who had apparently made it her life’s mission to midwife Eddie to graduation, dragging him kicking and screaming by the fucking hair, it felt like. He also had Jonathan and Argyle, too, because he accumulated Hopper-Byers crew elected to stay in Hawkins, perfectly happy to leave California in their rearview, and apparently Argyle had decided he was along for the ride as well.

Predictably, there had been an uproar at Hopper’s return to the land of the living, but that was what their shiny government-provided cover story was for, in the end. When Eddie finally got around to cracking it open, beyond just hearing the barebones from Hopper and Nancy, who’d both absorbed it much more in depth than him, he learned the lengths that they’d gone to to sweep their fucking MK Ultra-ass indiscretions under the rug.

Henry Creel, the son of Victor Creel, presumed dead all these years, had actually survived his father’s attempted triple-murder. He’d been sent to a psychiatric facility himself, far, far away, but had escaped, returned to Hawkins, and had been going on a spree. For quite some time, in fact, implied the feds: the cover story went on to pin nearly all the deaths and missing persons in Hawkins over the last four years on Creel the Younger and Allegedly Much More Insane; and that Jim Hopper, Police Chief extraordinaire, had been the only one to put the clues together. He’d faked his own death in order to disappear enough to hunt Creel from the shadows, and it turned out that poor Eddie Munson had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, witness to an atrocity and hunted himself. And then, of course, there was poor Steve Harrington, the last victim of Henry Creel, who’d thrown himself between Max Mayfield and little Eirca Sinclair and danger, now laid up at Hawkins General and fighting for his life —

A sad story, but a neat one, all the mysteries of cursed Hawkins, Indiana, tied up with a fucking bow, and everyone could go on with their lives, oblivious to the true horror of a world below, sealed up tight by a girl created by the same government agents who had helped to birth Henry Creel into what he was.

The cover story made no mention of Steve’s prophecy, and why would they? His sleeping and broken body was just an additional bit of color, one that people started to gloss over after the weeks became months and he remained stubbornly asleep, even as his limbs knitted themselves back together in his hospital bed.

Not even Steve’s own parents cared. They’d given up on him long ago, it seemed, as soon as the prophecy had been handed down that they had a son they’d never get to keep, not really, and the repeated calls into Mr Harrington’s office were met, again and again, with a secretary telling them she would pass along the message. No one ever called back.

Eddie couldn’t wrap his mind around that. He felt it like a pain beneath his ribs, a knife jabbed between them, because he didn’t fucking get it. He had Steve for all of one afternoon and maybe a handful of days before that, if Eddie was feeling optimistic that day, and just that was enough for him to want to keep him for as long as he was allowed. Who cared if there was some sort of expiration date on that? He would give anything —

After hanging up on the secretary for what ended up being their eighth and last try, two weeks after El had tried to wake Steve up, Hopper had put his fist through a hospital door and gotten kicked out for a week after they’d wrapped up his fractured knuckles for him. 

Robin had given Hopper the spare key to the Harrington house that evening, told him she thought Steve would want them to stay there if they needed to, and Eddie had watched as he’d pocketed the thing with a nod. The Hopper-Byers had all moved in the next morning, checking out of their series of long-stay hotel rooms, and the Harrington house had become the main hub of activity for the Party and their families and friends in between school and rotating in and out at Steve’s bedside.

Joyce Byers had created the schedule to keep Steve company with military precision. Robin had been dead-set on following in Eddie’s footsteps and flunking her final year so she’d be with Steve no matter what, but Mrs Byers — “Call me Joyce,” she’d quietly instructed Eddie on the third day of knowing each other but it still felt weird — had put her foot down. She was homeschooling Will and El for the rest of the year anyway and they could do that just as well from Steve’s hospital room during the day as they could the Harrington dining room. Jonathan and Argyle were going to get their GEDs on their own, and had gone to work at a local pizza place, because of course they had.

So they had the weekdays covered, and she’d created a schedule for the evenings, ensuring everyone got at least one day at Steve’s side. Robin got three days, though, Monday and Tuesday nights and all of Saturdays, though she had Erica with her on Mondays and Max on Tuesdays. Eddie had the Saturday shift with her, and also Thursdays, with Dustin. The Party as a whole had claimed Wednesday nights, and Nancy and Jonathan had Fridays. Hopper had Sundays with Max and El.

Sometimes they would come and go on each other’s days, if they were free, and Murray would appear sporadically, sometimes just to sit in the corner of the room and read the paper. But Steve was never alone, even if he was never awake.

Eddie didn’t know what the others got up to, not really, during their shifts. He and Dustin had spent their first few Thursdays in silence together, before Dustin mentioned Steve hadn’t read any of Tolkien's works and Eddie decided to read The Hobbit aloud for both of them (and the occasional evening nurse lingering in the hall). Every once in a while, Uncle Wayne would join them too, and he always gave Eddie a lot of looks he’d rather ignore when he was there. On Saturdays, he and Robin played cards at the table in the corner or did their homework, or Eddie tested out variations on the mixtapes he was making for them.

He tried to not let his heart get away from him, but a part of him assumed that ship had long ago sailed. Eddie gave his heart freely, and often, and sure he got it back battered and bloodied more often than not, but he always thought it was worth it, when you got to the end. There was Dustin and the rest of the Party, who he loved immediately and fiercely and wholeheartedly, and he’d taken Robin and Nancy and Jonathan and Argyle into his heart just as quickly. There was Max and Eleven, and he’d probably commit felonies for them both, no questions asked. There was Joyce, who insisted he and Wayne come to dinner on Fridays if they weren’t busy, and there was Hopper, who’d caught him helping one of the nurses wash Steve’s hair on Saturday and had just smiled from the doorway before turning away without a word.

There was Chrissy, whose smile he saw in his dreams and his nightmares alike; Chrissy, whose bright laughter he was worried he’d someday forget; Chrissy, who he’d only had for a handful of minutes, a breath, and would be looking for her around corners and in empty rooms for the rest of his life, because they should’ve had more time, she should’ve had more time —

And how was he not supposed to give his heart to Steve? That big-haired, preppy paladin —

One Thursday, when Dustin had stepped out to get Eddie water, so he could keep reading, and some snacks for the both of them from the best of the vending machines, the one on the second floor, Eddie had just stared at Steve’s unconscious body in silence. It had been mid-May, and they’d just cut the cast off his arm and had switched the bandages on his left eye to a patch; his legs had been broken the worst, and they wanted to keep them on for another month at least.

“I’m graduating in a couple weeks,” he’d told him quietly. “Nancy just bullied Click into grading my second to last essay early, and the only way I won’t make it past the finish line is if I fully fail the last one. And you know Nancy, man: that shit will not be happening, not on her watch. So. Yeah. Turns out ‘86 really is my year, baby, and if it’s not, like, too much of a bother, I’d kind of appreciate it if you’d open that pretty eye on up for me because, baby — because —”

He’d swallowed, looped his pinky with Steve’s, and he had whispered, “I don’t know, baby, it’d just be nice, is all. Please.”

(Just outside the door, one foot away, Dustin had clutched two packages of Skittles in his fist, a bottle of water in the other. 

He had heard everything Eddie had said, just barely, and now he could make out the sounds of him crying. Just sniffling, really, but Dustin had known, had felt his own heart crack and break, and he’d locked eyes with one of the nurses at the station, the really nice one, Deborah, who would listen to Eddie read The Hobbit and always let them stay past visiting hours. She had smiled sadly at him, crooked a finger.

So he had walked over and joined her behind the station. He could feel tears burning in his own eyes and she had just dropped her arm around his shoulder and said, “Let's give your boys a minute, okay?”

“It’s not fair,” he’d said quietly.

“No,” Deborah had agreed, equally quiet. “It never is.”)

In June, Eddie, Nancy, and Robin all got their diplomas. The kids and all their families cheered uproariously, but they all knew something was missing. Multiple things, if Eddie was telling the whole truth, and some of them were easier to stomach than others. Steve should have been in the crowd, his arms around Dustin’s shoulders, screaming for Robin so loudly he went hoarse, and Chrissy should have walked the stage just a few names after Robin had.

Even fucking Jason should have been walking too, but he’d gotten the Victor Creel treatment at the hands of the government when all the dust had settled in Hawkins. Erica had reported that he’d already seemed cracked when he’d stumbled into the Creel House on the hunt for Eddie, and he’d witnessed something wild behind the eyes himself when Patrick had lifted out of the lake that night. He’d been halfway to madness before Steve had sucker punched him in the temple, and the shady government guys tying up loose ends had jumped on that like rabid dogs on a bone.

It had been easy to paint Jason as a victim much like Steve and the others, confused and terrified and witness to something terrible; twice, even, Patrick and the attempted murdered of Steve, Max, and Erica that night in March. And with Jason practically a raving lunatic about floating bodies and the devil — at the end of the day, it was almost gift-wrapped.

Didn’t stop Eddie from feeling bad about it, vaguely sick. It could so easily have been him, and it so easily could have been worse.

Still, as he sat stiffly in a pool chair at the Harrington house, between Nancy and Robin as they watched the boys play in the water, a full week after graduation, almost three months since Steve didn’t wake up, two weeks since they’d taken the casts off his leg and had a physical therapist start a daily routine even though he could see in the eyes of the doctors they weren’t sure it was necessary, Eddie found himself turning the idea over and over in his head. When he finally spat a few words out about it, Robin had stayed silent and Nancy had shrugged one pale shoulder, said, “It’s nice you feel bad about it, but I’d get over it.”

Not for the first time, and probably not for the last, he found himself thinking that this girl was cold-blooded. He said, “You would?”

“I would,” she said. She adjusted her sunglasses, shouted at Mike to stop trying to drown Lucas, and took a sip of her Diet Coke. “Jason led a manhunt against you, Eddie. He convinced half this town you were on a Satanic murder spree, and now that same half crosses to the other side of the street when you come walking. Do I get it? I mean, yes, I can see it. He saw something awful and unnameable, and he snapped. It is terrible. I just can’t — I can’t imagine taking things that far, and doing what he did. Even if you’d done it, he still would have been wrong.”

“He broke Max’s Walkman,” added Robin quietly.

“He broke Max’s Walkman,” Nancy agreed. “I’m not telling you you’re not allowed to feel guilty, Eddie. I’m just — I’m telling you it’s okay to stop feeling that way, when you’re ready.”

Eddie stared out over the water and, after a moment, nodded.

Robin sat up in her chair, swung her legs over the edge. They turned to look at her. Underneath the too big wayfarers Eddie was positive belonged to someone else, she was pale and drawn, quieter than she’d ever been. Sometimes, one of the kids could do something that cheered her up, usually Dustin or El, and, when she was at Steve’s bedside listening to Eddie’s mixtapes or rolling her eyes as Eddie threw yet another hand of Snap, she almost seemed like herself. But the rest of the time she was a ghost, like half her heart and soul was with Steve, wherever it was he was.

She’d quit Family Video with little fanfare in April, and had coasted through the end of the school on her brains alone, not bothering to apply herself. Eddie had heard her tell Joyce, when Joyce asked, that she was planning on taking a gap year from college and would look for a job in the summer to keep her afloat.

They were all worried for her, and Nancy and Eddie especially tried to keep her close, keep her smiling, but it was tough going and Eddie just fucking worried.

“Sorry guys,” she was telling them. “I’m pretty — I’ve been pretty fucking exhausted since graduation. I think I’m gonna go take a nap, if you guys don’t mind keeping an eye on the gremlins?”

“Of course,” said Nancy. “Want me to tell them to keep it down?”

Robin was already walking away. She waved a hand over her shoulder, said, “Nah, I’ll put the radio on,” and disappeared into the dark of the house.

After a moment, Eddie flopped backwards into his pool chair. “Shit,” he said.

“Yeah. Shit.” 

There really wasn’t much more to say than that, he figured, and they sat in relative silence, watching the boys rough house once more — it was Sunday, so El and Max were at the hospital with Hopper, and probably thankful not to be caught up in whatever lawless game the boys had invented for the day — and sipping on their sodas. From Steve’s room above them, overlooking the water, a stereo turned on and Gordon Sharp sang, “I first saw you, you had on blue jeans —”

Nancy reached over and flicked Eddie on his hairy kneecap.

“How are you doing?” she asked. “Besides the Jason-related guilt.”

“Is this my government mandated Upside Down check in?”

“That’s on the second Tuesday of every month, and you know it.”

He snorted. “Yeah, that Owens guy’s fucking pushy about it. Has anyone set Murray loose in a room with him yet?”

“Obviously!” She laughed. “But it totally backfired and now they’re like best friends or something. I thought Hop was gonna burst a blood vessel when he told us he saw them drinking at the Hideaway together once.”

“Satan have mercy,” he drawled.

“But seriously,” Nancy said.

“I’m better than Robin,” said Eddie. “If that counts for anything.”

“It doesn’t,” she told him flatly. “Everyone is doing better than Robin. I love her, but it’s not a particularly high bar to jump, Eddie. She’s a mess. I wish she’d just admit she and Steve are together, I think it would help her a lot — ”

He half-expected Robin to repel down from the second storey, shouting about platonic with a capital P but, when he glanced up at Steve’s bedroom window, it was still firmly shut and Zeppelin had replaced This Mortal Coil and Robert Plant was crooning that his baby knew he was gonna leave them in the summertime, which meant she was listening to the most recent mixtape he’d made for Steve. Wow, that was gonna make this conversation extra fun, he thought.

“They’re not,” he said firmly. “They’re not, and you know it. And also that was kind of, like, a way shitty thing to say, Wheeler, even if they were. Platonic relationships are just as important as romantic —” 

Nancy rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. I just think if she admitted to it, it’d be easier for her to talk about, and we’d be able to help her better.”

“Be that as it may,” said Eddie. “They are, like, super not together, believe me.”

“Why?”

“Uh,” he said, waving a hand, “because he was clearly hung up on you in the Upside Down?”

“He was clearly hung up on someone, Munson,” she said, “but it wasn’t me, and you know that too.”

“So then what the fuck is this conversation about?” he asked.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “I think you know that too.”

“I know I’m extremely fucking confused,” he told her, “is what I know. Seriously, what the hell is happening?”

“You,” she said slowly, “and Steve.”

“Uh,” he said again, but this time he had no follow up.

Nancy sat up in her pool chair, swung her legs over the side just as Robin had, but she didn’t go much father beyond that, just leaned into his space and watched his face closely. She asked, “Did something happen between you and Steve? Before?”

He ran his tongue along his teeth and dragged a bit of hair in front of his face. “Before when?”

“In the Upside Down,” she said. “Or maybe a little after?”

In the pool, Lucas dunked Mike, who came up spluttering and shouting, demanding to know why Lucas wasn’t getting yelled at for trying to drown him, what the fuck was your problem, Nancy?

Which, like, yeah, thought Eddie, what the fuck was your problem, Nancy?

“No, why do you ask,” he said. He winced at his own weak tone. “I don’t, uh, know what you’re talking about. Like at all. So if we could maybe wrap up this weird ass, pointless interrogation, I do think Lucas is going to murder your brother —”

“Mike would deserve it. Eddie,” said Nancy. “Would you look at me?”

With great reluctance, he did.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t think I need to state for the record or anything that Steve and I dated, and it ended badly, and while we were both at fault, I was probably the most at fault. I definitely was, actually, and I’ve apologized for that and he forgave me and we’ve moved on. Is there more work to be done? Sure, and when Sleeping Beauty wakes up, we will. But we’re still friends now. We’re really good friends, I think. Not as good as him and Robin, but I know stuff about Steve, okay, and I’m not gonna toot my own horn here, but I’m observant as hell. And I know what Steve looks like, you know, when he’s into someone. I remember how he used to look at me, how he smiles, and I know he doesn’t look at Robin or smile at her like that, okay?”

“Okay?” he repeated. “So then what was that whole Robin needs to come clean thing back there, if you’re so knowledgeable on the look of a man in love? What are you saying?”

Nancy reached out, put a hand on his knee. “I’m saying, Eddie, that when Steve was looking at you, I saw, okay? And you — I saw you, in the RV, when Erica said he — I saw your face, Eddie.”

“Nancy,” he said. “I — ”

They stared at each other, and the noise of the kids and Marc Bolan above them now — it all faded away. There was only him and Nancy and these pool chairs, her small hand still on his knee, the scent of saltwater in the air, and there was something huge behind Nancy’s that wanted to swallow Eddie whole. There was a wave, too, cresting within Eddie and he wanted to scream, he wanted to cry, he wanted to collapse into Nancy and have her tell him everything was going to be okay. He wanted, so badly, for everything to be okay.

“Were you in love with him?” she asked quietly.

“You’ve been sitting on this a while,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears, like he’d been screaming after all.

She rolled her eyes, and it was only a little bit mean. “Eddie.”

“No,” he told her. “I wasn’t in love with him. But I could’ve. I think I could.”

(Halfway across town, Max and El were taking a quiz in the Cosmo they’d lifted from the nursing station, while Hopper drank a cup of coffee at Steve’s bedside, pretending he wasn’t listening to them giggling.

It had stopped being weird for Max pretty early on, being in a room with Steve and Steve not talking to her. She’d wanted him to talk back so badly at first, had wanted to scream at him for what he had done, for leaving her behind like this again and not giving her a reason at all. She’d at least given him that letter, which she’d pulled out of the pocket of his jeans back in the Creel House before the paramedics could take him away.

The paper was waterlogged, and her writing was almost unintelligible, but it had still been sealed shut; he’d never opened it. She’d thought that maybe he might, that they all might disobey her request, but he hadn’t and she’d realized, then, all at once, that she wished he had. So that he would’ve  known when he’d screamed Vecna’s name and told him to take him instead what he’d meant to her.

So she had whispered it into his ear, the first day that she was there with him, when Hopper had been taking a nap and El had gone to the bathroom. She’d whispered the whole damn letter to him and then said, “So you better wake the fuck up sooner rather than later, Harrington, because I’m not about to lose the one good brother I’ve got left, okay, mother fucker?”

She’d felt better, after, and she’d decided to not let his silence bother her after, either. He’d wake up, and she’d tell him all over again, or maybe she wouldn’t, but at least she’d said the words aloud, if only for herself. Maybe that was the important thing.

That was something Steve would tell her, she thought. He was a lot smarter than the rest of them gave him credit for, she knew.

“Oh my God, El,” laughed Max now, pulling the magazine from her hands. She glanced at Steve as she rolled her eyes, because she still liked to include him in her jokes, a habit she wasn’t looking to break. El was laughing too, reaching for the magazine, and Max held it up over her head, saying, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever —”

Wait —

Max snapped her head around to look at Steve. His eye was open.

She dropped the magazine on the floor.)

He woke up in fits and starts, after that first day.

Steve had stayed conscious long enough for Max and El to rush to his bedside, and for Hopper to nearly have a heart attack at the sudden commotion before he went hollering into the hall for a doctor. He fell back asleep right after the nurses and doctors had swarmed in, taken his vitals and asked him questions. He’d just stared at them, Max had reported that evening during an impromptu family dinner at the Harrington house, and then had pawed at the breathing tube before rolling his eye and falling back asleep.

Hopper had stayed behind at the hospital, intent on spending the night in case Steve woke up again, but Joyce came to the hospital as soon as Hopper had called to tell her and she’d taken Max and El home, along with all the relevant details. Despite the fact that he had only remained conscious for about ten minutes, the doctors were optimistic as well as confident in reporting that this new round of unconsciousness that Steve found himself in was just that.

Robin burst into tears when they told her, and then began to laugh. It was the first time any of them had heard her laugh since March, and they all started laughing too.

Still it took him about another week and a half to stay conscious. They’d updated their rotating bedside vigil schedule to account for school letting out and various summer jobs starting, and they continued to stick to it, though with a new giddy air about it. The kids, in particular, like to hold bouts of wakefulness over each other and had seemingly turned it into some kind of bizarre contest, with points being awarded for things such as “how long Steve was awake” and “whether or not he talked to you”.

That was the rarest of interactions, after the doctors removed his intubation, and he rarely remembered what he said, which the doctors assured them was completely normal and to be expected. Eddie had only been present for one himself, with Robin. 

They were playing cards in the corner, like usual, and Steve made a questioning little noise from the bed. Both of their heads snapped up to look at him, his eye blinking slowly, and he smiled from the throws of his blurry consciousness. Robin rushed over at once and Eddie watched as she curled up gentle and soft at his side.

“Robbie,” he asked. “Why are you crying?”

“Fuck you, dingus,” she said without heat.

“I probably deserve that,” he slurred, and slipped back under.

“Yeah,” Robin whispered, like Eddie couldn’t hear her, “but I’ll forgive you eventually.”

Still, despite only having seen Steve awake just that brief once, it was on Eddie’s watch that Steve awoke and stayed awake. It was one of the Thursday vigils with Dustin, in the early afternoon now since school was out, and when Steve had cracked his one pretty eye wide, said Dustin’s name, then Eddie’s, and asked, “Did we win?” Dustin launched immediately into a tearful tirade against him.

Steve took it with a bemused, sleepy smile, fond, and Eddie dipped out, ignoring the way that his one eye watched him go, to summon the on-call doctor as well as place a few strategic phone calls from the payphone at the end of the hall.

When he returned, Steve was listening to the doctor — one of the two government ones that had stayed in Hawkins to keep an eye on him — detail the care his body had gone through while he was unconscious for nearly four months. He was stone-faced as he took it all in, his right eye flicking down to his legs, thin under the blankets. They were confident he’d regain the ability to walk again, but it would be a difficult and long road and there was no guarantee he’d return to his previous level of physical fitness. His broken arm had healed well, they told him, and they’d been able to keep most of his muscles in both arms in working order while he’d been comatose. He’d never see out of his left eye again, the damage far too catastrophic, and they recommended he seek out a specialist to determine if it should be removed entirely.

As the doctor spoke, Dustin sat on one side of Steve and Eddie on the other, though when Joyce and Hopper arrived in short order, carting the rest of the kids with them he’d vacated his seat so that Hopper could have it instead. Steve had stared at him, wide-eyed; clearly while Eddie had been gone fetching the doctor and making calls, Dustin hadn’t gotten far in his retelling of events.

Nancy and the rest of the older teens were en route from their various jobs and weekday activities, so it was up to them to finish filling Steve in on what happened. Hopper gave the Reader’s Digest version of his and Joyce’s adventures in Russia while Mike, Will, and El had done the same with their part of the events. Dustin relayed the story of the greatest metal concert the world had never seen and Lucas had described Team Flambé’s journey through the Upside Down version of the Creel House, and Nancy’s performance as Judith beheading Holofernes. 

Erica and Max glared at Steve from where they were among the kids crowded around the corner table when he’d asked what happened after he’d started floating. Max said, “I think it’s pretty obvious what happened,” and then dragged Erica from the room to go get snacks from the vending machine.

“They just need some time, now that you’re awake,” Joyce said softly. She’d kicked Dustin out of the other chair and was smiling softly down at Steve, running one hand through his hair. “You scared a lot of people, Steve.”

“Sorry,” he whispered. His eye darted around the room, not staying on one person.

“Just what the hell were you thinking, kid?” Hopper demanded suddenly. “I told you not to do anything stupid back at Starcourt.”

“Well, you died and left behind a vacuum of stupid,” said Steve.

Hopper barked a laugh but no one else seemed to think it was funny.

“I just,” he said after a moment. “What else was I supposed to do? I had to protect the kids — I had to keep Max safe and I had to help El, and — it was the only way I knew how. I mean. It’s what was supposed to happen. It was what I’ve always been supposed to do, ever since — ever since I was born. This was what I was supposed to do.”

“Steve,” said El quietly.

“It’s okay. I’d do it again, El,” he told her. “I’d do it all again, because it’s what needed to be done, okay? That’s my job. I’m the babysitter.”

“You’re more than a babysitter,” began Joyce.

“No,” said Steve. He seemed to surprise himself with his own sharpness, because his eye widened a fraction, but he continued, “No, I am. I’m the babysitter. And I did what needed to be done.”

“Except nobody gets to make unilateral decisions for the Party,” cut in Dustin. “That’s like, the whole point of the Party! We make decisions together. We could’ve helped.”

“No, Dustin, you couldn’t, and, anyway, someone needed to be the adult, and I was the adult in the room, shithead,” he said. “I consulted with Nancy and Robin, and they didn’t like it, but they agreed with me that it was the best way to keep Max safe. She should never have been in the line of fire, not any of you. But we were making the best of a bad situation, okay?”

“Still, some of the rest of us would have liked to be read in on the situation too, you know,” said Eddie under his breath. It came out a little more snidely than he intended and Steve looked over at him, a flush appearing high on his cheeks. It was quite fetching, to be honest, but he was a little too worked up to fully appreciate it at the moment.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Steve asked.

He shrugged, backed himself up against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “The kid was right: we could’ve helped you, if you’d told us what was going on. We still could’ve used the prophecy but we could’ve done it, like, smarter or whatever. Not just let you walk alone into a den of lions.”

“I wasn’t alone,” he said. “I had Max and Erica.”

“Who are literal babies,” countered Eddie, “that had no idea what you were planning to do, and who are now fully fucking traumatized, as if they hadn’t been already!”

“That’s not fair —”

“Oh, boo-hoo, don’t talk to me about fair —”

“Why are you trying to start a fight with me right now, Munson?”

“Gee, I don’t know, maybe because I too am traumatized, and a little hung up on how cavalier you’re being about this whole thing!”

“It’s not cavalier,” said Steve through clenched teeth, “if you’re just following the script.”

“Babe, what the fuck?”

“You couldn’t have helped me,” he said, almost hissing. “No one could’ve helped me, why can’t anyone see that? That — that’s the whole fucking point of True Prophecies, they’re the end of the line, one way or another.”

“Well, it clearly wasn’t for you.”

“It was supposed to be!” Steve said. He waved a hand at the length of his own body in the hospital bed, at the people gathered in the room. “All my life, all my fucking life, I was told: this is what is going to happen to you, you’re going to die, this is how you’re going to die , and I’ve just been waiting on the specifics. I’ve been waiting since I was five years old and I found a copy of the prophecy in my dad’s study. He couldn’t even tell me himself, the coward. I was always going to die, and I was happy to, okay, when I figured out who it was talking about, I was fucking happy to die for someone like Eleven because someone has to put her first, and there’s no one else in my life — child without love — what the fuck was I supposed to do? Huh? What do you do with that? I wasn’t — I wasn’t —.” His one eye bore into Eddie’s. “Don’t you get it? I was never supposed to live!”

“And what about me?” he asked, crossing to the foot of the hospital bed. “What about me? Huh? Huh, Steve?”

“What about you?”

“You keep talking about people only needing you for one thing, and what about me? You made me — you made me a part of this.”

“Hey, I only — I didn’t make you part of dick, you shouldn’t have — I’m sorry about Chrissy, okay, but — ”  

“What? I’m not talking about that, and also fuck you very much!” Eddie said back — shouted back, actually, because they were shouting now, both of them, and a part of him was worried someone was going to come running to see what all the fuss was but also he was so angry he couldn’t fucking see straight. “And don’t fucking argue semantics with me, asshole, because yeah you did! Of course you did, Steve! You made us all a part of this, because you were so convinced you had to die because you think you’re fucking worthless beyond that crackpot bullshit, but you can’t see how many people love you. Everyone in this fucking room loves you. We went to hell for you! With you! I fucking — you — you asked me to fuck you in the bathroom of a stolen RV because you didn’t want to have any regrets before you went off and fulfilled some fucked-ass prophecy and I wanted to, I wanted to, I want you, and you just — and you didn’t spare a thought to that fact that maybe, just fucking maybe, that I might end up having some big feelings around making love to you and then you dying? Wow, considerate, Harrington! So glad I factored so heavily into your thought process there!”

Steve had gone white. “What?”

“What?”

“You said,” he said, in a very small voice. “You want? Me? You, uh — and you said, uh.”

“‘Making love’,” called Max, which was when Eddie realized that there were other people in the room. Had been the whole time, in fact. He looked over to see all the kids crammed around the table in the corner of the room, Max returned from her mission and eating a 5th Avenue bar with her eyebrows raised but all the rest of them staring at him with big eyes and shocked faces, their own vending machine candy fallen by the wayside. In the doorway were Nancy, Robin, Jonathan, and Argyle, also staring and when, exactly, did they get here? And of course who could forget that Hopper and Joyce were sitting at Steve’s bedside.

Eddie, apparently. Eddie could forget. That was who.

“Oh,” he said. He glanced over his shoulder at the window and wondered how badly he’d get hurt if he jumped out a third storey window. Maybe there was a bush below.

“You said ‘making love’,” Max said again.

“Said a lot of things, actually,” said Hopper, arms crossed over his chest.

“Oh,” he said again. He was under no illusions that most of the people in the room weren’t in the know, vis a vis Eddie’s sexuality — he’d already accidentally outed himself to Nancy, Robin, Lucas, and Dustin in the Upside Down, and Dustin, while well meaning, was the biggest fucking blabbermouth on the planet; the kids all must’ve known by then, and he’d told Nancy it was okay to tell Jonathan if it ever came up. But all the same: that window was looking pretty appealing, bush below or no. Anyway, he was at a hospital; he’d get treated quick for a broken leg, right?

“Hey, man, good for you guys, you make a cute couple,” offered Argyle from the doorway while Dustin opined in tones of great disgust, “Dude, I was in the next room.”

“We were all in the next room,” said Lucas. “I get it was the end of the world, but Jesus Christ, man.”

“Uh,” he said. He stared at the wall behind Steve’s head.

A chair screeched against the floor and Joyce Byers rose from her seat. She smiled gently at Eddie when his eyes darted over at the movement, said, “I think maybe we should give these boys the room for a minute,” and began to hustle the peanut gallery out the door. All of them were loudly protesting, except for Max, who was smirking, which Eddie just figured was Steve’s comeuppance.

“I’ll stay,” said Hopper.

“Me too,” said Robin.

They leveled Eddie with twin glares and he shrank back a little, but Joyce rolled her eyes and said, “No you most certainly are not. Come on, you two, into the hall, let’s go.”

Robin shot Eddie a point look and gestured with two fingers, mouthed, I’m watching you, and let herself be steered from the room. Hopper was a harder sell but ultimately a firm look from Joyce and a pointed toe-tap had him shuffling out as well, purposefully brushing past Eddie on the way, muttering darkly, “Munson.” Normally, Eddie would’ve rolled his eyes at this kind of posturing but in this particular instance he figured it would just be best to take it with a gulp and a nod and be thankful he wasn’t, finally, getting run out of town with a pitchfork.

On her way out, Joyce dropped a kiss onto the brows of both of them before whispering to Eddie, “For what it’s worth: I think you make a cute couple, too.”

She slipped out into the hall, shutting the door behind her and cutting off a protest from Hopper and El, both of them shouting, “Three inches!”

And then it was just the two of them in that hospital room, him and Steve — Steve, with his one good eye and too skinny legs all freshly mended — Eddie, hale and whole with a smattering of scars on his arms and no more murder charges keeping him in the shadows. They were both breathing heavily in the still of the room, and neither of them could meet the other’s eye.

In that same small voice from before, Steve asked, “Did, uh, did you mean that?”

Eddie started to pace. “Well, I mean, like the man said, I, uh, said lots of, um, stuff in there, I’m probably gonna need a little specificity.”

He made a few circuits of the room, pulling absently on his hair, before Steve said quietly from the hospital bed, “Eddie — could you sit down please? I’m getting kind of dizzy — I only have one working eye anymore, you know, it’s hard to keep track of you.”

“Don’t say shit like that,” he said, collapsing into the seat Joyce had left behind. It was the one on Steve’s good side. He stared at his hands rather than at Steve.

“It’s true.”

“Still.”

“I understand,” said Steve. Eddie glanced at him, and he was earnestly looking back. His eye was wide, and bright with emotion, and Eddie wouldn’t be able to look away from him now if the Harlem GlobeTrotters appeared in the room and started a private show for them.

“What do you understand?” he asked.

“All of it,” he said. “Look. I mean, I get why you’re upset — that was pretty shitty of me, to, like, put all of that on you, back then. In the RV, I mean.”

“It was,” Eddie agreed. “You didn’t — Steve, you have to know, I’ve always kind of had a thing for you, right? It was part of, like, the jealousy, in the end. You had everything, you know? And then you wanted me, and I — I really liked you. It surprised the shit out of me, but I really liked you and I wanted you too. But then you, you — it felt kinda, sort of like you were using me. Like, a little.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You didn’t?”

“Of course not! I — I really liked you too. And I, uh, didn’t have everything, you know,” he said quietly. “That’s the thing. I never had anything at all.”

He wanted to reach out; he sat on his hands instead. “Steve.”

“Don’t pity me,” he snapped. 

“I’m not!”

“I’m trying to — I’m trying to explain,” said Steve, “and I’ve never had to, to. I mean. That’s the thing, I think. I just — I never had to think about after, before, you know? My story always had an ending, always. It’s always been — ever since that first time, when Will went missing, I guess I’ve always just been waiting for the end, and I don’t — I don’t know. Everything around me never felt real. I never felt real. Or maybe I didn’t let myself feel real, because it was easier, you know, to not want things for myself because I’d never get to keep them, you know?”

“What does that make me?” he asked.

“Something I want to keep,” he told him.

Eddie bit his lip. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “It’s only that I’ve spent so long not wanting things, that I think I don’t really know how anymore, you know?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

He made a noise like Eddie had sucker punched him. His eye blinked rapidly, and he finally looked away from him, swallowing. He said, “Oh.”

“But I wouldn’t mind figuring it out with you,” he said. He put one hand on the hospital bed; his fingertips pressed up against Steve’s. They were cold and dry. “You broke my fucking heart, baby, but I did — I do, I mean. I meant it, what I said. I want you.”

Steve’s eye found his again. “Even now?”

“Even now,” Eddie told him. “That’s the thing I didn’t understand, when Nancy told me. That prophecy — it was bullshit. So many people love you, Steve, and I’d like the chance to too, if you’ll let me this time.”

They stared at each other in the quiet of the hospital room. On the bed, Steve’s fingers crept along the back of Eddie’s hand, twined their fingers together along the shitty woven blanket there. He smiled, small at first and then bigger, and said, “Well, turns out I’ve got a lot more time on my hands than I thought, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “I think you do.”

(Six or seven feet away, just outside the closed door of a hospital room, Dustin said triumphantly, “I’m no longer the product of a broken home!” while Mike, sitting with his back up against the wall and his legs akimbo, muttered around a mouthful of Peanut M&Ms, “Whatever, Eddie could totally do better than Steve but I guess I’m, like, happy for them or whatever.”

“Excuse you, Steve’s a fucking catch ,” said Max heatedly from the opposite wall, with both El and Lucas nodding along in agreement. She pointed her 5th Avenue threateningly at Mike. “Eddie really punched up, and he should be so lucky!”

Hopper was glaring at the shut door like it had personally offended him while Joyce rolled her eyes at him, and Jonathan had his arm around Will, who was smiling a private, shy but happy little smile. Argyle was wondering loudly if this meant he won some bet with Murray.

“I don’t think I want to know what that means,” said Nancy, sinking down next to Robin, who was watching all of it with a massive grin — her face had started to hurt a while ago, but she didn’t care. She patted Robin on the thigh and asked her quietly, “Good day?”

“One of the best,” Robin said, and it really, really was.)