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At this point, Eddie’s life had really just sort of become an Aristotelian confluence of events. It was maddening, if also hilarious, and sometimes he found himself laying in bed and just kind of staring up at the ceiling, wondering how the fuck he got here, or, like, anywhere. One wrong turn — or, more accurately, one ill-fated drug deal — and, lo, there he was: stomping through Steve Harrington’s house like he belonged in the place, trying to make sure the guy hadn’t, like, drowned himself in the bath or something because he was supposed to be picking up the shitheads they had joint custody of after Hellfire 2.0 but he didn’t show, and now the kids were all freaking out, more or less, and Eddie had to do a welfare check because he was concerned too sure but mostly because everyone had come to labor under the impression that Eddie and Steve were a Secret Item and, for reasons that really didn’t need exploring at this juncture (mainly because Eddie didn’t like looking directly at them, right?) they’d yet to disabuse them of the notion.
Like he said: Aristotelian fuckin’ confluence of events, man.
Of course, Eddie — you know. Eddie wasn’t, like, unaware of the part he played in it all. Why do you think he didn’t want to look at those reasons, hm? He’d been, okay, he’d been a little heavy handed, just a little, on the flirting, perhaps — the big boy of it all had been kind of a tell, sure, and calling out to Steve as he’d walked away? Maybe not the subtlest of moves but hindsight was always twenty-twenty as the cliche went — but in his defense he’d thought people might be a little bit more preoccupied with, you know, other shit. Such as their sudden but inevitable tragic early demises, to name one.
But you know what they say about assuming, he guessed. Plus there was no accounting for Dustin Henderson, at the end of the day, that fucking turd; Eddie loved him so much.
And also Eddie might have made the tiniest, teeniest pass at Steve when he was bridal carrying him out of the Upside Down. He was bleeding to death after getting somewhat significantly mauled, okay! And there was the chest hair to consider! And that waist! Trim! And the rest of the hair! And the fact that he was actually a good dude, maybe the greatest dude, and he was looking at Eddie with those eyes and that face and he was saying shit like, “You gotta hang on, Ed, c’mon, please, for me,” with his voice cracking, and it’s just a lot for one small town queer to take!
Should he have replied to that plea to cling to life with literally anything other than, “For you, Stevie? Shit, for you I’ll fly to the moon, for naught but the press of your lips to my knuckles”? Probably! Did he? No! Was he a dramatic piece of shit no matter the circumstance, including dying? Apparently!
But if Eddie had to shoulder some of the blame for the misconceptions of the children around them, then so did Steve, because while Eddie might be holding somewhat of a torch — against his will and better judgment, or at least he used to think better judgment for the torch was rather long lived at this point, damn him — and was also, again, actively dying, Steve didn’t have the same excuses to be doing romantic hero shit like the aforementioned bridal carry, begging, and then standing guard outside of Eddie’s hospital room like a knight in tarnished army surplus fatigues after he threatened to sue the hospital into nothingness if they wouldn’t treat Eddie, didn’t you know who his father was?
He’d basically fed into Dustin’s eventual delusions with that kind of shit. The standing there, the yelling, the earnestly shaking Uncle Wayne’s hand and telling him he’d do everything in his power to help Eddie, because he cared about him — a direct quote, by the way, because Robin loved Steve but she’d roll on him for a Twinkie and a good enough joke, but that’s siblings for you, he thought — and generally keeping vigil at Eddie’s bedside when he wasn’t at Max’s or, you know, engaged in the saving of the world.
Because, yeah, insult to injury there but Eddie missed the big final battle. There’d been meetings and plans and some psychic shit Eddie couldn’t follow, and Nancy with a very large gun, and Dustin with a final MacGuffin to close it all out. And Uncle Wayne, too, apparently, really threw down on Eddie’s behalf, as he understood it. Lots of fire, lots of explosions, and somehow the town thought this was all a fucking gas leak, again.
All of it while Eddie was floating in that sweet, sweet medically induced coma while they all prayed the blood loss wouldn’t get him in the end. Apparently the fuckers got an artery, and if Steve had been five minutes later with the bridal carry — well, two plus two equals four, right? And Eddie might have flunked out of two senior years but he’d got basic arithmetic down.
So when he woke, with six pints of Mike Wheeler’s blood in his veins, among others, and missing his left nipple, shit was all copacetic again, and Eddie genuinely, he did, he genuinely thought nothing would come from it. He thought maybe what he said — which he only vaguely remembered but Robin was threatening to learn to cross stitch so she could put it on ninety-seven throw pillows — would get swept under the rug of everything else, and they’d all just fucking move on with their lives and Eddie’s dumbass crush could remain just that. A dumbass crush that he’d learn to get over in order to stay friends with Steve.
Unfortunately, once again: Dustin Henderson, and Steve’s entire everything.
Maybe they could have still gotten away with it, just told people Steve was like that with everyone. Because he was! Was the thing! He was warm and thoughtful and beautifully bitchy and bratty when you got him going — and Eddie did like to get him going, God did he ever — and just, just beautiful, okay, which, like, just kill Eddie in real life if he had to have this wonderful creature of a straight boy holding his hand platonically for the rest of his life while rolling his eyes at their kids. He did not understand how Big Wheels could drop a boy like that — sure he came on strong, maybe too strong, but Eddie was kind of thinking that life was too short to pussyfoot around shit so you know what? You like me and I like you? Great, solid! And you wanna get hitched and acquire half a soccer team and then travel America? Why not! At least he knew what he wanted and wasn’t afraid to ask for it! Eddie liked that in a guy! Sign him up!
The problem was that Steve was like That, Dustin couldn’t keep his big mouth shut about his Theories when he had them (and boy howdy did he apparently have them about Steve and Eddie, once he found out from a very intense lecture from Robin whilst Eddie was in that coma that it was an option on the table, and man did he both want and not want to know what made that convo necessary), and Will Byers had taken to watching Steve and Eddie interact with a very specific set of big, sad, gay eyes. Big, sad, gay eyes that Eddie sometimes saw reflected in his own mirror, especially when he was that age. Yuck.
He was like ninety, ninety-five percent positive Baby Byers hated him — which? With the facts at hand as bloodlessly laid out by one Erica Sincliar, who had slightly higher standards on rolling on people than Robin, but didn’t pull her punches at all when she got her asking price — anyway, yeah, Eddie would not be surprised if he did, and he wouldn’t blame him either. Eddie kind of hated himself too, about a lot of things, true, but breaking a sacred oath of party-hood was a top contender. Even if it wasn’t necessarily his fault ‘cause, like, how could he have known, right? Still — really stuck in the craw, and Eddie’s self-hatred could really encompass a lot. It was the one area where he was always on over-achiever; that, and the guitar.
And he didn’t have it in him, okay, to crush the kid even more than life had already crushed him by inadvertently providing him with hope and then taking it away. Eddie would have killed at that age for a real life, hand to God, actual facts gay love story to be unfolding before his very eyes.
Bringing it up to Steve himself would be the hardest part but of course Steve, babysitter extraordinaire, had clocked that shit tout suite too. On his third or fourth post-hospital group outing to the arcade, he’d leaned into Eddie’s space — not hard, considering they tended to orbit each other like neighboring planetary bodies when they were in a fifty foot radius of each other and, upon reflection, they were both really, truly equally to blame for this situation, Eddie was prepared to testify to that in court, okay — he’d leaned into his space, and said, breath hot in his ear, “How do we let the kid down gently?”
“What?” Eddie had asked, manfully not thinking about Steve’s hot breath in his ear under any other circumstances, thanks.
He’d had jerked his head towards Will, who was rather skillfully pretending he was watching Max dominate at Dig Dug despite her new coke-bottle glasses and not staring at Steve and Eddie from the corner of his eyes. He’d said, “How do we tell him we’re not dating?”
At this point, Eddie hadn’t yet heard Dustin’s theory, but Steve had. So he told him about it, and about how he’d told the kid to go kick rocks because they weren’t but that, regrettably, this had never stopped Dustin before and probably never would when he was on a tear about something. So he thought they were dating, and he no doubt told the rest of the ankle biters, and now Will was looking at them with his big, sad, gay eyes, and allowing them to fill with hope at the idea that there were people like them out there who could get happy endings.
Which was when Eddie had to let his big, sad, gay heart get the better of him. Because the kid had been through enough, more than anyone in this world should, and he had a crush on his oblivious best friend which — been there, little man, was there, and it was Not Fun.
He had told Steve most of this, minus his own crush, naturally, and Steve had raised an eyebrow. In a volume not best suited for public but quiet enough under the noise of the arcade, he’d asked, “You don’t mind pretending to be gay?”
Eddie had narrowed his eyes, wondering what got lost in translation from his thoughts to mouth to Steve’s ears. Probably a lot, as was his custom, but at the moment it was hard to tell just what. He had figured he should try again. “Well, I wouldn’t be —”
“Because you don’t have to, you know, just for him,” Steve had continued, like he hadn’t heard him. He might not have; Dustin also had a theory about Steve’s multiple head injuries and the probability of hearing loss vis a vis that, which Eddie was read in on and subsequently deeply concerned about. “Like, Will knows I’m bi, it was this whole thing with me and him and Robin before they left for California, which is probably the only reason he believes Dustin. So, like, we can just tell him it was, like, my crush, and you let me down gently, but we’re still, like, really good friends and shit. So he knows that that’s a possibility. Like, to not get hurt that way, you know?”
Now, this was, admittedly, where Eddie should have stopped things. Probably in some, like, parallel universe he even did. After all, a lot of information just came at him very fast, and he had known he was reeling, quite a bit, from what Steve said — like, who could blame him? And an emotionally volatile Eddie, historically, did not make great decisions. Plus, it really did get his motor running unfortunately fast when Steve was all big hearted and kind, you know, and now that he knew that Steve Harrington sometimes went to bat for the home team? Fuck, God, oh God, what is he caught for the home team? Eddie was gonna die —
So, yeah, he should have stopped things. He should have taken the offer on the table, gotten out, regrouped, maybe jerked one out to clear his head, something. Hell, he could have even grown a pair, smirked, and dropped a line like, yeah, man, that sounds great, let’s talk more about it over dinner, just you and me.
Maybe there was another parallel universe where Eddie had, like, mad game, and he did.
Sadly, for him, he was in the universe where he didn’t do any of that, and what came tripping out of his dumbfuck mouth was —
“Nope, fake dating,” he said, too fast, too confident, and hitting dating way too hard. “I’m here for it. Operation: Gay Hope is a go.”
And so here indeed Eddie was: eight months (give or take a few for that medically induced coma, since Dustin was convinced they’d somehow consummated — “Oh my god,” Eddie had gagged; Steve had said with a thousand yard stare, “I know” — their affection pre-bats) into the longest relationship he’d ever had — the only relationship he’d ever had — and it was built on a foundation of lies. He was probably on track to break his own heart spectacularly, of course, but what else was new?
Mostly it was silly, fun. He and Steve had started doing shit all the time together before they decided to put their backs into the fake dating, so it wasn’t like it was hard. They did all their normal stuff, sometimes added a few extra touches here and there to really sell it. They joked about it with Robin, because Steve refused to keep a secret from her, and Eddie was convinced she’d probably see through them anyway. She thought it was stupid, but sweet, and she loved lying — and also the gay hope angle, she admitted somewhat begrudgingly, before Steve coughed, Boobies, into his hand and then she screeched and tried to smother him with a throw pillow, replete with shitty beginner cross-stitch — so she was down to help them out, was what he was saying.
Unfortunately for Eddie, it was so like how they interacted most of the time that it tended to feel beautifully, horrifyingly real sometimes. He could see them together in real life, as they were now: holding hands under the picnic table behind the new Byers-Hopper residence at a barbeque; Steve’s legs tossed across his lap on movie nights, and Eddie’s arm across his broad, fine shoulders; his vest thrown over a parade of polos and henleys; sharing space and cigarettes and breath and laughter and rolled eyes and —
Steve was even at Eddie’s place nearly every afternoon already when he wasn’t working, either helping Eddie with his PT or shooting the shit with Wayne over coffee. He wasn’t exactly sure what the old man made of the whole situation but he did always suspect he wanted a son to talk sportsball with, but wouldn’t ever complain about how he didn’t, and was thrilled there was a boy in Eddie’s life who could, so he wasn’t gonna look that gift horse in the mouth or ask too many questions he didn’t want answers to.
(They were both scarred from Wayne giving him The Talk at twelve, and then giving him The Talk, Boys Who Like Boys Edition, at fifteen after Wayne walked in on some shit, that Eddie sort of figured they would never talk about relationships ever fucking again, no matter what.)
Plus, Steve had put Wayne up in the Harrington house while Eddie was in the hospital, even before all this shit kicked off, and had insisted Eddie stay with them after, before the government set them up with a shiny new apartment on Main for their troubles.
So, yeah, all in all, it was sort of doing his head completely in, and he was doing absolutely jack shit to stop it. He was helpless, a puppet of the whims of fate, but in an almost fun way this time. He was all in, man; he was sold, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
He was, moreover, desperately curious what Steve thought of this whole situation. Like Eddie, he acted normal except for being just a little more handsy. And, sure, he caught him studying him like a bug sometimes, when the kids weren’t paying attention and neither was Eddie, fully, but fuck if he could make heads or tails of it. He chalked it up to Steve being kind of a stone cold weirdo who just hid it well, and maybe he was trying to figure out Eddie right back. After all, he seemed to be operating under the assumption that Eddie was straight, which was laughable, he personally thought, so maybe he was wondering about his motivations? He wondered if he was wondering why someone would pretend to be in a homosexual relationship just for some kid he barely knew.
He wondered if Steve would be doing this if he was the straight one. He wondered if his love for the kids would stretch as far as that, and actually he didn’t need that one answered, honestly, because the answer was: yes, because Steve was just Like That, and it was part of why Eddie was so hosed.
He wondered if Steve was in the same boat, their long term fake relationship becoming the longest relationship with a guy he’d ever had. He wondered how many boys Steve had kissed, what they looked like, how they smiled at him. He wondered if any of them looked like Eddie. He wondered, if he came clean, if he told him, “Hey, remember how you implied I would be pretending to be gay and I didn’t correct you? Well, surprise!” — he wondered what would happen. He wondered if he’d hate him for the lie of omission. He wondered if he would laugh. He wondered if he was Steve’s type.
“Get your shit together, Munson,” he told himself, then snorted. Yeah: statistically? Unlikely.
It all came to a head on a cold Saturday in late December. Hellfire was still meeting at the school on Fridays, with Mike running things now utilizing a bitchy but iron grip (often, of course, undermined by the rest of the literal twerps, to great hilarity), but Hellfire 2.0 met on Sundays in a back room at the library Jeff had somehow sweet-talked someone into letting them use. It was all the same people except with added Eddie since he hadn’t decided just what he was doing with his life yet, now that his name was cleared and he had full range of motion back in his left arm and shoulder — he was working down at Thatcher Tire, part-time, and working on his first novel, mostly, which was exactly as pretentious as Robin and Steve liked to tell him it was.
The three of them were talking about going to Chicago in the spring, and Eddie was fatalistically curious if him and Steve would break up as part of their move — realize they were not compatible cohabiting or some shit — but damn him if he wouldn’t still make that move anyway. His own awful, terrible, no good crush on Steve notwithstanding, he and Robin had become some of Eddie’s favorite people; he’d figured out how to live with the desire roosting beneath his breastbone, even if his heart shattered into a million pieces in the process.
Hellfire 2.0 was currently a series of winter themed one-shots, as run by Eddie, so people could come and go as needed with end of semester tests and finals and papers allowed. It was fun, low pressure, often they managed to get some of the less DnD inclined members to show up for a campaign, and if it looked like one was going to run long? Eddie could drop in a total party kill deus ex machina with zero repercussions. They were some of Eddie’s favorite parts of the week, to be honest.
That particular day’s campaign — a very ridiculous romp through a vaguely Nordic world with a Krampus big bad that was a thinly veiled reference to that ratfuck from Hawkins Lab, Brenner; everyone cheered when Byers fireballed him with extreme prejudice, and El cackled brightly through Eddie’s elaborate death rattle — was wrapping up, and Eddie was pretty intimately aware that Steve wasn’t there yet. He’d dropped a handful of rugrats off in the morning before his shift at Melvad’s — RIP Family Video, we hardly knew ye — and usually he’d pop back up in time to catch whatever big final battle Eddie was throwing at them, timing it so perfectly in fact that Eddie was beginning to worry he was becoming predictable in his storytelling.
But he hadn’t come slinking around the corner to join Eleven and Max — who liked heckling as a peanut gallery more than playing, though they’d been known to hop in now and again and form various unholy alliances with Erica’s stable of characters — on the couch in the corner. And there was radio silence on the walkie, even with Dustin getting increasingly annoying about it as everyone began to put their things away. Apparently Steve had been supposed to take Dustin last minute shopping for the kids Non-Denominational Winter Adjacent Gift Exchange tomorrow night.
(Steve, Robin, Eddie, Nancy, Jonathan, and Argyle would also be in attendance, but their plans were slightly more booze and drug related. It was nice, Eddie thought, having friends with shared interests and shared trauma.)
“Chill, man,” said Gareth, zipping up his backpack. “Me or Jeff or Eddie can give you a ride. He probably just lost track of time. Plus, you can go shopping tomorrow — teach you to leave things to the last minute.”
Dustin made a pinched face and Eddie shifted in his chair while the rest of the kids traded looks. That might be true, but Steve very rarely lost track of time if he could help it, or generally allowed anything to come between him and his sacred chauffeur duties, regardless of how he bitched and moaned. And the truly venerated Dustin and Steve bro time? Forget about it.
Eddie knew Gareth didn’t mean it maliciously — everyone in Hellfire had made abrupt one-eighties regarding Steve following Spring Break — but he also didn’t know, you know?
Ever the peacekeeper, Lucas offered, “Maybe his parents came back last minute?”
“Well, he'd definitely be here ditching them if they did,” said Erica archly.
“Is it snowing yet?” asked Will, a tinge of something to his voice. “Maybe his car isn’t starting.”
“Maybe he’s dead in a ditch somewhere.”
“Mike!”
“He’d walkie if his car wasn’t starting,” said Max, ignoring that wholesale, though Eddie was certain Mike would pay for that comment later, and made a mental note to make sure they weren’t in the same carpool home. His van didn’t need Wheeler blood on the upholstery. Again. “And it wasn’t snowing when we went for snacks, like, an hour ago, so.”
“Someone should go check on him,” said Eleven. “Perhaps he is sick?”
Frowning down at his walkie as he toggled back and forth between channels, like Steve would be randomly broadcasting on one, Dustin said quietly, “His head.”
Gareth and Jeff exchanged a look, then looked at Eddie, who explained, “He’s had a lot of concussions over the past few years, so sometimes some gnarly headaches take him out.”
“Migraines,” muttered Dustin, still looking at the walkie.
Among other problems, of course: there were some memory problems on occasion, sure, but those were usual remedied by a Post-It reminder or some Sharpie on his arm, random bouts of nausea, Dustin’s feared hearing loss, and Eddie’s great trial: reading glasses for when his vision gets fuzzy, and Christ on the cross did he look good in them.
“Someone should go check on him,” Eleven repeated, more earnestly, which was impressive, because earnest was sort of her default setting, and this time Dustin looked at Eddie.
“Would you?” he asked.
“Me?” he said. “Why me?”
This time, the glances exchanged by the kids included Gareth and Jeff, and were significantly less worried, more incredulous. Gareth said, “Dude —”
“What?”
“Obviously it should be you,” said Mike, scowling. “Isn’t that how shit like this works?”
“Excuse me?”
He waved a hand. “Boyfriend shit.”
“This explains so much about Eleven dumping your ass every couple of days,” commented Eddie. Will snorted and Eleven nodded primly.
Mike flushed. “Whatever. I’m not the one who needs to be told to go check on my boyfriend with a history of getting his ass handed to him in fights.”
“Hey —”
“Yeah. c’mon, Eddie, it’s not hard, but still. Be a better boyfriend than Mike ,” said Max, smirking. He rolled his eyes at her; he was pretty sure she saw right through them both, in a couple of different directions, but she was ultimately way too kind-hearted underneath that rock hard candy shell of hers to say anything that could inadvertently break Will’s heart.
There was really no out for him, here, to take, between Max’s Cheshire Cat grin and Mike’s scowl and Dustin’s pleading eyes. He didn’t throw his hands up, mainly because eventually, someday, they were going to have to fake break up their fake relationship, and they hadn’t really thought that far ahead but Eddie was well aware that he could very well end up as Public Enemy Number One if the perception was that he broke their beloved babysitter’s heart. Honestly, he wouldn’t be surprised if that happened anyway; it’d probably be the most believable outcome, Eddie fumbling someone like Steve.
Plus: he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t actually a little concerned himself. Like he’d said, Steve was pretty scrupulous about his chauffeur duties, no matter how he bitched about them, and very rarely let himself forget even when he was having a bad brain day, as Robin called them, and if something had come up — a flat tire, a last minute shift, or even the genetic donors swanning back into town, as Lucas had tried to suggest — he would have walkied someone to let them know he wasn’t going to make it.
Something, he knew, was up, and even though he knew the worst things were behind them — Eleven and Will had assured them, over and over and over — and no matter how he tried to cover it with humor, it nevertheless left a pit in his stomach, heavy and sick.
Still, he hedged, “He’d want me to drop you off at home first.”
“But then you’ll check on him,” said Dustin.
“Of course,” Eddie said. He studiously did not look at Max as he added, “What kind of boyfriend would I be if I didn’t?”
So Eddie loaded half the kiddies into his van, while Gareth took the other half with his shiny new hand-me-down Ford Fiesta, and made the rounds quick as he could. He had Max, Eleven, Dustin (who extracted a promise to make sure someone took him to a store to get a gift in the morning), and Will, who he dropped last at the old Byers place — a cramped stop-gap until the Hopper-Byers clan closed on a bigger house — so he could cut through the woods on a utility road to get to the Harrington hacienda.
It was dark, when he rolled to stop at the curb, both the cold, winter sun long set and the snow that the gray Indiana skies had been threatening all weekend was finally coming down in a delicate fall, just beginning to stick when Eddie parked. The lights of the house were all off as he went up the driveway, and there was no answer when he knocked. But Steve’s car was visible through the dusty windows of the main garage — though he didn’t see any other cars, so probably no additional Harringtons in residence at the moment, he thought, scratch that theory off the list — and Eddie’d got Dustin’s dubiously acquired copy of the house key in his hand so he let himself into the place.
“Steve?” he called softly as he creeped through the front door. He blinked hard as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the foyer and kicked off his Reeboks next to a few pairs of pristine looking Nikes.
It was quiet as well as dark, though there was a noise coming from somewhere upstairs that sounded vaguely shower-like, and Eddie felt relatively confident that was where he’d find Steve. He even managed to briefly convince himself that he would just find the man half asleep in the shower or something as he went through the motions of his extensive hair care routine, having lost track of time, and nothing, nothing, else.
What could Eddie say: the power of delusion ran strong though him even now. It was honestly all that got him through this fake dating shit.
He ascended the stairs and made the familiar trek to Steve’s plaid monstrosity of a bedroom, where he’d fallen asleep to many a b-list horror flick over the past few months. The sounds of the shower were of course louder there, and a picture was forming more clearly in his brain with it, though he wasn’t quite sure what to do with it when it did.
The thing was, he’d only seen Steve brought low by a migraine twice since that fateful Spring Break, and both times were mostly accidents because Robin had forgotten to call and cancel a movie night and Eddie had rocked up unawares to Steve closing out on having an extra bad brain day. Mostly Eddie's contributions to his care then were expertly burning some toast for Steve to eat while Robin played with his hair and they both pretended not to be charmed by the loveable grump the migraine hangover turned Steve into. He’d never been around for the main event, which was what he assumed he was about to walk right into as he pushed the door to his en suite open, calling Steve’s name for what felt like the millionth time.
A thick cloud of steam billowed out and Eddie felt cold shock slither down his spine despite all his best efforts when he spotted Steve, a smear of shadow through the pebbled glass shower doors as he sat with his knees pressed to his forehead at the bottom of the tub. He stumbled, sock footed, across the tile floor and all but ripped the door off its hinges as he flung it open.
“Jesus Christ, Steve,” he breathed.
The noise of the door basically bouncing off the wall behind Eddie had Steve hissing and curling into a tighter ball beneath the stream of water, which alleviated at least one or two of his fears. Namely, that Steve had collapsed, cracked his head open, and the water that was still running warm — rich people — had erased all evidence of Steve bleeding out from his skull.
Willing his heart to return to beating at a normal speed, he reached one hand in to touch Steve’s damp, warm shoulder. He turned at the touch, cheek pressed to his knees now, and cracked one eye open. “Eddie? What are you—?”
“You missed my big finale, honey,” he said unthinkingly, his hand drifting up to skim the wet hair plastered to his forehead back, “and we know how much you love those.”
“I do. Sorry,” said Steve, blinking hard and then wincing. He grimaced. “My head.”
“Yeah, we kinda figured it’d be something like that,” Eddie said. “Migraine?”
“Yeah.”
“Bad?”
“Not great, man. But I’ve had worse. Just — hurts.”
“You been sick?”
“Not yet. Felt it coming on, so I left work early, figured I’d wash my hair, maybe get a nap in, see if that did anything before I — oh, shit,” he said. “The kids — Dustin —”
“— is fine,” he told him. “They’re all fine. Little bitchy, but what’s new about that? Me and Gareth saw them all home before I came to look in on you. You feel like you can get up?”
Steve turned his face to press his knees into his eyes again. He mumbled, “Ugh. Maybe? But probably not. We can’t just sit here? Your hands feel nice.”
Eddie figured humans probably couldn’t spontaneously combust because, could they, he would’ve been a fucking smear of charcoal and bone on the tile of Steve’s en suite for sure. Jesus Christ, your hands feel nice, what was he supposed to do with that? It was incredibly not the time but he felt something in him try to rise to the occasion, if you caught his drift.
Luckily, Steve was really otherwise occupied so he didn’t see Eddie visibly have to pull himself together before he asked, “What if I help you?”
“I don’t — I mean, you don’t have to.”
“Hey. As the poets said, I’ve got you, babe,” said Eddie, finally pulling his hand from his hair to reach for the shower knob. “Lemme get you a towel first, though.”
“I’m telling people you know Sonny and Cher, loser.”
“Well, first of all, Cher’s an icon and an institution, so jot that down,” he said. “And everyone knows you’ve got a shitty brain, no one will believe you. I’m in the clear.”
He chucked, then winced again. “Don’t make me laugh. I told you: I haven’t been sick yet.”
“Noted,” Eddie said. “Your towel, my liege.”
Between the two of them, they got Steve up, dried off, and wrapped up. It was slow going, what with the deference they needed to show Steve’s head. Any little bit of movement seemed to have the poor guy wincing and flinching, slamming his eyes closed, his grip on Eddie’s wrist white knuckled and firm as he breathed shrap through his nose and clutched at him, muttering curses under his breath and whining. Which was fucking alarming, you know, considering Eddie once watched this absolute lunatic wander barefoot, and tits out, it did bear so, so much repeating, through a hell dimension after nightmare bats chewed on him — and Eddie knew exactly how much those dick-faced little bastards’ teeth hurt, so that was really saying something.
Plus, he was trying his goddamn level best to keep his hands and gaze respectful, clinical, and above the belt as he went, which was kind of slowing him down. Sure — he wasn’t, like, proud of the fact that he thought about sneaking a peek but listen, okay! He was gross and awful and twenty-one and pent up and life was fuckin’ short when you got down to brass tacks about it, and he was probably more than a little, ugh, more than a little in love with the veritable Aphrodite that was damp and warm, and soft, and damp, and sweetly, bitchily needy, and did he mention damp , pressed up against him.
Sometimes, he sort of suspected the end of Operation: Gay Hope wasn’t going to be a fake break-up of a fake relationship, but the very real death of Eddie himself when his heart ended up just sort of giving the fuck out from all the pent up sexual frustration and desire and then the self-loathing and shame that followed that like a snake eating its own tail.
All of this to say, he was focusing so hard on being the perfect, respectable fake boyfriend that he didn’t clock the tears streaming down Steve’s face until he was turning back from rummaging through Steve’s closet, a pair of soft, threadbare sweats in his hand, and asking, “Did you want a t-shirt, too, or — oh, fuck, Steve? What can I —”
Eddie had sat him down on the bed before going to the closet, and he’d been upright when he’d turned away. Now, he was collapsed on his side, scrunched up like a pill bug in a damp but fancy and oversized rich person’s bath towel on the plaid duvet, and there were big, fat tears streaming down his face. He was arrested by the sight.
“I’m okay,” Steve said before he could drop the sweats and rush to his side. “It’s fine.”
“You’re crying,” he said dumbly. “You’re crying.”
“Yeah.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets once more. “Feels like someone is driving a fucking spike through my skull. I don’t wanna be hyperbaric or nothing, but I’d maybe take the bats over this. I hate it. Literally the worst.”
“Can I do anything?” he asked. “To help? I can, like, call Robin or —”
Steve flapped a hand at his bedside table. “She’s got a date but Dustin made a list. In there.”
Saying Dustin made a list was sort of like saying that sometimes it got cold in Indiana in winter, which was to say: it sort of significantly and massively undersold the point. Because Dustin hadn’t just made a list — the kid had practically written a research paper on repeated head trauma and its after-effects, with a subsection on migraines that was quite literally eight single-spaced, double-sided pages long. Dustin’s magnum opus of overbearing little brother shit was carefully crafted on some word-processor, and peer-reviewed, apparently, by not only Erica Sinclair and Robin Buckley but also Mr fucking Clarke from the middle school.
“What the fuck,” he whispered, flipping through the self-bound volume. But there were, in fact, three actual lists at the end of the volume: the first titled TRIGGERS, the second titled PREVENTATIVE CARE, and the final was ALLEVIATION (BUT NOT CURE). He stopped on that one, and ran his finger down the bullet-pointed list (also complete with sub-points and footnotes, the little dweeb).
“Yeah,” said Steve. He sniffed around the congestion that the tears and pain had begun to cause and Eddie had to pause to remind himself shit like that wasn’t cute, it wasn’t, you absolute horndog. God, someone put him down. “Like, love the kid, but he really didn’t need to go to all the trouble, you know? It’s, like, my brain is shitty, news at eleven. Plus, half the time the only thing that really helps is my meds, which apparently I’m out of, and just passing the fuck out. That, or —”
“Jerking off?” he blurted, feeling his eyebrows shoot up behind his hairline. Well, to be fair, it said orgasms in perfect, evenly spaced typeset, with something scribbled beneath that about endorphins as some sort of addendum, and wow Dustin really needed to learn some fucking boundaries, Jesus Christ —
“I was gonna say weed,” he said, as wryly as the astronomical amount of pain he was in would allow. “‘Cause I figured you’d have some in your van. But yeah sometimes that helps, if it’s early enough. Don’t think either of us want you to watch me beat it while I cry, though.”
“Uh,” said Eddie, intelligently, and swallowed back the urge to ask, How early are we right now?
Because —
Well.
Like —
He was not not saying that. It wouldn’t, you know, exactly be a hardship or whatever, to watch Steve Harrington cry while he jerked it. Was it less than ideal circumstances? Listen, Eddie’s whole life was less than ideal circumstances, come to that, so, sure, yeah. whatever. And would it maybe, actually tick a few boxes for Eddie, like, that kind of thing? If he had to be honest about it also sure. And if he was being honest honest, the Big Man in the Sky’s Honest, he’d probably also like to be more of an active participant in those proceedings.
Eddie’d like to lend a helping hand, here, he was saying, and if that ended up with Steve crying less about his bitch of a headache and more about how Eddie was so big, he was too big, his huge dick was splitting open his tiny, pretty hole and he couldn’t take it, Eddie, but he didn’t tell him to stop — begged him to keep going, do it harder, give it to him more, open him up on that big cock and that big cock alone —
What could he say? He kept the disgusting, perverted goblin that lived in the attic of his brain pretty well locked up most days but he could still hear the fucker shouting from a distance, even at times like these, you know?
“I could go downstairs,” he said, a little overloud when he realized he’d been quiet for too long.
Steve blinked. Tears were still cascading down his face, but through the veil of them, and the pain, Eddie thought he could see realization starting to dawn. Oh shit, he thought. Oh shit, of shit, oh shit —
“Eddie,” he said slowly. “I’m not in any shape to really rub one out, man.”
“Fair,” said Eddie. And then, because he had no self-preservation to speak of — see also: the bats, though that had some other layers to it that didn’t apply to this situation that really didn’t need digging into, like, ever, thank you very fucking much, okay — he heard himself say, “I could jerk you off?”
To his credit, or, like, that immense pain just really wiping him out, Steve only blinked. “You wanna jerk me off?”
This time he kept in his knee jerk response of, I mean, it’s less of a want and more of a need, if we’re talking hierarchy thereof, but yeah, sure, we can say that, and said instead, “If it’ll help.”
“You wanna jerk me off,” he repeated, “while I, like, cry?”
“I mean,” started Eddie but he couldn’t really figure out how to end that sentence without blurting out any of the shit that he had thought just now. Which — he sort of figured he’d gotten himself in deep without the goblin in his brain digging the ditch even further for him. Honestly, he’d probably be plumbing new depths if he did.
“Jesus,” breathed Steve. “I can’t believe we're finally having this conversation, and it’s gotta be when my brain feels like it’s leaking out of my fucking ears and crying in pain.”
“Uh,” he said again.
“But I guess that does it for you, right? Mr Black Hanky, left pocket,” he said with a leer. Or, like, as close to a leer as he could get while still crying and, God, why did he have to be so pretty when he cried, and —
Wait.
What did he just —
Wait.
“What?” asked Eddie.
Rolling his eyes and then wincing for the millionth time, Steve sent him a baleful glare before dropping a hand over his eyes and pressing down with the heel of it again. “Listen, I wanted to let you do this in your own time, but it looks like that’s not an option anymore and, seriously, I’ve got maybe another hour before the nausea kicks in and this is off the table but: is that bandana fashion, or flagging, man? Because it’s been hard as fuck to tell, and Robin is getting sick of me complaining, so you gotta be nice since, again, my brain is trying to kill me. But” — here, he cracked open his fingers to peer through one wet, red-rimmed eye at him — “are you into me for real? Not just as Operation: Gay Hope? Because otherwise, I’m gonna have to ask you to go get me some of your weed and then, like, leave me to die here, okay? Let me take this migraine and the embarrassment in private.”
“What?” he asked. “No. No, I mean, yes. Yes to a lot of that: it’s fashion but I’m also flagging, and I’m into you, and I’m into the tears. Black bandana. You know—? You know what that? I’m into — that. That. I’m into that. All of the, you know, above. You, specifically. Very much so. So?”
“So,” said Steve. He reached up and, with a shaky hand but no hesitation, because that wasn’t the Steve Harrington way, pulled Eddie towards him by the neck of his Hellfire raglan.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“You sure about this?”
Steve made a face like he’d roll his eyes again if he could, the beautiful brat. “Since the arcade, man. Just been waiting for you to catch up, if I was right about that hanky.”
“You were. You are.”
“You said.”
“God. You’re unreal, you know that? Baby, I’m gonna take such good care of you,” he told him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Gonna make you feel so much better,” he said.
“Thought you’d wanna keep me crying,” said Steve.
He ran his thumb against the hollow of his eye, dragged it down the fine ridge of his cheekbone, the hinge of his jaw, the column of his throat. It grew wet and tacky with the tears it gathered and Eddie sucked it into his mouth to watch Steve’s eyes darken as they both let the moment wash over them. He said, “We’ll have lots of time for that later, baby, figure out all the things we both like about what I’ve got in my pocket, and I’m gonna take real good care of you then too. Now, stay still like a good boy for me, would you?”
Slipping his way back down Steve’s body, he chuckled quietly to himself as he undid the knot he’d done just ten minutes ago to keep the bath towel around Steve’s waist and tried not to feel like he was unwrapping a present as he did. Merry Christmas to him or whatever, and a Happy fucking New Year. When it was undone, he tugged it gently out from under his legs and tossed it over his shoulder to reclaim later before looking down on what he’d studiously tried to ignore before.
Steve had an incredibly pretty dick. Eddie was probably incapable of being objective about it but he figured any observer with his predilections would say the same. Cut, maybe a little shorter than Eddie’s own, but thick, quite the perfect mouthful, and flushed a very lovely dusky pink at the head as it grew hard beneath his gaze. It glistened, from the lingering damp of the bath that the terry cloth sweats didn’t wick away, and with his growing arousal.
“I don’t think I’m gonna be able to jerk you off, baby,” he told him. “I know I said — but now that I’m down here, I think I’ll fucking die if I don’t get to taste you.”
Above him, Steve’s face shifted beneath his tears from confused and mildly offended to land on blushing arousal. “Eddie —”
But whatever he was going to say was lost beneath a sweet, high whine that Eddie thought he was going to have to record so that he’d have it always, as Eddie popped the head of his dick into his mouth without further preamble.
He’d done this maybe a dozen times, a little more, since he turned seventeen and got the stones — and the driver’s license — to get himself up to Indianapolis to cruise. They’d been hurried encounters, in bathrooms mostly, twice in one of those pay by the hour motels, and he’d done more with some of the guys he’d found. Enough to figure out what he liked, what he wanted to get, what he wanted to give. He tried not to be picky, because he couldn’t always, but still he’d learned he’d like a certain type of boy, who wanted a certain type of thing: one who he could put into their place, sometimes gentle, sometimes not, and who craved the release of putting their care, their hurt, themselves, into Eddie’s hands. There were a few who’d even showed him some not so metaphorical ropes when he had, and he was so fucking grateful, now.
Because: Steve, now, before him. It was too much; it wasn’t enough. He’d longed, and desired, and dreamed, and now it was here. He was here, beneath his hands and mouth and body and tongue, and he was asking Eddie to take care of him. How could he refuse? How could he turn away?
God, how long could they have been doing this if only he’d just nutted up and said —
It didn’t matter, he thought. Not that part. He was here now. They were both here, and Eddie had a job to do, and what a fucking job at that.
Steve’s cock was as perfect a mouthful as he’d thought when he’d seen it, and he took him down without delay. It was heedy perfection, unparalleled bliss: hot on his tongue, and silky, and he tasted like salt and skin and something soapy from the bath, a little herbal. He barely moved, as Eddie sucked and swallowed and allowed the length of him to glide past the resistance of his throat, though he made this wonderful, awful punched out sound that suggested if he could, he would. Still, he pressed one forearm firmly along the valleys of Steve’s hips and pelvis to keep him in place, digging his fingerprints into one side, and trailed the other up the soft, downy expanse of his thigh.
He teased at the crease of his groin with a light touch as he pulled back slightly, suckling and trailing just the edge of teeth, and then pressed his fingers further towards Steve’s ass. He jolted at the touch, then groaned. At any number of things, he thought — at Eddie’s tightening grip in admonishment, at the pain from his head, and at the jolt of anticipation they both felt.
“Yes,” he whispered. “Eddie, Ed, please —”
Licking at the head of his dick, he asked, “Please what, baby?”
“Touch me.”
“But I am touching you.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I? I don’t know —”
“Eddie,” Steve whined, better than any music. “ Touch me.”
Eddie pressed his thumb against his rim. “Is this what you mean, baby? Since you can’t use your words.”
“Yes,” he breathed again.
He sat up a little, putting one hand on Steve’s dick now and lifting the other to his mouth as he jacked him, slow and sweet. He licked his fingers, then swallowed them, watching Steve all the while — who was watching him right back, his eyes half-lidded and squinted from pain and wet, wet, wet. God, he was beautiful.
“Normally I make my boys work a little harder for it,” Eddie told him, running his spit-slicked fingers across Steve’s tear-stained cheeks once more, “but I’m gonna make an exception for you. Think I’m gonna be making a lot of exceptions for you, pretty baby.”
“You think I’m pretty?” he asked in a small voice. “Even like this?”
“Especially like this,” said Eddie. He let go of his cock so that he could drape his body over him, chest to chest, not putting all of his weight on him, not just yet. He curled one arm around his head, gentle, to hold them both steady, and slipped his wet, sticky hand between their bodies, between Steve’s legs, further. He circled his fingers against his hole, pressed, retreated, teased, as Steve bit his lip. “Especially like this, baby. Wish you weren’t hurting, but God you’re gorgeous like this.”
“Make me hurt a different way,” Steve said, hips moving down, just so, to meet Eddie’s touch.
“Not this time, baby,” he said, with incredible strength of fucking character, he thought. He deserved a fuckin’ Purple Heart for this shit, a Nobel, maybe. “Plenty of that later. Just lie back now, babylove. Let me take care of you.”
“Okay,” he said, and Eddie pressed his index finger into his hole. They both breathed out, nothing with any real sound, barely even sighs, just exhalations, their mouths hovering over one another. “Kiss me?”
He couldn’t believe he hadn’t, yet. He tasted as sweet as his tears, as his cock. Lush and wet and perfect, just like the rest of him. Eddie could drown here, in his mouth, in his touch. He could live here, subsisting on his breath and body only, requiring no other sustenance and God, God, he knew he was dramatic, he knew he was over the top, but could you blame him? Could you?
They kissed, slowly and gently, as Eddie moved one finger within him, then a second and then a third, asking playfully, “How about my hands now, baby? They feel good now?” and Steve whimpering into his kiss, “Yes, so good, Ed, honey, so good.”
Too, he was so aware of the body beneath him, with him, and the pain that he was in — he wanted to take it away, take it within himself — so he worked as diligently and carefully and as sweetly as he could. Usually, he gave them the pain, fucked them hard and fast and good on his cock until they were bruised and weeping and wanting, and he supposed that, fundamentally, this was the same, that it was just different means to a common end. They’d do all those things, eventually, if Eddie’s luck held: he would bruise him and mark him and hold him down until he begged for more, he’d fuck him open on his cock until he was incoherent, he’d take him apart and put him back together as beautifully as he could.
But he could feel a certain difference, and he knew. Fundamental similarities or not, it was different. It was so different. He felt different, in this act, with this boy. He wanted to give him everything good he had. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever truly felt that before.
He pressed inside him eons later and he felt somehow hotter and tighter around Eddie’s cock than he had around the four fingers he’d gotten him up to as Steve had whimpered and moaned beneath him, one leg splaying wide as the other hiked itself around Eddie’s flexing hips. As he’d cried, through his pain, through his pleasure —
He bracketed his forearms around Steve’s hand, his hands laced through the hair at the crown of his skull. He pulled at it lightly, watching Steve’s gorgeous, watery eyes flutter shut at the sensation. “You like that?”
“Mmm,” he breathed. “Feels good.”
“Yeah?”
“Harder, please.”
“Not yet, baby,” he told him. “Not too much yet.”
“Please. You can give it to me,” said Steve. “C’mon. I want it.”
“Your head,” Eddie hedged.
“It’ll help,” he said. He reached up and took his wrists in a gentle grip, just holding. “I can take it. Please. Give it to me, or I'll take it.”
"Yeah? You'll take what I give you, how about that?"
Raising up a little on his knees, he fucked in once, testing the new angle. It was a short thrust, but hard, purposeful, and Steve let loose a punched out, hard little gasp of a moan, biting his lip at the end like more was trying to slip out. He breathed, “Yeah. Yeah. Like that. Felt so good.”
He did it again, and again, and again. Sweat was building up between their bodies, even with how slow they were going, and Eddie felt like he was teetering on a knife’s edge as they went. His body was strung tight, like guitar string that was about to snap, and he thought it was fucking crazy, how he could be so close to the precipice when he felt like he’d done so little. But, he also thought, it was fucking Steve and the last eight months probably counted as some fucked up form of foreplay, right? Eddie was going to count it.
“God, look at you,” he said. “Can’t believe you’re real. Can’t believe you’re letting me see you like this.”
“Wanted to,” he said around hiccoughing breaths. “Wanted to, so long. Want you.”
“Want you too,” Eddie told him. “Want to see it. Let me see it, baby. Let me see you come. Come for me, baby.”
“Eddie,” whined Steve and, to his immense shock and pleasure, he did.
Between their undulating bodies, Steve’s dick twitched and stiffened and then hot come was painting both their bellies. Eddie wanted to taste it, lick him clean and then spit it back into his mouth, and it was this thought and the subsequent one — that Steve would maybe even want it, might sweetly drop his mouth open and let his tongue lie pliant and expectant to have it fed to him — that had Eddie rabbiting his hips and humping once, twice, three times before he was coming. He moaned, finally dropping his face into the hollow of Steve’s neck as he finished.
He made to pull back, but the grip on his wrists tightened.
“Stay inside me,” said Steve. “Just — just for a little bit.”
“Okay, honey,” he said, pressing close again. He was slow to soften inside him, his dick making the valiant effort to stay hard so he could fuck Steve again and again and again, he thought, but that was a project for another day and God what a day that would be, right?
Steve clung to him like a limpet all the while, and Eddie peered up at him. His pretty face was flush and, even though he was still crying, the tears were slow as they spilled down his cheeks. He looked at peace, almost, still and soft and so fucking beautiful. He did that, thought Eddie, something warm and liquid and embarrassed and proud all the same growing in his chest. He put that look on his face. He took care of him.
Sure, it probably wasn’t anyway that anyone expected him to take care of him in this situation, but he did, and he fucking helped, he thought. He made it better. He did that.
When his dick finally slipped out of him, a mess of come and spit that Eddie would be investigating thoroughly if they’d fallen into bed for any other reason than the one they had, he leaned himself up on one arm. The other he put on Steve’s chest, running his hand through the thick, wiry hair there — and, sure, maybe catching the edge of a callus on one perfect, brown nipple to see what noise he would make. Listen, didn’t we already go over how Eddie was a weak, weak man? Because he was.
Anyway, the noise didn’t disappoint. Eddie wanted to record that too.
Shit. Was he gonna be the kind of guy who recorded his own sex tapes?
Depressingly, he was pretty sure the answer was going to be in the affirmative but, seriously, look at who he’d be recording it with. Not a court in the world would convict, he was certain.
He shook the thought away and spent a long moment staring down at Steve, his still flushed face, that sated, soft look, the tears. The light from the world outside — a few spotlights on the house itself from the landscapers, a glow from the pool, open and heated despite the season — was diffused by the fall of snow that was sticking to the window as it came down in earnest now, and, even in here, the world felt gentle and quiet, precious. Dreamlike and real, all at the same turn.
“How’s your head?” he asked, carding his fingers further through that gorgeous chest hair.
Steve chuckled and rolled slightly, dislodging Eddie’s hand, as he pressed his sweat and cum slick chest and belly to Eddie’s. He rubbed his nose, slightly chilled despite the warmth between them, against Eddie’s collarbone, and he felt more of him soften at the gesture. “Not great, man.”
“Shit, did I —”
“No. No,” he said. “I mean, that helped. It did! It was great! And I do feel a little bit less like I wanna drive a spike through my eye socket. But I hate to break it to you that your dick isn’t some magical migraine killer.”
He snapped his fingers. “Aw, shucks. There goes that career path.”
“I mean, if it was, I don’t think I’d exactly be jazzed about my boyfriend dicking down some randos,” said Steve.
Despite it all, that was what made Eddie feel flush from his eyes to his toes. “Boyfriend?”
“Um, yeah?”
“Like, for real this time?”
“I mean, Henderson can never know the exact timeline, but, uh, yeah I sort of figured,” said Steve. He traced the outline of Eddie’s bat tattoo. “Plus, um. I haven’t — I haven’t been dating anyone, you know. This whole time. Because I kind of hoped —”
“Yeah?” Eddie asked, breathless.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Well, lucky for you, you know, your boyfriend may not be a migraine dick specialist or anything, but he is flush with drugs,” he told him. He pressed a quick kiss to the corner of Steve’s mouth and smoothed a hand over his hair. “So gimme a sec, baby, and we’ll see if we can’t get this migraine sorted, okay?”