2. Chapter 2

“Uh, Steve? Why is there a dead metalhead on our couch?”

Steve stares at Robin for a moment, whose head is poking back around the office door. Dead metalhead? Then he sees the scattered ashes on the floor by the counter and remembers, like a fucking idiot, that he let Eddie sleep here last night and very much did not tell Robin about it. “Dead?”

“He’s not dead. Well, I hope he’s not. But what is he doing here?”

Steve joins her in peering around the door. Eddie is curled up on the couch, looking smaller than he usually looks, snoring faintly with his mouth open. The ashtray Steve left on the floor is nearly full.

“It stinks of smoke,” she says, wrinkling her nose and staring at him accusingly. “Well? I’m waiting. Are you going to explain or is this going to be one of those unsolved mysteries, forcing me to invent increasingly improbable explanations until I–”

Steve grabs her arm and pulls her back into the store. Insomnia, Eddie said. It wouldn’t be fair to wake him. “He came in when I was working late last night, alright? He was kind of” — completely — “freaked out. And he said he can’t sleep at home, so…”

She looks at him for a long, silent moment. Then she starts slowly shaking her head. “You’re really something else, Harrington, you know that, right?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means half the time you hate the guy and half the time you miss him and, frankly, all the time you’re obsessed with him! And you let him sleep in the office! Which Keith will definitely fire you for, by the way, if he ever finds out, but apparently you suddenly care about that less than you care about–”

Maybe that’s true. Sure, he doesn’t want to be fired. But in the moment last night, Eddie still shaking, such cagey desperation written all over his face, Steve hadn’t thought about Keith at all. “This is what we do, Robin, isn’t it? We look out for each other. Forgive me if I was trying to prioritise being, I don’t know, a decent fucking person over goddamn Keith.”

“Hm, well, this is awkward.” Steve whips around to find Eddie leaning in the doorway, blinking tiredness from his eyes, the gravelly richness of sleep in his voice. “Your decency is much appreciated, Harrington.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m very glad you had a better place to sleep, but I’m just surprised that Steve–” Robin abruptly shuts her mouth. “I’m gonna stay out of this.”

“Thank you so much, Robin,” Steve says tightly. He wonders how much Eddie heard. Not that much, it turns out, because Eddie isn’t meeting his eyes and it’s in a way that’s less oh you’re obsessed with me and that’s weird and more I was really fucking vulnerable with you last night and I probably don’t even like you that much so it’s embarrassing, which Steve is glad about, though he’s not actually obsessed so it’s a bit redundant anyway.

“I do mean it, y’know. Like, thank you.” Eddie keeps his eyes on the floor, fingers twitching for his cigarettes. Steve hopes he doesn’t take one out; Robin’s mad enough about the smell in here as it is. But then he looks up with a faint grin: “Knight in shining armor, as they say. Peak of chivalry, right here — no wonder this gentleman has them all swooning.”

“Don’t stroke his ego,” Robin says. “Besides, they’re not all swooning.”

‘Could’ve fooled me.” Eddie has crossed his arms over his chest, pushing up one foot against the doorframe at a jaunty angle, and Steve wonders at the fact that he can make any space interesting just by existing in it. He’s also not sure exactly what’s going on right now.

“Well, I don’t know what rock you’ve been living under, but it’s true, my dating life is miserable,” he says, and then doesn’t expect the silence that follows. Another awkward silence. Really? Is he that pitiable?

“I’m gonna go,” Eddie says suddenly. “But thanks, man, it means a lot.” And he smiles as he goes, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

Robin doesn’t mention him to Steve again that day, and Steve doesn’t want to fight, so he doesn’t bring him up. Weird as it feels, to be dodging a subject with his best friend. Not only a subject, but another friend of theirs, a person whose life they saved in the course of saving the world in general, and something the apocalypse movies never tell you is that it’s really fucking awkward afterward. Steve’s not sure high schoolers were ever meant to mean as much to each other as people who’ve saved the world do. But here they are.

“What’s wrong with The Rocky Horror Picture Show?” he asks Robin suddenly, as they’re getting ready for closing that afternoon. She chokes on air and then wheels around to stare at him like he’s grown an extra head.

“Depends what you mean by ‘wrong’, Steve.” She’s raised her eyebrows. “I mean, personally, objectively and subjectively, absolutely nothing. It’s the perfect movie. It’s just not–” She waves a hand. “Your scene.”

“My scene? What’s my scene, then?”

“Like, I dunno. The usual stuff. Fast Times and all that crap.”

“I’ve been branching out!” he protests. “I watched Alien. And Star Wars.”

“Only because Dustin made you.” She grabs Alien from the shelf in one hand and then, after a few seconds of browsing, finds Rocky Horror and holds both tapes up side by side. “These? Are not the same. Nothing is the same as Rocky Horror.”

“But no one wants me to watch it.”

“You were horrified when Eddie wore eyeliner, Steve. You’re not going to enjoy it.”

He stares at her. Horrified? Was he horrified? He doesn’t remember feeling horrified. He remembers feeling… surprised. Curious. Interested. And what’s Eddie’s eyeliner got to do with it anyway? “I wasn’t horrified,” he snaps. “Y’know, I can actually be pretty open-minded sometimes, not that anyone seems to believe it–”

“I do believe it, Steve.” She looks away then, her tone softening, and something about the whole thing is reminding him of a shitty bathroom floor and a really horrible high that probably changed his life for the better, actually, when he thinks about it. “I’m just– This movie is really personal to me. To a lot of people. And I really, like, don’t want you to hate it, or think it’s weird or something because you don’t think I’m weird but I love this movie and this movie is weird so what if you start associating the two and turns out I have been weird all along and it changes everything completely irreparably between us just because I let you watch it without at all knowing what you were getting into and then–”

“Robin,” he says. She stops. “Nothing’s ever gonna make me, like, hate you, you do know that, right? Besides, I think I know you pretty damn well at this point. A movie isn’t going to change anything about that, or tell me anything new I don’t already know.”

“Maybe not about me,” she says carefully, hesitantly. “But maybe about– other people.”

Steve’s not stupid enough to think she means anyone other than Eddie. Which makes him all the more curious to watch the movie, of course. Work out what the big secret is. He knows Robin’s secret, but she’s weird in more ways than one, and so is Eddie, so really they have a ridiculous amount in common. Band, for one thing. God, if it is a band thing, Robin’s right about him hating the movie.

Her comment about his straight-ass mind comes to his memory, and the eyeliner, and he allows himself a moment to consider it like she really meant it like that. Eddie? Sure, nothing’s impossible, he’d been convinced Robin was straight the whole time and she didn’t fit any stereotype he’d ever heard — but Eddie? He’s been seen with girls, Steve thinks, hasn’t he? Or, at least, he’s never been seen with guys. And girls dig that whole rocker/leather/ripped-jean thing. If he was… like Robin, the jerks at the high school would be calling him a far worse f-word than freak. Right?

It could be that, Steve will admit. It’s not like he has a problem with that. And maybe it’s not. Whatever, Robin has pretty clearly asked him not to pry, and he’s not going to pry. He resolves not to pry. He also resolves to ignore the way the hypothetical of Eddie with a guy is sticking in his head.

“If you don’t want me to, I won’t watch it,” he says.

Robin’s shoulders droop, as if relieved of a massive tension, and she gives him an apologetic grin. “Thanks. I know it’s stupid, but– thanks.”

“For the record, I have zero problem with eyeliner. It’s pretty cool, actually.”

She brightens. “Really? Does that mean–”

“No. All I said is it’s cool, not that I’d–”

“But you’d look so–”

“No.”

“I’ll convince you one day, Harrington. Just you wait.” She grins, and despite himself he grins back.

After their shift, she wheedles him into milkshakes with the kiddiwinks, and Dustin doesn’t know about the unspoken don’t bring up Eddie rule so it takes him about thirty seconds before he’s detailing the plans for the next D&D campaign, which they’ve managed to rope Lucas back into (who smiles sheepishly at the whole thing) and Max too (who rolls her eyes but doesn’t protest) and should be a monster of a campaign, though they’re aiming not to predict the next apocalyptic disaster this time, and Steve nods along easily until they get to the part where Steve’s invited.

“Uh, sorry, what?” he says, unsure if he heard them correctly.

Max shrugs. “You’re invited. If you want. I mean, everyone is, but I don’t think anyone’s ever actually asked you directly because everyone knew you’d automatically say no.”

“Well–” They’re right about that. But Steve is frozen for a moment, caught in wondering why this question, why now. Why after last night — if he’s not presuming too much, if he’s not being too bold. “I mean, I wouldn’t say I want, exactly, but…”

“Holy shit,” Dustin says, eyes wide. “Holy shit, Max, you got something that wasn’t a no. How the fuck–”

“Pay up,” Robin says, smirking, and incredulously Steve watches Dustin slide a five dollar bill across the table. She catches his stare. “What? I bet that you’d be at least a little bit tempted.”

“What the– why?”

She’s sitting next to him, so when she cups her hand over her face she can mouth at him without the others seeing. Which he’s glad about, because what she mouths is Because you’re obsessed with Eddie.

“That’s just not– that’s just not the point.” But no one’s listening to him anymore, because Dustin is too busy planning out what character he’d– play? Be? Steve doesn’t know what any of this means. “I haven’t agreed either!” he says, above the din.

“We can’t make him if he’s this reluctant,” Lucas argues. “Besides, is Eddie really gonna let such a beginner in?”

“Everybody starts somewhere!” Dustin insists. “I don’t know what goes on in Eddie’s D&D genius brain, all I know is that he said it would be cool if Steve came along so–”

Steve blinks. “Wait, Eddie said that?”

“Yes, Steve, Eddie said that.” Dustin speaks very slowly, as if talking to an idiot child, the tone he uses all the fucking time that Steve and Eddie bitched about together when they were stuck in Nancy’s room in the dark, and the thought marries weirdly with the knowledge that Eddie wants him around, that Eddie seems to like him after all. “I mean, it’s not quite the mandate we had to replace Lucas but it’s–” He stops, frowning. “I don’t know, man, he meant it.”

“Okay,” Steve says faintly. “I guess– I mean, I don’t want to play, I’m not gonna get buried in your fictional game for real, I have a life to live, but maybe, I dunno, I’ll come along some time.”

Dustin, Lucas, and Max look at him with a sort of disbelieving wonder. But there’s nothing to wonder about, okay? He’s just– dropping in. Babysitting. (Taking Eddie up on the offer of friendship which, it seems, has not been rescinded.) Robin is smirking on the bench next to him. Shit.

He regrets this decision when it comes time for it, of course. He drives the kids over and lingers by the car for a moment, something unexplainable flickering in his gut, a nervousness he can’t quite shake, which is ridiculous. It’s Eddie, and the fucking kids, and he’s nearly died with these people hundreds of times so really what is he worried about?

Eddie is talking when he comes in, sprawled in a shitty chair he manages to make look like a throne and holding the room in thrall — Steve’s never seen him like this, he realises, in control of his environment and exuding the charisma that makes nerds like Dustin want to die for him. As Steve enters he doesn’t stop talking, but he does look up and meet Steve’s eyes, a faint grin widening around his words. Steve works his way around the table to a beanbag a little way behind Eddie — sort of between Eddie and Dustin, but really nearer to Eddie — and when Eddie’s finished his little nerdy speech he leans back and says, “Harrington. You made it.”

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Steve says. Eddie smirks and then he feels compelled to add, “That was sarcasm. If it wasn’t clear.”

“You’re here, aren’t ya? That’s enough for me.” A crooked grin, a gleam of his eyes, and Steve feels distinctly weird about the whole thing. Not… in a bad way, necessarily. He’s not sure what kind of way.

“What, we have guests now? D&D isn’t a spectator sport,” one of Eddie’s friends complains, frowning over at Steve in his corner. Steve crosses his arms over his chest and tries not to feel too defensive.

“Yeah, and since when were we letting jocks in?” another one says.

“Hey,” Lucas complains.

“Since now,” Eddie says. “Maybe it’s to keep you at the top of your game, huh? Don’t want to be defeated in front of the jock, now, do we? Steve, Jeff, Jeff, Steve, Steve, Gareth, Gareth, Steve.”

The two of them narrow their eyes and nod stiffly, accepting their leader’s words, and Eddie is so different here, so fierce and so extravagant, throwing his arms around and painting pictures with words that are engaging even to Steve, in the end, so he has a pretty damn good time watching the campaign unfold. Dustin does some cool stuff, he thinks?, but it’s Max who saves the day, which has everyone feeling pretty good about themselves because she deserves, and probably needs, that little win. And the whole thing sets an odd feeling in Steve’s chest, because these kids really are having the time of their lives, and so is Eddie, and it might be the nerdiest shit ever but none of them give a flying fuck about that right now, they’re just living their lives and enjoying it, and Steve’s not sure he’s ever been able to discard his last flying fuck so easily. And it’s all Eddie. Eddie lets them do that for free.

Eddie ducks out afterwards, and Steve follows him before the little shits can collar him for their ride home. He finds Eddie smoking on the steps by the parking lot, the lit end casting a soft glow on his face, the breeze tugging at his hair.

“I gotta say, Munson,” Steve says as he lowers himself down beside him, “that was nowhere near as bad as I was expecting.”

He gets another crooked grin. “Oh no? I’ve failed in my duties, then! My mission was to scare you away for life.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say mission failed, maybe more, like, postponed.”

Eddie nudges him with his shoulder instead of answering, which has the side effect of making him aware of exactly how close they’re sitting, and then of the way Eddie smells like cigarettes and weed and stuff that shouldn’t smell good but does, somehow, and Steve clears his throat and speaks again to push these thoughts aside. “I’ve been spending way too much time in this high school for someone pushing twenty-one.”

“Oh, you’ve been spending too much time here? I’m the one who has yet to pass Ms O’Donnell’s fucking class. You’re free, man. I’m an adult who can’t pass a math test.”

His tone is joking, but Steve feels the sting of bitterness in it anyway — not directed at Steve, but at himself. “You know that Nancy, like, rewrote all my papers for me? That includes my college essay, not that I went to college, but still. I really can’t say I got there honestly.”

“Honesty, schmonesty.” Eddie takes another drag from his cigarette and offers it to Steve; he shrugs and takes it. “Those kids, they really– they make you feel like the top of the world, y’know? And Ms O’Donnell — well, high school in general — makes you feel like the very fucking bottom.”

“Don’t I know it,” Steve says, passing back the cigarette. Their fingers brush. Eddie’s eyes dart over his face as it happens and then quickly sweep away, something twitchy and furtive about him again, something Steve had thought they’d managed to ease. He’s not sure what makes him say, “Well, I’m glad the coparenting is going so well.”

“What– Oh. Oh, yeah!” Eddie’s voice has brightened, and he lets out a half-laugh. “I’m still waiting on my alimony, Harrington.”

“You’re gonna be waiting a while, Munson.”

A silence again. Steve thinks about their fingers touching, and Rocky Horror, and the way Eddie’s lips are now on the cigarette where Steve’s were before, sharing saliva, sharing touch, and how it’s a weird thing to think about and how it doesn’t feel weird at all.

“Speaking of jocks,” Eddie says, tone shifting to briskly serious now, “maybe you can tell me what to do about a little shall we say dilemma of mine. There’s some party on Saturday — celebrating the start of the new semester, not that anyone should be celebrating that — and I’m supposed to be there. Y’know. Dealing.” His eyes flick to Steve’s and then away again, and he exhales a long breath of smoke before continuing. “Only, these people are the people who wanted me dead and indeed took actions to that effect a couple weeks ago, and would probably still want me dead if I wasn’t their handy pipeline to the goods and actually probably they still do, so this really is a goddamn awful idea, isn’t it?”

“Probably,” Steve agrees.

“But that’s–” Eddie passes him the cigarette and then scrubs his hands over his face. “I’d love to pass, but it’s not generally — and especially now, let’s be honest — that simple.”

“I really don’t see what’s, like, so complicated about staying home instead of going up to the mob — they may as well have pitchforks and, like, torches — practically asking them to string you up.” Steve’s tone is maybe more agitated than it should be. Eddie looks at him sharply. “That is, um, pretty categorically a bad idea.”

Eddie tilts his head. “Categorically? Hmm. Contextually? I don’t know. I don’t know, man, I just– am sort of running out of options.”

Steve gets a horrible feeling then, like he’s missed something big. Another thing Eddie doesn’t want to tell him.

But then Eddie sighs, and shifts on the step, which somehow pushes his shoulder into Steve’s and keeps it there. “I asked for your advice, so I guess I kind of have to be straight with you. I’m sort of” — he winces as he speaks — “broke. Like, my-uncle-lost-his-second-job, they’ve-vandalised-the-house-and-we-can’t-afford-to-fix-it broke. And let’s say I’ve lost a good few customers. And the seniors, they like the expensive stuff, most of them money is no object–”

Steve knows that well enough. But he says faintly, “Haven’t you– I don’t know, can’t you, like, work somewhere? Family Video is boring as shit but it pays, and there’s a lotta places like that in this town.”

Eddie shakes his head grimly. “Not for me. No one’s gonna hire me, Steve, not after everything. You know what the vandalism was? On the house? It said– you gotta give them credit for creativity, of course– it said murderer, in big ugly letters. Smashed the windows too, which is actually the worst part, but yeah. A lot of people are pretty resistant to thinking anything good about me.”

“Shit.” Steve finds that pretty difficult to square with, actually, because he’s seen a lot of good so far. Then something hits him. “Wait, this Saturday? Whose party is it?”

“Helen Golder? She’s, like, one of the cheerleaders, I don’t know, dude, I’m really hoping she wasn’t best friends or something with Chrissy–” (they both pretend they don’t hear his voice hitch at the name) “because that would not go well for me, like, at all.”

Steve sighs. “She invited me. I went out with her a couple weeks ago, before the shit went down. She was pretty rude about Chrissy, actually, so you might be more okay on that score.”

Eddie’s got another strange look on his face. Steve wonders when he’ll know the guy well enough to understand what those looks mean. “Oh, you know the crowd, then? You think– I don’t know, scale of one to ten, ten being burnt at the stake, how likely am I to get murdered?”

The cigarette is done now, and Steve shoves his hands in his pockets against the chill of the evening. His arm brushes Eddie’s as he does it, and Eddie goes rigid as a board. Maybe the guy doesn’t like touch, and that’s all. He knows Robin sometimes doesn’t. “An optimistic three,” he says finally, “Because I’ll be there with my nail bat, and I have a hell of a load of experience with that thing against monsters a lot worse than a bunch of asshole jocks.”

Eddie looks at him sharply again, his hair falling over his shoulder, profile lit in the grim orange light above them. The strange expression is a lot more discernible this time — surprise, amazement, wary disbelief. “You’d rather spend the night — which whole thing is supposedly right up your street, by the way, in case you’d forgotten — you’d rather spend it protecting me from an imaginary mob than with this girl you like?”

“She likes me. I mean, like, she’s nice enough, but it didn’t– work. Besides, we save the world so often that saving people is, like, practically a hobby by now. It’s fun.”

Eddie’s eyebrows have climbed out of view behind his bangs, and his voice is disbelieving and vaguely frustrated when he says, “You’re really making this so goddamn fucking difficult, Harrington.”

“What?”

His face changes a little, closes off. “Just– why are you so stupidly nice? Like, stupidly nice. Ridiculously so. Mother Teresa’s got nothing on–”

Steve shoves his shoulder lightly. It seems to surprise him enough that he huffs out a laugh, though he doesn’t look at Steve, hiding his face behind his hair.

“Are you sure?” he says quietly.

No, Steve wants to say. Not because he doesn’t want to help him out at this stupid party but because he thinks all of this is unfair, and he wants to take one of his dad’s stupid fucking watches or his stupid fucking money in general and give it to Eddie like here, I didn’t earn any of this and neither did he really so do with it whatever you want because I’m not any better than you, just better off. Also, you’re probably gonna end up in jail either way. But he can’t do that and if he could Eddie wouldn’t accept it anyway, so they’re stuck. Going to this stupid party together. “Yeah, dude. Of course.”

They look at each other then, a long silent moment, and Steve couldn’t tell you what’s going through Eddie’s head but he knows what’s going through his own, and it’s something like I really fucking like being nice to him which is sure kind of the bare minimum but it doesn’t usually feel this good–

And then they’re interrupted.

“...told you they’d be out here together!” Dustin bursts out from the door, a triumphant and semi-annoyed look on his face. “Dude, are you smoking? You know Robin’s gonna kill you.”

“She doesn’t care that much, Henderson, she just doesn’t like it near her.” Steve stretches and supposes he ought to stand up. Before he can, Eddie pulls away and steps into a spot that is surprisingly far away, given how close they’ve just been sitting. “Does this mean you kids are jonesing for a lift now?”

“Please,” Lucas says, at the same time as Max says, “Well, overnighting at the high school isn’t exactly my idea of fun, so…”

“Sinclair, give the others a lesson in politeness sometime, could you?”

“Politeness?” Dustin scoffs.

“He’s right. You lot really can be insufferably rude.” Eddie shares a grin with Steve.

Dustin looks between them with narrowed eyes. “Hey, I’m not liking this. We didn’t invite you here so you two could gang up against us–”

“If I recall correctly, Henderson, I invited him.” Eddie leans back against the railing with his arms crossed, tilting his chin back, hair falling everywhere.

Steve tears his eyes away. “Yeah, this is what you signed up for when you decided one twenty-year-old babysitter wasn’t quite enough for you, you needed two, so really you’ve got yourself to blame if we’re getting our own back.”

“I think at this point we’re babysitting you, actually, if it wasn’t for us you’d still be stuck in the Upside Down.”

“And whose overcomplicated theory was the reason we ended up at the gate in the first place?” Steve snarks back.

As Dustin is constructing some long, condescending response, he hears Eddie saying to Lucas and Max, “They’re always like this?”, which is enough to stop the argument in its tracks, really, because Steve is distracted again. He looks over as Lucas and Max nod vigorously and Eddie snorts a laugh. “Damn, you got nothing to worry about from me, Harrington. That’s, like, true big brother-little brother shit right there. He doesn’t argue with me nearly so much.”

“Uh, yes, I do!” Dustin protests.

Steve feels strangely warm inside. “Well, guess that makes you the lucky one, Munson.” He meets Eddie’s eyes for a moment, then looks away to ruffle Dustin’s hair and say, “C’mon, then. Past your bedtimes.”

As they’re going, the kids ahead of him, Steve at the rear, Eddie catches his arm and pulls him to the side. Steve is too surprised to resist, and suddenly he’s faced with a repeat of that moment in the Upside Down’s blue gloom, Eddie’s face inches from his own as he spewed some bull about Nancy and true love and that ship has sailed, thank you, as much as Steve wishes it hadn’t.

“You really don’t have to– on Saturday, y’know? It’s really fine.”

“Well, sure, but it isn’t, is it?” Steve sighs. “Look, man, there’s something you gotta get into your head. After shit like what happened happens, we look out for each other. That’s just what we do, it’s, like, an unwritten rule. You don’t have to– question it, or say sorry all the time, or thank me. Y’know? Just know that any of us would do the same, like I’d hope you’d do the same for us.”

Something about that us feels strange in his mouth. Maybe it feels strange to Eddie, too, because he looks at Steve for a moment then looks away, and nods, eyes on the floor, and then nods with his eyes on Steve again, like he’s trying to convince them both he believes it. “Yeah. Okay. But I am gonna say it, and you’re not gonna stop me, because I’ll feel bad if I don’t — thank you.”

Steve takes it. “You’re welcome.”

Eddie still hasn’t let go of his arm.