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“Did you, uh… did you sing to me, once?” Eddie asks, sitting on the hood of Steve’s car and staring up at the sky so he doesn’t have to pretend he isn’t desperate for everything promised in the eyes that haven’t left Eddie since Eddie woke up in that hospital bed. It’s just –
Time loops, and the King of Hawkins High going back over and over and over again just to stop Eddie Munson from dying, and –
“Fuck,” Steve says, and Eddie doesn’t remember, but there’s a song that won’t leave his head, and the voice is soft and warm just like the way Steve smiles at him and – “I didn’t think you remembered any of it.” There’s an edge to his voice like Eddie might break his heart with the wrong response, but Eddie doesn’t know what the right one is so –
“I don’t,” Eddie tells him, but Steve’s gaze is hot like a brand and Eddie wants that mark burned into his skin even though – fuck, they’ve been conscious in each others presence for a total of maybe sixteen days. Or. Eddie has, but Steve can predict the moment Eddie will start bouncing his leg out of nerves, knows that Eddie takes his coffee black with two sugars, presses into the touches Eddie’s always given people just because he needs that skin to skin connection but it’s different, with Steve, and Eddie doesn’t fucking understand it.
“Right,” Steve says, and – Eddie darts his gaze away from Ursa Major in time to see Steve grimace and shake his head, in time to see him stub his toe into the dirt at his feet and clench his fists and –
Wrong response, only Eddie doesn’t even know why , just that Steve finally broke the time loop and he won’t say how many times it took for him to bring Eddie back from the dead and sometimes he stares at the mole behind Eddie’s ear like he knows it intimately.
“I did, though, yeah. It – the Beatles. You asked me what my song would be but you didn’t recognize the name so I – yeah.”
“You have a good voice, I think,” Eddie says because in what fucking world would Eddie not know every Beatles song ever created. Did he lie about it? Did Steve know? Was it an alternate reality Eddie who actually didn’t fucking know every chord of every song John, Paul, George, and Ringo ever performed?
Steve ducks his head like he doesn’t know how to accept the praise. “You uh… you said so. Before.”
“Maybe sometime you can sing it to me again.”
“Yeah well you fucking lied about not knowing it just to get me to sing it so. Probably not.”
Eddie laughs, because looking at Steve makes his heart hurt and he doesn’t know why only that song is still stuck in his head but Eddie can’t figure out which one and Steve looks at him like it’s every single one.
Steve watches the line of his throat when he tilts his head back up to the stars and Eddie wishes he could be whatever it is Steve thinks he is.
—
“Try me, dickhead,” Steve says, and Andy Whatever stares at the nail bat in Steve’s hands, at the “murde” he’d managed to paint across the trailer before Steve and Eddie pulled up, back at Eddie, tucked behind Steve like it was second nature for Steve to crowd Eddie behind him to face down an enemy. “You come back tomorrow to clean this shit off and I won’t swing right now.” and Andy looks like he wants to argue but there’s a crazed look in Steve’s eye like he might just lose his cool and wail on Andy anyway.
“Steve, leave it,” Eddie says, and Andy gets that look they all get when they’re zeroing in on a kill.
“You a fucking queer now too, Harrington?” And it doesn’t really hurt, all that much, anymore, the reminder that he’ll never have a moments peace for just being himself but Steve lunges, Eddie manages to wrap a hand around the barrel and yank the bat of his hand like his body somehow knew exactly what Steve was gonna do but even without the bat Steve’s fist hits Andy’s face and the impact of it drops Andy.
Eddie tosses the bat far enough away he thinks Steve probably won’t have time to grab it and rushes forward, slips his arms under Steve’s armpits, uses every ounce of strength he has to pull Steve up and away before Steve gets himself a felony charge. Steve doesn’t actually fight it, actually, kind of falls into the circle of Eddie’s arms, his back pressed to Eddie’s front and a halfhearted kick as Eddie drags him back.
Andy’s nose is broken, and he spits blood when he stands but at least he doesn’t have a nail bat sticking out of the side of his caved in skull, and he guesses Steve looks crazy enough to actually do it, because he doesn’t make eye contact as he slinks off down the dirt road.
Steve doesn’t pull away, turns his face into the curve of Eddie’s shoulder and takes a deep breath and Eddie’s still holding practically all of his weight but it feels familiar, somehow, like too many blankets piled up on his bed when the heat in the trailer doesn’t work in the dead of winter.
“Why’d you do that?”
Steve presses his weight back down on his own two feet, and Eddie drops his arms, but neither one of them moves away, the warmth of Steve’s body still present and heating his skin even with the sliver of space between them.
“I’m staying on the couch, tonight,” Steve tells him, and Eddie doesn’t bother arguing because he could have told Eddie the sky was purple and Eddie would believe him, even though – seventeen days he’s known Steve Harrington as anything more than King Steve. Only it feels like maybe he’s known him since the universe exploded.
Eddie tosses and turns in his bed until the sun starts to come up, and then he shuts his eyes and dreams of a melody he can’t quite place and fingers pressing into his skin, and when he wakes Steve and Wayne are standing on the porch together, novelty mugs steaming in their hands while Andy scrubs at the red paint smeared across the side of the trailer, and Steve looks at Eddie and Eddie thinks maybe someday he’ll be able to look at Steve the way Steve looks at him.
—
“Does he ever… I don’t know, do you ever feel like he can look at you and see into your entire soul?”
Robin steals a fry off Eddie’s plate and chews it with her mouth open. “Literally all the time, but I’m still not convinced the Russians didn’t accidentally meld our minds together, so.”
“Something happened to him, when he was…doing whatever it was he did.”
“He watched us die for like three months and none of us remember any of it, even I don’t have the powers to dive deep enough into his psyche and diagnose that.”
“You don’t remember anything?”
Robin stares across the table at him and Eddie can feel his ears burning. Exactly , he thinks, reading between the lines of all the things unsaid, Platonic with a capital P and the way Robin curls into the comfort of Steve’s arms but that string between them never pulls taut with tension and maybe she doesn’t remember any of it but her eyes have that same goddamn intensity as Steve’s, if not to the same degree. “Do you?”
“I remember a melody, and a feeling, and…” He glances up at her. Fuck it. “Sometimes when he looks at me I think I already know what he tastes like.”
Her eyes flutter a bit like she’s charmed. “Something definitely happened to him,” she admits, like there’s more she’d like to say but can’t. Eddie’s good at reading between the lines though.
“He says he lost count after a month,” Eddie tells her, and she grimaces.
“Ninety-seven,” she tells him, and Eddie doesn’t know how to wrap his mind around that, doesn’t know how to put into words how insane it is that someone, anyone, would live the same fucked up day almost a hundred times to save Eddie Munson’s life.
“I think he’s in love with me,” Eddie tells her, and she blinks but doesn’t really deny it.
Twenty-three days. Mundane days, days without the threat of interdimensional demons looming over their heads, days to lay beside him on pool chairs, days to give him shit while he pretends to work, none of the urgency of “you’ll be dead in twelve hours so it doesn’t matter how quickly I crawl into your skin and nestle amongst your bones”.
“I hate that I’m not in love with him.”
“As his best friend, I am not confirming or denying your assumption. But… if that were the case, I don’t think… I don’t think he blames you?”
“He deserves that,” Eddie tells her, like she doesn’t already know, like if she woke up one day and loved men the way Eddie loved men, anyone else in the world would stand a chance against her. “He deserves someone who looks at him the way he looks at me.”
“Is… do you…” Robin blows up at a bang drifting low over her eyebrow. “Do you want to be that person?”
More than anything, but he doesn’t know how. It’s not like they can recreate the scenario for Eddie to test it out.
“Like, is it – listen, this is gonna sound messed up, but – is it the feeling you’re trying to recreate, or is it actually Steve, because – because – because if it’s not Steve I think you have to put it away. I think you have to ride it out until you don’t want it anymore because that’s not fair to Steve and it’s not –.”
“I don’t know , Buckley, and I’m not looking to break his fucking heart about it so where the fuck do I even start?”
“Oh.” She pauses. “I guess. I guess maybe that’s the hard part. But like. He had to start every single day from the starting line, so…start at the start.”
—
“Yesterday,” Eddie says, “That was the song. You fucking lied to me about your favorite song for some lame sappy bullshit. What if you’d been Vecna’d that time and no one know the song because you lied about it.”
Steve doesn’t deny it – his lips curve up and he shoots a genuine smile at Eddie and he makes a circle with one finger. “Be Kind, Rewind,” he says and Eddie feels a bit like throttling him.
“You changed the pronouns and I was too enamored with your pretty voice to call you on it.”
Steve blinks. “You remember that?”
And he hadn’t, not til he said it, but it tugs something low in Eddie’s gut, because it hadn’t been the One, because for him it’d never fucking happened. But…
But it’s there, and with it a feeling of comfort – days spent in the passenger seat of Wayne’s truck, cruising to nowhere listening to Patsy Cline – the smell of a monster manual and the sound of the spine cracking open – the first time he heard Black Sabbath and knew there were other people who felt things the way he felt things.
“What is it, actually?” Eddie asks, taking a drag and blowing the smoke through his nose so Steve can’t tell his heart is stuttering in his chest.
“Blackbird. I – uh – I only lied about the song because you’d done something really fucking stupid the loop before and even if you didn’t know, it was…cathartic, I guess.”
“Are you about to whip out a poodle skirt and invite me to the sock hop, Steve Harrington?”
He laughs, and it catches in the bark of the trees, echoes in Eddie’s head like the songs that stick in there until he learns them back to front, strumming callused fingers along his strings until he bleeds. “That’s what you said last time,” Steve murmurs, and Eddie drops his gaze because – because there wasn’t a last time, not for him, and Eddie wants to be the hundred last times Steve knows but Eddie can’t recall.
Start from the start only works when you start the race at the same time. Steve’s already lapped him dozens of times.
“Let’s make out,” Eddie says, and Steve’s eyes go wide, his body stilling. The birds still chirp in the trees, and the picnic table beneath them holds them sturdy, and the breeze still rustles the leaves, and Steve swallows and shifts until their knees are touching.
“It’s – I mean, yeah, but also – it might be weird.”
“I’ve sucked face with other dudes before, man, I’m not a blushing virgin.”
“I know what you like , Eddie.”
And. Well. Cool. That’s – somewhere between one and ninety-seven alternate reality Eddie’s have taught Steve the way Eddie likes to be kissed, and they’re all dead but Eddie’s here and alive and he shouldn’t be jealous of him- fucking -self but.
“We don’t have to, is all I’m saying. I’m – this is – whatever. You don’t – you’re not obligated to –.”
Eddie leans forward and presses his lips to Steve’s and it’s –
Steve doesn’t hesitate. He falls into it like he’s made for it, like he’s been waiting a thousand years and he knows he doesn’t have much time to capture the moment. He slots a knee in between Eddie’s, glides a hand over Eddie’s jaw, glances over his earlobe and curls three fingers into the hair behind Eddie’s ear, tilts his head and licks up into Eddie’s mouth on a gasp. He tugs, gently at first, like a warning, then harder the way Eddie likes, just enough pressure to make him feel it but not painful against his scalp, and his tongue slides and slips and his lips press just right and his free hand curls around Eddie’s thigh, skitters up to Eddie’s waist to curl there. Eddie can’t remember his own fucking name or why they’ve never done this before except they have, except Steve knows to nip his bottom lip when they both breathe in, knows to keep his thumb on Eddie’s pulse point when the rest of his fingers slip towards Eddie’s nape, knows to slide his hand under the hem of Eddie’s shirt and skitter up towards his ribs only –
“ Fuck ,” Steve says and stutters back, his fingers catching on the scars at Eddie’s side. “Sorry. Fuck. These are – these are new.”
He’s still gliding his thumb over the silvery vines, and his eyes dart down like he wants to see them while he learns them, not content with mapping them out by touch alone.
Eddie’s glared at those scars in his bathroom mirror, but Steve watches his thumb move beneath Eddie’s shirt and it’s like the fabric is hiding a map to El Dorado.
“I’m sorry. I don’t – tell me to stop.” But Eddie doesn’t know if he can, so Steve doesn’t stop. He presses a palm there, glides over the raised edges of the scars, reverent, drops his head to Eddie’s shoulder and lets his hand shift up, down, across. They’d been mostly healed by the time they pulled the tubes from his lungs, and Eddie’d been too afraid to look at them while he was convinced he’d bleed out on Steve’s backseat, but Steve had seen them raw and ragged, and probably more than once.
The wounds are long healed, but Eddie feels like he’s been ripped open anyway.
“You kiss me like you’d burn the whole fucking world to the ground for me,” Eddie tells him, because start at the start doesn’t work when one of them has already crossed the finish line.
Steve’s hand stills, but he doesn’t pull it away. His pupils are still blown wide when he rolls his neck up and meets Eddie’s gaze. “Sorry,” he says, a wry smile on his face, even as he drifts back towards Eddie’s lips.
Eddie captures his chin between his thumb and forefinger – holds him there, a breath away.
“Just…let me catch up, Steve.”
“You wanna?”
Eddie thinks of bloody goodbyes and stolen laughter, of the taste of Steve’s smile against his skin and the pads of his fingers gliding over the mole behind Eddie’s ear – half-memories of a life he never lived, a death he never died.
“I’ll run the whole goddamn marathon, Steve, but I think you’ve still got about 20 miles on me.”
His thumb catches on Eddie’s ribcage. “Hey, that’s 6 miles further than I thought you’d be.”
“I, uh…” Eddie runs a hand through his hair. “I probably started the race before you. If we’re being fully honest.”
Steve’s eyes crinkle when he smiles.
“You said that before, too.”
“You really want to play Eddie’s Greatest Hits until I can meet you in the homestretch?”
“You’re the one who thinks I’d burn the whole world down for you. What do you think?”
Eddie thinks he’d like to dance in the flames.
—
Nancy makes him twitchy. She’s sweet and kind and scary as hell, but none of those things are why he feels like a live wire any time she’s in a room with him.
He’s still not sure he deserves it, is the thing.
Nancy – now Nancy Wheeler was the type of person you’d traumatize yourself on repeat for a quarter of a year for. Nancy was the type of person you could fall in love with ninety-seven different times.
Nancy catches them making out in the downstairs bathroom when she wanders in from the pool and gets a little jumpy when Steve lifts him onto the edge of the sink and Eddie sends a basket of potpourri flying.
“So much for taking things slow,” she says with an ironic tilt to her grin, and Steve flushes bright red and doesn’t move from the cradle of Eddie’s thighs.
Eddie knows if he asked, Steve would probably overthrow the fucking government to marry him, but he can’t help but think it would be easier, if it was Nancy he’d fallen back in love with.
Her eyes drift up to Eddie, over the bruise he knows is forming at his collarbone, over the hair Steve’s half-pulled out of the messy bun, and he doesn’t know what she sees but later when she corners him in Mr. Harrington’s office Eddie thinks he might have loved her, in another life.
“I know twenty-seven ways to kill a man without leaving a mark,” she tells him, and Eddie stops spinning the globe sitting on one of Steve’s dads side tables. “But if you fuck this up I’ll make sure everyone knows it was me.”
“You’re the scariest person I’ve ever met,” Eddie tells her, and then lifts himself up onto Mr. Harrington’s gaudy unused desk. “And I still don’t understand why it’s me and not you.”
Nancy bites her lip, like she’s trying to decide whether to be amused or concerned. Rather than choosing either, she pulls the door closed behind her and plops herself right up there next to him.
“I’m…practical. Realistic. I look for holes in peoples stories and I find them every single time. I look for the narrative and follow it to its conclusion.”
Eddie raises an eyebrow. “You’re a badass, Wheeler, and if I was into chicks you’d probably be my type.”
“No,” she tells him, sounding incredibly sure of herself. “I wouldn’t.” When she’s thinking through something, her nose scrunches up just a bit. It’s the kind of thing Eddie notices, but on her it’s just this side of endearing. When Steve works through a problem he sticks his tongue in his cheek and Eddie wants to chokeslam him to the bed, fuck him silly and then whisper romantic song lyrics into his skin. “He cares so much, about everything, all the time. And it’s exhausting. Stifling. I never understand how he has room for it.”
Eddie thinks he’d probably build him places to store it all until the only thing left was the heavens – and then he’d probably build him a staircase to get there too.
“You’d let him burn the world for you,” she says, and maybe Steve’s echoed the phrase or maybe she stumbled upon it all on her own, but Eddie doesn’t care because it’s been ninety-three days and maybe Eddie crossed the finish line before Steve anyway.
“Sometimes I think I’d like to slice him open and live in his ribcage,” Eddie tells her, and far from the horror those words should cause, she nods her head like Eddie’d told her the weather outside was nice.
“He’d hollow out his whole body if he thought he could fit us all inside it.”
And maybe they’ve all just experienced too much pain and heartbreak and adrenaline-fueled fever dreams but when she says it like that, it makes sense that it was Eddie, and not Nancy, who’d slipped in in the dead of night and plucked Steve’s heart right from his chest.
—
It’s a Tuesday. Just like any other Tuesday, really. Eddie gets off work, pulls Steve from his big empty house, drives them up to the quarry. Watches the stars shimmer and flicker back at him while Steve tells him about Mike Wheelers latest hijinks, about the girl who’d tripped over her own two feet when Robin greeted her from behind the counter, about the song he heard on the radio that reminded him of Eddie.
The memories don’t come rushing back, but there’s a trickle, like a tap left just a hair's breadth from off.
Steve hooks a finger in one of Eddie’s belt loops and mindlessly circles his thumb around the sliver of exposed skin beneath his cropped band tee.
Eddie stares across the horizon and thinks I’d build a better world for you and then slots himself into the space between Steve’s legs, yanks him forward, and kisses him until the words are etched into Steve’s soul.
“Oh,” says Steve, when they break apart minutes, hours, millenia later. “That’s what you meant.”