These Latter Days
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Summary
The problem is that once you know it's there — the world that lurks under the world — you can't ever go back to being normal again, no matter how much you want it. No matter how desperate you are to just go back to being the man (the boy) you were before. Sometimes, lying awake in the middle of the night, tracing the ragged scars on his side, the echo of the friction burn around his throat, Steve finds himself thinking back and back, past Family Video and Scoops, Ahoy!, back to when the most important thing on his mind was whether Nancy Wheeler actually wanted to make out with him. When he was still King Steve. When he could hide in that, and feel safe.
He thinks about how, sometimes, his head feels heavier without a crown.
*
Since everything that happened in the Upside Down, Steve hasn't been able to get Eddie Munson off his mind.
Series
- Part 1 of These Latter Days
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think of all the horrors that I promised you I'd bring by eudaimon
Fandoms: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
11 Dec 2022
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He can't stay here forever. He's got to keep moving, right? That's the sensible thing to do. That's the only thing that really makes sense here. In his chest, his heart feels like a wild, rabbiting thing, irregular with panic. He forces himself to take a deep breath through his nose, the air rank and sulfurous. He chokes on it, spits, the taste in his mouth bloody and sour. When he gets to his feet, he stumbles — the pain in his side is awful, worse than anything he's ever felt, and he finds himself wondering how the hell Steve Harrington took similar punishment and shook it off like it was nothing.
"Okay, Munson," he tells himself through gritted teeth. "C'mon, man. Get your shit together."
*
When he wakes up in the Upside Down, Eddie has to do his best to survive. He camps out at the Harringtons' house, and he tries to work out a way to break through. This fic happens at the same time as at last teach my how to touch my dead. I think this works as a stand-alone, probably, but it'll make more sense if you read it from Steve's perspective first.
Series
- Part 2 of These Latter Days
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"I can keep it open," says Eleven, her face set and serious. She's got a hat pulled on over her short-shaved hair. Steve feels a pang of loss on her behalf, thinks about how he'd feel if someone held him down and shaved his head, made him into something they wanted him to be, instead of who he'd fought to make himself.
"I'll be as quick as I can," he says. He's deliberately dressed for utility - the jacket that he picked up at War Zone over a black t-shirt and combat pants and boots. In his backpack, he's got bottled water and protein bars, candy, a baggie of Honeycombs. He's got clean underwear and a t-shirt and socks. A flashlight. Bandaids. Antiseptic. He's got his bat resting on his shoulder.
"I'd feel a lot better if you'd take a handgun, kid," says Hopper, his arms folded across his chest.
"Not if I shoot myself in the foot, Sir," he says.***
In which Steve Harrington goes into hell for the boy he loves. I'd suggest reading parts 1 2 first!
Series
- Part 3 of These Latter Days
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your heart is a muscle the size of your fist by eudaimon
Fandoms: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
27 Jan 2023
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"So he…you know. Loves her. Enough to marry her, anyway," he says, and he can't look Steve in the eye while he says it, so he finds himself looking at his mouth instead. "And they get married but she's bitten by a snake, and she dies."
"That's shitty luck," says Steve, his fingers tracing slow, whorling patterns over Eddie's exposed ribs."Yeah," he says, breathes. "It is. And Orpheus — he can't live with that, right? Like he's not willing to live without her. So he figures out a way to go down, all the way down, right into Hell so that he can try and bring her home."
"...Sounds familiar."
***
Eddie makes it home from the Upside Down. This is the life he builds in the ashes.
Series
- Part 4 of These Latter Days