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It’s a quiet morning, early enough that Eddie had just grunted and curled further around his pillow when Steve slipped out of bed and stumbled around the room looking for clothes.
But Wayne’s awake, feet propped on the coffee table and paging through the local paper with a cup of coffee at his elbow.
He looks up when Steve enters, lifts his chin in greeting then turns over a page in his paper and goes back to it without a word. Steve pours himself a cup of coffee from the pot in the kitchen and carries it into the living room, curling in the corner at the other end of the couch.
After a moment, when Wayne’s finished with his section of the paper, he folds it neatly in half and holds it out toward Steve, waiting for him to take it before moving on to the next.
They sit like that in comfortable silence for a long time, until Steve’s finished his coffee and Wayne has passed him the sports section before collecting both their mugs to carry them into the kitchen for a refill.
“Milk?” Wayne asks over his shoulder. It’s the first word either of them have said. Steve smiles to himself.
“I take it black, actually,” he says. Then, flipping over to read the score from last night’s Colts game, “Thank you.”
Wayne just grunts, giving him the small lift of a smile as he fills their cups. He squints out the window over the sink as he does.
“Supposed to be warm out today,” he says, taking a sip of his own coffee. “Could use some help in the garden, if you’re up for getting your hands a little dirty.”
“Sure,” Steve says, accepting the refilled mug from Wayne. It’s the one that’s become his in the past few months, ever since he started sometimes spending the night here. It’s nothing special, just a faded Hawkins Tigers logo, but he likes the weight of it in his hand. “I’ve been meaning to ask if you wouldn’t mind some help, but I didn’t think there’d be anything to do until Spring.”
Wayne hums, nodding slightly. “Always something to do, son.”
Eddie’s still all but dead to the world when Steve reenters the bedroom to find something warm enough to wear outside – it might be a sunny day for December, but it is still December, after all. He stirs a little when Steve perches on the edge of the bed to tug on a thick pair of socks, head popping up from his nest of pillows, hair frizzing out around his head.
“Wha’s ‘at?”
Steve just grins, leaning over to brush a kiss over his lips. Eddie shuffles closer, drawing him in, until Steve places a hand on his chest and pulls back a few inches.
“I’m going to help Wayne in the garden for a while,” he says. “Go back to sleep.”
“I’m awake now, though,” Eddie says, raising his eyebrows suggestively. “And way more interesting than a pile of old dirt in the backyard.”
He swipes his thumb over Eddie’s bottom lip then follows it up with another kiss before slipping out of his hold to tug his sweater on over the faded Sabbath shirt that he’s got tucked into his jeans. Eddie groans and makes grabby hands for him, but Steve just smiles as he runs a last hand back through his own hair.
“Come meet us outside,” he says. “You can heckle us from the back porch, if you want.”
Wayne’s busy dragging piles of dead brush out of the beds when Steve makes his way to the backyard, and Steve pulls on a pair of work gloves before joining him, shoulder to shoulder as they pile sticks and pieces of fallen limbs against the side of the house for chopping into firewood.
“Garlic has to freeze to grow,” Wayne tells him as they poke individual cloves into little holes in the freshly-revealed dirt before spreading a layer of leaves over the earth to cover it up. “It’ll be ready to pull up by the summer.”
Steve glances at him out of the corner of his eye. “Where did you learn all this?”
Wayne sits back on his heels, pulling his work gloves off before running a hand back through his hair. He squints up at the thin sunlight overhead where it’s peeking through the clouds.
“My dad,” he says after a moment. “Got us through the Depression like this, just sticking stuff in the dirt and waiting to see what popped up.”
Steve feels a small smile spread across his face, and he tilts his head to the side. “Did you grow up around here?” he asks. “Eddie’s never really said.”
Wayne lets out a little laugh, cheek dimpling on one side in the same way Eddie’s does whenever he’s thinking something through.
“Nah,” he says after a moment. “We were down in West Virginia until after the war, then our parents packed us in the car and came here for better jobs.” He laughs again. “That turned out about as well as you think.”
Steve takes a breath and nods a little. The ground is cold under his knees, and his cheeks feel flushed from the chill in the air, the light sweat from the work they’ve been doing drying tight on his skin.
“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you did,” he says. “You know.”
He casts a look back at the house where he can see Eddie puttering around the kitchen, pulling breakfast together. When he looks back, Wayne is watching him with a quiet expression on his face, and Steve feels himself flush. He shrugs.
Before either of them can say anything else, the back door slides open, and Eddie sticks his head out the door, hair pulled back from his face. He gives an exaggerated shiver.
“I made pancakes,” he says. “For whenever you two are done rolling around in the mud.”