Chapter Text
Eddie will not pretend he doesn’t squeak when Dustin bustles past him into the house—a wholly appropriate ranch on the edge of town, with two whole separate bedrooms, no one on the couch anymore, plus a little side room that Eddie thinks probably wasn’t meant as a guest room but can definitely fit about three sleeping bags, four at a push—but yeah, he should have expected Dustin to shove his way into Eddie’s home whether Eddie invited it or not.
He doesn’t have to like it. Or approve of it. Or tolerate it without complaint; without pushing back.
“Hend—” he tries to sound stern, tries to project hand-on-hips-authority like St—
Like some people do. Sometimes. So Eddie’s heard.
“Implied consent!” Dustin cuts him off, voice carrying from at least the living room already, Jesus fuck, this kid; his tone.
Eddie’s glaring hard enough to almost definitely bore a hole through this shithead’s skull, or maybe make him spontaneously combust. If Supergirl was the one glaring, it’d be a done deal.
“You didn’t shut the door, thereby participating in the creation of an entrance,” Dustin’s rambling on and Christ, but he’s such a pompous little fuck sometimes.
“Which is great, and super smart of you,” Dustin tells him earnestly, actually, and wow: if that isn’t condescending, holy fuck; “because the quicker we can address the problem, the quicker it can be solved,” and then he’s turning of his heel and fucking…clapping his hands to together like Eddie’s in goddamn kindergarten.
“So!” Dustin barks with a weird enthusiasm. “Now we can talk about what you did to Steve, and how you’re gonna fix it.”
Eddie blinds at him for a couple couple seconds before throwing his hands up and half-kinda snarling, half-kinda whining:
“What the fuck, man?”
And honestly, Eddie’s torn just now between hurt and angry, indignant and bleeding out a little, because he doesn’t like Dustin accusing him blindly, here, and while he’s long grown past thinking the hero worship was unfounded—honestly, if he’s going to have to think about the man explicitly instead of as the understood ‘you’ that the constant ache of him and his absence has settled as in Eddie’s universe: he thinks what he clocked as hero worship in the beginning probably could have used some bulking up, because…the genuine article was so much more than even the stories Eddie’d refused to believe at the start.
But, back it up: Eddie…Eddie can accept Dustin coming to Steve’s defense—encouraged it, even. But, like, Dustin has stood up for Eddie, too, and just…Eddie didn’t do anything, he’s spent enough cold nights with his arms stretched missing what they’d learned so well to wrap around and hold so close, mourning what’s not there and hell yes, he’s run down every little detail he can think of, where he might have been the one to drive Steve away without ever, ever meaning to, and it boils down the same every time: there’s nothing.
He wishes there was. Because then yeah, like Dustin’s saying—there’d be something to fix. Something to do, to try and salvage what Eddie is entirely aware was very probably the love of his fucking life.
But there isn’t.
“Clearly something is wrong between the two of you,” Dustin gestures broadly in the air, extravagant for no reason but then also it kinda fits entirely because this entire heartbreak of an affair is basically the most devastating thing that’s ever tried to take Eddie down, and he was basically dead in another dimension that one time, so.
That’s saying something, is what he’s getting at.
“And like, I’ve watched when Steve’s been the one to fuck up, man, so like, I can recognize the signs and,” Dustin shakes his head, looks not exactly apologetic but not entirely all-in guns-blazing about pinning the blame on Eddie alone. At least not without giving him a fair shake to explain first.
Which he’d do, if he had any fucking idea what caused them to crash and burn when they’d been the most solid thing Eddie had ever seen, let alone been a part of; got to feel for himself.
“I know Steve,” Dustin says carefully, kinda slow, almost reluctant, which Eddie doesn’t really get until the next part comes out, a little choked, like tears muscled down:
“I’ve never seen him like this.”
Well. Fuck.
Fuck.
“It’s the holidays, man,” Eddie tries to make it sound casual, or at the very least genuine, like his pulse hasn’t jumped for the idea that Steve’s…not okay. Not fucking thriving like he deserves, now that Eddie’s out of the way of what makes him as happy as he should always be. “Sometimes people are just a little down in the dumps, it’s not unheard of,” and he thinks that lands okay, those are all true things, no one needs to know the way his heart’s thumping like a rabbit as his head goes to all sorts of horrible possibilities, and he shouldn’t let himself slide down those pathways anymore, it’s not his business, Steve isn’t—
“He’s not just sad,” Dustin shakes his head; “he’s not,” and he trails off and Eddie’s heartbeat stutters then jackhammers wild for the way Dustin’s face crumples over a fucking interminable stretch of moments that drives every horror possible through fragile arteries not prepared for how much it hurts, laced with the acids at the base of Eddie’s throat and rising, banged around with every beat and—
“I don’t think he’s sleeping,” Dustin says, so quiet, hard to tell if there are actual tears of just the threat of them. “I don’t think he’s eating,” and he takes a shaky breath that gets mirrored in Eddie’s blood, sniffles as he adds on, kinda desperate, fraying at the seams: “Robin can’t even…”
He stops, breathes a couple of times and collects himself—too good at that. Eddie…
Eddie doesn’t even try to do that, for his part. He’s not…strong, like these kids. Like the rest of this little rag-tag-trauma family unit. Eddie isn’t built that impermeable. S’why he’s always had to put on a show, scare people off before they get close enough to see the obvious.
Until…Steve.
And the proof of Eddie’s weaknesses are front and centre right now, so. Case in point.
“I met him right after he and Nancy broke up,” Dustin’s saying after he takes the time to regroup, huffing a breath and furrowing his brows at nothing, until: “after she did the,” and he circles his wrist around again and oh. Oh.
Bullshit.
Eddie’s brow furrows, too, at that.
“I didn’t know it at the time, obviously, and not like I was really paying attention anyway,” Dustin screws up his face a little, like he’s angry at a lot of people for what he’s remembering, and he’s not exempt from his own list; “but you said it yourself, you thought they were meant to be,” Dustin points at him in the sort of way that presses down on Eddie’s shoulders, makes him feel queasy and just…small.
“Unmitigated love, or whatever,” Dustin half-sneers and he doesn’t think that was the word he used but fuck if Eddie’s not transported back to those woods, to those first inklings that his heart was gonna leap and know it couldn’t stick the landing, would less crack and more like splatter, a messy ruin on the sidewalk for trying, for reaching when there was nothing to hook with a grip—
Except there had been, in the end. He hadn’t known it then—just reveled in the way it felt to brush arms against that man, to lean close enough to feel his heat in the frigid deadspace that was the hellscape they were trekking through.
But the end, as it has come anyway, did in fact leave him a fucking spatter-scape on the concrete, exactly the same as he’d feared at the start.
But Dustin fucking Henderson hadn’t been there when Eddie was making eyes at Mr. Former High School Royalty, so—
“How the fuck do you—”
“Doesn’t matter how,” Dustin waves him off like he’s a fucking idiot for asking a question that’s beneath his concern for the topic at hand. “You thought that,” he rocks forward in emphasis and okay, fine, yeah. Eddie had thought that.
It’d taken a long fucking while for Eddie to stop thinking it; he’s tried not to wonder, now, if he was foolish to ever stop thinking it.
But: no. Of all the reasons Steve got sick of him, he doesn’t think it was because Steve decided to want Nancy. He remembers every word Steve told him about that time, and how Eddie knew it was downplayed for how much Steve took the brunt of her rejection, for how generous Steve was in hindsight to remember how it went down; how genuinely worrisome it was to know Steve actually saw himself as deserving what he’d gotten.
Still. Back in the Upside Down, Eddie had thought it. Told him to get it back. Couldn’t fathom her not seeing the error of her ways even before he comprehended just how egregious her errors ran the first time, just how little even unambiguous signs of love might still fail to deserve Steve Harrington.
But before he knew: he had thought he understood well enough to judge.
Just more reasons for Eddie Munson to quality as an unmitigated idiot.
“So when he lost that,” Dustin’s picking back up again, has got his explaining cap on, trying to map a diagram or some shit, save that it’s Steve and it feels…insufficient in every way, insulting at that, to think Steve could ever be made…simple like that. Cut and dry.
Eddie bristles at it. Maybe he doesn’t have the right anymore, but: Dustin sure as fuck does, and needs to do better.
“He was still okay enough, after that, to fucking join a quest for demodogs and get beat to hell by a psychopath,” Dustin’s saying with the kind of gravity all of a sudden that feels up to reshaping the world; “all just to protect some kids he didn’t even know.”
Eddie can feel where this is headed, can see the lead up to where Dustin’s going to drop them.
He wishes like hell that he couldn’t.
“So if he’s like this, now,” and Dustin sounds…fucking distraught, like all the posturing of pressuring Eddie to reveal what the hell had gone wrong, what he’d done to destroy them, to lose his Steve: the anger and the bafflement was all secondary.
The kid’s fucking scared.
And this kid? Who’s stared down certain death, who’s jumped after Eddie’s stupid ass when the end was imminent, no question?
That…that ratchets Eddie’s pulse up, considerably. For what it has to…mean.
“I have never,” and Dustin’s voice is kind of raspy, kind of too strained and Eddie…Eddie thinks it’d be shitty of him to say that Dustin only sounds like he’s struggling with a fraction of what Eddie’s starting to feel head-on, the bone-deep trembling worry for the unspoken details that must comprise the current state of Steve, piled on top of the wholesale grief and the mourning of both what Eddie’d had, and what he’d been hoping he’d be allowed, be able to keep.
It’d be shitty to say that. So he won’t.
Say it.
“Eddie, I have never seen him like this.”
And it’s all Eddie can do not to whimper, or moan pathetically because the hurt in those words is visceral, and it’s not supposed to be there because Eddie was the problem, he was what was hurting Steve and he’s out of the equation. So what’s causing this much anxiousness, this much concern? How could something have gone to shit so quickly, in just the weeks they’ve been apart—what’s wrong with his Stevie?
(And maybe Steve isn’t his anymore but by god, Eddie is Steve’s, will be to the day he dies, he thinks—no, he knows; no matter where he goes or who he becomes, a part of his heart will belong to Steve for always, whether it’s wanted or not. So that’s his Steve. Where is heart lives. Where is love burns, even as a nuisance. He can’t stop it. He can’t put it out.
It’s with his Steve, and no other.)
“And like,” and Eddie pulls himself enough out of his wallowing, his fretting, the aching in his fucking veins to focus on Dustin as he eyes Eddie up blatantly, the squints a little:
“You don’t look like you’re doing the best, either.”
Okay. Rude.
“Gee, thanks,” Eddie tries to drawl annoyingly, fails miserably; aim to bat his eyes at an attempt at levity that he knows falls flat as hell.
He doesn’t know if he was even trying for it more for Dustin’s sake, or his own.
“Fuck off, man,” Dustin rolls his eyes; “I’m serious,” then he’s gets that grave tone about him again and Eddie hates that these kids have to even know how to be that serious about anything—least of all him, and his…whatever you call the ruins of your everything, when it comes to—
“You might not be hurting like Steve is,” Dustin tells him plain, doesn’t pull punches; “like you’re joyful in comparison,” and okay, ouch—
“But that’s not a healthy bar to clear.”
And Dustin’s eyes are a little narrowed around the call-out, the judgement on so many levels but they’re also…open somehow. Trying to be receptive, and welcoming.
Trying to be a good friend—for Steve and Eddie alike.
“Henderson,” Eddie shakes his head even before his voice strains; “he,” and all the fight goes out of him, drained dry better than the bats ever managed to leave him which is for the best, really, because what he says next, what he admits next is as good as slicing as artery, the way it flays him open to speak into the world:
“He doesn’t want me around.”
He doesn’t want you—
“Oh, right,” Dustin snarks at him with a glare; “definitely doesn’t wilt whenever you come up, doesn’t leave the room or anything,” then it’s Dustin who wilts a little, somewhere between a pout and concern:
“When we actually get to see him at all.”
“That would be a prime example,” Eddie notes with a kind of…devastated intent, shoving the stabbing sense of worry at the core of him out of the way to make his point: “of what someone does when they don’t want a person around,” and Eddie is right, he’s absolutely right because that’s just natural, that’s a normal reaction and here is clear proof that—
“Not Steve.”
Dustin cuts Eddie’s mental conviction off at its knees with the sheer amount of feeling, of certainty in his tone, like he knows this one thing beyond all the doubt in the world.
It’s that certainty that sours worst in Eddie’s gut.
“If Steve doesn’t want something, he ignores it,” Dustin says, insistent and so fucking sad; “I think it goes back to his parents, like,” Dustin shrugs, and Eddie feels bile at the back of his throat.
“If you’re unwanted, you’re neglected, treated like you don’t exist,” and not for the first time, Eddie kinda-sorta regrets that the murder charges didn’t stick, because then he’d be tarred and feathered appropriately to just go ahead and off the fuckers that made Steve ever wonder if he was somehow anything less than the best person, the most deserving of everything.
“Because that hurts worse,” Dustin says, low, like he gets it. Like he hates it.
“Being invisible hurts the worst.”
Death would be too easy for those fucking assholes who taught Steve that, just because their own hearts were hateful. Eddie…Eddie wants to run to his Stevie and just, fucking, hold him. Make sure he remembers that it doesn’t matter if Eddie’s near or far, his or never close again: he’ll always matter to Eddie. He’ll never, ever be invisible.
“I,” Eddie licks his lips when the silence stretches too long, and Dustin doesn’t seem inclined to fill it this time. “He,” and Eddie’s mouth is too dry, throat still too tight; “we’ve been—”
“You’re together.”
Eddie freezes, heart doing a kind of hard brake thing that shakes him from the ribs on out, and Eddie may not have know where the hell he was going, how he was going to summarize then sanitize what it feels like to give all that you are and be found wanting in the end—but he hadn’t once considered fucking saying…that.
“What?” Eddie chokes, half-assed at best. It’s shock more than it’s denial, save that it should have been past tense, even if Eddie’s whole fucking soul is still with Steve, but he doesn’t think he knows or even fully wants to reel it back.
Ever.
But while they hadn’t hid anything more than in plain sight? They…no one was ever told they’d been dating, and, he, they—
“If even I can see it,” Dustin says, not unkindly exactly but…definitely blunt: “that kinda means it’s an open secret.”
Eddie coughs around the tight shock squeezing at his throat:
“Those aren’t your words,” he manages, because—they aren’t.
And Dustin looks briefly like he sucked on a lemon, knows he can’t fight the obvious.
“Max,” he sighs, admitting from where he’s borrowing uncharacteristic insight; “she told me I was the last to know.”
Any other day, about any other thing, Eddie would feel a much bigger sense of petty vindication in Dustin’s forced humbling.
As it stands? Eddie’s chest hurts too much to fit any kind of twisted delight of the kind getting any sort of foothold in him.
“Right,” he breathes out in an airy, useless kind of sound, doesn’t know where it’s going, doesn’t know what he’s doing.
He feels…actually?
Dying felt less tumultuous than what’s starting to churn through his veins right now, no fucking lie.
“You guys could have told us,” Dustin prods, a little sad, disappointed—hurt that he was left out.
“I,” Eddie’s mouth works around a lot of thoughts, a lot of half-formed feelings because what would it have been like to hold Steve where the people they loved could see, just because they could? To sit in his lap when he got tired, when the scars ached a little from doing too much for too long with the kids. To warm his hands just under the hem of a sweater. To just, just—
“Doesn’t matter now,” is what Eddie lands on, because it’s the honest conclusion of all his wishful wondering; bitter in his voice as much as it is in his chest. “It’s over.”
Fuck. Fuck, has he even said that out loud, yet? Can’t have—it hits too much like whiplash. Like the world ending.
“Doesn’t sound over,” Dustin volleys back like it’s simple; “is it over, for you?”
He asks it, like it’s enough to love with all that you are when it’s got nowhere to go anymore. Like he can strong-arm that kind of feeling through will alone. That one side can make a relationship on their own.
“It sure as hell doesn’t look like it’s over for him,” Dustin stares him down, now, something shifting in his demeanor that screams that he’s done playing games.
“What did you say?” Dustin asks him, something a little pleading in it, but Eddie’s throat won’t work, he can’t fucking speak and Dustin reads it as avoidance, instead of like Eddie’s heart is trying to rip out past his fucking trachea.
“What did he say?” but Dustin doesn’t sound even remotely convinced for his own self that this is on Steve. That it could be on Steve. And…again. Dustin hasn’t been shy about supporting one of them over the other when necessary.
“I,” and how is Eddie even supposed to breach explaining the chain of events that he can parse, leading to where things stand now? Sorry buddy, your ineffably physical and endlessly affectionate brother-slash-babysitter started refusing my kisses and sleeping on the edge of the bed so he barely touched me when he used to be a goddamn octopus to my sloth, grabbing and never letting go until he did, entirely, which is to say nothing of the sex, fuck, did you know your taxi driver is loud as shit in bed, but then all of a sudden if we even had sex he was suddenly silent and if there’s ever a blow to your ego, it’s to fuck your boyfriend and get nothing in response save sometimes tears he doesn’t acknowledge in the aftermath, that really makes a guy feel special.
Yeah, he’s not going to say that. He doesn’t even know how to get across how Steve pulled away, slow and all at once at the same time, overnight as much as it felt like it happened in pieces. But he stiffened when Eddie so much as brushed against him. He barely talked to Eddie. He was always taking extra shifts at work. He didn’t want to be around Eddie. He didn’t want Eddie, outgrew him in the course of weeks, maybe months if Eddie just hadn’t noticed in the beginning, but, it just…they were amazing, one minute. Perfect.
And then they…weren’t.
“He, I mean, it,” and Eddie grabs at his hair and hides behind it, because all of that’s true, all of what he saw and felt and lost in his relationship with Steve before it stopped: it’s accurate.
But then there’s…everything Dustin’s saying. And…Steve was pulling away from him, turning away from him, but did he…was he seeing Robin, or only at work? Was he seeing the rest of the Party?
“He was,” Eddie tries to find a throughway to follow but he’s too distracted because…was Steve sleeping before Eddie stopped coming to bed at all, because everything he tried wasn’t enough, because it was breaking him to keep lying there and not just be ignored, but be actively avoided? Was he…had Steve not been eating regularly, before Eddie left—
Wait.
Eddie…Eddie didn’t leave. He went to Wayne’s, the home that wasn’t the one Steve grew up in, when he needed to get more clothes. It was getting too cold, and since he’d basically moved in with Steve right out of the hospital and never really moved out, he’d been migrating what had survived the old trailer little by little as needed and so he’d…he’d gone to get things.
He’d broken down when his uncle asked him what was wrong, said he looked like someone ran over his cat.
More like his heart, but. Same idea.
And then he’d…he’d been scared. He’d called the house to try and ask Steve when he wanted Eddie to come back, because he’d wondered after telling Wayne everything—and hearing him talk about what it was like coming back from war for some of his buddies—if Steve just needed some space: but the line had rang and rang and rang. Didn’t even grab the machine.
And Eddie had…Eddie had cried so fucking hard he could have sworn he’d busted something in his eye. But…but…
never gonna leave you all alone again
He gasps to himself when the words run lightning quick through his head, and his heart clenches fucking hard.
Did…did Eddie, did he go and…and leave Steve…
Did he leave his Stevie alone?
No. No, it was, Eddie never wanted to keep his distance.
Eddie doesn’t stay awake to all hours staring the the ceiling while his body reels at what it knows it’s missing because he wants to. He doesn’t jolt awake lamenting that emptiness because he likes it, whenever his consciousness drifts in fitful bursts that he doesn’t feel like he deserves, because while he’d maybe been slinking back to lick his wounds when he went to Wayne’s, he would never have even thought to do this own his own, to be estranged.
Though all of those things aren’t without the parasitic leech of a thought on the side: he told you to leave with everything but words, and only that because he stopped taking at all.
But…but Eddie can’t live with Steve hurting. And maybe Steve doesn’t want him, doesn’t love him like that anymore. But Eddie thought of him as his friend, even if they never had a space between where they were just friends and not everything.
And it sounds like maybe Steve could use a friend. Maybe he doesn’t want Eddie for that either, but. Eddie’s kinda in agony at just the thought of the picture Dustin’s been painting.
“It’s Christmas,” Dustin takes that unspoken cue to pipe back up; “like, I just,” and he ends on a note of straight-up entreaty, damn close to pleading:
“Fix it, man.”
And Eddie…
Eddie doesn’t think he’s wanted, in general. Certainly not to be the one who fixes…anything.
But a nice chunk of his heart is with this man who is apparently hurting, and Eddie’s soul-certain love is fixed on him, probably for the rest of fucking time, so.
He’s sitting here being unwanted already.
Won’t hurt to try; can’t possibly end up worse.