Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

ONE — March 28, 1986. 11:28 PM

The last thing Steve Harrington says to Eddie—and Dustin, sure, but it’s Eddie he’s looking at—is, “Don’t try to be cute or be the heroes or something.”

It’s sweet, honestly. Both flattering and heartwarming that after spending a full fucking week watching Eddie run and cower every chance he gets, he still thinks there’s any possibility of him deciding to make the hero play.

The other trio are already on their way to the Creel house with nothing to defend themselves but music and guts and—hopefully—good timing on everyone else's part. The plan is already in motion. It is too goddamn late for Eddie to back out now, as much as he wants to.

Besides, he owes it to Chrissy to see this through.

The last thing that Eddie says to Steve Harrington is, “Hey, Steve? Make him pay.”

Steve holds Eddie’s gaze for a moment, then nods solemnly. At his shoulder, Dustin is practically vibrating with excitement and nerves. Steve and Nancy and Robin are weighted down with weaponry both makeshift and professional—Nancy fucking Wheeler has a sawed-off shotgun slung over her shoulder with an ease that still unnerves Eddie. Talk about heroes.

And then they’re gone, trudging off into the vine-infested woods like soldiers marching off to war, and Eddie takes a deep breath, looks at Dustin, and says, “Okay, let's get to this.”

They reinforce the trailer with sheet metal and whatever sturdy-looking junk they can find, haul Eddie’s new amp set up onto the roof, and then that’s it, there’s nothing more for it—it’s time.

He doesn’t actually manage to forget everything while he’s playing, but it feels a little more distant, with the scream of his guitar echoing in his ears, the distant thunder of drumbeats, his fingers sliding over the frets like his life depends on it, which, well, it kind of fucking does.

Or somebody’s life does, anyway. Eddie could still run if he wanted to, and make it out alive. The others can't. But he can't think about that now; all he can do now is play the rawest, most unrehearsed and high-stakes one-man concert of all time, and pray.

Master of Puppets is maybe a little on the nose, but nobody has ever accused Eddie of subtlety. He hopes Vecna appreciates the irony before Steve and the girls light his ass up, but that motherfucker probably wouldn’t have the good taste to recognize Metallica even if he hadn’t spent the past however many years stuck in a hell of his own making.

“T-minus ten!” Dustin yells, and yeah, that thunder isn’t from the amps anymore. The sky is full of those fucking bat things, and Eddie looks down before panic can make him slow. The music is the only thing that matters. This is no different from playing for a crowd of hostile drunks—there’s always been the chance that someone will catch him out in a back alley and kick his ass because they didn’t like the setlist or the look of his face or the bandana he keeps in his back pocket as some mix of pride and stupid defiance.

“Five seconds!” Dustin screams. “Four, three, two—get down, get down, get down!”

He drops the guitar and runs for it. Kills him to leave her up there for the swarm, even if it is just the underworld mirror of his own instrument, safe on the other side of the gate. But they have bigger fucking problems. They make it inside in one piece, and that’s when it really starts going to shit. The trailer rattles as the swarm descends, and Eddie has the sudden wild thought that they’re trying to flip it over, like it’s some oversized beast that they can tear the guts out of with their terrifyingly sharp little teeth.

Fucking piranhas. Supernatural flying piranhas. He saw what they did to Steve, and that was only maybe four of the bastards.

“Shit, shit,” Dustin yelps. “They’re coming through the vents, Eddie, they’re coming through the vents—”

Eddie slams his spiked shield at the scaly black head already snapping at him as it wriggles through the ceiling. He hears it scream, but there are more vents, and they are officially out of time.

“Go,” he snaps, shoving Dustin ungently toward the living room. He can hear wings in the hallway behind him. The gate pulses overhead as he hustles Dustin up the rope.

Then he turns. He's not even completely aware of making the decision. He just knows, suddenly, what he's going to do. What he has to do. 

“Eddie,” Dustin yells from the other side. “Eddie, come on, Eddie, we’re so close, let’s go—”

The door is rattling under the violence of the swarm and Vecna is still alive, and all they need is more fucking time.

Dustin screams when he cuts the rope, but Eddie can’t let himself think about that. He’s committed now.

He’s never been particularly athletic, but he’s always been fast—the legacy of a childhood spent outrunning bullies and worse. And adrenaline helps. So does the bike he snatches off the front lawn, the one he abandoned the first time they came here, what feels like an eon ago. The demobats rise behind him in a shrieking cloud as he flings himself onto it and pedals for all he’s worth.

He makes it almost to the edge of the trailer park before they drag him down. The bike slides beneath him, and he stumbles to his feet and makes it maybe another five yards before he stops and turns, screaming defiance into the storm. Wings batter at him, claws open up bloody furrows in his arms and face and hands, but he still manages to kill a few of them before a tail snakes around his neck and yanks him off his feet, and then it’s all fucking over. The swarm descends, tearing flesh from bone, shredding him until he’s not a person so much as a mess of hot agony, and he screams until his throat is raw and fights for as long as he can make his limbs move, but it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

He isn’t aware that the attack has stopped until the bats fall out of the sky. His body has gone beyond pain into a strange icy numbness.

Shock, he thinks dazedly. That’s hypovolemic shock. He remembers that from his mom’s nursing textbooks, the ones she used to read out loud over the kitchen table, before his dad went away and shit got bad. He’s probably spilled most of the blood he had in him, and there’s no staunching this, not when he’s been torn open to the bone. The taste of copper is thick on his tongue.

And Dustin is here. Jesus Christ, Dustin is here, face streaked with tears, hands fluttering like he’s trying to figure out where he can touch Eddie without doing any more damage. Which, yeah. Good fucking luck there.

“Eddie, Eddie,” he keeps saying over and over again, choked and awful. Eddie wants to wipe the tears away, wants to do something to comfort the kid, but he can’t actually move his hands.

“I didn’t run, did I?” he mumbles.

“No,” Dustin sobs. “Eddie, Eddie, oh my god, we’re gonna—we’re gonna get you out of here, you’re gonna be okay—”

Eddie laughs wetly, manages to choke out something neither of them believes about making it up onto that stage like he promised himself he’d finally do this year. His next breath doesn’t want to come, but it’s enough air to get the important thing out. “I love you, man.”

The world folds and fades. He hears, shaky and sobbing, “I love—I love you too,” and then there’s nothing.

TWO — March 28, 1986. 7:25 AM

Steve wakes up screaming.

Robin snatches her hand back from his shoulder like she’s been burned; on the couch, Nancy hisses when coffee splashes over her fingers and onto her pants. Eddie jerks back as Steve surges upright with another yell, hands scrabbling at the floor around him like he’s searching for a weapon.

“Steve—Steve,” Robin says frantically. “It’s okay, you’re okay, everybody’s safe—”

“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” Steve yelps, scrambling backwards; his shoulders hit the couch as footsteps thunder down the hallway, and the kids are there now, an entire chorus of the little shits demanding to know what’s going on. At the front of the pack, Dustin has the heavy glass ashtray from Eddie’s nightstand raised like a weapon, spilling cigarette butts all over the worn carpet.

“Just a nightmare,” Nancy calls, although she sounds shaken. She sets her dripping coffee cup down and touches Steve’s shoulder; he flinches hard before leaning back into her palm.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is thick. He rubs his hands over his face, and even from here Eddie can see that they’re shaking. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t sweat it, dude,” Eddie says, trying to sound more steady than he feels. Steve glances up at him; his expression freezes for a moment before he drops his head again and tugs at his hair. Nancy’s palm smoothes over the back of his neck, his heaving shoulders, the tense curve of his back still covered by Eddie’s tattered battle vest with its Dio patch, and Eddie tries not to feel stupid and rejected by the summary dismissal.

Robin’s on her feet now, hands fluttering. “Okay, but are we sure that it was just a nightmare? Are we completely sure? Because it could have been a—a vision, right, Steve? Did you see the clock?”

Steve shakes his head. He takes another shuddery breath. “No. No, I—no, I didn’t see the clock. I think it was just. Just a dream. It just—shit. It felt—really fucking real.”

“We’re in an extremely high-stress situation right now, vivid nightmares are normal,” Dustin says, but his eyes are very wide. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” Steve’s nodding. He swipes at his cheeks quickly with one hand, like he thinks he’s being subtle about it, and clears his throat. “Come on, quit staring at me, you guys, I’m fine.”

“Sure, Harrington,” Eddie finds himself saying. “But, like, just in case, what’s your favorite song?”

Steve breathes out laughter between his teeth. His eyes are still a little wet. Nobody mentions it. “Nothing you have on cassette, Munson, that’s for damn sure.”

Eddie claps a hand to his chest. “You wound me.”

“No offense, man, but—”

“Come on, who’s it by? Frankie Goes to Hollywood? Pet Shop Boys? Duran Duran? Lay it on me, let me work through the stages of grief already so we can get this done.”

He’ll do it, is the thing. Whatever soulless synth-pop tops King Steve’s list, he’ll figure out how to get ahold of it. Play it on his fucking guitar, if it comes to that. As unexpected as the revelation is, he genuinely likes the guy, but even so he wouldn’t wish Chrissy’s fate on his worst enemy.

Well. Maybe Jason Carver. Maybe.

The image of Chrissy’s limbs cracking and flailing like a marionette piloted by some demented puppet-master surfaces in his mind briefly; he shudders and shoves it back down. Okay. Maybe not even Carver.

“Actually, we should all probably write down our favorite songs,” Nancy says. She drops her hand from Steve's back, folding her arms tightly across her chest as she stands. “Just in case—just in case. And we need to talk about what we’re going to do next. He showed me something. Vecna. When he had me.”

Steve’s brow pinches as he glances up at her. He opens his mouth, starts to mouth something that Eddie can’t make out, then shakes his head, shoving his hair back out of his face. “Yeah. Okay. But can we, like, get something to eat first?”

“Yeah, if I’m going to be involved in more world-saving shenanigans, I will need some sugar in my system,” Erica says. Out of all of them, she looks the least shaken. Eddie’s not sure if that’s because she’s too young to really understand the gravity of what’s going on, or if she’s just got nerves of steel.

He remembers her staring him down with an unimpressed look on her face while he interrogated her at Hellfire, and almost manages a smile. Yeah. It’s definitely the second one.

“Yeah, there’s not really any food here,” he says apologetically. “Or at least not much that’s edible. I don’t think Wayne’s been back since the cops tossed the place, and it was my turn to do the grocery shopping, which is kind of hard when you’re, you know, hiding under a tarp for a week straight.”

“Too bad, I really feel like Eggos would improve this situation greatly,” Dustin says, and by the door Lucas lets out a sharp, startled bark of laughter. The rest of them look between them, and Dustin tugs on the brim of his hat. “Sorry, sorry. Inside joke.”

“Eleven,” Steve interjects, when he catches Eddie looking. Which, right. Their legendary, and unfortunately absent, friend with the psychic powers.

“Psychic powerhouse likes waffles,” Eddie surmises out loud. Sure. Makes as much sense as literally anything else that’s happened this week.

Steve nods. He’s still looking at Eddie, and something about his expression makes Eddie feel weirdly exposed. Like there’s something about him that Steve is trying to figure out. Which, well, there are plenty of things about him that he doesn't particularly want Steve figuring out, so that's unnerving.

“There’s food at my place,” Max says quietly, after a minute. Her fingers tangle and untangle in her headphone cord. “My mom’s car is gone. It should be all clear.”

Steve finally stops trying to stare into Eddie’s soul; instead, he turns that careful, penetrating gaze on Max. “She’s not going to be looking for you?” he asks, although it sounds like he knows the answer.

Max shrugs and wedges herself closer to Lucas, who loops an arm around her shoulders with a look so tender that it makes Eddie’s jaded, cynical, shriveled heart lurch a little in his chest. Christ, they’re just kids. “It’s whatever.”

Steve sighs, but it seems like he knows better than to push it, so they gather up all their shit and skulk across the way to Max’s trailer, locking the door behind them. There’s cereal there, and milk that’s just on the edge of going off, which Erica complains about but they all manage to choke down. The food sits like a rock in the pit of Eddie’s stomach, but he cannot reasonably argue for fighting monsters on an empty stomach, and fighting monsters does, in defiance of all good sense, appear to be the plan. God help them all.

They crowd around the table and scribble down their songs in the back of a notebook Max unearths from her backpack—it reads Mrs. Klein - 9th GRADE BIO in marker across the front, which makes Eddie’s heart do another one of those miserable little lurches. Lucas snickers when Dustin shields the page to write, and even Max cracks a smile, but it’s not like his song choice is much of a surprise, after how he’s been going on (and on, and on, and on) about Suzie, Genius Suzie, Like Seriously The Smartest Coolest Prettiest Girl I’ve Ever Met Suzie, who adores The NeverEnding Story, for as long as Eddie has known him. It’s sweet, honestly. And of course there’s Robin with the post-punk girl groups, and Nancy likes Blondie, which about figures. Steve’s is the last entry above Eddie’s; his handwriting is surprisingly neat, and his song choice makes Eddie raise his eyebrows.

“Queen?” he asks. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Harrington.”

“Shut up,” Steve says, but it’s mild. He peers over Eddie’s shoulder at the notebook. “Dio? Never heard of them.”

“Take a look at your jacket, dude. Or rather, my jacket.”

He regrets that a little when Steve actually takes the bait, shrugging the vest off with a faint wince that he does a pretty good job of hiding and peering at the collection of patches and pins. Black Sabbath and Judas Priest and Metallica, but there’s still plenty of space left to fill around the Last in Line t-shirt that Eddie picked up at a concert in Illinois and sacrificed for a full-sized back patch, which looks pretty badass, in his opinion.

There’s also Steve Harrington, bare-chested and still leaning into his space. Nancy seems too distracted to ogle him this time around, which makes Eddie feel kind of gross and pathetic about the way his own eyes can’t help but linger. But really, what else is new. Gross and pathetic is his fucking ouvre at this point.

He drops his gaze to the notebook and finishes writing in his song choice, and by the time he’s done Steve is semi-clothed again. Still grimy and shirtless under the vest, though. They all need to get cleaned up, and Steve almost definitely needs his bandages changed before those bites go septic while he’s trying to tough it out.

Then Nancy starts talking about her vision, and that's enough to distract them all.

It’s a horrorshow of epic proportions, naturally.

Hawkins on fire. An army of monsters led by some vast being with a mouthful of teeth. Gates splitting open and spilling hell into their world. He’d love to be the Eddie Munson of a week and a half ago, when all of this would just sound like one banger of a D&D campaign, but unfortunately he’s biked through the underworld after watching Chrissy Cunningham shattered by some unseen force and Steve Harrington nearly eaten alive by flying bat-squid monsters, and this is all feeling painfully fucking real right now.

Everybody else seems transfixed by Nancy’s halting narration, but Eddie catches himself watching Steve’s face instead. It’s not that he doesn’t seem worried, because he does. But there’s that odd expression there, still. Confused, almost. His head is cocked like he’s listening for a sound that isn’t quite there.

Eddie nudges him with an elbow, and Steve starts and glances over at him. “You good, dude?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good. Just, uh. Just thinking.”

Nancy wants to fight. Nancy wants to go back to the Upside Down and fight the dark wizard and the army of monsters that they barely escaped from the first time around. Eddie rubs his hands over his face. He’s already starting to get a headache. “No. Nope.”

Steve, at least concurs. So does Robin, which is a relief, although Eddie kind of wishes she’d use some less gruesome imagery to express her point, because he’s got plenty of fucking nightmare fuel knocking around his skull right now and he neither wants nor needs more.

“So we don’t fight fair.” Dustin’s eyes are alight, his face suffused with a bright resoluteness that Eddie recognizes, absurdly, from Hellfire Club. Nog the chaotic good Halfling cleric with a reckless streak a mile wide, Christ on a bicycle. “We know his strengths, and his—”

“His weaknesses,” Steve finishes slowly, frowning.

Dustin snaps his fingers and points at him. “Exactly! We know what El can do. We know her weaknesses, so we can assume that Vecna’s are similar—”

“Can we, though?” Steve says. “I mean, I’m just saying. We don’t really know anything about this guy. Maybe we should take some time, regroup, try to come up with a better plan. One that’s not going to get us all killed.”

“I concur,” Eddie says, and Steve glances back at him, brief and oddly intense. Then he nods.

“See? Look, why don’t we—”

“We don’t have time for this,” Nancy snaps. “He’s not going to stop. He’s going to keep killing and killing until we end him, and if he opens the gates to Hawkins like he plans to, it’s not just going to be a few people. Hundreds, Steve. Hundreds and hundreds of people die. More than that, maybe.”

“He has an army of monsters,” Erica adds. Eddie can’t really tell if it’s meant to be in agreement or opposition.

“Okay, but why does it have to be us, huh?” Steve demands. “Why does it always have to be us? Why can’t someone else step up and save the world this time around?”

“You guys. You guys,” Dustin says, and Steve throws his hands up, the picture of exasperation. It would be funny if the situation weren’t so dire. “If I may interject. So, listen. When El remote travels, she’s in this, like, trance state.”

“And it should be the same for Vecna,” Lucas finishes eagerly. “That’s what he was doing in that attic. When he’s attacking someone… he’d be defenseless.”

“Precisely. We go in, we take him out—”

“Yeah, and what about the bats, huh?” Steve snaps. He looks genuinely angry for the first time. “Do you have a plan to deal with that, genius? Because let me tell you, getting eaten alive by monster bats is not a super-fun experience!”

“We’ll figure something out,” Dustin says dismissively. “A distraction, or something. Draw them away so we have a clear shot at Vecna. But my point is—”

“Okay, that’s a terrible idea.”

“We don’t know when he’s going to attack,” Robin says. She looks as freaked out as Eddie feels, which makes him feel slightly less pitiful about the whole thing. “We can’t plan around that, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. He could attack anyone, anytime, anywhere. We don’t even know who his next victim will be!”

From the door, very quietly, Max says, “Yeah, we do.”

The room goes silent.

“No,” Lucas says, sounding gut-punched. “Max, no. He’ll kill you.”

“I survived before. I just need to keep him busy long enough so that you guys can get into that attic. And then you can blow him up or set him on fire or—or stab him, I don’t really care how you put this asshole in the ground, as long as you do it.”

“Shit,” Steve sighs. He drags a hand through his grimy hair. “Max. You really don’t have to do this.”

“Yeah,” Max says. “I do. I’m going to, and you’re not going to stop me.”

“I’m sticking with you,” Lucas says immediately.

“You’ll need a spotter, or, or something like that,” Robin says. “Someone to guard the door while you keep an eye on Max. Make sure there are no surprises.”

Erica lifts a hand. “Yeah, that’ll be me.”

“Erica—”

“Don’t even try it. Somebody needs to keep an eye on you, nerd.”

“You’re the nerd,” Lucas grumbles. She beams at him.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Eddie sighs. There’s that lurching, cowardly part of him that wants to yell, Fuck this, fuck Vecna and his monsters, and fuck Hawkins, let them have it, but he can see in their faces that they’ve all decided to stay and fight, so what the hell else can he do?

“Okay,” he says finally. “If we’re doing this, I think I know where we can pick up some weapons.”

“Stick to the plan, okay?” Steve says outside the trailer, several hours later. The Upside Down air tastes flat and sour, like the whole place is somehow rotting without ever having been alive in the first place. Eddie keeps wanting to scrape his tongue against his teeth to get the taste of it out of his mouth. He grips his spear tight and looks at Steve, who’s wearing a very serious expression. “I mean it. Don’t go sacrificing yourselves or trying to be heroes—”

Dustin laughs. “Don’t worry, Steve. You can be the hero.”

“I mean, look at us,” Eddie adds, gesturing at himself, at Dustin. Dustin Henderson, barely fifteen years old, curly-headed and soft-cheeked; Eddie Munson, who’s good at playing the guitar and running away and not much of anything else. “We are not heroes.”

Dustin huffs. Eddie expects Steve to nod, or perhaps clap his shoulder in a manly fashion. Instead, he steps closer, curls his fingers around Eddie’s wrist. His hand is very warm, his eyes very intent.

“Eddie,” he says quietly. “I’m serious, man. You don’t have to prove anything. If things go south, you get out of there. Both of you. Promise me.”

Eddie sort of wants to laugh, but his heart is suddenly beating fast for reasons that are less defensible than fear. He wants to jerk his hand away; he wants Steve to pull him closer. When he manages to speak, his voice cracks embarrassingly. “Okay, Harrington. I promise. If it goes south, we will run like the hounds of hell are nipping at our heels.”

Which should be easy, since that’ll more or less literally be the case.

“Good,” Steve says, and lets go. He holds Eddie’s gaze a moment longer, then nods once, sharply, and turns to start toward the woods after Nancy and Robin.

“What the hell was that about?” Dustin asks indignantly, once they’re out of earshot.

Eddie rubs at his wrist, like he can still feel the lingering warmth of Steve’s fingers.

“I have no idea,” he says finally. “Let’s get to it.”

Twenty minutes later, he cuts the line. Dustin is yelling frantically after him as he darts for the door, but the primary thought that surfaces on the ocean of fear lapping at his mind is to wonder how the hell Steve knew.

He makes it to the edge of the trailer park, but not much farther.

THREE — March 28, 1986. 7:15 AM

Existential terror is apparently one hell of an alarm clock. Eddie opens his eyes to stare at the stained popcorn ceiling above his bed, and even without looking at the clock he can tell that it’s hours earlier than he usually wakes up without some kind of assistance. He didn’t set his alarm clock last night, which is not unusual even when the world isn't ending. His shoddy attendance record is one of the many things standing between him and sweet, sweet freedom from Hawkins High.

Now he can add monsters, dark wizards, and a town-wide witch hunt to that list. He groans, unfolding from the mattress and patting absently for his pack of cigarettes. For a few minutes, he smokes and allows himself to pretend that this is just a normal day, and that all he has to worry about is whether or not he’s going to make an appearance at homeroom or skip until second-period English.

The illusion doesn’t last, unfortunately. Snores rattle the trailer; Dustin apparently moonlights as a chainsaw when he’s unconscious. He’s wrapped in a sleeping bag on the floor with his face shoved into Eddie’s pillow—Eddie tried to insist that he take the bed and was turned down summarily and with great offense, but he at least got the kid to take a pillow.

He taps ashes into the glass dish on his nightstand and slips out of bed, picking his way around Dustin. The door to Wayne’s room is open. Lucas and Max are still on top of the bedspread, holding hands in their sleep, Erica curled up like a little pillbug near their feet.

Nancy is awake when he makes it out to the living room, perched cross-legged on the couch with her hands twisting together and a dazed, haunted look in her eyes. She glances up when he comes in, and makes a valiant effort at a smile. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” Eddie says back, quietly. On the floor, Robin and Steve are still fast asleep. She’s got her head pillowed on his shoulder, a leg slung over his thighs, one hand resting protectively on his chest. The sweetness of the tableau is somewhat marred by the fact that she’s drooling copiously onto Eddie’s battle vest, which Steve is still wearing.

Whatever. That thing’s been through worse. It’s been through worse in the past twenty-four hours, for that matter.

Nancy follows his gaze, then gives him a tight smile. He’s not exactly sure why, although he could hazard a couple of guesses. He knows Robin and Steve aren’t an item, and he’s even got a pretty good idea about the reason for that. What he doesn’t know is how much Steve knows, so he’s not touching that can of worms with a ten-foot pole.

“Coffee?” he asks instead. “I don’t, uh, have any creamer, but…”

“Oh,” Nancy says, looking startled. “Um. Yes. Please.”

“There’s sugar, anyway,” Eddie adds. He feels kind of awkward about all this, even under the circumstances. Nancy Wheeler is the kind of chick who’d ordinarily never in a million years set foot inside his shabby trailer, unless it was to buy drugs. Which, like, yeah. Not likely.

He remembers Chrissy standing in the middle of this very room, shifting nervously from foot to foot, and grimaces. The gate is still there, a sullenly pulsing glow in the ceiling; he’s not actually sure how the hell they managed to sleep anywhere near that thing, considering what happened last time. Although maybe it was just sheer exhaustion.

“Nothing weird happened?” he asks just in case, nodding toward it.

“No,” Nancy says, subdued. “I couldn’t really sleep. I sort of—kept watch.”

“You could have woken one of us up. I would have spelled you.”

She shrugs tightly. “This isn’t really your problem. Or—I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

“It’s fine,” Eddie says, although it stings.

“I just mean that you weren’t involved until you got dragged into this.” She nods at the ceiling. The pulsing vent into hell above the spot where Chrissy died. “This shouldn’t have to be your fight.”

“Yeah, I bet the rest of you just jumped in headfirst, right?”

Although she did, last night. She and Robin and Steve all did, and Eddie the Coward lingered there in the boat dithering until shame finally drove him into the water. If the girls hadn’t been there, Steve would be dead now, and they all know it.

Nancy sighs, her eyes distant. “Okay. Fair point.”

It is really too goddamn early for this. Eddie shuffles into the kitchen and gets a pot of coffee going, and Nancy sighs and starts folding up the threadbare blanket she was sleeping under, stacking it neatly with the throw cushion she was using for a pillow, because Nancy Wheeler was evidently raised to have good manners. Eddie peers into the cabinets and the fridge, like food fit for human consumption is suddenly going to materialize there. It was his turn to do the grocery shopping, and Wayne evidently hasn’t been back since the cops tossed the place. The fridge door was hanging open when they got in here, so anything in there is useless. He eventually locates a box of Cocoa Puffs—almost certainly stale—and a few single wrapped Pop Tarts. Truly a feast fit for kings.

Robin and Steve are still passed out on the floor when he comes back into the living room. Eddie hands Nancy a cup of coffee and the sugar bowl, both of which she takes with a murmured thanks. He nods and crouches down to set a careful hand on their shoulders, jostling them as gently as he can. Robin mumbles awake first; she squints, opens her eyes, and scrubs at her drool-encrusted cheek, peering at Eddie with the crankily bewildered expression of a fellow night owl unwillingly awakened before noon.

“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” he says, taking pity on a kindred spirit. “Wheeler has the sugar bowl.”

“Kay.” Robin scrubs her face again, then leans down to jostle Steve much less gently than Eddie just did. “Hey. Dingus. Wake up already.”

Steve jerks awake, sitting up so quickly that Robin almost topples over and staring wildly around the room. When his gaze lands on Eddie, he blanches visibly.

“Oh, shit,” he mutters. “Come on, no. Come on. Not again.”

“Harrington?” Eddie asks slowly. He does not love the way that Steve is staring at him right now. He really doesn’t. Steve looks like he’s staring at a ghost, a bloodied monster, like Eddie is something that should not exist in the light of day. “You good, dude?”

“Jesus Christ, you sound exactly the same,” Steve says under his breath, sounding vaguely hysterical. “I’m losing my fucking mind.”

“Did you have a vision?” Robin demands. Her hand is still on Steve’s shoulder, clutching at him, fingers digging in. Her eyes are huge. “Steve, was it Vecna? Did you see the clock?”

“Jesus Christ,” Steve mutters again, but it’s weak this time. He rubs his hands over his face, then shoves them into his hair, tugging at fistfuls of it hard enough that Eddie’s slightly concerned he’s going to start literally tearing it out. Eventually, though, he drops his hands and looks around the room at all of them staring at him. His hair is sticking up in wild spikes and his eyes are red; he looks more than a little deranged, actually. Nothing at all like the smooth, suave, infuriatingly perfect King Steve that Eddie spent his high school career alternately lusting over and loathing from afar.

“Okay,” he says, and laughs: a sharp, weird, brittle noise completely devoid of humor. “Okay, so this is going to sound completely fucking nuts, but I’ve already lived through today. Twice.”

Chapter Text

“Look, I’m not saying I don’t believe you,” Dustin says. “I’m just saying that what you’re describing is a scientific impossibility.”

“Yeah, that basically does mean that you don’t believe me.” Steve flings a hand at the gate in the living room ceiling. “Also, we’re literally standing next to a gateway to another dimension and you want to talk to me about scientific impossibilities right now?”

“I’m sure it felt very real, but—”

“Oh, could you be a little more condescending, Henderson?”

“Sorry,” Dustin says, not sounding all that sorry. “I’m just trying to explore all the likely options first.”

“What, so you’re saying you’ve never heard of anything like this? Seriously?”

“Temporal paradoxes? I mean, in fiction, sure. There’s this Robert Heinlein story where the protagonist goes back in time and impregnates his younger self so he’s his own father and mother, and eventually it turns out that all of the characters in it are just different versions of the same person at different times in his life—okay, yes, it’s weird, it’s science fiction,” he adds, at Steve’s comically disturbed expression. “And then there’s 12:01 P.M. by Richard Lupoff, where a businessman is cursed to relive the same hour over and over again, so it’s like a recursive loop—”

“Okay, yeah, that sounds more like it,” Steve says.

“The NeverEnding Story is also sort of a temporal loop,” Dustin adds thoughtfully. “Although the movie just implies it. It’s more explicit in the book.”

“Wait, there’s a book?”

“Michael Ende,” Eddie says. They all look at him, and he shrugs. “It's originally German, I think. What? I read. Just not the boring shit that Mr. Armstrong assigns.”

“Right,” Steve says slowly. “So how did they solve it? Like, how did they end up getting out of the, the time loop?”

“Well, I mean.” Dustin winces. “In the Lupoff story they don’t actually solve it. He just ends up stuck in the loop endlessly.”

“Okay,” Steve says, and lets out a wild laugh. “Great! That’s great.”

“But that’s my point! It’s fiction, and that’s probably not what’s happening here. Isn’t it way more likely that you’re experiencing nightmares, or, or deja vu, or visions from Vecna—”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought the second time around, okay? I woke up screaming my head off, really freaked you guys out—”

“I’m freaked out right now, for what it’s worth. Like, completely, uncomfortably freaked out,” Robin says, and she looks it. Her coffee cup is abandoned on the counter, her hands fluttering as she paces back and forth. It gives her the impression of a trapped insect battering against a screen, and watching it is really not helping Eddie keep his already tenuous grip on his cool.

Steve makes an apologetic face, but he keeps talking. “Yeah. Sorry. Robin, you asked if I thought it was Vecna, and then Munson asked what my favorite song was” —Eddie snaps his mouth shut on exactly that question, feeling a sudden chill down his spine— “and we all ended up writing ours down, just in case, and—”

“Well, that’s an easy way to test this out, then,” Dustin says, crossing his arms over his chest. “What’s my favorite song?”

Steve gives him a look. “Never Ending Story.”

“Okay, you know what? Low blow, Steve. Low. Blow.”

“Am I wrong?” Lucas snickers, and Steve adds, “Yours is Let’s Hear It for the Boy.”

“Ha!” Dustin shouts. “That’s so much more embarrassing!”

“It’s catchy,” Lucas protests.

“So what about the rest of us?” Eddie asks, for no reason he can think of. “Come on, Harrington, if you’re a musical oracle, show us the goods.”

Steve’s jaw tenses, like it was a barb or a challenge, even though Eddie didn’t really mean it like that. He’s not actually sure how he did mean it. “Erica’s is Aquarius, um, the Fifth Element—”

“My mom likes them,” interjects Erica, who has located the Pop Tarts and is now munching placidly like she’s watching a spectator sport.

“Right. Cool. Robin’s is Typical Girls, Nance is Heart of Glass, Max’s is—”

“Running Up That Hill,” Max finishes quietly.

“Which we already knew,” Dustin adds, but it’s subdued. Belief settling in behind his eyes as he tugs nervously at the brim of his baseball cap. By the looks on everyone else’s faces, Steve’s clocked them all dead-on.

His eyes haven’t left Eddie this whole time, though. “And yours is Holy Diver. By that band on the back of your jacket. Dio.”

Eddie laughs, startled. “You know Dio but not Black Sabbath? You’re a man of unexpected contradictions, Steve Harrington. A true enigma.”

“I don’t know either of them,” Steve retorts impatiently. “I’ve never even heard the song before. I had never heard of Dio until the last time around. I only know that because you told me. So.”

There’s a fierce edge to his glare, and yeah: Eddie believes him, as little as he wants to. Shit.

“What about yours?” he blurts.

“What?”

“What’s your favorite song? Like. Just in case.”

Steve gives him a long look, then says, “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

“Queen?” It’s not really funny, but he grins anyway. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”

Steve laughs raggedly. “Yeah. You uh. You said that last time, too.”

That lands oddly, like pressing on a bruise, or a long-healed broken bone. It aches, in a way that Eddie can’t fully explain. Like rejection, like homesickness—a strange hurtful kind of longing.

Nancy has been quiet this whole time, but now she finally speaks. “There’s—there’s something else.”

“Vecna’s vision,” Steve reples. “Right? Army of monsters, four gates make a big earthquake that splits Hawkins in half and lets the Upside Down onto this side, which sounds super fucking bad, let me tell you—oh, also, Vecna is Henry Creel, and he was in the same lab as El. Did I hit the main points?”

“I haven’t told you any of that,” Nancy says. Her face is very pale. “I was going to—I didn’t tell you yet. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Not this time around.” Even now, Steve gentles himself for her. “Nance. I’m not making this up, I swear. This is the third time I’ve done this now. We wake up here, you tell us what you saw, we make a plan to kill him, and—” he falters. “It, uh. It doesn’t go well.”

“Well, shit,” Dustin says quietly. There’s silence for a moment.

Then Nancy’s head lifts, her jaw firming. “So we’ll do it differently this time around.”

She’s got that same bright, blazing, fearless look as on the boat in the instant before she dove into the water, and Eddie admires it even as it makes his gut clench with fear.

“Nance—”

“If you’ve been through this before, you can tell us where it went wrong, what we did, and we can do it differently this time around. But we have to do it. People are going to die, Steve. We can’t just do nothing.”

“This could be what it takes to break the loop,” Dustin offers, sounding uncharacteristically diffident. “Maybe it’s a chance to get it right this time around.”

“Or,” Steve says, “hear me out, maybe it’s the universe trying to tell us that this is a terrible fucking idea and we should run like hell before we all die.”

“What he said,” Robin says, pointing at Steve.

“I’m not running,” Nancy says. “My mom—Holly—no. I’m not running.”

“Me neither,” Max adds, chin lifted. Lucas reaches for her hand immediately, and Dustin sets his jaw and nods.

“What are we, cowards?” Erica adds.

Yes, Eddie thinks, but he can see in Steve’s face that he’s going to fold. It was a foregone conclusion from the moment Nancy spoke up. True love, indeed. Sometimes he really hates being right about everything.

“We should at least get some food before we try to plan anything,” Steve says finally.

“I don’t really have…” Eddie trails off at the look Steve is giving him, like he already knows what he’s going to say next. He can already tell that’s going to get old real quick. “Right. You already know. There’s not really any food here. Sorry.”

“There’s food at my place,” Max says, while Steve makes an apologetic face in Eddie’s direction. “My mom’s car is gone. If we’re careful we can probably get over there without being seen.”

“Also, we should probably get away from…” Lucas trails off with a wordless nod toward the living room ceiling, like he thinks Vecna is going to overhear them plotting against him. Which might be a real possibility, what the hell does Eddie know? The vines that grabbed Steve and dragged him under on Lovers’ Lake knew that he was there. That’s one of the many memories from the past few days that Eddie is trying very hard not to think about, though.

“Yeah, probably smart,” he says, and goes to dump some of Wayne’s whiskey into his coffee. Not too much, though. As little as he wants to be sober right now, he’s not going to repeat his mother’s final mistake. Not when there’s a very real chance it’ll get people other than him killed.

Erica keeps watch to make sure the coast is clear while they skulk over to Max’s trailer, where they all choke down stale cereal and crowd around Steve like a motley collection of disciples while he expands on exactly what went down the last time around. He’s not much of a storyteller, but he gets the main points across with reasonable clarity, and yeah, it all sounds like a suicidally reckless plan even before they get to the big crescendo.

“Well, no wonder it doesn’t go well,” he mutters. “It would be more straightforward to just rub ourselves in steak sauce and wander into his lair banging cymbals together.”

“It’s not like he wants to eat us,” Robin says. Then her eyes go huge. “Right? He doesn’t literally want to eat us, it’s more of a gruesome psychic murder, unleash hell upon the world kind of situation?”

“Are you saying that’s better?” Eddie asks.

“No, but just—”

Max and Lucas, meanwhile, are arguing on the other side of the room.

“I’m not going to stay behind while the rest of you walk into danger!”

“I’m just saying, there are plenty of other people he could be targeting. We go back through that list, and…”

“And I’m just saying, I know it’s going to be me. Okay? I can still feel him, Lucas, I know he’s there. He’s watching me. He’ll come for me. And we can’t just throw some random civilian into this situation without any warning!”

Civilian, Eddie thinks. The kid is, what, fourteen, fifteen at the outside, and she’s already talking about civilians like that’s something different than what she is. He feels like he should admire that, but he mostly just feels sick.

Quietly, Lucas says, “I can’t lose you, Max.”

Her hand catches his elbow, gentle. “You’re not going to lose me, stalker.”

On the couch, Steve has his elbows resting on his knees, his head hanging, not even trying to interrupt any of this to finish his story. He looks—well, he looks like he just got dragged through hell backwards and then spat back out, which is more or less what actually happened last night. Time loop notwithstanding.

God, Eddie is so out of his depth. He wishes that he’d never agreed to sell to Chrissy last week; she still would have died, but it would have happened somewhere other than his living room, and he wouldn’t be involved in any of this madness.

As soon as he thinks it, he hates himself. The violence of that feeling propels him to his feet and up onto the coffee table with a light jump that nevertheless rattles Steve’s nearly empty coffee cup off the edge, splashing the dregs across the old throw rug underneath. Steve jerks backwards, startled.

“Jesus, Munson,” he says.

Eddie tosses him a wild grin and addresses the room at large. “Gentlemen! Ladies! Should we perhaps allow our esteemed time traveler to finish his tale?”

That shuts them up. Dustin lets out a strangled laugh from his corner of the room, and Lucas shakes his head, looking almost fond, which is heartwarming and clearly indicates that Eddie has lost whatever ability he ever had to intimidate these kids.

Everyone else is staring at him; Steve looks like he’s mildly concerned about Eddie’s sanity. Eddie sweeps him a dramatic bow. “My liege. The floor is yours.”

Steve huffs out a laugh as Eddie hops back down. He doesn’t climb up onto the table, of course, but he does straighten a little, wincing. “Uh, there’s not really much more to tell, I guess. We drop you three” —he nods to Max, Lucas, and Erica— “off at the Creel house, and the rest of us go back through the gate at Eddie’s, and we split up, and—anyway, yeah, I think that’s where it goes wrong. I’ll stay back with you two this time around,” he says, meeting Eddie’s eyes briefly before looking away with an expression that Eddie can’t read at all. “If we’re really going to do this again.”

“You said it goes wrong,” Dustin says slowly. “So the distraction doesn’t work?”

“No, it works. It just—look, Nance, you and Robin don’t need me. I don’t do shit against Vecna; I’m pretty much just there to look pretty. I think it’s better if I stay back at the trailer.”

“God knows we could use some eye candy,” Eddie says, then contemplates throwing himself out a window when Steve’s startled gaze lands on him.

“Okay, but that doesn’t make any sense,” Dustin says, bulling on with merciful obliviousness. “Like, realistically, we’d be in a safer position, here, right? We’ll be right next to the gate—”

“Yeah, well, you don’t both make it back through the gate, okay?” Steve says shortly, and oh. Oh, no. “So if we’re doing this, which I still think is a terrible idea, by the way, I’m sticking with you guys this time around and making sure everybody gets out in one piece, and that’s final.”

“Oh,” Dustin says, sounding small. Eddie drops his eyes to his knees, feeling like he might actually puke. He can’t bring himself to meet anyone’s eyes. Can’t bring himself to ask Steve exactly how it happened, if he even knows. Maybe they were just overwhelmed, but maybe not. He can’t stand to think that he turned tail and ran, leaving Dustin to face down monsters alone, but he also can’t deny that it would be in keeping with everything else he’s learned about himself in the past week.

Dustin, Christ. No wonder Steve wanted to call this whole thing off.

“You okay, man?” Steve asks quietly, and that’s when he realizes that he’s been picking at the fraying knees of his jeans, digging his grimy fingernails into the worn denim. Steve sounds genuinely concerned, and that’s almost too much to bear.

“I… am doing fantastic,” he says, and flicks his hands out before resting them on his thighs with deliberate casualness. “I mean, how many chances am I gonna get to play guitar in hell? This is about to be the most metal concert ever.”

“You still want to do this?” Steve asks, and something about the way he says it makes Eddie wonder what would happen if he said no. If Steve would actually pull the plug. Let him off the hook.

And then the rest of them will go anyway, and maybe die. Like Eddie needs any more blood on his hands. He makes another vague and dramatic gesture and springs to his feet.

“Want is a strong word, my friend. But I’m on board if you’re on board. Let’s get this show on the road.”

Stealing the camper is more fun than it should be, even if Steve keeps leaning into his space and peering over his shoulder like he knows the first goddamn thing about hotwiring cars. It should not be appealing. Steve reeks—a foul effluvia of sweat and blood and lakewater mixed unpleasantly with the rotting stench of the Upside Down. Not that Eddie can judge; he’s been sleeping in the same outfit for the better part of a week, and that was before he jumped through a lake and landed in hell. The liner of his jacket is still damp and swampy. They’re both, objectively, fucking gross right now. But Steve’s proximity still makes him dizzy, makes him want to be reckless and stupid. More than he usually is, even.

So he leans up into Steve’s space and flirts outrageously, and Steve gives him an odd look but doesn’t jerk away. He’s pretty sure he catches Robin watching him like she knows what’s up, but he’s got an inkling—more than an inkling, if he’s honest—that this particular secret is safe with her.

Steve doesn’t say anything about it, which is a relief even if it makes him ache. After they pick up their gear, they park the RV on an empty backroad and set about making their preparations, but even that aches, in a different way. Eddie watches Dustin putting the final touches on his garbage-lid shield with the same expression of intense concentration that he wears when he’s painting D&D minis, and wonders how any version of himself could ever let something happen to this kid.

Not this time around, he thinks. No way in hell, no matter what. He glances back at the RV, where Robin and Steve are making Molotov cocktails and talking quietly, and finds Steve looking back at him with that same unreadable look in his eye.

Eddie looks away.

They part ways with Robin and Nancy at the trailer, and Eddie watches the way Steve’s palm settles on Nancy’s back when he pulls her into a half-hug, the familiarity of the gesture. She’s got a gun resting against the opposite shoulder and despite the fact that she’s a full head shorter than Steve, delicate-looking even in combat gear, Eddie thinks that she’s probably the most dangerous one out of all of them. Nancy Wheeler, another piece of Hawkins that apparently he never really knew at all.

She leans into Steve’s touch. Eddie averts his eyes, which is why he catches Robin watching them with an oddly pensive expression on her face for a moment before she looks up, catches Eddie’s eye, draws an exaggerated grimace, and looks away.

“Be careful,” Nancy says, and Steve nods.

“Yeah. You too.”

He reaches for Robin next, but she backs away with both hands raised. “Please don’t hug me, it makes me feel like I’m going to die.”

Steve laughs and drops his hands. “You’re not going to die. I mean it. You can handle this, one hundred percent.”

“Yeah. Girls rule,” she says weakly, and leans in to punch his shoulder.

“Just, like, watch out for the vines, okay?”

“Vines,” Robin repeats, wide-eyed. “Right. Definitely.”

“We’ll manage,” Nancy says, all cool confidence, and Steve nods and lets them go. He watches as they disappear under the dark trees before turning back to Dustin and Eddie.

“They’ll be okay, you know,” Eddie feels compelled to say, even though he does not, in fact, actually know that.

“Yeah,” Steve says, but he still looks worried.

“I still think we can handle this here without you if you want to go with them,” Dustin says. He’s made the same point, repeatedly and indignantly, even more indignant that Eddie hasn’t backed him up once, but Eddie’s been thinking about that haunted look on Steve’s face when he said, You don’t both make it back through the gate, and he finds himself disinclined to lend his support to any plan that might get Dustin killed. Any more than he already is, letting the kid be here at all.

He’s been telling himself that trying to keep him and the other kids out of it would probably just end with them going in anyway with some half-cocked plan and no backup, but it doesn’t fully assuage the guilt.

Reinforcing the trailer goes faster with three people than it would have with two, especially since Steve, while negligibly taller than Eddie, turns out to be a lot stronger. Eddie remembers him stripped to the waist on Lovers’ Lake, the taut lines of muscle in his chest and shoulders. Before he can dwell on that image, or feel guilty for wanting to, he’s forcibly reminded of just what happened after that when Steve hefts a heavy piece of sheet metal, hisses, and goes pale.

He dealt with the bites in the RV bathroom after they stocked up on weaponry, and now the makeshift bandaging is covered by a shirt, so Eddie hasn’t actually seen what they look like in the light of day. But he did see plenty in the Upside Down last night to guess how much they must hurt. The line of abrasion around Steve’s throat looks livid and purple in the shifting, uncertain light.

“You okay, dude?” he asks, keeping his voice low enough that Dustin, currently nailing a section of chicken wire over the living room windows with more enthusiasm than skill, probably won’t overhear.

Steve shrugs, winces, then immediately and obviously tries to hide his wince. “Yeah, man, I’m fine. You want to grab the other end of this?”

“You’re not going to, like, rip yourself open even more doing this, are you?” Eddie asks, but he grabs the other end of the sheet metal anyway.

“Nah,” Steve says, and if his face goes several shades paler and his jaw goes painfully tight as they lift it into place, that’s probably not actually Eddie’s business. He doesn’t personally have much patience with this particular flavor of performative stoicism, but he’s not the one who almost got his insides eaten by monster bats, so this is Steve’s show.

Later on, it’s his show. Later on, he climbs up onto the roof and feels, very briefly, completely fucking exhilarated, like he’s on a stage about to play the biggest show of his life. Which this is. The most important, definitely, even in the unlikely event that Corroded Coffin ever makes it out of The Hideout. Most metal concert ever.

Dustin keeps watch on the sky and Eddie does his best to focus on playing—the album’s new enought that he hasn’t had much time to learn the fingering on this. Maybe he should have picked a different song but he hadn’t been able to resist the giant middle finger of playing Master of Puppets to bring down this sadistic puppet master in particular. But he does catch a few glimpses of Steve’s face when he glances up, his expression startled and impressed in a way that makes warmth buzz within Eddie’s chest.

It all goes to shit in short order, naturally. The bats descend, Dustin counts down, and they scramble inside to huddle in the eerie dark of the trailer while monsters swarm the outside, battering at the windows, claws shrieking on the metal as they try to pry their way in.

“Shit,” Dustin whispers suddenly. “They’re coming in through the vents.”

He’s right. Eddie sees a scaly black head poke through the nearest one, teeth snapping, an instant before Steve swings his ax at it with punishing force. Another one replaces it an instant later, though, slithering through the narrow space, and Eddie can hear wings in the bedrooms.

“Okay, I’m calling it,” Steve says. “Time to go.”

“Vecna’s not dead yet,” Eddie points out, and the look Steve shoots him is blistering, unaccountably furious.

“This isn’t supposed to be a suicide run, Munson.”

“Listen, I’m just saying—”

“Oh my god, you guys, is this really an argument that needs to happen now?” Dustin hisses, and he’s right, of course. He and Steve both are. Vecna or no Vecna, they’re just about out of time.

“Go,” Steve snaps, shoving them both toward the living room while he covers their retreat like a paladin in secondhand fatigues, bloody and bruised and still standing tall. It’s a narrow enough space that he’s able to keep them at bay with the ax, but the flurry of wings is getting thicker, and Steve is injured, and there’s only so long he can keep this up before they’re overwhelmed.

Eddie looks between Steve—bleeding, pained, visibly starting to falter—and Dustin, who’s wide-eyed and pretending so hard not to be terrified, and he makes an abrupt decision.

He dodges past Dustin and runs for the door. Dustin yells after him and out of the corner of his eye he sees Steve start to turn, but then he’s crashing down the front steps and sprinting for the bike he abandoned here last night as the cloud of demobats leaves the trailer and rises up behind him. Steve will come after him, almost definitely, but he can be trusted to get Dustin to safety first, and that’s what matters.

What matters is that Eddie can buy them all just a little more time.

He makes it to the edge of the trailer park before they bring him down, and for a few horrible minutes there’s nothing but pain, tearing and deep, and the sound of his own screams echoing in his ears.

Then there are footsteps on the ground, a tall figure there, yelling: a sweep of Steve’s ax knocks a few of them loose and Eddie almost finds the breath to scream again as teeth and claws shred him on the way out. He blacks out for some endless moment and opens his eyes to find that the storm has gone quiet and Steve is pulling him awkwardly into his lap, slapping at his face hard enough that it would probably hurt if Eddie could feel anything at all other than cold.

He’s so cold.

“Hey, hey, hey, Munson. Come on, don’t go pulling this shit again. Come on. Stay with me, okay?

Again? Eddie thinks numbly. In the distance, he can hear Dustin yelling his name. Quick footsteps and the jingling sound of those ridiculous blank dog tags he insisted on wearing.

“I told you to stay put, Henderson!” Steve yells, and then his hand is on Eddie’s face again, gripping his jaw. “Hey, Eddie, come on—”

“Didn’t—didn’t run away this time, did I?” he slurs.

“You never run,” Steve says. It’s probably Eddie’s blurring vision making his eyes look wet. “You fucking idiot. Listen to me next time around, okay?”

“Pret’ sure ‘s’not gonna—be a next time.” His tongue feels thick, his chest tight, his vision starting to tunnel. “Hey, Steve, look…”

Look after Henderson for me, he wants to say, but the words are gone, and the world narrows down to the single warm pinpoint of Steve’s palm on his cheek, and then that, too, is gone.

FOUR — March 28, 1986. 2:03 PM

The front door of the RV slams. A moment later something heavy lands abruptly and ungently in Eddie’s lap. He catches it automatically and looks up; Steve looms over him, wearing a heavy jacket over the shirt he—begrudgingly—borrowed from Eddie’s dresser this morning. His face is set in the same scowl he’s had every time he’s looked at Eddie today. Eddie’s not actually sure what caused that. It kind of felt like he and Steve had reached some kind of détente, possibly even an understanding, while they were hiking through the underworld together last night, but whatever that was seems to have vanished with the morning sun. Eddie would blame Steve’s foul mood on the demobat injuries, which have to be hurting like a bitch, were it not for the fact that he seems to be the sole focus of it. He’s trying not to let it get to him. It’s not like Eddie the Freak was ever going to end up bosom friends with King Steve, no matter how tarnished his crown might be these days. This is a circumstantial alliance, nothing more.

But yeah, it stings a little. And it makes the gift, if that’s what this is, kind of surprising. He closes his fingers over a metal canister, hoses clanking painfully against his legs, and realizes belatedly what it is.

“Um, thank you?” he says. “Not to sound ungrateful, but why did you buy me a flamethrower?”

Dustin pops up from his half slouch, looking indignant. “Wait, wait, you got Eddie a flamethrower, and not me?”

“They only had one,” Steve says shortly. Eddie squints up at him, but Steve is avoiding his eyes. He drops the bag in his other hand on the floor with a heavy clang and adds, “That’s a just in case thing, okay, Munson? Don’t go pulling any stupid heroics.”

Eddie laughs, then holds his hands up when Steve glares at him. “Heroics? I think not. You must have confused me with someone else.”

“Yeah, right,” Steve mutters, and goes to sit next to Robin, who is huddled in a corner of the backseat with her legs drawn up, forehead resting against her knees.

Eddie’s not actively trying to eavesdrop, but it’s not a big space, so he hears Steve say gently, “Look, I’m sorry about—”

“Really don’t want to talk about it here,” she snaps without lifting her head.

“Okay,” Steve says, wincing. “Sorry.”

Robin makes an angry little noise between her teeth, but a few minutes later she lifts her head and tilts sideways just enough to rest her shoulder against Steve's, and he nods silently and leans back against her.

A minute later, Nancy slams up the steps with a shotgun case over her shoulder and a pile of bags that dwarf her frame. She shoves the bags at Lucas, who’s closest, slides the gun onto the empty bench, and says, “We have to go. Now.”

“What?” Steve asks, straightening.

“Jason Carver’s here, he’s asking questions, we have to go.”

“Shit,” Lucas whispers, craning his head toward the window. Eddie ducks down, hunching over the flamethrower and feeling ridiculous as he does it, but it doesn’t stop his heart from speeding up with fear. Monsters are one thing. Jason Carver and his merry band of Eddie-hunters are a much more intimately familiar threat.

Steve swears under his breath and shoves his way up to the front, dropping into the driver’s seat; Nancy, naturally, takes shotgun without a word of discussion.

Hah. Shotgun. Eddie snorts, then shoves the side of his fist against his mouth before he can break out into hysterical laughter as the RV careens wildly out of the parking lot. Erica shrieks, sounding thrilled and terrified all at once.

Like a bat out of hell, Eddie thinks, digging his teeth into his knuckle, feeling his ring press against his lower lip. As with so many things about Steve, it’s unexpected. He’d say something—tease a little, flirt a little, push those limits like he always ends up doing when it comes to pretty straight boys—but Steve doesn’t seem to be in a receptive mood and Eddie doesn’t really feel like getting punched, so he just waits silently until the ride has smoothed out and goes to sit next to Robin, cradling the flamethrower carefully in his arms.

“Hey,” he says quietly.

She gives him a tight, awkward smile. “Hey.”

“You good?”

Robin nods, still looking miserable. “Yeah. I just ran into someone inside that I—yeah. I’m fine.”

“Cool,” Eddie says, and leans his head back, eyes closed, clutching the flamethrower in his lap as the RV bounces down the uneven highway.

“Be careful,” Steve tells him outside the camper, hours later, and he doesn’t look angry at all now, just tired and worried.

“Harrington, if there’s one thing I can be counted on, it’s to save my own hide.”

“You’re full of shit, Eddie,” Steve says, flat and blunt enough that Eddie blinks at him, startled. Steve opens his mouth, sighs, and says, “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been a dick to you today. You don’t deserve that.”

“You have kind of been a dick,” Dustin observes. “What’s up with that, anyway?”

“I—” Steve breaks off, rubs a hand over his face, then says, “You know what, if we all make it out of this, I’ll tell you tomorrow. For now, just—be careful.” He pauses, then adds, “And cover the vents in the roof, for Chrissake. You know how these things can squeeze through tight spaces, and trust me, you do not want them to get in.”

“Sure, man,” Eddie says. Steve turns to go, following after the girls, and Eddie adds, “Hey, Steve? Make him pay.”

Steve squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, then nods. “Yeah. We will.”

Covering the vents helps, but not enough. The flamethrower helps, but not enough. When it runs out of fuel at the edge of the trailer park, the burning grass is scattered with winged corpses but the sky is still swarming with them.

Eddie flings the tank aside and reaches for his spear as they start to descend.

“Come and get me,” he screams into the storm, “come on, come on!”

And they do.

FIVE — March 28, 1986. 7:25 AM

“Oh, fuck this,” Steve says the moment he opens his eyes.

“Um,” Robin says, letting go of his shoulder and sitting back on her heels. Nancy sets her coffee cup down and straightens up. “Steve? Is everything okay?”

“No. Nope, everything is not okay.” Steve says shortly, pushing himself up to his feet with a pained wince. He presses a hand to his side, where the white of Nancy’s sweater is crusted with dried blood.

“You need someone to take a look at your war wounds, dude?” Eddie asks before he can think better of it.

“Why,” Steve challenges. “Are you offering?”

Robin jerks around to stare at Steve in possibly the most unsubtle way Eddie has ever seen, but Steve is still looking at him like it’s a dare, and he may not get what that’s about but Eddie has never been any good at backing down from those.

“Sure,” he says, nodding toward the hallway. “Bathroom’s right through there.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

“I’ll get the kids up,” Nancy offers from the couch. “There are some things we should talk about now that—now that we’ve all had some sleep.”

“Yeah, there are,” Steve says darkly, but doesn’t elaborate. “Why don't you guys head over to Max’s and grab some food. We’ll meet you there.”

Eddie would like to protest Steve’s assumption that there’s no food in the trailer, but while it’s rude it’s also accurate, so he gives them both a shrug—Robin is still staring between them like she’s doing complex math in her head and coming up with an answer that doesn’t make any sense—and follows Steve down the hall to the bathroom. Steve sinks onto the toilet seat with another poorly-concealed wince, and Eddie pauses, hand on the medicine cabinet. “You know I probably have some Percocet here somewhere if you want.”

Assuming the cops didn't find it when they tossed the place. Inventory has been pretty fucking low on his list of concerns, all things considered.

Steve snorts. “Yeah? What do you charge for that?”

“On the house, good sir. Only the finest of extralegal narcotics for a wounded hero.”

Steve gives him a long, thoughtful look, then shakes his head and starts gingerly unwinding the blood-soaked makeshift bandage around his midsection. “I think I’m good. Thanks.”

“Suit yourself, dude,” Eddie says, and pulls open the medicine cabinet. He gets out tape and gauze and iodine, and sets them all on the tiny sink counter as Steve peels the last of the cloth away from his skin and lets it drop into the tub. The wounds look worse in the light of day—torn and ragged, deeper than he thought. Eddie hisses through his teeth in sympathy. “Ow.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Steve mutters, shrugging off Eddie’s vest and setting it on the back of the toilet with more care than the grimy, bloody piece of denim really needs. Eddie appreciates the gesture, all the same.

“We should probably clean those before we do anything else. Flush all that monster hellworld gunk out of there, get some antiseptic on it. Lucky you're not already getting an infection.”

“What do you use for that?” Steve grins a little, still pained at the edges but clearly trying to hide it. Like Eddie is one of his kids that he has to reassure. Or maybe pretending he’s okay when he’s clearly not is a habit by now. “A bottle of whiskey like in the cowboy movies?”

“Warm water, Butch Cassidy. Unless you want even more tissue damage than you already have.”

“Sounds fun, but no. How do you know all this shit, anyway?”

“It may shock and astonish you to hear this, but my sparkling personality didn’t always go over so great with the ruling class of Hawkins High even before they all thought I was a homicidal cult leader. I’ve gotten my ass kicked a lot. Like, a lot.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

Eddie keeps his eyes on his hands as he leans over to start the faucet. Doesn’t look at Steve’s face or any part of his bare torso other than the bites. “Also, my mom was studying to be a nurse. Here, if you sit on the side of the tub, I should be able to—gonna get your pants wet, sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Steve’s breathing flattens and slows as Eddie starts rinsing out the wounds with water cupped between his palms. Deliberate, like he knows how to hold himself still and steady through the pain. He doesn’t speak again until Eddie is carefully patting the area around the injuries dry. “Your mom, she’s…?”

“Gone, yeah. Car accident, six years ago.” There’s more he could say about that, but he doesn’t. Hawkins is a small town. Steve’s probably heard about how Dorothy Munson was found with her car wrapped around a tree and a BAC twice the legal limit, and if by some miracle he hasn’t, Eddie’s not going to be the one to enlighten him.

“Sorry,” Steve murmurs again. Eddie taps his side lightly—warm skin, tense muscle, alive, alive—and reaches for the box of non-stick gauze pads.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Still.” Steve breathes in; his stomach muscles shift beneath Eddie’s fingers. “So it’s just you and your uncle?”

“Yeah, well—” he pauses to tear a piece of tape with his teeth. “Dad’s in Pendleton on a fifteen-to-thirty for armed robbery. He’s got some family down in Greensburg, but” —they think I’m going to hell for about a dozen different reasons and they’re always happy to tell me so— “we don’t really talk. So yeah. Just me and him.”

“Oh,” Steve says quietly. Eddie smooths down the last piece of tape, hiding the ugly mess of torn flesh beneath a clean white rectangle, and looks up.

Steve is still a mess, honestly: every exposed inch of skin is littered with scrapes and bruises. There are ugly lines of abrasion around his throat and both forearms—the latter is bruised black around the knobs of bone in his wrists, like the demobats held him even tighter there. It would have been easy for them to strangle him, or break his neck. Eddie wonders morbidly if the only reason they didn’t was so Steve would still be alive when they started eating him.

He’s still alive. Battered, but alive. Upsettingly pretty even now, although Steve’s always pretty in a way that hurts a little to look at. That soft mouth, those big dark eyes. Doe eyes, although there’s a steady thoughtfulness in them now that makes Eddie feel painfully exposed. Steve is looking at him right now like he’s made of clear glass, all the squirming needy intolerable parts of him on display.

“There,” Eddie says finally. It rasps in his throat like he’s the one who’s been strangled here. “Should be all set.”

“Thanks,” Steve murmurs. The moment lingers; Eddie’s fingers linger inexcusably on bare skin. Then Steve takes a breath and straightens, and Eddie jerks his hand back like he’s been burned.

“We should probably get over there,” he blurts, standing up so quickly he almost stumbles. Steve stands up more slowly and painfully shrugs Eddie’s battle jacket back over his shoulders. Eddie takes him a deep breath and follows him out into the hallway.

At Max’s trailer, they find everyone huddled in the living room around Nancy, who has folded her arms and hunched in on herself so that she looks even smaller than she is.

“So now we got to explain it again,” Erica says when they come in. It sounds like the continuation of an argument, especially when Dustin throws his hands up, looking exasperated.

“I was just asking! Jeez, okay—Eddie, Steve, Nancy saw—”

“Vecna is Henry Creel, and he’s planning to use the four gates from the people he kills to cause an earthquake and like some—massive gate that’ll let the whole Upside Down into Hawkins,” Steve interrupts. Eddie turns slowly to stare at him, aware that everyone in the room is doing the same thing. Steve scrapes a hand through his grimy hair, looking tired. “Yeah. So this is like the fifth time I’ve lived through today.”

There's a moment of stunned silence.

“How is that even possible?” Lucas asks.

“It’s not,” Dustin says immediately.

“Yeah, well, it’s happening,” Steve says. “Max, can I have one of those bagels or something? I’m dying here.”

She stares at him, unblinking, for several seconds, then wordlessly tosses him the entire bag. He catches it easily, pulls a bagel out, and crams half of it into his mouth in one enormous bite.

“Um,” Eddie says slowly. “Not to, like, interrupt here, but—what?”

“Time loop,” Steve says through a mouthful of bagel, which, gross. He chews and swallows, and adds. “Recourse terminal something, I forget what Henderson called it the first time around, but he was talking about some old sci-fi story about a dude who goes back in time and gets himself pregnant, which sounds pretty messed up to me, personally—”

“Recursive temporal loop?” Dustin asks.

Steve shrugs. “Sure. I guess.”

“Okay, but that’s supposed to be a thought experiment—it’s not actually a thing.”

“Yeah, you said that last time, too. Listen, okay—the last four times I've been through this, one of us ended up dead. So could you just trust me on this, for once? Please?”

The room goes quiet. On the couch, Robin starts to shake her head. Eddie doesn't even realize he's mirroring the gesture until he hears his own voice. “No. Nope, no.”

“Yeah, I’m really not okay with this,” Robin says, rising up, hands lifted. “I am not okay with this—”

“Who?” Nancy asks bluntly, finally lifting her head and pinning Steve with a glance. “Who dies?”

Steve doesn’t answer, but his gaze flicks toward Eddie, and Eddie’s stomach lurches like he’s taken a step down a staircase and found nothing but empty space beneath his foot.

“Me,” he croaks. “Right?”

Steve winces, then nods, then says, “I mean. So far, yeah. It’s always been you.”

“Great,” Eddie says. He runs his fingers through his hair, then makes a fist and tugs until it hurts. “That’s great, that’s just—great, Jesus H. Christ, from town freak to monster food in under a week, what a goddamn career trajectory!”

He’s not really aware of how his voice has been rising until Dustin steps forward with one hand outstretched, and Eddie’s mouth snaps shut, and the echo of his own yelling rings in his ears.

“Eddie,” he says, in that same too-gentle tone he used in the boathouse, the one that sounds like he’s soothing a wild animal in a trap. Which, yeah. Feels about right. “We’re going to figure it out, okay? It’ll be okay.”

“Right!” Robin adds. “Because we didn’t all know before and now we do, so we’ll know what not to do, and we can make different choices this time around, better choices—right?”

“Right,” Steve agrees, after a moment too long. Eddie’s stomach, already churning, turns to ice.

“How many times have you told us?”

Steve looks at him for a moment, then sighs. “Just once. It—look, the last four times, you and Henderson stayed behind to draw the bats away while we went in to torch Vecna. And every single fucking time, you sent him through the gate, and cut the rope, and went to draw them off. To buy us more time. And then you died. Okay?”

“Shit,” Dustin murmurs, paling.

Eaten alive, Eddie’s brain supplies helpfully. After what sounds like a frankly implausible bout of heroics. “That… does not sound like me.”

“Well, it’s what you do,” Steve says impatiently. “I don’t know what to tell you, man. Four times in a row, that’s what you did.”

“So we’ll do something different this time,” Nancy says firmly. “Eddie can come with us. Steve can stay back with Dustin.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how we survive attacking Vecna.” Robin is twisting her hands together, over and over again. “He’s been toying with us—Nancy only got away because he let her go, and in a fair fight he’d turn us inside out with a—a flick of his finger, even assuming we actually follow through with this crazy plan, how do we even get close enough to have a shot?”

Steve opens his mouth, then shuts it. This time his guilty gaze flicks toward Max.

“If we assume that he’s like Eleven,” Dustin says slowly. Reluctantly. “He’d have the same weaknesses. When he’s remote traveling… he’ll be in a trance state. He’ll be vulnerable.”

“But he only does that when he’s attacking someone,” Lucas says, and then his expression goes tight and scared and he looks at Max, too.

“Me,” Max says, calm and steady and so, so terribly brave. She lifts her chin and meets Steve’s eyes, then all of theirs, one by one. “He’ll be vulnerable when he’s attacking me.”

Steve catches him outside the RV when the others are preparing their weaponry. “Hey. Munson. Can I talk to you for a second?”

Eddie shoulders his shield, which is really just a garbage can lid, but the spikes give it more weight. A reassuring kind of heft. “Sure, what’s up?”

“Listen, just—you don’t have to do this. Okay? Say the word, and you’re out.”

Eddie shrugs and says, as lightly as he possibly can, “As tempting as that sounds, there’s a mob currently baying for my blood out there. Might be safer with the monsters.”

“You can stay at mine. My parents are out of town, nobody’ll be looking for you there.”

Steve’s giving him that same intent, careful look as in the bathroom this morning, and it occurs to Eddie that despite how impatient and exasperated he’s been acting about all this, he actually is very worried. Upset, even. About Eddie. It shouldn’t be so surprising, probably, if Steve has really been watching him die over and over again for the better part of a week, but Eddie can’t remember any of those deaths, and despite the terror gnawing at him none of it feels quite real. He imagines soldiers in the trenches feel much the same before the bombardment starts. Death doesn’t feel real until you’re watching it happen, he’s learned.

Or until it’s happening to you.

“Eddie,” Steve says, low and serious. “I mean it. You don’t have to do this.”

Eddie almost laughs. This is what he wanted, after all—an excuse to run away and hide somewhere safe while somebody else risks their neck. And here Steve is, offering it to him on a silver platter, without any of the judgement Eddie would deserve for being such a coward. But he thinks of Dustin in the Upside Down alone, of the others overwhelmed by demobats, of Max broken like Chrissy was, all that bright courage shattered and dead on the floor, and he knows he’ll never be able to live with himself if he takes the out.

“No, I'm in,” he says. “You give Little Red over there this same speech?

“Yeah,” Steve sighs.

Eddie glances over to where Max is helping Nancy saw the barrel off of a shotgun. Two unexpected shieldmaidens in the comission of what he’s pretty sure is actually a felony. He smiles a little. “Bet that went over great.”

“About how you’d expect,” Steve admits. “But I mean it, seriously.”

“I know you do. And I appreciate it, seriously, but I’m pretty sure I’m actually safer with your girlfriend than anywhere else on Earth. Scariest woman I’ve ever met.”

Steve rolls his eyes, flopping down into the seat next to Eddie. “She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Yet. Or, I don’t know, anymore? You’re already in a temporal paradox, right? Embrace it, dude.”

Steve gives him a look like he thinks Eddie isn’t taking this nearly seriously enough. Which, to be fair, he absolutely is not. On the other hand, if he does try to take it seriously he’ll probably collapse into a gibbering heap of panic, so flippancy is the order of the day.

“Me and Nance—” Steve sighs. “Look, even if she wasn't dating Jonathan, we weren’t good together. She dumped me for a reason, you know?”

“I’m just saying,” Eddie says, because he has eyes, okay. Along with a vaguely nihilistic penchant for jabbing at his own tender spots. Nancy or no Nancy, there's no way Steve is ever going to look back at him and see something he wants. So this is actually kind of selfless of him. Probably. “True love—it’s a thing. The bards sing of it.”

“Yeah? What about you?”

It’s not quite accusing, but it is sharp. And that’s a can of worms that Eddie is going nowhere near, thank you. “I… am the bard in this scenario, singing tales of your epic romance with Wheeler, who is scarier than you’ll ever be.”

“I thought you played the guitar.”

“I’m a man of many skills. I can sing, too.” Impulsively—stupidly—he adds, “I can show you, if you want. Once we get out of here.”

He expects laughter. Or maybe not that—Steve is kind, he’s learned, decent and kind and awkwardly gentle with the people he’s decided are his problem. So maybe not laughter, but a polite, noncommittal, sure, maybe.

Instead, Steve says, with startling sincerity, “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that a lot, actually.”

Eddie never stood a chance, really.

“So what’s the deal with you and Harrington, anyway?” he asks Nancy as they head off into the creepy Upside Down woods, leaving Dustin and Steve arguing over which of Eddie’s tapes to use for bait as they shore up the trailer. The sound system has already been set up on the roof under Eddie’s careful supervision.

“Um,” Robin says, and takes a quick step over a vine that reaches lazily for her ankle.

Nancy sidesteps it as well, and glances up at Eddie. It’s not as chilly a look as he probably deserves, but it is sharp, in the way that he’s learned that Nancy Wheeler nearly always is. He likes her better than he expected to, but he wasn’t lying to Steve when he called her scary.

“I’m not sure that’s your business,” she says finally.

“Oh, I mean, it’s definitely not,” Eddie agrees. “But I couldn’t help but notice that there was a vibe, if you will. A certain amount of, shall we say, unresolved tension.”

“There is kind of a lot of unresolved tension,” Robin offers, sounding apologetic.

“Right?” Eddie says. “I’m not imagining it.”

Nancy sighs huffily. The trees close around them, spindly branches blocking the sky from view. On one level, it makes Eddie feel safer, but he also doesn’t know what other unknown horrors might be lurking out here, and he’s not eager to find out.

“There’s nothing going on with me and Steve,” Nancy says finally. Then, to Robin, “Honestly, I really thought you two were a thing until like two days ago.”

“Oh, no, no, god no,” Robin says quickly, with a degree of horror that would be insulting if Eddie couldn’t guess the reason for it. “Like I said before. Totally platonic. Me and Steve is just—no. No way. Not a good match.”

“Huh,” Nancy says thoughtfully. The forest is starting to clear; up ahead the vast and ominous bulk of the Creel house looms over a broad, dead lawn. A cloud of demobats circles it, shrieking. Nancy holds up a hand to shush them, but it’s unnecessary; Eddie’s very breath feels frozen in his throat. They wait there silently while the bats wheel and circle, while the cold seeps into his skin and motes of light dance above the play structure. Erica is there, on the other side of a very thin scrim of reality that Eddie imagines digging his fingers into and clawing open, like he could climb back through to safety like that.

The lights rise, scatter. Erica's voice echoes: "Okay, she's in. Initiate phase three."

"Phase three," Robin says into her walkie. It crackles, then Steve's voice comes in.

"Got it. Phase three is a go." A pause. "Be careful in there."

"You too," Robin says. Her hand is shaking slightly as she lowers the walkie and clips it to her belt.

The sudden, familiar screech of amplifiers echoes in the distance, followed by the thunder of drums and power chords, Rob Halford growling out, Breaking the law, breaking the law. The grin that spreads across his face is wild and involuntary; he wonders how they decided on that one, or if Steve just grabbed the first tape he saw.

“I would have gone with Metallica, personally,” he murmurs. Robin shushes him in a thin, frantic voice. Her eyes are glued to the sky, where the bats have stopped circling.

Now, they’re heading for the trailer park. That vast, shrieking, sharp-toothed throng is heading for the trailer park, where Steve is; where Dustin is. Eddie feels the grin drop away from his lips.

“Alright, we're clear,” Nancy says grimly. “Let’s go.”

The bats are gone. The vines aren’t.

They make it most of the way to the second floor of the Creel house before Robin stumbles, then is yanked back against the wall with a bruising thud. Nancy cries out her name and Eddie rushes forward, sawing at the strangling vine with the spear in his hand. Robin claws at it, then heaves a breath when he finally manages to pull it loose.

Of course, then it’s focused on him. It lashes at his face, opening up a searing line across his cheek; blood drips down. He barely has a chance to yell before the whiplike end twists around his throat, yanking him up off his feet. He gags, choking, gasping for air that won’t come. Feels Nancy’s hands grab at him before she’s yanked away.

His vision goes red, then dark.

I’m sorry, he thinks as blackness rushes in, and he is—for a lot of things, honestly. For leaving Wayne alone. For not graduating. He’s sorry for dying (again) and he’s sorry, absurdly, that he’ll never get to sing for Steve now. He’s sorry that he’ll never get to—

There’s a sharp crack, a blinding burst of pain, and then there’s nothing.

Chapter Text

EIGHT — March 28, 1986. 8:16 PM

“I feel like I should have noticed that Hawkins has a literal haunted house,” Eddie muses out loud as the RV pulls away from the curb, leaving him standing on the sidewalk in front of the Creel house with the Sinclair siblings and Max Mayfield, who looks pale and drawn in a way that probably can’t be entirely attributed to the gloomy dusk. It makes him feel twitchy; makes his fingers itch for something to do, some kind of purpose to bend themselves to. “On the other hand, I guess I didn’t realize that there was a literal portal to hell in the middle of our charming little town, so that’s par for the course, right?”

“Yeah, you get used to it,” Lucas says, although from his wan smile Eddie’s got a feeling that’s not actually entirely honest. He appreciates the effort, though.

“We should get into position, anyway,” Erica says, glancing down the sidewalk. It’s empty—this isn’t exactly a well-trod section of town, with the creepy abandoned mansion and the even more creepy abandoned playground on the far side of the street, but Eddie’s skin prickles at the reminder all the same.

Monsters aside, he’s still persona non grata in the lovely town of Hawkins, Indiana. For a chilling instant, he thinks he sees a green windbreaker out of the corner of his eye, but it’s just an overgrown hedge shifting in the cold breeze.

“Yeah,” he says, jamming his hands in the pockets of his jacket. Wishing he had his battle vest, more for psychological armor than physical. Although with what they’re up against, psychological armor might be exactly what he needs. “Monsters are one thing. Getting beaten to death by homicidal jocks would just be embarrassing, even if it does reset afterwards so I don't remember.”

Max glances at him as they start up the walk. “You believe him, then? Steve, I mean?”

“You don’t?” Eddie asks, because Steve sat them all down this morning and explained that he was experiencing a temporal loop (yes, Henderson, I fucking know what that means, this is the eighth time I’ve lived through today) and it all sounds horrifying, to say the least, but no less believable than any of the other horrifying things that he’s witnessed in the past few days. But on the other hand, he is but a babe in the woods with this shit in comparison to these kids, so what the hell does he know.

She shrugs. “I guess.”

“I do,” Lucas says loyally. His hand twitches like he wants to reach for Max, but he drops it before he can complete the gesture. Young love, Eddie thinks, with a strange, miserable ache in his chest. “But it’s okay. We’re going to get this right, and we’re going to kill Vecna, and that’ll break the loop. It’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, I bet that’s what we all said the last few times he told us,” Max mutters, and it’s exactly the thing that Eddie’s been trying not to think. Steve was kind of scant on the details, but the haunted look in his eyes back at the trailer made it clear: whatever happened the last few times around, it hasn’t been good.

Maybe if Eddie were less of a coward, he would have pressed for more information. As it is, he thinks he’s happier not knowing.

“We’ll get it right,” Lucas says again.

Erica shushes him as Eddie reaches through the broken stained glass window in the front door, feeling for the door handle.

“Remember—no talking while you’re in there,” she hisses.

Lucas frees a hand to knuckle the top of her head; she bats him away, but it’s gentle.

“Yeah,” he says. “You be careful too, okay?”

“I’m not the one who needs to be careful,” Erica retorts, but she bumps her shoulder against his side a moment later. “Yeah. Keep an eye out for my signal.”

Lucas nods, and Eddie gives her an ironic little half-bow that makes her roll her eyes and smile, and then she steps back while he pulls the door open to let the other two in.

The house seems even more haunted from the inside. Gloomy with the windows covered, muffled in a shroud of dust. The floorboards creak beneath Eddie’s tennis shoes as they move into the entry hall, and he can’t help but imagine the floor cracking open and sending him toppling back into the Upside Down.

That’s not how any of this works, he’s pretty sure, and out of everybody tonight he’s got one of the safer jobs, but it’s still. Creepy.

He wonders at that last thing, though, as they move through the first story, the lantern light falling on moth-eaten finery: a long dining room table with the chairs knocked over, an old radio on the sidebar, moldering carpet underfoot. There’s no reason for him to be here instead of in the Upside Down with the others going after Vecna, but Steve insisted. In retrospect, it was almost like he was trying to keep Eddie out of the way.

The implications of that are pretty fucking awful, actually. But there’s nothing he can do about it now. Whatever he fucked up the last few times around, he’s not going to fuck up this time.

This time, he’s going to get it right. For these kids, who have been through way more than any freshman nerds should ever have to; for Steve, who’s turned out to be every inch the badass hero that Dustin always insisted he was; for Nancy and Robin and for everyone else in this shitty little town that'll be overtaken by monsters if Nancy’s vision comes to pass.

For Chrissy, who never had any chance at all.

Up ahead, Lucas nods toward the back stairs, raising his lantern, and they start to climb.

Inactivity doesn’t suit Eddie.

This isn’t actually news; he’s built an entire reputation on his inability to sit down and shut the hell up when he should, and only half of it is for show. Hopping onto cafeteria tables and mouthing off to teachers and lighting off the occasional firework in the boys’ room—all part of the Edward Munson experience, so to speak. It’s a restless body and a restless brain all wrapped up in one pretty package, and he’s made it work for him, if he does say so himself, but he’s never been someone who can just cope with—this.

The monsters, yeah. But also, right now, the silence.

It’s a necessary thing, sure. He knows that. No need to alert their local evil interdimensional mind-controlling wizard to the plan before everything’s in place. He’s good with that; he is golden.

It’s just that the quiet is kind of starting to get to him.

Scratch that. More than kind of. The week he spent hiding out in the boathouse was bad enough, but at least that was far enough out in the woods that he could bang around, run his mouth, break shit if he needed to—he absolutely owes Rick some new crockery, assuming the old stoner even notices what happened to half of his dishes when he gets back out. Assuming Eddie is even alive to make good on that.

This is worse. The stifling silence of the Creel house, which feels full of the ghosts of murders past and murders yet to come, or maybe it’s not nearly as metaphysical as all that and he’s just worried as hell about the two kids sitting across from each over over an eerily pulsing lantern in the attic of this awful place. Not to mention the rest of them, slipping down into the underworld to fight monsters without him.

Max scribbles something on the pad of paper in her lap and holds it up to show Lucas, who ducks his head, smiling. Eddie backs away toward the stairs, wincing when the treads creak under his feet. He grips the railing and moves closer to the wall.

There are bedrooms on the second floor, moth-eaten and cobwebbed and stinking of mouse-shit and dust. Dolls are scattered across the bed in the room nearest, their glass eyes blank, their little frilled dresses rotting; Eddie shudders and backs out into the hallway and doesn’t look into any of the other rooms. There’s a window on the landing; he leans against the frame and peers out across the street, to the small dark figure on the play structure that he wouldn’t be able to spot if he didn’t know she was there. Wonders if the others are approaching yet, on the other side of reality.

The floor creaks overhead as one of the kids shifts, then stills. And then the figure on the playground moves, straightening; metal glints in the moonlight, followed by the sudden blinding beam of the flashlight. Three flashes, a pause, and then three again, nothing fancy.

Phase three is a go. Eddie’s stomach lurches to the vicinity of his throat, and he starts toward the stairs, but Lucas must have already seen, because by the time he makes it back into the attic, Max is already talking.

“... just stood there and watched,” she’s saying quietly, cross-legged in front of that dusty wooden box and talking to thin air as if there’s an old friend on the other end of the line. “Not because I was weak, but because I didn’t know if he deserved to be saved. And I’ve tried to forgive myself, I’ve tried, but I can’t… I can’t… so now, when I lie in bed at night, I pray that something terrible will happen to me.”

Lucas is standing beside her, so still that Eddie’s not sure if he even saw him come up the stairs, except then his eyes flick up, and his face twists; his cheeks are wet.

It’s all part of the con, Eddie wants to tell him, as Max sets her palms flat on the floor and talks calmly to the middle distance about wanting to disappear. Just part of the con. She doesn’t mean it.

Except it’s not that simple, and he knows that. He knows that, on a deep, aching level that sometimes makes him wonder why it was Chrissy who died on the ceiling of his trailer, and not him.

“Max,” Lucas whispers, and Eddie realizes that her voice has trailed away into silence. That she’s frozen in place—not composed, but completely, inhumanly still. Her eyelids flicker; her eyes roll back in her head, and Lucas falls to his knees next to her with no sign of that basketball-hero grace; he looks clumsy and desperate and terribly young. “Max.”

No answer. She looks paralyzed, like Chrissy did that night. She looks like she’s already dead.

Eddie’s stomach lurches. Lucas starts to rise, groping for his flashlight, and he shakes his head, makes a sharp gesture at him, and leans down to scoop it off the floor. “I got it. You stay with her.”

Lucas nods, looking grateful, which means that Eddie can pretend that he’s doing this as a kindness and not because he feels like he might genuinely throw up if he has to look at Max’s frozen, hypnotized face any longer.

At the window, he flashes out a signal; after a moment, Erica responds.

“Phase three is a go,” he murmurs, shifting the flashlight to his left hand, rubbing his thumb over the familiar shapes of his rings.

“What?” Lucas asks behind him.

Eddie glances back. “Nothing. How is she?”

“She’s.” Lucas swallows audibly, then settles himself into a slightly less awkward position: cross-legged in front of Max, hands slipping into her unresponsive ones. “She’s hanging in there.”

She’s not floating yet, anyway. Eddie nods, and swallows, and looks back out the window in time to see a car rev down the street, headlights sweeping over the front of the house as Erica’s light abruptly goes out.

“Shit,” Eddie whispers. The car swerves to the side, speeding up rather than slowing as it lurches across the sidewalk to park cockeyed on the overgrown grass. Doors open; tall figures in letterman jackets spill out. “Aw, shit, come on—”

Lucas starts to rise. “What?”

“You stay with her,” Eddie says, snatching up the flashlight and the Bowie knife that Steve left him with, just in case. Right now, he really wishes it were a gun, and nevermind that he’s never shot at anything deadlier than a tin can on the back fence. Missed those as often as not, too. He’s no Nancy Wheeler. But right now, he’s all these kids have.

He half-expects Lucas to follow—it’s his little sister out there, after all—but he doesn’t slow down to check. Can’t let himself think past the forward momentum propelling him down the stairs and out the door.

Erica is already on the ground, struggling, a burly upperclassman pinning her down. Rage whites out every vestige of fear.

“Hey,” Eddie yells, and it’s like being in the cafeteria again, the way all of their heads jerk up toward him as he hops up onto the hood of the car, sheet metal clanging beneath his feet. Making himself big, making himself a target, drawing attention—he knows how to do this, if nothing else. “Hey assholes, what, are you running your little witch hunts at the elementary school now? Come on, I’m betting baby Sinclair there isn’t the Satan-worshiping freak you’re all really after—”

“Munson,” Jason Carver snarls, shoving to the front of the pack.

“In the flesh,” Eddie says, grinning to show all his teeth. “Heard you were still looking for me. I gotta be honest with you, I’m flattered. Charmed, even.”

Carver’s face twists, distorting his choirboy good looks into something almost ghoulish. “What are you waiting for?” he snaps, and his eyes are still on Eddie but the order is clearly aimed at his goons, who close ranks behind him.

Importantly, the guy who was pinning Erica lets her go. She scrambles backward on her elbows, her eyes huge and scared. Eddie sees this out of the corner of his eye; he doesn’t dare look away from Carver. Like a snake charmer, or a magician. Come on, you dumb little sheep, keep your eyes on me. Pay no attention to the monster behind the curtain.

“If you want me, come and get me,” he sing-songs.

Then he blows a kiss, leaps off the car and sprints for the street.

He’s never been athletic, but he’s always been fast. And the street is empty, this late: no traffic to dodge, no well-meaning pedestrians to intervene, for good or for ill. There’s just the pavement beneath his feet and the rising shouts behind him. They sound like a bunch of howling fucking monkeys. Footsteps on the pavement, closing fast. Eddie puts on a burst of speed, but if he wasn’t going to outrun these guys out behind the gym he’s definitely not going to do it now. The knife hilt is sweaty in his fist, and he has the thought that maybe he can scare them off a little, at least—

The tackle hits him low; he goes down hard on his knees and elbows. The knife skitters away, and he grabs for it but it’s too late: an ungentle foot kicks him over onto his back. They're looming over him: four of them, tall enough to blot out the night sky.

“Okay, okay, you got me,” he gasps, trying to find a grin. It comes out as more of a pained grimace: his knees are throbbing, blood soaking into his from where he scraped them raw.

“Edward Munson,” Carver says, with a preaching kind of resonance to his voice. One of his guys gets Eddie’s shoulders, the other one his knees, and he is too fucking familiar with this, even if Jason Carver always pretended to be above it all. Carver isn’t playing the choirboy anymore, though. He's not just going to stand by and watch this time.

In the distance, behind them, Erica yells, “Hey! Hey, get off him!”

Footsteps on the pavement, light and quick. She’s getting closer, and once she gets here she’s not gonna just stand by and observe. She’s gonna try to get involved, to protect him like she’s not eleven and he’s not twenty and that’s how any of this is supposed to work, and he already got them away from her once—he’s not likely to pull it off again.

Eddie kicks out, scrambles to his feet and makes it another three steps before Jason Carver hits him like a freight train, taking them both to the pavement.

It’s an ugly grappling match after that. A piledriver of a punch cracks his cheekbone, and he hits out the only way he knows how: knees and elbows, using the hard knobs of bone as weapons. Protect the hands, always protect the hands, because if one of those assholes stomps on your fingers you might never play guitar again. He finds a solar plexus, gut, throat, every soft spot there is in the dangerous bulk of the body above him. Animal instinct, feral and afraid and halfway to useless. Eddie’s never been any good at violence when it comes down to it. Not like this. Not when it’s real.

Carver hits him again, then fumbles for something in his back pocket and Eddie knows—knows, suddenly and certainly, how this ends.

Like this, right now. With his cheek and jaw aching and his back to the cold pavement as Jason Carver pulls out a gun.

The barrel glints bright in the moonlight. There’s a rising chorus of shouts and Carver’s face looks, for a moment, like a mask. A ghoul. A hollow skull with no reason or sense behind the dark pits of his eyes.

Eddie bats out instinctively. Carver rears back, aiming clumsily, but clumsy doesn’t matter at this range.

Someone yells, “No, Jason, don’t—”

The sharp report of gunfire splits the night. And then there’s nothing.

TEN — March 28, 1986. 11:40 PM

They make it almost to the second story of the Creel house before the vines attack. Eddie has time to shove Robin out of the way, but then one of them wraps around his neck, yanking him back. He claws at the slimy, fibrous surface, but it does no good; Steve lunges forward with his ax, but every blow seems to make it tighten even more. And then Steve is yanked away too, and darkness compresses his vision and he’s—

FIFTEEN — March 28, 1986. 11: 43 PM

—shoving Dustin behind him as the bats descend, shield at the ready, and it felt sturdy and solid when he made it this afternoon but now it feels like he might as well be holding monsters at bay with a paper plate. Like he’s nothing more than a kid playing pretend here.

“Eddie, come on, Eddie, let’s go,” Dustin yells from the living room, but Vecna is still alive. Vecna is still alive, and Steve and the others are still out there, and they’re not going to make it back to the gate if the demobats are out there instead of here, focused on the bait.

“You go,” Eddie says, shouldering the flamethrower Steve got him at the War Zone earlier. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” Dustin retorts. “I heard what Steve said. You’re going to do something stupid, aren’t you.”

“I do a lot of stupid things,” Eddie says, grinning, and pushes open the front door. The mesh surrounding the porch is black with the number of demobats battering themselves against it, but it’s still holding. Eddie feels a feral grin peel back his lips as he ignites the flamethrower and aims it. The monsters shriek as they catch fire and fall away, but there are more of them, always more of them, and the mesh is starting to bow.

Dustin, just behind him in the doorway. The trailer is secure, at least. Eddie turns and shoves him hard, sending him stumbling back, then slams the door and shoves the spent flamethrower under the handle to jam it.

Then he shoulders his shield and spear, shoves through the screen, and makes a run for it. The demobats rise in a shrieking cloud, then descend, and he—

SEVENTEEN — March 28, 1986. 11:47 PM

—flings another Molotov cocktail that smashes against Vecna’s ugly face with a satisfying crash, and Nancy steps up, pumping the shotgun and firing round after round at Vecna. Her jaw is set, her expression fearsome.

“Holy shit,” Robin whispers, sounding awed and vaguely hysterical, and Eddie exchanges a wide-eyed look with her and reaches for the next Molotov cocktail, but Vecna’s eyes are open, suddenly, open and aware and burning blue.

“Nance!” Robin yells as one twisted, scorched arm comes up, fingers splayed. Eddie charges forward only to feel weightlessness catch him like he’s been hit by a freight train, flung backward through the window. Glass shatters and the ground rushes up to meet him, and—

TWENTY — March 28, 1986. 2:45 PM

—Eddie flings his arms up as the RV peels away, leaving him behind on the side of the road. “Oh, come on, you have to be kidding me!”

Because sure, okay, Steve has spent most of the day trying to talk him out of coming, but somehow Eddie didn’t think he’d resort to this.

He waits there for a moment, just to see if Steve is going to come to his senses and turn around, but the RV’s engine echoes away into silence.

Eddie swears under his breath, both furious and hurt, then starts walking. To hell with Steve Harrington anyway. His royal highness might not deign to give Eddie a ride himself, but Eddie’s still got feet that work.

Somehow, amidst all the other madness in the past twenty-four hours, he forgot about the witch hunt. When a car slows down, crunching gravel on the shoulder of the road behind him, he turns, starting to lift a thumb in the universal hitchhiker's signal.

Jason Carver stares at him from behind the wheel. Eddie stares back. It’s a long, frozen moment before it occurs to him that he should be running, and by then it’s too late. The engine revs, the car lurches forward faster than Eddie can dodge, and he’s—

TWENTY-FIVE — March 28, 1986. 11:45 PM

—bleeding out in Steve Harrington’s arms and it doesn’t really hurt anymore because he can’t really feel anything anymore and there are worse ways to go, probably, but he really wishes Steve would stop crying.

THIRTY — March 28, 1986. 9:06 AM

“Does Harrington seem, like… okay to you?” Eddie asks Robin in an undertone, nodding toward the window of Max’s trailer. On the other side of it, the man in question is pacing frenetically back and forth on the grassy stretch of land between the trailer park and the woods beyond. He appears to be talking to himself, possibly even arguing, emphatic gestures and all. He doesn’t really look okay by even the most generous interpretation of the term—he looks like he's having a really bad fucking trip, in fact—but these are, as they say, extenuating circumstances. This entire week has felt like a bad trip to Eddie, honestly.

Before Robin can answer, Dustin poked his head out the open window. “Steve! Come on, let’s go!”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming,” Steve says, and resumes pacing.

“We don’t have all day! Come on already!”

Steve turns toward the woods for a moment, bracing his hands on his hips, then throws them up and turns to jog back to the trailer. Max pushes the door open to let him in.

“Okay, so, hypothetical,” he says as soon as he’s inside.

“Do we really have time for this?” Dustin asks, and Steve rolls his eyes with his whole head. Eddie finds that more charming than he wants to. As with many things involving Steve Harrington, he’s learned. A couple of days of sporadic food delivery and one evening of hiking through the underworld with the guy and he’s well on his way from idle aesthetic appreciation to a full-blown crush. Mortifying.

“Hypothetically,” Steve says, like Dustin hasn’t even spoken. “If you know something bad is going to happen and there’s probably no way to stop it, should you say something or should you just shut up about it so you don’t freak everybody out?”

“Is this about Vecna?” Nancy asks sharply from the couch. “Because we have to try. Even if it doesn’t work. We have to.”

“It’s not about Vecna—okay, it’s not directly about Vecna—like I said. It’s a hypothetical.”

“I mean taking into account the fact that you’ve already skewed the data just by asking us that,” Dustin says. “This doesn’t really sound hypothetical. If it’s not about Vecna—”

“It’s not, man, or at least, like, I’m pretty sure he’s not the one causing it, because it doesn’t seem like he realized any of the times we went up against him before, but…” Steve trails off and seems to realize that they’re all staring at him. He heaves a sigh and flops down on the couch next to Eddie, then puts his head back and closes his eyes, the picture of defeat. “Shit. Okay. I’m stuck in a recursive temporal loop. This is the…” he counts silently on his fingers, then says, “thirtieth time I’ve lived through today. Yeah. I’m pretty sure it’s the thirtieth. I gotta be honest with you, I’m probably going to start losing track pretty soon.”

There’s silence for a long moment, then Dustin says, “You can’t remember which Star Wars movie is which but you know what a recursive temporal loop is?”

“Yeah, well, you’ve explained it to me like a dozen fucking times now, Henderson, eventually even I can catch on.” Steve glances at Erica. “Uh, sorry.”

“I’ve heard worse,” she says blithely. “You figure out what’s causing it? If it’s not Vecna, I mean?”

“No, the only thing I’ve figured out is that it always resets when—uh.” Steve winces hard, then shoots Eddie a furtive look that makes his stomach drop.

“Why do I feel like I’m going to hate whatever it is you’re about to say?” he asks slowly.

“Yeah, you probably are, because, um.” Steve’s hands do an odd abortive motion, almost like he was about to reach out to Eddie before he stopped himself. His fingers curl inward. All in a rush, he says, “Every time, the loop resets because you die, man.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. It comes out sounding numb; he feels numb. Everyone has stopped staring at Steve and is now staring at him.

Dustin, of course, recovers the fastest. “Okay, but we can stop it. Forewarned is forearmed, so now that we all know we can change how it plays out.”

“You don’t think I’ve been trying?” Steve snaps.

“Okay,” Dustin says, putting his hands up. His lower lip is looking a little wobbly, and Steve must notice, because he scrubs a hand over his mouth, then sighs.

“Sorry. I know you’re just trying to help.”

“Yeah,” Dustin says quietly. His voice cracks.

“Holy shit, I hate this,” Eddie mutters, and drops his face into his hands.

“Sorry,” Steve says again, sounding so genuinely hangdog that Eddie can’t help but let out a faintly hysterical little yelp of laughter.

“It’s not like it’s your fault that the universe has it in for me—like, I mean, that’s not exactly news, right, considering that I’m suspected of murder and also devil worship and half the citizens of this good town want my head on a pike—so maybe I should have expected fate itself to make an appearance just to make sure it sticks.”

“What if it’s not that, though?” Lucas asks slowly. “What if it’s the opposite? Like, every time you die, the universe resets so it didn’t happen. That’s more like—I don’t know. Like you have a guardian angel or something.”

“I just don’t get why it would be Steve, out of all the people—I mean, no offense,” Robin adds. “But…”

“You think I know? I don’t know. I have been trying, here, okay, I tried sending him with Lucas and Max, I tried sticking with him, I tried talking him out of going with us…” Steve is ticking off on his fingers as he counts, his voice brittle and sharp. Eddie swallows hard and watches his hands move so he doesn’t have to look at anyone else’s face. Steve’s in particular. “I even tried leaving him behind on the side of the road one time when he wouldn’t agree to stay behind, and I’m not actually sure what happened that time, either, but—”

“Freak season in Hawkins, Indiana,” Eddie says. Bitterness lingers on his tongue. “Bet I can guess.”

Steve winces. “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

Eddie doesn’t know either, but he can imagine it. A car full of good, god-fearing concerned citizens with pitchforks at the ready to rid the world of one Edward Joseph Munson, queer metalhead freak at large. It’s not a new concern, is the thing. Under the circumstances, it’s almost funny. Of all the stupid ways to die.

“What if he agreed to stay put?” Nancy says. Before Eddie can object to being talked about like he’s not here, she turns to him. “If you agreed, and we found somewhere safe for you to stay, just until it’s over—”

It’s a kindness. He knows it is. Nancy is a kind person under all that sharpness. But it still stings, in the same way it stung this morning in his living room when she looked him up and down and said, This isn’t really your problem.

Like maybe this is the universe itself trying to tell him that he’s not cut out to be a hero. He never thought he was, not really, but after last night he at least thought that he could help.

But Dustin is looking at him with big, worried eyes, and Steve looks like the weight of the world is crushing him down into Max’s sagging couch, and maybe the best way Eddie can help this time is by staying the hell out of the way and letting the real heroes do the work.

It stings, yeah, but what else is new.

“You can stay at my place,” Steve says quietly. Pleadingly, almost. “My parents are out of town.”

“And for sure nobody will ever go looking for me there,” Eddie says. He grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, then barks out a laugh. “Okay, fine, Harrington. I’ll hole up in your palace for the duration if you think that’s what’s best.”

Steve’s shoulders sag. He looks so relieved that it almost makes Eddie feel better about cowering behind while the rest of them walk into danger.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, good. Thank you.”

“Anytime,” Eddie tells him, and looks away.

“We should probably get going,” Nancy says quietly. “If we’re going to go. We need to drop Eddie off, we need to get to the War Zone stock up on weaponry—”

“I am still super uncomfortable with this whole concept, for the record,” Robin says. “I can’t even shoot a gun. I have literally never fired a gun in my life, and you’ve seen how uncoordinated I am, you’ve seen how I run, if you give me a gun I am going to shoot myself or somebody else other than Vecna, and it’ll just be a disaster—”

“Besides, I thought the idea here was to avoid angry hicks,” Erica adds. “A store called the War Zone? Probably not the place for that.”

“Well, normally I’d agree with you, but we can’t go up against Vecna empty-handed,” Nancy says. She leans over to tap to the paper that Eddie spread across the table earlier on in the planning stage, before Steve abruptly turned around mid-sentence and stalked out the back door. “Besides. I can fire a gun.”

“Right,” Robin says, rubbing her elbows. “Right, just—I’m just. Really freaking out here, okay, I’m sorry.”

“It’ll be okay,” Nancy says, and leans close enough to bump against Robin in a comforting kind of gesture. Robin blinks, then goes bright red, and huh. Huh.

“Okay, but how are we even going to get there?” Dustin asks. “We have our bikes, but Eddie can’t really go out on the road for fear of being seen by—”

“The aforementioned murderous hicks, yeah,” Eddie says. A thought occurs to him then, a flashbulb of inspiration that almost makes him grin. It’ll be risky as hell, and if he pulls it off it’ll be another blot on his already very blotchy record with the law, but needs must when the devil drives, as the Bard once said. Or something close to that, anyway. “Don't worry. We’re not going to need bikes.”

“What, do you have another car, or something?”

“Oh, it’s not a car, Henderson,” he says, and he is grinning now, wide and wild and almost giddy with it. “And it’s not exactly mine, but it’ll do.”

He looks up to see Steve watching him. It’s a different look than the freaked out, exhausted anxiety that he’s been cloaked in since he woke up. Different, and harder to read. Knowing, a little bit amused, a little bit—dare he say it—fond.

Because he’s done this before, hasn’t he? Steve knows exactly what he’s about to propose. And he’s not protesting, he’s not even stepping in to take control of the moment, he’s just—letting Eddie have this.

Eddie raises his eyebrows, and Steve tilts his head slightly, a faint shrug, like he’s saying, go on, get to it.

It’s the same kind of silent communication he was doing with Nancy last night, but if Eddie thinks too much about that then the top of his head might blow off or something, so he turns to the other side of the living room where Max is lingering, watching this whole scene play out in wary silence. “Hey, Red. You got a bandana or a mask or something around here?”

Steve crowds behind him as he pries the steering column of the RV open and yanks the wires out to start stripping them, hands moving automatically through the familiar motions. The proximity is distracting, but fortunately, Eddie could probably do this blindfolded if he had to. And it’s not a bad kind of distracting, it’s just… yeah. Distracting.

He doesn’t realize that Robin has also crowded in close until she speaks. “Eddie, no offense, but I’m not sure I love the idea of you driving.”

“Oh, I’m just starting the sucker. Harrington’s got her.” He leans right up into Steve’s face. Recklessly close, close enough to kiss that pretty mouth if he were really suffering from a death wish here. “Don’t you, big boy?”

He’s expecting—he doesn’t know what, exactly. For Steve to jerk back, or freak out, or—or, shit, maybe he just wants to do something that Steve won’t be expecting for once. But Steve doesn’t jerk away, and he doesn’t even look startled, which begs the question: how many times has Eddie done exactly this, and how much has Steve put together from that?

He’s not sure he wants an answer, which is lucky, because he doesn’t get one; the engine catches and turns over, and Steve shoves into the seat as the hapless owners of this lovely motorhome start yelling and banging on the doors.

Eddie spares a moment to feel guilty about that, and then Steve throws it into gear and stomps the gas, and they’re off.

They stick to the backroads, looping around through the woods on the outside of town to bring them around to Loch Nora, a locale Eddie has exclusively visited in the past on business. He’s been to Steve’s house before, actually, although he’s not sure if Steve remembers. Or even if Steve was actually present at the time; his house parties had a tendency to take on a life of their own once they started. Legendary. Kind of sad, too, in retrospect.

“We’re going to need gas pretty soon,” Steve says as they pass the turn onto Old Highway 77. “You think it’s safe to stop? Like, if the cops are going to be looking for us—”

“The cops are going to be way too busy looking for him,” Max says, jerking her chin toward Eddie, who spreads his hands and offers an ironic little bow. She rolls her eyes, but there’s a hint of a smile there.

“Right,” Steve mutters. “I just mean, we’re not exactly inconspicuous in a stolen RV.”

“We’re not going to be inconspicuous if we run out of gas on the side of the road, either,” Dustin points out reasonably, so Steve swears under his breath and spins the wheel and they coast into the Kwik Fill just off the highway exit. The lot is empty besides them, but Eddie still hangs back in the RV away from the windows while Steve pumps gas and the kids all pile into the convenience store to load up on snacks. Robin hangs back with him. For a while they sit in companionable silence, listening to the sounds of traffic on the highway through the trees, to Lucas and Erica sniping at each other over by the vending machine. Steve has finished filling the tank; now he and Nancy are at the edge of the lot, talking quietly with their heads bent together. Eddie watches them for a few minutes, then looks at Robin, who is wearing a look he can only define as yearning.

“So,” he says eventually, nodding toward them. “Nancy, huh?”

Robin starts, then looks over at him, wide-eyed and edging toward frightened. Which, yeah, shit. Probably he shouldn't have said anything. That'll be his epitaph someday: Here Lies Edward Munson. Should Have Kept His Big Mouth Shut.

But then she looks back across the parking lot, pulling her lower lip thoughtfully between her teeth.

“So,” she says, in a pretty good imitation of Eddie’s faux-casual tone. “Steve, huh.”

Yeah, okay, she’s got him there. “Touché, Buckley.”

“Thought so,” Robin mutters. Eddie digs out his cigarettes, slips one into his mouth, then offers her the pack.

“I don’t smoke.”

“Suit yourself. You mind if I do?”

“Go ahead,” Robin says, and so he does. They sit there together quietly for a few minutes while cigarette smoke winds up into the air. Then she says, “Steve knows. About me.”

Eddie glances over at her. He did wonder, with all that totally-platonic-with-a-capital-P shit, but somehow it’s still a surprise to hear it confirmed. “He does?”

“Yeah. I told him last year when we were both high out of our minds on Russian interrogation drugs.”

“And he was cool about it?” Eddie asks, even though he obviously was. Even though that's maybe not the most important part of that sentence—Steve made one offhand remark about being tortured by Russians that first night and hasn't brought it up since, and Eddie's been dying of curiosity. It's not the kind of thing you just ask about, though, and right now this seems more important.

She nods. Her smile is a little wobbly. “I was scared. I was so scared, you know, that he'd hate me or that he’d tell everybody and I’d go back to school and they’d all know, and my parents would find out and they’d—I guess I don’t have to explain all that, right?”

“Nah, I get it,” Eddie admits, tilting his head back to stare up at the nicotine-stained ceiling. He lucked out, when it came to his uncle. Wayne’s a good one. Plenty of people aren’t. Before this week he would have bet good money that Steve Harrington was one of those people.

“That makes you the second person I’ve told,” Robin says, watching the smoke haze beginning to accumulate at the ceiling. “That I like girls, I mean. Which is like—it’s weird, right?”

“That you’re telling me? That is pretty weird, yeah.”

“No. Well, yeah, but if Steve’s right about all this, and you don’t—” she winces.

“If I don’t make it out of today alive,” Eddie supplies, with a dry edge of irony that he doesn’t in the least bit feel.

“Or if it resets for some other reason,” Robin insists. “It’s just—then I won’t remember telling you, and you won’t remember me telling you, and it’s—it’s weird, right, and it’s fucked up that Steve’s the only one who gets to keep any of this.”

“Doesn’t exactly seem like a party for him, either.”

“No, of course not, it’s just… I don’t know, I babble, I don’t know how to shut up and I just say these things, and it’s only after I say them that I’m like, oh, that came across kind of wrong and shitty—”

Eddie bursts out laughing. “Now that I definitely get.”

Robin ducks her chin. Smiles a little. It’s wobbly but it feels like a triumph all the same, the way it feels like a triumph to see his little corner of the cafeteria straighten their spines and laugh at his antics when he’s taunting the jocks. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“Don’t worry, I fully plan on making it out alive this time around. Unless one of King Steve’s marble statues or whatever falls over and crushes me like a bug—”

“Marble statues?”

“I mean, sure? I don’t know how rich people live.”

“You’ve been to his house before, though. Or, I mean. Steve said you had?”

The fact that he actually remembers that makes Eddie feel things that he'd rather not. “Purely in a business capacity, I assure you. You think his majesty was inviting a freak like me to his soirées? I was just there to distribute mind-altering substances to his adoring fans.”

“Pretty sure they were more like keg stands.”

“My bad,” Eddie says dryly.

Robin looks out across the parking lot, and Eddie follows her gaze. Steve and Nancy have started back toward the camper, walking close together but not touching. They make a pretty couple. Prom King and Prom Queen, and it would all make Eddie want to puke a little, except now he knows what’s underneath the glamor, and it’s something brave and shining and real. Something that’s as out of reach for Eddie as Madison Square Garden.

Quietly, Robin says, “He’s not like that anymore.”

“Yeah,” Eddie admits, and doesn’t say the other part: that it might be a little easier on his heart if Steve was still the oblivious entitled douchebag of Hawkins High fame. Simpler, anyway. He takes another drag on his cigarette, then says, “Russian interrogation drugs, huh?”

Robin puts her head back against the seat, laughing. “Oh, my god. It is a long story.”

And they’re just about out of time. The camper door swings open, and he can hear Steve’s voice below, hustling the kids up the steps. “Come on, come on, come on, let’s go already.”

“That’s nasty,” Erica informs Eddie as she drops into her seat, gesturing to the cigarette. “You couldn’t even open a window?”

“My apologies,” Eddie says, crushing the cigarette out and rolling open the window just enough to toss the butt out onto the pavement. To Robin, he says, “I’m gonna want to hear that story sometime, though. Once this is over.”

She leans over to nudge his shoulder briefly with hers. “Yeah. Once this is over.”

Dustin and Lucas both insist on hugging him outside of the Harrington estate, and Eddie allows it even though it makes him feel more than a little stupid. He’s not going off to war; he’s literally doing the opposite. But Dustin is as insistent about crushing Eddie’s ribs and jamming his face into Eddie’s shoulder here as he was at Skull Rock yesterday, and Eddie is only slightly less taken aback by it this time.

“Stay safe,” he orders. “I mean it. You better stay safe.”

“I should say the same of you,” Eddie says, and gets another squeeze for his trouble. Finally, Dustin releases him, adjusting his baseball cap.

“Steve’s got it under control. He’s already got experience with battle.” A pause. “Get it? Bat-tle. B-A-T—”

“Okay, you’re not funny,” Steve says, exasperated. Eddie laughs and tugs Dustin’s baseball cap off to ruffle his curly hair.

“Never change, Dustin Henderson.”

“Give me that back,” Dustin says, doing his best to look huffy as he snatches the hat out of Eddie’s hand. He breaks a moment later though, grinning. “I won’t. I promise.”

“Good.” He looks at Steve over Dustin’s head. “Keep an eye on him, would you?”

“Yeah, man, always,” Steve says. He hesitates, swaying closer, and for an instant Eddie wonders if he’s going in for a hug too. In the end, though, he just gives Eddie a firm, manly clap on the shoulder.

Eddie tries not to lean into it too obviously. “Take care of yourself, too, King Steve.”

“Okay,” Steve says, disarmingly steady. He keeps doing that shit—taking Eddie’s self-defensive flippancy and turning it on its head. It’s unnerving. “Stay safe, Eddie. I mean it.”

“Yeah, well, you know me,” Eddie says with an airy little flicker of his hand.

“Yeah,” Steve says, like that’s the problem. “Exactly.”

He gives Eddie a long look, then steps back. He hustles Dustin back toward the RV where Nancy and Robin are already waiting. Eddie gives them a wave, then folds his arms and steps back under the shadow of the trees lining the driveway as Steve executes a neat, quick K-turn with the unwieldy vehicle and accelerates out onto the road. And then he’s alone.

The whole point of this was to stay out of sight, but it still takes Eddie a few minutes to make himself unlock the front door with the key Steve pressed into his hand. It’s dim inside, unnervingly clean. He pulls the door shut behind him and moves into the entry hall, toeing his shoes off as he does. The carpet is lush and soft beneath his bare feet. He has been here before, but the space looks different when it’s not packed to the brim with drunk upperclassmen; the echoing silence makes it feel like a mausoleum.

The kitchen is miles of gleaming tile and fancy appliances, but when he pulls open the fridge there are six different kinds of mustard, a few cans of beer, a container of takeout that looks like it’s about to develop sentience, and nothing else. Eddie shuts the door and pokes through the cabinets, the contents of which are similarly bleak—how Steve maintains that physique on a diet of instant ramen and takeout is a mystery—then wanders into the living room. There’s a handsome set of Klipsch speakers hooked up to a state-of-the-art stereo system that makes him want to weep. The record collection in the attached shelving unit also kind of makes him want to weep, albeit for different reasons.

Maybe Steve will let him bring some of his own tapes over after this is all over. He can just imagine how good Paranoid will sound on those.

The rest of the house looks like a magazine spread, or a very fancy hotel lobby. Steve’s bedroom is immediately recognizable by virtue of being the only room in the house to display any signs of regular human habitation. It’s hideous, sure, with those plaid walls, but there are posters up, clothes tossed over the furniture, a shelf with sports trophies, haphazard stacks of tapes—less depressing than the collection downstairs; maybe there’s hope for Steve yet. Eddie flips over Jazz, tapping his fingers thoughtfully on the psychedelic white-on-black cover art, the row of little figures on bicycles above the tracklist.

Eventually, though, he sets the tape down and moves on.

It’s a weird, claustrophobic afternoon, time moving like molasses. Even with the size of the place, Eddie feels like the walls are tilting in on him; the temptation to run outside just to feel like he can breathe is overwhelming.

Solitude and silence, two things he’s never really done all that well with. His fingers keep itching to turn on the walkie that they left him with, just to check in. Just to make sure everything’s okay. Just to—fucking hear another human voice. Eventually, he turns the TV on, but even that echoes strangely in this empty mausoleum of a house. How Steve lives like this on a day to day basis is beyond him.

Maybe that explains all of those parties, in retrospect. Maybe it was less about cementing his spot as king than it was about just… not wanting to be alone. It's a depressing thought.

He heats up a frozen dinner—Stouffer’s cheddar potato bake—and eats it standing up in the kitchen, then makes another circuit of the house while the local news drones on about the latest in the hunt for Edward Munson, suspected cult leader, suspected murderer. He should probably turn that off, but instead he slips back into Steve’s room and pulls the door shut, enclosing himself in a dark plaid box. It’s like being inside a steamer trunk full of sports paraphernalia. He flops back onto Steve’s bed, which smells like Steve’s cologne and whatever expensive flowery stuff he uses to make his hair do that. Eddie presses his nose into the pillow, feeling kind of pathetic, but it’s not like anyone is there to see him. He closes his eyes. Breathes in.

The jittery adrenaline that’s been keeping him upright is slowly draining away into exhaustion. It’s been at least a week since he’s slept more than an hour at a time, and Steve’s bed is a hell of a lot more comfortable than the lumpy couch at Rick’s. Or the dank cushions under the tarp in the boathouse, for that matter.

Just another minute, and he’ll get up. Just one more minute.

He opens his eyes, disoriented, to find that the room is dark, lit only by the eerie rippling light from the pool outside. He sits up, rubbing his face, blinking out into the night; the forest beyond the yard lights is a grim, dark tangle that seems like it could hide just about anything. He wonders suddenly if he remembered to lock the front door.

He’s on his way down the stairs when the walkie at his hip shrieks, startling him so badly that he nearly loses his footing and tumbles the rest of the way down to crack his skull open on the marble tile below. Which would be a fucking mortifying way to go out, after all this shit.

He clutches at the railing, heart thudding, as the walkie squeals again. Then Lucas’s voice comes in, quick and panicked. “Hello? Is anybody there?” A brief pause. “Dustin—Steve—does anybody copy?”

“Lucas we copy. We just came back through the gate. What’s wrong? Over.” That’s Dustin, alive and well. Eddie sags in relief that goes up in smoke a moment later.

“It’s Max, she’s—it’s Max, I—I don’t know if—if she’s—”

That’s not interference crackling in between his words, Eddie realizes. Lucas is crying.

He sits down abruptly on the stairs. All he can see right now is Chrissy.

Chrissy, dead-eyed and floating. Chrissy’s joints snapping backwards, her jaw dislocating, her eyes crushed to wet pulp from within. And Max—

The walkie crackles again, and Steve’s voice echoes down the line. “Lucas, sit tight. We’re on our way to you. It’ll be okay,” he adds, like that’s something he can promise. Like he can make it be true just by saying it. 

Eddie thumbs the button of his walkie. “I’m on my way over, too.”

“What? No—Eddie, stay put, you don’t even have a car—”

“Didn’t we just have baby’s first lesson in hotwiring? I’ll figure something out. Don’t worry about it.”

He turns the walkie off before Steve can try to argue and starts down the stairs, across the foyer, out into the night. He's halfway down the front walk when the sky cracks with sudden thunder, red light flaring. Eddie stumbles and keeps stumbling, the earth beneath him suddenly unsteady.

The flaring light is getting closer, the thunder getting louder, a crashing, roaring, impossible sound.

Vecna’s gates. The fourth death, the last one he needed to rip open the world. Max.

The trees across the street bend and twist like a sudden gale is blowing through them, then fall away. The wind that whips his face has that icy, rotting stink of the Upside Down. Eddie stumbles back, and the earth beneath him opens up, and he’s falling into endless crushing darkness.

THIRTY-ONE — March 28, 1986. 9:15 AM

“Okay, so go through it again,” Nancy says, leaning over the notebook that Max dug out of her backpack. The front of it reads, Mrs. Klein - 9th GRADE BIO. Max herself has retreated, not quite leaning against Lucas but standing close enough that their elbows bump. Her fingers twist and untwist the headphone cord. Kate Bush’s tinny voice echoes up from the speakers.

She meets Eddie’s eyes, then looks away quickly. Eddie gets it, despite the sick lurch in the pit of his stomach. If Steve is telling the truth, which unfortunately Eddie thinks he is, they’re both dead men walking today.

Dead woman walking, in Max’s case. If fourteen even qualifies as that, Christ. She’s just a kid.

“Steve?” Nancy prompts when he doesn’t answer right away. Her eyes are still red, but her cheeks have been scrubbed dry and her mouth is pressed in a firm line. Eddie thinks that she looks steadier like this, with a puzzle to solve and a battle to fight, and that’s something he just does not get, because all he wants to do right now is hide under the couch until this all blows over.

“I already told you everything I remember,” Steve says. He looks exhausted, and he hasn’t looked at Eddie or Max since he started talking. Like he can’t bear to or something. “It’s not like I can just write it down. It’s a total reset, every time.”

He rubs at his side, winces, and drops his hand.

“You need someone to take a look at those bites, dude?” Eddie asks quietly.

He’s not sure Steve will even acknowledge him, but after a moment, he glances sideways at Eddie and says, “Why, are you offering?”

“Sure,” Eddie says. “Uh, Red? Bathroom?”

“Second door down,” Max says, waving a hand at the hallway. Eddie watches Steve unfold painfully off of the couch and wishes that he felt sure enough to reach out and steady him. Nancy half-stands and Robin catches his elbow, but when he’s finally standing he’s standing alone.

Eddie follows him down the hall as Lucas says, “Okay, I still think we should try contacting El again.”

“I called the house like fifteen times, nobody’s answering,” Max says.

Erica: “Okay, but what about that other guy—you know, the bald weirdo—”

“You mean Murray? I guess we could try…”

Eddie follows Steve into the bathroom and pulls the door shut behind him, muffling the rest of that discussion. The cramped space is tiled in faded yellow, the light overhead flickering briefly when he turns it on. Steve sinks down onto the toilet lid, shoves a hand through his hair, winces again.

“You okay?” Eddie asks.

Steve laughs: a short, sharp burst of sound. “Yeah, uh, not really.”

“That was probably a stupid question,” Eddie allows. Steve laughs again, then sucks a breath through his teeth as he starts to pull the vest off. Eddie reaches to help him without thinking about what he’s doing until he’s already sliding the body-warm denim off of Steve’s shoulders, and at that point it would be even more incriminating to stop.

“Thanks,” Steve says quietly as he folds the vest and sets it on the edge of the sink. “I think I got blood on it, sorry.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind it, actually. Bloodstains are very, uh, you know, very…”

“Metal?” Steve asks. It’s almost tentative, the way he says it.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

“I’ll take it,” Steve murmurs. He starts unwinding the blood-soaked makeshift bandage around his midsection to display ragged bite wounds and skin grimed with blood and Upside Down filth. The bloody fabric slops into the tub a moment later.

Eddie winces and turns to open the bathroom cabinet, which turns out to be surprisingly well-stocked. He pulls out bandages and medical tape and iodine and sets them on the counter, then says, “So, we should probably rinse that first.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, shifting painfully onto the edge of the tub. “Warm water, right?”

“You know your first aid, Harrington.” 

“Not really. You told me.”

“We’ve done this before?”

Steve nods. He’s watching Eddie intently, and something about that look makes Eddie very aware of how close they’re sitting.

“Oh,” Eddie whispers. It feels significant, but he doesn’t know how, or what to do about it. He clears his throat. “Here, if you lean a little—gonna get your pants wet, sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Steve murmurs, and closes his eyes to let Eddie rinse out the ragged wounds until the water runs clear, to pat the skin around them dry and apply iodine.

Eddie opens the box of bandages, which turns out to be half empty. “Surprised little Red has such a well-stocked medicine cabinet.”

“She skateboards,” Steve says, which Eddie supposes he did know, actually. “Kid’s a daredevil. Took half the skin off her knees trying out some stunt a few weeks ago and still didn’t quit until she got it right.”

“She’s pretty goddamn brave,” Eddie says. “You’re worried about her?”

Steve takes a deep breath. His stomach muscles shift under Eddie’s fingers. “Not just her.”

“Steve Harrington fretting over the lowly court jester, will wonders never cease,” Eddie says lightly, reaching for the tape.

Steve makes a noise under his breath, then reaches out to wrap his fingers gently around Eddie's wrist, stilling him.

Eddie gulps. His pulse is suddenly racing, and he wonders if Steve can feel it through his skin. Steve’s hand is large and warm, calloused where the weight of his grip sits. Dark bruises wrap around his wrist and forearm to match the ones on his throat.

Eddie takes a deep breath, then lifts his head. He is suddenly excruciatingly conscious of how close they’re sitting, of how their relative positions puts him a head lower than Steve, so that he has to lift his chin to meet his eyes. Steve’s eyes flicker over his face, lingering, and there’s something in that look that makes Eddie’s breath catch.

“Eddie,” Steve says quietly. He pauses, wets his lips, and something that might be anticipation or panic stills every single word Eddie could think of blurting out.

A sharp knock at the door makes them both jump. Steve lets out a pained hiss, and Eddie drops the tape with a clatter as Dustin shoves the door open, already talking.

“Okay, so Murray isn’t answering his phone either—surprise, surprise—and we were all talking it over, and we think the best plan is to…” he trails off, looking between them. His brow furrows. “Am I interrupting something?”

“No,” Steve says shortly. He shifts his weight, winces obviously, then just as obviously tries to hide it.

“Jesus,” Dustin says, moving into the room, then rocking back on his heels. “Steve, that looks bad.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t feel great either, thanks,” Steve says. There’s an audible eyeroll in his voice; whatever moment they were just having has vanished like smoke in the breeze and he is once again Steve Harrington, prom king turned long-suffering babysitter, and nothing more.

“Hand me the tape there, would you, Henderson?” Eddie says, and gets to work bandaging up Steve’s side, carefully focusing on absolutely nothing else. When all the bites are covered with clean squares of bandage, he shifts back, out of Steve's space. “You said something about a plan?”

“Oh,” Dustin says. “Yeah, we think—and this is Nancy-approved, okay, so yell at her and not me—that you should go with Lucas and Max. Because that makes sense, right, you won’t be in the Upside Down, and—bonus—you can help Lucas guard Max to make extra sure nothing goes wrong there this time—”

Steve sighs. “Okay, and I already told you, we tried that before and Carver found them.”

“Right!” Dustin points at him, triumphant. “But, only because someone saw Erica and called in the cavalry. Right?”

“I mean—I think so?” Steve says warily.

“Right, so if she goes around the backyard and signals from there—it’s just woods out back, nobody will see anything. No jocks interrupting, no new variables to worry about—”

“I still think this is a terrible idea,” Steve says, but in a tired way like he already knows he’s not going to win this argument. “Max shouldn’t be involved at all.”

Dustin’s shoulders slump. “Yeah. Yeah, well, we tried telling her that. You’re welcome to try, too, but—it’s Max. You know? She says if Vecna’s going to try and kill her, she’s going to make it count.”

He glances sidelong at Eddie, and Steve is looking at him too, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they’re both about to offer him an out. Offer him an opportunity to run away and hide like he’s already done once before, apparently, and let Max die for it.

Eddie slaps his thighs and gets to his feet before either of them can speak. “Okay! Well, if we’re actually going through with this batshit plan, we’re going to need some transportation.”

“What, do you have another car stashed here somewhere?” Dustin asks.

Steve snorts, and Eddie glances up to see a tiny glimmer of humor in his face as he pulls Eddie’s battle vest back on. So this isn’t new either. Eddie grins back at him.

“Oh, it’s not a car. And it’s not exactly mine, but it’ll do. Steve knows.” And recklessly—still wired on that moment they had earlier—he leans back into Steve’s space, grinning wildly. “Don’t you, big boy?”

Steve doesn’t jerk away. He doesn’t even give Eddie a weird look. He just laughs under his breath, shrugs his shoulders a little to settle the jacket, and says, “Come on, Munson, let's go steal an RV.”

Eddie cackles, delighted, and stands aside to let him out of the room.

“Wait, what?” Dustin says. “What, we’re stealing a what—hey, come on, wait up!”

“Be careful. Both of you,” Steve says that evening when he’s dropping them off. His face is shadowed and intensely serious as he looks between Eddie and Max.

“Just them?” Erica asks from behind him, sounding affronted.

“All of you,” Steve amends. “I mean it. If anything goes wrong, anything, you pull the plug. You don’t worry about us, you keep yourselves safe. Got it?”

“Got it,” Lucas says.

“Look, if—” Max starts.

“Is that clear?”

“Fine, okay, I got it! God.”

“I mean it, Max,” Steve says, in a much softer tone. He holds her gaze for a moment, and Eddie sees the moment she folds.

“Okay,” she says again, wrapping her arms around herself. When Steve touches her elbow briefly, though, she leans into it. “We’ll be careful. Kick his ass, okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Eddie…”

“What she said,” Eddie says, hooking a thumb at Max. “Better get this flying circus on the road. Catch you on the flip side, Harrington.”

Steve breathes out a laugh. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and lets them go.

Eddie watches the RV pull out onto the street, then turns to follow the others across the overgrown backyard of the Creel house. Halfway there, Max and Lucas link hands and don’t let go. 

Eddie is a chronic overthinker. Not in a way that tends to make him more inclined to be sensible, as anyone who’s ever observed the dumbass shit he gets himself into could probably attest. It’s more like his mind has an insatiable appetite for finding a loose thread and picking at it until it drives him crazy.

In this case, that thread is the bathroom this morning. The way Steve looked at him right before Dustin barged in. It was probably nothing, he knows it was probably nothing, or it was another entreaty for Eddie to be careful and don’t die, don’t make me live through this bullshit day again, but… somehow it didn’t feel like that. Somehow it felt like something different, something he can’t let himself believe lest he lose what little sense he’s got left.

Right, because Steve Harrington was really looking at him, Eddie Munson, like he wanted to kiss him. Because that’s a thing that would happen outside of his guilty fantasies.

Because his stupid crush on Steve is really what he should be focused on right now.

Eddie sighs and thunks his forehead against the window frame. Outside, he can just see Erica: a small figure in the overgrown tangle of the backyard. There’s a decrepit set of garden furniture back there, and she’s perched herself on a spindly chair, head tilted like she’s listening for something.

Then she stands, lifting her flashlight. The light seems blinding in the dark; Eddie rubs at his eyes as he turns back toward where Max and Lucas are having a silent conversation with their notepads. They both turn toward him: Lucas has a smile still fading from his lips; Max's eyes are fierce. They both look terribly young.

“Go time,” Eddie says reluctantly, and Lucas closes his eyes. Max nods, firms her jaw, and pulls her headphones off.

Eddie circles around to the front of the attic as she talks, trying not to listen to it. He hears more than he wants to anyway.

“I just stood there and watched. Not because I was weak, but because I didn’t know if he deserved to be saved. And I’ve tried to forgive myself, I’ve tried, but I can’t… I can’t… so now, when I lie in bed at night, I pray that something terrible will happen to me.”

Silence echoes in the wake of that. Then Lucas takes a shaky breath and says, “Max?”

She doesn’t answer. When Eddie turns, she’s deadly still, white-eyed, frozen. Lucas falls to his knees next to her, and Eddie swallows twice and says, “I’ll signal the others.”

He’s not even sure Lucas heard him. He feels guiltily, horribly relieved to move back toward the other side of the attic and signal Erica. She signals back in acknowledgement, and Eddie takes a deep breath and lets himself sag. Now there’s nothing left to do but wait.

The moment he has that thought, there’s the sound of tires on the street out front. Blue and red lights flash from below.

“Shit,” Eddie hisses, and Lucas’s head jerks up. He takes in the police lights, turns back to stare at Eddie, wide-eyed, as heavy footsteps echo on the front step. Voices from below, then a loud knock.

“Edward Munson! We have a warrant for your arrest, come out with your hands up!”

“Maybe they won’t—” Wood shatters from below before Lucas can even finish the sentence. He half-rises, looks at Max, then sinks back down. “How did they even know?”

“Neighbors must have called them or something. I don’t know. Shit.”

“Maybe they won’t look up here,” Lucas whispers, with what sounds like way more hope than confidence. There are footsteps on the stairs, spreading out to search the house. Four of them at least. The bulk of the manpower that Hawkins PD has to offer, how flattering. Eddie swallows a hysterical giggle.

“Oh, I think we are shit out of luck on that particular front, my friend,” he says, and starts toward the stairs.

Lucas makes like he’s going to get up again, then glances at Max again and sinks back down with an agonized look. “What are you doing?”

“Buying time,” Eddie says. “Tell Harrington he’d better spring for my lawyer.”

Before Lucas can answer, he races down the stairs, quick and clattering. He hears the cops below yell, converging footsteps, and he has the presence of mind to put both hands in the air when he stops at the second story landing.

Chief Powell pushes to the front, reaching for the cuffs at his belt as the other three aim their guns at Eddie. It is not actually the first time he’s had a gun pointed at him—hazard of the job—but somehow this is so much worse than that time some strung-out junkie waved a shotgun in his face over a pricing dispute.

“You’re not going to give us any trouble, are you, Eddie?” Powell asks, stepping carefully forward like he's approaching a rabid animal.

Eddie shakes his head. He’d really like to mouth off, but some of those trigger fingers are looking worryingly twitchy. “No, sir.”

“Good,” Powell says. “Now, turn around, face the—”

Everything after that happens very fast. There’s a clatter from upstairs, then a sudden crash like something heavy just hit the floor. Lucas yells, “Max, no, please, no—Max—”

The house rattles, the staircase lurching and bowing beneath them. Eddie flings out a hand to steady himself, and the air is suddenly full of thunder. Agony rips through his chest.

“Stand down, stand down!” Powell barks, but it's too late.

Eddie's legs give out. He hits the stairs hard, breath expelling from his lungs, and when he tries to take another it doesn’t come.

Powell is leaning over him a moment later, hands pressed to the wound. Eddie jerks beneath him, gasping like a beached fish, and Powell turns to shout at someone behind him. The floor lurches again, then cracks open, sending them both tumbling down into yawning darkness.

THIRTY-TWO — March 28, 1986. 7:25 AM

Eddie hands Nancy a cup of coffee and leans down to shake Robin and Steve gently by the shoulders. Robin wakes first, bleary-eyed and dazed-looking.

“There's coffee in the kitchen,” Eddie tells her quietly. “Wheeler has the sugar bowl.”

“Kay,” Robin mumbles. Steve is still out cold; she grabs his shoulder to jostle him much less gently than Eddie just did. “Hey. Dingus. Wake up already.”

Steve's eyes fly open. He blinks at Robin, then at Eddie, and his expression just—crumples. He shoves both hands over his face, heaves a deep, shaky-sounding breath, and mutters, “Fuck.”

“Harrington?” Eddie says, alarmed. “You good, dude?”

“Yeah, not really, actually,” Steve says, muffled by his palms. 

Nancy sets her coffee cup down with a hard clink. “Steve?”

“Yeah.” Still muffled. Steve rubs his face, tugs at his grimy hair, then lets his hands drop. He's dry-eyed but looks wan and gaunt and exhausted, like somehow sleep has made him more tired. Like he's aged a decade in the past eight hours. “Let's get the kids up. We need to come up with another plan.”

Chapter Text

THIRTY-TWO —March 28, 1986. 11:30 PM

Steve hasn’t moved from his spot by the door in at least an hour, in Eddie’s estimation. It’s not like he can check; his watch has been frozen at 8:26 since he dove into Lover’s Lake yesterday night, the minute hand twitching spasmodically but never actually moving forward. Which is a pretty apt metaphor for this situation, actually.

There are no clocks in Hopper’s old cabin. Everything is coated in a thick layer of dust that he feels weird about disturbing too much—less out of respect for the dearly departed police chief's privacy and more out of a lingering fear that the cantankerous old bastard will come back to haunt him for disturbing the peace.

There's no power, although there must have been a hookup at some point, given the light switches and the old TV set perched in front of the dusty, sagging couch where Robin is sacked out on Nancy Wheeler’s shoulder. It doesn’t look like a particularly comfortable position for either of them, but Nancy hasn’t made any move to shove her off. Max and Lucas are on the love seat, eyes closed, shoulders tilted together; Erica and Dustin are on round six of a cutthroat tournament of Go Fish using a deck of cards someone unearthed from one of the kitchen drawers, and Eddie is… sitting on his ass, trying not to vibrate out of his skin from boredom heavily laced with anxiety. The camp lantern on the coffee table illuminates the whole scene in flickering yellow light and deep shadows, and the smell of hot oil almost overwhelms the stink of mouse shit and mildew and dust.

“Do you have any… kings?”

Smugly, Erica says, “Go fish.”

Cards shuffle. A deep sigh. By the door, Steve shifts his weight, unfolds his arms and then folds them again, peering out into the night. Max's head tilts forward, her headphones dislodging briefly before Lucas reaches down to adjust them, sliding them back over her ears without even opening his eyes. He pushes back a strand of hair as well, then lets his hand drop.

“Thanks,” she mumbles. He hums acknowledgement.

Nancy has been watching the game, but now she looks at Max and Lucas, then at Eddie, and her wide-eyed, thoughtful expression doesn’t really help with the whole ‘wanting to crawl out of his skin’ feeling.

“Do you have any tens?” Erica asks.

“Go fish.”

“Loser,” she grumbles, drawing from the stack. And then, “Hah. Read ‘em and weep.”

“The game’s not over yet, Sinclair.”

Erica scoffs. Eddie unfolds abruptly out of his seat and crosses the room to stand next to Steve by the open cabin door. The air is cooling down now, and the night is full of frog sounds, the occasional owl hooting. In the distance, there’s a sudden burst of eerie yipping noises, then a shrill howl.

“Coyotes,” Eddie offers, when Steve’s shoulders twitch visibly. He’s pretty sure that it was coyotes, anyway. The demobats didn’t sound like that, and as far as he knows there are no gates anywhere nearby. So: coyotes. Probably.

Steve nods. “Uh, yeah. Figured. Just jumpy, sorry.”

“Hey, man, I get it. I’d be jumpy too in your shoes.”

Steve huffs quietly, ducking his head. He’s cleaned up some, although his hair is still greasy and lank, grime still ground into the creases of his skin. His feet are shoved into a pair of Eddie’s boots, and it makes Eddie feel some kind of ridiculous warmth that they wear the same size. He looks exhausted. Eddie wonders how much sleep he’s actually getting in between each loop—if it just resets every time he wakes up, or if he gets at least a few minutes of genuine rest—then gives it up because the whole concept kind of gives him a headache.

“How much longer, do you think?” he asks instead.

“I don’t know. None of the other loops have lasted all the way to midnight, so…”

Meaning that Eddie has never made it to midnight before. When he looks up, Steve is wearing a pained and apologetic look, which is nice and all, but Eddie's the dumbass who brought it up in the first place.

“So if we all make it to tomorrow, do you think that’ll break the… I don’t know, the curse, or whatever?”

Steve rubs the back of his neck and looks away. “Shit, I don’t know. I hope so.”

“I guess it could just reset at the stroke of midnight. Or, I don’t know, dude—I mean, assuming we live through tonight, Wheeler is still going to want to rain down hellfire on the evil wizard. She seemed pretty determined on that point. Time loop or no time loop, she’s not going to rest until she puts him in the ground for good.”

Steve laughs, sounding startled. “Yeah, uh. Yeah. She’s like that.”

“I got that impression.” Now Eddie’s the one who has to look away, remembering Nancy Wheeler in his living room this morning, tired and brave and resolute, telling him that none of this was really his problem. “You know, we were talking a little this morning before you woke up—it’s weird, this is so fucking weird, right, because the loop starts when you wake up, but as far as the rest of us are concerned we just went to sleep last night and woke up this morning, same as ever, but the last time you actually slept was… what, a month ago?”

“Uh, I guess?” Steve says. He looks mildly alarmed, like maybe he actually hadn’t considered that before.

“I’m just saying, dude, it’s a wonder you’re not hallucinating from sleep deprivation. Probably because your whole, like, body resets every time around, right? So it’s just the psychological trauma, or whatever.” He looks up again. Steve is staring at him. “Um. Shit, I’m sorry, ignore me.”

Steve shakes his head, starting to smile a little. It makes him look a little more alive, a little less exhausted. “I think I get why Henderson likes you so much.”

“He…” Eddie glances back to where Dustin is losing round seven of Go Fish, then back at Steve. “Was that a compliment?”

Steve laughs quietly, tilting his head back against the door frame. “I don’t know, man, I guess. You weren’t the only one who was jealous, you know? Like—this random kid just adopts me out of the blue, and we fight monsters together and all of a sudden it’s like I’m his big brother now or something, and he’s kind of an annoying little shit, but it’s—cool, or whatever, having somebody look up to you like that. Then he starts high school and joins your nerdy little club, and all of a sudden it’s Eddie Munson this, Eddie Munson that…”

“And you were jealous,” Eddie repeats, half-baffled, half-delighted. “You. Steve Harrington. You were jealous of me.”

“Are you kidding? Those kids think you hung the moon. You play Dungeons and Dragons, you're into all the nerdy sci-fi shit they're into…” Steve shrugs a little, looking embarrassed. “And like, what do I have going for me other than being a halfway-decent babysitter?”

“I think you have a lot more going for you than that.” He feels slightly wrong-footed, which isn't an alien sensation, but it is alien to care about getting this right. There's something unnervingly fragile about Steve right now that Eddie doesn’t quite know how to deal with. Steve has always—inasmuch as Eddie paid him any attention at all before the past week—seemed untouchable.

But he looks tired and tentative and kind of lost right now, and Eddie’s not immune. Probably wouldn’t be even if it weren’t for the big, stupid crush he has on the guy. Anyway, they’re hiding out in Chief Hopper’s old cabin in the hopes that once they tip over into March 29th time will start working right for Steve, and after that they still have a dark wizard to kill, so like—seize the moment, or whatever.

Steve snorts quietly.

“I mean it,” Eddie insists. “Henderson said you were a badass, and he was right, man, you’re like some kind of action movie hero already, and you’re—you care about people, and you don’t give up, I mean—like, you’ve been through this how many times already, and you’re still doing everything you can to keep us safe. Me, I would have cut and run on like day three of this shit.”

Steve is just staring at him, his eyes shadowed, his lips softly parted. The noise from the room behind them seems suddenly distant. In the stillness Eddie hears him breathe in quietly, then out again.

Finally, quietly, he says, “Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

Steve nods. He unfolds his arms, flexing his hands, then shoving them into his pockets. The movement pulls at Eddie’s vest so that it gapes open over his bandaged midsection. He’s been dealing with that for a month of Fridays, too. No healing, no relief, just the same old injuries, fresh and painful every morning.

“You shouldn’t say that shit about yourself,” he says after a minute.

Eddie blinks. “What?”

“That you’d run away. You wouldn’t.” He meets Eddie’s eyes again. “You never do.”

“You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to swallow. I’m not any kind of hero. I am in fact a true blue dyed-in-the-wool coward, my friend. No shame in admitting it.”

Steve sighs. “You know, the first time around—the first couple of times around—I told you and Dustin not to be heroes, and you said that every single time. That you weren't a hero. And every single time—” he breaks off, then shakes his head, turning away from Eddie to look out into the night. “Doesn’t matter. If this works, if we make it through tonight and the loop breaks, just—listen, you’re not a coward and you never have been. You don’t have to prove anything, okay?”

“I… sure, I guess, if you say so,” Eddie says finally, because really, what the hell else can he say in response to a speech like that?

Steve closes his eyes and nods; Eddie shifts forward to lean against the other side of the door frame, close enough that—if he really had any kind of courage—he could reach across and touch Steve. Squeeze his arm reassuringly, or something. He doesn’t do it, of course. They stand there for a few minutes in silence, listening to the murmur of voices behind them.

Then a low chime echoes through the room. Eddie jumps, and Steve jerks around, hissing between his teeth as he does.

Nancy is on her feet, Robin rubbing her eyes as she pulls herself upright. Dustin and Erica, too: card game forgotten, they’re back to back like a pair of warriors on the battlefield, peering around the room as another chime sounds. It seems to vibrate the dusty air all the way down to his bones.

“I don’t remember there being a clock in here,” Eddie says slowly. “Harrington?”

“There wasn’t,” Steve says. He's gone very pale.

“Max—Max,” Lucas says sharply, and that’s when Eddie sees it: Max has gone still, sitting bolt-upright, feet planted on the floor, limbs unnaturally stiff. Her eyes are flickering fast behind half-closed lids. Just like Chrissy’s did when—

“Oh shit.” Eddie flinches back, but Steve is already striding across the room to kneel at Max’s side.

“I think she fell asleep,” Lucas says tearfully as the rest of them converge. He fumbles with the headphones, but the tape is still going. Kate Bush's voice is eerily lovely through the tiny speakers.

“...make a deal with god, and I’d get him to swap our places. Be running up that…”

“I think she fell asleep and he—she didn’t sleep much last night, so he couldn’t—I didn’t even think—”

“None of us did, it's not your fault,” Robin says quickly, and she's not wrong but Eddie thinks that maybe one of them should have seen this coming.

Too late now. There's a third chime, and Max is starting to rise. Her limbs unfold loosely as her feet leave the floor, her head tilted up, unseeing eyes fixed on the ceiling. Exactly like Chrissy.

“Oh no, oh no, no, no, no,” Dustin mutters under his breath.

“Guys, come on, help me get her down,” Steve is saying, reaching up to pull at her limp hands. Robin and Nancy are on her other side; Lucas climbs up on the back of the chair, face streaked with tears, catching at Max’s shoulders to lean in and whisper in her ear where one headphone has come loose—singing, he’s singing, ragged and uneven and out of tune, and Eddie feels like he should do something, but he's just standing here staring, frozen and fucking useless yet again.

The clock chimes a fourth time, and Max’s right arm jerks out of Steve's grip to snap backwards at a sudden and horrible angle.

“Max—no, Max, fight him, you have to—”

“—see how deep the bullet lies, unaware I’m tearing you asunder—Max, come on, please, I know you can do this, come on—it’s you and me, it’s you and me, won’t be unhappy—”

Somehow in all the cacophony Eddie finds himself shoved next to Dustin and Erica, who are staring up, clinging to each other’s hands. Max is still floating, but she’s not loose and limp now, she’s trembling, jaw tight, her broken arm hanging at an awful angle. Her other arm flexes, then snaps back into Steve’s grip. Her fists are clenched.

She’s fighting, Eddie thinks with horrified admiration. She’s fighting him tooth and nail.

Her jaw grits, flexes, and Eddie watches with a surge of nausea, certain it’s about to snap to the side for that final dreadful breaking.

It doesn’t. Instead, she grits out a word: “Run.”

“What did she say?” Dustin demands, “What did she—”

“She said run, come on—yeah, Max, come on, you gotta run, you gotta—”

Max collapses all at once, so suddenly that she slips right through Lucas’s hands. Steve manages to half-catch her, looping an arm around her waist and tilting her back onto the couch cushion as Lucas scrambles down. He catches her chin, her cheek, patting at her face, calling her name, and Eddie’s heart sinks. Blood is oozing from under her half-closed eyelids, her nose, stark red against the pallor of her skin. She’s not moving. He doesn’t think she’s breathing.

“But she’s going to be okay,” Lucas says desperately. “She was talking, she was just—she’s going to be okay, she has to be okay. Max—”

Eddie is the one standing closest to Dustin, so he’s the one that Dustin stumbles into when the floor beneath him trembles. He catches him, steadies him instinctively. Feels Dustin grab for the sleeve of his jacket, clinging, and doesn’t understand what’s happening until the burnt-out lightbulbs flicker and Steve’s head jerks up.

“Oh, shit,” he says, “okay, everybody get back, come on, get out of the cabin—”

He’s lifting Max as he speaks, pulling her off the loveseat and toward the door, and everyone is yelling and Eddie—stupid, slow, stupid—still doesn’t fucking get it until the floor bows again. It’s an impossible motion, one that wood plank shouldn’t be able to do. It feels like the world has gotten soft, somehow, like another world is bubbling up from underneath it, and he gets it then, in the moment that it’s too late.

The floor splits. Dustin stumbles on the edge. Erica screams, shrill and terrified, and Dustin is still clinging to Eddie’s jacket as the crack widens between them, and Eddie doesn’t even think about it: he shoves Dustin, hard, sending him stumbling back onto solid ground as the floor gives way.

By the door, Steve jolts forward. Dustin screams, “Eddie, no!”

In the instant before death rushes up to meet him, he can’t even regret it. At least this way they’ve got another chance to get it right.

THIRTY-THREE —March 28, 1986. 11:15 PM

Steve has been weirdly quiet all day. Or at least it seems weird to Eddie—it’s not like he can really say that he knows the guy all that well, but he did think that he was starting to get, sort of, a little bit of a sense of him, anyway. And this seems… weird. He barely commented when Nancy was going through the horror story of Vecna’s vision this morning; he didn’t offer any input in the plan they’ve spent most of the day knocking together. He hasn’t even reacted to Eddie’s frankly blatant flirting—it’s only when Robin gives him a funny look in the RV that he realizes he’s maybe pushed it too far. But he always does that. Tries too hard to get a reaction and usually manages it, even if it’s usually not the kind of reaction he’d really like.

Steve doesn’t give him one. The only person Steve gives any noticeable reaction to is Dustin, after he says, “Okay, what is wrong with you,” and yanks at Eddie’s battle vest to get a look at Steve’s demobat injuries, and even that is just a halfhearted swat and a, “Knock it off, man, I’m fine.”

So, like, yeah, he’s got to be in a ton of pain, and maybe that’s all it is. But that doesn’t explain the way that Steve has been sticking to Max’s side like a burr—okay, he’s worried about her, of course he is, they all are—and it really doesn’t explain the looks he’s been giving Eddie all day. Weird, intense, unhappy looks. Eddie kind of wants to ask about them, but he’s also kind of afraid of the answer he’s going to get if he does.

Steve isn’t treating him like he’s diseased, anyway. So that’s something.

He’s wearing another one of those looks now, as Nancy goes through the plan one final time. Eddie hazards a careful nudge to his shoulder, where he’s fairly sure there are no open wounds. “You good, dude?”

“Yeah,” Steve says quietly. He doesn’t pull away, which is surprising. He stays leaning against Eddie, his body a distracting line of heat from Eddie’s shoulder to his elbow, their hips bumping together, the backs of their hands brushing. Eddie could turn just a little and hold his hand. He could turn just a little, and—

“Steve?” Nancy asks. Eddie jumps, guiltily; Steve doesn’t.

“Yeah,” he says heavily. “Okay. Let’s go.”

At the door to Eddie’s trailer, Steve pauses. Eddie is just behind him, the girls a few steps back, talking quietly. At the back of the group, Dustin swings his makeshift spiked shield over his shoulder. They look like extras from Beyond Thunderdome; Steve has a fucking flamethrower in his hands, for chrissake.

He pauses, anyway, and so Eddie pauses too.

“Eddie,” Steve says quietly. “Hey, listen, man.”

It’s both like and unlike the way he sounded last night in the Upside Down; there’s a stillness in him now that wasn’t present then. They’re standing very close, and Steve’s eyes flicker over his face, lingering on his mouth, and Eddie has the sudden wild thought: he’s going to kiss me.

It would not be the most insane thing that’s happened to him this week, but it would be up there. And it doesn’t happen, of course. Of course not. Steve drops his gaze, says, “Never mind,” and pulls open the trailer door.

Then he steps through, spins, and slams it in Eddie’s face. Eddie jerks back, startled. For an instant he’s childishly, absurdly hurt; then something heavy slams against the door from the other side and he understands all of a sudden what Steve is doing. Sometime during all that planning that he was pretending to ignore, his majesty made the unilateral call that he’d be going in alone.

“Oh, that fucker,” says Robin, who must have reached the exact same conclusion an instant later.

“What?” Dustin says, rattling up the steps, eyes wide, those stupid blank dogtags clinking against his chest. “Wait, what’s he doing?”

“Being an idiot,” Robin says, as Nancy hops off the porch and darts for the other door. It’s too late; that one is locked, too.

“Steve!” she yells. “Steve Harrington, I swear to god, I am going to kill you!”

Eddie and Robin exchange a faintly hysterical look, and then there’s a grunt from inside, a rattle, a thump and a distant clatter.

“Steve!” Robin yells as Dustin shoulders past—nearly goring Eddie on his shield as he does—to try the door.

“Is he going after Vecna alone? Is he insane?”

“Evidently,” Nancy snaps, coming back up the steps. She slams her palms against the door again. “Steve!”

There’s no answer from the other side. He’s probably already through the gate; if there’s one thing Eddie has figured out about Steve Harrington in the past week or so, it’s that once he’s decided on a plan, he doesn’t hesitate to act.

“Why would he do that, though?” he asks, directed at nobody in particular, as Nancy slams the butt of her shotgun against the lock. “We had a plan, we talked it through—if he didn’t think it would work, why the hell didn’t he just say something?”

“Because he knows we’d go after him,” Dustin answers.

“We are going after him,” Nancy says, and slams the lock again. When that proves to be fruitless, she spins the shotgun, setting the butt against her shoulder. “Everybody move out of the way.”

“Jesus Christ, are you gonna shoot the lock out?” Eddie demands.

“Yep,” Nancy says grimly. “Move.”

Her tone brooks no disagreement. Eddie moves. He pulls Dustin behind him and offers Robin a hand down, which she takes without looking away from Nancy; her expression is somewhere between awe, terror, and infatuation, and, well—Eddie gets the first two, at least.

“What if there’s a ricochet?” she asks.

“The door’s aluminum, and these are 12 gauge slugs,” Nancy says. “It’s not going to ricochet.”

Eddie wonders if he should lodge some kind of protest here about shooting through his door, then thinks better of it. It’s too late in any case; the shotgun thunders, loud enough that he ducks instinctively, and the lock vanishes in a burst of twisted metal. There’s a shout in the distance, and at least half a dozen dogs start barking furiously. Lights come on in two of the trailers behind them.

“Okay, everybody definitely heard that,” Robin mutters. “Three guesses how long it takes for the cops to show up.”

“There’s still something—come on, help me get the door open,” Nancy says, and Eddie scrambles up the steps to lend his shoulder to the effort, as eager now to get out of sight as he is to keep Steve from getting himself eaten alive for real this time.

Steve must have jammed the couch against the door—it’s heavy, and it tears the carpet as they shove it, but it moves. The four of them crowd in and slam the door shut. The gate pulses overhead, the Upside Down mirror of Eddie’s trailer on the other side. The makeshift rope has been cut in half, puddling on either side of the gate.

It takes them a few minutes to get through, and by the time they do Steve is long gone. He must have taken one of the bikes that they left here last night, but the other three are nowhere to be seen.

“Shit,” Dustin says. His voice is small—airless, terribly young. It strikes Eddie again that as much as Dustin seems to have—bafflingly—adopted him as a sort of surrogate delinquent older brother, Steve got there first.

He doesn’t want the kid here for this. At all, really, but—he doesn’t want Dustin to see whatever happened to Steve down here.

“Henderson, you’re staying here,” he says.

The glare Dustin turns on him is furious. “The hell I am. Steve’s out there. He could be in danger.”

He’s almost certainly in danger, if he’s not dead already. But Eddie can barely let himself think that, let alone say it out loud to Dustin’s face. He thinks Dustin knows anyway; above the determined set to his jaw, his eyes are wet.

“You promised you’d keep me safe, right? So keep me safe,” he adds, and yes, Eddie had promised that, hadn’t he, when they were deciding on who would stay behind to act as bait. More to the point: there’s no way to keep Dustin from coming with them without tying him up or something.

“If you get eaten by monsters, Harrington is never going to let me hear the end of it,” he says finally.

“Come on, if you’re coming,” Robin calls from up ahead, and they turn, jog to catch up.

The walk through the Upside Down is quieter this time; Eddie never thought he’d actually miss Steve and Nancy’s intense, flirty asides to each other, but this is so much worse. Nancy’s face is white and drawn, and Robin is chewing her lip, uncharacteristically silent. There are no bats in the sky, not until they approach the Creel house where it towers over the dead landscape.

Light is flaring there beneath the trees. Bright yellow, warm and alive and weirdly alien in this cold, rotting world.

“The flamethrower,” Dustin says in the same moment that Nancy says, “Steve,” and breaks into a run. They all do, stumbling carelessly over vines and protruding branches and the alien detritus of the Upside Down, but Eddie’s got longer legs, and he pulls ahead without even trying to.

As soon as he’s close enough to see, he wishes he hadn’t. The grass is burning, spreading out like ripples from the crumpled figure at the center. The spent flamethrower is in his hand, and the ground around him is scattered with winged corpses.

Eddie knows the moment the others see, because Robin makes a sound like she’s dying and Nancy lets out a single sharp, choked sob, and Dustin is calling Steve’s name in a broken-sounding voice, and all of it seems terribly distant as his legs propel him the rest of the way to the spot where Steve fell, as his knees give out beneath him.

His battle vest is drenched with blood, the patches barely visible under all the gore, the flesh beneath torn and bloody. Worse, somehow, is the fact that Steve is still breathing: rough, jerky, wet-sounding gasps as blood bubbles between his lips.

“Shit, Harrington—Steve, why the hell did you do this, what the hell were you thinking?”

Eddie’s not actually sure he’s conscious, but when he speaks Steve’s eyes open slightly. His lips twitch into what Eddie realizes a horrified moment later is supposed to be a smile.

“Just—okay, just, just hold still, Jesus Christ, I don’t—okay, okay, you’re going to be okay, Steve, just hang tight, okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve mumbles, and coughs. A bubble of dark blood leaks out the corner of his mouth. “‘S alright. Had t’ try it. See if. If it’s different this…”

His voice fades out, and it takes Eddie a second to realize that he hasn’t taken another breath. He slaps Steve’s cheek, calls his name, hearing the frantic rise of hysteria in his voice, Dustin crowding his shoulder, bumping him roughly, bumping—

—the body—

Steve in his arms, and Nancy is crying too, and Robin, and the world seems so loud, so impossibly, dreadfully loud all of a sudden, and then—

THIRTY-FOUR —March 28, 1986. 7:25 AM

Steve jerks upright so violently that Robin topples backward, landing with a thud on the worn carpet.

“Jesus, Steve,” she says, affronted, and Eddie blinks away a sudden echo of deja vu as Steve stares around at the three of them. Nancy sets her coffee cup down.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Fuck,” Steve says, flat and emphatic. He jams both hands in his hair, makes two fists, yanks hard enough that Eddie’s a little worried he’s going to actually rip a couple of hanks out, then lets them drop, leaving him looking like he’s been electrocuted.

“Fuck this,” he adds, hauling himself up to his feet with a hand on the coffee table. “Fuck all of this fucking bullshit!”

His voice is rising almost to a shout by the end of it, and he finishes off by aiming a hard kick at the TV stand. Hard enough to rattle the old TV and send the rabbit ears, carefully mended by Wayne with duct tape, over on their side.

“Dude,” Eddie says, because seriously. “Look, I know there’s a portal to hell in the ceiling and everything, but my uncle is going to be plenty pissed at me without you wrecking the place even more.”

He expects Steve to snap at him, or maybe—not really, not anymore, but maybe—to shove the TV off the stand to shatter on the floor, just to make a point. But Steve sags instead, shoulders slumping.

“Sorry,” he says, and then he turns on his heel and stalks out of the trailer, letting the door slam shut behind him. There’s shuffling in the hallway; Dustin emerges, yawning, followed by Lucas and Max.

“The hell was that?” he asks.

“Harrington is having some kind of breakdown,” Eddie says. Nancy shoots him a glare; he lifts his hands defensively. Because, well. He’s just calling it like he sees it. No judgment; Steve is probably long overdue for a breakdown, although his timing could be better.

“I’ll go talk to him,” Robin says, and Nancy lifts her head, opens her mouth, and then, surprisingly, subsides.

“Okay,” she says, folding her arms tightly across her body. “When you get him inside, we all need to talk.”

“Your vision, right?” Dustin asks, wandering into the kitchen as Robin heads out the front door, closing it behind her much more gently than Steve just did. “Yeah, I have some questions. The most pressing of which currently being: is there any food here?”

“Stale Pop-Tarts, maybe?” Eddie says. “Sorry, dude. It was my turn to do the grocery shopping, and turns out that’s kind of hard to manage when you’re hiding out under a tarp for a week. I don’t think Wayne’s been back since…” he gestures vaguely at the otherworldly gate on his living room ceiling and winces. “Well, you know.”

“There’s food at my place,” Max offers quietly from the doorway. “My mom’s car is gone. It should be all clear.”

Lucas reaches for her hand. Nobody asks if Max’s mom will be worrying about where she is—Eddie can guess the answer, after living next door to them for all these months. Apparently the rest of them can, too, which is depressing.

Erica keeps watch while they slip out the back of Eddie’s trailer. Robin and Steve are in the tall grass on the far side of the lot, heads bent together, talking quietly; Steve’s shoulders are hunched, his long frame folded in like he’s trying to make himself smaller. As he watches, Robin reaches across to touch Steve’s shoulder; it looks like it starts as a friendly jostle, but then Steve sags visibly and Robin hesitates, then turns it into an awkward, one-armed hug. Eddie watches Steve collapse into the embrace, and looks away.

It’s only then that he realizes Nancy is watching them too. The expression on her face is the same unreadable one that she wore when she saw the way they were sleeping tangled up together this morning. Eddie considers saying something—that awkward, sisterly hug was just about the furthest thing from romantic tension that he’s ever seen—but all he’s got is speculation of the sort that he knows he’d never want anybody spreading about him. Any more than they already do.

He might be a coward and a shithead, but he’s not fucking evil.

Nancy surprises him by being the first to speak. “Hey, I just… I wanted to say that I’m sorry.”

“What?” Eddie asks, wrong-footed.

“What I said earlier, about how this isn’t your problem—”

He waves a hand hastily, interrupting her. “Absolutely don’t worry about it, I promise you it’s already forgotten.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Nancy says stubbornly. “Really. None of us asked for this. Steve only got involved because of me, and I only got involved because of—of Barb.” Her voice falters briefly, but she recovers fast. “And the rest of the kids are only involved because of Mike.”

“Who’s dating the chick with the superpowers. Which he kept extremely quiet the whole time I’ve known him, by the way. Kudos to baby Wheeler in the discretion department. I had no idea that kid could shut up.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Nancy says, seriousness briefly eclipsed by sisterly exasperation. “But he was looking for Will at first. That’s how he got involved. That’s how all of us did. Me because of Barb, and Steve because of me, and Robin because of him and Dustin, and you—”

“Because Chrissy Cunningham died on my living room ceiling, yeah, I get it.”

Nancy has the good grace to wince. “Well… yeah.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way or anything, Wheeler, but this club fucking sucks.”

Dustin chooses that moment to stick his head out the doorway with a furiously wide-eyed look. “Hey, so any wanted fugitives present might want to come inside before anyone sees them.”

“Jesus Christ, that tone,” Eddie says.

“What tone? There’s no tone. Come on, get inside, let’s go.”

There’s definitely a tone, but he isn’t wrong. Eddie climbs the steps of Max’s trailer and holds the door open for Nancy, bowing slightly. She rolls her eyes, but there’s a tiny smile on her face.

“Steve, come on!” Dustin yells over his shoulder, and pulls the door shut, pushing Eddie inside with a huffy kind of impatience that would be a lot more annoying if Eddie couldn’t see right through to the worry underneath. “Unbelievable. Do I have to do everything myself?”

“Who died and appointed you God?” Max asks from the kitchen. She passes a package of bagels to Lucas, then starts pulling boxes of cereal out of the cupboard and handing them to Erica to inspect. Dustin swells visibly with indignation, but the door swings open again before he can answer, letting Robin and Steve in. Robin locks it behind her. Her face is pale.

“Okay, tell them what you just told me,” she says, hauling Steve forward by the elbow. Steve scowls but allows himself to be hauled.

“Eddie said you were having a breakdown,” Dustin says. “Can it wait? This is kind of important.”

“Again with the tone,” Eddie says.

“There’s no tone!”

“There kind of is a tone, man,” Steve offers from the doorway.

“Oh, right, some appreciation when I literally saved all your asses after you geniuses decided to go through the water gate against my explicit recommendation.”

“It was a rescue mission. We didn’t just like, decide to go through for no good reason, dude.”

Or, well, Nancy and Robin didn’t. Eddie supposes he did have some small part in the rescuing, even if his reasons for jumping in after the rest of them were decidedly less than heroic.

“Okay, after Steve—”

“I got dragged in by those creepy tentacle vine things,” Steve says. “It wasn’t my idea to go through the gate either.”

“Oh my god,” Robin says suddenly, and they all turn to her. She claps a hand over her mouth and shakes her head. “No, just—I just realized what they made me think of.”

“Evil Dead,” Steve says, nodding. “Right? That whole scene with the—”

“Ugh, okay, actually, let’s forget I mentioned it.”

“Yeah, on second thought I really don’t need that mental image.”

“Wait,” Eddie says, incredulous and delighted. “You’ve seen Evil Dead? You? His royal majesty King Steve Harrington has voluntarily watched Sam Raimi’s 1981 horror masterpiece, The Evil Dead?”

“Do you have to say it like that?” Steve asks plaintively. “Yeah, man, I work in a video store, I’ve seen a lot of movies.”

“Anyway,” Dustin says loudly. “A little appreciation after I saved the day would be nice, I’m just saying.”

“Actually, I’m pretty sure the Lite-Brite was my idea,” Erica says.

“Okay, fine, it was a group effort!”

Eddie meets Steve’s eyes over Dustin’s head and feels a stupid little thrill in the pit of his stomach when Steve gives him a fond, exasperated smile. Even if the fondness is mostly for Dustin, it feels—nice, to be in on something with Steve. It’s a nice distraction from the situation at hand.

“Steve,” Robin says, and Steve looks down at her, smile fading, and the moment is broken just like that.

“Shit,” he says. “Okay. So here’s the deal: I’m stuck in a time loop and I don’t know how to break it.”

“That’s not a real thing,” Dustin says immediately.

“Maybe we should hear him out,” Lucas offers, as Steve snaps, “Uh, yeah, Henderson, it is. I know it sounds crazy—”

“Crazy as in how the past week has been crazy?” Eddie asks.

Steve laughs sharply. “Yeah, something like that. Although it’s been more like a month and a half for me at this point. A really, really shitty month and a half.”

Dustin says, “Okay, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but what you’re describing is a—”

“—scientific impossibility, because recursive temporal loops are only a thought experiment in science fiction, yeah, Henderson, you want to know how many times we’ve had this exact conversation? I can trot out all your favorite songs next if you want more proof.”

“What’s mine?” Eddie asks, for no reason he can understand. The thing is, he believes Steve. Something about that look on his face makes it impossible not to. And it’s no crazier than anything else that’s happened in the past week. Robin believes him, that much is obvious. Dustin is frowning deeply but doesn’t lodge any additional protests. Nancy’s expression is impossible to read.

Steve gives him an odd, lopsided little smile that makes his chest do something funny. “Holy Diver. Dio. Which I’ve still never actually listened to.”

“Oh, man.” Despite the situation, he laughs. “Harrington, you are in for a treat once this is all over.”

“Alright,” Dustin says, rallying. “Alright, well, assuming you’re right about this—”

“Which I am.”

“We’ll come back to that. Assuming you’re right about this, our next step has to be figuring out how to break the loop. And then we can work on killing Vecna for good. What have you tried so far? How does it reset?”

Steve takes a breath, and glances at Eddie. He’s not smiling anymore, and something cold drops to the pit of Eddie’s stomach.

“You’re not gonna like it,” he warns, and Eddie somehow knows, just from that.

“I don’t make it out,” he asks slowly. “Do I?”

Steve shakes his head. “No. Every time, the loop resets when you die. Or—yeah.”

“Oh,” Eddie says numbly. “Great. That’s just—fucking great. Awesome! How?”

“It—a couple of different ways. Nance—” Steve heaves a deep breath. “Your vision, about Vecna—the gates, the army of monsters—”

“Wait, what?” Dustin demands.

“He showed me,” Nancy says. She’s got her arms folded across her chest like she's holding herself together. “He wanted me to know, to—he showed me four gates splitting open the world. Monsters in Hawkins, our Hawkins, killing—he showed me my mom, Holly, Mike—” her breath shudders in her throat. Her eyes are wet. Eddie would reach out to comfort her if he weren’t such a fucking coward; instead, it’s Robin who moves. She settles on the couch next to Nancy and pats her hand, a quick, tentative motion before she withdraws awkwardly.

“It’s okay,” she offers. “It’ll be okay.”

Nancy’s lower lip trembles briefly; then she firms her jaw. “You don’t know that.”

“Okay, no, you’re right, I don’t know that, and I totally suck at comforting people, I will fully admit that, but Steve has been through this, like, a bunch of times, so we’re going to figure it out! We will totally figure it out.”

Eddie doesn’t think anyone else is looking at Steve at that moment, but he is. So he’s the one who sees the way Steve’s expression crumples briefly before he squares it all away and nods.

“Yeah, definitely,” he says.

“Right,” Dustin says, rallying visibly. “Okay. Max, do you have a notebook or something? We should write this all down.”

The notebook Max unearths from her backpack reads Mrs. Klein - 9th GRADE BIO in marker across the front. Steve lingers on that for a moment before he flips to the back where there are still blank pages. Eddie wonders if he’s thinking the same thing Eddie is—that these kids are all way too young to be so experienced with all this shit.

“Okay, first and most obvious question,” Dustin says. “Have we tried just waiting it out and seeing if the loop breaks on its own?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, rubbing his forehead. “It didn’t.”

“It didn’t break?”

“We didn’t all make it to midnight. We—” his gaze flickers to Max, seated across the table with her arms folded, Lucas with his hand on the back of her chair. She meets his eyes and lifts her chin, and there’s fear there, sure, but she’s doing a better job of keeping a lid on it than Eddie is right now.

“It’s not just Eddie, is it?” she asks.

Steve shakes his head. Reluctantly, he says, “We were trying to wait it out, and Vecna got to you. Got in your head when you weren’t expecting it, and—” He winces hard, and Eddie feels faintly sick. He can imagine, entirely too well. “Yeah. So. That didn’t work.”

“Right,” Max says steadily. Lucas makes a wounded sound and she reaches back to grab his hand and squeeze it tight, but her gaze doesn’t falter. “So we should fight.”

“Max,” Lucas says.

“If he’s going to kill me either way, I’m taking him down with me. We’re putting that asshole in the ground one way or another.”

“He’s not going to kill you,” Dustin says. “Okay? Jesus Christ, you guys, work with me. We have an unparalleled resource here, we have literally the ability to workshop our approach based on what Steve knows has gone wrong before—”

“So you believe me now?” Steve asks, snappish.

“I’m willing to take it under consideration,” Dustin says, waving a hand. “The point being, if we know what doesn’t work, we can figure out what to do that will work. We get Max out alive, we get Eddie out alive, we take Vecna down, bada bing, bada boom.”

“Just as easy as that, huh? Piece of cake. Okay, sure, great. Definitely haven’t been trying to do that the last thirty-some times I’ve lived through today.”

Dustin lifts his chin. “We’re gonna get it right this time,” he insists. He spins the notebook and pushes it back at Steve. “So start from the beginning.”

Steve stares at Dustin, and Eddie can see the moment he folds. His shoulders sag, and he picks up the pen.

There’s something really jarring about seeing his own death written out like this, over and over and over again. He never really paid all that much attention in school even when he did bother to show up, but he remembers his eleventh-grade English teacher—Mrs. Kowalczyk, whom he got along with much better than most of his other teachers because she let him sit in the back of the class reading Terry Brooks and Piers Anthony paperbacks as long as he refrained from climbing on tables—talking about the inevitability of tragedies.

Romeo and Juliet, doomed by the narrative from the very beginning. Eddie’s no one’s idea of a romantic naif, but the comic relief usually doesn’t fare much better in those stories. Maybe it was always going to come down to this, from the moment he watched Chrissy die on his ceiling and did absolutely fucking nothing to help her.

He’d call it balancing the books, a life for a life or some poetic shit like that, except for the fact that Max definitely doesn’t deserve any of this. Whatever happened, whatever broken places let Vecna seep into her mind in the first place, she doesn’t deserve this.

So they’re going to find a way to fix it. And if Eddie doesn’t make it out alive, well, maybe it was always supposed to end that way.

He manages the be philosophical about that for maybe three seconds before terror curdles in his stomach. He rattles his fingers on the table, then shoves the notebook away, clambering out of his seat. Steve glances up at him, and Eddie flicks his hands out with a flourishy little salutation that he hopes looks careless and self-possessed as he backs toward the kitchen.

“Okay,” Dustin is saying. “So Eddie as bait is a no-go, but I make it out if I play the distraction alone. Right?”

Steve looks back at him. Eddie takes the opportunity to escape into the kitchen, putting some distance between the rest of them. He digs out a fresh pack of Camels and leans against the fridge to pick the plastic wrapping off it without meeting anyone’s eyes. His hands are shaking.

“Right,” Steve says to Dustin. “We hook up the sound system on the roof of the trailer and you make it back through the gate in time.”

“So there’s one part of the puzzle. I’m the distraction. Okay. If Eddie goes with Lucas and Max to the Creel house, either Jason Carver or the cops show up—”

“And we both die,” Max finishes. She, at least, is managing to seem genuinely calm about all this. Maybe she’s a better faker than Eddie is. Maybe she’s just fucking brave.

Dustin nods grimly. “So that’s out. And someone else needs to be there with you to help break you out of it just in case Lucas can’t.”

“What if Nance went?” Robin asks. “Nancy goes with Lucas and Max—you guys could use the walkies to signal instead of the flashlight if you time it right, so nobody would be able to see the lights and call the cops. Then me and Steve can go handle Vecna.”

“I don’t like it,” Nancy says immediately. “That’s the most dangerous part of the plan, no way should you two be going in without backup.”

“I could just go in alone,” Steve says.

“Okay, on what planet is that better?” Dustin demands. “So you go in alone, and if you die, then—”

“Then it resets,” Steve says, folding his arms.

“You don’t know—” Dustin pauses, narrowing his eyes. “You do know that. How exactly do you know that?”

“How do you think, Henderson?”

“Wait, you died?”

Steve hesitates visibly, then shrugs a little like it’s not a big deal and says, “Just once. Last time around, I ditched you guys and went in by myself. I figured, I don’t know, worth a shot. Those bat things got me. And then I woke up and it was this morning again.”

“Worth a—I’m sorry, you thought it was worth a shot to get yourself killed, on purpose? What if it hadn’t worked?”

“It didn’t. Obviously.”

“Okay, what if it had worked?” Dustin is winding himself up now, talking faster, hands waving. “What if you just died and that was it, end of story, did you even think about that, huh, Steve?”

“Clearly not,” Steve mutters. “Look, it was a stupid idea, I get it, can we just—”

“No! No, we cannot just—that was your plan? Really? ‘Oh, I’m going to go get eaten alive by demobats, that’ll solve everything’—really?”

“I just said it was a stupid idea, what do you want to hear, man?”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe something about how you’re not going to sacrifice yourself in some kind of reckless half-cocked scheme without letting the rest of us help you, that would be nice!”

“Yeah, well, tell that to Eddie,” Steve snaps, and Eddie drops the cigarette he was just about to light. Every eye is suddenly on him as he scrambles to pick it up.

“Um,” he says. “What?”

“You—” Steve sighs, looking almost apologetic. “Every time around, almost every time, you get killed saving one of us. Dustin, or me, or, or Robin, or Erica—you just—you fucking jump right in there and put yourself on the line, and you keep dying for it. Okay? So it’s not just me being stupid, here.”

“Okay, I didn’t actually mean stupid,” Dustin says, a little more subdued. “I just meant…”

“I wouldn’t worry about that, Henderson,” Eddie says. He finally manages to get the cigarette in his mouth and light it, making an attempt at nonchalance that doesn’t really succeed. They’re all staring at him, which is something he’s used to, but the expression on every face is earnestly concerned, which is not. “I am not the heroic type. But if it makes you feel better I’ll go with those two.” He nods at Robin and Steve. “Just as a backup.”

“I thought it would be safer if you stayed out of it, actually,” Nancy says quietly.

“Yeah, well, clearly not,” Eddie says. He takes another dramatic drag of his cigarette and flicks ashes into the sink. “Come on. Are we doing this, or what? We’ll need some weapons, and we’ll need a ride, and I’m pretty sure I have an idea of where to get both of those things.”

Steve snorts quietly. Eddie wonders if he’s going to lodge a protest about any part of this plan, but he doesn’t. He just unfolds out of his seat with a wince that he doesn’t do a very good job of hiding. Belatedly, it occurs to Eddie that maybe they should see about bandaging that, but then Steve shrugs his shoulders to settle the battle vest—the Judas Priest pin on the front briefly catches the light—and offers Robin a hand up.

“Okay, Munson,” he says. Eddie doesn’t miss the sudden shift back to his last name. Steve has been calling him Eddie all morning. “Let’s go steal an RV.”

After all that, he’s not really expecting Steve to stop him while the others crowd around the front door pulling on their shoes. There’s still an instinctive flinch in him when Steve catches his arm, and he stifles it as well as he can, but—not well enough, by the way Steve pulls back.

“Sorry,” he says, and then, “hey, look, man, I just wanted to say I’m sorry about that.”

“About what?” Eddie asks blankly.

“You know. Dragging you into it just now with Dustin. That was a dick move.”

Ah. “Already forgotten, Harrington.”

“Yeah?” Steve asks. There’s something in his expression that Eddie can’t read at all. It’s unnerving, honestly. Steve Harrington has never really struck him as the kind of guy to have any kind of unseen layers. He's always seemed kind of like a tropical beach: sunny, beautiful, and utterly shallow.

He was wrong about that, he knows. Figured out that much even before he watched the former prom king of Hawkins High tear apart a monster with his bare hands. But it leaves him wrong-footed now, out of his depth, unable to even guess what Steve is thinking right now.

“Yeah,” he says, turning the rubbery Michael Myers mask that Max found for him over and over in his hands. “I mean, to be perfectly honest I still kind of think you’re full of shit anyway.”

“Right,” Steve says dryly.

“Just saying. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself this week, it’s that I am not a hero.”

Steve sighs, then touches Eddie’s shoulder. It’s a careful kind of gesture, not exactly the solid, manly thump he was expecting. His hand lingers, a steady weight through Eddie’s leather jacket. “Give yourself some credit, man.”

Then Max is calling their names from the doorway. Steve lets go of him, and Eddie heaves a deep breath and pulls the mask on as they head outside.

Hotwiring the RV is a piece of cake, which is a good thing: Steve leans over his shoulder as he cracks open the steering column and yanks the ignition wire out, pliers clamped between his teeth, and it’s distracting enough that he’s glad to have done this so many damn times that he could probably do it in his sleep.

Not recently, though. As he explains to Steve while he works, he really did make an effort at staying—maybe not exactly on the straight and narrow, but somewhere within spitting distance of it. Somewhere that wasn’t Edward J. Munson, Sr. holding up a gas station and nearly shooting the clerk when she started crying from fear. Just good luck that Eddie had made himself scarce that particular evening, or he probably would have been roped into driving the getaway car.

Wayne took him in after that, and while he never actually said anything about Eddie being better than his old man, the fact that he just assumed that was the case made Eddie want to be. Fifteen years old, scared shitless, and willing to do just about anything to please the first adult other than his mom who’d ever looked at him and seen something worth a damn. It’s only in the years since that he’s realized how fucking lucky he was to land with Wayne.

He doesn’t mention that part of the story, but he does wonder as he works if some other version of him, from some other version of today, did tell Steve about it. There’s a disparity there, is the thing. Steve has known him longer than he’s known Steve, and it’s jarring.

“Eddie, I’m not sure how I feel about you driving, no offense,” Robin says from Steve’s other side. Eddie didn’t even realize she was there.

“Oh, I’m just starting the sucker, Harrington’s driving,” he says lightly. He turns back to look at her worried face, and Steve is right there, steady and warm and fucking magnetic even with all the muck and the grime, and that familiar dangerous impulse is suddenly impossible to stomp down. He leans a little closer, right up in Steve’s face, grinning sharp and wild. “You’ve got her, don’t you, big boy?”

Robin’s eyebrows go up nearly to her hairline, but Steve doesn’t startle at all. He just gives Eddie another one of those odd, thoughtful looks, and it occurs to Eddie a moment too late that maybe this, too, is nothing new.

That disparity again. Keeps tripping him up.

“Yeah,” Steve says finally. “I got it.”

There’s more that could be said, maybe, but then the engine catches and turns over, and the RV’s erstwhile owners start yelling and banging on the doors, and Eddie has a moment of genuine remorse about that before Steve drops into the driver’s seat and stomps the gas pedal, and they’re off.

They pull off the road behind a stretch of trees outside of town to make their final preparations. Overgrown fields sprawl out beneath the graying sky as Eddie settles in next to Robin and Steve to start putting together Molotov cocktails. Out to their left, Nancy is grimly sawing away at a shotgun barrel while Max holds it steady. Dustin and Lucas have dispensed with their preparations and are whacking at each other with the leftover staves while Erica alternates between jeering and cheering them on.

“Jesus Christ, they’re all gonna end up concussed,” Steve mutters, tearing another strip of cloth to stuff into the mouth of the bottle he has held between his knees. He passes it to Robin, who steadies it while Eddie funnels gasoline in. There are half a dozen of them already set up; a regular little production line of miniature bombs they’ve got going here. Eddie hopes Vecna appreciates the effort, before they light his ass up.

“Nah,” he says, as Lucas sweeps Dustin neatly off his feet and is tripped into the tall grass a moment later, the staff flying from his hand while Erica cackles wildly. “They used to pull this shit at Hellfire all the time before we almost got kicked out of the auditorium for breaking into the janitor’s closet to steal the mop handles for LARPing.” He pauses. “And by we, I mean they, naturally. I was entirely uninvolved.”

“Right,” Steve says dryly, starting on another bottle. He’s smiling a little, though. Eddie looks down, then back across the field to where Nancy is sighting in the sawed-off shotgun.

“So that’s illegal, right?” Robin asks, following his gaze.

“Oh, yeah, super illegal. Harrington, your girlfriend is officially a felon, congratulations.”

“Ex,” Steve corrects, with a weird little grimace. “Ex-girlfriend.”

“If you say so,” Eddie says, because he’s an idiot and also a glutton for punishment. Robin looks between the two of them for a long moment, then gets abruptly to her feet.

“Everything okay?” Steve asks, half-rising.

“Sorry, just—the smell, I need a minute,” she says, shaking her hands out like they’re blemished, although Eddie’s pretty sure he didn’t actually spill any gasoline on her. “I’ll be right back.”

“We can switch if you want,” Steve offers, but she waves him off and starts down the overgrown slope, the tangled grass leaving wet smears on her jacket and pants. At the bottom she stops beside Nancy and Max, heads bent low in conversation; Nancy lets the gun settle across her back on the shoulder strap. Max says something, then goes over to where Erica Lucas and Dustin are sitting in the grass and staring up at the gray sky. She says something that Eddie can’t hear, then drops down between them as they shift apart automatically to make room.

Steve is still staring after Robin, but after a moment, he shakes his head and swears under his breath and sets the bottle in his hands down.

“We can probably finish these without her,” Eddie offers. He feels wrong-footed, somehow disoriented by the expression on Steve’s face, and it doesn’t get better when Steve finally turns to look at him.

“No,” he says finally. “I’m ready for a break, actually. If that’s cool with you.”

“Sure,” Eddie says, and follows him into the camper to wash the gasoline fumes off of his hands. Steve washes up too, perfunctorily, wincing as he moves. He’s got a shirt on now, the bulky bandages that Robin applied earlier barely visible under the fabric, but he still moves like he’s in pain. Eddie hesitates, then says, “You okay?”

Steve nods, and reaches to turn over the vest where it’s still draped over the back of the kitchen bench. “Yeah. I think I got some blood on this, though, sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie says. The bloodstains really aren’t that bad; assuming they make it out of here alive, Eddie will soak it in cold water and it’ll probably be fine. And if not—well. Stains from fighting underworld monsters are just about as metal as it’s possible to get.

He wishes that Steve didn’t have to bleed for them, though.

“Still,” Steve says.

“It would be a complete douchebag move to give you a hard time about bleeding on my vest after you were almost eaten alive by monsters,” Eddie says. He winces a moment later, because that is probably not a moment that Steve wants to be dwelling on, but Steve just laughs quietly. “Besides. You were already bleeding when I gave it to you.”

He’s glad that Steve probably doesn’t have a clue about the significance of that. And the truth is, Eddie hadn’t really been thinking about it at the time; Steve was bleeding, bare-chested in the chilly underworld, and flirting with Nancy in a way that made Eddie’s gut churn with idiotic, pointless jealousy. If he’d actually been thinking about it, he would have given him his jacket instead. It would have been warmer. And it wouldn’t have felt so much like prying his heart out of his chest and throwing it at Steve.

Steve’s fingers linger on the Dio patch on the back of the vest, the line of careful but lopsided stitches attaching it to the denim. “You made this yourself, right?”

“Yeah. It’s, like, tradition. Picked the t-shirt up at a concert a couple of years ago—I had to go all the way to Illinois, fuckin’ hitchiked halfway there after my van broke down, Wayne was beyond pissed when he found out, but it was totally worth it. Fucking incredible, dude, you would not believe it. Twelve thousand metalheads all jammed together—”

“Twelve thousand,” Steve repeats, sounding amused.

“Shit, yeah, you think I’m a freak, Harrington, there’s tons of us out there in the big, bad world.”

“I don’t think you’re a freak,” Steve says. Something about his tone makes Eddie stutter, but Steve isn’t looking at him.

“The good citizens of Hawkins, Indiana would probably disagree with you there,” he says.

“They can go to hell,” Steve says absently, still looking down at the patch. His fingers trace the ornate logo, the demonic figure towering over the chaos below.

Or hell is gonna come to them, Eddie thinks, but that way lies panicked gibbering if he thinks about it too long, so instead he blurts, “His name is Murray.”

Steve looks up, blinking. “What?”

“The—on the cover art. He’s like their mascot.”

“The demon guy?” Steve asks. He looks incredulous, but also sort of intrigued. “The demon guy is named Murray.”

“Murralsee, technically, but yeah—there’s like this whole mythology about him, and their first album, Holy Diver—”

“Your favorite.”

“It fucking kills, dude, you have no idea.” He needs to stop being so thrilled that Steve knows things like that. It’s just repetition. It doesn’t mean anything. “But like, the cover art is this painting of him with a big chain wrapped around a drowning priest.”

“Jesus,” Steve mutters, but he sounds amused.

“Yeah, it didn’t go over great. But the lead singer, Ronnie James Dio—he was in Black Sabbath before that—”

“Not the bat guy.”

“No, that was Ozzy. Ozzy Osbourne, they had actually fired him because—whatever, it was a whole thing, and Ronnie James Dio replaced him for a while. Then he and Vinny Appice—the drummer—they quit to form Dio, and they released Holy Diver in ‘83 and people lost their shit about it. But then Dio was like, how do you know it’s the demon killing the priest? How do you know it’s not the other way around? Which, like—yeah, maybe they were just covering their asses or whatever, but that stuck with me. You know, the idea that you can’t always tell by looking who the bad guy is.”

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” Steve summarizes.

“Cliche but correct.”

Steve snorts. “Thanks.”

“I could—when this is all over with, maybe I’ll play it for you sometime.”

It feels too revealing in the way that throwing the battle vest at Steve was too revealing: like he’s peeling off a layer of himself and offering it up for inspection.

Steve glances up at him. “On your guitar, you mean?”

“I could,” Eddie says. He hops up onto the counter, rattling his fingers on the edge of it. Feels jittery, like he’s stuck his finger in a light socket or something. “You haven’t even heard me play, you don’t know—”

“I have, actually.”

“What?”

“I heard you play. On the—I don’t remember now, third or fourth loop. Before it all went to shit, I mean. You were the distraction, and you played the guitar, and—I mean, I don’t know shit about music, but you sounded like you knew what you were doing.”

“Oh,” Eddie says, breathless and embarrassingly pleased. “What song was it?”

“Dude, I don’t know the name. Something about puppets.”

“Master of Puppets? Metallica?”

“I guess. I don’t know.”

“Shit.” Eddie tilts his head back, laughing. “Oh, man, yeah, I literally just got the fingering down on that one, the album is brand new—I almost didn’t get a copy, but the guy who runs this record shop I go to up in Indy put one aside for me. He’s the one who turned me on to metal in the first place—he actually got me a ticket to the concert this was from.” He nods at the Dio patch again. “I’d introduce you, but he’d hate your guts. No offense. It’s the yuppie thing.”

“I work at Family Video,” Steve protests, although he doesn’t actually look offended. “I’m not a yuppie.”

“You look like a yuppie,” Eddie says, although right now Steve looks more like a refugee from a Mad Max movie. “It’s your whole, you know, vibe. Polo shirts. Good hair. All-American boy-next-door. You look like the first guy who dies in a slasher flick.”

“Yeah, well, you look like—” Steve stops abruptly, blushing faintly.

“What?” Eddie asks, fascinated.

“Never mind. Forget it. Just—I don’t know, try to make it out of this in one piece for a change, okay?”

“Oh, I intend to. But hey, listen, if you feel like giving me a kiss for luck, I won’t say no.”

Steve’s head jerks up, and he stares at Eddie, and—ah. There it was. That was the line: as usual, only visible once he’s already taken a flying leap across it. He slides off the counter, landing with a thud that feels jarring. Steve doesn’t move at all.

“Sorry,” Eddie says quickly. “Forget it. I’m just running my mouth.”

Every word feels like it’s making it worse, somehow, every word a step away from his ability to slide sideways and turn it all into a crass, provocative joke, but he’s off-balance—enthralled, he realizes suddenly, by the quiet space between them and the moment he’s just broken. Steve’s eyes on him a moment ago, warm and amused as Eddie babbled about music. Steve’s eyes on him right now, looking stunned. Looking like he’s just figured something out.

Eddie really hopes he’s not about to get decked. It wouldn’t be the first time his big mouth has gotten him into trouble—far from it—but having to take a punch from Steve after all this might just break his heart.

The silence stretches out into some aching, sharp-edged thing, and then Steve mutters, “You know what, fuck it.”

Eddie’s heart leaps into the back of his throat as Steve steps closer. It’s not fear, exactly, but there’s some wild nervous thing that he can’t define until Steve reaches out to cup his jaw with one warm hand.

Then he gets it. Christ. Talk about calling his bluff.

Still, it happens slow enough that he could easily pull away if he wanted to. He doesn’t, and so time keeps moving: Steve closes the space between them to press a careful kiss to his lips.

It feels like everything has gone still. Like maybe the world stopped spinning and Eddie’s body is taking its sweet time catching up, because Steve Harrington is kissing him slow and sweet and cradling his face like he’s something precious.

Eddie kisses back, because the world has maybe stopped and he can’t not, and he expects this moment to pop like a soap bubble, but it doesn’t. Steve kisses him and rubs a warm thumb against his cheekbone, and when Eddie’s hand finds its way to his nape, his pleased hum vibrates thrillingly between their lips. Eddie kisses him, and kisses him, and pulls him closer until he can feel the sturdy warmth of Steve’s body against him, the solidity of him when Eddie feels like he’s about to fly apart into a million pieces.

When they do finally part, it’s gentle. Steve still has a hand on his face, and his eyes are intent. They’re hazel, Eddie realizes suddenly, not brown. This close, he can see the little flecks of gold and green that catch the sunlight coming in through the windows. They’re stupidly pretty. Everything about Steve is stupidly pretty, and Eddie has never been more confused in his life.

“Okay,” he whispers finally. “I feel very lucky now.”

Steve laughs softly. His warm breath dusts Eddie’s cheek; his lips are slightly reddened. Eddie wants to press his fingers against them but he’s not sure he remembers how to operate his body anymore. “I gotta be honest, I’ve been trying to figure out if you were just fucking with me this whole time.”

“I was,” Eddie says, then realizes how that probably sounds. “I mean. Not, like, because I didn’t want this, but because I never in a million years thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that you would.”

“Yeah, well. It took me a while.”

“Maybe this is what it takes to break the loop. You know, like—true love’s kiss, or something.”

Immediately he wants to bite the words back out of the air. Steve doesn’t jerk away, though. His expression is still soft.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe.”

“Maybe you should do it again, just in case?”

Steve breathes out a laugh. He cups Eddie’s cheek and leans in until their lips are almost touching, then murmurs, “You make it to tomorrow and I’ll kiss you again. Deal?”

Then he pulls back. Eddie blinks at him, befuddled and affronted, and Steve’s grin is the brightest thing he’s seen all day.

Eddie opens his mouth, then shuts it again. Finally he laughs.

“Well, that’s an incentive,” he says. “Better be a good kiss, though.”

“Oh, it will be.”

“I’m talking fireworks here, baby.”

“Sure,” Steve says, achingly fond.

Eddie nods. He feels giddy, fizzy, absurdly goddamn delighted for a guy preparing to go fight monsters. “Okay, Harrington. You got yourself a deal.”

“Thought so,” Steve says. He looks pleased with himself, the bastard.

There’s a sharp rap at the door that makes them both jump, and then Robin’s voice: “Are you two alive in there? Because for your information, I am not planning on finishing the rest of these Molotov cocktails on my own, and also your children are demanding snacks.”

“Yeah, we’re good,” Steve calls back, without looking away from Eddie. A corner of his mouth curls up into a small, secret smile that warms him from the inside. More quietly, he says, “Come on. Let’s get this show on the road.”

They drop Nancy and Max and the Sinclair siblings off at the Creel house as dusk gathers in the sky, and Steve stops Max as she moves past him, out of the RV.

“Be careful,” he says seriously.

She rolls her eyes. “Stop worrying so much. I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, well, you better,” Steve says, and it looks like he wants to say more, but eventually he lets her go.

The ride to Forest Hills is quiet. Steve drives, and Robin sits next to him in the passenger seat; Eddie shares the table with Dustin, who is attempting to reinforce his spear with an extra roll of duct tape and having some trouble with the lurching movement of the RV. Eventually, Eddie reaches across to hold it steady for him.

“Thanks,” Dustin says, tearing a strip off with his teeth. He leans over to apply it carefully, and says, without looking up at Eddie, “Be careful tonight, okay?”

“Course, man.” Eddie ruffles his curly hair. “You too.”

Dustin bats him away. “I mean it.”

“Okay, okay, Henderson.” He places a dramatic hand over his chest. “I do hereby solemnly swear that I, Eddie Munson, will not charge headlong into danger for no good reason.”

Dustin sets his spear down and gives him a long, narrow-eyed look, then finally nods. “Good. We don’t have time to find a new dungeon master before the end of the school year.”

Eddie cackles out loud, delighted, and out of the corner of his eye he sees Steve glance briefly back at him before turning back toward the road unspooling ahead of them in the deepening night.

It’s quiet as they move out into the gloomy Upside Down forest, leaving the trailer park behind. Leaving Dustin behind with a flamethrower and a spear, both of which seem insufficient, to say the least.

“He’ll be okay, right?” Eddie says, glancing at Steve as he steps over a spiny root that reaches lazily for his ankle. He’ll never get over the sheer malice of this place, the way it seems like everything in it down to the very plant life actively wants him dead.

“Henderson? Yeah. He always makes it out.” Steve looks worried, though. He glances briefly behind them, but the trees have already enclosed them in darkness.

“I’m still worried about whether we’re going to make it out,” Robin mutters.

“Oh, I am highly motivated,” Eddie says, and grins wildly when Steve lets out a strangled burst of laughter that makes Robin look at him like he's insane. He turns serious a moment later, though, when a swarm of bats go shrieking by overhead. Fortunately, the dense branches seem sufficient to shield them from view. They all duck anyway, Robin clutching for Steve’s hand; Eddie wishes he had the courage to do the same.

“So, if he knew we were coming the bats would have come after us, right?” he asks.

“Probably,” Steve says, unreassuringly.

“Probably?” Robin hisses.

“Hey, I haven’t exactly had time to take a graduate level course in Upside Down wildlife here—you want theories, ask Dustin.”

Dustin, back at the trailer setting up the bait trap for those murderous flying fuckers, and there’s the impulse to turn and run: not to save himself, surprisingly, but to make sure that brilliant, aggravating little shit is okay.

Dustin makes it out. Every loop, Dustin makes it out. Steve said so, and Eddie knows that he wouldn’t lie about that.

They’re closing on the Creel house now: the structure gaunt and haunted-seeming even here, towering ominously over the dead landscape. Demobats circle the chimneys like crows over a battlefield. The woods are thick and tangled here, the playground overgrown with vines. They circle around to the back of the house, and find a glimmer of lights hovering over the set of spindly lawn furniture that sits half-buried in rotting goldenrod: Erica, waiting for them on the other side.

Robin releases Steve's hand to brush her fingers through the glow. “We’re in place.”

“Copy,” Erica’s disembodied voice says briskly. There’s more talking, muddled, and then the lights rise glittering into the night. They’re weirdly pretty; weirdly alive in this blasted hellscape. Finally she says, “She’s in. Phase three is a go.”

Steve relays this to Dustin, with a final hissed admonition to be careful. A moment later, Judas Priest blares through the night, and Eddie can’t stop himself from grinning even as the bats wheel away and start flapping eastward toward the trailer park.

“Okay, I feel like I’m gonna puke,” Robin mutters, but she gamely shoulders her bag anyway and starts toward the house.

“Be careful,” Steve says quietly, and Eddie nods. He wants to ask—jokingly, or not—for another kiss, but instead he leans breifly against Steve, feels the warmth and solidity of him.

Then he steps away. Steve gives him a nod, and they fall into step with Robin. Together, they approach Vecna’s lair.

They make it halfway up to the attic before it all goes to hell. Eddie has felt uneasy from the moment they stepped through the door—more uneasy, that is, than rational fear can account for. The entire house pulses strangely, more like an organ than a structure. He wonders suddenly if they haven’t got it all wrong after all: if it’s not just the vines and the bats and the other monsters connected to the hive mind. This entire place is a part of Vecna—hungry, hostile, and terribly alive. This isn’t just bearding the monster in its lair; this is stepping into the mouth of the beast, and it suddenly seems like a really fucking bad idea.

Too late. Max is already in place. Either they kill Vecna, or she dies. So there’s really no other choice.

Halfway up the stairs, the vines that have been twitching sullenly and spasmodically around their feet as they dodge come suddenly and violently to life. One whips around Eddie’s legs, jerking him back against the wall; Steve lunges for him and is caught by three of them, hauling him backwards against the opposite wall as Robin is dragged down on the stairs. She cries out in pain and Steve yells her name; then his voice chokes off. The rotting air is suddenly full of the stink of gasoline as one of the Molotov cocktails rolls down the stairs and shatters. The vine wrapped around Eddie’s ribs squeezes tighter and tighter, crushing him, and he thinks, for a moment, that this is how it ends.

Then there’s a shudder. The house groans; the vines retract, and he collapses against the wall, gasping for breath. Steve hits the floor in a heap a moment later, then groans and pushes himself painfully to his feet. Robin sits up, then hunches over with a low moan.

“Fuck, my ankle. I think it’s broken.”

“Shit,” Steve says, stumbling over to her. “Let me take a look.”

“No, just help me up, we have to—”

She breaks off. There’s a heavy thump from upstairs, as if something has just landed on the floor. Then footsteps.

“Oh, shit,” Steve breathes.

“How,” Eddie hisses. “I thought Henderson said—”

“Max,” Robin says.

Steve swears viciously under his breath, kneeling down next to her to slide an arm behind her back. “Okay, okay, we have to get out of here, regroup, and then we can—”

“What, are you gonna carry me out of here?” Robin demands. “Steve—”

“Yeah, so hang on,” Steve says, and hefts her into his arms, standing. He staggers slightly under her weight, face going gray, and it’s only then that Eddie remembers the bites. Still, they make it to the bottom of the stairs as those slow, thudding footsteps approach. A dark figure appears at the top, and Eddie shoves open the nearest door.

“Come on, come on,” he says. “In here, maybe we can barricade it, or—” Or he doesn’t know. What kind of barricade can hold against something that can shatter bones with a look?

“There’s a window,” Steve says, but even a glance is enough to show that they’re too high up; if they try to jump, they’ll never make it.

Robin laughs breathlessly; her cheeks are wet. “You guys can still run.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” Steve says shortly.

Footsteps on the stairs. Heavier than a person should be, slow and unhurried. Why should he bother running? This place is his, blood and muscle and bone. They’re not going anywhere Vecna doesn’t allow them to go, not when every part of this world belongs to him. The air seems to compress again, the organ of the house squeezing around them. A low, rumbling laugh, and then the voice of the monster speaks.

“You’ll be pleased to know that she escaped. Maxine. A strong-willed girl, a fighter. But it doesn’t matter very much to me; one death will do as well as another. Which one shall it be? Who’ll have the honor of releasing hell on the world with their last breath?”

The house creaks around them; compresses. Those heavy footsteps pause at the door, and Robin sobs with pain, trying to shove at Steve. “Just go, get out of here—”

“No way in hell, Robin.”

It's too late for that anyway. Something inside Eddie goes still and calm. He wonders if this is how it felt all those other times, the ones he can’t remember. That sudden clarity. If he dies, the others live. If he dies, they get another shot at this.

When it comes down to it, it turns out the choice is easy after all. He pushes himself away from the window frame. “Hey, Steve?”

The look Steve gives him is halfway to frantic, like he’s hoping desperately that Eddie has the solution here. And he does, but it’s not one that Steve’s going to like. In fact, Steve may never forgive him for this. “What?”

“I’m sorry.” He steps close, catches Steve by the back of the head and pulls him in for a single quick, hard kiss. If he’s about to die, he’s allowed to be a little selfish right now.

Robin makes a surprised noise, and Eddie pulls back. Steve's expression is stunned. Just for a moment, before understanding dawns.

“Eddie, no,” he says, grabbing at Eddie even as he darts away.

He’s never been all that athletic, but he’s always been fast. Steve’s fingers close on empty air, and he lets out a noise like he’s the one dying here. “Eddie, come on, Eddie, don’t fucking do this again, please don’t—”

“See you on the next trip, sweetheart,” Eddie says, and opens the door to meet the monster.

Chapter Text

THIRTY-FIVE — March 28, 1986. 7:15 AM

Eddie wakes to the sound of Dustin Henderson snoring on the floor next to his bed, which kind of immediately ruins the illusion that this is just a normal morning where his most urgent problem is deciding whether or not he’s going to make an appearance at homeroom or skip until second period English. Instead, it’s evil wizards and interdimensional rifts. He’s actually kind of amazed he managed to sleep at all.

He levers himself upright, groping for his cigarettes—Dustin is a blanket-wrapped burrito with just a tuft of curls visible, his head buried in the pillow to the point that Eddie’s a little surprised he can breathe, let alone snore that damn loudly—lights one, and flops back onto his pillow, staring up at the water-stained popcorn ceiling. For the duration of a single cigarette, he’s not going to think about it. Vecna, the gates, his own likely impending demise—he’s not going to think about any of it.

Easier said than done. He smokes a second cigarette on the off chance that it’ll do the trick where the first one didn’t, and when that doesn’t work he finally groans, stubs it out in the glass ashtray on his nightstand, and steps carefully around Dustin to get out the door.

The trailer is quiet, but there’s a heaviness to the air that he’s unused to, the residue of half a dozen more people breathing in here than there usually are. Or at least, he hopes it’s that, and not the interdimensional rift that is, yeah, still punched through his living room ceiling. Steve and Robin are asleep on the floor, curled up together like a couple of puppies, and Nancy is perched on the couch with her knees drawn up to her chest, deep circles under her eyes. When Eddie emerges from the hallway she glances up and makes a valiant attempt at a polite smile. It doesn’t quite work, but he’ll give her points for effort.

“Good morning,” she says quietly.

“Morning,” Eddie replies. He cranes his head to get a look at Robin and Steve: Robin clutching at him like a teddy bear, leg slung over his thighs, hands gripping the denim fabric of Eddie’s battle vest, which she is also drooling on. Nancy is also looking at them with a tense, unhappy expression that doesn’t really go away when she catches him looking and gives him a tight smile.

“Coffee?” Eddie asks, instead of trying to poke at that can of worms at just past seven AM. “I don’t, uh, have any creamer, but..”

Nancy blinks. “Oh. Um, yes, please.”

“There’s sugar anyway,” he adds awkwardly. He doesn’t have anything to prove to Nancy Wheeler, and he refuses to be ashamed of where he lives—it’s shabby and cluttered, sure, but also the first real home he’s had since his mom died—but it’s just. Weird. Usually, girls like Nancy only show up here to buy drugs, and that reluctantly. The end of the world makes for strange bedfellows.

He nods toward the sullenly pulsing gate in the ceiling. “Nothing weird happened?”

“No. I couldn’t really sleep, so I sort of… kept an eye on it.”

“You could have woken one of us up. I would have spelled you.”

“This isn’t really your problem.” She winces as soon as she says it. “Or—I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”

“It’s fine,” Eddie says, although it stings.

“I just mean that you weren’t involved until you got dragged into it. This shouldn’t have to be your fight.”

“Yeah, I bet the rest of you just jumped in headfirst, right?”

On the other hand, that is literally exactly what she did last night. That’s what all of them did other than Eddie, who lingered in the boat dithering until shame finally drove him into the water.

“Okay,” Nancy sighs. “Fair point.”

It really is too goddamn early for this. He shuffles into the kitchen to get the coffee started, then goes through the cupboards like he’s going to find anything edible there. It was his turn to get the groceries, and it doesn’t look like Wayne has been back here since the cops tossed the place. Sure enough: the cupboards hold a couple of mostly-empty cereal boxes, a few lone Pop-Tarts, and little else. Figures.

He pours coffee into one of Wayne’s mismatched collectible mugs—printed with the logo of Joshua Tree National Park, where Eddie is fairly sure Wayne has never actually been—and delivers it to Nancy along with the sugar bowl. Then he leans over to jostle Steve and Robin’s shoulders gently. Robin wakes first, yawning and bleary and scrubbing at her drool-encrusted cheek.

“There’s coffee in the kitchen,” Eddie says. “Wheeler has the sugar bowl.”

“Kay.” Robin scrubs her face again, then grabs Steve by the shoulder and shakes him much less gently than Eddie just did. “Hey. Dingus. Wake up already.”

Steve’s eyes open. For a moment, he just stares up at the ceiling; then he puts both hands over his face and takes a couple of sharp, shuddery breaths. His shoulders heave. He sits up without moving his hands and curls into himself, still shaking, and that’s when Eddie realizes that he’s fucking crying.

Nancy sets her coffee cup down, looking alarmed. “Steve?”

“What's wrong, are you okay?” Robin demands in almost the same moment.

“Harrington?” Eddie asks tentatively when Steve doesn’t answer. That gets a response, but it’s not a good one. Steve’s whole body flinches like he’s been struck; he makes a low, wounded noise, then shoves himself to his feet and stumbles down the hallway to the bathroom without looking at any of them. The door slams shut behind him, leaving echoing silence in its wake.

“What the fuck,” Eddie says.

Nancy is already on her feet, making her way down the hall to rap sharply at the bathroom door. Eddie and Robin exchange a wide-eyed glance, then trail behind her.

“Steve?” Nancy says. She knocks again as Erica appears in the doorway to Wayne’s room, wrapped in the blanket she was sleeping in and squinting crankily into the morning light.

“Y’all are noisy as hell, you know,” she says.

Nancy ignores her. “Steve, come on, just—”

“I’m fine,” Steve says from behind the door. His voice is so flat and steady that Eddie almost doubts what he just saw. “Just. Trying to get these bites cleaned out. Get some band-aids on them, or something.”

“There’s bandages and iodine in the medicine cabinet,” Eddie offers as Max and Lucas shuffle into the doorway next to Erica. Max still has her headphones on; Eddie can hear Kate Bush’s tinny voice rising up as she fiddles with the cord. He rattles his fingers on his thighs, then shoves them into his pockets. There’s a strange restlessness consuming him, an unease that he can’t fully explain.

Steve is silent for a long moment. Then, in that same flat, steady tone, he says, “Thanks.”

“Do you need help?” Nancy asks. “We could—”

“No,” Steve interrupts. It’s sharp; there’s a shaky breath that follows. Something creaks. Cloth shifts, then he says, “No, it’s fine, I’ll handle it. You guys should, um. Get the kids up. Fill them in on your vision, from Vecna. I’ll be right out.”

“How do you know about that?” Nancy asks sharply. There’s a thump from Eddie’s bedroom, and Dustin’s snores finally stop. A moment later, he appears in the doorway, rubbing his face.

“What’s going on?” he yawns. “What are you guys all doing?”

“Having a pep rally in the hallway, apparently,” Erica says acidically. “What vision? What is he talking about?”

“I saw—when Vecna had me, he showed me—” Nancy breaks off again. “Steve, how do you know about that?”

“Just give me a second,” Steve snaps. There’s a thump from inside like his fist just hit something.

“But—”

“Come on.” It’s Robin, unexpectedly, who speaks. Her eyes flicker toward the locked door and the expression on her face is tense and drawn, but her voice is steady. “Come on, come on, out of the hallway, we don’t all need to be crowding around the bathroom like a bunch of weirdos, let’s go.”

Briskly, she hustles them all out of the hallway. Nancy is the last to go. There’s a stubborn look on her face, and she gives the locked door a look like she’s thinking about—

(—christ are you gonna shoot the lock out—)

—kicking it down or something. Eddie blinks, feeling disoriented, like something has just lurched beneath him and then steadied. Robin steps closer and lays a careful hand on Nancy's arm.

“Nance,” she says. “Please.”

Something about that makes Nancy subside. Her narrow shoulders sag. She nods. “Okay.” Then, slightly louder, “Steve, we’ll be right in the living room if you need anything.”

“Right,” Steve says quietly, after a moment. His voice sounds—wrong, Eddie thinks, and thinks of his shaking shoulders and the way he folded in on himself a moment ago. He hesitates, too, but when Robin gives him a look he follows her and Nancy out into the living room.

“What the hell is going on?” Dustin demands. With his tousled curls and sleep-puffed eyes he looks unspeakably young. “What’s wrong with Steve?”

“You mean besides the fact that he almost got eaten by demobats last night?” Erica asks.

“He was fine last night,” Dustin retorts, swaying back toward the hallway and eyeing the bathroom door like he’s got X-ray vision or something; like he, too, is thinking about breaking it down. He turns back toward Nancy a moment later, though. “And what was he saying about a vision? What does that mean? Did you see something when Vecna had you? What did you see?”

Nancy sinks back onto the couch. She picks up her abandoned coffee cup and holds it between her hands like an anchor, not drinking. Robin perches on the cushion next to her, knees folded, hands hovering in the air for a moment like she’s thinking about touching before she folds them in her lap. Eddie, lingering by the doorway, feels a chill go through him that he can’t completely explain. His eyes are briefly caught by the gate on the ceiling, the shifting impossibility of it, the threads of deadened black bleeding into the world from the Upside Down.

“I—I saw.” Her hands shake; coffee spills over her fingers and she sets the cup down. “Sorry, I’m sorry—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eddie says immediately. Nancy holds up her dripping fingers, looking near tears, so he goes to tear off a sheet of paper towel and hand it to her.

“Sorry,” she says again, taking it. She wipes her fingers, then folds the towel into a knot between her trembling palms.

“Nancy?” Dustin asks, in a much gentler tone of voice. It’s not entirely dissimilar to the way he was talking to Eddie back at the boathouse—careful, soothing, and slow, like he’s talking to a wild animal in a trap. It worked well enough on Eddie, but he’s not surprised to see Nancy straighten defiantly, her chin coming up. Nancy Wheeler does not strike him as a person who’s amenable to being soothed no matter what the circumstances.

“I’m fine,” she says. The coffee-drenched paper towel remains knotted in her fists, her knuckles white. “It’s just. Vecna showed me a vision. He wanted me to know—he wanted to, to brag about what he was going to do. He showed me—a monster, with a mouth full of teeth—an army of monsters in Hawkins. Not the Upside Down Hawkins, but our Hawkins, our home. He showed me my mom, and Holly, and, and Mike—”

“But Mike’s in California,” Lucas says. He’s gripping Max’s free hand, and his eyes are huge. “He’s with El and Will, they're in California, not Hawkins.”

The subtext there is clear: They're safe.

“We should call them,” Max says quietly. “If this is really… maybe El could—”

“She doesn’t have her powers anymore,” Dustin says. “Remember?”

“Maybe they came back. If all of this is coming back, and it’s related to the Upside Down—we have to try. If nothing else, we have to warn them.”

“Okay, well, do you know their number? Because I don’t remember it.”

“Seriously, Dustin?”

“It’s written down in my mom’s address book! I remember their number for Hawkins!”

“I know it,” Lucas says, before they can really get going. “It’s 858—”

Max pushes her headphones down and reaches for the phone on the wall between the kitchen and the living room, and Eddie winces. “Um, that’s actually… not in service right now.”

“What?” Dustin asks.

“Unless Wayne paid it while I was taking a week-long sabbatical in Rick Lipton’s boathouse, which frankly seems unlikely. It was…” He trails off. February was a rough month, money-wise, between the burst pipes under the trailer during that last hard freeze and the transmission in Wayne’s ancient Oldsmobile unexpectedly kicking the bucket, but he feels kind of weird about getting into that. It’s not relevant anyway. “Anyway, yeah, no working phone here. Sorry.”

Dustin looks like he’s going to say something else, but Max, mercifully, just nods. “My phone is hooked up. We can call from there. My mom’s car is gone, so it should be empty. There’s food there, too.”

“Okay, sold,” Dustin says immediately. Erica snorts, rolls her eyes, and peers out the window.

“Looks like the coast is clear,” she says. “If we’re going, we should go now.”

Dustin hangs back as the rest of them head toward the door, then slips past Eddie to knock on the still-closed bathroom door. “Hey Steve? We’re going over to Max’s trailer to try and call El.”

There’s silence. Then Steve says, quietly, “Okay.”

“So meet us there whenever you’re done.” More silence. “Or you could just come with us now. You’re not dying in there, are you? Because I’ll totally break down the door, don’t think I won’t.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m not dying, get the hell out of here. I’ll meet you over there.”

“Go with them, Henderson,” Eddie adds quietly, and Dustin gives him a betrayed look.

“But—”

“You guys get started on a plan. I got this.”

By the front door, Nancy pauses, turning back toward them, Robin just behind her. Eddie waves a hand at her, and she gives him a long look—he’s not sure what she’s actually looking for, but after a moment, she nods and follows Robin out the door. Dustin opens his mouth like he’s going to try to argue, and Eddie gives him the stern look that he’s perfected in Hellfire Club for quelling rowdy and distracted players. He’s not sure he expects it to work here, but after a moment, Dustin subsides with a deep sigh and follows the others out of the trailer. The door swings shut behind them, and now Eddie’s alone with a door in between him and Steve and no clue what to do next.

He just remembers the look on Steve’s face when he woke up. That single cracked sob. Steve’s not gonna want Dustin to see him like that. Of course, he probably doesn’t want Eddie to see him like that either, but at least in his case there’s not really a relationship there to fuck up.

“Harrington?” he says after a little while. “You good, dude?”

There’s silence. Then Steve says, “You’re still here.”

“Yeah, uh, not gonna lie, I’m considering picking the lock on the door right now because you’re kind of giving me that vibe of like, that chestburster scene in Alien. Like, you know the one where—”

“They all sit down to dinner and then the alien explodes out of the guy, yeah,” Steve says from behind the door. He sounds slightly more animated. Eddie gapes at it, then laughs, startled.

“Okay, honestly I did not expect you to get that reference. You’ve seen Alien?”

“I work at a video store,” Steve says, sounding tired again. “I’ve seen a lot of movies.”

“His name is Kane,” Eddie says, trying to coax that brief spark of life back. “The um—the character, his name is Kane. Played by John Hurt. He was in The Elephant Man, too, and, like, a bunch of other movies, but he was nominated for this big British film award for Alien. He didn't win, but he should have.”

“Oh,” Steve says dully, then doesn’t say anything else.

Eddie thumps his forehead lightly with his fist, embarrassed. But the silence keeps stretching out and out, and there’s a knot in the pit of his stomach that has nothing to do with embarrassment that keeps twisting itself tighter and tighter.

“Okay, I wasn’t kidding about picking the lock, though,” he says finally.

He fully expects Steve to tell him to fuck off, but after the silence has stretched out a while longer, there’s a deep sigh and Steve says, quietly, “Go ahead.”

Gripped by an inexplicable dread, Eddie ducks into his room and paws through the cluttered surface of his dresser until he comes up with a paperclip that’s already been untwisted. It’s the work of a moment to get the cheap lock open, and he pushes the door open slowly, expecting on some level to walk in on a bloodbath or something worse.

It’s just Steve, though. He’s stripped out of Eddie’s battle vest and the blood-soaked makeshift bandage but doesn’t seem to have made any more progress than that; he’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub with his elbows braced on his knees, his head hanging. He doesn’t look up when Eddie steps in, but he does tilt his head slightly. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Eddie says back. It comes out oddly hushed. There’s a strange stillness to the space, the light coming in through the high narrow window over the tub gilding the room in false gold. Steve looks like some kind of Renaissance sculpture of a battle-worn hero, with his curved spine and his loose hair tumbling down to obscure his face.

Then he shifts his weight, wincing, and the illusion shatters. Steve just looks like a guy. A kid, really, barely older than Eddie: tired, unhappy, and in pain. In the light of day the bites on his shoulders and abdomen look jarringly gory, the shredded toothmarks, the skin that’s literally torn away in places. He definitely needs stitches, and maybe skin grafts and other shit that’s well beyond Eddie’s limited medical expertise. But that’s not an option right now, and Eddie is better than nothing. Probably.

“Did you clean those yet?” he asks. Steve shakes his head. “Okay, well, we should start with that. I have some iodine and bandages, but it’s best to use—”

“—warm water to rinse them out,” Steve finishes. His voice is rusty and quiet. Eddie nods, folding himself awkwardly down to sit on the edge of the tub next to Steve. Their knees bump before he shifts his legs away.

“Yeah. Here, let me—gonna get your pants wet, sorry.”

A shudder rolls through Steve, but he doesn’t lift his head. “It’s fine.”

Feeling genuinely unsettled now, Eddie turns the water on and tests it with his fingers until it’s lukewarm, then cups it in his hands to rinse the blood and other gunk—monster saliva, gross—out of the wounds. Steve doesn’t make a sound the whole time. He’s obedient to Eddie’s quiet directions to lean this way or that, to turn so that Eddie can get injuries on his other side, but he doesn’t say a single word. By the time the water runs clean, Eddie’s jeans are soaked through around the knees and the silence feels like a gnawing, palpable thing.

Steve is silent when Eddie turns the water off and pats the skin around the injuries carefully dry, and he’s silent when Eddie opens the medicine cabinet to pull out the iodine and the box of non-stick bandages and puts the lid down on the toilet seat.

“Probably be easier if you sit down here,” he says, and Steve nods and moves slowly over to sit down. He braces his hands against the edges and doesn’t meet Eddie’s eyes.

And he still doesn’t fucking say a word.

“I’m gonna just—is this okay?” Eddie gestures stupidly with the bottle of iodine, and Steve still doesn’t speak, but he does nod slightly, so Eddie takes the bottle and the package of cotton swabs and sets about applying it to his injuries. They look less gruesome now that they’re clean, but the iodine drips down Steve’s skin looking enough like blood to make Eddie uneasy. He becomes aware as he shifts over to start on Steve’s other side that Steve is trembling minutely, his stomach muscles tense in a way that has to make this hurt even more. His knuckles are white, tendons standing out like wires in his forearms.

“Look, if you need to take a breather—” he lifts his head, then stops dead.

Steve is crying again. It’s silent, but it looks like the silence takes effort: his jaw is tense, his lips twisted into a tight grimace as tears stream down his face. When he realizes Eddie is looking at him, he lifts one hand to swipe roughly at his cheeks.

“You okay?” Eddie asks, alarmed.

It’s a deeply stupid question, but the gnawing thing has grown sharp teeth and he feels unbalanced, with no idea what his next step should be. His hand hovers stupidly in midair, and when he shifts his weight he nearly knocks over the iodine bottle with his knee.

Steve swallows convulsively, twice, then says, “I’m fine. Keep going.”

The bleak, exhausted tone of his voice is more worrying than the tears. Because that doesn’t sound like pain, or at least not the kind of pain that has anything to do with Eddie sponging disinfectant on his torn-up midsection.

“No offense, dude, but you do not seem fine.”

“Yeah, well, whose fucking fault is that?”

The sudden snap of anger is startling enough that Eddie jerks back, hands flying up instinctively. Steve is glaring at him, looks furious even with his eyes wet and his face blotchy, and Eddie has not a single fucking clue why.

“Um,” he says.

As quickly as it appeared, the fury drains away. In its wake, Steve looks even more exhausted than before. “I’m sorry. Forget it.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

“You did it again,” Steve mumbles. Tears spill down his cheeks; he jams the heels of his hands roughly against his eyes like he can force them back in. “All that shit, everything we talked about, and you still—”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says helplessly. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says roughly.

“Steve?”

“Give me a minute.”

“Okay,” Eddie says, and bites his knuckle hard to physically prevent himself from saying anything else.

“This is the thirty-fifth time I’ve lived through today,” Steve says finally, letting his hands drop loosely into his lap. “And you keep dying.”

Eddie sits down hard on the bathroom floor. He blinks a couple of times up at Steve, who really does not look like he’s about to yell, sike! and burst out laughing.

“You mean like that freaky Richard Lupoff story?” he asks before remembering who it is he’s talking to. The likelihood that Steve Harrington has read through the public library’s moldy back-issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction is approaching nil.

The second part of that sentence he sets firmly aside in a triple-reinforced mental core reactor shield. You keep dying, in that tired, numb tone of voice—yeah, he’s not dealing with that shit right now. It’s easier than he expects; apparently living in a state of near-constant mortal terror for the better part of a week is giving him the knack of not thinking about it.

Steve, surprisingly, lets out a snort of humorless laughter. “Of course you’ve fucking read that too. The one with the guy who keeps repeating the same hour over and over again, right?”

Eddie stares at him. Then he says, “Right.”

“Yeah, Dustin told me about it on, like, the third loop. And then every time after that whenever I told you guys about it. He always takes the most convincing, which is, like—weird, right? This kid literally raised a demodog from a larva in his turtle tank. You’d think he’d be on board with this crazy bullshit, but no, he’s always gotta do the twenty questions first.” Steve laughs wetly. “Shit. I’m sorry.”

“I believe you,” Eddie offers. It’s the truth, but he thinks he’d say it even if it wasn’t. He thinks he’d say just about anything right now to get that look off of Steve’s face. Somehow the fact that he doesn’t even seem to be embarrassed about crying like this in front of Eddie is the most unsettling part.

You keep dying, he thinks, then shoves the containment chamber shut again.

“Yeah,” Steve says after a moment. He laughs again, swipes at his wet face. “You always believe me, like, right off the bat. I could never figure that one out.”

“I don’t know, dude, I mean—in the past week alone I have encountered an evil interdimensional wizard who can kill people with his mind and I biked through the fucking underworld after fighting bat-monsters that tried to eat us—you mostly, sorry—so, like, a time loop doesn’t really seem like that huge a stretch at this point. Reality is clearly already significantly more fucked than I realized.”

Steve lets out an odd noise. Then he ducks his head to shove a hand through his grimy hair and says, quietly, “Thanks.”

“Anytime,” Eddie says stupidly. “Um, do you—should I try to get those bandaged?”

“Oh,” Steve says, looking down at himself. His hand ghosts over his own torso like it doesn’t quite belong to him, and then he says, “Okay.”

“I’ll try not to fuck it up too badly.”

There’s another one of those odd little shudders. Then Steve says, “You won’t. You never do.”

Eddie pauses halfway through unfolding a bandage. “We’ve done this before?”

“Yeah,” Steve says quietly. He shifts his weight, then adds, “You said your mom was a nurse.”

“She was,” Eddie says after a moment. His own fingers are shaking a little; annoyed, he flexes his hands and spreads the bandage over the largest cluster of bites over Steve’s hip, holding it gently in place while he tears off a length of tape. “Or, well, she was studying to be one, anyway. She never actually took the exams before…” he trails off and shakes his head. Wonders if he told Steve that part too. If not, Steve probably knows anyway. Hawkins is a small town. It’s no big secret that Dorothy Munson was found with her car wrapped around a tree and a BAC twice the legal limit on Eddie’s third week of eighth grade. He still remembers the way Hopper looked when he showed up to pull Eddie out of fourth-period Bio to inform him, how he saw that grim bristled face in the high school guidance office and somehow just knew.

“Sorry,” Steve says again, even quieter. Eddie pats his side briefly, intending only to soothe, but Steve jerks painfully under the contact.

Eddie drops his hand and clears his throat, reaching for the next bandage. “Anyway, my old man never bothered getting rid of her textbooks afterwards. Came in real handy patching myself up in high school, let me tell you. And it was…” A way to feel closer to her, which is pathetic, probably. He still has them in his room, like any college in the country would accept him even before he was a wanted fugitive. “I don’t know, forget it, I’m just running my mouth.”

“I don’t mind,” Steve says.

“Yeah, well.” He unrolls another length of tape, secures the second bandage, and starts on the next one. “You figure out what’s causing it? The time loop?”

“No,” Steve says. His head is bowed again, loose hair falling into his face. “I don’t know what’s causing it, and I don’t know how to break it. All I know is that every time it resets when—” He breaks off with another shudder. “Forget it.”

You keep dying, Eddie thinks again, and suppresses a shudder of his own. He starts on the last of the bites, an ugly shredded one in the soft flesh just under Steve’s ribs. There are gouges around it, like the monster that was trying to eat him dug its claws in deep. Eddie wonders if that’s the one that Nancy ripped off of him when she charged in like an avenging Valkyrie, armed with nothing but a boat oar and a wellspring of furious courage.

“What about, you know, true love’s kiss? I mean, that’s a classic for a reason.”

It’s a stupid joke, but Eddie is sort of desperate to lighten the mood a little. Distract himself, at least.

Steve freezes. The expression that passes over his face is some dreadful mixture of longing and grief.

“Tried that,” he says after a moment. “It didn’t work.”

“Oof,” Eddie offers, with as much sympathy as he can manage, and goes back to taping down gauze so he doesn’t have to look at Steve’s face. “I thought for sure that Wheeler…”

“It wasn’t Nancy,” Steve interrupts quietly. The silence seems to spread like ripples on still water in the wake of that. Steve breathes out hard and doesn’t say anything else.

Eddie smoothes the last piece of tape down and tries to tell himself that his hands aren’t shaking. Steve’s skin is warm beneath his fingers. Solid and alive. Eddie should stop touching him now, but he doesn’t. He sets the tape roll aside and watches as it rolls away to bump against the side of the tub and topple over onto its side. Steve’s skin is warm beneath his fingers, his thigh pressed against the outside of Eddie’s arm because of their positions, which would be suggestive if they weren’t in a fucking bathroom and Steve wasn’t covered in blood and still kind of crying a little.

Stupidly, he says, “I didn’t think that Buckley was—”

Then he bites off the end of that sentence, shifting back until he's not touching Steve anymore. He settles against the wall of the tub, the pressed plastic damp and cool against his back. Steve sighs.

“Come on, man,” he says, sounding exhausted.

And yeah, okay, so Eddie might make a habit of playing dumb, but he isn’t actually an idiot. He knows what Steve is implying here, but he can’t just say it. For all he runs his mouth at the worst possible times, right now the words feel stoppered up in his throat, impossible to get out even if he wanted to.

Steve apparently has no such compunctions. “You know what’s nuts? I never even thought about it before. Like, that seems like the kind of thing you should figure out about yourself sooner, right? But I was… I don’t know, repressed. Or just stupid, who the hell knows. Jealous. I told you that, a few loops back, but—I was so fucking jealous, because you were the hot new thing in town and Dustin couldn’t shut up about you, and it felt like I was being, like, replaced or something. I didn’t even want to come find you at first, because I was so convinced you did it. I don’t think I told you that yet. We’ve talked about a lot of things, but I don’t think I ever told you that, because it feels like shit.”

It does sting, but Eddie’s not exactly surprised. “You’d be far from the only one. I mean, obviously.”

“It’s all bullshit,” Steve says. “This whole town, all the shit they say, it’s all bullshit. And I knew better, anyway. I was being a shithead, because I was jealous, and I was—” he knocks his head back against the wall, then leaves it there, eyes closed. “I was scared. You were all—” a hand waves in vague description at Eddie. “And you wouldn’t stop flirting with me. Just, like, constantly. I thought you were fucking with me. I didn’t know what the hell to do about it.”

“Um,” Eddie says. His hands are shaking again. He folds them into fists, then thumps them on his knees. “So, I talk a lot of shit. Like. A lot.”

Unexpectedly, Steve laughs. It’s a strangled sound, small and brief. He doesn’t open his eyes. “Yeah, trust me, I know. But the last time, you weren’t even… we were just, we were talking about music, and you were telling me about the demon guy on your jacket and this concert you went to in Illinois, and some record store you wanted to show me but couldn’t because the dude in charge would hate my guts, and I was just like, I can’t watch him die again, I can’t, so I asked you to be careful, and you fucking—you told me I should give you a kiss for luck.”

Eddie’s heart lurches weirdly, like it’s coming unmoored from his ribs, like it might travel up the back of his throat to spew out red and bloody across the bathroom floor. He thinks he’d run if he could remember how to get his legs to work. If he could bear to move.

“Oh,” he says. It comes out weird; choked.

“Yeah.” Steve rubs a hand over his mouth, then opens his eyes. He keeps his gaze fixed on the ceiling instead of looking at Eddie, which is probably a mercy. He has no idea what his expression is doing, but he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want a witness for it. It’s terror and hope and a weird wistful tinge of regret, all tangled up in an inexplicable knot in the back of his throat.

“Yeah,” Steve says again, steady and low and calm again. “So I kissed you, and we—and you know, I really thought maybe that was it, right, like that fixed it. Like maybe all this shit was just the universe telling me that I needed to figure out what I wanted and once I did it would all turn out okay.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath, then lets it out. “And then four hours later you fucking died for me, again, and I woke up and it was this morning, again, and I don’t fucking know what to do. I don’t know how to fix it, I don’t know what to do.”

You keep dying, and there it is.

“And I realize that this all must sound completely fucking nuts, because for you it’s been like three days and I’ve been a total douchebag to you the whole time, and now I’m dumping this on you and—Jesus, I don’t know. I’m just. Sorry.”

“I asked,” Eddie says finally, although he didn’t exactly. But the question was implied, and he’d rather know, anyway. Pandora’s Box, the fruit of knowledge, whatever—ignorance has never seemed like bliss to Eddie, even if there are things about the world that he wishes he still didn’t know. This one’s a mixed bag. He’s not sure he wanted to know what Steve looks like wrung out and exhausted and—grieving, he’s grieving Eddie even though Eddie is sitting right here, which is beyond fucked. But Steve looks—not better, not exactly, but a little like a wound has been lanced. Like all that misery inside him had to come out somehow, and Eddie’s the one who’s here. Eddie’s the one who volunteered to be here; insisted on it, even.

The other thing is, he knows the concert Steve is talking about—Hoffman Estates, that time when his van broke down halfway there and he walked down five miles of highway with his thumb out before a van full of hippies gave him a ride and toked him up in the bargain. And he knows the record store Steve is talking about, the one in Indianapolis that’s owned by a crusty old metalhead named Vinny who’d certainly never let Eddie hear the end of it if he showed up with Steve in tow in all his preppy glory.

And Steve kissed him. Said, I thought maybe I just had to figure out what I wanted.

Like maybe—possibly—the answer to that could be Eddie.

Like that’s the most important thing about this conversation. Like that’s what he needs to be focused on instead of You keep dying and the way Steve looks like something essential inside him is starting to break.

“How?” he asks, before he can start to spiral too much.

Steve looks at him, opens his mouth, shuts it, then says, “What?”

“I mean, how did it happen? Did everybody else make it out okay? Henderson, Sinclair, Max—did they all—?”

“Jesus,” Steve says. His expression does something complicated before finally softening. “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

“You think so?”

“We were all split up. We had this plan—anyway, Henderson figured out that we’d only be able to go after him when he was in, like, a trance while he was attacking somebody, so that meant—”

“Max,” Eddie finishes. It all makes a horribly poetic kind of sense, now that he’s looking at it. Like the part of a campaign when a well-built trap closes around his unwitting players, only deadly serious this time around. One way in, no way out.

“Yeah.” Steve sighs and tilts his head back again. “And it—didn’t go well, for her. Any of the times we tried it. Even when we tried to wait it out, keep her safe, he still got to her.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. So last time Nance went with them to help Lucas break her out of it if it looked like she was in trouble, and they must have managed it that time around, but—we hadn’t gotten to Vecna yet. You and me and Robin. And he came after us, and you jumped in front of us, and—yeah.”

“But Max made it out,” Eddie says slowly, trying not to picture it. Chrissy Cunningham on his ceiling, bones snapping. What it might feel like to have your own body shattered from the inside. How much it hurt before the end, that time around. He’s sorry Steve had to see it.

But Max made it out. And there it is: the loophole. The wiggle room in the trap. Maybe. Eddie knows how to put together a tricky campaign, but he doesn’t design his to be unwinnable.

“Yeah,” Steve says, but it still sounds miserable, like he doesn’t get it. “That time around, sure. But it doesn’t really count for much now because it totally reset again, so—”

“Right, but now you know you can save her,” Eddie says. He lifts his hands, trying to sketch the shape of his point in midair. “You know you can change the outcome for at least one of us, so it stands to reason that you can do it for both of us. And maybe that’s what it takes to break the loop. Or maybe it’s killing Vecna, but like, you know, I’m pretty personally invested in surviving all this, especially now.”

Steve drops his chin to look at him. Objectively, he is a fucking mess: puffy-eyed, greasy-haired and grimy, scraped all to hell and covered in Upside Down gunk and demobat injuries. Eddie still wants to kiss him. Again. He really wishes that he could remember the first time. It seems unfair that Steve can.

It probably doesn’t make up for all the emotional trauma, though. He’s kind of tempted to ask Steve, but before he can blurt that out or do something even stupider like lean in and kiss Steve just to see for himself, the front door of the trailer bangs open.

“—want you to be safe, that’s all,” Lucas is saying. “You know I’m not saying that you can’t do it, you know that, Max, but—”

“Calm down, stalker,” Max says. There are quick footsteps on the rattly metal steps, and the door swings shut again. “I get it, okay, but we can’t just drop some random civilian into the middle of all this and hope Vecna doesn’t kill them. And that’s assuming he’ll even go for them in the first place.”

“Sounds like they worked out a plan already,” Eddie says.

“Steve, Eddie, are you guys in here?” Lucas calls. Then, quieter, “I just wonder if we’ve considered all of the…”

“Yeah, we’re here,” Steve calls back. He looks away from Eddie, straightening up.

“Be right out,” Eddie adds. He leans forward to cap the iodine and sets it on the sink along with what’s left of the gauze, then stands, offering Steve a hand up. He’s not sure if he expects Steve to take it or not, but he does. He picks up the battle vest and turns it over in his hands with more reverence than the grimy, bloodstained piece of denim really deserves, but Eddie appreciates it all the same. Then he holds it out to Eddie silently.

Eddie takes it. In the living room, Mac and Lucas are still arguing in hushed voices. The vest is stiff with grime and gore, and there’s not actually any warmth still lingering from Steve’s skin, but he squeezes it between his palms anyway.

“I probably have a shirt or something you can borrow,” he offers tentatively. “If you want.”

Steve looks down at the vest in Eddie’s hands and nods. “Yeah, man, thanks.”

So they cross the hall to Eddie’s room, which is never exactly spotless and currently looks like a hurricane blew through it after Robin and Max’s frantic search through his music collection last night. The sleeping bag that Dustin was using is a tangled mess on the floor. Eddie kicks it out of the way to get the dresser open. He digs through the second drawer down until he finds a Heaven and Hell tour shirt that’s not too ratty around the collar, which he holds out. “Here.”

Steve has been peering at something in the corner; now he looks up, and Eddie sees that the thing he was looking at is Wayne’s old acoustic guitar, which he passed on to Eddie and didn’t even get mad about when Eddie spontaneously graffitied it one night when he was high and angry and full of too many other feelings that he couldn’t figure out how to let out for the life of him.

“This Machine Slays Dragons,” Steve reads. He’s smiling a little as he takes the shirt, but it looks fond, not mocking.

“Would that it were true, my friend.”

But actually—there’s a seed of an idea starting to germinate now. It’s a stupid idea, probably. Reckless. Possibly insane.

As Steve gingerly pulls the t-shirt on, Eddie opens the top drawer of his dresser, digs through his socks, underwear, weed stash, and the porn mags he only has because he trusts Wayne not to go through his shit, until he comes up with the used Walkman that he splurged on last Christmas and never, ever brings to school. He gets hassled way less now that he’s two years older than almost everybody and the main reliable source of illicit substances for the population of Hawkins High, but it’s still not never. He might shove himself in all his provocative glory right in all their smug faces, but he protects the things that matter.

The tape he’s looking for isn’t on top of the dresser where it should be, but a lot of things got knocked over and tossed around last night. Eventually, he finds it wedged halfway under his night stand. He flips the jewel case open to make sure that the right cassette is in there, then pops it in his Walkman, pockets that, and sets the empty case on the bed. Steve is dressed now in Eddie’s shirt, which is almost as distressing as the sight of him in Eddie’s battle jacket was. More, in some ways; Steve isn’t significantly bigger than him, but he’s broad where Eddie is lanky, and the t-shirt that’s almost too loose on Eddie clings to the sturdy breadth of his chest and shoulders.

“You ready?” he asks. Eddie nods. Steve reaches down to offer him a hand up, and Eddie—struck by the kind of wild impulse that he’s never been very good at resisting—folds Steve’s fingers delicately and leans in to brush a kiss against his knuckles. A squire to his knight, or a knight to his beloved—one of those things, definitely.

There’s a sharp intake of breath from over his head. Steve’s fingers twitch in his, but he doesn’t pull away. When Eddie lifts his head, Steve is staring down at him, his eyes dark, his lips softly parted, and the momentary cowardly impulse Eddie had to turn this into just one more bit of meaningless clowning drains away.

Steve knows better, anyway.

He tugs gently on Eddie’s hand, and doesn’t let go when Eddie stands. The stillness between them seems charged. Eddie looks down at their joined hands, then back up at Steve’s face. His dark eyes—hazel, Eddie thinks, not brown, although the truth is it’s not really light enough in here to see for sure. If he were closer he’d be able to tell.

He doesn’t get a chance to step closer, or to move away. Footsteps move quickly down the hall, and Eddie drops Steve’s hand before Steve has to do it for him. A moment later, Max pokes her head in. Her headphones are around her neck and her expression is alight with a sort of bright-eyed determination that makes Eddie’s stomach churn at the reminder of everything else that’s going on. The world outside this room, and this moment.

“Aren’t you guys ready yet?” she asks. “Let’s go.”

All told, it takes less time than he expected to convince the others. Steve, clearly practiced at this by now, rattles off a list of favorite songs, science fiction trivia he’d never otherwise know, and the parts of Nancy’s vision that she didn’t get around to telling them over at Eddie’s with a practiced ease that seems almost bored. There’s no sign of his breakdown now other than the redness around his eyes, although Eddie catches Robin giving him worried looks.

Dustin, as predicted, is by far the most skeptical, but he’s also the first to rally once convinced. “Okay, okay, fine. So the first order of business is to kill Vecna, obviously, and then we can…”

“Yeah, so,” Eddie says. His fingers find the edges of his Walkman where it’s buried in his pocket as every eye turns toward him. “I actually had an idea about that.”

Evening is coming down by the time they drop Dustin and Nancy and Robin off at the edge of the trailer park, armed to the teeth and looking like refugees from a George Miller movie. Steve hugs all three of them with a quiet, desperate kind of ferocity that belies his earlier calm; all three of them allow it. Eddie reaches across the seat to tug Dustin’s hat off and ruffle his curls, and Dustin rolls his eyes dramatically.

“Knock it off,” he says, snatching it back. He pushes his lower lip out consideringly as Robin says something quiet to Steve and follows Nancy out the door. Then he steps around the table and wraps Eddie into a sudden tight hug that’s almost as unexpected as the one at Skull Rock yesterday.

“Don’t die,” he says into Eddie’s shoulder. “Promise.”

“On my honor,” Eddie says solemnly, and Dustin nods, squeezes him again, and releases him. He looks at Max, who is leaning against the back of the driver’s seat with her headphones on, and she puts both hands up.

“Don’t hug me, please,” she says.

Dustin grins, gap-toothed and sweet. “Yeah, okay. Be safe, Mad Max.”

She glances over at Lucas, then rolls her eyes fondly. “You’re the one playing bait for a bunch of underworld bats. You be safe.”

“Right, okay, so we’re all going to be safe,” Dustin says firmly. He clasps Lucas's hand, gives Erica a nod, and climbs down after the others.

In the interest of not attracting police attention to their stolen vehicle, Steve parks the RV in a pull-off on the far side of the woods behind the Creel house. It’s fully dark by then, lit only by the distant streetlights and the waning moon overhead. Tromping through the gloomy trees is an eerie and unsettling experience, even though logically he knows that what’s waiting for them inside is way, way worse than whatever wildlife is there to be found in an acre or two of woods right next to town. It doesn’t really help his nerves to know that, though.

Lucas has the flashlight, keeping it sensibly pointed low—just enough to illuminate the path head and glimpses of the overgrown underbrush on either side. Max and Erica flank him as they walk, and Eddie falls into step with Steve a few paces back. They haven’t really been alone since this morning. He’s not sure if that’s been deliberate on Steve’s part, but he wonders.

Wonders if Steve regrets that kiss, or at least regrets telling him that it happened and introducing it into a timeline where Eddie still has a potential future. There’s no way he’s gonna bring that up now, but he still drops his voice to speak. “So, do you think it’ll work?”

“Your backup plan? I hope we don’t need to find out.”

“Yeah,” Eddie concedes. He tucks his fingers into his pocket, twists the headphone cord against his palm. “Did we ever, um. Did we ever try it this way in any of the other loops?”

Steve glances over at that. His face is shadowed and unreadable in the darkness. Finally, he says, “No. All the other times you never told us beforehand that you were gonna…” he trails off, then sighs. “I still think it should be me.”

It probably could be Steve. He’s definitely lived through enough bad shit in the past week alone. But Eddie remembers that fault line he glimpsed earlier, and he thinks that it wouldn’t take much right now to make Steve shatter from the inside out. He doesn’t want to risk that. It’s an instinct that’s probably selfish, after everything, but there it is.

Out loud, he says, “I’m pretty sure none of my music would work for you, dude.”

Steve smiles briefly. “Hey, you never know.”

“Well, I mean, you never did say what your favorite song is.”

Steve is silent for a moment, then says. “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

“Queen?” Eddie asks, delighted. “Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Harrington.”

“Yeah. You always say that.”

“Oh,” Eddie says. He kicks at a fallen log, then hops over it. Leaves slop wetly against his sneakers; the woods smell swampy and green with the promise of spring. “Does it get, like, super weird and frustrating having the same conversations over and over again with people who won’t remember them?”

“I mean, yeah, kind of,” Steve says. He glances over and adds, “They’re not all the same, though. Things change every time around. Like—I don’t know. Like the, what did Henderson call it? The butterfly effect, or something. It’s different every time because I’ve done it before even if you haven’t.”

He’s thinking about the kiss, Eddie knows. Maybe about their conversation in the bathroom this morning, but definitely about the kiss that happened in a yesterday that Eddie doesn’t remember. Eddie wets his lips, thinks about asking, and immediately chickens out. “So you think it’ll work? The plan?”

“I hope so,” Steve says, and then Erica makes a quiet exclamation up ahead as the Creel house looms out of the darkness. They pick their way through the thinning underbrush to the overgrown backyard, and Lucas shuts the flashlight off.

The goldenrod that has taken over the yard is gray and soggy in the dregs of winter. A rickety set of lawn furniture is nested in the weeds, and they pause there, looking up at the ominous bulk of the old house. The windows on the ground floor are boarded up, but the ones higher up aren’t. Two of them are intact, reflecting the gibbous moon all silver and gleaming; the rest are shattered. Glass shards cling to the frames like teeth around the darkened maw within. Eddie shivers and looks away.

“I’ll wait here,” Erica says quietly, perching on one of the chairs. It looks too spindly and structurally unstable to support an adult, but she’s small enough that it holds her.

Too small to be involved in this shit, even if she’s probably the safest of any of them right now.

Lucas nods, his jaw tight. “Okay. Signal on the walkie once the others are in place.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, I know, I was there when we were making the plan. Nonverbal signals only, yadda yadda yadda, I got it.”

“Erica—”

“You better be quick once I do give the signal, though. Otherwise, Vecna’s gonna know something’s up.”

“We know,” Lucas parrots back in the same impatient tone, but he pulls her into a half-hug anyway, and she doesn’t protest or make even a token effort at shoving him off. “Just be careful, okay?”

She lifts her chin as he releases her. “Don’t worry. I got it under control.”

It’s the same confident bluster that she had at Hellfire, a week and a lifetime ago. Eddie can’t help but smile. “Oh, we all know you do, Lady Applejack.”

Her stern look softens into a quick, delighted grin that makes her look exactly as young as she actually is. She holds out a hand, and he clasps it.

“Crit hit,” she says solemnly. “We got this.”

Eddie sure fucking hopes so.

Lucas holds the lantern aloft as they move through the kitchen, the dining room, the parlor, and the front hall. All of it empty, all of it thickly blanketed with dust. Steve’s jaw is tight as he peers around; Eddie wants to ask if he’s okay, or start rambling to distract him, or something. He bites his tongue with an effort. He’s been here for five minutes and the quiet is already starting to get to him.

It doesn't really get better as they make their way floor by floor up to the attic, which has an ominous feeling even before the lantern starts going haywire. Lucas sets it down on an overturned bench and backs away like he's afraid something will bite him. Max is watching the flaring light, her jaw tense, her face lit pale and ghostly from below, and Eddie has a nightmarish flashbulb image of her floating loosely in the air, suspended by an invisible puppet-master's strings. Breaking.

Then he blinks, and it's gone. Lucas slips a hand into Max's as Steve goes over to signal to Erica. Eddie hangs back by the door, unable to force himself closer.

Vecna's here. Or not here, exactly, but on the other side of the veil between worlds that's proven itself terrifyingly thin and porous. The thought of that is paralyzing. He wants to run, just turn tail and run like he's been doing all week.

He's not cut out for this. Whatever Steve said, whatever cocky plans he's made, Eddie Munson is no hero. He can’t help imagining the others: Dustin with the amps up on the roof of the trailer—Eddie gave him detailed instructions on how to hook everything up on the way over, but even if he hadn’t Dustin is smart enough to figure it out. Smart enough to get himself out of there, or at least Eddie desperately hopes so. Nancy and Robin, making their way through those blighted woods to the Upside Down mirror of this very house.

Max, sitting cross-legged next to the flaring lantern with an expression of meditative calm on her face. Max Mayfield, age fourteen, preparing to step willingly into hell.

Lucas is sitting next to her, close but not touching. By the window, Steve looks gaunt and pale in a way that Eddie wishes he could just attribute to the eerie quality of the light in here. His arms are folded tightly across his chest like he’s trying to keep himself together. Like he’s afraid that if he loosens up at all, he’ll collapse.

He glances up a moment later like he can feel Eddie’s eyes on him and offers a smile that’s jarring in its falseness. For some reason, that’s the thing that gets Eddie moving across the dusty, creaking floor to where Steve is standing by the window. The glass is intact, filmy and fly-spotted, and there are dead wasps and the crumbling remains of a mud nest scattered across the windowsill and floor. In the yard below, he can see Erica, a small figure nearly hidden in the night.

Steve gives him a brief nod and goes back to watching Max worriedly. Eddie leans against the other side of the window, mirroring his posture. On the other side of the room, Max pulls out the notebook that she unearthed from her backpack earlier and scribbles something down. She shows it to Lucas, who smiles bright and startled, then leans over to scribble down a reply. Eddie looks away, and finds himself meeting Steve’s eyes.

Then the small figure in the yard beneath shifts, climbing to her feet. Steve must have seen too, because he straightens up painfully. A moment later, the radio at his hip lets out a blurt of static, then Erica’s voice hooting softly. She doesn’t sound much like an owl to Eddie; hopefully Vecna’s not paying them too much attention.

Max sets down the notebook and stands. As Lucas stares up at her, she unhooks the headphones from her ears, then reaches down to turn her Walkman off.

Face set, she approaches the lantern. “Hey. Asshole. I’m here. No more music, no more games. Do you hear me?”

There’s nothing. Just silence. Just the buzzing of the lamp lighting the room in blue. Max takes a quick step forward, and Lucas’s fingers twitch like he’s aching to snatch her back. “What are you waiting for, huh? Come on! Do you want me or not? What are you waiting for, asshole? I’m right here. I’m right here.”

The lantern buzzes, then fades. Out of the corner of his eye, Eddie sees Steve’s shoulders sag, but if it’s relief, it’s too soon. Max’s jaw tightens. Then she unhooks the Walkman from her belt, pulls the headphones off of her neck, and shoves them into Lucas’s hands.

She sits down in front of the overturned table. Tears gleam in her eyes, but other than that her expression is calm. “I know you can hear me. I know you can read my thoughts. Even the worst ones. Maybe mostly the worst ones.” She takes a slow breath, then says, “I thought about what you said. About how I wanted my brother to die. I thought you were just trying to upset me, but you weren’t, were you? You were just telling the truth. Billy, he made my life a living hell every chance he got. So sometimes, I would lie in bed at night and I’d pray that something would happen to him.”

Steve unfolds his arms. His profile is drawn sharp in the flaring light; behind Max, the tears on Lucas’s cheeks shine an unearthly blue. The air in the room feels heavy, like it’s pressing in on them. Like electricity building before a storm while Max talks about Billy and his mean streak and his stupid fast car, Billy Hargrove, who’ll forever be that viciously angry eighteen-year-old, who'll never get a chance to grow up or fix anything with his sister, and there was no love lost there but Eddie’s throat still hurts as Max says softly, “I didn’t know if he deserved to be saved. So now, when I lie in bed at night, I pray that something terrible will happen to me.”

She stops talking. For a moment, Eddie thinks she’s just paused for breath. Then Lucas says, “Max? Max?” in a shaking voice and he realizes that she’s gone completely still. Inhumanly still. Behind her half-closed eyelids, rims of flickering white are visible. Otherwise her expression is totally slack.

“Max,” Lucas says again, and drops to his knees next to her. He pulls her hands into his, squeezing tight. Steve jolts forward, like it’s an instinct, then swears under his breath.

“We should,” Eddie says numbly. He can’t quite bring himself to look away. Can’t stop imagining Max rising, and rising, and the Walkman in his pocket is slippery against his fingers. “We should signal the others.”

“Right,” Steve says, and fumbles for the flashlight.

There’s nothing to do after that but wait. The stillness is stifling: Max’s stillness, the layers of untrodden dust in this old mausoleum of a house. The minutes tick by with agonizing slowness, and Max doesn’t move. Lucas’s thumbs rub over the backs of her knuckles, again and again.

Eddie thinks about what she said in the RV when they were putting the finishing touches on this madcap scheme, about finding a good memory to hide in.

Maybe it's just that simple; maybe if there are no interruptions on their end, that’s all it’ll take. It’s been almost ten minutes; plenty of time for Nancy and Robin to make their way into Vecna’s lair with their arsenal of guns and flamethrowers and Molotov cocktails. Maybe Vecna is even now starting to burn.

Then Lucas says, sharply, “Max? No—Max!”

She’s starting to rise. Her arms are limp, her head tilted back, unseeing eyes fixed on the darkened ceiling.

“Max,” Steve says sharply, and Eddie is moving forward without even thinking, crossing the attic to where Lucas is tugging on Max’s hands in two long strides. He yanks the Walkman out of his pocket as he does and half-turns to shove it into Steve’s hands.

“You know the drill,” he says.

Steve’s eyes flicker between him and Max and he says, in a low, awful voice, “Eddie, just—”

“You’re gonna get me out,” Eddie says, and folds Steve’s fingers around the Walkman, squeezing tight for a moment. “It’s on the right track. You just gotta push play. You’re gonna save me this time. You’re gonna save us both. I promise.”

That’s probably unfair to promise after everything, bordering on cruel, but they’re all out of time. Eddie steps forward as Max’s feet leave the floor, catching her face between his palms and tilting it down so he’d be looking her right in the eye if she were in there.

She’s not. But something else is, something evil inhabiting her small, trembling body. Eddie grips her tight and speaks directly to it.

“She’s fighting you, huh?” he asks. It comes out surprisingly calm; surprisingly steady. Max’s eyes flicker rapidly, and Eddie keeps talking like that was a response. “Yeah, she’s a fighter. Brave as hell. And, like, no offense, but she played you. You really thought she was gonna let you use her to carry out that grand master plan of yours? Come on. You showed your hand too soon, pulling that shit with Wheeler. They’ll never let you in without a fight.”

He takes a deep breath. “But me? I won’t fight you for it. I’m sick of this shit, man, I’m sick of this town. I’m never getting my life back after all this and everybody knows it. Even if I do make it out of here, I’m looking at a one-way ticket to federal prison. Next cell over from my old man, knowing my luck. So yeah, if you want to tear it down, I’m all in. Just show me where to sign, baby.”

To his left, still clutching Max’s hand, Lucas makes a low noise. Steve is completely silent. Eddie ignores them both, pouring every bit of persuasiveness he can muster into his voice. All the real hurt and righteous anger and the misery of those bleak dark nights after his mom died, the names he’s been called—by his dad, in the locker rooms, in the hallways at school, whispered sneeringly behind his back and flung at his face. Words, and fists too sometimes.

The miserable guilt of Chrissy’s death, the shame of running, the sickening churn of terror that’s been driving him for a week straight: he lifts the lid on that well of bitter darkness, and lets Vecna drink his fill. Hopes like hell that it's a lure that asshole won't be able to resist.

“Truth is, none of them were ever planning on sticking around for me anyway. You know, they talk a great game, but nobody ever actually sticks around when it gets rough. So if you want to take me off the board and wreck this fucking town while you’re at it, go for it. I’m all yours.”

Behind him, Steve snarls, “You fucking liar.”

The venom in his voice makes Eddie look back in spite of himself. If Steve seemed gaunt before, now he looks like a corpse: bloodless and drained of color, staring at Eddie like he can see into his soul and is disgusted by what he’s found there.

Eddie’s precious Walkman is still clutched in his hand; he glances down at it, then smashes it violently to the floor. Plastic crunches as his boot comes down hard on the delicate machine; Eddie jolts forward with a shocked, inarticulate noise of protest, then shrinks back when Steve laughs.

It’s an ugly sound. Cruel, in a way he hasn’t known Steve to be. “Should have figured. You like to pretend you’re some kind of hero, don’t you, Munson, but at the end of the day you’re nothing but a worthless, lying coward. Pathetic.”

“No, it’s not—that’s not—”

All his words wither in his mouth against the tide of panic. Instinctively, he steps back toward Max and Lucas, arms coming up like he can shield them against whatever fresh nightmare this is.

They’re gone. The attic is empty. He crashes into the overturned table, sending the lantern to the floor. Glass shatters, but the blue glow doesn’t flicker.

When he looks back, the thing that definitely isn’t Steve is changing. It grows taller, limbs lengthening, claws sliding out of the ends of its fingers; its eyes aren’t hazel anymore but a furious blue, burning like propane flames in the ruined mess of its face. Vecna.

“Oh, thank fuck,” Eddie says out loud, and then he turns tail and darts for the stairs.

You mean like a relay, Steve said when Eddie was explaining his plan earlier. Which—sports metaphor, not Eddie’s forte, but apparently his confusion was clear enough that Steve elaborated: like, she starts the race, and then when she runs out of steam you grab the baton and keep going. That’s your plan, right? Okay, but do you know how many ways that could go wrong?

If he didn’t before, he sure as hell does now. But he’s got the baton anyway, and it’s his turn to run. Lucky for him, he’s always been fast.

He makes it down the attic stairs, then across the third floor to the main staircase going down, the clattering sound of his footsteps almost drowning out the monster’s approach. He grabs the banister to spin around and start down the next flight of stairs, then lurches to a stop so suddenly that he nearly goes tumbling down anyway.

Light is spilling out from the half-open door across from him. Warm yellow lamplight, and the sound of a woman humming in a low, sweet alto voice.

California Dreamin’. His mom played the record over and over again until the scratches on both sides produced unbearable static. Eddie’s brain supplies the lyrics automatically, dredging them up from a place in his memory that he hasn’t looked at in years. All the leaves are brown—all the leaves are brown, and the sky is gray. I’ve been for a walk, on a winter’s day—

Moving like he’s in a dream—because he is, isn’t he, this is all just a dream, his body’s back on the floor of the attic and all of this is happening inside his head—he lets go of the banister and steps forward, pushing the door the rest of the way open.

The edges of the room are swathed in shadow and dust, but at the center is a pool of light coming from a wicker hanging lamp, its chain and cord attached to nothing. It illuminates the battered enamel table where Eddie used to do his homework, the green ivy pattern around the edges pitted with rust spots. There’s a woman hunched over it with her hair tumbling down in a riot of dark curls to obscure her face. A heavy book is open in front of her, a half-empty wine bottle near at hand.

Eddie knows that book. Nurse’s Reference Library, Vol. 3. He can’t see the cover, but he knows it.

The humming stops. A slender finger runs down the lines of text, and that sweet alto voice reads, “Hypovolemic shock. A form of shock caused by insufficient blood volume, due to severe dehydration or blood loss. You can die from that, sweetheart.”

“Mom,” he whispers. The word rasps strangely on his tongue, and his mother finally lifts her head to look at him.

What’s left of her head, anyway.

The left side of her face is caved in by the tree branch that went through the windshield of her car on that November morning in 1980, killing her instantly. Gelatinous brain matter spills into her matted hair, soaking the shoulder of her shirt, flesh hanging in loose, bloody strips. The hand she lifts to push her hair back is mangled, fingers smashed in a dozen different places, bone poking through the meat. She fixes her remaining eye on him—dark brown, the same shape and color that he sees in the mirror every day—and smiles.

“That’s not what happened to me, of course,” she says, gesturing to her own shattered skull as Eddie recoils, nausea surging. “And that won’t be what happens to you, either, once he catches up to you.”

Eddie stumbles backward as she starts to stand, gripping the door frame to keep himself upright. His heart is thundering in his ears, and for a moment he thinks that’s all it is. Then he hears footsteps on the stairs above and remembers that he’s supposed to be running.

“Just be still, sweetheart,” Dorothy Munson croons. The table and the lamp and the textbook fade away into darkness, but she remains: a bloody apparition that he’s spent too much time imagining in the dark hours of the night, stepping out of nightmares to claim him. “It’ll only hurt for a moment. Just a moment, and then it’ll all be over. Then you’ll be at peace.”

“You’re not her,” Eddie chokes out. “You’re not fucking real.”

And then he does the thing he does best: he flees.

Down the next set of stairs as Vecna’s unhurried footsteps descend above him. Swinging around the banister to take the final flight down to the first floor two stairs at a time. Across the hallway to the front door with its shattered stained glass inset. He yanks it open with slippery fingers, then freezes.

Where the front step should be is a sheet of bullet-proof glass. On the other side of it, a grim little room of sweating beige concrete, bars on the windows that he can see in the corner. A folding chair and a black phone on both sides. As he watches, the chair slides out and Edward Munson, Sr. drops into it.

He looks just like Eddie remembers, although it’s been years: graying hair clipped high and tight, old tattoos and scars on his forearms where the sleeves of his jumpsuit are pushed up. His eyes are a pale and icy shade of blue above his thin-lipped, scowling mouth; there’s not much resemblance between Eddie and his namesake. He ended up with his mom’s looks, which is just one more in the long litany of reasons his old man hates his guts.

His dad picks up the phone on his side and tilts his chin pointedly at the one on Eddie’s side. Unlike the last time this happened for real, Eddie doesn’t touch it, but his dad’s voice comes through clearly all the same.

“You need a haircut,” he says, looking Eddie up and down like he’s something scraped off the bottom of his shoe. “If it were up to me, I’d hold your head over the trash can and shave that mess off. You look like a fucking faggot.”

When this happened for real, it was at the end of an increasingly nasty argument and Eddie, age sixteen, finally spat into the phone, Yeah, dad, that’s because I am a fucking faggot, actually, what do you think about that, huh?

When this happened for real, he slammed the phone down and stormed out without a backward glance and didn’t cry until he was in the front seat of Wayne’s car on the way back to Hawkins, while Wayne was kind enough to watch the road and pretend he didn’t notice.

Now, he feels frozen. The monster is closing in, and there’s nowhere left to run. His dad rises out of his chair, somehow taller than Eddie remembers—as tall as when Eddie was a child, looming in the doorway, blocking his escape.

“You’re no son of mine,” he says. “You’re no son of mine, so don’t—”

—so don’t bother coming back, is the end of that sentence, but his ears are pounding and he barely hears it. The footsteps from above are on the last flight of stairs now, and there’s something familiar about the way the air seems to have gone hot and thin and heavy, like there’s another world bleeding up beneath it. Bleeding red sky and jagged pillars holding mutilated corpses like flies preserved in amber: a glimpse, he thinks, into the monster’s mind. The clock across from him chimes, then comes free of the molding, free of the wall that’s supporting it, tumbling crazily up into the reddening dark. Eddie can’t feel the floor beneath him. He wonders if his body is already floating on the other side, back in the real world. If Steve is playing music for him yet. If so, he can’t hear it over his own sobbing breaths, the terror so all-consuming that it blots out thought.

“What’s the matter, Eddie?” It feels like it’s coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once, like the very house is speaking with Vecna's voice, rumbling and deep and horribly amused. “This is what you asked for, isn’t it? This is what you wanted. Just hold still and it’ll all be over soon. There’s nowhere left to run this time.”

Nowhere left to run, and in the end that’s all Eddie has ever been good for.

But Dustin is in the Upside Down right now, luring the bats in. Nancy and Robin are bearding the monster in this lair. And Steve is waiting for him, and he promised to make it out alive this time. He promised they were all going to make it out alive.

Max, pale but resolute and so, so fucking brave: He only ever sees the ugly things. The worst things. So I’ll hide in a good memory, and maybe he won’t find me there.

Eddie closes his eyes on the moldering ruins of the Creel mansion. It’s not real anyway. The apparitions of his mother and father aren’t real. The monster isn’t any more real than Eddie lets him be, and there’s one place that Eddie has always held the power: where he’s always felt safe and happy and brave.

The rattle of dice. The smell of mothballs and stage makeup and weed, the cool ranch Doritos that Gary keeps bringing to games, the worn velvet cushion of the stage prop that he uses as his throne.

When he opens his eyes, he’s there. The heavy curtain closes off the stage and the rows of seating beyond; the backstage area is calm and dim, lit only by the rigging above his chair. The edges of this room are swathed in shadows too—the bins of props, the rolling stands of costumes, the painted facades for the spring production of Death of a Salesman stacked against the far wall. But it lends an element of magic here, of mystery, focusing all the attention on the illuminated tabletop. Behind his screen are his dice and his stacks of notes, his dungeon master's guide and monster manual; on the other side empty chairs circle the table, waiting for players. Waiting for the quest to begin.

Eddie breathes out hard into the sudden silence, gripping the back of the chair to stay upright.

“Holy shit,” he says, his voice rasping and strangely loud to his own ears. “It worked.”

Chapter Text

Time passes strangely in this pocket of his own mind. It’s quieter than this place ever actually is in reality—once Hellfire gets started it’s all yelling and debating and the rattle of dice, but even in those quiet moments of set-up beforehand he can always hear people. The other after-school programs, the janitors sweeping up the detritus of the day.

Here there’s just silence. Just the sound of his own breathing, the floor creaking beneath him as he paces around the table, flips through his notes, which he’s unsurprised to find are the ones from Vecna’s Curse. The D20 on the center of the table has the 20 still facing up from Erica’s final roll. Critical hit.

“One can only hope,” he murmurs, trailing his fingers over the surface of the table. Gary’s character sheet, and Jeff’s, and Dustin’s. Erica’s has Lady Applejack written across the top in swirling, fancy letters. The seat next to that should be Robbie’s, but instead there’s a fresh character sheet that reads Sir Steven the Brave across the top in Eddie’s own handwriting.

A paladin, naturally. His subconscious is not subtle.

He’s spinning the paper around to take a look at the stats when noise starts to filter in. Distant at first: the rubbery thud of basketballs in the gym down the hall, crowds cheering. It’s weirdly distorted, like the sound is coming up through water. Eddie lifts his head, ice trickling down his spine.

“One-two-three-four, let me hear you stomp the floor!”

It’s a chorus of voices, but he swears he can hear Chrissy louder than anyone. Chrissy Cunningham as she was before she got into his van that night: bright, peppy, alive.

Doomed, even then.

“Five-six-seven-eight, Hawkins High is really great!”

Stomp, stomp.

That’s coming from much closer than the distant gym. Eddie jerks his hand away from the paper as it starts to curl, mildew and rot crawling across its surface. The quality of the light is changing, becoming cold and blue and eerie. In the distance outside, thunder crashes.

Flecks of white drift down like snow, or floating ash. The floor creaks with the slow approach of footsteps.

“You can’t hide from me, Eddie.” The heavy curtain across the stage ripples as if in the breath of something vast. “It’s a clever game you’ve been playing, but it’s over now. You think I can’t see what you’re doing?”

Eddie shoves away from the table, scrambling backwards to put his back to the wall, groping desperately for a weapon. What comes to hand is a long wooden dowel from the props bin; it feels horribly flimsy in his hands.

“I can see everything, Eddie. Your friends—they’re close now. You’ll die, and they’ll follow, and Hawkins will be reborn.”

The curtain ripples and falls away, and the monster steps through. Eddie grits his teeth and raises his makeshift weapon, but his arms are slammed backward against the wall by a crushing, invisible force that lifts him off his feet. Shoulders scraping, breath coming strange and compressed as Vecna makes his unhurried way across the room. He can feel the bones of his skull creak, lightning-sharp pain in his sinuses, the hinges of his jaw. His ears pop, and there’s a distant whining buzz that seems to have taken over the whole world.

Sorry, Steve, he thinks, and somehow, ridiculously, he feels more guilty than afraid. The memory of Steve, slumped and hopeless, muttering, I don’t know how to fix this, I don’t know what to do.

He hopes tomorrow’s version of him can figure this out. He hopes—

Vecna stops, halfway across the room. His head cocks, like he’s listening for something that Eddie can’t hear. Then he turns toward the darkened theater. Eddie flexes his jaw as the pressure decreases, and has a moment to register that he can flex his jaw, and then there’s a distant thread of music, so distorted that it takes him a moment to recognize it as the Kate Bush song that Max has been playing on loop for days. Thunder echoes again, closer now. Something shatters in the darkness outside the edge of his vision, and Vecna’s hold on him releases all at once.

Eddie collapses to the floor in a heap. For a second, all he can do is pant helplessly, every nerve screaming with pain. His body doesn’t seem to have realized yet that he’s not dead, but he forces himself upright anyway, scrabbling for a weapon.

There are footsteps on the stairs again, and Eddie freezes, but the person who ascends to the stage is just a girl—a kid, really, barefoot in white jeans and a flowered top. Her hair is buzzed short and her nose is gushing blood. It dribbles down over her lips and chin to stain her shirt, but she doesn’t wipe it away as she advances slowly, moving like every step is an effort. Like she’s wading upstream against the force of an invisible current.

“Henry,” she says through gritted teeth. “You need to stop. It’s over. It’s over.”

“Is it, Eleven?” the monster asks. He cocks his head, his lipless mouth spreading in a gastly grin. “Don’t you get tired of fighting, always fighting, always trying, all of it for nothing?”

“It’s not for nothing,” she grits out, but she’s sliding back now, feet scoring the wood floor. Eddie wonders stupidly if she’s getting splinters like this, if that’s even possible in a dream, and he thinks that he should probably take this chance to run while Vecna is distracted, but he doesn’t.

She looks so fucking small. Her and Max. Dustin and Lucas and Erica, all of them, they’re just kids.

Thunder crashes again. The floor shakes, sending two of the folding chairs over on their sides, sending the books and notes and character sheets fluttering down in a flurry of paper. The D20 rattles across the floor, red numbers blurring on its surface as it rolls.

Roll for initiative, he thinks somewhat hysterically, but he doesn’t wait to see where it lands. He takes two long strides forward and wraps his fingers around the back of his wooden throne, feeling the sturdy heft of it as Eleven is forced backward to the edge of the stage, then into midair, her body arching back like it's been pulled taut on a rack. The blood streaming from her nose is a brilliant red against the pallor of her face. Vecna takes a step past him like he’s not even there, and Eddie plants his feet, lifts the chair, and swings for the back of his head like he’s in a cage match from Wayne’s beloved WWF.

Dry wood splinters; the impromptu weapon smashes to pieces in his hands. Vecna doesn’t even stagger. He turns slowly as Eddie drops the chair from numb fingers. It’s hard to read expressions in the ruin of his face, but Eddie thinks he looks incredulously amused, like he’s just been charged by a mouse or a sparrow or some other tiny, insignificant animal.

Eddie laughs, breathless, feeling a strange calm steal over him. So this is it, after all. This is how he goes.

He closes his eyes as Vecna’s hand starts to rise.

Eleven screams. Eddie’s eyes fly open as she surges to her feet, both hands outstretched in tense claws. There’s an explosion of pressure that makes his ears pop painfully, and Vecna goes flying backwards, smashing through the rows and rows of seats with a crash that echoes through the theater.

Eddie staggers, then steadies himself on the edge of the table.

“What the fuck?” he whispers.

Eleven cocks her head and finally swipes at her nose with the back of her hand. It doesn’t do much other than smear the blood around, but she doesn’t seem bothered.

“You’re not Max,” she says.

“Uh—no. No, I’m Eddie, and you’re—you’re Eleven, right? The chick with the powers?”

She nods, like that wasn’t the stupidest question he could have asked. “Max. She disappeared. I couldn’t find her, I couldn’t find Henry. I thought—” she takes a shaky breath. “I thought I lost her.”

“No,” Eddie says. “No, she got out.”

He thinks so, anyway. He hopes so.

Eleven smiles. It’s a beautiful smile, even with the blood. Sweet. “Thank you.”

Eddie opens his mouth to reply, but there’s a groan from behind her. A dark figure starts to rise from the wreckage of the chairs.

“Oh, you gotta be shitting me,” he hisses, as Eleven turns, stepping forward like she’s trying to put her body in between Eddie and the monster, and powers or no powers that shit just will not stand. Eddie shoves up next to her as Vecna takes two more staggering steps down the aisle, then pauses. His head lifts. Eddie braces himself, like that’s going to do any good.

There’s an echoing burst of distant thunder, a shriek that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once, and fire bursts across the monster’s skin. Eddie jolts back, pulling Eleven with him as another scream echoes through the room.

Vecna is burning. He’s burning, and the screams are so awful that Eddie wants to claw his ears out, but he’s burning, and if this isn’t a trick or an attack, this must mean—

—it must mean that they did it. Nancy and Robin, they did it.

The monster takes another staggering step forward as flames explode into a bright corona, scorching the carpet, melting the plastic siding of the seats. The smell is sharp and unpleasant. Eleven’s jaw grits, and she lifts a hand, pinning Vecna in place as he struggles and flails and burns.

“I have him,” she says without looking at Eddie. “You should run.”

“But you, that’s—” Eddie fumbles. “Are you gonna—”

“I’ll be okay. I piggybacked here from a pizza freezer,” Eleven says, like that makes any fucking sense. Amongst the wreckage of the theater, the monster has become a pillar of flame, a crackling roar of fire that almost overwhelms the sound of screaming. It’s taking him a long time to die, and it’s evil of Eddie, maybe, but he’s fucking glad.

There’s another sound now, winding through the smashed-up theater. Not drums, not yet, but he’d know that eerie synth intro anywhere.

“You’ll be okay?” he asks again.

“Mike will bring me home. I’ll be okay.”

Mike Wheeler? Eddie wants to ask, and maybe what the hell went down in California anyway?

Not the moment. Vecna’s howls are becoming distant, and he can hear the beautiful snarl of rhythm guitar now, drums shuddering in its wake, and Ronnie James Dio growling, Holy Diver, you been down too long in the midnight sea—

There’s a place where the world seems to have worn through, shredding like old denim to show a dark, dusty attic floor. On it, Eddie sees himself: his body, anyway, kneeling stiffly with his head tilted back, jaw stiff, eyes wide and blank.

Steve kneels in front of him, holding his headphones over his ears, or maybe just cupping his face with a desperate tenderness. His lips are moving, but Eddie can’t hear what he’s saying. He wants to, though. He wants to hear what Steve is saying, and the world is fragmenting into darkness all around him and he can’t hear Vecna’s howls now, or Eleven’s voice, or anything other than the music.

He runs. The floor has gone strange beneath him, shifting and unsteady, like any footstep might punch right through the thin skin of reality, but he runs anyway, arms pumping, breath sobbing in his throat, and there’s a hot blurry rush as he stumbles, falls, and lands hard on a dusty attic floor.

“—okay okay okay, Eddie, come on, man, you’re okay, it’s just us, you’re okay,” he hears, and only then does he realize that he’s kicking out, limbs flailing, head tossing like he’s an animal caught in a trap. The back of his skull hits something soft, and someone lets out a stifled oof, and two of the hands on him loosen.

“Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” he manages, breathlessly hysterical, and opens eyes that he didn’t even realize were squeezed shut.

Steve is half-kneeling in front of him, hands raised, eyes wide. In his ears, enclosed by the headphones, Dio sings, “Beneath the velvet lies, there’s a truth that’s hard as steel—”

“Holy shit,” Eddie says again, and if he were thinking he probably wouldn’t do it, but he’s not really thinking about it at all as he lurches forward into Steve’s arms. His forehead lands on Steve’s shoulder and he clutches at his sleeves with trembling fingers as one of Steve’s warm hands settles gently on the center of his back.

“Hey,” he says, very gently. It’s not loud, but it’s close enough that Eddie can hear him even over the music.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Eddie says, and then, “Is he dead, please fucking tell me he’s dead, please.”

“He’s dead,” Steve says. His hand rubs up Eddie’s back, then cups the back of his head, folding him close. Steve feels warm, and solid, and real, and Eddie will be embarrassed about how he’s clinging some other time, maybe. It helps that Steve is clinging back just as hard. “Erica just radioed in, they got him. They’re on their way out now.”

“Jesus,” Eddie mumbles again. He pushes his face against Steve’s throat, breathing in the human stink of dried sweat, which is still so much better than the memory of roasting flesh.

“We’re okay too, if you were wondering,” Max says dryly from behind him. Lucas lets out a strangled and semi-hysterical bark of laughter. Reluctantly, Eddie lets go of Steve enough to turn.

He must have knocked into Lucas during his panicked revival; he’s sitting half-sprawled on the floor next to the lamp, which has gone dark. The only light left in the room is from the moon, streaming in through the windows. Max has her Walkman back, but the headphones are loose around her neck. When Eddie looks at her, she cocks her head and gives him a lopsided little smile.

“Thanks, by the way,” she adds.

He nods, feels Steve’s hand shift where it’s still resting on his nape. “I’m glad you made it out.”

“Glad Vecna fell for the same trick twice in a row,” she says.

“Yeah, well, you were pretty convincing,” Steve mutters, and Eddie glances back at him. His eyes are dark and soft and worried, and look nothing at all like that nightmare version of him that Eddie’s mind conjured. Absurdly, he feels guilty about that, like his subconscious was slandering Steve or something.

“I dreamed that you smashed my Walkman,” he blurts, then winces when Steve blinks at him.

“Why the hell would I do that?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.”

“It wasn’t real,” Steve repeats. His thumb moves, rubbing against the knobs of Eddie’s spine, sending prickles of sensation in its wake. He feels weirdly raw, like his skin has been sandpapered thin and every touch is a live wire. It’s almost too much, but he doesn’t want Steve to stop touching him, even if Max and Lucas can see. It makes him feel like he’s real.

The thunder of drums from his headphones is starting to fade out now into hissing blank space; Eddie thumbs the pause button as footsteps clatter rapidly up the stairs. He has a moment to flinch, and then Erica emerges into the attic, walkie in hand, batting cobwebs out of her face.

“Oh my god, that’s disgusting, if I find spiders in my hair after all this I’m going to literally scream,” she says, and clips the walkie onto her belt to squint at them. “Everything good? You guys are good?”

“We’re okay,” Lucas says, and Max laughs breathlessly, and Eddie becomes aware that Steve’s hand is shaking where it rests against his skin.

Eddie glances back at him, but Steve chooses that moment to let go of him abruptly and stand up. He offers Eddie a hand up too, then lets go of him just as quickly, looking away like a flinch. Like maybe he’s remembered that there are other people here who can see them and draw conclusions about the gratuitous hugging. Eddie sways, disoriented and cold for a moment before he gets his feet under him.

His stomach lurches, then settles. Then Lucas claps him on the shoulder, says solemnly, “I’m really glad you’re okay.”

Eddie nods. He’s pretty sure he still looks like a disheveled hysterical mess, and that any chance of any of these kids ever being intimidated by him again is lost in the breeze, but he finds that he’s—surprisingly okay with that, actually. “Yeah. Right back at you, Sinclair.”

Steve parks the RV on the far edge of the trailer park behind a copse of trees, where it’ll definitely be discovered sooner rather than later. Eddie spares a moment to imagine the owners’ reaction when it’s found—not significantly worse for the wear, so they’ll probably assume it was just a bunch of kids joyriding. He hopes, anyway. Steve makes a cursory effort at wiping down the steering wheel, but they’ve definitely all left fingerprints all over the place, not to mention all the packaging from the War Zone.

The odds of the fine folks at Hawkins PD making any fucking effort to actually track down the perpetrators are approximately negative one-zillion, and in any case he doesn’t have it in him to worry about that right now. He tromps through the sloppy overgrown grass behind Steve, composing and discarding a dozen different conversational offerings and feeling like an idiot the whole time. It feels somehow even more awkward than talking to Steve in the Upside Down last night, especially since he really doesn’t want any of the kids to overhear anything they might say.

I know you’re all traumatized and shit, but how do you feel about maybe making out again sometime now that we’ll both remember it?

Yeah, right. Way to sell it, Munson. He snorts under his breath. Max glances back at him, her hand still clasped with Lucas’s.

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing, nothing,” Eddie says. He fiddles with the headphone cord around his neck and for a moment thinks he sees Steve glance at him out of the corner of his eye, but when he looks over Steve is facing resolutely ahead. They cross the stretch of unmowed grass behind Max’s trailer and step through the gap, and then there’s the Munson trailer. The windows are dark, but Dustin is sitting on the front step, still in his ridiculous paramilitary gear, legs swinging as he kicks at the overgrown grass. When he sees them, he grins hugely and leans back to rap on the front door before hopping down.

“You guys made it,” he says, still beaming. “Awesome.”

The door swings open, and first Nancy and then Robin hop down. They’re both looking more than a little worse for the wear—bloody and bruised, and Robin is limping visibly—but they’re both beaming too. Nancy crashes into Steve, wrapping her arms around him and squeezing tightly.

“Ow, Jesus,” Steve says, but he hugs her back just as hard.

“Sorry, sorry, I forgot,” Nancy says, pulling back. She smiles up at him. “I’m really glad you’re okay.”

“You too,” Steve says softly.

It’s a beautiful tableau between two beautiful people. Cinematic, even, but Eddie’s perusal of it is interrupted when Dustin slams into him in a hug that’s at least half tackle. Eddie staggers, partly for effect, and wraps his arms around Dustin in return. Lets himself settle a little at the tangible evidence that the kid made it out in one piece.

“Eddie, you should have seen it, you would not believe it—most metal concert ever—”

“Yeah? What’d you play?”

“That Metallica one you were practicing in the van a couple of weeks ago, you know—”

“Master of Puppets?”

Dustin snaps his fingers, grinning, as he releases Eddie. “That’s the one. Because, like, Vecna was sort of like a puppet master, right? So it seemed thematic.”

“Definitely, man,” Eddie says. He’s grinning, he realizes; something about Dustin’s giddy enthusiasm makes their victory seem real.

They did it. They really fucking did it.

Steve is being gingerly embraced by Robin now, her hands on his elbows like some semi-comedic slow-dance pose as she tries to put her weight on her left foot, winces, and hops awkwardly. Steve catches her like it’s automatic, but he’s looking at Eddie.

Eddie offers him a tentative smile. Steve’s face does something odd that’s half a flinch, half a smile, and he looks away. Dustin, meanwhile, is pulling first Lucas, then Erica, and then Max into quick tight hugs. The first two hug him back just as hard; Max tolerates it for a moment with a grumbling eyeroll that seems mostly for show, then shoves him off. “Okay, get off me, nerd.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Dustin says, releasing her and taking a step back, spinning. His hands are up, his eyes alight. “Oh, man, I can’t believe that actually worked. That was insane.”

“And it did actually work, right?” Erica says. “Because I do not want to go through all this again if it turns out he’s not dead for real.”

Eddie doesn’t have to see Steve’s face to read the way he stiffens up. Robin is still holding onto him, and she leans a little more into his chest, looping an arm around his shoulders. Steve allows it, but his expression is tight.

No fucking wonder.

“He’s dead,” Nancy confirms.

“Yeah, I watched him catch fire,” Eddie adds. “Like, in the dream, I mean. Or the vision, whatever. Did not seem like he could have survived that.”

“The Upside Down was falling apart. Or—I don’t even know. Disintegrating?” Robin says. She lets go of Steve to wave her hands illustratively, then staggers briefly before he catches her. “Like, I don’t know if I would have been able to make it back to the gate if it weren’t for Nance, because all of those vines and the buildings, they were all starting to fall to pieces. It was weird.”

“Vecna didn’t create the Upside Down, though,” Lucas says.

“Right,” Dustin says. “But, what if our experience of it is fundamentally mitigated by Vecna’s perspective? Like, whatever he found when El shoved him in there wasn’t how it was when Will got sucked in there back in 1983. So he must have shaped it using his own memories and impressions of Hawkins.”

“You’re just making that up,” Erica says cheerfully. “No way you know that.”

“Okay, it’s a hypothesis, but it’s a logical hypothesis. If we consider—”

“Guys,” Steve interrupts. It’s not sharp, but Dustin’s mouth snaps shut all the same.

“Anyway, the point is, he’s definitely dead,” he says.

Max nods. “I can’t feel him anymore. For the past couple of weeks, I kept—but he’s gone now. There’s nothing.” She takes a deep breath, then lets it out and looks at Eddie. Something passes between them; some kind of mutual understanding. “He’s gone.”

The gate in Eddie's ceiling is likewise gone now, but none of them really want to hang around here any longer than they have to. The whole place seems haunted. Last night aside, Eddie’s not sure he’ll ever be able to sleep there again.

“Also,” Dustin says, “the police are probably looking for us.”

“For Eddie, anyway. Although Erica’s the one who slashed the cops’ tires.”

“You’re welcome,” Erica says.

“Right, but they don’t know that, do they? They don’t know it was just her. We’re all, like, persons of interest now. We’ll need to go into hiding, shit, my mom’s gonna freak—”

“You’re not going into hiding,” Steve says, sounding tired. He glances up toward the road, then sighs. “Look, it’s not that far to my place. We’ll head over there, you little shits can call your parents and let them know you’re not dead—”

Lucas groans. “I’m gonna be grounded until graduation.”

“Yeah, I was serious about going into hiding,” Dustin adds.

“You’re not going into hiding,” Steve repeats, and there’s something in his tone, maybe, some leaden kind of weight, that makes Dustin’s mouth snap shut. Eddie folds his arms, cupping his elbows, trying not to think of a week spent hiding under a tarp. Trying not to think of Wayne, who has to have been going out of his mind with worry this whole time. “You’re gonna call your mom and let her know that you’re alive. It’s been like a whole day, man, and your parents give a shit about you.”

There’s a bitter edge to that, like there’s a second half of that sentence that he’s not saying: Steve Harrington, with his big beautiful home that’s always empty for parties on the weekends and has been for as long as Eddie can remember. Steve Harrington, basketball star, swim team captain, King of Hawkins High, lonely fucking kid who locked himself in the bathroom this morning rather than let any of them see him cry.

Robin’s limp gets more pronounced as they make their way through some circuitous backwoods route to Loch Nora that Steve, presumably, has mentally mapped out for makeout spots and—conveniently for their current situation—avoiding cops. Steve and Nancy bracket her to hold her up while Eddie trails behind them feeling useless, and feeling kind of like an idiot for caring. After a few minutes, though, Max falls into step beside him.

“So,” she says abruptly. “Thank you.”

Eddie glances down at her: the stubborn jut of her jaw and her frizzy red hair, the headphones she still has looped around her neck. His are in his pocket now, his fingers still resting against the plastic case like a touchstone.

“You already said that,” he says.

“Yeah, well, I meant it.”

Eddie nods. He looks up ahead at Lucas and Erica walking close together, something protective in both their postures.

“I met your friend. Eleven,” he says, and Max glances at him. “Like—in the dream, I mean. She saved my ass.”

Max lets out a dry little huff of laughter that makes her seem older than she should. “Yeah. She does that.”

“She was looking for you.”

Max nods. When he looks down at her this time, she’s got her lips pressed together tightly. She blinks a couple of times, then makes an angry little sound and swipes at her eyes, like she’s annoyed at the tears.

“He almost had us,” she says finally. “That stupid fucking—his stupid little floating mind palace, with all the other people he killed just pinned up on pillars like they were trophies or something and not…”

“Yeah,” Eddie says before she can go into any more gory detail. He only caught a glimpse of it, but a glimpse was enough. Chrissy’s once-pretty face, her eyes gone, her mouth wrenched sideways in an eternal scream.

“We were trapped there. He had us. And then you were talking to him. And it—it got his attention, I guess. Distracted him. I heard Kate Bush, and I ran, and he—” she breaks off again. “I didn’t know, once I got out. Because you were in there, and El—I didn’t know if either of you would make it out alive. And I was so mad at myself for running.”

“Hey, no, no, you can’t—that was the plan, right? Like Harrington said. It was like a relay race, right? So you did your thing, and then I jumped in, and like, it worked. Right? It worked. And El—she had Wheeler. The other Wheeler,” he adds, when Nancy glances back at him. “Sorry. I guess your kid brother ended up in the middle of all this shit after all.”

“Yeah,” she says wryly. “He always does.”

“Point is,” Eddie says, “she made it out. Definitely.”

He’s a little too aware of the fact that he gave the same reassurance about Max to Eleven, with as little certainty, but he was right about that, and he has faith—reckless, he thinks, but not unjustified—that he’s right about this too.

Max gives him a long look, then nods.

“Well, thanks,” she says, and jogs to catch up with the others.

It’s well past midnight by the time their motley little group staggers up the walk to the Harrington house. All the other houses on the street are dark, but Eddie doesn’t really relax until they’re past the ornamental hedges shielding the front door from view of the road, and Steve has unearthed a key from a hollow decorative rock next to the front step. He unlocks the door and holds it open to shuffle the rest of them into the house. Eddie’s the last to come in, and Steve brushes close by him to pull the door shut and lock it. They pause there for a long, strange moment, then Steve shakes his head and pulls back.

“Robin, I’m gonna grab you some ice for your ankle,” he says. He flips the keys idly a couple of times, then pockets them as he heads into the kitchen. “Henderson, Sinclair—”

“”Look, Steve, can we please just stay here tonight?” Dustin asks. Max snorts, leaning against the wall. Steve did not, Eddie notes, say anything about her calling her mom, even though they all know her phone is in service.

“No, dude, call your mom, come on,” Steve says. In the vast, gleaming kitchen off the hallway, he pulls open the fridge and rummages around until he comes up with a gel ice pack, which he wraps in a dish towel. Dustin groans and ambles into the living room, which has white leather furniture and a confusing piece of modern art made out of several angular pieces of what looks like multicolored sheet metal tacked up on the wall. Eddie tilts his head, staring at it, as Nancy gets Robin settled on one of the couches and Dustin heaves a deep sigh, picks up the phone on the glass-topped table in the corner and starts to dial.

“For the record,” he says, holding it to his ear, “I still think this is… Mom, hi—Mom, no, I’m fine, I promise I’m fine, I’m at Steve’s—yeah, he’s—Mom, I promise everybody’s okay—yeah. Yeah, I got it. Yeah—no, Lucas and Erica and Max are here too.” He pauses, heaving a deep sigh as the voice on the other end of the phone says something in a very sharp tone. “Okay. But we could—okay, okay, fine. Yeah. Love you too, bye.”

He sets the phone down with a deep sigh and scowls at Steve as he comes in with the ice pack. “She’s coming to pick me up, and she says I’m grounded until graduation. Hope you’re happy.”

“She’ll come around by next week and you know it,” Steve says, handing Robin the ice pack. She takes it with a wince, and Nancy leans forward to help her hold it against her ankle, wrapping her hand around Robin’s knee to keep it steady. She seems completely focused on the task, but Robin pauses, staring at her hand, color high in her cheeks.

“My parents definitely won’t,” Lucas grumbles. “I’m gonna be off the basketball team for good.”

“Oh, what, you mean the basketball team that’s out there hunting us for sport right now?” Erica says, before Eddie can blurt it out. She holds a hand out. “Gimme. I’ll talk to them.”

“Jeeze, okay, I didn’t mean it like that,” Lucas says, but he hands the phone over. Steve sinks down on the couch next to Robin and Nancy, either oblivious or uncaring about the smears of grime that they’re all leaving on its pristine surface.

“You guys are staying?” he asks quietly.

Robin finally tears her attention away from Nancy to nod. “Yeah, I already told my dad that I’m having a sleepover with Leanna this weekend.”

“Leanna from band? The one who stuck gum in your trumpet case? Don’t you hate her guts?”

“Yeah, but he doesn’t know that.”

Steve snorts. “Nance?”

“Of course I’ll stay.”

By the door, Eddie shifts his weight, tucking his elbows in. Trying not to call attention to himself, which is something he’s never really excelled at. All the same, he jumps when Steve adds, quietly, “Eddie?”

“Um.” He lifts his head, blinking. “I—yeah, man, if that’s cool with you. Not like I have anywhere else to go.”

He regrets that phrasing when something shutters in Steve’s expression, but before he can try to fix it Robin moves her leg and then lets out a pained noise, and Steve’s attention is back on her.

“You really should go to the walk-in,” Nancy says. “Steve, should we wrap this, do you think?”

“Nah, not overnight. Keep the ice on it for a while longer, though. You’re sure it’s just a sprain?”

“Do I look like I have a medical degree?” Robin asks snappishly. “There’s no bone poking out, and I can walk on it, sort of. So. Probably?”

“I’ll drive you to the walk-in tomorrow,” Steve says, then sighs. “Shit. I mean, as soon as I go get my car.”

“You should probably get checked out too,” Robin says. “Because I know you said it was fine, but I’m really actually worried about rabies, and that’s not to mention that you’ve been like this for, what, like a month of actual time, and who knows what kind of effects that could have.”

“Pretty sure time loop isn’t a diagnosable condition,” Steve says, and pushes himself off the couch with a pained grunt that he bites back immediately and obviously. “Let me go grab some stuff for you—you want to sleep on the pull-out so you don’t have to deal with the stairs?”

“Yeah. Please.”

Steve nods once and disappears down the darkened hallway. A light comes on, and a moment later there’s the sound of a door opening, soft rummaging through what Eddie assumes is a linen closet. This seems like the kind of house that would have things like that.

“Is he okay, do you think?” Robin asks Nancy quietly, as Dustin peers out the window and Eddie drifts into the room, hands tucked under his arms, unable to let himself settle.

“Would you be?” Nancy asks.

“No, I mean, obviously not, but I don’t—it’s Steve,” Robin says, and a few days ago maybe Eddie wouldn’t get what she means, but he does now. It’s Steve, who’s digging out blankets and pillows for them right now, who brought them home and got an ice pack for Robin and made the kids call their parents, who seems to look after everyone before he’ll even think about looking after himself. “I always know what to say to him, but I don’t know now.”

Nancy pauses, sitting back on the couch. Then she says, quietly, “I thought you guys weren’t…”

“No,” Robin says immediately. “We’re not. He’s—not my type. At all.”

She flushes as soon as she says it, and Nancy looks at her with wide eyes, and there’s something there, maybe, that Eddie can’t bring himself to interrupt, but then headlights swing into the driveway and Dustin groans loudly and then swears under his breath, and the moment, whatever it was, is gone.

Eddie banishes himself upstairs so as not to end up arrested after all as a gaggle of worried parents pound on the front door. There’s a lot of yelling, and a lot of apologizing (from Steve) and loud justifications (from Dustin and Erica). Max ends up bundled into the back of the Sinclairs’ station wagon along with Erica and Lucas. Steve folds her into a hug before they go, and she lets him do it, even clings back a little bit.

Eddie watches from the second floor window, feeling wistful or something about it. Like she knows he’s watching, Max lifts her head when Steve lets her go, flicks a little salute and an ironic smile toward the upper story of the house. Eddie’s standing well back from the window, but he takes another step back anyway just in case.

And then they’re gone, and the house seems suddenly echoingly quiet. They don’t speak as they get the pull-out bed set up, and once that’s done, Steve heads upstairs to retrieve what turns out to be a stack of clothes—sweatpants, soft looking t-shirts. He passes these to Nancy and Robin and says, “So, there’s a bathroom down here if you want to get cleaned up. Through the hallway there, third door on the left.”

“We know, Steve,” Nancy says, not unkindly.

He flushes. “Right, yeah. Sorry. It’s been a long…”

Day. Week. Month. He trails off with a wince. Robin tucks a Hawkins swim team sweatshirt under her arm, sets a hand on his elbow and says, seriously, “I mean this with lots of love and affection and respect for the trauma you’ve been through, but you smell terrible, Steve, you should also really take a shower.”

Steve laughs, ragged and startled. “Yeah. Okay.”

“Seriously. We’ll be fine. Go shower.”

“Right, okay. Eddie, you want to, um…?”

Eddie starts at the sound of his own name. “What?”

“I can grab some clothes for you, too, if you want to get cleaned up.”

That seems dangerous in a way that Eddie can’t quite put his finger on, but also he’s been wearing the same jeans for most of a week, and that was before he biked through a hell dimension and fought a monster, so he just nods and follows Steve back upstairs.

It turns out that there are two bathrooms up here: one in the hall next to Steve’s room and one off the bare and impersonal master suite that Steve’s parents allegedly share, although it doesn’t look like anyone’s set foot in there in months. Rich people shit, and in another mood Eddie would probably find it ridiculous to the point of comedy, but right now the emptiness of this house is just unsettling and kind of depressing.

Steve presses a bundle of clothes into his hands and doesn’t quite meet Eddie’s eyes when he offers a quiet thanks, and then he’s gone.

When he gets out of the bathroom, clean and dressed in Steve’s clothes, smelling like Steve’s expensive shampoo—or he assumes it was expensive, anyway, because the bottle looked more like something you’d find at a salon than the store brand 2-in-1 Eddie and Wayne usually get from Melvald’s—he pads down the hall, trying not to feel like he’s sneaking somewhere he’s not supposed to be.

Steve’s door is half-open, light spilling into the hallway. Steve is sitting on the bed, shirtless and barefoot, scraping his wet hair back out of his face with his fingers. The fresh bandages stand out stark and white against his freckled skin. He looks up when Eddie ducks his head in tentatively. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Eddie says back. He had some idea about offering to help Steve re-bandage himself up, but he must have done it while Eddie was in the shower. It would be stupid to be disappointed about that, so Eddie isn’t. “You good, dude?”

Steve nods, looking away. There’s a digital clock on the nightstand; as Eddie watches, the glowing green numbers tick from 12:56 to 12:57.

“March twenty-ninth,” he offers awkwardly, although it’s been March twenty-ninth for almost an hour now. “It’s tomorrow.”

Steve breathes out a laugh, drops his head. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says, shifting his feet, feeling more than a little stupid lingering in the doorway like this. He doesn’t know if Steve actually wants him to come in, but he finds himself equally unable to leave. Something about the way Steve looks: the smallness of him right now, with his hunched shoulders and his wet hair, sitting on this neatly made bed in this neat, empty room alone.

“You know,” Steve says, then stops. He clears his throat, rubs a hand through his hair again, then continues without looking away from the clock. “You know, the last time around, I told you that if you made it to tomorrow, I’d kiss you again.”

“Oh,” Eddie says, suddenly breathless. It didn’t really sound like an offer, is the thing; Steve’s expression is pensive and tired. But still. “I guess I kind of fucked that one up, huh?”

Steve shakes his head. “No. I shouldn’t have—I didn’t mean to put all that shit on you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie says. Tentatively, he takes a step into the room. “I mean—I didn’t mind.”

“Oh,” Steve says quietly.

“And just.” Eddie licks his lips, feeling his pulse stutter with nerves. “You know, like. It’s tomorrow.”

Steve lifts his head to look at him. Hoarsely, he says, “You said that already.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says. He hovers for a moment, then takes the plunge, perches himself on the edge of Steve’s bed—bare feet still touching the floor, poised to flee if it turns out he’s misread all this. Always fucking ready to run away, but somehow he doesn’t think he’ll have to this time.

Steve’s eyes are wide, luminous, lovely. When Eddie cups a hand against his cheek, his skin is warm and rough with the day’s stubble that he must not have bothered to shave. He doesn’t jerk away. If anything, he sways closer, tilting helplessly into the touch.

“Eddie,” he whispers.

“It’s tomorrow,” Eddie says again, and kisses him.

He means it to be quick and soft, and it stays that way for just a moment. Then Steve makes a quiet, wounded noise against his lips and grabs at him, pulling him closer, and the kiss is suddenly hot, open-mouthed, desperate. Steve’s hands tangle in his hair, pulling at him hard enough that he almost overbalances; his knee hits the edge of the mattress and then he’s tumbling down onto the neatly-made bedspread. Soft pillows beneath his head and Steve’s hands on his face, Steve’s body warm and heavy above him. Eddie hooks a leg behind his knee and is rewarded by another one of those wounded, desperate little noises. Steve’s fingers clutch at him tightly, thumbs digging into his cheekbones before sliding back into his hair and tilting his head so that he can kiss him with dizzying thoroughness.

He doesn’t really know what he’s doing here, truth be told. In this moment, specifically, because Steve is kissing him like he’ll disappear at any second and might still be kind of pissed at him; in general, because the number of guys he’s ever done anything with can be counted on one hand with fingers left over. And none of them have meant anything to him, not really, not the way Steve already does.

More than he should, really, when Eddie is the one who still can’t remember any of what’s happened between them before today.

He doesn’t want it to stop. He never wants it to stop. It’s just a lot.

Steve’s mouth trails across his cheek to open softly against the corner of his jaw, the hollow of his throat, lingering on the thin skin over Eddie’s pulse point like he can feel the rapid trip of his galloping heartbeat. It makes Eddie shudder and clutch at him with more instinct than intention. Steve swears under his breath and turns his head to kiss Eddie again, and that’s when Eddie’s clumsy, grasping hands bump against the edge of one of the bandages just above Steve’s hip.

This time, the low curse Steve lets out is definitely not a good sound. His whole body stiffens in a flinch and Eddie jerks his hand away, wincing. “Shit. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Steve mumbles. Their faces are still close; his lips whisper against Eddie’s cheek, the smell of toothpaste on his breath. Eddie’s hair is leaving a spreading patch of damp on the pillow and around the collar of his t-shirt. Steve’s t-shirt, which he is wearing.

“Hey,” he murmurs, and finds himself touching Steve’s face with a gentleness that seems at odds with all of this. “You okay?”

Steve closes his eyes and lets out a shuddering sigh, then rolls off of Eddie to flop onto the mattress next to him with a grunt. He puts an arm over his eyes and Eddie tries not to be distracted by the smooth shift of muscle beneath his skin. There are freckles dusting his shoulders, but the skin on the underside of his arm is pale and tender. Vulnerable. “Not really, man, no.”

“Sorry,” Eddie says again, and starts to sit up. Steve’s hand catches his wrist. His grip is loose; Eddie could pull away. He doesn’t. “Steve?”

“Just—sorry,” Steve says, and lets go to rub both hands over his face. “I keep fucking thinking I’m going to open my eyes and you’ll disappear, and it’ll be—shit, I don’t know. My head’s a mess right now, sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s to be expected, dude,” Eddie offers, and Steve lets out a faintly hysterical little laugh. “Should I—you want me to get Wheeler or Buckley? Or I guess I should probably leave you alone so you can get some sleep—”

“No,” Steve says. He drops his hands; his eyes are still closed. “Just, like, can we—would you stay?”

“Oh,” Eddie manages. There’s something wrong with his voice. He clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah. Of course.”

Steve’s eyes are open again. That in-between hazel shade that looks brown in some lights and green in others; right now in the lamplight there’s a golden warmth to them, a tenderness in the way he looks at Eddie that’s almost too much to bear.

“Thanks,” he says quietly. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” Eddie says, and leans back to fumble the light off. In the darkness that follows it seems easier to reach across the mattress and slide his hand into Steve’s. There’s a breath of hesitation, and then Steve brings their joined hands to his lips to brush a kiss across the back of Eddie’s knuckles, an echo of Eddie’s gesture from this morning.

His breath catches. Steve’s warm thumb rubs along the side of his hand, and he doesn’t let go.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay.”

Eddie squeezes his hand, feeling the sharp valleys of his knuckles, the warmth of his skin, the faint roughness of his palm. “Go to sleep, Steve,” he whispers. “I’m here. I’m okay.”

Steve’s breath shudders out of him: half-laughter, half-not.

“Okay,” he whispers again, and doesn’t let go.

Eddie closes his eyes.

The nightmare is jarring in its vividness.

On top of the trailer, metal flexes beneath his shoes and the sky is red and crackling and full of wings and teeth. His guitar strings vibrate beneath his fingers and the echo of the amplifier rings in his ears, but all he can hear is that awful nails-on-a-chalkboard shrieking.

Dustin is crouched by the amps, wide-eyed, white-faced, and tense as he stares out at the gathering storm.

“T-minus ten,” he yells, and Eddie keeps playing, and keeps breathing, and doesn’t let himself scream. “T-minus five—four—three—let’s go, let’s go, come on!”

Shrieks ring in his ears, and Dustin’s hands are on his arms, and then he’s—

—screaming defiance into the storm as he flings a flamethrower to the side, and then he’s just screaming, the pain so awful and white-hot that he can’t think of anything else. It swallows him up and spits him out onto cold pavement, flat on his back with his heart thundering as Jason Carver pulls out a gun. Eddie squeezes his eyes shut, and then Dustin is hugging him fiercely on the front step of the Harrington house while Steve watches from a few paces back with an unreadable expression.

“Get it? Bat-tle,” he says, and Eddie laughs and ruffles his hair while Steve groans. Eddie lifts his head, and he’s in the RV again, watching cigarette smoke trail up toward the ceiling.

“It’s weird, right,” Robin says to his left. “And it’s fucked up that Steve is the only one who gets to keep any of this.”

“Doesn’t exactly seem like a party for him, either,” Eddie mumbles, and only realizes that he’s awake when his eyes open involuntarily.

The room is dark, but there are shifting blue patterns on the ceiling that Eddie realizes after a few moments must be reflections from the pool outside. The curtains are open to let in the dim light, enough for him to see the sleeping shape of Steve in the bed next to him. They’re not touching anymore, but Steve’s hand is resting on the mattress in between them like he’s reaching for Eddie. His brow is furrowed even in sleep.

Eddie sits up slowly, careful not to jostle the bed. The fear is gone, but the echo of it remains, part of that strange unsettled feeling of waking in an unfamiliar place that makes him feel like he’s still halfway in the dream.

If it was a dream. There’s a part of him that wants to shake Steve awake and ask if what he’s remembering is real, and he actually starts to reach across to do exactly that before he stops himself. Steve looks exhausted, even unconscious. This is probably the first real sleep he’s been able to get in more than a month. Eddie can’t be the one to disturb that.

He swings his legs off the side of the bed and stands quietly, padding across the darkened room and pulling the door most of the way shut behind him. The house is cool in the night, the floor chilly on his bare feet. There’s a light on downstairs, and he follows the warmth of it like a moth toward a lantern. The memory of his vision at the Creel house surfaces, and he shudders, but by then he’s at the bottom of the stairs and he can see that it’s just Robin sitting at the kitchen island while a kettle hisses and burbles on the stove. She seems wan and small, swamped in Steve’s sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants that are rolled halfway up her calves. Her leg is stretched out to rest on the stool next to her, and the ankle is swollen enough to make Eddie wince.

Her head jerks up when he comes in, and then she registers who he is and relaxes visibly.

“Sorry,” he whispers, and nods to her swollen ankle. “You good?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Robin says quietly. “You?”

“Nightmare.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.” She rubs both hands over her cheeks, pressing hard enough to distort the skin and give her face a brief and weirdly jarring horror movie cast. Then she lets her hands drop and she just looks like a tired kid. “I’m having hot chocolate. You want some?”

“Uh, sure,” Eddie says, circling the island to sit in the next free seat. Through the wide doorway, he can see the darkened living room, the pull-out couch with its nest of rumpled blankets. A cloud of dark hair spills across one pillow. On the nearest side, the blankets are shoved back and the pillow dented; no question of where Robin was sleeping.

He sees her follow his gaze and then glance back at his face with a skittish look that’s as good as a confession, even though there are a dozen different ways she could play that off.

Eddie puts his hands up. “Don’t worry, Buckley. I’m cool.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “Right.”

“Scout's honor,” he adds, like the Boy Scouts ever would have taken his delinquent ass.

It makes her smile and roll her eyes, anyway. She points at a cabinet above the sink. “The cups are in there.”

She’s already got the cocoa mix and a bag of mini-marshmallows out on the counter. He pulls out another one of the fashionably hideous orange-and-brown dripware mugs and prepares his cup, too aware of Robin’s eyes boring into the back of his head.

When he can stall no longer, he turns. As expected, the look she’s giving him feels like it could x-ray the back of his skull.

“So,” she says finally. “You and Steve, huh?”

“So,” he retorts. “You and Wheeler, huh?”

“She’s got a boyfriend, it’s not…” Robin rubs her hands over her face again, lets out an odd little laugh. “Does this feel like deja vu? Like, I don’t know, like we’ve had this conversation before—or, like, I don’t know, something like it? Does that sound—am I crazy?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified to answer that,” Eddie says slowly, settling back onto his seat. He stares idly at the blue flame spreading out across the underside of the kettle and remembers the way Vecna’s eyes seemed to burn. “If you’re crazy, I think I am, too.”

“It was—we were in the RV, right? The others were inside, and we were waiting in the RV, and you were smoking a cigarette, and—”

“And you said it wasn’t fair that Steve would get to keep all of this, but we wouldn’t,” Eddie finishes. She nods, face pale. He lets out a laugh that sounds faintly unhinged even to his own ears. “I was really hoping that was all just a bad dream.”

The kettle on the stove lets out a thin stream of steam, followed by a shrill, rising whistle. Robin swears and Eddie lunches across the room to pull it off the heat before it can wake anybody up, but of course it’s too late; by the time he turns around, Nancy is fighting her way out of the sheets and blankets on the couch bed. She pushes her hair out of her face and blinks at the two of them.

“Sorry,” Robin offers sheepishly. She’s gone bright red. Nancy wraps the quilt around her shoulders and offers her a sleepy smile, which does not seem to help the situation.

“It’s fine. Bad dream?”

“Something like that,” Robin manages. “Hot chocolate?”

Nancy nods, and yawns, and shuffles into the kitchen to pull open the cupboard. She gets two cups out, not one, and Eddie is about to ask why when he hears a thump from upstairs. Then footsteps down the hall, on the stairs, and there’s a lurching half-remembered terror to the sound until he sees Steve emerge blinking into the light. His hair is dried in an appalling tangle and his face is ghost-pale. He comes to an abrupt stop at the bottom of the stairs and wraps his arms around himself, staring at the three of them like they’re a mirage that’ll vanish if he lets himself blink.

“Uh, hey,” he rasps finally.

Eddie is halfway across the room before he makes the conscious decision to move, and when he reaches Steve he just keeps going: slings an arm around Steve’s shoulders and jostles him lightly, which makes Steve let out a shuddering laugh and relax.

“Welcome to the midnight crisis club,” Eddie says, and pulls him into the kitchen. Steve doesn’t make any attempt to shrug off his arm, so Eddie leaves it there. He’s very aware of the smell of Steve’s shampoo, the sleepy warmth of his body. Robin raises her eyebrows at him; Nancy, pouring water into the quartet of mugs, seems unperturbed.

“Is that what this is?” Steve asks. “I woke up and…”

The shudder that rolls through him probably isn’t visible to the others, but Eddie feels it. He tightens his arm instinctively, and that’s when Nancy finally turns. Her sharp blue eyes scan the two of them, and Eddie wonders if she can see the imprint of Steve’s lips on his mouth, the imprint of his lips on Steve’s, but she doesn’t say a word. She just holds out a pair of mugs for the two of them, and Eddie finally, reluctantly, unwinds himself from Steve to take one.

“Thanks, Nance,” Steve says quietly.

She huffs and sets another mug down in front of Robin, then crosses over to pull an ice pack out of the freezer. “You can take a break, you know,” she says, and it’s somehow both brisk and sympathetic. Sharp, but not brittle. There’s a steadiness in her that wasn’t there this morning. Getting to torch the shit out of Vecna must have been therapeutic. “We’re all okay.”

Steve lets out a hoarse bark of laughter, then takes a huge gulp of hot chocolate like he’s trying to swallow it down.

“Yeah,” he says finally. Eddie starts to step away, reluctantly, and Steve bumps against his shoulder in a way that could be accidental but probably isn’t. He stills. Steve doesn’t move away. Eddie can feel every inch of where they’re touching, from the ball of his shoulder to the point of Steve’s elbow digging slightly into his arm. “Yeah. It’s just. Gonna take me a minute, I think.”

“We have plenty of minutes,” Robin offers, taking the dishcloth-wrapped ice pack that Nancy hands her and setting her mug down to hold it against her ankle. “Like—several hundred thousand minutes of linear time going in the right direction. At least, you know. Until the next crisis.”

“Thanks, Robin, that’s super reassuring,” Steve says dryly. He’s smiling a little now, though.

The mug bleeds warmth into Eddie’s fingers as the clock on the wall ticks over to 3:30 AM, and he finally takes a drink. Sweet chocolate, the faint grit of undissolved sugar on his tongue. Steve has his eyes closed, both hands cradling the mug, color finally seeping back into the pallor of his face.

“You okay?” Eddie asks him quietly.

“Sure,” Steve mutters into his mug, and makes a face when Eddie lets out an incredulous noise that he’s not actually sure he’s entitled to, at this point. They’ve shared a bed and a handful of kisses, and they haven’t talked about any of it. Whether any of it was just some kind of weird post-crisis thank-god-we’re-alive thing. It isn’t, for him. He knows that already. Eddie’s always had the habit of falling too hard and too fast for his own good. But he doesn’t have a fucking clue where Steve’s head is at.

Robin sets her cup down to adjust her grip on the ice pack, and Nancy says, quietly, “I got it, just—here,” and holds Robin’s leg in place with an absent palm while she resettles the ice pack. Color flares in Robin’s cheeks again.

Steve lets out a noise, and Nancy glances back at him. There’s a brief silent exchange there: her eyes narrow, and his smile gets several degrees more sheepish.

“Okay,” he says, like the conclusion of some subtextual conversation. And then, “Okay, actually, maybe we should all, like try to get some sleep.”

He slides off the stool, cradling his hot chocolate between his palms, and Eddie hesitates, uncertain. He knows what he wants to do, which is follow Steve back upstairs and curl into bed with him and maybe kiss him some more, but he’s not really sure whether or not that’s allowed now, in front of an audience. Then Steve cocks his head at him, the tired cast of his face softened with a faint smile. “You coming?”

Apparently it is allowed.

“Uh, yeah,” Eddie says, and slides off his stool as well. He gives the other two an awkward little wave. “Wheeler, Buckley—”

“Sleep tight,” Nancy offers, with a smile playing at the edge of her mouth.

“Yeah, you too,” Eddie retorts pointedly, and her grin is sudden and bright.

He thinks, as he follows Steve back up the stairs, that he could really get to be friends with Nancy Wheeler. Will wonders never cease.

Speaking of wonders: Steve pulls the door open and holds it for him like a gentleman, then pulls it shut behind him. The lamp on the nightstand is on, the sheets and blankets roiled like someone fought their way out of them. Eddie cradles his hot chocolate like a security blanket.

“I think I remember,” he blurts, and Steve turns. The lamplight gentles him, softening the angle of his jaw, obscuring the exhausted circles beneath his eyes. His eyes are dark, his lips softly parted. He spins the cup in his hands, then sets it down on the nightstand and sinks onto the bed: a prop, discarded.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“The—like, I thought it was a nightmare, but I talked to Buckley, and—did we, did I stay here before? On one of the loops?”

Steve blinks. Sets his hands on his knees and shifts like he’s going to stand, then just stays there. “Uh, yeah,” he says finally. “Yeah, I talked you into it. Thought you’d be safe.”

“I wasn’t.”

Steve shakes his head and offers an attempt at a smile that doesn’t really work. “No.”

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says, stepping into the room. Still unsure of his welcome but pulled, regardless, into the gravity of Steve’s orbit.

Steve lets out a sound that’s half a laugh, half a sigh. “Stop apologizing, man.”

“Tell you what, I’ll stop apologizing when you stop looking at me like you think I’m gonna disappear, how’s that?”

“Force of habit,” Steve says, with a weird little quirk of his mouth. “I’ll get over it.”

“I still have to get you turned on to Dio and Black Sabbath, and, like, the entirety of the heavy metal musical genre. I’m not going anywhere.”

That gets him an actual laugh. “Yeah?”

“I mean, unless you want me to. There’s gotta be like six bedrooms in this place, I can probably find somewhere else to sleep.”

“Five,” Steve admits, and laughs again, shoving a hand through his hair. “I don’t want you to go. Okay?”

“Okay,” Eddie says. He takes a drink of his cooling hot chocolate, then deposits the cup on the nightstand with Steve’s and sinks onto the bed next to him. Steve half-turns toward him; they’re close enough that his knee slides along the outside of Eddie’s thigh, a warm, thrilling pressure. His face is still soft. He’s so fucking pretty, even like this. Maybe especially like this, sleep-rumpled and watching Eddie with an unguarded expression that makes Eddie’s faulty brain-to-mouth filter abruptly give out. “So is this like just that you don’t want to sleep alone or you want to make sure I’m not dead, or is it—like, we didn’t actually talk about earlier, but if you wanted to do it again—”

Steve cuts him off with a kiss.

It actually takes a second for Eddie’s train of babble to derail itself, so he’s still kind of talking against Steve’s mouth when it starts—but he gets with the program before Steve can pull back and start apologizing. Steve's right, is the thing: they've both had enough of that. Eddie catches his cheek and presses closer, tilts his head to make it a proper kiss and swallows the soft noise that Steve makes without breaking away.

This is less frantic than before. Steve’s mouth is soft, moving sweetly against his; his hands don’t clutch this time but slide down Eddie’s arms with deliberate care, leaving hot prickles in their wake when they land on bare skin.

It seems to go on forever: an endless, dizzying epoch of Steve’s mouth, the taste of chocolate lingering on his tongue, the warmth of his hands. Eddie lets himself touch back, taking care this time for the injuries hidden beneath cloth and bandaging. He touches Steve’s face, slides his fingers back into Steve’s hair, careful of the tangles. When he tugs tentatively, Steve swears under his breath, then again, more vehemently, when Eddie uses his grip to tilt Steve’s head and kiss the bare, bruised column of his throat.

That has to sting, even as careful as he’s being—the skin abraded nearly to the point of blood, a web of burst capillaries over the purple bruising. But the shudder that rolls through Steve doesn’t seem like pain; he pushes up into Eddie’s hands and mouth and Eddie thinks that if he were a little more confident here he’d bite the warm skin beneath his lips.

The memory of Steve’s earlier flinch stops him. He keeps his touches light, even when Steve’s fingers grip his elbows bruisingly tight.

“Eddie, Eddie,” he breathes, and finally pulls Eddie back up into a kiss that holds just a hint of his earlier desperation. He’s wide-eyed when they break apart, flushed and breathless. Eddie did that to him, and somehow that’s the most insane thing that’s happened to him this week, and also by far the best.

“Hey,” he rasps, stupidly.

“Holy shit,” Steve breathes.

“I concur,” Eddie says, but the dry humor he was aiming for somehow doesn’t quite manifest. His mouth feels swollen, and everything seems hazy and warm. Steve is so warm where they're still touching. “So is this, like, gonna be a thing now? You never actually answered my question earlier.”

“It can be, if you want,” Steve says. He chews his lip briefly, then leans in to kiss Eddie again, quick and decisive, like he's making a point. “I’d like it to be.”

“Yeah, me too,” Eddie says—or starts to say, anyway. Embarrassingly, he’s interrupted halfway through by a huge yawn. “Sorry, sorry—”

Steve laughs, and then he yawns too. Sheepishly, he rubs a hand over his mouth. “Maybe for now we could just sleep?”

For now. The implication of a later there is thrilling, but Steve’s right: it’s almost four in the morning, dawn just starting to paint the sky outside in faint shades of gray, and it turns out that a week of near-death experiences is exhausting, who knew?

“Yeah,” Eddie says, feeling oddly shy about it. He’s shared a bed before, but not like this. “Yeah, I’d like that.”

He’s the one who leans over to turn the bedside lamp off, but Steve is the one to arrange the sheets and blankets over them, clean-smelling and body-warm. The mattress shifts as they get comfortable; Steve moves restlessly for a moment before finally rolling onto his side and hooking a leg over Eddie’s.

“This okay?”

“Yeah,” Eddie breathes. He reaches over to find Steve’s face in the dark with his fingertips, then uses them as a guide to lean in and kiss him again. He’s warm-lipped and pliant, and he sighs softly when Eddie pulls back to settle onto his own pillow.

He closes his eyes. The silence around them is soft as he slips down into sleep, and if he dreams this time, he doesn’t remember it.

March 29, 1986. 11:28 AM

He wakes to full daylight and the sound of soft snoring in his ear. There’s no disorientation; he knows immediately where he is. Steve’s mattress is softer than his, and lacks the busted spring that always jabs him in the back when he sleeps in the wrong spot. Eddie feels loose-limbed and heavy as he sits up slowly; disoriented in the way that he always is after sleeping half the day away. Light spills in through the open curtains and he can hear distant noise from downstairs: talking, soft laughter, the clatter of dishware, all of it calm and reassuringly domestic. Nancy and Robin must already be up.

In the bed beside him, Steve has kicked off most of the blankets and is sleeping in an exhausted sprawl, face half-buried in the pillow, snoring softly. Sunlight falls across him, washing him in shades of gold. Eddie doesn’t know how long he sits like that, watching the soft rise and fall of Steve’s chest, his battered hand on the sheets between them, the stubble shading his cheeks and jaw. There’s something unspeakably warm and tender bubbling up inside him that threatens to overflow when Steve finally shifts, scrunches his face like a cranky child, then opens his eyes.

“Hey,” Eddie whispers.

Steve blinks at him for a second. Then his face crumples briefly, like he’s about to cry; alarmed, Eddie straightens up, but Steve shoves both hands over his face and starts to laugh, quiet and raw.

“You okay?” Eddie asks, after a minute or so of this.

“Yeah,” Steve says, dropping his hands. His eyes are wet, his expression broken open, but it’s not in a bad way, or at least Eddie doesn’t think it is. There’s something like wonder there. “It’s just—it’s morning.”

“Yeah. Or, well, almost noon, actually.”

“Close enough,” Steve says, and reaches for him. His warm hands land on Eddie’s arms, and Eddie lets himself be pulled.

Later, he’ll help Steve retrieve his car from Reefer Rick’s, and he’ll call Wayne and hear his uncle cry for the first time in his memory. Later, a few days later, Steve will open the front door and almost have a heart attack when he finds the former chief of police standing on the step next to a slender teenage girl with a buzzcut.

“Holy shit,” Steve will yelp, and Hopper will roll his eyes and say, “You gonna let us in or what, kid?” and Eleven will unerringly find Eddie where he’s lurking out of sight on the stairwell and smile at him, sweet and knowing.

Later, all that will happen. For now, Steve pulls him down into a kiss, and Eddie settles into his embrace while sunlight spills around them and time keeps moving forward into a new day.