Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Steve thinks there’s something to be said about theater majors. Something about the self-importance, the sugar breath, the way they all talk like exclamation points in polysyllabic font. But mostly, there’s something to be said about Eddie Munson, and how Steve wants to grab him by his stupid cape and strangle him.

It started with a spilled coffee. One library, two seats left at the only available table. The doe-eyed dickhead accidentally bumped a hip into Steve’s bubble of solitude, then watched in horror as liquid caffeine — black, no cream, just malignancy and ice — soaked Steve’s lab report. The Michaelis-Menten curves had run in wet, sad rivulets of ballpoint ink across the crumpled loose leaf. Steve snapped his pencil. He would’ve snapped the guy’s neck too if the weirdo hadn’t cursed and ran off, long velvet cape fluttering behind him, dark blue and covered in yellow stars.

The librarian’s assistant had given Steve paper towels and helped to blot away and soak up the coffee, but the damage had already been done. Twenty minutes and a re-wound Walkman down the drain. Every time he blinked, Steve saw that goddamn cape disappearing behind the stacks and into the fiery pits of Dewey Decimal hell.

He didn’t know the kid’s name, had never even seen him before around campus, but Steve knew from there on out he’d be holding that grudge until the end of time.

Steve — dog-tired, beginning his junior year, and just trying to graduate with a biochemistry degree without killing himself first — had thought that that would be the end of it. The Great Ink Massacre of ‘94 that swept Indiana like a flood. But a day later, there he was again, lounging with the fall leaves and his fellow freshman. Same cape, same grin. He was perched cross-legged on the quad fountain lip like a warning sign. He was laughing too loud — an ugly squawking sound, that laugh — with the kind of people who spoke entirely in metaphor and metropolitan Middle English.

Edward Munson (which Steve would learn from campus gossip) looked up, shyly tucked hair over his mouth, and blew him a kiss. Steve hated him more than titration labs and the smell of ethanol in his hair.

That was five weeks ago. It’s December now, twenty days before Christmas break. Glacier-cold. The cattle on the outskirts of Hawkins’ cornfields are at subzero and counting. Now, on a freezing Monday morning, Steve is bundled in fleece gloves and a black Cashmere sweater that makes him look like the asshole aristocrat he was always meant to be. His breath fogs in the air as he hurries to the science building. His headphones are pumping a grainy version of Mariah’s newest single into his ears; Never Forget You, which makes him think about his great grandfather’s open casket and the trust fund sitting pretty in his bank account.

Maybe Charles Dickens would rise from the dead and help him with his upcoming organic chemistry exam. The one he didn’t study for because he was too busy chainsmoking and fucking his RA and ignoring his dad’s Nokia tunes. Oh, who was Steve kidding. He’d made it this far bullshitting his way through college, he could do it again.

He’d bullshitted his way through most of life, really. Certainly through four years of Hawkins High, where failing letters on essays discreetly mutated into As because of his last name, his basketball and baseball trophies, and his ‘leadership potential’ despite the fact he’d never once participated in a group project. His guidance counselor filed his missing homework under ‘extenuating circumstances’ and his charm under ‘promising.’ After his parents donated a check in hopes of adding new bleachers to the gym, his grades bloomed. After a prom king crown squashed his hair, extensions appeared like mushrooms. One undeserved A put him in Honors Bio, which put him on the principal’s shortlist for letters, which put him in rooms with alumni who smelled like dry cleaning and wallets.

By the end of his senior year, the machine was self-sustaining. The Harrington name had a kind of gravitational pull; deans, coaches, and admissions offices all quietly orbited around their Loch Nora backyard. His mom gave him watches and Nikes and gas money with every glowing report card. His dad called it luck and told him not to waste it.

Every acceptance letter felt less like achievement and more like inheritance paperwork. John and Susan wanted a son who was competent but never hungry, educated but not curious, ambitious only in bloodline-approved directions. In the meantime, though, they'd forgotten to raise him.

(No, Steve doesn't have any hang-ups about that or anything.)

When the conversation turned to majors, his dad said, ‘Something respectable, Steven, something measurable.’ So…biochemistry. It sounded like research development and cell culture. It sounded like a man with a future. Steve wasn’t brilliant, but he was consistent. The kind of student professors liked to mention during kitchen meetings. Hawkins High had taught Steve that effort was optional if you smiled at the right moment. College just proved the experiment repeatable.

The lecture room door closes with a heavy thunk, just as the professor is unloading his materials. Dr. Lin bores, but he grades with kindness and not the heart of a divorced biology professor with a Xanax addiction, so Steve usually cuts him slack. Not today though. Today, the perpetually empty seat at Steve’s lab table is occupied by Edward goddamn Munson. Cape, lollipop, Doc Martens on the epoxy. Steve’s eye twitches. The sight of Edward here — in his building, under his sterile lights, stealing his oxygen supply — feels like a punch.

Chemistry has borders. They’re posted in laminated commandments over every sink; NO FOOD OR DRINK. TIE BACK HAIR. CLOSED-TOED SHOES. NO HORSEPLAY. Eye-wash stations are customs, glass cylinders are guard towers. Steve has done his time at these checkpoints, he’s earned the passport stamp. But theater majors? They aren’t supposed to cross into this territory. They belong in the humanities wing, quoting dead poets and fucking scripts into each other’s mouths.

And yet here, Edward is. He's the wrong solvent in the wrong flask, grinning at the flash point. He shouldn’t be here. Not in the science building. Not under Steve’s vents and fluorescents and meticulously calibrated silence. Not polluting the pH balance of Steve’s morning.

Steve pictures Dr. Lin’s carotid artery — a single neat incision, quick and surgical — and files that under his normal, everyday thoughts.

His overcoat does nothing to placate his simmering rage, the tail end of it flapping furiously as he slings his headphones around his neck and walks to Dr. Lin at the front of the lecture hall. Lin’s desk is an archaeological dig of despair; strata of lesson plans, ungraded reports, and faint resignation trying to escape a battered briefcase, which Steve momentarily thinks about hurling across the room. 

Instead, like a real Harrington, he chokes it down, straightens his spine, and plasters on the kind of smile that’s bought him twenty-one years of forgiveness. It’s wealthy, empty, nuclear beneath the surface. “Dr. Lin?” His voice is the kind of smooth that belongs in a courtroom, or an execution chamber. “Can I speak with you for a moment?”

“Of course, Steve,” Dr. Lin says, voice sanded down to office hours. “How can I help?”

Steve jerks a careful thumb towards the lab table. “Who’s the new addition?”

Lin peers over the rims of his glasses, blinking like he’s trying to rediscover the concept of sight. “Ah. Edward Munson. He transferred into this course over the weekend.”

Steve stares blankly. “The semester ends in two weeks, Dr. Lin.” 

Lin just shrugs. “Paperwork cleared yesterday. Advising said ‘make it work.’” 

Academic fatalism. Steve tastes battery acid. “Right,” he says tightly. “Well, is there any way you could, uh…relocate him?”

Relocate him to Wallacea, Steve thinks, or the Mariana Trench. Or Hell.

Lin sighs, the sound of a man who’s buried too many dreams under tenure. “I’m afraid not. You’ll work with Mr. Munson for the remainder of the semester. Today’s lab is on enzyme kinetics. As one of my top students, I’m expecting you to make him feel welcome.”

Steve hears the words ‘top student’ like a verdict, not a compliment. He imagines his dad, proud of the phrasing, underlining it on a tuition check. Top of his class, bottom of his patience. The universe must be running double-blind trials on his self-control, because there it is, the sound of Steve’s sanity snapping like a peptide bond under heat. “I’ll try my best.”

When Steve returns to his — their lab table, fuck — Edward has arranged himself into some kind of mythological safety hazard; goggles perched atop his greasy shag, knees a geometrical horror show, lollipop bobbing at the corner of his mouth. He looks like Michiel van Musscher. He looks like tetanus.

Edward licks his chops, lazy and satisfied, and smiles like Alice’s favorite feline, as if he had just discovered narcotics and irony. Steve does not smile back. He shoves the kid’s boots off the desk and drops into his seat with the dignity of a man sentenced to community service. “Please,” he grits his teeth, “Do not fuck this up.”

Edward doesn’t even flinch. His eyebrows perform some kind of interpretive dance. “Who pissed in your Cheerios, Steve Harrington?”

“Whatever divine being thought it’d be funny to assign me an OSHA violation,” Steve mutters, not thinking about how Edward already knows his name.

“Firstly,” Edward says, words drawn out, elbows on the table. “I’m a Geneva violation at best. Secondly, don’t flatter yourself. My advisor squeezed me in last minute. Do you really think I give a rat’s ass about alkaline photometers?”

“Alkaline phosphatase,” Steve corrects. “And, no. I don’t think you give a shit about anything but reciting Shakespeare and getting your grubby fingers on a Pulitzer Prize.”

“Columbia likes their fingers artfully smudged,” Edward purrs, his voice radio-raspy and smug. Steve snaps on a pair of nitrile gloves and yanks open the drawer beneath him. Inside; micropipettes nested like surgical instruments, a rack of yellow tips, cuvettes, plate still in its sterile wrap. “But you’re right. I don’t care much for science. In fact, I find your scathing abhorrence towards a thespian trash puppy like me much more intriguing than an explosive beaker.”

Something in Steve’s chest flickers, traitorous. He ignores it. Reagents appear under his hands with the calmness of a bomb tech; substrate, enzyme, stop solution, buffer. He grids the plate — A1 through H12 — concentrations marching from 0.1 mM to 5 mM. It’s neat. It’s pretty. It’s the only religion he has.

Edward leans closer. “So what’s on the menu, Stevie? Cyanide? Truth serum? Love potion number nine?”

“Listen up,” Steve says, steady, practiced, real. “You’re pipetting the substrate. First stop pulls, second stop dispenses. Keep the angle, release slowly so you don’t bubble. We’re duplicating each condition.”

“First stop, second stop,” Edward murmurs, breath warm and smelling of sunshine, his big brown eyes flicking up to meet Steve’s hazel ones. “Feels intimate.”

“Feels analytical,” Steve says. It’s the first time he’s noticed Edward is shorter than him. Just by a few inches, but still. It’s a useless, dangerous fact he hopes to never think about again. “Just try not to contaminate anything.”

It goes disgustingly, insultingly well. Edward’s hand closes around the P200 like it’s a microphone. The motion is ungainly for exactly one second and then annoyingly precise. He aspirates, pauses, lines up the tip with A1. He moves down the line on an invisible beat — one-and-a-two-and-a — that is metronomic and focused.

They fall into a rhythm. Steve handles enzyme and buffer, Edward plates substrate. The air smells like alcohol and plastic and whatever candy chemistry Edward’s been sucking on. A faucet drips in the background.

Then, a smear of cherry red appears on Steve’s glove. Edward has tapped his lollipop against it absentmindedly, dotting him like a crime scene.

“Food and drink prohibited,” Steve says, reciting the sink commandments. Though he does nothing to try and remove the stain.

Edward’s eyes go big with mock piety. “Forgive me, Father, for I have swallowed.”

They reach for the same rack of tips. Edward gets there first and, instead of being gracious, holds it half out of reach.

“Give it to me, dude,” Steve says, displeased and losing patience.

“Say please,” Edward giggles.

There’s a subspecies Steve has always wanted to cut from the ecosystem, the kind who can be loud without paying a decibel tax, the kind who can keep their mouth full of teeth and appetite and not get strep. Edward is like that. Ostentatious, but cowardly when faced with wolves. And yet, Steve knows when Edward takes a hit — black eye, split lip, maybe a cracked rib — he still bounces up swinging, like some unkillable organism that’s figured out evolution owes him rent. 

A migraine throbs behind Steve’s temples. He loosens his throat and speaks in a low snarl. He sounds half-terrifying, half-bored. Just like his dad. “Now.”

Edward goes very still, unnaturally so, as this entire time the guy hasn’t stopped squirming and fidgeting and rocking back and forth like a Cola can ready to burst. Obedient hearts flicker in Edward’s wide eyes, then drops its volume. His cheeks color hot, and he tucks his hair over his mouth to cover it with his free hand. Choosing submission, he hands the rack over, palm up, a magician surrendering a dove.

Steve wordlessly nods as he takes it, and if he were any stupider, he would’ve said Good boy.

Time passes. Steve doesn’t think about the ticking clock on the wall, or Edward’s soft humming, or Dr. Lin’s droning, or his Walkman, or his grades, or his RA’s mouth on his dick. He doesn’t think about anything that would disappoint the Harrington family tree — until his hand brushes Edward’s. It’s almost accidental; Edward tilts the plate, Steve steadies it with a fingertip at the corner to keep the well from wobbling. A tiny electric current runs up Steve’s arm through the gloves he’s wearing. Edward’s hand, unprotected and considerably smaller than Steve’s, nudges closer.

Steve glances over to see Edward’s pink-slick mouth has curled up into a slow, delighted grin. His simper is small and private, not performative at all, like he’s forgotten all about his passions and is solely focused on the centrifuge becoming a distant ocean in their ears. “Steve?”

“What.”

“Rate my execution,” Edward murmurs, voice low enough to rattle cartilage. He licks a crescent into the corner of his own mouth. “Passable as competent?”

Steve snorts, because sarcasm is safer than admission. “Barely. Keep your angle, don’t touch the rim, and for God’s sake, stop humming. Some of us like to work in peace.”

Edward tilts his head. “What counts as ‘peace’ in the wondrous world of Steve Harrington?”

Steve stares at the plate like it owes him money. “Peace is when the baseline’s flat,” He says after a moment. “No drift. No hiss. No surprises.”

Edward’s mouth does a corner-crook thing that reads like trouble. “What am I?”

“You’re a full-blown feedback loop,” Steve mutters, and flicks the timer with his gloved knuckle. “Five minutes to incubate. Don’t breathe on it.”

“No breathing,” Edward says, immediately leaning closer again to whisper. “Promise.”

Steve pretends not to hear the way his own pulse stutters. He sets the stop solution within reach, labels another strip of wells, and checks his notes like they’re a rosary. Substrate concentrations tidy as a haircut. Enzyme volumes marching in formation. This is order. This is control. His hand is steady because he wants it to be. Because he makes it be.

Edward watches him with baffling focus, head tilted, curls half-shadowed under the fluorescent buzz. It’s the first time he’s stopped performing all day. He looks at Steve the way actors look at scripts; reading for subtext, for motive, for something to memorize.

“You like lines,” Edward says softly. “Straight ones. Clean ones.”

“They make things true,” Steve answers before he can stop himself. The honesty slips out like a leak in a sealed system.

Edward taps his ring on the bench once. Then again. The sound is bone and rhythm and trouble. “Mm,” he hums, eyes still on Steve. “I like true.”

The timer chirps. Saved by chemistry. “Stop,” Steve orders, and dispenses the alkaline solution into each well with surgical clicks, yellow blooming like a bruise across the plate.

“Color change,” Edward says. “Very theatrical.”

“It’s p-nitrophenyl phosphate,” Steve replies, sliding the plate into the microplate reader like a sermon into a slot. “Absorbance at four-oh-five. That’s the only ovation I need.”

Edward huffs a laugh that isn’t ugly at all. “Man, you keep saying things like that and I’m gonna start believing you.”

The spectrophotometer hums, then beeps. Numbers flood the screen, obedient and perfect. Steve feels his shoulders drop, the quiet ecstasy of data that behaves. The curve builds in his head; hyperbolic, greedy, leveling out like a heartbeat learning patience. V approaches Vmax. The world settles.

“See?” he says, pointing. “Low concentrations, big jump. As you saturate the active sites, the rate plateaus.” 

Edward leans so close their shoulders press. Steve inhales cherry-sweet stage dust. “So at low doses, I’m dramatic,” Edward translates, eyes catching on the screen, then on Steve’s mouth. “At high doses, you get used to me.”

“Now you’re misinterpreting the model,” Steve says, but it comes out more hoarse than it should.

“Actors’ prerogative. What’s my Km, then?”

“Not a parameter I’m willing to publish,” Steve says. He moves to pull the plate, realizing belatedly his hand has been resting warm along Edward’s wrist, latex to skin, for the last five seconds. He snatches it back like he’s been burned and immediately hates the cowardice of it. Edward whimpers quietly, dejected.

Across the room, Dr. Lin’s flat voice carries; “Excellent data, everyone. If all pairs could log their values and begin clean-up, that’d be great.”

“You hear that?” Edward yips, genuinely excited. “Dude! We’re excellent!”

“Just shut up and help me, Macbeth,” Steve says, rolling his eyes on principle. He watches, unwillingly impressed, as Edward seats the pipette, caps lined in a neat little phalanx. Performative chaos clicks into competence. It’s unfair and upsetting.

Steve writes with small, merciless handwriting while Edward watches like a critic sharpening a rave. When Steve signs his own name, his hand betrays him. He adds Edward’s name, too.

Edward grins. “Guess we’re a team.” 

Steve looks at the smear — Edward’s name tangled with his own — and exhales. It’s something unplanned and exothermic. “Yeah. Guess we are.”

Edward hums, pleased, and taps the page once, leaving a faint thumbprint in the wet ink. “Oh, Steve?” He says before he leaves. “Call me Eddie.”

Steve doesn’t answer. He packs up, careful not to smear what’s already blurred between them. Outside, the wind howls like punishment. Inside, something quieter, and much worse, begins to take shape.

⋆.˚⚕ ⚛︎ ⊹₊ ⋆

It’s late afternoon, and the sky looks like bruised copy paper. Blue salt bites the edges of the sidewalks, destroying anything silver and glittery around it. Steve’s day has consisted of five hours of class, cigarettes absorbed by osmosis, and one failed nap. He mentally recites his dad’s favorite folktale — ‘Don’t embarrass my name, it existed before you, and it will after’ — and then yanks a strip of flesh from his nail bed. He uses his teeth, spits the neglected peel into the dirt. Blood licks at the side of his thumb politely. He sucks it off, and his front teeth welcome a faint, pink sheen.

Steve, finished with a late lab, cuts across the quad towards the parking lot, his BMW a shining beacon in the snow. Every exhale ghosts ahead of him, scouting for danger. Steve follows it like maybe it knows something he doesn’t. His shoulders hunch in a way he’ll call posture later. The lamps along the walkways flicker, halos coughing in the wind. The whole campus feels like it’s waiting to be split open.

He adjusts his scarf and pretends that the static tripping down his spine is just electricity from his jacket zipper. His Walkman chews through the last song on Vagabond Heart, tape hissing between tracks like carbon decay. The sound comforts him, proof the machine keeps its promises. Rubber stretches, magnets tire.  The world loses fidelity in measurable increments.

Past the fountain, the humanities building glows too warm for December; brick and glass sweating with heat and self-regard. The windows hold gold like a grudge, pooling along the sills as if light could moan. Through the glass, silhouettes tilt and gesture with the arrogance of discussion. Steve’s gaze aims for the parking lot and misses, instead snagging on motion in a second-floor seminar room.

Eddie. Of course Eddie. Four days of forced proximity has tuned Steve’s attention like a dog whistle. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie is —

Baggy mesh over a skin-tight, cropped, white tank top that lets his eight tattoos breathe; six bats, hanging puppet, bloody face, wyvern, spider, Zippo, dice, dragon. Black ink is stamped along his skin like a constellation. His ribs flex when he cackles, hipbones thin and dirty. Cheap vampire fangs clamped over his canines. He bares them as he talks to his gaggle of nerd pals, not on purpose, but just because his mouth likes stage directions. Every vowel gets dramatized, every syllable lands like it’s auditioning for a role. His hands punctuate everything, wrists jangling with studded bracelets that beg for applause. He lifts an inhaler. The choreography is obscene in its neatness; shake, press, seal, inhale. He holds it — five, six, seven — eyes fuzzy and soft with chemical oxygen. His lips work around the mouthpiece, awkwardly stretching when his fangs meet the device. His movements are oddly delicate, caught between biology and theater. Then he exhales. The window fogs. The room behind him swims with blue velvet and yellow stars.

Steve feels like he just broke out in hives, wondering whether or not Eddie would want to star in his bedroom movie. His palms go hot inside his gloves, itchy, prickled. Like something inside him that has been told too many times to sit still, is now upright. He should move. He doesn’t. His brain does the work for him.

Subject: Homo sapiens (informal designation “E.M.”), male, uncoordinated, peart. Displays disregard for thermoregulation. Elevated seasonal confidence. 

Habitat/Conditions: Humanities Building, Window Alcove, 2F. Interior room overheated, voyeuristic observer overwhelmed. 

Apparatus: Visible dermal pigmentations (tattoos, n=8, motifs include chiropteran, demonic, cephalomorphic, draconic, and symbolic forms). Dental accessories (“vampire fangs”) attached to maxillary canines. No cape present, but phantom effect persists.

Method: Noninvasive visual observation (~30–45 s). No verbal interaction or interference with subject behavior. 

Notes: Subject performs standard metered-dose inhaler procedure, consistent with albuterol use. Technique effective and controlled. 

Observer Response: Objective stance disrupted. Notable attentional drift and mild autonomic activation. Subject poses low external hazard but moderate sensory risk.

Recommendations: Maintain ≥3 meter observational distance. Avoid direct eye contact for longer than ten seconds. Probability of success: low.

Steve blinks hard, like he can slam a lab report shut on his own cerebral cortex. The perverted qualitative study doesn’t dissipate. He starts re-labeling, fast, like taxonomy might save him. It’s just anthropology. Curiosity. Surveillance. Threat. Each word is a rung down the same ladder. Steve knows how to deal with the impulse of fantasy; strip it of meaning before it strips him. 

Something ugly and familiar suddenly presses up from underneath, copper-tasting and hurled in Eddie’s direction. A calumny Steve hasn’t said since junior year. He feels it collect behind his teeth; an old, bone-deep instinct. A pressure that reminds him of slamming his fist into his bedroom wall when the slow, sick panic of wanting things he was taught to mock grew too strong. But that’s not Steve anymore. Not here. Not right now. Not like this.

He blames the cold. The nicotine withdrawal. The dim hum of arachnids crawling all over his scalp. He blames Eddie’s stupid fangs, the way his lips catch on plastic, how he hides his blush behind his hair. All of it is too much data, too much noise. The world won’t stop showing him evidence. The itching stays there, pulsing like a live current, and for one dizzy second, Steve can’t tell whether he’s defending himself from Eddie, or from the proof of his own design. It doesn’t fucking matter. The experiment’s already contaminated.

So Steve turns on his heels, and walks to his car.

Chapter Text

Radiators hiss along the wooden floorboards, breathing dry heat into the still air. The library is humid in a way that feels suspicious, like someone’s trying to bribe Steve into concentration. He’s claimed a table under a fluorescent bulb that hums just out of tune with his heartbeat. His notebook lies open to a half-finished reaction scheme, pen idle in the crease, his head bobbing slightly to keep time with the music in his headphones. He’s been on a Tori Amos kick as of recent — Little Earthquakes fucking kills him. Mermaids in jeans, man.

The pages of his notes have gone soft from overuse, their edges feathered like tissue. He’s been staring at the same enzyme pathway for ten minutes, a repetition that feels devotional instead of productive. Every so often a student drifts past in layers of wool and apathy. Dust motes swirl in the lamplight, each one a distraction he’s willing to call scientific observation if it excuses him from actually studying.

A printer coughs. His Nokia rings. Whispers snake between books. Steve’s brain catalogues it all, the way it does with anything he can’t control. He builds a nomenclature without meaning to; mechanical, human, leaking. Classification makes the room quiet enough to think, or at least to pretend. Four pen-clicks, four cigarette puffs, four bones he wants to break. The pattern keeps him level.

And the room cooperates…until it doesn’t.

A noisy, hefty bleat. Steve freezes, pen still in hand, waiting for the sequence of fours to resume. It doesn’t. Another grunt of frustration. A complained “no, no, that’s wrong” followed by paper shuffling and the dull thump of a head hitting a table.

A few tables over, Eddie Munson is hunched over a pile of scripts like a seagull arguing with God. His lips move constantly, syllables tumbling out. One hand curls around a pencil, one twists knots in his hair. Every few moments he stops, stares at a line, then starts again.

The librarian shoots him a warning glance. Eddie mouths ‘sorry,’ presses a palm over his mouth, and immediately starts again. He rehearses in broken cadences, tripping on words he normally wields like weapons.

Steve tries to go back to Tori and the predictable universe of molecule conversion, but the mumbling keeps bleeding through his headphones. Eight seconds pass, maybe nine, before Steve finally stands up. He heaps his materials into symmetrical piles and crosses the aisle, exhaling sharp enough to sting his nostrils. He tells himself it’s for the sake of silence, not mercy.

Eddie’s table is a carcrash, the aftermath of  creative exorcism. Scripts, highlighters, loose Post-its, a dented aluminum water bottle, two crumpled granola bar wrappers. It’s horrific. Steve wrinkles his nose, but plops his things down across from Eddie’s mess anyway.

“You’re broadcasting,” He says, tone landing flat and unforgiving.

Eddie spooks, looking up. “Apologies, citizen,” He croaks. “I’ll take my soliloquies outside.”

“You’re fine. Just keep it below fire alarm-level.”

Eddie nods, too fast, too desperate for a voice that isn’t the one in his head. He looks back at the script, jaw working, breath shallow and quick and wrong. His next line reading comes out in pieces. “So art thou to r–revenge — ngh — when thou shalt…s–shalt—”

“Where is it?”

Eddie looks up again, panting like an animal that’s just seen its own reflection for the first time. “What?”

Steve doesn’t bother answering. He grabs Eddie’s canvas backpack, yanking it open with a precision that feels clinical. Pencils, cassettes, nail polish, moleskines, Mountain Dew, busted Walkman, cash —

Eddie snatches the inhaler from Steve’s hand and presses the mouthpiece to his lips. Five, six, seven Steve counts automatically, remembering Eddie’s choreography from his quad voyeurism a few days ago. The numbers slide into place like a lock clicking shut. Up close, the pattern feels different; the glint of the canister, the hollow shhnk of compressed air, the held puff that lasts one beat too long. Steve wants the sequence to stay perfect, because if it stays perfect, then nothing breaks. Nothing goes wrong.

When Eddie lowers the device, his cheeks have gone blotchy from the albuterol hit, a tremor in his limbs. For a moment, there’s nothing. No laughter, no performance, just recovery. Steve stares longer than he means to. He busies himself with Eddie’s chaos, gathering and marshalling on instinct. “You shouldn’t keep all this crap in your bag. It’s like a landfill.” 

Eddie manages a snort. “You’re reorganizing my personality now? What’s next, alphabetizing my trauma?”

“Just adding some folders,” Steve says. 

Eddie’s mouth weakly lifts, then falters. His eyes flick to the script, then the floor, then back to Steve. “Wait. How did you know I need an inhaler?”

Steve’s mouth goes dry. His cerebrum offers the truth in a neat, mortifying slideshow; the second-floor window, the vampire fangs, the tattoos, the way Eddie’s ribs lifted like wings under his shirt. He hates how clean the wanting is, how it files itself under ‘observation’ to dodge the word ‘desire.’ Some feral part of Steve imagines following the data set home, charting Eddie’s night like weather, if only he had had the guts that snowy afternoon.

What hour had the bracelets come off? Did Eddie sleep with the light on or off? How many breaths are between his laugh and his cough? Did he touch himself before bed?

Eddie has stuck with him — an ugly little keepsake in Steve's cortex. He wants to unzip Eddie’s bag and steal one stupid thing; the cap to his inhaler, a bracelet, a dead battery, something soaked in desquamation. He wants to build a pocket altar out of junk and pretend it isn’t worship. He wants to put his thumb in Eddie’s mouth just to shut him up, then sear the suction point. He wants to keep the mark.

Shame blooms hot under his collar, a physiological response he could diagram if he didn’t want to crawl out of his own skin. He folds it into charm the way he’s been taught to fold every other inconvenient feeling.

“Lucky guess,” Steve lies. “You wheeze like a haunted harmonica, and your backpack rattles when you walk.” He taps the inhaler once with a knuckle like he’s knocking on wood, like he didn’t just think about cataloguing Eddie’s body by the square inch. “Speaking of haunted, Dr. Lin is requiring a textbook this semester, which I’m fairly sure you don’t have. Field trip to the stacks?”

Neither of them move. The archival throb above them slows to a high-pitched thread of sound that stretches and rings in Steve's ears. He doesn't dare say anything.

Eddie squints at him, suspicion skimming the surface, but he lets it go with a grateful nod. He tucks the inhaler away, gathers his mess into an approximation of order, and follows Steve into the narrow canyon of books.

Old carpet swallows their footsteps. The stacks narrow, turning the shelves into canyons, sunlight coming in bars through the metal lattices and banding Eddie’s face.

Steve leads without announcing it, tracing spines with one fingertip as if he can read call numbers by touch. QP, QH, QP again. The letters soothe him. They’re tiny gates he can open and close. Eddie trails, lost in his jitteriness, gooey in his blinking.

“What are we looking for?” Eddie asks.

“Lehninger,” Steve says as he forages through bigger and brighter books. “Blue brick, white letters. Principles of Biochemistry. Should be around here.”

They walk, mothballs coating their molars, until Eddie can’t take it anymore. “I’m playing the Ghost,” He blurts suddenly. “In Hamlet. Risen like Jesus, all vengeance and grave dirt. I begged for the part, man. Problem is, I don’t do quiet-dead. I do annoying homosexual-alive. Everyone expects me to play the fool, the freak, the chainmail clown. But this one’s serious. I can’t be the jester.”

“You’ll be fine,” Steve says, only sort of paying attention. “You’re loud. People listen.”

“That’s the thing! They listen, sure, but they don’t believe. Theater’s brutal. Once you trip, you’re done. One bad performance and you’re sponsoring slapstick for the rest of your life. You sink, or you swim. And the water’s mostly sequined blood.”

“Cheery industry you picked,” Steve mutters, flipping through a forensic psychology textbook. 

Eddie’s grin shakes. “You think your major’s better? At least in theater you can die beautifully,” He rubs a hand across his jaw. “Look. I’ve been listening to Bauhaus, okay? Bela Lugosi died in his Dracula costume. I think about that a lot, that kind of commitment.”

“It’s black box.”

“It’s black death,” Eddie whines. “I can’t afford to fuck this up. You don’t get second chances in this business. Nobody forgives the guy who flubbed his soliloquy.” 

Eddie presses his face into the seam of a shelf like it might open a trapdoor. The words spill fast, tumbling over one another like they’re trying to beat his own embarrassment to the finish line. “It’s not even the Ghost part, really. It’s what it means. If I can’t do him right, then what am I even doing here? He’s the soul of the play, dude. He’s what kicks everything off. The haunting. The rot. And if I go up there and the audience laughs, then maybe they were right all along. Maybe I am just the punchline.”

Steve glances up from the book, caught off guard by the rawness under Eddie’s sarcasm.

Eddie keeps talking. He can’t stop now that he’s started. “Like, I know it’s stupid to take it this seriously. It’s a college production, I get that. But it’s the first time I’ve been cast as someone who matters. Not a messenger, not comic relief, not the weirdo who gets five lines before dying offstage. I’ve got ninety lines of actual literature. And if I screw them up, I’ll never get that chance again. I used to think theater was all pretend. But the more I do it, the more I think it’s the only honest thing I know. You get one shot to make people believe the impossible, and if they don’t — it’s not the words that failed, it’s you.”

Steve finally breaks his silence. “You’re eighteen, Munson.”

Eddie barks out a laugh that sounds like a cough dragged backward. “Yeah, and you say it like that’s supposed to make me feel better. Eighteen’s when you’re supposed to be brilliant, right? Revolutionary? Everyone keeps saying I’ve got time, but it feels like the clock started years ago and I’m already behind. I keep thinking, what if this is as good as I ever get? What if this is all I’m built for? You know what theater kids call it when you bomb? Dying onstage. Like, literally dying. And when you kill, it means the crowd loved you. Success and annihilation are the same word, just depending on who’s clapping.”

Steve opens his mouth, but Eddie barrels right over him. “And, god, the Ghost is all about truth. That’s the joke! I’m supposed to be truth. The dead guy who forces everyone else to look at the mess they made. How am I supposed to pull that off when I can’t even look at myself in a mirror half the time?”

The words hang there. Eddie’s panting. Steve shuts the book in his hands and leans an elbow against the shelf, watching him. The urge to say something snide comes automatically, some safe remark about melodrama or drug dependency, but it dies before it reaches his tongue. There’s a tiredness in Eddie’s voice. Steve recognizes it in the void behind his own ribcage; the certainty that if he ever stops performing, he’ll vanish.

“You think too much for a theater major.” He ends up saying.

Eddie looks up sharply, eyes tired but still bright. “You think too little for a scientist.”

Steve huffs out a laugh despite himself. “Touché.”

“Seriously, though,” Eddie sighs, tilting his head back against the shelf. “I don’t want to screw this up, Stevie. I don’t want to be another idiot who peaked at pretending.” He shrugs, thin shoulders twitching under his cape. “I just want to mean it for once.”

Steve should shrug, or joke, or change the subject to snow accumulation, or the way Eddie’s hair keeps brushing against the backs of perfectly alphabetized books. But he can’t. He doesn’t want to. Eddie’s standing there, red-cheeked and restless. Steve recognizes it. Remembers it. Hunts for it in his dreams.

“You wanna know a secret?” He doesn’t let Eddie answer. “I didn’t pick biochemistry because I liked it. I picked it because it sounded smart on paper. You can hand it to your dad, and he’ll say, ‘Thank god you’re not wasting my money.’ And…And because science doesn’t care. Science doesn’t interpret, doesn’t bounce a question back and forth and wait for the polls to flood. If you follow the steps, it works. If you don’t, it blows up. No guessing, no subtext. Just reaction and result.”

“That’s…bleak.” 

“Beats the family business. My parents didn’t raise me to be brilliant, just acceptable. The kind of guy who gets invited to charity galas and doesn’t spill wine on the carpet. A man who shakes hands like a mortgage application. And the worst part is — I’m good at it. I’m really fucking good at it.” 

Eddie’s voice is gentle, fingers flexing like he wants to reach for Steve’s wrist but doesn’t have the courage. “So that’s why you look at everything like it’s a lab sample. You’re scared of contamination. You clean up emotions the way I clean up dialogue.”

“Do you psychoanalyze all your scene partners?”

“Only the cute ones.”

Steve rolls his eyes, but the blush that flickers up his neck betrays him. “You’re ill-conceived.”

“And predictable,” Eddie’s gaze wanders upwards, past Steve’s head, and locks into place. “Hey. Blue brick, white letters. I think that’s your Lehninger.”

Steve follows the angle of Eddie’s chin. There it is, the monolith, sanctimonious on a high shelf like scripture.

“I’ve got it,” Eddie says, already stepping in. He’s too casual about height and consequence, up on the balls of his feet, one hand braced on a lower shelf, the other reaching. He can’t quite grasp it, so he steps up onto the shelf’s lip jutting out. It spares about two feet of advantage, until his cape swings behind him and snags on the corner of a metal bookend. All five-foot-eight inches of debauchery and Chekov daydreams wobble.

Steve spots the blunder before cause becomes effect. “Wait —”

Too late. The blue velvet catches. Eddie overextends, leverage deserts his ankles, and his chunky boots lose their footing. There's a small, helpless squeak as he falls, flies. Gravity steals his air suspension. “Steve!”

Steve moves without thinking, catching Eddie mid-air. One hand lands flat between Eddie’s shoulder blades — T4 to T7, heat and collagen — pressing him back into a human vector. The other cups the craniocervical junction where skull becomes neck, thumb tucked below the mastoid like a muscular diagram come to life. Weight transfers; 140, maybe 145 pounds in momentum. The aroma of Dollar Store shampoo, winter, foxed paper, chapstick, and boy fills Steve’s olfactory bulb. Time fractures into a triad; secure cervical spine, counter-rotate glenohumeral joint, check for pulse. Judgement compromised.

Steve is aware of everything he’s itemized — the angle of incline, the torque of muscle, the delta of elevated temperature — but none of it resolves into a rational sum. It’s just static and noise. Every part of his brain is screaming for him to move, to fix the math. This isn't Newtonian, it's an anomaly. But Eddie’s eyes are on him, dark and dilated, startled into some new species of awe. Steve’s muscles can’t remember the route to retreat.

“Wow,” Eddie manages, reverent. His breath fans against Steve’s collarbone, hot through the wool of his sweater. His lips part in a stunned parenthesis. “You — You are, um. Dipping me."

“It’s not a dip,” Steve says, which would be more convincing if his right hand weren’t planted at the base of Eddie’s neck. “It’s fall prevention.”

Steve lays out a few terrible options for himself: press his mouth to a peeling barcode sticker and take the glue-print evidence. Make Eddie’s breaths line up with his. Shelve him under QH and ink S.H. where the cape will cover. Hand over his mouth, tongue inside somewhere warm: be good, be still, open up. Instead, Steve just holds him like a gentleman. 

Eddie says, “Feels…choreographed.”

“You’re stabilized,” Steve corrects, and does not let go. His forearm is a fulcrum under Eddie’s ribs; he can feel every shallow inhale tick. Electricity pricks along the perimeter of his self-control. He should release, recalibrate, and retrieve the textbook. Name your variables. Keep your hands to yourself. Reset the calculation. Move on.

“If this is fall prevention,” Eddie whispers. “Why do I feel like we’re about to waltz?”

“Poor proprioception,” Steve says dryly. He’s buying time with vocabulary. “And hubris.”

“Hot,” Eddie says, and then, helplessly, “God, your arms.”

Something low-voltage jumps Steve’s synapses. For a second, one crystalline, lucid second, the world sharpens into experiment. His brain runs its old, compulsive circuit; observe, categorize, predict. The trajectory of a body caught and held with wire, the color of fucking muscle into tight heat, the intimacy of being seen without disguise. Eddie’s moans, Eddie’s sweat, osteotomy of the soul. Steve feels it pimple across his skin. Like always, he tries to reduce it to matter. Too much epinephrine, libido overkill, sympathetic misfire. Just stimulus. But the naming doesn’t save him. It never does.

“Is this where you say ‘one, two, three’ and lead?” Eddie asks, blinking owlishly.

“Frame,” Steve hears himself say before he can stop it. “You keep your frame. I…guide.”

Eddie’s laugh is a quiet crackle, half disbelief, half thrill. His fingers curl at Steve’s shoulder — not a real hold, more like an invocation. “Guide me, then.”

The sentence lands somewhere bruise-soft in Steve’s chest. He scrambles for a documented response and comes up empty. Every instinct wants to reduce the situation to physics, to name the variables and make the feelings shut up. Instead, he carefully begins to return Eddie to vertical like he’s resetting an instrument to zero. Each increment is measured and deliberate. Eddie rises slow and close, pupils still blown, the distance between them collapsing in centimeters. For one extra moment, call it operator lag, Steve’s thumb lingers in the hollow behind Eddie’s ear, pulse thrumming against skin, before he forces it to retreat. The loss feels like a system cooling.

Steve clears his throat. Reaches up for the Lehninger still leering down at them like divine punishment. He presses it against the other boy’s falling sternum. “Here. Dr. Lin approved. Don’t climb the furniture again.”

Eddie steadies the book, grin crooked and tenderly mortified. “Right. No furniture. Strictly ground-level dramatics.” He glances up through the fringe of his hair. “Thanks for catching me.”

“Wasn’t optional,” Steve mutters.

“Yeah,” Eddie says softly. “But you still did it.”

Back at their table, they settle like nothing happened; Eddie flipping through the textbook with disinterest, Steve straightening his notes with mechanical precision. The air between them feels rearranged. Not charged, exactly, but ionized — different in composition. Somewhere above, the building exhales. Steve pretends to read, Eddie pretends not to watch him, and the library keeps their secret in the hum of fluorescent light. 

⋆.˚⚕ ⚛︎ ⊹₊ ⋆

The ceiling in Steve’s dorm is cracked; a river running right over his bed, splitting the room into hemispheres. The side that remembers, and the side that forgets. Lounge Act gurgles from his CD player. Dorothy lies sprawled across both. One arm is slung above her head, cigarette balanced between two fingers. The smoke curls upward, fading into the plaster disruption. Steve watches it move, thinking about diffusion, about entropy, about how even air tries to leave eventually.

His RA blows out a plume, braless and breathless in his bed. “You’re miles away.”

The upperclassmen dormitory hums with the soft murmur of campus at night; laughter from the quad, pipes wailing. A faint scent of detergent and burnt popcorn seeps in from the hall. It’s the kind of noise that almost sounds like company if you squint at it sideways. Steve props himself on an elbow, sheets tangled around his bare hips. “Just tired.”

Dorothy hums, low and disbelieving. Her hair is dark against the pillow, black and wavy down to her teres major. Smudged makeup, body warm. She’s older by a couple years, not by temperament but by detachment. She’s the kind of girl who reads Murakami and pretends it’s ironic. Steve likes that she doesn’t ask questions before, during, or after sex. She lets him keep his silence and hide it between her thighs. She rolls onto her side and runs the pad of her thumb over Steve’s eyebrow in passive affection. “You always say that.”



“Because it’s true.”

“Because it’s convenient,” Dorothy corrects, dragging her nails down his sternum and tugging at the thick layer of hair there. Steve almost asks her to do it three more times. “You seem distracted. You’ve been distracted since the beginning of October. Even when you’re here, you’re not.”

Steve’s tongue darts out to wet his lips, itchy behind his eyelids, mouth tasting like cum and strawberry liqueur. The combination sits wrong, cloying. He can feel the sugar still glued to the back of his throat, the faint burn of whatever she’d been drinking before they made the mistake of undressing again. “Yeah, well. Not a new development.”

“You used to fake it better,” The words aren’t cruel, just factual. Dororthy’s good at sounding post-mortem. It’s what piqued Steve’s interest in the first place. “Now you look like you’re timing something in your head.” 

Steve doesn’t answer. He stares at the ceiling again, at the crack that divides it like a continental fault. He’s been cataloguing it since move-in day, how the paint peels just a little more every week, how it curves east to west like a map of somewhere better. If he looks long enough, he can almost imagine the halves drifting apart; one taking the bed, the girl, the stale smoke, the other carrying only him, unanchored.

Dorothy scoffs at the silent treatment, flicking ash into the water glass on his nightstand. “You know, you’re not exactly an easy fuck.”

“Then we should stop fucking.”

He says it calmly, almost helpfully, like he’s identifying a faulty circuit. He can feel the words land, the little hitch in her breath, the ripple of disbelief. Steve doesn’t look at her. He’s already watching the ceiling again, tracing the invisible fault line. Stimulus, reaction, silence. He thinks about how every system, no matter how sealed, eventually leaks. How diffusion is inevitable. How you can spend your whole life building a container just to prove that it can’t hold.

Dorothy goes still for a moment, like she’s waiting for the punchline. When it doesn’t come, she laughs. “That’s it? You’re clocking out?”

Steve doesn’t look at her. The lighter on his nightstand still smells faintly of her perfume and singed grief. “You said I’m bad at faking it,” He says. “Why keep pretending?”

Dorothy grits her teeth. Drops the cigarette in his water. “You’re unbelievable, Steve. I swear to god I’ve had one-night stands with more emotional range.”

He could tell her she’s probably right. He could tell her that the sex isn’t the point, that it’s never been the point. That he’s been using the whole arrangement like anesthetic, heat and motion to fill a silence he doesn’t know how to name. There’s no pleasure in it anymore, just maintenance. A way to prove he still occupies a body, that he can be touched without coming apart. He could tell her she’s been wasting her time, because lately every time Steve closes his eyes, he sees inhalers and ripped jeans and mutilated set props.

He wants to be blank again. Unmoved. Controlled. The kind of man who doesn’t think about another boy’s pulse when he’s trying to fall asleep. But if he says any of that out loud, it’ll sound pathetic, and Steve Harrington doesn’t do pathetic. So he just shrugs, the gesture mechanical. “So this should be easy.”

Dorothy jerks upright, the sheet sliding off her shoulder as she starts yanking on her clothes. The room fills with the sound of fabric and fury; denim snapping, the metallic click of her belt buckle, the angry hush of her breath through her teeth. “You know this is stupid, right?” She says, half to herself, half to him. “I could get written up for this. You think they let RAs keep their jobs after sleeping with their residents? You’re a liability, Harrington. Congratulations.”

Steve doesn’t move. He’s watching the thin ribbon of smoke climb from the water glass, still spiraling from the drowned cigarette. “Nobody knows,” He says. His voice sounds far away, like it’s coming from under ice. “Or cares. You’re sure as hell not going to tell anyone.”

“You’re not worth the fucking paperwork,” Dorothy barks. Her knitted sweater goes on backwards first, inside out like a mistake she refuses to fix, then she does with a frustrated grunt. The skin of her collarbones are marked faintly with the red geometry of his mouth. She stumbles into her jeans, half-zipped, muttering curses under her breath as she jams her feet into sheepskin boots. “God, you really are —” She stops herself, shaking her head hard enough the scene blurs. “Forget it. You’ll know when you finally burn out.”

Steve almost thanks her for the optimism. Instead, he lights another cigarette from the crumpled pack on his nightstand. His hands are steady. They always are when they shouldn’t be. The lighter flares, catching on the soft web of scars and veins across his knuckles, and the room brightens for an instant before falling back into its nicotine gloom. The cigarette crackles once, obedient. The first drag burns in his throat like an apology he doesn’t intend to give.

Dorothy’s soon at the door, one hand on the knob, hair falling in tangled sheets across her cheek. “You ever think about what it’s like for everyone else? Or do you just assume we all orbit around whatever’s left of your charm?”

“Mostly the second one,” Steve says cooly. 

Her mouth twists into something halfway between disgust and pity. “Fuck you, Steve.”

“You already did.”

The slam of the door rattles the frame. The sound echoes once and then crumples into itself. For a long time Steve just sits there, sheets pooled around his waist, staring at the glass on his nightstand. The water’s gray and opaque, cigarette floating like a drowned insect. He picks it up, turns it once in his hand. The surface glints under the moonlight filtering through his window curtain, a thin film of oil catching the glow. The ash inside curls into miniature storms. He thinks about solubility, about how some things dissolve and others only pretend to, splitting apart into particles that never really blend. They just hang there.

The water tastes like metal and dirt, like sucking an old coin through a split lip. The bitterness hits first. His stomach protests, but he swallows anyway. It feels important to finish it; a kind of punishment, or proof that he can still register nausea. One sip becomes four. Each swallow is heavier than the last, until the water’s gone and the taste clings to his teeth. His throat burns. His gut shifts uneasily, a small rebellion.

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and finds it smeared with gray. For a second he stares at it, the soot, and then he licks it clean. Pretends it tastes good. Pretends it’s the eyeliner he saw in Eddie’s bag.

Chapter Text

If you pour enough bodies into a house, someone will call it alchemy. If you pour Steve Harrington into a house, someone will call it networking.

Kappa Rho Alpha is overstuffed and improperly ventilated, a terrarium that shatters its own glass. Someone’s propped the front door open with a boot so the freezing night air can shotgun the hallway. Frost sneaks in and dies on contact with a space heater that should’ve been retired before the Persian Gulf War. The whole structure hums like a bad instrument; ducts wheeze, stereos snag, floorboards complain. It’s too loud to hear himself think, which is exactly why Steve can.

Upstairs, a pre-med in a novelty Santa hat uses a beer bong like an IV and mispronounces ‘peristalsis.’ In the living room, someone has taped a hand-lettered sign near the basement door that reads THE CHECKERED LAMBS — 11 PM. The ink is fat and bleeding, migrating past their border like refugees. Steve experiences the small, unfunny pleasure of centering the paper on its tape. There. Perpendicular. Refugees repatriated.

“Harrington!” A classmate from immunology yells, one of those men handsome enough to be in a mall catalog type of way. There’s a noose of holiday lights around his neck. “Look at you, slumming it with the big dogs tonight. I thought you were too modest for parties?” 

“I’m expanding my cultural horizons,” Steve says, letting the guy sling an arm around his shoulder and press a solo cup into his hand. He’s already hammered, talking in big, blurry shapes. His words slur like they’ve been left out in the rain. Steve lets him talk, smiling with half his mouth and nodding at all the right intervals.

The beer is warm and thin, the carbonation having already fizzled out. He doesn’t drink it, just holds it. He’s been doing this long enough to know that proximity looks like participation if you stand still and look confident.

Every inch of the living room is occupied by sound; cheap speakers blasting Summer of ‘69, bodies moving without rhythm, voices colliding. The smell is equal parts cologne, vodka, pheromones, and the vague sweetness of a Christmas candle that gave up hours ago. A couch buckles under five people and a single doomed spring. Someone’s girlfriend is getting groped in the corner. The pool table benches two cheerleaders making out while a horde of frat brothers cheer them on.

Ever since Dorothy left her scrunchie on his dresser and never came back, Steve’s felt like a heart with arrhythmia. Blood in, blood out, nothing filtering. It’s not heartbreak so much as it is bad plumbing. The machinery in him keeps cycling, because that’s what machines do. He wakes up, goes to class, studies for finals, folds his laundry — but every motion echoes. There’s too much space between the signal and the response. He prefers the space to stay empty, partition the organ systems. Emotion in one desiccator, hunger in another, memory sealed in parafilm. 

Eddie Munson keeps rooting himself there, anyway. Slow and patient, like fungus in a bell jar.

At first, it was easy to blame proximity. They were lab partners three times a week. Same bench, same buffers, same safety goggles. Then came study sessions and “accidental” coffee breaks, and Eddie’s lopsided grin caught in the café window when Steve underlines the definition of nucleic acid metabolism.

Noise has always helped Steve work. He likes boxy fans, the hiss in his Walkman, the metronome of somebody else’s life being taken on TV. Eddie should count as noise. But lately the chatter keeps changing color. Now, it sounds like Hamlet and fast food and lazy orgasms. Steve hates that his hands know where they want to put themselves whenever Eddie laughs.

He treats his own attraction like a lab error; preventable, measurable, entirely his fault. Tighten the emblem, keep the lid shut, thicker gloves next time. And still, Eddie gets in, with his vampire fangs and his clicks and chirps when he gets too excited about whatever nerdy shit he’s into that day.

Eddie is airborne. Microscopic. Impossible to culture, harder to kill. Steve has practiced ignoring this kind of blunder — caffeine tremors, nicotine curses, water droplets on a boy’s Adam’s apple at high school swim practice back — so he tells himself he can ignore this, too. Pull the plug, starve the colony. If he names it clinically enough, it’ll go inert. Exposure does not equal infection.

He recognizes Eddie as foreign matter. Not the kind that kills, just the kind that won’t wash off. Eddie blooms after bleach. He’s the band on the gel that refuses to fade no matter how hard you dilute, the corpse that won’t stay still. ‘Hate’ is the label Steve slaps on his feelings so he can pretend the inventory’s complete. It smells like disinfectant, and burns like it, too. But when he peels it back, there’s cherry and warmth and a heartbeat he can’t calibrate. So he hates Eddie. It’s cleaner than wanting him. It’s the only sterile word he has left.

He takes to the basement door. It yawns at the back of the living room, rusty hinges screeching every time someone squeezes through. Cold air falls down the opening in a steady sheet, denser fluid seeking its level, while heat sulks at the ceiling. Steve gathers himself into the stream, shoulder first, cup tucked in against his ribs. The first step is grotesque. The second squeals. The third is the liar — it looks dry, but isn’t. There’s a rule he uses for unpleasant stairwells; odd-numbered steps take his left foot, even take his right. Balance by superstition. Balance by force.

The rail is tacky with a film of other people’s bad decisions. Steve doesn’t touch it. A poster for the mathematics club droops from the cinderblock wall, Scotch tape losing faith. Halfway down, the bottleneck happens; three bodies wide trying to funnel into two. A girl in sheer tights licks lime and salt off her palm. A man in a varsity jacket braces a forearm above her head and fails to be a doorframe.

Steve angles sideways to slide past, his cup lifted just enough to telegraph See? I’m harmless. He could smile, if he needed to. He doesn’t. They move. He moves. Four steps to the right, four steps straight.

The room beyond is low-slung and damp. Pipes cover the ceiling like a second, shinier skeleton, sweating condensation that plinks into blue kiddie pools on the floor. Pallets and milk crates have been drafted into service as a stage, where a Persian-ish rug eats the center. Someone has gaffer-taped an X in front of each mic stand.

There’s a drum kit with stickers splayed over the kick and a pair of entry-level amps humming at sixty-cycle shame. Wet concrete, yeast, deodorant failing, the mineral tang of pennies where someone cut their knuckle on a bottle cap — it cascades over Steve in shivers, and puts a Jello shot in his hand. The liquor kicks his stomach like a bovine.

He chases the sting with beer, a performance of hydration, not the real thing. He lets the foam kiss his lip, and rejects it with a tilt. His mouth tastes like nothing. Somebody upstairs yells along to that one R.E.M. song everyone likes. There’s a moment Steve notices, right before anything begins, where every person in a room misbelieves the same air. It hovers now, caught between boredom and the idea of something.

Then someone kills the lights at the top of the stairs. A groan rolls through the crowd like the first shift of a tectonic plate. Feedback wails, a girl screams happily, and The Checkered Lambs burst into flames.

Strings spark like faulty wiring, chords fray into white noise. Drums kick in with fervor. The singer’s voice is scratchy and raw, but not hard to listen to. The stompbox clicks, the bass hammers at panic’s resting rate. The lead guitarist stands in the far corner of the rug, body tuned to a frequency Steve hasn’t named yet. His first riff lands clean and fast — Come Out and Play by The Offspring. The hollow part of Steve’s heart fills with blood when he spots a familiar studded belt.

There you are again, Steve thinks, my rhythm in motion. 

Eddie anchors the neck of his guitar and leans into the feed. Electricity skates the enamel of Steve’s molars. His band shirt darkens at the collar like a coffee-ring. Eddie keeps frame, even without a thumb digging into the back of his neck. His thin hips keep the count in a swaying, obscene metronome, and every downstroke digs into Steve like cat claws.

Steve, who can’t fucking breathe.

Syncope chases systole. Every note hits somewhere stupid in his body. He tries to chart it; jaw, chest, gut, cock, but the data overlaps in a tangle of red and blue wires. Eddie tips his head back on a bend, hair pasted to the sweat at his neck, mouth open around a sound he’s not making. His lips are red and bitten — flexion, extension, the anatomical miracle of hand to string. Steve wants to drag his tongue across every tendon he can name and make Eddie kick out his feet like Thumper trapped under ice. Maybe they’ll play that next.

Steve’s never seen anyone make chaos look so…exact. The guitar pick skims, teeth flash, a lock of hair adheres to the wet curve of Eddie’s mouth, which he curls around his tongue and sucks on. The movement is half-control, half-prayer. The crowd surges, but Steve’s vision narrows to a single wavelength; Eddie’s hands. Lithe fingers dance over strings with the kind of confidence that isn’t taught, only survived. He plays like someone who’s been told ‘no’ and decided to write songs about it. A shift in key makes Steve’s knees go lame. His brain, accustomed to control and classification and chemicals, betrays him greatly.

Mine, mine, mine, he thinks, his molecules dissolving into gelatin when Eddie bends over an amp.

It’s not prurience — it’s craftsmanship envy, obviously. Steve is just watching technique; wrist economy, pick angle, the way Eddie mutes the strings with the heel of his hand to keep the noise low while the singer growls. Any arousal roiling up Steve’s throat is just respect misfiled, any static under his skin is just the PA bleeding into the mains. Steve tries to summon Dorothy’s mouth, an ex-girlfriend’s cleavage, the glossy centerfolds he found once in Tommy Hagan’s garage, but nothing hooks.

This is fraud. He’s not into guys. No, he’s into competence.

Hypoxia mimics desire; poor oxygenation in a packed basement, ethanol fumes, decibels at headache threshold. Catecholamines, not confession. The bass is hitting Steve’s sternum at 120 bpm and agitating whatever sludge lives there, that must be the reason he’s feeling like this. It’s just resonance, a structural vibration. Like when an old window sings because the truck outside shifts.

He audits the control group; girls he’s kissed, girls he’s slept with, girls whose names he could list alphabetically if someone put a gun to his head. He likes women, that’s indisputable. He likes women in the normal, socially-funded way, with receipts and witnesses and a ledger of mistakes he can present at any inquest. This is just a false positive. This is Eddie moaning under a string of rainbow bulbs, and Steve feeling it in his bone marrow.

A brief trill opens the room a fraction, and Eddie lets it hang, hips arched like he’s tuning to a signal only he can catch. The bridge pickup spits something bright and bitter, and it touches Steve’s tongue through the air. He wants to chart the path, coil to cone to nerve, and hates that the diagram only ends in sensation. Through blurry vision, the clamor momentarily turns to figures; attack slope, decay time, peak height. When a screaming chord resolves, it feels like a latch giving way to a room Steve hasn’t opened since ninth grade.

Steve’s feet move without his permission towards the stairway’s mouth. His throat tastes faintly of phantom metal. His fingers itch to smear the visible sweat on Eddie’s temple and hook into mouth. He just needs to get upstairs, find colder air, and remember what kind of man he’s supposed to be before the next song starts.

⋆.˚⚕ ⚛︎ ⊹₊ ⋆

Back in the living room, Steve drifts toward a wall like a moth that’s forgotten how to fly. The afterimage of The Checkered Lambs still pulses under the carpet. His ears ring with guitar feedback, every sinus rhythm lands a fraction late, as if his body hasn’t been informed the show is over. Someone shoves a new drink into his hand, and he takes it without looking. It tastes like orange juice and plastic.

He tells himself it’s the alcohol, and the crowd, and the music — but the truth keeps pulsing at the base of his skull. The image of Eddie bent over the amp keeps replaying like a corrupted tape, his brain braiding it into new configurations. He tries to fix it by labeling it as neural misfire, somatic artifact, brain death. He tries to fix it by lying.

Four sips of citrus radiation. Four bezel nudges until his watch kisses midnight.

People swim past in shoals; someone’s wearing a reindeer headband with one antler bent, someone else is crying politely into their beer koozie. An old friend from sophomore year appears and disappears like a badly spliced reel, leaning in to say something about finals and how drunk he is. Steve laughs in the right place with the wrong half of his mouth.

He is fine. He is a closed system. He is a sealed plate. If a thought leaks, he tapes it with ‘HATE’ in block letters, which he’s sure will hold. He just has to survive this fucking party first.

The aux connected to the speakers downstairs thrums Black Velvet into Steve’s veins, and he finishes his drink with a grimace. A cheer spikes from the kitchen; one of those collective howls that means spectacle. Body shots, funnel, rock star — the vocabulary is crystal clear. Steve doesn’t move. He plants his feet on the carpet and closes his eyes. It’s none of his business. He is not a chaperone. He is not a lifeguard. He is not…whatever the hell he was for ten minutes down in the basement, counting boy steps with his teeth.

“Munson, you’re a pro!”

Goddamnit.

Linoleum goes sticky with spilled juice, shoulders packed three deep at the kitchen counter. It’s a floodplain. A single pendant lamp shakes from too many bodies slamming cabinets shut. The freezer door hangs open like a wound, exhaling fog over a tray of ice that has fused into one glacier. There's a giggling, stoned body on the floor. There’s freshman tradition.

Eddie’s on the kitchen island, but starting to slide off, tailbone skidding along marble while two brothers hold his elbows. His band shirt is torn. A plastic funnel hovers over his mouth like livestock gear, red vinyl tubing making love to a bottle of Smirnoff. Another guy is unscrewing a squared bottle from the pantry — extra-virgin that belongs near a stove, not clogging someone’s airways.

“Open up!” A girl in candy cane stockings cackles.

Eddie does — of course he does. His mouth drops obediently like the world has ever behaved. Vodka goes first; a heavy pour, a sputtered cackle, then two more swallows and a wet cough. The oil follows it, slow and viscous, pooling at the funnel stem in a green-gold meniscus before sliding down. Wrong density, wrong sheen, wrong kind of danger. Eddie doesn’t clock it, because he’s eighteen and thinks stage directions apply to gravity.

Steve is already moving. He does the math, quickly; aspirated lipid doesn’t burn, it coats. Today it’s chemical irritation, tomorrow it’s exogenous lipoid pneumonia. Alveoli carpeted in fat, surfactant shoved to the margins, macrophages turning into foamy cells that choke on cleanup. 

“Stop!” He barks at the guys holding Eddie down, which is a useless command no one hears. His hands end up doing what his mouth can’t, and he shoulder-checks the closest brother, clamping a palm over the funnel’s dripping stem and throwing it to the floor. It pinwheels once and clatters. Oil freckles the tile like blood.

“Hey!” One of the brothers shouts. “Relax, doc. He’s loving it.”

Steve doesn’t answer. He manhandles Eddie off the counter and forces him over the sink, hand under his armpit, another steady at his lumbar. “Go on, spit. You need to get it out.” 

Eddie obeys on a delay, jolted by the imperative into sense. He folds over the sink and goes loose-jawed, breath hitching, gagging before oil and vodka starts sluicing out in chlorinated ropes. The smell hits, greasy and acidic. Someone laughs. Someone else says ‘that’s gnarly,’ with the tone of a nature documentary host watching a lion rip apart a handicapped gazelle.

Steve ignores the background babble in favor of roping Eddie’s hair between his trembling fingers and rubbing his back. He can feel the tremor there. In his head, he’s already watching oil accumulate in Eddie’s air sacs.

It should be a clean rescue. It would be, if the kitchen wasn't packed with a hundred witnesses high on ritual. Someone shoves a disposable camera into the free space by Steve’s shoulder and pops the flash. The taunts and jeers and laughter don’t cease, because they’re free, and because no one here gives a fuck if a freakshow dies in their sight. Kindness is lost on people under the age of twenty-five here. Because kindness is a lost art in 1994.

Eddie moans weakly into the sink. “Steve…”

Is this where you say ‘one, two, three’ and lead?

Eddie’s hand searches without looking, fingers sliding over the wet porcelain until they catch Steve’s wrist. His grip is clumsy but certain. He squeezes, small and grateful, still gulping ragged breaths over the sink. It’s a private touch in the worst possible room. Something hot and ancient detonates inside Steve. Humiliation blooms like a chemical fire; self, dad, locker room, ninth-grade silence. Every trapdoor opens at once. Another disposable pops. There’s a single, terrible beat where Steve’s body wants to keep touching him, to say something steady and human, but his brain floods with every old warning he’s ever learned. His dad backhands the glory days out of him. His mom rips his report card into pieces and flushes them down the toilet. Not here. Not right now. Not like this.

You keep your frame. I…guide.

Steve, betrayed by his own compunction, yanks his hand away. “Don’t fucking touch me.”

Eddie’s shoulders twitch. His throat makes a small, apology-shaped sound. “Sorry, I —”

“Are you eighteen, or five?” Steve snaps, chest heaving, pores gushing out frothed insecurities. “Jesus christ, Munson, you can’t even hold your liquor. You’ve got oil down your throat for god’s sake. Don’t give me that look. I’m not your nurse. I’m not your babysitter. I don’t give a shit about your theater, or your band, or your goddamn asthma. You want to choke for an audience? Fine. Do it without dragging me into it.”

The kitchen ripples, delighted and uneasy. Someone asks what he’s talking about. They’re answered with a clueless shrug. A few frat brothers mimic tossing popcorns into their mouths.

Something respectable, Steven, something measurable.

“I told you to spit, not to grab me like a queer,” Steve’s tone is clipped like hospital bleach. He peels the wet cuff of his sweater away from his wrist like he’s removing a noxious glove, shoves it up to his forearm. “You’re hammered. Get a grip. No wonder you can’t act. You can’t even fucking stand.”

Don’t embarrass my name, it existed before you, and it will after.

Steve, just like his dad would, turns into air after that; moving through applause and laughter, the living-room tide of beer and noise parting around him without leaving so much as a fingerprint. Looming popularity chars his cerebrospinal fluid like smoked pork. The front door releases him with a sigh. Snow bites his ankles without hesitation, sinking into the mesh of his sneakers, wicking up his socks. The air is thin and punishing, too clean for how filthy he feels. His hands are shaking, fine motor trembles, and he tells himself it’s the cold. It’s always the cold.

The street is quiet and snowy, lamplight catching in the drifts. His lungs ache from holding too many words hostage. He’s going to leave, walk home, slip on ice, and then bury himself in the safety of his bedsheets. Before he can, the door behind him opens again, clattering against the siding. A lingering soul follows him, boots crunching.

“I know what you were doing!” Eddie calls after him, hoarse from getting water boarded with liquid fat. “I felt your hand, and then I felt you fucking rip it away like I’d bitten you. You can’t keep doing this, Steve. Catch, drop. Care, cut. I’m not a prop in your little experiment on what you can get away with without feeling anything.”

Steve turns slowly, face blank, eyelashes icy. “You’re drunk.”

“No shit,” Eddie hisses, words sizzling. “And you’re a real class act. You swoop in, play the hero, and then the second anyone looks, you leave me in the dust! What am I supposed to think, huh? I know you like me —”

“I don’t —”

“Then tell me!” Eddie’s voice cracks in a sob. He spreads his hands, his wings, a half-bow that isn’t a joke. “Tell me I imagined the library. Tell me I misheard the stacks. Tell me I made up your voice in my ear just now. Please, god, make me the idiot. I can live with that. I know how to live with that.”

Steve feels something loosen under his sternum, the part of him that’s been cinched since the library, but he strangles it before it can name itself. “You misread,” He figures, rubbing a hand over his jaw, feeling the stubble there and wondering when it was the last time he shaved. “In the lab, in the library, in there — that was procedure. I don’t want you, Munson. I want quiet.”

Eddie looks at him like Steve just reached into his chest and organized his organs by weight. For a second he looks truly eighteen, too young and scared of the anger rising in his belly. Then the doe-eyed stare curdles, an ironic laugh punched out bitterly. “You like lines, right? That’s your whole deal? ‘Stand here. Breathe now. Frame.’ You make a box and tell me you can’t see outside it. You don’t want quiet. You want control.”

“Same thing.”

“Not to normal people. Not to me.”

Steve’s hands have slipped into the pockets of his jeans like he’s already halfway home, like he didn’t hear himself choose the crueler variable. He angles his shoulders like a shield and lets the wind strip him of his humanity. “Go back inside.”

Eddie scoffs, shuddering from the cold. “You wanna know the worst part? I was quiet for you. I tried it on. I did our report in silence last week. I let you tell me how to hold my hands, I let you breathe on my neck, I let you touch my inhaler. I hate quiet, I hate it. But you made it feel like —” He chokes on a miserable hack. “You made me feel like I could go onstage and not embarrass myself.”

“You’re not the center of my life, Eddie! You’re a variable I corrected. You’re noise. You’re my lab partner, not my — fuck. Just go back inside, okay?”

Eddie steps closer into Steve’s space, close enough that Steve can count freckles and pores and the way grief makes someone’s mouth look soft. Close enough that if Steve exhaled a little harder, their lips would learn two new facts at once and undo them both. “Stop toying with me,” Eddie snarls, and the performative rhythm is gone. This is plain, stripped, stage lights at half-mast. “If you don’t want me, say it like a person and not a press release. If you do, then either be brave, or leave me the fuck alone.”

Steve doesn’t breathe. Snow lifts off the asphalt in tiny ghosts. Eddie stands there shaking like a dog that trusted the wrong hand and got the hose.

“Say it,” He pushes, voice wrecked, shoving a finger into Steve’s chest. “Pick a line and deliver it. ‘I don’t want you.’ Full stop. Then I’ll go back inside and pretend the last month was a warm-up exercise and not — not whatever this is.”

Steve’s mouth opens. Air happens. Language doesn’t. He could say the exact sentence Eddie gave him. He could lie with perfect lab diction and watch the result settle. He could tell the truth and watch everything else explode. A stupid fact intrudes; the hair at Eddie’s temple is stiff with oil and frost. He wants to wipe it. He puts his hands deeper in his pockets instead, and looks away.

Eddie’s face changes when he understands silence as the answer. It doesn’t break, but it does harden. His usual bombastic nature drops out, something older sitting down behind his eyes. “Okay,” He says, gently, desolate. “Okay.”

Snow lands on Steve’s lashes. His brain tries to file what’s happening under phenomena he knows; oscillation, hysteresis, failure curve. He finds nothing that will hold it. “Christ, Eddie, will you just —”

“Steve, don’t,” Eddie snaps, and the plea is naked and furious. “Don’t make yourself feel like the good version of you. Don’t catch me and then act like you don’t know me. Stop teaching me what safety is if you’re going to hurt me.” He tips his chin upwards, a defiant little line. “You don’t get to be brave in private and careful in crowds.”

Eddie takes a step back and almost slips. Steve’s hands jerk in his pockets like a reflex he refuses to have. Eddie sees it, and his mouth makes a small, sick smile. “You know what the Ghost says?” He asks conversationally, like this is rehearsal again and not the night he learns a new definition of cold. “‘Remember me.’ And I will. I’ll remember the part where you chose science over mercy.”

The door catches Eddie’s shoulder as he pulls it, party light spilling out and licking the snow, then retracting as the house reseals with him inside. Steve stands where he is and pretends the sting in his eyes is wind. Porch, yard, curb, ulna, radius, pulse, inhale, exhale, don’t cry, don’t fucking cry —

The snow falls harder. The world is simple. He hates it for being simple, when he isn't. He walks past a mailbox, a spare tire, a frozen shoe. At the end of the block he stops because he has to, bowing his head under the weight of breath and failure. Odd-numbered treads, left. Even, right. Heel to ball. Keep your frame. He counts to four, again and again, all the way home.

Chapter Text

Winter break breathes with no pulse. It lies there on the calendar like a flatline. The sky turns to old dishwater, sidewalks glaze over with ice. Before campus emptied, Steve told anyone who asked (no one) that he wasn’t going back home. There’s less noise at school, less echo for him to cross-examine. And right now? There is only echo.

Despite that, he couldn’t stave off his mom’s insistent phone calls. His short homecoming to Loch Nora welcomed him with posture compliments and grade interrogations. Christmas dinner was lamb chops, and a salad Steve had to chew with vigor. Soft meat sat on his plate, his mom’s wine endless, his dad’s presence split between his home office and his whiskey affairs. He answered any and all questions in mild, good-son murmurs. The next morning, he was left alone with a mountain of presents and a hastily written note by his mom saying they had business to attend to in Hong Kong. Steve spent the day binging James Stewart movies surrounded by VCRs, store-bought cookies, and vodka cranberries in coffee mugs.

He spiraled harder when he returned to his dorm. He had started with his desk; pens in a mason jar became pens by size, then by color, then by function, then by a system he invented where weight equals virtue. Textbooks marched in regiments — Lehninger, Pauling, Campbell — and ended with a slim manual that smelt like ceiling tiles. He rewashed dishes, eight times around with the sponge, because nine breaks the symmetry of four. With every twist of the sink faucet, he could feel the numbers in his wrist like a metronome he swallowed by accident. By the third day, cleanliness had turned to hypothesis.

Steve's knuckles took the brunt of it. It started with cracks, then webbing. Thin, pink fissures that stung when he thought about them. Cheap bandages now fill his desk drawer. He pretends they’re labels. Of course, his Walkman quit on him, too. His tapes now reach out and eat themselves, brown ribbons between his fingers like guts. He presses STOP, REWIND, EJECT, hard enough to bruise the button. His brand-new cassettes gave him the silent treatment. Lover, You Should’ve Come Over ties its own tongue whenever he tries to listen. Whatever. Sad relations like that would kill him, anyway.

The memories of his experiments plagued him for two weeks straight. Hand at the base of Eddie’s neck, fall prevention, dusty books, cherry-cheap conversations. The Offspring, guitar strings, oil in a funnel, pneumonia scares. His mouth in the shape of ‘Remember me,’ snow on Steve’s lashes, his dad’s voice wearing his face and turning back the clock on his wrist. On Christmas Eve, he had a dream where instead of turning away, he kissed Eddie’s wobbly bottom lip and hugged him like ursine sweethearts. In his sleep, every blood vessel had burst with relief.

By early January, the world has forgotten how to thaw. Campus returns to life in half-measures; cars in the parking lot, heaters clanging like reluctant hearts. Everyone else has new notebooks and resolutions. Steve has chapped lips and a stomach that doesn’t process carbs anymore. His classes have multiplied into narrower hallways; Thermodynamics of Biomolecules, Neurochemical Pathways, and a lab practicum that starts at eight in the morning and ends in suicide. His professors have stopped pretending they care about anyone’s well-being. He copies equations until they lose meaning, watching his handwriting shrink like it’s ashamed of being seen.

On paper, everything looks fine. His grades stay high, he rarely skips classes. He smiles at professors who nod back with vague approval. But concentration is a rumor he no longer believes in. Reading feels like pressing his face to glass — he can see the shapes of words but not what they mean. Sometimes he catches himself mouthing the lectures like a prayer, lips moving just to prove he exists, even if no one is looking at him.

Some late afternoons, he catches glimpses of Eddie; a shape on the far end of the courtyard, or a flash of black disappearing into the humanities building. His hunger stays comforting and contained in his belly. In class, he draws plastic fangs once by accident in the margin of a problem set. He rips the entire sheet out of his notebook and crumples it into a ball he will never see again.

In Thermodynamics, a chalk diagram metastasizes across the board — Gibbs free energy, a valley and a hill, a line of best intentions. “Spontaneous,” The professor says cheerfully, tapping the negative ΔG with his stick of chalk. “Doesn’t mean fast.” 

The room laughs. Steve thinks of how a reaction can be favored yet trapped, a molecule poised for change but walled in by activation energy. He writes spontaneous ≠ merciful, and immediately scratches it out until the page rips.

Somewhere between bruised fruit and sidewalk salt, the humanities corkboard has overgrown itself with flyers hypertrophied, staples layered until they shine like fish scales. HAMLET — FEBRUARY RUN. Steve keeps his eyes on the pavement but the information gets in anyway, the way cold does; dates, times, a box-office number he won’t dial. He can taste the font on the dry part of his tongue. Dinner is soup because it behaves. He tries to count the noodles, loses the thread at six when a spoon drops two tables over and detonates his ribs. He promises tomorrow he’ll fix himself.  He already knows he won’t. That’s the part the Ghost will keep, after the salt’s gone, after the melt. Remembering what he meant to do, and what he didn’t.

⋆.˚⚕ ⚛︎ ⊹₊ ⋆

The first week of February hits hard and ascetic. Old snow has been shaved down to frozen, stamped trash. Steve’s wearing two sweaters that make his armpits damp and sore. The science building releases him into a punishing light, the sun a low-watt bulb behind clouded plastic. And at the same time across the quad, the humanities doors unlatch like the gates of showbiz hell. One specific starboy waltzes out. 

Over the past month and a half, Eddie has molted like a lobster with no chitin. He has replaced his cape for a flayed Black Sabbath hoodie, the printed lyrics to Hand of Doom crunchy and wartorn from too many spins in the wash. The sleeves are gnawed at the cuff, the bottom half of his torso crowded with safety pins and buttons. There’s new jewelry in his ears; two hoops, two studs. His hoodie rides up when he lifts his arm to find a Marlboro. He smokes now? Christ. Add tar to the bronchial lottery.

Eddie cups his palm around his Zippo and takes a shallow, sinful drag. Cilia temporarily paralyzed, a cough already on its way out. There’s a brief flash of panic, animalistic instinct jerking his grip toward his hoodie pocket. Steve sees the outline of his inhaler, and his own fingers twitch with prayer that the kid never touches a pack ever again. Instead, Eddie deprives himself of albuterol, cigarette dangling, wasteful and ricocheting at his lip. He exhales smoke. Looks up at the man next to him for approval.

Leather trench coat, skeleton gloves, spiky bleached tips like a trebuchet. Older, mid-twenties. Jawline sanded sharper by humiliation. Fifth-year posture, boots that remind floors they will die. He smiles with half his mouth and looks at no one but Eddie. Discontent crawls up Steve’s throat and forgets how to swallow.

Trench says something quiet and close to Eddie’s mouth, something that flattens the younger’s bravado into a shy crease. He stubs the cigarette on the metal rail, gentler than he needs to be. Pinch, twist, smother, like he’s practiced putting out worse fires. Then he tips Eddie’s chin, and kisses him.

It isn’t a daredevil kiss. It isn’t up to date with the year. It’s…quotidian. Devastatingly so. Mouth to mouth, eyes half-lidded, the kind of soft press that urban legends say gets men like them killed in Indiana. Eddie seems to make a noise that Steve’s body recognizes before his brain can bayonet it; breath catching in a delighted hiccup, a happy hum because the person who’s kissing him isn’t scared of the dark. His hand goes searching with the messy, uncoordinated fidelity of eighteen, fingers tangling with Trench’s gloved ones. 

The kiss breaks on a lip bite that makes Steve’s solar plexus boil. Eddie gets hungry, a mucky pup who hasn’t learned the command for stay. His tongue tries to cuddle Trench’s molars, but stops when his cheek is pet in warning. A private boundary written onto skin. An inside joke. 

Steve stands there, and lets the ordinary ruin him.

He feels his own frame shear. Something in him cringes — lie, ligament, cartilage — and leaves his bones too tight for use. The air around him feels sterile and wrong. He turns before his legs can do anything reckless. The science building tolls eleven like a defibrillator. He does not go to class. He goes to the parking lot, where the world is ugly and honest and full of cars that won’t get this screwy over two boys kissing. He finds his BMW sulking. The interior smells like stale sex and auto upholstery impersonating wealth. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel, watching his own flesh ripple. 

Explanation arrives as procedure, not revelation. If there’s a god for men like him, it speaks in protocols. He blows on the glass until it fogs, draws a small square with the side of his thumb, and pretends it’s a door he can open. He counts to four because that’s what keeps the hatred polite. It doesn’t fix the pain under his sternum, but it does domesticate it. Pain, like everything else, can be queued if it’s taught manners. He isn’t his feelings, but he can be a personal project.

It’s impulsive, and dirty. His dad would call it ‘deviant hypothesis,’ but, fuck, Steve can’t stay quarantined forever. The eyebags have to mean something. Data always does. He decides, abruptly, like ripping a Band-Aid off sutures, that he’ll go toward the infection. He’ll survive it in measured doses. No more pretending hunger is healthy. No more building traps to prove he’s clever. He can already hear Eddie laughing at him, kind and unfair, turning longing into homework. But his faith is method, not miracle. Homework is the only ritual he still remembers. So he tithes his hours. Plans a sacrifice. Smoke until his lungs sound like loose teeth in a jar. Pray in chemical notation.

He wants the wanting to be dull. He wants to arrive somewhere where the answer is bored, not beatific. He wants to be a transaction, not an epiphany. He can meet nouns at a walking pace; man, want, yes, no. He can walk into rooms where the walls hold strangers whose shapes look like his future if he can stand to have one. He watches the rearview until his own eyes look like someone else’s. He would like to be someone else’s. Borrow a better man for an hour and return him without smudges.

He will not vanish if he names it. He will not die if he looks. He has already failed louder than this. He shoves his key into the ignition and tells himself, “You want him, you goddamn prodigy prick.” 




And…silence. The roof does not cave. The dashboard does not ticket him for obscenity. It just hangs there. It’s not liberation, it’s a measured release. Like loosening a tourniquet in small increments so he doesn't faint from reperfusion. 

Progress, Steve thinks, and clutches the gearshift.

The tires argue as he backs out, a shudder through the chassis that feels like dissent. He sets the heater to full martyrdom and watches the vents wheeze themselves warm, breath for breath with his own pulmonics. Reverse becomes drive, campus asphalt giving way to country roads that thread toward the highway. Black Hole Sun chants about washing away rain. Good. Let it come for him. Better water than the slush packed in his ears, clogging the exhaust of thought.

Cheap realty signs. A dentist selling sedation like a sacrament. Grain silos asleep in snowcaps. When Soundgarden fades, the radio coughs up a sermon about wolves in schools, then a country song about someone else’s woman, then static that sounds like a wound trying to scab. He kills it. Leaves room for the map. At a red light, he spreads the folded atlas over his thigh and traces the vein of US-31 with a knuckle. Indianapolis is a square with promises in it. He memorizes the exit like a password. Mile markers become self-administered doses — reach the county line and earn the next ten, survive the next ten and he earns the whole stupid, holy errand.

Forty-five minutes in, the first rest area appears like a temporal blessing. He takes it. Three semis let out dragon plumes. A station wagon evangelizes that Jesus is their airbag. He idles until the heat turns theatrical and faintly nauseating. Inside contains vending machines with the wrong snacks, maps stapled to corkboard, a smell that’s ninety percent human and ten percent mourning. He buys coffee with ashtray foam and gum for the mouth-need that isn’t a cigarette. In fluorescent judgment he studies himself — jaw bristled, hazel rinsed to pondwater, like something that learned to tread and forgot the shore. He washes his hands and spits repression into the sink. Back to the car. Back to half-life and ring roads.

The city looks like a diagram somebody half-erased. Streets are ruled lines, snow rubbed with soot. Steve lets Meridian siphon him like a beaker neck. Monument Circle flickers by; soldiers, sailors, limestone steaming in the cold. He didn’t come for a reason he can print — he came because motion felt medicinal, because he wanted to outrun voices that kept saying ‘Eddie.’ He parks crooked in a lot, passes a pawn shop, a bakery sweating king cake into its windows. A storefront church where the letterer runs out of vowels halfway through Deuteronomy. A corner bookstore waits with bay windows fogged, a small triangle of rainbow in the glass pinches something in his throat — pharyngeal muscles, conspiracy. The bell over the door sings. Heat touches the ruddy parts of his ears like absolution withheld.

Long, narrow, cat-track aisles greet him. Index cards give the shelves their tags; FICTION, POETRY, HISTORY, HEALTH, WOMEN’S STUDIES, SPIRITUALITY, LOCAL. A wire rack raises PFLAG times stapled in hopeful rows. A Styrofoam cup by the till wears a faded lipstick print the same shade of old blood. A one-eyed calico judges him from atop TRAVEL. The clerk looks up from intake forms. 

“Let me know if you’re looking for anything,” She says.

“Just browsing,” Steve says, because browsing is the hobby of men who sleep fine. And he has been sleeping very, very fine.

POETRY first, because it looks harmless, because he can stand there while his heart re-learns its normal beat. Rilke, Rich, Ginsberg rubber-banded at the waist. Winterson with someone else’s thumbprint greasing the cover. He forces his eyes across the shelf-talkers — Baldwin, Holleran, Schulman. He opens a book about ACT UP, catches the word ‘bisexual’ mid-sentence, and shuts it quickly. Heat behaves like a boil. It rises and hides when touched by a new temperature. He sets the book back with surgical care and doesn’t look at it again.

Steve drifts sideways into the row REFERENCE / PERIODICALS — because neutrality is an outfit he knows how to wear. Newspapers curled like old leaves. A Midwestern city guide with a smear of ketchup on Indiana. Local alt-weekly stacked in hopeful towers. He pretends to read a headline about zoning and lets his pulse climb down a rung. The rack beside it holds slicker paper, brighter inks. Men in suits and teeth grin from covers that are not quite men’s style and not quite news. He knows the magazines meant for him; Sports Illustrated, GQ (women posed like injuries, cleavage boisterous on purpose, he looks). They’re adjacent the way a mirror looks adjacent to a window. 

The Advocate. Out. Christopher Street. A copy of Genre with a man in a turtleneck flirting with the camera. They are shelved with the real periodicals, not hidden, not curtained, which feels more dangerous than a back room. Nothing to point at. Nowhere to say he didn’t know. In The Advocate, there’s a photo of two men in uniform, faces blurred down to lacquer. Steve’s stomach does something odd and marine. He flips, pages whispering like conspirators. An editorial about funding cuts, a photograph of a candlelight vigil, black coats. He reads none of it properly. He wonders what his dad would think about all this. Partner, risk, pride, home.

Steve practices a story in case the clerk asks. It’s for a project, for a cousin, for anthropology, for a friend. He tries each on his tongue and they all taste like copper. She’s not looking. No one is looking. The cat blinks its one eye. Steve doesn’t scowl, though he wants to. He looks at another magazine, the cover boy pretty in a way he distrusts. An ad for a watch, the clock hands locked at 10:10, optimism forced into geometry. He stares until the image stops being a picture and becomes physics — mass leaning into mass, a frame built to keep out scrutiny. He likes his own watch better, but the sentiment sticks.

A safe-sex ad with black rubber gloves and a reassuring font. He thinks about oil slicking down a funnel, alveoli carpeted in fat. He turns the page because he can’t stand that his history is here too, catalogued beside cologne. Another spread; two men sharing a scarf and nothing else, hickeys and bruises, unapologetic groping. He starts breathing hard, so he doesn’t look at it again. But the magazine will come home with him, anyway.

No one is here for the study of Steve Harrington’s Repressed Sexuality. Still, he shuffles cash out of his pocket. No receipt if he can help it. He chooses three magazines because he is a coward and a scientist. He stacks decoys because ritual demands camouflage — a used Rilke, a postcard of the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, a ballpoint at the register that says Hancock Insurance. 

The walk to the counter feels like crossing a sterile field. A convex mirror blooms above the register and turns him into a fish-eye. Wide, wrong, easily netted. The clerk looks up. She has a soft cardigan and a chapped bottom lip and the exact amount of interest owed to a human buying paper. “Find everything okay?”

“Yeah,” His voice sounds like it borrowed a new throat. “For —” He picks a story. “Class,” Blood in his windpipe. “I’m a biochemist.” Liar, liar. His creased pants catch gasoline.

She doesn’t respond. Just lifts, stacks, squares corners and rings them up. The cat hops down from TRAVEL and rubs itself along his pant leg, tail marking evidence. Species identified, owner implied. He reaches down to pet it. It sinks its teeth into his palm. Sure. He probably deserves that. He waves it off, no big deal. The cat smacks right into a bookshelf.

“Bag?”

“Yes,” Steve croaks, too fast, too obvious. He wants paper, brown and opaque like an unlabeled reagent bottle. She gives him exactly that, unthinking. He’s already counting exact bills, exact quarters, a dime that’s been in his pocket for god knows how long. His dad’s friends own every bank between here and Lake Michigan, but twenties and tens only know his hands.

Transaction leads to finality. The cat sneezes after he thanks the clerk. Outside, the chill has only gotten harsher. Arrow from door to car, distance minimized, exposure controlled. He doesn’t run, but in the car, he does lock everything twice to make sure no one can see his talisman, his creature habits.

He pictures returning to Loch Nora with this brown bag under his coat, getting caught in the foyer. His dad would not yell, but he would slam the door in his son’s face. His mom’s mouth would drop. Someone would say ‘phase.’ Someone would say ‘disease.’ Someone would say ‘lawyer.’ The fantasy has edges. He flattens it with variables: bag is brown, car has locks, clerk did not care, cat touched him, the sky didn’t fall. Result: No explosion. Conclusion: Repression is louder than reality.

Winter light bruises the dashboard. He decides to forgive it. He will not vanish if he names it. He will not die if he looks. He has already failed louder than this. Bisexual must mean many things. He says it, the thing, out loud. The thing that must be. Nothing happens, so he pulls out the magazines, starts to read. He stays in that Indianapolis parking lot for a long, long time.

⋆.˚⚕ ⚛︎ ⊹₊ ⋆

Trench’s name is Trent, Steve learns a few days later. It breaks something in him — an absurd, loud laugh punched from his sternum. The same one that escaped when Girls & Boys slurred through his car. A bit too on the nose for his taste.

He files it under nomenclature and farce, pretends that knowing Eddie’s boyfriend’s real name drains the ache. It doesn’t. The ache breeds in sterile media, colony count rising. He tries to bully it with routine; lecture, lab, laundry — but his hands keep doing small treasons like pausing over the stack of Hamlet flyers on the union corkboard, fingers drifting towards the cast sheet, touching Eddie’s face over and over again. It’s absolute contraindication. 

There’s a few notes in his personal notebook — noninvasive observation by chance proximity, path prediction via published rehearsal blocks. It’s not stalking, it’s pattern recognition. He maps Eddie’s circadian like a farmer reading frost. Warm-up gossip, cue-to-cue at dusk, cigarettes he never finishes. When Trent peeks his head through the stage door after Eddie’s class finishes, all leather and affinity, Steve re-learns envy as a biochemical secretion watching Eddie giggle and wherry into his chest. Steve tells himself it's just comparative anatomy, how Trent always massages Eddie’s lower back when kissing him. How Eddie lets it happen and parts his lips for more.

So — verification. He sits in his idling car, deciding the experiment requires contact with the reagent. If he christens it and does nothing, it metastasizes into theory. If he christens it and steps closer, maybe it denatures into something survivable. He parks in the closest space to the humanities building. Evening has chapped the sky, a hum in the vestibule. He feels that familiar, shameful clarity run down his spinal cord, the one that re-labels desire as surveillance. He watches theater majors spill out in clumps, then Eddie, finally, curls damp from effort, face pinked with stage-light residue. His mouth is bare. The fragile look of post-performance myelin. Raw, conducting. 

Steve quickly steps out into the cold. His breath makes small ghosts that don’t haunt for long.

“Munson!”

Eddie stiffens, turns. His first expression is reflex — wary, chin up, the bucking readiness of someone who has learned to survive applause and its cousins. Then recognition lands, and his pupils do that micro-dilation Steve’s textbooks only call sympathetic. Maybe true love. “You lost, Harrington? Lab is two buildings east.”

“I —” Steve swallows. His throat clicks. “Hey. Can we talk? Somewhere warm.”

Eddie tips his head, that old tilted-curious theatricality, but there’s no humor in it. “Why? So you can practice saying ‘procedure’ without choking on it? I’ve got plans. And you’re horrible.” 

​​“I know,” Steve sighs. He hears how pathetic it sounds, and doesn’t edit it. “I was cruel. No, I was a douchebag. And I want to try being…not that.”

“You want to be decent,” Eddie says, skeptical, fed by too many directors who never learned to apologize. “Great thesis, Stevie. What’s your method?”

“Ten minutes,” Steve says. His voice gentles, a change in pH. “No speeches. Just come to my dorm. Sit where it’s not trying to freeze us. Let me start over.”

Eddie’s laugh scrapes. “That’s not how starting over works,” He drags a thumb under his nose, turns his face away, coughs and grasps for his inhaler, which he forgets to ignore. His hoodie rides up, a pale flank of hipbone flashing like a siren song. “I shouldn’t. I really, really shouldn’t.”

“Eddie. Please.” 

Eddie looks at him then. Really looks. The examination is brief and surgical; zygomatic scan, mouth, clavicle visible where Steve’s sweater gapes. Steve feels identified to species and pinned to stone. Eddie’s shoulders sag by a millimeter, the surrender. “You’re such a headache,” he mutters, and the fondness he tries to strangle leaks into the vowel like blood into gauze. “Ten minutes. And if Trent murders you afterwards, you better haunt somewhere interesting.”

They walk. It’s awful and perfect. Their boots squeak a syncopation. Sodium lamps burn halos into snowbanks. Steve catalogs without meaning to, the way Eddie’s fingers worry the pull-string of his hoodie, the way his mouth keeps wanting to talk and then doesn’t. Their elbows knock once, a nerve-jolt that he feels in his palmar aponeurosis, the tendinous sheet that holds his hand together. He imagines their fascia finding ways to communicate under their coats. Hello, I know you, we have shared metabolites.

His dormitory building looms ahead like a bad fixative. At the edge of the quad, Eddie stops. He is miserable and beautiful and furious. He has chapped knuckles. His pupils are big. “And you’re not going to hate-crime me? Last time I saw you, you called me a queer and drowned me in Kappa’s sink.”

“I saved you from lung inflammation,” Steve says. 

“And then you tore my fucking heart out” Eddie says, without ornament. The line lands between them with a quiet thud, like a body set down gently on a gurney. “Your room. You say the thing. I say the thing back, or I don’t. Then I will go back to Trent, and you will be a decent person somewhere far away from me.”

Steve nods. They walk some more. The nausea lifting under his ribs feels like a good sign; vagal winning the tug-of-war, blood relinquishing its fist. He reaches for the front door of the dorms with one hand, and for Eddie’s sleeve with the other. Not skin. Not even wrist. Just the frayed cuff of his hoodie. He tugs, the way you coax a skittish animal past a threshold. Eddie lets him. The door swings, the corridors welcome them. Somewhere a resident laughs at the TV channel in the lounge. Steve starts up the stairs to his room, not needing to pull for Eddie to trail his steps.

The air between them is already changing state, vapor condensing into something heavier. Something that might hold. And Steve prays to every fucking god he knows that it does.

Chapter Text

Eddie kisses the way he smokes — badly. His breath hits too fast, too hot, a feedback loop of carbon and wanting. He quotes something about Ozzy and trains, coughs awkwardly against Steve’s mouth, and apologizes by massaging his palm over his zipper. Repetition until adaptation, evolution by error.

Their conversation had behaved like an appendix — present, useless, inherited. They'd shuffled into the dorm, Eddie biting his nails and Steve thinking about the magazines in his trunk. His ten minutes of apology hadn't lasted a baker's dozen seconds before they were on each other, two magnetized mutts, graceless rabbits scrambling over the threshold of fossilized trust. Albedo high, sound absorbed. Xylitol sweet, alkali bitter.

Eddie’s tongue tastes like unwashed cherries. Their clothes are still on. Steve feels like his skin has nowhere to go.

The room shrinks to a river in the ceiling and the heat of someone else’s mistakes. Steve’s bed complains in annoying, frightened squawks every time Eddie grasps his face and bounces in joy. Winter coats, graphite, old detergent. The ghost of Dorothy’s strawberry liquor. Steve decides not to think about that. ‘Remember me’ comes to mind instead. Keep your frame. He bites Eddie’s neck, who arches into it with slack posture. His rings are cold where they brush Steve’s cheek, then hot an instant later. He kisses along his jaw like he’s reading braille, gets tangled in the push and pull of it. It’s clumsy choreography with too many elbows, too much saliva dissection. But there’s a rhythm they both keep finding, four counts, in before out, that keeps them in time.

“Hey,” Steve pants, stretching Eddie’s hoodie collar out of the way so he can gnaw on his clavicle. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me, tell me. God, I’m gonna fuck you so hard, I’m gonna —”

“What about Trent?”

Well. That wasn't in the systematic process. Steve kernel panics before reluctantly lifting his mouth from Eddie’s hickey-covered, wet collarbone, brushing the tips of their noses together. His face is close enough that Steve can count pores, freckles. The tiny scar by his chin Steve has kissed more times than necessary.

Trent is nothing. Not a rival, not a man — an inconvenient external condition. Morality is a set of controls, and Steve’s spent too long living under their jurisdiction. He thinks of his father’s lectures about integrity and image, about clean hands and clean lines. Not making scenes. Ninth grade perversion. He wants to tell Eddie that loyalty is a myth invented by people too scared to admit they want more than one kind of truth, that nobody ever built a cure out of restraint. That Trent, wherever he is, won’t die from being unloved for one night.

“Do you want to stop?” He asks instead, already knowing the answer. 

Eddie, like a good boy, immediately shakes his head. He’s wrecked, ruined for anyone else. Steve’s hands too warm and big and tan for him to leave. “No. No, god, please don’t ever stop. Shit. Jesus christ, I’m a shitty boyfriend.” 

“Yeah,” Steve says, proudly. “Me too.” 

That’s the last concession he gives to decency. The moral architecture around them collapses into noise; creaking bed, rasp of moan, the humid pulse of another person’s wanting. Steve’s detachment towards Eddie’s paramour becomes its own appetite. No affection, no forgiveness, just the compulsion to see what happens when he stops pretending to care about the ethics of touch. Eddie’s lithe fingers wriggle under Steve’s belt, the heavy weight of his bulge a prodding fixture he seems to enjoy kneading. Steve, who hasn’t had sex in three weeks, cannot find a reason to complain. 

Peppermint gum and ozone flair seep into his sinuses, throbbing the same way his abdomen does when Eddie whimpers in his ear and finally unzips his jeans, shoves his boxer briefs out of the way. Hot, dry touch, the whisper of knuckles against his cockhead. Steve grunts, a dirty, pleased noise, and gives a few shallow humps. “Oh, Macbeth. I knew you were a slut.” 

Eddie laughs, unstable and reverent. He bites his lower lip so hard the pearly plush of it goes white at the edge. His wrist rotates awkwardly, working the rhythm in determined incomprehension. His palm drags up the length of Steve, thumb ghosting over his slit, gathering precum and redistributing it down with every stroke. He’s utterly focused, the tip of his tongue peeking out. The concentration is obscene. Intoxicating. 

Steve is trembling. He rarely feels so exposed, so needy, so out of control. The sensation threatens to strip him of speech, but something stubborn in his chest makes him grab Eddie’s hand, makes him hold his pace. “Slower,” he instructs, voice a hoarse scrape. “If you go too fast, you’ll trigger myotatic reflex.”

Eddie says he doesn’t know what that is, but obeys anyway. Steve watches his grip go lazy, recalibrating. Precision over force. Kinetic learning. His knuckles stutter at the base, fingers skidding clumsily through slick. Everything else is steady; the pulse in Steve’s teeth, the way Eddie’s rings accidentally and painfully snag his balls, the constant erosion of oxygen from air to bloodstream. Biological algebra. Steve feels like singing. 

“Feels nice,” His voice peels away from him, higher than intended. He wants to chart this — time, pressure, volume. The hydraulic mechanics of want. Eddie is chewing the inside of his cheek, focused. Dog-eared page, study group, midterm adrenaline. He glances up, and Steve almost laughs, almost snarls. “You know what’s happening in your hand right now?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, the urge to catalog and dissect and instruct overriding shame. “Tunica albuginea under your thumb. Nitric oxide-mediated vasodilation. It’s why I’m leaking for you. You’re doing this to me.”

“Sweetheart, you’re foul,” Eddie groans, shivering. He rolls his wrist, half on purpose, half by accident. Steve bucks up, and the world dilates to the diameter of Eddie’s hand. The outline of his own bones, the black hole at the center of his chest. Synaptic delay, percussive muscle twitch, the minute flex and sigh of flesh on flesh. Eddie’s grip is unscientific, made for guitar strings and ragged pockets, but Steve would take it over lab precision every time. His head tips back, Adam’s apple strobing, eyes fluttering shut. He forgets about fours and dishwater and thermodynamics for a few minutes. That’s all he could ask for in a handjob.

Striated muscle, capillaries blooming, touch nothing but electrical impulse and translated desire. Eddie’s hand is a scalpel, incising the last of his composure. Steve needs another variable, another data point. Their kisses turn to wet velvet, sliding tongues, seismic little tremors once their clothes come off. Steve blindly finds the silver foil of a condom in his bedside drawer, the cold logic of lube. It’s comical, the pragmatic afterthought of safe sex. The sterility of latex in a room thick with animal heat.

He tears the packet with his teeth, rolls on the condom, smears a generous amount of lube over himself and his fingers. Eddie’s eyes are glassy, drugged, wild. “You ready?” Steve asks, the question a loaded gun, the answer a foregone conclusion. He nearly spits on Eddie’s hole, watching its pinkness clench and relax in anticipation, but thinks that might be too daring at the moment.

“Please,” Eddie says, mouth open, back already arching, presenting himself. “Steve, I need —” He’s all loose-jointed invitation, ankles canted open, want as obvious as a fever chart. He grasps Steve’s biceps, his chest hair, tugging him down into a kiss that tastes like blueberry cobbler. When Steve presses a finger inside, feeling the heat and tight, living resistance of Eddie’s seclusion giving way by increments — he can’t help but think that this was worth spending Christmas alone. 

Eddie starts shuddering almost immediately, toes curling when Steve adds a second finger and scissors them, working him open. Finds his prostate with the clinical precision only a disconsolate biochemistry major could have. He narrates every step, murmuring against the shell of Eddie’s ear, curling his tongue inside. “You’re opening up for me, aren’t you? Your hole is so sweet, so pretty. You’re gonna take me so well. That’s muscle memory, Eds. That’s your body saying yes.”

Eddie’s nails dig crescents into Steve’s shoulders, his thighs tense and shaking. “Want you in me.” 

Steve lines himself up, the blunt head of his cock nudging Eddie’s entrance. “This is the interface,” he says, breathless. “The boundary condition. If you tense, it’s going to hurt. If you breathe, you’ll be fine.” 

Eddie frowns. “You know I’ve had sex before, right?”

“Yeah,” Steve nods. “But you’ve never had sex with a guy who wants you so bad he contemplates suicide.” 

When he presses in, when he starts to move, it’s a slow, unhurried lesson in anatomy and hunger. He can’t keep his teeth away from Eddie’s throat for more than ten seconds. Eddie’s eyes roll back, sweat on his temples as he wraps his legs around Steve’s hips and leans into each thrust. He purrs, kissing up Steve’s cheek, yanking at his chest hair so he can witch-cackle when Steve winces. Steve soothes Eddie’s foreskin down, makes him say ‘harder’ so many times it stops sounding like a word and more like a prophecy. 

Steve grips his thighs, angles deeper, likes the way Eddie’s tummy inflates and collapses when he hits his prostate again. Internal muscle, sphincter yielding, the familiar language of tension followed by loss. Their pace staggers into existence. Steve’s hips stutter, searching for the right vector. Eddie accommodates. Eddie never resists. That was, and will never be, in the curriculum.

Steve likes Eddie’s happy panting and drooling and giggling too much. He keeps talking, low and half-lost in the hidrosis on Eddie’s collarbone; “God, your hole’s so greedy. You ever wonder how many nerve endings you have down here? You’re full of me, Eds. You’re like a fleshlight. My good boy. You’re not gonna remember your own name. Just serotonin in your gut. All the pretty, sticky chemistry. I’m gonna make you cum so fucking hard.”

“I know, I know,” Eddie babbles, clawing at him, constants shredded and larynx bruised. His neglected cock weeps on itself, precum sultry and shiny in his pubes, bobbing upright when Steve folds his knee up and slams home. “Ngh — oh god, feels so good, feels so big and thick in me, Stevie. I love your dick, love your brain, love you —”

For a few seconds, the world is just hands and heavy breathing and friction. Their bodies meet in wet, clicking paps. Distant car horns mean nothing. Only pressure, and sex, and the idiot joy of being filled, being wanted, being catalogued and learned. Steve never stops talking, sometimes words, sometimes numbers, sometimes just the cracked sound of having missed his smell. “I want you to cum. I want you to feel it. Prostate, spinal cord, muscle tightening. I want to fill you one day, watch my seed drip out of your hole just so I can lick it back up. Would you like that?”

Eddie moans so loud Steve wonders if anyone in the hall will care. He wants them to. He wants everyone to hear — wants the world to know what it sounds like when two organisms choose appetite over fear. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. Oh god, Steve, so close, gonna cum. I’m gonna cum, mmph —” 

Steve groans, sympathetic magic, a contraction in his groin as he strips Eddie’s dick like he was born to do so. He thrusts harder, faster, a ruthless piston that hurts as much as it loves. The bed makes a fuss. Eddie cries out like heaven, freezes up, and spills an arc of cum over Steve’s healing knuckles. Steve fills the condom soon after, bites it into Eddie’s sweaty shoulder with an anchoring, pathetic whine. 

The afterburn is slow, recursive, fizzing through his bloodstream like sodium in water. For a long time, neither of them say anything. Eddie is laughing — the quiet, relieved kind, hands fluttering over Steve’s back, chest, hips, as if confirming he’s still real. Steve stays inside, one long exhale, forehead to Eddie’s, letting his adrenaline sort itself out. He presses too many kisses to Eddie’s mouth, biting gently before settling into the procedure of post-coitus. Condom off, tied, thrown away. The hem of an old shirt on Steve’s desk chair passed over Eddie’s belly and hipbones streaked with his own fluid. Milk-white skin has gone rosy. Eddie huffs out a chuckle, twitchy, ticklish. Such a good boy.

“Oxytocin spike post-orgasm,” Steve murmurs when Eddie peppers kisses all over his face and wraps himself around his thrumming heartbeat. “That’s why you’re so cuddly. That’s why you wanna keep kissing me.”

“Shut up,” Eddie groans, ignoring how the two hemispheres in the ceiling watch him pet Steve’s triceps. “Just shut up about chemistry and be gross with me.”

“You wanna go again, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Might need my inhaler soon. Give me a few so my ass doesn’t cry.”

“Okay,” Steve burrows closer, looking at the lamp, Eddie’s hoodie on the ground, lube somewhere unseen. The moon starts to peek through his curtain, his spine sighing in bliss. He doesn't mind the fact there’s a guy in his sheets, inhaling them, trying to absorb Steve's axillary steroids through his pillow. It feels like progress. It feels like love. “Four minutes.” 

⋆.˚⚕ ⚛︎ ⊹₊ ⋆

Someone’s abandoned a poinsettia on the library reference desk. The bracts are curling brown at the tips, chlorophyll conceding to time. Overhead, the bulb hums a quarter-step sharp of Steve’s pulse. It’s almost soothing. It’s almost not.

They’re at their semi-regular table. Eddie’s shoulder is warm against his — last night rewired a few proximities, rearranged some furniture. He’s slouched sideways like an angel fallen off its niche, one knee cocked over the other, black jeans slit with intentional ruin. His hoodie has been loved to velour, Paranoid cover art abraded into pilled night. The collar hangs loose where Steve’s fingers stretched it. The marks on Eddie’s throat are visible in the harsh light, a constellation read without pretending it’s poetry. Steve practices not-looking the way priests practice Latin, which is exactly how he gets away with looking. Ecchymosis blooming through its tidy spectrum; oxyhemoglobin, deoxy, biliverdin, bilirubin.

The indestructible Nokia brick in Eddie’s hand is Steve’s. Antenna up, nosy. His thumb worries a rubber groove until it squeaks. He swallows, listens to it chirp. “Hey,” He says when the call picks up, already sighing, already braced. “Yeah, it’s me. Can you — no, I’m at the library. Can we talk?”

Steve aligns his pen with his notebook margin, two exact millimeters of overhang, and folds his hands like they’ve never done anything coarse, like they weren’t tangled in Eddie’s hair less than 24 hours ago. He is a good person performing decency. Trent does not exist to him except as debris, a control sample he’s already contaminated, an old bond displaced by competition. Ligand displacement with hickeys. If a house comes down because he spat on the joists, it wasn’t a house — it was a stage set waiting for a stress test. He is, at this moment, proudly a home wrecker (ha,) clipboard out, noting violations. Insufficient shear strength, poor anchoring, load-bearing walls made of bravado and hair gel.

“Trent,” Eddie says. The name makes something small and stupid snarl in Steve’s ribcage. “Listen to me for a second, okay? Don’t act older. You know I hate when you do that.”

The phone leaks Trent’s voice in shapes rather than words, patience sharpened into condescension, vowels filed to a sneer. Eddie’s rings tap a staccato on the tabletop. He keeps his eyes forward, but Steve can feel the side-glances. “I did something. No, not — Jesus, will you let me finish? I slept with someone. A friend.”

A cold maggot squirms beneath Steve’s brain tissue. Friend. It’s fair, field-tested language. His lizard-brain wants worse, wants proprietary. ‘Mine mine mine,’ it chants, feral and untrained. His possessiveness crawls under his skin like mercury; bright, heavy, impossible to separate from blood once spilled. He knows this reaction is ugly, unpublishable, the kind that burns the beaker from the inside, but he also knows he’d run it again, every time, just to watch the bonds form. Interference. Lowered activation energy. Every synapse insists on what the data already proved. Eddie isn’t a variable, he’s the product. The yield. The thing that makes the experiment worth kissing. 

“You don’t know him,” Eddie says. “I’m not giving you a play-by-play. I’m — what? No, this isn’t a referendum. I’m not trying on a hat.” Another pause. He snorts, wet and humorless. “You’re not exactly a maestro in the sack, babe. I’m telling you because you deserve to know.”

Steve wants to press his thumb to the bruise under Eddie’s jaw where the ridge of his own teeth is still a faint topography. He looks at the nearby plant instead. Red has gone funeral. Observation logged. Useless.

“I didn’t do it to hurt you,” Eddie says. “I did it because I wanted to. And because I wanted him. And because what we have isn’t the relationship I want.” He admits, shaky, then steadier. “You’re not nice to me. You cut my scripts for your shitty collage projects. You kiss me in public and then yell at me in the car.” 

Eddie’s knee starts bouncing. Steve rests a palm on it without thinking, just weight and heat, eight ounces of ballast. The patella settles under his hand like a resting hunt.

“I know you’re angry,” Eddie says. The gentleness is surgical, not sweet. Something on the other end turns his face embarrassed and fiery. He blinks hard, refusing tears. “I’m not proving anything to you. You want to hate me better? Fine. We’re done. That’s the thing I’m saying. We’re done. You can keep the jacket. The records, too. I won’t be at the gallery Friday. Yeah. Okay. Bye.”

He holds the dead line to his ear for one extra second like inertia might keep the conversation alive. Then his arm drops, air draining out of him in a long hiss. He knocks his forehead lightly into Steve’s shoulder. “Fuck,” he says into the knit, miserable, crying silently.

Steve follows the Harrington manual and comforts him by patting his hand; measuring pressure along the radius, thumb finding the tendon like he’s reading a pulse ox. He fishes out the sulking Walkman from his bag. “Here.”

Eddie takes it on reflex, flips the latch with his nail, uses Steve’s pencil to wind the slack ribbon until both spools match like pupils. He closes it, hits PLAY. The motor whirs with the dignity of old machines. Steve settles the headphones over Eddie’s ears, cupping both shells to seal the hiss. “Mazzy Star,” he says. “Don’t judge me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Eddie weeps. “Fade Into You, huh? Makes sense.” 

“Anhedonia has a soundtrack,” Steve offers, which was supposed to be a joke. It isn’t. 

Eddie’s cheek nudges further into Steve’s sweater. “He sounded calm. Too calm.” 

“Corticosteroids,” Steve says. “Or ego.”

“You can’t call my ex a steroid.”

“I can. I did.” 

Eddie keeps the headphones on a second longer than necessary, like he’s afraid silence will tell on him. When he finally takes them off, the room widens by half an inch. He tucks the headband down with surprising care and sets the Walkman on the table, palms flat, counting the distance between each diaphragm contraction. Steve stares at the poinsettia and admits, privately, that he likes being awful.

Not cartoon-villain awful — efficient awful. Polite, plausible deniability awful. He likes that he can fix a mess with a smile and a well-timed shrug. He likes that people hand him clipboards and keys. He likes that he can cut a feeling out of himself and label the jar and stack it somewhere high. He’s good at it. He’s practiced. Change is for people who want to be forgiven. He isn’t sure he does. And yet there’s Eddie, cheek-salt on his sweater, a little tremor in his ring finger, smelling like twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation and yesterday’s stage makeup. Eddie who laughs wrong, who trips right, who makes Steve want to open a door and stand in the draft until his eyes water.

“I went to Indianapolis last week.”

Eddie fingers pause where they’ve been toying with Steve’s Walkman. He turns just enough that Steve can see the smudge of kohl he didn’t quite get off this morning, eyebrow raised, wiping his face on his hoodie sleeve. “Is that a confession?”

“Sure,” Steve rubs his thumbnail over the grain in the tabletop until he feels the burr catch and his keratin splinter. “Skipped lab to drive down. Drank roadtrip coffee and went to a bookstore.”

“How riveting,” Eddie says, indulgent and wary.

“A specific bookstore,” Steve amends. He gestures vaguely at the air like it might provide pictures. “With a one-eyed cat. I bought The Advocate, Out, Christopher Street. Then I sat in the parking lot and read for an hour with the doors locked.” He looks away. The overhead vent kicks on, blowing chalky air around them. “I think I’m, uh, bisexual.”

Eddie’s eyes widen, a clean and cheerful gleam that makes something under Steve’s breastbone stand up straighter. He doesn’t reach for him, just tilts, shoulder brushing Steve’s and sending static up his carpi ulnaris. “Look at you,” he says softly. “Savvy in gay media. I’m proud of you.”

The sentiment lands stiffly. A few tables over, a group of freshmen don’t talk to each other. The clock over Periodicals clicks forward, and no one dies. He wants to duck his head, climb into Eddie’s hoodie. Hide until the heat in his face remembers where to go. Instead he picks up his pen, sets it down, flickers his gaze over the stud in Eddie’s earlobe. He’d sucked on it last night before they fell asleep, and he kind of wants to do it again. “Yeah, well. I have a long way to go.”

“No shit,” Eddie says with affectionate brutality. “Congratulations on your first step. Let’s get you a Girl Scout Badge.”

“Eddie,” Steve swallows thickly, preparing himself for atomic warfare. “I owe you an apology.”

Eddie bends his neck in consideration, surprised. “For which incident on our greatest-hits reel?” 

“The kitchen,” Steve answers, dull and honest. “I was —”

“Cowardly?” Eddie chimes in.

“Yes,” Steve exhales, feeling it under his ribs. “I let a room decide what kind of man I was. I picked the one who would hurt you fastest. I left you alone. And I’m sorry. Look, I keep a list in my head of the kinds of guys I’m allowed to be — son, student, scientist. None of them were ‘boy who wants a boy.’ Instead of updating the list, I dragged you through the mud. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t brave. It was lazy, and mean.”

“You were scared and you took it out on me,” Eddie agrees, blackened waterline rough. He stretches his leg under the table, prodding his boot against Steve’s ankle. “Here’s the deal. I do forgive you, because I’m an idiot, and I really, really like you. I’m not going to ask you to be a saint, you’re too fucked in the head — but I want us to be a real thing. Dating. The kind where we actually see each other, not just when you’re in the mood to feed your self-respect. Treat me like a person, not a lab rat.”

The room keeps humming. Steve feels the sentence land and take a chair. There’s the brief, stupid instinct to negotiate — what if I offer Thursdays, what if I promise eye contact but only on even days? — the little bureaucrat inside him rifling for loopholes. He recognizes it for what it is; the old habit of building a maze and calling it safety. “Okay,” he says, final. It surprises him by being easy. “I can do that.”

Eddie squints, suspicious in a way that’s more frightened than unsure. “Say it without the lawyer voice.”

“I will treat you like a human being,” Steve tries again, plainly. “No more disappearing acts. No more public-cold, private-warm. If I’m scared, I’ll tell you. If I can’t do something, I’ll say I can’t and not make you guess. If you touch me, I won’t act like it’s a homemade incendiary device.”

Eddie looks at him for a long beat, like he’s checking for cracks in the drywall. Whatever he finds makes his shoulders drop a half-inch in rout, in submission. In approval. “Prove it?”

Steve leans in and kisses him.

It’s so simple it feels impossible. He wants to ask for a certificate with signatures and a seal. It isn’t a performance, it isn’t a pantomime of bravery. It’s a small, deliberate press, the kind he could explain to the slowest part of his own heart. Eddie startles — library conditioning, history, party noise in his back pocket — but then he smiles, an involuntary, embarrassed little hiccup of joy that makes Steve bite the corner of his mouth. That’s a sound he’d like to deserve, would like to hear on a daily basis.

When they part, Eddie tips forward and rubs their noses together, silly, domestic, untheatrical. “I like that,” he mutters, a little breathless. “We should do that when people are mean to us.”

“I’ll file a motion,” Steve deadpans. Gets an eye-roll for his trouble that he treasures immediately.

“And because I’m a professional who believes in comping the critics…” Eddie fishes in his hoodie pocket. Produces a crumpled pink rectangle and slides it into Steve’s palm with a magician’s flourish. “For you.”

HAMLET — FEBRUARY RUN. Tonight’s date. A seat number stamped in damp purple that has bled at the edges. Steve holds it like it might skitter away. The Ghost, velvet cape, dust, textbooks, dipping — he remembers it all. 

“You don’t have to come,” Eddie says, which means please come. “I mean, do what you want. Just — there’s a gravedigger joke that actually worked in rehearsal and, you know, I’d like you to be in the room when it lands. Doors open at seven-thirty. You’ll see me in greaves, if that sweetens the deal.”

“It does,” Steve says, because he can already picture himself stripping Eddie of his aluminum battle armor after the show and rimming him in his dressing room. “Seven-thirty. I’ll be there.”

“If you bring flowers, I’ll heckle you from the stage.”

“I’ll bring a stapler,” Steve offers. Eddie looks delighted enough to kiss him again, so he does — quick and certain. The experiment runs its course in the proof that some reactions are meant to hold. Meant to stay.