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stealthysteveharrington · 8 days ago

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Sad Steddie Scenario Part 5

Okay I said I needed to just post what I had mostly written instead of everything I wanted have in this chapter, so! Here we are! Hopefully it won't be a year until the next part, yikes.

Previously on SSS: Steve spends a week mourning his relationship while his parents are home and being assholes. Dustin shows up to yell at/comfort him.

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four

“I’ve got to drive the kids home.”

Eddie watches as Steve’s car pulls away, barely pausing at the stop sign before disappearing around the corner. He stares at the now-empty road until a squawk from the tree overhead startles him into action.

He can’t—he can’t think about what he did right now. He needs to grab his things and get out of here before he loses it. What the fuck just happened? What did he do? God, Steve’s face. No, no, he’s not thinking about it. He’s going back inside to get his shit, and then he’s leaving.

He slams open the door to Gareth’s basement and thunders down the steps. The guys have already settled back in, lounging around, shooting the shit, clearly in no mood to break the party up even though the session is over. They barely glance up when he enters, but Jeff instantly does a double take.

“Whoa, hey, man. You don’t look so good.” That gets all of their eyes on him.

“I broke up with Steve.” He doesn’t mean to say it, but the words are out there now, and it’s real. It’s real and he can’t take it back.

Around him, the guys are clamoring, a loud cacophony that essentially amounts to, “What?!”

“I broke up with him,” he says again, almost disbelieving. His mind is already racing. He can take this back. He can fix this. He just needs to drive to Steve’s house and tell him that he didn’t mean it. That he was body snatched or possessed or Vecna’d.

Okay, maybe not that last one. But, god --

Gareth crows with laughter, breaking through the spiral of Eddie’s thoughts. “Seriously? Good for you dude. We’ve been waiting. And thank god. He was such a square.”

Jeff rolls his eyes at Gareth. “Does it make you a square if you call someone a square?”

“Shut up, man.” Gareth shoves at him and Jeff shoves back.

Grant nudges Eddie from where he sits on the floor next to him, waits for Eddie to look down at him before asking softly, “Seriously, are you okay?”

“I—I don’t know. Did I fuck up?” His voice sounds funny, far off. His eyes refuse to focus. Jeff and Gareth immediately stop their tussling. Gareth leans up from where Jeff has him pinned to the floor, eyes blazing.

“No. This is a good thing. He was a douchebag.”

“You guys were around him for one night,” Eddie argues.

Jeff pushes up from the floor and stands in front of Eddie, serious in a way he rarely is. “Yeah, but Eddie, you’ve been fucked up for months. I know we don’t know what you went through, and I’m not asking you to tell us, but it’s sucked watching you be a freaking zombie.”

“We didn’t even really get to watch you for most of it,” Grant breaks in. “It was like Harrington had you on house arrest. Half the times we tried to visit you and he was there, he refused to let us near you. Every other time, he kicked us out after like five minutes. We had no idea what was going on, we couldn’t talk to you.”

“He was just being protective,” Eddie protests, but it’s weak. Steve had been pretty militant about visitors during the early days after spring break. But Eddie hadn’t minded. For most of his recovery, he hadn’t wanted to see anyone. He’d never explicitly told Steve to keep people away, though. He’d somehow just known. Eddie can only imagine to his friends, though, it looked like they were being deliberately, even maliciously kept away by a known asshole who probably wouldn’t know Eddie from Adam.

Jeff nods at Grant’s words. “We’re your best friends, man. We were terrified over spring break. Then suddenly you’ve got this guy who you couldn’t stand playing guard dog over you, and we’re just supposed to accept that?”

“Now that you’ve been out of your cage for a little while,” Gareth breaks in, “and we get to hang out with both of you for real, he acts like he’d rather be anywhere else. Doesn’t know our names, doesn’t talk with us, can’t even be fucked to remember shit that’s important to you. So, yeah. I think this break up is a good thing.”

Ten minutes ago, so had Eddie. But now all he can see is the devastation on Steve’s face.

“You guys mind if I skip the cleanup? I can get most of the stuff later.”

“Yeah, mean, get out of here. We’ll see you next week.”

“Or before then, if you want to hang out,” Jeff says. “Now that we’ll actually be able to see you.”

Eddie scoops up the papers with his DM notes on them, but leaves his screen, dice, and books to grab later, and trudges to his car.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The next week is a blur. Eddie barely leaves his room, barely leaves his bed. He hears most of the kids talking to Wayne at various points, but Wayne, like the saint he is, turns them away, leaves Eddie to rot in peace.

He misses Steve. It’s honestly stupid for him to stay in his room the way he does, because Steve is in every corner of it. He’s left so much shit there (including but not limited to: a Hawkins High baseball raglan, a Springsteen cassette, at least two pairs of boxers, and memories, memories fucking everywhere). Eddie can still smell him on his sheets. In his weaker, weirder moments, he finds himself trying to hotbox Steve’s scent, comforter pulled over his head as he buries his nose in his what’s now Steve’s pillow and sniffs hard enough to cause a headache.

Eddie almost drove to Steve’s house after leaving Gareth’s that awful day. Made it three blocks away before he turned around and went home. His brain had been a mess, unable to decide what to do or how he felt, and it still is days later. He goes over everything obsessively - the epic failure of their date, the argument in the car after, the two days he spent ruminating on their fate, and then the break up itself and Steve’s reaction to it.

Eddie’d felt so solid in his decision the minute Steve had opened his mouth at Gareth’s. But as soon as he said it, all his reasons seemed flimsy. Who cares that they had one bad date, that Steve had been at less than his best one time in front of Eddie’s friends, that he’d run the second Eddie had tried to talk about it? Eddie could have tried again, gone over to his house the next day or called him up, talked about it when their heads were cooler. And who cares that they don’t have anything in common? Steve still acts interested in whatever Eddie wants to tell him most of the time. Asks questions, smiles at him so, so sweetly and tells him to keep talking every time Eddie laments that he's boring Steve.

But there’s just been an itch at the back of Eddie’s mind since he got out of the hospital. A shadow at the corner of his eye that disappears when he turns to look at it fully. It tugs at him at odd moments, when things seem to be going fine, good, even, but there’s something off. He can’t see a pattern, but he knows he feels it more when Steve’s around. And every time his friends or Wayne push back against Steve, every time something Steve says hits a sour note, the shadow grows bigger and more menacing.

He’d felt the shadow swell at The Hideout as he waited in the parking lot, watching the minutes tick by. He tried to shake it when Steve showed up, tried to ignore it pulling more insistently as he clocked Steve’s attire, his inattention, his apathy, and his anger. But it grew and grew until it was almost suffocating, until he saw him at Gareth’s and it exploded in words he couldn’t…didn’t want to?…take back.

Now here he is. Midway through a D&D session with his three closest friends and three kids who clearly know something’s up with the way they’ve been trying him since the session started. Lucas and Mike are just being annoying, having side conversations, making Eddie repeat himself when they don’t pay attention to the narration, but Dustin’s actively hostile, antagonizing Eddie’s NPCs at every turn, tossing out snide remarks at the other players unprovoked, even the way he rolls his dice is disrespectful.

“You okay over there, Henderson?” He finally asks, the third time Dustin’s tossed his dice so hard across the board they’ve flown off the table.

Dustin accepts his dice back from Jeff who’d scooped them off the floor easily enough, but he sneers at Eddie. “What do you care, Munson?”

Even though Eddie knows the likely reason Dustin’s acting out, he still revels in the eyes going wide around him, the quiet ooohhs at Dustin’s words. Eddie smiles like a predator indulging its prey.

“A Dungeon Master always cares if his party members are having a good time,” he says, low and dangerous. “So if you have a complaint, I say out with it. Share with the class, please.”

The words and the tone pass over the kid who used to cower at the thought of Eddie being upset with him. The shadow grows larger.

“I don’t have anything to say.”

“Oh, really?” Eddie says, menacing, meeting Henderson’s head-on stare unflinchingly. “Well, if you don’t have anything to say, then—”

“What did you do to Steve?” Mike breaks into their standoff. Eddie’s attention snaps to him.

“Excuse me?”

Mike rolls his eyes at the theatrics, something Eddie wouldn't have imagined possible before spring break. “You heard me.”

“Why do you think I’ve done anything to him?”

“You haven’t been around at all, and Steve hasn’t mentioned you once since our last session. Normally he can’t shut up about you.”

“Mike!” Dustin hisses. Mike throws up his hands.

“It’s true! And his hair’s been all droopy!”

“Jesus Christ, Mike,” Lucas says, dropping his head in his hands.

“Oh no, not his hair!” Gareth cracks up with Grant and Jeff.

“Shut up, man,” Lucas says, with enough annoyance that the other guys stop laughing. Lucas never talks back.

“He dumped him,” Henderson bites off. “For no goddamn reason.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Eddie stares Dustin down from behind his DM screen. Yeah, he did do that. But he had his reasons…mostly…and he’s not going to let some snot-nosed freshman, no matter what they’ve been through together, act like he’s the bad guy in this situation. He did what he had to do.

“Yes, I do.”

“What,” Eddie scoffs. “Did Steve run and tattle to you?”

“What is he, five? No he didn’t tattle to me.” Dustin rolls his eyes, which Eddie’s getting real tired of seeing. “It’s not tattling to tell your best friend something bad that happened to you. Besides, he didn’t even want to tell me, but I caught him crying and made him.”

That brings Eddie up short. “He was crying?”

“He was crying.” Dustin says, somehow smug and angry and sad all at once. “I’ve seen Steve after he was tortured and I’ve never seen him cry.”

“After he was what?”

“Dude!” Mike smacks him on the arm, gives him a look as he gestures to the rest of the Hellfire guys whose eyes are all wide as saucers.

Dustin rolls his eyes. “Metaphorically tortured,” he amends. Eddie glances at the guys and can see it doesn’t help. Eddie needs to end this now, before anyone says something they regret, or anyone exposes something they really shouldn’t.

“Henderson, listen—” But he’s cut off by a herd of elephants galumphing down the stairs.

“All right, children, it’s time to go! Move your butts!” Instead of elephants, it’s Robin, entering the room like righteous whirlwind. Eddie clocks immediately that she’s spitting mad, eyes ablaze, mouth set.

Gareth, with zero sense of self preservation, whines, “But we haven’t finished yet!” The look Robin shoots him is pure venom.

“Yes, you have.” She dismisses him, and turns back to the kids who are already gathering their things without protest. “Now move it, chop chop. Nancy’s in the station wagon outside.” The kids don’t grumble the way they normally do when…when it’s Steve come to get them and is hurrying them out of the room. Dustin shoulder checks Eddie on the way out, knocking him off balance metaphorically if not physically.

As the kids file upstairs, Robin lingers.

“I need to talk to you,” she says to him. “In private, please.” It’s not a request. Eddie nods. Time for a reckoning.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Next up! Robin and Eddie have it out, and we get more insight into this "shadow" that Eddie feels.

I don't keep a tag list, so sorry! Likes and reblogs and comments are so so so appreciated!

#yayyyyyyyy an update on sad steddie scenario #eddie is so confused #but I can’t wait for him to know what he said about Steve that made Steve so mad #because I doubt he even noticed what he did #it didn’t even register for him that he was making excuses for steve #and now with the kids and robin all mad at him #and knowing how hurt steve is after the breakup #it’s just really good angst #steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #st fic

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