#also this is un-beta’d because my husband is bothering me to put my phone down

[frankenstein-ate-my-left-shoe]

Eddie's chest heaves as he sprints farther into the woods.

He's got some sense of where he's going, Hopper and Callahan got him in cuffs on Cornwallis which should be a clear cut through the forest past Loch Nora and to the park, but it's even darker here. The fading twilight blocked out by the cover of trees.

Still, he took off into the woods on the west side of the street so as long as he keeps going straight, he'll be fine.

Joke's on him though, nothing about him has been straight since before he came to live with Wayne (since he was born if what his science teacher Mr. Clarke once told him is to be believed), so it's no fuckin' wonder that he's gotten off course.

He dismisses it at first, the gradual incline he's following at more of a jog than a sprint now, but when he hears sirens go off way too close and he finds himself crashing into a meticuously trimmed backyard, it makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is why of all the gallivanting through the woods he'd just done, over and under fallen logs, rocks, through bushes and thickets, that his feet betray him on the half inch concrete lip of patio he hadn't yet slowed himself enough to avoid alltogether.

The toe of his sneaker clips the very corner, his feet try to right themselves, but he's already hurtling toward this person's inground pool.

In the split second he's falling, Eddie's brain does three things almost simultaneously: 1) realizes that whoever's house this is, there's only one light on. an upstairs window that must be a bedroom. Good. Maybe then he can pick himself up after this what-would-have-been super embarassing fall and get the fuck back out of their yard without them noticing.

2) It has enough sense to turn his body to the left to take the fall onto the concrete on his shoulder instead of his face, though it means he'll definitely be rolling into the pool now. Damn.

And 3) a simple thought of 'Aw, fuck.'

What his brain didn't account for was the edge of the pool. And that it should have considered its boney housing's downward momentum in the fall.

His temple collides with the edge where plastic meets stone, and Eddie Munson, freshly concussed and all but dead to the world, falls into the water.

---

The night Steve Harrington officially meets Eddie Munson is like every other.

At home, alone, waiting for it to be a reasonable time to go to bed.

He’s leaning his desk chair back on two legs, his feet propped up on his mattress, flipping through the new June '85 edition of Vogue that came in the mail that day addressed to Linda Harrington.

Halfway through reading about Eric Stoltz in that new movie Mask (and seriously debating guilting his parents into sending him one of these watches for a late graduation gift because shit that's a nice watch), he hears a splash from outside his window.

The sound makes him jump from how unexpected it is, and he would've for sure tumbled ass backwards off his chair if the wall hadn't been behind him.

He jumps up and yanks open his blinds to look out at the pool below.

There are fresh ripples weaving across the normally still top, and a shadow of something bubbling up from the bottom.

His guts twist up immediately; of course, it could be just some stupid deer, but it could also be any number of insane hell creatures, one of which had once used his pool as it's front door before.

"Shitshitshitshit," Steve snatches up his bat from under the bed and launches himself out his room and down the stairs in record time.

By the time he gets to the edge of the pool, the ripples have dispersed significantly, and the..whatever it is.. at the bottom is releasing bubbles slower than ever.

It takes about a second more for him to parse out the very obviously human shape crumpled under the water and--is that blood?

Steve dives into the water directly across from the bright red smear on the plastic lining.

His eyes burn with the chemicals, all he makes out of the person is a pale face and dark hair.

He hooks an arm under theirs and across their chest, and pushes up from the bottom.

Steve finds a foothold in the shallows and powers over to the stairs as fast as he can, pulling the limp man up onto the concrete.

He gets to work on them immediately, checking for a pulse, checking for breath..nothing.

"Fuck Fuck Fuck!" Steve starts compressions on his chest, counting in his head before sucking in a deep breath, pinching the guy’s nose shut, and sealing his mouth onto the blue lips below him.

Nothing.

"C'mon Munson," Steve starts counting compressions again. "Don't do this to me, man." It surprises him that this is when his brain pairs the pale features and dark denim to Hawkins' Super-Senior, but it's him alright. The vest is a giveaway, though he definitely looks like a completely different person without his bangs hanging over his forehead, or that dumbass grin he has when he's going on some tirade at lunch.

Steve closes his lips over Eddie's once again and this time, it works.

Eddie pitches forward, spewing chunky water all over the ground in front of him.

Steve supports his back as he does, "Shit, man, let it out, let it out." He looks down then, finally realizing Eddie's arms have been completely incapacitated by a pair of cuffs this whole time.

His breaths are ragged, gagging while he takes in shaky breaths.

He continues to pat Eddie's back, smacking his palm over some demon-looking thing on the back panel of his vest.

"Breathe, Eddie, you got it." The older boy's dazed gaze turns to him then, "You back with me?"

"Harrington?" it comes out a wheeze.

“Hey Munson, you okay?”

Eddie looks around at Steve’s yard, to the pool, “Yeah I—Yeah..” he looks back at Steve, “What happened?”

“You fell into my pool, dude.” he chuckles, “I pulled you out and you weren’t breathing.”

“…huh.”

That pulls another snort out of him “Yeah, ‘Huh.’.”

Eddie looks off into the woods, then back to his face. “And what happened before that?”

Steve pulls lightly on the cuffs. “I was hoping you could tell me that.”

thinking about eddie getting arrested one night by Hopper and officer whats-his-face and when they turn their backs on him for a second he fucking bolts.

hands cuffed behind his back he books it down the street and they're both chasing him, and it plays out like the scene from super bad, neither of them can catch him cuz he's wicked fast and they just end up panting in the middle of the road as he jangles his way into the distance, Hopper with his hands on his knees, gasping for breathe like "he's a freak. He's the fastest kid alive."