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carolperkinsexgirlfriend · 4 days ago

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can you see the stars in your dreams (and do they have a lot to say about me) - Part 17

Or: a secret Admirer AU

PART 1 || PART 2 || PART 3 || PART 4 || PART 5 || PART 6 || PART 7 || PART 8 || PART 9 || PART 10 || PART 11 || PART 1 || PART 13 || PART 14 || PART 15 || PART 16

Eddie’s back to school on Tuesday, black eye turning a mottled sort of green, lip scabbed over. From where he’s hemmed in by Robin and Chrissy, Steve watches Eddie catch a glimpse of him and bolt the other way.

Jeff sighs, lets go of his hold on Chrissy’s arm, and says, “sorry, Steve. I’m just gonna—” and then he points toward Eddie and follows after him without another word.

Steve’s gut clenches with guilt. He’d put that look on Eddie’s face, had caused the rift in his and Jeff’s friendship, had split the forming group up with his ridiculous crush. But Chrissy and Robin are still here, standing by his side.

“Are he and Jeff okay?” Steve asks, biting his lip as he glances at Chrissy.

“I think so,” she says, looking after her boyfriend. “They talked on the phone, but Jeff didn’t tell me what about.”

“Forget about them,” Robin replies, reaching out to take his hand even as it makes everyone around them stare. “Come on, Stevie, or we’ll be late to Ms. Clickity Clack’s class.”

Steve passes the rest of the day in a daze, the spot at his side a revolving cast of Chrissy, Robin, and Jeff, like they’d all talked behind his back and decided he couldn’t be trusted with being alone right now. Steve can’t blame them because as soon as he’s left unattended in his big empty house, he gets out his notebook and pen, and begins to write.

Eddie —

I’m sorry I never got to read your last letter, but it wasn’t for me anyways. Maybe none of them were, not really. And I’m sorry about that, even sorrier about how your pretty face got caught in the ceasefire. I’m just full of sorries I’m to scared to tell to your face—from the way you ran when you saw me in the hallway this morning, maybe you wouldn’t want me to anyway.

You’ve always been the brave one, so you must really want to not see me, huh? I hope you and Jeff are friends again. I’m sorry about that too, I’m the one who asked him not to tell you. I was afraid, but that’s no excuse.

I don’t know how to stop wanting to right write to you. I can’t turn off the part of me that still wants to know everything about you. There’s a whole in my heart, and I keep trying to find people to fill it, but I can never be in love with someone who loves me back. You know?

I’m sorry, Eddie. Maybe someday, I’ll get to say it to your face.

Sorry,

Steve

He closes the notebook on the damning words and shoves it into his nightstand so he doesn’t have to look at it. Sleep doesn’t come—the house is too quiet. He grabs the phone off his dresser and calls the only other person he knows whose parents trust them enough to have a phone in their bedroom.

“H’lo?” Robin mutters sleepily after finally picking up the phone six rings later.

She sounds tired—Steve’s sorry he woke her. “I wrote another letter,” he says.

That seems to perk her up instantly, as she hisses down the line, “Steven James Harrington.”

“Not my name, Robin Steven Bobbington,” he replies, talking right over her shrieked “well, that’s not mine!” to continue, “I’m not going to send it.”

“You better not,” she replies, and Steve can hear some rustling on her end, like she’s settling back down into her bed. He wishes, suddenly, that he was in there with her, clutching her hand as they fall asleep side by side. Instead, he lays down on his own bed and concentrates on the noises coming down the line.

“Is it stupid that I miss him?” he asks.

“Yeah, kinda.”

“Robin!”

She laughs, a quiet sleepy chuckle that warms him straight through. “I’m just saying! He’s been treating you like shit, Stevie.”

Steve sighs, burrowing down under his comforter and taking the phone with him. “He was different in the letters,” he whispers, like someone in his empty house might hear him otherwise. “Sweeter, you know?”

Robin sighs, “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

There’s enough sorries to go around for all of them, apparently. They’re quiet for a while, Robin’s breathing keeping him company in his big, lonely bed with his big, lonely thoughts.

“I love you, Robbie,” he whispers. “You know that, right?”

He’s been saying it a lot lately, throwing the words around like they’ll connect this time and get him something real. And they had, with Chrissy, with Robin, hell, even with Jeff. Just, not with Eddie. Maybe someday, he’ll learn to be okay with that.

“Love you, too, Dingus,” Robin replies, like it’s easy.

He falls asleep that night to the sound of Robin’s quiet snoring.

***

Eddie thinks about it—obsessively, compulsively. He dreams about it, jerks off about it, fucking cries about it. He reads the letters, again, and again, and again, wishing desperately that he still had that first one. At school, he checks his locker obsessively, compulsively, hoping there’s another note in his locker—there never is.

“Dude, what’s your problem?” Gareth asks, an elbow into Eddie’s side.

“Ow, ribs!” Eddie cries, curling away from him and into Doug at their usual lunch table.

“Sorry!” Gareth replies, leaning away from him and raising his hands up like that’ll somehow prove he’s harmless.

Jeff snorts around his sandwich, “gotta be careful, Gare-bear. He’s precious cargo now.”

“Oh fuck off,” Eddie replies, rolling his eyes as the rest of Hellfire laugh around him.

“No, but seriously, dude,” Gareth asks, this time without the thrown elbow. “What’s up with you?”

Eddie looks across the cafeteria at Steve and Chrissy’s usual spots, still empty the way they have been for weeks. He worries, sometimes, that they’re not eating, and it’s his fault.

Hopefully, they’re just packing lunches from home and eating somewhere else (he’s been too afraid to check).

“Can’t tell you buddy,” Eddie replies, still looking at the empty spot like that’ll somehow make the duo appear. “I promised.”

Gareth, clearly having followed his line of sight, leans closer and asks in an unsubtle whisper, “but it’s about you know what?”

Doug sits on, oblivious, but Jeff snorts again and asks, “okay, you didn’t tell me jack shit, but you told the freshman?”

“Sophomore, jackass!” Gareth cries, before seeming to realize the implications of Jeff’s sentence. “You told Jeff?”

“I knew before you did,” Jeff says smugly, and Eddie’s starting to get pissed off about that again.

“How!”

“Jeff, dearest?” Eddie grits out. “Do you want me to punch you in the face?”

That shuts the table up catastrophically. But in the end, Jeff sighs and says, “I’m coming over after school,” and the rest of lunch is spent fielding Gareth’s indignant questions.

True to his word, Jeff climbs into Eddie’s passenger seat at the end of the day. Eddie doesn’t take them to the trailer, he just drives around, taking back roads round and round, restlessness making his fingers twitch in the gear shift.

Jeff’s the one who breaks the silence, in the end. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he says, making Eddie flinch at the sudden noise. “Steve just seemed so scared, and Chrissy was crying so—”

“He was scared?” Eddie interrupts, stuck on the thought. He’d known that, before, but now that Eddie’s afraid, too, it hits like a punch to the chest.

“Of course he was,” Eddie replies to his own question. Suddenly unable to focus, Eddie pulls over to the side of the road. “I’m scared, too.”

Jeff sucks in a breath; Eddie doesn’t look away from his own knees.

“Yeah?”

Eddie bites his lip, knowing that Jeff will be able to read between the lines. “Yeah.” His eyes are watering, and Eddie swipes at them, embarrassed. “And I know we’re supposed to be talking about us, but I just—”

“No, hey,” Jeff replies. Eddie hears the sound of his seatbelt unbuckling, and the rustle of him shifting in his seat, and suddenly, Jeff’s hand is clasping Eddie’s shoulder, shaking him around just a little. “You’re my best friend—we’re fine, dude.”

Eddie swipes at his eyes again, “I think I want to ask him out, but what if I’m wrong?” Eddie asks, tracking Jeff’s expression out of the corner of his eye. “I don’t want to hurt him again.”

“So, what?” Jeff asks, voice deadpan. “You find out he likes you and suddenly he’s not just a jock anymore?”

Eddie looks down at his own knees, bracing for a hit he knows will never come. But, Eddie’s always been good at hurting himself, so he thinks about that yellow nail polish again, the enraptured look in Steve’s eyes during every D&D session, the way he’d glued himself to Robin Buckley, band nerd supreme’s side in recent weeks. The way he’d look at Eddie like he wasn’t the king of the freaks, like he was worth something.

“He was never just a jock,” Eddie murmurs. “I just never let myself think about it.”

Jeff mmmhmms him and Eddie knows him well enough to hear the doubt beneath the agreement.

“I was afraid, okay?” Eddie laments, scrunching his eyes closed tight until that makes his bruised eye ache too much. “You wouldn’t get it.”

At that, Jeff scoffs, and before Eddie can start up another tirade, he replies, “right, the black guy dating a white girl in Po-dunk, Indiana has no idea how scary it can be to make a move on the person you like.”

Okay, fair.

“You know what could happen if the wrong person finds out?” Jeff continues. “I’ll be lucky if they let me get out of town alive.”

“Okay, okay! I get it, sorry!” Eddie cries, throwing his hands up in defeat. And Jeff, being the asshole he is, just laughs at his discomfort. “How’s that going anyway?”

“With Chrissy?” Jeff asks, continuing when Eddie nods. “She’s great, man. I really, really like her.”

He’s smiling all goofy and in love. Eddie waits for the jealousy to hit; it never comes. Even as he’d flirted with her, there’d always been a disconnect for him between the letters and the girl. He knows why, now.

“I’m happy for you.”

Jeff aims that same goofy smile at him and punches his shoulder. “Thanks, man.”

Eddie wants to feel that way about someone. He wants to think of them and smile like he just can’t help himself. And with Steve Harrington of all people, maybe he can.

“If I ask Steve out, do you think he’ll still say yes?”

“Oh, for sure,” Jeff replies without hesitation before he turns to Eddie and eyes him up and down. “But are you sure you want to?”

Eddie bites back the defensive retort rising on his tongue, and grits out, “what do you mean?”

Jeff sighs and leans back in his chair. Eddie waits, three seconds from snapping as he stews in Jeff’s silence, hands clenched so hard against the steering wheel that it feels like one of his nails might pop clean off.

“Jeff–”

“No one’s ever liked you before!” Jeff cries, and it hits Eddie like a punch to the sternum. “And maybe it’s not fair of me to ask but, are you sure you even really like him?”

“What?” Eddie asks, his mind a record skipping against a bent needle. “What do you–”

“Eddie, man,” Jeff sighs, swiveling his head to finally look Eddie directly in the eyes. “Do you like Steve Harrington, or do you just like that he likes you?”

He drops the wheel, hands almost numb as he shakes them out, no longer able to meet Jeff’s eye.

How would anyone ever know that for sure? How can he know the origin of a feeling when it’s been there, simmering in the background of his brain, just waiting for him to wake up? How can he separate the feeling for a person and the person’s feeling for them?

That’s like asking him to unbraid his hair, let it fall back together, and still be able to tell which strands made up each component of the braid–it can’t be done.

But, “Gareth said I was obsessed with him,” Eddie replies, barely above a whisper. “Like, before I knew he wrote the letters?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Eddie laughs, but it’s just like Steve said–it sounds different when he doesn’t think it’s funny. “And, he was right, you know? I was flirting with Chrissy, but I couldn’t stop thinking about him.”

Eddie runs a shaking hand through his hair and buries his face into his hands with a shudder. “He’s just–he’s Steve Harrington, right? Everyone knows everything about him, but then he just changes the script!” Eddie’s smiling now, manic, animated. “And I wanted to know everything.”

Eddie drops his hands to look over at Jeff, meeting his eyes once more. Jeff looks patient, ready, hopeful in a way he hadn’t before, so Eddie keeps talking.

“Like, Chrissy was flirting with you and he didn’t even seem to care, and the yellow nail polish, and he came to Hellfire, Jeff. Steve Harrington came and watched us play Dungeons and Dragons.”

“I know,” Jeff replies, grinning now, pearly whites all on full display.

“And when he came to band practice, he was just like, watching me, and I sort of wanted to die, but in a good way, you know?”

Jeff decidedly does not look like he knows, but he’s still grinning across at Eddie like he’s proud of him. Eddie’s kind of proud, too, that he’s managing to say all of this aloud. It feels somehow new and a long time coming at the same time.

“Okay, you can ask him out,” Jeff says, turning forward in his seat and buckling his seatbelt once more.

Eddie laughs. “Oh, because I needed your blessing?”

“Yeah,” Jeff replies, grinning as he turns back to Eddie, looking him up and down like he’s a slab of meat Jeff’s checking for its quality. “Maybe wait until you’re healed up, though. You look like one of those cardboard box kittens that I keep seeing on the news.”

“Shut up!” Eddie squawks, but he’s smiling, helplessly, hopefully.

Eddie Munson with a chance at love, who would’ve thought?

PART 18

#koko's steddie secret admirer au #steddie #my fic #Jeff. the man that you are<3<3<3<3<3 #i am...SO excited for tomorrow's part. like. after struggling Hard with it. it might have been the most fun i had in writing for the fic

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