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munsonkitten · 1 year ago

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Steve gets Eddie out of the Upside Down. He doesn’t know how he does it, but he does. He holds his organs in with his own body, carrying him pressed front to front, one arm cradled under his thighs and the other wrapped around his back, Eddie’s head lolling on his shoulder. He has Eddie’s face on his bad side. If Eddie were to say anything to him, it would be lost to the constant ringing in that ear, but he hopes it’s nothing too important — Steve understands the situation. Either Eddie’s going to survive, or he isn’t and nothing he tells Steve now will be any help without a hospital.

All he cares about is keeping Eddie awake and keeping him alive.

Each heavy footstep as Steve runs jostles Eddie back into wakefulness, thank god. Steve doesn’t know what he would do to keep Eddie awake otherwise, seeing as his own voice is gone, unable to make its way through his throat because how the fuck could anyone talk after seeing the shit he’s seen?

They can’t get through the gate in the ceiling of Eddie’s trailer like this, that much was obvious from the moment Steve found Dustin cradling Eddie’s limp body to his chest.

Steve gets him out. He doesn’t really remember how. He doesn’t really remember what gate they went through. He just remembers running. He just remembers Eddie in his arms, weak and dying.

He doesn’t really know how he managed to carry him that long or that far with injuries of his own.

They get him into a car, Nancy behind the wheel because Steve won’t let go of Eddie in the backseat, cradling him to his chest. They get him to a hospital, they see an ambulance unloading a mangled, broken body with a shock of fiery red hair.

Max. It’s Max. Max is hurt — bad.

They take Eddie away from him. They take Max away.

Steve fights off nurses that try to help him, too. He’s fine. He needs to get to his kids. He needs to get to Lucas who is fighting his way over into the hectic emergency room, to Erica who keeps a hand gripping the back of her brother’s shirt so she doesn’t lose him.

He wraps the kids up in his arms, pulling them close, not caring that he’s getting blood all over their clothes. Nancy and Robin help a limping Dustin over to a seat. He gets taken back to get looked at. Steve can’t go with him despite his protests. That’s my kid! he thinks he screams. His ears are ringing so bad at this point, and he doesn’t think it has anything to do with the constant buzz he usually hears. His head feels like it’s full of static as he watches Dustin get taken away. That’s my fucking kid! he screams again, and now his voice is hoarse and he has no idea how long he’s been yelling, but he gets pulled into a chair and his head is pulled into Robin’s lap as he lays down, shaking and sobbing into her stomach.

Steve is woken up by a firm hand on his shoulder. He hadn’t even realized he fell asleep, really. Not this time. He’s been so in and out for what feels like days (but was more like hours), that it’s hard to tell when he’s awake or not.

He looks up to see an older man standing in front of him. He’s balding, and has a gray goatee. He looks like he has permanent worry etched into his features, like something has been going wrong for every day of his entire life. His eyes are soft, though, in such a familiar way.

“Mr. Munson?” Steve croaks. His throat is dry, his neck hurts from sleeping sitting up, and he’s still covered in blood and gore.

“You must be the Harrington boy,” the man says without answering. His voice is gruff, and he has a Southern accent, but Steve wouldn’t be able to place where. He still looks at Steve with those kind eyes, though, despite the shortness of his words.

“Yeah. Yes, sir,” Steve nods, standing up. He immediately regrets that, feeling a wave of lightheadedness was from the blood loss he’s experienced in the last several days— several years, really. He holds out his hand to shake, but draws it back when he sees the red stain covering the entirety of it. “Steve Harrington.”

“You saved my boy,” Mr Munson says. He pulls Steve into a bone-crushing hug and releases a sob. “You saved my Eddie. Thank you. And call me Wayne.”

“H-have you heard anything?�� Steve asks him. “They won’t tell me.”

“He’s stable,” Wayne says, pulling away. “He’s… he’s in a lot of trouble. They think he did it; they have him strapped down and cuffed to the bed, but there's a good chance he’s going to make it.”

Steve breathes out a sigh of relief. He has no idea how they’re going to get Eddie out of this mess, but fuck, it’s better than him being gone. Steve was really scared there for a while.

“I don’t know what the state of your home is, but considering you’ve been here instead of going home and washing all that shit off you, I figure… I have a motel room outside of town,” Wayne says after a minute. “Unaffected by the earthquake. I can take you there if you want to get cleaned up and get some rest. Ed will still be here when you get back.”

Steve finds himself agreeing.

The water pressure in the motel sucks, and Steve finds himself washing blood away for what feels like hours. The water just won’t run clean no matter how much he scrubs and scrubs. He thinks his wounds might have reopened, but he won’t remove the bandages on his own. He doesn’t think he can stomach it. Plus, he didn’t want to rip open the wounds when peeling them off, so he figured soaking them would be the best option.

So much for not reopening the wounds, he thinks as blood continues to pour down the drain, and he feels less and less like he’s going to stay standing.

Feeling defeated and not at all clean, he steps out and grabs a towel from the rack. The white towel turns pink in an instant, then saturates deeper and deeper as more blood soaks into it.

A soft knock at the door nearly makes Steve slip in his haste to cover himself up. He opens the door to see Wayne standing on the other side with a pile of clothes in his hands.

“These are Ed’s. I grabbed them when I left home just in case he found me, but… Well, anyway, they should fit you,” Wayne says. He pushes them into Steve’s hands and stands there awkwardly. It seems like both of them have been feeling a bit awkward. They don’t know each other. Steve barely knows Eddie. But they’re in this together now, it seems, so they’re both trying.

Steve nods, looking down at the soft shirt and sweatpants in his hands. There’s a small hole in the neckline of the shirt, clearly worn and well-loved by Eddie.

“I don’t mean to overstep,” Wayne says. “But those bandages need to be changed.”

“Y-yeah,” Steve stutters. “Yeah, but I don’t have extras and I can’t r-really do it myself.”

“Alright,” Wayne says. He walks back into the main room, leaving Steve in the bathroom doorway. He picks up his car keys and his wallet from a table, shoving his wallet into the pocket of his jeans. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

Steve ends up sitting on the bed in nothing but the underwear Wayne had given him. He doesn’t think too hard about it being Eddie’s. There’s a towel beneath him, catching the blood that runs down his torso and his back. There are a few chunks taken out of his thighs that he didn’t notice before, too caught up in, well, everything to really care.

Wayne comes back not too much later, a bag full of gauze and bandages and antiseptic and Tylenol. He begins laying everything out on the bed beside Steve.

He works in silence, disinfecting Steve’s wounds and bandaging them up. Steve, on the other hand, makes a myriad of embarrassing noises, laced with pain.

“Eddie’s come home beaten up more than once,” Wayne says as he finishes up bandaging Steve’s thighs. “I’ve had to fix that boy up plenty of times.”

Steve can tell, too. Wayne is gentle and practiced in the way he does this, like it’s definitely happened way too many times to count. He doesn’t even think between each step, just does them carefully without speaking a word or hesitating.

“I don’t… I don’t know if Eddie’s ever told you about me,” Steve says, swallowing down the guilt rising in his throat. “But if he has… Thank you for helping me, anyway.”

“Oh, sure,” Wayne shrugs. “Not that Eddie didn’t come home crying, saying Steve Harrington called him a queer and tripped him so he fell into a locker and busted his nose, or anything.”

“No, yeah, I — I know,” Steve whispers. “I’m sorry, and… I’m going to make it up to him, I promise.”

“You saved him, Steve,” Wayne says. He starts packing up the supplies and shoves the bottle of Tylenol into Steve’s hands. “And last year, I asked if you were still giving him any trouble, and he said you weren’t friends with that Hagan boy anymore and you were leaving him alone, even if the other boys weren’t. He said you’d changed and I’ll be honest, I didn’t believe him, but I see it now.”

“He said that?” Steve asks.

“Uh huh,” Wayne nods. “And that Henderson boy would come around to talking with Ed about that game they play. He always had good things to say about you… Never quite understood why. It’s like he was trying to set you two up on a date, or something.”

“What?” Steve asks.

Wayne just chuckles in response, and says, “Don’t worry about it, kid.”

Steve ends up falling asleep on one side of the bed, warm in one of Eddie’s sweatshirts and a pair of pajama pants. He wakes up at some point, sweating and feverish. He rips the sweatshirt off, kicks off his blankets. Wayne is there a minute later with a cold washcloth that he places on Steve’s forehead.

He falls back asleep, but it’s fitful. He knows he should probably see a doctor about his injuries, he knows he’s fighting off an infection as he sleeps. He’s just so tired. He just wants to keep sleeping.

Wayne leaves a few times, comes back, forces water and pills down Steve’s throat, replaces the washcloth, checks his bandages. He doesn’t think his own parents ever cared this much for him when he was sick. He has no idea why a man he barely knows is showing him so much kindness.

Steve wakes up to the shrill sound of the hotel room phone ringing. It’s just a few short rings, a swear from Wayne, and then the ringing stops. Steve thinks about falling back to sleep when he sees tears fill Wayne’s eyes, and hears a very quiet, ‘Thank you.’

He assumes the worst with the way Wayne gets emotional, but then he hangs up and breaks out into a huge smile.

“We can visit him, kid,” Wayne tells him. He goes over to a duffel bag in the corner of the room — Steve knows it’s the one full of Eddie’s clothes. He digs through it until he finds something, and tosses it over to Steve, who, in his fevered state, can’t even think about doing anything besides letting them hit him in the face.

In the end, Wayne has to help Steve get dressed, and it’s awkward, and the pants don’t quite fit right and the outfit is nothing Steve would wear in a million years — Black jeans with holes in the knees, a black shirt with the sleeves cut off and ‘Iron Maiden’ emblazoned on it in red. Wayne picks up Eddie’s vest from the chair Steve carefully laid it down on. He had been wearing it under his jacket that he wore into the Upside Down. Eddie hadn’t asked for it back.

“You know something?” Wayne says, holding the vest in his hands.

Steve just shakes his head.

“He wears this every single day. Won’t leave the damn house without it,” Wayne smiles. He turns it over in his hands, running his fingers over a fraying edge of the back patch. “This patch on the back here was a t-shirt at one point. I took him to St Louis to see Dio in ‘84… It was supposed to be a graduation present, but I couldn’t take it back when he didn’t graduate, not when I saw how excited he was. Anyway, I bought him a shirt because I had saved up as much as I could to go all out for this. It was his favorite shirt, wore it every day until the neckline was falling apart and the sleeves were just about coming off. He asked me one day if it would be okay to turn it into a patch, you know. He knows it cost money, so he thought he’d ask. I just laughed and told him he better before it’s completely ruined.”

Steve finds himself smiling as Wayne tells him.

“Anyway,” Wayne says, passing the vest over to Steve. “For him to give this to you — I don’t know if you know what that means. He’s put hours into sewing these patches on, he made some of these pins by himself, you know. Made the design, pressed it with one of those button presses the school has, or whatever, he spent his own money on others. It’s all the things he likes most… What I’m saying is that this vest is Eddie. It’s everything he is. You better keep that safe and understand how much trust he has in you. That’s why I’ve been helping you, even knowing you were a dick to him in school.”

Steve feels like he’s going to burst into tears. He hugs the vest to his chest, and then quickly slips it on to wrap himself up in it. It’s covered in blood, it smells, but it’s Eddie’s.

Eddie isn’t strapped down to the bed when they walk into his room. He isn’t cuffed. There are no police officers sitting guard outside his room, stopping everyone but hospital personnel from going in. Steve is just about to ask how when the answer walks into the room.

“Hey, kid.”

Steve turns around and can’t believe what he’s seeing. Jim Hopper is standing there, his head shaved, his clothes hanging loosely off his body, deep bags under his eyes. But alive. He’s alive and standing right in front of Steve, and he’s the reason Eddie isn’t being carted away to prison while he’s still in a coma. Eleven steps into the room behind him, and her head is shaved again, too. She’s taller now, her face is so much older. Like she’s aged five years in the eight months since Starcourt. Steve imagines she’s seeing the same thing when she looks back at him.

She walks right in and wraps Steve up in her arms, her head pressed into his chest. She lifts her head and presses in close to his good ear before speaking again, and Steve — well, Steve figures of course El would know. She has always been far too observant.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

“For what?” Steve asks, returning the embrace.

“You have kept my friends alive,” El whispers. “You have taken care of everyone. Dustin says they would have had no chance if you did not drive them around.”

Steve laughs. That’s true, but he doesn’t feel like he’s all that important in the grand scheme of things.

Hopper pulls him into a hug next, and it’s weird because Hopper and Steve were never all that close, but it’s nice, too because Steve still mourned Hopper, and now he’s here. He’s here and he’s likely the reason Eddie isn’t cuffed to his bed rails, and he’s going to make all of the Upside Down bullshit better because he isn’t afraid to go in headfirst to anything.

“What are you wearing?” Hopper asks, taking a step back to look at him.

Steve feels even more heat rush into his face, even when he’s already feverish. “They’re not mine.”

Hopper barks out a laugh, then grabs Steve’s arm to pull him into the hallway.

“You need to get fixed up, kid,” Hopper says with no room for argument. “I got Eddie’s charges dropped, and now you’re going to do this for me, alright?”

“Or what?” Steve asks. “You’re going to re-arrest him?”

“I just might,” Hopper says, amused.

There’s a doctor at the end of the hallway that Hopper passes Steve off to, and he spends the next few hours being sewn up and pumped full of antibiotics. He spends that time worrying and wondering if Eddie is going to wake up anytime soon. He’s worried that he won’t be there when he does.

Steve doesn’t really know why that matters so much to him.