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steddiehyperfixation · 1 year ago

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don't you forget about me (steddie fic)

saw this post and was inspired to write something angsty <3

The first thing Eddie is aware of when he wakes up, before he even opens his eyes, is the dull, aching pain throbbing through pretty much his entire body. The second thing he’s aware of is that someone is holding his hand.

“Eddie?” The hand in his tightens its grip as Eddie begins to stir; the voice it presumably belongs to sounds immeasurably relieved, yet only vaguely familiar.

Eddie groans. His eyelids flutter, blinking awake, and he groggily rolls his head to the side to get a look at whoever had spoken.

The voice sighs again, “Oh thank god-”

“Harrington?” Eddie’s eyes fly open wide now as they land on the mystery man sitting beside him on the edge of the bed - a man he most definitely is not close enough with to be holding his hand, and a bed that is most definitely not his own. He snatches his hand away. “What the hell are you doing? Where am I?”

“Ed-” Another man’s voice, this one just as relieved and infinitely more familiar. It fills Eddie with relief too as he looks to his other side to find his uncle Wayne rising from a nearby chair to come up next to him.

“Wayne, what-?” His surroundings are becoming more clear. “What happened? Why am I in a hospital? And why the fuck is King Steve at my bedside?” Eddie tries to sit up only to gasp and wince in pain as the dull ache in his sides sharpens to near agony at the movement.

“Take it easy, son.” Wayne’s hand lands on his shoulder, gently but firmly pushing him back down onto the pillows. “You were hurt real bad.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Eddie grumbles out. He sucks in a deep, intentional breath and exhales slowly, the pain beginning to dull again now that he’s settled. His questions are still largely unanswered, though. Blank mind reaching desperately for any logical piece to this bizarre puzzle, he turns an accusing glare to Harrington. “Did you land me in here? Is that why you’re here, some sort of weird guilt thing?”

Harrington’s looking at him like a kicked puppy. “What? No, I-” he falters, takes a shaky breath and swallows painfully like he’s trying not to cry. “You don’t remember?”

“I don’t remember what? Will someone just tell me what happened?” Eddie’s confusion is rising more and more into agitation with every second he remains without an explanation.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” Harrington asks quietly.

“I was driving home from school, just found out I wasn’t gonna graduate again.” Eddie frowns as he thinks back, still trying to put pieces together. “Did I crash my car? Is that it? I was emotional and not paying attention and got into an accident?”

Yet again, he receives no answers.

“Eddie, what month is it?” Wayne asks instead, his tone dangerously measured and serious. “What year?”

“May…” Eddie says warily, “1985.”

His words hold a weight he doesn’t understand, landing heavy on the others in the room and thickening the air. It sends a chill of dread down his spine, the way his answer etches concern deep into the lines of Wayne’s face, the way Steve Harrington seems to take it like a blow to the chest.

Harrington exhales sharply as if he’s been punched, standing abruptly and taking a few stumbling steps back. Wayne says, “It’s April of ‘86, Ed.”

Eddie’s blood runs cold. “No. No, it can’t be.”

“I’m gonna go tell the nurse you’re awake,” Harrington mumbles, his voice strained and his eyes glassy with barely held-back tears.

“I’ll go,” Wayne offers, pushing himself away from Eddie’s bed. He gives Harrington a meaningful look, though what that meaning is, Eddie can’t decipher.

Harrington turns his devastated gaze to the older man. “But, Wayne, he doesn’t-”

“I know, kid.” Wayne gives a sad smile and places a sympathetic hand on Harrington’s shoulder as he passes by. “Just talk to him.”

Eddie is thrown off by this familiarity between them. Since when were those two close? He feels like he’s entered some sort of parallel universe where everything is just ever so slightly wrong. It leaves an itch beneath his skin, uncomfortable and out of place, like he no longer quite fits in his own body, in his own life. He’s lost 11 months, apparently, and this world is no longer his; he doesn’t know where he fits into it anymore.

Wayne leaves the room, and Eddie wants to protest: Don’t leave me here with this guy I don’t know in this time I don’t know, please, you’re the only thing that feels safe and familiar! Anxiety is crawling through him like a thousand tiny bugs in his veins. He wants to scream, he wants to cry, he wants to run. Anything to shake this feeling loose. But he’s confined to this bed, trapped both by his pain and by all these machines he’s hooked up to, and he sure as shit isn’t going to have a breakdown in front of Steve goddamn Harrington.

Instead, Eddie resigns himself to this situation and casts a sideways glance at Harrington who very much looks like he’s also trying not to have a breakdown. “I’m freaking out, man,” Eddie says finally, hating how shaky and pathetic his voice sounds. “I swear to god, Harrington, if you don’t tell me what the hell is going on…”

Harrington worries his lip between his teeth as he hesitates. “It’s a lot to explain.”

“Yeah, I bet,” Eddie scoffs out a humorless laugh. “I’m missing nearly an entire year, of course it’s a lot to fill in. Unless I’ve been here this whole time?”

“No.” Harrington shakes his head. “No, you’ve only been here about a week. I- I don’t know why you’re missing so much time, the whole Vecna thing only started like a week before that-”

“Vecna?” Eddie interrupts to question. “What does any of this have to do with the D&D campaign I was planning? And, also, how the fuck do you know about that?”

Harrington closes his eyes for a second and takes a breath, like having this conversation is the most painful thing he’s ever had to do. “I’m not talking about D&D, Ed. Vecna was a real-life monster from a real-life alternate dimension we called the Upside-Down. The kids only called him Vecna because we didn’t know who he was at the time and he, like, cursed people before he killed them, but he was actually Henry Creel, which is a whole other fucked up story.”

“Okay…” Eddie doesn’t know who ‘the kids’ are and he’s skeptical of the way Harrington talks so factually about monsters and dimensions and curses existing in the real world, but he does remember his uncle telling him stories about the demonic tragedy of the Creel family, which is the only thing that makes any of this even halfway believable. It still doesn’t explain how Eddie wound up in the hospital with his entire body feeling like it’d been run through a blender, though, or why the former king of Hawkin’s High was hovering over his sickbed. He gestures for Harrington to continue.

“I never wanted you to get involved in all this Upside-Down shit,” Harrington’s voice breaks. He steps closer to Eddie’s bed again, and he looks so so sad as he stares down at him that it makes Eddie’s own heart ache, just a little bit. Harrington’s hand twitches at his side as if he means to reach out for Eddie but then thinks better of it, running the hand through his hair instead as he continues, “I tried to keep you from it for so long, I really did, but then Vecna killed Chrissy in your trailer and the whole town blamed you and you were just a part of things then, there was no getting around it. You helped us fight him - Vecna. You kept his army of bats off our ass while we weakened his body and El weakened his mind. If it weren’t for you we never would’ve defeated him and we certainly wouldn’t have all made it out alive.” Harrington’s gaze softens, as does his voice, his next words almost a whisper, “You were a hero, Eddie.”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” Eddie says, like that’s the least plausible part of Harrington’s story. And, really, it is. He can wrap his mind around a lot of things: a murder in his trailer - sure, Forest Hills always was a shady place; the whole town accusing him of being a killer - yeah, of course, that tracks; even an evil wizard from another dimension with an army of bats - fine, okay, why the hell not. But Eddie Munson is no hero, and he’s definitely not any sort of fighter either.

“No, you never did think so, did you?” Harrington mutters with a sad sort of fondness and the barest trace of a wistful smile. “But it’s true. Dustin was in danger and you didn’t even think twice. You ran right into the fray without a second thought, sacrificed yourself so that the rest of us might survive. Those bats nearly killed you, b-” he breaks, choking on whatever word he was going to say. His eyes swim with yet more unshed tears. “I almost thought they had killed you, you know. I thought you were dead when I carried you out of the Upside-Down,” he admits shakily, choked up and barely managed, “and even when I brought you here and you were stable, I was still so scared you wouldn’t wake up…”

Eddie doesn’t know how to react to any of that information or to such a display of emotion. His own hands twitch now with the urge to reach out and comfort him, but he too denies that instinct. He tries for humor instead, something lighter, cracking a grin and teasing, “Aw, Stevie, I didn’t know you cared.”

Harrington makes a sound halfway between a sob and a laugh. “Oh, Ed, you have no idea.”

“We were friends then, weren’t we?” Eddie guesses now, carefully. It’s rapidly becoming the only possible explanation for the guy’s behavior around him. “Before all the Vecna stuff?”

“Yeah,” Harrington manages, forcing a small, sad smile as his eyes finally overflow and streak his cheeks with tears. “Yeah, we were good friends.”

Wayne reenters the room then with a nurse in tow, and Steve quickly turns away and rubs his hands over his face. He needs to pull himself together; he can’t break down right now, not yet, not here.

He listens, distantly, as the nurse asks Eddie a bunch of questions and then tells the rest of them that she needs to take him in for some tests to determine the cause and prognosis of Eddie’s amnesia. He watches, numbly, as she wheels Eddie’s entire bed out of the room.

Steve can barely hear, barely see, his emotion clouding his eyes and roaring in his ears. He stares blankly through the open doorway and struggles to swallow down the ever-rising lump in his throat.

Wayne’s voice rumbles from somewhere beside him, but he can’t quite make out the words. “What?”

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” Wayne says, the sound reaching Steve’s ears a little clearer now. “I asked if you were alright.”

Steve shakes his head. His voice comes out coarse and raw, “‘Course I’m not alright.”

“Right, ‘course you’re not,” Wayne echoes. He follows Steve’s mournful gaze to the door Eddie had disappeared through. “What did you tell him?”

“Told him he was a hero,” Steve croaks, “...and that we were good friends.”

“Ah…” Steve’s vision is so blurred behind a thick layer of tears he can’t see the sympathetic frown on the old man’s face, but he knows it’s there. “At least he’s alive, kid,” Wayne tries to be comforting. “You can always start over.”

“Yeah, I know, but I don’t- I don’t want to start over, I just want-” Steve chokes back a sob. He just wants Eddie.

It’s a horrible thought, but Steve almost thinks that this just might be worse than if Eddie really had died… Because how is Steve supposed to handle the fact that his boyfriend of 9 months no longer knows him? How is he supposed to cope now that the love of his life looks right at him and no longer sees him?

He closes his eyes, presses the heels of his palms into his eyelids, inhaling a shaky breath and exhaling an even shakier sigh. Steve whispers, “It feels like I’m losing him all over again.”

(part two is here!)

(also on ao3)