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hitlikehammers · 1 month ago

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so maybe steve strikes a bargain with unknown eldritch upside down gods in exchange for eddie’s life, what of it? ♥️ the hell else was he supposed to do, don’t even judge him ✨what’s a hades/persephone kinda deal among soon-to-be-more-than-friends, anyway?✨

✨future fic (because somehow steve signed them up to be 💫star-crossed-adjacent guardians of the seasons ❄️☀️ or some shit)

but they’re canny motherfuckers; they can make the arrangement bearable their own

(kind of.)

They’d been lucky. They’d been lucky that Steve had come back on his own to the boathouse that first night. Had talked Eddie down, made sure he wasn’t alone—held him, a stranger at best, a pariah at worst, and never once shamed him, fucking soothed him when he couldn’t fight tears. They’re lucky that the walk through the woods somehow short circuited any remaining shred of sense in him, or maybe shocked it into overdrive as he’d grabbed Steve behind a tree thick enough to hide from either of their compatriots turning around and catching it, catching them when he carefully—those bats hadn’t been kind—but a little bit crazedly pressed Steve against the fragile-rotting bark, where Steve stilled, stared, and then closed the distance between them. Eddie’d had his taste on his lips right up ‘til the end. Not even his own blood had taken it from him at the last. He’d felt death, though, like a limbo, a haze rather than a darkness, a liminal fog and he’d screamed, he hadn’t felt quite alone, even before a voice echoed: “We are freed from him now.” Eddie’d shouted questions long after his throat started stinging for it, before realizing the echoing voice hadn’t been talking to him; most especially when he’d felt warmth in inexplicable places in the form he’d been walking around in that he wasn’t wholly sure was even really and truly a body, but then— “You can’t take him.” Eddie turned, knew it fruitless to try to find the source but it hurt so bad because that voice was absolutely tortured, and it was— It was Steve. Or: of course Steve bargains with the ancient eldritch deity beings of the Upside Down for Eddie’s life. And maybe they end up some ill-defined guardians of the seasons in weird Persephone-style twist as a result. What the hell else was he supposed to do?

rating: m ♥️ tags: post-S4, everyone loves, getting together, magical realism✨, established relationship, future fic, of course steve makes a bargain with the eldritch ancient god being things in the upside down to save eddie’s life, what ELSE what he going to do?, don’t even pretend to judge him, eddie and steve become ✨guardians of the seasons✨, it’s a task they definitely make their own, very Persephone coded, fluff, romance, softness, let me repeat that last one: SOFTNESSSSSS ♥️

for @steddielovemonth day twenty-one: “If you remember me, then I don't care if everyone else forgets.” ― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

“How can you even stand it?” Dustin whines, his leg bouncing frantically as he tries to hide how he’s scanning the edges of the park for any hint; and sign: “If Suze and I—

“You’re missing him hard, aren’t you?”

Eddie asks it from behind his sunglasses—how bright the glare sparkles off the ice is the outward sign that it could be today, that it could possibly happen today; but for Eddie, there’s no need for the kinds of hints that drove Dustin to his door, bouncy and frantic, anything but the impressive computa-chemical-whatever-nerdy-as-fuck-genius-level professional he’s grown into, with his own mini-brood of Hendersons, no: he’s immediately fifteen years old again asking Maybe today, could he maybe come today, is it close enough, like, not on the calendar but sometimes he shows up unexpected, right, so maybe today—

It would be unexpected; it’s late January. Far too early, by rights. But again: Eddie doesn’t need any outward signs.

Ever since it started, ever since the deal was struck with powers beyond their ken, with sense beyond their grasp or even want of it: they’d neither of them wanted sense if it could have cost them the chance at this, it’s just—

It’s hard, still. Easier every year but: hard. Eddie thinks it’ll always be hard. He loves too deep, like this, for even a breath without to be less than a tiny agony.

But fuck if he’d trade it for anything.

Eddie’d had his taste on his lips right up ‘til the end. Not even his own blood had taken it from him at the last.

He’d felt death, though, like a limbo, a haze rather than a darkness, a liminal fog and he’d screamed, he hadn’t felt quite alone, even before a voice echoed:

“We are freed from him now.”

Eddie’d shouted questions long after his throat started stinging for it, before realizing the echoing voice hadn’t been talking to him; most especially when he’d felt warmth in inexplicable places in the form he’d been walking around in that he wasn’t wholly sure was even really and truly a body, but then—

“You can’t take him.”

Eddie turned, knew it fruitless to try to find the source but it hurt so bad because that voice was absolutely tortured, and it was—

It was Steve.

It was Steve and Eddie recognized the warmth, then: his body on the ground being cradled close so his still-cold chest touched a living one, arms around him, and he’d reached with his own version of a hand to trace the feeling.

“We killed Vecna, we set you free. You cannot take him.”

Oh, Steve.

Eddie was right, in all that he’d wondered if he was being fucking insane even by his measure, to think he could love this man, maybe even already was a little by the time they’d parted ways. But after what he hears?

And then piecing it all together, Steve fighting something that trembled otherworldly in the air for the sake of keeping Eddie��like Eddie was worth it. Like Steve cared that much.

Time passed, and then the voice had come through clearer; something shook in Eddie’s chest like an echo, and the sick taunt of a pulse to a corpse:

“This nature has been perverted. Abused. It has been tied for purposes indefensible and profane to another realm. You will take guardianship of the tempers of your dimension, in exchange.”

Eddie’d been pretty fucking sure that the words had meant as little to Steve as they had to Eddie himself, but Steve hadn’t let more than a second pass before he was all in:

“Done.”

And Eddie had gasped in a breath more painful than he’d recalled death being in the first place, save that this time it’s soothed by the way he blinks to waking with Steve’s hands on his face, fingers trailing to his neck to check his pulse thrown back to racing—mostly?

Just…Eddie’s coming to find that most things are soothed, made bearable by the fact of Steve Harrington.

Back to the point though: since the very beginning, opening his eyes when he thought he’d never do something so mundane, so human, so alive even again, and to the sight of an angel’s face at that, tear-streaked and staring at him and him alone: Eddie didn’t need tangible proof to know, coiled and warm behind his sternum, that change was on the air.

And they’d both absorbed the terms spoken only to them—a fact they later discovered, annoyingly, in trying to explain to everyone else—that they were in charge of keeping watch of the seasons, and naturally, then, they’d be apart for the work of it most of the year. Steve watching summer, Eddie manning winter—save for the middle-grounds; the overlaps inside the ends of autumn and the beginnings of spring—windows they’d know innately, though how?

Fuck if they understood the mechanics of it all.

It was heartbreak. It was a miracle.

They would have until that year’s autumn equinox to prepare for…for maybe always.

“Like Hades and Persephone,” Robin had said, horrified and marveling in equal measure, gripping hard to Steve’s hand.

“Seems worse, though,” Dustin had chimed in—typical. “Like it’d be less time, depending on what counts as overlap.”

Eddie and Steve had…not disagreed. And had made the most of the embers of what they’d started to feel in the boathouse, in the Upside Down: they leapt without looking, and fell fast—the way Steve did too often, but never like this before; the way Eddie had quietly daydreamed about every so often, all the while knowing it could never be for him.

Eddie—then to now—doesn’t think anyone ever expected the thing they make for themselves, for each other, in those scant months, when they imbued so much, trusted hearts and souls to a word as small as love.

And when the time came, and they parted—they were neither of them ever unoccupied, they realized quick, Steve feeling physically pulled across the fucking equator all the stronger by the day: but when the time came?

Dying hurt worse. Eddie swears it without a fucking ounce of doubt in him, no hesitation.

It’d been a bleak fucking season.

But they’d both known their share adversities, if dressed up different across time. They weren’t…they mourned, for a little while.

But then Eddie, in the dead of his own winter, found a bright bouquet of fresh wildflowers he’d never seen before his doorstep, from fields he’d never set foot upon.

He can remember, just in closing his eyes and breathing in, how his heart had leapt; had hoped, and he’d—

“Why can’t we take a day?”

Eddie can hold his breath and relive it right now, just how that voice had stolen the air from his lungs as he’d stood just past the solstice, so much time left before he could even hope to see the other half of his fucking heart—how he’d spun toward the sound of it but was dizzy already before he moved a single inch, how he’d slowed the distance and crashed into Steve’s waiting arms, the steady strength of his welcoming chest with enough force to shake his own heart into beating with real gusto, with an intent he hadn’t realized so so dimmed, maybe wholly snuffed out in these months without.

He hadn’t questioned the how—plane, just a plane on the credit card he still had from his dad’s account, probably a one-time opportunity but worth it, more than, and proof that they could split the difference of the time, they could find ways, make money, spend all of it on how they needed each other now just to be able to breathe right.

“We have to keep the bargain,” Steve had always held, the steel in his gaze something Eddie knew in his bones not to question even at the start, especially not when it was followed by the kinds of kisses that convinced Eddie that a human soul was a real thing, for how it got teased from his throat, tongue to tongue.

“That can’t possibly mean there isn’t any,” Steve had gasped, just as sure and unwavering, but the steel giving way to a neediness, a softer resolve, if still just as unshakable: “any flexibility.”

Eddie couldn’t have agreed more.

And it hadn’t been easy, especially not out the gate; but they’d learned. They’d both left tokens, Steve leaving flowers, Eddie bringing holly and pine, surprising Steve on hot days with icy hands on his shoulders when he packed snow in a cooler just for the sake of the bit; Dustin had found out further into their working through a balance and had declared that—

“That’s like,” he’d frowned, less from distaste and more from actually to puzzle out something unexplainable: “long-distance flirting but, metaphysical? Meteorological?”

Eddie had been the one to hear that dedication with his own ears and had felt distaste, forbade Dustin on the spot from speculating before he got to—

“Primal-magic phone-sex on steroids,” Dustin had muttered himself and yep. That.

Before he got to that.

He’d shared it with Steve, who was as entertained and appalled as Eddie in fairly equal measures, but had made a point come his own time in Indiana again to impress, in no uncertain terms, that Dustin needed to shut his fucking trap about his and Eddie’s love life, lest Steve cause the temperature of his petri dishes to unfortunately shift by half a degree and spoil his weird ass mold experiment.

That’d been a pretty effective threat, even if Steve wasn’t actually capable of delivering on it without the aid of fire.

Which he wasn’t above employing.

Regardless—

They’d worked hard, built slow, and as they learned that the only cost that time seemed to extract from either of them was missing one another worse than a limb, they had the time to invest in something lasting.

They never let another season pass where they saw nothing of each other, ever again.

Now, though.

Now, they have it down to an art. Eddie makes music—has had all the time in the world to wait until the right someone hears and understands what he’s saying in the notes, and he does. Steve teaches at a community college, flexible enough for his real job, and funnily enough—gorgeouslyenough—sells flowers. Invests, here and there, because it was one thing his father had drilled him into knowing enough about before giving up on him as a lost cause. He picks underdogs, mostly because they’re cheap and the very idea of not spites everything his father stood for. Expected of him that was all so far from everything Steve is.

A couple of those underdogs make them a pretty fucking penny. It makes their ongoing trial-and-error of how to do their jobs—to maintain their end of the agreement, to the minimum viable product, and love on each other to the maximum possible extent in every interim possible—it makes the experimenting of it all easier; quicker.

It has to cut the hurting time in half, at the very least.

They never do hear directly from those voices again, the ones who struck their bargain—but they can feel direction, displeasure, satisfaction. They know they’re kept watch of, in the same way they both somehow know how, and what to keep watch of in doing the work for themselves: they don’t change things, can’t change thing; they’re not…powerful, not that way, just some degree of timeless, ageless—which is a whole other hill to climb, and cross to bear, especially when Steve sees Robin, is part of why they made the exception that is Robin; but then increasingly when either of them see the kids, and now the kids with their own kids—but.

They learn that the winds, the magnetic poles, fucking nature magic: it pushes them when their traveling aligns with the seasonal shifts, rather than their own desires—those have racked them up significant benefits from frequent flyer miles—but if they’re pulled by their callings, the callings they can fucking feel—they could fight it. But if they’re give in to it, assent to it, they can blink and end up where they’re meant to be.

Trippy. But kinda cool.

(Would be way cooler if it’s was just straight-up teleportation but: still neat.)

They’ll feel off a day or two, queasy before they overstay their hemisphere, their season outside the natural overlaps. They both of them push it by design, by their own nature—they come to suspect the powers that entrusted them with this, gifted and cursed with this task while blessing them with each other: they think those entities appreciate their commitment to the task alongside, second only to their commitment to each other. They both assume those eldritch gods are responsible for the minor barometric oddities that crop up if they push the limits too far, not-so-subtle nudges back to what they promised; what they’re bound to.

And Steve never lets them push too far, too afraid even after all this time to risk the bargain being taken back, rendered void, quite literally; Eddie, who never shared that sense of preservation regarding his own self, sure as shit shares it tenfold when applied to what he shares with Steve so: he never argues.

He cuddles Steve harder those last days, always, because while he knows they could have languished an eternity literally split from one another for half a year at least, for always, the way he’s grown to feel differently, to gauge time both as shorter and longer and inconsequential depending on the context: it all fades away against the backdrop of how much bigger his love is, and how an hour is a day and the fortnights are a century in his chest, nonetheless.

But as time passes, as the world changes and technology shifts and he can call Steve easier, he can hear his voice, then when webcams came around—it got better. It gets better all the time.

But still: he always feels less whole, whenever either of them has to leave, no matter for how long.

“Shut up,” Dustin shakes him back to the present with the snippy tone he shoots Eddie’s way—some things truly never change—but Eddie honestly doesn’t remember what the fuck either of them had said, but then he glances over and—

Ah. Still staring at the trees. Waiting.

“Think about how Robin feels,” and it’s a little disingenuous, seeing as Robin sees more of Steve than any of them, but Eddie means it as a sympathy. A commiseration.

Dustin scoffs.

“Maybe Robin flaunts that whole capital ‘P’ platonic soulmate thing left and goddamn right,” he bites out with narrowed eyes; “but that’s my fucking brother—“

“You’ll get to see him all the time, all summer long, shithead,” Eddie flicks his ear fondly—Dustin squawks and again, it’s refreshing. No matter how old they might look in comparison now, they’re still who they’ve always been to each other.

And yes, Steve’s still his brother. Steve didn’t forgetthat, never had for a second. And Eddie’s spent all winter with Dustin and Suzie and their munchkins—Steve’s gonna lose it to see how much they’ve grown in just a few months. Eddie’s excited for it, will go straight there with them if that’s what Dustin wants, will understand if Dustin would rather some one-on-one first, this surprised out-of-season visit quite possibly a fleeting one. Eddie gets it, he’ll—

“But these are the only times I get both of you,” Dustin trains his eyes on the trees more intently, now—less to avoid looking elsewhere than to seek out what might comes out from them; “together.”

Eddie’s throat tightens a little. He won’t pretend it doesn’t swell his heart the way it does to hear it.

He swallows, clears his throat, and tries his damnedest to not trample prominent but also not actually fall into the amount of feeling that’s behind the admission, all the history inside it. He’s never been good at that shit.

Except with Steve.

“It is earlier than usual,” Eddie comments, tries to make it encouraging; “that global warming thing, think we’re both gonna start to linger longer in the overlay as a rule,” Dustin frowns and yeah, okay, maybe that part’s less encouraging.

“Might end up sucking hardcore for you guys, though,” he adds, a little sheepish. “Sorry, man.”

Because seriously: he and Steve, they don’t make the seasons. Just watch over them, as best they can. Conduits for whatever the Upside Down really is—they still haven’t ever understood the powers that had receded under Vecna and returned to make them as them are, and frankly, they don’t mind overmuch, so long as whatever that power isallows for the life they lead that, they’d never had had a chance at otherwise—but they’re mostly messengers. They can’t…fix, what’s looking like it’s happening. And the buzz they both feel from the power that made them this way is concerned, but in a distant way. Like hearing sad story about another life, a century removed from yours.

“We’re working on that,” Dustin says and, yeah. Eddie’s pretty sure somewhere in Dustin’s massive government lab of geniuses, they are. Fuck? But he’s so proud of his little sheepie, all grown up.

And then there’s how Steve feels—

“Hmm,” Eddie hums as he nods; “plus the overlap will work down south, too, so,” he muses, pulls his with his hair across his mouth the way apparent immortality never knocked out of him.

“Down south?”

Oh. Right. Oops.

They don’t flaunt how they’ve made the most of the flexibility—or those long shot investments—and perfected a schedule to live more like businessmen with long company trips every few weeks than quasi-magical beings who traded death for this, and made out so much more the richer. It’s not that they don’t love everyone, the kids, their families, the Party at large. As he made a point to notdivulge before: Robin is the only one who knows, because of course she does, but they keep houses in both halves of the world, not sprawling but not modest, comfortable and welcoming to the two of them plus one occasional platonic soulmate. They can each of them stretch their time away from their own season to near two weeks—it’s too disruptive to switch straight back with whoever is leaving their current home-turf just just returning with a stowaway, they have to rebalance for another two weeks but then, if they switch, of Eddie visits first, they wait, and then Steve makes the journey next? It holds.

And so they do exactly that.

They’re just…Steve committed them to a fantasy life, the bargains of a Labyrinth crossed with the whimsy of the fae, he’d done it without question just to save Eddie’s fucking life, okay, so it can’t be a fucking surprise that when they fell whole-heart in love, it got a little co-dependent.

Eddie actually fucking adores that about them, and Steve does, too—it’s everything they missed out on in the first part of their lives, and ached for worse than they’d realized until the space was filled, then overflowed; now they get to have it in spades, and forever.

“Oh, just musing about the state of the mortal coil,” Eddie rolls his head over to Dustin to give him an answer, even if it’s not a whole one—if he told him the full story of just how often they see each other, he’d absolutely push his way into what Eddie needs as just for him. Maybe it’s selfish.

But Eddie’s not wholly human anymore, so far as he can tell, so he’s gonna just lean into that’s a limitation no longer relevant to my being argument.

He’s honestly grown pretty fond of that argument.

“Fuck off, man,” Dustin shoves him, more than used to giving him shit when he plays high-and-mighty for serving as co-chief chronicler of the weather and still looking 20.

“Let me see him,” Eddie’s voice slips serious, because his heartburn thumping, his nerves are shivering, it doesn’t fucking matter that the two weeks apart has only been two weeks—the same senses heightened to feel his other half approaching on the breeze more than on a round trip ticket: it heightens everything.

And there is something special, unique, in the first natural shift where Steve gets to step into Eddie’s space and be held tight in Eddie’s arms because the seasons will it, because their bargain holds and keeps them.

“Just let me see him for a bit on my own,” Eddie turns to Dustin, pleading him to stay put on the bench where they’ve been waiting, Eddie knowing that this park, along these woods, is where Steve will come if he comes at all—but he has not qualms begging for just a minute alone as feels himself start to rise to his feet because the cells of his body know that Steve’s near, now, and call him to move, to run to his partner, his only.

He sees the unspoken protest in Dustin’s eyes

But you’ll have him forever.

Eddie gets it, sighs; tries to explain.

“When we,” he pauses, tries to find a better word but really there’s only one: “changed, we became something,” and Eddie, see, they were never told the details, the how’s and whys never explained. They just know how it feels.

And how much it feels is more than enough to serve as an explanation, as is.

“My heart’s got this bigger capacity to feel, now,” Eddie tries just being blunt, and not trying to logic out what transcends the concept as a rule; “my soul’s, just,” he shakes his head a bites on a grin in a battle that he’s ecstatic to lose:

“It’s just his in a way I never could have dreamed of before. It was already basically true before but that truth was a,” Eddie sighs, and doesn’t bother fighting the grin this time because it’d be a lost cause before he even starts, the very same heart he’s talking about is stretched to bursting and he, he wants, he needs him to understand that because Dustin’s become his brother, too, in a different but still profound way and Eddie loves him, so he wants him to understand it’s not about shutting him out, or denying him a single thing, but what Eddie knows a normal person can feel, like, not by choice but by design is, is—

“A fuckin’ pittance, man, in comparison.”

Dustin eyes him, and—thank fuck—reads not only what Eddie says but what he means; that Eddie also feels bigger for what they have, for Dustin’s family, for the whole Party and the sun and snow and the trees and then—

Then there’s his whole heart and soul, that he can feel is about to be waiting in those trees—another level. A wholeness he couldn’t put to words if he tried, which is how he knows it’s both real, and other; not what he was or could have been before they were given their duties; gifted their whole fucking lives.

In each each other.

Dustin finally sighs, theatrically in a way that makes Eddie chuckle as he’s shooed away with a sage “Public indecency is still a crime!” —to which Eddie offers his middle finger as he bounds through the tree line and only stops when he finds the clearing that feels right.

Then he waits.

And waits.

He lets his eyes close, reaches inward where his heartbeat’s ramping up; reaches outward to the trees, still barren but never quiet, never dead.

He feels.

Feels something slip behind his ear: a stem, petals tickling his cheekbone when nothing here is blooming yet; when everything is blooming nowunder Eddie’s ribs, blossoming in the smile that stretches across his lips as a warm breath tickles his neck and weight presses behind him, familiar arms wrapping around his waist:

“Gorgeous weather you’re a having, hmm?” Steve teases and the shell of his ear, nips the lobe and turns Eddie around at the hips and fuck yeah.

Fuck yeah

It’s gorgeous.

🌷🌺🌷🌺

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