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hitlikehammers · 13 days ago

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eddie doesn’t understand how steve can ♥️love♥️ him (eddie is frequently worryingly oblivious with a side of ✨self-worth issues✨)

“I’m dead weight.” Eddie’s voice is so fucking tiny, it almost undercuts his resolve. Almost. But it’s a fucking fact, so his useless resolve doesn’t actually matter either way, which is kind of a comfort. Until Eddie blinks, and between lashes fluttering Steve’s in his face. Leaning over him, caging him in not with his arms so much as the heat of him, the weight of his presence more than any part of them presently touching. And still those fucking eyes; stars could be born inside them. Eddie just wishes he deserved a future where maybe he’d get to watch a whole new one burst into life, where he’d deserve that kind of privilege— But he wasn’t exaggerating. He is dead fucking weig— “I know what it feels like when you’re the closest you’re ever gonna fucking get to dead weight,” Steve somehow bites it out so sharp while sounding so level, just stating facts like his eyes aren’t on fucking fire: “This is nothing like that.”

rating: t ♥️ tags: established relationship, post-s4, softness, fluff, tiniest bit of angst because of eddie’s headspace, eddie has self-worth issues, true love, fitting each other’s jagged edges♥️, romance, happy ending 💕

for @steddielovemonth day nineteen: “Love is putting up with someone's bad qualities because they somehow complete you.” ― Sarah Dessen, This Lullaby

Eddie’s staring at the popcorn ceiling, gnawing on the pick hanging from the chain around his neck: yellow—blindingly so, couldn’t miss it if you tried—in place of the old one.

Steve told him it wasn’t good for his hair to chew on it. Eddie doesn’t think he absolutely loves the way he’s replaced the habit, but. It’s symbolic: Steve in his sunshine-y wardrobe, the way he’s Eddie’s sunshine always, the way Eddie wants basically any and every part of Steve in his mouth at all times—

See? It makes sense; it shakes out perfectly logical.

But there’s good reason Eddie needs the sunshine, his sunshine, and a constant reminder snug against his chest: his head’s prone to going dark places, now, ever since—

Well. Ever since.

It’s basically the main reason he sometimes just…sighs and throws himself farther back into the still-stiff-but-slowly-braking-in cushions on the sofa, in this also-still-too-pristine-but-a-valiant-work-in-progress living room, and huffs, half-disbelieving, wholly-disgusted:

“How the fuck do you put up with it, man?”

“Hmm?” Steve hums distracted, distant, not even in the same room because he’s washing dishes, or else, rinsing them before the machine does the work which Eddie will never understand. Eddie hadcleared the table, so he hadn’t been totally useless, but…

But.

“How,” Eddie flicks the chain where it sits atop his shirt, pulled out now, watches the pick float for a second; “do you,” and he tries to make himself not pull the thin ball links into an angry new brand inside the divot-line of the scar already around his neck:

“Put up with it?”

Eddie doesn’t know if something about his words shifted, his tone, or if Steve’s just knows him, or if the dishes are just done now.

But Steve’s in the doorway with his hip jutted toward the frame of the opening, his sleeves rolled up but still damp at the edges, his hands not helping where they cross over his chest.

“With what?” Steve asks, lost; cloudless. Oblivious.

Which, to Eddie’s mind, is just…absurd. Because the answer is right there.

Right fucking there:

“Me.”

Eddie’s moods. His rambling. His stubbornness. His nightmares. His inability to even get so much as a sit-down for a job around here. His freakish interests. His woefully limited ability in the kitchen. His uselessness in cleaning up: too little, too cluttered. His wild sense of most things in the worst ways, at the worst times. His general billboard-sized advertisement of ‘Waste of Space: Steer Clear, You Can Do Miles Better’.

How the fuck do you put up with me?

So it is almost obnoxiously conspicuous, sticks out like a goddamn sore thumb, right?

“The hell did that come from?”

Or not.

Steve’s not standing in the doorway anymore.

“I just,” Eddie swallows, because Steve’s eyes on him are intense, low, laser-focused and Eddie’s suddenly not entirely sure how much of what just cycled through his head maybe came out through his mouth so he settles on a sanitized version, a middle-of-the-road sort of example that gets the point across but…anemically:

“I’m always lounging around while you’re doing actual things, y’know, contributing,” he throws his weight back into where he’s doing exactly that just now, gesturing to the suds on Steve’s arms near the creases of his elbows to illustrate the stark difference: “where I just stare into space and try to plot twisty-turny things that’ll trip the shitheads up next session,” and he shrugs, looks back up at the ceiling because Steve’s never something he wants to look away from, ever, which is why this hurts so much to wrestle with.

But right now, those eyes on him are…a lot.

“I’m dead weight.”

Eddie’s voice is so fucking tiny, it also undercuts his resolve. Almost.

But it’s a fucking fact, so his useless resolve doesn’t actually matter either way, which is kind of a comfort.

Until Eddie blinks, and between lashes fluttering Steve’s in his face. Leaning over him, caging him in not with his arms so much as the heat of him, the weight of his presence less than any part of them presently touching.

And still those fucking eyes; stars could be born inside them.

Eddie just wishes he deserved a future where maybe he’d get to watch a whole new one burst into life, where he’d deserve that kind of privilege—

But he wasn’t exaggerating. He is dead fucking weig—

“I know what it feels like when you’re the closest you’re ever gonna fucking get to dead weight,” Steve somehow bites it out so sharp while sounding so level, just stating facts like his eyes aren’t on fucking fire:

“This is nothing like that.”

Eddie’s throat tightens, his stomach drops.

“Steve,” Eddie chokes, a hand fraying to clamp around Steve’s wrist held rigid.

“You know what I mean,” and yeah he begs it a little. He didn’t mean that.

“I do,” Steve nods, never looking away, barely blinking. “But I meant what I said,” then he softens a little, turns his hand in Eddie’s grip and bringing them palm or palm, seeming to study their hands and Eddie doesn’t get it, doesn’t know what he’s looking for—just kinda knows his heart in his throat, and the way the world feels more right, maybe the only right it has in it at all, when Steve’s hand’s in his, in any way at all.

He’s holding on to that certainty, that feeling that always puts up a hell of a fight against all the dark in Eddie’s chest, just inside the warmth of that hand.

So he startles a little, when the words break through, so close:

“You have no fucking clue, do you?”

Eddie…Eddie only knows that he blinks. Only knows how to blink because: what?

Which he supposes answers the question; seems to clearly enough that Steve huffs, shakes his head, lifts up like he’s going away and Eddie’s blood runs frigid—no, no, the part of him the suspects this end result isn’t ready, he’s not strong enough yet—never will be, but maybe closer, maybe—to stand up and fight back to hold and keep—

But then Steve’s crossing his arms, leaning back on his heels as he looks Eddie up and down, reads him like a book as he’s somehow learned to do; somehow cared enough to learn to do—

Then he’s settling across Eddie’s lap, strong thighs bracketing Eddie’s hips on either side as he lifts broad hands to cups Eddie’s cheeks the same, hold him in place—but he doesn’t have to.

Those eyes are steel; more than enough.

But the lips that land on his forehead, so soft, are both wholly at odds but…perfect.

Eddie feels something unspoken inside him start to tremble; prepare to crumble.

“The stuff you like? All the goddamn noise choseyou pay for on cassettes?” Steve smirks as Eddie squawks a little in instinctual protest, not even something he consciously decides; but it earns Eddie those lips pressed now to the corner of his own—so: maybe not just instinctual, possibly Pavlovian before Steve leans in to whisper:

“It plays at a pitch I can barely hear anymore.”

Eddie pushes back into the couch to meet Steve’s eyes, chest tightening again because: he didn’t know that. He’s wondered, sometimes, just little quirks, but now his heart twists because his Stevie’s hurt, something is wrong with his Stevie, and what is it, what does it mean, will it get worse, will it be—

“Too many knocks to the head,” Steve taps that same head gently with a crooked grimace and all Eddie wants is to grab those hands and move then, it’s not a thing to take lightly, but Steve’s just shrugging as he pushes on:

“They actually don’t expect it to like, get worse,” Steve reads him, as ever; “but there are just certain…”

He makes an ear-piercing sound in the back of his throat that sounds nothing like Eddie’s music, and he’d take offense, if…he wasn’t still reeling with the revelation Steve’s just set before him.

“It kinda sounds like office music,” Steve says it like a confession, like he’d been holding on to that admission and is only letting it out now in a time of dire need; for Eddie.

“Almost…pleasant in the background,” his nose crinkles a little. “Soothing almost, because it’s familiar,” then his features go smooth and lax, and he grins small, fond before he breaks Eddie’s heart not least because he stretches it bursting too fucking fast:

“Because it’s you.”

And that’s…that is—

“I don’t really like exciting food,” Steve’s plowing onward, now, purposeful and on a mission, hands not yet leaving Eddie’s cheeks: keeping him right where he is.

Keeping him.

“I like predictable food. I really do believe fried chicken is a worthwhile meal as a treat,” he shakes his head in the way he has when he remembers a time that’s not so long ago but feels like a different life after everything; Eddie tucks it in his back pocket to ask about if the right time ever comes, just because every part of Steve is a thing Eddie aches to know.

“Your kitchen skills are perfect,” Steve pokes his chest with real force to it, and Eddie’s wondering how much of his internal running commentary was maybe accidentally voiced aloud—or if Eddie’s just known that well, in a way he’s never had before. “They’re always just what I want, and they taste special because I don’t always expect it, because I think you’re shy with it because you think it should be something grand or whatever,” and again, Steve soften, leans to pop a kiss to the top of Eddie’s nose:

“But it is something grand, dumbass,” Steve murmurs close; “because you make it for us.”

Something warm and kinda…kinda like, expansive? Like it’s alive and growing and spreading through him in time with still-shaky heartbeat that wants to believe the dark things that rise in his head are don’t hold sway, the warm-thing in his belly that’s spreading up and around the rest of him feels like it’s trying to convince him that yeah.

That’s all any of it is. But still—

“Did you know I used to get pissed as fuck every laundry day?”

Eddie whips back into the present; frowns up at Steve’s solemn expression.

“You love laundry day.”

Steve hums a little mournfully, but there’s a twitch to his lips that gives him away.

“I don’t own enough bona fide darks for a full load,” he laments mostly tongue-in-cheek, but most in the just-over-half sorta way, because almost-most of him is genuinely lamenting that state of affairs,

“I either had whole parts of my wardrobe waiting weeks to wash in a corner,” Steve literally shudders at recalling it, the dweeb—and fuck, but Eddie loves him; “or I ran like, quarter-loads at best.”

A cardinal sin. Absolutely unforgivable. His poor poor Stevie.

His Stevie, who’s pecking at his lips with a bit-back grin and glowing eyes as he comments pointedly:

“Don’t run into that problem anymore, do I?”

And the way the words land, like Eddie’s a good thing, something that adds to Steve’s world in a ways that may look small but that Steve feels mean something. It’s, it is…

“I love it here, you know. With you,” Steve says like the second half’s the only part that really matters, and the spreading warmth has made its way through Eddie to wholly swirl around his heavy-thumping heart; “but before you moved in?“ and that’s the first time Steve glances away, even if it’s only a second, and Eddie grips for his hand again, hard this time—the fear in him still breathing, even if it’s for a death rattle to it, for the sake of the man on top of him.

“You have no idea how much I used to dread the drive home,” from Eddie’s, from him and Wayne, where they still spend nearly half the week even if this is home base, and Eddie could never have imagine what it would mean, how it would feel to hear that said out loud; “the part of the day that’s supposed to be the best part, the relief after everything,” Steve shakes his head, glances around and grips Eddie’s hand back to match in strength:

“It was a tomb in here. It fucking echoed.”

And the warmth in Eddie’s chest seizes a little: heartbroken on principle, Steve’s hurting always more devastating than his own could ever be. Livid that this man could ever have been left alone that way. Enraged that he hadn’t noticed, stopped it.

“I used to play little games, with myself, like,” Steve licks his lips; “how long would it take for someone to notice if I died in here.”

The warmth in Eddie’s chest retreats in an instant, because just…just that idea in the world—Eddie’s heart remembers what almost losing Steve feels like.

And Steve’s not talking about reality, sure; but he’s also not talking about almost.

“It’s big enough that the stench would take forever, like, for the neighbors,” Steve reasons in the most rational voice saying anything but: “and—”

Eddie’s hand on Steve’s must be painful, or maybe it’s the way his nails might be digging in hard enough to draw blood because Steve stops, looks down at their hands and then softens, looks apologetic but only just, like he…like in all of this he knows he’s hitting painpoints, not the biggest ones but not the easiest ones either, and he means to.

He’s making a point of what he sees instead of dead weight.

But still—

Eddie’s breath catches when Steve brings his hand up to kiss his knuckles, and doesn’t ease the hold between them one bit for doing it.

“I know it’s probably legitimately psychotic to rinse the dishes when that’s why I buy the good detergent,” Steve exhales between Eddie’s fingers; “part of it’s habit, from,” his eyes dart, and Eddie knows the look: he’d deck Harrington Senior, and maybe just give Mommy Harrington the stink eye until she folded, he’s not sure—he just knows he hates them, for the toll they took on Steve.

“Beyond that, though,” and Steve’s features brighten in an instead, curl a little sly and flush a little pink on the apples of his cheeks: intoxicating:

“Mostly it’s just so I have a good angle to watch you, right here,” Steve knocks his shoulder against the back of the sofa. “Being you. Doing things that make you, you.”

And fucking hell, but the way he says all that like it’s almost a gift.

“Your nightmares break my heart,” Steve turns Eddie’s palm to kiss there, to speak deep into the lines; “but if I can make you feel even the slightest bit better? Safer?” He kisses one more time before he draws their joined hands in between them, rests them safe between both their laps.

“It makes me feel less like I’m just mooching off you for doing the same for me in return,” Steve shrugs, but he’s earnest, he means that, and that is so not how any of that even works—

“That’s not—” Eddie stats but Steve cuts him off with his lips, dirty fucking pool.

Goddamn effective, but such a fuckin’ cheat.

“Maybe we both have stuff we still gotta work through,” Steve sighs, shrugs again a little, like their stuff doesn’t include death and dying and monster and apocalypses—and maybe the fact that it doesn’t doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t change a goddamn thing.

“But then maybe I believe with every bone in my body that even if I have to spend the rest of my life working through it? Doing it with you, both of us doing it together,” and Steve smiles at him, a delicate thing because it holds almost too much love inside to stand:

“That sounds like kinda the best life. With you.”

And Eddie regrets only one thing in what he does just then, because it breaks that delicate smile by design.

Because he surges straight up and kisses those lips and breaks that delicacy wide fucking open so he can taste it; drink it in like manna, like ether, like something that can bring him back to life.

The way Steve kisses back and shakes Eddie’s pulse in wild ways for the force, the feeling: it’s no less than exactly that.

“Your rambling is how I know life’s okay, that the world’s spinning,” Steve pants between them when they shift position, before they dive back in; “it’s like how you know your own heartbeat like, like when I used to do swim, or how you get ready when shooting a basket, or plain…shooting,” he hugs and then Eddie’s too greedy to keep any distance, too needy to wait any longer to taste Steve on his tongue a little longer, a little more.

“I only paid attention when I needed to focus,” Steve barely breathes as they both have to concede to a breather, to literally steady their lungs, and he presses down at the center of Eddie’s chest to balance, maybe, but Eddie suspects it’s most to make his point:

“But you know when it’s fucking off, not quite right,” and then Steve stares at his hand on Eddie’s heaving chest, eyes a little glassy for a minute as he whispers, kinda broke :

“Or when it’s missing.”

Eddie slaps an uncoordinated hand on top of Steve’s and helps him feel closer, feel more, the vessels and the chambers and the valves or whatever; the only place Eddie trusts them—only places he ever could—is in these hands.

“You’re that,” Steve declares simply, lifting his lashes before his gaze.

“You just,” he swallows hard, a little; “I understand more now than at the start. I want to keep understanding more, but,” and Eddie gets it, what Steve’s inching toward—Eddie’s lived with his story close to the chest, held tight and safe but Steve’s closer, now, and it’d be hard to hide from him, even if it hasn’t always been easy letting it free, story by story, card by card.

But it’s Steve. And any hard thing is worth it, if Steve’s the endgame. At the very core, there’s nothing he wants to hide from Steve.

It’s just more been about the things he’s too afraid to let anyone see, because they’re too much, they be the final straw, and he—

“It’s more the you part, than the what. The fact that it’s you, whatever there is to know.”

And that’s where Eddie’s gonna work on it, because he wants the same in return. For the first time in his whole life, Eddie Munson is giving his all to this. To them.

Maybe they’ll stumble. They already do. But fuck if it hasn’t been a revelation to know he’ll always be picked back up in less than a heartbeat, and never once be proven wrong.

He doesn’t realize there’re tears involved on his end until Steve leaning down, kissing them away.

“I love you,” Steve breathes into his cheekbone on the right; “all the parts of me I thought I had to hide because they were weird or wrong or not shaped right,” and he pauses then, kisses a little line of fluttery things along the left line of Eddie’s face to match; “you fit where they live like you were made to,” then he kisses, draws a shiver through Eddie’s whole body, when those searing lips trace the line of the scar that’s mostly faded pink, now, but pulls down the lower length toward Eddie’s jaw.

“And all the jagged edges of me that I thought were gonna leave me alone forever,” Steve mouths there, kinda adoring, reverently; “they make where we fit snap into place that much stronger, that much more sure.”

And he looks down at their hands, and lifts them a little, let’s go only enough to clasp loose, like a businessman might to seal a deal.

“Not like this,” he says, definitive; “like this,” and he locks their grip then, finger braided across finger, tight and automatically feral against the force he puts on trying to pull it apart when he’s done, to show it; to prove it:

“Not going anywhere.”

And Steve’s eyes are still flame-bright, still intense to the point of stealing breath but it’s not stealing when it’s given free, when Eddie wants all of him to be Steve’s, for always. Not dead weight. The same weight in the same body. The same soul twined together; the same fucking beating heart.

“You get it?”

And Eddie nods, as best he can, before he catches their hands—unbeatable—between their chests this time to kiss Steve until the love in him is the only taste Eddie even knows.

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