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hitlikehammers · 2 months ago

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🎸That One Time Gareth Had To Square With The Reality of Eddie with Steve Harrington and/or Gareth Being Kind of a Dick Without Just Cause

🤘OR: 1/5 times Steve/Eddie talk to anyone but each other about their feelings (for each other), +1 (other time they turn around and talk to one another)

“These aren’t in Jeff’s range, man.”

Eddie’s been bowed over a notebook for hours now, co-opting the bed in Gareth’s room while the actual fucking owner of the room gets relegated to the desk chair. As soon as Eddie’d been miraculously saved and recovered enough to get out of the hospital, and then out of his new house—first time Gareth had him over, he’d offered the bed without question, propped up his still-recovering friend and got a genuine attempt at a smile through the still constant pain as he’d basically walled Eddie in with pillows. Mostly out of concern; but not empty of guilt.

But those days are thankfully behind them now and if Gareth needed anybadditional proof that Eddie was more than back to himself?

It’s that he still sprawls wide over Gareth’s bedspread, just like the throne in the drama room—entitled, and comfortable with it, despite how the way he folds himself over his books is, just, painfullooking,

“Hmm?” Eddie’s still distracted, but he at least looks up from his campaign notebook when Gareth shakes his lyrics notebook loud enough to make a rustley noise at a pitch that’s hard to ignore.

“They aren’t in your range, either. Which one of us are you planning to have try and hit this?” Gareth taps the top line of scribbled notes across the ruled pages; “and embarrass the fuck out of ourselves for it, Jesus,” he mutters, because: seriously.

None of them can hold this pitch. Any of these—they might be able to convince Grant to try for the laugh because he reads the worst of the four of them, but he’s not so sheet-music-illiterate that the entertainment frankly wouldn’t last long enough to really be worth it.

Gareth doesn’t exactly process that he hasn’t gotten any kind of response at all to his bitching—which, if he’d been paying attention, would have been his first clue; but he doesn’t process the absence of Eddie’s retort because he’s finally pairing the notes to the words scribbled on the page opposite them.

“Dude,” Gareth taps more insistently at the only-just-legible letters—unfortunately for Gareth, he reads Eddie-scratch well.

“These the lyrics that go with it?”

He still doesn’t get an answer, but he…he doesn’t really need one.

Because he’s clear that the lyrics go with the staffs. And the lyrics are…

The lyrics are clearly all about one King Steve Harrington.

Gareth sighs a little, to himself on purpose even though it’s probably not important to try and make it subtle: Eddie’s in his own world, still, and Gareth, well, like…

Gareth’s had the hardest time accepting…Steve. And Eddie. Steve with Eddie.

And he’s gone through the stages of disbelief hard for it: fury, followed by giving an ice-cold silent treatment, and then intentional obliviousness. Now he’s kinda been…forcibly cordial in a way that, if he’s being honest with himself, he knows is the most offensive of the attitudes he’s landed on so far.

It’s just that…Steve never did anything to him, or their friends. Gareth knows that. And he knows it’s not fair to judge someone solely by the company they keep, especially when they broke really publicly and like they meant to with that exact company. It’s just…

Harrington could have changed things for people like them. He could have called off the dogs when he was at the top and maybe they’d have learned to lay off the freaks and nerds even after he tumbled from grace.

And if he was with Eddie, now—like, actually withEddie like Eddie claims, like the lyrics in the notebook clearly spell out, even though Gareth’s never seen them do more than slap each other’s backs when Eddie’s ride’s out of commission and he needs a chauffeur from practice, or they hold Not-Hellfire-Anymore-New-Name-Pending at the guy’s massive house—and don’t get Gareth started on how awkward that shit had been; still is, for him, as the only holdout on the goddamn Harrington charm, fucking gag him—

But if he’s with Eddie? Why the fuck couldn’t Harrington have maybe gotten his so-called friends to ease off the queers, too? Just be less…loud about it, if he was one of them, even in the closet? And how could Eddie stand for that, like, none of them were out out, and it’s not like the freaks have a ton of options anyway, even guys who glanced both ways like Gareth did—and apparently Harrington too, unless everything else before had been a facade, or self-deception. But like, how could Eddie, loud about everything, shack up with someone who—and yeah, this one was hearsay, but still—but someone who’d called out the eldest Byers for being a queer, even if it did leave him with the shit beat out of him after, and Byers stealing his former girl in a very-not-queer way?

How could Eddie…date someone who hated what he was enough to egg on one of their fellow freaks, or at least a weirdo-adjacent comrade, like that?

Even just once.

But Gareth’s not blind to how just looking at Harrington now would hint he’s someone different, whether the rumors had been true or not. And Gareth knows he’s held on to this…grudge, thing, to the point of being unreasonable. His bandmates have both taken him aside one-to-one, tried to be Switzerland about it, calm in the middle, but both made out in Steve’s favor. And yes: Gareth knew, and agreed, even before he’d reached the point he’s at now, that they should be grateful their friend is alive, thankful for the way—even if he’s never owned it to them himself, Eddie’d sung his praises even before there was more for him to sing—but they should all be grateful that Harrington pulled him out, got him help, kept him breathing long enough. They should be happy for their friend who they’ve never seen happier, even through the long slog of rehab; the long months he couldn’t even hold a pen steady, let alone his guitar.

They should trust Eddie on the topic of Steve until proven otherwise. And…all Steve’s been doing is proving Eddie right, and then some.

And the freshmen, they just stare at him a little cooler, generally, which sucks. He didn’t realize he gave as much a shit as he apparently does about the pipsqueaks beyond how they played and what they rolled—but yeah.

Turns out he actually gives a decent amount of a shit when he has to square with the way they side with Steve, too. Steve, it seems, even over Eddie, which: they’d been pumped so full of hero-worship that it’d been frankly annoying after the first couple months but, apparently that didn’t hold a candle to Harrington+.

So like: Gareth knows he’s outnumbered. And he’s been outnumbered now long enough that he isstarting to wonder if maybe he’s the one who’s got it wrong. Unthinkable, at first.

But…even Wheeler scowls at him. He does kinda scowl at everyone, always, but when Steve Harrington comes up?

It’s a special scowl just for Gareth.

“Eddie?” Gareth turns to being a nuisance, knows that’s the only way he’ll pry Eddie out of his zone. “Earth to Munson,” he waves the notebook he’d been reading from in front of Eddie’s view of his campaign outline in the other; “come in Munson!”

“Knock it off,” Eddie splutters when a page finally tickles his nose, batting Gareth away and blinking, like he’s gotta remember where he is.

Typical.

“This shit’s not your style,” Gareth doesn’t think it’s worth mincing words. That’s not who they are, the friendship they have.

And Gareth…Gareth read the words, right?

He’s maybe…he’s maybe been a fucking stick in the mud about one of his closest, oldest friends’ love life for long enough already.

“Says who?” Eddie snaps a little, that razor-edge peeking out of his retort. “I fuckin’ wrote it, ergo,” he snatches the second notebook straight out of Gareth’s hands:

“My style.”

Gareth huffs, and moves over to the bed. Because, like…bite the bullet. Slay the monster.

Save that…that’s not it, is it? More like…

Man up and own your own bullshit, Gareth Emerson.

“It’s not the band’s style,” he says, and keeps his tone tight not because…well. Mostly just so it doesn’t stray where he doesn’t want it to go.

He anticipates the way Eddie snaps—also knows Eddie well enough to see it for what it is: far less dramatic than it could have been:

“Maybe I didn’t write it with the band as the first thought in my fucking mind, man,” he bites a little, but more than that?

It sounds tired. And Gareth…

Gareth knew he’d feel like shit when he finally squared with this, with how he’s handled…the Steve thing.

Or probably more like not-handled-it-at-all.

“It’s,” Gareth leans, peers over Eddie’s shoulder at the notebook in his hands, still open to what Gareth had read.

“It’s a love song.”

Because there’s no other word for it. But there’s also no denying the obvious:

“But you’re not singing it.”

Eddie huffs—there’s the drama.

“My falsetto is impressive—”

“Not just that, the lyrics,” Gareth says, tone still reined in, but he lets himself be curious, kinda prod at the obvious thing held between them, scratched in ink.

“They’re like a letter you wrote, to someone you love, but like, for them to read.”

Gareth looks over at Eddie, knows Eddie feels it, may even see it from his peripherals even if he won’t turn to meet him before Gareth calls out the glaring heart of it all:

“To you.”

The guilt sinks its teeth a little deeper, when Eddie holds himself so goddamn still.

“What’s Harrington’s range?” Gareth asks, lets that guilt soften his tone, loosen his limbs. Open him up to the reality of…his best friend being actually-probably-no-longer-deniably ass-over-tits in love.

“Tenor, like, naturally. I think,” Eddie’s immediate to answer, and that only solidifies the reality for Gareth, here—Eddie knows the man he loves, musically. “But he’s got an insane voice, man, I mean, the shit he can do…”

“Maybe I thought,” and fuck, Eddie sounds almost hesitant, it’s so clear in comparison to how quick and sure he was just a second before; “like, not for our shit, but maybe he can just, like, even just the two of us, him and me before we wrap, or after even, and he can, just, like,” Eddie’s slows the words like he’s trying to build up to something unthinkable, something that almost cows him for a second, but even that’s so not Eddie:

“Sing it.”

Eddie looks purposefully away and Gareth…

Gareth’s admittedly kinda reeling—how did hesomehow make his friend sound like he was trying to be small, and Eddie of all his friends, at that?—but the lyrics are romantic. Are goddamn yearning. Are asking for forever in a way that’s kind of scary, but are asking from a place that’s positioned as the weaker party, the one begging for that idea of always, and so just in case, for both Eddie’s sake but also possibly for Gareth’s because maybe there’s something deeper, something sinister to this love-fest he’d been right to hold out against—

“Does he make you feel like you’re not—”

“God, no,” Eddie nearly snorts, like he’s never heard Gareth be so absurd in all the years they’ve known each other; which says a lot.

And solidifies Gareth’s sole position as the tool, here. Probably from the very start.

“He makes me feel anything but. I don’t fuckin’ understand it,” and that smile of Eddie’s, it’s not lesser at all, somehow. But it is softer.

“I’m a little terrified by how much I can’t possibly deserve it,” Eddie’s tone shifts to something that’s not for Gareth anymore, and Gareth feels it acutely; like he’s lucky to be allowed to hear it. “But he thinks I do, somehow. He makes me feellike I,” and Eddie sighs out heavy, hard, shakes his head again in that wonder.

“He sees all these things in me without a second thought. Never any question,” Eddie taps at the side of the notebook with the words; “I just am,” and he swallows hard, Gareth can hear it; “needing some help to find them in myself.”

And Gareth…Gareth’s been in relationships, or thought he had. Watching Eddie right now, hearing the fucking blood-deep feeling …Gareth thinks maybe he’s never been in a real relationship in his fucking life.

And if that’s all because of Steve goddamn Harrington, inside the most cynical, jaded heart Gareth knows, in Eddie Munson with his diatribes and his doctrines?

Maybe Gareth has been even more wrong than he’d suspected, this whole fucking time.

“We maybe can’t hit the notes but,” Gareth finds himself saying without really thinking, straight on impulse, on a feeling of need. “We could play this, just,” Gareth reaches out for the side of the notebook Eddie isn’t holding to, the music;

“We could play this, like, fine,” Gareth clears his throat, feeling a little at sea; “I guess.”

He falters at the end, but Eddie’s lips twitch; he hears the stumbling for what it is.

“The lyrics aren’t for us, anyway, right? So,” Gareth shrugs, not really knowing where to go next, and Eddie finally turns to look at him straight-on.

“That’d be,” Eddie bites his lip a little, weirdly hesitant, too fucking thankful: “really awesome.”

“Mmm,” Gareth makes a noise instead of a word so his relief is less obvious. Then, once the relief wears off and he’s kinda fucking desperate for Eddie to be not…not cooped up and locked down in his presence. That’s not Eddie.

“You do, though,” Gareth says, hoping the gamble of pushing a little is a step in the right direction, the right move; “yeah?”

“I do, what?” Eddie asks; honest, too. He’s not leading Gareth past a quick horde of zombies just to throw him to the wolves with a Pit Fiend.

“Love him,” Gareth spells it out, nudging Eddie’s shoulder a little playfully, hoping it’ll diffuse the tension left; “s’a love song, so.”

And where Eddie could have clammed up, or shrugged Gareth off? Would…probably have been more than justified for it?

His face splits all the way open on the dopiest grin, something Gareth’s never seen the likes of on that face before.

It’s…it’s a really good look.

“So much more than you can imagine,” Eddie says, kinda marvelling, laughs a little disbelieving, like in actual fucking awe: “more than I ever could have.”

Well: damn.

“You’ve got a,” Gareth clears his throat, a little unexpectedly cowed by the shine of it all: “a pretty wild imagination.”

Somehow, impossibly, Eddie’s smile just gets more charged-up with wonder.

“Right?”

This time when Gareth stares, and Eddie feels it? He does turn.

“What?” He doesn’t look less…blissfully happy. Just curious.

“You love-love him,” Gareth says, with his own little shred of all that wondering because…this is bigger, deeper, more, for Eddie, than Gareth could have ever expected.

“I do,” Eddie nods, doesn’t falter, does not fucking hesitate, and it’s said in this way, this way where Gareth just knows that—

“You wanna say that,” Gareth says slowly, dawning realisation a weighty blow of a thing:

“You want to say that differently.”

He’s in this with Harrington. He’s…all the things he railed against a year ago. Eddie wants it, every bit of it, at Steve Harrington’s side.

Jesus fuck.

“If only,” Eddie murmurs, dreamy as any chick in homeroom had ever aimed for.

And Gareth? Is so grateful his friend is here. Alive. Breathing that kind of wanting into the world.

And Gareth…Gareth needs to fucking trust his friend.

“Bring him around,” Gareth says with conviction he doesn’t expect to come out so clear until it does; exactly as it needs to. “To sing, or not,” Gareth adds, then goes a little further: “more than just, like, picking you up and saying hi.”

Eddie turns to him, considers him for a long stretch. Gareth wonders if maybe he wasn’t as clear as he wanted to be, until—

“I do love him. With everything,” Eddie says slowly, with heart in it; “part of that is protecting him from getting hurt. Even if he doesn’t admit it, especially if he’s enough of a fucking fool to think he deserves it,” and Gareth doesn’t think Eddie blinks once; and if there was a question of who Eddie’s man needed protection from in his head; who he thought he deserved the cold shoulder from…

There’s no fucking question, now.

But while Eddie can be cruel, and Gareth thinks he would deserve it, here; instead Eddie’s careful, but…direct.

“You guys, you didn’t—”

“We were wrong,” Gareth cuts him off, suddenly…needing Eddie to know that he wasn’t in the wrong. That Steve wasn’t either. “We sucked.”

But that’s not even quite true, is it?

“I was wrong,” Gareth says, low and rough, ripped out heavy and hard. “I sucked.”

Eddie doesn’t say shit to that. Which is enough of a response-and-a-half.

“If he means that much, then he’s not going anywhere,” Gareth gathers himself to say, not as hard as he thought it would be—because it feels like this guy might not be everything Gareth built him up to be in his head.

“And we’re not going anywhere, so,” and Eddie’s mouth quirks up at that, which feels like a win.

“Bring him, more,” Gareth wishes he had his sticks to twirl, something to do with his hands as he offers an olive branch, or…the opposite, probably, or something different entirely—what is it called when you’re the one in the wrong, all on your own?

“If he wants,” Gareth finds himself adding in a rush because…what if maybe they’ve—no, he, what if he’s already lost his shot at trying to mend fences with the guy, if Eddie’s already felt all this time like his own friends were people to protect his what-sounds-definitely-like-more-than-a-boyfriend from?

“Tell him he doesn’t have to leave and come back after practice, or hide out upstairs during Not-Hellfire,” Gareth keeps going, mostly because he’s…he’s uneasy. Unsteady. He picks at the threads in his comforter until he makes a whole new hole before he swallows hard.

“He deserved better,” Gareth exhales hard, swallows at least a little of his own fucking pride, bitter as hell; “give us a shot to try and give him better.” His eyes flick up to Eddie, who’s the one watching him, now, so he looks Eddie in the eye when he says it:

“To give you both better.”

Eddie’s breath shudders out a little. But he doesn’t look away.

“Thank you,” and Eddie doesn’t sound small, exactly. But Gareth doesn’t think he’s ever heard his friend sound so…genuine. Like, really from the heart.

“Don’t mention it,” Gareth says, kinda automatic, before he wants to smack himself because: it’s shitty to just say that in the face of what might be Eddie letting Gareth in the tiniest bit to a part of himself that Gareth wasn’t even aware he’d maybe always been missing out on knowing.

“We love you, Ed,” Gareth says, and now his is the small voice; “we were so scared, when,” and he can’t say it. He cannot fucking say it—

“Me too,” Eddie throws him a lifeline for it; is a good fucking friend and the end of the day. And the he gets a slighter version of rhat dopey-ass grin again—but not even that much smaller—

“He saved me, y’know?” Eddie says, all big eyed and moony over it.

“Yeah,” Gareth tries not to sound like he wants to roll his eyes so hard it colors his tone—but he really does. Eddie’s only told them this part a million and five times.

“Not just from the quakes, he,” Eddie shakes his head, expression going introspective now:

“I wouldn’t have pulled back out, for all the bullshit, the doctors, the treatments, the recovery,” he shakes his head, marvelling again but…if not at something new—still Harrington—it’s like it’s from a different angle. And he does it like there are…near-infinite angles.

“I don’t even know if I would have put the effort in to learn to walk on my own again,” Eddie says plainly, doesn’t sugarcoat it; “or fuck, to playagain,” and Gareth feels the weight in it, the gravity, the unspoken underpinning:

I wouldn’t have come back, not really, without him.

And the fuck can Gareth even do with that?

“He pushed me,” and the way Eddie says it, it’s like it’s closer to a fond memory almost, and fucking how; “and was there to catch me,” and maybe that’s how, maybe falling in love like that smooths out the parts where you almost died in the process; “and he was there to make it better, whenever it hurt.”

Gareth can…Gareth can respect that. He doesn’t know if he can wholly understand it, still, but.

He can respect it.

“And he still is,” Eddies doing his marveling again, he’s might-break-his-face smiling again; “just in all these,” he shakes his head, floored inside his own mind: “these new and less dire fucking ways,” then he swallows, like his throat’s tight, and Gareth doesn’t get why until the next words come out:

“Still feels pretty life-or-death, though,” Eddie says, and his voice is a little soft this time with a clear sense of holding something damn-near holy; “never really bought how someone could be your whole heart like that, but then he…” Eddie trails off, looks over to Gareth, doesn’t quite blush.

But it’s a close fucking thing.

“Sorry,” Eddie clears his throat rough, looks away, and in that second Gareth gets it. Or else, clocks something extra that he didn’t realize or appreciate that he did entirely fucking wrong—a brand new layer to be guilty about.

“Don’t be,” he says, and he means it. “We were a place you could be safe with that,” which he also means, but not without having to tack on, almost like a physical requirement: “vomit-inducing as it is,” because, well.

He means that, also. A lot. He means that part a lot. But.

“We were a place you could be safe, and you didn’t feel like you could...”

Because they were the freaks. And maybe none of them were out-out but they knew who liked who, they knew each other. They all had each other’s backs. That was part of the whole point.

Except this time, when they…didn’t.

“It was shitty, not to, we...” and Gareth steels himself again because that’s not quite true, and he wants for do better, wants to be better:

“I was shitty.”

And maybe some of that resolve, that intention and decision to be someone safe and trusted again, with this, for Eddie and the person Eddie could love that big?

Maybe some of that sinks through because Eddie considers him with narrowed eyes for a couple of drawn out seconds before he breaks the spine of the notebook, flips it just to the music, hiding the words, and taps near the middle of the page.

“Help me tighten up this part?” he asks, like a peace offering when he’s not the one who needs to give one. “Want it to be perfect, y’know,” and this time Eddie does blush, but it’s almost like he has to, in order to smile that sweet around the confession that comes, no matter how obvious it is:

“I want it to be perfect, for him.”

And Gareth sees it all for what it is: an invitation. A cautious, hopeful extension of the trust Gareth had been betraying in his way, without meaning to. Without thinking about it as a whole.

“‘Course,” he says, reaches out and again, he means it; “hand it over.”

And this time when Eddie smiles, it’s also cautious.

But the hope is bigger, and Gareth thinks that means he’s finally on the right track.

1: Gareth // 2: Mrs. Harrington // 3: Wayne // 4: Chrissy // 5: ??? // +1: ???

🎸

✨also on ao3

💫for @penny00dreadful—happiest of happy birthdays, my lovely 🖤

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