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the-fiction-witch · 1 year ago

Text

Just Breathe With Me

Media The Artful Dodger

Character Jack Dawkins

Couple Jack X Reader

Rating Sweet as Sugar!

Requested Can you please do a Jack Dawkins x reader who has a panic attack? ( comfort/fluff no smut ) wait omg plz do 🙏 only if you're comfortable of course

Warnings: Panic Attack In great detail! Please be careful!

I opened my eyes and was forced into this world, for a few brief seconds I enjoyed my peace until the chaos ensued.

Olivia cried in her crib, her little body in her baby clothes stood up in her crib, her hands on the top of the bars as she shook them, her face red and her eyes squeezed tight with tears streaming down her face.

Luna screamed on her bed, wearing her little white nightie, she jumped up and down on her bed screaming at Martin, as he tried to take her teddy.

Martin shouted as he was took all the various teddies and toys to steal for himself, half-dressed but nothing more than his socks and trousers.

Lucas hits his stick on various things in the house, not dressed at all so he runs around naked, each hit makes a loud bang.

He even knocks off a vase causing it to smash and sending broken pieces all over the floor.

I forced myself up out of bed, my body exhausted but I had little choice but to get up and function. I quickly cleaned up the broken vase and just got on.

I briefly became an octopus or I wish I had, as I managed to cook breakfast, get each of my siblings washed, dressed, hair brushed and presentable, get myself dressed, changed Olivia, quelled four arguments and made the beds Before we even hit the top of the hour. I felt faint but Ignored it and pushed on.

And right on time once every job was done, my mother trudged down the staircase from her bedroom upstairs in her nightie, her hair matted and messy, her whole body stank of whiskey, she sat herself in the chair and snapped her fingers.

The snap caused my heart to jump from my chest to my throat, beating rapidly, I hated myself but I handed over her spirit bottle.

She immediately took an intense swig of it, and the first words out of her mouth were harsh and bitter,

"Where's my vase?"

"Lucas broke it this morning," I told her,

"Find a replacement today."

"Yes Mother," I nodded,

"And we are out of food."

"Yes, Mother I will get food at the market."

"and I need more drink."

"Yes, Mother I will get some,"

"They'll be late for the schoolhouse."

"I know, I'm just taking them." I nodded, "Come everyone school time." I told them to sort them all out with their books and what little lunch I could give them and got them all out the door on time,

"You won't see me later, I'm going out."

"Yes Mother," I sighed "Perhaps not too late-"

"Dont. Say a word." She demanded,

I nodded and just got going into town.

Of course, the town was bustling with the commotion of carriages, horses, carts and people all going about their business. I did my best with Olivia on my hip to make sure everyone else behaved and avoided getting hurt, having to juggle the three of them to the schoolhouse. a twisting in my stomach but I didn't have time to dwell on it,

As soon as they were in the school house I had to scamper my way across town to drop Olivia off at her nursery, then before I had much time I had to get myself to my work in the local tailor pushing open the door and heading in grabbing my apron as I went catching my short breath.

"You're late again!" He snapped,

"Sorry Mr Ashworth, I had to drop my siblings off," I said quickly sitting at my old rickety sewing machine almost fifteen years old this machine but still I had to use it every day to do hems and repairs, the pile as tall as me beside my table, having to go slow but not too slow or I'll never get finished, fast but not to fast as to damage the fabric, or catch my fingers, or break a needle, every time I had to rethread the machine with a new colour or type of thread for a different fabric or use I held my breath for a few seconds it took to change but every second counts and I can't afford delays. The longer the day went on I began to lose feeling in my fingertips, with tingling of pins and needles in my fingers and toes, but I pushed through even if it did mean I cut myself more often as without feeling I got dangerously close to my scissors and needles.

As soon as work was over I had to rush across town and pick up my siblings from the school house, I tried to keep them all in line as we headed to the market, and I got all the things we would need for the next few days while also batting at their hands to try and get them to settle and not steal things even if some things had to be paid for because someone ran off with them, all the while I kept feeling these flashes or heat, or chill but I don't have time to dwell on temperature.

Once I got all the food I took them home and left them to play dropping the groceries off too before I returned back to town to go looking for a replacement for my mother's vase, it was slim pickings but I managed to get one and haggle down the price to what little I had left for this month. I knew by now my legs were trembling, and my body felt like giving in but all I needed now was to pick Olivia up, go home, make dinner, do a round of baths and get everyone to bed. Ready to do all of it again tomorrow.

When a young boy ran past knocking into me sending me tumbling down to the ground the vase hitting the ground and smashing into a million little pieces.

"No... no... no no no no" I muttered trying to put it back together.

And the moment it smashed, I completely broke open.

Tears streamed down my face, as I cried hysterically, my breath short and shaky, my throat choking and tight with every breath, my mouth dry and sickly, my heart raced jumping in and out my chest, my fingers and toes numb, my head dizzy almost to faint, my every limb shook and sweated, my stomach churned and turned like a hurricane, I couldn't even think, or even begin to know where to start to fix myself.

"Oh my goodness, are you alright?" A voice asked but I couldn't pick up much about it I just was lost almost distant from my body as it went through this agony, "Come on, with me." He said helping me to my feet and leading me to a rear alley out of sight of others, he helped me to lean against the wall and began to speak to me his voice soothing, and with his every word I began to slowly feel like I was swimming like I was at sea, my body a boat and slowly I was swimming back to it. "Okay, it's okay, Just breathe. Just Breathe with me... Breath in." He asked and I did my best even if I felt so short and so breathless, "And out." He asked so I did as he asked between my tears, "Okay, Just follow me just breathe with me, In... and out." He reassured He walked me through each breath he would make me inhale for five whole seconds, hold it for five more and then release for five seconds, he walked me through this for a good while until my breathlessness began to disappear, and between my tearful eyes my vision cleared and I saw him.

He was a young man, I wouldn't say much older than me, in brown trousers, a white shirt, a blue waistcoat, a green tie, a slightly purple jacket, and a hat, he had deep chocolate eyes and seemed to genuinely want to help me.

"There we go, That a little better?" he asked and I nodded even if I still couldn't stop, "Alright, I want you to do some things for me, alright? Can you do that for me?" he asked and I nodded, "Alright, I want you to tell me three things you can hear, doesn't matter what just focus on the sounds and repeat them back to me."

For a moment I couldn't hear anything my ears ringing and burning but I knew one thing I could hear and I forced it out "You're voice."

"My voice, That's perfect," He smiled, "You think you can do another one for me?"

I tried to listen to pour all my attention into my ears and I could hear "The Market Stalls,"

"You can hear the market? That's perfect, one more for me? One more thing?"

I listened closely trying hard to hear anything else "horseshoes,"

"Horseshoes, Excellent, what do you think they're from?"

"A carriage maybe?"

"Yeah I think so too," he chuckled, "You able to tell me your name?"

"Y/n."

"Y/n, That's a very lovely name." He smiled, "I'm Jack. You feel a little better?" he asked and I nodded "Good, That's very good. Just slow down, keep breathing for me, just stay here and stay still a moment."

"I can't I need to-"

"The only thing you need to do right now is to get better. Trust me I'm a doctor. You're strung out to the limit and in the middle of a panic attack. Whatever it is I'm sure it can wait a moment." he said, "Y/n I want you to tell me three things you can see, doesn't matter what any three things."

I was nervous and still struggling but slowly my symptoms began to slow and I noticed just how fuzzy my voice was from the tears and how tunnelled my vision was, "Uhhh I uhh I see you..."

"Good, that's good you see me," he said, "Anything else?"

"The uhhh the sky."

"You see the sky, that's perfect, it's a very nice afternoon. One more I know you can do it."

"The wall, for the bakery."

"That's perfect, the bakery wall. Can you imagine all the lovely cakes, and pasties, and fresh loaves in there?"

"I uhh I can." I nodded,

"Excellent, One more little thing y/n, I want you to tell me three things you feel okay?"

as he said it I noticed just how little I really noticed but with each thing I listed to him I became more aware and more into this world again,

"I, I feel the wall."

"How does it feel?"

"Cold, uhh stoney I suppose."

"Stoney?" he laughed, "what else?"

I slightly moved my feet feeling the dusty dirt around my boots slightly move to the side like sand as I did so, "I feel the dirt, as it pushes away."

"How does it feel against your boots?"

"Rough and small"

"That's good, one more for me, just one more."

As he asked it I felt almost normal, and I noticed "Your hand." I said, His hand graced mine his fingers on my wrist checking my pulse, the other on my neck but not harshly not as if attempting to harm me or threaten my throat but merely rested there as if he was monitoring my every gasp,

"How do my hands feel?"

"Uhh Warm,"

"Good."

"They feel rough," I blushed a little trying not to giggle while also trying to you know not insult the man who helped me,

He chuckled, "Yeah, Surgeon. Sorry about that." He chuckled,

"Does that mean they are dirty?"

"I mean... yeah probably, I'm sorry for that too."

"It's okay. I uhh Thank you."

"You're welcome," He smiled, "I saw you were struggling I thought you were having a heart attack and first but no, a panic attack, Do you get these a lot?"

"unfortunately yes."

"Alright, well. The best thing I can say is to try to manage your stress so it doesn't overflow, maybe slow down a little but those three sights, sounds, and feelings are really good it help calm and ground so use it when you can alright?"

"I uhh I will do my best."

"I assume you have a stressful life?"

"Understatement."

"If I let you go right now are you going to go straight back to the level of stress you were at?"

"I uhh... I am late from picking my sister up, and I need to get a new vase for my mother, and I need to get home and do dinner and get everyone to"

"Okay. Okay." he said stopping me, "I'm getting bloody anxious just listening to that,"

"Sorry-"

"It's alright, I was heading home anyway I can come give you a hand if you like?"

"No no, I couldn't-"

"It's no trouble, you need to relax a little if I can take something off your plate anything it'll help. In fact as your doctor at this moment I insist."

"Well okay, my mother insists I come home with a new vase."

"Okay, I can find a vase. anything particular?"

"No, just a vase."

"Okay." He nods,

"I uhh but I don't have any money left."

"You let me worry about that, it's on me." He smiled, "I'll meet you back here when I'm done." he smiled heading off back to the market,

I blushed but smiled and headed on my way picking up Olivia luckily she was asleep by now, and I returned to the alley where Jack already waited with a vase in hand.

"Did I do good?"

"It's beautiful. How'd you-"

"It's best not to ask questions." he winked, "Aww who's this little lady?"

"This is Olivia." I smiled letting him see her but not wake her,

"Aww, she's beautiful, your daughter?"

"Sister, well half-sister really... though I don't honestly know." I answered, "But thank you so much, I really need to get home now,"

"Alright, I'll walk with you, so long as you don't mind,"

"Ohh no of course not, thank you."

"It's alright no trouble, here you take this, and I'll take this little lady." He smiled handing me the vase and taking Olivia letting her sleep on his shoulder as we walked, by the time we got home I felt a rush of anxiety as the house was a tip and my siblings losing their minds from being home alone so long,

"Oh no no no."

"It's okay, don't worry. You take her and get her to bed. I'll take this lot and sit with them in the garden we can have a play around and get some energy out"

"Are you sure?"

"Of course, it's no problem," he said,

"Alright, Okay everyone outside with Mr- uhh"

"Dr, Dawkins."

"Everyone out to the gardens with Dr Dawkins," I told them and of course, a chance to play outside was not passed up, he went out with them and I began work I put Olivia down to sleep in her cot and cleaned the house as best and putting the new vase on the shelf. Once done I sighed in relief and went out keeping the door open as I saw Jack helping my siblings, playing with them, playing a game of knights. Luna is a princess, Martian is a dragon and Lucas is a knight with Jack narrating them and helping them play.

I smiled and took a seat on the bench outside the front door taking a rare moment to... be at peace,

"You feel a bit better now?" He asked sitting beside me,

"Yes, thank you, Jack."

"you're very welcome. they're great, a lot of energy."

"Yeah well the get cooped up a lot."

"You know talking does wonders for anxiety." He smiled, "I'm not that sort of doctor but I'm happy to listen anyway?"

"I don't want to burden you, you've done enough."

"It's not a burden I want to help, and I admit I'm curious about you."

I chuckled a little, "Well, we live here all of us."

"All five of you?"

"Six my mother too."

"Ahh, your father?"

"Never met him."

"You said Olivia might be your half-sister, where's her father?"

"They all are my half-siblings, as far as I know. None of us have the same father, as far as I am aware. None of them have ever met them."

"I see. You're mother she a -"

"She was,"

"That explains that then."

"It does, yeah."

"Then... why are you looking after them?"

"Mother... likes to drink."

"Ohh."

"yeah."

"I see. So she just goes out and drinks all day? leaves you alone with them?"

"Pretty much, sometimes she's here just... hungover as all hell."

"So you do... everything I guess?"

"cook. clean. baths. bed. back and forth to school."

"I'm surprised you didn't crack sooner..."

"Well, sink or swim I guess."

"I suppose so, still school gives you some break time I guess."

"I wish, got to go to work while they're at school, and Olivia isn't old enough yet."

"Hold up- You work?"

"Yes."

"You have a job! on top of basically full-time caring for four kids?"

"Yes."

"what do you do?"

"Tailor's assistant in town, I run the old machine in the back doing alterations."

"Ohh my god- that's a tough busy job. You work quickly in there."

"We do, two days or less for your garment to impress he really likes that motto."

"I know, I got this repaired in like a day last time I got a rip in it," he said looking at his shirt,

"Yeah I think I remember it," I laughed looking at the familiar shirt, "Yeah, I was going fast the seam is crooked," I laughed

"Ohh? I never looked that closely at it." He laughed, "How many hours do you work?"

"Eight hours a day seven days a week."

"Holy- no wonder you're running yourself ragged. I'm a doctor and I don't work that much!"

"Well, I'm the only income coming in, got six mouths to feed."

"You are amazing, you know that?"

"I am."

"You are. That is insane, and the fact you do it with such grace. It's astonishing."

"Thank you," I blushed.

"If I may be so bold, If you need an extra pair of hands, and you do. I'm more than happy to come help."

"I couldn't ask you to do that,"

"You're not asking me, I'm asking you. You're only going to get worse unless you lighten your load, and all although panic attacks are best just ridden out... they can cause serious damage." He explained, "I want to help, even if its just little things. I can take one job off you a day, or take them for an hour and go play in the garden just, something to lighten your load a little."

"You'd really do that?"

"I would,"

"Why?"

"Becuase you need help, and as a doctor, I can't stop myself from helping those who need it. and right now... you need it more than anyone."

"Thank you Jack," I smiled leaning my head on his shoulder,

"You're welcome Y/n" He smiled, kissing my head. "Now, how about you look after them I'll get dinner on?"

"It's a deal."

"Good girl, What uhh... what am I cooking?"

"Soup,"

"Soup?"

"Yeah,"

"What kind of soup?"

"Leek soup."

"Just leek soup? you have any bread for it?"

"No."

"Okay, new plan you wait here and look after them I will get dinner as my treat."

"I can't ask you to-"

"No. No. I'm doing it. at very least getting bread if nothing else,"

"Alright."

"Good, I'll see you as soon as I can." he smiled kissing my cheek before he took his stuff and headed back toward town.

#tbs imagine #thomasbrodiesangster #tbs imagines #thomas sangster imagine #thomas brodie sangster smut #tbs smut #thomas brodie sangster imagine #thomas brodie sangster #tbs #thomas sangster #jackdawkins #jack #jack dawkins #thea #thearttfuldodger #theartfuldogger #artful dodger #the artful dodger

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murralsees · 9 days ago

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rabbit, rabbit, rabbit rating: T/M relationships: Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson; Eddie Munson & Family tags: vignettes, non-chronological, pre-series, post-series, references to illness > read on ao3

promises

1966–1986

The Munson brothers had never been close. That didn’t matter.

When Al called to announce the birth of his son, he admitted right away that he and the boy’s mother, Liz, had yet to decide on a name. They had taken care of everything else: the nursery with its fresh yellow paint, the stuffed animals and picture books, the top-shelf formula, but not the most important thing. Who would he be? What kind of man?

Wayne was sure that it was their mother talking through his worry. The minute Al came into the world red-faced and screaming, she had called her eldest son into the room. You look at him, she pleaded. One day when he’s grown and doesn’t need his ma anymore, he’ll still need you. You’ll teach him how to be a man.

Of course, once those frightening first years had passed, they would rarely run into each other even while living under the same roof. If ever they did, they would find each other in the electric glow of the kitchen, tired and hungry in the aimless hours between night shifts and walks to school. When Wayne finally left home, Al was still a scrawny little thing with a warble in his voice.

“It’ll come to you.” Why call if not for reassurance? They had never been close, but one of them had been born with a brother to look up to. “Sounds like he’ll be livin’ the life of Riley.”

“There’s our name!”

Wayne thought he had forgotten the sound of his laughter until it crackled over the line, transporting him backwards to the last time he had drawn it out of him—a long time ago, when he had taken his first job as seriously as any other lest he let their mother down. He was old enough to remember the fear rounding her eyes as they fled. He could remember the life she left behind, not just for her, but for the child fleeing with her and the child still on the way. When she died, Al didn’t call.

He asked for their address. His brother had settled away from the countryside—away, as he said, from the scenic fields of cowshit—in a nice suburb with friendly neighbors. That was where he hoped the package would reach them. Posted to the Munsons was a box with a yellow stuffed rabbit inside, a tag tied round its ear. For Riley.

About a year later, well into the afternoon as he had been fast asleep, he received a call from an Elizabeth. He had never heard that name, and never heard her voice, and in his exhaustion had nearly hung up on her. It wasn’t until she asked for him personally that his heart sank.

“I’m embarrassed to say it.”

“What happened?”

There was a brief silence. “It’s my fault.” The admission carried no emotion, but if the pause had meant anything, it meant intention, strong and unwavering. “He was trying to help.”

Wayne posted his bail.

The family had moved at some point, from their nice, friendly neighborhood to a quiet plot of land at the edge of Hawkins not far at all from the house where Al was born and Ma had died. It was so late when he drove there that the surrounding woodland was too dark to find against the black night. Not even the headlight beam of his truck could penetrate it as he turned down their gravel road, hitting a mile-thick wall of pine trees and stopping there.

“We’re comin’ up on the left,” Al directed him. He would have missed it otherwise, the cracked siding of their ranch barely peeking out from behind another row of trees and shrubs. His brother kept his finger to the window, tapping the glass as the hum of the engine finally cut off. It was only his tapping for a moment, quick to be deafened by a chorus of peepers and crickets as he cracked open the door.

Wayne yanked him back by the arm. Though he couldn’t see him, he could feel the twitch of his nerves and guiltily loosened his grip.

“Thanks for everything.”

That wasn’t what he had stopped him to hear. He kept his eyes locked on the source of his breathing. “You’re lucky,” he told him. “It’ll be a year if that. First time, probably just a slap on the wrist…”

“Yeah,” he sighed.

He didn’t want to hear his relief, either. “Damn fool,” he hissed, blindly reaching past him to slam the door shut. “Don’t you think I would’ve helped you? The woman’s sick.”

“That’s why I—!” Hot air pushed back against Wayne’s face. The words failed, his deep timbre breaking, and in its place was the shaky whimper of the young man he used to know.

“What good are you behind bars?”

Al sniffed into his sleeve, the answer a rasped and muffled, “I know.”

“Think of your boy.”

He would then make good on a new promise, not to his mother, but to Al. Half asleep, he would drive directly from his shift at the plant to the house in the woods. There, he would make himself useful for as long as he could doing whatever needed doing: bills to be sorted, grocery lists to be made, the cleaning, the prescription pick-ups, the bills again.

His sister-in-law was tall and thin, quick on her feet as she worked through bursts of energy that, once expended, removed all the bounce from her step and let her long curls droop motionless around an olive face. Still, the baby would cry and she would be up, ready with a tune to hum. It didn’t take too many trips for Wayne’s promise to change hands again. He wouldn’t pretend to be there for his brother’s sake, for to think of him at all was to hate him.

One morning, Liz walked into the living room with her son on her hip and a laugh in her voice. “We have a question for you, Uncle Wayne.” From behind her back, she presented the stuffed rabbit to him until a focused pair of little hands reached for it. “Who’s this Riley kid?”

The corner of his lip quirked, surprised more than anything by the levity. “I think it was an inside joke.”

“Was it?”

“Don’t remember now.”

She passed him the toy first, letting him intuit the follow-up before she could progress into the kitchen.

Sitting the child down in his lap and leaning him against his chest, “Eddie’s better,” he said.

“My idea! It suits him fine.”

Eddie had a pretty head of curls like his mother. He wasn’t too fussy, either, like his father had been. Wide brown eyes followed the voices he heard as if following the conversation as well, and maybe he was. He would be trouble once he started talking if that was the case. Too smart.

Five months later, Al would come home to his family. Wayne would check in now and then, well aware of his brother’s bullheaded mission to prove himself. It wasn’t until Liz died that he was the one picking up the phone. He wasn’t invited to pay his respects. He wouldn’t have done it for him anyway.

His nephew was six then and smart as a whip. Looking into his eyes, one knew not to bother with platitudes.

“I know I’m like a stranger. She told you not to talk to strangers, I bet.”

As he nodded, his moppy hair fell into his face.

Wayne knelt down, meeting him at eye level. “We were friends when you were this big.” He lifted a hand just off the ground. They were standing in the front lawn, a chill descending for his last goodbye of the night.

“I member.”

“Well, that was a long time ago.”

“You’re Uncle Wayne,” he muttered, a bit impatiently as he went on, “I member. If he had hair on his face he’d look like you. She said that.”

His hand froze over his bristly chin.

“I still got Bunny.”

The stuffed rabbit he had sent him was important enough to be given a name. Indecisive as his father when it came to the naming, it seemed, or perhaps the opposite. He saw what he saw and loved it completely. “That what you named it?”

“She.”

“Okay, she. That’s right,” he added. “Little yellow guy.”

“Girl.”

“Sorry.”

By some miracle, Eddie cracked a smile. From crooked beginnings, it spread wide to show off a missing tooth. “I’m kiddin’ you. Mama calls him a girl because she thinks bunnies are girls, but this one’s a boy.”

“I’m sure glad you got that straight.” He opened his arms to him, laughter hummed as he threw himself into the hug. “You be good, you hear? That bunny’s my friend, too. Don’t want him giving me bad reports.”

That same year, Al was charged with grand larceny. He was home when the arrest had been made, as was Eddie, who would later recount that the man had been dragged off the property kicking and screaming. He remembered his name being shouted from behind glass and his father’s hand pounding at the cruiser’s window. I did it for my kid! Ask him! You ask him!

Eddie sat at the edge of a freshly made futon. It would be his bed for a while, until they settled into the routine. Wayne’s day would begin late at night, interrupting sleep to brew a pot of coffee, and once school started that wouldn’t do. The trailer’s single bedroom would become Eddie’s.

“I know what he did,” the boy told him. “He said it wasn’t bad since we needed the money.”

His uncle sat beside him, a deck of cards shuffled between his knees.

“Is he bad?”

Wayne shook his head, watching the stack arch under his thumbs to collapse. “Wasn’t right to make you worry, though.”

Eddie pushed the hair out of his eyes to focus on his uncle’s hands. “Do you think he’s got cards to play with?”

Wayne nodded.

“That’s good.”

“What’d he teach you?”

He sat back on his palms. “War, Go Fish, rummy, and we played Texas hold 'em sometimes but I don’t get that one really.”

“What’s your favorite?”

Again, he swept his moppy hair back. Smiled devilishly. “War.”

Wayne taught him a few more in those aimless hours between night shifts and walks to school. It was one way he knew that he could be there for Al’s boy, and while he feared it wouldn’t be enough the older he got—there weren’t enough hours in the day to be there like he should have been—he was pleasantly surprised by the friends he would eventually bring home: excitable but certainly harmless, more interested in the games Eddie had prepared for them that day than causing trouble. It was never the same thing at the center of their table, the cards, pawns, or chips flying with their laughter or their outrage, and yet there would always be a moment when his voice would rise above the ruckus. Didn’t I tell you? My uncle’s sleeping! They’d quiet right down.

Eddie had an interest in music, too. That had always been the case, as far as he knew, the short phone calls with his parents often returning to that strange talent of his. Liz discovered it when he was three or four, humming along to some song on the radio. She started hearing double—a tinkling echo—come to find out it wasn’t her, but her son down the hall. Just like the kid from Charlie Brown, she said, tapping away at that little toy piano! Wayne waited for him to bring the subject up himself. He didn’t, and when he asked him outright if he’d be interested in piano lessons someday, the answer was a hard no. He wouldn’t be any good at it, he told him. More importantly, he didn’t want to be because that would be a waste of money.

“Besides, I know what I’d save up for,” he explained further. “What gets your toes tapping when you’re driving around?”

Wayne didn’t answer. He waited for the continuation, lips pursed around his cigarette.

“Well, you got Woody Guthrie,” he offered, “or Willie Nelson, or Jim Croce right? Not Beethoven or whoever else.”

His uncle smirked. “Guess that’s true.”

“But I’m gonna get my own.”

They reached a compromise for his thirteenth birthday. Eddie could pick out the instrument, but Wayne would be buying. It was an investment as much as a gift, he assured him—if he was serious about playing, then he had better play.

The guitar he chose was an acoustic, shiny and new. It was a beautiful thing to look at, but to hear it was something else. Sounding good, then sounding better, and in no time at all sounding like a calling, the most beautiful thing about it was that Eddie never put it down.

Wayne didn’t buy his second guitar. That one came home without him knowing, never played with him around, or at least never heard. It had to be plugged in. The amplifier had been snuck home, too, only discovered on a hot summer night when all the windows had to be opened. He wouldn’t have gone into his room otherwise.

When Eddie came home from his friend’s house, his uncle was waiting for him. They needed to talk, he said.

“You don’t really think I’d steal it, do you?”

“How’d you get it?”

He scoffed, nonchalance faltering as he was met with narrowed eyes. His lips twitched into a smile. “Coffin’s doing good.” That was his band: Corroded Coffin. They usually played at a dive called the Hideout, if that story was to be believed anymore. “Not that you’d know…”

“What was that?”

“Well Jesus, Wayne, it’s not like you would know!” he laughed shakily. “And I’m not saying that to blame you for working. I’m saying that because it’s true.”

He ran a hand over his chin, covering his mouth as he let him go on.

“Listen, I’m just trying to earn my keep here. That’s all I ever fucking do.” As Wayne sat forward, only Eddie’s breath could be heard. It hitched in his throat. “I’m not like him.”

“No,” he agreed, looking down at clasped hands. “That’s why I’m surprised you’re lying.”

The silence built and built. Wayne could feel his heart pounding out of his chest, then watched it happen as Eddie stomped away. He flung his bedroom door open hard enough to hit the wall, but he didn’t close it, returning to toss a handful of plastic baggies onto the coffee table. “There,” he huffed. “That’s how I bought it.”

Glancing down at the pile, “That all of it?”

“I swear, just the pot.” Answering a question he hadn’t asked. Realizing it, he squatted down to look his uncle in the eye. “The band could really be something. It really could! I thought if I put everything I got into it, you know? Flipping patties was never gonna get me there.” He had been held back a grade, he said, because of it. He was a bad student as it was—he just didn’t have the brains. Add a part-time job to the mix, and he would never make it out of that school.

The truth was, Eddie was smart. He was excellent at whatever interested him: the music, the games, and even studying, which was apparently a requirement for those games as he, himself, was creating them from scratch. He was a fine artist, too, as long as his drawings had something to do with Dungeons and Dragons or his band. He would have done well in English if he had been allowed to discuss The Lord of the Rings, having read those books from cover to cover more times than anyone—for fun, for research—but he didn’t relate to the material he was given and thus wasn’t invited to try. Perhaps to his greatest credit, even if compelled by spite, he didn’t plan on dropping out. He would do what he needed to do, but he would graduate.

Yes, he would.

“I want it out of this house,” his uncle told him. “Your responsibility, not mine.” It would break his heart to hear about again, and in time, he would—from police who didn’t care, from reporters who never met him, and from a family who lost their daughter and had no one else to blame. He would never believe that Eddie had done it, but he had to believe he was dead.

Wayne wrote to his brother.

hands to hide in

1987

“Your cooperation is voluntary, of course, but know that your protection can’t be guaranteed if you revoke our services. A new identity is a new identity.” Sharp blue eyes cut to him over a stack of papers, his white face barely visible under the harsh light of the holding room. “Clear so far?”

He was chewing the inside of his cheek, tasting blood that wasn’t there. His mouth was too dry. Even so, for months upon months, that taste wouldn’t go away, tinging every bite of bland hospital food with a metallic bitterness and slurring his words as if it stayed on his tongue. “What do I get?”

The man looked down, scanning the information in his packet again. Fwip. “We’re covering all expenses for…” Fwip. “Let’s see here.”

“Where’re you setting me up?”

“Greenacres.” Fwip.

“The place to be,” he deadpanned. No reaction—over his silvery head as he searched for that magic number. “That in Indiana, or—?”

“Washington.”

Eddie laughed. He couldn’t help it: the blue eyes without a face, the blood no longer choking him, the second life he didn’t even want, Green-fucking-acres, just gimme that countryside. He laughed until his sides ached, though he didn’t have to laugh hard. Sitting in that chair long enough would have had the same effect.

“One year,” came the answer. “That should give you plenty of time to settle in.”

“Generous of you.”

The papers were set down on the laminate table between them. “I know it’s not ideal.”

“‘Not ideal,’” he scoffed, running his palms over his shaved head. “I still have family back home, you know.”

“I’m sorry.”

He could feel a red anger rising into his cheeks. “Can I just ask what good it is keeping it all hush-hush? You’re sending me off to bumfuck nowhere for—what? For everyone else to believe things’ll go back to normal? I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure normal has left the building.”

Hands tented in the silence that followed. The man’s necktie folded over the table as he scooted forward. “I’m a caseworker, Mr. Tracey.”

“Not my name.”

“But if you’re asking for my two cents,” he went on, ignoring the mumbled interruption, “I’ll just remind you that seeing is believing. I’m afraid that ninety-nine percent of the time, it really is as simple as that.”

Very few had seen what Eddie had. He hardly believed it himself, even with a thousand scars to prove it and the taste that never went away. Those government types would have let him die if they didn’t believe his story, but because they did—and because it was their mission to deny that there were any other monsters lurking under the bed—he had to start over. Of course, seeing what he had seen, how could he? How could they even ask that of him?

Unsurprisingly, it was because “they” weren’t even people at this point in the process. They were words on a page, and he was too tired to keep arguing with a stack of papers. So, the next morning, he would wake up in a stranger’s skin. Dave Tracey’s bed sheets, damp with sweat, still smelled of the plastic packaging they came in. He had no hair to comb, but a mouthful of teeth to brush. Spit, rinse, and yet that taste returned: freshness was no match against the unwaning death of Eddie Munson. You can start over.

It’s not your life, his inner voice shot back.

He wondered who he had been talking to. It must have been early on, before the haze of medications had dissipated. It’s not your life… Trying to slot in a name, It’s not your life, blank, he caught his reflection furrowing his brow, drool beading at the corner of his mouth while the floss paused between molars. He finished up, dropping the string into the trash and running the bath. They hadn’t let anyone into that room with him—the one at the facility, which was somewhere around Hawkins, he guessed—and had moved him one day or night while he was asleep. But before that, he did talk to someone who knew him. Hazy as his recollection was, he could be sure it happened because the shock of it hadn’t worn off yet. Maybe because he hadn’t tried to dissect it until now.

Bang, bang, bang, pounding at the door of that memory.

He tested the bath, watching the suds circle around slender fingers. Hot water pushed between them; holding him, if he closed his eyes.

Steve’s hand was warm around his.

Nothing else had been since the Upside Down, had it? Eddie’s blanket was paper thin, trying its best to hold in whatever heat his dying body struggled to produce—which wasn’t enough anymore. Never would be again. What a terrible thought that was.

His mind lagged to pay attention to the gentle sound beside him.

“I don’t think it was luck. I think you fought like hell and won, and I wish they’d just say that.”

Eddie nodded slowly.

“So I wanted to at least,” he went on, “before I can’t say it, I guess.”

Hard as he tried to understand what that meant, it wasn’t until his new friend loosened his grip that he realized it was supposed to be a goodbye. He forced out a sound, a hoarse and panicked “no!” Relief was almost outweighed by guilt, having startled him into holding on, except that he was holding on even more tightly than before. Out of the lake again, onto the sunbaked shore, dragging himself back to life without asking himself why. “Stay.”

The blurred shapes of his face changed. “Until they have to chase me off.” Eddie imagined him smiling. “It’ll be alright.”

Irritated to be using his imagination at all, though, his eyes shut. He rolled his head back and forth against his pillows.

“Hey,” quiet but close, “listen, I know it will. You can start over.”

“You—” He resisted the sudden urge to pull free. It would be making a point, if he had the energy to do it, but it was a point he couldn’t make anyway. Not if he wanted to keep warm. “You can say it’s–that it’s nothing. It’s not your life.” What point was he making now, he wondered, squeezing another hand around his? “You’re not the one who’s running…”

As he continued to imagine Steve, almost certainly frowning, it was impossible to conjure up a version of him that knew this would happen. Like Eddie, his only goal was to get him back to dry land. That was all. And, imagining him still, it was impossible to forget how he had last seen him, his smile a final comfort in the wavering candlelight. He hadn’t been asking him to live yet. Just to survive.

“I’m a call away.”

Eyes opened again, forgetting their uselessness. They couldn’t parse his meaning.

“I promise,” Steve said, answering a blind and frantic search. “I’ll be easy to find.”

Quarters jingled in his jacket pocket, waiting to be interrupted by a tinny voice in his ear.

“Operator. City and state, please?”

“Hawkins, Indiana? Uh,” he could see his breath, puffing in the air and clouding on the glass. Surprised to have gotten that far, maybe expecting an agent to pop out of the bushes, he jingled as he glanced over his shoulder. “I’m looking for a number. Steve Harrington?” His house was the big one on the other end of town. The party place. “Should be on Cornwallis, I think.”

“One moment.”

It did occur to him, letting the seeds of doubt germinate as he wandered his new stomping grounds, that Steve had never made that promise. However, he came to the conclusion that he had to have left some sort of impression regardless; some suggestion of kindness. A goodbye like that couldn’t have been invented otherwise. There was a question that had kept him walking around the outskirts of town, too, on and on, all afternoon from gas station to gas station and to that payphone by evening. Who could he call right now? Wayne wasn’t one of those people in the know, meaning his nephew had died a murderer. He didn't want to cause any trouble. He didn’t want to give any hope, either—not to Wayne, not to his friends. Not right now.

It was a cold first night. All he wanted to do was warm up again.

“I see a John Harrington on Cornwallis.”

Probably his father. He’d hang up if he got him. “That’s right,” he answered.

“That number is—”

Pen. He patted at his jacket, retrieving it just in time to scribble it onto the back of his hand.

Thankfully, the next voice he heard was Steve’s. He had told him, hadn’t he? Easy to find.

Eddie wiped at the foggy glass with his sleeve.

“Hello?” He had to repeat himself. Only once, because that promise was being kept. Quiet but close, even miles away: “Hey.”

“Miss me?” It didn’t have the right effect. He knew, shivering.

“Where are you? Can you say?”

No one was there to stop him. “Greenacres, Washington.”

“Green…acres…” There was a scratching moving from background to foreground. Pencil to paper. “Really?”

“Farm livin’.”

The scratching was replaced by his whistling, the first few notes of that old theme song.

Of all the reasons to cry. At least he got that much-needed warmth, he thought: so much of it that it was spilling over, falling in heavy drops down the front of his coat.

“What do you need?”

Need. Eddie had needed. Dave only wanted. What was left to do? He sucked in a breath to stop a quivering lip. “I’m alright, I think.” Cleared his throat. “Quiet out here. I’m just–I dunno, trying to stay sane.”

“Can I come see you?”

A protest squeaked at the back of his throat, cut off too quickly by another steadying inhale. It ended with laughter as he rubbed the side of his wet face. “What are you gonna do, drive out?”

“If you want me to.”

He rested his head against the glass. It’s not your life. Was that how he had taken it? As a challenge? “That’s days, Steve. Your folks are gonna wonder where the hell you went.”

“Yeah.” Air fizzled over the line. “Other way around, trust me. If you don’t want me to, that’s something else, but I thought—”

“Twenty-three Martin Ave.”

His little house looked different when he flipped the lights on again. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to notice the details before: the beige wallpaper that greeted him in that snug living room was actually a dusty pink, speckled with tiny rose bouquets. There were no paintings, posters, or pictures decorating those walls, but as naturally as if he wanted to be there, he told himself that this would change. If he still had a guitar, he’d hang it opposite the fireplace filled with cobwebs. He would only have to reach up and grab it if he put a chair in that corner, too, plucking out an idea on those mornings when he wished he was dead.

That week, he waited. The days passed, but he didn’t worry. Days would pass. He had said it with the same certainty that Steve would eventually knock on his door. He kept himself busy cleaning, stocking up on groceries and booze, and by the fourth day had picked up a rickety chair off the side of the road. It would do the job, he figured, because he was on his way back from the music store. A guitar was essential as far as he was concerned, and no one was there to stop him from shelling out. He tested his memory next, starting with the simple melodies and chord progressions that had taught him how to play: Guthrie, Nelson, and Croce, always at home with them in his uncle’s pickup, coming home again to Greenacres.

Invited, at least. His memory wasn’t the problem, but his fingers—slow and weak—and a frustration that would rise to eruption. Still, returning the six-string to its rack, he would scrawl a few bars out in a notebook to come back to later. If there was to be a later, then he hoped there would be a new song waiting for him somewhere in those pages.

On the fifth night, he could have missed the knocking, obscured as it was by a storm cloud of expletives. No doubt Eddie could be heard from the front stoop, where that knocking had no choice but to crescendo into a jamb-clattering bang.

He shed his guitar and flew to the door.

Finally there in the dim light of the doorway, Steve’s lips parted to grin. He brushed the snow off the brim of his baseball cap. “Thank God I found it,” he said. “I was starting to lose daylight.”

No one else was there to hold Eddie back. It took no force at all to bring him in from the cold, the door closing effortlessly against the collapsing weight of their bodies. He wanted to commit him to memory—the shape, smell, and taste of him—until the memory of him was so full that he could hide in it. Fingers lost in the tangles of his hair, and plastic scented sheets smudged clean by Tide and tobacco, and the combination should have been enough to wash the blood out of his mouth. For one blissful moment, it was. The taste of salt reminded him that he couldn’t lose himself, even now. Especially now.

Palms warmed his cheeks, tears swept and kissed away.

a bit of sleep

1987–1988

Eddie was cold.

Whenever the blanket began to slip, it was his hand that reached up, determined to cover broad shoulders. Steve was careful not to expose him to anything but warmth, lifting his shirt only so skin could meet skin. This was the way he mapped him in the dark, remembering the wounds that wept through layers of gauze, now dry and smooth under his fingers. Those scars could be followed from his waist to his chest, branching more jaggedly along the arms. The last time he had seen him, he couldn’t hold his hand without worrying about the tubes and wires keeping him alive—as much as testing, recording, and monitoring the improbability of that. Of him.

“Can’t hurt me,” Eddie whispered under a laugh, leading him by the wrist to the sharp peak of his hip bone and to the valley dipping under elastic. His breath caught as he pressed himself into the touch.

Answering, Steve lowered flush against him, lips trailing from neck to jaw and stopping where smoothness was interrupted by coarse stubble. “Okay?”

Arms wrapped around him, keeping him close and willing him even closer.

For a moment, he wondered if he was studying him with the same anxious intensity, the cool of his palms seeming to follow the raised patches where his back had met hard ground and split open.

But, laughing again, “Where were you?”

“Mostly,” he muttered, “I-90.”

Laughing into a kiss, turning Steve’s smirk into a grin.

“Well!”

Laughing hard. It was cut off too soon by a tremble and a sigh. “You know what I mean…”

It had taken a massive improbability to bring them together. He didn’t want to think about it.

Fingertips followed the curve of Steve’s spine again, stalling briefly over those remnants of the Upside Down until he had passed them, slipping into his jeans. Eddie pushed down to pull him close again, leaned up to lean back down—over him and under the blanket held in place by different hands. When they came together, they laughed together, too. The stupid simplicity of it all. Where had they been? Why not here?

Steve was cooking breakfast when Eddie appeared in the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from his eye.

“I thought I smelled toast,” he yawned. “Good thing…”

“Eggs, too!”

“You’re something, man, you know that?”

“Coffee, bacon, what else?” He gave the pan a stir before cracking open the fridge, scanning it as he smoothed back his bed head to no avail. His thick brown hair bounced back up, defying gravity. “Anything?”

Eddie propped his elbows on the countertop, chin in his hands as he watched him. “You didn’t have to do all this. Seriously.”

“What if I was hungry?” He gave his temple a peck as he set a steaming plate down in front of him. Then, with a helping for himself, bowed over the counter to dig in.

His fingers ghosted over the kiss as if preserving it. “Sorry I don’t have a table.”

Steve shook his head, working on a mouthful.

“Should probably get one, huh? A few more chairs.”

Swallowing, “I don’t mind.”

“It’s…a house, though. I mean,” he poked at his plate, pushed a breath through his nose, “right?”

“Your house.”

He kept his eyes down, lips skewed to the side.

“If you want a table and chairs, though, let’s go get a table and chairs! Hell, if they’re buying…”

A smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

It was nearly missed. “What?”

“Just you,” he told him. “I can’t tell if you’re real.”

He struggled with that question himself, off and on. Off entirely since he got there, certainly, but generally on. Generally, time hadn’t budged from the sterile room where they had left it. He wiped his mouth. “I forgot,” he said. “I brought you something.” Standing straight with the quirk of Eddie’s brow, he was interrupted nonetheless.

“What’d you do that for?”

“Can I go get it?”

“No,” he chuckled airily, grabbing a bathrobe on his way to the door. True, then, Steve thought: he had noticed that his slowness wasn’t all worry. It was the past they shared, too, dragging him by the ankles across the rocky depths. “Where?” Eddie called.

“Shotgun!” He knew he wouldn’t miss it. As he waited, he rested his back against the wall, stretching his muscles in the other direction before a twinge could turn into an ache.

Slam. The walls shook with his reentry. “Asshole!”

Steve stifled his laughter with another bite of bacon.

“You want me to cry! You fucker—”

“Don’t cry!” Stifled no more as he helped close the distance, then shocked out of him again as he tossed the denim vest aside to hold him instead. “Come on, don’t cry.”

“Don’t go.”

They agreed to let the day play out as if he never would.

Steve kept the heat blasting on their drive into town. He had to remind himself to pay attention to the icy roads, catching himself glancing at his passenger.

Daylight flickered in his eyes as he spoke. “I still can’t believe you hung onto it!” Eddie was talking about the battle vest, lost and found, blood-caked and hanging in his closet. “Reminds me, I wanted to start on a new one before everything happened. Ha. Guess I’m gonna need some projects out here. Got the guitar at least—”

“I saw that!” His gaze lingered on him again. The light changed from red to green on his blanched face, only reminding him to go when he turned to smile. “You know, I haven’t really heard you play.”

“Yeah.” Eddie winced. “You don’t want to.”

“Oh, please! Henderson says you’re like a freaking prodigy.”

“Henderson hasn’t heard me since I got ripped to shit,” he laughed. “Maybe once my fingers are working…”

Steve found his hand in his lap.

“Then, my liege, I guarantee a worthy performance.”

“Can’t wait.”

Eddie was watching him in his periphery, a glistening darkness fixed on him as he wove into his grasp and squeezed. “How is he, by the way? Does he know that I, um…” The words drifted under the mechanical hum keeping them warm.

“That you called?” He couldn’t say with total certainty why it was him, before everyone who loved him, to whom Eddie had decided to reach out. There was the fact that, like him, Steve would have done anything to protect those kids. He had been the one to hear his worries about life after Hawkins, and to accept the instability of it. Eddie wasn’t out of the woods yet. If there was a way out, he hadn’t found it. “I didn’t tell anyone.” Still, a ventured guess was only that: Eddie had called, so Steve had come. “I said I was seeing my dad about a job.”

He sighed, slumping back in his seat. “Thanks.”

Robin hadn’t quite believed that story, though that went unsaid. Someday soon, he would have to apologize not only for lying to her, but for asking her to lie, too. She would understand once she saw Eddie, he hoped: how far away from himself he was, in no shape to fight for his good name.

“Anyways,” Steve went on, “Dustin’s doing alright. He told me he visited your uncle a couple times.”

“Oh.”

“He’s doing okay, too, but I’ll leave it at that if you want.”

“No,” he answered. “What else did he say about him?”

“I mean, it’s been hard. They, uh, moved everyone out of the trailer park—”

“What?”

“Yeah. I wish I thought to ask where he was.” When he looked again, Eddie was running a hand over his buzzed head. “I will when I get back. After things have settled down a bit, who knows? Maybe he’s far enough from Hawkins that you could go see him…”

He didn’t answer this time. He wasn’t watching him anymore, either, staring far off into the snowy distance.

“Hey.” Steve rubbed a hand over his shoulder. “You just got out. One day at a time, you know?”

Slowly, letting that thought sink in, Eddie nodded.

“Today’s about tables and chairs.” And so it was.

That left the second day free, and they mostly spent it walking. A quiet bike trail stretched alongside a frozen creek, through the woods, and into town, and Steve imagined that a greener Greenacres would make for a prettier journey than the one they had taken by car.

“When I was a kid,” he said, “there was a path across my street kind of like this. It grew up too much, but for a while you could take it all the way from my house to Lake Jordan. Sometimes I’d sit out there pretending to be a runaway.”

“Well,” Eddie kicked a pinecone ahead of him, “if you ran away, then technically…”

“Yeah, a runaway ‘til dinnertime. You know in the movies where they pack a bag and carry it on a stick? I thought about it, but how many PB&Js can you stuff in there, you know? And then the bread gets all soggy and shit.” Hearing a breath turn into laughter beside him, “You know! The soggy PB&J bread…”

“I know. Torture. That’s why you gotta go peanut butter only,” he reasoned. “Always keeps better.”

Steve snorted. “I wish I had you to set me straight.” It was a silly conversation, but he had hoped for at least one. They hadn’t had one since Hawkins. “Boy, if I knew you then…”

“Right?” Suddenly, Eddie’s voice was overbrimming with enthusiasm. Before Steve could look at him again, he would have been convinced that they had managed to step into the distant past. “I’ve thought about this! I kind of remember you from the itty bitty years. Kind of. Granted, you were ittier and bittier so I didn’t see you that much, but I swear I sort of do remember how you were always, like, holding court at the playground.” A groan barely interrupted him. “And I just thought that was funny, because when it was my turn for recess, that was my court. You sat right where I did.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not.” His grin dipped back beneath his scarf, the rest muffled: “Happy to share now, though.”

“Then I consider myself lucky.” He looped an arm around him. “Are you getting cold? We can head back.”

Eddie shook his head.

“You sure?”

A mitten rose to free his mouth again. “It feels good to stretch my legs,” he said. “I wanna hear more about Lake Jordan, anyway.”

Not far from Main Street, they would come to a bridge that overlooked their creek. From at least a half a mile back, they thought they could hear music; now they were close enough to see the red and green banners strung between old brick buildings.

They weren’t the only ones to stop there. A small group—maybe a family—had wandered away from the festivities to take pictures.

Steve was quick to volunteer for them, mainly to prove that he had thought this far ahead. He reached into his coat and passed over a Kodak. “Could you get us, too?”

On his second trip to Greenacres, that picture was framed. Under it, Eddie’s round kitchen table was covered with playing cards, stacked, strewn, and fanned by the missing hands of work friends. They had only been mentioned once over the phone, unnamed and in passing, but Steve’s guess had been right. Eddie peered mischievously through a mop of curls: “Suckers.”

“Made a killing again, huh?”

“Truly a wonder they keep showing up.” Every Friday since he started at the music store, he had told him. How it started, he couldn’t say, but he didn’t see it stopping if they had put up with him this long.

“Please,” Steve scoffed, flopping down onto his loveseat. He had helped him bring that home the first week, too, nearly throwing his back out in the process. “You’re pretty loveable!”

His arms had barely opened in invitation before Eddie had accepted it, landing sideways across his lap and hanging his long legs over the side. If his hair had grown back to its old length, he would have been able to hide better: instead he twisted its stubbiness around his finger, pulling it straight to cross over a winking eye.

It was early spring—still cold enough inside that Eddie had to wear a sweater over two other layers of t-shirts. His face was noticeably rounder, though, a lively pink glowing under the surface of scarred skin, and his lips were warm, curving swiftly into a bright grin as Steve mumbled against them, “I missed you.”

Fingers traced along the curves of his jaw. “Now you don’t have to!”

“About damn time, right?”

“If you wanna know how much I missed you…” One hand dropped to reach, searching under the sofa. “Whenever I do, I break out this baby.” His tongue poked out of the side of his mouth until he caught the edge of it: a black-and-white composition notebook, its coffee-stained pages flipped under his thumb between them. “Nothing like the real thing, but– well, here, you’ll see what I mean.”

Brows knit, Steve hesitated to open it.

“Go ahead,” he prompted, eyes drifting shut as he settled back into him. “Just don’t try and read the chicken scratch.”

He was met with a flurry of letters and numbers. Horizontal pencil lines kept them in some kind of order, shuffling them from left to right and following the words he was told not to read. He only scanned, page after page, front and back, until he had reached the very end. Filled with music. That’s how much.

Steve shook his head, turning pages backwards to go through again. “I—” A twinkling laugh escaped him. Sure enough, back and front, this was no trick. He was seeing it. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“Maybe that I’m out of my damn mind?”

“No. They’re not all about me, are they?”

“Oh,” Eddie crooned, “even when they aren’t, they are. I start thinking about you and don’t want to stop, so.” He patted the cover of the journal, that hand coming to rest over Steve’s heart. “Honestly if I haven’t lost my mind yet, that’s gotta be why.”

tables and chairs

1972

Eddie dropped his knife into the sink. He hissed, chilling the nerves under his loose tooth.

“Let me see!” His mother caught him by the wrist, wasting no time to check for blood. There was none to be found, of course; even the pain he had felt so sharply seconds before was gone. Just a cramp. “Ah.” Laughing under her breath, she rinsed the knife and stood behind him to correct his grip, first around the handle, then around the half-skinned spud in his left hand. “What’d I say? Hold on too tight and that’ll happen.” Her fingers worked his. “The trick is letting that blade do all the work, see? Glides right along.”

The snow was falling in heavy clumps outside the window, bright white clusters illuminated by their kitchen against a dark blue sky. Whenever she checked on the roast in the oven, the rich smell would make his stomach growl and fill the room with steam. He had only just noticed how, in those brief moments, the smiling face of the clown he had drawn into the condensation that morning would reappear. Sometimes he would leave little messages there—Hi Mom, Eddie Wuz Here, XOXO—or comic strip characters, or Bunny, or the stray cat that came around every spring to sunbathe on their porch. That morning had been a clown because he thought she could use a laugh. She had slept a lot that week.

“Eddie Munson,” she sang, “are you watching?” One long, papery shaving fell into the basin, adding to his pile of imprecise chunks.

He had gone completely limp, letting her take over with a grumble. “This one’s too bumpy.”

“Do me a favor, then.” Stepping back to let him hop down from his chair, “Bring these over to the table. Cut them in half and in half again. Carefully,” she added. “That knife’s sharp, but don’t force it if you can’t get it through.”

“Okay.”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She spun her dishrag and gave him a weak smack on his way past, his long face betrayed by a fit of giggles in spite of his best efforts.

A spot had to be cleared for the cutting board, grocery bags and envelopes pushed aside. “When can I mash ‘em up?”

“First we’ve got to boil them.” Her knee came to rest on that chair as she leaned against the counter, balancing her as she swiped the hair out of her face. Dark curls had fallen free from her bun, sticking stubbornly to a clammy brow.

Eddie sighed. “Takes forever…” His regret was immediate.

“Patience is a virtue,” she reminded him.

Though he had heard it a thousand times by then, it occurred to him that he didn’t know what a virtue actually was. The inevitability of that line annoyed him too much to inspire curiosity, leaving him with nothing but an educated guess: shut up and do the work. After all, she wasn’t complaining.

A deep breath rattled in her chest, preparing for another long string of words. “If you thought you liked mashed potatoes before, just wait ‘til you’ve made them yourself!”

“Okay,” he muttered. Then: “Yes, ma’am.”

When he was done cutting, he was told to take the biggest pot out of the cabinet and place it on the stove. She’d add the potatoes and water, then he’d make sure it didn’t boil over while she opened that day’s mail. Like every afternoon, she sat in her chair at the end of their enamel table, resting her head in her hands as she read through those papers. Junk would get tossed to her feet—the best kind of mail, at least to him, as it was his job to rip it apart or set it on fire—and the rest would usually be read over a second time before she made her phone calls.

“Boiling!”

With the receiver balanced on her shoulder, she turned the heat down and rustled his hair. “Yes,” she answered the buzz in her ear, “and make sure it’s an itemized bill. Honestly, all the mistakes I catch, I should be on the payroll.” With a ring, the kitchen timer was set down in front of him. She covered the phone as she told him to set it for ten minutes.

Once Eddie had done that, he peered over the bubbling pot to let the steam kiss his nose. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick, not even ten seconds had passed before his hair was sticking to his face. Just as he had seen her do, he brushed it aside with the back of his hand.

But his mother had turned away from him already, the telephone cord winding around her finger as she talked to the wall. “No, and I’m none too happy about it. I smell fraud.”

That was a new one: fraud. Like frog. He mouthed both words so that he could remember the difference in shape, feeling his tooth wiggle against the tip of his tongue. Frogs are hoppy. Fraud’s unhappy.

The timer went off during her third call. She stretched the coils out of the cord as she drained the potatoes, dumped them into a mixing bowl, and—all the time repeating herself to an invisible stranger—finally handed her son a wooden spoon. Her free hand mimed the proper motion, and after watching him try, she nodded in approval.

It wasn’t as fun as he thought it would be. He imagined at first that he was a warrior clobbering his mortal enemy in battle, but he couldn’t keep the right pace without his arm getting tired. By the time she had rejoined him at the table, he had slowed down to such a pitiful tempo that she offered to finish up for him. “I want to make sure we eat tonight,” she joked. “You did good, though! Only a few lumps here.”

“Who’d you have to call?”

Maybe she was imagining herself clobbering, too. She mashed harder the longer her answer went on: “Just the hospital, then the pharmacy, then the bank.”

“How come you gotta call?”

When her arm came up to dry her brow, he could see the smile twitching onto her lips. “To fix their numbers,” she answered. “They want us to pay more than we owe.”

“How come?”

“‘Cause most of the time, they can get away with stealing. That’s why I read everything over and over.” She paused, staving off a cough with a few shallow inhales. “When things don’t make sense you ask why, don’t you?”

At that minute, he was trying his best to piece everything together without asking outright what is fraud and what does it smell like? Maybe if he knew, he could help her fix things, and if he knew without asking then he would prove he was smart enough to be relied upon. “Shouldn’t they have to make you happy if you give ‘em money?”

Her grin widened, a pride that spread to leave a twinkle in her eye. “Oh…”

“And how come they’ve got to steal even more?”

“Eddie, Eddie,” she laughed huskily, rounding the table to cup his cheeks in her hands, “oh, sugar, you’re asking all the right questions!”

His fish mouth forced him to mumble: “So why?”

Her hands had moved upward, suddenly distracted by his hair. “Shoot,” she sighed. “Look how long this is getting.” She must have caught the worry in his uncovered eyes, her own suddenly narrowing.

“Do I look like a girl?”

His mother was an honest person. Too honest sometimes, according to his father, who would—more often than not—cringe at the questions he would think to ask. Why the hell does he know what that means, Liz? Let the kid be a kid. “No.” Her simple answer now would have been enough to smooth out the wrinkle between his eyebrows. “Who said that? Someone at school?”

As she held onto the table to lift herself upright, he stood close to offer his shoulder. Then he nodded.

“Want to tell me who?”

His curls drooped back over his eyes. That classmate, Brian, hadn’t been trying to hurt his feelings. Really, no feelings would have been hurt if the rest of their lunch table had missed his comment, but since they hadn’t, they all had a pretty good laugh over the whole thing. Even that wouldn’t have bothered Eddie too much, though. He figured that if he could get them to laugh at him, then they were only a few steps away from laughing with him.

But Brian didn’t like being laughed at. He had stopped talking to Eddie since then.

“Wasn’t mad at him,” he assured his mother. “I said Eddie’s not a girl's name and he said sorry.” And as she returned to the kitchen, setting the mixing bowl down hard on the counter, he followed closely behind. “Member when you thought my bunny was a girl?”

Their eyes met when she glanced over her shoulder. It would have been hard to say who broke first—her with a snort, and him with an expectant shriek as a hand reached down to tickle him.

April 8, 1988

Wayne,

I hope this reaches you. Better the postcard than me, I think—I’d hate if a ghost showed up at my door.

Want to visit and explain if OK. No room here.

Love and miss you,

Riley

And in case Steve had gotten more than the address right, Eddie left his phone number as well. Better the postcard than him, certainly, and better something than nothing. That was the decision he would come to in the silence of another morning. After all, no one in the history of the world had ever been guaranteed the morning: not him, not his uncle. What was he doing, then, other than wasting time?

According to Steve, Wayne had never doubted his innocence. That still seemed unlikely to him, but of course he hoped it was true, all his time-wasting aside. He didn’t need to prove himself to the whole town, and wouldn’t if his entire trailer park—neighbors, aunties, childhood friends—wasn’t even there to make it a homecoming. But his uncle deserved to know what he had been defending. For him! Defending.

Every night after work, he checked his answering machine. Every morning, he waited until the last minute to leave the house. The telephone would ring at the store and he would jump, having trained himself in, what, four days? to stay alert. What if the call came while he was asleep? He couldn’t let himself miss it, and so the phone came into the bedroom with him.

His hunch was right, because it was around three o’clock when he was awoken by a screaming in his ear. It only rang once. He grabbed for it in the dark. “Hullo?”

The line was quiet.

Until he held the receiver away from himself, he wondered if his anxiety had tricked him again, this time with a dream so real that he had picked up a nonexistent call. But that wasn’t the case. His room was quieter than the soft crackling in his ear.

“Say more.” The gruff response dispelled all doubt. “I’ve got to know it’s you.”

“It is! I swear. It is,” he answered quickly, his heart pounding in his throat, “and I would’ve called you already, but I didn’t know you’d left, and they told me not to tell anyone, but I had to tell you. I had to.” He swallowed hard, the lump still there as he kept going—say more: “They said everything’s gonna be fine as long as I stay out here, and I’ve been here since December, Wayne, somewhere near Spokane. I want to go home so bad,” and hadn’t realized until then, somehow, how badly he actually needed to. “I’d understand if you never wanted to see me again. I shouldn’t’ve run away ‘cause now—”

“You listen to me.”

He did, stopping the words with the crumpled edge of his blanket.

“You’re alive,” he reasoned. “I’m talking to you.”

“But still.”

Wayne couldn’t have heard his whispered answer, cutting it off halfway through with a quivering rasp. “Whatever it was, you didn’t do anything to deserve all this.”

“How?”

“What do you mean ‘how?’”

“How do you even know that?”

“Boy—” Eddie couldn’t tell if it was a laugh or a sigh, “—I know you.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, that faceless man had told him, people needed to see to believe anything at all. Eddie was lucky. He knew the one percent.

going nowhere

1988

Early in the day, Eddie decided he would welcome his company with a proper home-cooked meal.

His uncle had been watching the chaos unfold since then. Help was turned down again as pots and pans clanged under a deluge of curses, and yet again before Wayne could even offer. There were just a few things he needed from the supermarket, the boy said, before flying out the door. “All under control!” was meant to keep him seated in front of the TV.

But through the window, a golden sun was hanging low over the harvested cornfield. “Like hell it is.” He gripped his chair to stand.

This caught Eddie’s attention faster than anything else had. Slinging a grease-splattered dishrag over his shoulder, he wound around a half-set table. “Wayne, sit!”

“Stay,” he deadpanned, “roll over.”

A less-than-sincere smile answered him. It was sweet, in truth, to see him so frazzled. Whoever the kid was that was paying them a visit, his nephew was smitten.

Poking at the side of his foot with his cane, “What do you think I did all day before? Collect dust?” he asked. “Step aside.”

“Man…” Tattooed and scar-etched arms came down to his sides, slowly, hesitantly, but no longer blocking entry.

“And put on a jacket. I’m cold lookin’ at you.”

“Careful,” he quipped, “or I’ll send you back to Indiana with him.”

Wayne hummed, letting steam billow as he lifted the lid of a bubbling pot. He prodded a chunk of potato with a fork.

Eddie had obliged upon his return, wearing a sweatshirt. More accurately, his uncle thought, the sweatshirt was wearing him. As he slapped a pan down onto a free burner, his sleeve unrolled to cover a busy hand. “You should’ve seen the breakfast he made first time he was here. I had leftovers for a week.” He freed his hair from under his collar then bunched his sleeve back into place. Chopping off a slab of butter for the pan, he carried on: “All he’s got along the way is fast food and gas station hotdogs, you know? And I don’t think he eats great when he’s back home, either.”

Though it resembled one, Hawkins wasn’t a ghost town. Those who stayed tended to be trapped there nonetheless. “How’s the family?”

When Eddie shook his head, Wayne clicked his tongue.

“Oh, no, they’re fine,” he clarified, speaking over the sizzling of onions. “Some high-society fly-by-nights, I guess. Hardly ever sees them anymore. He says he’ll go over there to water plants then spend the rest of the week working in Indy, so I just don’t know where he’d find the time. And I’ve got nothing but time.”

He glanced sidelong, catching the downturned effort of a smirk. When a hand came up to rub over scruff, he stopped himself from acting on the same idle habit.

Nothing but time, he said, but his guest was due to be there any minute and those potatoes still needed mashing. His uncle checked on them again, deciding with a harrumph that they were close enough to drain. When he turned, Eddie was reaching over the table to hang a picture. Wayne peered at it through the steam.

“Forgot I took all these down,” he began to explain, stepping back to align with his thumb. But, perhaps worrying that the rest would resemble an accusation, he moved swiftly along. “I can take it from here!” He pulled a chair out for him.

Icy eyes stayed on that picture as he ignored the invitation, choosing instead to finish setting the table. “That him?”

Now that the nightmare was over, it was easy to forget how long it had actually been since they last lived under the same roof. Eddie’s face, sharpened by age and marked by recovery, wasn’t as expressive on the left side, and Wayne found himself learning how to read him again. It seemed he wasn’t alone in trying, either. The subtlety of a joke, invisible to the eye but smoothing over the gravel in his voice, had to be relearned by his nephew as well. Enough time had passed for uncertainty to grow up between them, weeds popping up to be plucked gone. One day, it wouldbe. Eddie was still Eddie, and Wayne still loved him like a son. He knew what really had him hiding those photographs because it was a fear they both held: how could they ever lose each other again? What could they do to prevent it?

But the young men in the picture rested against each other, at peace and warm against a snowy grey sky. At peace in a way that Wayne had never seen.

Of course that was him. Couldn’t be anyone else. And realizing all over again that his uncle could indeed be trusted—that this was an unalterable truth—“Yeah,” finally, Eddie laughed under his breath.

My uncle’s very kind, but I wouldn’t call him nice. Wayne Munson was a man of few words, Eddie had told him, and that put some people on edge. Just thought I should warn you. So Steve knew this—but he knew how to win parents over, too, and had guaranteed as much when that warning had been made.

And just how many parents have you had to win over, stud?

If he were being honest, he had only ever cared about impressing Nancy Wheeler’s parents, sure as he was that it was serious. Too serious to him, surely, with his future hinging on their approval. Mrs. Wheeler seemed to have come around to the concept of him eventually, warming from skepticism into distant politeness. Mr. Wheeler never actually learned his name, but Nancy assured him back then that it wasn’t personal; he wasn’t very good with names or with people. Again, if he were being honest, Steve was just an ass. Still, the Wheelers were an exception to a rule, and he was confident enough to give Eddie the go-ahead when the next step was beginning to look more like an inevitability. Sure, you can tell him my name! As far as he was concerned, it was a good sign that his invitation wasn’t rescinded after that.

And yet, as suddenly as the little old house appeared in his headlights, he came to the conclusion that he had been overconfident. He wasn’t going to spend the night schmoozing and wouldn’t be the fool who tried.

After all, he knew something else about Mr. Munson: not only had he refused to accept the easy explanation for his nephew’s disappearance, but he had done it after discovering the poor girl in his own trailer—mangled beyond belief—and that Eddie was nowhere to be found. The connection was obvious but wrong, and he knew it. While the name Vecna meant nothing to him, he remembered the town that brought the monster into existence. The man could see straight through bullshit.

Who even was Steve underneath it all? A waste case at best, a disappearing act at worst, and for what it was worth, he was trying desperately to be neither. He cut the engine and sat in the driveway for another breath, his vision adjusting more quickly than his nerves once the headlights had given up on him. Coming into focus: the soft warm glow through the curtains, the gentle rustling of dead leaves across the patchy lawn, the red door he had never dreaded to approach until now.

Then his sweatshirt—left behind, lost and found by Eddie. Him and his grin, and his arms, and his eyes, dark and bleary.

His kiss tingled on Steve’s lips when he took in the cold air. “Oh!” he noticed, sniffing, “what’s cooking?”

“Well, good lookin’, come on in and I’ll fix you a plate!” He hooked an arm around him, holding him close enough to whisper, “You’re nervous.”

As they turned the corner into the living room, he answered through a gritted smile. A door closed down the hall. “No.”

“That’s cute.”

“Yeah, no. I’m not–”

“Steve’s here!” As his uncle crossed the kitchen to greet him, Eddie’s voice echoed through the house and rang in his ear.

He could have kicked himself, only remembering to remove his baseball cap when the man lifted a hand from his cane. When he scrambled to shake, he thought he heard a breath of laughter behind him. Cute. Great. “Mr. Munson! Wow, I mean,” he heard himself blabbering, “what an honor to meet you. He talks about you all the time.”

Eddie leaned over Steve’s shoulder. “Good things,” he chipped in.

At least he didn’t have to remind himself to smile. This time, it was genuine. He did look like his uncle, didn’t he? Though he had grown out his hair and regained some of the fullness around his cheekbones, he had the same narrow face and prominent, heeding eyes. With his slender frame swallowed up in flannel, his uncle’s resemblance was closer to the Eddie he had met on his first trip to Greenacres; perhaps, stroking the silver whiskers on his chin, closest to the Eddie he hoped to know someday.

The older man shook his head, brow furrowing. “Wayne,” he corrected bluntly.

And there it was again, that sing-song laugh, moving ahead of them into the kitchen with the wave of a hand. “Alright, don’t yap his ear off, Wayne!”

When Eddie wasn’t leading the conversation, he was busy keeping the plate next to him full. By the third helping of potatoes, Steve’s weary, full-bellied gaze drifted across the table, meeting the sharp blue eyes that were already fixed on him. His heart stopped until the dim light revealed the reason for their narrowing: a slight smile, there and gone.

“So basically, half of Hellfire was raised by this guy before I gained custody.”

Snickering at his own distractedness, he finally raised a hand to halt the shoveling.

“Scratch that,” Eddie went on, scooping one more spoonful in spite of him. “Half the damn town. You remember Red, right, Wayne? The little Mayfield?”

That's right, Steve thought. Once upon a time, Max and her mother would have been their neighbors. Wayne didn’t have to recall, though, nodding before he had finished asking the question.

“You babysat her, too. Right?”

A hazy vision of the past crept into the forefront of his mind, upside down turning right side up, and little Max Mayfield looking back at him from the driver's seat of his BMW. She had patched his face up with Band-Aids before that, and before that had watched her older brother beat him to a pulp. If someone had told him she had carried his dead weight into the backseat herself, he would have believed it. “Kind of,” he answered a waiting grin, shaking off the memory. “I dunno. They’re all super geniuses. I pretty much just chauffeured them around.” Except that one time.

Eddie tutted. “How very modest… Aht-aht!” Attention seized by his uncle’s shuffling feet, “Put those dishes down! I got it.”

“Hush up.”

He slumped in his chair. Sink running, silverware clattering, the curve of his finger invited Steve to listen close. “He really likes you.” Catching his grimace, he crossed his heart then squeezed his hand over the table.

“Because you’re talking me up,” he whispered back. Then, forcing a tremble and earning him a snort, “Am I shaking?”

“Can’t even tell!”

Over his frizzy hair, hanging on the flowery wall, Steve could just make out the colors and shapes of much clearer memory.

Turning in his chair, Eddie traced his squinting to that photograph. “Been meaning to ask,” it seemed to remind him, “are you working Christmas?”

The answer was an immediate “no.” He’d have to check the schedule, but it wouldn’t change that decision. Life was a finite thing. Retail was forever.

“I still hate making you drive. There’s an airport near–”

“Oh, no, the drive’s a piece of cake!” If he had his car, he had control. He could get them all back to safety. The logic tracked. “No problem as long as, uh…”

He followed his line of vision again, to Wayne’s progress from the fridge.

Two cans of beer hung over the table for them. They both thanked him, though Steve stumbled on his name: Mr. Mun– Sorry. Wayne.

“Told him he should stay for Christmas,” Eddie announced.

The chair creaked as his uncle settled.

“But I don’t want to put you out,” Steve added.

“Now you’re overdoing it.”

The silence was resounding but short-lived. Wayne clicked the tab of his drink.

“Hell, it’s Christmas we’re talking about! We want you here, don’t we, Wayne?”

Again, Steve’s eyes cut to him and his twitching lip. They must have been thinking the same thing: Eddie couldn’t have cared less about the holiday itself. Of those he actually looked forward to, Christmas and its gaudy, unrelenting commercialism wasn’t one of them. Unfair that he needed one, but it was an excuse for more time.

“And,” this, too: “I don’t like thinking of you out there on your own.”

He didn’t have to be. There were always the Buckleys, and they had told him outright that he never needed an invitation. Appreciated as that was, they actually did invite all the grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, and, this year, Robin’s girlfriend, Laurel: it was bound to be a full house. Funny that he hadn’t mentioned any of this—hadn’t even thought that far ahead—but Eddie’s assumption was spot on. It would have been an especially long long weekend.

A knurled hand reached across the table to toast. “The more the merrier.”

So Eddie’s full of shit. His uncle was kind, yes, but Steve doubted in the moment that a nicer impression had ever been made.

no clover, no heather, no cross

1995

April was a good kid. Her teacher, the sunny and soft-spoken Ms. Nelson, assured her parents that she had no worries about her transition from preschool to kindergarten. She was social, clever, a pleasure to have in class. She colored within the lines. She could count into the hundreds. Ms. Nelson would never have expected it would be her, sweet little April, the first of her students to make her fear for her job.

Steve was trying to remember the teacher’s name. He had met her briefly before the school year began. Emily something…Nolan? Neeson? She was fresh out of college, the poor thing. Trial by fire.

“I’m staying,” April announced, braids bobbing as she crossed her arms over her chest. She stood her ground at the door, unfazed by the tall shadow looming over her or the sixth-graders craning their necks beyond the threshold.

“That’s fine.” Taking her backpack, Steve ushered her into his classroom. “Jimmy’s out sick today. Why don’t you just sit at his desk?”

“That one?”

He pulled the chair out for her on his way past.

Too small, she forced herself to sit pin-straight in her plastic seat, locking onto the chalkboard to ignore the other dozen pairs of curious eyes fixed on her.

“Alright, alright!” He clapped for the room’s attention. “Everybody, this is April. She’s visiting from…”

April was a good kid, but she wouldn’t be fooled. Long before she knew how to read the alphabet, she knew how to read her uncle’s uncertainty.

“You can tell them,” he prompted. Do colors all look the same to everyone? Where do we go when we die? Often, his non-answers trailed off into non-admissions of cluelessness. “They don’t bite.” Just like that.

She sealed her lips with a theatrical zip. Though the round of hushed laughter made her jump, she settled into the sign of appreciation—and Steve’s sighed impatience—with a dimpled smile.

He knelt down and dropped his voice. “I’m not gonna send you back with an hour left. I just want her to know you’re with me so she doesn’t worry about you. That’s all!”

Round brown eyes narrowed on him.

Waiting, he realized. He crossed his heart.

“Ms. Nelson,” she whispered. The subsequent demand, however, was shouted out: “And don’t let her take me back, either! Promise, Stevie!”

He could hear the chuckleheads loud and clear before the ringing in his ears had abated, letting them make their jokes as he reached for the phone across piles of paper. They wouldn’t be laughing when he returned those abysmal essays—a thought so petty, he couldn’t help but laugh along. That was a sign. Too much of his life had been lived at the whim and in the world of twelve-year-olds.

“Ste-vie! Ste-vie!” Now it was their chanting, fists pounding, feet stomping as the telephone line trilled.

Like his students’ illegible papers, though, there was no one but himself to blame. She had taken all his solacing literally on the first day of school: no reason to be worried without her parents there! His social studies class was just three halls down! He could imagine her marching with a purpose, uninterrupted as she counted corridors and numbers until she had successfully retraced the steps they had taken together.

Robin beamed when he told her, her pride nearly spilling over into tears. It was the mention of the book bag that had done it, of course: not only had she remembered to bring it along for the journey, but she had packed it all by herself.

“She was just bored,” he explained, using her words. “When you’re here and you get bored, we find stuff to do. School’s a little different, though, isn’t it?”

April shrugged. She only had to look up and behind her to know how her stunt had actually been received, but at least the adults in the room—God help her—could assume it was for the best that she was too busy moping to notice. They’d let her mope.

As she pouted down at her sneakers, her mother gave her shoulders a squeeze. “So you know what we’re going to do when we get home? We’re going to write Ms. Nelson a very nice apology.”

The suggestion was shot down with a grumble.

“Think how impressed she’ll be,” Steve offered. “You already got a cursive lesson under your belt! I mean, how many kindergarteners can write in cursive?”

“That’s true.” Robin winked, her grin softening in silent thanks.

He nodded. It took a village, didn’t it?

Between the two of them, he never would have guessed that Robin would be first-in-command from diaper duty to the dispensing of life lessons. He wasn’t surprised that she was as loyal as always, wasn’t surprised that she was a fiercely protective and loving parent, just surprised by the way things had shaken out. They both were, to be put mildly; most of their waking hours were spent in awe that things had shaken out at all.

“Hey,” she leaned in the doorway, one hand still tethered to April wandering restlessly into the hall, “come over this weekend! Laurel’s doing a roast.”

A smirk answered her. “Yeah. Roasting me alive when she hears I kidnapped—”

“I’ll protect you.”

Laughter fizzled out with his breath.

“Unless you’ve got other plans!”

“You know I don’t.”

It must have been about a year. He remembered thinking how lucky he was that Eddie ended things when he did: autumn, with its comfort food and regular workweeks. If it didn’t mean goodbye and don’t call, his consideration alone would have deserved a thank-you.

“See you later, then. Say ‘Arrivederci, Stevie!’”

April gave a final tug on Robin’s sleeve. Finally successful in dragging her mother away from a boring conversation, she spat out a “Bye.”

Watching the two disappear around the corner, “I’ll bring dessert or—!”

Their voices mingled in the stairwell for a moment, high and low, there and gone. Only in the silence did he close the door.

Refusing to let it get too comfortable, a huff escaped him as he scanned his apartment. “Or something…”

Now what?

There were pots and dishes that needed to be cleaned, left to soak in the suds and the yellow film of mac and cheese. There was a new stack of papers to grade, if he could actually read them this time—big if. There was laundry to sort, and a bed to make, and maybe a cake to bake, and he’d answer that insatiable question as many times as it took: too busy to think beyond the present moment, and then too tired.

“Do you know what I’m about to say, Dave?” In his drummer’s left hand was the last sheet of looseleaf. In the right, a pen running out of corrective red ink.

Eddie blew a breath through his lips. They had been sitting at his table so long, he could see a blue morning on the horizon over her shoulder.

She dropped her pen and crumpled forward, puffs of bleached hair splaying over forced metaphors and coffee rings. “We’re fucked.”

“You didn’t let me guess.” With the attempt at lightheartedness going unappreciated, though, he was urged to concede halfway for the sake of the band. What was left of it, anyway, sitting across from each other in his kitchen. He reached out to pat her arm. “So we’re fucked! Blame MTV.”

“But,” she predicted.

Correctly. “At least we’re playing what we want to.”

“Are we?” Lifting her head, she freed her hands to shove her notes across the table. “Or did we just spend six hours asking ourselves how many ‘sorcerers’ and ‘dragons’ we could get away with this time?”

He sighed, scrubbing the life back into his face. “Look, Lil…” When she started at the shop last year, she had introduced herself as Lilith. She had black hair then, almost indigo, which fell flat around the upper half of a looming frame. The first question he had asked her was Do you play anything? “I don’t know what to tell you here. It’s the nature of the beast. Either you’re in or you’re not.”

The smudged shadow around her almond eyes shifted as she looked down—at her empty hands, at those papers. “Then I guess I’m not.” When it surprised a laugh out of him, those eyes slowly rolled to meet his, apologetic. When she shrugged, her lips quivered into something almost smile-like. It would be her stab at levity this time. “Dragonslaying doesn’t pay the bills, you know?”

It never had. He nodded, reluctant with the full admission. “I know.”

“I’m sor—”

But, shaking his head, he knew she was sorry. He was, too.

When she left, he did something he hadn’t done in about a year: looked backwards.

By now, the old notebook was buried deep under his bed, slotted between boxes of warm weather clothes and yellowed paperbacks. With or without a band, he supposed there had to be an idea hidden somewhere in those margins. He could change the names and references until they meant nothing to anyone but him. It would be a start, he thought. That was all he needed.

Of course, he couldn’t figure out where he was supposed to be going. He was looking backwards, after all, flipping forwards through memories that were hopefully still shared. Christ, he hoped they were, even if…

Eddie caught himself. Not “if.” He meant what he had said one year ago, knew he was asking them both to move on, for better or worse, and that it was only for��worse if he dwelled in his own perspective for too long. Bad habit, anyway. As far as he was concerned, no one should.

I wanted us to be happy.

We could be.

He wouldn’t remember how “goodbye” sounded in Steve’s voice, but sure as shit, he remembered that. We could be.

And he remembered how the smile struggled onto his own quivering lips. No, he had told him, they couldn’t. And true as that was, he couldn’t imagine saying it now.

He reached the last page. The last song, “Easy to Find,” was as straightforward a ballad as they came. There in the darkness, you made up your mind. The simple melody came back to him as effortlessly as the promise that inspired it, spoken through the haze of confusion and survival. In the light you were waiting, easy to—

Dust flew when he clapped the notebook shut. Full of ideas, certainly, but none of them good.

The last time he saw him, Steve had asked him for a favor. If that was that and they were done, then he deserved to hear it in those words.

Eddie didn’t say it, though. Not so bluntly. The best he could do was advise him not to call, and while it didn’t occur to him at the time what he was doing, he knew now that he had locked the door and kept the key; that no one was going to open the past up again but him. Maybe he figured he’d be dead before he realized how much power he had granted himself, or maybe that enough time would pass and not even Steve Harrington would have had the patience to wait for him on the other side.

The phone was in his hand before he could turn back, asking him to leave a message. So he did, the mattress squeaking beneath him as he laid back. “Hi. It’s me,” pause. “I guess it’s late,” and another pause as he squinted at the clock on his dresser. “Or early. I’m sorry. It’s so early…” He wanted to take that red pen and scratch himself out, too. Nothing else was going to stop him. “I just wanted to talk to you. There’s no reason you should want that, so I won’t try and make one up, but I wanted to—”

There was a click in his ear. The chill was sudden, but it sank into his bones.

“Hi,” he started over. Just as suddenly, he settled into the old norm: “Hi, Steve.”

But the voice on the other end wouldn’t let him. “What’s going on?” he asked, a little breathless. “Are you okay? Is Wayne?”

An arm came down to cover his eyes, hiding from someone who couldn’t see him anyway. “We’re fine!”

“Then why…?”

Eddie rolled his head back and forth.

It was as if Steve could see him, though. He sighed.

“Because I’m selfish,” he offered. Nothing was offered in return: only the white noise of his presence. “I guess that hasn’t changed.”

No click. No buzz. Nothing.

Still, after a moment, he had to wonder, “Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Thanks. And I understand,” he added. “I get that this is all out of nowhere.”

“Then…” He must have thought better than to ask again. Why? Who knew? Steve cleared his throat. “Can I come see you?”

Tears, wet and hot, seeped through the sleeve of his flannel. “No,” he said, forcing calmness into the reply. Hadn't he done enough for him already? Wasn't he about to? “But I’d come out if you let me.”

This’ll get worse before it gets better.

Eddie, you don’t even know that.

Yes, I do! And so do you.

“Okay,” Steve answered. “I’ll be here.”

to be happy

1994–1995

When Steve left the hospital room, the golden hour was drawing its last breath.

Eddie's uncle followed him into the hall, casting a silent shadow that waned and vanished as he shut out the setting sun. He approached slowly then, deafening the keys in his hand as if their jingling would scare the young man away. “Go on home,” he told him, meaning what he had meant before this day began: the little house across from the cornfield. “Get some sleep.”

Eyes shifted under the brim of his baseball cap, from the keys, back to Wayne, and to the door closed behind him.

Scared he was, understandably, but scared frozen. His sneakers were stuck to the polished floor, waiting for sense to be made of their journey thus far. (That morning, up and down the stairs in search of a phone number, sprinting out the door carrying twice the weight they were used to, pumping the gas and running red lights—to this spot, the very same day, stuck.)

A hand met his shoulder, guiding him the rest of the way and staying even after that job was over. It kept some warmth between them as a cold breeze swept across the parking lot. Already, under the dull floodlight beam, he could see that the air was nipping rosiness onto his cheeks.

Steve gathered his wits with a shiver. “You staying with him, Wayne?”

A nod answered him. Had things gone differently, he knew that he would have offered to take his place. Instead, staring miles ahead of himself into the dying sunlight, he cracked his car door open and held it while he lingered. Cane tapping against the asphalt, Wayne met him on the driver’s side. “Boy’s shaken up,” he offered—and with this offering, another, accepted with the click of his lighter. “Worried he’ll be a burden.”

“Did he say that?” At the subtle tilt of his head, a No, he didn’t have to, Steve pursed his lips around his cigarette.

“Might think it for a while.” Wayne followed his long gaze across the emptying lot. It went on so far, he was surprised he couldn’t see the curve of the Earth burning off into darkness.

Though he smiled in profile, a wisp of smoke rose and curled around his right hand, his thumb drying the other side of his face. It happened so quickly that he could have been scratching an itch. “I just want him to be…” Something stopped him from completing that thought.

“I know you do,” he assured him. “Got a feeling I’ll be seeing you around.”

Eddie wasn’t a nervous person. He never suffered from stage fright or let his regrets keep him up at night. Adrenaline had served a purpose when he was running for his life, and so he gave himself some grace whenever the Upside Down stalked his dreams. He was far from perfect, but at least he had lost trust in his own reflection enough times to know who to look for: Eddie the leader, ready to fight for the underdog, and Eddie the example, comfortable in his skin however he appeared and whatever he was called—the banished, the freak, the damned. Dave. He knew who he was supposed to be.

The flight was long, and he trembled from takeoff to landing. With enough focus and breathing, he could sometimes corral it into his arms or his legs. Too exhausting to keep up with for long, he could track its spread into his ribs, teeth, and scalp even as he drifted in and out of sleep. And to think it was one fear causing it! Only the one, branching out into unrelenting shockwaves! Where had it come from?

Steve had asked if he was okay. Eddie had forgotten to ask him.

Hadn’t he sounded so unlike himself over the phone? Wasn’t it possible that they weren’t meeting to pick up where they left off, but to close that door for good? And wasn’t that owed? Wasn’t that love, ungrudging and just? He held his breath as he approached the apartment number, smudged on his palm but committed to memory. Still shaking, he shoved his hands into the pocket of his sweatshirt, rubbing clamminess away.

This was what it might have been like for him to meet Wayne, and he had been teased for his nervousness. Cute, Eddie had called it. Seconds from chumming on his doormat, he overcorrected with a good thought to kill the bad: Steve would open that door, pull him into his arms, and break the curse of fear with a kiss. Once Prince Charming had done that, he would come back to himself, same as always.

He could have saved some time had he just been asking the right question: Where would love be looking?

Daylight poured into the hallway. It warmed the air around him, but Eddie stood in shadow, struggling to make out the features of that face as his eyes adjusted.

“Hey,” Steve huffed, keeping the threshold between them.

Another swell of panic rose in his chest, parting his lips and yet stealing the words he had rehearsed. His mind went blank. It left room for simple observations, like Steve’s glasses; funny, he used to be the one reminding him to wear those. Whose job was that now? What was the source of the tired smile on his face? Fulfillment? Bitterness?

Or was he just tired?

“Hey yourself,” he managed to say. That was all.

While he felt better just to say it, it must not have been obvious. Steve’s smile wavered as it widened. “Come in,” he urged with a wave. “How was the flight?”

Eddie swallowed dryly.

“Are your arms tired?”

As he followed him inside, he watched his shoulders shake with a quiet chuckle.

He didn’t register the punchline, distracted by the perfumey scent of dryer sheets. He could hear the laundry tumbling as they entered the bright, tidy kitchen. This is your kitchen, he thought, and while it was his first time in this kitchen, it was the sort of basic, primordial thought that would have had him questioning his sanity a few years ago. This is my face. Another one, reminding him with the frazzled reflection in Steve’s oven how he used to drag himself to the mirror each morning. Here’s my toothpaste. These are my teeth.

The apartment was so clean, it shined. Eddie was overly conscious of his own shoes, worried that he might have tracked the outside world in with him. Even that was the same fear as before, though, he supposed: worried just to exist around him.

Despite the pristine state of his home, he was dressed casually by most standards—no necktie, no leather shoes, jeans instead of khakis—but held against Eddie’s expectations, this was almost too formal. He wanted to tell him to mess up his hair and toss the striped button-down. That an old t-shirt and sweatpants would have sufficed.

As Steve leaned back against the fridge, crayon drawings peeked out from behind him. A butterfly. A starry sky. A little stick figure holding a bigger one’s hand, all smiles.

Eddie had never gotten the chance to meet the artist. Not yet, he reminded himself. While that thought could have been disguised as optimism, he knew at its inception that it was nothing more than that: an objective reminder. Steve always came to Greenacres with stories, and because April was funny, and sharp, and terrifying, those stories were about her more often than not. He could have convinced himself that he had been there laughing, dumbfounded, terrified.

But he had never met her.

Finally, Eddie slumped across from him. “How are you?”

Smiling still, Steve nodded.

“I meant to ask before you picked up, but,” the dam holding his thoughts back was as good as gone, “I guess hearing it out loud, it’s a pretty fucked up thing for me to be asking anyway, isn’t it?” He would acknowledge the possible foot in his mouth for the sake of saying something, though. He had come this far.

Steve’s gaze fell to the spotless floor as he listened, his expression unchanging.

“Good or bad, it’s not like I’ve been around to…” When his attention returned to him, he was crossing his arms over his chest. The glasses, the freshly ironed shirt, the happy faces drawn in crayon. Combined, they completed an image that made his breath flutter in his throat.

“What?” he asked, that odd smile arching crookedly into a more familiar smirk.

“You just—” Eddie shook his head, surprised to be finding the humor. “You look like a teacher.”

Through the cloud of worry that seemed to be hanging between them, a peal of laughter broke through. “Well!” There was the light, clear as day on his face.

Like staring into the sun. He tried nonetheless, his eyes blearing. “I know,” he joined in the laughter, “I know.”

“Did you think I was lying?”

Palms hid his cringing and muffled his answer. “C’mon, man.” He could hear the airy snicker coming closer to him.

“Bad?”

“No!” Eddie peered at him through his fingers until, brought back into the light, they were coaxed away. “No,” he repeated. In the sudden abundance of warmth, it was easy to forget what came before it. “I just feel like I skipped a chapter.”

Steve seemed to be studying their hands as he chose his next words. Trailing back and forth over the ridges of bone, he seemed to be following the shape of him, too, though the feeling told a different story. Only without looking did Eddie notice how his thumb would lift away before pressing between knuckles, not studying but remembering. His voice barely rose from the thoughtful pause. “I’ll always save your place.”

It should have gone without saying. Eddie would have been drawn into him regardless, too readily to even recall what had happened first: the invitation or its embrace. Held close, he breathed him in, comforted by the trace of smoke that couldn’t be scrubbed out. “You shouldn’t have to,” he said, softly against the skin of his neck, and quickly, just to fill his lungs again—silently, slowly, only to repeat the cycle. “Can we figure something out?”

He felt the answer nodded before he heard it. “Yes.”

“‘Cause I’m starting to think I’ve got nine lives, and I’m not about to spend all of them missing you. And if that’s selfish—”

“Stop saying that.”

“—then I’ll be a greedy bastard for my last one. I don’t care if that’s my legacy or whatever, long as I’m alright in your book.” He could see him trying to mirror his grin. When he couldn’t, Eddie cupped his cheeks in his hands, hoping his newfound ease would pass through his thumbs. “Listen,” he went on, “if I can find a way to be here, can we do that? I think we’ve given it enough time. I won’t do anything stupid or get you in trouble. I won’t go anywhere near that hellhole again. I’ll be Dave, I’ll be whoever!”

“Eddie’s fine,” Steve said, a lighthearted twinkle in his eye.

After all, he knew what was meant. "Then I'll be him."

Every other weekend, family dinner was held at Robin and Laurel’s. Steve would always bring something, he said, but he felt he owed them anyway. This was how the conversation began. It was far from how it ended.

“It’s family dinner,” Eddie reminded him. They had carried this topic from the bedroom to the sofa, not yet dressed for the day but awake and semi-caffeinated, at least. Over Steve’s lap, his head rolled to meet his sleepy gaze. “You still haven’t answered my question, by the way.”

“Hm?”

Laughter rasped, competing with the low hum of the morning news, “Have you run it by Buckley?”

“Oh,” he answered, too high-pitched for comfort. “Yeah, totally!”

“And?”

Steve shrugged coyly.

“Ah.” Eddie turned, watching the ceiling. “Well,” he said, “I’m sure it’ll go great. I only stopped talking to you for a year. And then there was that stretch of time when you were—” in air quotes, “‘job hunting.’”

“My decision.”

“My fault.”

“Anyways,” he interrupted, sitting up to channel surf. Eddie shifted with him. “Point is, you’re here. I feel like celebrating if you’re up for it.”

A more mirthless laugh turned genuine as a loud kiss was planted into his bed head.

That weekend, for the very first time, family dinner would be held at the apartment. Uneasy as he was by the situation—of his own making, to be sure—he had to laugh at Steve’s attempt to break the ice. Their three guests were met with a smile and a wave to the table: candles lit, plates set, the chicken, gravy, green beans, and stuffing, but, “Look at those potatoes, huh?”

As Laurel slipped past to do exactly that, pulling a chair out for April to do the same, Robin lingered at the door. Smiling, her blue eyes narrowed on him. “Davey T.”

“Bobin B.” Like Steve, she had grown up in the past year, her short hair styled neatly and her silk dress shirt perfectly wrinkleless. Relieved to see her kick off a scuffed old pair of Chucks, he returned her smile thinly.

She read from it what needed to be read. After all, she was here. Her whole family, too. A hand reached out, only patting his sweatered arm at first. Hard to say who made the change that turned it into a hug, but Eddie found it harder to let go. “You doing okay?” Maybe that was why she asked. She patted his back, joking through a stifled breath: “Should I try the potatoes now?”

Somehow, over the shuffling of chairs and the pleas between mother and daughter to eat or not eat, Steve had heard that. “You should! He’s the king.”

“Oh yeah?” She winked and elbowed him on her way past.

Laurel was tying her long hair back into a scrunchie, hoping April would take the hint before digging in. When she didn’t, she reached beside her with expert timing, tucking her braids behind her ears. She turned sideways in her chair and, in the next fluid motion, held out a free hand to shake. Her cadence was slow and deep, a soothing contrast to Robin’s bottomless well of energy. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

“And my potatoes?”

The sharp bridge of her nose crinkled when she laughed.

Her daughter’s did the same. He noticed as soon as he faced her, craning his neck around Laurel’s seat. “April,” he pretended to guess, “right?”

“April Marie Bennett.”

He extended a hand. “David Marie Tracey.”

Her brow furrowed for a moment, studying the old marks on his face and gauging his seriousness before delighting in the uncertainty. “No, you’re not!”

“Am too.”

Hard to say if it was out of habit or an abundance of caution that, to the newer members of this family, Eddie Munson didn’t exist in name. Still, It’s going well, he thought. I’m getting away with it.

But what of the dead? Once invited, the memory would sit across from him and wait: the girl in the forest forever searching for a way out. What if he had asked the right questions then? What if someone had?

Candlelight flashed and flickered, reflecting in Steve’s glasses. Robin had leaned in to whisper something funny in his ear. Whatever it was, it had them both snorting.

Laurel shook her head. “Twins,” she muttered.

A little voice piped up: “They are?”

“Can’t you tell?” Eddie stilled his hands over his knees, stopping a tremble before it could start. “They’re identical.”

Now she had him figured out. April squinted at him.

Their standoff ended with a wink. “Hey,” he began again, “did you do all those drawings I saw on the fridge?”

When she nodded, her hair threatened to dip into her potatoes. Luckily, always alert, Laurel’s hand swept down to catch for her.

“They’re good!”

“I told Stevie he needs more art.”

Eddie’s eyes cut to him, a laugh escaping despite his best efforts to take this conversation seriously. He knew he would have appreciated the effort if he were her age; knew, too, he would have been an easy target for a good laugh. “I think you’re right.” He sat back, taking a look around the immaculate apartment. Had it always been that way? She’d surely know—

“I have a bunch more here,” she said, hopping out of her chair. “Wanna see?”

This caught Steve’s attention. As he watched her cross into the living room, he knew immediately what must have been asked. “Showing him your works in progress?”

She reached under the sofa and pulled out a notebook. “Sometimes I get bored,” she explained, turning the pages for him, “and when I’m not at school I like to draw. My teacher doesn’t want us doodling on papers unless it’s art class.”

Eddie followed along, humming his sympathy.

“Even when I’m done with all my work and there’s nothing to do!”

“That’s not fair.”

“Nope!”

He glanced over his shoulder. Steve was looking on, chin resting in his hand.

“What’s your favorite animal?”

By the time he refocused on her, she had found a crayon and a blank page.

“Any bunny rabbits in there yet?”

“Nope.” So, with a confident stroke of purple, she got to work. “You can keep this one, okay?”

Just a moment in time. Nothing so important that it had to be carried with her as a memory. “Okay.” No matter either way, Eddie thought. It would be safe with him.

#steddie #st fic #hey tomorrow #writing #hiiii C:

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