Hold me down tight when I'm losing my mind

You tied a tether here to keep me close

I've been talking to myself on some Icarus spell

But it got better when you didn't go

- The Happy Fits

July 8, 1995 - Tacoma, Washington

The next morning, Steve wakes up early to go for a run (what a freak), and by the time Ed himself is up, Steve has come back, showered, and gone back out to grab breakfast according to the note he's left on the counter.

(He ends the note with love you, - S, followed by a doodled heart, star, and smiley face, just like he always does).

Once Eddie realizes the day doesn't need to truly begin quite yet, he quickly returns to bed and lets himself doze back off.

He doesn't actually fall back to sleep, his mind wandering lazily.

Wayne is here.

He's in the spare bedroom next door unless he went with Steve on his journey for breakfast (which is the more likely case, now that Eddie is thinking about it; Wayne has always been an early riser).

Steve had picked him up from SeaTac on his way home from work last night, and they'd had a nice evening in, as Wayne tends to prefer. They'd ordered take-out and watched reruns of Unsolved Mysteries, Steve's insisting all the while that, "Someday there's gonna be one of these for Hawkins — I'm telling you," (Eddie always agrees, though silently he hopes Steve will turn out to be wrong. He just wants all that shit to be behind him). Afterward, they'd played a few rounds of hearts (and Eddie still doesn't understand the strategy behind hearts so he gets annihilated), and because Wayne had spent practically his entire day on an airplane, they all turned in relatively early.

Well, Steve and Wayne had turned in early. Technically speaking, Eddie went to bed with Steve, though he'd ended up staying awake for several more hours writing, hence his late rise in the morning.

A half-hour after Eddie returns to bed, he wakes to the sound of the door opening as Steve enters the room, bringing the smell of coffee and something chocolate-y with him.

Eddie could sit up, but instead he just feigns sleep so that Steve will come over and be all sweet to him like he usually does.

Today, he doesn't disappoint.

"Rise and shine, lover boy," Steve says as he sits on the edge of the bed and runs a hand over Eddie's hair, and Eddie can't help the way his lips split into a massive grin. Lover boy is nearly his favorite nickname Steve has for him, second only to my love, which still manages to have him absolutely giddy every time he hears it. Nobody has ever called Eddie their love before, though in fairness nobody had called Eddie anything that mattered before Steve.

"Morning," he replies as he cracks open his eyes, "Still the morning?"

"Still the morning," Steve affirms.

Ed's eyes fall on a cup of coffee on the bedside table.

"You bring me breakfast?"

"Mm-hm," Steve nods, running his hand through Eddie's hair again, "Out in the kitchen with Wayne."

Eddie lets Steve pull him out of bed, throwing on a t-shirt before following him into the kitchen where Wayne is sitting at the table.

"Mornin', sleeping beauty," Wayne says with raised eyebrows.

Eddie flips him the bird as he trudges towards the food.

Wayne still lives in Hawkins, and as far as Eddie is aware, he has no intention of leaving. Back in 1986, when the U.S. government had barely even started the years of groveling they would do to ensure they didn't get sued or outed for everything that took place in Hawkins, Wayne and Eddie had been offered an apartment in a newly rebuilt part of Hawkins's downtown, and they had accepted.

The apartment was small, though still larger than the trailer they'd lived in before, with two whole bedrooms and a reliably hot shower and brand new appliances. Eddie had lived there with Wayne for years after everything until he decided it was time to forge his own path.

Wayne retired early last year. He hadn't really needed to work at all, given how Sam Owens had promised they would be comfortably taken care of (for their troubles, Owens had said, which Eddie had known even then loosely translated to for not suing the everliving daylights out of us for mismanaging an unethical project so badly it both nearly killed Eddie and got him accused of murder in one fell swoop). Wayne likes to be busy, though, so he'd quit his job at the plant in favor of a part-time day job at a quiet record store two towns over and had worked there until he decided he was ready to be done.

Eddie wants Wayne to move out of Hawkins, and while he's choosing to not press the issue until he and Steve have found somewhere to more firmly put down roots, he's trying to plant the seeds.

There's no reason for Wayne to stay in Hawkins — not in Eddie's opinion anyway, and though lots of time has passed and things have mostly blown over, he knows Wayne still occasionally takes some shit for Eddie's perceived involvement in the bedlam Hawkins saw in March of '86.

Much to Ed's vexation, Wayne always shoots down the idea of moving whenever he brings it up, claiming Hawkins is his home and he ain't leavin' 'til he's good and ready. He also reminds Eddie that he'd have a hard time finding a better deal than the Main Street apartment given how Owens takes care of nearly all the bills besides utilities. Ed tries to tell him that Owens would probably help him out the same way wherever he decided to move to, but this is usually the point in the conversation where Steve tells him to drop it.

Steve, as Eddie knows, is having his own difficulty convincing Joyce and Hop to leave Hawkins and he's got about half the party on his side, so he's empathetic to Eddie's struggles.

Wayne, Eddie knows, is set in his ways. He likes the life he lives, and he'd always taught Eddie to not mess with a good thing while you've got it. If Wayne is still seeing Hawkins as a good thing, it's no one's right to mess with that, certainly not Eddie's — even if Eddie has no fucking idea how Hawkins, Indiana could possibly be a good thing for anyone. To each their own, he supposes, or rather forces himself to suppose, because he's still sort of trying to shake the urge to bend the world to suit his view of it.

Apparently that's "unrealistic" and "not pleasant to be around".

Or so he's been told.

Wayne's reason for visiting Washington after all this time: Eddie's first book is being released tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Holy shit.

Honestly, he can hardly believe it's even done. He'd started working on it in 1987 at twenty-one years old, and it had been pretty slow-going at first, not that he really remembers the beginning. It's like he blinked and a half-baked idea he'd barely parsed through had become an entire novel — with a cover and bindings and all the pages and everything.

It's more than done, actually, it's being published, released unto the masses and their scrutiny and critique (and hopefully at least some enjoyment).

Honestly, Eddie can't really believe it. It's like he blinked and a half-baked idea he'd barely parsed through had become an entire novel — with a cover and bindings and all the pages and everything.

He has a wrapped copy on the kitchen counter with Wayne's name in it, and Steve had made him write an inscription in his own (which had turned into a novel in its own right, so lengthy it covered the inside of the front cover all the way to the book's first line). Eddie had wanted to set aside of box to dole out to the party, but they're all insisting on buying their own copies —Robin had even gone so far as to say, "Yeah, I'd much rather support a local bookstore than get one for free — they're dying out, you know," then she had muttered, "Fuckin' Barnes and Noble."

What a weirdo.

Many months ago, when the book was in the earliest of editing phases, there'd been the issue of when exactly to release it.

They'd projected for it to be ready in the late winter of 1994, and the initial release date had been in early March, exactly nine years to the day Eddie nearly died in the Upside Down.

The date wasn't his idea. Rather, the publishing house had been the one to suggest it based on market research or some shit like that. Eddie hadn't bothered letting them know that the date held any sort of significance to him, was gonna just let it be something private for the few people who truly get it.

It was fitting, too, because the book is kind of, sort of, maybe based on what he'd experienced back in March of 1986, back during the worst week of his life. It had started out practically autobiographical, and he'd voiced concerns to Nancy that he was writing something that couldn't ever see the light of day for fear of being sued, incarcerated, or assassinated by some secret branch of the U.S. government. Nancy had told him to worry about that later and, because she's right about practically everything, as he explored new themes and developed his cast of characters, the story branched off into something new. Elements of his own experience are still there, of course, and probably obviously so for those who know him closely, but nothing for Sam Owens to bat an eye at.

Eddie had liked the March date, thought it was metaphorical, full circle and all that shit, but in the end, it had needed to be pushed out to May, which he had vetoed because he refused to have the publication of his very first book be overshadowed by Steve's graduation — degree conferral, whatever — and it totally would have been. Earning a fucking doctorate is a way bigger deal than publishing a book, or it is in Eddie's opinion, at least. Steve feels the opposite, and strongly too, which Ed supposes is fair enough. Writing of any kind had never been Steve's strong suit, and Eddie had needed three tries and a supernatural disaster to even finish high school.

Different strokes, and all that.

Anyways, they'd finally landed on July — July 9th to be exact, which is fucking tomorrow, apparently.

"Sleep well, weary traveler?" Eddie asks Wayne.

"Not bad at all," Wayne replies, and Eddie watches his eyes roam over the apartment, the home Eddie and Steve are making for themselves, now drenched in daylight, "That rot on the window?"

"Did you talk to Hop before you left?" Steve asks drily.

Eddie makes to look at the offending window (which had indeed offended Hopper for the same reason when he and Joyce had visited in May for Steve's graduation), but his eyes fall on a small, wrapped parcel on the counter.

"I have something for you," Eddie says, snatching it off the counter and moving to give it to Wayne.

Wayne looks down at it.

"This the book?" he asks.

"Yeah."

Immediately, Wayne pulls his hand away.

"Wha—"

"Not until tomorrow with everyone else."

"Are you serious?"

Wayne only raises an eyebrow.

"Wayne," Eddie pleads, knowing his tone is bordering on the kind of whine that would be unbecoming even for a much younger person, "Please? There's gonna be so much going on tomorrow. This is important."

Wayne looks at him for a long while before letting out a resigned sigh — one Eddie is well-acquainted with after years of badgering Wayne into giving in to even his wildest whims — and wrenches the wrapped book out of his hands.

Eddie holds his breath while Wayne tears through the Garfield wrapping paper and reveals the book. He looks at the glossy cover for a long while.

"This the Byers boy's work?"

"Yeah," Ed nods.

Eddie had managed to convince his agent to convince the publishing house to let Will create the cover art for his book. It hadn't exactly been a hard sell; Will is very good and at the time he'd had been on a weird kick of combining Bauhaus with optical illusions that just so happened to suit the novel well. Ed fucking loves it. It's weird and it's different and it's totally perfect, and there's a copy in the mail for Will due to arrive sometime tomorrow so he'll get a chance to see it before it hits the shelves.

Wayne makes an impressed sort of sound as he continues to look at the cover.

"Ed Munson," he reads from the thick, embossed letters at the bottom of the cover, "You went with Ed, huh?"

"Yep."

"Makes you sound forty."

"Well, Eddie made me sound twenty, and I hate to break it to you, old man, but I'm closer to being forty than twenty."

Steve's expression turns to one of bewilderment.

"That is…not true at all."

"Gets closer to being true every day," he points out.

Both Steve and Wayne ignore this as the latter flips open the cover.

Much like Steve's copy, the inside cover of Wayne's book is completely consumed by Eddie's chicken-scratch handwriting.

"This why the release got delayed, boy?" Wayne asks.

Steve laughs while Eddie sputters out a protest.

"No!"

"He's been drafting it for months," Steve supplies helpfully.

Eddie smacks Steve's arm.

Wayne and Steve get along well — perhaps too well, like now and every other moment they choose to gang up on Eddie. They'd gotten along well for years, probably ever since Steve had parked himself in Eddie's hospital room and refused to leave. Eddie hadn't been conscious of that, and wouldn't be until nearly a full week after Vecna and the Mind Flayer and all the other shit that Eddie wouldn't be fully clued into until later was kaput.

When he'd eventually come to, Wayne had been far too understanding of Eddie's dazed, groggy retelling of demon bats and portals and alternate dimensions to not have been at least partially let into all that shit — not that Eddie had been coherent enough to grasp that at the time, but afterward he'd surmised that Steve, who'd been politely pretending not to exist from his chair in the corner while Eddie and Wayne reunited, probably had taken advantage of Wayne's proclivity for listening while they'd waited together for Eddie to wake up.

Eddie fiddles with his rings while Wayne reads everything that Eddie wrote. Then, he flips to the next page and his eyes fall on the dedication.

The dedication had been deceptively difficult. Going into it, Eddie had figured it would be the easiest part — his whole life is filled with people he loves who deserve the mention, or he could take the sardonic approach and flip Owens one more bird (that's mostly a joke, not to mention more of a fourth book type of venture). His publisher, however, wants him to keep it brief — one person, one line, and Jesus, is that trickier than it should be.

In the end, and after intense deliberation, Eddie had landed on a simple For Wayne.

He watches Wayne read the two words once, and then again. Wayne gives a minute nod, but doesn't look Eddie's way.

Ed knew that would be the case. They aren't exactly talkers, the pair of them, and never had been. Even when he was a kid they'd both preferred the silent kind of acts of service as their method for showing their appreciation and gratitude for each other, like how Eddie would turn the heat on in the mornings before leaving for school so Wayne would return from work to a warm trailer, and how Wayne would make Eddie's favorite foods for dinner if he caught wind that he'd had a rough day, and how, whenever Eddie traveled, he always brought back the corniest location-specific mug for Wayne he could find, and how Wayne had vouched for Eddie at the auto body shop in Marion and landed him that mechanic job, and how Eddie had dedicated his first book to him.

Dedicating the book to Wayne had been the obvious choice. For one, his agent had told him to hold off on mentioning Steve until he's too successful for the queer thing to hold him back too much (Steve had wondered if Eddie should take offense to this; Eddie was just so flattered by the continued faith in his eventual success that he decided to shrug it off), but there's also a conveniently Wayne-shaped father figure in the book who's pretty instrumental in the main character's triumphs, so it's within theme too.

It's easy for Eddie to acknowledge how Wayne is pretty much the sole reason that he's a person worth being. With his mother dead and his father a fucking asshole (and also dead, but that's recent enough that Eddie is still adjusting to the notion), Wayne is the closest and only thing Eddie has to a parent.

From the first step Eddie took over his doorstep at seven years old, Wayne was there. He attended every parent meeting at school, every dumb chorus concert (and then band, when he was old enough to opt out of stupid chorus), every celebration. He showed up whenever Eddie got in trouble at school, every time he ended up in the back of a cop car whether it was warranted or not, even the time he snuck out to Indianapolis at sixteen and got a little too deep in a situation he knew not quite enough about. Wayne taught him how to ride a bike and how to drive a car, how to sew patches onto his battle jacket and properly clean a wound so it didn't get infected. Wayne caught him kissing a boy and didn't say a single word other than to tell him that he'd always have a home with him no matter what.

Wayne raised Eddie, well and truly. He had raised him with an unconditional love that certainly couldn't have been easy, and that, looking back, Ed isn't so sure he always deserved.

"Didn't need to do this," Wayne says, his voice perhaps a little scratchier than normal.

"Yes, I did."

Just like Ed expects, Wayne doesn't say anything else, just begins to thumb through the first few pages of the book.

Eddie's book.

Eddie's book, which is done and bound and sitting in bookstores even right at this very minute, even if not on the shelves quite yet.

The dedication had been the last step — his last step, anyway. The rest is in the hands of the publishing house, who'd apparently done their job because the book is being released tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

Jesus Christ.


December 28, 1994 - Pensacola, Florida

Eddie had slept late that first morning in Florida, and Steve had let him.

He didn't want to be here, not in this hotel where he and Steve had gotten a room with two beds because that was less of a hassle than getting a room with only one and allowing the world an opportunity to speculate about their queer presence, not in this stupid fucking city with all it's horrible memories, not in this homophobic state that he could never have found true happiness even, even if his now-dead father hadn't killed his mother right in front of him.

Fuck Florida.

Steve being here with him was his only saving grace. Eddie knew Steve had wanted to go out into Pensacola that day and keep themselves busy while Wayne was back in Century again finalizing all of Eddie's dad's post-mortem affairs, but Eddie hadn't wanted to. Closely wrapped up underneath the covers, he'd told some stories of his mom that Steve hadn't heard yet in the hopes that it would guilt him into taking pity on Eddie and allowing them to instead spend the entire morning and most of the afternoon in bed.

Ultimately, he'd succeeded.

Was that manipulative of him? Maybe, but if there ever was a time in which Eddie was allowed to be a little manipulative, he figured this was it.

Steve left briefly to grab lunch, and when he came back he told Eddie to get dressed because he'd run into Wayne on the way back up who said that there was something they needed to take care of.

Eddie considered protesting this for about as long as it took to remember yet again how, twenty-two years ago, Wayne had put his entire life on hold to swoop Eddie out of a fucked up situation, at which point he pulled himself out of bed and began picking through his suitcase for something to wear.

"We're doing stuff tomorrow, Ed."

Eddie whipped his head in Steve's direction.

"—and not that. Something making use of the rental you insisted we had to get."

"Fine."

"Great. Wayne said he'd be ready in a few."

True to Steve's word, Wayne was knocking on their door a few minutes later, while Eddie was still threading a very worn leather belt through the loops of his jeans. Steve let him in, and Wayne gave them each a nod.

"Where're we goin', old man?" Eddie asked as he tugged his sneakers on.

"Tarkiln," Wayne replied, and Eddie froze.

Tarkiln Bayou State Preserve Park — or just Tarkiln to Eddie and Wayne, at least — was a state park right at the bottom corner of Florida's panhandle. No biggie to the majority of the population, but Eddie had never really been part of the majority of anything, and Tarkiln had been his dad's favorite spot in Florida.

Goddamn fuck Florida.

"Got it."

He finished putting on his shoes, his mood officially sullied, and then the three of them headed down the hall, through the hotel lobby, and out the door.

Steve made a beeline for their red rental car, already having declared himself driver for the trip to Tarkiln.

The car was new — a Toyota Celica from this year — and while Eddie was the resident car guy out of the two of them, Steve was typically the designated driver so Eddie was pleased to see Steve actually looking at least semi-interested in it.

Maybe a sign that Eddie could bring up the potential of buying a new car without getting his head chewed off for it.

Two months ago, Steve's burgundy BMW had finally shat the bed for good.

In Eddie's opinion, it was about time. The car was twelve years old, and BMWs aren't exactly known for their longevity, a fact that certainly wasn't helped by Steve's lack of even the most basic car maintenance knowledge. Also in Eddie's opinion, he and Steve didn't even need two cars between them ever since Eddie signed the book deal and quit his day job at a local garage. Steve got to and from classes and clinicals just fine with Ed's old Honda, and they hadn't seen any real disruption to their routines.

Cars get old. Cars die. It happens.

That was Ed's thoughts on it, anyway.

Steve, on the other hand, had surprised Eddie by having a very difficult time coming to terms with the Beemer's demise.

The night Steve finally agreed to sell the car for parts (which was an entire denial-filled week after it died), he had admitted to Eddie why he didn't want to say goodbye.

Steve had gotten that car as a sixteenth birthday gift in 1982.

In 1983, it drove him to the Byers' house where he ultimately saved Jonathan and Nancy from a demogorgon.

In 1984, it drove him to Dustin Henderson's house and the demo-dog in his storm cellar.

In 1985, it drove him to the Starcourt Mall, to Scoops Ahoy and to his best friend on the whole goddamn planet (and its keys had been fished out of a secret Russian bunker that summer too).

In 1986, it drove him to Eddie for the very first time, drove him all over Hawkins while he and his friends who would become his family uncovered a terrible mystery that lived beneath their feet and right under their noses.

That car, that ridiculous, gaudy, status symbol of a car surviving all that was like a tangible reminder to Steve that he had survived too. That they all had managed to survive.

Eddie hadn't really wanted to give up the Beemer all that much anymore after Steve told him all that.

But they had, and Steve had socked away the money for a new one. He'd asked Eddie to help pick it out when the wound wasn't so raw, and they'll definitely be waiting until the move to Boston, both because sales tax was pretty significantly lower in Massachusetts than it was in Washington, and also because they had no interest in dealing with the hassle of getting two cars across the entire country when the one will be hard enough (because when they make the move to Boston, they'll be flying; that's for damn sure and certain).

Since picking up the car at the airport in Pensacola, Steve had made a few intrigued comments about the way the Celica drove that made Eddie hopeful for their future car shopping.

The thirty-minute drive to Tarkiln was a quiet one aside from Steve's muttered comments about Florida drivers and Wayne's responding horror stories of driving these roads as a teenager.

As they approached the park's entrance, Eddie felt a funny dread-like feeling he hadn't encountered in years.

"Why're we here, Wayne?" he asked warily.

"Paying our final respects."

Well, that didn't answer his question at all.

"What if I don't want to pay any respects?"

Wayne didn't dignify that with a response, and rightfully so.

Eddie sounded like a child. He felt like a child.

He suddenly remembered a conversation with Nancy Wheeler he'd had many years ago, one where she'd confided to him about how, after she moved away to Boston for college, she would return to Hawkins and find herself slipping into a person that she no longer recognized, a younger, more tormented version of herself that she'd thought she had long since outgrown. He and Nancy had always bonded over hating their hometown, of wanting to run away and never look back, but that was one thing he'd never been able to fully relate to.

Now that Eddie was back in Pensacola, he understood.

Since the moment he arrived, Eddie had been feeling timid in a way he had no reason to be, had been fighting the urge to look over his shoulder for a threat that would never be there, had been flinching, fingers twitching, heart rate jumping, at the slam of doors and shouts from just out of his range of vision, and it was all so familiar — comfortable, even.

He hated it. He hated feeling this way, and all he wanted to do was go home but instead they were driving through the main gate of yet another place in this God-fucking-forsaken state that he could only associate with his dad.

Steve parked the car, and Eddie watched as he exchanged a look with Wayne through the rearview mirror before giving him the briefest of nods and stepping out onto the gravel lot. He closed the door behind him before leaning against it, and Wayne made no move to exit, so Eddie turned to face him.

"The fuck was that? You and Steve just have your own secret communication about me now?"

He regretted it the second it came out of his mouth, but he knew that he got a little snappy when he was feeling threatened, and everything about this place was a massive threat.

"Come now," Wayne calmly replied, "Easy. Just wanna let you know how everything at Century went."

Eddie slumped over in his seat, nodding as he ran a hand over his face.

"Yeah, 'kay."

"Alright, it went well, all things considered. He didn't leave all that much to go off of, so lots of decisions to make."

"Yeah, I—"

"I didn't hold onto any of his things," he continued, ignoring Ed's attempted commentary, "An' didn't want to drag things out, so I opted for cremation."

Wayne glanced at the floor of the car, a motion so quick it was probably unconscious, but when Eddie followed his gaze he saw a small black box.

He felt his stomach turn over.

"Holy shit, is that—"

Before Eddie could finish his question, Wayne was grabbing the box with one hand and stepping out of the car.

Eddie followed, because it wasn't like he had a goddamn choice unless he was going to sit and wait in the car like a belligerent pre-teen, and together, Eddie, Steve, and Wayne began to make their way down the trail.

As a child, Eddie's father had brought him here on the few and far between occasions that he was trying to convince himself he was a good dad.

(He'd never been a good dad. Maybe if he'd come here more instead of wasting away in bars and casinos and jail cells (though he hadn't had as much control over that last one, Ed supposed), he'd have been a better person. Maybe if that were the case, Eddie's mom would still be alive).

It felt familiar to Eddie in a way that made him nauseous, in a way that made him feel like nothing had even changed in the last twenty years.

Things had changed, though. It may all look the same, but in those twenty years that had passed since he was last here, the trees have grown and shed their leaves and sprouted new ones, the path has been spread with new mulch, the flowers have bloomed and died and bloomed again and died again, and Eddie isn't the same anymore, either. He remembered learning in biology eons ago that the human body refreshed itself every seven years. Every seven years, all the cells in the body had been destroyed and replaced with new ones, and Eddie had lived seven years three times over since the last time he was here, which meant every bit of him, every hair on his head, every inch of his skin, every drop of blood coursing through his veins had never been here before, had never been touched by his scumbag father.

If only his brain and his memories were able to join that particular party.

Wayne led them down the path in his slow amble, When Wayne took a turn in the path, onto the boardwalk, Eddie knew it was coming. They were following the exact path his dad had liked to take. Eddie had never been here with Wayne before, had never even talked about Tarkiln with him, but now it was obvious to him that Wayne also knew of its importance to Eddie's father, Wayne's younger brother.

He wondered if Wayne had ever walked these trails with Eddie's father.

(He wouldn't ask, but he was allowed to wonder).

Eddie wanted to leave. He didn't want to be here anymore, didn't want to feel the way his chest was tightening and his heart rate was skyrocketing, all the worst parts of him rising to the surface.

In the year and a half that he and Steve had been together, they'd really only had one fight — a real fight, with hurt feelings and vitriolic words and Eddie forcing himself to ignore the urge to cut and run so he wouldn't have to deal anymore, as was his tendency.

In retrospect, it had been so fucking dumb, too.

One night, Eddie had pulled back the covers on their bed to find a light brown hair tie within the sheets.

Eddie's mind had immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario, and before he could realize he should spare the situation even a single rational thought, he was blurting out, "What the fuck, Steve? Whose is that?"

And then he'd watched Steve look at the hair tie, then look back at Eddie with a look of bewilderment on his face.

"Ed, you — last night you tried to braid my hair. Do you…do you not remember that?"

And Eddie suddenly had remembered it.

He and Steve and been lying in bed together, Steve drifting off, Eddie idly running his fingers through Steve's hair and wondering if the inspiration that would inevitably strike as soon as the lights were out might get him over a particularly severe bought of writer's block he's been battling when he'd suddenly had the intense desire to try French-braiding Steve's hair like Max and El had taught him how to do eons ago.

He'd told Steve as much, and he'd grumbled a sleepy, "Do your worst," before telling him that some of Robin's abandoned hair ties were still in the bathroom.

Fuck.

Before he could say anything, before he could even come to a full and complete understanding of how badly he'd screwed this up, he was watching Steve's face change from bewildered to hurt to betrayed to angry.

They'd bickered before that moment. They bickered all the time, actually. They had disagreements. They got into the odd heated debate.

They'd never been in a real fight before, not like the one they'd had over a stupid fucking hair tie.

Look — Steve could be mean when he wanted to be, and he'd certainly been mean to Eddie that night. Granted, Ed had sort of vaguely accused Steve of cheating on him, or at a minimum exposed an unconscious belief that Steve could even have the capacity to do something like that (which is a sore topic for Steve in general), so Eddie hadn't exactly been an innocent party in the situation, but Steve really had gone for his fucking jugular in the way he'd immediately responded, and Eddie hadn't been much better. He knew he tended to fall into a snappy, acerbic kind of sarcasm when he felt threatened, and he detested that prickly discomfort of knowing he was in the wrong because he'd felt that way his entire goddamn life, so, yeah, he'd gotten a little defensive.

In the end and after some time, they'd managed to work through everything, but, god, Eddie just hoped he'd never fight with Steve again.

As he walked down a weathered Tarkiln boardwalk, he was feeling that same prickly sort of discomfort, though he didn't exactly know why. He knew it was why he'd snapped at Wayne in the car, because he'd wanted desperately to pin that feeling onto someone else other than himself. Wayne wasn't a good target. Neither was Steve, and Eddie's dad is dead now, so he wasn't an option either.

Whatever the fuck had him feeling this way, it was on Eddie and Eddie alone.

Wayne eventually came to a stop on a stretch of the boardwalk not yet touched by the growing shadows of twilight, and when he did, Eddie and Steve stopped too. Eddie watched Wayne set the box on the flat top of the wooden railing.

"Are we allowed to be doing this?" Eddie asked warily, not because he'd become any sort of rule-follower over the years, but because as much as he wanted to support Wayne he still couldn't completely ignore the voice in his brain telling him to cut and run.

Wayne only gave a gruff, "Yes," before he was opening the box and extracting a sealed plastic bag with dark ashes inside.

It was —

"That's it?" Eddie blurted out, "I thought there'd be more."

Granted, Ed's most recent memory of his father is from twenty years ago, but he remembered his dad being a pretty big guy — tall and broad with a beer gut from all his nights at the bar (though he'd held onto enough of his past as a high school athlete to move quicker than one might think just by looking at him).

The bag Wayne held in his hand wasn't even full, probably only three pounds.

"According to the staff, he'd been sick a long time," Wayne replied, looking out over the grasslands.

"Thought it was pneumonia."

"Cause of death was pneumonia. He was HIV-positive," Wayne paused, "'pparently."

Eddie was still, and his eyes slid off the bag of ashes and onto the bayou.

"Oh. That's…" he couldn't help a dry laugh, "…ironic."

Wayne gave a noncommittal grunt.

"Well…let's do this, then, I guess."

Eddie had never scattered someone's ashes before so he let Wayne take the lead, and Steve stood behind him, arms around his middle and chin hooked over his shoulder, and the breeze was blowing in just the right direction, and the sun was setting over the bayou, and they were quiet. Wayne went through the motions like it was something familiar to him, and Eddie wondered for a moment if he might not scatter all the ashes, wondered if he'd maybe keep some so that another urn might join the one for Wayne's mother that sat on a mantle in his home in Indiana, but before long, the bag was empty and it was done.

"You sure he deserves all this?" Eddie asked once the wind had stilled, aware it was a bold question but needing to ask it anyway.

Steve wisely chose that moment to step away from Eddie and wander a little further down the path. Wayne didn't look away from the water.

"Not sure it's a matter 'a deserving," he finally answered, "More about everyone finding peace. Including us, and including him."

Eddie nodded even though he wasn't completely sure he understood.

He didn't think he'd ever really be able to find peace when it came to his father, but Wayne should be able to. Wayne deserved it more than Eddie did, he thought.

"You takin' care 'a that boy?" Wayne asked, tipping his head just so in the direction of Steve, who was leaning over an informational panel on pitcher plants installed in the wooden fence.

"Doin' my best."

Wayne nodded.

"He's a good one. They don't make 'em like him often, and he's good to you. You and I both know you're not the easiest person to deal with day in and day out."

Eddie feigned an offended gasp, though he couldn't help but be a bit offended for real.

"The hell does that mean?"

"You know exactly what I mean, Ed. I raised you."

"I'll have you know, Wayne, that I was a victim of bullying and torment, so excuse me if—"

"If my memory serves, you also did quite a bit 'a jumping on tables and yelling at people."

"Alright."


lyrics are from hold me down by the happy fits (second time the happy fits are making an appearance in this series. srry not srry bc they are wonderful and this song is so eddie-coded to me)

AUTHORS NOTES:

- the mid-nineties was when Barnes and Noble's reputation was at a low because they were edging independent bookstores out of business. The rise of amazon in the early-2000s illustrated B&Ns importance to the preservation of the industry and rehabbed their rep. i am a big barnes and noble fan :)

- in 1994, sales tax for vehicles in washington was 6.8%. massachusetts's was 3% (wish it was still that lol, tho MA is still lower than WA)

- so the thing about all the cells in your body being new every seven years is not completely accurate. different organs/parts of the body don't all refresh on the same timeline, and those timelines general measurement, it varies person to person. seven years is also kind of an understatement - it's more like 7-10, and there are some cells that are with you for life (the lens of your eye, about half of the heart, and neurons in the brain, though the neural pathways will change over time)

- I chose not to touch on the aids crisis in this fic, but I didn't want it to just not exist at all within the story. hiv/aids was and continues to be present in prison systems throughout the us due to drug use and sexual violence (among other things) and it was particularly rampant during the peak of the aids crisis, naturally.