You taste like wine
But I can't find those vines
So c'mon, show me home and I will go
So c'mon, show me home and I will go
- The Collection
July 9, 1995 - Tacoma, Washington
The day Eddie's book is published, he wakes up early. Early early, when the sun has just barely begun its ascent into the sky.
He hadn't slept very much last night — probably like a kid trying to sleep on Christmas Eve, he thinks.
His fucking book is officially published today, and his publishing house is projecting that it's gonna do pretty damn well, which is something Ed is trying his hardest to not think about, and his agent has the day filled with activity to make sure that comes to fruition.
Jesus Christ, Eddie can't believe his life. He really fucking can't.
He'd never thought it was possible to be as happy as he is, to have a life that makes him feel as goddamn good as his does. Until recently, he'd thought it was something that would always evade him, if he was even allowed to have it at all.
Here he is, though.
Steve — his Steve, his boyfriend, his partner, his husband someday if he has any say in the matter — is still asleep beside Eddie, and he chooses that moment to roll over into his space and sling an arm over his middle, burying his nose in his neck.
Eddie presses a kiss into his hair, wrapping his arms around him and sliding a hand beneath the elastic waistband of his boxers to rest on the curve of his ass. Steve makes a groggy, disapproving grunt, but otherwise doesn't move, so Ed thinks he's in the clear.
It occurs to him that unless things take an unlikely turn in the next hour they've actually made it through a night without any nightmares or otherwise past-trauma-related incidents for the first time in about a week.
In the nine years (and some change) that has lapsed since the gates to the Upside Down closed for good, Eddie can safely say that he and the rest of the party have healed about as much as they were ever going to after everything they experienced as teenagers — physically, emotionally, the works. He won't speak for the entire party, but Eddie himself finds that, on the whole, he's able to actually think back on that time of his own volition these days rather than having to plead with his subconscious to stop hurling horrific memories into the forefront of his brain at any waking or sleeping moment. The nightmares, the inexplicable sense of dread, the urge to check over his shoulder for something that would never be there, it's all few and far between these days — though as far as nightmares go, the ones he does have still fucking suck. He doesn't think that will be changing any time soon.
Steve tends to agree with Ed's assessment of things, though most recently that first week of July had shaken things up a little bit — "anniversary reactions," Steve had muttered the morning of July 3rd after a night filled with some truly kick-ass nightmares. He'd spent a good portion of that day on the phone with Robin, as Eddie is sure this month's phone bill will attest to.
There are a few times a year that the party gets a little weird: end of October, end of November, early July, and pretty much the entire month of March. Eddie himself only truly shares in the last one, and while he's gotten the play-by-play of the other three, he's missing the experience piece that would have him fully partaking in the weirdness with the rest of the party.
Good, he always thinks, and maybe that's selfish of him, but he doesn't have a goddamn clue how anyone managed to survive four tours in that hellish war like Steve and Nancy and most of the kids had. Eddie had barely survived the one and he still had come out of it a completely different person.
Years and years ago, back when Vecna had only just been ended for good and he had a long road of healing in store for him, Eddie had figured he'd return to the person he'd been before Chrissy Cunningham died in his living room, like it was akin to a broken bone that would heal back to what it had been before rather than the natural fall-out of experiencing an earth-shattering trauma like it really was.
After a while he had come to the realization, brash and unforgiving as it was, that he would never — could never — be the same. It had stung for a while. It had stung at twenty-one-and-three-quarters when he thought about who he'd been at twenty and missed what he remembered. Now that he's twenty-nine, he thinks back on that Eddie with fondness and a natural touch of mortification, and the loss of him stings considerably less.
After all, he was always going to change. The person he'd been in high school was never going to be the person he is as an adult (and a lot of it had been a facade, anyways — not all of it, but some). Sometimes he just wishes that the road from there to here wasn't as…he's not sure the best word to use. Harsh, maybe?
As a kid, Eddie had always been fascinated by snakes — all reptiles, really, but especially snakes. Snakes molt. Snakes routinely shed their skin to facilitate new growth. They force themselves out of the old knowing the new will be better in every way. A part of Eddie wishes he could at least know the person he would have been if his growth had been like evolving, like a routine, like shedding the old parts of himself when they no longer fit, instead of like a loss, instead of like frantically throwing things overboard to save a sinking ship.
Eddie knows he lost a part of himself over those terrible few days in March of 1986 (actually, he lost a good few chunks of himself courtesy of those fucking demo-bats, but that's not exactly what he's getting at).
For one, he had ended up leaning away from the whole metal thing afterwards, which Eddie knows is something akin to sacrilege and it hadn't exactly been a willing change either. It had come as a major fucking shock when, about a week after he left the hospital, he shoved his most well-loved heavy metal mixtape into Steve's shiny new tape deck and just…didn't feel any better.
It had kind of sucked, actually, to no longer find solace in something that once had been so critical to who he was, something that he'd centered his entire personality around, when all he'd really wanted to do was figure out how to move on after going through hell and back in the span of six days, but after some reflection, he thinks he understands why it happened.
Eddie has a "cousin" (who isn't really a cousin, but the kid of a lifelong friend of Wayne's which, in his eyes, is close enough) who used to be a ballet dancer, and she'd once told him that after she danced to a song, she couldn't really ever listen to it again. She'd said it was like the song had been tainted, but Eddie doesn't see it that way. He sees it more like the song had been elevated to a higher purpose, no longer occupying the same liminal space as every other song cataloged into one's brain. Once that purpose is fulfilled, though, it can't just drop back down to the rest of the mind's discography, can't ever lose that heightened significance, so trying to listen to it — just to listen and nothing more — makes the song feel incomplete.
It's why Metallica's "Master of Puppets" never made it onto a single one of Eddie's coveted mix tapes, never got burned onto a CD, even though it came out mere weeks before Eddie's macabre concert in the Upside Down. It's why he won't ever skip it when it comes up on the radio, but he will never play it of his own accord.
He'd cut his hair too, about five months after he'd left the hospital, because he was sick of being harassed by Hawkins torch and pitchfork-wielding townsfolk who hadn't bought into the proclamations that Eddie was innocent (which was the majority), and Eddie had acknowledged that his long, wild, (badly cared-for, in Steve's words), hair made him easy to spot.
At the time, he'd figured that losing the hair would be devastating, but in the end it hadn't been as big a deal as he'd thought. Losing his friends, on the other hand, had sucked as entirely much as one would think.
He blames the fucking NDA.
He'd had to sign an NDA once he was coherent again, and normally he wouldn't give a rat's ass about any fucking non-disclosure agreement (or any agreement in general), but signing that stupid dotted line got him and Wayne a real place like his uncle had said they'd do for years and it's also the reason Wayne was able to quit his job at the industrial plant and start working short shifts at the quiet record store in the next town over. Even then, Eddie knew that he owed Wayne the entire world, so for once he'd actually really cared about not fucking something up with his big mouth.
Obviously, that meant his core group of friends before his whole world was flipped around had to be left in the dark and, as it turns out, it's really fucking hard to pretend an earth-shattering, life-changing, horrible thing hadn't happened when it totally had, when it had changed Eddie to his core, so being around Gareth and Jeff and all his friends from school, from the band, from Hellfire just couldn't hold a candle to being around the motley crew he went to battle with, even if most of them were actual children.
And that sucked too. It sucked that even just being around his friends was no longer fulfilling in the way that it used to be, that he couldn't explain to them why he was an entirely different person now, couldn't explain why he cut his hair, why he was living in a brand new apartment on Main Street, why his once exclusively-metal mixtapes had suddenly been diluted with the saccharine pop (and its related genres) he'd always condemned so heavily, because it's hard to explain that once Kate Bush and the B-52s and Journey and Blondie become the fucking musical equivalent of life support, he couldn't continue forcing himself to not see their value.
(Hard to explain because he legally could not tell them. Not allowed, and how the hell else could he possibly explain his way around it all?)
In the end, their friendship sort of just petered out, coming to an unofficial close once they all left for college that September just like they always were going to, like Eddie never would.
Even that hadn't hurt as much as it could have. After all, he's no stranger to losing friends to situations outside of his control.
He'd been class of '84 for thirteen years.
From his first days in Hawkins's school system back in January of 1974, he'd had friends. Good friends, best friends, but all that changed when he got held back that first senior year — his real senior year — in 1984.
Thirteen years worth of friendships moved on and left Eddie behind because, as Eddie himself knows, once you leave a small town like Hawkins for something bigger and better, why the fuck would you go back?
Thank Christ for Hellfire, because that club was the only reason he'd been friends with any of the underclassman during his real senior year, the only reason he returned to Hawkins High as part of the class of '85 with people there excited to see him — two juniors, three seniors, and, after the first week of school, one freshman, Gareth. He'd formed Corroded Coffin that year too, after christening it a year for grasping at opportunities.
Then he got held back again, and those three seniors who had just refilled that spot of good friend were gone too, and Eddie was still in Hawkins, still a high school senior, though now with the class of eighty-fuckin'-six, who'd once been lame freshman he'd made fun of as a goddamn junior, and wasn't that just fucking mortifying?
But they'd had Hellfire and they'd had the band, and they were friends. Eddie still had a pack of sheep to harass and protect, and he'd herded in a new batch of lame, dorky freshman so that Hellfire would live on, but it never was the same as those friends he'd had during the thirteen years he'd been class of '84.
And then the actual town tried to kill him and, as it turns out, friendships formed while solving a supernatural murder mystery are even more ironclad than the ones made by happenstance of existing simultaneously within the American public school system.
Go fucking figure.
"Ed," Steve suddenly says, and he sounds dazed enough for Eddie to know that he's still mostly asleep, "We forgot to send Hop and Joyce an anniversary card."
Eddie manages to hold in a snort of laughter.
"No, we didn't. We sent them one."
"We did?"
"Yep. In April…which is when their anniversary is."
The spring of Steve's first semester of college — seven years ago, now — Joyce and Hopper had pissed the entire party off by getting married at a courthouse in Indianapolis without cluing any of the rest of them into their plan. They'd waited until the first family dinner after the older half of the party had come home from college to tell everyone, and when they'd been met with a cacophony of fury, indignation, and all other kinds of discontent, they had tried to claim that they didn't want everyone to make a big fuss about it — a reason absolutely none of them accepted. Will and El had gone so far as to give them both the silent treatment for eight whole days, but eventually they all got over it (and threw them an obnoxiously large surprise party for their first anniversary after El and Max bullied Steve into small-talking the date out of Joyce).
"Oh…it's…"
"July, baby."
Steve is quiet for long enough to make Eddie to wonder if he might have drifted off again, but then he mumbles, "What's today, then?" and then his eyes fly open. He pushes himself up onto his elbows, miraculously wide awake, "Shit, it's today. It's — Ed, your book!"
And the look of wonder on Steve's face and the way it matches everything Eddie is feeling inside has him falling in love with the wonderful man before him for the millionth time.
"Yep," Eddie replies, choosing to focus on Steve's tousled hair rather than see the sincerity in his eyes, "That it is."
"Fuck, Ed, I'm—" Steve pauses, pushing himself up so he's sitting. He grabs Eddie's chin in his hand and tugs until he's forced to meet Steve's gaze, "Love, I'm so fucking proud of you. Today — fuck, today's gonna be the best day. The whole goddamn world's finally gonna start seeing how great you are."
Ed shakes his head against Steve's grip.
"Won't be everyone's cup of tea."
"Duh," Steve rolls his eyes like it's obvious (and, shit, maybe it is obvious), "But it will be some people's."
"Yeah, yeah." Eddie dismisses him.
It's not a concept Eddie is unfamiliar with. He may have been labeled a "freak" in grade school, but he hadn't ever been entirely isolated. Even as a super-super-senior, he'd had his people. He knows that there will be people who like the book, who like the story he's putting into the world. What's different about this — what's different about him now than who he'd been ten years ago — is that he wants more. He wants the book to be a big success because he wants this whole writing thing to work out because he wants a long and happy and comfortable life with Steve, and he wants that for Steve too.
Ed knows that Steve can take care of himself — more than that, he knows Steve has hit the jackpot in finding a career in something he's passionate about — but he also knows that Steve had taken care of himself for far too long when someone else should have been doing it for him. Maybe he just wants to make sure Steve can decide to be done whenever he wants to, that he doesn't have to work his entire life if that's not what he wants to do anymore.
As a kid and as a teenager, Eddie had never imagined he'd live a long life. He'd imagined a pretty fantastic end, actually — something dramatic and show-stopping and soon. He'd imagined something sudden and unexpected but entirely preventable like a drug overdose or a car crash. Sometimes he'd imagined something quick and violent, someone gunning for him and the way he was choosing to pursue his own happiness, but no matter what, he was always dying young. He doesn't think he'd ever imagined it any other way.
He hadn't realized it at the time, but it was actually borderline suicidal, probably, how readily he'd welcomed the notion of dying young. That whole time in March of '86 he'd been kicking himself for thinking any of it, because once it was actually a threat, once he was staring death in the face with his scythe held firm to his throat, he'd been fucking terrified. Scared in a way he'd never known before.
Jesus H. Christ, he can't even believe how stupid he'd been to romanticize that sort of ending now that he has what he has. Now that he has Steve, he's praying to whatever higher power may or may not be out there that it's a long way out, that he has a kind ending, that rest eternal comes for him beside Steve in a big, soft, comfortable bed and that he's happy all the way through his very last breath.
"Steve, I hope you know how…" Eddie pauses, eyes flickering around their bedroom in search of a sufficient word for the emotions swirling around in his brain. When he comes up empty, he settles on ol' reliable, "fucking grateful for you I am. For everything you do and everything you are."
"Fuck deserving," Steve replies, his nose scrunching up, "If you want me, you've got me for as along as you want."
"I'm sorta hoping for forever, personally," Ed says, feigning coolness as he bent an arm behind his head.
"Damn straight."
December 29th, 1994 - Pensacola, Florida
The next day was Eddie and Steve's last in Florida.
Thank fuck, Eddie couldn't help but think.
He kind of hated it here — actually, he completely hated it here, and had wanted to leave from the second they arrived. They'd be leaving tomorrow, getting up at the ass crack of dawn (and not a moment later) to head off to the airport and then their home in Washington.
Wayne had left early in the morning to meet up with an old friend who still lived in the area and then his flight back to Indiana had been in the mid-afternoon. During the interim, Steve had succeeded in dragging Eddie out and about Pensacola, Florida.
It was misery.
After Wayne left, Eddie had managed to convince Steve to return to the hotel instead of venturing back out into the city (Steve had been angling for a dolphin-spotting tour that would probably have pushed Eddie right over the edge into total insanity), but as soon as they were back in their room, Steve was shoving him bodily into the shower.
"C'mon man, you haven't showered since we got here," he'd said when Eddie tried to protest, "I love you more than anything and I get that this shit is tough, but enough is enough."
It was better than being dragged around Pensacola like a pestilent child, so Eddie showered in the nice hotel shower, and once he was dry, he pulled on a clean pair of boxers and contemplated trying to work his way through the ridiculous hair routine Steve had built for him (contemplating, because the alternative was calling for Steve to do it for him which would be admitting that, A — he still didn't know the steps himself even after nearly two years, and B — he actually did like the routine despite his aggressive eye-rolling about it since the start).
He did like the way his hair looked these days — actual curls instead of the frizzy mess he'd been mismanaging before — but Ed, still stubborn as a mule, refused to give Steve the satisfaction of being proven right (not about this, anyway), so he resigned himself to figuring it out on his own.
He was looking in the mirror trying to decide if his hair was damp enough when his eyes fell on the scarring along his abdomen and torso and back.
It's a big mirror, way bigger than the one hanging above the sink in their minuscule bathroom at home that barely even contained his shoulders. This one caught just about everything that wasn't cut off by the reflection of the bathroom counter.
He kind of hated the scars.
Sometimes he didn't.
Today, he wasn't sure.
They're actually kind of gnarly — pretty metal, if he was in the mood to think of it that way — pink and puckered and shiny, and they stretched from just beneath the waistband of his boxers up to his collarbone, with some smaller, less severe ones on his neck and face. He'd started slowly tattooing over some of the ones on his abdomen a few years back, though he doubted he'd ever get them fully covered. For one, they weren't exactly cheap, but also, as he'd discussed with Steve ad nauseam, those scars were more than just healed-over skin. They were a sign that he had survived all that shit back in 1986 despite improbable odds and a lot of people's wishes.
Eddie had to admit that it's a pretty valid reason.
Steve still had his scars too, though not nearly as severely as Eddie did. Steve's had also mostly faded. The ring around his neck had completely disappeared — the bruising from being nearly strangled by sentient demon vines had apparently been way worse than the abrasions, and his throat had been fucked up for weeks afterwards — and the bite marks at his sides were only a few shades paler than the rest of his skin and, though slightly raised, nearly invisible. Steve had fared quite a bit better with the bats than Eddie had, not that he'd realized it in the moment. All he'd known was that Steve had looked not good after barely escaping the bats, so Eddie had figured he'd experienced the same.
(Not even close, though he wouldn't come to understand that until later).
In the aftermath of Vecna, Eddie had detested the scars. Naturally, he'd pretended that he loved them, that they were cool, metal, because that's what he always did. When there was something about himself he didn't like, he pretended he adored it, that it was his favorite goddamn part of him, because that made it harder to target.
Back then, if he'd been asked if he wanted to undo all of it, to go back in time and avoid it all, he would have said yes in a fucking heartbeat.
Now, coming up on nine years later, he was pretty sure he felt differently.
He knew unequivocally that the only reason his life looked the way it did now is because of Vecna. His friends, his writing, Steve — god, Steve. All of it happened because Chrissy Cunningham got Vecna'd in his old trailer.
Eddie wished Chrissy hadn't died, and he wished he hadn't had to watch it happen. He wished Patrick and Fred and even fucking Jason hadn't died either. He wished he hadn't been dragged into the Upside Down bullshit, and he wished it hadn't tried to kill him. He wished it hadn't left permanent, unescapable marks on him that made it all impossible to forget.
But that shit turned him into the person he was today and, believe it or not, he actually liked the person that he was.
He still hated the scars, though.
Scowling, Eddie wrestled a shirt over his head.
That itchy feeling he'd been ignoring for days was back ten-fold, so strong he could hear it like a buzzing in his ears. He knew what he needed to do — had known since yesterday, probably, but pretended he hadn't because…fuck, for a lot of reasons, but since seeing those fucking scars, he didn't want to pretend anymore.
Eddie left the bathroom to find Steve watching highlights from some sports game they'd missed yesterday.
"Get your shoes on," he said before Steve could say anything, "We're going back out."
Steve seemed to hesitate, looking at Eddie like he might change his mind (which, he supposed, was fair enough considering his behavior over the last several days), but once Eddie was fully dressed and pulling on his own shoes, he got up.
"Am I allowed to ask where we're going?" Steve asked, hopping slightly as he tugged on his laced sneakers.
"No," Eddie replied, not yet wanting to put it into words, "I'm driving."
They were in the car not long later, and after another thirty minutes they were crossing into the town Eddie had spent his formative years in. Steve didn't know this — he knew Steve didn't know what this town meant to Eddie, and when he drove past his old street, he knew Steve wouldn't know of its significance either, but a part of him thought that Steve might just sense it, that he might somehow notice a change in the air and just know. He didn't, though, or if he did, he didn't let on, and after another few minutes of driving, they reached their destination — a weathered cemetery set close to the road in a big, open field.
Only when Eddie was done parking the car on the side of the road did he look at Steve, who was wearing an expression that betrayed how he'd figured out where they were and what they were doing.
They were here to see Eddie's mom.
As far as cemeteries go, it was a small one, which was good for Eddie's sake as he had no memory of where his mother's headstone was. He didn't remember much of her funeral either, just that Wayne was there and his father wasn't and it had been cold outside and when it was all over Wayne had brought him back to his house down the street just long enough for him to grab some stuff before they headed up north for Indiana.
It didn't take long for Ed to locate the gravestone, and when he did, he found himself pausing as something wet rose in his throat, though if it were bile or tears, he couldn't quite tell.
"Let me know if you want a minute, 'kay?" Steve said.
Ed swallowed an inhale.
"I—y-yeah, I want a minute," Eddie heard himself stammer.
Steve nodded, pressing a firm kiss to the side of his head before he took a few steps backwards and slowly headed off in another direction.
Eddie blinked and continued on his way to his mother's grave, its finer details becoming more and more clear as he approached, and then he was right in front of it.
He looked at the headstone for a while.
It was small and grey, with a flat top that a small pile of stones balanced atop of. There was a small Star of David engraved on the flat face of the granite, and below that, in large, carefully cut letters, was her name.
Maureen.
Just Maureen, nothing else.
Below her name were the dates for the day she was born and the day she died. Eddie tried his best to do the math in his head and came up with thirty-eight.
She'd been thirty-eight years old.
Jesus Christ.
Only ten more years until he was as old as she ever got to be — less, actually, considering his twenty-ninth birthday was only a month and some change away.
As Eddie continued to look at the headstone, he felt enormous waves of gratitude for Wayne wash over him.
Wayne had been the one to plan the funeral. He'd picked out the headstone and he'd found a plot in the one graveyard in their tiny hometown not affiliated with a church.
He'd known Eddie's mom since they were in school together with his dad years ago. They'd been friends before a terrible marriage made them family, and when his brother goddamn murdered her (manslaughtered, actually, according to the judge), he hadn't wasted a second to step in, to make sure that if they had to bury her, they would do it right.
Eddie crouched down on the dry, yellow grass so he was eye level with his mother's name.
"Hey, mom," he said, fighting away the thoughts telling him that this was silly, "Uh…long time, no see, I guess. Sorry 'bout that. A, uh…a lot's been going on."
He paused, "Dad's dead. That's why I'm here. Pretty sure you wouldn't know that because…" Eddie laughed drily, "I mean, he's definitely not with you. That's for fuckin' sure."
"I…I brought someone with me — here…and just, like, on the trip. Steve. He…"
Eddie looked back to see that Steve was crouched in front of a gravestone about a hundred feet away, wiping at the granite to get a better look at the inscription.
"He's, um…he's pretty fuckin' great, actually. I—" he paused, "You'd like him. Wayne likes him and we know he's a pretty tough critic, so…I dunno. I wish you could meet him."
"I…Jesus, I wish you were here still. Things were…things were pretty fuckin' tough out there for a while. I almost got eaten by monster-bats at one point — that was wild. Kinda glad you weren't there for that part 'cause it sucked. Shit turned out okay in the end, though, if you can believe it. I wish you were here to see it."
With that, Eddie found that he was out of words, out of things to say.
He picked up a loose stone from the grass, small and dark and jagged, and as he stood up he placed the stone on top of the headstone with the others.
Eddie took in a deep breath, held the air in his lungs for a second before letting it out long and slow. He looked around until he found Steve, and he must have sensed Eddie's eyes on him, because after only a few seconds, he looked over.
Steve smiled an encouraging kind of half-smile and began making his way back across the cemetery.
Once Steve was back by Eddie's side, he looked at the headstone for a long time.
"Thank you for bringing me here," he eventually said, slipping an arm around Eddie's waist, "I wanted to meet her someday."
Jesus Christ, if Eddie was a crier, he'd be done for.
He nodded.
"Yeah. Me too. Wish you got to meet her for real."
"Me too."
Eddie's hand found Steve's and they began a slow walk back to the car.
Once Eddie was back behind the wheel of their rental with Steve beside him in the passenger seat, they embarked on the drive back down to Pensacola. Steve fiddled with the radio for a while, settling on a seventies station and keeping the volume down low.
"S'it cool if we make another stop?" Eddie asked, and though he felt Steve look his way, he didn't take his eyes off the road ahead of them.
"Yeah," Steve replied. He didn't press any further.
Thirty minutes later, Eddie was pulling into the gravel lot of a small Pensacola beach.
Once the car was parked, Steve made to open his door, but Eddie exclaimed, "Wait!" and threw a hand across Steve's chest.
As Steve made to look at him with his trademarked bemused expression, Eddie hurried around the car and opened the passenger side door. As he held out a hand, Steve looked up at him and raised his eyebrows.
"Yeah, I can be gentlemanly too," Eddie said, "Don't look so surprised."
Steve rolled his eyes as he took Eddie's hand and let himself get pulled out of the car.
"Pretty sure chivalrous is the word you're looking for," he commented, which Ed chose to ignore.
Steve didn't let go of his hand as they walked up the rickety boardwalk, and after only a few paces, the beach came into view. In the early evening, it was mostly empty, and the sun was low in the clear sky, reflecting off the rippling water.
"You come here as a kid?" Steve asked as they stepped onto the sand.
"Maybe," Ed replied, "I remember going to the beach sometimes, but not much of the specifics. Wanna sit?"
Steve nodded, and when Eddie took a seat on the sand, Steve sat down beside him and slung an arm over his shoulders.
They were both quiet for a while.
A few hundred yards ahead of them, an elderly couple slowly walked an equally elderly dog close to the shoreline.
"Look Stevie," he said, because he couldn't help himself, "It's us in ten years."
"Well…I hope it's more than ten."
Eddie threw his head back and laughed before pressing a kiss onto Steve's cheek.
"Sorry again for derailing the visit to Boston," he said, because he needed to say it even just one more time. Steve looked his way as he opened his mouth to protest, but Ed ignored him, "I know you said it's fine, but, fuck, I was disappointed. Obviously, you would be too."
"I mean, yeah," Steve conceded, "It's a bummer, but that's mostly because it's, y'know, it's fun, and I know the holidays can be rough for you so it's nice when you can actually enjoy it, but there'll be more. They're an annual kind of thing, actually."
Eddie rolled his eyes, trying his best not to crack a smile at Steve's corny, dad-humor.
"I just…" Steve continued, "you've been sorta off since we got here. That's…I know that makes sense, y'know, considering, but I still don't like to see it."
Eddie let out a sigh, running a hand over his hair.
"Just…thinking about a lotta shit I usually try to ignore."
Steve nodded.
"Your dad?"
"Yeah," Eddie replied drily, "Not sure he's worth the attention, though."
"That's for you to decide," Steve shrugged, "And…you know, thinking about him isn't, like, a betrayal to her."
"Yeah, I-I know," Eddie said, mentally cursing Steve's psych degree and his intuition and his unending empathy, "Just…I guess I always sorta convinced myself that if I dwelled too much on him, it'd, like, seep into who I was," Eddie paused to replay the words he'd said back to himself and then shook his head, "I think I was worried I'd end up like him if I thought about him enough. And I really don't want to be like him."
Steve exhaled a short laugh, "Think you didn't have any reason to be worried, man. You're your mom through and through from what I hear."
That time, Eddie really couldn't help a smile even as Steve continued.
"Still…whether he's your dad or not, I don't think you could ever be capable of doing what he did — any of it. It's just…it's not you. You know that, right? You're too good. You're a good person, Ed."
Eddie ignored the parts of Steve's statement that made him feel like crying, instead asking, "You think he was always that way? Like, destined or some shit? I mean…his old man was a piece of shit too, according to Wayne, but Wayne didn't turn out that way and they grew up together so…"
Steve nodded understandingly.
"Diathesis-stress model," he added, as if Eddie would know what that meant.
He looked over at him.
"What?"
"It's a…it's a theory about explaining behaviors and disorders and stuff," Steve said, then shook his head, "Never mind, just — they're, you know, they're different people. Even though they grew up in the same house, they would have been affected by shit differently. But, yeah, I don't…I don't think kids are just, like, born with, like, the tendency for that kind of shit."
"Yeah. Me neither."
Ed paused, looking out onto the dark ocean.
"You…you want kids, though, right? Like, someday?" he asked, feeling nervous even though he already knew the answer. Steve looked his way, their eyes locking.
"Yeah," Steve nodded, "I mean, I haven't really thought about what capacity I'd want kids because there's, like, options or whatever, but, yeah, I do want kids."
There was a beat of silence between them, and then Steve said, "You?"
Eddie didn't immediately answer.
If he'd been asked the question when he himself was a kid — okay, maybe not a kid, more like when he was a teenager — he would have said no, and he probably would have followed it with some kind of pessimistic, anarchist spiel about how having kids is just conforming to the nuclear family bullshit established as necessary by society. Eddie had wanted notoriety, fame, importance, infamy in whatever form it happened to come in. He'd wanted to stand out, to see some kind of large-scale recompense for the hell on earth his childhood and adolescence had been. He didn't want to just be someone's dad.
But then Chrissy Cunningham died the worst kind of death right in front of his eyes and turned Eddie's world upside down in more ways than one, and he was pretty sure he grew up more during that stretch of March in 1986 than he had in all his previous twenty years roaming the earth, and he learned pretty quick that he didn't want that life anymore. He wanted a calm life, a safe and comfortable life filled with peace and love and stability. He wanted the mundanity of a house he owned with the man who turned it into home, with kids running around making noise and maybe a couple cats too because Steve had always said he couldn't ever look at dogs the same way after Hawkins. He knew now, at nearly twenty-nine years old, how that life is just as big an accomplishment as what Ed had wanted before because that life is a sign of being loved. Steve loved him so much that he wanted a family with him. He wanted to build a legacy that would be theirs together, as a unit — a veritable parental one.
In Ed's eyes, no other accomplishment could ever hold a single fucking candle to that.
He considered again what Steve was asking him — did Eddie want kids?
Yes. Yes he did.
He wanted a family with Steve. He wanted to watch Steve get to be a dad, and he wanted to become one too. He wanted that life he'd never thought he'd want because being with Steve — loving Steve — had made him want it.
"Yeah," he finally replied, "Yeah, same."
Eddie didn't take his eyes off the ocean, but in the periphery of his vision he saw Steve nod.
"Hope you don't mean now though, because I'm pretty sure Florida's sodomy laws are still firmly in place."
Steve gave him a shove and Eddie let himself topple backwards onto the sand so Steve fell over top of him. Steve caught himself above Eddie with his hands bracketing his shoulders and a knee shoved between his thighs.
Steve's got a big grin on his face, and Eddie could feel that it was mirrored on his own.
"Eddie, I love you."
Ed caught Steve's face in his palms.
"I love you too, Steve. So goddamn much."
"So much," Steve affirmed, and Eddie tugged down to collide their lips together.
He kissed him long and slow, and when Steve eventually pulled away (probably sooner than he normally would because, well, Florida), it's with a satisfied hum and a look in his eyes that Ed hoped he would get to see forever.
"Life is good, Munson," Steve said as he fell onto the sand beside him, immediately reaching to catch Eddie's hand in his.
"Yeah," Eddie replied, and he let out a short laugh as he looked up at the dark, Florida sky because, goddamn, he actually fucking meant it, "Yeah, Steve. Life is good."
eep she's done. eddie's voice is tricky for me so this may have been ooc, but this entire series is mostly self-serving so i don't care all that much :)
author's notes:
- the diathesis-stress model is a theory in psychology that essentially attributes disorders to a combination of predisposition/genetics (diathesis) and life experiences/environment (stress). colloquially, it can also be used in discussions of behaviors, and generally is a player in the nature vs. nurture debate. steve 100% learned about it in undergrad and actively utilizes it as a grad student. interesting stuff.