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hitlikehammers · 2 months ago

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Rockstar!Eddie Comes Back to the Love He Left Behind in Hawkins 🎸to Hold SO TIGHT to His Dream (✨Steve✨, of course) Forever and For Always This Time ❤️‍🩹💕

“My sunshine,” Eddie whispers, pressing a thumb at the notch between those sharp-stunning clavicles, into the pulse, the heavy swallow, the life right there: exceptional. “You have my heart, so anything I put my heart into, anywhere at all, is filled with you. It’s you, Stevie,” Eddie’s voice breaks, eyes stinging again as he leans down, replaces his thumb with his lips—breathes into the beat: “Always you.”

rating: m♥️ back in steve’s bed still in steve’s bed after eddie declares his undying love and stuff 🛌 pure and unadulterated fluff✨ potentially harmful amounts of softness. like basking-in-the-afterglow levels of schmoop here 💕 eddie’s maybe astounded that it’s all turned somehow out this good and this right after convincing himself he’d never have it; eddie also might slightly underestimate just how in this beat-for-beat 💞 (he didn’t think he’d get ANY OF THIS, he is forgiven for misreading that part in his overarching blindness)❤️‍🩹 steve is alongside him 💓 sometimes it’s nice to be surprised that way ♥️ making plans for a future that include them both as it always should have and honestly basically did all along. they’re just each other’s dream inside every dream after all✨

sequel to dreams within our dreams (tumblr // ao3) for @steddielovemonth Day Six: "Just in case you ever foolishly forget, I'm never not thinking of you." —Virginia Woolf

this is a standalone in its universe, but also very much a sequel to it ♥️

It’s kind of strange, in the marveling sort of way.

It’s not make-up sex, because they never properly ‘broke-up’. They never yelled, or fought—and that was likely the core of the real problem.

They should have fought.

Eddie knew what they had was once-in-lifetime. Eddie knew he’d never not just recover from losing it, but he’d never even bother looking for a passable substitute when nothing could ever compare. He should have fought, back then, for the better part of his heart.

So it’s not make-up sex, per se, in the strictest sense. And to call it a reunion would probably not be the most accurate either, given how Eddie’s a frequent flyer on every available airline for how he’s spent more than half of the not-as-impressive-as-he’d-daydreamed paycheck he gets on tickets back to here. Back to Steve. As often as he can.

Back to his home.

He was never naive about what he more than wanted; what he needed to breathe. He was just…he was so convinced, you know? Even as they inched toward the shallow end of fame, Eddie knew being worthy of Steve Harrington was never about that; and was something forever out of his reach, so—when they cut an album and sent it into the world? There was pride, and he felt happy for moments in it all, and still Eddie knew the entire time: it would never, could never, fill the hole in him.

It would never mean he could go back to Steve the next time and be enough to change how it’d shaken out—and because he’s selfish, he was always going to go back, and hope Steve kept being fond enough in the nostalgia, at least, or else that he kept building up sufficient pity, to take Eddie in and top him up for a little longer with the elixir he lived from, lived for, that he found in Steve’s skin against his—but no amount of success on the outside would mean that anything Eddie had to offer, or that he was, to beoffered, would mean he deserved to have Steve with him always—foralways.

It was never going to be that; and knowing as much was the only reason he’d been able to pull away and drive off in the first place, to keep a foot on the gas despite the way he was dying by half-breaths with every mile. The way the biggest part of him never really stopped that withering. Not wholly.

And that’s it, he thinks. Like: Eddie guesses all he can really say is that, for as perfectly fucking transcendent as coming back to Steve always is—as they’ve learned each other more and more across these barely-a-handful of years that stretched lifetimes in Eddie’s chest, cracked his ribs with every breath he took at all—as much as coming back to Steve was always a revelation, the only thing that kept him sane at all: that part of him that never stopped dying, bit by bit? It sat and watched and waited while the sweat dried and the lungs calmed and it maybe held itself in stasis while Eddie relished the heat, the flawless fit of Steve inside of him, but after?

It always just kept dying.

And that’s where the moment, the now is wholly, gorgeously, impossibly, miraculously different.

Because Eddie may just be staring at this man beside him, watching him breathe, watching him exist like the gift it fucking is while Steve gently traces Eddie’s scars without having to look, like he knows them. Like he bothered to remember down to that detail, like a sunrise under Eddie’s ribs as they both luxuriate a little in the warm musk settling after making the thing they’ve been doing forever, somehow still for the first time:

Love. They made love, and Eddie’s heart still hasn’t calmed from the high.

In honesty, like, strike-him-dead honesty: fuck, but Eddie can barely breathe with it; ending up here after everything. Through…everything.

Because it wasn’t just Steve who kept dreams inside his dreams—or maybe, more that he found the real dream he knew lived side-by-side with the other, where only one was actually even potentially attainable. And the other was heartbreakingly beyond even…even hoping for, let alone trying for.

So maybe it’s more…there was that possible-dream he placed just so, front and center and angled just right, to hide his deepest, truest dream.

The one next to him in bed, with a curve to his lips that Eddie’s never seen before: so weightless. So free.

It trips in Eddie’s pulse, just to witness.

The dream within his dream, held safe and secret and aching behind other lesser wants, eating away at him, death by a million heartbeats wasted too far from this body, this single soul in the whole goddamn world. The need inside the bloody mess of Eddie’s heart, the thing lives there, that keeps the shape of it to work at all. The whole of this center-cannot-hold reality that was always his truth, always what made and built who he’d become, that filled all his lines in and gave him all his color; always this.

Always Steve.

For all the times Eddie told himself no, told himself to walk, to swallow, to find a way to breathe, to leave no matter how his own legs fought him because he wasn’t enough, not for a man who deserved all things; a man who Eddie couldn’t even give some things to, in the sphere of what he desired most—the house, the kids, the kind of peace and calm Steve goddamn Harrington had more than earned, and had always deserved beyond question: that was so far from everything Eddie could work to be half of at best, even if he tried with every breath up to his last.

And he would, he would have tried with everything in him if he believed he could have so much as scraped the surface of the things that made up Steve’s dreams, that filled Steve’s heart—and Eddie had never believed he’d change himself for someone else that way. Never even processed the possibility that he could know a love so deep that he’d want to.

That he’d not only ache, but damn well collapse inward on himself for facing the sheer fact that he couldn’t. He couldn’t be that, he’d never be that.

He was so sure.

But then: here he is.

Here he is: and Steve’s heartbeat is a sure-steady thing, a perfect entity in a world almost too flawed for it to be real—save that it is.

This is real.

Eddie’s own heart pounds a little heavier, headier, just for thinking those words.

And Steve’s fingers are running through Eddie’s hair, never catching, never fighting with the strands, just following the twirl of each curl like a maze, or a map—but one he knows.

One only he has always known.

Eddie’s been a goddamn fool. Eddie’s the luckiest motherfucker who’s ever lived.

“You’re the whole thing,” Eddie breathes out now, the marvel of those truths settling deep in his blood, coursing heavy and wild through him head to toe, singing out his whole fucking life as he reaches, cups Steve’s face in his hands; “you’re all of it, you know that?”

Steve leans into Eddie’s palm when he tips his head, furrows his brows a little, all-askance.

Eddie’s heart trips—this man is so precious; so exquisite.

“My dream. Everything I dream of, have dreamt of or wished for since I met you, since I really met you,” Eddie whispers, his voice low because like he said: this man is precious. This moment feels sacred. He’s going to tread reverently, while his heart’s flayed bare, here. Not even for the sake of protection—more so that Steve can look, and reach and test whatever he might need to, to be sure. Eddie means this more than he’s ever meant anything, and he’s laid bare now before the man he loves not to prove it, as much as to offer it—clear where he’d always thought he had to hide—and fucking…hope.

Then again: with Steve?

He’s always laid bare, offered whole, heart and soul and self entire: with Steve. That’s…that’s kind of the point.

And they missed it. All this time, they missed it.

No more.

“You’re at the heart of it, everything I thought was fully-formed before you, it all fits so much better, like it’s meant to, it’s all so much brighter with you at the center,” and if Eddie keeps Steve’s cheek cradled in one palm, he traces Steve’s collarbone with the other, slow enough that he can feel the heartbeat nearby as it raps against his unspeakably grateful, still unworthy hands:

“My sunshine,” Eddie whispers, pressing a thumb at the notch between those sharp-stunning clavicles, into the pulse, the heavy swallow, the life right there: exceptional.

“You have my heart, so anything I put my heart into, anywhere at all, is filled with you. It’s you, Stevie,” Eddie’s voice breaks, eyes stinging again as he leans down, replaces his thumb with his lips—breathes into the beat:

“Always you.”

Because every step he made himself take was—when he looked at it all clearly, now—somehow puzzle-pieced together in his head as being one step he could bring back to Steve, the fool’s-errand that he could ever truly make it back to Steve and be enough—because he was always headed back to Steve, they could tour the world and there’d still be a countdown to when he could see Steve and was allowed to breathe again; but it drove him. The strings under his fingertips were always held against the texture of Steve’s skin. The notes could ring symphonies but they had nothing on Steve; never could. Not Steve’s voice, not Steve’s breaths, or the sounds he made when Eddie fucked him just right, or his soft affections in Eddie’s ear when he sank in and drew noises from Eddie that were for Steve alone.

Only Steve. Always Steve.

And Steve shivers the slightest bit, but Eddie feels how strong that blood moves, beauty in itself, this core manifestation of what Eddie doesn’t just want most.

But what he needs most.

“I play for you,” he breathes there, smiles when the rhythm kicks a little harder, like the words can fill Steve’s heart the way they don’t just fill Eddie’s, but make Eddie’s, down past the cells. “You’re in every track,” he whispers, and fuck is it true: “you make the chords sing.”

As if it ever could have been a coincidence that they found anything like success only after there was Steve, only after Eddie’s heart was spoken for and filled full, broken open under his own fumbling hands, and if there’s any possible way to find any worthy thing inside any of these half-lived years, lived half-apart—because fuck the success, it’s been hollow every moment he couldn’t walk back through the door and know Steve wouldn’t be far away—but if there’s anything worth salvaging in it?

Maybe he can grasp onto loving that strong anyway, through all of it, never once faltering in it and more, never wishing he could, because yes he tried to bury the hurt, run from it—but never did he even consider a world where he wasn’t built up from his DNA, constructed out of a love for Steve, of Steve, with or without Steve but always Steve; his own stupidity, or maybe it was just cowardice: but even that pain wasn’t a match for the unshakable thing he doesn’t just feel, but breathes inside as a rule, for Steve. Made of Steve.

Offered heart-in-hand, to Steve—

Eddie kisses a little trail down into the hair on Steve’s chest, following that flow of life: needs it in this minute. Needs to squeeze his eyes closed and hold there just a second. Let his body soak in how this is real.

This is real.

How is this real—

“I come home to you, always been coming home to you,” he breathes where he can feel Steve’s heart move, and when he blinks a tear falls there and it feels kind of fitting; kind of wholly right in a space inside him where nothing’s been right in years, and he swallows hard around that flash of clear truth as he exhales shaky:

“You are my home.”

And Steve’s inhale is sharp at that, and Eddie goes to kiss his chest again because he can, good god, he fucking can and Steve—

Steve reaches to cradle Eddie for himself, now, palms curved against Eddie’s head, his devotion pressed tight to Steve’s chest, the riotous waves bounding below his mouth and lifting like a kiss in its own right against Eddie’s parted lips.

“I never thought I’d get this, though,” Eddie breathes, barely; thinks maybe the words aren’t even loud enough to hear, and the way Steve presses him closer for it is just because his heart against Eddie’s mouth heard the heart in Eddie’s mouth loud and clear.

“Never, Stevie, I,” and his voice cracks, and Steve’s fingers thread through his hair: comfort; protection. A claim Eddie never thought he’d earn, hasn’t earnedhere but had known in his bones, before, that he had to have lost any chance—to walk from the biggest parts of your heart and soul, and to do it because you knew your better halves couldn’t ever hope to match even a fraction of his lesser halves? No nuggets, no Winnebago, no picket fence, no garden or dinner on the table, even if he’d try, he’d have tried so fucking hard but he’s not made for the kitchen and all that is just the baseline, the simplest minimums of what Steve deserved, and Eddie, all Eddie was, all Eddie had to offer, it’s, he…

But then he’s reminded again, with the massage of that heartbeat on his lips: he is here. They are here.

And…and maybe not even in spite of what Eddie can’t give, or be, like he always thought. Maybe…somehow…

Maybe something else. Maybe even the exact opposite. But no matter the how, or even the why?

He’d been so wrong, and he doesn’t deserve the spoils of it, but god he has never been more grateful to have been a blind fucking fool, to have broke his own heart and maybe the one underneath him too but maybe also not beyond repair, and as far as he can tell, not beyond offering—and more unfathomable still, but also not beyond reclaiming as deep as it’d ever been, the love still there, despite all the bruising, and if it’s there then it’s not even a question of whether it can be nursed back in full, Eddie will do anything—but if everything he thinks he sees, and feels, and knows in these moments now is true?

Holy fuck, Eddie has never been so goddamn grateful to have gotten every part of it this fucking wrong.

Until now. Now, when his own heartbeat is back to pounding again: less steady than Steve’s but not because he’s anything but sure. Overwhelmed—that’s probably more accurate. Overfull. Vibrating and shaking as a single thing, filled with joy and terror in equal counts but a terror that is primarily a joy of its own.

The kind of terror that you feel in the face of something so profound, it freezes you in awe for it.

That dazzling spark that makes a heart anything more than a hunk of meat.

Dreams inside fucking dreams.

Eddie whimpers, pulse tripping as Steve keeps his hands around Eddie’s face, frames it sure but soft, dear.

“Always,” he leans to kiss Eddie’s lips, long and languid and like they have all the time in the world, and could they, this time, do they really, finally?

“You always had it,” and Steve keeps one palm cradled to Eddie’s cheek and Eddie moans a little as he leans into it heavy, needy when Steve draws Eddie’s other hand firm, decisive to the center of his own chest as he whispers, closest thing to a vow Eddie’s ever heard:

“It’s never not been yours.”

And the closest thing to heaven Eddie’s ever felt is Steve’s wholly-offered heartbeat under his hand as Steve breathes those words into his parted lips before kissing him again, more like a claim crossed with a benediction, a marveling sort of gratitude:

“Always you.”

And Eddie basks in that feeling for only a moment before he gives as good as he gets and then some, because Steve will always deserve above, and then beyond—but it feels a little more like they’re less battling with their tongues and more teasing each other open to breathe in one another’s soul—and if that’s what it is, if that’s even possible: Eddie fucking wants it.

“Do you know what it does to me?” he pants against Steve’s equally-swollen mouth when air’s no longer willing to be ignored. “What you do to me?”

“Tell me,” Steve mouths against Eddie’s lips like a secret, like a dare, like a promise. Like intimacy incarnate.

Eddie’s pulse surges high in his throat, desperate to touch.

“I want to regret the time we spent where we didn’t, where I didn’t,” Eddie licks his lips and sucks in Steve’s exhale, they’re so close—so close; “I cannot regret any time I’ve lived loving you, though, it’s,” Eddie confesses, and sacrifices the wonder of Steve’s heartbeat in his hand to flip their hold and press Steve tight to his: what Steve does to him.

“It feels wrong on this, like, elemental level, to even think it,” Eddie gasps through trying to shape words to it all, something that is so much more than the words.

“Maybe it could have looked different, earlier,” and even the possibility lands sour in him, and yet it’s not…it’s not as bad as he’d have expected, and maybe that’s because—

“But the fact that you’re my whole heart? That doesn’t change, that never changed, that never got more or less true,” and Eddie says it with his whole chest, his whole heart like it fucking deserves; “it’s an absolute, y’know? Law of the universe,” and he knows that. He knows that more than he knows anything.

And when he mouths his feeling into Steve and watches it sink in deep, then deeper, and feels Steve’s heart jump under his hand, it hits with a rightness, a cosmic sort of ‘message received’ like quicksilver in his veins.

“Still feels like a dream,” Eddie whispers, and is finally close enough and at the right angle to bow his head into Steve’s, to breathe him in when Eddie breathes out, to hold steady, brow to brow, needing one another so fucking hard; “to be this lucky, y’know?”

“I know,” Steve whispers, and it’s sweet, it’s so fucking sweet; “I know.”

And then he’s pulling back a little, just enough to meet Eddie’s eyes again, his as bright and wet as Eddie’s knows his own are, at the least.

“But maybe that’s it. Maybe because you were my dream the whole time,” Steve breathes out, the joy in him a more quiet marvelling thing, just as stunned and overcome but…Eddie thinks they’ll find in time—all the time, in all the time they have to learn the things they missed, all the time in the world—Eddie thinks they’ll find they both resigned themselves differently, and the the way Steve managed was a quiet hurting, a folded up devastation deep in his chest.

But…somehow he’s telling Eddie that that very chest, and the heart he hid that devastation behind, was Eddie’s the whole fucking time. Somehow. Impossibly.

In his arms, pressed against him here and now.

Eddie swears to fuck that he will take that devastation and cast it into the fucking fire. Never let it touch his Stevie ever again.

“However I could have you, however we could be,” and the simple…well-worn drudgery of those words, the acceptance in them—it nearly knives Eddie’s heart mid-beating.

But Steve: Steve, being all the light and wonder and worth in the world, he has to see something. He has to see it, and so he reaches to cup Eddie’s face somehow more delicate and dear still, leans to kiss Eddie soft and sure, before he’s drawing them near nose-to-nose, only the barest distance necessary to keep each other in their sights.

“When I gave you my everything I wasn’t looking for a refund,” Steve’s eyes flicker over Eddie’s face, drinking in his expression, seeing him in a way Eddie’s only known with Steve, only even given to Steve, only found hands willing to hold all he offered in Steve’s steady palms.

Goddamn, he should have fought, they should have always been here, but he wasn’t lying for his own sanity, to make the ache land softer. He meant it; being with Steve at all is a gift he never thought to hope for; always has been.

The thing he was dreaming of, inside the heart of every other dream, it was never a dream of more, just of different. Because Steve, was Steve, is Steve.

Anything with him is a motherfucking privilege.

And if this is real, and it sticks for keeps: he wasn’t asking for more.

But this thing he’s already feeling is going to stretch and break him wide open in the most impeccable way, glorious as it shines and bleeds sacraments between them, and there will be more because loving, like this, the two of them in tandem, in sync, will make it so. To reshape what they can hold in the first place.

“I wanted you to keep as much of it as you wanted, however you wanted, forever,” Steve whispers, nuzzles a little at the stubble on Eddie’s cheek, unquestionably adoring and Eddie, he…

This was only ever Steve’s.

It could only ever have been Steve’s.

“That,” Eddie breathes, half-like a whimper. “I always wanted you,” and he frames Steve’s face and runs both thumbs over his cheekbones as he pledges his whole goddamn soul:

“Forever.”

“That’s what you have,” Steve’s eyes finally loose a tear where Eddie’s already soaked Steve’s hands for the way he’s sobbing through the pieces of him finding how they’ve always been meant to fit. “S’what you’ll always have.”

“I love you so goddamn much,” Eddie’s voice shakes for all the fullness in his chest, all the feeling in his heart, Steve’s heart—his heart had always belonged to Steve: “I always have. I never stopped,” he swears, he needs Steve to know even if there’s been nothing but proof shown between them this night—and Eddie’s watched Steve believe him but he still needs him to know in the marrow of his bones.

“I never will.”

And the way Steve kisses him before he can even breathe, can even swallow once those words come out—Eddie thinks he’s made his point.

Confessed this single truth of his whole fucking soul.

“I have,” Steve draws back eventually, bows his head into Eddie’s forehead; “I have never even bothered trying to love when it wasn’t you,” Steve nuzzles the side of his nose a little, like the leftovers of a shrug but…it makes Eddie’s chest so warm, even before Steve tacks on:

“Always you.”

And that’s it. That’s…that’s the core of it all. That is the dream. The only dream.

Always. Always this; them.

“How do you want this to be?”

And it’s always gonna be. It’s fucking always gonna be.

“Hmm?” Steve hums, a little boneless, mostly curious, gratifyingly at ease as Eddie’s arms have snaked around him and pulled Steve close, chest to chest so they rise into each other as it should always have been. As Eddie didn’t realize he’d been missing like a fucking limb this badly until now. He’d suspected, but—

No more. Never again.

Not. Ever. Again.

“I can move back here,” Eddie thinks that’s probably the logical choice, unless Steve’s looking to relocate as Erica’s graduation gets closer; “or—”

“What?” Steve pulls back a little to catch him in a baffled stare, jaw a little dropped, totally uncomprehending.

Which…okay yeah, wait: what?

“You,” Eddie takes a deep breath; this isn’t hard, or some unknown quantity to take a risk on anymore. But it’s too important not to handle with care, nonetheless. “You want to be together, yeah?”

Steve’s confusion morphs immediately into the kind of look he’d perfected when the kids where younger, and had never lost, for when someone asked an absolutely asinine sort of question.

“Of course,” Steve tells him, emphatic in the unyielding hold of his embrace; “always,” and even if he can’t move too much for how tight Eddie holds him, he can still lean his neck back and kiss him full of intent, making a point.

“But Eddie,” his voice softens, alongside the abiding sort of love unmistakable in his eyes:

“You always come back to me.”

Like that’s a perfectly reasonable answer. A perfectly acceptable status quo. Like what’s been this long is…is enough.

Eddie was never going to go back to what it’s always been, now that he knows that he can have it all. Now that he’s been given everything; now that they can be everything.

Even considering risking that bliss, that blessing is un-fucking-fathomable.

“I don’t want to come back to you,” Eddie clings to Steve a little tighter, buries a little closer into his neck, maybe a little desperate, but he thinks after everything he’s allowed it. Entitled maybe, even.

“Always, yeah? I want us to be always.”

And he’s equally entitled to sounding needy, to being goddamn desperate when he says that, too.

“Eds,” Steve kisses him slow this time, like he wants to press the feeling into him thorough, to last: “I am. We are,”

“We can be,” he says with a sureness that stumbles bright in Eddie’s swollen heartbeat, clatters buoyant through his whole chest; “we know now, and so we can be,” he sighs, shakes his head a little and smiles soft, means his words:

“It doesn’t have to change.”

And Eddie sees that what he means is that they…they can play this game, and simply change the rules. Or keep the rules, but shift the game. That knowing how they belong to one another, now, will be enough. Will be liveable. Will be a balm on all the ways they’ve torn themselves in two for so very long, and a promise that when they part now there won’t be tearing, just missing.

But that’s…Eddie’s fucking exhausted, living without a whole heart. He…he knows Steve means well, and knows just as much that Steve could believe to the molecules inside him that he’s loved far beyond measure, but he’s still built to bend. To give, and concede. To bear the load, to carry the brunt. Things he never deserved to accept, let alone expect.

That’s not going to be what they are, anymore.

“I,” Eddie licks his lips. Swallows hard before he meets Steve’s eyes and says, so clear and somehow with at least equal sureness to Steve’s own, maybe more, harder earned because Eddie’s not built for it like Steve, his beautiful paladin, but he can be selfish, in defense of them both:

“I need more.”

And Steve knows all of what runs through Eddie’s head before he speaks, knows what it holds and what it costs to have said it. To have confessed and begged for it.

He looks like he might start crying a little again. Eddie certainly feels his eyes stinging already.

“I’d never ask you to follow me into the kind of life I have now,” Eddie tries to rush the words out, before he gets lost in the waves of feeling that are building upon themselves, close-on to towering and that’s only right and good, they should never be less but Eddie needs his wits to finish what he means to make known, first: “to be dragged into something you don’t want, that isn’t your dream,” because even if Eddie is? The fame, to nomadic ping-ponging, the insanity of it all: that’s the opposite of the picket fence he said he didn’t want anymore but it’s also…it’s not glamorous, it’s not comfortable, it’s entirely separate from what Steve deserves.

“So I’ll change it, I’ll do it different,” because it’s not a question. It’s not a…it’s not a fucking question, Eddie doesn’t care what it takes. He reaches for Steve, thinks he may frame his face but decides to wrap around him instead, presses so tight and close, doesn’t stop until he swears he can feel Steve’s heartbeat against his own and his eyes slip closed as he breathes in deep to feel just that little bit more: this is what he wants. All he wants.

All he has ever truly dreamed of.

“I built so much of myself around you without being able to have all of you,” Eddie breathes into the shell of his ear, kisses below the lobe and stays there, stays.

“There’s nothing I won’t do to keep you, Stevie. Nothing.”

That’s all there is. All he knows. It’s all he’s been doing the best he could, the most he thought he was able or allowed, was welcome to, this whole time that’s all he has lived to do at the end of every day, every breath; but now? Knowing they could have more, that they can be everything?

That is all that there is.

“Sweetheart,” Steve murmurs where he’s lined up close to Eddie’s ear to match on the other side, and Eddie shivers for the sensation, but also the endearment: it’s Eddie’s for Steve—when Steve chooses it, it’s special:

“You’re not listening,” Steve breathes so warm, so fond and it’s that paired with the ‘sweetheart’ and the strong-steady feel of his heart against Eddie’s chest that holds Eddie’s pulse from shooting off wild in fear, in foolish doubt.

Steve’s wrapped too tight around him, though. Steve’s with him, whatever he means with those words—whatever it is, it’s no more than a misstep. A single trample of toes in the dance of their lives.

“What did you think I meant, when I said there was a dream inside my dream,” Steve exhales against his hair, kisses at the line of where his sideburn would grow if he let it; “when I told you what my dream wasn’t?”

Eddie wants to look into his eyes and ask with his gaze what he means, but…he doesn’t think he can physically do anything but lean into the damp heat of Steve’s mouth, chase that comfort as he tilts into Steve’s attention, gets more kisses along his hairline for the subtle ask, for being known so well and loved so deep that Steve was already ready and waiting to give.

Eddie thought this is what Steve meant by a dream inside his dream. It’s what Eddie meant. They’d seemed to be on the same page. It feels, like this, in this moment, like they’re definitely on the same page.

Undeniably.

So what does Steve mean—

“I still have the goddamn luggage, Eddie,” Steve mouths along his skin, and fuck, he doesn’t know what else to do but to lean in; to want for it. For always.

So it’s probably kind of predictable, at the very least instinctual and beyond his conscious control, how he lets out a fucking whine when Steve replaces his mouth with his palm and moves to look Eddie square-on.

The love in his eyes makes Eddie’s heart flip reckless inside his ribs.

“You’re it,” Steve tells him, leans in a little extra with the feeling; “you have to know,” he shakes his head, in the marveling kind of way;“you have to know that.”

And then he’s holding Eddie’s face and he kisses every inch of it: the lines of his eyebrows and the soft dips of his temples; the splay of his lashes and the bow of his lips. The tip of his nose.

Eddie’s eyes ease open a little lazy, a little fucking dazed for how intimate it was, to feel that treasured; to be reverenced so well under that mouth before it opens once more to squeeze around Eddie’s heart, to break Eddie’s world in two:

“You wouldn’t be asking me anything I haven’t been dreaming of being asked, for years.”

And the words themselves don’t spell a promise out in letters but that’s exactly what it is. It’s a vow as much as any that comes with a ring and a license—but Eddie will damn well do that part as best he’s able, too.

But what Steve is fucking saying, and everything it holds inside? It cracks the world in halves. Everything before this moment, and everything that waits for them to come—the future ahead.

And Eddie only knows how many days it’s been—3 years, 7 months, and 14 days; 15, now, as the sun pokes just the slightest bit on the horizon, like a dare through the window—but Eddie only knows because his heart counted the beats the whole fucking time. Because he learned how long he could push each absence of the very reason it kept pumping at all before the threads that held Eddie in one piece—all of them tied to Steve, all of them, always—frayed too to snapping, and then he came back, he always had to come back.

This was his heart.

And now his heart was telling him that he’d always been waiting to follow with everything, not merely to be rushed toward every time Eddie had to beg for what scraps he could pretend to deserve, fool himself were enough, before he unraveled, died of a starvation in his fucking soul.

And Eddie isn’t going to do things like he’s always done. He’s not going to live the same life, if Steve’s coming with him: because his Steve is not going to follow him. His Steve is going to walk side by side, where both of them will learn what it can feel like to live when your heart’s always whole.

Eddie doesn’t know what else to do, in that moment, in that clarity of that realization: he doesn’t know anything but to near-tackle Steve to the bed and kiss him breathless, until Eddie’s lungs hurt but his heart dances too much, to overjoyed to fucking care.

Because this is the start of what comes next. This is the future broken wide open for them to grasp with both hands and pull to their chest and hold tight between them. For always.

For both of them.

With both fucking hands.

Finally.

🖤🎸❤️‍🩹

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