#anyway I hate sad endings so pls be aware that Eddie is in fact undead and skulking around somewhere

[laundrybiscuits]

“Who’s Eddie?”

Darren doesn’t sound jealous or anything. It’d be a little hypocritical of him, considering he’s got a boyfriend and all. But Darren’s stayed the night a few times, more than anyone else Steve’s been sleeping with lately, and Steve thinks they’re getting to be pretty good friends at this point, and Steve’s been trying this thing lately where he’s more honest with his friends.

“Why do you ask?” Steve’s stalling, and he knows he’s stalling.

“You say Eddie sometimes in your sleep. Just wondering. He an ex or something?”

“No. Not an ex. Just a guy I—just a guy I liked, when I was a teenager.” It’s not completely true, he doesn’t think. But it’s close enough.

“Never got up the courage for a sweet little farmboy fumble?” Darren’s a city boy, and he likes to tease Steve about his supposedly agrarian roots even though Steve keeps telling him he’s never even been on a farm. (Aside from harvest festivals, and apple picking, and 4-H fairs, and his grandpa’s—okay, Darren has a little bit of a point. Not much.)

“He’s dead. He died,” Steve says. They’re just words. They can’t hurt anymore.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” says Darren, because Darren is not actually an asshole. He’s looking carefully at whatever Steve’s face is doing. Steve doesn’t know. Tentatively, he asks, “Was it because…?”

“No,” says Steve. Then he backtracks. “Maybe. Partly.”

Hunt the freak, right?

It wasn’t Jason Carver’s teeth in Eddie’s guts, but if things had broken a little differently, if they hadn’t had to worry about the human monsters in Hawkins…Steve thinks a lot about how it might have gone. Sometimes he hates Eddie for not being just a little bit more normal, and then he hates himself for thinking like that.

Steve has never said yes to a guy named Jason. It’s so fucking stupid and pointless. Maybe he’s missed out on the love of his life by turning down Jason Jones or whoever, and it's not even like Jason was the only one responsible. But he just can’t. He can’t.

He thinks it’s probably not even about Eddie himself, like as a real person. Eddie was just some guy, some kid, who was funny and handsome and sweet and wild, who loved the things he loved as if nobody had ever told him not to. 

A lot of people had told him not to. 

Eddie died because of ravening nightmare beasts and one superpowered evil dude with a god complex.

Eddie died because he liked playing a game about stories and magic.

Eddie died because some people, the people who raised Steve, the people who Steve used to love and look up to—those people couldn’t understand him, and thought that gave them the right to take away his life.

Growing up, Steve had always thought of himself as a lifelong Hawkinsite, the kind of guy who sticks around and puts down roots. But when Robin had asked him to go with her to New York, near the tail end of '86, it had been so easy to say yes. Leaving Hawkins behind had felt like escaping the jaws of a trap, even if it meant leaving a limb behind. They’ve been to Paris and London and LA, staying in filthy student hostels and drinking cheap wine, living the kind of life that had once seemed as make-believe and impossible to Steve as the kids’ wizard games. 

Steve dates men, now. He thinks that would have seemed even more impossible than Paris to his sixteen-year-old self. 

He still dates women sometimes. He’s had a couple girlfriends. Mostly, though, he’s not looking for anything too slow or serious, and that’s easier to get with men once you know where to look. He’s got Robin, he’s got the kids to see on Thanksgivings and Christmases, what else does he need? 

They’d moved out of New York around '91. Rent got to be too much, and Dustin had just bought a place in Oak Park with his then-girlfriend because the kid U-Hauls faster than a lesbian. 

So now, they share an apartment on the north side of Chicago, close to the lake. It’s pretty nice. Steve’s pushing 30, bartending six nights a week, and Robin answers phones at a fancy dentist’s office in the Loop. It’s been a lifetime since they’ve run from anything with too many teeth under the wrong sky. 

“Tell me about Eddie,” Darren says into the silence that's been stretching out too long.  

Steve closes his eyes.

“He was brave,” says Steve. “Every single day of his life, he was brave.”

(Now with follow-up!)