#steddie fictlet

[metalhoops]

Corroded Coffin didn’t ‘do’ love songs. 

It wasn’t some unwritten rule or unspoken theory that they were too ‘cool’ for love songs. Hell, metal ballads were a whole subgenre. Even W.A.S.P. had a love song. 

It was just that in their three years as a band, they’d never written a single love song. If Corroded Coffin had a lyricist, it was Eddie. It wasn’t as though other members hadn’t tried their hand at writing. Gareth and Jeff had written a handful of songs between them, as well as helped Eddie polish a couple of verses. Grant had even written a chorus, but generally, the lyrics of a Corroded Coffin song were, first and foremost, Eddie’s brainchild. 

The closest they’d ever gotten to writing a love song was ‘Killer Konnection’, and that was all Jeff. Though it was more about lust than love. So you could imagine the boys' shock when Eddie showed up to band practice and played them a love song. 

It was unlike any of their other material. Since Eddie disappeared back in March after being framed for a series of murders, the songs he’d written had changed. That hadn’t surprised the boys. Being proverbially run out of town with pitchforks could really change a guy’s view of the world. He pulled out some killer prose about red skies filled with bats and dark wizards out for deathly revenge. But they’d never heard Eddie write anything like the song he played for them that morning. He hadn’t even named it. Though Gareth caught a glimpse in Eddie’s notebook and saw it was going by the tentative title of ‘S’. A mysterious name for a mysterious song. 

Sure, ‘S’ had all the hallmarks of a Corroded Coffin song. It had the killer beat spurred on by the anxiety-inducing pounding drumbeat and base, accompanied by thrashing guitars and raw vocals, but the lyrics? Downright Robert Smith or Morrissey vibes. Maybe ‘love song’ was too harsh. Really, it was a song about longing. Even the guitar chords appeared to ache under the weight of the song. 

The song left the three other members of Corroded Coffin asking one question. What the hell happened with Eddie? They’d known Eddie was gay since before they’d become a band. It wasn’t like the boys were the type for adhering to societal conventions anyway. 

It’d be another year before Gareth decided he didn’t particularly have any preference as to who he fell in love with, and Grant? He decided he’d rather play D&D and work on creating his own tabletop RPG than date anyone, anytime soon. Thank you very much. Jeff was the token straight friend, though he did like wearing eyeliner and painting his nails, so people thought what they would. 

They knew Eddie had dated guys — maybe ‘dated’ was too strong a word. They knew Eddie had hooked up with guys but none of them had inspired such a response. They made it their mission to work out who the hell ‘S’ was about, and maybe try to knock some sense into him. Eddie’s song sounded so damn heartbreaking. They were his best friends. They had to do something. 

It wasn’t until their next Hellfire session that all the pieces fell into place. Since Hawkins burst of Satanic Panic, D&D at the high school was no longer an option, so they’d been couch surfing across different members’ houses. How they ended up at the Harringtons’ the Corroded Coffin boys would never know. They knew Dustin and the younger kids were friends with the guy, but since he’d gotten off the hook for the town murders, Eddie and Steve had gotten close. 

The men had eyes. It was clear to see by the way Eddie’s focus honed in on Steve the second he entered the room, the guy was equal parts smitten and grief-stricken. It was also painfully apparent Steve was oblivious. Not Eddie falling for a straight guy, again. That always ended poorly. 

Yet there were moments, the boys questioned how one-sided the affair was. Gareth noticed the way Steve went straight to Eddie after the session was over. He asked about the game. He knew Harrington didn’t give two shits about D&D but he listened attentively, nodding his head and narrowing his eyes as though in deep concentration as Eddie spoke. Weird. 

He was also nice to the Corroded Coffin boys. Uncharacteristically nice.  Harrington got a little snarky with the kids. He’d make jabs about them making sure to use coasters or get their feet off the coffee table, but the Corroded Coffin boys? It was nothing but small talk and platitudes, as though he was trying particularly hard to be nice and non-offensive. Why would Harrington care what they thought? 

Eddie was always the last to arrive at rehearsals, which left plenty of time for the men to discuss. One pressing question: was Steve actually queer? Gareth said yes, Jeff said no and Grant wanted to be excluded from the conversation. The next, had anything actually happened between Eddie and Steve? After going through ‘S’s lyrics with a fine-toothed comb, they all agreed on ‘maybe’. Which was less than helpful. The boys weren’t usually the type for meddling but Eddie had been downright mopey all month.  They needed to do something. 

Gareth took one for the team at the next Hellfire session held at the Harringtons’. They’d been playing for three hours straight and were taking a well-deserved break. The kids were eating lunch while Eddie was smoking out back near Steve’s pool. Harrington was cleaning plates in the kitchen, so Gareth offered to help. He’d never been subtle, so he began the conversation with a sentence that seemed to hit Steve, much like a sledgehammer to the face. 

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Steve looked at Gareth wide-eyed, all deer in headlights, dull doe eyes. Gareth didn’t understand Eddie’s seemingly deep and aching love for the guy, but he was easy enough on the eyes. 

“No. Not currently,” Steve fumbled. 

“Oh. Okay cool.” Gareth paused for too long. He should’ve had a better plan than just ‘talk to Steve’. 

“Do you want one?” 

“A girlfriend?” Steve clarified, still looking both alarmed and dumbfounded. 

“A friend. Who doesn’t happen to have to be a girl,” Gareth circumnavigated. People said Harrington was dumb, but the guy appeared to catch onto what he was implying too quickly for an entirely straight ex-jock. 

“I-uh. I don’t know you that well,” Steve mumbled, his eyes suddenly glued to the dishes in the sink. 

Holy fucking shit, Steve Harrington thought he was asking him out. Nope. NO. Abort. Gareth needed to crawl into a deep, dark hole for the foreseeable future. He had no clue what he’d said to Steve. He just got himself the hell out of there. Steve spent the rest of the session being annoyingly nice to him, without mentioning the awkward moment in the kitchen. Gareth spent the time wanting to crawl inside himself and puke. Eddie was going to be so mad if he ever found out. 

With all his inner turmoil, it wasn’t until he left the Harringtons’ that he realised, Steve hadn’t turned Gareth down because he was a guy. He’d turned him down because they didn’t know each other. Holy shit. There was hope.  

At the next rehearsal, he managed to sway the other band members into believing that despite their (and likely Eddie’s) assumptions, Steve Harrington wasn’t as ‘totally straight, off limits’ as they’d assumed. It was Jeff’s turn to have a plan. He kept the other members in the dark, besides his exclamation of ‘I have a plan’. By the time the plan came to fruition, it’d sunk into the back of the band members’ collective subconscious. 

The band was playing at The Hideout and Jeff insisted they change their setlist to include ‘S’. There wasn’t much argument.  When it was time to play the song, Jeff quickly introduced it, dedicating it to ‘someone special in the crowd’. It was then that the other Corroded Coffin boys were suddenly on hyper-alert, searching the crowd for whatever poor girl Jeff had decided to fall for, when all three sets of unassuming eyes found the familiar face of Steve Harrington lingering in the back booth. He stuck out like a sore thumb amongst their regulars. 

Eddie looked ready to puke or run but the boys quickly counted him in, and they were off to the races. Eddie couldn’t resist a catchy hook. Once the setlist was over, Eddie remained hiding backstage, pacing and looking ready to actually commit a string of murders while muttering ‘what the fuck did you do?’ whether to himself or the rest of the band, they didn’t know. 

Eventually, a familiar figure appeared at the backstage door. Steve knocked tentatively before peeking in. He gave an awkward half-hearted wave to the other members before making a beeline for Eddie. 

“I got your note,” Steve said, the note all band members were now sure Jeff had somehow engineered. 

“I liked the song, it was kind of sad though...” Steve muttered, gazing down at his shoes: dentist’s teeth fresh, white reeboks. Who wore reeboks to a metal show at a bar? 

Much to the dismay of the other Corroded Coffin members, Grant chose that moment to get involved. He ushered Gareth and Jeff out to the front of house, out of earshot. Leaving Steve and Eddie to have their conversation in private. 

The next week, Eddie arrived at rehearsals early, with Steve Harrington and a new, real Corroded Coffin love song in tow. 

[metalhoops]

Steve’s party trick was appearing sober long past the point of inebriation. 

It was an act he’d perfected through observation. He’d watched his mother down wine like water and waltz into a garden party looking sober as a saint. So when everything went down at the Starcourt Mall, with the drugs and the appearance of another burgeoning concussion-induced migraine fogging the edges of his vision, he’d pushed through with professional tact. 

Steve couldn’t explain how it happened. One moment he was sitting on the kitchen counter, cradling a bag of frozen peas to his bare face, freezer burn nipping at the edges of his consciousness, and the next he was sprawled out on the carpet of a stranger’s house. 

What happened in between, he’d never know. 

Maybe it was for the best. Ignorance was bliss, in Steve’s opinion. His life was so much easier before the Upside Down. He would’ve been a worse person and lived a worse life. Yet his life would’ve been close to normal, not the mercurial mess it’d become.  He wouldn’t have spent the night locked in a secret underground soviet bunker, his face doubling as a punching bag for a man he didn’t know, while monsters roamed about the town. 

The mall had burned down, Steve remembered. After all was said and done, Mrs Byers dropped him and Robin off at their respective homes. Steve insisted he didn’t need to go to the hospital, that he was fine and, more importantly, that his parents were home. When Robin sobered up, she’d realise Steve had lied.

He’d told Robin a lot of things, and after the night in the mall, so had she. She knew Steve’s parents had been out of town for months, but she’d been flying too high to use any of her admittedly brilliant brain to put two and two together. Steve loved Robin. He loved her differently after that night, but he still loved her. He was human. He needed time to lick his wounds and some space. The quiet of the Harrington house had seemed like a blessing, so where the hell was he now?

“Hey, what did you take?” A vaguely familiar voice shook Steve from his stupor. 

He rolled away from the sound, burying his face in the carpet. He cringed as a  spark of pain shot through the veiled numbness that’d inhabited his body since the Russian drugs had hijacked his system. 

“Ouch,” Steve grumbled miserably. 

His head throbbed. One eye was entirely swollen shut. Even if Steve was sober, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to place the boy through his hazy vision. All he could make out were colours, pale skin, dark hair, and darker clothes. 

“I know. I know. You’ve got a real shiner, Harrington. Come on, up,” the boy instructed. 

Steve felt cool skin graze against the nape of his neck, pulling him up into a sitting position. Steve remained boneless, not making the task easy. 

He felt separate from his body, not sure where he ended and the rest of the world began. Once pulled up, he kept falling forward, his face making contact with the dark fabric of the boy’s shirt. The boy was more comfortable than the floor, with less carpet burn and more smooth leather. He smelled of smoke, sweat and an earthy kind of cologne that hadn’t been refreshed in hours.

“Elevator up,” Steve chuckled, laughing too hard for his own good. 

His ribs ached. He felt a laugh shudder through the boy’s body as he pulled Steve back, trying to get a better look at him. He held a finger in front of Steve’s face. 

“Not sure what this is meant to do but I’ve seen it in movies,” the boy commented as he moved his finger right to left, inspecting Steve’s face for something, neither boy was quite sure of. 

“Alright. You’ve gotta know I’m the least likely person to narc on you, Harrington. What did you take? Special K? Some Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds? Were you Chasing the Dragon? Gotta be something stronger than weed, man,” the boy insisted. 

Steve screwed up his nose and moved away from the man. 

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Steve complained, trying to untangle the string of words the guy had thrown his way. 

Steve staggered to his feet, swaying before propping himself up, leaning against the wall, and feeling the whole thing tilt under his weight. 

“Dude, your walls are broken,” Steve muttered, as his legs gave out and he slid down to the floor. 

“We’re in a trailer, Steve,” the boy pointed out. Steve looked around the place, trying to make shapes from the blurs of colour and light. 

“Oh yeah,” He noted before resting his chin on his knee. 

The boy sat down in front of him, mirroring Steve’s posture, his chin resting on the bare knees of his ripped jeans. 

“Do you know what you took?” He pushed on, this time taking a different approach. 

“No,” Steve admitted, at last, sliding forward. 

The boy’s rings had caught his attention. They were little halos of light. He curiously tugged at his hand, pulling him close to examine the shine. He ran his fingers over the rise and fall of the rings. 

“Okay,” the dark-haired boy breathed, seemingly to himself. 

“I think you need to go to the hospital, dude.” 

“No hospitals,” Steve remarked eloquently as he returned to his previous position, face down on the carpet, taking the boy's hand with him. 

“Yeah well, I’m not so sure I like the idea of you sleeping either, Stevie,” He reasoned, his voice sounding strangled.   

“I’m tired,” Steve rebutted, his eyes sliding shut. 

There the boy was again, taking Steve’s face into his palm and pulling him up. For a moment, the vision in his good eye cleared enough to make out brown eyes painted with concern. 

“Look, I know we hated each other’s guts in high school but I don’t want you to O.D. on my carpet. It’s not good for the ambience,” the boy continued. 

Steve squinted, trying to place the face. Sure, he’d been a jerk in high school, particularly before his senior year, but he didn’t remember hating anyone. Not really. Maybe Jonathan, for a time, but that had passed. 

Munson. Steve’s brain supplied at last. The boy was Eddie Munson. He sold drugs and hung out on the fringes of Steve’s bigger parties back in the peak of his ‘King Steve’ era. 

“You hated me?” Steve asked, hearing the hurt in his voice before he realised what he was feeling. Eddie’s eyes widened in alarm, Steve’s face still in his palm. 

“What? No. I thought you hated me. I mean, you were a jock and I’ve got my whole ‘fuck the man shtick’, so it wasn’t like we ran in the same circles,” Eddie elaborated. 

“Jocks are ‘the man’?” Steve questioned. He’d like to blame the drugs, but he’d probably ask the question sober. 

“No. Yes. Kind of. Jocks are like... the grease for a cog in the wheel of the machine. All mass compliance to societal norms... or whatever.” 

Steve blinked owlishly at Eddie, trying to make a lick of sense out of what he’d said before resigning himself to the fact that he was completely lost. 

“I like Grease. It’s a cool movie,” he settled on, startling another laugh out of Eddie. He gently lowered Steve’s face onto the carpet and sighed. 

“Yeah, it’s a cool movie,” he muttered, leaving Steve for a moment, tossing sheets and a pillow from the sofa to the floor beside him. 

“Look, I’m going to stay up and make sure you don’t choke on your own tongue. You can stay here for the night, but I’m not letting you crash until my uncle gives you the thumbs up, weirdo.” 

Eddie slid a cushion beneath Steve’s head and draped the sheet over him. Steve was bone tired. He wanted nothing more than to sleep, but the pain in his body was growing by the moment and less favourable memories were leaking back into the forefront of his mind. He watched as Eddie placed a tape into the VCR and sat down beside Steve. It took him too long to realise the film was Grease. 

“Who’d you get into a fight with this time?” Eddie asked, seemingly aware of Steve’s sudden restlessness. 

Steve didn’t answer. He didn’t know how to. 

“Were the drugs before or after?” He pushed, searching for something Steve couldn’t work out.

Again, Steve didn’t know how to answer. Once more, Eddie let it slide. 

“You want me to call anyone? A girlfriend... or?” He doesn’t mention Steve’s parents. 

Maybe he was at more parties than Steve remembered, enough to know that the Harringtons being in Hawkins was rarer than a blue moon, less frequent than even Steve would admit to. 

“No,” Steve grumbled, starting to feel the swelling in his lip. 

Eddie nodded and let Steve have his silence. He half paid attention to the flashing lights on the screen, fading in and out of consciousness. Eddie would gently elbow his side each time Steve almost reached sleep. It was a long night, broken only by the opening of a door come sunrise. 

The light was too bright, too sudden. Steve shrunk from it curling into the closest point of dark comfort. Steve realised too late he’d curled himself into a small ball, tucking his face into the familiar darkness provided by Eddie’s crossed legs. 

“What in the Sam Hill have you gotten into, kid?” Steve heard a gruff voice ask in the doorway. Despite his words, the man didn’t sound angry, more amused. 

Steve felt Eddie pull the sheets up to hide his broken face from the light. 

“You know when I was fourteen, and I brought home that stray cat?” Eddie asked. 

Steve heard a door shutting and the scrape of a dining chair sliding against the linoleum. 

“The one that was sick as a dog?” The gruff voice replied. Probably Eddie’s uncle. 

“Same situation,” Eddie spoke.

“You’re telling me you found a kid wanderin’ round the trailer park at night and thought you’d bring him home? You remember what happened to that cat, right?” His uncle asked. 

“He went missing after a week. Then we found him half-kickin’ curled up in the back seat of the Johnsons’ cinder-blocked Austin,” Eddie muttered, stating the words as though it were a conversation Eddie and his uncle had before.  

“And you didn’t leave your room for a week.” 

“Your point, old man?” Eddie remarked.

“My point is, I love you, kid. But sometimes your bleeding heart is more trouble than it’s worth.” 

To Steve’s surprise, the sheet was pulled off his head. The next thing he knew he was face to face with Eddie’s uncle. The man shone a torch in Steve’s eyes, echoing Eddie’s movements, placing a finger in front of his eyes. Eddie watched in silence at Steve’s side. 

“He’s got a pretty bad concussion,” Eddie’s uncle supplied after a beat. 

“He was on something when I found him,” Eddie said. 

Steve was getting sick of people talking about him like he wasn’t there but in the same vein, he wanted to convalesce in peace. Eddie’s uncle shot him a sceptical look.

“Nothing I gave him, promise. He’s not letting me take him to the hospital.” 

“He’s right here,” Steve interjected.

He watched as Eddie’s uncle levelled him under his intense gaze. For the first time since he’d entered the room, he wasn’t seeing symptoms, or a problem Eddie had dropped in his lap but a boy. A kid, in Wayne’s eyes, one that looked worse for wear. It was the goddamn cat all over again. 

“I’m going to get you water and some aspirin. Eds, get some rest. No buts, kid you look like you haven’t slept a wink. Should also be safe enough for you to try to get some shut-eye, boy. I’m not Eddie, you can’t bat your eyes at me and get your way. I’m taking you to the hospital if anything happens, right?” 

Steve looked at the man with narrowly masked surprise before giving him a weak nod. He couldn’t imagine his parents doing the same, not even for one of Steve’s friends, let alone a stranger. 

“Come on, you can sleep in my room,” Eddie uttered, springing to his feet with a joviality that someone who’d gone twenty-four hours without sleep shouldn’t be able to muster. 

Steve blinked, slowly standing and gathering the sheets around himself, acutely aware of how ridiculous he looked. 

“Keep the door open,” Wayne called at their retreating backs. 

That was how Steve spent the summer of ‘85 hauled up and healing at the Munsons’ trailer. A few months later, he’d return the favour. When Eddie went missing, Wayne knew where to look. 

[metalhoops]

‘Of course, I remember you.’ 

As far as first words go, Eddie’s were a hell of a head-scratcher. 

To catch up the uninitiated, everyone in the world has a soulmate. It’s been debated and speculated if a person can have more than one, but the mechanics behind soulmates was a pseudo-science at best and downright magic at worst. The first words a person’s soulmate spoke to them were inscribed somewhere on that person’s body, typically in their soulmate’s handwriting. 

Doesn’t handwriting change over time? The uninitiated might ask, to which Eddie would repeat, it’s pseudo-science or magic. Either that or something like quantum mechanics, where people are pretty sure, one day we’ll understand how it works, but right now there are a lot of theories and only a little bit of evidence, most of which contradicts itself.

Most of the time, the words are boring and wholly unhelpful. He could count on two hands the number of people that simply had some variation of ‘hello’, tattooed somewhere on their body. From Eddie’s point of view, he got lucky. 

He had a sentence of scratchy scrawl written on his inner arm stating, ‘of course, I remember you’. And really, what the hell was Eddie meant to make of that? 

Typically, your tattoo lets you know you’d found your soulmate upon first meeting, but his words implied he’d meet his soulmate before they first speak and that it would be memorable. Wasn’t that goddamn frustrating? 

His soulmate’s first words were right up there with ‘hello’ in Eddie’s list of ‘top five worse soulmate marks,’ because how the hell were those poor bastards meant to know if they’d just met the love of their life or if it was just their weird neighbour Tom? With his number one spot reserved for Gareth’s truly horrific, ‘I’d thought you’d be taller’. His soulmate was original. He’d give him that. 

There was no surefire way to know your soulmate’s gender, same as there was no surefire way for a mother to ‘just know’ a baby’s gender before it was born. Yet if Eddie was being sacrilegious, as he so often was, he’d say he ‘just knew’ his soulmate was a guy. 

There was nothing in the handwriting that gave it away. Nothing particularly ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ about the lettering. But ever since Eddie was a kid whenever he thought about his soulmate, he’d always think of them as ‘him’. 

He would like this or that. He wouldn’t be an asshole, like the meathead jocks at Hawkins. He would be different. He’d be kind, caring, and of course, a total badass. Eddie just had to wait to meet him. 

Steve’s soulmate mark drove him crazy. 

‘You might not remember me’. 

What the hell was Steve meant to do with that? Soulmate tattoos were meant to let you know when you’d met your soulmate, not that you’d already met them. In the days before Steve received the shake-up of his life in the form of Nancy Wheeler and the Upside Down, he had a reputation for sleeping around. He knew back then he’d been a little hopeless, but surely he’d said more than a couple of words to a girl before he slept with them. 

It horrified Steve that he could meet his soulmate, in some respect, know them, and yet had never talked to them. Could he really be that much of a jerk?

He’d never thought Nancy was his soulmate. He knew their words didn’t match up. That didn’t mean he loved her any less. Statistically, the odds of meeting your soulmate were somewhere between getting crushed by a vending machine and winning the lottery. Steve’s parents weren’t soulmates and boy did that show, but a guy could dream. Call him a hopeless romantic, but Steve was holding out hope for them. 

He’d almost thought his soulmate was Robin. It fit, right? They went to the same school, but they’d never really talked. He’d been so busy with his first day at a real job, he’d missed Robin’s first words to him. It wasn’t until later he’d started to expect it might be her. That was, until the pair were huddled beside each other on the floor of a bathroom stall. Robin was a lesbian and her first words, although interesting, definitely proved they weren’t soulmates. 

When Steve was a kid, he’d spend hours daydreaming about what his soulmate would be like. She’d be outspoken. She’d be bold. She’d be able to make him laugh. When he’d gotten older, something changed. He didn’t know how to put it into words, at least not ones he was ready to say out loud. ‘She’ didn’t fit his soulmate quite right. So after high school, he started wondering what ‘they’ would be like. ‘They’ felt not quite right, but closer. 

Their handwriting was distinct. It was all sharp-edges and odd-angles. It looked like it was trying to replicate something Steve couldn’t quite place until he walked into the record store at Starcourt and caught a glimpse of an Iron Maiden album cover. That gave Steve his first real clue as to what his soulmate might be like. 

It would be another year before the same handwriting would stop him in his tracks. Dustin had marched into the Family Video store as they were shutting up shop, brandishing a notepad and talking about needing a ride to go play his fantasy game. Steve was always going to drive Dustin, but he’d been dragging his feet, to show the kid he wouldn’t always drop everything to take him places. A familiar sharp edged, odd angled handwriting stopped Steve cold. 

“What are those?” Steve asked, trying to fain disinterest as his heart pounded in his ears. 

“They’re notes from the last session. You know, so we can keep track of what’s happened so far in the campaign. Who’s doing what quests, how many hit points everyone’s got. Mike is currently—.” Steve couldn’t give a crap about Mike. 

“Who’s writing is it?” Steve tried not to sound as desperate as he felt. 

Robin must have known something was up because she moved to Steve’s side. With one glance at the notepad, she understood why Steve was acting so strangely. She’d seen his tattoo, she knew it was his soulmate’s handwriting. 

“Our D.M.’s” Dustin replied. He might as well have been speaking in freaking code. 

“Alright, I’ll drive you,” Steve gave in, hoping he could catch a glance of his soulmate. Maybe his tattoo was wrong, maybe he’d know his soulmate when he saw them. 

They pulled up outside of the high school. He saw a group of people loitering outside the auditorium. Dustin had brought a lot of loose sheets of paper, so it only made sense Steve helped him carry his notebooks in. Most of the people there were familiar faces, the kids he’d babysat with a few exceptions. 

“Well, if it isn’t our favourite bard. I’m glad you decided to grace us with your presence,” an oh-too-familiar voice crooned. A boy broke away from the crowd to meet Dustin. 

He was Steve’s age. They’d gone to school together. The dude used to do all these weird soap-box sessions on their lunch table. They had gym together, and history. Steve didn’t think the two had ever actually spoken.  

“I would’ve been here quicker if I hadn’t had to play twenty questions with Steve. Steve, you know Eddie, our D.M.? Weren’t you two in the same year?” 

Eddie was practically shooting daggers at Dustin’s side profile, shaking his head discreetly as though hoping Steve didn’t remember who he was. He supposed Eddie always had a reputation. 

“You might not remember me,” Eddie spoke before Steve could answer. 

Holy shit.

“Of course, I remember you,” Steve argued and watched as Eddie’s eyes swelled to the size of dinner plates. 

Both boys stood, slack-jawed and stiff-shouldered, peering at one another. Steve’s brain short-circuited, because holy shit, Eddie Munson was his soulmate. Holy shit he’d found them, him. 

Steve dropped Dustin’s notes and swarmed forward without thinking, throwing his arms around Eddie. Much to his surprise, instead of freaking out, like any normal person, Eddie was waiting to catch him, leaving both of them to tumble ass backwards onto the parking lot asphalt.

They held each other in a bone-crushing hug. Steve buried his face in Eddie’s neck, surprised at how naturally the action came. He’d never hugged a man like this, hell he’d hugged no one like this. He was clinging so desperately to the man that he’d never thought he’d really find. Eddie pulled back slightly, trying to get a better look at Steve’s face. The guy’s eyes were alight with wonder and mischief. 

“That was quite an entrance, Harrington. All for little old me?” 

“I’ve been looking for you forever,” Steve admitted. 

“Well, clearly you’ve been doing a shit job of it,” Eddie argued which earned a snort from Steve. His soulmate would be able to make him laugh. 

“You’re not disappointed, you know? That your soulmate is the town Freak?” 

Steve had given up on caring about labels, on caring about what other people thought. Since high school, he had changed. He was different.  He didn’t want to be just another, shallow, meathead jock. He wanted to be different. 

“No. Absolutely not. Why would I care?” 

Dustin shattered the moment, clearing his throat and proclaiming,

“Alright, anyone care to tell me what the hell just happened?”