this one is in honor of the 2-year anniversary of st4 (literally last week but my life is a whole whirlwind atm)
It occurs to Eddie one night as he’s putting his and Steve’s daughter to bed that it’s been twenty years since everything in Hawkins, Indiana went to shit (for him, anyway).
Not down to the day, obviously, but it’s mid-March of 2006 and, honestly, mid-March is the only calendrical detail he ever really retained (too preoccupied with the whole on the run thing to be paying attention to the date, which he thinks is fair enough).
It’s kinda crazy, when he thinks about it, because he really didn’t see himself coming out of those god-awful days alive to tell the tale. Here he is though, twenty years later, alive and truly well.
Steve beats him to bed that night (probably because he’d called dibs on their youngest, Robbie, that night, leaving Eddie to wrangle Moe – the difficult one of the pair when it came to bedtimes because, frankly, her ability to argue her way into extra stories is getting a little frightening), already sitting under the covers with a magazine by the time Eddie retires to their room.
Their room.
That’s one of those things Eddie wouldn’t have believed if he’d heard about it while he was bleeding out in the Upside Down twenty years ago.
The Steve of it all really is the most improbable – that’s Eddie’s opinion anyway.
Surviving a swarm of hungry bat demons? No problem.
Bagging (i.e. marrying the fuck out of) Steve Harrington? Totally out of the question.
Here he is though, defying all the odds.
“You know what I realized?” Eddie asks as he climbs into bed beside Steve.
“Hmm,” Steve replies, not looking away from his magazine. His glasses are slipping a little as he reads, and Eddie reaches out to nudge them back up the bridge of his nose. The gesture has Steve raising his head to look at him.
“What’d you realize?” Steve asks.
“It’s been twenty years since all that shit in Hawkins.”
Steve’s gaze slides off somewhere behind Eddie for a moment.
“Shit, you’re right,” he says, “Crazy.”
“That’s what I said,” Eddie grins. Steve isn’t matching his expression though. Rather, he’s looking at him somewhat pensively, dark brown eyes roaming over his face.
“Hey,” Eddie says, because he gets it. They can make all the jokes they want about how wild that time was, but it doesn’t ever take away the horrible things they'd seen, the horrible things they'd been asked to do.
Eddie’s glad he survived and all, but people don’t always talk about how the after of surviving isn’t necessarily a walk in the park either.
He runs a hand through Steve’s hair, grazes the tips of his fingers over the barely-raised scars on his neck left behind from whatever went down at the Creel House in the Upside Down, “I love you, Steve.”
“Love you too,” Steve replies, gripping a hand tight around Eddie's thigh, "So much."
"So fucking much. Sucks we had to go through all that shit to get here, but...I'm glad we're here."
And Steve only nods as he wraps an arm around Eddie's shoulders to pull him in close.
"Yeah," he eventually says, pressing a firm kiss against the side of Eddie's head, "I'm glad we're here too."
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One thing I really love about Jon and Martin is that it's not even slow burn. There is not even a spark in the beginning. And then whatever there is, it's not reciprocated. There's nothing there from Jon at first. And that's so human, isn't it?
You meet someone, and your first impression of them becomes how you think of them. You're not interested in changing that. But you also see each other all the time, every day. You talk. You go through stuff together. You learn things about them you didn't know.
After a while, you notice their absence when they're not there. You worry about them. You...miss them? You think about them. And when they're in danger, you realise you'd do anything to help them.
It's not a lightbulb moment. You don't know when it happened, or how. It's not falling in love, there was never any falling involved. It's just day after day of knowing someone, of having them on your mind until you realise you need them in your life like you need air.
It starts with nothing and becomes everything. And I think that's beautiful.
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