#this is only chapter 1 steddie will be there later but i need to build the foundation first

[papermachedragons]

The first time Eddie ran away, he was four years old.

It was before his dad started teaching him how to hot-wire.

It was a cold winter. That winter where the heater broke and Eddie caught cold after cold that took weeks to disappear; there was not money to turn on the heat or fix the perpetual draft that crept through their windows, so there certainly was not money to get Eddie any cold medicine. It got so bad, Eddie coughed and coughed and hacked, his breathing was a constant wheeze and Eddie's father had had enough. Not enough to get him to a doctor, but just enough to drive him to Wayne Munson's trailer, where he dumped him. It was not the first time Eddie met his uncle. Far from. But given the backpack he dropped him off with and the gruff comment to bring him back, when he stopped sounding like a broken A/C unit, it was the first time he would spend more than a few hours with him.

That first night in his uncle’s home, Wayne Munson laid a bleary, tired, sleep deprived Eddie — because Eddie had not been able to sleep for more than an hour or two consecutively for days, since he kept waking himself up coughing or sneezing or struggling to breathe — to sleep in his own bed. Packed him down with heavy, thick blankets and two heated water bottles filled with hot water. And Eddie fell asleep to a callused hand sweeping hair away from his face, surrounded by warmth and a gruff, but warm voice mumbling about killing someone if he ended up with pneumonia, whatever that was.

It was the first week Eddie ever spent under his uncle Wayne's care. It was also the first time Eddie learnt that there was warmth and care to be found under his uncle's roof and safety in his arms.

Only two months after that experience that remained half-buried under a bleary fever, Eddie ran away for the first time.

It was the middle of the night. Or close to, at least. Eddie had been slow to learn time and the clock, so he had no idea what time it was. But he knew, he should have been asleep a long time ago, only he was not. His body was buzzing and frantic. A wild river was coursing through his blood, impatient and racing; coursing through him with wild abandon. And he had not been able to lie still in bed. His feet had rubbed together under the blanket. Back and forth. Back and forth. He had played with the ears of his bunny, constantly flipping them all around and rolled from side to side, unable to find a position that could soothe the itch underneath his skin.

  In the end, he got up. Skin buzzing with an energy that zapped against him, and it hurt him, it hurt so much, he could not—, he needed to—, it hurt. He needed it to stop and he needed to move and he needed something and he didn't know what, but it burned against his skin and clawed at his chest and nothing was helping. So, he tried getting up and jumping around. But the noise drew his father and a loud voice that did nothing to settle the burn and buzz working its way across Eddie's skin. And he tried to explain, he really did, but his voice was static and he couldn't find it and the words didn't make sense and he was babbling in half-curled sentences, because his thoughts were racing through his head and he couldn't grasp them into one, so he was halfway through one sentence, when his mind had already moved onto the next one, so he had to scramble to grasp that one, before it disappeared too, and—

Pain exploded across his cheek and Eddie cut off. He raised his eyes to find his dad with a hand raised in the air and a hard set to his jaw.

It made it worse. Eddie turned on his heel and started pacing. He flapped his arms up and down by his sides and the wild river tore at his chest, trying to eat him from the inside out and Eddie just wanted it to be satisfied. To stop. So, he babbled, could not really stop, and he knew his dad had hit him; he had done smaller things like that before; taken a rough hold of his arm, when Eddie wouldn't sit still in the diner; smacked a hand on the side of the car seat, when Eddie’s fidgeting made the car rock by swinging his legs — that were too short and hanging above the floor anyway — back and forth; pinched Eddie's skin, when he talked too fast and the words stumbled wrong out of his mouth, when Eddie's dad was trying to focus on something else. So, Eddie wasn't confused. He knew what it meant. He just could not stop.

It only took a few paces through the room, before Eddie's dad had him by the front of his shirt. Hands curled in the fabric of his shirt, tight and tense. He shook him back and forth and Eddie's teeth chattered and clattered together and he bit his tongue. Eddie’s dad spat in his face and told him to shut up and go to bed.

"But I can't! I can't! I tried and I can't and it hurts!" Eddie smacked at his dad's arms. Maybe he would understand, if he would just listen. It earned him another hard smack on the head and a hard punch to the jaw. This time Eddie stopped. It hurt. Worse than the pain in his chest.

When Eddie's dad let up his grip on his shirt. Eddie ducked under his arm, ran out of his room and escaped out the front door. He was gone, before his dad ever had the chance to shout him back.

That first time, four years old, caught in his pajamas and with tears down his cheeks, running through the street of early spring, was the first time he ran away from home.

After running through the cold embrace of night in bare feet and bare arms, he wound up on his uncle's doorstep. Wayne Munson opened his door and swept Eddie inside with nothing more, but a sad smile and a warm embrace.

It was not the last time Eddie ran away. Far from it.

Later, when Eddie had grown a little, his father started pulling Eddie into his side-business and odd jobs — and by consequence — teaching him how to lock-pick and hot-wire. A tool in his mouth and wires between his fingers taught him his father’s skill; a gravelly voice in his ears taught him his father’s cynical worldview.

All through his childhood, sparks of electricity and hard, cold fingers digging into his shoulders, taught him the world was a cold place and Eddie would have to fight to survive in it. Nothing would be given to him, so he'd have to take it for himself.

The world was a cruel and cold place. That was Brian Munson’s doctrine. One he had no issue instilling in his son.

And Eddie took it to heart, because he was a kid and that was what you did with the things your parents handed you.

Eddie's father taught him to lock-pick and slip people's wallets from their pockets entirely un-noticed and unremarkable. And Eddie swallowed it up like a sponge did water, despite the wrong wrong wrong that repeated in his heart. Because it was his father, who handed it to him and it was all he knew how to do.

The one thing his father never should have taught him was the road that lead to his uncle's trailer.

Whenever he got tired of having Eddie underfoot and got impatient with him, or — as Eddie learned when he got older — wanted to go to Chicago and Eddie would be more a hindrance than help to his errand; he dropped him off on his uncle's doorstep. Which was how Eddie came to know with certainty that his uncle Wayne was a far warmer man than his father; that he had a home, which would not cut and bruise him; arms that would catch him, when he fell, and also how he learned the way to get there.

By the time he was six, he knew this with such certainty in his heart, that when his father unknowingly chased him out of their house with his loud, angry voice and his angrier hands — which happened more and more as time slipped passed, as if the time was made out of barbed wires and cut at his father as it passed him by, making him sharper and harder and more cruel — it was the place Eddie ran to, half-blinded by the dark and heavy rain, clutching one of his stuffed animal — the one thing he had grabbed onto, when his father first raised his voice — and nothing else, because Eddie's racing heart and quick feet had brought him out the door, before he could think to grab anything else.

Uncle Wayne opened the door to him crying on his doorstep, shivering, cold and sopping wet, and brought him inside with hardly a word. Eddie warmed up snuggled into his side with his arms around him. That night cemented Wayne Munson as the only safe place to run to, when the world and his father's hands turned too sharp and cold and yet still found a way to burn him.

It was the only home Eddie had ever known.

The place in Hawkins that belonged to his father had never been more than a couple of rooms and the four walls of Eddie's tiny bedroom. There was no one else. Nowhere else. There had only ever been his father or his uncle. He never knew his mother. She left when he was two years old.

So really, running away was in his blood.

And always had been.

It became the one thing that stayed with Eddie as he grew older. The colder his father's hands became, the more Eddie ran away.

His father would drink or he would come home, with something angry buzzing under his skin like bees of an active beehive and Eddie would do something wrong, say the wrong thing or whirl around the house with an energy that kicked up all the dust from the dormant tornado, his father had brought back home and everything would explode.

  And every time it got too much, Eddie would sneak out the window or out the door, while his father's back was turned, and he would run and run, clutching a small bag or nothing at all, through half of Hawkins until he would be in front of the trailer door, standing on the porch steps, trembling and shaking. And every time, his uncle would let him in with the same kind eyes and relieved smile. He would tuck Eddie inside with an arm thrown over his shoulders and ruffle the top of his head, even though there wasn't any hair there to mess up, because Eddie's father kept his hair buzzed and short. Once every month, since Eddie was seven, he'd shave all the hair off Eddie's hair, so it was easier to shove a beanie or hat on top of his head, when he pulled Eddie out the door with him to one of his jobs. Something Eddie had always hated.

 

Some days, it felt like he had spent half his childhood on the streets. Running. Always running.

No wonder then, that running away came second nature to him. It was practically in his blood. Made a part of his DNA. The atoms in his body rearranged and shifted so often to survive the cold, sharp winds and the harsh embrace of night, because he was a kid, who jumped out the window in just a t-shirt, before he would face the hallway and living room on the other side of his bedroom door; the atoms in his blood rearranged to change 'fight or flight' into 'flee to survive'.

 

When Eddie got older, his father went to Chicago more and more often. It was not always to do the kind of stuff that made Eddie’s stomach turn. Mostly, it was to smoke foul-smelling cigars, drink oddly colored liquids and play poker in a darkly lit room with people filled with drawings all over their skin. Eddie only knew this, because one time, he had snuck to the back room once, while the bored-looking teenagers that were supposed to be watching him, were distracted by a rounded and oddly shaped glass — that they all took turns bending over and blow smoke out of their mouths — and found his dad bent over that poker table with rough, angry looking men sat around the table with him. Brian Munson was quick to catch him and throw him back out of the room with a hard grip on his arm and an even harder voice.

Whenever Brian Munson went to Chigago, Half the time, he would take Eddie with him and they would stay there the whole weekend. Sometimes, they would even stay there a full week, even though it meant Eddie would miss out on school.

It was worse there. Brian Munson was worse there. But in Chicago, Eddie had nowhere to run to.

At least, it felt like that.

He still ran away. His hummingbird heart gave him no other choice.

A few times, he called his uncle halfway across town from the grubby motel his dad had found, and Wayne would drop everything to come get him and drive him back to Hawkins, where he'd spend a few nights in his uncle's own bed, until his dad came back home.

 

When Eddie's dad was caught and thrown into prison, Eddie went to live with his uncle. Wayne Munson was quick to buy a fold out cot, but even faster to declare his bedroom as Eddie's own, as if he had been keeping the words waiting on his tongue for years.

When Eddie's father came back out, he came to get Eddie back from Wayne and Eddie followed.

It was a pattern that went in a circle.

By the time Eddie was eleven, Eddie's dad had been thrown in prison three times. And every time, Eddie went to live with his uncle and tried not to look at the countdown to his dad's release as the end of the world.

It all stopped after Eddie turned twelve.

One week, his father took Eddie with him to Chicago.

In their motel room, they got into an argument.

Eddie had not wanted to come. He’d wanted to go and stay with his uncle. He'd wanted to stay home so he could go to school and go to practice with his band, but his dad had practically dragged him to the car, shoved him inside and slammed the car door behind him.

Before they even got to Chicago, Eddie had decided to leave. To get back to Hawkins on his own. To, essentially, run away again.

When his dad found the bag and money he'd stowed away, he was pissed. More angry and red in the face than he'd already been. It was not the first time he hit him, but it was the worst.

The motel room got a hole in the wall and Eddie got a broken hand.

He never even took him to the hospital. Just told him to go to bed early and turned his back on him, spitting about god giving him a cowardly fairy for a son.

When his dad got distracted next, Eddie pulled his bag out from the space between the wall and the musty bed, slipped out the window (even though they were on the second floor and his dad's car was parked below it) and ran; bruised and aching, clutching his hand to his chest; he ran.

In their fight, his father had taken all the money, Eddie had squirreled away, so Eddie had no way out the city and no way to call his uncle.

He tried asking for help. But no one would help a bruised, broken kid, who looked as rough and dirty as the vets lining the streets. Eddie tried stealing some, but with a broken hand, he was not as quick as he could be and people caught him. Threw him around and kicked his shins. He tried sneaking his way onto a bus, but he was thrown out. He tried stowing away on a pick-up truck, but was found.

In the end, it was the police that scraped him up off the ground of an alley. They took him to the station. Hauling him by his arms in hands as angry and sharp as his father’s.

The police asked him about his parents and Eddie, spiteful with anger and raw with pain that did not all come from his hand told them about his father and where to find him.

While his father was brought into the station for money laundering and identity theft, Eddie's uncle was called and drove all the way to Chicago to get him.

It was his uncle, who came to pick him up.

It was his uncle, who took him to the hospital and his uncle, who not only drove him back to his place, but brought him back home.

It was his uncle, who cried, when social services finally gave him a signed and sealed document that declared his custody over Eddie.

And it was his uncle, who saw Eddie through the tears and pain of trying to revive his messed up, broken hand, once it got out of the cast. Who was there, when Eddie was told he would have permanent damage in his hand for the rest of his life.

It was his uncle, who, time and time again, helped Eddie through bad days and nights, when his hand cramped up and pain kept him awake and away from everything he loved.

 

 

Eddie’s father only came looking for him once. It was before his trial and subsequent final prison sentence (although they did not know that at the time).

He came to Forest Hills trailer park, hammering on their door in the middle of the night, demanding Eddie back. Saying loud and drunk that Eddie was his and Wayne couldn't take him; he needed Eddie. Wayne just sat with Eddie in the furthest room and furthest corner from the front door and held him tight. Hands pressed into him and arms encasing him in his body while Eddie shook and shook; while Eddie clutched at his uncle with his one working hand and the tips of the fingers of his broken one; the tips of his fingers just peeking out of the cast, barely able to graze his uncle's flannel. His one hand digging so deep, he must have left bruises, and shook his head, burying away in his uncle's chest, trying to drown out his father.

But then his father let slip how Eddie had always had such clever hands and could manage tricks he never had.

That had his uncle surge up, tell Eddie to stay and stomped out to the door. The door banged open and the sound of a gun cocking rocked through the trailer.

Eddie clamped his hands over his ears, the best he could, and squeezed his eyes shut, rocking back and forth. Mumbling and whispering nonsense to himself, as if he could drown out the world, if only he could remember his favorite passages from The Lord of the Rings and the Earthsea trilogy.

Despite his desperate efforts, he still heard his uncle tell his dad to get lost, that Eddie was Wayne's kid and had been since the first time Wayne found him on his doorstep; since he'd gotten Eddie through his fever; since Wayne was the first one to hold him in the hospital back when he had been born. He also heard the ugly, loud words his dad spewed at his uncle in return. And the gunshot that ripped through the air. (Later, Wayne did tell him it had been a warning shot into the air, but that had not changed the way Eddie had flinched hard and then felt such relief course through him, when the night fell quiet and he wondered for a moment, if that meant his father was gone for good.)

Eddie’s father left without another word.

The trial came and went and Eddie’s father went to prison on the longest sentence yet and Eddie never saw him again.

 

In his uncle's home, Eddie could finally stop running.

But that did not mean he ever did.

Running away was a hard-learned lesson and it was harder still to let go off.

His uncle did everything he could to soothe the bruising touch of Eddie’s father, but it was an uphill, impossible climb.

He never gave up on him though. Not on his bad days. Not when the police came knocking on his door with yet another warning that they had pulled Eddie from some unsavory corner and bothered its neighbors. Not that time he came to on the floor of their shower, shaking and trembling with his latest supply from Reefer Rick’s flushed down the toilet and the knowledge that it had been a close one. Not when he failed to graduate High School the first time. And not the second time either. Not when he spent days and nights, kept awake by this desperate fervor to learn a new song on his guitar or write the latest idea for his campaign down that filled the missing gap he had been searching for, for weeks.

Not when he first got the signed document declaring his custody and Eddie wrenched himself out of his relieved embrace and told him, all sharp-edged and burning with heartbreak, the one thing he had always thought he would keep locked up tight inside him for the rest of his life. Not even then.

 

The last time Eddie ran away from his dear old dad, he was fifteen.

It was the day of his father's funeral.

Eddie did not want to go. If he went, he just knew, he would just kick the casket until it broke or throw a lit cigarette at the depressingly tiny selection of flowers gathered by its feet so it lit on fire and ate the entire thing up. He just knew he would do something that satisfied the angry buzz that blazed under his skin and boiled in his blood; like the swarm of angry bees that had erupted from the nest that had dropped to the ground and cracked open like an egg, when the Newman's at the other end of the trailer park, found a beehive in the tree by their trailer and asked the Johnson's to do something about it, because Mr. Newman was allergic to bees and they could not risk leaving it there.

The day before the funeral, Eddie's blood was already boiling and buzzing, and no manner of stamping around and huffing or jumping up and down, fisting and un-fisting his hands did anything to expel it; even his steadily growing collection of metal music was not working, nor did any of the cigarettes he smoked. So, he crawled out the window in the middle of the night, before his uncle came home from the night shift at the plant, he had only just taken on and high tailed it to Reefer Rick's.

Pockets full of newly acquired goods, he snuck into an abandoned building on the edge of town that was popular with drunks and bored high school students looking for a high, where he spent the day in a thick, syrupy haze on the musty, old couch. Before he collapsed on the couch, he might have thrown around one or two of the many empty beer bottles that littered the ground everywhere you looked in the building though. Which might have been a big contributor as to why he came to behind bars in the police station; his skin layered with dust and grime and the sticky, cold feeling of dried sweat and the taste of old beer and dank breath in his dry mouth. The afternoon sun was going down outside past the windows and his uncle was waiting on the other side of the bars, his Sunday hat in his weathered, callused hands and wrinkles on his face that had not been there, when the news of Eddie's father's death had reached them; wrinkles, Eddie knew from years under his uncle's care, were only ever there for Eddie.

Care and concern that Eddie was only just getting used to accepting after three years of his uncle patiently leading him there.

It had taken a lot of time. Longer still.

They were so different. Brian and Wayne Munson.

Polar opposites.

Where one left, the other stayed. Where one tried to take Eddie's hands and mold them into something they were not; the other held them, loving and soft, just as they were.

Eddie had learned how to hotwire cars from his dad, how to pick locks and pockets. Under his uncle’s care, he learned how to fix broken machinery. How to listen to engines and clicking, scratching parts of cars, A/C's, fans and other moving parts; how to pick up the hurts from just a sound and how to make it whole again.

Eddie's father taught him how to break things; his uncle taught him how to fix it.

 

The last time Eddie ran away ever (before Chrissy and alternate dimensions and freaky kids, who treated the End of the World and superpowered wizards with less hesitation than high school bullies), was when he was seventeen.

Ever since Eddie was a kid, running away was the one thing he could always count on. It would protect him, when nothing else would. It would keep him safe and bring him somewhere warm and safe. That was the only lesson he had learned from his dad (however unintentional it had been) that he had a hard time throwing away. And it took years before Eddie stopped running away at the smallest thing. There was a rabbitty heart inside Eddie's chest and it was always one drop away from carving away at his chest with a single repeating message in its grasp. Getawaygetawaygetaway. He did not always know why, just that he needed to get away.

But eventually, with the comforting smell of his uncle's home all around him, of smoke and coffee; with his uncle's arms and his soothing rumbling voice that had never quite lost the accent of his first ever home all around him; Eddie learned to let go of that failsafe. To trust. To stop running, whether that was out into the night or the smothering, heady embrace of drugs.

Until Chrissy.

In those terrible days, of bones snapping and the gruesome last image of Chrissy burned into the dark of his eyelids; of boatsheds and water lapping against wood, the sound loud and roaring, getting closer and closer, like the warning of something creeping towards to him, the longer he was curled up inside the dingy; he was haunted by both terrible images of Chrissy's death and his hand cramping up in terrible, blazing pain. The final gift Eddie's father had left him; a hand that cramped up with pain and locked up stiff and useless, especially in the cold. Just the cherry on top of the worst week of Eddie’s life.

After long nights and days in the cold of the boatshed, Skull Rock and then the Upside Down, his hand was unforgiving. It cramped up with a burning agony. It turned stiff and locked up; the joints stiff and cracking. Pain blazed to life and tore through his muscles. The inferno came hand in hand with his new nightmares of Chrissy; an old companion, in the arms of a new one. Lightning shot through his hand every time he used it. No amount of trying to work through the cramp or massage it made much of a difference. The cold made sure of that.

It was only thanks to a night in the RV they hijacked that some life returned to his hand. While the others made plans and prepared — checked their makeshift weapons and equipment and went over the plan in repeated details — Eddie sat in a shadow in the RV and worked through his stiff hand and its locked up joints, desperately trying to loosen it up, so he wouldn't be one hand down in the fight. Trying even more desperately not to cry from the pain tearing through it.

And it worked.

Barely.

It was only thanks to sheer determination and gritted teeth, burning through the flaring pain with an inner fire Vecna had poured gasoline on, when he took Chrissy, Patrick and tried to take Max that Eddie even made it through Master of Puppets. When he went to climb up the sheet leading back home, the pain flared to life like blaze of fire that tore through his hand, up his wrist and towards his arm. He stood there with a hand that would not close properly, unable to grip the sheet, and knew he would not be able to make it to the other side. He stood there and knew, if he stayed, it would be Dustin's death; it would be doom to the entire plan.

So, Eddie turned and ran and tried not to hear the ghost of his father's voice in the slap of his footsteps.

When Eddie ran from the bats, it was the pain in his hand that had never quite healed right and the echo of his father's voice, calling him weak and a coward, telling him that he couldn't run from everything, that made him turn around.

It had always been the greatest fault Eddie's father saw in him. Cowardice and a runaway.

But Eddie never understood him back then, why running away was such a bad thing. Was that not why his dad had taught him all he knew? Was that not why Eddie's fingers had been blackened with electric shocks and his father's choices through his childhood? Was that not why Eddie's fingers had been shaped and molded to easily slip money from pocket to pocket, and never once be felt — like Eddie's touch was nothing more but a whisper of the wind, a ghost and a spectre — so Eddie would always have a way out?

Not according to his dear old man.

See, the trickiest thing about teaching your kid to always look out for oneself first, was when they began to take it to heart and protect themselves from you.

Eddie's father found that out too late.

Teach a kid to be fearful and he will fear his parents too.

Teach a kid to be quiet and small, so no one will see him, when he steals the stuff his father asks him to and when he steals himself away, his father will be left with his ghost, long before either of them are dead.

 

Running away has always been the one thing Eddie has known. The one thing his body knows the steps off as much as it knows the strings of a guitar, if not more so. The one thing he can do asleep, high as a kite or drunk off his ass. Flight, is the one thing, whose footsteps he will always recognize, even blind.

So, really, by the time Hell broke through its gates and rained reckoning down upon Hawkins, Eddie simply did what he knows best.

Is it any surprise, he spent all this time running?

Then, why, oh why, did he ever stop and turn around, when he learned long ago, only death lies waiting in the shadows of his footsteps?

Maybe Eddie has lived so long without having to run away, he forgot the hardest part was never to take that first step, but to keep going once you started. That the biggest threat to Eddie's safety has always been his own mind, not the monsters he tried to leave behind.

Maybe he just wanted to prove his father wrong once. That he was different than him.

Maybe, he wanted to be brave like the people, who had come to help him, when the world was crumbling all around him and he was left hurdling through a black hole with nothing to keep him tethered.

Maybe, just maybe, he was scared and it was an easier way out. Simple.

Maybe he forgot the one person he’s always had the hardest time convincing of his own worth was himself.

Continue reading ch. 1 of A Safe Harbor on ao3