When The Dog Bites

“Wait, listen. I just need Dustin to take a look at something for me, okay? Shit, no, his foot—in Steve’s room, there should be a tape in a drawer. It’ll—” He has to stop talking suddenly, recalling the horror all over again of finding that empty cassette case. “It’ll just be loose in there, no case.”

He hears Max half cover the receiver, hears her shout, “Lucas!” She relays the information to him, and Dustin’s voice comes through, calling after them both: “What’s going on?”

“Just wait at the stairs for Lucas, Dustin. Oh my god, use your crutches!” Then she must be speaking properly into the phone again, because her voice is an undertone. “This is for Steve’s song, right?”

“I...” Eddie sighs. “God, I hope so.”

They both fall quiet, and Eddie listens to Dustin’s echoing complaints at Lucas taking too long; the sound of Erica running up the stairs to help in the search.

“I would’ve given him my tape,” Max says, barely above a whisper. “If it would’ve helped.”

Eddie is speechless for a moment, then quietly clicks his tongue in sympathy. “Ah fuck, Max. I know you would’ve.” He laughs a little, tries and fails to ward off another wave of emotion. “He wouldn’t have let you, though. Not a chance in hell.”

She scoffs, sounds a little teary herself. “Yeah, I know.”

There’s a distant shout of triumph. “We’ve found it!” Lucas yells.

The line crackles briefly as the phone is passed over, and then Dustin is speaking, chanting, “Holy shit, holy shit,” over and over again, clearly having made the same connection as Max. “Um, Breakaway by Art Garfunkel?”

Eddie chews on his thumb nervously. It sounds right, but... “Could you read out the track list?” He can't stifle a gasp when Dustin says, “My little town,” and that leads to an explosion of noise on the other end.

“Holy shit,” Dustin repeats. “That's his song, isn’t it?”

Eddie can’t speak. He nods uselessly, before finally managing a shaky, “Yeah.”

-

Things start to become a blur; it’s only thanks to adrenaline that exhaustion doesn’t bring Eddie to a complete standstill. Still on the phone with Dustin, he realises that it’s almost three in the morning and while he’s itching for that tape, he knows damn well that if he has barely slept, then neither has Dustin.

“Oh, ew,” Dustin says when he brings this up. “Get it together, Eddie, you’re not the babysitter.”

“But Steve gave me a schedule and everything,” Eddie says sweetly.

And that elicits a giggle out of Dustin (a proper giggle! After everything! Jesus Christ, he loves this kid), which makes him laugh, too; but he has to quickly stop himself before it dissolves into something else.

After a reluctant but genuine promise from Dustin to sleep for at least a few hours, Eddie then sprints back to Steve’s room to catch the girls up with everything.

He delivers a quiet snippet of the song to demonstrate, weak with relief when he sees that little crease of concentration return to Steve’s face.

Robin, who is holding Steve’s hand again, gives a breathy, near silent scream. “Oh my god, his finger twitched, oh my god.” Then, deadly serious, she adds, “Eddie, I could kiss you.”

Eddie, feeling like he’s pitching towards hysteria, only just stops himself from saying something like, “Well, that would be hilarious for two reasons.”

Instead he just laughs, tries to keep singing. But it quickly feels like every part of him is trembling uncontrollably, and Nancy clocks it just as his voice fails at the start of a verse.

“Get some rest, Eddie,” she says firmly. “You’re the only one who hasn’t had a break.”

But he hesitates at the hospital entrance. He’d had a vague thought of going to Steve’s house to check up on the kids but, after a week of hiding, he can’t really wrap his head around the idea of just calling a cab out in the open.

But then, as if he’d heard his internal dilemma, Wayne meets him by one of the front doors.

“Let’s go, kid. Got us a hotel a couple blocks away, they’re giving out rooms for free.”

They walk there together, Wayne guiding Eddie with an arm around his elbow, like he can sense his exhaustion. Their door is at the very end of a floor, a little distance away from the other rooms. It’s quiet. Peaceful.

When they get inside, the first thing Eddie notices is that it must be two adjoining rooms, a door embedded into one of the walls left slightly open. Then he looks around and freezes.

Because his guitars are there. There’s somehow hardly any damage, just a faint scratch on the surface of the electric guitar, and some of the paint spelling out ‘This machine slays dragons’ has chipped off on the acoustic—barely anything. Eddie would rather they both have been smashed to pieces, if it meant that Steve would’ve been spared.

“You... you went to the trailer,” he says, stunned.

“Sure did.”

“And...” Eddie tries to avoid Wayne’s gaze, knows that his face is probably cycling through too many emotions to count. “And it was... okay?”

Wayne sighs. “It was pretty banged up, Eddie.”

Oh, Eddie thinks, and this time he does feel more than hysterical. He thinks I've not seen it.

“But, like, that was... it?” He doesn't really know how to ask ‘no portals to another dimension? No gigantic cracks in the earth?’ without, well, asking about it.

He chances a glance at Wayne, watches him raise an eyebrow. “Why the hell you askin’ that? What else would there have been?”

“Oh, no reason,” Eddie says, high-pitched and strained. On the bedspread he can see a little bundle of his clothes has been salvaged, and he already knows in his bones that there’ll be significantly more of his own things rescued compared to Wayne’s.

Wayne gives a small, knowing smile. “It’s just stuff, Eddie.” He nods in the direction of the shower. “Go on, now.”

The shower is an arduous but therapeutic task: just taking off his bloodied shirt feels like he’s shedding just a little bit of the horror of the night behind. Afterwards, Eddie stretches out on the bed; through the wall, he can hear Wayne talking on the phone to one of his colleagues. He makes out something about an earthquake hitting, about the colleague’s daughter in a car wreck, and he holds his breath, listens closer... but it sounds like she’s okay. Jesus H. Christ, he can’t take another fucking tragedy.

He feels his chin dipping down to his chest, and he sniffs sharply, rubs a hand over his face. It’s as if when resting, his body has finally given itself permission to feel every ache: his knee throbs dully from where he had fallen in The Upside Down, and his limbs are as heavy as lead.

Eddie groans, forces himself to sit up. He reaches for the acoustic guitar, mutters a little, “C’mon,” when he catches himself drifting too close to sleep. He has work to do.

He gets the chords down in fits and starts, plays the song on a loop until it feels like it’s a case of muscle memory, ingrained into some deep part of him. Soon even his fingers feel too heavy to lift, and he swears he’s only stopping for a moment, just to rest, just for a minute...

He wakes under the blankets. His guitar has been propped up by the end of the bed, and he can faintly hear the phone ringing in the room next door, Wayne answering it gruffly.

Eddie sits up at the sound of a soft rap on the wall. He rubs at his eyes; he’s slept so deeply that he can feel the mark of a pillow crease on his cheek.

Wayne enters through the adjoining door, says, quietly bemused, “Mornin’. There’s a Dustin Henderson waiting for you at the hospital. That make sense to you?”

“Yeah. Shit.” Eddie stifles a yawn into the crook of his elbow. “What time s’it?”

“’Bout eight.”

Eddie pushes himself off the bed. Wayne watches him with interest, eyebrows raising when he grabs the acoustic guitar.

“You need that for the hospital?”

“Mhm.”

He's put on his jacket, ready to leave, when he catches Wayne still looking at him.

“What?”

“You always lose your words when you’re hiding something,” Wayne says mildly enough, but Eddie can still hear the worry underneath.

“Wayne, I’m not in danger,” Eddie reassures. “I’m not the one who…”

“That Henderson boy mentioned something about Steve Harrington?”

“Yeah. He—” Eddie has to grip onto the door handle for a moment. “He’s the friend who—he died trying to—to save us. All of us. But then, he—his heart started beating again, fuck, I don’t even know how, Wayne, he died in my fucking arms—”

“Shh now, take a breath. This was… in the earthquake?” Wayne asks delicately. He says ‘earthquake’ with the same skepticism he holds when repeating Eddie’s words back to him, whenever Eddie breezily says, “Oh, I just had a thing,” instead of, “I got a detention.”

Eddie nods slowly, makes a vague gesture with his hand meaning sort of. Close enough. “We’ve… we’ve got a plan. To bring him back.”

“Something the doctors can’t do?”

“Damn it, Wayne, I told you, there’s stuff I can’t—”

“All right, all right.” Wayne raises his hands slowly in placation.

“No, I’m sorry. It’s just… I don't know if it’ll work,” Eddie says, voice faltering. “Don’t know if I’ll—if it’ll be enough."

Wayne considers him with a long look. He crosses the room to squeeze Eddie’s shoulder and his hand stays there, a reassuring warmth. “You’re a smart kid, Eddie. Reckon you’d best see it through.”

-

They reunite in Steve’s room: Eddie, Robin, Nancy, Dustin. Robin has brought a few extra tapes from her parents’ collection, including the Paul Simon album that also features the track. Dustin has Steve’s original tape along with a casette player.

Before Eddie’s arrival, they had tried playing the song a few times over but, by the fourth play-through, Steve’s heart had started beating alarmingly fast.

“Shit,” Eddie says, his own heart plummeting. “What happened?”

“One of the nurses said it was like he was... having a panic attack,” Dustin says quietly. He exhales in frustration. “I don't get it, Max only had to hear a bit of Kate Bush before she came back.”

Through a nerve-wracking amount of experimentation, they work out a routine that doesn't send the heart monitor screeching in warning: every hour on the hour, they play through the song once via a cassette, then Eddie picks up his guitar and sings. Steve’s thoughtful expression gets the tiniest bit more pronounced each time, like an opaque window slowly becoming clear, bit by bit.

When Robin takes Dustin away for a late lunch, Eddie finally asks the question.

“Hey, Wheeler? Why’s it just... us here?”

Nancy is slowly rewinding one of the tapes with a pen, but at Eddie’s words, she stops. He can tell by her face that he doesn’t need to elaborate; she knows what he’s asking.

Because the thought that Eddie cannot get away from is the fact that, if he were in Steve’s position, Wayne would have been here, would have moved heaven and earth to stay by his side.

“I...” She sighs. “I don't think they've ever come, Eddie.”

They’re silent for a moment, as if they both need to take the vastness of that in.

“In ’83, he stayed at mine for Christmas,” Nancy goes on. “And at the time... God, I can't even remember, maybe I thought it was a little weird that he didn't even—like, there wasn’t even a phone call, you know? But he just made it out like it was normal, so I... I didn’t...” She sighs again. “You know how... like, at school, people would be like, ‘Oh, I came in drunk, my parents went crazy,’ but you could tell that they were fine, that they were just... playing it up?”

“Yeah.”

“I think he was the opposite,” Nancy says. She looks at Steve, her lips pressed thin. “I think he said just enough to... hide behind it, does that make sense? I didn't see.” She tuts at herself, raises her eyes to the ceiling. “I remember thinking, sure, he might say ‘my dad is an asshole,’ but no-one who actually says that is serious; look at him, how bad could he have it?”

Eddie thinks of himself saying, Rich parents, popular. He feels sick.

“I didn't see either,” he says.

Nancy smiles sadly. “That's the thing,” she says. “I don't think he wanted anyone to.”

-

Eddie stays overnight at the hospital. “I can't leave him,” he tells Wayne over the phone, and while he's waiting for Nancy to give Dustin and Robin a ride home, he finds that a bag has been left for him at reception, containing more clothes and his toothbrush, and his breath catches a little at the sight.

The staff have told him not to play any music past eleven at night, and Eddie almost fights them on it, like, oh yeah, well that didn’t stop that radio playing at whatever-the-fuck o’clock. But then he looks at Steve’s face, at the drawn eyebrows, and realises that he looks...

Pained.

Alone in the room, Eddie finally sets his guitar down.

“You tired?” he murmurs.

He tentatively reaches out, brushes a couple of his fingers across Steve’s forehead, as gently as he can. When he draws back, he finds that the lines of tension have dissipated, but the stillness doesn’t look so unnatural; it feels like Steve is still there.

It just looks like he’s sleeping, Eddie thinks, and he blinks hard.

“S’okay,” he says softly. “Just rest, Steve. I’m right here.”

-

“Mm, damn, I think that was pitchy, dude,” Dustin says, far too brightly for nine in the morning.

Eddie gives the guitar a warning strum and flips Dustin off. “That wasn’t funny the fifth time you said it, dude.”

But his tone is far too fond to even fake annoyance. Dustin is clearly in much better spirits today, largely helped by the fact that he’s brought in his walkie. Every so often, Lucas or Max will call in from Steve’s, crowing about some discovery they’ve made in the house.

“He has a VHS collection that's just musicals,” Lucas intones gravely, as Max cackles in the background.

“Tragic,” Dustin says.

And Eddie can’t resist his own curiosity. “Which ones?”

Lucas recites the titles and Dustin gives a wheezy laugh at, “The Sound of Music.”

“Imagine if The Lonely Goatherd was your song,” he says with pity to Steve—and Eddie counts that as a goddamn victory, because it's the first time Dustin has properly acknowledged Steve’s presence; speaking teasingly, as if Steve can hear him.

“I’d still sing it,” Eddie replies, and he means to sound light-hearted, but Dustin must hear something else, because he looks over at Eddie, and his expression softens.

“Yeah,” he says quietly, smiling. “You would.”

-

Some time after noon, Dustin leaves to raid the vending machines for the pair of them. Eddie has played through the song twice to mark the hour, feeling calmer than he has in days; something in him has settled through the ritual of it.

He’s doodling on the back of his hand with the biro Nancy left behind when he hears the familiar click of the walkie, but no-one starts speaking.

He picks it up. “Sinclair,” he says, “you’re pressing the—”

That’s when he hears it.

A faint crackle. Someone breathing, gasping and catching their breath at frequent intervals. They’re crying.

“Oh, God,” comes the whisper, and Eddie knows that voice. “I—I don’t know where I am.” Eddie holds the walkie with a white-knuckled grip.

“I don’t know where I am,” Steve Harrington repeats, cracked and desperate. “God, please, I—I don’t—”

“Steve!” Eddie shouts into the walkie. “Can you hear me? Come on, man, I’m right—”

But then Steve’s voice is abruptly cut off, replaced with static.

Eddie swears vehemently, drops the walkie and flies to the bed. There doesn’t seem to be any change—if anything, Steve looks peaceful.

But no. He looks harder, feels a tug of doubt and follows his instinct, swipes his thumb underneath Steve’s eyelashes, feather-light. Feels a dampness there.

And then he sees two tears leak out of the corner of Steve’s closed eyes, trail across to his temples.

“Fuck,” Eddie says. “I don’t—Steve, I don’t know what to do.”

I can’t reach him.

The door opens.

“I got one of everything! But oh my god, Eddie, Nancy called and she says that Mike says they’re—what’s wrong?”

“I heard him,” Eddie says. He gestures to the walkie. “But I couldn’t—I couldn’t help—Dustin.” His voice breaks. “He sounded so scared.”

Dustin runs to the walkie, leaves his crutches behind with a clatter. He tries it multiple times, saying Steve’s name urgently, but there’s no reply.

The tears have dried on Steve’s face. Eddie sits down wordlessly and puts his head in his hands. When he looks up, Dustin is kneeling in front of him.