dont try to be heros.

Wayne watches Eddie grow up, watches him struggle in school and with himself, but he knows his boy is trying. He hadn’t had the easiest start to life so Wayne gives him yards and yards of slack when he fails his senior year twice, when he grows his hair out, when he plays that racket at all hours of the night, when he’s brought back to the trailer park by Chief Hopper instead of to the station. He has an agreement with his old fishing buddy, and Chief Hopper knows Eddie’s misguided but harmless. 

But then Chief Hopper dies, or so he thinks, and Eddie doesn’t have this protection from the closed-minded townspeople who see him as a leper, a stain on their town. 

Eddie’s accused of murder and Wayne knows that his boy who only drinks hot chocolate out of his Garfield mug and shivers until there’s two thick blankets thrown over his shoulders didn’t do it. Not when he’s constantly talking about protecting the younger kids of Hellfire Club from the “dystopian nightmare of normalcy” and taking a cut of his weekly dealing profits to buy cat food for the park strays. 

Wayne understands why Eddie runs, but it leaves him sitting alone, wondering, afraid. Eddie’s his to keep safe, no matter how old he gets, and now he can’t. He can’t protect him from the town, he can’t protect him from the media, he can’t protect him from the basketball team or the earthquake that follows. There’s no way to link them logically, but he knows in his heart of hearts that Eddie’s disappearance and the odd series of catastrophic earthquakes are related. 

It only gets worse when Dustin gives him the bloody guitar pick, that red one Eddie wears daily cold and sticky in his calloused hands. No one will tell him the truth, but Eddie is a survivor. If there was a way to climb out of a ditch or from under a tree, he would’ve. Hell, these friends of Eddie’s that Wayne meets in the aftermath look like his company coming back from the War. 

The Harrington boy in particular tells him the same story: Eddie was lost when the Earth splintered open and he pushed Dustin out of the way in a show of self-sacrifice, but his eyes seem desperate, unfocused, lost. 

Wayne knows this was no earthquake and goes searching. 

Every night for months, Wayne goes out into the woods and looks. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, exactly, but he ignores everyone who tells him to let it go and work through his grief. He doesn’t need to mourn until he knows for sure that Eddie’s dead and he doesn’t. Not when the Harrington boy looks like there’s a truth beating at his chest as he watches him with a kind of pity that doesn’t match the story. 

It’s a sweltering summer night when he heads into the woods looking for answers for the last time. He and his flashlight search the brush, look beneath bushes and behind gnarled trees. An owl hoots in the distance and Wayne hears the snapping of twigs behind him. 

Wayne turns to face whatever approaches him, frighteningly calm. After the past few months, he’d welcome a bear. 

What he finds instead is Eddie. Or, well, a version of Eddie. His eyes are less chocolate brown and more red velvet, and he was always a pale kid but Wayne doesn’t remember the bluish bags beneath his eyes. He’s still Eddie– there’s something different about him, but it doesn’t matter. Not to Wayne. 

“Eddie?” Wayne steps forward. 

“Hey, old man.” His voice echoes, almost musical, but it breaks all the same. “I shouldn’t be here, but I couldn’t keep you in the dark anymore. A lot of things happened, but I’m… well, not quite alive but I’m okay. Or, at least I’m gonna be.” 

“Son, what the hell is going on? Let me help.” Wayne’s heart pounds in his rib cage, hard enough to be felt in his stomach and heard in his ears. 

Eddie’s eyes dart down to Wayne’s chest and back up, shaking his head rapidly. “It’s a long story, and it’s not over yet. But when it is, I promise I’ll tell you. You just– you can’t tell anyone about this or that you saw me. You’ll be in danger.” 

“Does anyone else know?” He asks, but he knows the answer. Suddenly, Steve's reactions all make sense. 

Eddie nods. “He wants to tell you too, but it’s not time yet. Just, please, listen to them. If they tell you to leave town, do it. If they tell you not to trust someone, don’t.” 

“I’m just supposed to accept that you’re alive but not really, and trust the people who kept this a secret from me blindly?” 

“Yes. I know how it sounds, but they’re your only allies right now. There’s a lot going on beneath Hawkins, Wayne. It might not be safe for much longer.” 

Wayne swallows and takes another step towards Eddie, watching as he flinches and crinkles his nose. “The earthquakes, right? They weren’t just earthquakes, were they?” 

Eddie sighs and lifts a hand to his nose, an old tell that he’s clearly brought into whatever new version of himself he’s become. “Just listen to them. Trust them. Please, Wayne.” 

There’s a desperation to Eddie’s voice that makes Wayne ache. He steps closer and outstretches a hand, the same one he’d offered all of those years ago when Eddie arrived, scraggly and scared at the trailer. This time though, Eddie takes it. 

His hands are still cold, and Wayne brings up his other hand to hold Eddie’s tightly between his shaking, calloused fingers. 

Eddie’s in the hospital for two weeks, and Steve stops by almost every day. He sits for a while, sometimes they talk, sometimes they don’t. Sometimes Eddie wakes up and sees Steve sleeping in one of the uncomfortable hospital chairs. He doesn’t wake him, just smiles to himself because Steve’s tired, but he doesn’t want Eddie to be alone.

It’s been a while since Eddie’s had a friend the same age as him. Jeff and Grant are both two years younger than him, Gareth is four years, and Henderson, Wheeler, and Sinclair are all five or six years younger. He has friends, but Steve feels different, just a few months younger but already graduated. In a way, it makes Eddie feel younger, still being in high school and all.

He doesn’t really think that should matter, but it kind of does. All his younger friends look up to him, he’s always the one making plans and making sure everyone sticks to them, he’s the one in charge of it all — the older one. But when Steve’s around — Steve, with his real job, and high school diploma, and his nice car, and the brood of children he chases after, Steve, who’s an adult in all the ways Eddie himself feels like he’s not — Eddie feels like he can sit back and let someone else do all of that.

When Steve’s around, it feels like he has someone to care for him and look out for him the way he’s done for the others.

It starts to ease everything he’s carried for so long.

* * *

The next time Steve buys something for Eddie, it’s even smaller.

In fact, it’s so small that Eddie doesn’t even notice it at first because Steve was actually really sneaky about it. Eddie would almost find it cute, if he were allowed to think about Steve that way. He’s not, to be clear. It goes against his Munson Doctrine to have crushes on the jocks, rich kids, and straight boys, of which Steve is all three, but if he wasn’t, then yeah, Eddie would find it cute that Steve is sneaking him tiny gifts when he isn’t looking.

There’s a keychain on his van keys that he certainly didn’t get for himself. He notices it one day during a get together at Harrington’s house. Eddie just got out of the hospital a few days ago, and everyone insisted on throwing a party. Now kids are running around Steve’s backyard, yelling and hollering and trying not to fall in the freezing cold pool. It’s still too early in the spring to swim.

Even Max, barely out of the hospital herself, is being wheeled around in her wheelchair by nothing more than El’s mind powers.

It’s kind of fucking insane, to be honest.

But Eddie needs to go out to his car to get his pain meds because he’s really starting to feel the length of the day in his aching joints and healing wounds, so he grabs his keys off Steve’s counter where he left them, and that’s when he sees it.

A tiny metal bat dangling from his keys.

He knows it was Steve because Steve was the only one in the house when he got here and set his stuff down in the kitchen, and no one else has gone inside since Eddie found his way to the backyard, so of course it was Steve.

Eddie doesn’t mention it, just smiles to himself and runs his fingers over the pointed wings.

He sees Steve looking at him when he comes back into the kitchen. Eddie raises his hand and shakes his pill bottle at him, and without another word, Steve goes to the cupboard to get a glass that he fills with water.

Eddie sets his keys back down on the kitchen counter as Steve slides the glass of water over to him. Steve nods at the keys, and Eddie grins at him.

“Thank you,” Eddie says.

“I have a matching one,” Steve says, turning back toward the sink to look out the window above it. “Just, you know, because…”

He gestures at his torso, and then over at Eddie, and Eddie nods. He gets it.

It makes him feel a little bit closer to Steve. Even if Eddie isn’t allowed to crush on him, he’s happy to have someone who gets him. Who understands what he went through, and feels similar pain.

It’s like Steve’s saying You’re with me now, we’re connected, and you’re not getting rid of me.