just wanna be a good passenger

Henderson had always been the touchy-feely type, yammering on about emotional intelligence or whatever, so Steve had figured he’d probably want to fill in some of the blanks. It wasn’t like Steve had really known Eddie at all. Not for real, or not enough to count. Henderson had practically worshipped the guy, though, which meant there had to have been some memories bursting to get out. Stories about how he was with his friends, with people he liked, not jocks he teased and yapped at with that kooky energy that made people feel like they were going insane. Steve would’ve listened. He wouldn’t have minded.

But Henderson was being a fucking asshole for no reason, all touchy about the stupidest shit, and flat-out refusing to talk about Eddie or Eddie’s death or how they couldn’t have done anything, really, they couldn’t even have dragged his body back with them, so there wasn’t any point feeling like shit about that. At least Steve had Robin around to be even more of a disaster, and she might actually get a happy ending out of this whole clusterfuck. Vickie Dunne was there and the boyfriend was out of the picture, so: green light, full speed ahead, no problemo. Robin just needed to nut up and make a move before Vickie slipped through her fingers, like he kept telling her.

Robin had taken to threatening him with bodily harm if he made any more incredibly supportive comments, so he had some time on his hands. Some of the co-ed interns were pretty cute, but he just didn’t feel up to flirting much. They were pretty buttoned-up and boring-looking, probably not even down for a good time. It wasn’t a crime if he didn’t want to waste his energy on someone who seemed a little too clean-cut to handle him. There wasn’t any reason to give Robin an excuse to start a new You Suck board, either.

He figured he’d just work a little, save up, then…who knew? At first he’d thought he could get a place of his own in Hawkins, but it actually hadn’t sucked to get out of town for a while. He hadn’t been hating it. So maybe after their contract was up, he’d set out on the road and find somewhere else to settle down and have a family, the way he’d always wanted. It could still happen. He was barely old enough to drink, for god’s sake, it could all still happen.

It just didn’t feel that way, sometimes.

Steve tried not to let stuff like that get in his head too much, especially when he was working late at night and Robin wasn’t around. He always ended up spending hours just staring out of the curving glass panels into the creepy fucking ocean full of weird fish and weirder sea bugs.

Eddie probably would’ve liked it, if he’d been around. Not like Steve had any idea what the guy liked in a specific kind of way, but—they’d shared a school for four years, anyway. If Henderson was such a genius, you’d think he’d remember that Steve had known Eddie way longer, if you counted high school. Sure, they hadn’t known each other, but the point was that Henderson was an asshole and not as smart as he thought he was.

Whatever Eddie would’ve liked or not liked, Steve had to kill the time somehow, so he ended up just staring out at nothing most of the time. That’s how he started noticing that the reflections weren’t where they were supposed to be. Robin kept saying the windows were just like that, but they weren’t.

The way the caf was built was kind of artsier than the rest of the station, he guessed; maybe the eggheads wouldn’t ever emerge from their clipboards unless there was something pretty to look at. There were more windows there than anywhere else, practically slicing the cafeteria dome down the middle: half of the caf was normal metal walls, and the other half, where most of the tables and stuff for the scientists were, was made up of thick metal ribs joined with curving glass. The glass wasn’t all one big piece between the ribs, but Steve never could figure out what kind of pattern the huge panels were supposed to make. Maybe they’d just thrown some stuff together and figured that whatever fit, fit.

They’d tried to put in giant bamboo trees at one point, but it’d all died. Each plant had probably cost more than Steve and Robin’s contracts put together. You’d think the geniuses running the station could figure out how to keep a stupid expensive plant alive, but what did Steve know? He was just a hired grunt.

Anyway, they’d ended up moving some giant kelp around outside the windows so people could have something to look at that probably wouldn’t die. It wasn’t like they covered the whole area, just a little stand off to the side, right about where the massive glass panels ended and the metal walls began. A lot of tiny fish lived in the kelp, but they were pretty boring and Steve usually couldn’t really see them from the counter. Sometimes bigger stuff would come through and that was pretty cool, but normally Steve wouldn’t even bother trying to get a closer look.

Method/Approach

While logged in to my AO3 account (thus with visibility on archive-locked fics), I went through the AO3 ship tags for the most popular ships of 2024, the most recent overview available from @toastystats. Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson didn't make the cut at 23.3k in 2024, but note that that number does not include archive-locked fics.

Within each ship tag, I filtered for (individually):

#Loss of Virginity

#Virginity Kink

#Virgin [character A]

#Virgin [character B]

I did not have a hard cut-off for posting time, but I did grab everything within the span of about an hour.

I decided not to pull rating data (e.g. what percentage of fics in the fandom are labeled Explicit), because I think stories featuring virginity could hypothetically be in just about anything. If I ever do decide to do a follow-up, that's something I'd probably look at, though. Who knows, maybe there'll be some interesting correlations.

I also looked at the stats for "Uchiha Sasuke/Uzumaki Naruto" because Naruto made the biggest fandoms list and I was curious, having sort of nominally been on the fringes of that fandom in the mid-2000s; it's got 21.5k fics so I think it's a pretty reasonably-sized inclusion.

Something I did not expect to discover was the fact that "#Virgin Rey (Star Wars)" kept popping up as one of the top suggested tags whenever I typed in a "#Virgin [character]" tag, so I dipped a cautious toe into the heretofore-unknown-to-me world of Reylo. How could I not, with bait like that?

(Steve Rogers' virginity or lack thereof also seems to be of paramount interest to the good people of AO3...)

Reylo-specific Weirdness

I'm not really sure my approach was sufficient, because I discovered that "Kylo Ren/Rey" (16,748 fics) and "Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren" (31,759 fics) are listed as two separate ships. I did a quick search for any AO3 news items explaining why they're separate and didn't see anything; if anyone knows what's up with that, please let me know! I'm not saying it's wrong, I just have no idea what's going on or if it is indeed appropriate for purposes of this study to treat them as separate.

The numbers I got for those ships are also slightly off, because I decided to sum "#Virgin Kylo Ren" and "#Virgin Ben Solo" to get the "#Virgin [character]" figure, even though I could already see a ton of fics tagged with both on the first page of results. I suspect the raw sums ended up being off by about 100-200, since the lower number in both cases was ~300.

(In both ship tags, "#Virgin Rey" was still the higher of the two sums, so it didn't end up mattering at all in terms of getting a percentage range.)

Key Methodological Weaknesses

⚠️ Obviously, these tags are not comprehensive.

I poked around a bit to see if I could find any other commonly used tags; I considered including "#Sexual Inexperience" and "#First Times" as well, but felt that those were too imprecise and included a lot of e.g. first times between those particular characters. Ultimately, I decided that what I was actually interested in was references to "virginity" as a specific socially constructed concept in and of itself.

⚠️ I did not clean the datasets.

For example, these numbers include fics in which the tags refer to a different ship than the one I filtered by, such as multi-fandom anthologies and works in which the filtered-by ship is a background pairing.

I'm gonna be honest: proper cleaning sounded like a lot of work and I didn't want to do it.

⚠️ I did not account for multi-tagging.

I'm absolutely certain that many if not most of these have more than one tag applied, e.g. "#Loss of Virginity" and "#Virgin [character A]" on the same fic. Therefore, the total number of unique fics is definitely less than the sum of the tags. Which is fine, because I'm interested in looking at tag frequency, but it is a limitation that should be top-of-mind when looking at this data.

Findings

These are raw counts, which means that they're not scaled to the overall fandom sizes as indicated by the grey "Fic total" columns (scaled to right-side Y-axis, not shown).

Given all the listed methodological weaknesses, I want to emphasize yet again that this is an extremely sloppy study with a lot of holes in it, and no firm conclusions should be drawn from it. I know some of the numbers aren't really visible here and honestly I think that's appropriate, because they should be taken as relative indicators/estimates rather than precise measurements. (Actual numbers at end of post.)

Nonetheless, I found these results pretty interesting in terms of overall trends! For my purposes, getting a general range was sufficiently accurate, even if I had a hell of a time figuring out how best to visualize it within Google Sheets.

Here's a chart showing approximately how many times those four tags show up in fics for each ship, described as a minimum percentage (the highest number of any individual tag) and a maximum percentage (the sum of all four numbers). The actual number of unique fics that use at least one of those tags is definitely somewhere between the two, and probably much closer to the minimum than the maximum.

INCREDIBLE. Reylo fics tend to use at least one of those tags at a rate roughly 3-5x any other ship. I have no idea what's going on in there and I'm a little bit afraid to ask. (No, that's a lie, I am so anthropologically interested, please tell me if you know anything!!)

The other major outlier is the Miraculous Ladybug ship, Adrien Agreste/Marinette Dupain-Cheng; I know literally nothing about that fandom/canon and have no idea what's going on there either, but there are only 65 fics tagged "#Loss of Virginity" + one tagged "#Virginity Kink" (which is a multifandom anthology, so I strongly suspect it shouldn't count, but I didn't want to be inconsistent about my hands-off approach to data-cleaning) + one tagged "#virgin marinette."

So with those three (counting the two Reylo as separate) removed to make the chart a bit more legible, I got this:

Second figure included because it's closer to what I actually wanted the data visualization itself to look like but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to add the actual numbers, blech. GIVE ME BOTH.

By this point, you may have noticed that I wrote out some names in full and some in shorthand. This is purely based on my own personal convenience, because it's not like I'm going to forget what LWJ/WWX stands for, but if I shorten the BNHA characters' names I will simply never remember them again. I did, however, write out the character names instead of the ship names e.g. Johnlock because that helps me remember at a glance which one was Character A and which one was Character B.

Main Observations:

Hermione/Draco and Steve/Eddie have a VERY similar spread of around 1.4%–2.4/2.8%.

Jungkook/V (BTS RPF) also overlaps a bit, though with a lower maximum; this may be due to e.g. a fandom tendency not to use multiple of the listed tags in the same fic, though this is just an example hypothesis and further investigation is required to draw any particular conclusions.

Sherlock/John is the only other one with a min% of >1%, though Bakugou Katsuki/Midoriya Izuku (BNHA) and Harry/Louis (1D RPF) come fairly close with a ~1.3% max% for both.

I also noted some interesting patterns around tag frequency/distribution when I was pulling data:

I went with a percentage format for these data markers, but please note yet again that these are not percentages of unique fics! These percentages represent tags used, and the ratio of tag:fic is definitely not 1:1.

Main Observations:

"#Loss of Virginity" tends to be the most or second-most commonly used tag, with "#Virgin [character A/B]" also frequently used.

"#Virginity Kink" is not that commonly used overall, which I find pretty interesting in and of itself! It shows up pretty heavily in LWJ/WWX, which makes sense because they are canonically kinky (I don't remember whether the incense-burners featured virginity kink specifically? but it's definitely not too big a stretch), Dean/Sam (SPN), and of course Steve/Eddie, which has the highest actual number of tag usages (87 compared to the next-highest at 57).

Some fandoms have a pretty even split of which character gets the "#Virgin [character]" tag, and others don't.

On that last point, I wanted to take a closer look at which ships had strong discrepancies and which had a more 50/50 split.

The formula I used was basically in the format of (MAX(A1:B1)-MIN(A1:B1))/SUM(A1:B1)—in other words, the closer the number is to zero, the closer the "#Virgin [character A]" to "#Virgin [character B]" ratio is to 1:1.

I wasn't expecting these results! I'd initially thought that it might make sense that some ships include characters who have unambiguously canonically had sex, so the bulk of canon-verse fics would thus reflect a certain weighting.

However, as the second (sorted) graph shows, below the top two, the curve is pretty smooth! I don't really know what that implies except that my hypothesis was definitely wrong. There does seem to be a more jagged step-down from 0.53 to 0.41, but I'm not convinced the R-squared is out of bounds, especially when n=23.

(I've included the Reylo numbers, but here is a gentle reminder that they should definitely be higher due to fandom-specific tagging practices that I don't know enough about to resolve appropriately. The maximum end of that range would be about 0.3-0.35, for the record.)

(Lack of) Conclusion

⚠️ It would be intellectually irresponsible to come to any overarching conclusions based on this data. (This is mostly a reminder to myself!)

What I can reasonably say is this: the data does in fact seem to support the idea that Steddie fics on AO3 may have more of a tendency to use virginity-related tags than other popular ships do, particularly the "#Virginity Kink" tag.

I am not even going to try to speculate on whatever's going on in the Hermione/Draco situation, but it's utterly fascinating to me that that's the main highwater comp, especially since the overall numbers are relatively similar but the internal tag distribution looks pretty different.

And finally, because I do know it's a pain to try and read the actual numbers on the graphs, here's a cleaner table:

It had all worked out in the end, more or less. And Dustin was a man of science, but he’d also been a fucking child, so at some level, the garbage lesson his child-brain had taken was that it would always work out, more or less, if he could just be brave enough and smart enough to follow the facts. People, grown-ups, didn’t want to see things that were right in front of their nose, and all he had to do was ignore the stupid grown-ups telling him to ignore what he could plainly see. It was like magic, like a cheat code, if you just had the nerve to question what you were told.

He was never going to be that naïve again. He was probably less of a child than anyone on this stupid fucking station, because his boss Dr. Dey sure as hell hadn’t ever watched the light go out of his friend’s eyes, hadn’t ever had to stand up covered in blood and walk away from the thing, the inanimate object, that used to—that Eddie was—

Eddie had been—

Anyway, Eddie was gone, and Dustin was left with stupid Steve Harrington following him under the water even though Dustin had told him not to. It’s not like Steve was trying to make nice with Dustin or anything; he was being a pretty shitty friend in general, actually, and he’d always talked shit about Eddie anyway, so Dustin had no idea why Steve was following him around like a dog. Maybe Steve just didn’t have anything better to do.

Maybe Steve thought that he could just take Eddie’s place in Dustin’s life. If he did, he was doing a fucking awful job. There was only one Eddie Munson, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do to fix the gap he’d left in the world.

When the acceptance letter came in, Dustin had really seriously thought about not accepting the internship. He’d applied months and months ago, before everything. Before Eddie—or, no, Eddie had been there to say huh, sounds pretty cool, so that was during Eddie. Mid-Eddie. The Eddie chapter of Dustin’s life, which he’d thought would be so much longer than it ended up being.

Anyway his mom had tried talking to him again about seeing a, a fucking grief counselor of all things, like that would bring Eddie back, so he’d booked a flight and moved under the sea where nobody would try to talk to him about Eddie or about his fucking feelings anymore. All anyone on the station cared about was science, which was how things should be, always. Science was straightforward.

Living in the station turned out to be a lot easier than living at home. Hawkins was full of unexpected booby traps, treasure chests that turned out to be mimics, like when he’d walked into the library to pick up his weekly stack of holds, and realized that one of the books was something Eddie’d recommended specially. Eddie had said, “Henderson, this is gonna blow your mind, trust me.” The cover had not one but two dragons, which was objectively awesome, and he couldn’t look directly at it.

He’d had to turn around and leave. His feet had made the decision before his brain could kick in. The librarian had shouted after him, but he’d left his library card and the books right there on the counter and he hadn’t been back. He couldn’t ever go back there again.

He’d brought one normal-sized backpack to the station, bought new, with nothing lurking in the seams to remind him of anything. It had been working out okay, but Steve was the fly in his goddamn ointment. He’s sure he’d have been having a great time, or at least a productive time, if Steve fucking Harrington hadn’t decided to tag along.

It was sort of funny, but not in the ha-ha kind of way, that Dustin could remember with agonizingly shameful clarity how he used to be the one tagging along after Steve. Maybe Steve could only ever really be friends with kids, because that was just how far his brain had developed. Dustin was just gritting his teeth and counting down to the inevitable future moment he snapped and told Steve exactly what was running through his head whenever they bumped into each other: I’ve outgrown you. I grew up, and you didn’t.

Steve had been seventeen when they met. Dustin’s age, now. He doubted they’d have been friends at all, if they’d been born in the same year. The Henderson-Harrington Theory of Relativity: two people moving at different speeds, happening to sync up at one improbable moment, but never again.

Dustin Henderson, seventeen years old, knew you had to grab things while they were there, because even if everyone was trying their best and nobody wanted to leave, people left anyway, and then you were somehow way more alone than you were before they showed up in the first place. Even if sometimes they were still hanging around, sniping at you and being a pain in the ass.

Science would stay, though. Science had his back. Dr. Dey liked him because he worked late and didn’t fuck around like some of the other interns, so he’d already received some pretty strong hints that there’d be a place waiting for him at Dr. Dey’s lab in Oxford, and that was his future taken care of. Dustin would get a couple degrees, make some modest discoveries, get published in some journals, and live the rest of his life, a life that would never have Eddie in it again.

Steve Harrington was the most grounded person she knew, which was why she wanted him with her. Not the only reason, obviously, but there was some part of her that was convinced that as long as Steve was nearby, she’d always be able to see land. There’d always been something very earthbound about Steve, when Robin was prone to floating away. He tethered her.

It’s funny how gravity works underwater, though. Things sink, up to a point, but the water is reluctant to let them settle, and tugs them sideways and around and even back up again. Not like air, which mostly leaves things be. It might wick away the corners and smooth over sharp edges over time, but it doesn’t seize the great bulk of whales just the same as the plastic-bag insubstantiality of jellyfish to hurl about. It’s funny, because water on land is always only ever running downwards. It’s how you find the lowest point of something: pour a little bit of water on it, and it will relentlessly seek depth. Water knows where it belongs.

In their little soap bubble—the vast, sprawling shielded research station clamped tight onto a rock shelf at the boundary of the twilight, with reinforced glass as thick as her arm—gravity worked pretty much like it did on land. Robin had thought at first that it would be basically exactly the same. Recycled air, sure, but all the basic things were there. She’d thought she could close her eyes and feel the same as she did on the surface.

It was different right away. She would know the difference with her eyes closed and her nose pinched and earplugs stuffed in her ears. It felt so wholly and immediately obvious to her that the station with its gravity was alien to its surroundings; that they had carved out a fragile world, an inverted tide pool.

Steve was never bothered by that kind of thing, which is why his insistence on the creepiness of the cafeteria at nighttime was so nonsensical. It was nice to be able to remind him of that, loudly and repeatedly.

She couldn’t really be blamed, she decided afterwards, for making fun of him the first time he said he’d seen something weird and creepy outside the glass.

“Yeah, dingus. Weird and creepy is kind of the default around here. That’s what all those super-fancy monitors and cameras and stuff are for, remember?”

“Jesus christ, Robin, I mean like—creepy, creepy. Not normal-creepy.”

She’d leaned forward to ruffle his hair before he slapped her hands away, and cooed: “Aw, did Stevie see a big scary fishie and get spooked?”

“It wasn’t…” He’d scowled, trailing off, and left it at that.

There was no such thing as an empty ocean. Fish were almost always around, though usually they were sweeps of tiny silver-blue-black things shimmering iridescently in the reddish light of the station exterior. Sometimes, Robin could see squid, jellies, even dolphins and sharks. At the very least, she knew there were tiny translucent zooplankton living their tiny translucent lives in every drop of water.

The mammals were the easiest to read: sometimes they’d nose around curiously, and Robin felt a fierce kinship with their quizzical expressions, warmblood muscles tugging their faces into familiar shapes. What are you doing here? their almost-human eyes seemed to say. This isn’t a place that creatures like us can stay for long.

Like the whales and dolphins and seals, the humans surfaced every so often. The contracts called it shore leave, but really it was to stop them going funny in the head. Robin and Steve were in total agreement that one weekend every two months wasn’t actually enough to keep the funnies at bay, and if anyone needed proof, they just had to look at the official regulations: nobody was allowed to skip more than one shore leave in a row, which meant there’ve been people who tried to spend more than four months below the surface.

You had to be at least a little bit not-normal to begin with, to sign up for something like this. But after everything had gone down the way it had, Dustin Henderson had gotten it into his head that grief was best processed hundreds of fathoms away from fresh air and unfiltered sunlight, and Steve had had the bone-headed idea to follow him down. To keep an eye out, Steve had said, though it seemed like every time he and Dustin crossed paths on the station, one or both of them ended up yelling and upset. Nowadays they mostly steered clear of each other.

The Kingdom of the Lord will come again, and the faithful will be rewarded. Those who are true and walk in His light will be taken into His kingdom, forever and ever, amen.

Those who walk with the devils will perish. Do not let your loved ones perish. Don’t let her go into the dark.

You can save her. Your beloved, your queen, your angel. She looks just like Mary in the painting your mother hung at the top of the stairs, skin like milk and a golden halo of hair hanging so sweetly. A virginal, childlike spirit with the endless love and compassion of a mother. When she sat across from you on your first date and giggled at something you said, you knew what it was to be blessed. It’s not a blasphemy. You see the Lord in the purity of her love for you, in the strength of your love for her. Base urges have never felt like this, and you know this to be a sign that the Lord has set her aside for you.

She is holy.

You meet the Devil later on. People say he was there all along, but you think you would have remembered; you would not have been deceived. You find him in your own domain, Hawkins High; a reminder that the serpent nestles in the bosom. You had gotten too comfortable, too pleased with your new love, too caught up in the things of this world. The Lord saw fit to remind you, and so permitted the Devil to enter Hawkins.

You are not ashamed to admit that the Devil struck some fear into your weak and fallible human heart. You had been warned many times before that the Devil attacks the servants of God through fear, but you had not yet had enough practice in girding your heart against weakness. You had been so foolish, drowsing and distracted in the hard pews instead of reaching back towards the bountiful strength the Lord offers to His faithful. Foolish, and a child.

But you will not falter again. How can you? If you are ever to be worthy of her, your angel, your perfect helpmeet, you must prove yourself no longer a child but a man of God. You were not there to carry out your duty and protect her from being seduced by the Devil, and now you are paying for your failure. You are Job, being tested beyond what an unbeliever might be able to endure, to burn away the impure weakness in your soul.

Few have been tested so, but few, you know, are so worthy to be tested. You would not be fit to join her in the presence of the Lord, if you do not do this—if you do not climb these creaking stairs like you’re descending backwards into the mouth of Hell. You will not be a Doubting Thomas, hesitating and arrogant enough to demand proof, whining about the clumsy and unjust laws of a world overrun by sin. You know full well that there is only one higher power, and it is not the United States government, for all that people have fought tooth and nail to keep this a Christian nation. Your trust is in the Lord alone, and the Lord will deliver you, because you are a soldier of Christ.

The Lord will deliver her, too. You know it in your heart, sure as a bright sword. She may be lost to you in this world, in this life, but you will be reunited in the life beyond, the eternal one. This world is shadow and ash only, but you're not going to lose her for real. You can still save her if you are pure of heart and humble yourself as a servant of the Lord.

The thing in your hand is nothing more an instrument that the Lord may act through if He so chooses. You are an instrument just the same, enacting your part, because all that happens in this world is the will of God.

She is gone, for now, only for now, and it must have been God's will to teach you a lesson. But she is yours; she will be yours; and you will become worthy of her by ripping this corruption out at the root. Even if the people of Hawkins, those poor stupid drug-addled wretches who reject His love—even they do not deserve the Devil poisoning their souls. They are as blind, naked children scrabbling in the dirt, and you must protect them even as they squall in their ingratitude.

You do this for her, and you do this to be worthy of her, but you do this because you know in your heart that it is the bright and shining path, the path of righteousness, the path of angels. You are David, you are Moses, you are Joseph, you are making a stalwart stand against the callous and corrupt heathen masses who would let a wolf loose among the flock. Even though every hand is turned against you, you will not falter in your duty.

Though you walk through the valley of death, up these rickety wooden stairs, careful to muffle the sound of your footfalls as best you can from the dark mass of enemies ready to rend you limb from limb with all the unnatural might of Satan’s power, you are not alone. She is with you here. You can feel her presence, just as you feel the presence of the Lord, and the last whisper of doubt finally slips from your heart as you surrender entirely. Lord God Almighty, Lamb of the Cross, Our Father, deliver us. Let us be delivered. Thine the Kingdom. Thine the glory.

You reach the top of the stairs.

They’re pretty together, like a matching set of china. Eddie’s not even all that bulked-up, but Nancy looks so tiny and delicate next to him when their heads bend close, dark curls swaying. She laughs a lot when she’s around him. He seems to like making her laugh, or maybe it’s just that he’s a funny guy. They look like they could fit together on a Christmas card.

Eddie could probably do her better than Jonathan did, Steve thinks. He looks like he’d be good in bed. Kind of sweet, kind of mean, you know? Girls like that stuff. Jonathan might’ve gotten in a few lucky hits, back in the day, but Steve can’t really picture him being an animal in bed. He probably weeps gently to the tender strains of The Smiths. Eddie, on the other hand, is—he’s easy to picture. It’s basically Steve’s main hobby these days, picturing.

He tries not to picture Eddie and Nancy together. It happens just a couple times by accident, and it sends a wrong kind of shiver through his limbs, like tweaking a nerve.

It's not like Eddie’s given him all that much to work with, in terms of what he likes in bed. Steve hasn’t spent much time around another guy his age in a while, but even at high school kickbacks, he’d expect at least a little friendly chit-chat about preferences, fantasies, experiences, that kind of thing.

It doesn’t seem likely that Eddie’s a virgin. Steve’s pretty sure he’s seen some of the girls giggling over him, back when all Steve knew about Eddie “the Freak” Munson was that all the teachers and all the parents hated him, which meant that some girls with a screw loose had thought he was hot shit.

Not the popular girls, mostly, although back in junior year, Kathy Jacobson once swore up and down she’d heard the head cheerleader’s best friend saying she would. Everyone had given her shit for it, because everyone had known that Eddie was bad news.

It’s hard to remember that guy sometimes: Eddie “the Freak” Munson. Before they’d even ever crossed paths, it had been all over the middle school that the Freak had gone crazy on some kid’s ass, screaming like he’d been possessed, scratching and biting like a critter that had nothing left to lose. By high school, everyone knew that the Freak was a loser, but the kind of warped sicko loser that might set your dog on fire if you pissed him off.

They hadn’t known anything about him at all. When he’s bouncing around in the afternoons, full of energy, he talks a mile a minute about whatever’s on his mind, fingers brushing Steve’s shirtsleeve and pulling away. If he’s on a rant about something, Steve sometimes has to steer him away from the stove in case he knocks a pan over. It’s happened once or twice. In the mornings, Eddie’s even worse; he’ll trip over his own feet and slump into Steve’s shoulder, too zonked out to notice Steve’s not rushing to push him away. Late at night, Eddie’s thoughtful and calm, with a habit of talking the conversation around to the universe, the meaning of life, destiny, the stars, that kind of thing.

He’s just not the guy everyone ever thinks he is.

———

“Hey, you ever get any, like…groupies, before?” Steve asks. “When you were playing shows, and all that stuff.”

“Harrington, you might be overselling the Hideout as a venue ju-u-ust a smidge,” drawls Eddie. “You probably saw more action from all your little basketball groupies. What do they call them, ball bunnies?”

“What, no,” says Steve automatically. He’s not sure exactly what he’s saying no to, but it seems like a pretty safe bet.

“C’mon, I’ve been in the general vicinity of a game once or twice in my long and storied tenure at Hawkins High. You’re telling me you never used your superstar throwing-balls-into-laundry-baskets skills to pick up a starry-eyed ingenue?”

Obviously Steve can’t say that, but he’s not sure what he’s supposed to say instead. If Eddie were a girl, he’d know where the lines are, but he’s never met any girl who’d talk about this kind of thing like this. Well, other than Robin, but he thinks she probably doesn’t count because she’d be trying to pick up babes too if she weren’t so locked in with Vickie.

If Eddie were a girl, all of this would be so much easier, and he can’t even act like he doesn’t know what all of this is.

“I mean,” he says. “Ball bunnies? Where do you even get this shit, man? No, but hey, you—you never said. You’ve never had metal chicks coming up to you after a show all, like…ooh, I was so into all the noise you made up there, it’s so, uh…loud. Definitely doesn’t make my ears bleed. Super sexy.”

Eddie’s eyes narrow and he steeples his fingers. “Okay. I know you listen to some Dokken, Harrington, I’ve seen you bopping along to Shout at the Devil and Perfect Strangers, which means that right now, you…are being a little shit on purpose.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Steve sits back, grinning, and pops the cap on a Corona. “I’m just saying. Some total babe comes up to you, wants a private concert, you’re not gonna…strum a few chords?”

“Total babe, huh?” Eddie snorts.

“Yeah, you know…” Steve sketches a shape vaguely in the air. “Big hair, ripped denim, great legs…”

He’s seen them in the halls, smoking out by the football field, driving around town. Hawkins isn’t huge, but it’s big enough to have at least a handful of girls who look like they could be in a Whitesnake video: hair teased out into a massive mane, miniskirts and denim jackets with pins and patches. The kinds of girls that guys like Eddie drool over.

Eddie snorts. “Sounds like you’re trying to pitch a porno, man. I mean, certainly, I’ve had a respectable share of, ah, offers around the Hideout, but…I don’t think whatever you’re picturing up there—” he wiggles his fingers in Steve’s general direction— “is the high-fidelity documentary cut. Sorry to disappoint, but my life is no Penthouse letter.”

“Hey.” Steve clinks his bottle against Eddie’s. “No Penthouse letter…yet. Never say never, my guy.”

Eddie huffs out a dry laugh. “Yeah, I’m drowning in it over here, Harrington.”

“No, c’mon. You’ll be back on stage before you know it, with a crowd of babes throwing their underwear at you, all—I never thought it would happen to me…”

Steve pulls a fake-shocked face, and Eddie sputters into his drink. The little crease in the middle of his forehead is gone, though.

“When you make it big, you should totally keep me around to fend off all the girls trying to get backstage, man. I’ll save you from all the hotties who want a piece of Eddie Munson, badass rockstar and handsome devil. I’ll be, like, a personal bodyguard.”

He kind of likes that idea: following Eddie around on tour, handing him water and throwing a friendly arm around his shoulders as he leaves the stage. He’s seen Eddie playing enough by now, even just in his bedroom, to know how Eddie gets when he really gets into it. He can practically see the scene unfolding in front of him, with Eddie tearing offstage while the crowd roars for another encore, jumping onto Steve’s back like a monkey, a little rough and careless with all his buzzing energy let loose. Maybe he’d let Steve twist to set him gently on the ground, Steve’s hands lingering on his waist. Just to steady him.

Steve’s not so jazzed about the other scene that shows up a second later: Eddie in a hotel hallway, pressed up against some girl in heavy eyeliner and ripped stockings who’s totally gagging for it, detaching for a second to rasp see you in the morning, Harrington with his hungry grin. That’s not real either, though.

“Good,” says Robin. “I mean. I don’t know. She’s a little pissed at me. I keep having to cancel date nights for stupid Upside Down shit, which is so not my fault, but I have to keep giving her all these shitty excuses. It’s not like we ever find anything, anyway.”

“Yeah, that’s—that’s gotta suck.”

Robin tips her head back and groans. “I know I can’t tell her. I know! She wouldn’t even believe me, because she’s, y’know, normal!”

“Yeah, I mean, you’re just trying to protect her, right?”

“Exactly! She doesn’t get that it’s for her own good, so monsters don’t claw her beautiful face off!”

Steve nods. It’s weirdly unsettling, to hear Robin admit that her picture-perfect relationship might have a couple cracks in it. Obviously he cares about her and wants her to be happy, because they’re friends, but there’s a sick vindictive swoop in his belly that’s going I told you I told you I told you.

“Look, Robin…don’t worry about it, okay? We’ll kill Vecna ASAP and you’ll be back to regular date nights before you know it, no more monster mishaps to worry about.”

“I guess,” sighs Robin as she shoulders her bag. “I just think…what if she’s it for me, like what if she’s…you know, it?”

Steve’s mouth is dry. “You, uh. You think she might be...it?”

“Maybe! I don’t know! Yes? No? Maybe? But if by some mind-boggling chance she is, then…what if our whole life together is just built around a lie? Like, do I just never tell her this huge secret thing about me until we’re roommates in a nursing home and she already thinks I’m senile?”

“Jeez, Robin. You gotta stop worrying about all that stuff so much. I mean, if she’s it, does it really matter if she knows all the details of this shit? If you love someone, then—then, I mean, I think it’s fine to have a couple of secrets for their own good. In ten years it’s not even gonna matter, you know?”

They push through the doors of the station into the mellow, calm autumn dusk. Steve leans against the wall while Robin unchains her bike.

Before he knows he’s going to say it, he says: “Hey, you want to hang out tonight?”

“Shit. I would, Steve, but—I already blew Vickie off once this week, I can-not do it again or I’m gonna be in the doghouse for real.” She rubs her face. “I mean…maybe I can call her and reschedule for tomorrow?”

“Dude, no, don’t—c’mon, man, I’m not gonna cockblock you. Or, uh, whatever.”

“Next time, I swear, dingus. I know right now you’re…” Robin waves her hands around, face screwed up in distress, and Steve thinks—he doesn't know what it means for sure, but he thinks maybe she’s caught on to him, at least a little bit. “And I’m really really sorry!”

“Buckley, it’s the end of the world,” Steve tells her. He doesn't really want to have this conversation after all, anyway. “You should go. Have something nice. I’ll be fine, it’s no big deal.”

———

The way he feels about Eddie, the way he knows he feels now, it can’t be right. He knows it can’t be, because it’s like it’s got him in its teeth now, scruffed. He’s dragged around by the feeling, and it’s all he can do to stumble along without losing his feet.

He comes down to the kitchen in the mornings, to Eddie, and suddenly he’s having to white-knuckle the counter just to stop himself from reaching out. He hadn’t known exactly why he’d wanted to reach out at first, but then he’d thought very specifically about what might happen after he did, on the super slim chance Eddie wouldn’t be going to cuss him out or kick his ass. Now, every fucking morning’s like a highlight reel behind his eyelids, his busted brain sending out technicolor surround-sound suggestion after suggestion.

Eddie’s wrist arches as he pours his morning coffee, and Steve wants to lick the little knob of bone.

Eddie throws his head back to laugh, and Steve wants to leave bite marks like a collar around his neck.

Eddie belly-flops onto the couch, and Steve thinks about crawling on top of him and holding him down, just for a minute, to feel him startle and buck.

Eddie leans over Steve to grab something, and Steve starts to get some brand goddamn new ideas about what it might feel like if he held Steve down instead, which isn’t—it wouldn’t be—

Eddie definitely knows something’s up, and he’s been getting pretty fidgety about it. Steve guesses that if you’re cooped up all day and only really see one guy day-in and day-out, you’re probably going to be tuned in when he suddenly starts acting like a freak.

He can’t stop. It’s horrible. It’s like he doesn’t have any kind of say over the shit he does, how he acts, what he says. Eddie gets up in his space like usual, and all his body wants to do suddenly is throw a punch. He’s not a violent guy at heart, but this thing’s got all his wires crossed, like all his instincts are getting shuffled around. But it’s obviously not like he can just haul off and hit Eddie for no reason, that’s insane.

Steve’s feeling pretty insane these days, he guesses. He starts getting up earlier and coming home later, which sucks, actually, because it turns out that that’s a pretty effective way to see a lot less of Eddie, and it also turns out that Steve doesn’t really want to do that after all. So in the end, he puts up with it, because all his choices are bad: either he comes home to a dark, quiet house and pulls leftovers from the fridge, or he comes home and has a whole fucking second shift trying not to be too weird around Eddie, which is a losing play from the get-go.

“Um. Little personal space, Harrington?” says Eddie, when Steve accidentally backs him into a corner because he was darting between the pantry and the stove, grabbing and forgetting and discarding one thing after another, until Steve’s brain completely blows a fuse for a second and his body intercepts Eddie’s path to crowd him against the countertop.

“Man, stop fucking—zooming back and forth, you’re making me dizzy,” Steve says, instead of apologizing. They’re not touching at all, but his hands are flat on the countertop on either side of Eddie’s hips, keeping him there.

“Okay, okay, okay,” laughs Eddie. “Sor-ry, officer, didn’t realize this kitchen had a speed limit posted.”