thatâs the first miracle.
he makes it out of the upside down bloodied, wrecked, half-feral and laughing in that hysterical way people do when theyâve looked death in the face and somehow convinced it to blink first. vecna dies, the gates close, hawkins gets to limp forward pretending it can ever be normal again, and somehow the whole gang survives long enough to see what comes after the monsters.
and what comes after, for Eddie Munson and Steve Harrington, is each other.
it starts in the wreckage. in the hospital. in the weeks after when sleep wonât come easy and silence feels too much like the upside down pressing in through the walls. eddie is all nerves and sharp jokes and hands that shake when he thinks no oneâs looking. steve just⌠stays. keeps showing up with coffee, with dumb movies, with a presence so solid it starts to feel like a second heartbeat in the room.
by the time they kiss, it feels less like something new and more like finally naming something that had been circling them for months.
messy, awkward, soft in all the places eddie thought life had carved him hollow.
but love doesnât magically cauterize old wounds.
eddie is gay with a capital G. thereâs no hesitation in him there, no uncertainty, no room left for doubt after years of knowing exactly what the world wanted him to be and exactly how he didnât fit it.
and in the late 80s, that lands in eddieâs chest like a splinter he canât stop worrying at.
because he knows what people say.
that bi men are confused. greedy. halfway out the door. one foot in queerness, one foot in safety. that eventually they âpick a side,â and the side the world rewards is obvious.
eddie hates himself a little for how much it gets under his skin.
itâs never about not trusting steve.
itâs about trusting the world.
trusting the million ugly voices that have always whispered that men like steve eventually wake up and realize life would be easier with a woman, with a wife, with normalcy wrapped up in a suburban house and christmas cards and a life no one spits at.
so sometimes it hits him at night.
steve asleep beside him, warm and real and close enough to touch, and eddieâs brain still spirals.
what if this is a phase for him?
what if one day he wakes up and decides this was just surviving vecna, surviving trauma, surviving hawkins?
what if iâm just the bridge between the life he had and the life he actually wants?
he never means to say it out loud, but sometimes it leaks anyway. in the quiet hours. in the brittle moments after too much whiskey or too little sleep.
and every single time, steve answers the same way.
with his hands cupping eddieâs face, thumbs brushing the sharp edge of panic before it cuts too deep.
with soft, stubborn words.
he spends years proving it, not because he has to but because he loves him enough to understand that some fears donât die in one conversation. some of them need time. repetition. evidence.
it isnât until 1990 that it finally sinks all the way in.
and it takes tragedy to do it.
the call comes late on an april night, the kind where los angeles still hums outside the apartment windows, neon and traffic and the low throb of the city while corroded coffin is just starting to become something real.
years of smoking, years at the plant, years of brushing off the cough as nothing more than stubborn lungs and bad luck until suddenly itâs too late and there is no more pretending.
eddie goes white when he hears it.
like all the blood in him evacuates at once.
steve is already moving before the phone is even fully back in the cradle. grabbing keys. grabbing jackets. grabbing eddieâs shaking hands and forcing him to look at him long enough to say, âweâre going.â
they make it back to hawkins in record time, the drive a blur of headlights and half-formed prayers.
and somehow, against everything, eddie gets two months.
two months of wayne still being wayne, even as the cancer strips him thinner and quieter. two months of sitting by his bed in the trailer, then in the hospital, then back in the trailer when he insists on seeing home one more time. two months of stories, old jokes, cigarettes eddie catches himself reaching to take away before remembering thereâs no point now.
and steve stays through all of it.
quits his job without hesitation.
helps with medical bills, with insurance calls, with cooking meals wayne barely touches. he learns medication schedules. drives to appointments. sleeps in uncomfortable hospital chairs. holds eddie together when the cracks start showing.
he never once acts like itâs a burden.
wayne dies on the fourth of july.
because life has a cruel sense of timing.
fireworks are going off outside the hospital window, distant pops and bursts of color lighting the dark in ugly flashes while inside the room everything is still.
wayne exhales once, thin and tired.
and then he just⌠doesnât inhale again.
eddie makes a sound steve will hear in nightmares for the rest of his life.
not a scream. something worse. something raw and broken and so full of grief it sounds like itâs tearing him apart from the inside.
steve catches him before he hits the floor.
holds him while he sobs so hard his whole body shakes, while the fireworks keep booming outside like the world has the audacity to celebrate something.
wayne lies lifeless in the bed beside them.
and steve just holds on tighter.
after that, eddie disappears into the trailer.
into the bed that still smells faintly like old spice, machine oil, cigarettes sunk so deep into the mattress theyâll probably never leave.
doesnât come out for a week.
doesnât eat unless steve physically brings food in and even then it mostly goes cold.
the grief hollows him out.
turns him back into that scared kid who only ever really had one person in the world who chose him every single day.
after a week, steve has had enough.
just of watching grief eat him alive.
so he goes in there, peels him out of the sheets with hands that are firmer than usual but still gentle, dresses him in a black suit while eddie barely protests, half dazed and moving on instinct alone.
he stuffs him into the beamer.
and itâs only when they pull up to the church that eddie finally blinks hard enough to see.
the doors open and suddenly itâs everyone.
gareth. jeff. freak. all of corroded coffin already there, faces wrecked in that quiet way grief ages people.
then beyond them, the kids.
Eleven, Max Mayfield, Will Byers, Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair, and Dustin Henderson.
dustin is the first one to move, of course he is, crashing into eddie so hard it nearly knocks the breath from him before the others fold in too, one massive group hug of trembling shoulders and wet eyes and familiar faces.
then Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers are there. hopper gives him that dad-like pat on the shoulder first, rough and grounding, before hauling him into a bear hug that smells like coffee and flannel and safety. joyce rubs slow circles into his back while he breaks all over again.
even mr. and mrs. wheeler.
mrs. henderson giving him that soft, devastated little wave that somehow makes it all worse.
eddie turns then, dazed and wrecked and still half inside his grief, and looks at steve.
at the dark circles under his eyes from sleepless nights.
at the suit he probably put on in a rush after making phone calls eddie never even knew happened.
at the way heâs standing slightly behind him, close enough to catch him if he falls, far enough to let him have the moment.
and suddenly every stupid fear eddie has carried for years just⌠melts.
all those nights worrying steve would leave him for easier. for safer. for normal.
because this is what love looks like.
not promises whispered in the dark.
holding him through the ugliest thing heâs ever lived through.
building a funeral when eddie was too shattered to even remember it had to happen.
making sure wayne was mourned by every single life he touched.
making sure eddie was not alone for one second of it.
and it clicks so hard it almost steals the breath from him.
isnât halfway anything.
he is eddieâs ride or die.
and for the first time since the call came that april night, the grief in eddieâs chest makes room for something else.
