#crescentwolf

Steve watched you watch Dustin and Max and Lucas, your eyes bouncing between the kids you and him had somehow become babysitters for. The kids you loved and would protect with your own life.

The thought made Steve's chest tighten.

"Hey, uh, Henderson's not, uh, cursed is he?" Munson asked from his perch on the ground. To be fair, Eddie was taking this all fairly well. Steve was sure he would've run for the hills if a group of kids started telling him that the reason the whole town was out for his blood was because of some freak game character from an alternate dimension.

"Cursed? No, no, he's fine," Steve glanced at Henderson, who was still pacing, but his eyes moved to yours immediately, drawn to you like a magnet. "Mental? Absolutely." Drawn to your lips as he was reminded once again how badly he wanted to press his own to them.

"Boom!" Dustin exploded, making you jump a little. Steve wanted to rush to your side. "Bada... Bada... Boom! I was right!"

And Henderson was right, the little shit. Your body turned towards Steve, eyes lit up with amusement while Dustin explained how, yeah, Steve was right, he knew where all the good make-out spots in Hawkins were - he invented all of them for crying out loud - but Dustin was right too, something that made you smile when you saw how it irked Steve right to his core.

"He's got an attitude problem," Steve complained to you while you all walked to wherever the compass said the baby gate was.

"I know," you smiled, though it was a teasing kind, "he's kinda the worst," but you didn't mean it, and neither did he.

And Steve really thought he was about to have a chance - his big moment - when you were separated enough from the group and you tripped a little over a hidden branch and he reached out to grab your hand, to steady you, and when you squeezed tight and didn’t let go he thought this is it. This is my chance.

"Dustin, slow down!" Someone yelled ahead of you guys and Steve had to fight the urge not to run away with you, to turn around, go back to Skull Rock, take you with him kicking and screaming if he had to because something bad was about to go down at Lover's Lake. He just knew it.

What he didn't expect was for you to dive head first into a pitch black lake to look for a gate to a hell dimension.

Steve's heart almost dropped out of his ass when you took the lead, popping off your shoes and sweater, revealing the undershirt you had on underneath, momentarily distracting him so he couldn't stop you from plunging into the water before he could even get his mustard yellow sweater off his own body.

You didn't even have the flashlight with you.

Steve let out a string of curse words that probably would've made you laugh, had you not already been gone and by the time he caught up with you, you found the gate and was exactly as they had hypothesized, a snack-sized gate compared to the one El closed.

You reached forward, poking at the skin that covered the glowing red portal but Steve grabbed your hand and pushed off the ground, pulling you to the surface as quickly as possible.

"Are you crazy!?" He didn't mean to yell, really, it just... came out. You grabbed onto the side of the boat at the same time as him, taking a second to cast him an unreadable glance before completely ignoring him. Again.

"We found it."

Infuriating. You were infuriating.

And beautiful.

And amazing.

And getting pulled under the water.

And this time, Steve's heart really did fall out of his ass.

Eddie Munson didn’t think anyone in this town was cool enough for him to be into.

Sure, his D&D friends were cool, how could they not be? But that was a different kind of cool, and after years and years he was pretty damn sure nobody was metal enough for him to like like that.

Until he met you.

He didn’t even really know you - a few passing glances in the halls, a shared class or two - you stayed within your group of friends, not bothering to venture too far out. But you managed to talk him off the ledge while he had a piece of shattered glass pressed to The Hairs neck, and your general calmness in the face of danger kept him nearly glued to your side. There was several times where he felt himself gravitating towards you without noticing, having to consciously distance himself so you wouldn’t get weirded out by the freak.

But you never did.

And here you were, arms raised over your head, getting bandaged up by Steve and Nancy because you decided to dive into a dark lake and got yourself nearby eaten alive by daemon bats in a place Henderson called The Upside Down. And when you ripped one of those demobats nearly in half, Eddie almost proposed right then and there.

You were cool. You were metal. You were fuckin’ Hard. Rock.

Even as you bit back tears while Harrington tightened Nancy’s scrap of shirt around your exposed abdomen.

He wanted to hold your hand and kiss your pain away. Make you laugh so he could see that smile that belonged on the cover of every magazine in the country. Which was stupid, because, again, he didn’t even know you.

And he wanted to punch Harrington for hurting you. Which wasn’t a new feeling because Steve was always a capital D, Dick in school.

“You okay?” You appeared next to him while everyone high tailed it to the Wheeler house in search of the girls guns and another way out of here.

“Me? Shit, shouldn’t I be asking you that?“

You laughed a little and Eddie wondered what your lips tasted like.

“Honestly? I’ve been worse, you just found out about all this like, what, a couple hours ago? I’d be losing my shit if I were you,” you were wearing his denim vest to cover up what the bats had torn apart, the now tattered shirt you had been wearing under your sweater only covered the upper part of your body and Eddie was only being polite when he offered it to you. "Thanks for saving my ass back there by the way."

"Me? Shit, you saved your own ass. Very Ozzy of you." Eddie leaned closer to you as walked side by side, one of his feet lifted in the air to counter his balance and you smiled at him and didn't push him away when he got too close.

"You think so?"

Eddie watched the smile take over your cheeks and felt that all was right in the world again.

"Hell yeah, you're a total badass. The way you just dove into that water," Eddie just shook his head, still walking close enough that his arm would bump your own every couple steps, but you didn't move away and you didn't seem to mind and he couldn't find it in himself to stop, "shit, I could never do something like that."

"I think you'd be surprised by what you would do for the people you love... those people, those kids... that's my family and I'm not gonna let anybody hurt them again."

"That's pretty metal," was all Eddie could think to say. Was all he could say, because if he let his mouth just... go, he was afraid he might say too much.

And you smiled and laughed and Eddie promised himself he would get you out of here without another scratch.