Steve would never admit it to Tommy H or Carol, but his dreams were his only safe place. In Steve's dream world, he wasn't the son to absent parents or the perfect King Steve; he was whatever version of himself that would've never been allowed around the Harringtons or the population at Hawkins High. Steve was comforted by the anonymity that was created as he slept till an alarm or the sunlight peeking through his curtains woke him.

Before the Upside Down, Eddie Munson would laugh as he told the rest of Corroded Coffin about how much he slept during the weekend. But, groan when Uncle Wayne stomped into his bedroom at 4pm wondering, "Boy, since when did you become a vampire?"

Basically, Eddie found it hilarious that he could sleep 16 hours a day and still go to bed at 9pm every night. One thing about Eddie Munson before that fated afternoon with Chrissy Cunningham, he could sleep like a corpse and never worry about sleep avoiding his clutches. Because as Uncle Wayne or a member of Corroded Coffin could tell anyone, Eddie loved to sleep and would theoretically kill anyone who tried to disrupt his slumber.

After the Upside Down, Eddie Munson and Steve Harrington found solace in one another as they struggled to remember who they were before circumstances led them to emotional, mental, and physical scars. Steve could no longer find comfort in his dream world as it replayed his most traumatizing moments from the last couple of years. Eddie could no longer sleep like the dead since he actually knew what it felt like to lay limp and face death.

Eddie and Steve stare into one another's eyes as they share a pillow in Steve's massive bed. Eddie whispers to Steve about how envious he is of his past self as he dramatically recounts Uncle Wayne's stomps or Corroded Coffin's scoffs. As Eddie spoke, Steve wonders if Eddie could be trusted with his deepest secrets about who he wishes he could be.

As Eddie's giggles fade into the dark of the night, Steve clears in throat and begins to tell Eddie about the lack of safety he has felt since turning 12 and being handed bundles of money that were to be budgeted until his parents came back home from whatever business trip Jonathan Harrington needed to attend. Steve mumbles about Tommy and Carol, or anyone else, never being able to fill the hollow space that was this mausoleum of a house until Dustin Henderson hijacked Nancy's roses and forced Steve to go on a wild demo dog chase. With a smile that actually reaches Steve's eyes, he tells Eddie how he finally knew what a mutual love felt like when Robin refused to get a new job without Steve.

Eddie desperately wants to read between the lines and believe himself to be someone who brought something into Steve's life. The begging words he sends up to whatever universal force doesn't want to continue fucking his life are interrupted as Steve looks Eddie in the eyes and admits, "Eddie Munson, you brought light and noise into my life."

Steve Harrington never understood how significant it was to feel the sun on his skin until Eddie woke up from his coma after his encounter with the bats, and begged for the blinds in his hospital room to be opened. Eddie's smile changed as he adjusted to the new scars on his skin, but Steve has never seen something so beautiful in his life.

Steve flinched in noisy environments when he remembers how angry his father would get if Steve existed too loudly. But, since Eddie took Steve to the middle of nowhere and convinced him to just scream, Steve has found himself seeking out music that taught him to release his emotions instead of pushing them further and further down.

He never let himself linger too long on it in fear of what he might see if he let himself look. If he let himself dust off the dirt that lay on top of it, too overwhelmed by the possibility that he really hadn’t had himself figured out the way he thought he did.

But it’s true.

Like the sky knows clouds that filter in and out of eyesight, like the moon knows the unwavering devotion of the tide, Steve knows this to be a fact as irrefutable as the nature of gravity:

Eddie Munson is beautiful.

It’s in the way his hair bounces with every step. These springy, frizzy little curls that Steve desperately wants to know, intimately, the way he knows his own. Wants to compare them, wants to feel them in the spaces between his fingers, the sensitive parts that nothing else really touches.

It’s in the way he lights up a room as soon as he steps into it, a walking sun that burns so bright that he leaves the hole of every space he was once in great and gaping and singed at the edges. Everything he touches turns to gold, everyone he meets ruined for anyone else.

It’s in the way he carries himself. Tall when people are looking and small when they aren’t, like his body is a show that no one ever willingly buys tickets for but ends up seated front row at regardless.

Steve would buy tickets.

If he had known, if he had been brave enough when it really counted, he would have bought tickets.

There is no one like Eddie, and there never will be again.

But it doesn’t matter now.

Because Eddie is still beautiful, Steve thinks, even when he’s pale.

Even when his skin is sallow and sunken, even when his big brown eyes are tucked behind grayed eyelids.

Even when Steve himself was the one to shut them, but only after he spent nearly an hour gazing into their emptiness.

His hair is shorter now, the frayed edges trimmed by Wayne. He’d laughed as he did it, a sad little hitch in his throat, because apparently Eddie never let him cut his hair when he was younger.

When his blood flowed warm through his arteries, when his skin was still pink.

Wayne said he used to bounce his leg so hard that he was worried he was going to stab the scissors right through his thick skull.

So Eddie grew his hair out, split ends running wild.

But Steve still thought he was beautiful. Frizzy hair and all.

Steve’s never seen him dressed so fancy, not even for his own graduation.

But then again, he never got to try on that suit he borrowed from Wayne. Never got to see just how long the sleeves were, because he never got to be as tall as his uncle, did he?

No, Eddie never got the chance.

Never got the chance to he a normal boy with a normal childhood. To grow into the man he could have become and then into the world that was always too small to fit him.

Eddie Munson: born to die in Hawkins, Indiana.

If only he had tried just a little bit harder.

Fought just a little bit longer.

But he did his best, didn’t he?

Steve certainly thinks so.

Steve thinks he looks beautiful, now, still, always. He tucks a trimmed curl behind his ear, wishes he could have known what it would feel like if his skin were warm.

But it’s okay. He’ll know the feeling one day.

Next time.

Next time, they’ll try again. They’ll try harder.

Next time, Steve won’t be afraid to tell Eddie how beautiful he is.

Won’t be afraid of what comes after, because it will be different.

It won’t end with Eddie, sallow and skinny in a suit six sizes too big for him.

It won’t end with Eddie, pale and pretty as ever, laying in the coffin that’s been on reserve for him since the day he was born.

Next time will be different, see, because it won’t end.

They’ll do it right.

Steve will do it right.

And Eddie will still be beautiful, and Steve will tell him so.

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