#stranger things reader insert

warnings: this story overall is rated mature/explicit, and features an optional sex scene in the fourth chapter. general warnings for discussions of grief and mourning, depressive episodes, lots of blood, mild violence/injuries. eddie is very hungry and desperate and it makes him sort of mean and scary—his intentions are dubious for much of the story. mild discussion/depiction of bullying + harassment for both homophobic and anti-black reasons, one instance of non- or dub-con blood drinking but reader is very into it. eddie expresses very low self worth due to his vampirism.

★ chapter 1 ☆ chapter 2 ★ chapter 3 ☆ chapter 4 ★ chapter 5 ☆ chapter 6 ★ epilogue

The sunlight is pretty on your skin. He wonders how it always looks so smooth, polished, yellow light gleaming off of you like you’re glowing from the inside out, and—

Quit staring, creep. He squints his eyes shut, rubs his fingers into them until galaxies burst behind his eyelids.

…It’s sort of frustrating. He actually got really, really close to getting over it—to forgetting about that afternoon, your gentle eyes boring into him like you’d somehow noticed something beneath the surface and didn’t find it revolting or pitiable, like he wasn’t just “Eddie Munson” to you but maybe even a real human person; and on the other end, the nauseating, full-body freeze of a rejection that should’ve been obvious, the humiliation of having let the tiniest spark of bizarre optimism override his common sense and driving himself home with weeping butterflies in his stomach. Just when he’d finally stopped dwelling on it endlessly, pathetically, groaning into his pillow at night and carrying a mimic of you in the back of his mind even after you had long gone off to college, in waltzed Sinclair the Younger with his merry band of walking targets, and the bottle he'd sealed you away in burst like an artery and drenched his sorry ass all over again. 

It’s really not fair. 

Sometimes, as Hellfire would sit around a table, eating lunch or slaying beasts, Lucas would smile, or pout, or speak with an intonation so uncannily familiar that it would send his head reeling with deja vu, wiping every thought from his mind that didn't sound like your name. Undermining his own DM authority with inexplicable bouts of sputtering, red-faced confusion. 

He’d convinced himself that he was never going to see you again. You’d gone off to college (Notre Dame, he’d found out, when he finally figured out an unsuspicious way to ask), to bigger and better things, and why the hell would anyone who actually made it out of this miserable town ever willingly come back? He wouldn’t have been able to (almost) get over you otherwise, and that’s why, right now, it’s so damn hard to stop himself from staring at you, for the millionth time, like a goddamn—

…You’re shaking. Eddie freezes as soon as he notices. He ducks his head, trying to be less obvious as he watches your fingers lightly tremble against the table. You stretch them out, then clench them into a fist, but it doesn’t help much. Your eyes flit around at the world outside, thinking more than seeing, he guesses, and then scrunch tight in a wince. The deep breath you try to take only spreads the reaction further, stuttering as you release it, a shiver wracking your entire body, and when he sees you bite your bottom lip into your mouth to stop it quivering, he’s already rising to his feet before the thought to do so even passes through his mind. 

His stomach ties itself in knots, bouncing a fuzzy little mothball of anxiety off of his insides like a pinball machine as he inelegantly slides himself into the seat across from you. He squeezes his hands together in his lap until it feels like his rings are going to leave bruises at the bases of his fingers.

“Hey,” he says. His mouth is dry, and he’d give his right kidney for another beer. 

Your body stills itself for a moment as you stare at him in shock. It’s not the poorly concealed dread or sneering disgust or even the occasional outright fear that he’s used to receiving. It’s that same simple, quiet surprise you wore when you found him waiting outside of the high school, chainsmoking his nerves away. He doesn’t really know what that means.

“...Hi.” 

“Are you, uh…” That’s a stupid thing to ask. He swallows around nothing. “...How are you holding up?”

“I’m alright,” you insist, fast enough that you couldn’t have thought about it. 

And the thing is, you were. At least on the outside, you seemed to be taking all of this about a hundred times better than Eddie was, as cool and focused and levelheaded as you always were at school. (Especially during that one volleyball game he wouldn’t have been caught dead sneaking into, peering and hiding at the far end of the bleachers until someone caught his eye and made a face, most likely assuming he was sneaking glances for the wrong reasons.) The only time he’d ever seen you upset was when he knocked you over and hurt your wrist, and right now, the tremors that keep running up your arms are too close to that memory for comfort.

He stares a little too long, and you hide your shaking hands under the table just like he did. Nice going, jackass.

“...You sure?”  

You nod insistently, but when you open your mouth, you have trouble getting any sounds out. “...Are you—?”

Your voice comes out thick, heavy, cracking under pressure—it startles both of you. Embarrassed, you drop your head and take another slow breath, even shakier than the first, and your body goes rigid as you try to hold it back, to re-erect the dam that’s kept you from breaking down all this time, but it's a lost cause. You’re already tipping over the edge. Another shiver rattles your body, goosebumps blooming along your arms as you try to keep blinking back tears that are clearly about to overflow, and Eddie throws himself out of his seat again.

You jump a little, and he can feel some pointed eyes on him from the back of the RV, but he’s too focused to care. He rifles urgently through cabinets until he finds a roll of paper towels—close enough—and sets it out in front of you. Then, on a secondary, somewhat humiliating impulse, he shrugs the jacket off of his shoulders and holds it out to you.

“Can I…?”

You only gawk at him for a handful of seconds before you lean forward, making room for him to carefully drape it over your shoulders. He slips back into his seat, heart beating out of his chest, feeling like a human tornado. You’re still staring at him in a way he can’t really place, but with your tears held at bay for the moment, he’ll consider it a success. 

“...Thanks,” you tell him, less choked up than you were a minute ago. Another success. 

“Anytime,” he says; a little too honest.

It doesn’t occur to him until it’s too late that his leather jacket probably doesn’t smell great—it was definitely due for a freshening the last time he bothered to check, and that was before the torrent of fugitive-related stress sweats and not one but two unceremonious dips in Lover’s Lake, but if it bothers you at all, it doesn’t show. You take a moment to tear off a piece of paper towel and dab at your watery eyes, and the way you pull his jacket a little tighter around yourself before you speak again makes him feel funny.

“...I just got—scared, I guess,” you admit quietly, letting your eyes fall to the table between you. “For some reason, none of it really felt…real, until just now.”

“That’s okay,” he says. “...I’ve been scared shitless pretty much nonstop for the past week, so…I get it.”

Your eyebrows pull together in sympathy, your stare flickering back up to his face. 

“I'm sorry,” you say, stabbing him in the gut. 

Fuck me.

“No, no, it's…” He trails off, clears his throat, resists the urge to rip his hair out. Maybe the dogshit attempt at self-deprecating humor will land better if he's actually fucking smiling.  “…Honestly, part of me still kinda thinks the real Eddie is locked away, having a…full-on nervous breakdown in a padded cell somewhere, and this is all just one big, insanely vivid hallucination.” Why else would you be here?

“If it is, I feel bad for you,” you say—lighter now, matching his tone. “...If I was out of my mind and living in a dream world, I would hope it’d at least be a pleasant one. Not this nightmare.”  

“Yeah,” he agrees, scratching his jaw. “...Well, it’s not completely terrible.”

You give him a funny look. “It isn’t?”

“Nah.” He shakes his head, letting his eyes wander around. “...I mean, I’ve always wanted to hijack someone else’s motorhome, so I’m…kinda living the dream right now.”

That gets a genuine smile out of you, very nearly a laugh, and the way it feels to do so is definitely gonna be a problem for him. It isn’t long, though, before it falters at the edges, twisting back into a frown.

“...I’m sorry, Eddie,” you tell him again.

It stings just as bad the second time. “Why?”

“It’s just…not fair, that you had to get wrapped up in all this.” 

He shrugs. “You did too, didn’t you?”

“Not really,” you say. “I…pretty much bullied my way into tagging along.”

Not because of you. Because of her siblings. Obviously. His heart skips a beat anyway. 

“...There’s still time, y’know,” he says. “To bow out. No one’d blame you.” If you get hurt because of me again, I think I’ll probably drown myself.

You scoff at him. “And just sit at home while the rest of y’all risk your lives?”

Eddie shrugs. You stare at him hard, blinking faster, lips pulling taut—it’s building up again. …Christ, you’re fucking pretty.

“...I just have this…awful feeling,” you whisper to him, breathy and tight, your face tensing up like you’re close to crying again. It’s killing him. “That something’s gonna…go wrong, or fall apart, and I won’t be able to do anything about it.”

Eddie, in all honesty, thinks each and every one of you are fucked beyond belief; himself most of all, or at least second to poor Red. He hasn’t really had it in him to think about what that means for him yet—to stop pretending he doesn’t feel that cold, rotting hand gripping tighter and tighter around his throat—but the more time he spends running and hiding, the more he finds himself mentally sorting through his belongings. Taking stock of all of his tapes and records; his Warlock and his amps and all his other decent equipment; his good winter clothes and anything else well made and sturdy that he hasn’t worn out or hacked up beyond repair, trying to add it all up and figure out just how much it’d give Wayne to put towards a funeral.   

The thought of anything remotely along those lines running through your head makes him sick to his stomach. Without even looking, he rips off another piece of paper towel and holds it out to you. 

“...Nothing’s gonna happen,” he says with absurd confidence, only fortifying as he watches you wipe your tears away. He wants you to believe it, so he has to believe it, too. “And even if it does…these guys are veterans, right? You and I may be a couple of newbies, but they’ve gone through this Upside Down shit more times than I’ve been through the twelfth grade. Whatever happens, they can handle it, and we’ll just…follow their lead. It’ll be fine.” 

You scrutinize his face with watery eyes, and he swears, he can feel you beneath his skin. Down to the fucking bone. His hand, still laid out on the table from his offering, twitches with nerves, and your eyes catch on it for a moment. 

“...You really believe that?” you ask, politely neutral.

…Christ. How the hell do you do that? He feels like he’s made of paper—every machination of his stupid mind written out in lines across his forehead.

Eddie licks his lips, opens his mouth to speak again, but he goes stock still when you reach your hand out, still lightly trembling, hesitating before letting it fall into his. He only barely stops himself from snatching it away with a rushed apology, instinct convincing him you must’ve done it by accident, somehow. For a split second, he wonders what you’d do if he tried to kiss you.

The sting of a slap would probably do him good—set his mind straight. 

“...Yeah, I do,” he says. This time, he lets himself stare at you, unrelenting, like it’s a contest he can’t afford to lose, and he doesn’t. Your eyes fall uneasily down to your hands, resting in each others’ palms, and you curl your fingers a little tighter, brushing his skin so lightly that it tickles.

“I don’t know, Eddie.” 

He wishes he could record the way you say his name, play it on a loop, blast it through his headphones until his eardrums ring. His other hand reaches out, landing on top of yours, squeezing you half as tightly as he wants to. 

“Hey,” he calls with even more senseless confidence. “Look at me.” And you do.

He smiles at you, utterly full of shit—letting the stars you put in his eyes beam right back out at you. The worry in your brow smooths out and your tight jaw falls loose again, staring at him with such soft, thorough attention that it makes his cheeks burn. 

“We’ll be okay,” he tells you. “...I promise we’ll be okay.”

-

On the way down, you have to stop yourself from mindlessly resting your hand on your shoulder; the bandage hidden beneath your blouse where you’d let Eddie top himself off last night, determined to keep him as completely and utterly himself as possible. You can feel him anyway, obscurely close, comforting and anxiety inducing in equal parts. As soon as Nancy locks the door behind you, you force yourself to take a deep breath before you follow Steve and Robin down the stairs. They wander further into the room than you expect, your teeth gritting together as they pass the first few aisles before coming to a stop, and as soon as Nancy completes the little circle, Steve lets out a sigh.

“...Given the awkward silence, I’m guessing no one has any good news,” he begins. 

“Well, there’s no bad news, either,” Nancy says. “...There still haven’t been any more…victims, as far as Robin and I can tell.”

“But with no victims,” Robin tacks on, “there’s no way to find him. If he was leaving a trail, some kind of M.O. we could narrow down, then we might have a chance of catching him in the act, or setting up another ambush, but there’s just…nothing. He's a total ghost.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Steve says, furrowing his brow. “...If he’s going around biting people, you’d think someone would call the cops, or turn up missing, or—something.” 

“Maybe he isn’t,” Nancy suggests lightly. “...Biting people, that is.”

“No way, not possible,” Steve insists. “All he could talk about was how hungry he was—I mean, he was begging for it.”

You have to bite your cheek to hold back a scoff. 

“Then maybe he left town,” Nancy tries instead.

Steve calls your name. You startle a little, and it feels like you have to drag your eyes through quicksand to bring them up to his face. Whatever you were dreading—anger, resentment, disappointment—is nowhere to be found. You could almost believe that nothing ever happened, and that the other two are none the wiser.

“...Still nothing?” he asks. “No…dreams, or anything?”

You shake your head, and do your best not to tense up when you register Eddie inching closer. 

“If he left town,” Robin starts, “then isn’t it kind of…not our problem, anymore?”

Steve scoffs at her, and Robin shrugs, helpless. 

“If he’s gone, then he’s long gone,” she goes on, “and at that point, what the hell can we do? Plus, as far as we know, the only gates to the Upside Down are here in Hawkins, so if he really did skip town, he probably isn’t a Vecna-puppet, either.”

Steve gawks at her. “...Robin, he eats people.”

“Yeah, and that sucks, but I don’t know, if he isn’t killing anyone—”

“That we know of!” 

“I mean, Robin has a point,” Nancy interjects, stopping their bickering short. Steve’s eyes snap to hers, disbelieving. “...We can expand the search a little, try to see if there’s been anything weird in Bedford, Hartleyville, but…if he isn't hurting anyone, I don't really see a point in trying to hunt him down.”

“Nance, c’mon. You said it yourself, we don’t know what he’s capable of. If someone hadn’t found that man in time, if— if we hadn’t gotten there in time the other day—”

“But we did, Steve,” Nancy says, patient but firm. “We can’t prove he would’ve killed someone if he never has.”

“...What about Eleven?” Steve suggests—he glances at you before you even give him a look, already anticipating it. “I know we said we wouldn’t involve the kids if we could help it, but El could definitely find him.”

“And then what?” you chime in.

“What?”

“El finds Eddie, and then what?”

His mouth falls open, searching behind his eyes. “We…recapture him, make sure he can’t hurt anybody else, and—”

“He isn’t hurting anybody else,” you insist. “He only ever did when he was starved half to death. When he didn’t have a choice.” 

“Come on, that’s—” Steve looks to Nancy and Robin for backup and finds none. “Seriously?”

“I mean, it’d be one thing if we thought we could fix it,” Robin says. “Like, cure him. But we don’t, so… If he wants to be left alone, maybe we just…leave him alone.”

“...Nancy?”

She sighs. “...Locking him up didn’t help much the first time. I think our best bet is to just…wait. Maybe he'll come back on his own.”

“Hopefully not with a vengeance,” Robin adds.

Steve looks like he just realized the rest of you have all grown a second head when he wasn’t looking.

“...Are we seriously talking about just letting this—bloodsucking creep off the hook?”

“Betcha wouldn’t say it to my face.”

The sound of Eddie’s voice makes everyone jump, four faces snapping upwards to find him perched silently and weightlessly on top of a row of shelves, sitting on his heels and peeking over the edge. You blink up at him in shock, wondering how the hell he evaded even your notice. 

At the sight of him, Steve and Robin let out a jumbled flurry of curses—Steve stumbles back and Robin instinctually grabs the back of his shirt, half-wrenching him in front of her. Even Nancy, who surely expected a sudden appearance, takes a startled step away, almost enough to bump into you. Her hand seeks out her hip and then relaxes, resting in place.

Only lightly suppressing his pleasure, Eddie surveys the spooked faces below him and shifts around, sitting with his legs dangling off the side. 

“Oh, don’t stop on my account,” he says with a grin, lightly kicking his feet. “...Looks like I didn’t skip town, so that’s a bummer.”

“Eddie,” you groan.

“What? I was sitting there for like, three minutes. S’not my fault no one noticed me.” 

Steve’s eyes look close to falling out of his head. “Jesus, how are you—? It’s like two p.m.!”

“Thought you were safe, didn’t ya, Harrington?” Eddie teases. He pushes off the shelf entirely, landing on his feet with an effortless grace that doesn’t remotely match his appearance, and the others give him a wide berth.

“You promised to behave.” The glare you throw his way just bounces right off of him.

“This is me behaving,” he insists with a blameless grin, then shifts to give Nancy a polite nod. “Wheeler.” When he turns towards Steve and Robin, they both visibly tense up. “Oh—relax, you two. Jesus. I come in peace.”

“Eddie just wants to talk,” you supplement with sigh. 

Steve’s eyes flicker between you and him in disbelief. “You— Did you plan this?”

“I…didn’t know how else to get everyone in the same room,” you say. “How to prove he isn’t dangerous.” 

“Um, no offense or anything,” Robin pipes up, “but ‘isn’t dangerous’ does kind of feel like a stretch to me.”

You open your mouth to plead his case, but Eddie cuts you off.

“No, you’ve got a point, Buckley,” he agrees. “I am kinda dangerous these days…but, well, so is Little Miss NRA—” He jabs a thumb towards Nancy, whose eyebrows pop up. “—and no one seems to bat an eye at her walking around armed to the teeth like Rambo.” 

For some reason, that seems to be getting through to Robin. Steve just rolls his eyes.

“This isn’t—” You pinch the bridge of your nose in stress. “The point of this is, Eddie hasn’t killed anyone, even when he was out of control, and as long as he stays fed, he’s never gonna be out of control. He isn't a threat.”

Eddie, more than anyone else, makes a show of looking unconvinced, scratching idly at the back of his head. “Well, I don't know about that.”

You feel about as crazy as a lawyer would watching their client confess to the crime mid-case. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Eddie just snorts, as if this isn’t the make or break moment of his foreseeable future. “Hey, this is about…building trust, right? Clearing the air? So there’s no point in lying. …Let's call it ninety-percent control. Just, y’know—don’t threaten me with a good time.”

He gives you a sly little glance, and your face goes hot instantly. You could probably strangle him.

A brief, uneasy silence passes while that settles into place.

“...So, don’t bleed in front of the vampire, and you won’t have to worry about getting bit,” Nancy interprets carefully. Eddie shrugs, nods. “...Makes sense.” 

“None of this makes sense,” Steve insists, snapping out of his incredulous daze. “Did we all forget what happened the last time we saw him? The last time one of us trusted him?”

“Stop it,” you snap back—you aren't doing this with him again. “Eddie was only that desperate because we made him that desperate. He didn't hurt me, and he knew he wasn't gonna hurt me—didn't you?”

Caught in your inflamed stare, Eddie nods with perfect obedience. The humor has largely drained from his expression.

“He knew he wouldn't hurt me,” you repeat, “and he didn't, and he hasn't laid a hand on me since.” Eddie, thankfully, has the sense to suppress a reaction to that. “So if I can forgive him, the rest of you should sure as hell be able to.”

You’re addressing everyone, but you’re only looking at Steve. His expression is hard, reluctant, and he clearly wants to try to lecture you again, but whether he’s actually changing his tune or just aware of how outnumbered he is, all he does is take a deep, disgruntled breath.

Robin has calmed down enough to abandon her defensive posture behind Steve, and she steps back into the circle with a deep frown, curiosity killing any of her remaining apprehension. 

“...Um, Eddie?”

“Yeah, Buckley.”

“You seem, like, totally yourself again—not terrifying at all, which is great,” she notes. Eddie pops a grin. “And I'm guessing that has to do with…staying fed, but…if you haven't been, y'know, attacking anyone, where the hell have you been getting blood?”

Eddie’s mouth twitches a couple times as the question sits in the air, clearly his half-hearted attempt to wrestle down a smirk. Then, in a betrayal so heinous that he’ll be answering for it for days to come, he tosses a glance at you. It’s just the slightest flick, blink and you’ll miss it, but it’s more than enough for every other pair of eyes to land on you as well, igniting a fire in your cheeks, and only Nancy has the grace to keep her expression in check. Robin looks somewhere between concerned and repulsed, and Steve shakes his head, his chest puffing out like he's on the verge of blowing up. 

“That—doesn't seem healthy,” Robin says with a grimace. 

Steve half-shouts over her. “Munson, are you completely out of your—?!”

Eddie throws his hands up, eyes rolling theatrically. “Oh, for the— Jesus, what am I, a total shitbag? Settle down.” The corner of his mouth twitches up again as he glances at your glaring face. “Sinclair's…generous donations have been much appreciated, but I couldn't live off of just one source if I wanted to. I've been hanging around bars.”

“Bars?” Nancy prompts. 

“Yep.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “...Wait around at last call, and there's always a couple guys stumbling around, too shitfaced to know what hit ‘em. Y'know, big, sturdy guys who won't miss a good pint, and won't even remember getting bit the next morning. The, uh…secondhand buzz doesn't hurt, either.”

Nancy frowns. “Then why hasn't anyone gone to the cops?”

“Even if I was blackout drunk, I'd still freak out if I woke up with a bite mark,” Robin says. “Actually, I'd probably be more freaked out.”

Eddie opens his mouth, tapping one fang with the nail of his index finger.

“Doesn't look like a bite if there's only one gash,” he says, a little sparkle in his eyes. “It's probably less dangerous that way, too, with all the, uh…wriggling.”

…He's ruined you. The image in your mind of Eddie overpowering another grown man—maybe even a bigger, taller one—so he can take what he needs from them should be, if not horrifying, at the very least uncomfortable. Instead, all you feel is a situationally inappropriate flush, and a nasty little pinch of envy.

“That's…actually pretty smart,” Nancy says.

Eddie gives her a sarcastic smile. “Well, don't sound too impressed.”

She smiles back, apologetic. “Sorry.”

“...But what if someone does remember?” you ask. This is the first you’re hearing of this, too. “What if they recognize you?”

Eddie shrugs, unconcerned. “Who’s gonna believe them?”

“The same people who believed you were a satanic cult leader?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says, bitterness rising to the surface. “They can try to hunt me down again all they want. No one’s gonna find me, and even if they do, they sure as hell couldn’t catch me. If it freaks them out, then, fuck, that’s the least they deserve.”

He’s probably right. There were more than enough people crying wolf even during the panic—now that it’s in the past, it’d take a lot more than a couple drunkards’ testimonies to start it up again. But that doesn’t mean it won’t catch up with him eventually.

“...I still don’t like it,” you mutter sorely. Eddie gives you a sideways grin. 

“I keep telling you not to worry about me,” he says, dropping into a low, affectionate register, and just like that, it’s like you’re the only two people in the room. “...I’m a hell of a lot harder to kill than I used to be, babe. I’m not going anywhere.”

A ripple passes through everyone.

“...‘Babe’?” Robin repeats to no one, kind of a whisper.

Brow furrowed deeply, she looks towards Steve, and Steve is looking at nothing at all, staring into the middle distance with a tense expression until his eyes fall shut, nodding lightly to himself. Nancy ducks her head to hide a grin. You’re looking at Eddie like he’s crazy, your whole body burning like a furnace, and that’s enough for Eddie to startle, glancing around before hitting you with a painfully unrepentant smile.

“Ah, shit, sorry,” he breathes. “That was, uh…still a secret, huh?”

You just rub your hands over your face, scalding them with the heat in your cheeks until the need to move on from this moment boils over.

“...So, are we good?” you huff, more than ready to get this over with. 

“Good how?” Steve asks.

“Good as in we can put all of this shit to bed and just—move on with our lives?”

Everyone takes a moment to look at each other, deliberating or waiting for someone else to drop the verdict.  

“...I think we’re good,” Nancy is the first to say. 

She steps up to Eddie, holding her hand out. It shocks the hell out of him for some reason, glancing between her and her hand with alarm and slowly raising his, as if he half-expects her to yank it away at the last second, but she changes her mind. Taking another little step closer, she gives him a quick, light hug—a show of complete trust. Out of the corner of your eye, you notice Steve tensing up again as she does it.

“...Welcome back, Eddie,” she says simply. 

“F— Fuck, um…thanks, Whe— Uh, Nancy.”

You snort a little at how flustered it makes him and smile at the faux glare you get in response. Robin comes up next, holding her hand out with only minor hesitation. 

“...I know it might not seem that way, what with locking you in a basement, and everything,” Robin says as Eddie takes her hand, “but…it really is good to have you back. We all missed you.” 

Unable to land on a response, Eddie just nods and swallows, still looking much like a spooked prey animal as Robin steps back.

…There’s a pause. Eddie looks over to Steve almost reluctantly, and gets a mild, unimpressed glare in return, his arms crossed over his chest.

“...Harrington,” Eddie says carefully, clearing his throat. “...No hard feelings?”

“Steve,” Nancy prods quietly, and he deflates a little at the sound.

When Steve glances at you, you give him your best pleading stare, and when his expression softens a little bit, you know you've got him. With a long-suffering sigh, Steve sticks his hand out. 

“...No hard feelings,” he agrees flatly. “...Welcome back, man.”

You let out a deep, relieved exhale.

Eddie glances at you (as if to make sure you're seeing this shit, too) before he shakes Steve's hand with an impressed grin. 

“...Wow,” Eddie remarks afterwards, now that any sense of tension in the room has evaporated. “Shit.”

“So now what?” Robin asks.

Nancy shrugs. “Now, I…guess we tell everyone.”

“Dustin is gonna lose it,” Steve says with a tiny smile. 

Eddie tenses up instantly, clenching his jaw tight, and you interject as soon as you notice.

“I think we let Eddie decide what to do next,” you say, drawing everyone's eyes to you. “...It's his secret to tell, after all.”

“...Sure,” Nancy agrees easily. “Just…keep us updated, and we'll keep our mouths shut for the time being.”

Though still smiling, Nancy throws a very pointed look at Robin.

“Thanks,” you tell her.

Robin bristles immediately, but starts following as Nancy turns to leave nonetheless. “Are you kidding me? Steve's the one that blurts shit out all the time!”

“What? You blurt like, ten times as much as I do,” Steve argues, trailing along right after her.

“No, I ramble,” she bites back. “You blurt. This is so—”

“Uh—Steve?” you call on impulse just as he reaches the first step. He stops instantly, turning to you in question as Nancy and Robin disappear up the stairs, bickering in the distance.

“Yeah?” he asks—not the slightest bit reluctant, or inconvenienced, or even awkward. Just the same quiet concern he's always had. 

It takes you a moment to build up the nerve. “...Thanks,” you say. “And—I'm sorry, again.”

He pops an embarrassed grin. “What for? You…kinda had a point, and I was—”

“Worried,” you insist. “I know you were just worried about me, and I appreciate that.”

Steve's eyebrows pop up. “...I mean, I was gonna say I was being a jerk, but…yeah, that too. Seriously, don't mention it.”

Steve glances lightly at Eddie before going on, a little smirk growing on his face.

“...But, y'know, if Dracula ever gives you trouble, you know my number.”

You chuckle at him, and Eddie scoffs behind you. 

“Yeah, I do.”

Something Eddie does must make him smile a little wider before he continues on up the stairs. “See you around.”

“See you,” you agree.

Eddie comes up beside you. “Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out,” he calls after him obnoxiously, and you turn to swat him on the arm.

“What?” he asks, pretending to rub at the damage with a blinding smile. “He started it.”

Rolling your eyes, you tug his arms open and slot yourself between them, breathing out any residual anxiety into his shoulder. He wraps his arms around your lower back, gently rocking side to side.

“...I think you were right,” he says after a moment.

“About what?”

“Steve wanting to bash my head in.” 

You laugh into his leather jacket. “No, he doesn't.”

“Oh, he's aching for it. S'not a bad thing, though. All that babysitting and shit—he's got a strong protective instinct.”

Whether he's referring to babysitting you or the actual kids, you have no clue. 

“...It's not just because you bit me, though,” you say. “...I think he was also a little upset that I still picked you, anyway.”

“...Oh,” Eddie says, pulling back to look at you, his eyebrows flying up. “Does he know that we, uh…?”

“God, no,” you say, surging back in to hide your face in his neck. “I don't think I could even look him in the eye again if he did.”

“...So,” Eddie says ambiguously.

“So, what?”

“So, we've got, like…” He pulls back one arm to check his watch. “Five hours, minimum, until the sun goes down.”

He keeps his face strategically blank, but you're already shaking your head.

“No,” you say. “You're crazy.”

“Wha— I didn't even say anything!” He tries to look offended, but he's smiling too damn hard to sell it.

“You don't need to,” you say, and, feigning annoyance, you push back from him completely, crossing your arms. “Y'know what, I should've known you wouldn't act right today.”

He points at himself—who, me? “Babe, I did everything you asked me to.”

“There's that damn ‘babe’ again. I bet you did that on purpose.”

Eddie nearly cackles. “Sweetheart, honey, c'mon.”

He tries to close the space between you but you keep stubbornly creating more, and before you know it, he's pretending to chase you through the archive, disappearing entirely every now and then so he can pop out at you and ignite your wrath all over again. 

Whether he'll get what he's looking for when the game gets stale and he decides to actually catch you, you'll both have to wait and see, but if your feelings on the idea of wriggling in his arms haven't changed, the odds are probably in his favor.

…

Even with everyone’s doubts and concerns surrounding Eddie mostly alleviated, it takes a while for much to change. Letting him set the pace of his return has it proceeding at about a snail’s—it’s over a week before he’s built up the nerve to see his uncle, and despite Wayne’s tearful, overjoyed, and completely undisturbed reception, it doesn’t seem to reassure him much when it comes to anyone else. 

Eddie spends the next couple weeks gently shutting down the topic, if not blatantly avoiding it all together, and with his constant unwillingness to talk about it, it’s hard to gauge exactly what his hang-ups are. He’s scared—of course he’s scared—but you just can’t get him to understand that hiding away like this is a needless punishment for everyone involved, prolonging his own isolation as well as his friends’ grief. It gets to the point where you start to wonder if he ever intends to come back—the subject of the first genuine fight of your relationship. 

It takes a confrontation from Steve, of all people, to really get through to him. Eddie’s death hurt Dustin more than just about anyone else, and even as he tries to force it down in front of his friends, Steve can tell the weight of it only gets heavier as time goes on, and it drives him crazy having to keep Eddie’s return a secret from him. It isn’t until Steve describes, in heartbreaking detail, his last straw—Dustin failing to hold it in and breaking down in his arms, sobbing and shaking and clinging onto him like a little kid—that Eddie seems to realize just how deeply he’s missed. That his absence hurts more than his presence ever could. 

A couple days after that, you meet with Eddie under the guise of planning it all out; when and how to approach the others, whether you should do it all at once or one by one, warn them ahead of time or just show up out of the blue, and how the hell to explain it all. And you do talk about all of that, of course, drawing out the conversation as long as possible, but what you’re really doing is distracting him; not a remotely difficult task. Every time you let your eyes linger on his lips a little too long, ghost a slow, deliberate touch along his arm or his chest, or scratch at your own neck just to draw his eyes towards it, you throw his train of thought so far off of its tracks that it takes half an hour to get back on them, and before you know it, an hour long discussion ends up taking three. 

In fact, it’s all so effortless that when you return together to where Eddie’s been staying a little bit past midnight and notice him tense up, sensing instantly that something isn’t right, it almost makes you feel a little guilty. 

After Eddie’s first bite and escape, it turns out that he didn’t go all that far. With no safe place to stay and no friends that he was willing to seek out for help, he ended up searching through the abandoned neighborhood much like the rest of you had when you were looking for a place to trap him. Just a handful of blocks away, Eddie claimed the most presentable house he could find on the emptiest street possible, boarded up the windows, and turned it into his hideout. 

Presentable is a bit of a stretch, though. Most of the windows were already shattered before they were boarded up, and while Eddie did attempt to clean it all up before you started coming over, you still couldn’t be paid to walk around with your shoes off. A lot of furniture sits fallen or thrown askew and Eddie hasn’t bothered to fix much of it, and the areas that he has no real use for—the kitchen, for example—still look like a tornado passed through. Other people’s clothes have been tossed in random, haphazard piles, making room for his own growing collection in the master bedroom closet and dresser, and a lot of general belongings and household items are strewn in a similar state, just from his own exploration and careless rifling through drawers and cabinets. It’s not quite surprising when you think back to the state of the bedroom you remember from his old trailer, but at least that bedroom was a messy, chaotic portrait of himself and what he loved. The house he's been squatting in is just a damn mess.

Tonight, as he pulls your car up in front of the house, he stays frozen for long enough that you have to ask him what's wrong. He quietly cracks the door open, tenses up even more, and then tells you to stay in the car with an anxious glance. You have to bite your cheek to stop yourself from smiling.  

For all of ten seconds, you watch him creep towards the house, and then swiftly get out and follow him. When the door closes behind you—almost a slam in your attempt to create an audible warning—Eddie looks back to give you a full-on what the fuck? with his eyes. As you come up to him, he tugs you a little closer to whisper through his teeth.

“There’s people in the house.”

“Yeah, I figured,” you say, unbothered, and Eddie’s eye twitches. “...I’ll stay behind you.” 

He gives you a frustrated stare for a few seconds before he relents, huffing at you and turning around to continue around the side of the house, one arm stretched back as if to remind you to keep some distance. 

To keep up the illusion of being empty, Eddie boarded up the front door as well, so you follow him around to the back. He hesitates before opening the door, looking back at you again with a pointed stare and an insistent, wide-stretched hand—please, for the love of God, stay there. Biting back another smirk, you wrap your arms around yourself and nod, watching him mentally prepare himself for another moment before slipping into the house. Once again, you wait a few seconds before following him, and you step through the door to find him frozen a couple paces into the kitchen. He isn’t in sight yet, but between the familiar scents and familiar voices murmuring in the living room, he’s surely realized what’s going on. When you rest your hand on his arm, his head snaps towards you like he’s just seen a ghost, and you finally give him your smile.

“Go on,” you whisper to him. “They’re all here for you.”

He swallows hard, taking a few deep, slightly shaky breaths to work himself up to it, and you squeeze his hand all the while to ground him. He loosens his grasp, fingers slipping through yours as he hesitantly drags himself through the threshold and into the living room, and the house goes silent. 

You watch his eyes flicker around, taking in faces, and he wets his lips with his tongue, mouth dropping open with no idea what to say. About two seconds later, Dustin Henderson slams into him like an eighteen-wheeler. 

“Fuck,” Dustin groans loudly, muffled by Eddie’s shirt. “...Fuck!” 

Eddie’s brain stalls for a few seconds, freezing again with his arms floating awkwardly, but eventually he manages to reciprocate, lightly at first and then a little stronger.

“...Fuck is right, Henderson,” he says, clearing his throat, though you can hear the beginnings of a lump in it anyway. “Fuck is right.” 

You step into the doorway, and find Mike and Lucas hovering a few steps back, evidently outran by Dustin. 

“M’ so sorry, Eddie,” he chokes out next.

Eddie frowns. “You’re sorry?”

“I just left you there,” he cries. “I—didn’t know—”

“Nope,” Eddie interrupts sharply, shaking his head, holding him tighter. “No way. Drop that shit, man, don’t even think about it.”

“M’sorry.”

“Henderson, you apologize to me one more time and you’re dead meat. You hear me? You're dead.”

Dustin just whines in complaint, and Eddie finally pops a grin, blinking his watery eyes. “...I missed you, man.” 

The response he gets is garbled and heavily muffled as Dustin only cries harder, but you figure he returns the sentiment. With a little laugh and a sniffle, he looks up to the other two. Mike’s smiling like he can barely believe his eyes, and Lucas is fighting like hell to keep his face straight, rubbing discreetly at escaped tears in a way that makes your heart melt.

“Seems like Henderson’s gonna be snotting up my shirt for a while,” Eddie says, “so, uh…you might as well just bring it in.”

One after another, they throw themselves into him on either side of Dustin, and Eddie grunts at each impact, pretending like it hurt.

“Jesus—Christ, what have they been feeding you?”

The three boys practically swallow him—he’s quite literally up to his neck in them, and you wish someone would take a picture. After a few moments of desperate clinging, Lucas can’t keep quiet anymore.

“...Uh, Eddie?”

“Yeah, Sinclair?”

He hesitates before speaking, like he damn well knows better but needs to say it anyway. “...I’m sorry, too.”

Eddie glances over at you with a little smile, but it doesn’t show in his voice at all, raspy and stern. “What the hell did I just say to Henderson?”

“I know,” Lucas whines—a crack in his voice making you tear up, too, “but I am!”

“Alright, that’s it.” 

Eddie worms his arms back to himself so he can yank Mike (despite his lack of misbehavior) and Lucas off of him by their respective ears. They both cry out excessively in protest, but rub their sore ears with matching smiles. He’s a little gentler with Dustin, wrapping a hand around each of his arms and tugging to ease him back.

“C’mon, Dustin. I promise you’ll have the rest of our worldly lives to bruise the shit out of my ribcage.”

Reluctantly, Dustin steps back and nods, scrubbing his face with his hands. Eddie squeezes his shoulder one last time, and Mike carefully maneuvers him aside, rubbing his arm in support as he reels himself in.

After that, Eddie makes the rounds. Steve, Robin, and Nancy are all here of course, but so are Erica (who expresses her relief to see him alive by telling him that, if she were him and miraculously came back to life, the first thing she would’ve done is get a damn haircut), Jonathan and Will Byers, and El, the super-girl he heard so much about. The Hellfire kids buzz around Eddie all the while, introducing him to Will and El, launching into animated stories of past Upside Down related happenings and government conspiracies, jumbling up the events so terribly that practically everyone ends up chiming in to set the record straight or add forgotten details. He seems to be following along, but even you struggle to keep up, and you’ve already heard most of it by now. Eventually, when a tangent of a tangent ends up losing most of the room, Eddie grabs hold of the reins, clearing his throat excessively.

“...Now, if you’ll permit me to address the elephant in the room,” he says. “...What the hell did you people do to my house?” 

“First of all, this isn’t your house,” Dustin drones. “And second of all, you’re welcome.”

In the rough three hours you’d spent distracting Eddie, everyone else had gotten to work taming the hurricane of his living space. The ubiquitous clutter has been largely straightened out, full garbage bags set aside, boxes with sorted items that might be worth keeping or donating, and someone definitely ran a heavy-duty vacuum cleaner over the floors. All the traces of sticky, built up dust and spiderwebs have been cleaned away and all the haphazard furniture has been set orderly—they even managed to set up a makeshift fix for the broken couch (one leg was broken when Eddie found it, and the other you managed to break together) with cinderblocks and wood boards. 

Not only that, but one entire wall in the living room has been painted a deep, bloody red, and the other walls and boarded up windows have been lightly decorated with band posters—some clearly handmade, some probably from the record store or donated from their own rooms—and drawings of fantasy characters and monsters. Eddie takes the time to look over each and every one of them, tracing them with his eyes and his fingers like it’s all the most incredible thing he’s ever seen in his life.

“We could’ve done more if you were gone longer, but, uh…it’s a start,” Lucas says bashfully. Eddie has no idea what to say.

Then come the presents. Nancy and Robin drag him over to the couch and shove him down in the middle of it while the kids gather what they have to show him. When you catch his eyes, they’re as wide as saucers, reacting to an influx of loving gestures in the same way they would to impending torture.

With his eyes obediently covered by collective demand, everyone scrambles to arrange his gifts on the coffee table in front of him—about 10 tapes from various metal bands (a few of which were already his, borrowed by one of the kids before shit hit the fan), a brand new walkman, and two thrifted band tees, Iron Maiden and Judas Priest, to restart his destroyed collection. Finally, Dustin and Lucas unveil a brand new Corroded Coffin banner, hand-painted just this morning. The strokes of the lettering vary in thickness and quality, clearly done by a variety of hands, but the little symbols that dance around the edges—instruments and vampiric motifs, a skull and a fireball and, of course, a corroded coffin—have Will written all over them. It all touches Eddie so much that he has to hide his face, setting off a chorus of gentle teasing and awwing and comforting touches so egregious that he pretends to get pissed off just to escape it.  

By the early morning hours, things have calmed down, everyone sitting around in chairs or on the carpet, passing around snacks and making each other cups of coffee. In planning this whole surprise, none of you had told the kids much beyond hey, Eddie’s back, try not to stare at the fangs, so naturally, at this point, their curiosity about what exactly happened to him is too extreme to keep suppressing. You’re impressed they even made it this far. 

While he clearly sidesteps any attempts to go into detail about how he got back from the Upside Down and what the hell he’s been doing since, he does entertain about a hundred increasingly silly questions about his condition on its own. Do you really drink blood? What does it taste like? Do you show up in mirrors? Can I touch your fangs? Do you need an invitation to enter someone’s home? Can you fly? Can you turn into a bat? Have you tried to turn into a bat? How do you know you can’t turn into a bat if you haven’t even tried to? He even agrees to run a few impromptu tests for their entertainment, biting into a clove of garlic and spitting it back out—not because it hurt, just because it tasted like shit—and holding Nancy's sterling silver ring in his hand to see if it burns his flesh. When he mentions that he’s a lot stronger than he used to be, Dustin doesn’t believe him until Eddie grabs him by the scruff and lifts him clean off his feet with one arm, cackling at the way he shrieks.  

“What about like, vampire mind powers?” Mike asks. “Can you hypnotize people?”

“Or like, charm them?” Will throws in.

Eddie’s mouth drops open, but he hesitates.

“...Close enough,” Steve mutters under his breath, earning him an elbow from Robin. “Ow.”

“What does that mean?” Dustin's head snaps to Steve, then back towards Eddie. “What does he mean by that?”

“Uh…” Eddie continues to balk, either unsure of how to explain it, or reluctant to divulge that potentially sketchy information in the first place.

“Eddie can…connect with peoples’ minds,” you say on his behalf, as diplomatically as possible. “It’s how we found him.”

“Holy shit,” Mike says. “Just like El!” 

Eddie shakes his head excessively. “No. No, man, not even close.”

“Try it,” Eleven says, and Eddie visibly startles to be addressed by her directly. “On me.”

His eyes flit around the room. “Wh— …Like, right now?”

“Yes, now, do it now!” Dustin urges. 

“Henderson—relax,” Steve scolds lightly.

Eddie seems to realize he’s not getting out of this easily. “...I mean, shit, I can try, but—I've never done it with a million fuckin’ eyes on me, so if I’m having—performance issues, or—”

“Don’t worry,” El cuts him off. “I can help.”

“...Shit,” Eddie breathes. “...Alright, then, fuck it. Just—everyone shut the hell up.”

Everyone does as they’re told. El gets up and carefully moves his things out of the way so she can sit herself on the coffee table in front of him. With one last nervous glance around the room, Eddie twitches his head to the side, closes his eyes, and tries to focus. 

His brow furrows, gradually pulling tighter, and after a few seconds, you start to feel something, a gentle push and pull, waning and waxing. You have to suppress a gasp as he grasps onto it properly and pulls the plug, quieting the gentle noise in the back of your mind. A moment later, Eleven hums in acknowledgement.

“...Almost,” she encourages. “I can feel it.”

Though you can’t feel any of it, you get the sense that, rather than dipping into her mind himself, El latches onto his probe and yanks him past the barrier. They both react when the connection is formed, El with another curious hum, and Eddie with a full body jolt and:

“Oh—fuck, what the fuck?”

El investigates in silence for about a minute, during which Eddie makes a continuous series of severely uncomfortable expressions. 

“...Interesting,” she notes eventually. “It’s like…a very weak projection, but…it’s open on both ends.”

“What does that mean?” Mike asks quietly.

“It means…he is in my mind, but I’m in his, as well. I can see… Oh!”

Suddenly, she startles, abruptly pulling back and wiping the blood from her nose, and Eddie jumps just as badly on the way out, cursing under his breath. 

Mike winces sympathetically. “El? What happened?”

“Nothing,” she insists quickly. “Just—I didn’t want to snoop.”

She stands, quickly scurrying back to her place on the floor next to Mike, visibly red in the face—it makes you nervous enough to trigger an odd flutter in your stomach, and when you catch her sneaking a quick glance at you, confirming your fears, it sets off your own face twice as hot. Eddie keeps his eyes closed until you feel the familiar chill of him settling back in your mind and then drops his head, scrubbing his hands over his face. 

“Jesus…Christ, that was exhausting,” he mumbles.

The kids try to quietly prod at El over what the hell she saw (and you see her give Lucas a nervous glance before insisting she really can’t say), up until Eddie raises his head and the room goes silent again, all eyes on him.

“...What?” he asks, tensing up in alarm.

“...Dude,” Dustin says.

“Your eyes,” Lucas finishes. 

“Shit, sorry,” Eddie says, rubbing at them with his fingers as if that could make it go away. “It’s just—it’s the blood.”

“No way,” Mike corrects. “...I mean, it’s freaky, but—”

“It’s fucking sick,” says Dustin. 

“Totally metal,” Lucas adds.

“...Yeah?” Eddie asks, uncertain as he lets his hands fall away. 

“Absolutely.”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Yeah, man. Especially with the fangs.”

Eddie grins wide. “Y’mean these?”

The kids react to a clear look at his fangs with all the jittery excitement of a corny jumpscare in a low-budget horror movie, fawning over how awesome and badass and completely fucking metal the whole “rising from the dead as a vampire” thing is in a way you’re sure Eddie hasn’t really allowed himself to indulge in yet. After all the angst you’ve seen from him since he came back to you, it’s very gratifying to see him so happy, smiling and showing off and goofing around with friends, exactly where you’ve been so desperate to bring him—to convince him he still deserves.

Pretty soon, the time of night catches up with everyone. El starts dozing off on Mike’s shoulder, Steve and Robin keep bumping their heads together as they nod off to the side, and Erica has somehow ended up curled up with her head on Nancy’s thigh. When Dustin accidentally lets his volume peak out of control, startling Steve awake mid-snore, he launches himself all the way to his feet and declares it time for everyone to go the hell home. Sleep deprived bodies stumble around, saying goodnight to Eddie and sorting themselves into carpool groups as they filter out of the house. You alone stay exactly where you are, and you get a couple of odd looks for it. 

“Hey, sis,” Lucas calls back to you with a frown, “you coming?”

Eddie lets his head fall back against the couch, smirking at the ceiling. You resist the urge to throw something at him.

“I’ll be back later,” you say. 

His face just twists into a deeper frown, but Nancy pushes at his shoulder, keeping him moving before he can ask any further questions. 

As soon as the door closes behind them, you pull yourself to your feet and slink silently over to Eddie, and he watches you with lidded eyes, his head still tilted back. 

“...So,” you begin, sitting yourself right on top of his spread thighs. His hands land on your hips, playing with the belt loops on your jeans, and you rest one hand on the couch next to his head to steady yourself while the other draws aimless designs on his chest. “Did you like your surprise party?”

Eddie chuckles beneath you, narrowing his eyes just slightly.

“...You know I have to get you back for this, right?”

You raise an eyebrow at him, cocking your head to the side. “For what? Surrounding you with friends and getting your pig-sty cleaned up for you?”

“Yep,” he says, his grin spreading until he shows off his fangs again, and your stomach does a flip in anticipation. “...You’re gonna get it big time.”

…

He always makes sure you feel him coming.

Sometimes your nights together are planned in advance, sometimes they’re more spontaneous, but not once have they ever taken place within a stone’s throw of the Sinclair residence. Tonight, though, based on the speed he’s moving (and the lack of pauses, when he’d usually wait for you to play your part in the push and pull), you’re pretty sure it’s an unspoken rule that he’s intent on breaking. He must be a bad influence on you, too, cause you don’t feel half as much dread as you do blushing excitement. 

Unlike when he came to you at Steve’s house, he doesn’t bother to bring himself up to the window to let you know he’s here. Three quiet taps sound at your window, and you pull the curtain aside to find him on your front lawn, tossing pebbles at your window in full view of the neighbors. He gives you a wave and you wrench the window open with a vengeance. 

“What are you doing?” you hiss down at him. “Get up here!”

Eddie giggles, climbing up to your window with an ease and quickness that makes your head spin.

“It’s called romance,” he tells you as he steps through, kicking his shoes off automatically. “...What’s the point in dating a cool, dangerous bad boy your parents would hate if he doesn’t sneak into your bedroom in the middle of the night?”

You raise an eyebrow at him, unimpressed. “Well, if you find one of those somewhere, just point him in my direction.”

His jaw drops with the utmost scandal, and you throw your arms around his neck with a giggle to placate him.

“Just kidding,” you assure him, surging up for a kiss, but he tilts his head away stubbornly to dodge it, his arms unmoving at his sides. “Eddie.”

“Nope.”

You click your tongue at him and pout. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

He snaps his head back to you just to show you the cartoonishly disbelieving look on his face. “Oh, I’m too sensitive?”

The outrage passes to you just as a smile breaks out on his face, and any words you may have for him die in your throat as he lifts you into the air. Faster than you can react to, he steps further into the room and tosses you onto your bed, but before he can follow, you shoot out your hand with a pointed finger.

“Aht!” you scold, and he freezes, looking at you with big eyes and a startled smile. “Not on the bed.”

“Just trying to get comfortable,” he says with an exaggerated pout, and you roll your eyes light-heartedly.

Slipping off the bed, you walk over to your desk, taking a moment to kick the chair aside and methodically organize and move your things out of the way. When you glance back at him, Eddie stands exactly where you left him, watching you with amusement, apparently waiting for permission to move again, and you can't help but smirk. You've got him trained pretty damn well.

When you're satisfied with the space you've created, you carefully jump up to sit on your desk, one hand planted behind you, the other beckoning him towards you with one finger.

“Alright, pretty boy,” you permit.

Eddie's eyebrows pop up for a second. Then, he clasps his hands behind his back, taking small, bashful steps towards you, tilting his head down so he can flutter his eyelashes at you.

“...You think I'm pretty?” he asks, pretending to be shy.

“Mhm,” you hum sweetly, watching him with hungry eyes, patting your thigh to hurry him up. The sight of your legs spreading to make room for him between them almost makes him break character. “...Especially when your mouth is busy.”

Breaking into a wicked grin, Eddie closes the remaining space in an instant and his mouth is on you just as fast, making you gasp against his lips. He kisses you like he's trying to steal something from you, greedy and incessant, following you stubbornly even as you try to break away. When you finally manage to escape, panting a couple times to catch your breath, Eddie doesn't stop for a second, his mouth finding your jaw, nipping at your ear lobe, pressing wet kisses down your neck and across your collarbone. 

“Jesus, Eddie,” you giggle, squirming a little in his grasp, smacking at one of his hands when it gets a little too adventurous. “Down, boy. We're in my parents’ house.”

He whines next to your ear, a faux puppy dog cry, and you grab his face, squishing his cheeks a little, closely examining his theatrical pout.

“I just missed you so much,” he explains. 

“Yeah? How much?”

Happy to be asked, he grabs your hand, pressing a kiss to each fingertip before trailing them up your arm.

“...Every hour— minute— second, without you near— is excruciating— soul-rending agony.”

“Wow,” you say, grinning unbearably. “...It's a miracle you survived the trip across town.” 

“That it is,” he agrees soberly. “But, fear not, my dearest lady, for not even death could keep me from your…lovely, tantalizing neck.”

He punctuates the thought with a soft, tender kiss right at your pulse point, and you hate knowing that he can feel the way it quickens under the affection.

“You are so goddamn corny.” 

He squints his eyes at you. “Yeah, but corny kinda does it for you, huh?”

He kisses you again. Slower this time, letting each press of his lips really soak in, only lightly teasing you with his tongue as his hand rises to cup the back of your head, holding you still. You let your fingers thread into his hair, holding him just as close. It’s almost enough for your brain to go numb, all your worries hollowed out and filled up with the feeling of him instead, but…not entirely. Eddie must pick up on it somehow; your slight distraction, delayed responses, attention still caught half-way in your own mind. He pulls away with one last peck, giving you a searching look that makes you pout.

“You alright?” he asks. 

You nod. “Yeah, just…thinking too hard today, I guess.”

“Yeah?” He rubs his hand along your arm in comfort. “Thinking about what?”

You struggle to put it into words. “...I’ve just spent so long focusing on you—on…finding you, getting you home safe—that, well… Now that you are, and you don’t need me anymore, I…don’t really know what to do with myself.”

“...Well, first of all, I do still need you,” he teases. “Very, very badly. But, uh…that’s alright, isn’t it? Just…relax for a while. God knows you’ve earned it.”

You huff. “Yeah, but there’s a difference between taking a break and just…floating around aimlessly.”

“Okay.” Eddie shrugs. “...So, what do you want to do?”

“That’s the problem,” you say. “I…don’t know. I had a plan, and I was doing so goddamn well with it, but then…Vecna happened, and you happened, and now I…don’t even feel like the same person anymore. It feels crazy to just try and pick back up where I left off as if everything isn’t different now.”

Eddie nods, processing, but clearly your dilemma doesn’t seem like much of a dilemma to him. “...Then you’ll come up with a new plan,” he says. “Because you’re smart, and capable, and in the meantime, you can relax and take as much time as you need to figure it all out. There’s no rush.”

You swallow, flicking your eyes down, looking the zombie on his Iron Maiden shirt in the eye instead of him. “...If I wanna be readmitted to Notre Dame, there is,” you mutter.

Eddie’s quiet for a moment. “...Do you?”

You just chew on your bottom lip, mind racing and yet somehow still blank.

“Hey,” he says quietly, tilting your chin up to look at him again. He doesn’t look upset at all, but you can’t help but feel a cold drop of guilt in your stomach anyway. “It’s alright if you do.”

“...I don’t know,” you admit. 

His eyes graze over your face, making sure you mean it, and he smiles. 

“Then you’ll figure it out,” he says. “And if you do end up going, I’ll be right here. Waiting. Counting down the days until you can visit like the proud, besotted washout that I am, and doing everything in my power to send you just…the nastiest, raunchiest, most depraved wet dreams that my terrible mind can imagine, night after night after night.”  

A laugh bursts out of you, but you grab him by the collar of his jacket and give him a shake. “I really can’t stand you.”

“Good thing you’re sitting, then,” he mutters, bumping his nose into yours.

You tug him into a faux-angry kiss, rougher and hungrier, pushing your tongue past the seam of his mouth. Eddie groans into it, tilting his head and sucking you in deeper, and when you decide to put an end to it, he rests his forehead against yours, eyes still closed like he’s already savoring it in his memory.

“Fuck, man,” he rasps, almost like it hurts. “...You think your dorm would let you bring a pet?”

This time, you both laugh until he cuts it off with another deep kiss, which turns into him getting handsy again, and before you know it, his lips are traveling oh-so-slowly along your jaw. 

“Eddie.”

“Relax, babe,” he tells you. “If anyone so much as looks in the direction of that door, I’ll know about it.”

“If you aren’t too distracted to notice,” you argue weakly. 

He chuckles at your worry and then brushes his lips against your neck, kissing and licking and then sucking until you shudder against him. The hum that vibrates against your skin sounds encouraging as he raises one hand to cup your neck, sucking even harder until he pulls a little whine out of you, and he sighs. 

“Pretty girl makes pretty noises, too, huh?” he mutters into you. 

Your entire body floods with heat, and each moment that passes makes it harder and harder to remain vigilant for the both of you. When he lowers the hand at your neck to slip it under the hem of your shirt you gasp and stiffen, but you can’t even bring yourself to scold him as his cold palm cups your breast, his thumb sliding back and forth over your nipple, igniting little sparks in the sensitive skin. His tongue runs flat and heavy along the side of your neck, and you know you’re doomed as you feel the prickle of his fangs, digging in just enough to tease you.

Then, he stops. Waits. Even the hand at your breast has gone still and you clench your jaw in frustration, knowing exactly what the hell he’s doing. You jerk against him in complaint, and Eddie still doesn’t move, but you can feel his cheeks pull into a smile. It takes less than half a minute for you to give in.

“...Eddie, plea—”

The moment shatters like glass as your door opens abruptly, the unmistakable voice of your brother calling your name, and a surge of adrenaline goes through you as you open your eyes, looking over Eddie’s shoulder to find him frozen in your doorway, wearing a carbon copy of your wide-eyed, mortified expression. Eddie, at least, has the good sense to take his hand out of your shirt before he turns halfway to address him.

“Oh, hey, Sinclair,” he says, deeply unconcerned, smiling at Lucas as if nothing were amiss. “...Do you mind? We’re, uh…kinda busy here.”

You both remain paralyzed until Eddie claps his hand on your thigh a couple times and Lucas jumps out of his skin, snapping out of his disbelief to scramble out of the room in horror, a rushed “Sorry!” thrown over his shoulder as he goes. 

“...Guess the cat is out of the bag, huh?”

When Eddie turns back to you with a smirk, just on the edge of bursting out laughing, you finally let out the breath you were holding in. He opens his mouth to say something else, and no sooner than he does, you attack.  

“What the hell is wrong with you?!”

His laugh bounces off your bedroom walls. “I’m sorry, babe, it was just too—ouch. I couldn’t—ow, ow, fuck!”

“The next time I see you on this roof, I swear to God, I’m calling the cops.”

“You don’t mean that, sweetheart, I— Shit, no, not the hair! Please, baby, I’m sorry—I’m sorry!”

What should’ve been a sweet, romantic little tryst after dark ends up culminating in your lunatic of a lover back on his knees for the better part of an hour, begging for forgiveness in a variety of increasingly ridiculous ways. As hard as you try to remain stubborn, it’s no use—you’ve always been weak for his antics, and you’re pretty sure he only gets away with all that he does because he looks so damn good apologizing.

Eddie Munson might just be the biggest headache of your life. 

If you were as religious as your mother is, you’d wonder if he was made for you—as a gift or as a punishment, you aren’t quite sure yet. 

But as you reach down to hold him by his jaw, tilting it up to get a better look at his beaming, sinless face, staring adoringly up at you with dimples and smile lines, charming creases and long eyelashes around the biggest, roundest, sweetest brown eyes you’ve ever seen, you know that if anything ever happens to him—if he even thinks about trying to leave you again—you’ll drag his scruffy ass back out of hell yourself, as many times as he needs you to.

-

The unmistakable clang of someone’s body colliding with a row of lockers is all it takes for you to remember exactly what you’re seeing. 

As the crowd clears even further, repelled by a confrontation that no one sane wanted any part of, you get a proper look at what’s happening. Three garish lettermans crowd around a scrawny underclassman, only mildly recognizable. 

Liam. His name is Liam Chen. …You didn’t know him at all, though, so you aren’t sure how you remember that. 

You’re still a bit too far to make out what they’re saying, or maybe your memory of the exchange is too muddled to recall, displaced by the shock of seeing it. He owes them something, apparently; them being Sean and probably Danny, led unsurprisingly by the overblown ego of Tommy H.—why is it always Tommy H.? 

Your own conversation peters out, the three of you coming to a stop, watching warily. Tiff, as unimpressed by the sight as she was by everything, scoffs beside you.

“If they spent half as much time practicing as they did shaking down sophomores, maybe they’d actually make it to nationals.” 

Becky giggles, punctuated as usual by a half-endearing snort. They try to keep walking, then, but hesitate as your feet remain planted, watching. Becky calls your name, unbothered.

“Let’s go,” she whines. “If I’m late again, Vanderbilt’s gonna kill me.”

“You wouldn’t be late if you didn’t have to scrape all that paint off your face every day.”

“Shut up, Tiff.”

…You can’t stop it. You tried, once, and practically got laughed out of the building. Practice is in about 15 minutes, you’d guess, so there’s still time to run and get a teacher, maybe even to the front office, but it’d definitely be social suicide. You’re already on thin ice, especially after the volleyball drama (team captain Connie thought that giving your neighbor a very reluctant ride to school one time meant you were trying to steal her ugly boyfriend,) and snitching on a couple of Hawkins High golden boys would be a surefire way to spend your last year as a persona non grata in every circle you’re a part of. 

Tiff is speaking now, her own exasperated vocal fry urging you to get a move on, but all you hear is the squeak of sneakers on linoleum, louder and closer until someone bursts past you, a flurry of wild brown waves and light denim, close enough to pull a gasp out of you.

Eddie Munson. 

As soon as you lay eyes on him, everything seems to come into focus, sharpening at the edges. Colors brighten like varnish spread over a painting, details fill in; you can see and smell and hear a little better, like a light fog you barely noticed has suddenly cleared away.

The burst of air that hits you a second later smells like him—smoke, weed and the burning tar of cigarettes, punctuated by something slightly pungent, herbal and musky, probably trying to cover it up. It sticks to you for a moment, flavoring the air you take in.

Eddie comes to a stop about halfway between you and the confrontation, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Wow, wouldja look at that,” he remarks loudly, cocking his head and half of his torso aside, catching the group’s attention. When he sees him, Tommy rolls his eyes so hard that his entire head moves in a circle. “Fundraising again, fellas? I didn’t realize our star team was so strapped for cash.”

Becky recoils immediately, jerking back half a step with a little whine that sounds a lot like ew. Tiff’s standard look of distaste twists into even more of a sneer.

“Jesus, not this freak,” she mutters, then calls your name again. “Let's go.”

At her insistence, you take another couple steps, but hesitate again, unable to peel your eyes away. You feel trapped. There’s nothing you can do—you know that already, and now that someone else has intervened, you should feel like you’re off the hook, but the more people filter out of the area, the higher your sense of dread rises. The poor kid, Liam, is still shoved up against the lockers, frightened but giving Eddie the kind of look that you'd typically reserve for the second coming of Christ. And Eddie…

Tommy hates Eddie. Everyone does, for reasons that still don’t fully make sense to you, but Tommy fucking loathes him. Eddie isn’t a shrimp by any means, which is more than clear at this proximity, but the odds—and the way that Tommy turns, spitting at Danny to hold the kid in place while he redirects his attention, practically radiating malice—make your stomach flip in anxiety.

“You want some, too, freak?” Tommy barks, spreading his arms in invitation. “There’s plenty to go around.”

“Yeah, actually, I kinda do,” Eddie says. As bold as he projects himself, he scratches at the back of his neck a little excessively. “Let the kid go, and I’m all yours.”

Tommy scoffs, stepping a little closer, a nasty look in his eye. Eddie’s back straightens, tensing up just slightly.

“...What are you, some kind of queer?” Tommy asks, his smirk cutting across his face like a switchblade. “No matter how many times you get your ass handed to you, you just keep coming back for more. I bet you enjoy this shit.”

There’s another one. Slinking down the hall, probably in Eddie’s blind spot, dressed in that same obnoxious green you’re starting to hate. Panic sparks inside you like a lit fuse burning down towards something awful, and your mouth falls open, but you can’t make a sound. Defending the kid would be bad enough; trying to warn Eddie fucking Munson would probably get you burnt at the stake.

“Boy, do I ever,” Eddie jokes, inching backwards as he speaks. “...But it kinda seems like you enjoy it too, Tommy. …Y’know, if you have a crush on me, you can—”  

Tommy’s vision goes red—you can practically see the veil fall over his eyes. Eddie jumps backwards, expecting retaliation, but Tommy’s faster than he looks—he grabs Eddie by his vest just as the fourth jock, Colin, you think, approaches, and an odd, clipped little sound squeezes out of your throat unintentionally. Tommy does a double take at you over Eddie’s shoulder, his anger briefly morphing into an awful smirk, something sparking behind his eyes that makes your stomach clench up. 

“What’re you looking at, homewrecker?” he goads, and your mouth snaps shut. “Don't you have practice?”

Damnit. Glancing to the side, you find your teammates have quietly left you behind, but you don’t even have it in you to be upset about it.

Not realizing you were still there, Eddie looks over his shoulder at you with wide eyes—the wrong shoulder, though, because now Colin’s close enough to grab him, or hit him, and it’s too late to warn him, and—

Tommy jerks him aside, adjusting the angle, and then shoves him hard. Colin just sticks his leg out, and with a grunt, Eddie drops like a sack of potatoes. Caught halfway between jumping out of the way and trying to break his fall—a premonition flashes in your mind as it happens, the crack of a skull against linoleum, deep brown curls matted with blood—you don't really succeed at either. He knocks into you as you're mid-step, making you stumble, and your schoolwork slips out of your arms as you lose your footing. You don't fall nearly as fast or hard as Eddie, who lets out a deep, hollow grunt on impact, but when you catch yourself on your wrist, a stinging pain shoots up your arm that sends a shockwave through you. Not pain so much as panic. 

“Oh, shit,” Tommy says, raising his fist to his mouth with a delighted grin. “My bad, Sinclair.”

“Two for one special,” Sean mutters somewhere behind him, and a wave of snickers circle around you, pelting you from above.

All the remaining stragglers down the hall have frozen, watching the spectacle either in alarm or with a similar amusement, but it barely even registers to you. All you can do is sit there, clutching your wrist, processing and dreading and starting to spiral. 

“Alright, Munson,” Tommy says, reaching down to grab a fistful of his shirt and wrench him up into a crunch. “Let's see how much shit you can spew with no teeth.”

Eddie isn't even looking at him—he's looking past him, back towards the lockers, and it isn't until he confirms that Liam managed to slip away that he stares Tommy in his stupid, freckled face, deflating with a long exhale. Then, a wide, provoking grin spreads across his cheeks, defiance sparkling in his eyes.

“...Whatever gets you off, man.”

With his face twisted into a snarl, Tommy’s arm draws back—Eddie winces in advance, raising an arm, bracing himself—but the punch never lands. Danny comes up behind him, catching his arm. 

“Dude, it’s Higgins.”

Sure enough, at the far end of the hallway, Principal Higgins has just turned the corner. You doubt they’d get in any real trouble, even if they were seen beating on another student (or maybe just this student in particular), but it’s still pretty early in the year, and clearly, they plan to make a habit of it. A girl being caught in the crossfire might complicate things, too, though in your case, you wouldn’t bet on it. Either way, better to postpone the first half-hearted swat on the wrist, you suppose. 

Tommy drops Eddie with a shove, groaning in annoyance, but he still delivers a swift kick to his ribs before stepping away. Eddie curses through his teeth, curling slightly in on himself, clutching his side with one hand.

“Next time, you’re dead fucking meat, you freak,” Tommy spits as he and his cronies start off in the opposite direction. 

“Don’t I know it,” Eddie mutters, painfully hoisting himself upright with a grunt. “Jesus.”

Then, immediate danger averted, he finally has it in him to check on you, and his eyes blow comically wide. 

You’re crying. Full on, tears streaming down your face, shuddering with the effort to not sob outright-crying. You aren’t even sure when you started, but between that and the death grip you have on your right wrist, it probably paints a much more dire picture of what you’re feeling at the moment.

You almost gave him a fucking heart attack.

Eddie wrenches himself up until he’s kneeling beside you, panicked eyes dancing around, and the hand that isn’t at his side is raised between you, twitching with uncertainty. Didn’t think you’d want him touching you. He looks like he’s just been tasked with diffusing a bomb. 

“Shit, are you alright?” he asks, frantic. “Is it— do you think it’s broken?”

You shake your head. It probably isn’t broken, but it hurts enough that it’s definitely sprained, and you’re a hitter. You’re the goddamn hitter, and, yeah, your academics are pretty stellar on their own, but it’s halfway through the last season of your senior year, and if you get benched, or can’t play as well—

“I’m sorry,” Eddie says. “Fuck, I’m so sorry.” 

The doom spiral in your mind freezes, thrown entirely off its tracks. He's sorry? The only one that was brave enough to actually do something? You look at him and sniffle, your eyes naturally drawn down to where he still clutches his side, his hand disappearing into his leather jacket. 

“...Are you okay?” you ask. “He kicked you pretty hard.”

He doesn't move, doesn't blink—for a moment, you wonder if he even heard you. When his mouth finally falls open, a fraction of a syllable punching breathlessly out of his chest, it’s too late to say anything. 

“Mr. Munson,” comes the booming, exasperated voice of Principal Higgins. “What a surprise.”

Eddie’s face twists with theatrical, eye-rolling disdain at the sound of his voice, almost enough to get a giggle out of you, but he wipes it into a tight, sarcastic grin as he raises his head to look up at him. 

“Higgins,” he says, sickeningly sweet. “Always a pleasure.”

“Step away from Ms. Sinclair,” he commands flatly.

With a huff and an awkward little glance back at you, Eddie does what he’s told. You look between them, a little bit bewildered, before Higgins focuses in on you.

“Are you able to stand?” 

“Yeah, I’m alright,” you mutter, planting your good hand on the floor to push yourself back to your feet, trying to subtly wipe the tears off of your cheeks as you do so. 

“Good,” he says. “I’ll escort you to the nurse, and afterwards, we can discuss what occurred here. Munson—”

“Yeah, yeah, your office, I know the drill,” Eddie sighs, standing back up to his full height. Higgins makes a gruff, displeased sound in the back of his throat.

Vaguely, you were aware of him skirting around Higgins, circling over to the right of you, but it isn’t until he’s finished that you realize he’d been gathering up your things for you. 

“Can you hold this, or should I—?”

“Yeah, it’s— I can—”

He holds your book and papers out to you and, embarrassed and off-kilter, you reach out to grab them clumsily. When your finger presses accidentally into one of his, an odd little spark travels up your arm and you seize up just slightly, inadvertently yanking your things up to your chest. It’s silly—girlish, even, that you would react like that to the smallest little touch, and your face burns a little as you process what you’ve done, but, hell, a lot is going on at the moment. There’s a version of Eddie that you’ve carried around in the back of your mind for a couple years now—defined mostly by leisurely glances at ripped jeans, intriguing pins and patches, a dimpled smile; dragging steps for discreet eavesdropping and furiously suppressed delight at the occasional dramatic outburst—entirely compiled from a distance that allows for that sort of private observation. Being the subject of his attention for once flips it all on its head and makes your brain feel like a rotor ride, almost like you’ve been caught red-handed. 

But you know that Eddie doesn’t know any of that, and unless he feels compelled to break into your bedroom and steal your diary, he never will. He just takes it for what it is—a recoil—and his pretty eyes seem to deaden as he drags them away from you. It makes your throat dry up.

“Sorry, I—”

“S’fine.” Another forced smile, and he pivots back towards Higgins. 

“...Thanks.”

He nods once, small and detached, already moving on. You stare at him blatantly as a sick, regretful little feeling blooms in your stomach, but he doesn’t return it—why would he want to? If he thought you might’ve been different, you just proved that you aren’t.

You can almost hear it in your own voice—I’m sorry, I don’t think you’re gross, I just think about you way more than I should and I don’t know how to deal with that—followed swiftly by the deafening, operatic crash and burn of your life as you know it.

For a moment, the only sound is footsteps, tapping and squeaking down the hallway.

“...I had assumed we were at an understanding.”

It comes out with enough venom that it startles you, but you realize pretty fast that you aren't the intended target.

“Starting fights with the basketball team is shameful enough, but hurting a young woman—”

“It was an accident,” Eddie explains with a weary sigh.

His response makes you stall for a moment, incredulous of the thought that he'd accept the blame so easily. You speed back up with a disturbed frown on your face.

“Eddie didn't push me,” you insist. “...Tommy did, Tommy Hagan. Eddie was just trying to help.”

Higgins slows, turning halfway to examine you, and Eddie nearly trips over his sneakers. He gives you that bomb-diffusing stare again, and you're just happy to get another look at his face. Higgins doesn't bother trying to confirm this with Eddie, but doesn't ask for any elaboration either. He just hums, almost huffs, and continues on walking. Eddie stays frozen until you start moving again, and then swings himself around with a start, now offering you plenty of very unsubtle glances as he walks. You have to bite your cheek to not look too pleased by it.

He liked you a lot after that, babe. Like…a lot. 

…Then why the hell didn't he say anything? 

He was probably trying not to suicide bomb your social life. Y'know, as a thank you.

When you reach the office, you hesitate—the nurse’s door is to the left, but Eddie just keeps walking forward, barking a sarcastic greeting to Janice at the front desk as he follows Higgins straight into his office. As the door closes behind him, everything dulls, like any beauty you could find in a place so otherwise dreary only perks up when he’s around.

The school nurse, who was clearly on her way out by the time you walk in, can't tell you much that isn't already obvious—minor sprain, definitely not broken, and you should probably wear a brace for a couple weeks. She very halfheartedly wraps it in gauze and offers you a cold pack, and you hold it uselessly to your wrist as you report to Higgins. Whatever he had to say to Eddie was apparently brief, and your shoulders slump in disappointment as you realize that you didn't get to bump into him one last time as he was leaving. You don’t remember much beyond insisting repeatedly, in a variety of different ways, that Eddie didn’t lay a hand on you and he’s probably worse off than you are. Between your stubbornness on that front and your competing reluctance to be a total snitch in the event that this testimony of yours gets spread around, there isn’t much that Higgins can do other than let you leave. At this point, as much as it pains you to break your streak of perfect attendance, there’s no way you’ll be showing up at practice, so after a quick stop at your locker to pick up the rest of your things, you go on your way.

And all it takes is one step out of the main entrance for the world to become vibrant again. 

The smell hits you first—to your right is Eddie, leaning against the brick wall with a cigarette between his lips, and your heart stutters a little in your chest. As soon as he sees you, his eyes widen and he pulls the cigarette away, blowing the smoke out of the corner of his mouth and waving his other hand to disperse it. Another second of consideration and he drops it entirely, stomping it out, and the presence of another flattened orange filter next to his sneaker reveals just how long he’s been standing there.

“Hey,” he says with a cough, pushing off of the wall, and then, indecisive, settling back against it sideways. “I, uh…hope Higgins didn’t grill you too hard.” 

You shake your head. “...I should say the same to you.”

His mouth opens, but he just shrugs, crosses his arms, and smiles, a little too wide, Jesus, pull it back. “What, me? No way, Higgins and I are like this.” He holds up his hand, middle finger twisted around his pointer. “He can’t get enough of me.”

You grin at him, mentally racing for something else to say, how to keep this going a little longer—you and him both. Eddie gets there first. 

He clears his throat, beginning to twist one of the rings on his left hand back and forth. “...How's your wrist?” 

“Oh, it's—” You twist it around compulsively, accidentally sending a twinge of pain up your arm, and when you wince, Eddie's face twitches sympathetically. “It'll be fine. Just a sprain.”

“Great, that’s—great.”

He nods, chewing on his cheek for a moment. You gesture a little awkwardly towards your own side.

“How's your, um…?”

His eyebrows twitch up, and he has to fight his smile down again. “Hurts like a bitch, but, uh…I've had worse. At least the bruise'll probably look kinda badass.”

You breathe a little laugh, probably out of pity, and he realizes, then, that what just came out of his mouth sounded a little too pathetic for his tastes. Clearing his throat again, he pushes off the wall properly, taking one very measured step closer. 

“Hey, uh, listen…” You’re already listening so damn hard, the building could catch fire and you'd be none the wiser. Eddie's eyes flit around in thought for a moment, and when they find yours again, he swallows. “...Do you need a ride somewhere, or…?”

Something warm flutters through your body in a wave, stealing the breath from your lungs, and the grasp you have on your books tightens—you've never in your life wished so badly that you didn't have a car. When you hesitate, Eddie corrects himself, shifting his weight around aimlessly, kicking the ground with his shoes. 

“I just thought I should, I dunno—thank you, somehow. For not…throwing me under the bus, and all.” 

After all the fidgeting he's done since you stepped outside, he now stands remarkably still, his usually soft eyes pressed into a stare that's probably a lot more intense than he realizes as he waits for you to respond. 

“That's…”

Heart beating wildly, your mind reaches desperately for any rational way to accept the offer and comes up woefully blank. If you leave your car at school overnight just to get a ride home from a boy you think is cute, your parents will have your ass, and might even confiscate your keys for the foreseeable future. And, as guilty as it makes you feel, the longer you think about it, the more the possibility of being seen accepting a ride from him becomes a concern. For all you know, Tommy and his goons could still be hanging around—one glimpse of you in his passenger seat, and by tomorrow morning, you’re either a laughing stock or a leper.  

“I… You don't have to thank me for that, Eddie,” you finally land on, your mouth now uncomfortably dry. 

“I know,” he says carefully, his head tilting as he considers you, trying to parse what you're thinking from all the little shifts in your expression, and whether any of it is in the realm of abject horror. “...I just want to.”

…He waited for you. He doesn't know you, and you don't know him, but he liked something about you well enough to wait around so he could check on you and offer a ride. And, sure, as sweet as he seems, you don't know him or his intentions, and he's still a guy—maybe he picked up on your little crush (yeah, right) and he's just hoping to get lucky in one way or another, and then he'll tell everyone about it and ruin your life, but right now, holding his absolute attention for the first time, it's pretty hard to view even the worst case scenario as a bad thing—

As he waits, Eddie starts chewing anxiously at his thumb nail. For a moment, it looks like he’s going to say something else, dig himself into an even deeper hole, but he must think better of it.

—but it's a terrible idea, and you're already fucked because your whole team hates you, and your goddamn wrist is sprained in the middle of the season, and it'll all get even worse if Tommy finds out that you dropped his name to Higgins, so…you can't. You just can't. Your diary thoughts and daydreams will have to remain just that—it’s not like you were planning on ever acting on them, anyway. 

“I…really appreciate it, but I think I can drive,” you say, doing your best not to keel over with regret. 

He stops biting, looks you up and down.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I'm sure.” You can’t even look him in the eye as you say it.

He nods a couple times, more to himself than to you. “Right. Yeah, ‘course.” His face twitches into a frown for a second, but he shakes it off as he starts walking. 

The muscles in your abdomen pull tight for a second as you watch him go, and you pivot, taking an awkward step in the same direction, like it takes you a moment to get a handle on the impulse to follow him. Your mouth falls open, wanting to say one last thing to him, (which hopefully won’t be impulsively confessing your nebulous feelings in desperation to stop him leaving,) but nothing comes out.

After a few steps, Eddie twirls, walking backwards so he can give you a wide smile and a dorky salute. “See you around,” he says, like the goddamn loser that he is.

“See you,” you agree hastily, charmed beyond what you thought possible. 

As you sit in your car, hunched over with your forehead resting against the wheel, you squint your eyes shut tight, willing yourself not to tear up. It was never supposed to be a real crush—and it isn’t, you just think he’s cute, and funny, and nothing would ever come of it. It’s just a little secret to keep with yourself, somewhere for your mind to go when you zone out in class or struggle to fall asleep. No, you never expected to see him be kind to you, and stare at you so closely with his big, pretty eyes, and wait up for you like he wanted to spend more time around you, too, but…that doesn’t change anything. 

…And even if it did, it probably wouldn’t work out, anyway, ‘cause you don’t even know each other, and your parents would hate him, and you’re gonna be going off to college in the summer, and— 

Stop it. You don’t need to justify it to yourself. He’s always just been a fantasy; that’s all he can be.

And you really thought you knew that, so why the hell are you crying? 

…

You wake up with a dramatic gasp, disoriented and panicked at the sound of someone banging at your door, shouting your name. It takes you a moment to blink yourself awake, to remember when and where the hell you are and who’s missing from beside you, and you rest your hand on your chest, taking a few deep breaths to calm yourself down.

“Steve?” you croak.

“Oh, Jesus Christ,” he groans on the other side of the door. There’s another soft thump, and you picture his forehead bumping against it. “I was this close to kicking the door in. You slept in way later than usual, I thought that—” He cuts himself off.

“Sorry,” you say, and it hits you very suddenly how completely disgusting you feel. “Just tired, I guess.”

“No, it’s fine, I just—” He pauses. “...Well, anyway, Nancy called a few minutes ago, and she said—”

“Steve,” you interrupt. “How about I meet you downstairs in thirty?”

“...Right. Yeah, take your time.”

After probably the most frantic full-body scrub down of your life and your best attempt to salvage your slept-on hair, you find Steve downstairs in the kitchen, feeling a little bit like a misbehaving child who’s been sent to the principal’s office. Eddie said he was sleeping, but you still can’t help but watch his face intently, searching for even the slightest sign of knowing. 

“...Are you hungry?” he asks, watching you watch him, sounding a little like he’s lost his train of thought. “Want me to make you something, or—?”

“I’m alright,” you assure him. You’re goddamn starving, but it can wait. 

His gaze flickers slightly down and then catches on something, his eyebrows pulling together in a little frown, and your heart must jump into your throat—did Eddie leave something on you that you somehow didn’t notice? But you remember quickly that yes, he did, and Steve already knows about it; it’s just that the bandage is gone.

“Thought I should air it out,” you mutter, hoping the embarrassed heat that floods your body isn’t radiating off of you. “...What did Nancy say?”

He nods, wrenching the train back on track, planting one hand on the counter as he rests against it. “Uh, yeah, she and Robin were looking into the man that Eddie, um…attacked.” He lowers his voice around that word, as if you’d be sensitive to hearing it as a fellow victim. “...Turns out, he survived.”

“What?” 

You never fully internalized the idea that Eddie had killed someone—largely because that would require dwelling on the memory of watching it happen, rather than trying desperately to file it away somewhere unreachable—but the assumption was clear to make. The ferocity of the attack, Eddie’s desperation and lack of control all made it seem horribly inevitable.

“Apparently, someone found him on the side of the road with his own shirt ripped up and tied around him as a bandage. He’s still unconscious, but he’s alive.” Steve delivers the news very matter-of-factly—it doesn’t seem to move him.

“That's…great,” you breathe, and the tight knot of your body loosens up a little. “Eddie must've come to his senses, stopped himself and tried to help him before it was too late.”

Why didn’t he tell you? It would’ve been a hell of a lot easier for him to plead his case if you knew that he didn’t actually kill anybody—that even at his most senseless, he still had the wherewithal to save a life—but then again, he never really tried to make a case for himself in the first place. 

Steve’s head tilts forward and he hits you with a look that you usually only see him give to Robin and the kids. Lightly exasperated, just on the edge of stern; parental in a way that would definitely piss him off if you pointed it out. 

“Or, y’know, he left the guy for dead, and someone else tried to help him out while he stalked off to find his next victim.”

“If someone else helped him, why would they leave him on the side of the road?” you argue, regrettably completing the dynamic with a tinge of petulance. 

He shrugs, shaking his head. “Maybe they went running for help, and someone else found him in the meantime.” 

“Or maybe the guy who's only in this situation ‘cause he was falsely accused of murder still wouldn’t kill somebody.” You don’t mean to raise your voice, but the way your body tenses up with frustration makes it a little hard not to.

Steve blinks at you, wide-eyed, and he says your name like a plea for reason. “...I get that you want to be—optimistic, here, but Jesus, you could’ve ended up the same as that guy, or—worse, if we didn’t get there in time.”

As if he hasn't been stubbornly pessimistic this entire time. “He wasn’t going to kill me,” you groan, “he didn’t want to kill me, he promised—” 

You stop yourself and clench your jaw, realizing too late that that isn’t going to mean much to him. 

“He promised?” Steve repeats, incredulous. “Do you hear yourself?”

I fucked him to tears in your guest room last night, asshole. You scrub your hands down your face, frustrated and weary, accepting that you probably should’ve ate something before diving into this conversation. 

“...I’m not saying he’s evil,” Steve goes on, staring at you a lot like Nancy did the other day—like you might actually be a lost cause on the subject. “But he’s given us zero good reasons to trust him, and more than enough reasons not to. Whether or not he killed that hiker, whether or not he means to be, he’s dangerous. I don’t understand how you can’t see that.”

“Of course I can see that,” you spit. “I never claimed he wasn't.”

He doesn’t look convinced. His brow furrows and his voice drops quieter, a little distant, narrating the memories as they play behind his eyes. “He acts like it’s…funny. Like it’s all a joke to him. You’ve seen how he gets when he’s angry, like one second, he’s Eddie, and the next, he isn’t even a person anymore. And Christ, the way he looks at you, like— like you’re dinner.” Steve actually shudders. “...All the flirting, talking to you in that creepy voice, taking advantage until you let him go, just to turn around and hurt you, too. It's sick.”

“That might be how it looked to you, Steve, but that’s…not what happened,” you insist quietly, with little to no hope of reaching him. The both of you might as well be talking to a brick wall.

Steve just stares at you, helpless. “...What is it, with him?”

“What do you mean?”

“Before any of this,” he says, “ever since Vecna, you’ve…” He trails off with a frown, dots connecting behind his eyes. “...Or was it before Vecna, too?”

Your heart jumps into your throat, and you must look as caught as you feel, because Steve’s face begins to settle, like something is starting to make sense to him. It grates on you like a hot poker down your spine.

“Is that it?” he asks, not accusatory but not relenting, either. “Did you…have something, with him?”

“No.” It comes out a little too forceful, and you cringe at yourself. “Jesus, Steve, I barely even spoke to him. I probably knew him as well as you did.” 

He considers that, and you consider storming out at the insinuation just to get the hell out of this unbearable conversation. When his head tilts back suddenly, you suck in a breath and brace yourself.

“...But he’s your type, right?” Steve deduces. “...That’s what he meant the other day, isn’t it? I thought he was just—mocking me, but if he’s been in your head—”

You scoff at him, shellshocked by the question and incredulous that he’d even ask. “What the fuck does that matter?” 

Eddie finding out through freaky Upside Down telepathy was stressful enough, but Steve figuring it out on his own is well beyond what you can handle. An odd pressure builds rapidly in your stomach.

“It…doesn’t, I guess,” he mutters, a little surly. “...But it explains—”

“A lot? Yeah, I’m sure it does.” You feel caustic, cornered in, like all you can do is lash out. What the hell business does he have interrogating you about this, like it’s any right of his to know in the first place? Just because he decided he has a crush on you all of the sudden? “How about you worry about figuring out your own type, alright? It would save a lot of girls a lot of fucking grief.”

It’s a wild swing in self-defense. You know it’s mean (and childish, and unnecessary,) before you’re even finished saying it, and you can see the hurt in his expression like a slap across the face, but in the moment, it’s almost satisfying. All you can think about is how desperately you need to get the fuck out of this house—immediately, right now, before you crash and the anger turns to shame and regret, and you end up crying your eyes out on the carpet somewhere like a crazy person.  

You turn and practically bolt out of the room, up the stairs, and straight into your bathroom, gathering all the toiletries you’d left there for convenience like a woman possessed. Bursting through your door, you shove them into your luggage with a frantic disarray that you’d typically hate and snatch up whatever else you can find that belongs to you, but when your eyes pass over the duvet again—the ruined duvet that you still need to explain somehow—you freeze. 

Fuck. The frustration boils over, mingling with fierce humiliation, and the mounting guilt you’ve been fending off finally starts to seep in, building up like tears in the corners of your eyes. You’re breathing too hard, and you slap a hand over your mouth, but it doesn’t stop your rising panic from ripping it out of your control, and a different kind of anger is starting to overwhelm you; furious at yourself for messing everything up, for being so goddamn sensitive, and selfish, and—

A violent shiver wracks your body, and your breath catches in your throat. It prickles along your skin, burning and freezing at the same time, and your mind wipes blank, trying to cling onto it and figure out what it means. He isn’t here, and he can’t be on his way with the sun so high in the sky. 

Lost in your confusion, you realize belatedly that it calmed you down. Maybe it wasn’t a signal, coincidentally easing your emotional tide, but a response to it, reaching out to ground you from wherever the hell he’s hiding himself. Either way, you can take a deep breath again. 

Decidedly calmer, you go back to packing up, still set on leaving. Before putting away your journal, you rip out a page from the back and reluctantly scribble down a note—You’re sorry, started your period earlier than you expected and did your best to clean it up…and you shouldn’t have said that to him, and you’re sorry again, and you appreciate him letting you stay. Reading it over again makes you grimace, especially knowing that he’ll probably take the excuse for the stain as an excuse for your crankiness, too, but it’ll have to do. It’s not like he’ll want to talk to you again before you go. You consider leaving some cash too, something to put towards the replacement of the duvet, but you figure it’d probably make its way back to you eventually, and it certainly wouldn’t make him any happier with you.

With one last once-over, you take your suitcase and your purse and head downstairs. The house is silent and Steve is nowhere in sight, but you’re pretty sure he’ll know what it means when he hears his front door close behind you.

… 

By the time you’re properly settled in back at home, family thoroughly greeted and belongings neatly replaced, you’re already raring to go out again. Residual anxiety from earlier spurs on an ever-increasing, multilayered need to see your little bloodsucker again, rising like mercury in a thermometer as the sun moves through the sky. It has you feeling like a wind-up toy, unable to sit still, doing even your sibling’s designated chores for them just to distract yourself. 

You hold out until around 6:30, when it occurs to you that you still have a ton of books to return, and the library closes at 8, just around sunset. Getting sidetracked at the library until closing is well within the realm of believability for you, and you’re sure you’ll be able to come up with some decent excuse for being out another, say, 30 minutes past that. Besides, you are a grown woman now—why should you have to answer for your whereabouts like a child out past curfew?

…These white kids might be starting to rub off on you. File that last part away under how to get whooped with a spatula.

Your only lightly thought out plan gets turned on its head with characteristically perfect timing. Just as you’re gathering up an armful of books—deliberately leaving a few behind in case you need to recycle the excuse—the doorbell rings. You don’t think much of it, too focused on giving your appearance a quick once over and practicing your lines in your head, until you make your way downstairs and find, talking to your mother on the front porch, none other than Nancy Wheeler. She perks up at the sight of you so seamlessly that you’d almost believe it was real. 

“Well, here she is,” your mother says, turning to raise an eyebrow at you with a hand on her hip. She says your name like you’re already in trouble. “You didn’t mention you were helping Nancy get ready for college.”

All you can do is frown heavily, your head cocking aside in confusion. Nancy’s quick to butt in.

“Oh, no, that makes it sound so serious,” she says with a little laugh, taking up the disposition of a small woodland creature. “We’re just having a chat, y’know—what to expect, any advice she might have for me. Unless…” She frowns then, a little worry in her brow; the kind of look that could make a grown man sell his house for the chance to turn it into a smile. “...Oh, shoot. It wasn’t supposed to be tomorrow, was it?”

All the tangled bewilderment of trying to figure out what the hell this is supposed to be abruptly straightens itself out as you process an opportunity to put it on the backburner. Your mouth opens, a resounding yes on the tip of your tongue, but your mom speaks faster and louder.

“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” she says, then gives you a proper look up and down. “...I know you aren’t on your way out again.”

You’re careful not to let your exhale turn into a huff. “...Actually, I was on my way to the library—”

“It’ll be there just the same tomorrow,” she insists with exasperation, stepping further in to let your visitor pass the threshold. “Come on in, Nancy. You’ll stay for dinner, too, won’t you?”

Nancy pretends to glance between you with uncertainty. “...I mean, if it isn’t a bother.”

“Not at all, we’d love to have you.” Then she turns to you. “Tell your brother to come down here and help out.”

And just like that, your evening is foiled. You’d almost be impressed if you weren’t so damn annoyed. 

It isn’t Nancy’s first time in your bedroom, but it’s pretty clear that she feels out of place in it. She rejects your offer to sit at your desk chair in favor of floating in the center of the room, arms tight over her chest, her socks digging mindlessly into your carpet. You aren’t really crazy about the thought of her looking down at you while she explains what the hell she’s doing here, so you stand as well, as casual as you can manage as you lean against your dresser. For some reason, she seems reluctant to go first, so you figure you’ll address the elephant in the room.

“Steve call you?”

“No,” she answers, but there’s a few layers woven into her tone. Then she wilts with a sigh. “...Well, yes. But he didn’t…ask me to check on you, or anything. I already wanted to talk to you.” 

You suppress the itch to ask if he said anything—if he told her about your outburst, and if she can tell how he feels about you after it. 

“Okay,” you say. “...Is something wrong?”

She takes a long look at you, guarded enough that you can’t pick much out of it. Maybe a little flicker of curiosity.

“...Were you going out to see him?”

You aren’t surprised to hear her ask—she kind of seemed to be the only one catching on to what was really going on with you and Eddie. 

“No,” you say, testing the waters. “How would I?”

As far as she should know, you have no way to find him anymore. Nancy smiles, just barely, nodding her head.

“No, of course not,” she agrees, still just staring. She says nothing else, so it must be your turn. You sigh.

“...But if I was,” you start carefully. “...You’d have something to say about it?”

Whatever she was looking for, you seem to have given it to her; she relaxes a little, a seal cracking just enough to release the pressure.

“...Robin and I are a little stumped,” she tells you. “I’m sure you heard that Jerry Alden—the man you saw Eddie attack—is still alive. But it’s not just that. We tried to track down any other potential victims, anyone killed or admitted to the hospital because of…an ‘animal’ attack, or anything just—unusual, but there was pretty much nothing. Nothing serious, at least. We even asked about any missing persons reports since Eddie came back, and even though they usually get tons of false alarms ever since Will went missing, Hopper said there’s been exactly zero.” 

“Wait, wait—You got the police involved in this?”

“No, no, it wasn’t— We didn’t say anything about Eddie. Made it seem like we were just…being vigilant, worried about gates still being open. My point is, Hopper’s more paranoid than any of us, and has the best vantage point to hear about anything weird going on in town.”

“So, what are you saying?”

She clears her throat, prodding you a little harder with her stare. “I’m saying that…either Eddie’s leaving Hawkins entirely for his meals, or…”

“Or he isn’t actually hurting anyone.” You take a deep breath, filtering out some of your stress—you half-expected a repeat of this morning’s conversation.

Nancy shrugs, a little show of cluelessness. “I don’t know. We didn’t get much of a chance to talk to him.”

You’ll assume that “we” excludes you. “We didn’t give him much incentive to cooperate, either.”

She gives a sigh, lighthearted irritation. “He can’t blame us for being cautious.”

“He probably doesn’t,” you say. 

“...You think so?” 

That isn’t really what she’s asking. Apparently, in the absence of corroborating evidence, you’ve gone from a spellbound victim to the primary character witness. You frown a little, considering her. 

“...You don’t still think he’s connected to Vecna?” 

“Well, I don’t think we can rule that out, exactly,” she says. “But either way, it’ll be better for everyone if he’s…around. Accessible.”   

“And not hiding because he thinks you wanna blast him back to kingdom come.”

She snorts a quiet laugh at you and nods.

“...I was gonna talk to him tonight,” you admit, “about…coming back, talking to y’all. Telling you what he told me. There’s no reason he should have to hide from people that are supposed to be his friends.” 

“If you think he’ll agree to it.”

“He’ll agree to it,” you insist. One way or another. “...He might not trust y’all, but he trusts me. It’s not him I’m worried about.”

“...Don’t be,” she says. “Just…let us know when you wanna talk, and we’ll be there. …And if someone else happens to crash our meeting, then I guess we’ll just have to hear him out.”

“...No guns?”

Her face scrunches in reluctance. “Mm… One gun? A little one. Just in case.”

“...Concealed carry.”

She shrugs, perfectly agreeable. “Sure.”

With a sigh, you push off of the dresser. “Then I guess we’ve got a deal.”

Nancy gives you a typically delicate grin, stepping closer with her hand stretched out. You shake it thoughtlessly, but she doesn’t let go, instead leaning a little closer and putting her other arm around you in a light hug. It startles you enough that you forget to reciprocate. 

“Um…” she begins. “...Sorry for siccing Steve on you. I’m sure it was…awkward, but I figured he’d do the best job at looking after you.”

“Looking after me,” you repeat, deadpan. 

“I know. Sorry.” She pulls back with a giggle, her face a little pink. “But…I really wasn’t sure what Eddie wanted with you, and, well… I knew he’d stay focused. Put a pretty girl in front of Steve and he’s not gonna be able to think about much else.”

You scoff a little, offset by a pinch of warmth in your cheeks.

“Well, in that case…I appreciate you looking out for me.”

You used to be closer with Nancy, especially when you were kids. Living on the same street will do that. In your family photo albums, there’re pictures of the two of you in costume together from nearly every Halloween of your childhood, with or without your respective younger siblings, and no doubt the Wheelers’ look the same. 

Sitting at the dinner table with your family, watching her relate her college plans and hopes and dreams with an incurable sparkle in her eyes, you can still see an echo of her younger self, twin braids blowing back in the wind, grinning at you with a freckled nose and a missing front tooth as you circle around each other on banana seat bikes.

…

Becky’s back in town this week. 

At least, as far as your mother knows, she is. After a morning full of unbidden housework and sweet-faced ass-kissing, you get your parent’s sign off on a one night—yes, you promise, just one night—slumber party. And after an afternoon of driving Erica and a couple of her minions around like the chauffeur you promised to be, you’ve successfully abated her wrath for long enough to not worry she’ll turn your room inside out in your absence. 

Just as the sun starts to droop in the sky, you park your car in a little picnic area near Danford Creek and get comfortable. No one else is around. You chose the dinky spot— just two picnic benches in a small clearing off of the main road, too small for kids and pets to run freely, too shrouded by trees and brush to offer a decent view of the creek itself.

For the couple hours it takes to get dark, you entertain yourself with journaling, nibbling at a couple snacks you picked up while waiting for Erica’s movie to finish. You brought a couple books to read as well, but you can’t keep your attention on either of them as that little tingle in the back of your mind grows stronger, fondness and excitement driving your heartbeat faster.

Eventually, you hear a dull tap somewhere to the right of you, but when your head whips up towards the sound, there’s nothing there. You frown, leaning over to get a better view through the window, even twisting to look through the back, but you still don't find anything. When you return to center, you catch something in the corner of your eye, and twitch towards it to find Eddie’s face at your window, pulled into a ridiculous expression. Unfortunately, it makes you jump out of your skin, and you’re immediately swinging your door open in outrage, but he’s too damn fast to get hit by it. 

You push yourself out of the door instead, mildly fuming as you stalk towards him. Eddie giggles at the sight, bounding backwards just fast enough to keep himself out of reach. 

“Sorry, sweetheart, I thought you saw me,” he teases, blinking his big eyes at you in an attempt at innocence. “It was an honest mistake.”

“No, I’ll show you an honest mistake. Quit running.”

Visibly giddy, he freezes, but just before you can grab hold of him, he bursts past you with a harsh gust of wind. Disoriented, you blink in shock, and when you turn around to look for him, you nearly shriek as he appears in front of you, crouching down to wrap his arms around your hips and lift you into the air. Holding onto his shoulders for dear life, it’s a little hard to keep glaring at him when he beams up at you like the goddamn sun, bouncing you playfully a few times. 

“I missed you,” he tells you sweetly, tempering your wrath with infuriating ease. You can practically see the cartoon halo sparkling over his head. “Didja miss me?”

“I did, until you tried to make me give up the ghost.”

“I told ya, sweetheart, it was an accident.”

Before you can rebut, he shifts you haphazardly in his arms, and you cry out again as you land in a bridal carry, suddenly face to face with that evil grin of his, curled up against his chest. You can’t even pretend to be mad at him anymore, the closeness making your brain stutter—eyes wide, blushing like a radiator. Eddie’s grin pulls even wider as he leans in, fooling you into expecting a kiss until he changes trajectory, nuzzling his face into your own with a pleased hum. 

“Always so warm, babe,” he mutters, low and raspy with a smile in his voice. Thankfully, you can pretend the shock of cold skin is what sends a shiver down your spine. “...Soft, too.”

He presses a whisper of a kiss to your cheek, just barely there, and it makes you burn even hotter. “...You feel like you’ve been sleeping in an icebox,” you tease, and he hums at you.

“Bet you could warm me up real good.”

The next shiver is accompanied by a distracting little throb. If he has it his way, there’s no chance you’ll actually make it through your agenda for tonight.

“...If you behave tonight, I might consider it.”

Eddie pulls back, still grinning. You start to squirm, and he holds you a little tighter.

“Put me down,” you insist. “We’ve got a lot of shit to talk about.”

With a melodramatic sigh, Eddie walks you over to one of the picnic tables and sits you carefully on top of it with your feet on the bench. He sits next to you, leaning back on his palms, legs spread comfortably (probably just to keep his thigh touching yours), perfectly carefree. At least, he'd seem perfectly carefree, if his right knee didn't immediately start bouncing like a jackhammer. 

“...I wanna talk to the others again,” you tell him, “and I want you to talk to them, too.”

He slumps down with a sigh, his head falling a little further back. “I dunno if they’re gonna like anything I have to say.”

“Yes, they will, because you’re gonna behave yourself.”

Eddie hums, uncertain, and you reach over to grasp him by the jaw, making him look at you. He seems to enjoy it a little too much.

“I’m not asking, I’m telling,” you say. “You’re gonna behave, because we’re gonna convince them that you can behave, and you’re not a threat, or a spy, or a wild goddamn animal, so we can move the hell on and figure out how to make this work.”

“Make what work?”

“Everything,” you say, releasing him as you think it over. “Who can know about you, where you can stay safe during the days… Make sure you have the things you need, and how to keep you fed without starting another panic. It might take a while, but you can still have a life. We should probably do some tests, too, try to see if this is…reversible, or something. Or at least figure out how much the movies got right.” 

His eyes run over your face as you ramble, warm and a little amused.

“...Does that sound good?” you ask, suddenly self conscious. It didn’t occur to you until now that he might actually prefer to go it alone, but even if he did, you aren’t sure you’d be able to let him.

“It sounds like a lot of work,” Eddie notes ambiguously.

“Maybe,” you say. “But everyone’ll think you’re worth it.” 

He gives you a lighthearted scoff that makes you wanna smack him on his own behalf. 

“I’m serious,” you tell him. “You shouldn’t have to keep sneaking around like this. You deserve to come home just the same as the rest of us.”

“Come home?” he repeats, furrowing his brow at you. 

You nod, confused by his confusion. He blinks at you a couple times and then looks down, picking at one of his nails in his lap.

“I mean, I…appreciate the sentiment, but…there isn’t really a home for me to come back to.”

“Your old place was destroyed, I know, but—”

“That’s not really what I mean, babe,” he says with a frown. “...Even presumed dead, my face is still plastered all over town. Shit, they talk about me on the news like I’m the next Bundy. Sneaking around is…kind of my only option.”

“I know that, but—that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. You have friends and family that care about you, and still think you’re gone.”  

The stare you get from him is so blank that it almost startles you. 

“What about, um…” You swallow—his eyes are making you nervous. “...Your uncle, have you…?”

His head snaps straight ahead with a stiff little shake. Your heartbeat quickens a little, conscious that you’re venturing into territory you aren’t really sure you have a right to, yet.

“...Why not?”

It takes him a while to say anything, and the words come out tight and heavy. “I, um… I think I’ve put him through enough, as is.”

It makes your chest ache. Eddie takes a couple breaths, suddenly difficult, and gives you a quick, jittery glance.

“He, um… He’s had a…heart thing, the past couple years, and I—” He cuts off his voice when it quivers, clenching his jaw tight and breathing deeply through his nose. “...I don’t wanna…scare him. Fuck.”

His voice cracks terribly, and when he tilts his head back, rubbing at his eyes in frustration, you can’t help but tear up with him.

“Oh, honey,” you breathe. You want to throw yourself at him, hold him and kiss him until he smiles again, but you don’t let yourself do more than rest your hand on his shoulder as he tries to calm himself down. 

“I just— It’s better, I think, if I—stay gone. At least until…” 

His eyes flicker around aimlessly. There's no end to the sentence.

“...Eddie.”

“Yeah?”

“Why didn’t you tell us that the man you…drank from when you first got out survived?”

He startles, his head snapping towards you, scanning your face like he’s making sure you’re serious. “Fuck,” he breathes out. “...I didn’t know.”

“He’s alive,” you repeat, giving him a little squeeze. “Someone found him, got him to the hospital in time. …You could’ve at least mentioned that you tried to help him.” 

“Yeah, well, I was a little distracted,” he says. “Seemed like they’d already made up their minds, anyway.”

“...I’m just saying, it would’ve helped,” you argue softly. “We…were scared, but we wouldn’t have been so rough with you if we knew you didn’t want to hurt him like that.”

“Oh, I wanted to,” Eddie mutters with a self-deprecating little chuckle. “...I wanted to rip the guy to shreds and fucking bathe in it.” 

It lands cold and deep in your stomach, and you have to brace against a shudder. 

“...But you didn’t,” you say. “You stopped yourself, and that means something.”

“Not if no one believes me.”

“Well, if you had—”

“I didn’t care,” he says louder, final. His fingers rub into his eyes in stress as he speaks. “About…anything. I just wanted to see you. It was all I could think about.”

He looks at you as if that same need is sprouting up again, but his features are heavy, weighed down and pitiful.

“...I tried to convince myself,” he admits. His voice drops lower, stilted and weak with nerves. “To just—leave you alone. For fucking hours, waiting for the sun to go down. I wanted it so bad and it scared the shit out of me, cause I had…no idea what I’d do when I saw you, and I was still so fucking hungry, and nothing out there helped. I…kept thinking to myself, like—even if I couldn’t resist, at least I could probably stop myself before it was too late. Maybe you’d even let me. …Maybe you’d even want me to.” 

Everything he says seems to agitate some old wound, compulsively ripping out stitches like he thinks you’d prefer to watch him bleed. 

“...Eddie—”

“I guess I owe Wheeler and them a thank you,” he says, dry and humorless. “Because, fuck, if they weren’t there…” His chest starts puffing up again, each breath taking more effort than it should. “If it really was just you down there—Christ, I could’ve—”

“Eddie, stop it,” you interject. “You don’t have to tell me all this.”

“Don’t I?” he says, teeth gritting together. He stares at you long and hard, and even wide awake, it feels like you’re seeing straight through his eyes and into his mind. 

It’s just like that day in your dream, the hallway with Principal Higgins. Eddie won’t argue for himself, only ever against. 

In his mind, he can’t come back because he didn’t come back. Eddie died in the Upside Down, and what woke up was something different, changed for the worse—too sick to be worth the grief, infected down to the bone with something vicious and selfish and so goddamn hungry. Maybe you’re an exception—your bond was formed with this Eddie, not the one that’s missed—but he’d rather stay dead to the world than return to find that his loved ones wish he had.

For a moment, you try to take off your rose colored glasses, to really consider him as he is. As much as you’ve gotten used to it, he still doesn’t look right. His skin is pallid, dull and bloodless and nearly translucent in some places, and Eddie was always on the pale side, but not like this. Sometimes his eyes are just as you remember, but when he’s hungry, the lightless black they become is darker than anything you’ve ever seen, a sinking, ravenous void that draws you in like a black hole, the only visible trace of that endless hunger inside of him. And, of course, there’s the fangs—the most obvious hint that he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Once you’ve noticed them, they’re as impossible to ignore as a knife in someone’s hand. None of it is glaring, exactly, but it’s unnatural in a way that triggers a deep, instinctive fear, and the more intense the hunger is, the more prominent it all becomes. Your first proper look at him—gaunt and looming in the basement, that night he could’ve done something awful—still feels like a nightmare lingering in the back of your mind.

But none of that really matters when he’s speaking, dry and sarcastic, bold and theatrical, or stringing together nervous fragments; fussing over his hair, or the way his rings sit on his fingers, shifting his weight needlessly like he has to use the bathroom; making big, dramatic expressions, cackling like a dork, or smiling brightly with the same precious dimples he’s always had. There’s nothing scary about Eddie—it’s just that supernatural bloodlust that tries so hard to swallow him down.   

“...You aren’t as scary as you probably think you are,” you tell him. “…And I know I’m biased, but…you’ve only ever scared me when you were hurt, and starving, and…that wasn’t your fault. When you’re…taking care of yourself, like this, you’re still you in every way that matters, and anyone who cares about you will be able to see that.”

He lets out a long breath, having calmed down again as you thought it over, but his face is still tense, his teeth biting painfully into his bottom lip. As he processes all of that, he gives a jerky little nod. 

“If, um…” Your stomach flutters almost painfully with nerves, as if this constitutes some massive, risky step in a relationship where you traded I love yous on your first night together. “...If you’d let me, I could…talk to him first. Your uncle, I mean. Tell him what happened and all, so you don’t have to worry about startling him.”

He looks at you, sweet, watery brown eyes resting gently on your face. Eventually, he nods again. 

“...Maybe.”

“Yeah?” you say. “...I don’t know where he’s staying, now, but—”

“I do,” Eddie says, quiet and a little gruff. “...I’ll tell you.”

You give him a little smile. “Whenever you’re ready.”

Your hand on his shoulder trails down his arm and Eddie meets you eagerly, fingers interlocking where your thighs rest against each other, and the feeling of his gaudy, oversized rings digging into your skin makes you smile. The hard part is over now, so you might as well give yourselves a minute, just breathe and enjoy the company before you dig into the other things on your mind. Rubbing your thumb into the back of his hand, you watch the sky for a while; clear enough for the stars to shine through, the near-full moon soaring above the trees.

“It’s a beautiful night,” you muse quietly. 

You don’t expect a response, and he doesn’t give you one for a while, which is probably why it gets you twice as bad as it should.

“Well… Not as beautiful as you are.”

When you glance at him, you almost do a double take, startling at the sight of him with his face tilted towards you, watching you with lazy eyes and a little smirk. Your face flushes hard enough to embarrass you, and you can’t entirely fight down a grin.

“That was ridiculously corny,” you tell him, mostly to save your pride.

“Sounds like you liked it, anyway.”

Your heart rate must have picked up, and it does again at the acknowledgement. With a growing smirk, Eddie reaches over to cradle the back of your head, gently guiding your pout within kissing distance. You let him get away with one, and then another, and one more after that, but at the first swipe of his tongue between your lips, you grab him by his jacket collar and break away. Now he’s the one pouting.

You stare at him, a sudden thought dancing at the tip of your tongue. When it looks like Eddie’s about to ask you something—probably if anything’s wrong—you manage to spit it out.

“...That dream the other night,” you say, clearing your throat. “The memory. Did you…do that?”

He grins in a way that seems to contradict what he says. “I don’t know… Maybe we both did it.”

He doesn’t wither under your scrutiny, so you assume it’s honest. “I don’t know how I forgot about that day,” you mutter, half to yourself. You’d written a verifiable novel in your diary that night, and you couldn’t even look at him for a month or two without mourning it all over again.

Eddie pulls a face. Then, with typical drama, he groans and falls back flat on the table, arms spreading wide like Jesus on the cross, and you snort at him. “...Ouch. I dunno if I can recover from this one, babe. I might actually die.” 

“I mean—before the Vecna shit,” you correct, but Eddie doesn’t look much happier.

“Right, yeah. Not like I’ve been thinking about it, oh, I dunno, every single day since it happened, like some kind of…enormous loser, or anything. Feel free to rub some salt in, if you’d like.” 

“Oh, shut up.” You wrap your hands around an imaginary stake and plunge it into his sternum. Eddie pretends to convulse, his eyes rolling back into his head, and you giggle at the ridiculous performance. “...I still thought about you, doofus. I probably just suppressed the memory out of regret.”

Ceasing the dramatics, Eddie rolls over onto his side, propping his head on his hand. He stares up at you for a while, his nail scratching idly at the outer seam of your jeans, a little amusement dancing behind his eyes. 

“...What?” you prompt. 

He chews on his lip, flashing one gleaming fang at you. “...Did you really think I was gonna try to sleep with you if you got in my van?”

“No,” you spit on impulse, your cheeks catching fire fast enough to make you dizzy. “...I don't know. Were you?”

He makes a comically offended face, scoffing out a laugh. “Are you kidding? I almost shat myself just offering the ride. I would've died at the wheel before I had it in me to make a move on you.”

The thought of you making him shy is cute, but you pout a little anyway. “So you didn't even think about it?”

His nail stops scratching, his hand instead stretching over to rest on top of your thigh, tapping a little rhythm—mostly innocent. 

“...Well, I didn’t say that.”

Thinking back, that distinctive, ugly van of his was pretty big. Seemed to have a lot of space in the back. 

…Of course, you wouldn’t have given it up right there in the parking lot. You remember a fragmented little thought that you had at the time, wondering whether he’d be the type to keep something on hand in the glove box for situations like this, but now, it sends a zap of irritation through you—if he did, then there must've been other girls, and of course you weren't the only one who appreciated the way he looked, even if almost everyone treated him like he had the plague. Hell, maybe he even got older girls, cool, mature 20-somethings who'd already grown out of petty high school social hierarchies, and—

“Babe,” Eddie says, interrupting your possessive spiral with a wide, curious grin. “What the hell are you thinking about?”

Apparently, as you were making up past hypotheticals to be annoyed at, you'd had your narrowed gaze pointed right at his face. …Well, that might just serve him right. 

“...Whether or not I would've slept with you in the back of your van.” You decide to let him off the hook. 

“Shit,” he says, his eyebrows popping up. “...Well, what's the verdict?”

You take in a deep inhale, and hold it in as you decide. “...Depends.”

“On?”

“Probably how many other girls had done the same thing.”

Eddie chokes on air, sputters into a laugh, and you stare at him in alarm. 

“Fuck, that’s—you're joking, right? That was a joke?”

“No?” 

“Oh, sweetheart," he says, shaking his head, still blinding you with his grin. He reaches up, probably to pinch your cheek, but you swat his hand away. “No. I mean, not for lack of trying, but— Fuck, I was pretty much a virgin before the other night.”

Something warm and bubbly settles in your stomach until you run that through your head a second time. 

“...What the hell is ‘pretty much a virgin’?” 

He half-shrugs, reaching back to scratch at his head. “Well…there was, um—” When he glances at you, you must be glaring at him again, cause he has to suppress a smile. “...Doesn't matter. But I never did anything with someone who actually, y'know…cared about me.”

…You suppose you can accept that. Eddie clears his throat, pulling himself up until he’s sitting next to you again.

“...Well, now that I've aired out my humiliating lack of sexual exploits—”

You’re already shaking your head. “Don't even think about it.”

“Why not?” He leans into your space, smiling wickedly. “Fair's fair, right?”

“No way. Eddie—” All of the sudden, his hands are on you, poking and prodding at your ticklish ribs. “Stop, stop—okay, fine!”

He retreats with a victorious smirk, and you try to throw a glare at him, hot in the face. Still, you hesitate for a moment—the topic is a little nauseating for you—but Eddie just stares at you warmly, waiting patiently.

“...The same as you,” you eventually land on. “Nothing with anyone who really…knew me. Or—wanted to know me, I guess.”

Smiling even wider, Eddie wraps his arm around your shoulders, trying to pull you in, and you scoot into him until you're practically in his lap. He presses a cold kiss to the side of your head before nuzzling into it.

“...Thanks for sharing,” he says.

Eventually—inevitably—you end up migrating back to your car. The backseat of your car, to be specific, but before you can get too deep into fogging up the windows, another pang of annoyance hits you and makes you pause, pulling back, staring him in the face until he starts to sweat.

“...You alright?” he asks.

You narrow your eyes at him, and Eddie’s eyebrows twitch upwards.

“Did I…do something bad,” Eddie tries, “or—?”

“No,” you insist. “But...when you said pretty much a virgin—”

He cuts you off with a burst of surprised laughter. 

“Still mad at me?” He looks as delighted as could be. “Baby, you're so pretty when you're jealous for no reason.”

“I'm not jealous,” you deny with a pout.

“No?” When you open your mouth to respond, only a yelp comes out as he grabs you by the hips, yanking you a little further beneath him until your back falls flat on the seats and giving you an evil grin. “Cause, uh…you seem pretty jealous right now.” 

“It just—took a lot of work to get you here, is all,” you continue, breathless as he hovers above you. He nods in sarcastic understanding. “...So, if I find out you're putting those cold ass hands on anyone else—”

“Oh, sweetheart, I'm all yours,” he assures you, low and rough, like it works him up just to say it. Lowering down, he bumps his nose against yours, strands of wavy hair tickling your face, his lips just barely out of reach. “...I'll even let you collar me, if you want. Y'know, in case I get lost.”

Your laugh bubbles out of you before you can suppress it. “You really liked that dog comment, didn't you?”

His eyes crinkle, big smile turning bashful as he tilts his head aside. He must do this shit on purpose. “Maybe. Is it obvious?”

“Well, you sure got the eyes for it, puppy dog.” Raising your hands to cup his cheeks, you stroke one thumb beneath his eye a few times, then tease him with a little scratch under his chin that makes him giggle. “...So are we making out, or what?”

He doesn't need to be asked twice. It isn't as desperate as the last time you saw each other but slow, almost lazy, kissing each other dizzy and groping over your clothes with fumbling hands, pausing to tease each other and whisper in the dark like you have all the time in the world. 

And you try to keep it PG-13, you really do—technically, you're still in public, after all—but when you scrape your teeth against his throat a little too good and Eddie can't stop himself from grinding into your thigh with a sweet little whine, you can feel it bringing out the evil in you. 

As you start to undo your fly, Eddie freezes, watching and waiting, his eyes flickering between your face and your hands with clear excitement. And when one hand slips into his hair, scratching gently at his scalp for a moment before you make a fist and start to push him down your body, you give him a smirk, watching as his eyes go even wider, a little moan getting caught in his throat. 

“...Be a good boy and I might give you a treat, alright?”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he hisses, yanking your jeans down your legs like his life depends on it. 

-

He seemed excited for today’s run. Masking his worry with a healthy dose of distraction and conversation, or an attempt at one. Truth be told you haven’t registered a single word he’s said. 

It was time to get a closer look at the bunker, going the furthest you’ve gone in the last week you’ve been here. Nervousness settled in your stomach like a stone sinking to the bottom of a pond, a heavy weight that you couldn’t shake. 

You’ve only had the confidence to map out the local town, feeling comfortable enough with something you were familiar with. Hiding, keeping quiet, taking down the wandering husks that lingered. 

Most of the stores were unfortunately picked clean, probably thanks to whoever inhabited this mysterious bunker. It only made things more frustrating when you realized that you were all down to your last bag of chips. Supplies were running dangerously low and so was your water. It was time to make your move. 

Dustin had been more quiet than usual, tucked away behind the front desk with a book in his lap. You decided not to pry, knowing that the poor boy was probably exhausted enough as it was. It just made you sad. No child should have to go through the things he’s seen and experienced in the past year, his whole life reshaped by the horrific world that now surrounded him. 

“You almost ready?” Eddie leaned forward on the couch, elbows bracing on his knees. He had a hint of concern reflecting in his eyes, a soft smile resting on his lips. 

Eddie knows the kind of internal battle you’ve been struggling with, having talked with you extensively about it on your second day in the radio station. He sympathized and even expressed the same worries as you, telling you how terrified he was. After all, there was no such thing as trust anymore. There was no such thing as safety. 

You have no other options. That’s what you kept trying to tell yourself, a feeble attempt to convince yourself it was true. 

A slow steady breath was exhaled from your lungs as you stood. You walk over to your shoes and grab the pair before grabbing your backpack next. The bag jingles quietly as you throw it down onto the couch next to Eddie, with you plopping down onto the uneven cushions right after. 

“Dustin, come on buddy, time to get rollin’.” Eddie called out, watching as the boy’s head peeked over the front desk. 

“Coming.” Dustin sighed, placing his book down on the desk before standing, going to fetch his pack as well. 

The silence was heavy, unspoken words saying everything you were all thinking: 

“This was stupid. A suicide mission. It will not be worth it.”

Eddie stood from the couch, clasping his hands together before turning to you and pointing, “You got the map still?” He asks, his eyes going towards your backpack briefly. 

“Mhm…” You hum, unzipping the bag and handing him the old paper map. A big circular coffee stain obscured most of the town, making the street names borderline unreadable, but it was enough. It showed you just how far off into the woods this place was, secluded where anyone could be watching. 

“Ready?” 

“As ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.” You reply, your stomach twisting anxiously. 

-

The town was uncomfortably quiet, not even the droplets of water dared whisper a sound. It was just silent, dead. The only thing that truly filled your ears was the occasional scrape coming from your shoes, a pebble or two shifting under your weight. 

“So…” Eddie starts, bringing the faded map closer to his face so he could read it better, the shadow cast by the awning you stood under not helping, “Uh- it seems like all we gotta do is follow this road east for two miles. Then we make a left into the woods I guess.” He shifts from foot to foot as he thinks, “Might be a dirt road, otherwise we’ll just have to find a trail or something.” 

“We should stay hidden in the trees, find some good cover and just watch for a little bit.” You offer, thinking it would be the safest option rather than just walking straight up to the door. 

Eddie nods at that idea, “If there is anything to watch, that is.” Eddie counters, “But good call. We gotta play smart.” 

He folded the map back up and motioned for you to turn around. The teeth of the zipper on your backpack groaned as he opened it, the paper rustling as he tucked it safely inside before closing it once more. 

Eddie placed a gentle hand on your shoulder, squeezing against the tattered fabric of your jacket, his warmth pressing into your chilled skin, trying to soothe the tense muscles. His fingertips ghost down your arm as he steps away, eyeing the road ahead and deciding to take the lead. 

“Let’s go before the rain starts to pick up again.” His head tilted up slightly to look at the dark looming clouds, a distant rumble of thunder echoing in the far distance. 

Dustin walked beside you, watching your surroundings carefully as you both followed closely behind Eddie. The road ahead was seemingly endless, trailing off into a hill that you hoped you wouldn’t have to walk up. 

The trees were wrapped in kudzu, large vine formations that imitated faceless giants, the invasive plant consuming the land around it and reclaiming what was once owned by humans. 

On either side of the road was a dense forest, an occasional birdsong echoing from the tree line. The slow conjoined melody did nothing to calm you, if anything it felt mocking, like they were laughing at your steadily approaching demise. 

“Your hands are shaking.” Dustin whispered to you, his shoulder brushing against your forearm as he drew himself closer, he tilted his hat up so he could get a better look at your face. 

“Just cold.” You lied, not wanting to scare the kid more than he already was. 

Your mind was a whirlwind of bad outcomes, a nonstop torrent that was assaulting any positive thought you had. It was hard to keep your hands from trembling as fiercely as they were, your limbs seemingly locking up more and more as you got closer to this bunker. 

“Look.” Eddie said suddenly, pointing towards a break in the treeline where a large gravel path marked your way through the dense forest. You were here. And you were terrified. 

A steady sigh slipped past your chapped lips before you gave one simple nod of acknowledgement and walked into the ditch by the road. You were the first to step into the treeline, deciding to take up the task of leading your two companions. 

Your eyes stayed glued on the gravel path just outside the trees, your steps careful and calculated, making sure to stay a good distance away from the makeshift road. You wanted to see them before they saw you. 

The path curved to the left and so did you, straining your ears for anything out of the ordinary.

It was a long walk, the anticipation building with each step, feet barely missing the jutting roots that hid themselves against fallen leaves, or jumping at the sound of squirrels running away from your group. 

Then finally the gravel path solidified, broken pavement that held several cars with dusty windows and tents that flapped helplessly against the wind. There was a large building in the middle of it all, fenced off with high chain links that were topped with barbed wire. The Bunker itself was rectangular in shape, not entirely what you expected to see. Assuming it would be more of an entrance that led to something underground. 

You turned back towards Eddie and Dustin, whispering for them to hide behind some trees. The wet ground soaked the knees of your pants as you slowly kneeled behind one yourself, fingers quickly unzipping your backpack and taking out your binoculars. You hid behind a thick tree trunk, your back against it before peering past the mossy bark and looking to the bunker. 

There were two people standing outside, an older man and a young woman that seemed to be around your age. They both had shovels, digging into the wet dirt next to what seemed to be the start of a garden, a loud laugh came from the older man as he conversed with the girl, kind smiles on their faces. 

From the outside they seemed harmless, but looks could always be deceiving. 

A tree branch snapped behind you, making your lungs stutter in your chest. You were quick to look towards Eddie, who was now crouched closely next to you, his hand reaching out towards the binoculars. 

“Lemme get a look.” His whisper barely graced your ears. 

You weren’t sure how long the three of you sat there. Rain droplets were starting to patter against the broken pavement of the compound, wetting the beige color into a soft brown, you watched people filter in and out, a small group having driven in from what you assumed to be a supply run.

There were people of all ages in the group, teenagers, older women, young adults. You lost count of the new faces, finding yourself growing more and more troubled by your current position. At any point someone could wander into the woods and see the three of you spying, or even worse, the dead could come. 

“We need to leave.” You told Eddie, reaching out for the binoculars that were practically glued to his face. He hadn’t budged from his spot, his body not as well hidden as yours was as he drew himself closer. 

“Wait-“ He whispered, watching as a group walked out from the front doors of the bunker, a few of them heading towards one of the trucks that had just driven through the front gates. 

“Eddie, we've seen enough.” You urge, eyes going from him to the people that were unpacking the vehicle. 

It’s as if he was waiting for something to happen, waiting to see something you couldn’t. It made your irritation spike, the way his hands didn’t budge when you tried to take the binoculars. You could feel the anger slowly seep out of your heart as you continued to watch him. There were far too many people, and one wrong move would have you all found out. 

You grabbed his jacket and forcefully tugged him towards you, forcing his body to collide into yours. Your grip didn’t let up though, forcing him to hide behind the large tree trunk once more, hearing the roar of a motorcycle approaching.

The binoculars dropped into the wet leaves on the ground, Eddie’s eyes widening as he realized that he had fully stepped out of cover in order to get a closer look. 

“I-” He started, only for his mouth to be covered by your palm. 

You glared at him, hearing the loud vehicle approach and pass by. The sound would surely draw in any husks that remained in the surrounding forest. 

The front gate of the compound squealed as it was rolled open, the gravel shifting beneath and crunching underneath the gate’s wheels. You could hear voices but couldn’t make out the words, too far away to understand, but too close at the same time. 

Thunder clapped overhead, the sound made you flinch. Eddie’s eyes softened at that, realizing how terrified you truly were in this moment, the terror swimming in your eyes. You were shaking like a leaf, your fingers tightening on the front of his jacket.

It was a moment like this where you truly began to mourn the old world. It felt like a lifetime ago now, being able to walk around and greet people without fear of them shooting you dead.

“Let’s go.” Eddie whispered after gently removing your hand from his mouth. 

You were walking back to the radio station on trembling legs, your hands clenched tightly into fists at your side. At any second someone could have driven by and seen the three of you, someone could shoot at the three of you thinking you were one of the dead, anything could happen when you were out in the open like this. Vulnerable was the last thing you wanted to be right now. 

Eddie walked up beside you, matching your quickened pace. His warm fingers smoothed over your knuckles, softly urging you to open your hand for him, and you did. His fingers weaved through yours, the cold bite of his rings making you shiver. Warmth seeped into your cold skin, traveling up your arm and into your rapidly beating heart. 

“Almost there.” He reassured you, smiling before glancing back towards Dustin. 

The teen was almost pressed into your backs thanks to his close proximity, equally as eager to get back to the safety of the radio station. 

-

Your backpack dropped to the ground with a plop, a cloud of dust rising in its wake. You let out a long sigh, fingers sliding along your forehead as you began to pace along the lobby. 

Everything you saw was circling back around, there had to be at least twenty people at this compound, maybe even more on the inside. Every single person you saw had a gun, a knife, or both. They had at least ten cars in total sitting inside the gates, three on the outside-

“I’m sorry.” Eddie spoke from behind you. 

You stopped pacing and turned to him, he looked so guilty and in a way you were glad he was. 

These strangers, no matter how nice they looked on the outside, could be monsters. You saw them with people they trusted, people they were clearly close with, there was no telling how they would respond to three strangers rolling up to their gates. 

“It’s fine.” Your head dipped down, the toe of your shoe poking against the carpeted floor, “There were just so many of them…” You sounded pathetic, voice strained as your eyes started to burn. 

Eddie was quick to lift your head, his thumb and curled index finger lifting your chin tenderly. He could see the shine of tears in your eyes, making him frown softly. His warm hand slowly trailed across your jaw and to your neck, bringing you closer into a hug. Your arms wrapped around his waist like a scared child, body shuddering against his tight hold. 

“You’re safe now.” He whispered into your hair, “I promise.” 

You believed him in that moment, your body relaxing against his warmth. Comforted by the weight of his forearm pressing into your back, his other hand faintly massaging the back of your neck. 

“Still got the magic touch.” He attempted to joke as the shaking finally started to subside, your sniffles muffled against the fabric of his jacket. 

Thunder rumbled loudly outside, the sound settling deep in your chest alongside the heavy weight of your emotions. Slowly, Eddie guided you over to the dusty couch, sitting down with his back against the armrest and a leg propped up on the cushions, he gently tugged you down by your hand, urging you to lay against his chest. 

The fabric of his shirt was soft against your wet cheek, the steady beat of his heart against your ear lulling you into a sense of comfort. His fingernails scratched against your back in a calm rhythm, his other hand cradling your jaw as a way to keep your head pressed to his chest, thumb tracing your cheeks. 

After some time your eyelids grew heavier, the emotional exhaustion beginning to take hold. There was a soft hum that rumbled in Eddie’s chest, a song you used to force him to play for you all the time, making up for his lack of guitar with his own voice. 

“You are such a fucking cheat!” Steve yelled, pointing an accusatory finger towards Eddie, who could barely contain the smirk that was rising on his lips. 

The cards lay on the table in a mocking manner, this being the third hand in a row that Eddie’s won. He couldn’t hold back his chuckle before he took a drink from the beer bottle in his hand, shrugging his shoulders. 

“Sorry Stevie-boy, I think you just suck at poker.” He teased after setting the bottle back down, winking at the seething man as he began to gather the cards around the table. 

You leaned back in your chair and laughed, “Don’t be such a sore loser, sweetcheeks.” You joke, leaning over to pinch Steve’s pink cheek. He slaps your hand away with a playful glare. 

Steve lets out a frustrated sigh, watching as Eddie quickly dealt out the next hand. Steve’s chair scraped against the ground as he stood, pointing at you then to Eddie. 

“If either one of you fuck with my cards while I’m in the bathroom, you’re so dead.” 

His empty threat only made you laugh harder than before, looking over at Eddie.

“Oh shit dude, I’m sooo scared.” He joined in, feigning his own fright at Steve’s words. 

Once Steve was out of sight you reached for his cards, lifting it to see yet another horrible hand. The horrible luck he had was truly astonishing, it almost made you pity him. You lifted your own hand to see much better cards, finding it in yourself to be kind enough to switch the cards with him, hoping he wouldn’t notice the shit-eating grin on Eddie’s face. 

“Now who’s the cheater?” Eddie quietly asks, pushing your shoulder lightly making you let out a giggle. 

“It’s not cheating if I’m letting him have the upper hand.” You roll your eyes, he would never know. 

“Alright dickheads, I’m confident in this one.” Steve came back with a new found enthusiasm, his exaggerated anger subsiding. 

“Whatever you say, man”- 

The sound of a pounding knock on the radio station’s door woke you, shaking you from the dream you were having. You were quick to sit up, hand reaching for the knife that was clipped onto your belt, shaking Eddie awake beneath you. 

“What-” Eddie mumbled sleepily, sitting up on his elbows and squinting up at you. 

The morning sun was shining through the dusty windows, making you realize that you had slept through the night cuddled against Eddie. His hold on your waist tightened only subtly, trying to urge you to lay back down, but he hadn’t heard what you did. 

Terror washed over you as yet another series of harsh knocks rang out, then . The sound of it made Eddie sit up as you did, his eyes widening, quickly going to grab his knife that was sitting beside the leg of the couch. 

“I don’t hear anything.” A male’s voice said, muffled by the wooden door. The knob started to turn, and your breath caught in your throat. 

This was it. This was how you were going to die. 

The door opened with a creaking groan, the hinges mocking you in your final moments. It swung open slowly, your body seizing in fear as you saw two figures, shadows from the dark radio station obscuring their faces. Your fingers tightened around your knife like a lifeline, as if it would help against the guns that the two men had pointed towards the carpet. 

“Oh.” One of them said, looking towards the other. 

“Anything in there?!” A distant voice called, quickened footsteps approaching. Another figure joined the others in the darkened doorway. 

You felt as if your heart was going to explode out of your chest, fear choking the life out of you as your throat tightened and tears started to pool in your eyes. The emotions from yesterday were still raw, like a wound being cut open once again, the sickening thoughts of how you were moments away from death suffocating you. 

“Holy shit.” The newly joined member whispered, quickly making his way past the two men and through the station doors. 

You flinched at the sudden movement, your eyes clenching shut and your head bowing down against Eddie’s shoulder, afraid that the man was going to attack you, anticipating rough hands yanking you away from Eddie. 

Your friend was quick to cradle you against him, holding you tight in a way that almost made you feel safe. His head quickly turned to the man, pointing his hunting knife in his direction. 

“Get the fuck back-” His voice started as a snarl, loud and booming before softening suddenly as he cut himself off.

“Holy shit.” Dustin’s voice finally rang through the radio station, walking out from the breakroom where he had been sleeping. You could hear him running, his sob ringing through the room, your head shot up at the sound, thinking that he was being hurt by this stranger. 

It was far from that though. 

The teen had his arms wrapped around the man’s middle, his cries muffled against the dirty cable knit sweater that the man wore. His back was to you, broad shoulders shaking as he leaned into the hug from the teen, his arms tightening around him with a relieved sob of his own. 

You felt frozen in place, the shock and stress making you feel lightheaded. Your breathing quickened, throat tightening as you tried to calm yourself, blackened spots dotting your vision. 

“E-Eddie…” You whispered, your vision going in and out, before you finally slipped into the black abyss.