˚୨୧⋆｡° Awrf! ⋆ ˚｡⋆୨୧

Steve’s been working a summer job, and Eddie’s just along for the ride…

…Is what Steve would say, because between them, it is clear who is winning employee of the month at their shitty retail job—Robin, but Steve’s a close second. Scraping it at the bottom is Eddie, who only commits to doing just fine so he can keep a single toe in the door of employment and still get one of Steve’s legendary sandwiches every lunch break. Apparently granola bars and other snacks ready-wrapped in plastic aren’t enough to sustain oneself through a day’s shift. Be it plain anxiety or the extra cholesterol giving him chest pains just by watching, Steve couldn’t stand by and let Eddie feed himself like that.

The sun is starting to hang and cast orange light over open fields of maturing crops. It’s only the boys today, enjoying their ‘Clock-out Take-out’ on a desolate roadside at the edge of Hawkins when a fleet of engines comes a-roarin'.

On the few weekends he’s not pushing scratch-offs to gambling addicts on company orders, Eddie likes to frequent the leather bars. He’s been slowly crawling his way down the list subheaded ‘INDIANA’ in his Gayellow Pages. Once, he even backpedalled through the alphabet and landed in Chicago on a sort of kinky pilgrimage he took last year—“To find myself” was his vague excuse to Wayne, who was furious when Eddie came home looking well and truly fucked by the weekend prior and suffering a mighty comedown.

So, when he recognises the patches whizzing by, belonging to a variety of queer denominations, embroidery fraying as the wind rips around countless leather jackets, he drops his sub sandwich and makes some undignified noise around a bite of cheese and ham. Steve’s shoulder gets an over-excited backhand before Eddie is wolf-whistling at decibels that nearly knock Steve off the hood of the Beamer.

Some of them beep back and carry on, but the road they're coming from resembles those 19th-century drawings of the bison herds that dominated the Plains before the whites got to them—they are the horizon. Soon enough, after Eddie whistles a couple more verses of eardrum torture, one guy splinters off the road and sets off a domino effect as a few more wearing the same insignia roll to a stop right in front of Eddie, Steve and the Beamer.

Decorating their jackets is a medieval-style coat of arms. The face of the shield is white, with stark black crenellation falling over the top edge, and the proud silhouette of a black knight chess piece below the club’s name in old manuscript font.