Archive of Our Own

November 1st, 1986

Eddie,

Well, man, you fuckin called it: fully got “gang-pressed” or whatever into hosting a Halloween party for the twerps last night. Shitheads totally trashed my living room. But it’s fine. Mom’s been saying she wants to replace the sofa for like a full year now so. Guess this will be a good excuse for her to pull the trigger.

Coulda been worse tho. Coulda been more like one of my old ragers back in junior year, and instead of Lucas’s New Coke all over Mom’s Cassina couch it could be, like, wine cooler and Tommy H’s puke, you know? So I guess I’ll take my wins where I can get them. Cause these nerds just wanted to eat me out of house and home and marathon r-rated horror movies and keep me up all night because the dweebs freak themselves out. I was like you’re not gonna be able to sleep and they were like dude we’ll be fine. But then they’re crawling into my bed like overgrown toddlers at four am shrieking like bannedshees about chainsaw arms or some shit. Ugh. Can’t believe I caved, man. But I caved so fast. Am I getting soft in my old age? Robin says I might be nineteen physically but spirich spirtlly spiritually I’m about fifty-five. (She also says I’m siprit spiritually a fifty-five year old PTA mom which, like, I know but she doesn’t have to be so mean about it, right?)

Nice to let them be kids tho. That’s, you know, what Mrs B says to me. Nice to let them be kids. At least I had those ragers, and you had your shit right? Your like band? They gotta grow up in the, like, shadow of this hot garbage. We got to be like. Young and dumb. And shit.

There doing okay. I mean. As okay as they can be. They miss you, is what I’m saying. We, like, all do, man. I don’t really know what else to say without being a fuckin bummer about it. So. Sorry.

I’m looking in on Wayne for you, like you asked. Got us tickets for a Pacers game in a few weeks. So. And I’ll keep writing. Till you get sick of me. Ha. And like once your all settled and shit, I’ll come for a visit with Robs maybe. If you want. Don’t think they’ll let me bring the infants but maybe I can stack em on each other's like shoulders and throw em in a trench coat. That’ll fool em.

Anyway.

Take care, man.

Your friend,
Steve Harrington

Eddie’s kicked back in his bunk, Return of the King propped up against his thighs, when the new guy comes to rattle the bars of the ole eight by eight. 

They’re one of his only possessions these days, his copies of the trilogy. He’d had more things, back when he’d started out, but the series of eight frantic and largely unexplained transfers he’d experienced between the fall of ‘87 and his arrival in Pelican Bay SuperMax in ‘89 when it opened had meant he’d been cruelly separated from nearly all his carefully curated collection of prison appropriate bits and bobs when the dust had settled.

Now, he has: a small radio and some batteries, those a constant refreshed cycle courtesy of the commissary and what he assumes is a government funded allowance at this point because he doesn't know who else would be footing his bills here, not anymore; several packs of 100s because, even though most of the other residents tend to steer clear of him (what with the satanist murderer rumors) except the old timers (who think he’s funny, he guesses), the importance of this prison currency had been drilled into him; his journals; and his set of first edition — and yes you heard that right, fellas, first editions, hot damn, he’s at least got that going for him — copies of The Lord of the Rings, spines lovingly worn and ferally protected. He’s got a handful of letters from the outside world tucked between their pages, and some Polaroids too. He thinks if those books, and those few letters and photos that had been miraculously saved, had disappeared in the shuffle he probably would’ve done himself in.

He’d spent his first few prisons, and first few years, fully in SuperMax facilities, himself, on lockdown for twenty-three hours before his one hour of fresh air in the yard. His meals had been delivered by the same rotation of four guards in each facility, and his visitors had been kept to a strict minimum. Mostly, he thinks, it was so they’d be sure he wouldn’t run his mouth about what really happened but Eddie knows well enough: lots of people on the inside swear up and down they didn’t do it; him saying he’s innocent doesn’t make him special. It just gets him looked at with pity, or rolled eyes, and honestly he’s not sure which one is worse. Probably, he thinks, the pity.

Anyway. Those small things — his books, the letters, his journals with his thoughts and shitty song lyrics, the radio that he never found a decent station on and consequently always had to put up with Top 40 bullshit — they’d been his lifelines, then and now. And he’d had more, once: more books that he’d been sent by his friends, more letters, more pictures, even a sweater or two that made him feel like he was still an actual fucking person when he could barely talk to other fucking people.

His arrival in Pelican Bay, despite also being a SuperMax, had seen him released into gen pop at long last but the trade off hadn’t been worth it — or, at least, what he perceives the trade off to have been: regular interactions with other prisoners versus the loss of the vast majority of his shit, besides what he’d stuffed in a dubiously acquired backpack that some guard had taken pity on him and let him hold onto against regulations.

And communication with the outside world. That stopped around that time too, or just before, letters from his usual correspondence buddies dried up around that third to last transfer and those rare few in-person visits before that too. It took Eddie himself another year before he stopped writing, tired of sending his words out into the void when realistically the only people who were reading his shit were the government stooges tasked with monitoring his mail.

Eddie could find it in himself to forgive everyone for leaving him behind bars and moving on with their lives — he wouldn’t blame them in the slightest, if that’s really what happened — but he’s not an idiot, okay. Maybe it took him a hot minute, and maybe he didn’t get to walk that stage and flip the bird to all and sundry in Hawkins, but he got his grubby little mitts on a GED through some continuing education program in ‘88 and that counts for something, it got him into a prison college program even, and so, you know, Eddie can put two and two together and get four like any other schmuck.

So, yeah, there are only so many coincidences a man can perceive before he decides, yep, yep, this was purposeful. All those transfers, all his shit, the letters he looked forward to with weekly mail drop (some, yeah, some of them more than others) — what is it that they say? It’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you?

Because Eddie’s seen some shit, man. He’s been to literal biblical hell, he thinks, and came back with the screaming nightmares, facial scars, and missing nipple to prove it. And it doesn’t matter, he thinks, if he would swear up, down, and until he was blue that he’d never tell another living soul what had truly happened in Hawkins if they’d just let him go free, spend the rest of his life on the straight and narrow like any other good, God fearing white boy from the midwest. It doesn’t matter, because someone needed to take the fall and Eddie? He’s been holding the bag since the beginning, hasn't he? He’s always been easy pickings from way back.

All of this to say, he’s sort of become numb to it, and he doesn’t expect much, and maybe that’s why what happens next — he doesn’t see it coming. 

Because eight years on, here he is: in the cell he calls home, listening to that Top 40 shit, and reading his book, idly thumbing the edge of one of those letters that sticks out between the pages. Maybe he’ll revisit them — or a very select one, to be honest — later, after lights out — later, when he’s got the privacy of the dark to read words he has totally memorized by now, actually, and to picture a specific set of hands as he slides his own under his waistband —

A baton dragged across prison bars makes a certain kind of noise, a familiar, classic kind of noise, and that’s what pulls Eddie from the daring rescue of Frodo Baggins from Cirith Ungol by Samwise Gamgee and has him looking up at the door of his cell to the new guy.

The new guard, to be more specific. Like he said, most of the prisoners and guards tend to keep clear of Eddie. No matter that he doesn’t talk about what he’s in for; prisons a den of gossips, he’s found — someone’s always spilling someone else's secrets if it means getting favor somehow, a leg up or over, or an extra privilege here and then. But the new guard doesn’t seem phased by whatever he’s been told, and Eddie finds he actually kind of likes the new guy, inasmuch as a prisoner can like their jailer, he supposes.

Guy came to Pelican Bay about six months ago, transferred in from some prison on the East Coast that Eddie’s never caught the name of and not either of the two that Eddie spent a few months in ‘88 — somewhere in New England, new guy said, which is where he says he was from, born and raised in Rhode Island, he says.

Eddie’s not too sure about that. Dude speaks like he learned English from Katharine Hepburn movies, all wide vowels and clipped Mid-Atlantic, Shakespeare movie sounding consonants, and sure Eddie’s never been to Rhode Island — never been much of anywhere, for all that he’s been the resident of something like thirteen US states these days; what can he say? He doesn’t get out much, drum roll and high hat, he’ll be here for sixty to life! — but he’s pretty sure people from Rhode Island don’t sound like that. Plus, he’s got those eyes that you only get when you grew up fucked in the head on a steady diet of communism and root vegetables, he thinks. So, like, Enzo Beneventi, Eddie’s right nut, okay?

Still. It doesn’t seem like the guy is out to get Eddie personally. It’s not like he goes out of his way to be chummy with him or anything; he just doesn’t actively avoid him like some of the others do or, like, crosses himself after he walks past — which, hilariously, has happened more than once; Eddie would play into it, if it wasn’t actually such a fucking bummer. Beneventi isn’t mean, or cruel, like some other guards have been and are, either, seems like he’s just here to do his job, do it as well as he can and punch the clock on the way out, so Eddie figures Officer Beneventi is, like, decent people in the grand scheme of things. He even saw the guy stop a fight once, so.

“How’s it hangin’, sir,” he says, after a moment of Beneventi just sort of standing at the bars and smiling that absent smile that never reaches those sad, bushbaby eyes. He rolls them, now, at Eddie, but almost fondly.

“You’ve got visitors,” Beneventi replies.

And that, of all things, is what makes Eddie’s eyebrows shoot all the fuckin’ way up into his hairline, practically about to achieve liftoff, because he manifestly does not get visitors. (It’s also what should have set alarm bells off in the ole noggin but alas poor Eddie, blinded by the promise of something new and shiny and oh-so desired to distract him yet a-fucking-gain.) He thinks the last one he got was back in ‘92, almost a full two years ago, and it was some upstart reporter that had lied about her connection to get in to see him. She’d reminded him of Nancy Wheeler, and there’d been a minute there where he’d almost entertained the conversation, except she thought he was guilty and was just looking for a shocking story. So, yeah, not at all Nancy Wheeler adjacent in the end.

He doesn’t even get visits from his lawyers, mainly because he doesn’t really have those anymore. They’d given up on him and his case a while back because the only way Eddie’s getting out of the big house is if he pleads insanity, which means a one way ticket to a psych ward somewhere and all things being equal? It ain’t Club Med, but he’ll take SuperMax over the loony bin, thanks.

So it’s with an excess of perverse curiosity (and also probably schadenfreude, he thinks) that Eddie finds himself setting Return of the King down on his bunk after marking his place with a loose Polaroid and trundling out of his cell and after Officer Beneventi. He follows him down the hall, nodding to a couple of the old timers as he passes, and then down a flight of stairs towards the visitation area.

It has, as he had said, been a hot minute since he’s had reason to step foot in this particular part of the prison, and he’s a little at a loss as Beneventi leads the way into the room. He nods his chin at a certain seat — all of them are open, he notes, and he wonders if someone got special permission to see him, got the room cleared out for whatever is about to be said, which does not exactly fill him with confidence, here, and okay so maybe some alarm bells are starting to go off — and Eddie blows out a gusty breath. He scrubs a hand through his hair, chopped close to his skull long ago in deference to prison hygiene and personal safety, and sits down in the chair.

Eddie picks up the phone that allows him to talk through the thick, bullet resistant plastic and stares at the man sitting in front of him, his own phone pressed to his ear and a vapid smile on his face as he awaits acknowledgement.

He’s a silver fox of a man, no bones about it. Eddie’s never really been in the market for that kind of thing, but he’s got eyes, you know? This guy could get it, with his salt and pepper hair all slicked back, wearing a suit that probably costs more than the yearly GDP of a small island nation somewhere. Pretty hazel eyes — which, like his friend Enzo Beneventi, that plasticine smile doesn’t quite reach, though there’s a certain twinkle of something else there that makes Eddie a little more nervous than before — and a ski-slope nose, a jaw that could cut fucking glass, and a starburst of moles high up on one sharp cheekbone like an echo of a memory, and that’s probably what makes him look familiar, Eddie thinks, probably just those Cindy Crawford pretty moles and a kneejerk gasp of want, ghost-like, someone walking over his grave, maybe. He dismisses the thought as soon as he has it; he doesn’t know this suited up asshole from Adam.

Of course, that’s when he clocks the young woman behind him, sitting just to the left of his shoulders and staring at Eddie in a flatly familiar way, like a dare. Her shoulders are relaxed, her head cocked just so and her silk press falling in soft waves down the back of her neck. There’s a legal pad in front of her and the handwriting hasn’t changed much since she was busting him down to size in a high school classroom but she sure had gotten big. The Sinclairs must’ve made ‘em tall and how , he thinks almost hysterically.

“Jimmy Papadopoulous,” says the man in front of Eddie, either completely unaware of Eddie’s total mental freeze or simply undeterred by it, which frankly seems more likely, some distant part of him thinks, “and my paralegal, Ms Zadie Blanchard. We’re your new lawyers, Mr Munson.”

Behind him, Erica Sinclair, aka Zadie fucking Blanchard apparently, wiggles her fingers at him.

“What the fuck,” says Eddie.

Okay, so, like, cue the record scratch and Eddie asking, I guess you’re wondering how I ended up here?

Maybe not. It’s probably painfully obvious.

But let's get into the nitty gritty, shall we? Let’s really twist that knife — 

In 1986, after he’d done the dumbest, bravest, most suicidally stupid thing he could conceive of — though in his defense he didn’t really see any other option and also yeah he may have not been doing super hot mentally then so maybe a little extra emphasis on the suicide or it all — Eddie woke up in some government hospital with upwards of a couple hundred stitches (but who's counting), and a decent amount of staples too, on his torso, neck, and face, four pints of someone else’s blood in his veins, and down one kidney and one nipple, both the left ones. There’d been no one by his side except some government stooge called Owens talking a good game about how they’d clear his name when all this Upside Down shit got done and dusted.

Except: they never did. Color Eddie surprised — not.

He got tried for a triple homicide with a side helping of Satanism and leading a cult, though that had been more him getting tried in the court of public opinion more than anything Indiana state could actually pin on him. Murder in the first degree, however —

Dustin and the boys and girls of Hellfire and the Party had stuck by him until the bitter end, when he was found guilty and sent packing in irons. Even Harrington had tried to use daddy’s money to rustle up a better lawyer than the beleaguered public defender who’d taken one look at Eddie and gone sheet white, so shocked and terrified at the prospect of who he was defending and the details of the case. Eddie didn’t even have it in him to toss up some half-hearted devil horns to really complete the look, that was how scared that guy had looked, and honestly after all this? So much of what made Eddie Eddie had kind of lost its appeal and all he really wanted was to be small and safe and free.

Chief Hopper, miraculously not dead, had tried too, shouted at people until he was hoarse and red in the face, or so Eddie was told back then, waved his hands around and made a scene, but if the Harrington checkbook, powerful and plentiful its contents may have been with all that money his pop’s made in insurance, wasn’t enough, what would be?

It was open and shut, except for all the ways it wasn’t, and Eddie got seventy to life with little to no chance for parole, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, never see your friends and family again, you satanist, trailer trash piece of shit. And maybe let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!

There were the letters, for a while. Visitors here and there; the kids weren’t allowed of course but Wayne was on the list, in the beginning — was the list, in fact — though it was six of one, half a dozen of the other if he actually got in to see him. The letters were more reliable. Harrington, surprisingly, was his main penpal, his biggest link to the outside, those charmingly misspelled and grammatically questionable letters that slowly got better over time as Steve took a community college class here and there.

Letters that he had hoarded, cherished, pressed between the pages of his prized possessions and wept bitterly over when almost half of them were lost as he was transferred again and again and again.

Letters from a guy who he started to call Steve , then Stevie , then baby and honey and sweetheart as the letters wore on and they grew closer and closer, an emotional intimacy growing and taking root between them, a lack of physical intimacy unable to stop the want, the need, that had also grown between the spaces of their words.

And if those spaces turned to words themselves, turned to something printed, inked and real and touchable if only beneath the pads of Eddie’s fingers? Well, even if they did, that’s between Eddie and his god.

(Also the people who monitor his mail. And they call him the freak, Jesus.)

But then there were those transfers, and then there were no visits, no letters, nothing, complete jack shit. It had felt so deliberate, so pointed, but Eddie tries not to think about that because then he imagines them looking for him, wanting him still, sick to their stomachs not knowing what happened to him, what’s happening to him, and that’s worse, somehow, in a way he cannot articulate. So it’s easier to just think of them happily living their lives, whole and safe, and to think of himself as someone left behind, and not holding a grudge about it, because surely it’s to be expected, right? Just another chip off the old block, just another jail sentence for someone called Munson, and he even beat the old man’s time, bully for him.

He wonders sometimes too if he’s proud about it, though he feels bad almost immediately whenever he does. He’d only been trying to provide for Eddie, when you got down to it; wasn’t his fault he was poor white trash with no other means. It was just the luck of the draw, you know? Of course, that doesn’t make his absence, his choices, sting any less, he thinks. Still.

And so Eddie has been abandoned: by his friends, by his lawyers, by the US justice system and shit. But fuck it — fuck that, and fuck them.

Prison, he finds over time, isn’t, like, the worst. Could be better, but could also be so much worse probably. He’s got three hots and a cot, as they say, and, yeah, maybe Eddie can’t play the guitar anymore, hardwon calluses softened and faded, and, yeah, maybe he had to cut all his rockstar fucking hair off because sometimes the guard were shitty about showers in SuperMax and sometimes people got a little too close for comfort and he’s stuck in loose fitting clothes that are easy to grab but he can make himself less of a pulling target without long hair, even if all he usually has to do to get them to back off is bare his teeth and narrow his eyes and suddenly everyone is remember just what he’s rumored to be in for —

But he can read a shit ton, make his way through the mental list of books he always wanted to read but never had time for because they were making him read David Copperfield and shit instead as a kid, and here in Pelican Bay he’s even got a nerdy little book club with anyone who’s interested. He was able to get his GED, learning on his own time, and there’s those other correspondence classes he can take for a real live college degree so he’s doing that now too. Gender Studies, though he doesn’t make a point of advertising it; he thinks Buckley and Wheeler would get a kick out of it, when he can bring himself to think about the others.

He writes in his journals, his thoughts and feelings, and little short stories and song lyrics. The short stories are good, and sometimes he wonders if maybe there’s a market for prison sci-fi and fantasy outside these walls. He doesn’t think there’s a market for the song lyrics. Those he thinks are too personal, too raw, to be sung by anyone else, his early stuff, at least. The shit he writes now are just terrible love songs to someone who probably moved on long ago, got a wife and a white picket fence and those six fucking kids because who would wait for someone like him? It’s real Top 40 shit, is what he’s saying, romantic bullshit, and those are dime a dozen, even if some guy in for a triple homicide has penned them and there’s some sort of novelty value in that. Whatever — Johnny Cash he ain’t, right?

Plus, while he doesn’t so much mind being solitary, some of the older guys, the ones who are bank robbers and hardened criminals and, you know, real murderers which Eddie tries to just put that in a little box to never think about, are kinda nice to him. He’s the youngest there with a sentence like his, practically life, might as well be, and sometimes he thinks they think about him like he’s a little kid, or maybe it’s just easier for them to envision him as someone’s son. He wonders if they think he could have been one of their kids, skinhead haircut, ugly facial scar, and dorky, half-mangled tattoos and all.

Sometimes they even pretend to believe him when he says he didn’t do it.

That counts for something, he thinks.

Just what, he doesn’t know.

January 16th 1987

Eddie,

She’s out, man! I’d say noone’s happier than Mayfield herself to be cut loose from the hospital but pretty sure the nurses were like 15 minutes away from putting like an air bubble in the kids IV. Love the kid like a sister but she really did make them work for it.

Whatever. Fuck em. Government assholes deserve to have the Max Mayfield special after all this shit am I right? And like she deserves to bitch out whoever she wants too. They [something smudged out here] They [something even more forcefully struck out here now] Fuck.

Well.

She’s never walking again. That’s what they say. Gonna be wearing fucking coke bottles over her eyes for the rest of her life to. Got a good attitude about it, much as you can I think. Makes a lot of jokes about how you and me were batfood and now she’s blind as a bat, so were gonna all be in good company or some shit. So. Yeah. She’s doing okay. Doens’t talk about the walking thing. Don’t blame her. I got this ringing in my ears you know and I don’t wanna talk about that like ever so I get it I guess. Maybe I’ll be deaf like a bat. Are bats deaf? Wait they got real good hearing I think. What the fuck is deaf? Whatever.

Kids are gonna throw a party for her this weekend. My place, as usual. Can’t wait to tell em my parents are finally cutting the place loose in a few months. Kids gonna loose it when I tell em they gotta find a new hang for this shit. Probably be even more upset about that then me having to like live out the bimmer. Ha.

I’ll wait to send this until after the party. See if Jonny can get us some nice snaps.

Your friend,
Steve H

PS
Don’t run your mouth about the ear thing. It’s just like a joke. Mainly. But Robin’s already weird enough about my concussions, I don’t need like rabies part two electric boogie shoes or whatever. And I don’t wanna hear shit about it from the rest of these dweebs. It’s not that bad. So. Shut your yap about it.

PPS or like is it PSS?? I’ll ask Rob
Car thing was a joke too. The old man talks a good game about me like standing on my own 2 feet and pulling myself up by the bootstraps or whatever but Mom would probably set his hair on fire if he tried to pull that shit. So. I’ll be. You know. Fine.

Eddie’s pretty sure he’s gotta be having some sort of goddamn out of body experience or something, and, like, he knows from out of body experiences, okay? This is fucking one of them.

His lawyer with the insane name has been talking, and talking for a while, because maybe he likes the sound of his own voice a lot, Eddie doesn’t know, but he’s been using three words where he could use one this whole time, he thinks, talking with his hands all big and wide, hitting his knuckles against the plastic divider more than once, and he’s been explaining to Eddie that he and his team — which is a very generous way of saying him and the paralegal Eddie can’t stop staring at like a fucking creep — have been hired by a third party to look into Eddie’s case, as something something there have been some new developments and yadda yadda new evidence has come to light —

Zadie Blanchard is ignoring his eyes on her. Erica Sinclair is acting like she doesn’t recognize him at all anymore. Zadie/Erica had wiggled her fingers like another memory from long ago, smirked, and now nothing. Nada, zilch, zip, bupkis.

He feels like he’s going crazy.

Again.

Like, how many mental breaks can a guy have? Eddie’s asking for a friend.

“Mr Munson?” asks Jimmy Papadopoulous when he appears to finally run out of steam and information to impart at the truly impressive clip he talks at. It reminds him of Henderson. Fuck. Memories and feelings are fighting their way to the surface and he ruthlessly squashes them down “Did I lose you?”

“No,” he says. He tears his eyes away from the woman called Zadie Blanchard, the woman with Erica Sinclair’s eyes and smirk and handwriting and whole ass face. “No. Just — a lot to take in, you know? You really think you can clear my name?”

“Yes,” he tells him; that smile still doesn’t meet his eyes, “or my name isn’t Jimmy Papadopoulous.”

Eddie’s grin feels like a rictus, himself. “You’re the first.”

“Well, you’ve never had anyone like me or my team on your case before,” he says and just for a minute there his smile turns to something else. What, he has no idea, but it feels like a secret shared, like he’s trying to say something else, and then he fucking winks at Eddie. Eddie’s never known what to do when a grown man winks at him.

“Cool,” he says.

“Very,” says Zadie Blanchard in Erica Sinclair’s voice. She pulls up a pager; he did not think you were allowed to bring those into prison. “Jimmy, we have an update from the research team; they want to speak to you directly.”

“And here we go, Mr Munson,” Jimmy Papadopoulous says. He claps his hands together. “Now, we will be in touch with updates, and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out!”

He hangs up his phone and disappears in a cloud of shiny hair, shinier shoes, and probably — and he’s just guessing here — the sleaziest smelling cologne Eddie’s ever experienced. The woman who may or may not be Erica Sinclair, but probably is definitely Erica Sinclair, oh god, what is happening, follows him out, little kitten heels click clacking away, shiny silk press bobbing with her movements, and Eddie just sits there, holding the handset still.

“I don’t have your number,” he says faintly, and entirely to himself.

Eddie hangs up the corded phone. He looks over his shoulder to Officer Beneventi, who is doing an admirable impression of being one with the gray prison walls right now. He watches him for a sec; guy doesn’t even blink.

“Um,” says Eddie. “I’m all set.”

Beneventi cocks his head to the side. He still doesn’t blink. One more point in the fucked in the head because of communism column, he thinks. Maybe he’s got those double eyelids like a snake or a cat or something.

Wordlessly, he gets led from the visitation room and back the way they came. Nice guy he may be, Enzo Beneventi is not one for small talk, which is usually kind of nice in an environment like this. Eddie, however, has just been through the emotional ringer, or he’s experiencing a very prolonged and detailed hallucination which — either of those suck, actually, he doesn’t want either. Can he take the option behind door number three, please and thank you?

So to fill the uncomfortable silence he just sort of starts talking. It’s a defense mechanism, man, what can he say? 

“I have had a lot of weird interactions in my life, man, and that one may have just taken the cake. Which is really saying something, ‘cause this one time I got like hunted for sport and — anyway. Did you get a look at that guy? I mean, his suit cost more than the trailer I grew up in, I’m willing to bet, so what he’s doing working pro bono on a case for little ole me is beyond, you know, me, and like what’s in it for him, right? I’m kind of — it’s probably mean to say but it’s about myself so whatever, but I’m kind of a lost cause, right? Like, all hail Satan, prince of darkness, eater of worlds, or wait, that’s Oppenheimer, I think? Whatever. That’s what people think of me, though, right? And so like I don’t know. Do you know? Do you even know, like, who I am? Wow, that was conceited. You know, I wanted to be a rockstar once and now I’m like do you even know who I am but it’s about my, like, rap sheet and you know murder charges. Should you have cuffed me for this? I feel like you should have cuffed me for this. It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these but I really think you should have cuffed me, man.”

“Why?”

“Why? Uh, why what? I think maybe there was a lot you could be questioning in there. Sorry. I’m a nervous talker. And I’m nervous a lot, which is kind of a bad combo, not as bad as this girl I used to know, though, Robin, smart as fucking anything but that’s a sister who could ramble —”

“Why should I have cuffed you? You’re not dangerous,” says Beneventi.

Eddie stares at him. He seems so deadly serious and he doesn’t really know what to do with that, if he’s being honest, so Eddie says, “Wow, you really don’t know who I am.”

“I know who you are, Edward Theodore Munson,” he says.

“Oh, shit. Full name. Damn.”

“But there are more dangerous things in the world,” the guard continues like Eddie hadn’t spoken. They’re back at his cell now and he unlocks it, his back turned to Eddie and that has to be against, like, every goddamn prison policy in America, but Beneventi just unlocks the door, steps back, and eyeballs Eddie. He still hasn’t blinked. Maybe Eddie missed it or something but those big blue eyes just stare flatly at him, and he adds, “Much more dangerous things in the world, than you, Munson. This, I think you know too.”

Eddie steps into his cell and Beneventi pats him on the shoulder, his fingers skimming the edge of his collar, and then he pulls back to close the door like it’ll offer Eddie any sport of protection or privacy. “Dinner’s in four hours.”

“See you then, Officer,” he says.

Beneventi walks away and Eddie steps backwards exactly four paces and then two to the left. The backs of his knees hit the edge of his cot and he folds like a marionette with its strings cut, collapses onto the mattress that has always been somehow both too firm and too soft, and Eddie stares into the middle distance of his prison walls, whitish gray and lifeless. He doesn’t scratch the days in, like some guys do, or hang things up; he stopped counting when he realized he’d never get out, which was pretty much from the start, and he stopped personalizing cells back in ‘88 when it just meant leaving something else behind.

He reaches up to the collar of his jumpsuit and pulls out the piece of paper that had been carefully, craftily tucked there by Officer Enzo Beneventi’s deft fingers. It’s just a scrap of something, clearly torn off the bottom of another page, and in a tiny and cramped but neat little copperplate of a hand:

tomorrow
the yard
after breakfast

Eddie reads it once, twice, three times, and then tucks it into the pages of his book. For a moment, before he does, he seriously thinks about eating it — you should do that, right, he thinks, on the edge of hysterical, when someone, a guard, passes you a secret note in mother fucking prison? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do? Should he burn it? Flush it? Something?

He cracks open the well worn spine of Return of the King once again, and stares at the Polaroid he’d used to mark his place before he’d left. It’s the Party, and the rest of the monster hunting crew of Hawkins as background dressing, and most of them are crammed onto the sofa at Steve Harrington’s place back in ‘87, right after Max got out of the hospital and right before the Harringtons sold the place. She grins from the center of the picture, sat in her wheelchair in pride of place, with her murky eyes magnified behind coke bottle glasses, the boys and Jane Hopper draped over her and the couch haphazardly. Nancy Wheeler and Robin Buckley are sitting on the back of the couch, laughing at something Argyle, who Eddie’s heard a lot about but never got to truly meet, said, and Joyce Byers and Jim Hopper are off together to one side, whispering, probably, framed in a open doorway. On Nancy’s left, also on the back of the couch, Jonathan Byers is rolling his eyes, a hand raised  in exasperation or perhaps to say hey man hurry up , at the blur of someone else’s body trying to duck back into frame in time to be in the picture.

Eddie’s index and middle fingers hover over the swoop of unfocused, dark hair. His heart beats in his chest, his lungs expand and contract, and he can’t decide if the precipice it feels like he’s standing on is freedom or suicide. He can’t stop thinking about Chrissy, never really stops, always sees her on the backs of his eyelids, and isn’t that punishment enough? To relieve it? Every night, and every day, she haunts him. He doesn’t —

He doesn’t think he has it in him, to do this again. To sit through another government funded nightmare, because surely that’s what this is, and to think that everything will be okay. To get his hopes up, to believe. To wish for the happy ending. Eddie the Banished no more — now Eddie the Free. But even if he gets out, will he ever stop being a prisoner to this?

His little radio plays the Top 40, just a little staticky, and Eddie sits with his back against the cement wall of his cell, book in his lap, picture beneath his fingers still. He doesn’t end up reading anything else that afternoon, or for the rest of the night.

March 23rd, 1987

Eddie,

Heard their moving you again. What is that, 4th time in two months? That’s some bullshit man, I’m sorry. And I just figured out how the commissary worked at your old place, though the old man says it’ll probably work the same at this new one. I guess it’s a similar system wherever? Least I can do is keep you in a abond abound aboundance (??) of cigarettes, because Dad also says that’s really good for getting dudes like off your back or on your side. I know you said people tend to leave you alone I just figured.

Wayne’s the one who told me, by the way. Because you didn’t want us to know? Which first of all go fuck yourself man. Anyway don’t be mad at him for telling me. I woulda found out some other way, a, and like b what else am I supposed to talk to your old man about?

I’m kidding. We got lots to talk about.

Wayne’s kind of the best. I know everyone thinks Dad pushed me into basketball and like maybe he did but he’s about as athletic as a wet blanket. (Fine. He’s a swimmer. But he did also one time tell me running is only something you do when someone’s chasing you with a knife (because you can’t outrun a bullet he said). He’s an asshole but weirdly I think you and my old man might have more in common then you think. Heh.) So he liked you know the optics or whatever of basketball for me? But he can’t talk about it.

And you’re uncle played! He was a small forward and I was a point guard but like he gets it. I get it. And we both like the Pacers right? Guys are looking real good this year. Not like that you care but we’re like almost definitely getting into the playoffs which is awesome cause last year kinda sucked. If we make it I’ll see if I can treat me and Wayne to one of the home games, that’d be sick right? (Like seeing your Metallica dudes live, is what I mean.)

He’s talking about moving. Wayne. But I get it. You get it to, right? I mean. My parents sold the house so I gotta hit the bricks soon too and Robin’s got into UChicago for the upcoming school year like I told you before and she says we can get a studio and “live out of each other’s pockets” up there if I want. Don’t really wanna leave the kids but a change of scenery, you know? Plus my old man’s been all up my asshole about the family business again especially with the house being sold. I keep like telling him that it’s not my bag on account of how I don’t think I’m you know smart enough but then him and Mom are both all it’s not about being smart it’s about being clever. Thinking on your feet. And I guess I’m clever? Resourceful, they call it too. And maybe I’m that. I don’t know. I’m good with a bat.

It was always wierd, you know, growing up with them always gone doing that stuff. I was like so lonely and whatever. I was too young to be involved and I know they love me and stuff and it was for my own safety or whatever but it was still. I was lonely. It’s not there fault. But sometimes I think maybe it could be kind of interesting, and Rob would actually probably be like so good at it. Maybe she and I could be a team like my parents are. Don’t know if she’d go for it, kinda hard to tell. I think she’d be into it. I don’t know. I told him I’d think about it. But like for real this time, I said, not like oh I’ll think about it, pops, you know?

Oh I almost forgot. You were saying like a couple letters back that you were having trouble getting what you like to read from the library at your old place and maybe it’ll be different where your getting moved but I got this already so. I hope you like it. It’s that series you and the shitheads were always talking about, and Dustin like fully lost his mind when I showed them to him cause they’re like first editions or something? I don’t know, man. My mom picked em out for you cause I was talking on the phone to her about it and she was like “oh I know a great second hand place” which like sure Mom “second hand” right, next she’ll tell me they fell off a truck, but yeah so hopefully this is the kind of stuff you’re talking about.

I don’t think anyone will try to take them from you? Maybe it’ll help if I promise the people who totally read my letters I’m not putting an kontraband shit in here. You see that dudes? Nothing to see in these nerdy fucking books, just nerdy fucking books! Scouts honor.

Anyway. Hopefully you like them. You know reading makes my head hurt but there’s some neat like etchings in there too. And they smell nice, but if you tell anyone I said that no more smokes money. (I’m joking. But don’t tell anyone tho serious. My rep can’t take another hit man the nerds will eat me alive this time if they find out I’m into like old book smell or something.)

Your friend,
Steve

The morning after Eddie gets surprise new lawyers and the suspicious note from a guard slipped into his possession, and Eddie can’t decide whether or not any of this counts as another mental break, he eats breakfast with his book club and tries to keep his shit together.

News travels fast in a prison like Pelican Bay — like all prisons, really — and so Eddie’s greeted with whispers and sidelong glances by the other inmates as he makes his way through the cafeteria line. At least his guys —  mainly the old timers who think Eddie’s like their weird little mascot he’s pretty sure but also a couple youngers guys who are in for lighter shit and who just had bad luck with where they ended up, who looked like fish out of water and Eddie’s old sheepdog tendencies didn’t leave him when he left high school it turns out — don’t ask him questions about it, give him a little peace.

He knows it’s interesting, the freshest piece of gossip within their closed little community. Eddie Munson, Satanist triple murderer, doesn’t get visitors; he doesn’t even get mail . So him suddenly getting pulled in the middle of the day to head to a near empty visitation room? It’s top tier stuff, man, really high caliber juice. He doesn’t blame anyone. It just makes his skin crawl. Reminds him of high school a little too much, honestly.

Years ago, commanding attention was armor for him. He’d walk on tables and shout about conformity, the man, small town bigots, etc, etc. Now, though, it’s just further proof that he’s everything they say he is, everything they say he’s done, and a one way ticket to solitary for a few days on top of that. It’s better to keep his head down, read his books, and write his stories and pathetic song lyrics.

So he appreciates that his guys keep their traps shut about it, and instead chat about the four chapters they’re working through of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls ahead of this week’s book club meeting. Eddie lets the sound of their voices wash over him as his mind keeps trying to race and make mountains out of mole hills, probably.

He keeps telling himself that there’s nothing too sinister or nefarious about Beneventi’s note. It was probably harmless! This happens all the time, right? He’s probably just trying to, like, extort Eddie or something, that’s a common prison thing, isn’t it? He’s totally not about to be murdered by this guard because his case is being reopened and now the government needs to silence him and oh god he’s totally going to get murdered by this guard because his case is being reopened and now the government needs to silence him — 

Eddie shoves his prison oatmeal in his mouth and tries not to hyperventilate, eyes darting along the guards patrolling the tables, looking for Beneventi.

He finds him, on the other side of the room, and he doesn’t look particularly murderous this morning but hey you can’t judge a book by its cover. Eddie knows that’s what helped do him in in the end so he tries to look past the gang ink and facial piercings of those around him and into their hearts —  pretty dark for the most part, unfortunately, it is SuperMax after all — but he never would have thought Enzo Beneventi’s sad Eastern European adjacent eyes were going to come after him after breakfast.

Dude, you are being insane, he hisses to himself in the privacy of his own brain. Fucking cool it, Munson!

By the time people start shuffling away to do whatever it is they all do during the day — jobs, naps, visits, hitting the gym and getting those reps in — Eddie himself slinks his way out of the cafeteria and in the general direction of the yard. He thinks about telling someone, anyone, just in case he is about to get fully murdered by a prison guard, but he feels like he might be betraying something, somehow. So he just repeats to himself how Beneventi has always seemed like a good guy, wild-ass accent aside, and it’s probably just a run of the mill blackmail situation and he’s gonna have to let the guy down easy because his job at the prison library doesn’t exactly pay the big bucks. (It pays approximately nothing; it’s more of a volunteer position than anything. Honestly, Eddie just thinks the librarian just got sick of him being there all the time and started to put him to work reshelving books.)

When he gets out into the yard, Beneventi is waiting in one corner, looking for all the world like he’s on a cigarette break. Eddie swivels his head around, checking the angles, but no one is paying attention to either of them, it looks like: not the other prisoners and not the other guards.

Beneventi likes menthols, apparently, Eddie smells when he gets to his side, and he’s kind enough to offer him one but he declines and cuts straight to the chase instead. He asks, “What’s with all the cloak and dagger, officer? All for little ole me?”

He blows an impressively intact smoke ring into the sky. “It was impressed upon me that you deserve only the best, after all your contributions.”

What the absolute fuck does that mean, thinks Eddie.

“What the absolute fuck does that mean?” he asks.

“It means greetings from sunny Hawkins, Indiana,” says Beneventi in his flat little accent and the bottom of Eddie’s stomach drops clear the fuck out. He might actually start to cry and he could not tell you why for the fucking life of him. Beneventi and his big unblinking eyes stare at him as he says, “Your lawyers, yesterday. They told you there’ve been new developments in your case, yes?”

Eddie swallows. “Yes.”

“These new developments,” he continues, “have, hmm, necessitated that there be protections in place for you within these walls, as it is likely that certain parties will not want your name to be cleared.”

“Oh, shit,” he says quietly. “It really is a conspiracy.”

Beneventi tips his head. “A great many, I expect, and several that those of us not involved from the beginning are even unaware of.”

“Oh,” he says again. “Yeah, that, you know. That tracks.”

He tips his head again, blows another smoke ring and, shit, those most have taken years to perfect, look at that Gandalfy mother fucker go, and oh my god, focus up, Eddie, he thinks.

“There are two others, here, for your protection,” Beneventi tells him. “Another prisoner, who will be arriving in the next transfer, to better keep an eye on things and act as a better set of ears among the rest of them, and a doctor we have recently  inserted into the infirmary.”

Brow furrowing, he asks, “Why the prison doctor?”

“You’ll see,” he says, and Eddie doesn’t ask any follow-ups on that, despite, you know, the glaring red flags whizzing over his head. Classic Eddie, he’ll think in the not too distant future. But Beneventi is still talking as he smokes his menthol down to the filter, saying, “We do not know if they have anyone on the inside, themselves, but it’s a fair bet, what with how the, how do you say it, hornet’s nest is being kicked. So we’re taking precautions, and making plans within plans. A little convoluted for me — I prefer a good, old-fashioned prison break myself — but they don’t want to leave anything to chance. So my plan is further down the list as it were.”

“So I’m not pulling a McQueen?”

Beneventi snorts. “The Cooler King, always, yes? But you don’t strike me as the type, I’m sorry.”

“Ouch.”

“No offense, Munson, of course. But for now we’re putting all of our eggs in Papadopoulous’s basket.”

“That guy, really? The, like, ambulance chaser lawyer guy?”

He shrugs again. “Apparently his experience trumps my own, so.”

“Alright then.”

The yard is starting to get a little crowded now, and Eddie’s starting to feel a few sets of eyes lingering on them, here by the fence. He can tell Beneventi, or whatever his name really is, can tell too, because he’s taken a subtle step backwards now and the language of his shoulders is changing into something more standoffish and firm than it was. He’s a good actor, he thinks distantly, wonders what kind of practice he has.

Eddie swallows again and says quickly, “Can you — just — I know it’s really cloak and dagger shit, and I probably shouldn’t, like, know more that I need to but — can you tell me? Are the others — the kids — is everyone okay? Are they waiting?”

For once, Enzo Beneventi’s smile reaches his eyes, says, “Whose idea do you think this was?” and then all at once he’s shuttered again and pushing Eddie back with a hand that is far more gentle than it looks. He storms off, flicking the butt of his menthol through the mesh of the yard’s fences.

Shoving his hands in his pockets, Eddie does his best to not look guilty of anything in particular and slinks away himself, hyper aware of the eyes that both slide off him and linger. He’s still the best gossip in the place, with or without this, and this is now just adding another layer of intrigue that he honestly could probably do without, what with the honest to god conspiracy shit now happening.

But beggars can’t be choosers when forces beyond him are both out to get him once again and working, at long last, to set him free.

So he goes about his day as best he can, keeping to his normal routine. He logs a few hours in the prison laundry as his actual job, reads for an hour in a corner of the library, back to the wall so he can see if someone is coming, and then it’s lunch. He sits with the book club again and they don’t talk about the book this time, mainly eat quietly together, before heading to their next things.

Eddie returns to his cell, his afternoon free today, and sits on the edge of his cot, fingers drumming restless on the blanket that is simultaneously itchy and threadbare. He wonders if he should see if the commissary has any new ones on offer and focuses on having normal fucking thoughts like that and not dwell on the conversation this morning.

A new prisoner to watch over him among gen pop because they have no idea if anyone’s out to get him, and the fucking prison doctor or something for secret reasons, and the world’s most cryptic weirdo for a guard and Eddie is fucking spiralling now, even though he is trying so goddamn hard not to. Can you blame him? Really, can you fucking blame him on this one? He doesn’t think you can blame him.

The paranoia is creeping in with patience and a steady goddamn hand, waiting to overtake him, and he doesn’t want to let it, but Jesus H Christ does it feels like Spring Break 1986 Part Two: Electric Boogaloo right now in his brain: his hands are clammy, his heart rate is too high even just fucking sitting here like a bump on a goddamn log in his dump little prison cell, and he feels sick to his stomach, waiting for the other shoe to drop again. He thinks he can hear the noise of her bones again and fights the urge to press his hands, hard, against his ears.

All that’s missing, it feels like, is Jason Carver (RIP or whatever, asshole) and his religious loonies on Eddie’s six. But maybe he’s got that too, somewhere else in the prison. He doesn’t know if he can do this again, but he also doesn’t think there’s any other way.

That’s another similarity: no matter what Eddie wants, he’s got a one-way ticket on the Upside Down Bullshit Train, and it’s a runaway, man.

He wants to cry. He wants to scream. Why is it always him?

Eddie lies back in his bunk, digs the heels of his hands into his eyes instead of his ears, and tries to regulate his breathing. It works, somewhat, and no one bugs him if he pretends to be taking a midafternoon nap so he drags the blankets over his head while he’s at it.

He passes the afternoon in a blur of anxiety beneath those equally scratchy, starchy, prison-issued sheets, and emerges only when the dinner bell is sounded and one of Eddie’s book club comes knocking at his proverbial door.

New whispers, not about Eddie, abound when they arrive, and the eyes of the Pelican Bay linger on him but briefly with the arrival of a handful of new inmates on the prison bus. He wants to cry again, though this time in a kind of relief, but he’s still pretty keyed up and alert for whoever it is that’s supposed to be his new comrade here.

Luckily, with everyone else getting their nosy bastard on, he doesn’t have to be subtle about taking the new guys in himself. There’s a beefy guy with a shitty buzzcut that immediately gives Eddie the heebie jeebies so he hopes that’s not his man, and another guy who’s basically a carbon copy of the first guy but with an even worse haircut that also wigs him out. Then there’s a reedy white guy with an enormous face tattoo that speaks to a lifetime of bad decisions even worse than Eddie’s, and two Hispanic guys who have actually cool ink that Eddie wonders if he could strike up a conversation with.

And then there’s the bearded guy with beady eyes behind some beat up old glasses and a hairline that’s probably been stuck in retreat since the late 70s but with an impressive, soft looking curl to it. (Not that Eddie can talk, vis a vis balding patterns; he’s been noticing his own hairline on the move just slightly, looking more and more like Uncle Wayne in the mirror with each passing day, and that’s sure as shit depressing for a guy as vain as Eddie is but Wayne always looked good for his age so he figures he needs to suck it up and anyway who does he have to impress in fucking prison .)

Not one of the new prisoners comes to introduce themselves to Eddie and his table of old timers, going instead to the guys that look like them or bear similar gang tattoos, and none of them really look twice at Eddie at all except Beardy, sitting two tables over. 

He pretty blatantly stares at Eddie in between weirdly enthusiastic bites of that evening’s meatloaf until Eddie finally makes eye contact with him. Then he flings a frankly saucy wink at him that has Eddie turning to his own meatloaf to mouth, What the fuck, pretty emphatically and they proceed to ignore each other for the rest of the meal.

Is that his guy? he wonders. He kind of hopes not, would maybe take Bad Haircut 1 or Bad Haircut 2 instead, but fucking who knows.

At the end of dinner, he debates hanging around, waiting to see what will happen, but he catches Beardy slinking out almost immediately when he’s done eating. Eddie sits there for a moment, waiting, watching, wondering if he’ll swing back around, but it doesn’t seem likely. So he packs himself back up, waves goodnight to his book club, and trudges back to his cell. 

He lies down on his cot and stares up at the ceiling until lights out for the second night in a row.

He doesn’t sleep.

It takes a couple of days for whoever exactly it is that’s about to become Eddie’s new best friend to track him down and, like, hold a conversation with him. He supposes that makes a certain amount of sense. If this is some great conspiracy that might end in Eddie getting broken out of prison in lieu of his name being cleared — which, sure, Eddie would love but he’s still hedging his bets because, yeah, the name clearing feels highly unlikely these days, after all the work the government, you know, didn’t do to save his ass after he helped save the fucking world, and also he’d be lying if he said a prison break didn’t sound metal as fuck — they should probably lay low or some shit.

Unfortunately, this just means Eddie has to wait on a knife’s edge for the proverbial other shoe to drop and all those other cliches, for the two of them to somehow end up alone together, which also sets his hair on end because he’s kind of made it a point over the years to never be fully alone with another prisoner, especially one he doesn’t know is in fact his prison break buddy and not one of the people who may or may not be out to get him.

What can he say, Eddie lives a charmed life.

But a few days isn’t much compared to the time he’s already spent inside, and the time that he will continue to spend inside if this is all just some bullshit, man.

In the end, it’s in the stacks of the prison library that it all comes to a head. Eddie’s in the middle of one of his little volunteer shifts at the library, and he’s just sort of pushing a rickety restock cart through the aisles, humming an old Dio song to himself that he really only vaguely remembers the lyrics to, totally unsupervised by the guards and prison librarian because Eddie’s kind of a model prisoner after all this time. (And, again, he thinks the librarian is just trying to keep him out of his hair.)

Like, in hindsight, though: maybe not the greatest idea for Eddie to be alone there, considering.

He’s just shelving his books, is the thing, humming away, and he’s not sure what makes him turn. Maybe he hears a footstep under the sound of his own voice, or maybe it’s the shift of air around him, or maybe he even hears the guy’s breathing because he’s got all that sweet, sweet trauma induced hyper-vigilance thrumming under his skin these days. Maybe it doesn’t even matter why. Either way, he turns and he has approximately half a second to clock the guy standing all up in his space — one of the white guys from the bus last night, the one with the shittier buzzcut of the two that upon closer inspection feels real government-issued, a little too high and tight, you know? — before he also clocks what appears to be a spoon handle in his hand.

Shiv, his brain tells him and then he’s fucking ducking and running, with little to no input from his brain, curtesy of the hyper-vigilance, thanks bunches. He feels a burst of furious vindication that he felt weird about this guy from the jump but also he tells himself it’s kind of not the time. He can pat himself on the back when someone’s not trying to kill him.

Again. God, what is his life?

The guy’s not expecting him to run, of course, but Eddie thinks maybe he wasn’t briefed on his target well enough because that’s kind of his thing, man, that’s his raison d’etre or whatever. Eddie’s great at running from all kinds of shit.

Second thing the guy’s not expecting (and to be fair neither is Eddie) is for Beardy to come out of goddamn nowhere with what appears to be one of the thicker volumes of an Encyclopedia Britannica. He gets the guy upside the head with the broadside of it, says nonsensically, “Oh, Joyce is going to love that one,” and it doesn't even really slow Government Haircut down. In turn, it doesn't slow Beardy down either.

Eddie is sort of a helpless spectator from that point on. Beardy drops into some faux martial art style pose and Government Haircut stares, which appears to be a tactical error, because it looks like that shit wasn’t faux anything . Beardy takes Eddie’s would-be assailant to the goddamn cleaners with a few well-timed throat chops, a knee to the solar plexus, and two fists to his spine. 

Then, because it’s prison rules, man, thinks Eddie, Beardy grabs him by his shitty haircut and slams him face first into one the library tables once, twice, three times before dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

For a moment, the only sound in the library is Beardy’s breathing, relatively even for all the exertion.

“I knew those guys were up to no good,” he says. “Dmitri owes me fifty dollars.”

“Who?”

Beardy shoots him a look. “Dmitri. Enzo. Our mutual friend. One of our mutual friends. Oh, whoopsy, did I blow his oh-so careful constructed cover?”

“No,” says Eddie. “I knew he was in on it. You’re in on it?”

“Baby, I was born in on it,” he says with another one of those horrific winks. He follows it up with an equally awful smile. Jesus Christ, this guy’s got a lot of teeth.

Eddie just stares at the guy. He’d be lying if he’d been hoping it wasn’t Beardy, because he’d seemed like a fucking stone-cold weirdo that first night and, anyway, he looked like kind of a Grade A dweeb with his glasses and eyes and just, like, general demeanor and shit because Eddie knows from dweebs and god dammit he really has been doing so well at not judging books by their covers. People contain multitudes, Munson! Didn’t Steve Harrington in the Upside Down ripping a demobat apart with his bare teeth teach him anything?

(Besides what it’s like to get the world’s weirdest boner at the most inconvenient time possible, of course.)

“Now, let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we?” Beardy is saying. “I’m here to keep your flat ass —”

“Excuse me?”

“— safe from harm, because I’m a saint, and also I kind of live for this shit, so you’re gonna do me the favor of listening to every damn word coming out of my mouth and not questioning a damn thing and following my lead from here on out, capisce? First thing’s first, you can call me Agent M —”

“Fucking no I will not, what kind of dumb ass name is —”

“The back sass, princess, is not appreciated, what did I say about not questioning me? I’m Murray, if you’re going to be whiny about it, but the nice people of Pelican Bay think my name is Larry Hollows, and as I’m sure you’ve guessed there’s a whole big conspiracy afoot from keeping our friends on the outside from getting your name cleared. Now, clearly they’re on the right track, or otherwise nobody would be coming after your pasty ass with a shiv.”

“Man, what is your obsession with my ass?”

“Oh, honey, you wish,” says Murray, “but you’re just not my type.”

“Well thank fucking god for that.”

“So, to sum up, the government stooges are out for your blood again —”

“But it’s been years,” Eddie says in what he’d describe as a whine if he wasn’t a grown man and also this wasn’t the privacy of his own head, where he can be as delusional about his own tone as he wants, thanks. “This is what I don’t get!  I mean, sure someone’s trying to clear my name, but also I’ve never shut up about how I didn’t do it, and why would they want me silent after all these years? No one even came to see me after that journalist chick and, trust me, I was waiting for it.”

“Well, hello there, she thought you were guilty, so that would’ve been good press for them,” says Murray. “Also, real quick, are you allergic to not interrupting people? I was told you’re annoying but Jesus, Mary, and Joseph —”

“I’m in the middle of an insane situation, someone just tried to kill me again, and also I’ve been in prison for a murder I didn’t commit for like ten years, cut me some slack —”

“Eight, and maybe I will, maybe I won’t, just keep the ‘tude in check.” He toes the body of Eddie’s would-be murderer and then bends down to pick up the shiv that had fallen at the guy’s side, holding it up to the light and inspecting it with a gimlet eye. “And to circle back because I guess you weren’t paying attention to me or Dmitri, I have to assume, or maybe it’s just in one ear and out the other, but you’re in the crosshairs because some of your idiot friends have decided enough is enough, and they’re finally joining me on Team The Government Can Suck My Hairy Balls. Frankly, I never knew the haircut had it in him but I do love a juicy little heel turn.”

He blinks. “What?”

“You’ll see.” He turns back to Eddie, looks up at him and makes an apologetic little face. “Also, I want the record to show that this I am sorry about. It wasn’t my idea, though I can’t fault it. But it’s all part of the plan.”

“Sorry about what?” he asks.  “Plan? What —”

And that’s when Murray stabs him. Like, genuinely stabs him. With the shiv and everything!

“You stabbed me,” says Eddie. He presses his hand to his abdomen where he was stabbed . Blood spills over his fingers.

“Only a little,” he says. “You already got scars there anyway, man up.”

“You stabbed me!”

Murray ignores him, seemingly busy now planting the evidence on the guy to whom the shiv belonged in the first place. “Is this going to be a thing, Munson? Don’t make this a thing.”

“You stabbed me, I get to make this a thing!”

“No, I didn’t stab you,” he says. He finally stands, jerks a thumb at the prone white guy with his government haircut. “ He stabbed you. I happened to appear at the proverbial eleventh hour, knocked him out, and now I am going to summon the guards and get you taken to the prison infirmary, where you will be safely locked away from all intent to do harm. Yeah?”

“What the fuck,” says Eddie with feeling.

“That’s the spirit.”

Murray, who lately stabbed him and no Eddie is not getting over that any time soon, thanks, even if he’s totally gonna do what the guy says and lie about it, gets Eddie’s arm over his shoulder and hauls him towards the doors. He starts hollering for the guards, really laying it on thick, but Eddie is, once again, a fresh new stab victim and also a theater kid from way back, if he’s being honest, so he appreciates the dramatics.

Guy works it like it’s his day job and doesn’t let the guards get their hands on Eddie, which he does appreciate — though he says something about being a doctor before and something about fraud? Eddie’s not really following because, once again, for the folks playing along at home, he was just fucking stabbed — and Eddie gets dragged unceremoniously through the halls of Pelican Bay SuperMax while guards and prisoners look on.

He must’ve gotten a tour at some point, or something, because he beats feet straight to the prison infirmary without their entourage of guards even so much as making a peep to direct them. He’s pulled through a set of double doors after a guard swipes his keycard to let them pass and Eddie gets shoved onto a gurney by Murray.

One of the guards comes up to try to cuff him and someone says, “Hey, now that’s not necessary!”

Eddie’s head whips around so fast he thinks something in his neck cracks. 

“I may be new to this facility,” says Steve Harrington, snapping on a pair of blue nitrile gloves and looking over the brim of his glasses at the guards with a severe look, “but I don’t like having my patients restrained before I can even assess what the damage is.”

“I was stabbed,” offers Eddie faintly.

“He was stabbed,” agrees Murray.

“You were stabbed?” asks Steve Harrington in his little white lab coat. “Alright, clear the room. You, inmate, were you there?”

“I was,” says Murray.

“Perfect,” says Steve Harrington who is wheeling over a tray of shiny silver scalpels and such to Eddie’s gurney now. “You, stay, and tell me everything that happened so I know what to expect.”

“Doctor,” starts one of the guards. 

“You’re dismissed,” Steve Harrington, prison doctor, apparently, says. Miraculously, the guards do leave. He smiles at Eddie. “Now, I’m Doctor Ben Hammond — let’s see about getting you all stitched up, shall we?”

“Sure,” says Eddie.

He wonders if this is what a brain aneurysm feels like.

May 6th, 1987

Ed,

Uh it was a total bomb man thanks for twisting the knife. 

I’m joking. About the knife, not about it bombing. Cause it was a bomb. Total dud. Not like I care.

I mean. Yeah okay I care. I’d like to you know make a real fucking connection with someone. I know everyone always used to talk about me in school dating everyone and like going from girl to girl and trust me I am fully fucking aware of how mortifying my confession to Nancy was. (Max and Dustin bring it up like every twenty minutes man. I always wanted siblings when I was a kid but now that I have them I’d like a damn refund.) But I would kind of like to meet someone nice. Meet someone real.

Don’t get me wrong. Hooking up with people is also nice. And I don’t wanna rub salt into any wounds or whatever, so tell me to shut up if you don’t wanna hear about it but you did ask in the first place. So. Yeah I’ve been getting tail. What do you call dude tail do you think? Robin doesn’t know and she also told me not to call it tail like ever again because it’s mysogniatic and also gross and she also says I’ve been like objectifying myself? Which I don’t know how I’d do that, but she’s like all up in arms about how I perceive myself or whatever and how I let people like use me. I keep telling her sex is you know sex and fun for me but then she does that like pinched face thingy and I feel bad and then she feels bad and then I say something dumb to make her laugh and it’s fine.

Anyway. Play. I’ve been getting play. Like across the board, which Rob says is real unfair because it took her like years to work up to hitting Her clubs and I hit them up with her and immediately get taken to a bathroom by a total babe. Man she was so pissed at me, said I was betraying the sisterhood but Vickie just high fived me. (Because PS yes I was so right about the boobies, Rob can cry about it.)

But he had great hair, man! And like killer pins. I mean killer. Cool leather jacket too, you woulda dug it. You get it right? And like in the grand scheme of things we fought monsters, right, there’s a whole fucking alternate dymension what’s the big whoop about giving a guy a handy? Fuck it I’ll do it again.

Maybe thats the whole thing, right? Maybe I’ve just been barking up the wrong tree. What do you think, should I try dating a dude? How’s that work? Can’t be too different. Should I give it a shot?

Steve

He’s not sure how long he stares for. But it’s, like, a while. 

It really does feel like he’s having an out of body experience. Or, like, he’s been dropped into some sort of fucked up, weird-ass alternate universe but no one here has a particularly villainous mustache or anything to tip the scales in that favor. Mainly, he just ends up feeling all kinds of lost and confused and like a little turned on but then mad at himself for it because like he knows he’s desperate horndog, his body doesn’t need to put him on the news like this.

Steve, aka Doctor Ben Hammond, which that’s precisely as subtle as a low-flying brick, and also makes him really think because do they want to get caught? Feels like they want to get caught with that.

But Steve’s got this sunny little smile plastered onto his face as he sits down on a stool and adjusts a light over Eddie’s wounded — again; he knows this Murray fuck was joking but it doesn’t exactly make him feel better to have another scar there, you know? His body already feels foreign enough to him most days as is — torso and he’s saying, “Alright, Inmate — Munson, is it? — just try to relax for me, okay? I’ll get you patched up in no time.”

Eddie watches as he skillfully gets a suture ready, threading the needle with precision, before injecting Eddie with what he hopes is a local or something, and it just sort of slips out of him when he says, “I’m losing my mind from blood loss, aren’t I?”

“Oh you’re fine,” scoffs Murray from where he’s lingering in the doorway like a bad fucking penny. “Don’t be such a baby. I didn’t stab you that bad.”

“All stabbings are bad!”

“Well, you’ve certainly had worse , so —”

“Oh, don’t talk about the bats like you know me, man —”

“Wow, we really should have called this buddy comedy in the planning stages,” comments Steve from the general direction of Eddie’s crotch as he stitches him up. He glances at that image for half a second and then looks up into the overhead lights to try to blind himself. Maybe he is thankful for the blood loss, he thinks, because by all rights he should be popping the second most unfortunate boner he’s ever had right now. Steve continues, “We should’ve gone with Hop after all.”

Officer Beneventi appears over Murray’s shoulder and says in a Russian accent, which, like, did Eddie call that shit or did he call that shit, he knew those eyes were a Communist tragedy, “He was too recognizable, and also that is a one way ticket to PTSD flashback.”

“Yeah, but even Hop would think it was worth it to avoid this —”

“Oh, blow me, haircut, me and Munson are a delight —”

“Yeah, yeah, you wish I’d —”

“First of all, you’re an infant, and second of all your father is much more —”

“And you two are not worse?” asks Beneventi — Dmitri? Was that what Murray called him? “I think perhaps you two are worse. Anyway. What is the diagnosis, Doctor?”

“Well, it’s not fatal, and like he said, Ed’s had worse,” says Steve, putting a bandage over what Eddie is assuming are some very neatly done stitches, or maybe they’re a hot mess, but hell if he’s going to check with Steve still floating around down there like a replay from several of Eddie’s favorite dreams. “I’ll want to keep him for observation for, oh, three days, four days? Just to be safe. So if you could tell the other guards —”

“I will spread the word,” says Dmitri, slipping back into that broad, flat American accent of his as he speaks. “that he is knocking on death’s door, and will be in lockdown for the foreseeable future here.”

“Wait,” says Eddie, “didn’t you just say it wasn’t fatal?”

He catches a couple of rolled eyes and flat looks — and a somewhat fond one from Steve that he really doesn’t want to read into too much but he fears that ship has sailed long ago — and Dmitri is already disappearing from the doorway while Murray says, “Keep up, my precious punk princess —”

“Metal, and I’ll kill you in real life —”

“Who stabbed who again? People are trying to kill you in real life, Munson. Besides confining you to solitary — and even then, I’m not sold that none of the guards are in on it, because everyone’s got a price tag in the end — this is the safest place for you to be. And Harrington, I’m sorry, Doctor Hammond is here to keep that true, until all your friends out there in the outside world are done pissing off the entire U.S. government and also I think the states of both California and Indiana — we really have a lot of irons in the fire. And can I just say I’m sad I’m missing the actual action? You know I love blackmail!”

“Didn’t you just get to fight a guy?” says Steve.

“It’s not the same,” says Murray, truly upset. “Now I can only imagine how sexy she is in action, instead of seeing it —”

Steve makes a disgusted noise. Once again, Eddie is so lost, and he hasn’t even been given a pain killer for his trouble.

“Dude, could you not?” he asks. “It was bad enough watching you guys all make eyes at each other while we were planning this shit. Like, those are my parents.”

Murray is now cackling too loudly for Eddie to try to ask just what the fuck is happening, reaching over to pat Steve on the cheek as he says, “Aw, honey, I promise to be an excellent step-parent.”

“Get the fuck out of my infirmary, man,” he says tiredly.

Miraculously, he does, though not without one last pat to Steve’s cheek — and then Eddie’s, what — and a cooed, over the top goodbye. He all but saunters out of the infirmary, shutting the door behind him with a faint click.

And with that, for the first time in nearly a decade — actually, he thinks depressingly, maybe for the first time ever — Eddie is alone in a room with Steve Harrington.

He looks good. Eddie’s not surprised; Steve always looked good, even when he was an asshole teenager who clearly subscribed to the time honored belief of “the bigger the hair, the closer to God”. But now he’s, like, a man and Eddie only feels a little gross for thinking it. His shoulders are broader than they were at nineteen, twenty, that little lab coat practically straining at the seams over them, and there’s a weight to his middle that suggests he’s stopped trying to be so trim, aiming for strength and sturdiness and just a little more bulk. There’s not a hint of gray to his hair, just as thick as it ever was, maybe a little longer, a little softer looking, curling sweetly around the delicate pink shells of his ears. He’s got a five o’clock shadow, an artful looking one, and the scar around his neck shines bright and white from underneath the collar of his scrubs.

I had a dream about you, he thinks.

Eddie wants to climb him like a fucking tree. He wants to disappear into the earth. He wants.

“Hey,” says Steve.

“Hey,” says Eddie.

“You look good.”

Eddie snorts. “No, I don’t. I just got stabbed. You should know — you stitched me up. All those head injuries finally catching up to you?”

He lifts his hands, laughs a little. “I’m just trying to be nice.”

“Sure.”

They just sort of — stare at each other then. Eddie asks, “Could I get like an aspirin or something?”

“Oh, shit, yeah, hold on.”

Steve spins on his heel, goes to a cabinet in the corner, and uses a little key he pulls from his pocket to open it. He pulls out a bottle of something, shakes out a few pills, and grabs a glass that he fills with tap water before handing everything over to Eddie. He swallows the pills then takes a sip of water, ignoring Steve’s wince and a grumbled, “I mean that’s why I got you the water but okay,” as he goes.

“So how ya been?” he asks when the silence returns and continues and continues painfully.

“The same,” he tells him.

“Well, that’s totally a lie, man,” snorts Eddie. The painkillers are good shit, because he’s already feeling it, he thinks. “You’re, like, pretending to be a prison doctor.”

Returned to his seat on the stoll, Steve uses his knee to nudge him and say, playfully severe, “Hey, you don’t know my life —”

Which, like, cue the record scratch again, Eddie guesses, because, yeah, he doesn’t know Steve’s life. He never did, he thinks, and it’s kind of fucked up that he ever really thought he did, all these little intimacies he extrapolated from, pretended with, longed for.

He knew Steve this one way in school, when they were dumb kids, and that was the totality of him for so long: pretty boy prince of the jocks, with his hair and his moles and mean girl tendencies. He never bullied anyone, but when you’re at the top of the pecking order, do you even need to? He was the king of cool in Hawkins, and Eddie was the lowest of the low, maybe a court jester if he was feeling particularly charitable in his recollections of those times. All Steve had to do was keep throwing great parties, play his little sportsball games as best he could, and also look smoking hot in a speedo — everyone else did the rest for him.

Until the fall from grace, but he was still someone in town: rich kid, no parents, big house, even if he never used it anymore the way everyone wanted him too. He still commanded a room when he chose to, still had that fucking face and that hair and that everything , and then Eddie had a gaggle of infants telling him how cool Steve was, how badass, despite the fact that he couldn’t keep a date for longer than two and hung around with a band kid, and it was just another set of rumors, just another persona, until it wasn’t anymore, and Eddie was having the worst series of days of anyone’s life and watching that badassery in real time in some nightmare realm of shadows situation.

But was that real? Was that the real Steve? Or was the real Steve those handful of letters Eddie had, those thirteen letters he got over a year and a half, those seven letters he managed to save, slipped oh so carefully between the pages of his most prized possession in here. They became one of his most prized possessions too, those words, those glimpses.

They ended just as abruptly as the King Steve persona, just as abruptly as the Badass of the Upside Down did, the Champion of the Dweebs and the Downtrodden.

He’s told himself that they were real, but were they? Are they? 

If Steve’s here now, if he’s tracked him down here, couldn’t it have happened sooner? Couldn’t he have written back one last time, regardless of the transfers? Say hey this has all been in good fun but I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want to give that to you anymore, never did in the first place, was only trying to be nice, be sexy, be fun, because you made it weird, man, you took it from something hot to something with feelings, had to go and say —

Nah.

Nope.

Let’s not —

He’d only —

Fuck that.

He’s not going there.

Put the record back on and crank that shit. Eddie’s done, thanks.

June 28th, 1987

Ed,

Man, I don’t know what to do either! I can’t control the guy, he’s got free will and shit! What do you want me to do, chain your old man by the fuckin leg to the radiator in his government funded sorry for leaving your kid high and fuckin dry and also about the monsters apartment in Hawkins?

He wants to get out of bumfuck Indiana, man, and so do I and also he wants to be near you! I don’t blame him! So like. We gotta live with it. There’s nothing here for him, Ed. It sucks but. There’s not. Just bad fucking memories and people talking shit making more bad memories. So you know what? I support his decision. Am I gonna miss my Pacers buddy? Yeah. It was fun. We had a great time. But there’s these things called phones and I can call him and talk about the game and also I’ve got a car and what do you call what we do huh?

So. We’re living with it. We’re gonna make our peace with it. And fuck you if you think I sound like my government funded therapist, I like my government funded therapist. It’s some real bullshit you don’t get one.

Commissary money trasnfer okay? Dad says wardens can be dicks, especially in the private ones, but you’re in club fed mostly so it should fine. It’s fine right? You’d tell me if it wasn’t fine?

Also yeah man I’m being safe when I’m at the club. I know I talk a lot of shit about my own smarts but I’m not a complete fucking clown. And Robin and Vickie are up one ear and down another with me. Also Mrs B weirdly? Or maybe not so weirdly. Coulda done without Hop being there for that talk tho I’ll tell you that for fuckin free. Dont know which one of us that shit was more painful for, man.

So I’m being safe. Are you being safe? I don’t. Listen. You don’t have to. I don’t like know how to say this but if you need anything like for that I swear to god I’ll figure it out. And if there’s.

We know people. We um. I know people. I’ll take care of it I what I’m saying. Because you’re my [something aggressively scrubbed out] friend. And I care about you. I do. I 

Will’s running Hellfire, to answer that question. With an iron fist by the way. He’s a tiny little dictator and I’m obsessed with it man. Kid’s really come into his own after everything and I’m like so proud of him. (I’m pretty sure Erica’s gonna give him a run for his money tho when she hits 9th in the fall. Not to rub salt into another wound man but kid got bumped a grade cause she’s even more of a tiny genius than all of us combined swear to Christ.)

And guess what?? Max is regaining feeling in her toes which is fucking AWESOME right? Like her doctor’s fucking LOST it when I brought her in for PT last week. Which she does with exactly as little grace as you can imagine but it’s part of the deal with her getting to stay with me while her mom is getting clean. Though Hop is running a good game trying to get us to move in with him and Mrs B (they’re living in sin it’s awesome too haha when I say that to Jonny his face man I love it) because according to Hop a walk up above Melvad’s isn’t conducive to Max’s continued healing joruney or like my concussions. Which. What does he think I’m gonna do? Fall down the stairs with her on my back? We got this shit down to a science. We’re fine.

Fuck this letter is all over the place. Is this what it’s like to be in your brain? Ha. I’m joking.

Anyway, that’s my girl though: defying all expectations. I’m so fucking proud.

Hope your okay too. I miss you.

Steve

“— like, fuck you, I could’ve become a doctor,” Steve is continuing. “I could be a great fucking doctor for all you know.”

“But are you?”

He stares him down, face unreadable, for a long moment. Then he shrugs.

“So I was right,” Eddie says.

“Sure.”

“And I just let some man stitch me up.”

“Yep.” Steve smirks. “I mean, I took some EMT classes right after everything, so I promise they’re, like, totally professional grade. Does that make you feel better?”

Eddie can’t help himself: he snorts. “Yeah, I mean, a little.”

“I actually almost got, like, the whole license, but there was a test and I’m just, you know, super not great at testing, totally choke, man,” he says. “But by then I’d been thinking about what my old man said, and we didn’t know where you were, so I figured, couldn’t hurt to do what he says, join the family business, maybe we could figure it all out —”

“So, like, Big Insurance is getting my name cleared or something? How’s that fucking work?”

For some reason, this cracks Steve up. Eddie can’t make heads or tails of it, because, like, that was an honest fucking question, right? Insurance was what Danny Harrington was famous for, at least when Eddie was growing up — maybe he got out of it, but Steve’s always talked about the family business in his letters, so he just sort of figured that was still the thing. That his dad was out selling big, massive policies for fancy businesses with Mutual of Omaha (which Eddie only knew the name of because Jeff used to love that wild life show of theirs, and people always talked about how Harrington’s old man was a VP for them) when he wasn’t off banging his secretaries.

And he, like, truly doesn’t understand how insurance could be bailing him out, but maybe there’s even more money in that than Eddie figured, or connections or something. Hell, Murray’d been talking about blackmail — maybe Steve’s dad’s got even juicier state secrets than the little MK Ultra girl.

Whatever it is, Eddie doesn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, you know?

Still stings a little, how hard he’s laughing, though it does feel like he’s not really laughing at Eddie, which is confirmed when he follows it up with a sigh and a big smile, saying, “Wow, I almost forgot how funny you are, man. Big Insurance, ha. But — yeah! Turns out he was right, which that’s a toss up who that pissed off more, Hop or Dustin, but they both came around fast when we started planning. Sorry it took so long, by the way. It was hard to get the right angle, and then we had to make sure all the pieces were in play, or whatever, and Mom’s the chess player, not me, so. Kinda left it to her.”

“I didn’t realize she was in insurance too,” says Eddie, kind of dumbly, he’s gotta admit.

“I mean I don’t think we’re being, you know, bugged here but sure,” he says with a wink, which is much cuter coming from Steve than Eddie’s lawyer, if he’s being honest here, “insurance.”

“Can I just say I have no idea what’s happening right now,” he tells him. “Like, zero clue, dude.”

Steve sobers. “It might — it might be for the best. For you to not know. If this goes south — if what we’re doing — if we can’t get you out one way or another, it’s probably best you don’t know the details.”

“I guess,” he says. “I just — I really hate being in the dark. Makes me feel kind of helpless.”

“I know.” Steve wraps his fingers around his wrist and squeezes it once. When he lets go, the warmth of his touch lingers like a sunburn, and is maybe just as painful, but Christ what he wouldn’t give to feel it again and again and again, all over his body and then some. Eddie kind of hates himself for it, but what can you do, right? “Me too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“At least I’m not alone in that.”

“You’re not,” he says earnestly. “Eddie, I promise, you’re not gonna be alone after this, okay? But right now the important thing is keeping you safe, and that’s what I’m here to do. Like Murray said, this is the best place for us to do it, and until we get the all clear, or I have to bust us outta here Great Escape style, man, that’s what I’m gonna do. You trust me, right?”

“Of course I do,” Eddie replies, just as earnest — probably even more. Gross, he thinks. He’s so pathetic. “You’re the babysitter, right?”

“Always,” he says.

Even after the three days that Steve says he’ll be keeping Eddie for observation are up, he stays in the infirmary. He thinks Steve is just making up reasons to keep him there, can hear him in the hall occasionally telling the guards that the patient is resting and shouldn’t be disturbed because the “blood loss was so great” and he needs more time to “recover his platelets” which sounds like bullshit even to him but the guards seem to accept it. He uses that excuse for two days in a row, and then Eddie hears him talking about an infection and figures that Steve’s really taking this keeping Eddie safe campaign to heart. Guy doesn’t even let the guards in the same room as him.

It’d almost be like a vacation from the whole SuperMax of it all, laid up in his sweet little infirmary bed with his meals delivered like clockwork and sleeping off the admittedly minimal blood loss — because Eddie knows from blood loss — if he isn’t rapidly becoming bored out of his skull because his only entertainment is the fake doctor double checking the supplies in the room and, like, actually seeing patients.

“This feels unethical,” points out Eddie on one such occasion after Steve gets back from treating a guy for toothache.

“I said I’d call in the dentistry specialist from county, what’s unethical about that?” he asks, glancing at him over the rims of the shiny metal glasses that are normally keeping his hair from his face. “It’s not like I pulled his tooth out with the string and the door technique or something. Also, I told you that I really did almost become an EMT. I know how to treat a lot of shit that might come up. Just ‘cause my paperwork and whatever are all Will Byers and Dustin Henderson originals —”

“Wait, those two forged your certificates?”

Steve laughs. “Yeah, they’re, like, frighteningly good at it. Dustin does the computer stuff and Will does all the physical copies. Mom says they’re the best she’s ever worked with. It’s really going to both their heads, to be honest.”

“Well, I guess insurance people would know from good fakes, right?”

He winks broadly at him. “Totally.”

And don’t get him wrong: shit like this is hilarious. Watching Steve give the guards the run around, and listening to him tell some of the most off the wall stories about what the kids are getting up to that he never goes into nearly enough detail about — because if it isn’t wild enough that Dustin and Will are in some sort of forgery business cahoots, apparently Max is also getting into hacking (which, what? ) and Mike, Lucas, and El are, like, taking up lockpicking for some reason? And El’s getting really into cars — and all that really would be a good time to Eddie in any other circumstance. It’d be funny as hell, and a welcome reprieve from the general sadness and stagnation that his life has become in the fuckin’ clink.

But as it is, it’s kind of also the most awkward experience of his life. It would just be one thing if Eddie’s just trapped in a tiny room for days on end with a guy who he sort of saved the world with (though Eddie did miss the big finale, thanks for nothing, medically induced coma) and for whom he had a pretty embarrassing hate on for while he was in high school. It’s a whole other thing when you think about how he’s trapped in a tiny room for days on end with that same guy and that he also had a kind of weirdly fraught letter writing campaign with him and that that culminated in perhaps the single sexiest thing Eddie has ever experienced in life, and then fucking radio silence when Eddie tried to return the favor and also maybe confess how he felt.

He can’t even get up to his favorite pastime of writing terrible song lyrics that deal with all his awful, big, terrible, gross feelings — which have grown to even greater awful big, terrible, gross proportions with their proximity and one on one time actual facetime , God, he hasn’t been in the same room as Steve since he woke up and learned he was missing a nipple and a kidney — because he doesn’t have anything to write them down on and also Jesus H Christ what if he did and Steve accidentally read one of his horrific odes to his moles? Eddie would rather go one on one with the bats again and, like, that didn’t exactly end well for him the first time.

And he, like, can’t get a read on Steve at all, and usually that’s something he’s really good at, you know, reading people and figuring out what they want from him. Because he used to think Steve wanted something very specific from him — the man had written he had, even, it didn’t really take Colombo to puzzle it out — but now he’s absolutely bamboozled.

Because in between his patients, he talks to Eddie, tells him stories about the kids, about Robin and Nancy and Jonathan and Argyle, about Wayne , asks him questions about how he’s doing, presses his fingers to the pulsepoint of his wrist when he does, doe eyes all big and sincere, like he really cares that Eddie’s doing okay. And, like, sure, yeah, he never gave Eddie a reason to think he didn’t care, to think he wasn’t kind, except for how the letters stopped after Eddie had written that response, and that’s not exactly something he can hold against him, because why would someone like Steve, out there in the bright, beautiful world and not pacing an eight by eight cell for the rest of his natural life, want someone doing exactly that?

To be fair, there’s lots of other things Eddie wants to hold against him. His body, mostly. Preferably naked.

Oh my god, he thinks. See! This is what he's talking about. He’s got no outlets right now so he’s just unforgivably, confusingly horned up about everything and Steve is right there being sweet and kind and a total smokeshow and not at all mentioning what had transpired between them, which Eddie wants to talk about like burning and doesn’t know how. Seriously, how do you even broach something like this? Oh, hey man, I know this is the first time we’ve seen each other face to face since an interdimensional nightmare creature tried to tear the world apart and I hope you’re doing good and stuff while I’ve been rotting away in prison, but can we please talk about how you implied you wanted to give me the business, because if that’s still on the table, could we hop on the good foot and do the bad thing, like, right here in this prison infirmary, please and thank you?

Anyway, if he could, Eddie would walk into traffic, is what he’s saying.

But that’s not in the cards for him. He’s gotta play the hand that he got dealt, however fucking shitty, and so he’s in this infirmary room with Steve day in and day out, his hands clinical and warm on his body and he tells himself he’s imagining it when he think the touches linger. Why would they? He’s not worth it. He’s never been worth it. And now they’re going to all this trouble —

“Can I, like, get you anything, man?” Steve asks on the fifth afternoon of their cohabitation here. Guy only goes home if Dmitri’s got the night shift and is posting up outside Eddie’s doors; if he doesn’t, Steve spends the night in the office that connects to this room, all the doors in to both of them safely locked and with a scalpel under both their pillows to boot. He both does and doesn’t want to see Steve in action with it. “I know it’s not exactly riveting stuff here.”

“I’m fine,” Eddie lies. “Just a little bored, nothing to worry your pretty head about.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. But, like, tell me if you need something, right? Like, what do you do for fun?”

“Read,” he tells him and to Steve’s credit his nose only scrunches up a little. Eddie doesn’t mind; he’s been more than a little certain these past few years that Steve’s got some sort of undiagnosed dyslexia, which probably makes reading kind of a chore for him. “And write.”

“Yeah? Like, write what?”

“Um, like, short stories, mostly.”

“Oh. Stories? Shit, really? Cool. You think I’d like them?” he asks.

He shrugs, which doesn’t even pull at his stitches anymore because, as much as he never wants to say shit about it, the stabbing from Murray had been almost gentle in the end — not that he’s ever giving that mother fucker a pass on shivving him. He says, “Probably not? You were never into my dweeb shit, I think you called it once. And it’s kind of like — fantasy and far flung worlds and escapism and like majorly dweeb shit. You’d probably hate it, actually.”

“I’m sure it’s not shit,” Steve tells him in that overly earnest voice of his before pulling off his glasses to clean them with the hem of his little lab coat. Again, this is what he’s talking about! Who gave this guy the right, man.

Eddie wishes he still had hair to hide behind. “I mean, no, you know, not to toot my own horn, but they’re actually pretty good. Maybe I’ll get ‘em published when I’m out of here. Probably get a deal just based on the fact that I was framed for a gruesome crime I didn’t commit, right? That’s gotta sell books, I’m thinking.”

“Totally,” he says. “Not gonna lie, man, I thought, I would’ve thought, like, given your whole everything, you’d be writing music and whatever. Getting a little prison band together. Not that your stories probably aren’t also, you know, cool as hell.”

“Unfortunately they don’t have a music room in SuperMax,” he notes wryly. “All those calluses I worked so hard for are but a memory, probably shred my fingers if I tried to play again, you know? But, um, I do that too. Some. Despite that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Metal?” Still holding his glasses, Steve throws up some horns, or he tries to. He does thumbs instead of index, so he’s hanging ten with both hands instead, but Eddie’s easy — so tragically, tragically easy — and he lets himself be charmed by it.

“Honestly? Not really,” he says. “Mainly, like, sappy love songs that I’m kind of embarrassed to admit to.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you be embarrassed about writing love songs? I, um, I love love songs.”

“Well, mainly they’re shitty. Like, genuinely some trite bullshit with the worst rhyme schemes on the planet, and like so, so awful. Depressing as fuck. No one wants to hear about how pathetically head over heels I was for someone I’m never gonna get because — whatever,” he cuts himself off. He won’t look Steve in the eye, picks at his cuticles. “Ship sailed, right? Shouldn't want what you can't have. Can’t get. Best to leave my sad boners in the past, man.”

“Oh,” says Steve quietly. “Um. Was? So you don’t? Uh. Anymore?”

He keeps staring at his hands.. “Don’t what anymore?”

“Never mind.”

“No, what?”

“It’s not important! I just thought — no, it’s not important. It’s probably not even. Uh. Don’t worry. I’m being dumb.”

“You’re not dumb. Pretty sure dumb people don’t con their way into jobs as prison doctors to help their buddies break out of prison.”

“Buddies?”

Eddie finally looks up. “We’re friends, right?”

I didn’t ruin it that much, did I? he wants to ask, even though it had always been Steve that had escalated things, until — until —

“Yeah.” Steve smiles tightly at him. He puts his glasses back on finally, pushes them up the bridge of his nose. “Friends. Anyway, Dmitri’s got the night shift tonight. So. I should head out.”

“Hey —”

“I’ll see you in the morning, Eddie. Night, D. You guys stay safe. Okay. Bye.”

Bewildered and feeling like he’s totally lost the plot, he watches Steve beat feet out of the infirmary like the demobats are on that shapely ass again. Eddie turns his face to Dmitri, who is indeed standing in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest.

“How much of that did you hear?” he asks.

He just stares at him. There’s a look on his face that suggests he finds Eddie entertaining but in, like, a really pathetic way, like a captive zoo animal of some kind that doesn’t realize it’s captive. He says, “A painful amount. You are worse than Jim, and that is saying quite a lot, my friend.”

“Yeah,” says Eddie, tired. “Yeah, that tracks.”

July 17th, 1987

Ed.

Man you gotta

You gotta fucking know by now Ed, Jesus Christ. It’d be you. If it was anyone, if it could be anyone, it’d be you. Do you not read the descriptions of the guys I write? They practically are fucking you man.

It’d be you. With me, in those bathrooms. In those motels. I’d give fucking anything

I think I fucked it up. I think I fucked so much up. 

I called him by your name.

It’d be you. I’d want you. I want you. So bad my teeth ache.

Did I fuck it up?

Steve

Eddie gets a second visit from his very suspicious legal team while he’s being held hostage for his own safety in the prison infirmary and continually putting his foot in his mouth while there. He’s nearly a hundred percent positive now that they’re in on everything alongside Steve, Murray, and Dmitri — they’d never said as much, either side, and Dmitri had only vaguely alluded to the guy being part of it that first conversation, but it’s too great of a coincidence if you ask Eddie, having several members of Hawkins, Indiana’s premier monster fighting squad infiltrate his prison for his quote-unquote protection, right, for a girl who looks and talks and acts so incredibly like Erica Sinclair to not actually be Erica Sinclair.

Of course, he’s got no fucking clue who this Jimmy Papadopoulous dope is, thinks maybe he’s the only one not involved, because sure the guy looks familiar, like a memory from a dream or some shit, but also he wouldn’t have put it passed Erica to have gotten some mark to do her bidding completely unaware. She’d been terrifying at eleven, and presumably only got more so with age. Honestly, he thinks, she’s a fucking icon. People should build altars for her. He can’t believe he ever tried to scare her out of hanging around him and Hellfire.

None of this is helping him in feeling any less insane, however, especially because Erica is truly committed to her bit as Zadie Blanchard, it seems, and is simply sitting behind Papadopoulous’s shoulder as the man gives him an update on the case.

It’s not a particularly concise update either: the man talks in circles, backtracks and glazes over and says shit like, “Well, that’s not actually a concern,” while Zadie/Erica just smirks at him in between taking minutes or something. He also talks with a broad Long Island accent that Eddie thinks is probably offensive even to people from Long Island, which he didn’t clock the first time, probably because there’d been so much fucking else for him to get hung up on about the guy.

There’s not much for him to do even now but just sort of hang on for the ride as Papadopoulous gesticulates and rambles away.

“And of course it is completely unsurprising to me, you know, that the warden of this place is obviously on the take — perhaps I should just be thankful they stuck you in a federal penitentiary, and not a private one, because honestly it could be so much worse, Mr Munson, do you even know the kind of egregiously illegally sentencing behavior that happens in those places? Of course, of course, it’s similar here too, you really did get the fuzzy end of this particular lollipop, that is certain — but it’s almost like they are gift wrapping this whole endeavor for the lot of us! Especially me, you know, I love a warden who needs to be taught a lesson, it’s so — and of course the research team is making great strides, you know, really uncovering quite a lot about that serial killer —”

Eddie tries to cut in, and not for the first time either, with a quick, “Serial killer?” but he’s once again steamrolled with an airy wave of a hand, those hairy knuckles bumping up against the plastic divide.

“Oh, don’t act so shocked, Mr Munson, of course it’s a serial killer who framed you for those grizzly murders, whatever else could it be? The shadowy arm of an equally shadowy government organization that is hell bent on covering up its terrible crimes at any cost necessary, which of course wouldn’t at all open them up to blackmail of their own kind if only a person knew where to look? How fanciful!”

He gets a broad wink from the man at that and seriously what is with all the winking lately? It’s creeping him right the fuck out.

Zadie/Erica catches Eddie’s eye and smirks as he agrees hollowly, “Yeah, how fanciful.”

Papadopoulous has already moved on. “It’s just so fortuitous though that this is happening. It’s practically gift wrapped for us! I remember saying to the head of our research team out in Washington, you know, I said we have to really attack this job from every angle, Lane, because it’s not our normal fare, but there’s so much potential! We could really have something, here! And a corruption case is the perfect bit of heat to have on top of everything else, just really is going to tie this up with the neatest little bow.”

“It is?”

His hand hits the divide again as he gestures widely. “Of course, Mr Munson. Do you not see it?”

Eddie blinks a few times because, uh, dude, he really doesn’t. He wouldn’t be asking if he did. These people are so confusing.

But in a flash, the phone is pulled from Papadopoulous’s grip and Zadie/Erica’s got it pressed to her ear, leaning forward towards the divider between them. The move doesn’t even phase Papadopoulous, looks like: in fact the guy looks weirdly proud of the shit his paralegal has just pulled, watching her with a fond, vaguely paternal smile.

“You know, Munson, you’ve got a lot of questions for someone who’s supposed to be this big, bad Dungeon Master,” she says. “Did we get that wrong?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Dungeons and Dragons, Bambi, keep up. You had a whole little entourage of dorks and one arguably very cool person playing it, back in the day, we’re told, and you had this reputation, didn’t you, as the most feared DM who’s ever gotten behind the screen. Did they get it wrong? We heard all your campaigns were legendary, and you were cruel and unforgiving and had the best twists in the game, if maybe a little heavy handed sometimes —”

“Hey —”

“— and now you’re sitting here all confused because shouldn’t you know the biggest part of telling a story?”

“What?”

She smiles, says, “Misdirection,” and hangs up the phone.

Without wasting another beat, Zadie/Erica is then up and out of her chair, heels clicking on the ground as she leaves. Both Eddie and Papadopoulous watch her go.

Papadopoulous picks the phone back up and says to Eddie, who of course never hung his side up because he was pretty busy just staring in open mouthed shock, like fucking usual these days, “She really has quite the flair, doesn’t she? Excellent timing. She’ll be terrifying running her own crew someday. I can’t wait. ”

“Okay, listen, I’m sorry, I get the DM thing, I was rightfully roasted there, but seriously what could that possibly mean?” he demands.

But Papadopoulous is making his own grand exit now too, tossing the phone back, lifting his briefcase, and disappearing after Zadie/Erica in that cloud of shiny shoes and expensive cologne.

“What the fuck,” says Eddie.

A full two weeks into Eddie’s confinement in the prison infirmary, he gets stir crazy enough to finally ask for some of his shit. It’s been fun and all but Steve’s been running especially hot and cold since Eddie talked about his godawful song writing, which he still doesn’t get why that would have done anything unless he’s really uncomfy about the idea of Eddie holding a torch for him, in which case, like, go fuck yourself, Steve, you started it.

Anyway, he’s losing his goddamn mind so when Murray swings through one morning after breakfast for his daily check-in (complaining this time of an exceedingly painful hangnail that just has to be infected, you see), he asks him if he could maybe get a few of his books from his cell so he could read.

Steve frowns down at where he’s keeping up appearances in case one of the guards at the end of the hall gets nosy by half-heartedly poking at the “infected” cuticle — Eddie’s pretty sure it’s just ketchup because honestly that guy is even more dramatic than Eddie sometimes, which he didn’t really think was possible — and doesn’t look up when he says, “Man, I told you to let me know if you needed anything.”

“And up until now, I didn’t,” he tells him. They both sound exceedingly bitchy about it, which of course makes Murray light up like a Christmas tree, the psychopath, but Steve shoos him out as soon as Eddie’s got his request in and doesn’t let him get a word in edgewise, whipping off his glasses to point with them, still frowning. And on any other day he’d probably be super grateful for it because as it transpires Murray is the nosiest mother fucker on the planet and he apparently lives to give Steve in particular a bunch of shit for whatever reason — possibly since Murray and him have kind of heavily implied that he’s banging one, if not both, of Steve’s parents, which, like, what — but Eddie’s pretty wrapped up in his big feelings again.

So Murray gets shooed off, and as Steve makes to retreat into his office without another word, stuffing his glasses into his breast pocket and shoulders hiked up around his ears like a hurt little kid, Eddie realizes he can’t fucking take it anymore.

“Man, why are you being so weird with me?” he asks and if there’s a little whine in his voice, he doesn’t want to hear about it.

“I’m not being weird with you,” says Steve, standing frozen in the doorway.

“Yeah, maybe try turning around and telling me that to my face, Harrington, and I’ll consider believing you.”

He turns around and repeats, face stormy as anything but those shoulders still all high and upset, “I’m not being weird with you.”

“Hmm, no, still not believing it.”

“Jesus Christ, whatever.”

“Hey, don’t walk away from me!”

“What? What the fuck? Are you my old man now? I can go where I want. You’re the one making shit weird.”

“Well, maybe I am,” says Eddie, leveraging himself up and off the hospital bed he’s been lounging on for the past two goddamn weeks. “Maybe I am being weird, but it’s only because you’re the one setting that tone! I don’t know how to fucking talk to you anymore, man.”

“Oh, like we talked so much before,” scoffs Steve and Eddie can’t help it. He rears back like he’s been slapped. Steve’s face flinches minutely but he doesn’t take it back.

“I see how it is,” he says slowly. “Yeah, I see it now.”

“Yeah?”

“Fucking yeah. You just want to pretend that all that shit we got up to never happened. That we never said all those things to each other, right? Makes it so much easier to play the good guy, the white knight, when you don’t have think about how you just fucking left me here to rot, right?”

Eddie wants to take it back as soon as the words leave his mouth. Steve may have said what he said but Eddie is super aware that right now, what he just said, that? He knows he went too far, way too fast with that, and even if he’d been hurt by the letters stopping, even if he is hurt, he knows that’s not what happened. He knows, okay, but he wanted to say something that took the hurt out of him and put it on Steve but he’s gone too far and Steve looks, hand to god, like he might burst into tears.

He stalks up to Eddie and jams a finger in his chest instead. “Fuck you, Eddie. How dare you.”

“Steve —”

“No, you don’t get to say my name like that,” he says. “You don’t get to. How dare you. I never once — I never. How dare you? I looked for you, Eddie. Every day, I looked for you. I thought — maybe I said too much. Maybe I needed to give you time, or maybe I said things you didn’t like, even though you — maybe I read it wrong, and you were just looking for — I don’t fucking know what you were looking for. I hated myself for sending that letter to you, okay, because I thought — but then Wayne said he hadn’t heard from you in months either, and I tried to look you up, but you were gone. We couldn’t find you. It took me months. Years. I looked for you. I dropped out of school, started following my parents around like they always wanted, because I thought — we all looked for you, Eleven looked for you. Couldn’t tell shit because all these places look the same, but she looked for you. We couldn’t find you. We couldn’t find you. So how dare you say that to me. How dare you, Eddie. I get that you didn’t want shit from me the way I wanted to give it, but that was the only way I could, okay. That’s the only way I know how: all or nothing, man. But when we found you, when we found the paper trail they didn’t quite cover good enough — there was time, man. I know there was time. You could have written back. You could have. You just didn’t. So don’t fucking act like I’m the one who — yeah. Yeah.”

Eddie’s head is spinning. “Steve —”

“I told you, don’t say my name like that,” he says. “You don’t get to. Stop. Please. Just — stop.”

“I don’t know how to say your name any other way,” he tells him. 

“Then just don’t say it.” He still looks like he might cry, face furious but eyes huge, wet. “Let us just get you out of here, and you can never say my name again, okay?”

“No,” Eddie says. It sounds like his voice is coming from a very great distance from himself. “I can’t do that. Steve. I can’t — what did you mean, that there was time? That I could’ve written back? What did you mean by that? Because I don’t fucking understand. Not at, like, fucking all. What did you mean?”

“I wrote you that letter,” says Steve. “In September. You didn’t get moved until Halloween. You would’ve gotten it. You had time to write back. But you didn’t. So I figured: you didn’t want me. And it’s fine. Most people don’t want me. Not, not really. I’d just thought — I wrote you that letter, and you couldn’t even write me back to let me down gently. You just ignored me. Fuck, can we just go back to pretending you didn’t get it? It was easier, then.”

“I don’t want to pretend that I didn’t get it,” says Eddie. “You think I was pretending I didn’t get it?”

“Um. Yeah?”

“Oh, I got that fucking letter,” he says.

“But you didn’t like it,” Steve says. “You didn’t like me. Not — not like that, right? So you just pretended.”

“Can we can it with this pretending shit? Because I gotta say I think we’re both just confusing each other at this point. Because, like, I was very, very into the contents of said letter,” he says, and his voice is embarrassingly breathy but like he needs Steve to get this right now, so. “Like, so much, man. Like, I cannot emphasize enough how into that letter I was and, um, everything that you wanted, and, uh, fuck, showed me —”

“So then why didn’t you write back?” he asks. “If you — why didn’t you write back? To that one, or the next one, or the one after than, because they moved you at Halloween, Eddie, I saw, there was time. I can take a fucking hint, man. You don’t have to pretend —”

“What did I say about that word?” Eddie says. “And for the record? I fucking wrote you back, okay, I wrote you back, and got jack after I told you that I —”

And because Eddie’s life is and has always been a complete fucking joke, but one of the Greek tragedy kind of jokes, Murray swans back into the infirmary with a stack of Eddie’s books and journals, saying, “Alright, I have returned with a bounty of first edition fantasy masterpieces, if you’re into that kind of thing, and also what I have to assume is a very sad handwritten book by the looks of it —”

He cuts off abruptly. He looks between Steve and Eddie with what can only be described as rising psychotic glee. “I’ve entered into something. I can—” he smacks his lips together twice “— taste it in the air. Are we finally having our big gay reveal?”

“You can exit something too,” says Steve, manfully ignoring him.

“Yeah, this is an A and B conversation,” Eddie agrees, “so you can C yourself out of it, thanks. Also, fuck you, with that crack about my journals.”

Murray’s eyebrows climb like caterpillars up his forehead. “Oh, I’m not the one you wanna fuck, sunshine, I thought you two were covering this.”

“Murray,” Steve says sharply. “Out, please, or I’m telling my parents.”

Surprisingly, or maybe not so much, this has the desired effect and Murray all but shoves Eddie’s things into his arms. He’s not ready to receive them, of course, so half his shit falls to the ground — not the first editions because apparently Murray isn’t that much of a dick, but it’s a near thing with Return of the King, which is sitting close to the top underneath a stack of three journals. Those are what eat shit, and Steve, pissed at Eddie though he may be, catches Return with those well-honed jock reflexes and then stoops to help collect Eddie’s things.

One of the journals landed fully open to a spread of vaguely pornographic doodles of a man with freckles and, you guessed it, folks, one of Eddie’s shitty ballads!

Steve says, “Oh. Is this one of your songs?”

“Yep,” says Eddie. “Sure is. How about you give that to me, like, immediately —”

He doesn’t, of course. He quints at the pages because apparently those glasses are not a prop and that’s about the only thing that’s looking up for him at the moment. Steve asks, “Is this supposed to be —”

“No one in particular,” he says, his voice uncomfortably high. Nailed it.

Steve glances up at him from beneath his lashes and Eddie sort of winces, gives an abortive little shrug, and he says again, “Oh.”

“Really,” he says. “You don’t need to read that, um, yeah, please don’t read that. I told you, they’re, like, really bad, and —”

For a moment, Eddie is almost thankful. He really doesn’t see how this could go worse for him because Eddie’s written all sorts of horrific ballads over the past, oh, decade, and he knows every godforsaken line he’s written over the years, what’s on every page, and it just so happens that this one is the, like, pinnacle of his awful, painful longing and desire. He fucking rhymes freckle with regnal at one point in it which even he can admit is probably against the Geneva Convention or something. There’s an honest to God line about a fluttering whorl of secret skin nestled between two perfect spheres. He wonders if it’s possible to just, like, burst into flames with embarrassment as Steve holds the book up to his face and reads, a faint blush rising up in his cheeks as his eyes flick between the words and Eddie himself.

Unfortunately, he has forgotten the cardinal rule of the universe, which is that it’s distinctly out to ruin his life in particular and in as many varied and creative ways as possible so as Eddie is thinking, Well, at least this is the worst it’s going to get, something slides out from between the pages of Return of the King as it’s held awkwardly in Steve’s grip, and gently starts to make its way to the ground, feather-light.

He can see the handwriting on the paper as Steve pauses his reading of Eddie’s crime against humanity and bends to pick that up too. It’s not his. The handwriting, that is. It’s not Eddie’s. It is, in fact, Steve’s, and Eddie curses the fact that he can recognize, at a fucking distance, which of the seven letters he’d managed to save are which.

Who knew JRR Tolkien would ever do him this dirty, he thinks distantly, clutching his other books and journals to his chest, and then also that he’s lucky he never, you know, got anything on it over the years, because there were definitely a few near misses whilst in the dark of his cell.

That would have been truly its own special kind of hell. Not that this one isn’t in a category all of its own either — even the way the thing is creased to hell and back, soft in places from repeated handling, the writing a little blurred from the grease of his fingers caressing it — shit, it’s incriminating as fuck.

And Steve is just holding it now, crouched low on the ground, the book itself tucked in his armpit, Eddie’s awful song lyrics in one hand and that letter in his other. He blinks a couple of times, turning it over, opening it up. Eddie kind of prays that maybe Steve’s actually, like, fully blind without the glasses. That’d be great but given his, you know, everything, doesn’t really feel like it’ll be coming up Eddie any time soon, you know?

Like, he can feel how his face is now fully fire engine red. Who knows, maybe he will burst into flames and die. 

God, he wishes. If only he was so fucking lucky. Too bad he’s been cursed from the jump, right?

“You kept it,” Steve says faintly.

“What?”

He holds up the letter. His face is unreadable. “You kept it.”

“I don’t know what you want from me right now, man,” he says instead of confirming or denying when it’s pretty clear that he did keep the letter, and anyway, hadn’t he already, you know, spilled the beans on this one? He tells him as much, and Steve’s face goes all adorably furrowed and confused.

“What do you meant, you told me?”

“What I said! I told you!”

“Told me what?”

“That I kept them!”

“What?”

“Your letters!”

“Letters?”

Eddie throws his hands up because sure he is pretty well mended but that’s still about the extent of dramatics his recently stabbed body can achieve. “Oh my god, what is this, the Who’s On First of Epistolary Horniness? I told you!”

“No you didn’t!”

“Yes, I did!”

“No, you absolutely did not. I think I would have remembered if you said that you kept my letters, plural!” Steve shakes the letter up at him as if to punctuate his point. Sinking into his own, significantly more pathetic and defeated crouch now, Eddie puts his face in his hands and fights the urge to scream into them for just a brief moment of catharsis or something.

“I said I was into the contents of the letter!”

“That could have meant anything!”

“Yeah, and in this case, it meant that I kept the letter! All of them! Of course I kept them! Fuck, the first time I read it, I beat little Eddie like he owed me fucking money, Steve!”

Steve clears his throat but he still can’t look at him. “You — you, uh —”

“Steve,” he says, plaintively. “Please don’t make me say it again.”

“I just,” he says. “You, um, like them? Like that? Liked that one like that?”

“Of course I liked that one like that!” Eddie fans his fingers to peer at him. His face is also bright red now but he looks almost kind of pleased and Eddie asks, “Seriously what is happening? Was I supposed to like it another way?”

“No, that was, um, that was kind of why I wrote it,” he tells him. “Didn’t I say?”

“I mean, yeah? It was. Um, it sure was something. Is something. That’s why I, you know, kept it. That’s why I — I read it all the time, Steve,” he says baldly. “I still read it all the time. It’s maybe, you know, the hottest thing that’s, like, ever happened to me?”

The look on his face goes even more pleased. “It is?”

Eddie swallows. “Why would I lie about something like that? Now?”

“I don’t know, man,” Steve says in a wounded kind of voice. He’s finally set the book and the song lyrics down on the ground by their feet but he’s still got the letter clenched in his fingers, almost white knuckling the thing. “You never wrote back.”

He feels his heart break. “I did. I did, honey. I told you. You just never got it. I’m so sorry. You just never got it.”

Shifting to his knees, Steve puts that hand holding that letter on Eddie’s thigh. His palm is warm even through the thin, worn paper. “You promise you wrote back?”

“To that letter?” he says. Eddie takes his face, dear, into his hands. “Sweetheart, I wrote you sonnets. How could I not?”

Because, yeah, truly, how could he not? It was — it was —

Ugh, he thinks.

Okay.

Fine.

Alright, perverts, here you fucking go —

September 8th, 1987

E —

I had a dream about you. Do you want to hear it? It was a good dream.

Thought it wasn’t, for a minute. Thought it was real. We were in your bedroom, the one Wayne had made up in the apartment they gave him, after. When we thought maybe they’d actually do right by you. We never told you about it, because by the time it was finished. Well. We didn’t wanna get your hopes up. But Wayne made it up special. Kids helped. It was real nice. I used to crash there, after we’d watch a game, if I’d had a few two many beers and he wouldn’t let me drive home. Had your posters, your old acoustic, some shit from your old friends. You woulda liked it. Felt like you. Didn’t smell like you.

In the dream, it smelled like you. We were in bed, just woke up. I had my head on your chest and you were playing with my hair and you smelled like sweat and skin and pot and my cologne. Leather, too. Metal, like the cheap kind, those shitty gumball rings. Cause in my dreams I get them for you sometimes.

You were playing with my hair, and it felt so nice. Felt right. You scrapped it back from my face, and you said hey baby all low and sweet and I said hey back. I could feel your dick on my leg, hard on account of you just waking up. I was too and I’m not you know afraid in my dreams or shy. I mean I’m not in real life either. So I ran my hand down your chest, across your belly, and I put my hand in your boxers. I asked you if you wanted me to do something about this, and you said whatever you want baby.

So I crawled under the covers and got between your legs and I put my mouth on you.

I like doing that. Like it for girls, like it for guys. Like it when I get used a little, and in my dream you know that about me but you’re always real gentle about it at first, in my dreams, when I imagine you. I imagine you alot. Run your hands through my hair, touch yourself through my cheek, my throat. Say nice things about me. How I take you. How pretty I look doing it.

I get so worked up when I’ve got someone in my mouth. And you. I bet you taste good. Clean and hot and a little like musk. Salty. I’d take you raw. I know it’s not smart but fuck baby I wanna taste you. I’ve only tasted myself before, really.

You fucked my face, in the dream, once we got going. Really let loose, cause that’s the way I like it and you like it to. You got wild with it, and I got my fingers in you while I was down there, which got you even wilder. You were still pretty loose, from the night before, and it didn’t take much to get you ready. Get you begging for me.

Fucked you raw, in your bed. Laid you out on your back, with your hair all spread over the pillow like a halo, and I got your leg on my shoulder and fucked you with nothing between us. You felt so good. Inside, beneath me. Your dick all hard on my belly between us. You staring up at me with your dark fucking eyes, mouth all wet and wide and red, dropped open, and I thought about spitting in it, because you’d take that too, wouldn’t you? Take me anyway you can have me.

Cause it’s the same. For me. I’d take you anyway I could have you. Over and over.

I’ve never been fucked before. I can’t. I’m saving it for you. I think. Is that fucked up? Every part of me is yours and I gotta save it for you. Didn’t think I had a thing for that but I want you to take my virginity. Like that. You’d make it so good for me, baby. Would you eat me out first? Read a zine about that. Can’t get it out of my head. Your tongue in me.

I touch myself in the shower thinking about you. Everywhere, to be honest. In my bed, in the shower, while I’m blowing other guys in bathroom stalls. I always imagine it’s you. I know I said before, but I say  your name sometimes. Only had one guy get mean about it. Most don’t care. They get it, I think. We’ve all got someone.

Touched myself when I woke up from the dream. Didn’t even make it to the shower, and I had to stuff my pillow in my mouth so I didn’t scream when I put my fingers in myself and imagined it was you. Returning the favor. Flipped myself over and put myself face down into my pillow and shoved two fingers up my ass and fucked myself like it was you. Begging for you. Crying for you. Imagined you holding me open to spit on my hole before you fucked into it, and I came so hard I got jizz on my chin. Didn’t even need to touch my dick. Two fingers and the thought of you and I fucking blacked out with my own spunk on my face.

Thought about you licking it off me, after, and spitting that back into my mouth. Making me swallow it. Fucking me still. Fucking me until I was hard again. Almost broke my wrist trying to do it to myself, saying your name. Crying.

Eddie.

God, I wish I could see you. I wish I could know what you [something struck out]

Wish that I could tell you that I [something struck out so hard the paper is nearly ripped]

I dream about you all the time.

Do you dream about me too?

S

“I wrote you pages and pages, baby,” Eddie says, his thumbs tracing the ridges of Steve’s fine cheekbones as he stares deeply into his hazel eyes. They’re warm, like melted honey, if he’s gotta be too poetic by half about it, and frankly he does. He can’t believe he never realized just how beautiful they were, never had the time to gaze into them like this, and honestly he’s a little grateful, because he thinks he would have gotten lost within them before if he had, been pulled beneath their undertow and drowned gloriously. “I filled up notebooks with my, my desire for you — I’m so fucking sorry you ever had to doubt just how much I ached for you.”

“You did?” he asks.

“I did,” he says. “I did — I do. All these years, Steve. All these years, I’ve — and these last few weeks, with you here with me, have been torture —”

“Yeah, and not just for both of you,” offers Murray, somewhat acidically, from the doorway because of course that nosy piece of shit did not go far when Steve tried to banish him.

Eddie watches as Steve levels the man with a particularly mean glare in return, feral and sharp, and Eddie was, like, aware he had some wires crossed, like, sexually speaking before this but god damn is that doing it for him. What can he say? He likes ‘em bitchy.

“Man, can we get the room,” he hisses.

Murray just chortles and he turns to glare at him too, hands still caressing Steve’s face because like hell is he letting go anytime soon now that he’s got permission, even here. They’re being watched with poorly concealed mirth as he leans around the doorway like a demented gargoyle, and he opens his mouth to say something undoubtedly horrific to them. 

Luckily for them, whatever it was gets interrupted by the appearance of Dmitri, who pops up to mirror Murray on the other side of the frame. He eyes Eddie’s hands on Steve’s face, and his hand on Eddie’s thigh, still knelt together on the floor of the infirmary, and asks, “Oh, have they figured it out?”

“Yes,” says Murray gleefully. “It only took years off all our lives with their interminable will they, won’t they bullshit.”

“Dude, I’ve been in a SuperMax facility for the last eight years and the government as been censoring my mail apparently, cut me some fucking slack,” complains Eddie.

“It’s okay,” says Steve. “We’ll have plenty of time after this.”

“That is very true,” says Dmitri. “And you only have to wait just a little bit longer now. Oh, a week I think?”

Steve’s eyes widen. “It’s time?”

Dmitri winks. It’s even stranger coming from him than Papadoupoulous, which is fucking saying something, but significantly less horrifying than the ones Murray has leveled at him. “It’s time.”

“For what?” asks Eddie.

“Prison break, sweetcheeks,” crows Murray. There’s a little dance involved.

He scrunches his nose up in disgust. “Really?”

“Not for you, sorry, Cooler King,” says Dmitri, ignoring that it was more at what Murray called him than anything. He jerks his thumb at Murray. “For him.”

“They did it,” breathes Steve. “They did it?”

“They did it,” he echoes again. “Just one last piece of the puzzle to go. One week.”

“Boys, it’s been a slice, although I am personally devastated I will not be watching the Eddie and Steve Show live any longer,” Murray says. “It’s Emmy worthy, truly. A Day Time one, sure, but it counts. And, anyway, I’m sure I’ll get it up close and personal again next family dinner. Eddie, any dietary restrictions? I’m assuming you’re fine with sausage —”

“I’m gonna make sure no one has sex with you ever again,” says Steve. 

Murray laughs. “Not with this animal magnetism, sonny boy. Got ‘em quite literally falling at my feet, and I always reciprocate.”

Steve makes an inarticulate noise of rage that Eddie tries very hard to not find incredibly sexy. He fails, and so feels like it’s his duty to try to get this shit on track.

“Seriously,” he says. “What the fuck is happening? Am I not — I mean, I do wanna know about whatever the hell you have going on, and with significantly less detail than you’ll feel the need to add, but like right now — am I not getting broken out of prison right now? I thought that was the plan? Like, a whole prison heist. The Cooler King cracks alone —”

“ I’m the prison heist,” says Murray, “ you’re a whole other thing that’s actually surprisingly legal, except for the forgeries and the blackmail and the threats. But then again, only one of us in this room is here under his real name, and someone else is apparently very invested in making sure you get a whole, completely free life under it after all this wraps up so you can live in gay bliss somewhere with like a thousand cats.”

“Also,” adds Dmitri, “ someone’s father has decided the warden needs to be taught a lesson.”

“Oh, God, not again,” mutters Steve, still a little red in the face because of anger. “He’s got a complex because of Mom.”

Eddie is so lost. “What? What?”

Of course, keeping on theme, he doesn’t get an answer, and probably won’t until he’s well shot of this place, because the alarms immediately start blaring.

“Oh, they’re playing my song!” Murray says, miming wiping a nostalgic tear from his eyes. He looks at Dmitri. “Memories! Am I right?”

“Less fighting for our lives,” he says, “but I’ll allow it. Shall we, Inmate Hollows?”

“Oh, we shall, Officer Beneventi.”

The pair spare them a set of grins — Murray’s wildly toothsome and Dmitri’s his customary sardonic one — and then disappear from the doorframe. The sounds of their footsteps echo only briefly down the hall, swallowed by the screeching of the alarms, and Eddie catches a snatch of a sentence, something about a flame thrower and an honest to God laugh from Dmitri before that too is taken by the noise.

Steve finally removes his hand from Eddie’s thigh with an apologetic little look and rises. He goes to the door, peers out into the hallway this way and that, and then retreats back into the room. He pulls the door closed behind him and locks it.

Still in his crouch on the floor, he twists to look at Steve. “Okay. Listen. I have really been giving everyone the benefit of the doubt these past few weeks, and don’t get me wrong I’m thrilled we’ve cleared up our thing, at least, I think we have — I really hope we have — but I am so, so, really very confused right now, and also kind of scared because I don’t know what’s happening, or what’s going to happen, and I know you probably can’t say a lot — you said that, before, I think, for, like, my protection. But I’m thinking maybe I might need to know now, and also I kind of deserve to know?”

“Ed,” says Steve warmly. He reaches down and effortlessly hauls him up by the biceps; Eddie leaves his things on the ground. He keeps a hold of him too, after, his thumbs rubbing comforting circles on the meat of his arms, as he says, “I’m sorry, honey. You’re right. About all of it. The short of it is Murray’s been causing trouble since he’s been here to have a cover for an escape once we got word your name was nearly cleared, and we’d be able to ease up on the protective detail. And Dmitri just lit the powder cake or whatever. So Murray’s gotta get out, and you will be too — just, like, more legally, like the man said.”

“That’s really happening?”

“That’s really happening. I wouldn’t lie about that.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s kind of — it was kind of non-negotiable for me. And everyone else too, sure. But. Yeah. No one is gonna have the guts, or the reasons, to try to come after you again, now that you’re innocent in the eyes of the law, and not just the rest of us.”

“Oh,” he says again. “So now we just sit here?”

“Until the guards come and give us the all clear.” Steve shrugs. “Which might be a while. I think Murray’s been having way too much fun with this job. Introducing him to my parents was kind of a mistake in more ways than one.”

“I’m really going to want, like, an extremely in depth rundown on that when we get out of here,” says Eddie.

“Oh, me and Robin have a whole presentation,” he says. “She thinks I need to be more accepting of their lifestyle and I tell her I totally am, it’s just that’s my mom and dad and Murray, you know?”

“I mean I barely know the guy but yeah I think that’s fair.”

“Thank you!”

He scuffs his soft little prison slipper across the floor. “So. Did you, I don’t know, did you wanna make out? While we wait?”

Steve snorts. “You think I’m that easy?”

“I don’t think there’s anything easy about you,” Eddie says, earnest. “I just — I feel like maybe I have some compelling evidence in favor of you being receptive to the offer.”

“You’re not wrong,” he says. He steps in closer to Eddie while still maintaining the hold on his arms. The warmth of his body is unreal, he thinks, so hot, almost painful, as the movement slots their hips closer and this, this is how Eddie wants to combust: in Steve’s grip, sheltered by his body, immolated by the heat of him. “You’re really, really not wrong.”

He reaches up, presses his thumb to his mouth, traces it along the heavy swell of his bottom lip, slightly damp from Steve’s tongue as he’s wet it while speaking. Eddie wants to gather up that spit with his finger, suck it into his own mouth — gather it up from the source next, swallow it and whatever gasps he can pull from Steve whole. He wants to consume him, and is consumed by the idea in turn, the weight of his desire so large, so heavy that it almost shocks him. Eight years, he thinks, eight years.

“Was it for me?” Steve asks around the thumb still pressed to his mouth. Eddie adjusts his touch then, moving southward to hold the delicate jut of his chin between thumb and forefinger. He asks, “The song you wrote. Was that for me?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Of course. Who else?”

“I don’t know, man. It was kind of awful,” he tells him.

Eddie huffs out a laugh. “Thanks.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” he says.

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” Steve bites his lip. “Because I did, you know. Like it.”

“That’s good,” Eddie says. “I wrote more.”

“They all that bad?”

He laughs again. “Well, they’re not great. My new stuff will be better though.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he repeats. “I mean, really, you can only go up from there.”

“I guess,” says Steve. “Hey. So. Are we gonna make out or what?”

“Hey! You’re the one who brought up my shitty song writing!”

He snorts and lets go of Eddie’s arms. He’d protest the loss but his hands are sliding upwards, curving around the sharp points of his shoulder blades, and somehow Steve presses himself even closer to him. It’s like he’s trying to fuse their bodies together, become one creature, and the idea that some time soon Eddie will know him that way — Steve inside him, him inside Steve, so intimately connected — lights his nerve endings on fire in a new way.

There’s a small gap between their heights — Eddie’s maybe half an inch taller these days — but Steve’s broader, shoulders and chest thicker, wider. Eddie drops his hands down to the soft triangle of his waist, long fingers spanning the sides as he sneaks his hold under the flaps of his lab coat, feeling that warmth of him through his thin cotton button down. He pulls their hips completely flush now, steps one narrow thigh between Steve’s more muscular ones. They both hiss out their breath.

Fuck earlier, Eddie’s dying now, like this: alarms screeching, body pressed against Steve Harrington’s, in the middle of a fucking prison infirmary.

“You got me, big boy?” Steve is asking.

“That’s my line,” he says.

Behind them, glass breaks and the metal door slams off the infirmary wall.

In a display of strength that Eddie will be replaying in a loop in his brain for days after this, Steve tosses him behind him with zero hesitation. He puts his body between Eddie and the threat with the same selfless, bullheaded martyrdom he’d had as a teenager and squares the fuck up with the two people bursting into the room. It’s the awful government haircuts that had come in on the same bus as Murray, because of course it fucking is. Hadn’t at least one of these assholes gotten put out of commission?

“Gentlemen,” says Steve. “Now, who let you out of your cells while we’re supposed to be on lockdown? Because that is a gross violation of, you know, policy and shit.”

Predictably, they don’t answer him and just get straight to the business of trying to go through him to get to Eddie, who dives for the scalpel he keeps under his pillow to defend himself. He didn’t need to; Steve takes care of the problem very quickly, and Eddie just ends up kind of standing there, holding his weapon to his chest as he wipes the floor with them.

After Eddie had woken up in the hospital, post-bats, the kids had tried to keep his spirits high in the face of, you know, all the shit that Eddie was up against. They’d regaled him with stories of the final battle while both he and Max had been comatose — though apparently Max had been an active participate still, helping Eleven to kick Vecna’s ass while still trapped in her own mind — and then they’d told him stories of all the other dust-ups they’d had over the past few years with the Upside Down before he’d been taken to Indianapolis and put on trial.

So he’s heard all about Steve and his fight skills. It had been strange, getting all the fights he’d lost when he’d gone up against humans recounted to him — both Dustin and Erica seemed to think “that thing with the Russian guard” had more to do with the element of surprise and luck, rather than any real skill — when Eddie had personally witnessed Steve, shirtless, bleeding, hairy, Jesus God so hairy and damp and hot, tearing a nightmare bat with a face like a dick apart with his bare hands. He’d apparently been two-and-one with humans, but four-and-oh with monsters, and the kids seemed to revere and disdain this in equal measures.

And, look, Eddie never got in that many fights himself growing up — he wielded his words, his looks, and his role as high school drug supplier like it was a blade of some kind, and most people fucked right off from him — so he could never speak to how easy or difficult a fist fight should be, and he’d kept his thoughts on Steve’s physical prowess — mostly positive, and definitely, completely inappropriate for the audience — to himself and let the kids have their opinions.

But apparently he’s leveled up as a barbarian since his ill-fated dust-ups nearly a decade ago. Once again, mark Eddie down as scared and horny, and then sign him up for fucking more.

The guy whose clock Murray had thoroughly cleaned before is handled with aplomb. He’s got a bruise the size of Lake Michigan on his face, and he’s moving with a limp, so he goes down with minimal assistance. Just a few well-placed punches to the solar plexus, a knee to the groan, and then a bedpan to the brainpan and the guy is quite literally tossed on his ass out of the room. He slams into the wall opposite the broken-in door with a dull thud and slumps, unconscious, against the ground.

Government Haircut: The Haircut Strikes Back has been trying to get after Steve while he’s been dealing with the first guy, but he’d been deterred by Steve ably using his friend as a human shield until he was dispatched. He seemed confident, at the start, but now Eddie can see a bit of doubt creep in behind his eyes as the minutes pass and Steve keeps dodging blows, only a few glancing against him now and again, and Eddie still out of his reach.

It’s got a bit of an air of desperate last attempt when the guy spears Steve around the middle to bear him to the ground. They both go down with an oomph that is nearly drowned out by the still blaring alarms and the medicine cabinet behind him rattles with the sound of two grown men hitting the proverbial dirt.

He gets in a few good blows to Steve’s face, taking advantage of the air knocked from his lungs, the stunning that always comes with that kind of thing. Eddie thinks about throwing himself onto the guy and getting a little stabby, stitched be damned, when he sees blood bloom across Steve’s mouth, but then the tables are turned.

Steve bucks his hips, twists, and then, in another arousing display of skill, he gets his legs around the other guy’s neck and shoulder, trapping his non-punching arm below his body so all he can do with it is frantically claw at Steve’s legs. And those thighs are clearly made of steel because Government Haircut #2 can barely even thrash in their grip too. Not fucking now, he thinks in the general direction of his dick.

The other arm was left free but apparently that was the plan, because Steve’s got it stretched out and pulled taught, pulling, pulling, pulling with gritted teeth until there’s a cracking noise that makes Eddie flinch, close his eyes and breath through his mouth, his heart rate racing now for a third reason as the adrenaline and desire is outweighed by the memory of fear, of horror.

“Eddie,” says Steve. “Eddie, hey, hey, Ed, you’re okay, you’re okay. Can you open your eyes for me?”

He does. Steve’s standing in front of him now, his hands gently covering the desperate fist he’s making around the scalpel. His mouth is split open, bleeding, and he’s got a nasty black eye blooming, another bit of split skin on that sharp cheekbone, but he’s standing, mostly whole, and Government Haircut #1 is still in the hall over his shoulder. Government Haircut #2 is unconscious on the floor with what looks to be a dislocated shoulder, maybe a broken arm, hell maybe both, his own face bruised and bloodied.

“There you are, baby,” he’s saying. “You’re okay; I’ve got you.”

“Yeah.” He swallows. “Yeah, sorry. The noise —”

Steve’s face crumples. “Oh, baby.”

“I’m okay,” he says. “I don’t normally, you know, these days, just. Just — took me by surprise. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I’m fine. Guy got a few lucky ones in. Are you okay for a minute while I get them sorted?”

Eddie nods and Steve shoots him a smile that looks a little painful, a little bit wince like, before ducking into his office. He emerges with some zip ties and he makes quick work of securing the Haircut Twins, dragging the second guy out into the hall. He closes the door, and then pushes a cabinet in front of it with a grunt when he realizes the lock is fully busted. Eddie’s not sure what good it will do, because the glass pane there is also broken but he imagines it’s the principal of the things. Plus, he doesn’t think those guys are getting up any time soon, what with the TBIs and the liberal application of those zip ties.

While Steve works, Eddie himself goes to grab something to clean him up with, a bottle of alcohol and some sterile gauze pads. Steve rolls his eyes when he turns around and sees him standing there with them but peaceably takes a seat on Eddie’s former throne when he frowns and gestures emphatically at it. He allows him to wipe the blood away with a fond look in his eye, watching Eddie as he stands between his legs to work.

An echo of earlier, he rubs his thumb under the bleeding swell of his lower lip, gentle as anything, and Steve stares up at him with those big, beautiful eyes of his. Eddie says quietly, “Don’t think you need any stitches or anything. But I’m guessing we need to table that make out session, huh?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Probably. Too bad. I was really looking forward to it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Rain check?”

“Of course,” says Eddie. 

Steve squeezes Eddie’s wrists, lets him go, and with great reluctance — and one last soft press to his lip — he lets him go too. He hops up next to him on the infirmary bed, their shoulders just barely touching as they sit side by side. He can feel the warmth of Steve’s thigh next to his, hot like a furnace, and he nearly startles when his hand presses up next to him.

He looks down. HIs knuckles are bruised, a split across the middle one that’s already scabbing over. Steve lays his pinky over Eddie’s, curls it under. He curls his own.

They sit like that, entwined so smally but so infinitely, until the alarms finally cut out and they hear footsteps in the hall.

One week later, Officer Enzo Beneventi comes to rattle the bars of Eddie’s cage for a final time. He smirks at him as he runs his baton over the bars, and this time it meets his eyes, a little mean, a lot mischievous. Murray’s bailout from the prison had gone smoothly, it seemed. Security had gotten a little tighter, which worked in Eddie’s benefit, though according to Dmitri the attempt on “Doctor Hammond’s” life during the breakout got the Haircuts transferred out real fast to a different facility, and most of them are resigned to significantly less yard time while tensions die down and a manhunt gets underway for Larry Hollows, fugitive.

It didn’t appear that anyone was any wiser to Steve’s particular secret identity, or Dmitri’s, and their involvement in what had gone down. The two of them roamed the prison and the infirmary free as birds, even if they’d kept their distance from Eddie when he was back in his cell.

And, yeah, as for him?

The day before, he’d been called to the warden’s office. A new guy was installed behind the desk, not that he had ever been super familiar with the old one, and he’d told Eddie that he was getting released the next afternoon. He’d known this was coming — he’d known that whatever it was that was happening behind the scenes of the Eddie Heist That Wasn’t had gone off without a hitch — but he’d still stared, blinked. Because it’s one thing to know but it’s another thing to actually have the judgment being passed down, to have this decade long nightmare come to a close. Honestly, a part of him still couldn’t believe it as he sat there, was convinced someone was going to pull the rug out from underneath him and the next day would roll around and someone would say, Just kidding! You’re here forever, Edward Munson! Get fucked, asshole!

But Dmitri is at the opening of his cell for the first time in days, smiling that smile of his, and he says, “The FBI had a press conference earlier today. They announced that new evidence has been brought to light in several murder and missing persons cases in rural Indiana in the late seventies and early to mid eighties that now shows they were all perpetrated by one man: Martin Brenner, a former government scientist out of Hawkins National Lab. They say he’s the most prolific serial killer in Indiana history — even moreso than Larry Eyler.”

“Martin Brenner, huh?” says Eddie. If memory serves, he’s the guy that made Eleven call him Papa, and basically kicked off all the rest of that shit. “Fuck that guy.”

“Fuck that guy,” agrees Dmitri. “Have you got everything?”

He hefts his backpack, replete with Tolkien first editions and homegrown pornography and the best worst love song ever written. He’ll leave the radio behind for someone else; he’s pretty sure he can get his hands on a better one soon enough, maybe even something with a tape deck and, gasp, buy some real goddamn tapes. “Ready when you are, officer.”

Dmitri walks him out of his cell, doors left open behind him, and down to intake which is also, apparently, outtake in a pinch. The clothes and possessions Eddie went in with back in ‘86 are long gone, but they’d been scrubs anyway, so it’s no skin off his nose. His lawyers had left some new duds for him too and Eddie slips away to change from his prison issued threads to a pair of black Dickies, a Metallica t-shirt with artwork he doesn’t recognize that he holds to his face and breaths in for a long moment, a pair of Vans with crew socks stuffed in them, a pair of plaid boxers, and what looks like a second hand leather jacket.

There’s a little ziplock baggie in the front jacket pocket; it’s filled with Eddie’s old rings, his guitar pick necklace. He gives himself five minutes to cry, holding the little baggie against his forehead as he sits on the toilet seat, hiccuping.

He splashes some water on his face when he’s dressed and looks at himself in the mirror. He adjusts the way the jacket lays on his shoulders, touches the chain of his necklace reverently where it rests against his scarred collarbone as it peeks out from his shirt, touches the delicate fuzz of his shaved hair, and he thinks he looks good. Not the same as he was back then, and maybe better for it. 

“You’re gonna be okay,” he tells himself quietly.

Dmitri’s waiting with the receptionist or whatever the fuck and Eddie’s paperwork when he emerges. He signs a few things, carefully reading it just in case, but there’s nothing there to trip him up: just some formalities, and then Dmitri has his hand between Eddie’s shoulder blades and the other on the double doors of Pelican Bay SuperMax.

Outside, on the asphalt, the California sun is high in the sky but the air is cool, dry. Eddie thinks he can smell the ocean but he never did on the inside so he figures it’s probably just wishful thinking. He closes his eyes anyway, imagining as he tips his face up against the warmth.

There’s a ripping noise from Eddie’s right and he looks over to see Dmitri tossing his uniform jacket into a wire wastebasket after having just torn the thing clean into two apparently. He looks very satisfied by what’s been done and Eddie asks, “Are you walking off the job right now?”

“Yes,” he says. “Enzo Beneventi is traumatized from the prison break, which, for reference, he spent locked in a utility closet, and has had a change of heart regarding the prison industrial complex in America as well. He’s thinking about going into insurance.”

Eddie snorts. “Cool.”

Ahead of them, there’s a nondescript beige towncar, a Lexus maybe, and Erica Sinclair slash Zadie Blanchard leans up against it, a soft line of pastel lavender suiting in repose. When they’re about two feet away, she smirks at them and opens the door to the backseat, climbing in, and, while Dmitri takes shotgun, Eddie slides in after her.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” she says. She punches him in the shoulder with that same smirk and then grabs him close for a hug. Eddie presses his cheekbone to the top of her head, breathes her in. She’s got that salon kind of smell lingering in her hair, must’ve gotten it done recently, and her perfume is something sweet and herby, he thinks. She’s real. This is real. She says, “Good to have you back, batfood.”

“Oh, god, I was hoping that nickname wasn’t going to stick.”

Erica pulls back, smirks wider at him. “Sucks to suck, batfood.”

The door on the other side of the backseat opens and Steve slides in, slacks and a button down, a tie he’s loosening one handed, but no lab coat.

“I did not sign up to ride in the middle seat,” protests Erica.

“Ready to go?” asks Steve.

“We were just waiting on you,” she says.

“So, like, is anyone going to fill me in or,” says Eddie.

Jimmy Papadoupoulous leans around the driver’s seat and eyes Eddie over expensive looking sunglasses. His hazel eyes, ugh, he hates that he’s gotta say this but — his hazel eyes veritably twinkle as he says, “We’ve got some people to meet with first, Mr Munson, and then we can get down to brass tacks, as it were.”

He turns back in his seat and guns the engine.

They tear out of Pelican Bay SuperMax and no one says shit when Eddie rolls down his window to send the guards the gate a stiff middle finger. Erica basically crawls into his lap to do the same thing with both hands, which gets Steve going and then Dmitri. Papadoupoulous laughs from the driver’s seat like this is the funniest thing he’s ever seen, lays on the horn for a good thirty seconds, and then the only home Eddie’s known these past few years is nothing but dust in their rearview. He feels like crying again but doesn’t. He thinks he’s probably going to feel like crying a lot in the coming days, months.

Papadoupoulous takes them to a state park just ten minutes away. The sign says Tolowa Dunes, and Eddie is almost positive they’re driving illegally as they approach the beachfront but he’s too busy sticking his head out the window like a fucking dog, the breeze against his face and Steve’s arm stretched out across the backseat behind Erica so he can keep a fist in Eddie’s jacket collar, like he think he’s gonna fall out somehow.

There’s a bunch of cars waiting for them when they park and, when Eddie climbs out of his seat, Erica basically pushing him out of the car from behind, he only has a second to catch a glimpse of Joyce Byers standing next to Murray, who’s shaved his beard and appears to be loudly complaining about it, and Jim Hopper, his hair and mustache grown out from the last, brief time him and Eddie crossed paths in Eddie’s holding cell back in Indianapolis, clapping Dmitri on the shoulder when he gets to his side and asking, “You guys get out okay?” before Eddie is swarmed by a mass of bodies.

He’s all but crowded up against the Lexus and it takes him a minute to start making out faces and voices from the crush, grown and changed since last he saw them. 

Max is the easiest to pick out, her hair still bright red, but she wears it cropped around her chin now and he thinks he can spy a bit of an undercut. She’s got the thick glasses still he’d seen in that photograph and her eyes, an even paler, hazier blue than they were before, look huge behind them as she smirks up at him from her wheelchair, which is basically parked on his foot but does Eddie give a shit? Eddie does not give any shits. He gives negative shits, in fact.

Lucas is even taller than he was at fourteen, a good head taller than Eddie, and he’s got a hairstyle that reminds Eddie of that artist Jeff had liked, the guy from New York who’d been in that one Blondie music video back in the day. He’s dressed less preppy than he was when he last saw him too, a big oversized blazer over an NWA t-shirt, baggy jeans, pristine Nikes.

Conversely, Mike is the one that has gone the preppiest of them all. His hair is cut short again and he’s only a little taller than he was at fourteen, must’ve capped out shortly after, just about Eddie’s height. He’s got glasses too but his are pushed back into his hair and the sleeves of his Oxford are pushed up to reveal a mass of colorful tattoos as he vies for Dustin for a position to strangle Eddie with a hug. 

And Dustin — Dustin’s hair is big and long and curly, a soft cloud around his head and only kept down to a shout by one of his baseball caps. This one is for the Pacers, which could only be Steve’s influence. He looks the same as the last time he saw him but more grown, an adult, a smile full of straight, white teeth and his squinted eyes wet with tears. He’s got on a new Weird Al tee, naked in a pool, a reference he can’t hope to get just yet but give him time, he thinks.

Eddie can’t stop touching them, going from one kid to the next to the next. He even drags Will Byers into the hug, who’d been standing at the back of the crowd of them, looking gangly and sweet and unsure. They’d spent approximately zero time around each other but Eddie had always heard great things, and so he hauls him in close too by the neckline of his plaid flannel, ruffling the baby soft hair that he knows was kept in a bowl cut until Steve wrestled the scissors from Joyce Byers’s hands one weekend, shouting that he wouldn’t let Baby Byers live like this anymore before locking them both in a bathroom.

He’s got so many memories of them, some of them his, most of them second hand ones now, passed down from Steve in snatches and half-told stories and lost letters, and he always thought it was all he was going to get. But now he’s going to get so much more: he’s going to get all of them, new and real and held in his arms like this. He feels himself start to cry, thinks, Fuck it, because he’s earned it.

He’s out. God, he’s fucking out.

Through tear clouded eyes, he looks up and around, catches sight of Dmitri and Hopper and Joyce again, who all smile — Murray, who wiggles his fingers and winks, God, fuck that guy, he loves him so much too. Jonathan is sitting on the hood of a Jeep, trading a cigarette back and forth with Argyle, and emerging from the Jeep is — is —

If it isn’t for the kids holding him up, Eddie would be collapsing to the ground as Wayne walks over, hands in his pockets, trucker hat tipped back to show his shining eyes as he smiles tremulously at him. 

As it is, Mike’s got a death grip in the back of Eddie’s jacket, and Dustin is under his left arm holding more than half his weight, but they push him forward without hesitation into his uncle as soon as he gets close enough. He falls into him and is held like a child in his arms, his gasping mouth against Wayne’s collarbone, Wayne’s boney hand gripping the back of Eddie’s neck like he will disappear like smoke if he lets up even the smallest bit.

Sound fades in and out around him as they all stand there, giving Eddie the space to feel his feelings and release, oh, eight years worth of trauma. He’s aware that he’s babbling something — just what, he’s got no fucking clue — into the increasingly damp fabric of Wayne’s shirt. His old man doesn’t say anything at all about it, just holds him, strokes his hair, and Eddie feels like he’s a kid again, ten years old and being thrust into this man’s arms. He loves it; he wouldn’t have it any other way; he’s so fucking happy.

By the time he gets himself back under control, his breathing hitched and his face pulled tight and hot from his tears, but his shit mostly back together, he peers over his shoulder to make eye contact with Papadoupoulous, who is standing shoulder to shoulder with Steve and something about the picture they make is sending signals to a remote part of his brain. It flits in and out of reach and he decides to deal with it later as he croaks out, “So, do I finally get to know what the fuck has been happening the last eight years, or what?”

But once again this is Eddie’s life, so he’s rudely robbed of a response from anyone when a candy apple red ‘62 Dodge Charger peels over the sandy dunes and slams to a stop, very nearly murdering, oh, all of them with its grand entrance. 

Behind the wheel, Eleven whips off a pair of expensive looking sunglasses and says, “I’m getting good at that!”

She hops out of the car and beelines for Eddie, crashing into him and Wayne with an unhesitating familiarity that nearly makes him tear up again.

“It is very nice to see you again in person, Eddie,” she says sincerely when she pulls away. “I am very happy.”

“Me too,” he says.

Wayne pulls back just slightly, which is all the warning he gets before Robin and Nancy also hop out of the car and take his scrawny ass straight to the sand. They’re laughing as they do it, pinning him under their exuberance, smacking kisses to his cheeks, and he laughs too. No words are exchanged here, or needed, he thinks, and eventually they allow him to sit up, Robin practically in his lap, as a fourth and final person emerges from the front seat of the Charger.

Now, Eddie’s not known for his interest in women — he’s a five on the ole Kinsey scale, sure, and like he knows it’s super reductive and not inclusive of the full spectrum of gender expression (he’s really looking forward to getting that degree as a free man, gotta say, maybe he’ll even do some post-grad — wouldn’t that be a trip?), but he thinks it’s handy in a pinch — and for the foreseeable future (and also forever, if he gets his way), he’s pretty sure he’s only got eyes for a certain undercover prison doctor with a smile like sunshine and an ass that hasn’t quit since 1982. But the woman climbing out and then leaning against the hood of the car like she’s auditioning for a Whitesnake video is — well —

About six feet tall, a sharp jaw, cornsilk hair, and big dark eyes, she cuts an impressive figure in her severe pantsuit with a camel jacket thrown over her left arm. She’s probably old enough to be his mother and Eddie thinks, This better not awaken anything in me. She smiles warmly at Eddie, making her even prettier, but her eyes flicker over his shoulder and suddenly she’s frowning.

“Bubba, what happened to your face?” she asks.

He blinks, and the woman is on the move, walking past him and the girls in their pile in the sand, getting her hands on Steve’s jaw in record time as she turns his face this way and that in the light and frowns prodigiously at his fading bruises, his scabbed lip. For his part, Steve just allows it to happen, though he is rolling his eyes something fierce while she goes.

“I’m fine,” he says.

“This is not fine, bubba!” she says. She’s got a very pretty, vaguely southern accent to go with her pretty everything else. “You look like you lost another round with that awful boy — not you, Jonathan, sweetie, you’re an angel, that other one, the one from eighty-four. And, Danny, didn’t the doctors say he shouldn’t have another concussion?”

“Well, I didn’t get another concussion, so jot that down —”

“Do not back sass me, young man!”

“I’m not! I’m not back sassing! I’m just saying! Mama, please, I’m fine . We don’t need to do this right now. I wanted to introduce you to Eddie, finally.”

This gets the gorgeous, ambiguously southern woman’s attention off Steve and back to Eddie but unfortunately Eddie’s now back to being thoroughly confused. Mama? He stares, wide eyed, between the two of them as they walk over to him.

The girls finally get off him and help him to his feet. He’s immediately enveloped into the beautiful woman’s arms, kisses pressed to his cheeks, before she pulls back to give him a thorough once over. She says, “Oh, look at you — the man who stole my darling boy’s heart. Are you hungry? I can’t imagine the food is any better than I remember it, and there’s a lovely little place down in San Fran owned by a friend of mine who went straight — so tragic, she was one of the finest forgers I’ve ever worked with — Will, Dustin, I must remember to introduce you! — oh, we have to go now, she makes such wonderful grits, and I can assure you that you’ve never had the like even before prison, I swear it was the first thing I wanted when I got out, the drive won’t be too terrible —”

“Mama, that’s like a six hour drive, and please we haven’t told him anything yet,” starts Steve as Papadoupoulous appears at Eddie’s shoulder, throwing his own arm around him, saying, “Oh, Lane, my love, what an excellent idea, Julie does make the best grits, and the best provenance papers —”

Eddie blinks, and then blinks again. He stares around him, at his friends, at his family, at his brothers and sisters in arms, and then at Papadoupolous.

“You’re not a lawyer,” he says somewhat lamely. “Are you?”

He grins. “No.”

“And you’re name isn’t Jimmy whatever the fuck either.”

“Steve, bubba, did you not explain?”

“I was trying to say —”

“Danny Harrington,” Papadoupoulous says. “And my wife, Lane. You’ve met our son.”

“So the family business,” he says. “Not insurance?”

“Once,” says Steve’s dad.

“For you ,” says Steve’s mom.

“Art theft, mainly,” says Steve.

“The Harringtons kind of rule,” says Robin.

Eddie blinks some more and Robin and Steve give what is apparently an abridged version of the presentation he was promised while everyone else chimes in with their two cents in between chatting amongst themselves and filling each other in on their own parts of the story. Mike, Lucas, and Max are telling a story about a fire in an Indiana courthouse that sounds both alarming and intriguing, while El is saying something equally alarming about rappelling down the side of the building which has got Hopper’s eye twitching, and Eddie is so helplessly lost but mainly he gets:

Danny Harrington used to be in insurance, many years ago, and he even had been employed by Mutual of Omaha. However, about ten years before Steve was born, a client of the company had had a very famous piece of artwork stolen from their collection, and Danny had gone on the hunt for it. He’d met Delaney “Lane” Smith, an art historian, during the course of his investigation, only to discover after another two high profile thefts from Danny’s clients that Lane had been the thief.

He’d spent the next five years or so chasing her across the globe, and she’d narrowly avoided capture several times and fallen into Danny’s bed more times than that. They fell in love and, when she was finally nabbed for a different crime — “Sheer dumb luck from Interpol,” she complains when they touch on it — Danny left behind the life of an insurance agent and broke her out of prison.

They were married under Lane’s real name, though only Danny and Steve apparently know what it is, and Harrington also isn’t Danny or Steve’s real last name either. But it’s what he and Lane operate under, and what Steve goes by too, and it’s close enough for baseball, Danny tells them. Now, they travel the globe, stealing from museums and rich assholes and becoming rich assholes themselves. 

When Steve had been little, they’d moved to Hawkins to try to raise him as “normies,” but they’d struggled, fought, missed the life. They’d compromised: when Steve was old enough, they would tell him what they did, and if he wanted to join them, great; if he didn’t, they would hire the best nannies they could and call frequently, visit in between jobs and cons, and maybe someday he would also join the family business. They created the cover of Danny as an insurance agent on frequent business trips, with a history of womanizing, allowing Lane to follow, and Steve had thought it was funny enough to go along with it, considering how in love his parents are with each other.

(“And apparently Murray now too,” Robin tells him in an undertone while Steve pretends to gag. “Be glad they’re behaving right now. They’re usually all over each other, and Steve’s always threatening to gouge his eyes out.”

“Yeah, because they’re my parents,” he says, disgusted and rote, while Robin cackles and Murray, sensing that he’s being discussed, blows kisses to everyone in their particular huddle. Danny and Lane each catch their kisses and pretend to put them in their pockets.)

As all the Upside Down shit unfolded, Steve had hid it from his parents for a solid two and a half years, though it seems it was mainly because of how much both Danny and Lane hate the government and Steve knew they’d be upset by what he’d gotten mixed up in. They’d swooped in after the business in Starcourt, tried to get Steve to leave Hawkins, but he hadn’t. There’d been a massive argument, a blow out fight, and Steve had threatened to move out. Another compromise then, and one that would ultimately benefit Eddie: the minute something else went wrong, the Harrington parents were to get involved.

So when the law left him behind and he ended up in the big house, the Harringtons were swooping in to try to get him out using less than legal methods. They’d nearly had the perfect prison break ready for him back in ‘87, about to be set in motion, when he’d disappeared; Murray apparently held the belief that the government caught wind of it somehow, and didn’t want to have the scapegoat taken away from them.

Steve had said they’d all looked for him, after that; Eddie had believed him, of course he had, but he hadn’t known the extent of it: the Harrington parents and all their underworld contacts, Hopper hanging up the badge and opening a PI firm with Joyce, Dmitri, and Wayne, the kids taking up a life of crime with Steve and Robin and Nancy, learning to hack and forge and steal. It might have happened anyway, they tell him; Steve had already been halfway to following his parents, and Robin would have followed him, and Dustin and Erica both say that if Steve had gone rogue and they’d found out, they would have followed him in a heartbeat.

And then they found him at Pelican Bay SuperMax, and a new plan was hatched. Danny and Erica played the red herring, running the prosecution on Eddie’s case ragged with “new details” that were being dug up and forged by other members of their crew (and apparently starting beef with the prison warden, which Lane sighs over, saying, “Daniel, you are such a romantic,” and Danny stares at her with heart eyes, replying, “Only the best for my angel”). Lane had taken a veritable girl gang to D.C. to do even further digging, breaking into government facilities to get blackmail material and plant the careful constructed evidence from Dustin, Will, and the others to make it seem like the government had been covering up the crimes of their former employee.

“That being one Dr Martin Brenner, of course,” concludes Danny, the story this time much more concise and true than the one he’d told as Papadoupoulous — Steve’s dad is, apparently, a fucking phenomenal actor or, you know, con man, he thinks. “Frankly, everything about him practically gift wrapped it for us, you know.”

“Fuck that guy,” says Eleven with a defiant tilt of her chin.

“Fuck that guy,” everyone agrees.

“I know you’d been hoping for a nice, clean prison break,” offers Danny, “but really there’s nothing quite like just a good, old fashioned heist and some blackmail too. You can never go wrong with the classics, you know?”

“And nothing brings a family together quite so well as that,” says Lane warmly, pressing kisses to the temples of her husband, son, and Eddie too. 

The story told, the group starts to disperse further, laughing and joking and retelling the choicest parts of their various roles. Eleven is regaling Max with a near miss at the Capitol after the repelling business while Hopper continues to listen on, clearly about to have an aneurysm, and the boys start taking off in the direction of the pacific ocean, hooting and hollering as they strip out of their clothes. Steve’s parents and Murray start making eyes at each other, and so do Robin and Nancy, which now that’s a fun development, thinks Eddie. Dmitri and Joyce and Wayne huddle up, though Wayne keeps looking over at Eddie like he thinks he might disappear if he stops for too long, and Eddie fights the urge to start crying for a third time.

“Sorry again you didn’t actually get to be part of the heist,” offers Steve once everyone drifts away from them. He’s half watching the boys at the water, his old lifeguard instincts probably activated by proximity. “Or a prison break.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie tells him. “Clearing my name was probably better in the long run.”

“Yeah.”

“But, like, out of curiosity, I guess — what would have happened? If I had to, you know, go on the run?”

“Mom had Julie — her friend that’s out of the game? — she had her make some papers for us, so they couldn’t be traced back to the kids somehow,” he says, “and Dad bought a house under one of his least used aliases in Canada. Yellowknife, I think. Wouldn’t have been able to see everyone again for a while, at least two years to be safe, Dad had said — but once the heat was down, they could’ve come to visit. The kids, I mean, and Wayne. Everybody.”

Max and Eleven have joined the boys in the water now, Eleven and Lucas gently helping Max out of her wheelchair and Eleven clearly using her abilities to ensure her friend, laughing, is successfully floating in the waves of salt water.

Eddie says quietly, “Us?”

“Um, yeah.” Steve scratches the back of his neck, bashful. There’s a light dusting of color across his cheeks, beneath the freckles and moles he shares with his father. Eddie wants to lick them; Steve’s, of course, not his dad’s. He’s saying, “I mean, I didn’t want to, like, presume or whatever but I kind of figure you might, like, want a friend or something, or, um —”

“I kept the porn you sent me,” he says, feeling a blush rise on his own cheeks. “So, like, presume away, big boy.”

Steve’s blush grows a little hotter. “Oh. Okay. Um. Good.”

“Yeah,” says Eddie. “Good.”

“Good,” he says again.

Eddie reaches for Steve’s hand. “You know, I’ve lived in California for five years now or so —”

“You were in prison, I don’t know if it counts —”

“Shut up, man, I’m trying to do something here —”

“Fine, man, fine, please, continue.”

“ Thank you. Anyway. I’ve lived in California for five years, and you know this is the first time I’ve been to the beach, like, ever. In my whole goddamn life, in fact. You know?”

“Really?”

He uses the hand in his to tug Steve down towards the surf. When they get down there, they kick off their shoes, roll up their pant legs to their knees and wade in. He says, “I’ve got a lot of firsts I missed since ‘86, actually.”

“Maybe you should start a list,” Steve says.

“Maybe I should. I mean, here’s one done, at least. Could use some help completing a few others too, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” says Eddie, looking out over the water. He can feel Steve’s gaze on the side of his face, heavy, and he chances a glance form the corner of his eye to see what exactly it looks like. It’s warm, familiar. He’s smiling softly.

“I’ve got a few of my own, actually,” he tells him. “I think, I think maybe I told you about one or two. Once. In a letter.”

Eddie swallows. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well.” He squeezes the hand in his. He smiles.

Steve leans in and kisses it off his lips, takes the breath from his lungs too while he’s at it, as they stand their in the surf, the laughter and cheers of their friends and family and co-criminals in front of them and behind them, cheering as Eddie presses himself further into Steve’s hold. 

“Well,” he repeats, the sun on his skin, the future like the ocean stretching out before them, way out and past the horizon. “Here’s to firsts then.”