Chapter Text
Eddie is beginning to think that, somewhere in the helter-skelter of surviving the Upside Down, being swarmed by possibly rabid but definitely rancid demobats, and charbroiling Vecna’s slimy ass, he accidentally tripped through the wrong gate and landed in an alternate dimension. Well, a different alternate dimension than the one he was already in.
Because Steve Harrington is flirting with him.
Steve “The Hair” Harrington. King Steve, ladies’ man extraordinaire. Flirting. With him. Eddie “The Freak” Munson. Hawkins’ resident pariah.
Or, at least, Eddie thinks he is.
He can’t be entirely sure. It’s not like he’s ever been a hot commodity. Or even lukewarm. He’s more like an old bag of peas that’s got a few rips in it and has been forgotten so long that it’s now fused into the crusty ice at the back of the freezer. Sure, he’s been flirting with Steve since the moment they dove into Hell and turned the corner from ‘actively hostile’ to ‘begrudgingly chummy’, and he’d only ever been half-joking, even in the beginning. That’s all well and good and in line with the natural order of the universe; Eddie’s never really been able to resist pretty boys, after all, though he knows it’ll end up nowhere at best and in the emergency room at worst. But the idea of Steve flirting with him wouldn’t hold a lick of water in even Eddie’s wildest, top-secret, take-it-to-his-deathbed dreams, let alone in the real, waking world.
Hence, the presumed alternate dimension.
He’s probably just reading into it.
Yeah, that’s definitely it. Seeing what he—unfortunately—wants to see. Letting his perpetually overactive imagination spiral and spin romance from innocent tokens of friendship. But he doesn’t know what else to make of…whatever it is that Steve’s doing.
Every time they hang out these days, there’s always something: some smile or touch or look or tease or joke whispered into Eddie’s ear, for him alone and nobody else. The guy is just too nice, and he cares too much, and he always wants to help, and he listens, and he understands, and he has so much patience, and he notices the minuscule shit that nobody else sees, and he remembers all the dumbass things Eddie tells him like they’re grand secrets of the universe, and he keeps stealing fucking Cow Tales from the overpriced display at Family Video because Eddie mentioned that they’re his favorite in the middle of an argument with Henderson two months ago. Aside from his Uncle Wayne, nobody’s ever given even half as much of a shit about him, and Eddie—Eddie just has to try and keep his cool as if he isn’t losing what little of his mind he has left and his stomach isn’t a jolly spring meadow being ransacked by ravenous, relentless butterflies.
Which is…fine. He has a reputation to maintain after all. And he’s had plenty of practice lying through his teeth, putting on a damn good show, parading around like a fool, making a mockery of his feelings. But now, as Steve stands sheepishly in his doorway—one hand in his jacket pocket, the other outstretched, offering—Eddie thinks he might have finally met his limits as a thespian.
“I just thought, you know…” Steve shrugs, waves the cassette tape in a vague, looping gesture. “Since you’re always sharing your music with me, I figured I should return the favor.”
Eddie raises the most derisive brow he can manage—which isn’t saying much at the moment—and lets out a wobbly laugh. Yeah, it’s kind of a dick move but at least it’s better than just standing there, breathless, starry-eyed and blushing like some bodice-ripped heroine. “You call auditory assault a favor, Harrington?”
He takes the tape anyhow, making sure—because he’s a wanton, craven heathen—to let his fingers brush over Steve’s in the process. He hates it: one little blip of skin on skin, and the butterflies go absolutely berserk, battering themselves senseless against his ribs, feathery wings flapping in time with the racing beat of his heart. Though, in fairness, maybe that has more to do with the tape in his hands. Steve’s tucked a little scrap of notebook paper in the front: a homemade j-card, ‘Pop 101: A Stubborn Metalhead’s Guide to the Mainstream’ written in all caps, polka-dotted with a jumble of wonky musical notes.
“Hey, don’t knock it until you try it, right?” Steve claps him on the shoulder, and his hand definitely doesn’t linger, doesn’t clutch a bit tighter, like a magnet resistant to parting. “I have a feeling you might actually like some of those.”
Eddie highly doubts that, but god damn it, just that soft hum of hope in his voice, that little honey glint of excitement in his eyes paired with his stupidly beautiful smile that should be exclusively reserved for angels and puppies but miraculously is bestowed upon Eddie with alarming, thrilling frequency: it’s enough to make Eddie’s heart stumble and his knees weak. He ducks his gaze and pulls a strand of hair over his face, a poor—read: pretty damn obvious—attempt to hide his own smile.
“This better be the cream of the crop, Stevie,” he says. “I don’t wanna have my mainstream cherry popped by just any old swill, you know. My little virgin ears better be wined and dined.”
“Oh, of course.” Steve’s smile slips into a disgustingly charming smirk that Eddie should want to punch—past Eddie, otherwise known as Eddie the Sane, certainly would have—but instead he wants to run his fingers over it and put it in a jar and keep it on his nightstand and build a three-tier shrine for it. And also kiss it off Steve’s dumb face; he’d really like to do that, for hours preferably. Then the bastard winks. “Only the best for you, Eds. Your virtue is safe with me.”
With that, he raps twice on the doorframe and jogs down the stairs, some bullshit about seeing Eddie tomorrow tossed over his shoulder. But Eddie can’t really hear it over the loaded whoosh of his pulse in his ears. He doesn’t wait for Steve to drive off, doesn’t even wait for him to unlock his car before he slams the front door shut and falls back against it. He clutches the cassette tape against his chest and tries to kick his ass into breathing again while his face bubbles and boils like the surface of the sun.
Swooning. He’s fucking swooning. Actually, literally swooning. Over a dumb piece of plastic and a smarmy wink.
It’s awful, it spits in the face of everything he stands for. He’s meant to be a hardboiled cynic, for fuck’s sake. And yet…it’s incredible, intoxicating, better than any high he’s had in a long time. He wants to roll around in it and cover himself head to toe, distill it into ink and tattoo it over every inch of his skin; he never wants it to stop. He feels electric, all lit up and stirring; he feels giddy and boundless and fluttery, too warm in the best possible way, his chest full of fizzy peach and butterscotch and a dozen other frilly shades he’d never be caught dead in; he feels like he could walk outside and float up, up, up to lounge in the crook of the moon, plucking stars from the firmament like grapes from the vine, wrapped in bliss beyond the fickle troubles of the world. He—
Holy shit.
He’s in love.
He’s in fucking love.
Jesus, what a lame way to realize it. Exceptionally underwhelming. He’d expected fireworks and fanfare, perhaps even a touch of frostbite as an old, impossible fantasy rose from the grave and Hell froze over. Something befittingly momentous, like it is in the movies. But it’s a quiet affair, a simple recalibration in his heart. Though, maybe that’s more fitting after all. Because, despite all previous expectations and prejudices, being friends with Steve—and falling ass over tits for him, apparently—has been effortless. Almost fateful, if Eddie believed in that kind of garbage.
At the very least, he thanks whatever all-powerful being who might be listening that Wayne isn’t home right now. It had been bad enough that time when he walked into Eddie’s room just in time to see fifteen-year-old Eddie shove his ragged copy of Playgirl back into its prized place under his mattress; if he was here now to witness as Eddie realized he was in honest-to-God, ooey-gooey, mushy-gushy love, with a Harrington? Eddie would have to throw himself into Sattler Quarry just to hear the end of it.
Hell, might as well chuck himself in anyways.
Because he is so screwed.
So, so, so screwed.
He nearly faceplants in his haste to get back to his room, and—with a mumbled apology—he all but hurls his British Steel tape across the room when he rips it out of his Walkman. Far more carefully, he lifts Steve’s tape from its case, clicks it into place, and wedges his flimsy headphones on; trailer walls are thin, he can’t risk anybody overhearing this shit and thinking he’s gone soft. He lays back as he presses play and, holding the case out above him, he traces his eyes down the squashed tracklist Steve has so thoughtfully provided him.
Take A Chance On Me - ABBA
Eddie snorts. Fucking ABBA, what a surprise. That’s Stevie, for ya: a delightful paradox, banal predictability wrapped around an endless contradiction. A swell of fondness clambers up Eddie’s ribs, but so far, he’s not too impressed. The song’s a bit too…bubblegummy for his tastes, all squeaky-clean, no raging guitar to pound on his chest and make his fingers twitch with need. But Steve’s always been a good sport; he patiently hears out every album Eddie foists on him—like a kid presenting his gloopy macaroni art—and he always finds something nice to say even if it’s not his favorite. And, well, that means a lot to Eddie. He really wishes it didn’t, but it does—gets him all warm-and-fuzzy knowing Steve cares enough to take an interest. So, he can give Steve’s music a fair shake too. Even if it offends—or brutal bludgeons—his delicate sensibilities.
The annoying thing is, though, the more he listens, the more he pays attention to the lyrics, the more he hears himself in them. He can—shock horror—empathize with these peppy Swedish women. God knows what he wouldn’t give to get Steve to take a chance on him. Not that he has much to give. Nothing that Steve would want, anyhow. Nothing he wouldn’t rather have from Nancy Wheeler. He probably thinks about her when he puts this song on, dreams about what-ifs and maybe-still-could-bes.
Eddie lets out a sigh of relief when the track finally fades out and a disconcertingly twangy guitar riff starts up in its place, but his relief is short-lived. He’s never heard this song before, doesn’t recognize it even distantly, but the first few lines alone have his stomach flipping like goddamn Shamu.
She ain’t got no money, her clothes are kinda funny, her hair is kinda wild and free, oh, but love grows where my Rosemary goes, and nobody knows like me.
The melancholy that had been creeping up on him lurches into loose lunacy, whiplash-quick, and he rolls over to smush his loony smile into his pillow. Just two songs in and the inane pop’s already battered his brain to an irrecoverable pulp, but he can’t find it in himself to care. Because there’s no hint of Nancy Wheeler in lazy, crazy Rosemary, and he’s just enough of an ego-maniac to let himself believe that, maybe, just maybe, Steve had picked the song because it reminded him of Eddie. A delectable shiver runs down his spine at the thought of Steve crooning along to those words, mumbling them against Eddie’s jaw between lazy kisses as they make out on his bed, the radio playing low, their legs tangled together, Steve’s hands free to roam and sneak up to get an illicit taste of bare skin, his hands free to finally make a suitable mess of Steve’s stupid, gorgeous hair.
By the time he comes back down to Earth from the heady heaven of that little fantasy, the song is over and the next one is already well underway, just as mind-numbingly generic as the others. He can practically feel his brain cells lining up at his ear canals, ready to abandon ship and take a swan dive—and he really can’t afford to lose them. But, for Steve’s sake, he grits his teeth and picks through the plastic overproduction to find something he likes. The vocals. Yeah, the vocals are solid. The singer’s got a real good voice on her, even if it is criminally wasted on this garbage. But to each their own, he guesses.
It’s not until the sixth song, when some guy is belting about all the rays of the sun streaming through the waves in his girl’s hair, that Eddie starts to notice a pattern. Or, rather, a running theme. A running theme that probably should have been immediately apparent given that it had been already parading around with a trumpet, taking up every square inch of available space front and center in Eddie’s addled brain.
Love.
Every single song has been a love song. A profession of love, or a longing for love, or a tongue-in-cheek vision of what love could be like.
The realization launches Eddie up and out of his bed, straight into a bout of ferocious pacing. His headphones nearly get ripped out in the flurry, but he can’t be bothered about that right now. Much more pressing matters to attend to. He zeroes in on the lyrics with the sort of feral intensity he should have but never could manage to devote to his schoolwork, even when his diploma was on the line. Right now, every word feels vital—literally—like a secret code he needs to crack in the next thirty seconds or else he’ll spontaneously combust. His heart thrashes in his chest, every beat as thick and heavy as a lead foot on a bass drum, which definitely can’t be good for him; he might, he thinks, actually be in the opening stages of cardiac arrest, and fuck, after everything, wouldn’t that be a helluva way to go? His idiotic heart getting overexcited and crapping out on him because of a fucking mixtape from a cute boy filled with the worst music he’s ever heard.
But if two times is a coincidence and three times is a pattern, what does that make seven times? Because, sure enough, as soon as track six wraps up, here are the goddamn Beach Boys—standards, Stevie, have some standards and try not to be a walking cliché—harmonizing about how nice it’d be to live together in the kind of world where they belong. And as much as Eddie hates to admit it, that sentiment jams its thumb straight—ha—into a not-so-buried, perpetually fresh bruise in his stomach. It hits suspiciously close to home and blows open the door for a risky thought to creep in:
Was…Was Steve trying to tell him something?
He had to have picked these songs for a reason, right? I have a feeling you might actually like some of those, he’d said. All hopeful and shit. With a goddamn twinkle in his pretty eyes. And then that fucking wink. Maybe…Maybe Steve has actually been flirting with him. Maybe this is his way of making a move, testing the waters, baiting the hook. But it seems too indirect, too ambiguous, too cautious and easy to brush off. Steve’s nothing if not a go-getter, unabashed in his interest and fearless in the face of potential rejection. Though, Eddie supposes, the stakes are a bit higher with him than they would be with some random girl, and subtlety, plausible deniability would be a saving grace if—
Eddie stops dead and tips over, falling face-first back onto his mattress.
He groans into the skimpy, stained sheets and doesn’t care that he can’t really breathe like this. God, he wishes he could just shake his Walkman down, slap it around a bit until it spills its guts and tells him what the hell to make of all this. If there is anything to make of it.
No.
No, there definitely isn’t. He’s just reading into it. Again. Wishful, desperate thinking.
Delusion brought on by prolonged exposure to shitty noise masquerading as music.
But…
What if?
Eddie’s never been lucky. Pretty much the exact opposite. Life has always happily taken the liberty to screw him at every turn and kick him while he’s down. But perhaps, after spending his spring break witnessing two horrific murders that got him framed as a Satanic, cult-leading serial killer, being hunted by jocks who’d gone on a power trip off the deep end, and battling nightmares come to life in a literal hellscape, the universe has noticed that it sort of owes him a break. One win in reward for all the bullshit he’s taken in stride over the years. He knows better than to let himself think like that, even for a second, but hope has invaded his stomach and put down roots, preparing a siege on his heart.
Forty minutes later, when the seventeenth and final song has finished, Eddie has managed to unconvince and reconvince himself at least fifty times, every new sappy song pouring a barrel of gasoline on the fire, egging on the tug of war between his head and his heart. He’s going to drive himself crazy—if he’s not already there, most would argue that ship sailed a long, long time ago—going in circles and getting nowhere. He could argue with himself all night, and probably will anyway, but he needs a third-party opinion. A somewhat unbiased perspective. A debatably level head.
He needs to speak to Hawkins’ leading expert on Steve Harrington.
It’ll be mortifying. He’ll suffer greatly for it. But Robin’s already, unfortunately, quite well aware of his baneful crush, and at least that way he might actually get an answer and not tear every last strand of his hair out in the process.
He stabs the rewind button on his Walkman and rolls over, throwing out his hand and smacking around on his nightstand. The second his fingers hit upon his emergency bedside joint, he slips it between his lips and rips through his pockets for his Zippo. One, two, three flicks of the lighter, and the first pull is an instant balm. Like a breath of fresh air.
His Walkman clicks as it reaches the beginning of the tape. Ready to go, once more unto the breach.
He inhales deep, holds it for as long as he can, lets it out slow, and presses play. The Swedes get to warbling again, still gratingly peppy, but this time, he smiles up at the ceiling like a fool. Just for tonight, he decides, he can let his imagination run wild and free. Just for tonight, he can let himself believe that Steve wants him. Just for tonight, he can let himself hope for more than just tonight.