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People are always saying that dying is like falling asleep. But as Eddie lies there choking on his own blood, he thinks this is very much not like falling asleep at all. It’s not peaceful or easy or safe. There’s no sense of his soul being carried gently from one life into the next. It’s painful and terrifying and fucking heartwrenching, tears caught in his throat as well as the blood as he spends his last moments struggling to speak, trying to give the poor kid crying over him some parting words, some small comfort. Dustin’s already going to be traumatized for life from this, it’s the least Eddie can do.
Eddie’s breath rattles. Death rattles. His vision darkens, thoughts growing sluggish, and, oh, maybe this is the part that’s like falling asleep. The dull numbness spreading through his body, the looseness and heaviness of his limbs, the soft swooping sense of release as everything goes black.
He even dreams. Hazy scenes float in and out of his vague awareness, disjointed and nonsensical, as dreams often are. Breathing in the fresh forest air under the stars… Laughing with the kids… Kissing Steve Harrington... Maybe this is heaven. Blood on his hands and in his mouth… Fear and hatred burning in his friends’ eyes... A horrible creature with the appearance of a man skinned and scarred and mutated beyond all recognition of humanity standing at his side... Or maybe he’s in hell. The monster telling him, “Kill them, kill them all...” Screams filling the air… No. No. This must be hell. A nightmare. He doesn’t want to know how this one ends. He sinks back into the blackness and he doesn’t dream again.
And then he wakes up.
Gasping and shivering, Eddie’s eyes fly open in the undeniable sharpness and solidness of reality. He’s acutely aware of his own body, of every sensation in and around it. A physical form feels almost foreign to him now after so long of dreaming untethered. Being alive is such an assault on the senses, has anyone else ever noticed that? He’s never felt so real, so cold, so hungry. “Fuck,” he gasps out as he heaves his upper body up from the cold hard ground he’d been laying on.
He’s sitting in the dirt, on the blood-soaked earth of a recent battlefield. Bodies of dead Upside-Down creatures lie scattered all around, including the corpse of his nightmare monster-man, whose head now sits quite a few feet away from its body. No human bodies lie among them, thank god. The humans, his friends, are all still alive, their victory apparently recent and the relief of it still fresh as they tend each other’s wounds and collapse into one another with tearful hugs. The sound of Eddie’s movement gives them pause, a collective apprehensive breath rippling through them. They all turn to look at him.
“Eddie!” Dustin’s face lights up and he moves as if to run towards him, but Steve almost immediately shoots his arm out to block him, holding the kid back with a firm hand on his chest as he steps protectively in front of him.
“Is that really you?” Steve asks with narrowed eyes and a voice harsh with distrust.
“Yeah, of course it’s really me,” Eddie answers. “Have I ever been someone else?” He means to say it like a joke, but his humor dies in his throat under the wary glares of not just Steve but everyone else as well. Even Dustin’s face has fallen into a hesitant frown. And suddenly the idea doesn’t feel all that funny; suddenly it seems like a very real possibility.
Robin is the one to confirm his growing fears. “Yeah, actually,” she says plainly, “you have. You just were.”
“Oh.”
It certainly explains things: how he got here, alive and back in Hawkins, when the last thing he remembers was dying in the Upside-Down; why he feels so unused to his own skin now; why his hands and face are currently sticky with blood that’s not his own; why Steve won’t let Dustin get close to him; why none of them will quite look him in the eye. Someone or something else had been parading around in his body, wreaking havoc or doing who knows what for who knows how long, while Eddie had been dreaming none the wiser. He shivers again, his stomach twisting, because not only is he cold and hungry still, now he’s also guilty. Guilty of something that’s made his friends afraid of him. He looks over each of them. They all appear to be in rough shape, not one of them unmarred by deep scratches or bruises; Steve even has a large bandage covering the side of his neck, the bloodstain seeping through shaped just like rows of teeth. Eddie can’t help but wonder which of those injuries were inflicted by his hands, if the claw marks on Dustin’s arm would match his own fingernails, if the bite on Steve’s neck would match his own teeth.
He rises unsteadily to his feet. Everyone takes an instinctive step back, flinching away from him, and Eddie raises his hands in what he hopes is a non-threatening gesture (although given the amount of blood they’re covered in, it might not actually be all that comforting).
“I, uh, I’m sorry f-for whatever I was, whatever I did,” he says shakily, “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know- but I-I’m me now, I promise. I’m me, I’m Eddie. Good old confused and terrified Eddie.” He punctuates the end of that sentence with some self-deprecating jazz hands and then immediately cringes at himself. Back from the dead and still a loser, some things never change.
Dustin looks up and over at Steve. “I believe him.”
Steve frowns, his expression carefully guarded. “Yeah, well, we all believed him the first time around too, and look where that got us.”
“I didn’t,” Nancy speaks up. “The first time around, I never totally trusted him the way you guys did, but I think I believe him now too.”
“Yeah, Steve, I think maybe this time we really did get an extra win,” says Robin.
“Maybe.” Steve doesn’t sound entirely convinced, but he does relax his protective stance somewhat in favor of crossing his arms and turning slightly to look at the rest of the group while still keeping Eddie warily in his peripheral. “Anyone else care to chime in?”
“I never really met the real Eddie, so I wouldn’t know either way,” the remaining older teen of the group, who Eddie recognises as Jonathan Byers, says with a shrug. “Do you guys, like, feel anything?” Jonathan directs the question towards two of the kids - his little brother Will and a girl with a growing out buzzcut, who Eddie assumes is probably that superpowered girl El he’s heard so much about.
Eddie watches, twisting his rings around his fingers as they all talk about him like he’s not there.
Will and El both shake their heads. “One is dead,” El says, and Will agrees, gesturing vaguely at the back of his neck, “There’s nothing there anymore.”
“So then obviously that’s the real Eddie,” Erica says like anyone who thinks otherwise is hopelessly stupid. “It was all a hivemind, right? Cut off the head and the body dies? Well, we cut off the head. Literally. Nothing under Vecna’s control could’ve survived that.”
So the beheaded monster-man corpse must’ve been Vecna(/Henry/One). Gross. For some reason Eddie had been picturing a much cooler-looking villain than that. Not that that’s at all relevant right now though. Bigger things to worry about.
“She has a point,” Lucas adds. “Kas was part of Vecna’s hivemind, so if Vecna is dead then Kas is dead too.”
“Kas?” Eddie questions, briefly drawing some of the attention back to him.
“That’s what we called you after we figured out that you…weren’t you,” Dustin explains. “As in-”
“As in Kas the Bloody Handed, Kas the Betrayer. Right. I get it.” Eddie’s more than familiar with the D&D character Kas, the deceptive and disloyal vampire who serves as the dark wizard Vecna’s right-hand man right up until Kas ultimately betrays him too; Eddie had only just used him in his own campaign. It fits, bloody hands and deception and all. Vecna’s minion. Eddie wonders if when the kids named him they did so with the hope that he might eventually fulfill his namesake and turn on this world’s Vecna as well, help them defeat him. He hadn’t.
Guilt again, running deep and dark and ugly in the cold hollow of his veins and his stomach. Guilt and hunger are really not a good mix. If his stomach twists one more time he thinks he might throw up. If there would even be anything to throw up. Did Kas ever eat?
The rest of the group has returned to squabbling amongst themselves over whether or not Kas could possibly exist outside of Vecna, and Eddie is just another problem to them, something to solve. He stands on the outside, trying to swallow down how uncomfortable he is, all his pain and fear.
He fidgets with his rings again, stares at his stained hands. Kas the Bloody Handed. For some reason, curiosity or instinct maybe, Eddie finds himself bringing his fingers up to his lips and licking tentatively at the blood still dripping from them. The tiniest touch and the sweet metallic taste explodes across his tongue, instantly bringing some relief to not only his hunger but the cold he feels as well, as if the blood is warming him from the inside out. His mind clears of everything except the craving of that relief. He laps up more, licking his hands clean. He shoves his fingers in his mouth to suck the remaining blood from them like a lollipop, and something sharp pierces his skin.
“Ow, shit,” he hisses, pulling his hand away and watching as the tiny pinprick wounds on his fingers close up and disappear within seconds. The sudden pain had snapped him out of whatever daze he’d just been in, and now the true horror of it all can begin to set in. Eddie lifts a shaking hand back up to his mouth and carefully feels along the edges of his teeth. Sharp, pointed. Fangs. Fuck.
“Uh, guys?” he calls out, interrupting whatever debate is still going on about him. “Your Kas didn’t happen to also be a vampire, did he?”
The attention turns towards him again, and his question receives the wary response of, “Yeah, why?”
Eddie grimaces, lips drawn back just enough to reveal the sharp new points of his teeth. “I, uh, I think he might’ve left something behind…”
“I fucking knew it,” Steve sneers with a bitter sort of vindication. He gestures sarcastically towards Eddie as he raises a bitchy eyebrow at everyone who’d spoken up in defense of the vampire. “You guys were saying?”
“Wait, that doesn’t mean he’s still Kas though,” Dustin protests.
“Look at him, Steve, he’s terrified,” Robin says. “That has to be real.”
“Kas was a good actor.” Steve looks at Eddie like it pains him to do so, a million contradictions in his expression. Though his face softens slightly, his eyes are hard and conflicted, so many unreadable emotions behind them. “I know that more than any of you. Besides, how else do you explain the fact that he’s still a vampire?”
“I’m not Kas,” Eddie insists, though no one really seems to be listening to him. He takes a deep breath and wills his fangs to retract - and, miraculously, they do. Maybe it will be easier if he looks more normal again.
He really shouldn’t have said anything. He should’ve kept his sharp new teeth to himself instead of reigniting everyone’s suspicion. He’s not sure what he was thinking, only that he’s so fucking scared he needed to do something, and maybe some stupid desperate part of him was still clinging to the hope that his friends might give up on trying to solve him and start trying to help him. But clearly that’s not going to happen anytime soon. There's no comfort to be found here. He’s on his own with his fear and it's threatening to overwhelm him.
But he can't have a breakdown, not now, not here, not with these people. Eddie takes another measured breath and tries to redirect his growing panic into something safer, something more productive. Agitation maybe, frustration.
It's not too hard. Everyone is theorizing again.
“What if the vampirism wasn’t actually because of Kas?” Mike is saying. “What if it happened separately from Kas, like a mutation in just the body that maybe made it more viable for Kas or whatever, but not necessarily connected to him?”
“So when Kas died with Vecna, the mutation still stayed,” Will tacks on, nodding like it makes total sense. “It might even be what’s keeping the body alive still.”
“I’m not some fucking thing!” Eddie finally snaps. “And I’m right fucking here!” Predictably, there’s a collective flinch at his outburst, startled eyes snapping to attention. He huffs, pulling agitated hands through his grimey, tangled hair. “Look, I’m not a threat to any of you, alright? In fact, all I really wanna do right now is just go home and take a nice hot fucking shower because I’m exhausted and filthy and clearly I’m just freaking you guys out by being here. So if you’re all done trying to figure out what sort of monster I am, can I get going now or are you guys gonna try to stop me?”
There’s a bit of an awkward pause at that, like no one’s quite sure what to say or how to say it.
“You, uh, you can’t go home,” Robin tells him, a little apologetic scrunch to her face. “Not because we won’t let you or anything, it just kinda…doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Your trailer was destroyed when Vecna split the world open and your uncle moved to some government-paid-for house miles outside of town,” Nancy explains. “He was told you were dead, so…”
So Wayne didn’t have a reason to stay in Hawkins anymore, especially not if he had enough government hush money to afford somewhere nicer. Eddie can’t fault the old man for that, although this news does waver his current ability to keep holding himself together. He forces down the emotion rising in his throat. “Right.”
“You stayed at Steve’s last time,” Dustin offers helpfully, earning him a glare from Steve, which he then makes worse by amending, “Or, well- Kas did, while he was pretending to be you.”
Eddie graciously manages to ignore Dustin’s complete inability to read the goddamn room, and looks at Steve instead. “I take it that’s not an option this time?”
“I don’t know.” Steve crosses his arms and frowns as he considers Eddie with those fractured eyes of his. “You can use my shower,” he decides finally, “just so that the sight of you wandering around covered in blood doesn’t send the whole town into another witch hunt again. But beyond that…I wouldn’t count on it.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Eddie says. He just needs to get out of here, as if a change of scenery might change his situation. Everything else he can figure out later when he’s not so singularly focused on trying not to fall apart.
“Great,” Steve says dryly, like he might already be regretting this decision.
He turns away from him again for more conversation Eddie's not part of anymore. But at least they're not talking about him this time. It's mostly just a basic discussion of what everyone's doing next: who's going to update Max (who apparently is currently blind and wheelchair-bound and couldn't be here for the main fight), who's going to stay and help dispose of all the Upside-Down creature corpses, when they're gonna regroup next, how long El thinks it will take for her to recharge enough to be able to use her mind powers to check on the situation in Eddie's head. Okay so maybe some of it is still about him.
Steve makes a comment about how his task is to “babysit the vampire,” and Robin must’ve caught the way Eddie grits his teeth a bit at that because she ducks away from the rest of the group to talk to him.
“Hey, Eddie. Cut him some slack,” she says, gesturing with a dip of her head towards Steve. “Kas messed with all of us, but he messed with Steve the most. This is especially hard for him, just give him some time.”
“Yeah, okay.” Eddie folds his arms over his chest, his fingers pressing into his biceps like it might help to press down everything roiling inside of him. He’s getting antsier and antsier by the second, and Robin is absolutely not helping. His guilt flares again and so does his irritation, the two mixing like oil and water. He can’t even begin to imagine what awful things Kas had used him to put everyone through, and of course he understands that, but at the same time it’s not like this is all that easy for him either. No one seems to appreciate that Eddie is also having a terrible fucking time right now too.
“Oh, and you should know - if you somehow are still Kas and you fuck with him again, I will personally make sure that you join Vecna in the beheaded freaks club in the afterlife,” Robin adds, perfectly matter of fact, and Eddie doesn’t doubt her.
“Yeah, alright, Robin, I get it,” he assures her before she can say anything else to make him feel even worse. “You don’t have anything to worry about.”
“Good.” She nods, apparently satisfied enough with his response, and the tiny half-smile she offers him then is the closest thing to sympathy or apology he’s received all day.
“Are you ready to go?” Steve approaches, swapping places with Robin as she falls back to rejoin the rest of the group.
Eddie nods, dropping his arms and rolling back his tense shoulders. “Lead the way, Stevie.”
Steve flinches. “Don’t call me that.” He turns sharply on his heel and starts walking off in long, quick strides.
Eddie nearly has to jog to catch up to him. “Sorry.”
Steve doesn’t respond and the rest of the walk to his house passes in a thick and heavy silence. He can still hardly seem to look at Eddie, always staying a few steps in front and keeping his eyes fixedly forward with the same sort of steeled and measured determination that Eddie is also currently employing. Like maybe they’re both trying not to have a breakdown.
Thankfully this horribly uncomfortable journey does not have to be suffered through for very long, and they soon emerge from the woods into the Harrington’s sprawling backyard. If Eddie was in any state to, he might’ve made some comment or joke, some dig about Steve’s rich-kid house, but now he stays quiet, mutely following Steve inside.
Steve gathers up a fresh towel and some clean clothes for Eddie to borrow. “Here. You can use the bathroom down the hall, second door on the right.”
“Thank you,” Eddie says, sincerely. Steve only nods, looking away from him again.
And now Eddie is finally alone, in the biggest bathroom he’s ever seen in his life. His entire trailer could probably fit in here three times over and that’s only a mild exaggeration. There’s huge mirror above two sinks, a jacuzzi bathtub in one corner and a fancy shower with glass doors in the one adjacent, and in the center of it all there’s even this large circular cushioned seat, perfectly in front of the toilet just in case you wanted to have a friend come sit and chat while you take a shit. Again, this would be a comedy gold mine if only Eddie wasn’t already too distressed to appreciate it. Instead he hardly even takes a second to look around before he simply strips off his filthy clothes and makes a beeline for the shower.
The second those glass doors close behind him and the warm water hits his back, that flimsy little wall he’d been trying to build up around his emotion crumbles completely and all his fear and guilt and everything else tears out of him in a ragged sob that wracks through him so completely his entire body shudders and convulses with it. Another sob breaks through before the first one’s even finished, and then another and another and another. He’s choking on his tears, hardly able to breathe. His thoughts aren’t helping either, set free and spiraling through every awful thing he hadn’t been able to let himself dwell on earlier.
What did you do? You were used, violated, your hands have drawn blood, maybe even killed, why didn’t you stop it? His mind berates him, blames him. Kas had hurt and damaged and destroyed, every act seeping into and staining the vessel he’d used to do it, and then he’d left Eddie behind to carry the weight of it all on his own. Left him in the body of a monster, in every single way. You’ll need to draw blood again to live, drain the life of another living thing to sustain your own. Who or what will you hurt next? You’re a monster. A monster a monster a monster.
He’s never felt such despair or so trapped in his own skin. I can’t live like this. He sinks to the ground, curled in on himself and gasping, drowning, drowning in the roar of his mind and emotion and the water still beating down on him from the impassive shower head above him. His thoughts are becoming less and less complex or coherent with every hyperventilating breath until they ultimately solidify into simply: I can’t I can’t I can’t I can’t.
A hesitant knock on the door startles him suddenly. Maybe if he wasn’t so lost inside himself and the sound of his own sobbing he would’ve heard the footsteps passing by and then passing back, a wavering pacing before the knock even occurred, but he hadn’t, and so it startles him, his rapid breaths now freezing entirely for a moment.
“Eddie?” Steve’s voice floats uncertainly from outside. “...Are you okay in there?”
“I’m fine,” Eddie manages, voice raw, and his lungs take the opportunity to resume with breaths even more panicked than before, as if to make up for the previous few seconds of suffocation.
“Are- You don’t sound fine,” Steve says after another moment of hesitation. “You…you kind of sound like you’re having a panic attack.”
Yeah, no shit. Eddie only curls up further, knees to his chest, arms in a death grip around his legs. He can’t find the breath to speak again. He can’t he can’t he can’t.
A few more seconds stretch by and then Steve knocks again, softly. “Can I come in?”
I can’t. Eddie couldn’t move to unlock and open the door for him even if he wanted to. His body won’t listen, too stiff, too busy shaking. I can’t. “I can’t-” Aloud this time, quick and broken through his gasps. “I can’t- I can’t get up.”
A much longer pause this time. Maybe Steve’s left. Eddie doesn’t know, doesn’t care - can’t care, mind too full and too loud. And why wouldn’t Steve leave? He’s already made it clear he still thinks Eddie is a monster. A monster a monster I can’t
Something clicks in the lock and the door swings open. “Oh, Eddie…” Steve whispers at the sight of him, immediately rushing to open the shower doors, turn off the water, and drop down to join Eddie on the floor. He pulls Eddie’s tense and trembling body into his arms and holds him against his chest.
Eddie’s head falls into the crook of his neck, too close to the artery there, too close to the sound of Steve’s blood and the monster inside of Eddie. He dips his head lower, tucking it under Steve’s chin instead. Safer. “I don’t- I don’t want to be a monster, Steve,” he sobs, in all the choppy, shaky speech he can manage. “I can’t- can’t live like this. I can’t.”
“Hey, it’s okay, you’re gonna be okay,” Steve murmurs; soft, soothing voice. A hand comes up to gently stroke Eddie’s hair. “Just breathe, Eddie, you need to breathe. Can you do that? Can you breathe with me?”
Eddie can feel the slow, steady rise and fall of Steve’s chest beneath his head and he struggles to breathe in tandem with it. He manages one breath, two, but the third one breaks and shudders into another bout of hyperventilating.
“It’s okay, you got it,” Steve encourages, gentle and patient, still holding him, still stroking his hair in time with his even breaths. “Just keep breathing, keep breathing. That’s it,” he says as Eddie sucks in a deep inhale and tries again.
Slowly, very slowly, Eddie’s breath finally begins to consistently match the rhythm of Steve’s, and his shakiness starts to ease.
“There you go, good,” Steve continues to whisper. “That’s good, Eddie. You’re okay.”
Eddie’s recovered enough for some of the tension to drain from his body and he lets himself sag further into Steve’s chest with a heavy sigh. His coherence returned, he lets out a shaky, sniffly little laugh, hoping it doesn’t sound too bitter as he says, “Does this mean you believe me now?”
“Yeah,” Steve says quietly. “Kas never would’ve cried like that.” He holds Eddie a little closer, fingers curling in his hair. “I’m so sorry I didn’t believe you before.”
“S’okay,” Eddie mutters. “I get it. Robin said-” His voice wobbles still, tears pricking back up into his eyes. He takes a deep breath. “Robin said Kas messed with you more than the rest. What- what did he do to you?”
He can feel Steve shaking his head, his chin brushing against the top of Eddie’s hair. “Don’t worry about that.”
“I want to know.”
Steve is quiet for a moment. “Kas- well, you know he pretended to be you for a couple weeks before he turned on us, so he really fucked with everyone’s heads, but with me…for some reason with me he decided to fuck with my heart too,” he says finally, still incredibly vague and not actually offering much at all in the way of explanation, but Eddie gets the gist of it just fine.
“Oh.” It makes a little more sense now, the depth of pain in Steve’s eyes, why he found it so hard to look at him, why Robin was so protective. Kas hadn’t just betrayed Steve’s trust and friendship, he’d seduced him into thinking they were something more than that and then broke his heart too. Eddie feels like he might cry again. “I’m so sorry…” He lifts his head and sits up a bit, suddenly finding it kind of cruel to keep being cuddled up to Steve like that.
“It’s okay, it wasn’t you.” Steve’s arms fall away from him and he leans back slightly as if to give Eddie some space. His tone is reassuring enough, though his gaze has become avoidant again.
Eddie hadn’t really wanted Steve to let go of him, but maybe that’s cruel too. He pulls his knees back up tight to his chest, and it occurs to him also that he’s still quite naked.
This has evidently occurred to Steve too, because he’s already turning away to reach for the towel that Eddie had, in his rush earlier, dropped unceremoniously on the floor just outside the shower. “For your modesty, dude.” He cracks a lopsided smile as he tosses the towel over Eddie’s lap.
“Thanks,” Eddie returns the smile with a soft chuckle, grateful for the attempt at levity in the face of the awkwardness that’s beginning to settle back between them. A brief moment of respite before Steve shutters his expression of genuine affection and Eddie’s mind returns in force to all its guilt and worry.
Selfishly, he wishes Steve would still hold on to him, because he still feels like he could fall apart again at any moment. That wouldn’t be fair to him, though, and so Eddie simply holds himself a little tighter, arms wrapped firmly around his knees. Beside him, Steve has shuffled into a similar position, a little less tense and hunched maybe but still just as uneasy.
It’s a game of looking and looking away, eyes never quite on each other at the same time, neither of them sure what to say or what to do, only with a sense that there is something more that should be said or should be done.
“Um-” Bringing this up won’t help anything, in fact it will probably only make things worse, but Eddie starts to ask one of the questions on his mind regardless. “You said Kas messed with your heart, so did-?” He pauses, hesitates, then rephrases, “When I was…gone, I wasn’t really, um, aware of anything, but sometimes I would have these dreams, just little bits and pieces, and in some of them- in some of them I saw us kissing. So did that, uh- did that actually happen?”
Steve looks over at him. “Yeah.” He nods. His eyes land briefly on Eddie’s lips and then guiltily dart away. “Yeah, that actually happened.”
“Okay.” Eddie takes a breath, tapping his fingers against his shins, nervous to find out just what else exactly his body had been used for. “And was it only kissing, or did we- did you guys…?”
“No,” Steve is quick to reassure him, his eyes going wide as he shakes his head. “No, it was just kissing, that’s it, nothing else happened. We realized it wasn’t you before our, uh, relationship could progress that far.”
Eddie exhales in relief. “Good.” That probably would’ve sent him into another panic attack. Not that he’s necessarily opposed to the idea of sleeping with Steve Harrington, he’d just very much prefer to actually be there and present in his own body for that if it ever were to happen. So it’s a good thing it didn’t while he wasn’t. That worry, at least, is eased.
But something about the way Steve is looking at him - or rather not looking at him - is still stressing him out. He glances at Steve who glances away, and there’s still more that they’re not saying.
“There’s something else, though, isn’t there?” Eddie presses, his fingers resuming their nervous drumming. “Something else happened that you’re not telling me?”
Steve shakes his head again. “It’s nothing, it’s not- it’s nothing you need to worry about.”
“Right, that’s super reassuring,” Eddie huffs. His mind could spiral through a thousand awful possible things it could be if he’d let it, and he’s trying very hard not to. “What- Did Kas hurt someone or something - like, seriously?”
“He bit my neck, tore up Dustin’s arm, and got Robin’s face pretty good too.”
Eddie had gathered that already. “But that’s not the thing you’re not telling me.”
“No, because it’s stupid. It’s not anything Kas did, it’s not a stain on your hands. He just knew how to get under my skin, is all. Don’t worry about it,” Steve insists.
“Too late, I’m already worried about it,” Eddie says, getting frustrated now. “And clearly you have something you want to say about it, otherwise you would’ve gotten up and left by now.”
Steve blinks like this analysis has thrown him. “I haven’t gotten up and left by now because I wanted to make sure you were okay. But I can get up and leave if you want me to.”
“For fuck’s sake, Steve!” Eddie bursts out. “Can you just fucking tell me!?”
“Fine!” Steve snaps back, then sighs and softens his voice, “Fine. Kas was a liar, I know that, so it really doesn’t matter anyways, but fine.” He runs a hand through his hair, hesitant and reluctant, wavering through a few false starts as if unsure of exactly how to tell it. “He’d just attacked us after we confronted him with our suspicions. I mean- his teeth had just been in my neck, the jig was up, and now he was just saying whatever he thought would hurt us most in that moment…”
Eddie nods with impatiently widened eyes, urging him to stop stalling and get to the goddamn point already.
“He told us you were dead, gone, whatever, but that he had access to all of your old thoughts and memories and feelings,” Steve finally starts approaching the point. “Kas never actually cared about me, he told me that and it wasn’t a surprise, but then- I mean, he could’ve just gone for easy and brutal and told me that you never gave a shit about me either, but no. No, Kas was so clever with his cruelty…” He falters again here, a bitter exhale and an awkward pause, not quite looking away from Eddie but not quite looking at him either.
Eddie curls apprehensively over his knees. “The suspense is killing me, man. What the fuck did he say about me?”
Steve takes a deep breath, as if to steel himself. “He said that you did give a shit about me? I mean, he said that he had just been going off of what was already there in your head, that he only…went after me the way he did because of the thoughts and, uh, feelings that you already had about me - or for me, I guess. I know he was probably lying though,” he barrels on before Eddie can even begin to react to any of that. “I think he just thought the ‘what if’s and ‘what could’ve been’s would drive me crazier, you know, hope always hurts more, and it did, he was right, but it’s fine. I know Kas was just a liar and a jerk and I shouldn’t believe a word he said-”
“Wait, Steve-” Eddie interrupts his nervous rambling, sitting up a little straighter. “Steve, he wasn’t lying - not about the, uh, my thoughts and feelings and stuff at least, not really.”
Steve finally looks at him, eyes a little bigger with surprise and a tentative hope. “He wasn’t?”
Eddie shakes his head in confirmation. “No, he wasn’t.” He shrugs, feeling nervous and strange, like a little kid with a crush as he admits, “I mean- Well, I mean, yeah, I’ve thought about you. Like, in school I’d always had a sort of…curiosity about you, I’ve always looked at you, of course I have, you know, you’ve seen you. And then when we actually spent some time together, I mean yeah we were stressed out and fighting monsters and shit, but I don’t know, I liked just being around you, I really did. So- It’s not like it really got the chance to develop all that much or anything, but yeah, the thoughts and feelings were there- are there. I, uh, like you, or whatever the kids are calling it these days.”
“Oh.” Steve's face slowly spreads into a smile. “Really? That’s good to know. I, uh, like you too, obviously. I just wish we could’ve been figuring this out under better circumstances.”
“Yeah. You know, in any other context, me naked on your bathroom floor would actually be the perfect circumstance,” Eddie jokes, wiggling his eyebrows playfully. Steve laughs, a genuine burst that brightens his whole face, and, oh, Eddie would do just about anything to make sure that light stays in those gorgeous eyes forever. “I mean, seriously,” he continues teasing, “what the hell else are you supposed to use this bathroom for? There’s even a cuck couch in here and everything.”
Steve snorts, shoving at Eddie’s shoulder. “Shut up.”
“But I guess it’s just not as sexy when I look like a drowned rat and my face is still all red and puffy from crying, though, huh?” Eddie laments, his theatrics embellished with a mock pout.
“Says who?” Steve smirks and sits up on his knees to shuffle closer. He lifts a hand to Eddie’s cheek, gently tilting his face up. “I still think you’re beautiful.”
Eddie blushes, heart and lungs and brain rendered suddenly utterly useless. His dramaticism has shorted out and all he can manage is a flustered “Shut up.”
“I mean it.” Steve smiles at him, so softly, so warmly. Hard to believe that only a mere minute ago they were in the midst of the world’s most awkward conversation ever. Not that Eddie’s complaining at all about this turn of events though. Steve’s thumb brushes over his cheekbone. “And if you’re okay with it, I’d really, really like to kiss you - the real you this time.”
Yeah, Eddie is definitely not complaining. “I’m absolutely okay with it,” he says, the words barely past his lips before he’s getting a hand in Steve’s hair and tugging him closer.
They meet in the middle in a slow, sweet kiss, lips sliding together unhurried. The panic that had been sitting in Eddie's chest for so long is now entirely replaced by something warm and sparkly blooming through him, the remainder of his tension and worry melting away in favor of savoring the simple feeling of Steve's mouth against his. It's the sweetest thing he's ever tasted, a tenderness he's never known before. He could get lost in it forever.
Forever, however, happens to only be about 30 seconds, the kiss breaking when their growing smiles soon get in the way.
“Hmm,” Steve hums as they pull apart grinning, cradling Eddie’s face in both hands now.
“What?” Eddie asks breathlessly.
“Nothing, it's just, you’re softer than Kas was,” Steve muses. “I like it.” He kisses Eddie again, brief but lingering. Their foreheads rest against each other as Steve smiles softly at him and says, “I’m glad you’re you again.”