Steve delicately tries to discover if Eddie wants to know his fate. Eddie realizes Steve is the Aragorn to his Boromir, but still fails to catch a hint. Other LOTR comparisons are
made.
⚠Spoilers for season 4; mentions of injuries, death, etc.
The door to the convenience store shut behind Steve, and his eyeline was drawn straight up again as a stream of cars flew through the corridors between the buildings. This place was a wonder on its own, but Hawkins didn’t have buildings this tall. Looking up was the mark of a suburban kid who never ventured into any big cities. Looking up was also the mark of a teenager from the 1980s who had recently been told cars didn’t fly, and there they went.
He shook himself and ducked his head for a minute to put two cans into his backpack. Someone shoved past to use the door, which made him realize he was blocking it -- and then made him double down on his stance because wow, where were their manners? This city never stopped. He half wished it would for a second just so he could put his damn snacks away before setting off for the local high school.
And Eddie.
Despite the change of scenery and the completely unhinged way that they were expected to just pick up some life they had never lived, Steve found that syncing with the unhinged was getting to be muscle memory. He adjusted his backpack on his shoulders and started walking as day two of this week wore into the late evening hours. It didn’t take too long to reach the school itself, but by the time he did night was creeping in. That hit different, too. Light played strangely on the sidewalk given that the sun’s descent was competing with neon lights and headlights ricocheting off the windows of buildings.
He stopped at the front entrance and pulled up his phone. It was a quick message to Eddie. ‘Font door let me in.’
Steve sighed.
‘FRONT door.”
All the smarts crammed into these things and they couldn’t make the stupid letters bigger.
Day two of being a high school janitor was not any better than day one. He understood, in a deep innate level, why Steven King had gone into horror writing after his own stint as a janitor. Eddie wasn’t sure why he didn’t just ditch his job for the week. It was just the week, right?
Except he had this fear, probably an unreasonable fear, that eventually it was going to get out to the rest of Derleth that Eddie was still in high school. A twenty year old senior working at graduation attempt number three. But that was stupid, right? No one from his world would do him dirty like that, would they? And besides, Eddie Munson was a freak which meant he wasn’t supposed to care what anyone thought of him. It was a defense mechanism that served him well, except part of that defense had started to become harder to put back on the longer he stayed in Derleth and got to know people.
So he had to go to work. Act cool, right? It wasn’t an amazing job, or even a good job, but it was better than anyone catching onto the truth of who he really was.
Eddie showed up to the front door a few minutes later in blue coveralls and brown work boots. He’d made the mistake on day one to go to work in his white sneakers, which were now no longer white. Attached to him was a giant ring of keys which jangled with every step. He pushed the door open for Steve to let him through.
“Harrington.”
Eddie looked around, still unable to shake the feeling that he was keeping some dark secret and Steve was his accomplice. In a way, Steve was.
The door opening brought Steve back to the moment from where he had swiveled around and eased against the wall beside it. It was something of a classic Harrington pose. Easy lean, sunglasses on, and arms crossed -- with sleeves shoved up to mid-forearm because fashion.
He looked over and caught sight of Eddie. There was a return nod. “Munson.”
School was a strange, empty place when the student body was gone. It was liminal. Like it froze in time until the kids came back -- or maybe it just felt that way here because everything was foreign in a way. It made the wrong fit of it all stand out way more.
Their footfalls carried in empty halls.
“So, this is it, huh? Given that cars are flying outside, I guess I just assumed it would be…” He waved a hand around. “Not this normal in here?” He tapped a locker where someone had pinned a flyer stating that there was a school dance coming up. There was a generic drawing of some balloons on it. What holiday it was for was anyone’s guess.
“Nice look, by the way.”
Eddie flipped Steve the bird, but it was a largely toothless gesture. At least he still had his hair. He hadn’t woken up bald or old or different. Eddie just had a nice, boring life where he could keep his head down. No one wanted him dead or arrested. Perhaps it was a sad commentary on his psyche that Eddie could not think of something bigger or grander for himself.
“Not all of us got to be a stay at home mom,” he teased.
Eddie patted down his pockets and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, offering one to Steve before leading him through the building to an outdoor commons area that was mostly concrete, some benches, and four giant sequoias in each corner that appeared endless. There was just trunk and branches. If the tree had roots they appeared to be buried somewhere deep beneath the school.
Sitting on the bench, Eddie had a metal lunchbox in hand, exactly like the kind he used to carry except instead of drugs he had an actual lunch for once. Opening it up, Eddie offered half his sandwich, which was sadly just a few slices of cheddar cheese in the middle. The sandwich wasn’t even grilled. Just plain white bread with cheese. A Munson dinner specialty, so Eddie didn’t think anything of it.
“Speaking of, looks like you managed to get away for the night.”
“Not all of us have older cousins with six kids. I don’t. And, I feel like that can’t be pointed out enough. I definitely don’t. No idea whose kids those are, but they know me,” Steve replied. He took the pack of cigarettes and tapped one out for himself. He wasn’t more than a social smoker, but given the freaky nature of relatives he didn’t remember having (and six of them at that), he felt like maybe he was also a smoker who might benefit from the distraction of it. Later, though. He tucked it behind one ear.
Steve unzipped his backpack and pulled out two drinks. Beer had been a choice reluctantly left behind because apparently there were age limits here. Possibly it was for the best. Smuggling beer into school was probably a dumb idea, even if they were out of this place in about five days from now.
Two cans were set on the table. The label was unhelpful, but it did suggest that whatever was inside was fizzy and had some type of flavor. He nudged one can to Eddie and accepted half of the sandwich, which he gave a bemused look. Very homogenous for a sandwich.
“Not sure they’re not all robots or something. The people here are off.” He held up the sandwich with a nod and took a bite. So consistent. That was a 50-50 bread to cheese ratio with nothing else.
“Dustin’s old enough to babysit, isn’t he?” Eddie grinned. It seemed like perfect revenge for their favorite protege. Stick Dustin with a bunch of kids who talked back and see how he liked it. Eddie’s cigarette was tucked behind his ear to enjoy after he finished his dinner. Smoking wasn’t allowed on the campus, even outdoors. That seemed strange to Eddie. The teacher’s lounge at school smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and he frequently saw them smoke outside on campus. He didn’t get it.
But what were they going to do? Fire him? This was in opposition of his earlier fear of being found out for the loser he was, but Eddie wasn’t concerned with the contradiction at that moment.
“I could run another Dungeons and Dragons session,” Eddie offered by way of an excuse. He might have enjoyed giving Steve shit, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t beyond trying to help him out of his awkward situation. “Of course that would mean you would have to come play.”
Eddie took a bite out of his sandwich with a big grin. It was more like a dare than anything, one he did not expect Steve to partake in.
The bread stuck to the roof of Steve’s mouth and he tried to work at it with his tongue to varying degrees of success.
“Yeah, not putting Henderson in charge of those kids. Knowing my luck, they’ll turn on him and I’ll get the usual code red call when I’m trying to relax. End up going back to a full mutiny or something.” Steve reached for the drink and popped the tab. He took a drink and immediately put it down with an expression of unpleasant surprise.
“Ugh, god. That’s a mistake.” The flavor seemed to be some indistinguishable fruit and TV static. It hit a part of his taste buds that had been dormant and made him turn to back to the sandwich in desperation as a palette cleanser.
“No on the game stuff. I’m suffering enough as is. Why -- why is this just cheese?”
Eddie was frowning. First because of the drink, then from Steve’s culinary critique. “What’s wrong with cheese?”
Naturally, he had to find out what was wrong with the drinks Harrington chose and popped open his own can of soda with a carbonated hiss. He tried the drink and winced. “Ugh. Okay. Lesson learned.”
Eddie mirrored Steve and also took a bite of his sandwich, chewing to forget the memory.
“Something that tastes that bad should be alcoholic,” Eddie complained, after he forced himself to swallow. He wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve, but it didn’t help.
“Nothing wrong with cheese. Just don’t get why there’s nothing else. Are you a butter on spaghetti guy, too?” Steve asked, despite that he’d taken another resolute bite of Eddie’s sandwich just to further distance himself from the moment of injury.
The cans were given a glance, then, and Steve shrugged. “It says ‘Everyone’s favorite fizzy drink’ on the side. Again, not ruling out robots. Might be battery acid.”
There was a beat in which Steve took a moment to really get a read on the outside break area. His eyes tracked up the trees, then down. Nothing in this place made sense. At least zombies were logical. Gross, but logical. He could understand how they worked. This Frankenstein’s Monster of a world just didn’t meet properly at the seams.
But then again, he wasn’t here to eat the world’s worst dinner and consider how this place could even exist. Part of reaching out to Eddie and knowing he could catch Eddie alone was because of a lingering thought Loki had left him with the previous week. Whatever Eddie learned about his future couldn’t be unlearned, but there had to be a way to know what Eddie would want without spilling. It was Steve’s foolish confidence that thought he could figure out exactly how to do that on the walk here.
He didn’t.
“Hey…” And he wasn’t about to figure it out anytime soon, so winging it was likely the outcome here. “You know how people get memories and stuff sometimes?”
“Why? Is butter on spaghetti good?” Eddie asked. Spaghetti noodles might have been cheap, but the concept of spaghetti seemed complicated. Eddie’s uncle worked nights which meant he could count the number of times the two ate together in a typical year. If it wasn’t something Eddie could heat out of a can, he assumed it required more cooking than he knew how to do.
Eddie smirked at the battery acid remark and shrugged. He did not totally disagree, only in that he knew slightly more about cars than he did about cooking. At least when it came to stealing them. Maybe it was just battery acid flavored. That he would have bought. He almost brought up this insightful point, except he’d been too busy stuffing the rest of his sandwich half into his mouth to finish eating when Steve spoke up again.
“Whaddya mean?” Eddie said, before he finished chewing and actually swallowed the rest of his sandwich. Out of desperation, he washed it down with another swallow from the battery acid flavored soda, deciding not to let it go to waste.
Because what was more moronic than trying it a second time?
Eddie tried to exercise the flavor from his mouth by lighting up the cigarette behind his ear and taking a drag. Yes. That made it much better.
“...What do you mean?” Eddie repeated.
He really needed to pay more attention to the network, but some of the posts that mentioned gaining new memories were either cryptic by people he didn’t really know and he was not curious enough to try and figure it out, or filled with a lot of text his eyes naturally skimmed over.
“I mean…” Steve shrugged. “It’s carbs and butter. It’s like a wet version of bread and butter.” He pulled a face immediately after saying that. “No -- forget… I take that back. It’s safe. Anyway, my point is that…” He’d raised a hand, then lost the point he was trying to make or possibly realized his point was bullshit. Instead, he took a bite of the sandwich and shrugged again.
Which meant the conversation was only getting continued on the other side of a mouthful of bread and cheese. It took several long seconds.
“Alright, so…” Dustin was probably the one who would be better at explaining this. That little technical brain of his was quick on the uptake. “People wake up and somehow they just know stuff. Like whatever happened back in their world in the time since they got dumped here. They crash out and wake up, and it’s just memories they have. Follow?”
Eddie stared. It was not the most intelligent expression his face was capable of making, but he was only partially slack jawed and his eyes wandered a little bit as though he were on the verge of trailing off entirely on some other thought process.
“No, but continue.”
He would save his questions for the end of the explanation, unless that was the end of the explanation, in which case, he had questions. Eddie blew his cigarette smoke away from Steve’s face, but his eyes locked onto his friend for the answer.
Friends? They were friends now, weren’t they? It seemed better to call Steve a friend then person who got dumped with him when he was pulled into an alternate dimension. Friends shared cheese sandwiches and got each other battery acid flavored soda waters, did they not?
“Ah, shit. How do I…” Steve’s eyes scanned around for props. He ended up grabbing his can of carbonated misery.
“No, this doesn’t work.” The can was set down again.
Steve knocked his knuckles against the wood of the bench table as he heaved a sigh and looked around again. It wasn’t really a pantomime situation.
“Let’s just say Dustin goes to bed tonight. And then overnight, Dustin’s mind -- for some reason -- gets a bunch of recollections crammed in there from stuff back home. Suddenly, he’s got a few more weeks of knowing exactly what happened back home even though he never left here. That. That stuff happens. Means that he might know the future. Which is his current, but our future. He’s…” Steve snapped. “He’s Marty McFly now. Get it?”
Eddie frowned.
“Kinda…”
He scratched the side of his face thoughtfully with the hand that was still holding his cigarette between his fingers before taking another drag.
“...Wouldn’t that just be a vision? How do you get memories of a future that hasn’t happened yet?”
Eddie flicked the ash from his cigarette onto the pavement beneath them. There were no cracks. The school building looked both brand new and ancient. In perfect condition but lacking any kind of shine to it. Like they were in a life sized model of a building that wasn’t quite real.
“But okay, okay. I get what you’re saying. …Did Dustin get a vision?”
The last of the sandwich was polished off, and Steve absently took another drink of his seltzer. He weathered the mistake as nobly as he could.
“Okay, call it a vision. And Henderson didn’t, but, like, he’s the question…”
Steve took his own cigarette down from behind his ear and twirled it between his fingers for a thoughtful second.
“I mean, what if one of us gets one of those and it’s not great? We all kinda knew that fighting back might not work out for us.” He was operating on instinct, and instinct made him take an honest right turn. It helped him avoid other truths. “Robin says Max is in a coma. Real bad off, like I don’t know, man. Hawkins might not get out of things in one piece.”
Eddie leaped in his seat, instead of sitting in it properly, it was now perched on the bench, balanced on the balls of his feet, knees bent, free hand gripping the back of the bench for support so he didn’t end up toppling over forward or into Harrington.
“Wait! Woah, woah, woah. Buckley had a vision? Or this is just an example? Because Max was fine. You guys figured out the thing with the walkman, just like you figured out where I was hiding, and you figured out the stuff with the upside down and using the lights…”
Eddie’s expressions could turn from 0 to 60 in seconds, and there was the same level of frightened intensity as when the two of them first met and Eddie had Steve pinned to a wall with a broken bottle at his throat.
Only Eddie didn’t have a weapon to comfort him and he had no one to point that weapon at. Instead his right hand made a fist with his cigarette pointing upward, like the cigarette was somehow flipping off their situation and that would somehow be more effective than his actual middle finger.
Steve expected a reaction because if Eddie was one thing, he was definitely animated. The shift in eye line made Steve look up a little.
“Okay, hey. Calm down.” He knew that was bad advice, and that in actuality Eddie was right to freak out. He just didn’t know the extent of it. “Robin had one. Look, I don’t know the way it went down. I just know she wouldn’t kid about that. Not about one of ours.”
He closed his eyes for a moment. The cigarette kept twirling in his fingers. He opened his eyes. “Can’t do anything from here, Eddie. I just think maybe we need a protocol, you know? If someone gets any idea about what comes next, I would want to know. Even if I don’t make it.” That had to prompt the answer he was after. He looked at Eddie in a way that he hoped would lead the other man to give his own choice. Just say it, Eddie. Come on.
“Nu uh. No. No way. Steve, I swear to Christ if you don’t make it, I am going to kick your ass so hard. If you don’t make it, you think there’s any hope for the rest of us? For me especially? Huh?”
If both of Eddie’s hands hadn’t been occupied, one keeping him balanced and the other keeping him smoking, he might have done something drastic like grabbed Steve by the front of his shirt and made him swear. Swear he wasn’t going to think like that.
Eddie couldn’t keep still. He hopped onto his feet and started pacing in a small space in front of Steve, back and forth, keeping him trapped there on the bench as Eddie processed it all.
“Fucking shit!” Eddie cursed. It made him feel a little better. He could calm down now. Just a little. He could think seriously about this.
“We’re not telling Max shit,” Eddie vowed. “Nu uh. No way. Not until we at least have the slightest inkling on how to fix this. We know the future now, which means we can sit Robin down, ask her exactly what happened, figure out where it all went wrong and then do something different, right? We come up with a new plan and then… if we get sent back we do the new plan instead of the old one.”
He didn’t know Max well, not as well as Dustin, Lucas or Mike, but he had the same instinct to protect the younger members of the group as he assumed Steve and Nancy and Robin did. They were the older generation. That was their job.
As for anything happening to Steve? For now what kept Eddie going was a refusal to believe it was possible. He took a very deep drag of his cigarette.
“Does anyone else know?” Eddie asked. “About Max.”
Steve watched in the same way someone might look on at a car crash. The worst part was that he’d basically lined up the conditions to incite it. Eddie pacing, Eddie swearing, Eddie freaking out on a level that was warranted…
Eddie not answering the question that Steve hoped he would answer. There wasn’t a band-aid to rip off if he didn’t have permission to do it.
Robin was gonna flip.
But he’d dug himself in, and lying now was just not going to work.
“Okay, we won’t tell Max.” Steve searched his pockets and pulled out a lighter. It was about time to light up. “The others all know. Just me running point here. Look, I just wanna say it’s possible that every one of us might come up against someone knowing what happens to us. We can work on the big plan, but maybe we need a smaller plan about what gets shared. Yeah?”
Eddie shook his head, hand waving off Steve’s suggestion. “Yeah, sure, whatever.” The smaller plan, the protocol, sounded like the sort of thing Dustin would have opinions about. And he’d be right and it would be annoying and Eddie’s mind was not nearly as concerned about the smaller plan as he was about the big plan.
No, instead, Eddie’s next concern was Steve. Things more or less looked grim -- bleak -- hopeless. But things had looked real bad before and so far they had done pretty okay.
So Eddie did the one thing that seemed like the only way he could be the most helpful in that moment. He grabbed Steve by the shoulder and pulled him onto his feet. Steve was slightly bigger, a little taller, but Eddie could summon bursts of surprising energy when called to do so.
What he wanted to do was stand Steve there and look him in the eyes. He just needed to stare Steve down hard enough and close enough, that some of Eddie’s manic desperation would somehow transfer into energy that would translate into confidence for Steve. After all, he was the hero of the group, right? He was their fucking Aragorn.
Which made Dustin and the others hobbits. (Max was definitely Frodo, which made Lucas Samwise, and Erica and Dustin Merry and Pippin.) Robin was fucking Legolas. Nancy, the one with the gun, was Gandalf or maybe Gimli, possibly both, Eddie was still figuring that one out. All that left for Eddie was fucking Boromir -- the expendable one. The one most likely to fuck up in a moment of weakness.
“Steve, I swear to god, we are figuring this shit out.”
Eddie left Steve with only time to react to everything that was being thrown his way. He had been trying to take a pensive puff of his cigarette to quell his growing suspicion that he’d screwed this up since hands were forcing him up to standing. He complied out of not knowing what else to do with Eddie’s electric and entirely frenetic energy.
Being throttled by the shoulder made his cigarette almost slip and he had to raise a hand quickly to save it. All that did was leave him face-to-face with Eddie’s over-large eyes beaming out pure chaotic power.
It was hard to say what was actually going on in Eddie’s head, and Steve was sure he didn’t want to ask and find out. He did, however, note that a reattempt to get an answer had gone down in fiery flames.
“Yeah, that’s still the plan,” he finally croaked out. He reached up his own hand and let it hover for a second above Eddie’s shoulder -- only out of uncertainty for if another burst was coming -- before letting it give that shoulder a double pat. It felt miserable in a way Steve hadn’t quite considered to be trying to console Eddie. That mental path of his couldn’t even see his own danger in all of it. There was outrage for everyone else. “Dude, you know I don’t give up on those kids.”
Eddie nodded solemnly. They hadn’t explicitly made a vow, but it was close enough to be treated as sacredly as one. The words seemed to satisfy Eddie, and yet he was not completely satisfied.
Because he was scared shitless.
So he pulled Steve into a hug. Clearly the conveyed intention was for Steve’s sake. Eddie would be in complete denial how much the hug had actually been for him. The two of them were safe here, wherever the fuck here was. It was weird and annoying and maybe a little bit boring this week, but all of that was so much more preferable than the terror of what awaited them back home.
Eddie held on tight and maybe a little too long before clapping Steve a few times on the back. Even then there was a hesitation in releasing him. But Eddie did. He looked exhausted afterwards.
But at least he was calm.
The whole script was blown. Not that Steve ever had anything in mind when he came, but he also never fathomed any of this. In a mere few minutes he’d blurted out that Robin had new memories, fessed up about Max, gotten mildly threatened by one of the deepest and most alarming eye gazing exercises of his life, and now?
Now, he was trying to negotiate being tugged into an unexpected hug. He had enough wits about him to open his arms and to keep his lit cigarette extended far enough to not unceremoniously ignite Eddie’s hair, but what that amounted to was Eddie’s hair getting into his mouth when he found himself full within the man’s embrace. His free hand settled down for another double pat because that seemed like a reasonable response to another whirlwind moment.
And within a subset of that moment, there also came the distinct recognition that Eddie’s scent remained floral and pleasant as ever thanks to fairies.
It was all surreal. Surreal, messy, profoundly stupid, and aromatic.
Eddie pulled back and Steve stood there with his arm still held out. His cigarette had continued to burn, neglected. He looked at Eddie and felt uniquely at fault for how wearied Eddie seemed in that moment. He should do something, right?
“You don’t wanna go back to work, do you?” He threw the nub of his cigarette down and stomped it out. “Come on, we’ll take a walk.”
Eddie nodded emphatically, taking a final drag from his cigarette before crushing it under his work boot. He could find someone on the way out and go home sick. If he did that. Eddie was all too accustomed to skipping school and not quite mature enough to realize he couldn’t quite skip out on work the same way.
To add insult to injury, Eddie left the cigarette butts and cans of questionable seltzer behind for someone else to clean up.
His lunchbox, sadly only carrying the cheese sandwich, was empty now, but came with him out of guarded habit. He might have been a drug dealer back home, but as a janitor he wasn’t dealing to kids. Felt too skeevy in a way being a third year super senior did not.
“Yeah, fuck this place,” Eddie said, as he followed Harrington out.