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It’s 10:15 on a Sunday morning, and Steve is on Eddie Munson’s couch.
More specifically: Steve is on Eddie Munson’s couch, in his boxer shorts and a shirt that's clearly been slept in, eating dry cereal out of the box and blinking slowly at the TV, which is currently playing WWF. His hair is more of a mess than Dustin has ever seen it outside of literal fights to the death. Eddie himself is nowhere to be seen.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Dustin demands, dropping his backpack just inside the door.
“Good morning to you too,” Steve mumbles. He pours another handful of Cocoa Puffs into his mouth, blinks a few more times, then looks over again like he’s just actually registered Dustin’s presence. Steve is not a morning person; Dustin is very aware of this fact from the times he’s had to catch a ride to school with him. He’s taken to making Steve coffee on those days—instant, which Steve complains about, but his mom doesn’t drink it and Dustin doesn’t need anything to stunt his growth any more—out of sheer self-preservation after he almost dozed off at a stop sign one time.
So yeah, the yawning, the general dazedness: not that weird. The fact that Steve is hanging out on Eddie’s couch in his boxers, eating Eddie’s food like he owns the place: extremely weird.
“I reiterate: what are you doing? Does Eddie even know you’re here?”
“No, I just broke in to eat his cereal,” Steve says. “What do you think, dickhead?”
It’s at that point that Dustin registers the glass pipe on the coffee table next to a battered lighter and a stack of cassettes. The one on top is Chicago, which definitely does not belong to Eddie. It could be his uncle’s, but the simplest explanation is that Steve brought it here to listen to, and Eddie inexplicably did not throw it or him out a window. And also: the blackened residue in that pipe is definitely not tobacco. A skunky odor lingers in the worn couch cushions and on Steve’s clothes when he shifts.
“Have you two been smoking pot?”
“Okay, Nancy Reagan,” Steve says, which is possibly the most insulting thing anyone has said to Dustin, ever. And there are a lot of options to choose from there. He swells with outrage, but before he can give it voice, there's a thump and some muffled cursing on the far side of the trailer. A door creaks open and Eddie emerges from the hallway, squinting in the morning light. He, at least, is wearing pants.
“I thought I heard Henderson’s dulcet tones,” he says, muffling a yawn into his shoulder. “What are you doing here, dude? You’re gonna get mugged in this neighborhood.”
“On a Sunday morning?”
“Crime waits for no man,” Eddie intones, and yawns again.
“I left my Bio textbook backstage and I thought maybe it ended up with your stuff. Mike and Lucas haven’t seen it. Why is Steve in your living room?” Dustin asks, flinging a hand in Steve’s direction.
“Your Cocoa Puffs are stale, by the way,” Steve says, holding up the box and shaking it.
“So why the hell are you eating them?” Eddie asks. “I told you I’d cook.”
“I was hungry and you were sleeping.”
“Just wake me up next time.”
Steve snorts expressively, like this is a manifestly ridiculous statement. Dustin looks back and forth between them.
“Next time?” he asks.
Eddie makes a huffy noise that might be laughter or might be something else. It’s actually kind of fucking weird to see him like this, in sweatpants and bedhead and missing his rings. He picks up a pack of cigarettes off the table as he shuffles into the kitchen, tapping it absently against his palm as he pulls the coffee pot out from the wall, then tucks a cigarette between his lips and pats his pockets.
“Here,” Steve says. He scoops the lighter off the coffee table and tosses it to Eddie, who catches it with a grateful hum and an impressive lack of fumbling, lights his cigarette, and sets about brewing coffee. Smoke winds up through the dusty air, turning it hazy. Probably explains why everything in here has a faint patina of nicotine yellow that’s both gross and kind of exotic; Dustin’s mom doesn’t smoke, and if she did she certainly wouldn’t do it inside.
The point, however is: this is clearly a familiar routine that he’s stumbled in on.
“This is a thing now? You guys have been hanging out without me?” he asks slowly. Neither of them answer, but it’s self-evident. Indignation bubbles in his stomach. “You have. What the hell?”
“You sound mad,” Eddie remarks. He opens the fridge and pulls out a carton of milk, which he opens and sniffs at thoughtfully before making a face and setting it aside.
“I am mad! You wouldn’t even know each other if it weren’t for me, and now you’re just casting me out, like, like—”
“Come on, dude,” Steve says, unfolding off of the couch, cereal box in hand. He wanders past Dustin into the kitchen to set it on the counter. “Nothing personal, sometimes we want to, you know…”
“What, smoke weed?” Dustin asks. “I could smoke weed! If I had any!”
He knows he’s going to get laughed at the moment it’s out of his mouth. Instead, and even worse, Steve puts on his Babysitter Face and says, “No. Absolutely not.”
He spins and points a warning finger at Eddie, who holds up both hands but looks more entertained than threatened. “Hey, I was not planning on selling the kid weed.”
“Selling? You’d really make me pay for it?”
“I’m not gonna give you weed either,” Eddie says. “Try back in a couple of years.”
“Do you make Steve pay for it?”
Steve and Eddie exchange an infuriatingly unreadable look, then Eddie shrugs and turns back toward the fridge. “Steve’s a special case. You want eggs?”
“French toast?” Dustin asks hopefully.
“Milk’s gone bad,” Eddie says, and holds the carton out for Steve to sniff, which he does, grimacing.
“Gross.”
“Eggs it is. Henderson?”
“Fine,” Dustin sighs. “Thank you.”
“I’m gonna borrow your shower real quick,” Steve says to Eddie. “And some clothes, if that’s cool.”
“Sure, dude, you know where everything is,” Eddie says absently, pulling a pan down from the rack. Steve thumps his shoulder briefly, ruffles Dustin’s hair as he wanders past, and then is gone. A few minutes later, the shower hisses on. Dustin sits at the kitchen table, braces his elbows on the faintly sticky surface, and stares at the back of Eddie’s head as he putters around the kitchen, trailing smoke from his cigarette and humming absent little snatches of music under his breath.
“So this is a thing now, huh?” Dustin says, when the silent weight of his glare fails to make any noticeable impression on Eddie. “You and Steve. Hanging out.”
“Stranger things have been dreamt of in our philosophy.”
“Stop butchering Shakespeare and answer the question.”
“Self-evidently, we… are hanging out,” Eddie says in a measured voice, glancing back over his shoulder. There’s something in his expression that Dustin can’t quite get a read on, and it disturbs him.
“Like, you’re friends now. You and Steve.”
“You know, Henderson, I think I liked you better when you were scared of me.”
Dustin scoffs. “You’re not that scary.”
When Eddie glances back this time, it’s with a grin that seems sharp but not displeased. “I guess that’s all relative, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Dustin says, somewhat more subdued now. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
There’s scarier stuff in Hawkins than Eddie Munson. Or at least there was. Dustin very much hopes that the past tense stays past tense this time around.
The shower sputters off. There’s shuffling as Steve moves around the bathroom, then crosses the hallway to what is presumably Eddie’s room. More rummaging. In the kitchen, Eddie pours whisked eggs into the pan and pulls three mismatched cups out of the cupboard. “Coffee?”
“It’ll stunt my growth,” Dustin says.
“Suit yourself.”
“Fine. Yes. Coffee. Is there sugar?”
“Do you take me for a heathen?” Eddie asks. He pours coffee into a cup with a map of Idaho on the side of it, and crosses over to deposit it and a sugar bowl in front of Dustin. “My liege.”
“Thank you,” Dustin says, and sets himself to scooping sugar into his coffee as Eddie goes back to the stove to stir the eggs. It still tastes pretty gross when he tries it, but he’s committed now. He sips it and tries to hide his grimaces while Eddie cooks eggs and toast with a degree of competency that probably shouldn’t be as surprising as it is. Like Steve, Eddie occupies a strange liminal space in Dustin’s world. Adult-adjacent. Although he guesses they are both technically adults now. Eddie is out of high school. Steve will be old enough to drink pretty soon, not that he doesn’t already anyway. Although not usually around Dustin. Something about this whole tableau has made him suddenly aware of how much both Steve and Eddie must clean up their acts around him and the rest of the Party, and now he can’t decide whether to be touched or offended.
He’s still pondering this when Steve wanders back out in a pair of Eddie’s black jeans, a Megadeth t-shirt, and wet hair, and the sight of that is weird enough to take Dustin’s mind off the subject.
“Oh my god,” he says. “Seriously, Steve?”
“Hey, man, it was this or underwear. I’ll get these back to you, by the way,” he says to Eddie, who flaps a hand dismissively.
“Sure, sure, dude, I know where you sleep anyway.”
For some reason, this makes Steve laugh. Dustin peers at him as he pours himself a cup of coffee and comes over to the table to sit. “What happened to your pants?”
Steve blinks, takes a slow sip of coffee.
“Spilled something on them,” he says finally.
By the stove, Eddie makes a strange noise. Dustin stares at him, then at Steve, who takes another sip of his coffee and doesn’t elaborate.
It occurs to Dustin that he is definitely missing something here. He hates that feeling.
“So does this newfound friendship with Eddie mean that you’ll finally be joining us for D&D?” he asks when Steve is driving him home later, his bike hoisted in the back of the BMW, ‘Alive and Kicking’ playing quietly on the radio. The tape that was on when he got in was something with screaming guitars and a driving drumbeat that the Steve he knows would never in a million years listen to. Steve switched it out without comment, so now they’re listening to Simple Minds. Dustin isn’t sure that’s actually better.
“What?” Steve asks, frowning. “No. Jesus. I told you, like, a million times already, I’m not playing your nerd game.”
He looks mildly appalled at the idea, the same way he has every other time Dustin has brought it up. It’s disappointing, but it does at least lend an element of normalcy to the otherwise deeply abnormal sight of Steve with limp unstyled hair and Eddie’s grunge metal clothes on.
“Are you sure?” Dustin prods. “Because you also told me you’d rather eat glass than hang out with Eddie ‘The Freak’ Munson, and yet, here we are.”
“Okay, first of all, I did not put it like that. And second of all…” Steve trails off, then shrugs without looking away from the road. “That was before we fought monsters together. Eddie’s cool.”
“Told you so,” Dustin crows.
“Yeah, yeah, don’t sprain anything patting yourself on the back, Henderson.”
He never does find his Bio textbook.
He does, however, discover that nobody else in the Party other than Max was aware that Eddie and Steve have been hanging out, and that only because she lives right next door to the Munsons. Even more infuriatingly, nobody else actually seems to care.
“Well, they’re both, like, out of high school now,” Lucas points out reasonably. “Maybe they want to hang out with people their own age?”
“They’re both emotionally and developmentally stunted basket cases,” Dustin hisses, and that isn’t the point anyway. “Besides. Why would they be hanging out together without telling me?”
“Maybe because you’re not the center of the universe?” Max suggests.
“Okay, rude.”
Mike heaves a deep sigh and holds up a pair of VHS cases. “Look, can we please just pick a movie? El is going to be there by the time we get back, and—”
“Yeah, how is El, by the way?” Max asks innocently. Mike—and, surprisingly, Will—cut her dirty looks.
“Fine,” Mike says shortly. “Labyrinth or Legend?”
“Or we could go with The Neverending Story,” Lucas says, with a frankly unnecessary malicious glint in his eye.
“Okay, look, that is just—”
“—look at what you see in her face, the mirror of your dreams,” Max sings, hands clasped to her chest. She laughs when Dustin glares at her, exchanges a gleeful look with Lucas. It’s nice to see her smiling, although it would also be nice if it weren’t at Dustin’s expense. “How’s Suzie, by the way?”
“She’s fine,” Dustin says with great dignity. “I vote for Legend.”
“Boring,” Max says. “I like David Bowie.”
Mike sighs deeply. “Look, there’s a Tuesday special, can we just get them both and get out of here?” he asks, and to general grumbled agreement, they approach the counter. Robin is working today, sans Steve, which means that she’s been resolutely ignoring them since the moment they walked into the store. Mike sets his tapes on the counter and taps the bell a couple of times when she still doesn’t look up from the magazine in her lap.
“Hey,” he says. “Are you actually working, or…?”
Robin lifts her head and gifts Mike with a beatific smile. “If you keep following your dad’s example in dealing with service workers, I hope you’re prepared to eat spit sauce at every restaurant you visit for the rest of your life.”
Dustin can’t help but cringe a little—Robin is scary, okay—but Mike just rolls his eyes. “So is that a yes?”
“It’s a yes.” She sets her magazine down with an aggrieved air and stands, kicking the rolling chair out of the way. “Two for Two Tuesday, I presume?”
“Yes. Please.” Mike slides his mom’s membership card across the counter, and Robin gives him a skeptical look but takes it and the crumpled bills he digs out of his pocket without comment.
“Due back on Friday. Rewind them before you bring them back or I’ll climb your drain pipes and hide under your bed with a butcher knife.”
“Does Keith know you talk to customers like this?” Dustin asks before he can think better of it.
“Keith loves me,” Robin says dismissively, which is, unfortunately, true. “Anyway, you little gremlins are a special case. Consider it balancing the books for Steve being such a total pushover.”
“Speaking of Steve,” Dustin says.
“Oh, come on,” Max groans.
“Speaking of Steve,” Dustin repeats, a little louder. “Do you know what the deal is with him and Eddie? They’ve apparently been hanging out. Without us.” He doesn’t say, without me. That would probably come across as unnecessarily needy. And this is a Party matter, even if nobody else in the Party seems to give a shit. “And they were both being, like, super weird when I saw them on Sunday.”
Robin stares at him for a second, then widens her eyes until she looks slightly deranged. “Maybe they’re starting another cult.”
“What? No, for the last time, Hellfire Club is not…” he trails off. “You’re messing with me.”
“Yeah,” she says sympathetically.
“So do you know what their deal is?”
“No idea,” Robin says, and jams the videos into a bag, which she hands to Mike along with Mrs. Wheeler’s card. “Maybe think about minding your own business?”
“That’s what I said,” Max says, because Max is an incredible kiss-ass when it comes to Robin. Whatever. Strong female role models, Dustin gets it. He just wishes they wouldn’t gang up on him like this.
“See?” Robin says, jabbing a finger at Max, who beams. “Good advice. You should take it.”
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea for any of us to be keeping secrets, after everything that’s happened!”
Robin pauses, sets her elbows on the counter, and gives Dustin a look that’s more serious than he’s used to from her. It’s almost as bad as Steve’s Babysitter Face. He wonders if Robin hangs out with them when they’re smoking weed together, since there’s apparently a seedy subculture amongst Dustin’s older role models that he was heretofore unaware of. It would probably be out of line to ask her that while she’s at work, though.
“Listen, dipshit,” she says gently. “If they want you to know what’s going on, they’ll tell you. Until then, mind your beeswax. I mean it.”
“Oh,” Will says from behind him. When Dustin glances back, he’s got an odd, thoughtful look on his face, but he doesn’t say anything else.
“Yeah,” Robin says. “Now scram. Enjoy your movies, children.”
He gets the context he was missing a few weeks later, and completely by accident. This time, he’s not actually looking for either of them; he’s taking a shortcut home from Lucas’s house that his mom would probably have a heart attack if she knew about, but whatever—there are things in Hawkins a hundred times more dangerous than the sketchy drunks who hang around The Hideout, and he’s faced them down and survived. Besides, he has a radio and a flamethrower in his backpack; he’s not worried. The streets are pretty empty here on a Tuesday night, anyway, although he can hear music from inside the bar. Loud, with a thudding bassline that Eddie would probably love. There are a few people smoking next to the entrance, but it’s a familiar van parked by the back that catches Dustin’s eye.
A familiar van, and two familiar figures leaned against the back of it, nearly hidden by the shadows.
Dustin narrows his eyes. He knows that Eddie’s band plays here sometimes, but he doesn’t see Gary or any of the others. And something about the way Steve and Eddie are standing seems—secretive, almost. As he watches, he sees Eddie pass Steve something, a small flame glowing, and—oh, for Christ’s sake. They’re not really getting high right here in public, are they? When Steve’s house is nearly always empty and Eddie’s uncle doesn’t seem to care? They’re going to get arrested. Chief Powell hates Eddie even now that he’s been exonerated; he’ll take any excuse. Hellfire Club will have to find a new DM and Dustin will have to find someone else to drive him to the arcade on the weekends, and this is honestly just absolutely unacceptable.
He starts to push off, already mentally reviewing the lecture he’s going to give them—he’s spent time at Hopper’s house, he knows how to compose a good lecture—then stops.
It’s a cigarette they’re sharing, for one thing; he can see that now that he’s closer. So that’s fine. Doesn’t explain what it is they’re doing at The Hideout on a Tuesday evening when the band isn’t even playing.
Other than that this is apparently a thing. The two of them, hanging out.
Eddie is talking, animated and laughing, spinning joyously out into the darkness while Steve leans back with his hands in his pockets. It's like there's an invisible string between them, with Steve as the anchor point as Eddie orbits around him. Then Eddie says something that makes him break, laughing, untucking his hands; he catches Eddie's wrist and reels him in, and Dustin should see it coming, probably, just from that. But he's not expecting it, hasn't even considered it, and so he's flabbergasted when Eddie crashes against Steve and instead of shoving him back Steve tugs him closer still, catches his cheek to draw him into a kiss.
It's quick, over almost as soon as it began. But Dustin knows what he just saw.
“Rebel, Steve Harrington,” Eddie crows into the quiet night, sounding delighted. Steve's response is inaudible but it's almost certainly some flavor of fond, exasperated shut up, man.
“Rebel, rebel,” Eddie sings, laughing. He makes a noise like a guitar riff between his teeth. “Hey, babe, your hair’s alright, hey babe, let’s stay out tonight—”
Steve shoves him, and this time it's Eddie who catches him and pulls him in. No kiss, but they stay close.
Dustin stands still for a moment, straddling his bike, blinking.
“Huh,” he says finally, under his breath.
Then he kicks off, puts his feet to the pedals, and aims himself toward home.
“You finally decide to get off their case already?” Max asks after their next D&D session, when she catches Dustin watching Steve help Eddie load their makeshift cardboard dungeon into the back of the van. They’re definitely going to rip it, and Dustin is not going to help put it back together this time.
They’re talking quietly. Laughing. Comfortable in each other’s space. This obviously isn’t new.
It’s—weird. Unexpected. But he’s happy for them, he thinks.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he says loftily, and pretends not to see Max roll her eyes as they head out into the late afternoon sunlight.