Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It wasn’t like he remembered, the cabin.

When he had left, just a couple of years ago, it had still been Hopper’s cabin, in the way that it looked and felt, and maybe even on paper too— Eddie’s mind had been too frayed back then to pay attention to things like paperwork. Not that his mind was quiet now— he had spent the ride rehearsing this moment over and over again, never quite sure what he would say.

Now the cabin was more than a place he lived for one summer, more than a place that Hop had kept for years before turning it over to Steve. Now it looked like Steve’s cabin, felt like him, even from the driveway where he cut the engine of his motorcycle and swung his feet to the ground. The sun would set soon: it was already pink in the sky, the light left behind on the road from Indianapolis.

Eddie pulled his helmet off, shaking his hair out as he took in the changes. The paint they had so messily applied together was faded already, the land lived-in. What had once been a bare yard with an old truck parked in it had become a garden, some sense of organization to it even underneath the riot of greenery and flowers. Trellises climbed the front of the cabin, and those were laden too: herbs and vines and something that smelled sweet underneath it all. As his ears adjusted to the space his engine left in the air, he could hear bees and the creek and maybe even chickens.

The Steve Harrington he had known once upon a time had been a spoiled suburban kid who had never grown anything and had only touched flowers to woo girlfriends. But even before he had left, Steve had begun to change.

A curtain twitched in the front window where he remembered the kitchen being, and he imagined Steve drying his hands at the sink. A cat wound itself around his ankles as he approached the door, and he stopped to pet it on the porch. A stack of wood sat to one side, the other half of the porch occupied by a rocking chair with a folded yellow paperback on one arm, an abandoned tin mug sitting in a circular stain atop it. The door swung open while he was still petting the cat, crouched awkwardly as it butted its face against his boots. He looked up at Steve, who was propped in the door watching him.

I’m back, he had meant to say. Or maybe something like I bet you thought you got rid of me. Something like, I wish I hadn’t come, I wish I had never left, a hundred different things that were swallowed down at the sight of Steve. Eddie felt like a man now, the way that he had built his own life far from Hawkins and worked hard to maintain it, the way that he always had things to do and bills to pay and nobody looking over his shoulder if he wanted to drink or fuck or wear his hair long. But he hadn’t been aware of the passage of time in any real way until he saw it on Steve’s face: the way his jaw was shadowed and his body was broader and his scars were faded. The way he looked like someone had carved him right here, in the woods, from earth and stone.

“Um, hi,” he managed to say, and it felt like an accomplishment. Steve just nodded, looking at him. Eddie wondered what he saw in return.

Steve opened the door and let him in.

The first thought that Eddie had was that it was surprisingly warm inside. It went beyond the reluctant warmth of spring between rains— it was positively cozy, like a fire had just died down in the worn brick fireplace, like the kettle was on and the air was its own blanket. The cabin had always been small, but now it felt deliberate, the space precious and private on the inside, just enough for one person or maybe— if he remembered right— two people, if they liked each other a little too much. A vintage stove sat in the middle of a converted kitchen area, a strange collection of wooden furniture and leather armchairs scattered over an eclectic layer of rugs that overlapped across the creaky old wood. A folded quilt peeked out from the open door to the bedroom, potted plants and stacks of books and an ancient record player cluttering the path toward sleep. At once Eddie understood his own apartment back in Indy as soulless and cold: each piece here was richly patterned or textured in a perfectly-coordinated chaos.

The second thought that Eddie had was that it felt like Steve even more here, inside, like his very soul was written on every inch of this place.

Steve had turned away to let Eddie take it in, busying himself pouring too much wine into empty jam jars— the set of his shoulders uncomfortable.

“Since when do you have a garden?” Eddie asked, for something to fill the silence. “It must be a lot of work.” He turned to the window, looking beyond the gauzy curtains and the blur of thick glass through to the back of the cabin. They were far from Hawkins proper, the neatly-tended yard stretching from one stone border wall to another a respite from the surrounding wildness. The river that he remembered on the back of the land disappeared from view here, long green grass and a tree line in the distance promising its presence at the back of the property. An ancient silo sagged beside an ivy-covered greenhouse with whitewashed windows and a border of blooming trees, another garden bed between them that promised spring vegetables: snap peas and flowering artichokes and beets nestled warm in the ground. Small though it was, surely even a hobby farm was more farm than hobby. To his city eyes, it seemed overwhelming, although every place he looked was neat and tidily thriving.

Steve just shrugged. I work hard, he didn't say, though his pride and his discipline were stamped on the land.

Eddie waited to see if Steve would speak, but he just leaned against the counter and held one of the jars out, wordlessly. His was a mason jar, label peeling; Eddie’s was short and fat and rough with the invisible remains of glue. Eddie leaned next to him, and blew on his wine as though it were a hot drink, wondering what to say.

“Robin sent me,” he settled on, and Steve’s eyes flicked to him, then stayed, their weight steady and warm and familiar. “No one’s heard from you in a while, man.”

Steve snorted, and Eddie flushed.

“I know I haven’t called,” he admitted. “But— she says you two don’t usually go this long, and you weren’t picking up. Everyone worries about you, and you’re the only one left in Hawkins. Hell, I’m hours away and I’m still the closest. So. Here I am.”

Steve raised his eyebrow, nodded at a rotary phone that Eddie hadn’t noticed. It looked like it had been burnt. He picked it up, listening, understanding why Robin had worried when the line was dead. “You weren’t going to get this fixed? What if something happened?”

Eddie sighed when Steve shrugged again. He had talked before, hadn’t he? He looked different now, but he smelled the same— sweat and oud and amber. When had he stopped bothering to speak to Robin? When had he stopped bothering to speak at all?

Steve pulled soup from a whirring, yellowed fridge that was covered in scribbled notes, then fetched out a half-finished loaf of dark, seeded bread. Eddie talked as he put the soup into a pot, telling him things he may not have heard. Wayne, out of Hawkins to live with an old girlfriend who had become his new girlfriend. Nancy was in school, Jonathan wasn’t. The kids were settling into their new cities— Dustin, of course, having been the last to see Steve before moving. And Robin— too busy with her masters language program to travel home, had a girlfriend now.

That was the only thing that Steve reacted to, a shadow passing over his face like regret. It was strange to think that Eddie had been called and consulted after the meet-cute in a library, the first date panic attacks, the escalation of intimacy, the it’s-official screaming. Him, and not Steve.

“She misses you,” he said, not to make Steve feel bad, but as a defense for his presence here. He knew she called him every so often, and that Robin feared she was annoying Steve for the way he spoke less and less on the phone. He had been sent on the wave of her love— propelled despite his own fear. It was that fear that made him babble now, falling away from the updates he knew Steve was owed to a more general chatter. He was nervous in the silence, nervous here. He felt like he was intruding— knew he was, in truth. He hadn’t expected to be met with soup and chickens and this newer, truer version of Steve. Settled and strong and silent, only glancing up occasionally to show that he was listening. Each time he did the catch of his eyes felt heavy. Physical.

Eddie couldn’t talk as much through dinner, so they ate in a quiet that made him itchy. The soup was good— mushroom and asparagus and lemon and the heavy bread with flakes of salt that he could see. He complimented it, and Steve dipped his chin, then got up as soon as he was done and shut himself in the bathroom. The shower hissed on, and Eddie groaned into his hands at the table. He let himself have a minute, two minutes, to feel like a fool, and then got up to wash the dishes. He wanted to pour another glass of wine, but it was dark outside now, and it would be a long ride back. He stared at his hands in the soapy water for a long time, watching them prune as it ran cold.

Steve emerged in a thick-knit sweater and pajama pants, his hair dark and damp. He wore glasses that Eddie had never seen before. There was a duvet in his arms with a pillow on top, and he brought them to the couch as Eddie turned, drying his hands on a thin tea towel.

“You don’t have to do that,” he insisted. His backpack and helmet were on the floor by the front door: he gathered them up, slinging the backpack strap over his shoulder and tucking the helmet under his arm. “I can go. I should— I was planning to go. It’s fine, I’ll be home by midnight.” Enough time still to go out, if he wanted— to work out this weirdness in a back room before collapsing into his single bed alone again.

His jacket was on the back of the chair at the kitchen table: he picked it up, but then Steve was there, his hand closing around Eddie’s wrist. Eddie stopped: Steve waited for him to still.

“I don’t want to intrude,” he managed, lower, his heart stuttering in his chest. He knew Steve could probably feel his pulse in his wrist, the way it was racing. “I can go. It’s just, I know you didn’t invite me, and it was kind of you to feed me, but—”

Steve shook his head and put his finger to Eddie’s mouth. Eddie closed it on his next word, feeling the press of clean skin against his lips. He didn’t breathe. Steve watched his face, waiting for— he didn’t know what, but he waited too, his eyes searching Steve’s. In the low light of the kitchen his hazel eyes were brown, were as shadowed and quiet as the room around them.

A moment. Two. The memory of Steve pressed against his lips— not quite this way.

When Steve drew back, Eddie breathed. He helped make the couch into a bed, both of them quiet in the dark.

The couch was overstuffed and lumpy and it smelled like cat. Eddie hadn’t gone to bed so early in years— and he was the opposite of tired. With Steve in the other room, he was wide awake.

The ceiling was unremarkable, but he studied it as though it held every secret of the natural world.

The last four years had been the longest of Eddie’s life. He’d been through a lot, over the years, from his dad’s imprisonment to his mom’s death to his murder accusations to Chrissy Chrissy Chrissy, eyes bursting into nothingness, her body breaking with the last of his innocence. And he’d run, finally, run away from the town that took too much the second he had healed up enough to gain momentum.

But Indianapolis hadn’t been kind to him. He’d felt like he was stuck in a broken washing machine the entire time, spinning and spinning but never getting clean.

He hadn’t gone with high hopes, and he’d still been disappointed. He found the parts of town that were cheap and dangerous and populated by artists and people like him, but the parties went on too long and the drugs were too strong and the men who took him to bed had a new idea of violence.

He’d been on a comedown when Robin called, a ring of bruises around his throat that he could feel, invisible under dark ink. He wasn’t sure whether he’d been manipulated into this self-hatred by the last guy, or whether he was the manipulative one, or whether that was something he’d been manipulated to think: his brain wasn’t his own, anymore, was the point. His heart hadn’t been his since he’d held Steve Harrington to a boathouse wall and now his mind had slid out somewhere in the city, falling underfoot like so much litter, buried under powdered drugs like the drifts of dirty snow that had only just begun melting.

Eddie rubbed at his throat in the dark, remembering the pain that sex always asked for and the infuriating closeness of a floating that he could never quite reach, the search for a trust that he had never even come close to finding. He’d been in a bad place all winter, wanting to feel closer to Chrissy, taking the pain like penance. He’d tried to take control where he could, but it always felt like being the killer everyone wanted him to be, not like being the person who could be trusted to lead. He wanted things that seemed simple in his head, but got all mixed-up in other people’s wanting and in his own tendency to follow whatever was asked of him, so that at least someone could be happy. He’d spent years hoping to get it right, going from a small-town virgin to washed-up old news in the sex clubs and the back rooms and the secret parties. People had begun to avoid him, and he knew it was because he had the wrong kind of intensity for a city that took nothing seriously. He’d gone to Indy having kissed only the sweet, clean mouth of Steve Harrington, and now he had been called home again filthy.

Somehow the press of a finger and the shake of a head was the brightly-burning heatwave he had been hunting for. Somehow he didn’t even need to hear the voice he longed for to know exactly what Steve wanted. Somehow he was still a person who had something to give, some remaining softness, immediate and entire and entirely Steve’s.

He must have worried himself to sleep somehow, despite the overloud silence of the woods around the cabin. The only light upon waking came from the pre-dawn, a pink unreality creeping in all around him. The cat was still on top of his legs, and Steve was standing in the hallway, frowning as he watched Eddie take up his space. He could smell the tea that Steve was drinking, something strong and herbal. He could see with his eyes still half-shut that Steve had put work boots and a jacket on to go outside, although it felt earlier than Eddie had ever woken up before, closer to the hours that he normally fell into bed.

He got too hot these days, some internal switch in his body permanently cranked up from all the weirdness that the Upside Down had left inside of him. The blankets were thrown off of his body, tangled in his feet and the cat, halfway to the floor and halfway revealing the skin he had stripped down to. His hair was damp with sweat upon the pillow and he had undressed to his boxers, but he was afraid to cover up lest Steve noticed that he was awake.

He knew that his body was different now, that he’d stopped being the scrawny boy that curled up with Steve like puppies that one summer. He was still too thin, sure, the bruises under his eyes too dark, his skin more tattooed than untouched. He wondered if Steve had had anyone over here, if he had gone into town to find girls to touch, and then swallowed down the idea in shame. He stretched, a rare moment of peace in his body, and Steve turned away.

He heard the back door swing open. He heard the door close. He fell back asleep.

Eddie awoke again to a vice-like headache and the call of a rooster.

He was on the couch still, face smashed into the cushions, weighed down by the cat and a heavy duvet and a faded quilt that smelled a little musty. It was late morning, the light finally finding him where he lay. Steve’s bedroom door was visible but still shut, and the windows were throwing sunshine onto the ceiling in distorted squares. Eddie sat up, offering an apologetic pat as the cat awoke at the motion.

“Steve?” There was no answer. Eddie heaved himself up, hesitant to disturb, but perhaps Steve couldn’t hear him through the door. He slid out from under the cat and went to piss in the blue-and-white bathroom. The window panes opened the tiny bathroom to the land, the salvaged clawfoot tub sitting beneath the glass-framed greenery. He approached the tub guiltily, picking up the soap on the windowsill and bringing it to his nose. It was musky and feral, exactly as Steve smelled, oud and golden amber. He set it down. He had been allowed to stay the night, out of pity and more remembered friendship than he was due. It wouldn’t do to repay that kindness by pushing the carefully-drawn boundaries of Steve’s world. It already felt like he was spying on something unbearably intimate to see Steve’s toothbrush atop the sink, the jars of crumbled herbs that lined the shelves, the warped paperback on the floor by the bathtub.

He stretched and splashed his face with water, recognizing the years on him in the mirror: his hair was longer and his throat tattooed, lines around his eyes that weren’t from smiling. He dried his face with the bottom of yesterday’s shirt and knocked on Steve’s bedroom, only raising his knuckles hip-high against the door.

There was still no answer, but he hadn’t expected one at this point. The door wasn’t closed tight, and the cat wove between his legs to push it open, slipping inside to jump onto the bed. When he peered after it, the bed was empty but carefully made, the sheets a perfect match to the sage green duvet that Eddie had woken up under.

The bedroom was another comfortable mess of oddities and antiques, a banged-up dresser in one corner host to a strange assortment of candles and stones. Another stack of books sat on the floor beside the bed by a basket of yarn, the nightstand’s surface reserved for a leatherbound journal and an assortment of little jars, sealed shut.

The rooster quieted as he returned to the cabin’s main room. He watched the land through the back window as he folded the blankets on the couch, ready to say goodbye as soon as Steve returned. The tree line down by the river was lit by morning now, and a mist rose up between the crumbling stone wall at the border and the low planters in between. Water sparkled behind rustling trees, and the land beyond the yard opened up to scattered grasses and fallen leaves. The mist hung low to the ground and Steve came up the land, the voltaic energy of him abuzz against the green and brown. His coloring blended into the earth, the dirt, and he looked somehow right here between flower and fern. He seemed comfortable amidst land that he knew, land that knew him.

Steve came up the land and Eddie’s hands fumbled on the blanket. He felt on display somehow: standing in the living room, nothing to do with himself other than wait to be discovered. It felt like Steve would know that Eddie had smelled his soap, had looked at his toothbrush, had held his breath on Steve’s early-morning inspection of him, wondering what it was that he saw.

He opened the door for Steve, letting the cat slip out, waiting as Steve stamped his work boots clean of mud and then bent down to unlace them. His overalls stretched over his thighs and Eddie swallowed, looked away. Steve brought his boots in and lined them up by the door, then stood upright, offered something that was almost a smile.

He tapped the back of Eddie’s arm and Eddie followed him to the kitchen, following Steve’s nod at the cabinet to handmade tea blends and a jar of coffee beans, sugar cubes, a wooden grinder and a French press that had seen better days. He began to brew it as Steve washed up and pulled things from the fridge— milk for their drinks and ingredients that he laid out efficiently, taking a cast iron pan off the wall to preheat as he assembled a batter. Eddie took a sharp breath as he saw Steve wash a handful of wild blackberries from his pocket, underripe and early for this time of year, tumbling them into the batter. Steve glanced up, smiled for real.

“You remembered,” Eddie said, feeling stupid. Maybe he didn’t remember. Maybe pancakes with blackberries weren't anything especially unique. Maybe Steve ate them every day. Maybe he had seen blackberries ahead of season and picked them thoughtlessly. But Steve’s forearm was scratched like he had reached far for the few he had come home with, like he had hunted for a piece of that summer, that day when they’d eaten themselves sick on berries, fingers dripping with dark juice, burnt pancakes for dinner that had ruined Hopper’s cheap pans.

Steve flipped a stack onto Eddie’s plate and zested lemon over the top, offered honey that smelled like his garden. Eddie poured a coffee and a tea and settled at the table, not sure quite why he wanted to cry.

He took a bite, cleared his throat. “They’re really good. Um. Thank you. For breakfast, and letting me crash. This time I really can go.”

“Why did you come?” Steve asked. His voice was low and rough with disuse. From across the table, Eddie felt the urge to come closer, to press his hand to Steve’s throat and feel the rumble of each word.

“I told you,” he answered, confused and startled and aching. Hearing Steve’s voice made him feel like Steve had finally come into the room with him: like Steve was finally paying attention. “Robin sent me.”

“You left.” Steve didn’t say it like it was an accusation: he said it like there were only two ways of being: here, and there. Like coming and going from here was impossible, and that where Eddie had chosen to leave Steve had chosen to stay. In truth part of Eddie had never left, as much as he had tried to. Every quiet moment felt like torture in the city, the moments when he could not occupy his mind. But he always remembered this place, this company— the way it had once been to know a silence that felt like peace.

Eddie didn’t know how to say all of that, though. It felt like too much. He picked up his mug, studied the chip on it instead of looking at Steve. He had forgotten the milk and sugar on the countertop. “Well. I’m here now.” He risked a peek up: Steve was frowning at the black coffee Eddie held. Eddie always took his pale and sweet, so much sugar that Steve had once made fun of him as a daily part of their morning ritual. He hadn’t thought that Steve would remember that, either. He hadn’t thought Steve would remember anything, and yet there was no piece of Steve that Eddie would ever forget.

Steve glanced at the counter. At his gaze, the milk and sugar twitched, then came, sliding smoothly through the air to land in front of Eddie.

That, he definitely couldn’t forget.

“Stay this time,” Steve said, like it was simple.

Eddie nodded, wishing it was.