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Eddie first notices the shadows sometime after he and the girls save Steve from becoming a chew toy for bats. After they get him all nice and bandaged (and full of infection, which he is definitely, absolutely not thinking about) and begin the long, miserable trek to Wheeler’s house. After all that, Steve turns to Eddie, and smiles in a way that’s a little bit left of human, and thanks him for saving his ass.
And the shadows move. Curling up from the roots and vines to wrap themselves around Steve’s ankles, nipping like a disobedient dog. It’s only a second, only a flash, and then the smile drips off of Steve’s face and the shadows are back where they should be. But they’re still…churning. Waiting. Alive.
Something very cold skitters down Eddie’s spine, a house centipede with a million spindly legs pricking directly at his nerves. His legs feel frozen to the ground, every muscle locked into place like moving an inch will kill him.
He’s a jackrabbit sprung to run from the snapping jaws of a coyote.
He’s a kid gasping for air inside the twisted crush of a car-made-tomb.
He’s a mosquito twitching beneath the shadow of an outstretched palm.
And then Steve looks away and he’s himself again.
“What the fuck?” he gasps, lurching away from Steve with a jackrabbit’s heart. He feels like he’s about to pass out. The shadows squirm beneath his feet, and nausea roils in his gut at the sight.
“Sorry,” Steve says, and he does look genuinely apologetic, shoulders hunched and face turned away like he’s bracing himself for a blow. “It’s…it’s a lot stronger here. I wasn’t trying to freak you out.”
“Consider me freaked,” Eddie says, inching away from Steve and his army of shadows. “What the hell is it?”
Steve’s shoulders hunch even further, and the shadows peel away from Eddie to wrap themselves around his legs, his waist. It almost looks like they’re…
“Is it hugging you?”
“Little bit,” Steve snorts. “And it’s…it’s complicated, it’s really complicated. It’s too much to explain when we’re trying to not get eaten by monsters but—you can ask Robin or Nancy, it’s not dangerous. I’m not dangerous.”
“Really reassuring,” Eddie says. He backs up another foot. “Hey Robin? Nancy?”
The two girls spin around, the beam of Robin’s flashlight casting even wilder shadows, which immediately peel away from the trees to drape themselves around Steve’s shoulders.
“Holy shit,” Robin breathes, stepping closer. “I haven’t seen it this intense since…y’know. Do you think it’s cause you’re hurt again?”
“Maybe,” Steve says, wincing. “Or maybe it’s cause we’re here.”
Nancy follows Robin over to Steve, and her shadow slips away from her feet to join the mess writhing around him. She doesn’t even seem bothered.
“Do you feel more separate?” she asks, getting up on her tiptoes to peer into Steve’s eyes. “Like the…threads you were talking about, the binds connecting you, are there less of them?”
“Not really? It’s more like—”
“Hi,” Eddie cuts in, waving his arms like he’s trying to direct a plane. “I’m also here. Would anyone care to fill me in on why Steve’s got a whole Lord of Shadows routine going on, or are we just gonna continue to let me have the most confusing week of my life?”
Nancy’s face takes a heaping spoonful of accusation, mixes it in with two cups of confusion, and turns on a blender.
“I thought you said you filled him in,” she says.
“We did!” Robin says. “Most of it. Not all of it…seemed…relevant?”
“It’s really not relevant,” Steve says, as Nancy continues to give Robin the most befuddled look that Eddie’s ever seen on a person’s face. “It’s not like it lets me like. Do anything helpful.”
“Right,” Nancy says slowly. “But did you never consider that maybe, just maybe, you need all your allies to know how important it is to keep you alive?”
“I don’t think Eddie’s just gonna let me die—”
“Yeah, I jumped in the lake the same as the rest of you,” Eddie says indignantly. “I’m not letting any of you—”
“It’s more important than that,” Nancy says. “No offense Steve, we all…we all care about you, you know that, but it’s more important than not letting Steve die. If he goes down, it’d be…”
She trails off, biting her lip.
“Catastrophic,” Steve says. His voice is soft. Quiet. A little to the left of human. A little to the left of Steve.
“That’s one word for it,” Robin says. She slips her hand into Steve’s, leaning closer to him. Her expression is fierce, guard-dog-like. Eddie’s not even sure why they’re discussing the possibility of Steve dying, with her around. “Apocalyptic is another one.”
“...why?”
Steve sighs. Tilts his head back and watches the shadows stream down from the trees.
“If I tell you, you’re gonna freak out,” he says. “And probably have…some variety of crisis. That’s what everyone else has done so far.”
“Not me!” Robin says brightly.
“Not you,” Steve says, squeezing her hand. “But you’re…a rare exception.”
“I’m already freaking out,” Eddie says. “And having a crisis. About ten crises actually. I think you letting me in on why the shadows are hugging you would actually help alleviate some of the crises.”
“I don’t think—”
“C’mon, just tell me.”
And Steve—
Steve frowns-and-smiles-and-laughs-and-screams and his head is tilting down and tilting up and breaking into a thousand pieces of spewed-out brain matter and his eyes are staring-staring-staring-staring-staring and Eddie is roadkill, and he is a chopped down tree, and he is screaming as a man digs a knife into his chest, and his limbs are snapping, and he is closing his eyes at the end of a long, long book and falling asleep.
And he is dead.
“Do you really need me to tell you?” Death asks.
Eddie swallows. Blinks. His face is wet. A tendril of shadow braids itself across Death’s head.
“No,” he whispers.
“Good,” Death says.
And then something in its face flickers and it’s just Steve, standing in a tangled writhe of shadows.
“Okay, now you cannot have a mental breakdown in the middle of a hell dimension, dude,” he says, holding his hands up. “You good?”
There’s blood in his mouth, and poison, and a delicious meal, and a loved one’s kiss. He swallows it all and nods.
“M’good,” he rasps.
“Cool,” Steve says. He shifts from foot to foot, looking immensely awkward. “I’m just…Nance, d’you wanna fill him in on the rest?”
Nancy nods. Her small hand comes up to rest on Eddie’s shoulder as Steve and Robin start walking again. She gives them a few paces to put some distance between them before she starts gently pushing him forward.
“You okay?” she asks. “Genuinely. I know it’s…it’s a lot. The first time he showed me, I just started sobbing.”
“Honestly? I’m just focusing on the fact that I gave Death my vest. And that I’ve watched him shove french fries up his nose to make a bunch of jocks laugh. That’s…that’s kinda holding back the…”
“The whole ‘just met Death’ breakdown?”
“Yeah. Fuck. Fuck. How is he…how is he a person? How is he Steve?”
Nancy sighs. She kicks at a twig, sending it skittering off into the bushes.
“He’s not,” she says. “Not…fully. He’s— it’s, really, it’s more of a…force or a spirit than an actual person—it’s not actually Steve. But it’s bound to him. Best we can tell, best Steve can tell from its emotions and memories, something tried to—to kill it, back in ‘79.”
“Something tried to kill Death?”
“Mmhmm. And it…it failed, but Death was badly weakened, barely holding on, so it just reached out and…”
She gestures at Steve where he’s swaying into Robin’s side, laughing loudly at something she’s saying to him. The shadows are curling around her shoulders too, now, welcoming her into their orbit. She doesn’t flinch away.
“He was the nearest living thing,” Nancy says. “So it just…bound itself to him. Used him as life support.”
“And now it can’t unbind itself?”
“It’s still too weak,” Nancy says. “It’s regaining strength, but slowly. If it let go of Steve it would just…dissipate. And I don’t think I need to tell you how fucked we would all be if Death didn’t exist.”
He thinks of Chrissy, of her broken-legs-broken-arms-broken-neck-broken-eyes. And God, it was an awful way to die. But he thinks it would be an awfuller thing to lie like that for minutes-hours-days-years- forever with no escape.
He thinks of drowned sailors, trapped at the bottom of the ocean with lungs full of water. He thinks of terminal cancer patients, bodies completely taken over by the disease with no hope of cure or escape. He thinks of smashed-flat roadkill.
“You don’t,” he says with a shudder. “But if it’s so…if it’s dependent on Steve for survival, then what happens if Steve…”
“Like we said,” Nancy says, eyes grim. “Catastrophe. Apocalypse.”
“So why… fuck, why is he still here? Why the fuck is he in this town and not wrapped up in bubble wrap on a beach somewhere, waiting for his little parasitic cosmic entity to grow up big and strong?”
Nancy snorts. Gestures around herself with the flashlight.
“Because we’d still be here,” she says. “And before he was Death, he was Steve.”
In front of them, the shadows close over Robin and Steve fully, leaving two gray outlines walking through the trees hand-in-hand.
From this angle, it almost looks like armor.