Chapter One: The Monster's Belly.
Pairing: Steddie, Steve Harrington x Vampire!Eddie Munson
Summary: Months after Eddie Munson’s death, Steve Harrington still can’t make peace with the empty casket buried beneath the grass. On a hot night in June, Steve finds himself at Hawkin’s cemetery with scraped up knuckles and the sickening, bruising punch of grief burning within him. Eddie is dead. Steve knows that. He spent months trying not to imagine what was left of Eddie in the Upside Down. But when Steve is attacked by a familiar monster, he must grapple with the realization that some things refuse to stay buried.
Warnings: 18+ MDNI, post-S4 in the gap between S5, eventual sexual content (none in this chapter), yearning, bittersweet longing, grief, angst, slow burn romance, mentions of canon character death, blood & minor gore, mentions of alcohol, Steve briefly recalls his father slapping him as a child, Steve’s dad cheating mention, neglect, single slur used from Tommy to Steve (not the F-slur), brief mention of vomit.
a/n: I love the idea of Gothic horror x slow burn romance, angsty Steddie and vampire!Eddie with a bit of an actual bat quality mixed in, so l decided to combine them. Reblogs and feedback always appreciated! Happy reading!
Steve watched his casket be lowered into the ground. He had comforted Dustin. He had felt the burning sting of tears in his eyes as he held them back, trying to be strong for his younger friend. He’d seen the sorrow in Wayne Munson’s eyes, the broken emptiness that came with losing the only family he had left. Eddie was dead. And he had sat through the service with a stiff back, knuckles white from gripping the wooden pew beneath his hands. He’d told himself to be a man, but Steve had gone home that evening of the funeral sick to his stomach, a churning feeling from low in his gut to the lump in his throat. He hadn’t let himself cry then; instead, he had drowned himself in the six-pack Eddie had left in his Beamer just hours before he was killed.
And yet, here he was at Eddie’s grave somewhere around midnight. So many months later. Three maybe? Steve didn’t know; the days mostly blurred together now. He felt defeated—and he knew it was a shared feeling among the entire party. It was a strange juxtaposition: they had won. They had killed Vecna, right? So, why did it feel like the other shoe had yet to drop?
Steve was familiar with that feeling. He’d felt it burning inside him his entire life, a gnawing, wilting thing that ate him alive. He’d first felt it when his dad had gotten a promotion around the time he’d turned ten.
Oh, what a win it had felt like then, when his father had taken Steve and his mother out to Enzo’s. When he’d announced that they were getting a pool. Steve had been so excited. Maybe this would be the thing that would bring his family closer—that would make his family feel like a real one.
That nagging feeling had bubbled up within him so easily then. And his intuition had been right. He had heard a noise downstairs late at night, sleepily stumbling down the stairs in his pajamas. He’d been the one to find his father kissing his receptionist on the couch. Leah Kelly, he had met her once before that at a Christmas party. That was the only time his father had ever struck him. Steve could remember it clearly when he closed his eyes; his father red in the face, vein throbbing in his forehead as he shouted at Steve for being out of bed. The sting of his father’s larger palm across his cheek, the spray of spit as he snapped at him about not telling his mother. It lived behind his eyelids still all these years later.
But Steve had told his mother. How could he not? Not that he understood what he’d seen then; he didn’t know until a couple of years later that his father had been screwing his receptionist. It wasn’t long after that that his mother began leaving him with a nanny, so she could join his father on his business trips. And Steve had hated his first nanny. Rebecca Jones; she invited her boyfriend over constantly, and they’d make out in the pool. Steve had a crush on her, but that had died too. The shoe had almost dropped so many times, after that: divorce lawyers, talks of custody, Steve watching his parents fight, and his mom filling her wine glass for the third time in an hour. But for a reason he didn’t understand, they were still together.
He had felt it far more often after that. When Nancy Wheeler left him for Jonathan Byers, getting stuck in the Russian elevator at Starcourt, Billy Hargrove’s arrival to Hawkins. Yet the most potent had been when he had kissed his former best friend, Tommy Hagan. It was mid-December 1980, right around winter break of freshman year, that Tommy had spent the night. Tommy had kissed him back only briefly in a mashing of lips, too wet with spit, before he jerked himself away, and a sort of fear and disgust had settled in his eyes. Steve knew that fear. He’d felt it the first time a boy had kissed him at baseball camp. The words Tommy had said lived in Steve’s head still, “that’s not what boys do, you pansy.”
Steve’s throat had felt thick the rest of the night, tears burning into his pillow long into the early hours of the morning. The lump had stayed in his throat for another week. He’d waited for the shoe to drop then with an anxiousness that almost gave him a hernia. And even though Tommy never told anyone, Steve wasn’t stupid enough to think that their friendship hadn’t changed after that.
But this was far more visceral a feeling than that had been.
The skin over Steve’s knuckles began to split and scrape as he punched the no-longer-fresh dirt. Blood trickled over his smudged skin as he shouted into the grass, keeling over as if he had been punched in the gut.
“You fucking bastard! God! You asshole! Shit, Eddie!” Steve grunted into the dirt, the most insulting words he could think of, as if that could offend the metalhead enough to rise from the grave. Steve had told Eddie not to be a hero—and what did he do? He took on a swarm of demobats. And for what? Nothing. Nothing, because once they’d gotten their stories straight, they’d found out Eleven had been fighting Vecna in Max’s mind at the same time. Had Eddie just waited—just gone through the gate with Dustin and held on a bit longer—he would still be alive. Or that’s what Steve had been telling himself in his anger.
Robin had told him it wasn’t that simple. And deep down, Steve knew that, but the writhing, ugly heads of grief pushed that logical side of him down. A Cerberus of his own making.
A sob escaped Steve’s puffy lips, new tear tracks staining his cheeks over old ones in the humidity of the night. It was miserable outside, even now, close to what was possibly midnight. Again, Steve wasn’t sure of anything other than the fact that he was miserable, too. But the heat, it was potent and suffocating. Like he had crawled into the mouth of a beast seeking solace, only to be chewed up by gnashing teeth and swallowed down into the monster's swollen belly where his anger lived. Steve had been stuck in that cycle, being digested and crapped out just to become food for it again.
“Fuck,” Steve sniffed, rocking back on his heels as he swiped his sleeve across his nose, smearing a disgusting mixture of tears and snot. A frustrated noise left his lips, and he tried again, ruining his sleeve in the process of cleaning up the mess from his face. It wasn’t the worst thing he had cleaned off of himself. The worst had been the mix of his and someone else’s vomit a couple of years ago. He’s gotten so drunk at one of Tina’s parties that he’d just fallen fac- first toward the toilet to empty the contents of his stomach.
Steve would take that nauseating realization over the reality of what he was feeling now, any day.
Steve tugged the bandana from his back pocket, wrapping it around his bleeding knuckles. It was Eddie’s. The sight of it made his bones ache. It wasn’t the one that he’d been wearing the night he had died—Steve hadn’t been able to bring himself to look at Eddie’s corpse or even touch him longer than it took to pry Dustin off of him. He’d snagged this one from the coffee table in the Munson trailer once they’d gone back through the gate.
Steve had been telling himself he hadn’t done it for any sentimental value; he’d just needed something to stop the bleeding the living vines in the Creel house had caused on the already scraped skin the Demobats tails had done damage to on his neck.
And of course, he had felt guilty about it at first, once he thought it over. Even more so when the trailer had collapsed into nothing after Hawkins split open. In the following days, he’d considered giving it back to Wayne Munson, having been volunteered by Dustin to help sift through the rubble against police warnings for anything salvageable. But the thought of handing him the equivalent of a bloodied rag felt too grossly symbolic of presenting him with his dead nephew. And so he had kept it.
Little good it was doing for Steve now, except reminding him that his knuckles burned.
Punching the ground had been yet another pointless thing he’d done tonight, like coming to the cemetery. Eddie’s body wasn’t beneath the dirt. It wasn’t inside the coffin, or even on this planet. Eddie’s corpse was somewhere else. It was rotting in the upside down, food for whatever creepy alternate dimension crawlies feasted on shit like that. Some sort of demo-bug with sharpened teeth and no face. It was ironic in a way that made Steve’s stomach twist; Eddie would find it to be the most metal thing ever. The stupid jerk would probably have the biggest shit-eating grin about being eaten piece by piece by tiny bug-like monsters in some other dimension. He’d make a reference about that stupid game he played—D&D or a metal band Steve didn't know.
Steve snorted, watching the blood drip down his fingers into the grass. “Pretty fuckin’ metal now, aren’t you, Eddie? You rotting jerk."
There was no answer back. Of course there wouldn’t be. Steve wasn’t sure why hope had bubbled in his chest that Eddie might answer. He was in the upside down, he had never come back. But if Vecna, the mindflayer and all the creepy creatures of the upside down could be real, then why couldn't Eddie finding some way to respond be real? Steve needed answers. He couldn’t place the feeling growing within him, the last time he’d seen Eddie alive. It was something he wished he could have come to understand. Like he’d seen Eddie for the first time again. He remembered how he felt when he first spoke to Nancy—it was like that in a way. But what was the difference? He’d only really known Eddie a few days—so why did it feel deeper than that? He would never know, now. And it wasn’t fair, Steve let the words go off in his head like firecrackers; it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair.
Steve was broken out of his state of wallowing in his own self-pity by a sudden, very slight change in the air. It was no more noticeable than a shift in the atmosphere. He didn’t understand what it was at first. He had only ever felt it a handful of times. The first time he’d faced a demogorgon. Protecting the kids at the junkyard. Going into the upside down for the first time. Steve's heart sank. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. Goosebumps raised the skin on Steve’s arms, tiny dots that he barely spared a glance. The world seemed to slow as he felt eyes on him, and then a rustling in the trees ahead of him—or, wait—no.
It seemed to be coming from all sides now. Quick-moving, darting shadows and lithe movement, despite the heaviness of the crunching leaves.
Steve’s heart raced. A bead of sweat ran the length of his forehead, down his temple to drop onto his jeans. Steve pictured a demogorgon, its face opening wide, and it’s many rows of teeth covered in thick, slimy saliva.
He imagined it as the last thing he ever saw.
A beat of silence passed.
Maybe it was divine intervention or a supernatural-like intuition, but Steve bolted upright and threw himself to the side just in time for a dark mass to crash into a nearby headstone. Something in the backseat of his head had told him to move, even when he felt his body was too sluggish to go. Whatever it was, it was gone quicker than Steve’s eyes could track. He rolled to his feet, adrenaline pumping, but not enough to ease the ache he felt from hitting the ground. His blood was pumping beneath his skin, pulse pounding in his ears.
“Shit,” Steve panted, looking around for something to injure the monster. But there was nothing around him but the gray rock of tombstones he didn’t think he could lift.
He should be running. Heading straight to his Beamer parked just beyond the row of trees—but what if this thing went after Dustin? Or Robin, Nancy—anyone else? He couldn’t let it hurt his friends. He had to stay and fight, even if it killed him.
“W-What the… what—“ the fuck. What the hell was happening? Could it be a demobat that hitched a ride over from the upside down? Steve’s mind raced. He was certain it was far too big to be a demobat. The shadow he’d seen had been almost the same size as he was.
No, no, no. Think Harrington. Mrs. O’Donnell had said in freshman year science that shadows could make things look bigger. Surely that was what this was? Maybe it hadn’t been anything more than a large bird.
But Steve was wrong, as usual. He learned that the hard way when something massive and heavy crashed into his side and sent him careening over Eddie’s headstone, thrown halfway across the nearby plots. Steve felt headstones breaking against his back and whatever had a hold of him, the gnashing of its teeth the only sound against empty air as they tried to sink into his throat.
“Fuck!” Steve shouted as the creature had successfully stopped them rolling and gotten the upper hand, pinning him down against the dirt. Steve’s breath caught in his throat. So, this was how he was going to die? After everything he’d been through? A small part of him felt resigned to his fate. Until a sliver of moonlight caught the face of his attacker. A mess of curly hair, inky black under the night sky. Large, doe eyes resigned to the same darkness. Teeth, sharp and glistening. Two sets of fangs.
No. It couldn’t be. His face was all wrong.
Steve’s brain was surely showing him what he wanted to see. Like those nut jobs who thought Jesus Christ was showing his face in their coffee. Eddie was no Jesus, but whatever thing wore his face, whether real or imaginary, had sharp, wet teeth heading straight for Steve’s neck to tear out his throat. Steve’s eyes squeezed shut. He felt the hot breath and cool fangs against his skin… but no bite—no gurgle of blood drowning him—ever came.
Steve opened his eyes to find… nothing. He let out a shaky breath and clambered up onto his hands against a headstone. Had it not been for the path of destruction ahead of him, Steve would have thought he’d made it all up. He sighed and ran a shaky hand through his hair. Something told him that he wasn’t alone still, and he forced himself to make a run for his Beemer, looking over his shoulder the entire time. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. What the hell had that thing been? Why had it looked so much like Eddie, yet so unlike him at the same time?
And why didn’t it kill him?
Chapter Two: Heaven and Hellfire, coming next week!
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