63 + steddie for the writing prompts ✨🫶🏽💗
Oh the grotesquerie the two of you have wrought by submitting answers to this writing prompt, more at the borrom.
“You’ll be right here? In this spot? You listening to me, Harrington? Because if you get…distracted or wander off to chase co-eds around the old stomping grounds and I get back here to find my get away vehicle gone, my vengeance will be swift and terrible.” Eddie asks with a tremor in his hand on the handle that cranks the passenger window up and down in Steve’s old new truck.
He kept trying to turn that tremor into a beat on the drive over, something fast and loose with two hands on the already cracked dash, but it’s like he can’t catch it all the way. Like it dies out before anything real can come of it. Eddie has a lot of half songs right now, things Steve hears him hum that never reach words.
He’s only picked up the guitar when he’s alone, and Steve only knows that because he’s noticed how it’ll be left in new places when he comes to visit.
Eddie doesn’t sound very swift or terrible but Steve, because he’s a good friend, doesn’t comment.
He looks like he didn’t sleep a wink last night, but he was standing out by his mailbox even though Steve’s driven up to the porch to collect him eight out of ten times. He smelled like freshly mown grass from across the street when he’d climbed into Steve’s new old truck, which meant he’d probably been out there glaring into the middle distance for a hot minute.
The window’s as tightly shut as it can be, looking like the glass would pop out if you shoved it a bit too hard. But Eddie’s still refusing to let go of the handle, looking out of it like he’s standing in an open doorway.
Like he’s stranded, hanging out in the open air, and just waiting for someone to see him.
Like if the handle didn’t stop where there was nowhere else to go he’d just keep cranking and cranking to have something to do with his nervous hands.
Eddie has asked him a similar question, given him a similar instructions on where to park his new old truck (the Beemer finally gave up the ghost at the end of April and Steve’s on his first monthly payment for the new truck that’s squashed him and Eddie up in the front seat with his cane jutting out of the back) in triplicate by now because it took a minute to get out here from the sticks.
Steve has gained a new appreciation not just for Jonathan Byers’ piece of shit car, but also for how well-scheduled he had to have be to not end up late to school everyday like Steve would have most definitely been if he’d lived all the way out here.
Steve gets to park in the handicapped spot in front of the administrative building because Wayne’s let him borrow the tag to hand from his rearview (Eddie had it in his pocket but shoved it in the glove-box like he didn’t want to remember that it was there) because Eddie may be up and about but he still can’t handle too many long distances after having his body cracked open and stapled back together after his insides got blended by bats.
Steve’s to keep the truck running the whole way (not just using the battery to tune into your God-awful radio stations, Eddie had said) in case an unaccounted for morning janitor or some kid who’s here to weasel some points into their finals tries to murder Eddie and they have to make a run for it.
In theory only teachers should be here, locked in their rooms with piles of papers to grade by the end of the week. Needless to say, Eddie Munson didn’t come back to school after Spring Break. He was in the hospital, recovering from wounds that he had apparently sustained battling the serial killer who’d used him as a scapegoat, but even when he could have come back he’d been politely told that maybe it would be a good idea to just sit the rest of the year out. They’d wave his fourth quarter grades and the finals, and just count his third quarter ones which had been frozen at barely passing. Mid-army crawl.
He hadn’t walked across the stage, but Eddie Munson was a high school graduate in the eye of the state. Wayne might not have gotten an invitation, and they might not have called his name at the ceremony, but they had his diploma. All he had to do was come and get it.
That’s what Miss Valentine the administrative assistant said when Wayne had called about all this, about the last thing he needs to hand over to the government to complete his leap into a new identity.
The government’s promised remedial courses if Eddie’s not ready for college, or a new name in a town of their choice if he was tired of school, and all Eddie has to do is hand over every document that remained with his name on it.
His driver’s license (which had been in his wallet in his pants pocket the whole time), a flyer touting him as the frontman for Corroded Coffin (which had been hidden away in his van), a fifth grade report card (all A’s, one of a kind, taped up in Wayne’s locker at the plant), and this diploma (which had to be retrieved by somebody in the family instead of a government weirdo whose presence would be scrutinized like nobody’s business).
Apparently everything else (participation certificates for talent shows, name tags from club fairs, and his social security card) had gone down with the ship and was smoldering in another dimension, which at least meant that wrapping up this disaster was easy for the shadow government. They got everything they wanted and the list wasn’t even too long.
All they wanted was for Eddie Munson to tie every tube of Hawkins's that ever fed him life or shit tight tight. They wanted him to make a clean break of it.
To show how he took his licks and maybe committed murder in the public eye but was thoroughly cleared on paper if anybody came around asking. He just needed all of his documents, all traces of his life, burned so thoroughly that nobody could find him out when he leapt into the rushing rapids of the rest of the world. Never to be seen again.
Eddie’s not ready for leaping though, if you ask him (which Steve has with his heart in his throat) even though he wants it so bad he’s practically drooling. Even though he’s been penned up with his uncle in a rental house out near the old Byers place, near the woods where people have stopped going and started warning their kids away from.
The most social interaction he gets anymore is grocery drop-offs and getting shuttled to the appointments he couldn’t skip in preparing for a new life. Being checked out like Steve to make sure bat saliva didn’t carry mind-controlling parasites. Heading to a dentist out of town to get a cracked tooth from hitting pavement hard fixed on government money. Collecting the fragments of his existence. So far Steve’s volunteered to do the driving for a lot of these outings, like he’s trying to cash in as much time with Eddie as he possibly can.
Eddie hasn’t said when he’ll leave. He hardly talks about it at all, actually. It’s Wayne who tells Steve not yet in a voice that says he’s only telling Steve this because he dragged his nephew half-dead out of another dimension and that’s the only thing that could have him chip away at his nephew’s silence.
He’s still adjusting, Wayne says, and Steve doesn’t pry if it’s about the pain or the thought of what came next after you survived the end of the world. Either way Steve, with his headaches and the way he’d almost thrown up the first time he’d tried to fill out a college application, kinda got it.
But Eddie wants the diploma in his hand, and he wants it now, and he wants to get it on his own. It was a hassle just to convince him to let Steve drive instead of just hot-wiring the van himself because Wayne’s hidden the keys and now it’s a hassle with a set of very specific instructions. In triplicate, having turned off the radio in the middle of Peter Gabriel wanting to be your sledge-hammer just when Steve was starting to groove with it.
Steve is not to come into the school with Eddie (even though he argued this would ensure no murder attempts) because right now Eddie does this thing with his life where he designates parts of it as challenges to be overcome on his own two feet. Like some kind of alligator clamping its jaws shut on a carcass, the shit you’d need to pry loose and probably get holes in your arms for your troubles. Eddie’s determination was the shit that broke bones before he’d let go.
Steve is only to leave the car, run in and save the day if he hears the sounds of a scuffle that Eddie might not be winning. He isn’t to come in too early because Eddie’s pride is tender and honestly he’d love to win a fight right now.
Steve knows all this.
He’s nodded along twice before, played thoughtful driver, but now he’s starting to get pissed.
Because they’re parked, Steve’s got it, but Eddie’s still looking at Steve and talking at Steve in this way people do sometimes.
Like he’s a dog with something already in his mouth or seven years old and likely to forget that you can’t microwave a bag of popcorn for longer than four minutes or it’ll start to smoke.
He’s only forgotten two bags of popcorn and almost started some fires, but he was seven the first time and coming down from a concussion the second so he wished Robin would stop telling people about it.
And he has never put anything in his mouth that he didn’t fully intend to be there.
But still there’s that look, like Eddie thinks Steve’ll forget and wander off to skirt-chase when this clearly is a thing and Steve knows how Eddie can get about things.
“Dude, I’ve got it. No moving from this spot, no turning Gretchen off, no intervening unless your ass is sounding thoroughly stomped. You’re in, you’re out. Easy.”
Steve pulls down his sun visor to check his hair, which he does to keep himself from saying something shitty. It’s a habit he developed a while back, like a smoker learning to quit. Something else to replace the physical sensation of his mouth opening and stupid shit pouring out. The relief, the dark burn of getting some of the attention off of him.
Instead he’s just got good hair.
He doesn’t know exactly what he’d say, maybe something about not having to be here because it’s true that he didn’t have to beg to swap shifts with Daisy the newly graduated hire and lose his unaffected sheen with the youths to shuttle Eddie to his crucible (Eddie’s word, Steve’s not entirely sure how Arthur Miller fits in here he didn’t read more than the first act of that shit), but he can tell it would be mean.
And sometimes Eddie wants him to be mean, to show up when he’s stuck on the couch and call him names until he’s up in Steve’s face. To snip at certain spots so he can snap back in a way that would make Henderson look wounded or Robin go white-lipped but Steve just gives as good as he gets.
But this isn’t one of those times. This is a time where Steve thinks that way way down, in spite of what he says, Eddie wants Steve to be here. That he wants Steve at his back, keeping the truck running, because maybe the reason he’s been repeating his instructions for the third time is he can’t make himself get out of the car.
“Gretchen’s awful,” Eddie says, finally tearing his gaze away from scanning the empty parking lot with a heavy certainty that somebody with a baseball bat or Molotov was going to pop up calling his name from behind a bush. Steve looks away from the mirror, leaving it down with the little light still glowing, to meet him halfway.
“Oh, come on. You’ve said that about all my name choices.”
“Yeah, because I have to save myself and the rest of our friends from associating with a guy who names his truck Stacy.” Eddie’s face has gone sour like he’s remembering a bad taste. It’s the exact same face he’d made when Steve watched him chug expired milk straight from the carton and the face he’d made when Steve had first introduced him and Gretchen (then Stacy).
“Okay, so maybe she’s not a Stacy–.”
“And she’s not a Lucy, a Diana, a Megan, a Lauren, a Frida, or a Whitney.” Eddie’s hands don’t tremble as he ticks the names off on his fingers, or as he sweeps his arms about like a king gesturing to a bounty of land. “Just look at her, Steve. Look at this truck and figure out a name that doesn’t come from the back of a Mattel box. She’s a woman, not a girl.”
Steve has, obviously, had this lecture before and is, honestly, more than a little offended. He always is.
“I still stand by Frida but any of those would be better than Moon Child or Eowyn, or any of your other weird ass selections and you know it.”
“Your uncultured ass would consider itself lucky to be ferried about by a shield-maiden of Rohan and you know it,” Eddie says tartly and Steve knows he’s being bated to ask what a shield-maiden is because yeah it does sound kind of hot, but instead of taking a bite Steve lets the silence stretch a bit like the languid pulling taffy.
He watches Eddie deflate a little when the momentum suddenly goes flat.
“You know the longer we wait,” Steve finally says, “the more likely it is that somebody will show up.” He folds up the mirror without looking, exposing the whole of the almost empty parking lot like the sudden swell of being in the middle of the ocean.
Eddie turns back to the window like he doesn’t want to look at Steve, like he’s checking that it’s still just them and Miss Valentine’s station-wagon put in park (the other teacher cars loom from their respective parking lots).
It is, and Steve doesn’t think anybody else has much reason to be here.
“I know,” Eddie says like he’s looking away from a needle. Like he wishes he was already moving, already back in the car. Like he can already feel the jolt of each step to the double-doors.
A part of Steve wants to snidely goad Eddie with the promise of Dairy Queen from a town over (he’s already taken off work, might as well make a day of it) while another part wants to take his hand and let Eddie lean on him instead of the cane. That part wants to walk every step of the way with Eddie and feel the pads of his fingertips, to hold his hair back if he wanted and trace the nape of his neck. To bend his body down and let Eddie walk on his back, to make a kinder road the only way he could think of. To tell him you did so much good that you deserve more than a piece of paper.
But those two parts are eternally locked in a stalemate in Steve’s gut, so he just closes his mouth and sits there with Eddie. Lets Eddie look and look out the window for a while longer.
“Promise you’ll be here when I get out?” At this Eddie doesn’t look at him and Steve doesn’t blame the guy. His voice is small, like a hand hooking in the back of your shirt that begged you not to turn around as much as it said not to go. His face is hidden by the drape of his hair and Steve wants to part, to tuck the closest side behind Eddie’s ear, more than he’s wanted a lot of things.
“Cross my heart and hope to die,” Steve says easily, keeping both hands on the wheel and not reaching out.
Eddie nods once. Twice. Three times. Triplicate. He takes a breath and holds the swell of it in his chest.
Then he flings his door open and reaches back for his cane.
He almost dings Steve in the forehead in his sudden haste to get out the door, to extricate the cane from the little space of the second row of seats that could really only fit one person comfortably and not lose momentum, before he starts walking.
But when he looks back, just before taking his first step, it isn’t much of an apology. It’s an acknowledgement, a thanks, and a tribute.
Then he starts walking, and the click of his cane and the scuff of his steps off the asphalt is like the laying of a bricks. The building of the road that would take him out of here.
Officially welcome to i love you you dope, my Julie & Julia style magnum opus fever dream that I've decided is great on Christmas break but will probably kill me by February.
I will be answering all of p0ck3tf0x's 100 Ways to Say I Love You prompts, one a day style, until they're done. Here's the prompt list:
“Pull over. Let me drive for awhile.” “It reminded me of you.” “No, no, it’s my treat.” “Come here. Let me fix it.” “I’ll walk you hom
And here's an A03 link to this fic and where you can also see the collection and follow one woman's descent into madness:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Get ready squad it's gonna be a hell of a ride.
@p0ck3tf0x I hope this is okay, your list is amazing!
