Bark At The Moon
Part 35 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19 Part 20 Part 21 Part 22 Part 23 Part 24 Part 25 Part 26 Part 27 Part 28 Part 29 Part 30 Part 31 Part 32 Part 33 Part 34 Part 36 Ao3
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2160 words
The thing with Steve is that Eddie doesn’t exactly know how to be around him anymore. He knew how to with Ozzy, and he knew how to with Steve before he figured it all out. But now- he doesn’t know how to combine them, or even if he could. There are moments though where he forgets, moments where the rage that has simmered into distant understanding falls away altogether and Steve is once again just Steve. Where Eddie nearly falls into him after invading his personal space, crutches tripping together as Steve gives him either a fond laugh or a soft smile. Where Steve’s hands are warm against his skin, steadying, mesmerizing, everything, but then Eddie sees those brown eyes under swooping honey-brown hair, and it all comes crashing back down. And Steve is no longer just Steve, and Eddie can’t breathe.
Steve on the other hand seems to have it all figured out.
In the worst possible way.
He’s distant but present, quiet but here. He barely talks to Eddie unprompted, but he still sleeps on the couch behind Eddie’s mattress every single night, the very way he’s done since Eddie first asked him to stay all those nightmares ago.
He tells Eddie almost anything he asks, everything but what he really wants to know.
“Why can’t I see him?” Unanswered.
“How is Hopper alive?” He was taken by the Russians from Starcoart and held prisoner until Mrs. Byers and some guy named Murray went to get him.
“Why did you never tell me?” Nothing.
“When will I be able to see the kids again?” Dustin will be over three o-clock on Saturday.
“Was it something I did?” Steve’s face twists and he leaves the room.
“When will I be able to leave?” Hopper said he’d let us know. Soon he said.
It’s infuriating, how little he gives and how much he refuses to.
Eddie doesn’t really think it’s all that fair. He still doesn’t even as Saturday comes along and the hour's hand on the clock inches towards three and Steve can only stare at him as he says so.
“Eddie…” Steve mumbles weakly, his eyes closing as his face pinches up. “I-”
“I know, okay? I fucking know!” Eddie throws his hands up, arms now able to stretch to their full length. He’s been here for two months now. He’s been practically ignored for two fucking months now. At least where it matters. “I know, I just don’t understand.” His voice cracks.
Steve flinches slightly.
“Why don’t you trust me anymore?” It comes out small, exactly how Eddie feels from where he sits on the couch, looking up at Steve standing in front of him.
“I do.” Steve sucks in a whistle of sharp air through his teeth, his hands shake. Eddie focuses on that rather than his face. “It’s not- Eddie, I’m-”
Eddie’s eyes begin to water and he’s just not having that. “Cut the bullshit! Just- you know what? It doesn’t matter. It’s fine.” He grabs his crutch, pushing up and shouldering past Steve who calls after him in a wobbled voice. Just his name, always just his name. “It’s- I get it. I fucking- I won’t ask anymore.”
It’s fine.
Dustin shows up ten minutes after three and Steve leaves two minutes after that.
It’s the first time they’ve been apart since the hospital and Eddie hates it. Though he supposes it’s better than being what they are now around Dustin who will no doubt call them out on it. Them and all of their bullshit.
Besides, Steve said he was going to go see Max.
And as much as he pretends to, he doesn’t hate Steve enough to prevent him from doing that.
He doesn’t hate him at all. His traitorous mind whispers to him beneath his cranium
“Eddie?” Dustin pops into Eddie’s peripherals, poking at his arm. His scars are covered by one of Steve’s sweaters- the one he forgot when he had run out the house. The one that Eddie now mindlessly plays with as he stares down at the fabric. “Eddie- EddieEddieEddie-Eddie?”
“What?” Eddie huffs, shoving the kid away as his hat nearly takes out one of Eddie’s eyes. “I’m trying to watch a movie here.”
“Bull!” Dustin squawks, poking at Eddie again- only this time with a vengeance. “Bet you couldn’t even tell me what's happened in the past half hour.”
“Bull you! I could!” Eddie pushes Dustin’s face away- the kid’s cheeks squishing up as he falls backwards, only this time fighting a smile at the hmph noise the other dramatically makes in response. Dustin raises an eyebrow at him, expectant. “I just don’t want to.”
“Uh-huh.” Dustin rolls his eyes before attacking Eddie with a look. “And this isn’t at all because Steve left looking like a kicked puppy earlier?”
Eddie chooses to ignore him, pointedly giving the television screen playing the movie he was in fact too busy moping to pay attention to now all of it. Dustin gives a great big sigh next to him, plopping against the couch cushions in defeat.
“The two of you are impossible.”
The movie, at least from what Eddie saw, was only slightly bad. Bad in the way some horror movies are just bound to be, but he didn’t hate it. He actually really liked it- especially once Dustin finally pulled Eddie from his dumb Steve thoughts and back onto the fact that this is the first time he’s been able to hang out with his favorite sheep in weeks.
“Oh!” Dustin sits straight up from where he was giving a dramatic reading of one of Steve’s old comics (Dustin had found them in the mysterious vast-land of Steve’s room that Eddie has still yet to venture into) and staring straight into Eddie’s soul as he delivers the information that’s been keeping Eddie awake at night since his coma. “I ran into Gareth yesterday. At the school. He asked about you.”
Eddie chokes around his drink. “Gareth- did- he went to the school? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine, I saw him before any of the crazies did.” Dustin’s eyes go wide at the thought before he shudders.
But Eddie ignores it, sitting fully upright now. “What’d he say? What’d you say?”
“Told him not to be an idiot.” Dustin flips the page of the comic book.
“Dustin.”
Dustin cringes at Eddie’s use of the DM voice. “I didn’t really… respond to anything he asked about you and I think he took that as an answer in itself, but-”
“Does he think that I'm dead?”
“What!?” Dustin’s face falls, the same way it always does when anything even remotely reminds him of the bats. “No! He just thinks you’re laying low- which- he’s not wrong.”
“What about the others? Did he say anything about them? Jeff? Freak?”
“I think they’re all staying together until the witch hunt is done.” Dustin plays with the paper’s edge nervously. “I wish I could tell them you’re okay.”
Eddie closes his eyes, hands fisting the fabric of Steve’s sweater as the familiar sensation of miss worms its way through him once more. “Yeah. Me too.”
Later, Eddie wakes up to the sound of the front door slamming shut.
That, and the sound of sobbing.
“Wha-” He rubs at his eyes as he sits up from where he had passed out on the couch after Dustin had left, Steve’s blanket wrapped around his knees as he tries to blink away the splotches in his vision. “Steve?”
Choking, a thud.
“Steve?” Eddie snatches up his crutches from where they fallen, nearly falling himself as he jerks into a stand. The blanket drops to the floor. He doesn’t falter with it, ignores it entirely as he rushes to where he knows Steve to be.
He does, however, freeze at the sight.
Eddie thinks he can count all the times he has known Steve to cry on one hand, knows and hates that he has been the cause for most if not all. But this- this isn’t just crying it’s-
Eddie can feel his own strangled breath fall from his lips as he pushes away the crutches in order to kneel in front of the man now hiding behind wet honey-brown hair with his hands around his neck and mouth. Distantly, Eddie can hear the sound of rain and the thuds of his aid on the floor, but he doesn’t care. Steve doesn’t seem to see him, doesn’t seem to notice anything as Eddie says his name again with more urgency.
Steve’s entire body is trembling, shaking- quaking with his grief.
It’s the worst thing Eddie has ever seen.
He acts without thinking, heart hammering in his throat as though it itself is desperate to leap out to Steve’s aid. With one hand he grabs ahold of Steve’s arm, with the other the side of Steve’s face. He feels cold under his touch. “Hey- hey, look at me. It’s okay, everything’s okay- fuck-”
Steve doesn’t process the touch at first but when he does he reacts. Flinching backwards hard enough to slam his head against the door as he tries to flee. To flee from the touch, from Eddie.
He’s crying harder now, but Eddie doesn’t let up. Not now that he sees the hand around Steve’s neck has claws covered in the blood that drips from his pulse. Not now that Eddie can see that the wet hairs on Steve’s arms are more than what he has become so used to seeing.
Call him selfish for it. He doesn’t care.
This is the closest thing to Ozzy that Steve has given yet.
“I need you to try and breathe.” Eddie whispers, feeling almost suspended as he reaches out to Steve’s face once more, thumbs wiping away the mix of rainwater and tears. “Can you do that? Can you just try and breathe for me?”
Steve’s deep brown eyes stare into his own, rimmed red but still so beautiful as his ragged breaths force themselves into something calmer, something even.
“That’s it, Stevie. Just like that, in and out, nice and slow.” Eddie moves forward a bit, glad that he can feel the skin beneath his fingers begin to warm slightly. Steve makes another choking noise and Eddie shushes him, one hand falling from Steve’s face to trail around the back of his neck and into his hair. “You’re doing so good for me.”
It’s just as soft as Ozzy’s.
Steve leans his face into his palm, the sound of his inhale wet with snot. Surprisingly, Eddie doesn’t care- not now that Steve’s hands are coming up to hold him back, not now that the touch blooms magic in its wake.
Those sharp, bloodied claws dance over the skin of his wrist as though a feather. As gentle as silk. Eddie’s alive with it.
“Fuck.” Steve breathes out, eyes closed as his hands trail up Eddie’s arms and down his back- bunching up his own sweater over Eddie’s shoulders in the action of just touching, just feeling. “Eddie.”
Eddie scratches at Steve’s scalp, watching with a bit of star-strucked awe as Steve sags into it. He feels breathless himself, like a willing puppet as Steve’s hands drag him closer and closer.
Until their foreheads press together and their noses brush without flinch. It’s only here that Steve seems to finally become truly calm. Become whole.
“Steve?”
“I couldn’t save her.” Steve whispers, eyes still closed as he just breathes. Breathes Eddie in. Like he’s the most important thing in the world. Eddie shudders with it. “I couldn’t- I-"
“Steve.”
“I almost had him, Eddie. My teeth were around his throat but- but then I heard Dustin and-"
Eddie can’t move, not as the implications slowly begin to sink in.
“You would have died if I hadn’t let him go.”
Those claws find his shoulders now, the pressure slightly sharp as Steve trembles beneath Eddie’s fingers. His breath against Eddie’s face is warm. It’s the only thing keeping Eddie from wanting to run. Only thing making him want to stay.
“I had to choose, I couldn’t- I couldn't save you both. And, God Eddie, she looked so small.”
Eddie can feel the warmth of tears against his skin as Steve begins to cry again, calmly this time. Solemn.
“You have to know that I trust you.”
“Steve.”
“I’ve never trusted anyone more than you, Eddie, you are- fuck, Eds- I lo-”
But Eddie never does hear what comes next, is only left waiting upon the tightrope that is them as Steve shuts his mouth with a loud clack of teeth.
“I’m sorry.” Eddie whispers, using the hold he has in Steve’s hair to angle them into a hug, Steve’s tears now pressed into his neck. He doesn’t know what else to do.
Steve grips him back so hard it hurts. “It’s all my fault.”
“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t know what else to say.
“I killed her.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Part 36
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