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hitlikehammers · 1 day

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roll for time-for-sex-in-the-beemer

Because Steve is right there to indulge Eddie in a backseat quickie indulge Eddie in a second pre-campaign-launch quickie help Eddie get his DM groove back, right?

or: Eddie didn't think 'happy' was in the cards for people like him. (Spoiler alert: he was wrong.)

✨CW: explicit content / NSFW✨

I Could Be Your Nurse (or something)

Or: Five Times Eddie Has To Ask For Help, Plus One Time He Doesn’t Need It Anymore (but asks anyway) ✨ for @penny00dreadful 💜

<<< four: play 🎶

👑 🐍 five: climb 💦 🎲

It actually was kinda weird, the first time Eddie thought about it; weird in the best possible way but nonetheless weird: how just grinding dicks—not even unzipped, just through the denim—blows every other sexual, or hell, even not-quite-sexual-mostly-just-sensual encounter Eddie’s ever had before March: blows it out of the water. Bar none; no contest.

Like, he’d always basically categorized sex as increasing in both pleasure and quality-of-end-product as the clothes came off. Not that he had a wealth of experience, especially not in places or circumstances where there was much opportunity for clothes to come off so much as shoved just out of the way and tugged back up before the chance of sticking a little to the inside of your own fly was entirely off the table but like, he read a lot. He had a stash of mags under his bed like any other guy. And he listened to gossip, of course he did; there had to be some upside to being one of two polar opposites in high school: the center of attention, or part of the furniture.

But like, there was a reason porn wasn’t done clothed.

So, or else he figures: what makes the reality of this—back of the Beemer, panting enough to steam the windows, Steve’s palm braces on Eddie’s chest and that’s like, kinda how they always end up, no matter the place or position, one hand on a chest not like Eddie’s previous partners, yanking him from the hips, but more like bracing, balancing more than just their weight, more than just bodies, this unspoken intimacy where when it’s Steve’s hand on Eddie’s chest he’s keep Eddie steady so he can fucking soar, and Steve just wants to feel it as it happens, Steve just lights up and comes alive in whole new ways like it’s a privilege and what the fuck, y’know, but it’s that and then second, except how could it ever be considered second, but it’s secondary how Steve uses that hand as leverage to grind them just right, the lengths of them caught deliberate, a planned sort of taunting in how they’re both wholly dressed, not even a top button popped and Jesus fuck is is everything—but Eddie figures that this, and so much else, is wholly believable as more and better and bigger and right beyond anything he’s ever known before this, and them, even without a stitch of clothing removed—it boils down to the singular fact of his boyfriend, the love of his fucking life, Steve goddamn Harrington, who rewrites every rule there could ever be.

“Not gonna be able to hold on if you keep going, babe,” Eddie keens, cants up so the perfectly-painful strain of his cock presses into where he knows the vein of Steve’s own dick throbs in those sinful goddamn jeans, even before Steve gasps for it, then groans so low that Eddie has to throw his head back against the window where Steve’s shoved both their coats for cushion; so deep that Eddie has to clench his teeth close to cracking and yes, fuck yes he whines a little for it; is so far past being embarrassed by it for both the arousal coursing through him and causing the goddamn problem in the first place, and the comfort he has in all of this, with this man pressed against him: there’s so very little he has left to be embarrassed about, and fuck: even less of a reason for it, because even when he’s at his most humiliating, he gets to feel loved.

And that’s just fucking wild, man.

Which is probably how Eddie processes what happens next in slow-motion with at least a five second delay: puts together based wholly on sensation when Steve only answers not by stopping, because they’re in the high school parking lot and yeah, sure, it’s the back lot, all the sports have away games, save for the basketball team who’s basically locked in the weight room for the next half-hour, it’s long enough after the last bell that everything’s cleared out save for clubs and Hellfire had delayed their session on account of the aforementioned basketball commitments because sometimes Eddie learns his goddamn lessons: but no. No: Steve doesn’t stop even though they don’t have fucking changes of clothes and Eddie’s gonna, he is gonna—

Nope: Steve slips down, wedges the base of his dick somehow into the seats beneath them and presses hard, holds himself back as he yanks Eddie’s zipper down and slides a warm hand practiced straight into Eddie’s boxers, coaxes him like a goddamn pro through the flap while it nearly sends Eddie over the edge just for his touch save Steve pinches the head the slightest bit to keep him there, just there at the edge until he doesn’t grab Eddie’s hips, more slips his hand right under the globes of Eddie’s ass and lifts Eddie’s dribbling cock in between Steve’s ready lips and let’s go of the pressure beneath the crown, lets his thumb drag that ridge so Eddie jerks for it before he starts jerking full-body, hit straight down Steve’s throat and holy goddamn shit.

Eddie’s only left uncovered from the middle of his dick, all Steve needs to suck him dry before they collect themselves to leave the car but Jesus H. fucking Christ: Steve’s kinda fucking everything lays Eddie wholly bare every time, and Eddie never expected that kind of nakedness to feel so sweet, but.

Y’know. Steve Harrington. Just out here rewriting all the rules.

And Steve, Jesus fuck: but Steve licks at the slit after he’s cleaned Eddie just spit-damp with his mouth, then he kisses the very tip before he tucks Eddie back in, zips Eddie back up, then slides all graceful-like up Eddie’s chest to kiss him on the lips this time, lets Eddie taste himself before he reaches to fluff his hair—and it bounces right back into place, too, goddamn him—and pop the lock on the door as he shuffles off of Eddie’s thighs and lands on his feet the stretch just outside the car, groan when he gets his back to pop just right and wink at Eddie with a grin before he tugs his shirt into place, adjusts his own not-at-all-flagging hard-on, and shakes a familiar key ring in Eddie’s direction where, yes: he’s still boneless on the back seat catching his breath, and apparently still operating on delay because it takes arguably too-long of a time to notice that those keys are his, and Steve swiped them sometime between crawling on top of him and sucking him dry.

And he’s now on his way to the back of Eddie’s van to get the supplies they’d packed in there, that Eddie’d protested shoving into the backseat he’s currently occupying.

Jesus.

Eddie hauls himself up to sitting and squints at Steve’s ass—yep, his own keys are in the back pocket, hard to fucking miss—before he pulls himself out of the car and locks the doors behind him, then makes to help Steve unpack the little extras he’s prepared, scenery and shit made of cardboard and science fair trifolds. He slides up next to Steve, who’s delicately stacking the poster boards that’d been propped near the curve of the wheel-well, and reaches for the mass-ass camping backpack Steve had got for all his various supplies with enough separate zippers to keep all his dice and manuals and miniatures safe and separate and yes indeed: Steve had gotten so many fucking blowjobs that weekend as a thank you that Eddie wasn’t sure his jaw was gonna survive it, but hell if it wasn’t more than deserved for his gratitude.

“Careful,” Steve warns in the now with a glare when Eddie knocks the bulk of the bag against the other pieces as he drags it with enough force to sling it over his shoulder; “you’re gonna fold ‘em!”

“It’s fine,” Eddie huffs and shakes his head, grabs what he can of the smaller cardboard builds before he fears he’ll start dropping them; “makes ‘em look rugged.”

It’s only once he’s got almost too many stones piled into a hollow-box tavern mock-up that he notices how still and silent Steve’s gone, and looks up, concern first at the front of his mind but—

Then he sees Steve’s face. That’s his bitch face.

The concern kinda does stay in place but, it shifts significantly.

“We legitimately took two vehicles here because you said they couldn’t fit in the back without, like, creasing them or something,” Steve narrows his eyes at Eddie, tone flat.

“Ah ah ah,” Eddie picks up quick because this, this he actually has a very honest and ironclad answer to: “you may wish to revisit your recollections, my dearest beloved,” and Eddie risks falling flat on his face and crushing all the shit he worked so hard on just to smack a kiss to Steve’s frowning cheek while they’re still hidden from view by the van doors;

“I believe I said wouldn’t fit in your backseat,” as in, he refused to do so; “which was wholly true,” because he’s very bad at lying to Steve, established fact;

“Because I had other, much more important plans for your backseat,” and if he meets a little at the still-slightly-foggy windows, like only if you knew to look and suspect and Eddie did in fact knowvery nearly drop all his shit this time when he feels the sharp nudge of something long and thin against his ass.

He swings his head back around to see Steve holding all the poster boards in a stack, and swinging them back to hit Eddie’s ass again.

“What,” Steve deadpans; “you want them to look rugged.”

And Steve overtakes him, walks right past and fails at stifling a snort as he flicks the poster boards back against Eddie’s shins in the process and, and…

It’s like this, right: there is not a single red blooded human person with a pulse and a sex drive who hasn’t caught a glimpse of Steve Harrington and imagined, Eddie is convinced of that. The straight men and the lesbians, sure, they don’t imagine long, and they probably think about it all very differently, but Eddie doesn’t even think he’s being biased, here. Seeing Steve Harrington jumpstarts ideas what his hair smells like (sweet, so long as the aerosol’s faded), how his moles feel to touch (delicate, like little kisses of something that holds you before you’re born but these marks stick around; better question would be how they taste), whether there are flecks in his eyes (so many), how he treats his dates (The Harrington Experience was legendary, after all), what kind of husband he’d be—

Okay, fine, but Eddie was clear: just because he’s firm in his belief that everyone imagines, he never said he was some exception; that he didn’t ever imagine the same.

But Eddie was an exception, on at least some level, because when it came to thinking about dating, about relationships—which it almost never went that far, he wasn’t so delusional: because people like him didn’t get happily ever after, but then fuck—people like him didn’t get happily. People like him got maybe a number scrawled on a napkin for when you’re back in town, that even connected to a real person half the time; people like him got a preferred back alley less trash-drowned than the others, and people like him, no matter what other reliefs or tastes of something got collected, built up toward a word like real if only real-for-now: all of it was rooted in wholly logical fear, closer to fucking terror when the high faded and the booze left your system. People like him didn’t get…this.

Because Eddie thinks the bubble of joyful, chaotic bliss between his ribs has to be made of something heretofore unknown to man, because it’s squeezes through the spaces in the cage more and more every day for how big and full and bright it’s growing but it never bursts, just sends little current of warm and right and, and love through him to beat through his veins with every swell of the feeling, lasting whole-on until the next press of more against those ribs to let a new wave consume him. Eddie never dreamed it could be joyful. But more than that:

Eddie never dreamed, never even dared to have the passing thought, that he could have love, and it could be playful, like normal people, like smacking the ass of your partner with a stupid little poster board because he contrived to leave your backseat free for a car-quickie.

And for the way Steve glances back at him where he still stands a little dumbfounded and starstruck for it all, his heart throbbing heavy and filling up that bubble of blissfulness with every pump; the way Steve looks back at him not wholly different, wide-eyed and beaming awestruck, Eddie thinks maybe this is the Steve Experience, the real one, and maybe it surprises Steve to have found something so damn precious, too.

He trips over his own feet a little to catch up to Steve, who waits for him, and they walk together the rest of the way into the high school, shoulder brushing innocent but deliberate, Steve holding the door.

Eddie ducks his head and bites his lip, no hands free to hide behind his curls: it’s all just kinda…magic.

He glances at the clock when they close the drama room door behind them—Eddie has permission to use it, because Eddie had permission for a lot of things this year; the school wanted to be assholes about granting his degree while recovering, but the Feds forced them to let him try one more time, even if the technical limit was three-strikes, and they had to be fair, Eddie even had an overseer from the Department of Education to make sure everything was above board and, in all honesty, he likes that DoE better than…the other one.

But either way: the clock’s broken, still, hasn’t been fixed in his absence as he walks in for this first campaign after…after everything. He grabs Steve’s hand, checks his watch and nods; okay.

Okay, he can do this. This being setting up, and then…then also more than just the setting up.

But if he's learned anything these past months? One thing at a time, man. Baby steps.

He gets to work, moves smoother now than he honestly expected, getting most of his dexterity back, just more sore more often. He brought his baby Dragon Slayer to give the bard some extra oomph, finally able to hold his guitars long enough to play a short fucking set, thinks he’s close to a full length show when everyone’s ready, if they’re ready. Another thing he’s learned is some patience—at least, as it counts for someone like him. Who started with negative patience points, basically.

And so he flits around, sets up the table, asks for a hand up onto his long-missed throne just in case is balance fails him—he’s pretty confident, and he hasn’t wobbled in a bit but like hell he’s going to compromise the work he’s put in here to have everything just so; that Steve’s put it at his side because he knew as well as Eddie where things were meant to go and there it goes again, the warm joy filling up his heart to beat through his every limb—Steve’s hand in his as he climbs to the vantage and appraises the stage: perfect.

He sighs, and squeezes Steve’s hand as he drops down and sighs.

“Think they’ll be okay with it?” Eddie asks, a little breathless as leans back to survey the table again from the lower vantage point.

“Eds,” Steve keeps hold of his hand but swings up behind him, puts hands on his shoulders and grips tight and talks just below his ear: “they’re gonna be over the goddamn moon, man.”

And Eddie grins, because he’s, he thinks he did pretty good but he’s still, he’s just, it’s just…still—

“I,” he sucks at his bottom lip and rolls his weight back into Steve’s body behind him from right, almost like a lean into his warmth:

“It’s only a oneshot though,” which is true. And which is shorthand for all the ways he’s afraid this, the story, the set up, the concept—him, now, how he is and what if he’s less now, what if he can’t do this or maybe even worse: what if he can’t do it the same and then he’s a whole different kind failure because they know what he used to be and can see the decline, the knock-off version that’s left, he’s rusty and anxious, yeah, but what if he’s just not able anymore, even at his very best and they’ll smile and they’ll stay and they won’t say shit but Eddie will be able to see it, see the pity and the disappointment and—

“Which is better anyway because it’s almost Christmas break,” Steve reminds him, in fact, uses his own words; “you said yourself that two weeks between is a blow to the narrative momentum and compromises the structure of—“

And then Eddie’s pulling him from his hand, over the back of the chair and yeah, it pulls weird as shit and kinda hurts but it’s worth it, more than worth it to catch Steve’s lips just so, to suck at the sweet.

“I love when you’ve listened enough to my rambling that you can talk nerdy to me,” Eddie exhales with a unquenchable grin and Steve matches it, Eddie relishes the feeling of the stretch of his lips for it;

“I always listen to your rambling,” Steve says like it’s simple fact and Eddie can’t help but chuckle, kinda marveling.

“Doesn’t bore you?” Eddie asks; thinks he knows the answer as he strikes a thumb along Steve’s cheekbone.

“It matters to you, and that’s matters to me,” Steve sighs, leans into Eddie’s gentle touch and says it all so simple. “You love it,” and Steve reaches, catches Eddie’s hand now and kisses his knuckles before he goes to playing with Eddie’s rings and murmurs low:

“You look good in love,” and Steve’s not meeting his eyes because they’re not talking about a game at all.

But that means Eddie isn’t going to stand for not looking Steve straight on, letting him see the full extent of how Eddie’s heart belongs to him in pull, before he draws Steve in for a gentler, deeper kiss as he whispers between their lips:

“Flatterer.”

And Steve laughs a little, kisses back as tender but volleys the point like a pro:

“Don’t think I don’t know you asked Lucas to teach you about basketball.”

Eddie pouts dramatically, but it has very little effect when their lips are still pressed close.

“Little fuckin’ snitch,” Eddie huffs, and glares at the seat set aside for the elder Sinclair; “his character dies early, then, that’s handy.”

“He didn’t say shit,” Steve chides, grinning, nuzzling the nip of his nose to Eddie’s; “which is how I knew. He’s the only one of those dipshits that could keep their mouth shut. Plus the obvious option, in terms of experience, but then suddenly you know what a fucking free throw is?” Steve tsks playfully. “Does not take a Dustin Henderson to puzzle that one out, babe.”

And Eddie does smile at that, can’t keep up a ruse of annoyance as he swings Steve around by his hand to hold him to his side over the arm of the chair, leaning into him maybe a little too heavy, probably a little too telling but: Steve would pick up on his mood, read his mind either way.

More rewritten rules, and that’s shit.

“Hey,” Steve leans and kisses the crown of Eddie’s head through his curls; “they’re gonna love it.”

“But it’s,” Eddie starts, because he’s still unsure, even if the doubts are shrinking with every ounce of warmth bleeding into him Steve’s side pressed against him.

“They,” Steve cuts in, and squeezes Eddie closer; “are gonna love it.”

And it’s so…absolute. Steve doesn’t even allow space for it to be questioned. Eddie…feels really fucking grateful for that certain hand, just now. It steadies him. Helps him breathe deeper.

Then Steve’s climbing over him, settling in Eddie’s lap with his legs spread around him, knees hooking near the bends of Eddie’s own.

“I know you don’t like dwelling on it,” Steve’s gaze flits all around Eddie’s face; “but Eds, this is as good as you’ve ever done, if I understand any of it,” and Eddie reaches up to tuck Steve’s hair behind his ear even if it’s not styled to lie there, a comfort and a reassurance—Eddie loves how much Steve’s come to actually get so much of the game.

“But the fact that you’re still here, to do it,” and Steve’s tone doesn’t get more serious, but the beat of his heart bleeds into it, dips extra solemn before he tries to smile, and doesn’t even fail the attempt: “fuck, man, you could ask them to play fucking Yahtzee with the big dice and they’d be over the moon.”

And Eddie? He fucking snorts. Full body, fall straight into Steve chest and cackles.

“I,” he tries to catch his breath; “it feels kinda sacrilege but,” and he shakes his head between Steve’s legs because he can:

“I kinda want to figure out the rules for Yahtzee with a d20.”

“Maybe for April Fool’s,” Steve suggests and it sets Eddie off all over again.

“Holy fuck, that’s insane and brilliant,” Bevause it is, but then Eddie breathes deep, settles, and he’s still held tight to Steve’s chest so the only thing he can say is:

“I am so in love with you.”

And then the only thing he can do is thread a hand around the back of Steve’s head, tug at the hair and kiss him so goddamn hard. With everything he’s got.

“Also,” Steve adds, a little extra breathy when they break for air, foreheads tipped together; “don’t act like there’s not a whole notebook with ideas for the full campaign you're planning to start for them in January.”

“It’s epic,” Eddie agrees, but like even that’s not foolproof, not quite enough; “it has to be, because it’ll be my last—“ and Eddie doesn’t love saying it out loud. Admitting that he is on the road to graduation, ‘87 is gonna be his year, but leaving this, leaving all of them—

“You know they’re family, right?” and of course Steve feels it emanating from him, knows him that well, reaches to hold his face, to cup his cheeks and draw his gaze.

“You’re graduating,” and there’s a thrill in how he says it so sure, a fact to plan your life around, that he’s planning around, for the two of them; “and you’ll pass the club on, but the kids are our family,” and Eddie knows, he knows but…hearing that, too, is something he needs, means something so big for the undeniable truth of it, the way they’ll all live and grow and never not be in each other’s lives no matter where they end up—

“And I think your friends are warming up to me, especially the guys in the band,” Steve adds, hopeful, like there’s a question—

“The band adores you,” Eddie says without hesitation. “Dougie feels weird saying as much, and Gareth’s confused about it,” he concedes, because those boys aren’t great with emotion generally; “but they kinda think the world of you.”

Steve takes a beat to look dumbstruck, then his smile, so cute and little and…oh he’s gorgeous. Eddie wants to eat him, Eddie wants to tuck him straight inside his chest.

“That’s,” Steve swallows, soft and beautiful; “that’s good.”

“The rest of the group would probably marry your ass just for the baked goods,” Eddie tags on with a grin; “so they’re sold on you too,” and when Steve eyes him dubiously Eddie snorts and doubles down:

“Once they know you better, you’ll have ‘em asking you to prom before you know it.”

Steve chuckles and shakes his head, holds Eddie a little tighter before he replies : “The only person I’m saying yes to,” and he speaks so low: “is already right here.”

And Eddie…Eddie doesn’t think he’s being entirely delusional to think that answer’s speaking to more than…prom.

And Eddie can’t help but kiss him more, pull him close, deeper, chest to chest and devour—

“Nope,” Steve pulls back suddenly, and Eddie whines; “we agreed,” he eyes Eddie sternly, holds back his attempt to renegade with a palm on his chest: “unless we have a full fifteen minutes before they show or—“

“A locked door,” Eddie sighs; “yes.” That was the rule. Neither of them relished being caught in the act by the D&D club.

“Won’t be the first time I’ve DM’d with a boner because of you,” Eddie shrugs, and Steve’s eyebrow reaches impressive heights.

“Told you I had a crush forever,” Eddie grins, and just shrugs again because really, that’s it.

And Eddie didn’t intend for the truth to have the effect that is does but when Steve grabs onto him at the hips and tilts just so, fucking growls—

“Fuck it,” and presses down a little, like he’s surveying the lay of the fucking land and then grinds hard and gives his estimation: “think you’re close enough,” well.

It’s not like Eddie is complaining about breaking their rule, here. As if he would ever.

“Holy fuck,” Eddie gasps as Steve crawls off of him and starts to undo his jeans, again: “am now, baby.”

And Steve smirks so fucking sly; the both know they’re on borrowed time and they’re pushing the boundaries of getting caught but, but—

“An exhibitionist streak,” Steve purrs as he works Eddie out to the root of him, holds him as his dick twitches hard; “I like it.”

“Don’t act like it wasn’t obvious,” Eddie grits through clenched teeth, his head thrown back; he cannot help it—

“Not for this,” Steve counters, but ducks to lick at Eddie’s tip, judge his angle as Eddie rasps:

“Only ‘cause it’s not safe, here,” at the school, in the town, in the whole goddamn world, with the way he is—

“But I’m always safe with you.”

Eddie doesn’t even mean for it to come out, let alone as starry-eyed and reverent as it still manages while he’s already panting but: again with the rules, and how they’re different, now.

Also Eddie cannot lie to Steve to save his life, so: also that.

But it does its job, whether intentional or otherwise and between blinks Eddie’s dick is at the back of Steve’s throat, twitching, needy and desperate like he didn’t just come down in less than an hour ago. And he spills quick enough to be laughable, really, given the givens.

“Holy Jesus fuck,” he gasps with his head tipped back against the wooden line of his drama-prop throne.

“Good?” Steve asks, innocent as hell save for the way he licks his lips as he watches Eddie through his lashes, and gives himself away: he knows exactly what he’s doing.

“I think that answers it’s fucking self, Steven,” Eddie huffs, still too breathless for more than a shove but Steve laughs, stands and straightens his shirt while Eddie zips himself back up and tries to, you know. Breathe air correctly?

The fuck, man.

Then, once his pulse has calmed so he can hear the world around him, even if he’s still floating on that hazy orgasm high even a quickie with Steve send him on, he hears it:

Rubber soles on cheap-ass school tiles.

Fuck. Fuck, yeah, okay, Eddie sees it. They had that rule for a reason.

The quickly-approaching shitheads being the reason.

But Steve? Head enforcer of said rule? He’s cool as a cucumber, pats Eddie’s shoulder with a smirk that Eddie tries to scowl at but fails, still too up on that come-high, then he presses that smirk against Eddie’s temple and melts him all over again, the devil:

“I’ll go ask them to help haul in the drinks,” he shakes his head like it’s nothing, all in a day’s work; “give you an extra couple seconds,” and he nods down at Eddie’s thankfully limp-dicked crotch before he kisses Eddie’s cheek this time and squeezes his thigh to Eddie’s involuntary moan:

“Love you,” and then he’s striding toward the door at the far end of the room.

“How’d you learn to do that?” Eddie calls when he’s halfway there and Steve stills, turns with a tilted head.

“Hmm?”

“Have a stiffy in those fucking jeans,” Bevause Eddie could feel it, and can squint to see, and Steve hasn’t come once this afternoon, oh god, he’s a horrible selfish boyfriend isn’t he, but also he’s curious to a painful, near lethal fault so, so:

“How do you do it, and still strut like that?”

Steve turns fully for a second, crosses his arms and surveys Eddie from the distance like actual royalty sizing up their hoard. Tickled fucking pink . And then he’s walking to the door again, but now before tossing over his shoulder:

“I’m not the only one who’s been stuck with a hard-on in this shithole and had to manage the rest of a lunch period after somebody, I dunno,” he shrugs, but his grin’s too sharp; “spent his own strutting over the top of my food.”

And then, like the demon spawn he is, he leaves Eddie all alone to process the implications of that and not get painfully hard again, and this time end up stuck with it.

“Fuck me, you can’t,” Eddie splutters as he makes it to the door, palms the handle; “you can’t just drop that bomb on me and leave, I—“

Then he grins, steps through the opening, and lets the latch catch behind him, leaving Eddie open-mouthed with far too tight a fit at the crotch of his jeans.

“Steve!” he calls out for absolute fucking nothing, the room’s unintentionally almost soundproof and, and: fuck. He glances around a little desperately.

At least his DM screen will hide the damning bulge if it decides to stick around longer than Steve can keep the gremlins at bay.

✨permanent tag list: OPEN (lmk if you want to be added/removed): @pearynice @hbyrde36 @slashify @finntheehumaneater @wxrmland @dreamwatch @perseus-notjackson @estrellami-1 @bookworm0690 @imhereforthelolzdontyellatme @nerdyglassescheeseychick @swimmingbirdrunningrock @goodolefashionedloverboi @sanctumdemunson

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hitlikehammers · 4 days

Text

time for that age old question: is love enough to beat back the apocalypse?

Because Steve's right there to protect everybody like the self-sacrificing asshole he is help Eddie make the music he's not strong enough for yet help them all put Vecna in the ground for good this time, right?(!??!)

or: what's the song for your walkman, baby? does it even matter?

I Could Be Your Nurse (or something)

Or: Five Times Eddie Has To Ask For Help, Plus One Time He Doesn’t Need It Anymore (but asks anyway) ✨ for @penny00dreadful 💜

<<< three: sleep 🌗

🎧 🎹 four: play 🎶 🛡️

To tell the whole truth of it: it comes too quickly—Vecna’s last stand. Of course it does.

But probably, if he’s being fair: they’d never have been really ready. Not for this, and so maybe it’s best that they’re not fully healed, not at full strength when it all comes to a head, not least because that means Vecna and his petal-toothed brigade aren’t at full strength either. And that choice, for their side, is sloppy; the Party stands on the right-side-up against the attack because they have to. Vecna makes his move because—or else, Eddie’s fairly sure—because the sadistic ballsac is losing his fucking mind.

Which is terrifying, sure, but fuck if it doesn’t help their cause.

It’s actually over pretty quick, even compared to Spring Break which, while it felt like a lifetime for how much it changed Eddie’s own, it’s only been those handful of days—but it’s kinda like the grand finale at a fireworks show: everything all at once then, done. In the everything’s though: he might not like it, but Eddie’s not so foolish as to believe he’s not still too tender, still too deep in healing the finer points of being gnawed alive to be anything but a burden in the thick of it. He refuses to be sidelined, though, and he thinks it says a lot for the long-term health of this glorious impossible thing he’s…building? Yeah, he, umm, he, Eddie Munson, is building a real goddamn thing where he doesn’t even just let someone into his heart and treasures them there, no, he’s building a thing where he gives his heart and gets on new and soft and trembling in kind and they both get to work at the treasuring of something more precious than just their own vulnerable insides, but yeah, yeah:

Eddie thinks it bodes really fucking well for the hopes he has that lean hard toward forever, already, in Eddie’s chest at least when Steve looks his way as they’re planning the teams and he locks eyes with Eddie and Eddie doesn’t even get his mouth open to breathe, to plead don’t cut me out, don’t send me to Wayne to be ‘safe’ or ‘out of harm’s way’ or whatever, don’t leave me so fucking far from you my heart hurts just because it’s beating in the middle space unmoored and shaking around all bruised up with it for not knowing and I know I can’t do what everyone else can but it’ll be bad enough not being next to you please don’t push me far enough that I won’t know the moment you’re safe, just—

Steve meets his eyes, and Eddie’s breath catches before his heart trips, and then Steve speaks up—and he doesn’t, not all that often when the nerdiest among them are shoring up the battle plans—but he watches Eddie without blinking when he pipes up:

“Eddie’s on medical and audio, with Erica and Jon.”

And maybe it’s his tone—this almost wholly novel thing in Steve that’s steely and unquestionable but no one pushes, they nod and get back to work, totally seamless and, and…yeah. That’s all Eddie wanted. Best he could hope for. Just outside the gate they go through. Close enough to hold a hand on the way down, and reach for purchase on the journey back.

Steve swallows hard, and nods at Eddie before he looks away and starts gearing up, twirls his fucking nailbat so it catches the sunlight even thought the metal’s mostly rusted, now and just…Eddie hadn’t needed to say a word. And Steve wanted to send him to safety, the way his throat had bobbed made it real clear there was something heavy he’s held back but: he’d said what he said. He’d laid the line in Eddie’s favor. Eddie wants to hold him, wants to pull him close and feel him breathe, and—

Yeah. Eddie kinda feels like the way it goes is a really good sign for their future as a couple. A couple. Them. Together.

With an always on the other side of all of this that could be kinda fucking magnificent, maybe. Given the chance.

Point being: Eddie gets himself set up with at least a full ambulance’s supplies for first aid, definitely not acquired legally, and a stereo set up he really wishes someone had been kind enough to outfit him with in not-the-apocalypse, holy shit is it gorgeous, but since the strength in his hands is still a work-in-progress, he’s gotta be ready to crank up the noise as a distraction from arm’s-length. It’s actually driving him fucking crazy—or, was; it was, pre-active return to the regularly scheduled world ending—the whole not being able to make music, to translate the noise in his head into sounds on the strings but even that, even that’s been tolerable, survivable because of Steve—who he loves, he gets to love Steve Harrington holy fuck—but Steve’s not just there to be everything and more than the air Eddie goddamn breathes, to become the music just by existing, nope, he one ups that shit: he asked Eddie if it’d be enough to learn the chords he needs. So Eddie could match the words with the notes right, so Steve could be a—

“—kinda piss-poor substitute but,” Steve had shrugged for it with a crooked grin; “but even a bad translator gets a message across, and you’d know when it’s wrong so we can figure out how to fix it and—“

And Eddie’d grabbed Steve’s chin and yanked his mouth close to fucking consume that man like a soul goddamn starved.

“I’d be a shit teacher,” Eddie had mouthed against Steve’s lips after they were sucked well-swollen; “if I still can’t lift the fucking neck for more than a minute,” but Steve had heard none of it, just shot right back:

“You don’t think we’ve beat steeper odds than that?”

And in the face of that raised brow, those red lips parted, that pulse in that neck still a little bit visible like a tease: the fuck was Eddie supposed to do but dive back in and love on the man who’d somehow agreed to be his, and to claim Eddie of all people in turn?

Which is a whole other reason why everything’s gonna be fine: Steve’s gonna make music with him. Steve’s gonna be Eddie’s muse and the vessel for what he inspires. It’s gonna be like Greek fucking poetry, except it’s gonna be them.

So Eddie’s all stocked up, s’got everyone’s floaty-bone-breaky songs queued up on blast for immediate deployment as necessary, and Steve’s the last to go through—he always is, in Eddie’s experience, waits for everyone to be safely accounted for before he spares a thought for himself and it might kill Eddie one day but not fucking today, because it’s gonna be fine—

“Eddie.”

It feels a little like history repeating itself, the way Steve huddles him in a little. Henderson’s through, with Lucas and Hopper and the weird stray Russian, but it’s not like history repeating, because Eddie’s got different words to see him off with; so fucking different.

“Last time I didn’t have,” and Steve reaches, cups Eddie’s cheek, drags down to press on his chest as his voice strains hard: “and it almost killed me,” and Steve usually pinches between his eyes to keep his feelings in check but instead of using his free hand to hold back the tears he reaches for Eddie’s and laces their fingers as his voice cracks and he chokes out:

“Please,” and it’s for everything. For all the almosts from last time; for all the possibilities rife this time. For all the hopes Eddie thinks they share beyond how this shakes out.

“Exceptionally underqualified field med,” Eddie breathes, and squeezes Steve’s hand so, so hard like a promise, because it is; “exceptionally overqualified DJ,” and Steve chuckles, wet but real and it’s enough, because:

“I got it, Stevie,” Eddie bends his forehead to Steve’s to say better than with words that he’s not in this to be a hero, he’ll be right here the whole time, but that doesn’t mean he…that doesn’t mean he can help but to ask this time:

“Just,” and the breath in him punches out unexpectedly as he damn-near begs:

“Only bring me back the little things, yeah? That I know how to fix?”

And they both hear what’s said underneath it:

Don’t turn around and die down there, and kill me in kind..

And—if anyone’s keeping track—they turn out not to need it but: the way the kiss is a wholeass wartime farewell, man.

And then: Eddie waits, and fucks with the speakers for less than an hour before the earth shakes, and his heart drops, but then he hears it.

The fucking whooping of those shitheads echoing through the cracks.

And then he sees it, runs, grabs the first hand that’s clinging to the rope this time and pulls with strength he doesn’t have, is probably more a hindrance than a help but he steadies them each back on the ground and hugs them so tight, kisses more than one of them on the head or the cheek as he doesn’t pretend not to be sobbing through the laughter because they did it, they fucking did it, somehow it’s over and he loves these people and he’s so fucking happy they’re alive and safe and here and—

And the person he loves more, loves most, brings up the rear, a little bloodied, a little scratched up, dingy with the fucking air down there but smiling and Eddie…

Eddie falls into him so fucking hard they both hit the ground and just, just grab onto one another. Just hold and breathe and catch lips every few seconds like an afterthought because they feel each other’s heartbeat where their chests are pressed tight and it’s, they’re…

Steve’s got four broken fingers across both hands. None in a row. He’s basically giving a Vulcan salute by default for how they’re taped.

Eddie loves him so goddamn much it hurts.

And Eddie’d obviously known—once things start to settle in the days that’ve followed—that teaching Steve guitar with those Spock-y hands was on the back burner, but he does ask Steve to sit, and to rest, and to help hum back the tunes in Eddie’s head while Eddie jots lyrics with a hand that’s still shaky but steadying out more every day, and it’s kind of perfect, and Steve adds some things into the melodies either on purpose or by accident but they’re better for it every time and—

Muse and vessel, man. The light of Eddie’s whole goddamn life.

With fucking Vulcan hands still, though, so: excuse Eddie for being…bewildered when his boyfriend—boyfriend, that’s his boyfriend—but his taped-up-healing-Vulcan-handed boyfriend is propping the front door open and lugging in a long, not-recovery-friendly thing that looks close to dropping on his toes and—

“The fuck are you doing?” Eddie asks with a little more panic in his voice than he’d hoped for as he rushes as best he can to where Steve’s kicking the door shut behind him, fluttering his hands around uselessly as Steve maneuvers past him, leans across for a peck at the corner of Eddie’s mouth and calls—“It’s fine, it weighs, like, nothing”—over his shoulder as he settles the, the thing down on the coffee table in the living room they’ve started actually using for, y’know.

Living.

Eddie follows him in, though, because of course, he’s half-a-dog on that man’s heels, whole-caught-in-the-gravity-of-his-everything: but Eddie follows as Steve tosses himself backward with something in his hand, rolls and rucks up his fucking absurd Hawking Middle tee across the sweet curve of his hips, the way the soft give of skin tempts Eddie to run his tongue over the trail of almost-curls, like baby-curls where they lead under the waist of his jeans: Eddie would happily volunteer to survive on the taste of that musky-delicate space until the end of goddamn time—

But then Steve’s huffing a breathless ha from behind a chair where he’d been stretched to reach and a light catches Eddie’s eye from his periphery where he’d been staring unblinking just at Steve: the big long black thing on the coffee table. It takes a genuine concerted effort not to keep at the Steve-staring—not an uncommon state of Eddie’s existence, in all fairness—and check what’s glowing on the table: something turned on. Was plugged in, right, that’s what had Steve rolling on the floor without Eddie on top of or being deliciously pinned down by him.

The something being the big long black thing that Eddie takes in for the whole of it, now: a keyboard.

“Jon picked it up for me second-hand from the place next to Fox Photo when he drove down for his camera, and Rob vouched that it’s a good brand and like, really good condition,” Steve’s raised up on his knees, now with his hands braces on his thighs as Eddie studies the keys, fingers the ends of a every few of the naturals.

“Rob helped with those, too, so I’d know the right, like, chords,” and yeah: they’re stupa of masking tape stuck to the keys with letters in blue, black, and red pen, alternating so they don’t get mixed up, some with and arrow, Eddie assumes, to indicate a sharp.

“I only remember like half of one song from when my parents thought it would look good to have me take piano lessons,” Steve huffs in whole-ass judgment; “my mom wanted the endorsement of the guy who was stepping down from city council, and his wife taught private lessons, so, y’know,” Steve rolls his eyes; “super convenient leading up to the election.”

“What song?”

Steve blinks, tips his head in askance for what Eddie recognizes very clearly as something closer to a croak than a question, his throat all tight. He tries to cough, to clear it.

“What song do you remember?”

Steve snorts at that, leans back on his palms, and fuck is he beautiful.

“Clair de Lune,” Steve grins crooked; “the one song I was allowed to pick, instead of just being assigned.”

“Why’d you pick it?” Not that Eddie doesn’t like it or anything. It’s more that…he knew Steve could more than just drum fingers on keys, if only just, and that a baby grand used to sit in the corner where there’s a stereo cabinet now, but.

But: see, there’s like a whole half of his heart that’s dedicated to collecting new knowledge about everything Steve: his favorite food when he was 12 versus the now. How his favorite color became his favorite color. The story behind all the polos. The nitty-gritties about why he’s in a big-ass house alone for approximately 360 days a year, and how long it’s been that way. Eddie’s whole heart is basically Steve’s but every day that half overflows a little, and Eddie’s only keeping it relegated to parts filled with Steve-lore so he can feel the collection break containment every other day, this grand and joyous bursting under his ribs as everything spills over again, and again, and again until it’s all just Steve, and his heart has to burst or stretch, or both.

Eddie thinks both will be amazing.

And right now, in the interest of building toward that amazing-both: he wants to know why Debussy.

Steve chuckles to himself—better music than any dead French guy by a country mile—and eyes Eddie almost slyly.

“Do you remember Claire Reynolds?”

Vaguely. Like, very vaguely. He remembers…uneven pigtails. Very actual-cult-like vibes about her family as a vague impression and now that he’s bringing it to mind he feels a new wave of indignation: those Children-of-the-Corn motherfuckers were just fine but Eddie liked a board game and he was probably a murderer.

“When we were in like, first grade,” Steve’s continuing on; “she asked me every, single, day, to come over and see her sheep.” Steve looks up at Eddie and bites his lower lip, lets his gaze dance and lets Eddie fall into it for a few dazed seconds before he spells it out.

“She had these crazy eyes about it, it was kinda unsettling,” Steve nudges, but Eddie’s doesn’t get it until:

“And it’s not like I do now, because obviously I don’t, but I definitely didn’t speak a lick of French when I was eight.”

It takes Eddie a hot second before he snorts hard enough to hurt:

Claire, da Loon.

“I was eight,” Steve protests Eddie’s laughter halfheartedly even as he joins in, reaches to slap at Eddie’s upper arm which honestly: just makes him laugh harder.

“Anyway,” Steve fights through the last of the chuckling as it peters out between them, drags himself to sitting next to the coffee table and taps his hand to the top of the keyboard.

“I know it’s not the same as learning guitar to help, and I can probably only get the top and bottom notes with these,” he lifts his Vulcan-fingers his a shrug; “but I was hoping that’d be better than nothing?”

And, like, how Eddie was talking about his heart having to swell, for all the things he gets to tuck inside of it that come with loving Steve Harrington?

He might crack a rib, just now, because—

“This is for me?”

Steve purses his lips, lifts a brow:

“Well, technically it’s for me,” steve singles his fingers, which looks absurd with the splints; “but yeah. To help you get the songs out. I mean, once these are free again, you can help me with the guitar like we talked about, until you’re—“

And Eddie cannot be blamed, see: he cannot be fucking blamed for tackling Steve to the floor and kissing him hard enough to bruise because…

“You got hurt,” Eddie half-breathes between kisses; “you got hurt and I was so afraid I was gonna lose you,” and Eddie reaches for those taped fingers and kisses them, too: so gentle and Steve’s expression softens so quick:

“I was scared, too,” he whispers between them, cups Eddie’s face with his unloaded hand; “you were as safe as I could make you within the fucking city limits but I was still so goddamn scared.”

Cue more rib-cracking for the heart-swelling, because Jesus fucking Christ.

“And you,” Eddie exhales, slow and shaky; “you’re hurt, but you went and got,” he nods to the keyboard;

“I know it’s not ideal,” Steve’s quick to, to what, apologize? For being insane and perfect and—

“Shut up,” Eddie says, voice low and watery and he’s still kissing at Steve’s fingers, holding his wrist delicate but also like a lifeline.

“You’re hurt,” Eddie maybe kinda moans it because he hates it, as much as he’s so fucking grateful that’s it’s just this, no worse than this; “and you still—”

“I promised, didn’t I?”

And that…that’s one thing Eddie’s learned beyond reproach; that even to his detriment, Steve keeps his goddamn promises.

And he’d promised to help Eddie get his words out, to place the lyrics to the notes and help unclutter his brain so he didn’t lose his mind.

Holy fucking hell.

“Steve,” Eddie starts, shakes his head, needs to find the right words. “You’re alive,” the most important thing. “You are healing,” another most important thing, for Eddie to oversee and make sure of, even as Steve keeps an eye on the last lingering threads of the long haul on Eddie’s road to recovery in kind, his beloved mother hen.

“This is,” and he runs his fingers too light to draw sounds across the keys, hopes he sounds as awed and grateful as he feels; “but you, you’ve gotta test, you have to,” and Eddie shakes his head and lifts his eyes to just fucking ask it:

“Why?”

And Steve: Steve just studies his face for a few seconds, reads what he needs before he smiles kinda exasperated, mostly fond and answers so simply, while also breaking a few more of Eddie’s ribs when he just says:

“Because I love you.”

And Eddie’s heart’s not so overfull yet of all of Steve, it’s not fair that it just bursts right then and there, Eddie propelled into Steve’s arms to kiss him deep this time, like he’s searching out Steve’s soul to taste and maybe he is, save that he needs his heart to not have exploded for feeling if he’s going to keep the memory of it safe in his chest for always, he needs to patch his heart back up first but he’s too distracted, too drowned in the way love actually fucking feels, fucking shifts his cells around and makes a new version of him, lets his heart grow bigger except it went and blasted apart with the unprecedented immensity of loving and—

And then Eddie’s got Steve’s taped up hands on both his cheeks, and he remembers that night, in the shower, where Steve ripped the seams from his shirt so taking it off wouldn’t hurt him; notices how Steve is wearing that same fucking shirt in this very moment, all in one piece, like it never split apart in the first place.

Master seamstress, tried and tested and true; truer than anything.

So Eddie just dives back in and kisses with everything in him, thinks maybe when Steve tastes the pieces of Eddie’s blowout heart under his tongue while Eddie goes diving for the sweet lick of Steve’s soul:

Eddie thinks Steve’s mouth might know how to stitch up torn things, too. Especially the kinds that are ripped at their seams wholly for the sake of loving that fucking hard.

divider credits here & here

👾 title credit here

💫 ao3 link here

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hitlikehammers · 5 days

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Based on this TikTok

Steve’s always said Eddie��s fingers are magic. Guitarists fingers. Strong and deft, he’s always been better than Steve at anything more precise than getting a basketball through a hoop.

Eddie’s the one who mends their clothes. The one who took apart their stereo and got it working again.

Who, now, has to squint hard when he does any of it.

But those skillful fingers are in Steve’s hair, now. Scratching against his scalp. Massaging the tightness in his neck. And every time Eddie does this it makes Steve drool. Makes his jaw unlock and dribble spit out of the corner of his mouth, makes his eyes close and his spine tingle because this truly has to be recognized as an eighth wonder of the world.

“Fallin’ asleep on me?” Eddie murmurs, above him, and it’s all Steve can do to crack an eye open.

“Feel s’good.” He slurs, and Eddie’s hand shakes as he laughs, adjusting, slightly, to comb a new pattern through his hair.

Steve closes his eyes again. Snuggles deeper into the pillow he’d laid on Eddie’s lap.

Their pillow smells like nothing, because their home—their home—is so familiar to him he can’t smell it, anymore.

His childhood home always smelled like linen.

Eddie’s hand adjusts again, gently twisting hair between his fingers. “You’ve got some grays back here, sweetheart.” He murmurs, not judgmentally, never judgmentally, he says it as fact. One that’s clear to anyone who looks.

Steve mumbles his affirmation, well aware of the cluster of grays sprouting in full force at the crown of his head. “Y’ve seen ‘em before.” He mumbles, and Eddie hums, continuing to twist the strands between his fingers.

“Just,” Eddie starts, voice just above a whisper, “did you ever think it was gonna happen? For us?”

Steve blinks his eyes back open. Comes to a little more at Eddie’s tone and wipes his chin off with his wrist, turning in his love’s lap. The fingers retreat from his scalp and Steve finds Eddie’s hand in the dim glow of their living room, squeezing tight, letting them rest on his chest. It’s a comment on their relationship, forged and cultivated through nearly two decades of friendship, of bone-deep trust and more love than Steve ever saw himself worthy of that not a single part of him is anxious when he asks, “what d’you mean?”

Eddie’s free hand comes to Steve’s temple. Strokes along the grays he is well aware rest there, too, hidden, at the right angle, by his glasses that now lay discarded on the coffee table.

“That we would get to grow old together.” Eddie whispers. And he keeps stroking that cluster of gray, looking as reverently down at Steve now, at forty, as he did at thirty. At twenty. Touches him with all the love he’s always had. Always held. All of the love Steve never thought he would find returned to him in kind, never thinking that his love for someone could be matched, could be held for him in return, but here they are. Eddie loving him with his glasses, his hearing aids, the wrinkles that have begun to creep onto his face and the grays sprouting through the hair he still can’t leave the house without styling, marveling at being able to see it at all.

And as much as Eddie loathes to admit it, being the one who always calls Steve the vain one, he can see the beginnings of Eddie’s own hairline beginning to recede. The start of wrinkles on his forehead. How his curls have grown wispier. But Steve doesn’t think there’s anything more beautiful than the visible reminder of their years shared.

And yeah. Steve gets it, now. They weren’t exactly counting on a tomorrow for a couple of years, there.

Steve kisses the back of Eddie’s hand, the scar tissue that’s still raised and puckered, even after all these years. “I’m glad it’s with you.” Steve murmurs back.

Eddie’s hand moves again. Begins scratching at the top of his head. “Wouldn’t want it with anyone else.” Eddie finishes.

They don’t say what they both know to be true. That neither of them would have made it here without the other. That without Eddie Steve may never have left Hawkins. That without Steve Eddie would never have made it out of the Upside Down. That either of those fates would have killed them, in the end. That without each other their lives would have followed paths so very different than the one they’re on. A path that still prickles the back of Steve’s neck to think about.

A path that will, thankfully, never happen.

Steve closes his eyes again. Turns into the pillow that smells like nothing while Eddie’s fingers resume tracing patterns through his silvering hair.

Tomorrow they’ll both be a day older. They will both have more grays. Steve’s back is going to hurt because he spent too long lying on this couch and Eddie’s bad knee is going to ache because he scratched the headache from Steve’s scalp instead of doing his exercises.

But they’ll always do it together.

✨Tag List✨

@hotluncheddie @hitlikehammers @hbyrde36 @littlewildflowerkitten @chaotic-waffle @westifer-dead @perseus-notjackson @theheadlessphilosopher @spectrum-spectre @itsall-taken @marvel-ous-m @bookworm0690 @acasualcrossfade

#steddie #fic rec #gorgeous #always gorgeous #so soft

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hitlikehammers · 7 days

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straw poll: How Many Times Can You Sleep In The Same Bed With A Guy Before It Starts To ✨Mean Something✨?

Because Steve's just there to be a good friend hold Eddie close through the night so Eddie knows what his breathing sounds like as he falls asleep help Eddie through the nightmares, right?(!??!)

or: just how many manners of sin does 'trauma' cover, exactly?

I Could Be Your Nurse (or something)

Or: Five Times Eddie Has To Ask For Help, Plus One Time He Doesn’t Need It Anymore (but asks anyway) ✨ for @penny00dreadful 💜

<<< two: wash🚿

💤🪦 three: sleep 🌗 🛌

Eddie shoots up in his bed, less afraid of choking on his own heart for its pounding than he is for gnashing it apart with his teeth, it’s surged so high and he can’t breathe, he doesn’t know if he wants to because it’s dark and he can’t see and last thing he did see was, was—

“Ed,” and it’s murmured so close, and the bed dips quick as warmth envelops Eddie’s frame, as a hand grabs one wrist, both wrists and crushes them between two bodies to feel, feel—

“Eddie, breathe, breathe, shhh,” and oh: that’s what he’d seen, what he always sees now: the images he remembers, and the things he’s been told of his own near-demise, but it’s not his body; it’s never his body and more, and worse, they’re always too late and he’s being told to breathe but he can’t, he can’t breathe because they failed, he failed and Steve’s not breathing, he’ll never breathe again—

“Right here, Eds, I’m right here,” and one hand lets go of him and starts carefully wiping at Eddie’s face, drying his eyes so they can focus and recognize not just the touch and the scent and the heat but the sight of the body wrapped around him.

“I’m with you, you’re okay,” Steve breathes, he breathes and Eddie can feel it, he can feel it and it makes no sense but it’s clear and it’s deep and deliberate and, and—

“Breathe with me, come on, just breathe,” Steve coxes a little like soothing a wounded animal and…that’s apt, Eddie feels small and skittish and he needs the warmth and the dawning truth of Steve’s weight against his bones; “it’s okay, everyone’s okay,” and yes, yes, that’s important, that’s so important but it’s not enough, there’s still blood pumping like it wants to leap from his mouth as he gasps because he cannot fucking breathe until—

“I’m okay.”

Steve says it as just part of an ongoing litany of reassurance, hopes to calm Eddie into, y’know, the basic needs of human survival, heart and lungs remembering how to move right but—

Steve’s okay.

It’s like Eddie heart and lungs had an agenda; like maybe they didn’t want to move right if the dream—a dream, a dream, just a dream, Steve’s chest lifts against him, falls, lifts again, and again, and again, real—but maybe neither was really invested in survival, if it all hadn’t just been a dream.

“We’re okay, Eds,” and Eddie doesn’t mean to gasp, to half moan and half whimper in something wreathed in pure relief, doesn’t plan to burrow into Steve like he does as Steve presses closer, closer, so it’s only logical, only the reasonable thing when Steve’s lips move against Eddie’s skin at the hairline, at the temple when he speaks, he’s just that close, y’know—

“Swear,” Steve murmurs, and he crushes their hands a little closer between both their chests, and his face is still so close because of it—no other reason, it can’t be any other reason—that his lips drag when he breathes, when he fucking vows:

“I swear we’re okay.”

Eddie nods, just nods; Steve keeps him tucked under his chin, safe: he lifts with his breathing, his heartbeat’s right there, taunt but true, realand maybe Eddie nuzzles there a little, so fucking sue him.

It’s been like this, though. Lately. More than just lately; it’s been like this for a while. Steve had always been around for the nightmares, and he always came to ease Eddie through them but he ended up back on the couch if Wayne wasn’t there, or in the chair in the corner, or the sleeping bag they’d found and he’d set up on the floor before Eddie could protest—and he never wanted to push too hard because, because…

At least on the floor, Eddie could hear him breathe.

But then, then the nightmares stopped being highlight reels of reality; then they turned, and they’re focused on…variations on a theme.

A theme of losing one Steve Harrington.

And then Eddie grew clingy, without even meaning to, or planning to, and Steve never fought him. It took a couple weeks before Steve didn’t only come to him as soon as Eddie started gasping, screaming and then stayed with him through the night, no: then Steve just started coming with him to bed and opening his arms to roll into, to wake up shaking against.

It didn’t make the nightmares go away but it made them…bearable. Because proof of the lies in them was there waiting to wrap around him, if he wasn’t already buried in that warm, fuzzy, living chest.

Where Eddie’s pressed tight, now. And he…he couldn’t say what tips the scales. What changes things when nothing is different. Steve’s heartbeat’s a little faster, maybe Eddie’s gasping heavier, more of Steve in his lungs than usual. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Whatever the reason, Eddie lets his open lips drag along Steve’s collarbone. For proximity’s sake.

“Steve?”

And Eddie’s back to feel like his heart’s less a threat like the bat tails choking than it is for the biting in half where it’s caught on his tongue, like an offering, or else damnation.

Maybe both.

“Hmm?” Steve’s hum’s a little sleepy but he’s quick to maneuver them, to face Eddie and rove eyes over Eddie’s face with fully-wakeful care; concern.

Offering. His heart’s a manic wild thing thrashing on his tongue when he makes to speak but it’s…

It’s Steve’s. His heart is Steve’s and Eddie’s lost but in maybe the best most terrifying way imaginable; Eddie is beholden to Steve with all of him, and if the ungainly pulp shaking out of his ribs and up past his throat’s going to fall out with the words he has to whisper, well.

It’s Steve’s, and whether he feels anything at all in return, he’s been more than the word kind knows how to hold; maybe he’ll be gentle with it even in rejecting how it shakes, for him.

Kinda, just for him. Like this: just for him.

“What is this?”

He doesn’t move, doesn’t gesture or look anywhere but in Steve’s eyes but: their hands are still linked, and his fingers twitch without him meaning to move them at all but Steve.

Steve grips tighter. Steadies him with question; immediate.

“Trauma,” Steve huffs a little, humorless, but his breath’s so near, so warm: “or so they tell me.”

“No, I mean,” and Eddie’s shaking his head then because; “yeah, yes, definitely that, but,” and Eddie can be brave, he has to be brave because if he’s not brave this will maybe break him: the middle space without an answer, he needs some kind of answer—

“I mean this,” and now Eddie forces himself to tighten his fingers, and presses into Steve closer: Steve’s heart isn’t wild, but it’s not calm either. It’s not sleep-slow. It’s…untamed.

Eddie doesn’t know what it means.

But Steve looks at their hands, pulls Eddie’s fingertips through the curls on his chest, starts tracing Eddie’s nails from cuticle to tip.

“I’ve never been good with subtle,” Steve barely breathes, and his heart’s faster for it, where Eddie can feel; “or moving slow,” and then he laughs; it’s not humorous now either, more self deprecating, and Eddie…Eddie doesn’t like that.

Eddie loves this man too much.

“Kinda notorious for wearing my heart on my sleeve and all,” and Steve shrugs, only pauses the motions of their hands for half a breath, less than a heartbeat at the going pace. It feels too small for something so…significant.

Something precious like that.

“Easy to get stomped on,” Eddie finds the words tumbling out, almost aggrieved; he heard the rumors, even among their friends, their family but faced with it so stark like this, naked chest to chest, it’s…unthinkable.

It hurts, just to think of.

“Yeah,” Steve exhales; fucking…Eddie thinks that sounds resigned: “I know.”

Eddie doesn’t expect the whine that escapes him, a little jagged on the frantic pulse he can feel all in his teeth; he doesn’t expect it, but it’s not big enough. It’s not deep enough for the ache in him at that…acceptance, that expectation of hurt.

“I didn’t,” Eddie starts, desperate for him to know; however this plays out, Steve cannot ever, ever believe his heart isn’t…isn’t the most invaluable gift in, in—

In any universe. Any dimension. Across any existence at all worth knowing.

He doesn’t think the words he knows could do the sentiment justice, though. And words, shit: he should be good with those but, even if he knew the right ones. Hell just fought up his still-pounding heart with a flail and that’s…

He grabs Steve's hand tighter, fit to break bones: the need unquestionable.

He hopes the want, the devotion in him translates just as clear.

And then, oh holy fuck—then.

Steve holds back just as hard.

“I wanted to try to keep the ball in your court,” Steve exhales, shaky; and Eddie knows, he knows they’re on the same page. Steve’s heart’s so fast. Eddie’s is faster.

“I told you,” Eddie starts, more like he’s trying to figure it all out for himself more than arguing anything but, how could Steve had thought Eddie didn’t, how could—

Why would anyone trust Eddie with any kind of sports-oriented ball—

“With the shower, and—“

“I’m not that guy anymore,” Steve barely whispers; “you might’ve had a crush on me then but now I’m,” Eddie feels Steve swallow; hears his heartbeat maybe skip; “I think, I mean, I hope I’m a different person.”

Eddie has to breathe at the notch in Steve’s throat for a couple seconds, maybe minutes; this…this sounds like…like maybe…

“And just because the ball’s in your court,” Steve’s pulse kicks up, and up, and—

“Didn’t mean my heart wasn’t still held out for the stomping,” and he’s twirling Eddie’s hair, he’s twirling his fingers through Eddie’s hair while he talks about the impossible possibility of, of what: Eddie…not wanting, of Eddie doing the stomping—

Eddie can barely swallow.

“You saying you wouldn’t help bathe all your friends in similar circumstances?” he mostly kinda squeaks; he can barely hear over the rush of his own blood.

“I’m saying not all of them,” there’s a little smile in Steve’s voice, but his pulse is still knocking against where Eddie pressed into his neck; “but I wouldn’t be risking my heart for it either way.”

And Eddie…Eddie thinks he’s maybe dying, for real this time. He thinks maybe he’s never felt alive before this moment, ever.

He blames the confusion, for not thinking through his next words.

“Would it be too not-slow,” Eddie mouths against the pulsepoint jumping at him, fit perfect to his lips; “or unsubtle, if I said I thought I was in love with you?”

He might not think the words through, but hell if he regrets them for a goddamn second.

Not when Steve doesn’t move to pull away, doesn’t let go at all, holds on tight—but the pulse against Eddie’s lips redefines what it means to hammer, to race.

Eddie starts thinking about turning, looking Steve in the eye and hoping to find what he…what he thinks he’ll find but there’s still a part of him that’s scared, that’s not brave, that’s…

But then Steve’s moving, raising up to meet Eddie’s gaze: so bright in the middle of the night, in the pitch dark. Lips open, breathing heavy, their chests still flush but now Steve’s reaching, framing Eddie’s face and just…looking.

Nah, no: staring.

“Steve?” Eddie thinks it’s more a matter of his lips moving than of sound coming out, especially as he tries to follow the pad of Steve’s thumb as it traces the corner of Eddie’s lips, careful, so careful, like Eddie’s glass and wonder all at once and—

“I think I’m in love with you, too.”

And then Steve’s leaning in, then Eddie’s learning that Steve tastes like leftover toothpaste and some kind of spice they hadn’t eaten, that Eddie doesn’t know: thinks, believes is what dawn tastes like, the breaking of day itself in Steve’s mouth, his veins.

They move slow, slick, tongues less exploring and more kinda worshipping; Eddie’s been kissed harder and faster and deeper for the technical definitions of any of the terms but he’s never felt so dizzy, so spun from the axis of his world, the line that splits his heart in halves; never like someone was tongue his soul out gentle to weigh and bathe in, like, adoration.

Eddie doesn’t have a word for how it steals his breath.

“Hey,” he tried to gasp anyway when they break apart for air; “hey, Stevie?”

“Hmm?” Steve hums, running the line of his nose up Eddie’s jaw, and Eddie throws his head back, shivers when Steve licks at the fading scars as he goes. When he makes it to kiss Eddie’s temple—because now he means to, or maybe he always did and, oh, oh shit, what if he always did—then he leans back and looks at Eddie, and there’s…

There’s so much in those eyes. It makes Eddie feel…almost-brave.

“What if I took the ‘think’ out?”

Steve tips his head, fucking adorable.

“Whatcha mean?”

Eddie swallows, and soaks up that gaze some more: almost-brave.

“I said I think I’m in love with you,” Eddie exhales; “what if I said that, but I took out the part where I say ‘think’?”

And oh wow: he’d thought, he’d known Steve was some inexplicable light before.

He’s putting their whole galaxy’s suns, every one of them Eddie doesn’t even know—the way his eyes shine and his smile beams puts every goddamn one of them to shame.

And Eddie doesn’t expect it, exactly, when Steve gathers his hands again and crushes them to his chest just to murmur low:

“Then I’d say this is yours to do with whatever you’d like,” and he moves Eddie’s palms to cup around the beat that’s still so fast and hard but not pulled taut anymore, closer to sugar high, or a rubber ball ricocheting around the ceiling just for the joy in it; “stomping included,” and he smiles for it like a joke but…but Eddie would never so—

He leans in and this time he captures the lips, and he presses hard, dares to nip at Steve’s lower lip and bite out:

“Never,” and he meets Steve’s eyes, watching them dilate impossibly in too little light and he just, he just…

He falls into Steve, presses his cheek close and, and feels him. Somehow all of it’s new.

“You okay?” Steve eventually asks, but doesn’t pull away, just slides a hand up the line of Eddie’s spine to steady, to keep him like there’s a question of Eddie going anywhere but here every again; and then just leans into Eddie’s cheek, magnetic-like.

And okay is such a foolish, insignificant word. Eddie could hold the weight of the earth ten times over, he feels strong enough; Eddie could swallow the stars and it wouldn’t matter because he has his own sun right in front of him.

Eddie doesn’t know if he understood the word happy before this moment, and every synonym for it that means the exact same thing’s a lot like okay: just too fucking small.

“Yeah,” Eddie answers, and breathes Steve in so deep his lungs kinda shake for it before he breathes back out; “yeah, sweetheart,” and fuck, fuck—Eddie Munson’s not just in love.

Eddie Munson is loved in return. Eddie Munson loves, and is loved back. That’s…that’s just…

“I’ve never been better.”

>>> four: play 🎶🎧🎹

divider credits here & here

👾 title credit here

💫 ao3 link here

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hitlikehammers · 10 days

Text

recovering!Eddie Needs Help With The Whole Showering Thing💦

Good thing Steve's there to help give Eddie a goddamn stroke at the idea of being naked in front of him? help him, huh?

or: put-up-or-shut-up time, Edward Munson

I Could Be Your Nurse (or something)

Or: Five Times Eddie Has To Ask For Help, Plus One Time He Doesn’t Need It Anymore (but asks anyway) ✨ for @penny00dreadful 💜

<<< one: drink 🧊

🧼 two: wash 🫧🚿

“You’ve basically got two choices, man.”

Eddie folds his lips over on themselves, mashes them together until it fucking hurts, might put the last of the stitches in the gouge out of the left side out of their misery early and pop them clean out of the skin for the force of his, his…

“Pout all you like, dude, they’re not changing.”

He is not. Fucking. Pouting.

He is a grown goddamn man.

“I reject your binary options, Steven,” Eddie volleys, because he’s not pouting, he is applying logic to an honestly-offensively illogical proposal like a mature adult; he is rightly pushing back against two unacceptable options when another has to exist, obviously, because the ones presented are impossible and so there must be a possible one he hasn’t found yet. One that’s just hiding from him. Sneaky.

“Reject all you want, man,” Steve scoffs, and leans back with arms crossed over his chest, stretching his sweater across the expanse and that right there is why there has to be a secret hidden third option waiting for him somewhere, Jesus H. fucking Christ: “they’re not going to change.”

Eddie blinks probably too long, too many times; is quiet for the whole span of moments before he decides deflection is really his only way forward, here.

“You’re very cruel sometimes,” he laments with the best sigh he can heave with the remaining stitches in him; “leaves me positively despairing, almost.”

And it was a good, solid, drawn-out sigh, that he heaved, just for the record. Because there are fewer stitches holding him together today than there were yesterday, and fewer yesterday than last week, and it’s progress, there is so much progress—

It’s just that progress is a very big reason for why he has this particular goddamn problem right now.

To set the stage: he’s been home for almost a week. The freedom is glorious. The new trailer the Feds set them up with is a little bigger, close enough layout though to still feel like home. His room is almost suspiciously similar given that 98% of his belongings were collateral damage or in government lockup. Certain questions Steve had asked him over the past weeks make a little more sense; the main orchestrator of the set up likewise clear on context. Eddie is warm with it every time he thinks about it. Which is whenever he’s in his room. And whenever he sees Steve.

Which is probably the main thing to add, for context: Eddie had been grateful as fuck for Steve while he was in the hospital, the man rarely leaving his side, usually just to check on Max who, while not yet awake, was making progress in healing and Eleven—who Eddie’s finally met now and kind of fucking adores—thinks she finally understands what’s blocking her ability to reach Red, meaning she can work on obliterating it: all good signs. And if Steve’s abounded presence did absolutely fuck all for Eddie’s old and apparently latent crush on the asshole jock-king from high school, flamed into kind of a fucking inferno over the course of spring break—if Steve’s steadfast presence and tireless attention to Eddie’s needs in the hospital had only managed to tame it into some kind of big and bright and undying eternal fucking flame—and that’d be a good song title, he needs to remember that—but if that was the payoff, as it were?

The burn of it—incredible and unbearable alike—was kind of almost secondary to the mixed emotions Eddie was having over leaving the hospital and losing this; losing Steve.

Except—and here’s the fucking kicker—he doesn’t. He doesn’t…lose Steve. Like, not at all.

Sure, maybe Steve goes home more, like, touches base at his own house, and he pops to the hospital where Eddie currently isn’t anymore to check on Max, but on the flipside Eddie is awake more and so he gets to soak up all the time Steve is here, in the trailer, next to Eddie, breathing air in the same space, breathing the same air as Eddie and, and, and—

“Look,” Steve’s sighing, slapping his thighs—such fucking distracting thighs—and leaning in pointedly on his palms; “Wayne’s pulling the night shift,” he nods at Eddie’s little TV tray with the crust of half a grilled cheese and a little cup of his medications; “you take your pills, you’ll sleep until after he’s turned in,” then Steve leans back, lifts a finger demonstratively: “so there’s another day.”

Eddie pouts, now, sees where this is going.

“Wayne might be pulling night shifts all week, in fact,” Steve adds, another finger pointed upward, counting in the air.

Eddie doesn’t nibble his cold crust petulantly or anything. Like, he does nibble. And it is cold.

But petulant; him?!

Never.

“The nurse isn’t due by until Thursday,”and Steve pauses before arching his brow even higher; “afternoon,” and he raises two fingers for that and Eddie’s got enough presence of mind to shoot back, even if it’s muffled, bread still in his mouth:

“You saying I smell?”

Steve’s eyeroll is such a fucking impressive feat it should be, like, an Olympic sport. But it’s probably too arousing for national television, so. Shit, that wouldn’t work.

“I am saying,” Steve draws out the word obnoxiously and why is that attractive, good fucking god: “you’re itching places you’re not even fucking stitched up,” he pokes at Eddie unapologetically in a safe place on his still-fairly-bandaged body and Eddie jumps harder than he should, but makes sure he grins for it, that he doesn’t play up the annoyance or the shock because one, Steve’s eyes go wide and incredulous and kinda fucking scared, like he knows he didn’t touch anything healing or tender, because Eddie’s thinks Steve knows his wounds mapped out so goddamn well he could draw them out blind and he didn’t touch anything bad actually, and that brings up two, which is: Eddie didn’t even have to exaggerate his reaction; he hasn’t been touched playfully in so long and he didn’t realize how much he missed it, how much his body missed it and he’s also kind of fucking thrilled it’s Steve, who broke the sad little standstill—Eddie makes sure to laugh a little and it’s not fucking hard once he starts because the way the tension melts off Steve in a huff is a shot of adrenaline, a hit of dopamine, a bubble of joy stretched to bursting and then fucking popping to spill warm and gooey in Eddie’s chest and he—

What the fuck is happening to him?

But then Steve’s poking him again and he twitches for it and just laughs more because fuck he missed that but also fuck he wants this to meansomething and it’s wild and insane and he kind of doesn’t know what to do with it at all when Steve leans in and whispers slyly:

“So I am guessing you’d feel better with a shower.”

It’s not a lie. It’s not a lie but when he says it, particularly paired up with how he says it?

How the fuck can blood run hot and cold all at once?

Because Eddie does want a fucking shower, so he doesn’t feel fucking gross. And Eddie knows he needs help: moving like that, reaching what needs reached, and fuck all, but avoiding all the bandages, for fuck’s sake—but.

But: there’s this line, newly discovered beyond theory for one Eddie Munson, that divides an idle crush from an active wanting; that separates your fantasy jerk-off material from something that sits and grows branches and roots, heavy and tight and real in your chest.

Basically: there’s a difference between imagining what sucking pretty boy asshole King Steve off in the locker rooms might be like and coming hard in the privacy of your own bed for the gorgeous absurd impossibility of it, and the genuine article, not a king but something worse, something more like, like a benevolent god for how he speaks, how he touches, tends to Eddie so careful but sure, so goddamn competent and beautiful, dear god, he’s so much more breathtaking up close, but it’s not even that, it’s not even that, or well, it’s that, but it’s so much more than high-school-distanced-Eddie could have guessed even in his quickest, most satisfying jack-sessions, because Steve as a human being?

Fucking…captivating.

Funny. Bitchy. Cares so goddamn much it makes his heart crack wide to see it, let alone be the focus of it but then he’s so strung tight, so anxious with frontline reflexes that shatter that cracked heart and let it bleed with the desperate fucking need to care for him in kind but somehow tenfold but then you’ll always fail because this level of compassion and just, just this pure kind of love, how can anyone match it, which is where Steve has to land in benevolent god territory, some ineffable chaotic good, and Eddie—

Well. Yeah.

Of course, Eddie’s quiet for the whole of running this through his head and Steve’s taken the entry to care some more and cross over to Eddie, move his tray and hold out his hands expectantly. Like Eddie’s got a choice in the clear intention Steve has to…haul him to his feet?

“It’s not like I haven’t seen you naked before.”

And oh, wow, good thing Eddie's not actively dying anymore, because his heart goddamn stops for that, no getting around it for the way it bangs upon restarting; and if he'd still been half-dead regarding the rest of his body, that'd probably have done him in because Jesus flying fuck.

So it’s: haul him to his feet and drag him to the shower. Which he does, so careful but so precise, when Eddie’s mind blanks out and loses the window available to protest by way of stunned silence, which continues all the way to the bathroom where Steve lowers him to the closed toilet lid, again so careful, and goes to work.

Readying a shower. Eddie’s shower.

Which he needs help with. Lots of help.

While he’s, as indicated clearly: fucking bare ass naked.

And not even just in front of Steve, no, nope. Not that that wouldn’t be bad enough. But this?

This is him actively needing Steve’s help. Like…hands-on help.

Eddie thinks his heart’s about ready to crash into his chest wall for the reckless speed it’s taken to racing at because, just…

Holy fucking hell.

“Skipping gym class may have done half the work of failing your ass, but it’s not like you never showed,” Steve points out, still unbothered, so, so fucking unbothered when Eddie’s over here with palms sweaty enough to leave wet-marks on his sweats; “you came into the showers,” Steve barrels on as he moves the bottles of shampoo and the bar of soap out of the way for Eddie to maneuver in, with help, with Steve’s help;

“More than once,” Steve tacks on and Eddie has to blink, has to refocus on what they fuck was being said: he came into the showers. More than once.

Right.

“Wow, thanks for noticing,” Eddie quips, or tries to; it falls fucking flat, and for the way Steve stills, and then sighs with, like, the whole of him, it’s obvious he missed his mark.

“Eddie,” Steve starts, and pulls away from where he’d been learning to start the water, to warm it up right.

“Look,” Eddie breathes out shaky, because fucking hell; “it’s not like…that. It’s not the same.”

Steve stills, and doesn’t know what to expect of the way he freezes, back to Eddie but his muscles going tight beneath his shirt, and Eddie’s stomach drops preemptive-like, because, because—

“Oh,” Steve’s voice gets a little sharp around the edges; “so it’s okay when thirty dicks are swinging alongside yours, I get it.”

Except it really doesn’t sound like Steve fucking gets it; not least because Steve wouldn’t be fighting this, wouldn’t be putting up the front of pushing the point if he did get it. It he got it for real.

“It’s different when it’s you,” and honestly the words come out before Eddie can think them through; they’re not inaccurate but when he hears them out loud he winces because it sounds wrong no matter what he means and—

When he sees Steve’s face fall, eyes so wide, that flash of hurt, he, just: fuck.

He hurts too; he might even hurt harder.

“Jesus,” Eddie half-gasps, half-pleads already because no, no, fucking no; “not like that—“

“No,” and oh god, if Eddie ever thought about what real heartbreak felt like, he only has to hear that voice, in that tone, because Jesus fuck, he feels like a hand’s gone into his chest, snapped a couple ribs, and used the sharp bits to twist his heart around like a goddamn knitting needle.

“No, man, I get it,” but Steve’s tone’s too dull, too measured, and his shoulders are too tight, and he’s not looking at Eddie at all and Eddie kinda want to fucking cry, and—

“No need to explain,” and oh, god, did Steve’s voice break a little? Did Eddie cause that, all on his fucking own? What kind of monster is he, and all for his goddamn…what, shame? Pride? Cowardice? God, he can’t, he can’t let this happen, he can’t let this keep going—

“Maybe I can, like, get you some washcloths? And like, a bar of soap, just for now,” and fuck, no, shit, Steve’s rambling in that anxious way that’s also kind of….mindless, robotic and hollow and then he looks up, finally; he hadn’t been looking at all and Eddie thinks he can hear his own heart crack for the way those eyes are too damn bright, and look too fucking dead all the same:

“Is it still, like, a problem if I help? So long as you’re mostly covered,” Steve asks, and god, it’s like…it’s like he’s a stranger. It’s not like he’s mean, or distant really, but it’s like Eddie was welcome inside this door to him, pulled in close from the threshold and welcome and now it’s not the the doors shut in his face, nothing so definitive or rejecting: more like the door was gone and never there.

And that hurts…so much fucking more.

“Or, all the chairs are too big but maybe a stool,” Steve’s saying, moving things around in the bathroom where Eddie’s followed him, that voice still tomblike where it should be filled with sun; “just gotta make sure the bandages stay dry, do you think you can—“

“Steve.”

And the man stills, a bar of Ivory soap denting in the shapes of his nails for the way his hand’s clenched and…Eddie was scared. Of losing. Of being tossed aside, which would hurt with anyone, for anything. But the things he’s started feeling now, for Steve, changing the shape of him as much as his healing scar but for the better, if somehow far more terrifying—losing that, even where it lives alone and unrequited, and Eddie’s suspects also only half-formed yet even for how big it stands?

Losing the source of the star in Eddie’s chest would do him in quicker than the fucking bats ever had a chance to.

And the feeling of seeing Steve think…come to the conclusions he’s coming to now because Eddie’s a coward, like he’s misstepped or not given enough or said the rough thing or been supportive or, or, or—

The look on Steve’s face, and the crack in his voice: they’re causing pain under Eddie’s ribs in a way he hadn’t even considered the torment of.

And Eddie’ll probably crumble if this goes wrong, if Steve flinches away for knowing and if Eddie

loses this thing, this person whose presence he’s already grown to depend on, not for the help Eddie needs but for the >i>person Steve Harrington is: but he’ll fall apart anyway if he lets things stand as they are and he refuses to be the reason Steve’s pulled down in the collapse.

So he reaches, and fights the way his heart drops when Steve tenses as Eddie tries to nudge him into turning around, into facing Eddie. Into looking him in the eyes and seeing, or else, Eddie hopes like hell that he will see—

“It is different, when it’s you,” Eddie makes sure he says it careful, gentle; that he pitches it like a prelude to the way he’s gotta give up the cowardice, gotta face the music and be brave for this beautiful boy in front of him who’s scared for all the wrong reasons, for the lie of him somehow being the fuck up here, like he’s the one who did anything wrong—

Impossible. Impossible, so Eddie’s gotta pull back the curtain and if he holds his breath around it then—doesn’t fucking matter. So long as he says it.

“Because I never had an,” he chokes just a little, coughs around it and clears his throat too much; “umm, well, like,” and he stumbles, he stumbles but he tells himself it’s acceptable, that it’s to be expected, gotta build momentum to get this out:

“Never had an arguably-debilitating crush on those other guys,” Eddie finishes, a little shaky but without a hint of nervous laughter, closer to nausea than anything, and yeah: given that he can’t seem to get fucking words out when he tries to just say it, and shit: words are kinda his thing, y’know?

But the fact that he can barely string any of them together makes it really clear, at the very least inside his own chest: it’s debilitating, alright, and it’s already far more than the high school crush that started years ago. It’s…it’s so much more than that, now which, fuck.

Fuck, can Steve hear the truth of it in the shaking, the stuttering? Does he know?

“Plus y’know, eww,” Eddie covers up nervously, always with the babbling, the lunge for distraction; “I didn’t go perusing the dick selection in the Hawkins locker room on the regular, please give me some credit,” and he tries so fucking hard to end on comic disgust, he tries, he thinks he might be shaking, he’s—

He’s being caught by the wrists. He’s being pulled in chest to chest so his own can heave with the trembling gasps he’s not even trying to fight but that can’t really build to their potential against the wall of Steve’s chest but; he can’t feel his heart racing against that sturdy splay of chest, he’s held so tight. He can’t kinda feel Steve’s heartbeat too, faster but not like Eddie’s. Just…faster than normal. It kinda feels like it should mean something. Eddie doesn’t move of his own choosing, but also can’t manage to stop with the shaking. Which is…not ideal.

“Eddie?” And Steve’s looking up at him, chin tipped down so he can glance through those goddamn lashes, so Eddie can have proof in the wild off-pace thump his heart gives, that rattles his bones just for extra proof that ‘crush’ alone left the building long ago. He mostly just…just tries not to tremble, mostly wills his knees not to give out even if he trust with everything in him that Steve’ll catch him, it’s just—

Steve looks up at him, and says his name like it’s delicate, like it’s worth something, like he is worth something, then he’s gathering Eddie’s hands in his and that’s, that’s not normal, it’s not for balance or to help guide him save where he need to go: no. No, Steve raises their joined grasps and Eddie’s pulse skips twice to think they’re going to Steve’s lips but he just lifts them to his forehead like a touchstone and breathes for a few long moments, the color on his cheeks changing shade before he sighs long and deep and brings Eddie’s hands under his chin before he whispers:

“Let me help you shower,” and maybe it’s not spoke like a question, but Eddie knows it’s a choice and how; how can this man still want to touch him, see him, he can’t, he can’t—

“Steve,” Eddie barely breathes because of all the ways he’d maybe envisioned this going, from worst case scenario to impossible fantasies, the possibility of it all just…kinda being a non-thing, taken wholly in stride?

That wasn’t in the cards he’d prepared for. Eddie…doesn’t know how to handle that.

“Let me help you,” Steve repeats, as soft and like a given as the first time but then he averts his eyes again and sucks in a breath through his teeth:

“Or, I guess,” he huffs, swallows, really is the braver of them for how quick and firm he meets Eddie’s eyes, then: to ask:

“Do you want me to?” and Eddie’s heart clenches like every way it’s ever clenched before was a trial run, because this is a squeeze and a twist for how earnest he not just sounds but looks, how big and bright and honest eyes are and he’s so beautiful, he’s so fucking beautiful—

“If you don’t, that’s,” Eddie must be staring, quiet for too many seconds in a row because Steve sounds just as earnest but…can you be earnest about being hesitant? About giving someone the space and letting them hold the reins entirely? Jesus, it’s, this is…

“Yeah,” Eddie’s a little breathless, probably doesn’t sound as sure as he wants to but maybe sounds as sure as he can because he’s fucking taken aback, okay? Steve…people in general aren’t this good, y’know?

“Yeah, if you,” Eddie gestures between them, between Steve and Eddie’s crotch because, because, then more generally, more vague mostly to buy time, mostly because Eddie doesn’t even know what the fuck to do with this except, except say yes because he’s grateful, because he’s shell-shocked, because…

“If you’re okay with it,” because if Steve’s is, then: yes.

But Eddie’s gotta make sure.

But of course then there’s Steve, who never once let go of his hands, and now he’s squeezing them, and looking Eddie square in the eyes once more until Eddie returns the gesture; not nearly as steady, but fuck does he try.

“I am here,” Steve speaks clear, enunciates every syllables and barely fucking blinks; “so that I can help you,” and it’s the way he exhales while still holding Eddie’s gaze that nearly does Eddie in before Steve kinda just breathes:

“Okay?”

Eddie’s kinda proud he managed to nod because goddamn.

Given permission, he’s quick to work; he helps Eddie to lean against the closed toilet lid and then he’s shimmying Eddie’s sweats down, waiting for Eddie’s to step out once they’re pooled to the floor, meets Eddie’s eyes with hands on the waist of Eddie’s boxers and Eddie flushes so fucking hot he might set flame to something if he’s not careful but he inclined his head and Steve’s quick about it, stretches the elastic out extra wide around his hips and never looks away from Eddie’s face until they fall to the floor.

Then he’s reaching for something Eddie hadn’t noticed—scissors—and he’s going for the hem, of Eddie’s sweatshirt which—

“What—“ Eddie starts, but it hurts too much to flinch away and even if he could manage it: just because he doesn’t understand doesn’t mean he doesn’t trust.

Which should be fucking terrifying, but here they are.

“I can stitch it back together, promise,” Steve’s saying while he uses the blade not to cut but as an ad-hoc seam-ripper, and making a clean job of it from what Eddie can tell, all things considered.

“Steve Harrington, master seamstress?” Eddie chokes out as Steve moves to tear out the stitches nearest the neckline and then peels the top from Eddie’s body, no painful contortion required.

Man’s goddamn full of surprises.

But then Steve leaves Eddie buck naked while he goes into Eddie’s bedroom, comes back in an instant with more towels that Eddie thought they owned, pops two big ones on the sink and hands Eddie a big stack of washcloths while he starts lining the floor with the rest, pooling them carefully around the base of the toilet near Eddie’s feet, his head not dangerously close to Eddie’s not limp dick or anything while he gets to work, Jesus H. fucking Christ.

Then Steve’s grabbing for one of the washcloths and Eddie can safely place the rest of his lap for this goddamn modesty.

Eddie almost topples them to the floor and ends up with negative modesty when a damp cloth brushes his forearm, unannounced and so fucking gentle.

“Too hot?” Steve asks, and Eddie shakes his head. It should be. The water’s been running long enough. But…nothing’s probably hotter than Eddie’s skin right now for how he feels his cheeks burn so.

Relatively speaking it’s fine.

Steve raises a brow, fiddles with the knobs a little and then soaks the cloth, soaps it up and…starts from the top.

And he’s so careful, so gentle, so clinical but soft in the precise way he makes points, little triangles like a puzzle to clean just up to the lines of bandages, never submerging or letting the wet get to the edges, threaten the adhesive, and he’s no one-trick-pony either, because it’s soap then it’s a fresh towel to wipe clean, the whole of him, save for the behind he sits on and the…not attentive dick and its neighboring real estate under the extra cloths.

Steve holds up a finger, asks for a pause while his footsteps rush to the trailer beyond, and come back with a…

Chair from the kitchen.

Then he’s busy covering it with towels before he wordlessly helps Eddie to his feet and leads him to sit, back to the shower.

“Lean back as much as you can,” Steve says, and Eddie has no reason to argue before Steve’s got another towel gathering his greasy-ass hair up and then making a barrier between the limp matted mess and the wooden spindles, and then—

Oh god, oh god, then his hands are in Eddie’s hair, holding it at an angle so the water he’s pouring from somewhere falls into the tub basin until the strands are wet and if Eddie thought that was heavenly, then he’s working the shampoo in and Eddie’s been afraid for a little while that nerve damage would impair…y’know but good goddamn no worries there save for coming all over the fucking towels because Jesus H., the feeling of Steve’s hands in his hair, massaging his scalp, ringing and repeating, combing through the strands with his fingers…

That’s what the word orgasmic means. Every other definition is a lie.

Eddie thinks he’s between floating on the high of the sensation and squeezing his dick to keep from shooting off beneath the washcloths and so he probably misses exactly when the water stops rinsing his hair out, and when Steve’s hands stop touching him save to mop the worst of the soaked ends of his squeaky-clean mop, but when he does blink back to the moment Steve’s frowning, but not, not at Eddie.

More like near Eddie.

“We can’t put it in, but,” and oh, he’s talking about the chair, can’t put a wooden chair into a shower, fair, fair, but then Steve’s eyes are lifting back to Eddie and they look…a little apologetic, but mostly resolute: “if I help, do you think you can,” and he nods at the tub, the mid-height lip of it. Eddie sucks in a sharp breath, for the challenge, but.

But also because there is really just one general area of his body that’s not been…attended to yet for cleaning.

So it’s maybe like a 60-40, 70-30 split on that point. Moment of truth, either way.

“I’ll need a lot of help,” Eddie bites his lip, and he’s not even surprised when Steve meets his trepidation with encouragement.

“I can lift you,” and oh, wow, hey, definitely a safe thing to say to a guy before you’re gonna help him wash his dick. “But do you think you can stand if I help you keep your balance?”

Steve’s obviously got a plan and Eddie obviously just needs to not come on them both on the way to, in, and out of the shower right now so, he figures they should both handle their own separate priorities for the home stretch, here.

“Yeah,” Eddie answers, even though he doesn’t believe it.

He believes in Steve, though, so. Probably that’s enough.

And Steve does lift him, and the towels are still covering his front but Steve doesn’t shy from lifting his ass and wow, okay.

Okay.

“You lean on me, like this,” and of course he’s manhandling Eddie as he runs a quick cloth—soap, then water—over Eddie’s back and then across the curve of his ass, holy mother of—; “and then,” Steve holds another soapy cloth to Eddie and gestures, this time hidden from a full frontal view by propping Eddie against his still-clothed chest:

“Then you can finish up,” Steve says like it’s simple. Maybe it is.

Eddie’s soaped up his pubes and barely dropped the cloth before he reaches for the wet one to rinse but—

Nope. Nope, Steve’s got a cup, maybe what he was using for Eddie’s hair, a crackled novelty one from the Pizza Hut in Muncie, Eddie remembers getting the damn thing; but Steve got that cup angled so he pours directly below Eddie’s lowest dressing, letting him use both hands to work the soap all the way out.

“How,” Eddie starts, kinda marveling that his short and curlies are…distinctly not bubbly.

“Got good aim,” Steve’s smirk is audible behind him, and tangible for how it lifts his chest with a little huff; “basketball and shit.”

“Fuckin’ jock,” Eddie lobs back without any heat at all; shit, if anything, it sounds fond on the outside.

Adoring if you go any deeper.

“Dry off,” and it’s then that Steve hands Eddie the last of the bath linens that had been his little loin cloths before being hauled into the tub; he dries his front as best he can and then tosses the cloth before Steve’s reaching around him with a wider towel, drying him hip-to-thigh, and cupping across his ass. again before loosing the towel to the floor and grabbing around Eddie

“Hold onto me here,” and Eddie’s being hoisted ever-so-gently over the side of the tub and deposited back on the toilet which has a…fresh towel on it for him to sit on. When’d that get there, anyway?

“Okay, now,” and oh, wow, okay, Steve’s kneeling between his legs and when’d he get there, anyway?

“Slip these on, for your modesty,” Steve winks as he works a new pair of boxers up Eddie’s legs, quick and efficient like Eddie hasn’t had a fucking stroke here; “and let’s get you toweled off the rest of the way and into some clean fuckin’ clothes.”

He gets the boxers up as far as the line of his pelvis before it’s unavoidable, and Eddie assumes he’ll try to stretch the waist far again, to keep his hands as far from anything too weird no, nope: Steve sticks with quick and efficient and he gets those fucking underwear up and settled in no time at all.

And he brushes his forearm twice against Eddie’s shaft in the process, and does nothing. Has no reaction. Is…fine.

Eddie doesn’t know what to do with that at all.

Steve does, though, apparently: which is to careful dab the towels where he can’t rub him dry, and do exactly that until Eddie’s got nary a stray droplet left to be soaked up by the unseamripped sweatshirt and clean sweatpants Steve helps him into, before helping him to bed but Eddie shakes his head, nods at the door, toward the living room.

Steve eyes him appraisingly before helping him in that direction and Eddie’s glad he could fake whatever amount of wakefulness was necessary to bypass the bed because the fact of it is he’s bone fucking tired—all the arousal did not help that specific point—but Steve’ll sit next to him on the couch, as a given, where sometimes Steve sits next to his bed instead of next to him in his bed.

And Eddie wants to tip over exhausted against Steve, okay? Because Steve doesn’t seem to fucking mind, so.

They settle, exactly like always, exactly like Eddie expected. And Steve’s arm welcomes his rapid descent along Steve’s ribs, the soft echo of his heartbeat this hallowed, magic thing that just makes Eddie feel warm.

“Thank you,” Eddie says, for this, for the shower, for the way this is the same and also maybe better beyond all probabilities: for everything, really. For Steve, being Steve.

And Eddie’s almost asleep, and it might be the magic warmth of the way he tipped into Steve’s space and the tangle of their bodies for it but the words Eddie hears last before he’s out come from near his scalp, and lips move in his hair and maybe that’s just coincidence, or maybe all probabilities are still being shatters and it’s almost something like a kiss but either way—

Either way, Steve’s voice is so soft and open when he whispers Eddie into sleep with the most perfect word imaginable:

“Always.”

>>> three: sleep 💤🪦🌗

divider credits here & here

👾 title credit here

💫 ao3 link here

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hitlikehammers · 13 days

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Post S4!Eddie Needs a Little Help

Good thing Steve's such an excellent nurse boyfriend? friend, huh?

I Could Be Your Nurse (or something)

Or: Five Times Eddie Has To Ask For Help, Plus One Time He Doesn’t Need It Anymore (but asks anyway) ✨ for @penny00dreadful 💜

🧊 one: drink 🧊

The first thing he clocks, when he surfaces back to the land of the living: he can’t move his fucking arms.

At first, he thinks he’s locked up, restrained somehow: cuffed, but he can’t even know that, he can’t even check because he can barely fucking move at all, he—

“Eddie,” he hears his name through white noise that’s tunneling his vision, that’s caving in with every blow his pounding heartbeat deals to the walls as they close closer—there’s beeping like a time bomb in the background but it’s not just his name, it’s the voice that speaks it: it cuts through. It bolsters the walls and shelters him from collapse as his eyes dart wild, seeking out the sound.

“Breathe,” plush lips and earnest eyes coax him, and Eddie feels his own eyes widen because: Steve goddamn Harrington.

Here.

“You can breathe, okay,” Steve’s saying and his eyes are bigger now, there’s a pleading in his tone and Eddie sees it happen before any sensation, any feeling comes with it: Steve’s got Eddie’s hand in his, cups it to his chest but never breaks from holding Eddie’s gaze and the first thing Eddie thinks he feels as a touch is the warm pressure of the chest under their joined hands lifting almost-too-strong, almost-too-full.

The things Eddie feels that have nothing to do with his five fucking senses—he’ll work those out later.

“Come on, with me, with me, yeah?” and Steve’s breathing deep and even and forced for it, keeping a punishingly intentional sort of time and Eddie realizes oh, hey, right: he does need to breathe and so the next thing that he feels is the tail-end of pain, sneaking up under a fog that hints at any to come when whatever’s blanketing the feeling gets lifted, taken away, but then Eddie’s zeroing in on Steve’s face again, gasping a little and fuck, but it hurts: but Steve.

Steve’s smiling at him, in a way Eddie doesn’t know he’s ever seen before; definitely never felt before for the way it points a direct hit to his sternum, all fuzzy and sunrise-gold, and he doesn’t know if it helps him or hurts him in trying to breathe, to get the rhythm back to is but it sure as shit kicks at his heart and he thinks that punches his lungs hard enough to do…something, because Steve’s smile just grows, and the warm-gold-glow starts to spread through Eddie as something bigger and brighter and fuller than the pain as Steve exhales once out-of-sync and Eddie feels it, how Steve presses his hand tighter to his chest for it and laughs a little around one single word:

“Yeah,” and then it’s back to deep breaths, carefully measured, and Eddie wants Steve to talk again, but his head’s getting clearer, his lungs remembering how to work right, and he feels things under his hand now where he didn’t before: soft sweater. Rabbit-quick heartbeat.

“Steve,” Eddie chokes it, drags the word across gravel and bleeds it out and he’s disgusted in an instant, horrified by the sound coming out of himbut before he can let the terror and the hurt swallow him, he sees Steve, who somehow found a way to grin broader, shine brighter.

“Hey,” he laughs it out with so much goddamn relief, so much feeling, that Eddie can’t help but melt into it; Steve must feel something in him, or maybe he just knows, because he’s gathering Eddie’s hand, flattening it as a palm against his chest to keep breathing, keep breathing, but then he’s reaching and there’s a gentle whisper of touch against Eddie’s left cheek, and it stings, and he knows he should feel more but it’s…it’s goodeven as it aches and he leans, fuck, he doesn’t think twice before he leans.

“God, it’s good to hear your voice,” Steve says and it’s so warm and honest and it’s fucking laughable because Eddie sounds goddamn abysmal, and his throat tries to push the laughter, even if it’s poorly placed, even if nothing really feels fucking funny about anything but the effort’s like sandpaper on glass, wretched and violent, and Steve’s eyes widen when Eddie flaps at his neck, but he’s already reaching for the side of the bed, and—

“Water?” He asks, holding up a pitcher and a clear plastic cup and Eddie bites his tongue, tries to remember breathing without Steve’s guiding hand and he almost manages as he nods and then tries to reach when Steve places the pitcher, cup in his hand but Eddie’s hand…

He can’t lift it right. His vision’s either totally fucked, or his hand is tremoring hard enough to make him dizzy. He can’t feel anything, again. He—

“Eddie?” Steve’s voice is careful, gentle, but it’s firm: like it knows it’ll find steel to press against when Eddie meets his gaze and makes himself listen: he wants the glass. He can’t…he can’t reach for it, let alone hold it, let alone get the water to his mouth, and not all over everywhere else for the shaking. He doesn’t know if he’d feel the width and weight of the cup, or the wetness of the spill: he’s a mess, he’s broken, he’s totally fucked, what even if this, what is he, is this what it means to have survived, what is wrong with him—

“Look at me.”

Steve’s got that tender-pressed iron in his tone, the command less grating where it would make Eddie seethe—still does, the slightest bit but so far beneath everything else; beneath a sense of being cared for, being held close and then Steve’s hand is reaching for Eddie’s face again, brushing along his cheek and oh.

Oh, tears. He, he was—

“We almost lost you, Eds,” and it’s Steve that sounds choked for it, his voice wet and weeping with it and eyes gleaming just a little too bright and Eddie’s pulse trips to see it: proof that he means something. Proof that the wild things Eddie’d let himself imagine in the past days, in what he was so fucking sure were his last moments at all: they might still be wild, but they might also be things he’ll get to touch just an edge of, a gentle mercy of the corner of the things he spun up in his head.

“We almost lost you,” Steve says it again, and it’s sounds just as gutted, fucking…heartbroken, and for what, for Eddie? He, it’s—

“And you’re on a lot of medications, and you have a lot of injuries, and some of it’s gonna just take time and some of it’s gonna take more work, but Eddie,” Steve tilts his head, leans in and Eddie can feel the body heat of him from the chest on out: “Eddie, we are all here to help you, okay? No questions asked, we’re here to help,” and Steve’s eyes are a piercing kind of starfield, deep-dark but lightened by the fire burning: kinda mesmerizing even before he speaks again:

“Because we love you, all of us love you, and we are so fucking relieved you’re still here,” and there’s no question in it, no hesitation or resistance: it’s wholly felt and believed and Eddie reels a little for it because how and why, and the idea of all of them, and of Steve being included in the all-of-them, and love, of any kind, but love being a word no one fucking uses for a thing that’s small, or weak, or fleeting and just, just…

“And it’s not charity, or obligation, or pity,” and it’s like Steve can read him, can see his soul, the worst endings to the story that had drowned him in an instant when he couldn’t feel his fingers, when he couldn’t grasp a goddamn cup, before he could even stop to consider that he was already in the best possible ending, either way.

Because it was one he was still here to see.

“Kinda the opposite, really,” Steve’s slipping his fingers between Eddie’s atop his sweater; “because it kinda hurts when we’re not here to see you being okay,” and it’s so earnest, so sincere when he says it, when his voice goes low and faint like he doesn’t want to tempt the universe by letting it hear an unthinkable possibility that they’d dodged to by the skin of their teeth, but by the skin on their bones as sacrifice, scars to match and all:

“It hurts to be anywhere but here, where you’re okay, when we were so fucking afraid you wouldn’t be.”

And doesn’t that fucking sear for the slap of it in his face; doesn’t that goddamn sing in his veins that still have blood pumping through them, Jesus H. Christ.

“So,” Steve leans forward, draws Eddie’s touch somehow closer, has to almost be painful when all Eddie can process above the fog and the warmth is the breadth of Steve’s chest, and the thrum of his heartbeat as real-real-real, and there for Eddie to anchor himself in as being real, too.

“Will you let me help?”

Eddie’s eyes dart to where Steve’s placed the cup back on the side table, and has a hand near it waiting: for permission. He’s giving Eddie a choice, and there’s a version of Eddie, in a version of events not so far from these, here, but then so far from these here, that would fight harder at the idea of being coddled, of being invalided and made purposeless, fucking pointless for being wholly ripped of his ability to care for his own needs and wants, but this…

This isn’t that version.

So he nods, and Steve lets out a sigh Eddie can map from inhale to release, and he smiles like it’s a gift to him that Eddie lets him do this, lets him lift the lip of the cup to Eddie’s lips, careful and Eddie can feel it rest on tender flesh, something torn there too like so much else of him, and he drinks like manna from a heaven he doesn’t believe in, save that he thinks there’s something angelic, something godly in the tenderness of Steve’s movements, of his eyes on Eddie, of his heartbeat under Eddie’s touch: just him, there, present.

Like all the idly musings he’d allowed himself in the dark of a hellscape, in the moments he’d thought for sure would be his last: like those fleeting little fantasies may not have legs for themselves, but could grow into something just as good, or better even.

Because maybe they’ll be something true.

“Thank you,” Eddie manages to say, and it’s a whisper but it’s not something out of a horror film, so it’s an improvement after five careful swallows and Steve’s deft hand to wipe his bottom lip.

“Thank you for letting me,” Steve’s foolish enough, perfect enough to say; “it helps me, too.”

How, though? How, and more: how are they here like this, in this moment? Just—

“How’d I get out?” It’s an easier question to ask, so he feints that way instead.

“We carried you out.”

Vague.

“Who did?”

Steve only blinks, but his heart thumps an extra beat against Eddie’s fingertips.

“I did.”

Of course he did. Of course it was him.

“You’re,” Eddie licks his lips, closes his eyes; tries to figure out if he needs more water to keep going: no. No, he can do this.

“You’re okay?” he turns his hand just a slightest bit, doesn’t want to stop touching Steve but wants to press his hand to Steve’s the other way ‘round.

“Bats,” he manages to mouth, and Steve’s got the water to his lips again, now, carefully portioning his sips as he answers:

“Getting there, but I’m fine.”

Eddie wants to roll his eyes. Eddie wants to hold Steve to his chest and check his wounds himself. Eddie wants…

“Everyone else? Dustin?” he follows up because he can guess; Steve wouldn’t be so calm if something terrible had come of the battle, but still. “And—”

“Healing,” Steve’s quick to answer the half-formed questions, knows what Eddie’s concerned with most without trying and maybe it’s obvious, probably yeah it is but it feels warm in him again, through him like honey, thick and slow and sweet. “Max has got a rough road ahead, and it’s touch-and-go, because we’re pretty sure the things that are still wrong with her are tied up in Vecna,” Eddie frowns; regrets it for the pull and why is sensation coming back for hurting; “we didn’t wipe him out entirely, we lost this battle,” but then Steve’s hand is closer against his cheek: he doesn’t know if he leaned in or his Steve moved nearer but it doesn’t matter because Eddie will hurt far more than this, will take feeling for all it’s highs and lows, will claim it back and clutch it close if he also gets to feel Steve.

“But maybe more it’s like a draw, really, because it could have been such a bigger loss,” and Steve’s voice catches, and so does his breath where Eddie’s hand’s still charting; his pulse trips and Eddie frowns deeper, fuck the pain of it and whatever real damage it does above the waves of heavy narcotics, Steve’s eyes have gone glassy and his throat’s working harder around something thick, difficult, and the hand holding Eddie’s to Steve’s chest is rubbing the skin at his wrist near-raw for how hard and how metronomic it’s digging against Eddie’s veins, and his mouth’s parted and he’s staring at Eddie like—

Oh.

Oh, that’s what he meant, about…bigger losses.

Well, shit.

“And there’s still hope, y’know?” Steve’s voice comes quiet in comparison to where it was before but it’s still music. Still beautiful.

Eddie tries to swallow, wet his mouth on his own but he can’t so he turns eyes that can’t possibly look short of pleading, now, and blinks toward the cup at the bedside and Steve’s on it in an instant, easing it to Eddie’s mouth and tipping gently, painstaking in its care until Eddie pulls back and steels himself to try again with words, because these ones, he needs the to come out strong, and right:

“We’ll win the war.”

It’s scratchy, and probably more motion than sound but: it’s there, and it’s full and solid and Steve fucking beams for it:

“Yeah,” Steve speaks it like it’s fact, or like in saying it he’ll seal it as law and Eddie believes it just as sure, too, so:

“Yeah, we will.”

They will. They will.

They sit like that for a while, and Eddie feels the exertion of doing very little at all start to creep up on him and he must shift, or make a sound he can’t quite pick up himself to notice because Steve’s quick to jump:

“What else do you need?”

And Eddie’s drifting, and he doesn’t want to be a bother, a burden—useless—but Steve’s looking at him…the way Steve is looking at him?

It kinda prickles behind Eddie’s eyes, so he closes them, which feels like such a goddamn loss because then he can’t see Steve and he, he just…

“Can you,” Eddie starts to bite his lower lip but the sting rips through at the first hint of pressure so he bites at the tip of his tongue instead, and Steve’s already settling him; he never sat up, not truly, but Steve’s making sure he’s laid flat and comfortable, pillows arranged just so and Eddie can barely manage to pat the mattress when Steve retreats, but Steve knows him for that innocent gesture, too: grabs for his hand and Eddie remembers breathing well enough, now, to sigh in contentless, in fucking relief for the touch.

“Couldn’t feel,” he rasps a little; “hands, arms, when I first,” and then he opens his eyes, and locks gazes with Steve and forgets, for a second; forgets again, about the breathing.

And it’s okay; he’s okay with forgetting.

“Would it,” Eddie struggles with the words, throat start to feel a burn in it for the strain; “okay if—“

“The answer’s yes, man,” Steve’s soothing him, but also kind of shushing him, all in one go: “whatever it is, okay? So just ask, don’t like, pull the punch,” then Steve’s squeezing his hand, and murmuring deep and smooth and almost like a purr, a source of pure comfort just to hear, and then to feel through the air between them:

“‘Cause it’s not a punch, yeah?”

And: okay. Okay then, he can; Eddie can do this.

“Can you keep,” he barely breathes, but it’s all he remembers so he goes with it, hopes it’s enough: “holding? I can feel, when you’re…”

He trails off, but it’s…fine. It’s fine, because Steve never lets go once, just readjusts the hold of his hand on Eddie’s, of Eddie’s inside his, and settles next to him quiet and steadfast and kind of fucking everything and Eddie fades into the feeling of it with the last of his words like a vow:

“I’ll hold it until you wake back up, if you want.”

And if Eddie knows anything as sleep claims him: he knows that he wants.

>>> two: wash 🧼🫧🚿

divider credits here & here

👾 title credit here

💫 ao3 link here

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hitlikehammers · 16 days

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For @hbyrde36

From chapter six of Steve Harrington: Vampire Hunter

Eddie continued to dance under Steve’s watchful gaze, undulating his hips to the beat in a way that was utterly mesmerizing. The song ended and a new one began. Eddie dropped to his knees next to the pole, a perfect compliment to the transition in music. He rolled his body as he flung his head around, the movement loosened the hair piled on top of his head, sending it cascading around his face and shoulders like a dark curtain.

#steddie #stranger things #eddie munson #steve harrington #penny00dreadful #so fucking talented it’s insane #art gallery

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hitlikehammers · 17 days

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ART!!! A GORGEOUS PIECE OF ART, inspired by MY WORDS?!!!

Please lavish this with all of the love it deserves while I sit here and stare in speechless awe a little more.

Inspired by Under the Water by @hitlikehammers linked below

*speaking of pirate romance, just rewatched season 2 ofmd and I am just ugh it felt so shallow and mid. Hence why you should read this because it cures gay pirate disappointment

Really such a good read, it satiated my need for pirate romance* and cured my scurvy.

Here's the original sketch, I think I prefer it

#steddie #eddie munson #steve harrington #pirate steddie #spookednsaucy #stranger things #stranger things art #stranger things reverse big bang #IT IS SO BEAUTIFULLLLL #never gonna get over people reading this let alone liking it #but MAKING ART IS THIS WHOLE OTHER LEVEL OF THING I WILL NEVER GET OVERRR #art gallery

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hitlikehammers · 19 days

Text

🌊✨NOW COMPETE✨🌊

Fail-Pirate!Eddie, Meet Mysterious-Castaway!Steve (Pirate AU)

Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)

Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson 🌊 25k 🌊 Explicit

Link to Art by the Lovely @imfinereallyy

No Archive Warnings Apply

You’ve gotta understand: the truth about Eddie? He’s shit as a pirate. Like: an absolute disgrace. Of all the bad names associated with the trade, if trade is what it can be called? He might just give it the worst. But he’s enamored with the Sea. And if piracy’s his ticket to know it, and spend his days upon it? So be it. Failure be damned. So it’s greater success than he ever expected when, on a routine fishing trip, what he catches is the most beautiful man he’s ever laid eyes on in his whole wretched failure-ridden existence. It’s almost impossible to believe at all when the man—snarky and canny and full of inexplicable talents and undeniable secrets—seems to be falling for Eddie as much as Eddie’s long tumbled overboard for him. But the Sea—much as Eddie loves it—is a most treacherous thing. And its secrets are the ones that some souls— some loves—aren’t meant to survive the knowing.

NOW LIVE: tumblr/ao3

For the @strangerthingsreversebigbang inspired by the gorgeous art of the ineffably talented @imfinereallyy; thank you for trusting me with your artwork! My sincerest thanks to both @hbyrde36 and @pearynice, the sweetest human beings, cheerleaders, betas, hand-holders, and just fabulous friends an author could ask for—thank you isn't wholly sufficient, but I couldn't have done this at all with without either of you 🧡

NOW COMPLETE 🌊

🌊SNIPPET + FULL ART BELOW THE CUT🌊

You’ve gotta understand: the truth about Eddie?

He’s shit as a pirate. Like: an absolute disgrace. Of all the bad names associated with the trade, if trade is what it can be called?

He might just give it the worst.

So, y’know. That’s nice.

Like, he knows his knots, he is excellent with his hands thank you kindly, and he ties those motherfuckers like a pro, too! So what if he just sometimes confuses his hitch for his stopper, they’re both knots, they both do the job of knotting.

(Mostly. They only lost a boat the one time.)

(As in lost-lost, not the ones that were retrieved in time but landed Eddie on scut anyway.)

Which doesn’t touch on his absolutely abysmal record at the looting end of things. He doesn’t mind taking from the well-off, but he does mind adding it to the ship’s take every time they make land; he maybe lies about how bad he is at the stealing, the all-important plundering of the job, because he ends up finding the people outside the center of town at every port, the ones who line the edges and he drops what he takes with the ones who need it there, where they can’t escape on the water, can’t live in motion on the whims of the waves and find their needs in the flux of a life unanchored.

So he’s not the worst thief, for the right victim. But his spoils never make it back to the ship so: it probably makes him pretty shit at the job to hand, in the end, either way. Add a mark to the tally.

And then, gods: don’t get him started on the taking of…other things. Who aren’t things, they’re fucking people and they deserve respect not…what the other people sailing under his colors seem to believe them useful for instead.

Eddie’s been sick over the edge of the stern, hidden by shadow even if it’s unnecessary because fuck, the rest of the crew is full-occupied with their plundering, and that’s the reason he spews over in the sea, the waves always feeling a little extra angry for his pollution of their waters and that’s fitting. It’s fitting that he’s defiling something sacred with the weakness of his stomach—but not his soul, not his morals or his sense of humanity, fuck’s sake, so: at least there’s that.

He guesses.

Admittedly, though: Eddie doesn’t care so much that he’s a shitty fucking pirate. It’s not piracy that led him here, that charted this course for his life.

It’s the Ocean.

🌊 FOLLOW:

tumblr : ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // SIX // SEVEN // EIGHT

ao3 : ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // SIX // SEVEN // EIGHT

by @imfinereallyy

START HERE: tumblr/ao3

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hitlikehammers · 19 days

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When It Turns Out You're In Love With the Sea but also THE MAN YOU LOVE IS LITERALLY THE SEA (Steddie Pirate AU)—COMPLETE

(or: remember when I mentioned MYTHOLOGICAL THEMES in the tags?)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Eight: No Idle Exaggeration

✨NOW COMPLETE✨:

START AT CHAPTER ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // SIX // SEVEN

also on ao3

Eddie’s body fails him wholly, in that moment, bones trembling and breath catching and knees wholly giving out but in that moment, his crumbling frame is not the only phenomenon to take place.

Because when he pitches forward, those cool-firm-familiar-beloved-too-strong hands are already catching him, already pulling him close to a similarly familiar and beloved chest that’s rising and falling against Eddie’s cheek with real breath, that’s beating fast and full and almost frenzied but there’s a restraint in it, not of feeling but of rhythm: like the, like it’s the—

Like the whole goddamn Ocean is held in the chambers that draw in, and beat out, again and again and again; like the world entire, above and below the water’s pulsing reassurance, intent and devoted to the fixed point that is Eddie’s needy ear pressed against the sound.

It helps. It does help. He can breathe, a little; he can’t stop sobbing but he doesn’t think that’s really in the cards any time soon no matter the strength of the heart under him, the undeniable proof of life-life-life—it’s not foolproof. It cannot stitch every tear in him left festering these long weeks alone but; but.

But gods, does it help.

“-eloved, sweet angel, breathe with me, gentle and sure, listen, just listen,” and Eddie is, now; he doesn’t know what time must have passed but his weight’s leaned wholly in Steve’s arms, translucent only on the surface now, it seems, to the point of iridescence in the moonlight with a certain ebb and give to the shimmer—like the Ocean dances with the moon—and it’s a transfixing sight, maybe moreso with the wavering focus through his own ceaseless tears as he shakes in Steve’s—Steve’s—hold as Steve’s chest lifts him with the strength of the tides as much as the soft cradle of the surf, a lingering hold that does not dare halt in the middle, between inhales and exhales lest there creep any doubt in the break—for Eddie’s sake.

Wholly for Eddie.

“Hold onto me, darling,” and Eddie hadn’t noticed Steve’s litany of gentle endearments hadn’t paused any more than his breath or the heavy, unassailable knock of his heart to Eddie’s cheekbone; Eddie doesn’t notice the words having never stopped until they shift, and even then it takes a moment, a few cycles of breath before he processes them, murmurs at the same pitch, in the same lull of life through lungs and blood through veins.

Eddie grips tighter to Steve’s shoulders, hopes that’s sufficient and Steve only reaches, breathes and hums and never once shifts Eddie’s head from its place above his heartbeat as he bends, as he scoops Eddie’s from his boneless knees into what he thinks may be a bridal carry but that will shift him too far, that will move the beat away and if he loses his breath again, he whines at the threat, the terror rising in him—it wasn’t real, it was only a dream, the truth a nightmare he’s barely survived this far and won’t much longer, can’t after this; not after this—but he had nothing to fear, not further loss to weather because Steve…moves, bends, flows effortless as he cradles Eddie’s head to the center of his chest, safe against the drum of the undertow not seeking to wash him away but envelope him with its force and carry him always; then reaches with a strength so far beyond a man, yet seemingly as effortless as him curls Eddie’s legs around his middle, keeps hold at his thigh in case he can’t brace himself and he’s not sure he can, in truth: he needs Steve.

He needs Steve’s strength as a practicality; he needs Steve’s hold as further proof.

But it’s like that, with his unwashed hair split and wild burrows tight to Steve’s tidal heartbeat—it, too, stronger than any human chest should hold, more might in the sound than Eddie thinks the heart itself was build to stand and yet it echoes like a lullaby, like a promise wrapped tight and true inside the kind of sound a child has to imagine is the closest to be found alongside the voice of a god; it’s twined around his frame and held up in his arms, held close to his heartbeat and kissed at the temple for every second step, surrounded as best he can be by proofproofproof of the unimaginable, that Eddie is carried to the chambers that has been theirs, together.

Eddie is being carried there by Steve, so that they might be there…together.

Eddie’s not sure he ever wholly stopped his tears from falling, but gods: the sobbing reclaims him as the weight of it hits him anew: this space, this haven, this home, and all of the loss and the heartbreak—

Theirs. Together: theirs, and as Steve settles them soft upon the bed and wraps his legs around Eddie all the close and tighter, his hold all the more firm and unflagging, Eddie thinks also: theirs, and maybe mending where it had shattered so completely. Beyond all possibilities, even the smallest shards and crushed fragments ground to dust unrecognizable are somehow impossibly shifting toward whole again—because here, here, is Steve.

Eddie’s chest clenches but…not in a wholly bad way, or perhaps no degree of bad about it at all as Steve settles them, curls around Eddie like a cocoon, fostering the rebirth of a self that Eddie had thought lost, the version of him whole and in love and held close to a warmth that was close enough to love to be more than all he needed in this life; Eddie’s eyes flicker idle toward the door and he burrows into Steve all the closer, suddenly afraid Steve will try to wedge the entrance for privacy, but Eddie won’t be able to bear it, he won’t be able to watch him with both eyes and not still think his own sight a liar, a figment of a broken mind, he—

“They won’t bother—“ Eddie blurts out quick, his muscles tensing but his pulse still strangely so steady even if it seems to transmute speed into strength, still it should be racing, terrified; he isn’t wholly sure why he volunteers the proof that his crewmates had written him off as a lost cause as his main argument for keeping Steve precisely where he lies, here, but.

Eddie’s never claimed to be of the most sound mind on any day of his entire life; and damn it all if the days that have preceded this moment could even rightly be counted as life, for the pain in them. For the shell of him that barely moved and scarcely lived.

He forgoes making sense of anything, save the sound of Steve’s breath, the beat of his pulse, the coolness of his touch that isn’t cold but refreshing, something protective in it that lends it the most untenable contradiction of warmth that tremors through Eddie’s limbs, sparks feeling in them again.

“They know not to bother you,” Steve acknowledges Eddie’s nonsense divulgence with something close to vehemence, certainly a cutting, steel-line of a thing as he gathers Eddie’s closer to him, wraps him tighter where the patch of curls are slowly softening from sea grass to fluffy hair on his chest.

“Your care was not theirs to interfere with, nor theirs to commit to,” Steve hisses so low it’s nearly a snarl when he adds: “to be trusted with.”

Eddie almost shivers for the razor edge in the words but: he wouldn’t. Not ever. In fact he feels just about the exact opposite, as if safety and protection, reverence and a vow deeper than words is flooding his mind, the breath he’s slowly regaining as if the promise beyond speaking is why he’s able to gasp that very breath back at all.

“Not that you made it simple for me,” Steve cocks back at the neck to shoot a narrowed gaze downward, one that Eddie’d believed he’d never see again save in the tortuous dreams that would plague him until rest claimed him, granted him clemency; “I have never restored my human form so quickly in all of time, do you understand that?” Steve fusses with the linens in tucking Eddie into the bedding, close and tight; “Every source of nourishment I could find across the sprawl of my entire being, the whole of the body of my First Form taking in the strength to heal, so as to pass it to you as you chose to neglect your wellbeing, to let yourself languish, as if you are not infinitely precious,” Steve’s voice halts when Eddie whimpers, when Eddie feels his eyes prickle, then the tears fall anew when the words sink in, when the truth of the voice being hereseems undeniable, despite…everything, despite the sense-memory of Steve’s blood-tacky chest stilling under Eddie’s hands—

But then there are hands moving Eddie, and Eddie whines again to be ripped from the comfort, the reassurance, the certainty in the motion, the breath and beat of Steve’s chest but hands cradle his face ever so gently, but intent still, almost urgent as eyes that have darkened closer to amber again pierce him to the soul:

“Did you think it was all exaggeration?” Steve asks, somehow both incredulous and heartbroken and it leaves Eddie feeling just the same, lifting his hands to cover Steve’s and take comfort in how they’re laced together immediately, no hesitation: there’s no hint of incredulity in that.

“I told you the Ocean was a part of you always,” Steve tells him with a vehemence that tips the boat, like the Ocean responds to a call upon its presence; “I asked you to feel it for yourself, the way I made the whole of me move and give in time with your pulse that night,” and Steve’s gaze may ask if Eddie recalls clearly enough but oh, Eddie remembers, of course Eddie remembers Steve’s body on his body, taken needy and as a gift received and given into his body, carnal yes but so far beyond, like it replaced the blood in his veins with the salt of the Sea.

“And then so much more,” Steve confirms it, tracing his lips without every looking away, not once and Eddie feels the strangest sensation where his heart should be racing for the gravity in it all: it’s almost like it shivers instead, shudders deep, like the breaking of the waves as Steve breathes against him:

“I gave you my Heart,” he exhales like a holy thing: “to keep.”

And the shuddering continues, the ebb and flow of the tides, and Eddie…Eddie witnessed with his own eyes a resurrection. He saw a man beyond a man, saw an entity beyond Eddie's imagination come to him, merge for him alone it seemed, felt, no—no, Eddie knew as much, from the foreign familiar lump of a more sacred thing out from his heart; Eddie had felt it when Steve, undeniably his love, clutched him and caught him and cradled him close with strength exceeding any human, any beast, anything Eddie’d seen or heard of or known: but also more tender than Eddie knew a thing could be and survive all the roughness of the world: as if both existed…beyond. Just this world.

“Your Heart,” Eddie whispered, runs words back through his reeling mind: the Ocean was a part of you always, without exaggeration, and the feeling of being one with the water when Steve rocked into him, when Steve held him close and whispered how the Sea was in him, how he’d been right to dream it so all along; he takes a halting breath, not afraid exactly but overwhelmed, in truth, before he slides a palm of his own to his chest, presses to his sternum hard enough to ache, and feels, really tries to touch the sensation below and consider it, because when he does, when he’s not lost to fancy, or too overcome with hope tangled with disbelief inside the miracle of his love returned to him—when he reaches down and feels the rhythm—

Eddie knows his heartbeat. Doesn’t everyone, isn’t it the thing that lives in the background perpetually until it surges to the fore to be known in fits and bursts? It’s intrinsic, and Eddie is keenly aware of its deep hum, the music of it. And the thing is: this is still music. Elevated, almost; familiar, and welcome almost beyond what he’s always known, ecstatic to be held and kept, to listen to and feel close, thoughtful the whole of him but—

It is not the same heartbeat he’s lived with all his life. Because it’s not the same heart, either. Because Steve gave him, to keep because mortals needed it; and all the whole Steve had said and held as truth that Eddie was of the, the, he’s—

“Your heart,” Eddie whispers, marvels; doesn’t ask it like a question because as unfathomable as it is, it’s only less so than the depths of the Sea itself and if he takes that for all that it is, takes Steve for all the he says and does and feels clear in Eddie’s own veins, for Steve here and holding him, watching him with affection and unwavering care: there’s a sense in it. It’s impossible, but he felt Steve still beneath his hands. The possible is maybe not so simple an idea to name anymore.

“Your heart,” Eddie says once more, slow and considering, massaging the almost-beat, whole-formed rhythm under his ribs; “because you, you’re,” and he looks askance at Steve, needs his strength again because he can’t say it; in case it is impossible, and it is only for absurdity’s sake that he concocts such foolish fucking notions, he cannot be the one who says it first—

“Because I am the Ocean.”

And of course Steve saves him, steps in to carry him and lend his strength entire without ever needing to be asked. And it’s not as if the words weren’t the ones on Eddie’s tongue, or else, not that close, more stuck in his throat around the sea-sway of his blood rushing, impossible but real. It’s just the way it’s said. The sky is blue. The grass is green. Eddie’s heart belongs to the Sea. The Sea is sometimes a man named Steve.

Eddie’s heart belongs to Steve even stronger, even fiercer; even more.

But…his brain is less quick to be convinced than his heart is, and there are still slivers not of doubt, but of something staticy and numb, catching on the rough snarls of impossible.

“You mean, you’re,” Eddie’s desperate mind grapples, and he thinks it might be something like the death rattle of sanity, on the edge of epiphany; “you’re like,” he clears his throat; “like Poseidon?”

It’s not that it makes more sense; Eddie thinks maybe it’s just an easier scope of a thing to pretend to grasp at.

And Steve, oh…oh his Steve: first he wrinkles his nose, then he lifts it ever so slightly in the air as he huffs a laugh, almost offended by Eddie’s fumbling clinging to the final remnants of what counts among the even tenuously tenable.

He’s so godsdamned beautiful, and Eddie is so irrevocably in love.

“The many gods have liked to play at controlling me, fickle children,” Steve comments flippantly, as if he’s remarking on the shade of the trees against the setting sun, and whether he buys into superstitions for its shade; “they come and they go,” and then his lips curl and his eye sparkle; he looks less idly bothered and more wry, even mischievous:

“I sometimes like to play along in kind, for sport,” he confesses, muffling a spat of laughter into Eddie’s hair; “it is usually enough to spurn them when I stop indulging them,” and spurning gods, in the manner Steve shares it, sounds no less than a giddy fucking lark before Steve tuts, and Eddie can hear the eye roll that accompanies his little dry chuckle as he still downright despairs:

“They always have the fragilest egos.”

And Eddie takes a moment in the lingering levity to ponder just what has become of his life. And yet, in Steve’s arms that are more warmth now than anything else, the hum of his beating life a resonant constant through every place he presses to Eddie’s frame, his breath real and hot through Eddie’s curls, at the shell of Eddie’s ear: he finds an answer to the question land superfluous. He doesn’t truly give a damn what’s become of his life in rational terms. His heart feels back to swelling, so full and stretching further again, like life is soaking back into him, has already made roots to keep once more: for Steve.

Roots…roots, Eddie thinks, somehow made of Steve.

“I am not a god,” Steve huffs a little, and his hair’s mostly human strands when he flips it just the slightest bit; also Eddie would beg to differ, because Steve may not be that sort of his but Eddie’s spent too many hours just staring at him, gazing upon him to not be fully aware and convinced that Steve is a fucking god, so—

“What I am,” Steve leans in pointedly, eyes Eddie so meaningfully; “is the Ocean.”

And again, he says it so…simple. Like it’s a plain fact that requires no context. Like it’s an obvious, commonplace declaration.

Like it makes any godsdamned sense at all but…Steve’s hand is in Eddie’s hand, playing over his knuckles, and okay. Okay.

Eddie can try to…figure out what that means.

“So,” he draws out, impressed his voice is a little more of a human sound now, just Steve’s presence, his proximity, his living-breathing realitypumping life into the cracks of him;

“Like a naiad?” Eddie ventures, because his mother told him other stories, when she told him of the shell-secrets; “or a, a nymph?”

Eddie winces at that because no, Steve’s isn’t nymph-like, if the stories were at all to be believed, and even if they weren’t, the name just doesn’t match the touch of him, the body that had laid against his body, the feel of him to stretch and fill—

No. Not a nymph. But when Eddie winces for the suggestion?

Steve laughs, reaches for Eddie’s cheek and draws him into the kind of kiss that’s more smile than anything else, and chuckles warmly as he strokes Eddie’s jaw, the sound just pure joy.

“You have such a lovely mind,” he tells Eddie with nothing but warmth, and wondering; “no, though both have been my companions, from time to time. The sirens and bisimbi, the mermaids and the selkies, the nixie and the kelpies and the kappa, even the rusalki who get a very underserved reputation, they’re actually not bad at all,” Steve tips his head like there’s a story, no, more like so very many stories; “I’ll have to introduce you to a naiad especially, my oldest friend,” Steve’s smiles small, the kind of grin pressed close to the heart and Eddie knows yes, he must meet this naiad—a naiad?! The best friend of the Ocean, who is, just to keep on track, Eddie’s own lover and beloved?!

It is too…it is so much. Yet it is starting to settle like wonderment, like excitement in him. His love is just casually asking him to meet the family, as a matter of course.

What’s the ocean’s equivalent of butterflies in his stomach, given that his blood’s been co-opted by the waves?

“These are creatures and spirits who call me their home,” and no, no, Eddie is not petty as to bristle at someone, anyone, anything else calling Steve home, especially when something of such unthinkable and almost ungraspable magnitude may very well be in the process of being revealed him. Eddie is not that petty.

He’s not.

“But they are not Me.”

And Steve may say it with that simplicity, that almost-flippant obviousness, as if whole concepts of being, of the earth and existing on it, of loving and what a heart can hold: as if he’s not rewriting and remaking them entire as he lies wrapped up around Eddie’s body, as he strokes through Eddie’s hair with…with an uncanny way of watching the wayward waves of his curls, now that he thinks of it, now that he considers the snags Steve never catches as he glided like pure comfort through the strands.

“I am,” Steve toys with his lower lip, so strangely human, so tempting to Eddie’s gaze, Eddie’s own lips; “Elemental, and came to be upon the shaping of their world. Though throughout whole epochs I only changed the stretch and span of my First Form,” and here Steve’s hand pauses, cradles Eddie’s cheek again and looks at him so ducking tender; “it was not until humankind emerged that I strived to match their likeness, and reach to them,” and he wraps his whole hand the at the curve of Eddie’s neck, thumb stroking slow, rhythmic: the goddamn waves at rest under all the sky.

Jesus.

“I have been revered, through the many ages, as if I were a god,” Steve grimaces, confesses it like an embarrassment; “which I worked very hard to learn to see as ignorant flattery, rather than insult—“

“Insult?” Eddie tries very hard to comprehend how seeing Steve for all he is and feeling appropriately worshipful could be anything but just…natural. The proper way of all things.

“The gods are petty and discard their toys when they tire of them!” Steve’s tone is both imperious and indignant, and oh, oh, Eddie didn’t realize he was afraid to miss the catty, petty, adorable side of his beloved, considering he’s turned out to be not only not-human, but to top that, the whole-ass larger part of the world, not merely Eddie’s world alone anymore, but the warmth that rises through him is colored with relief and joy, now, especially as Steve adds, a little haughty:

“I am constant. Reliable. Eternal.”

Ah, yes. There’s his beloved, in as his adorably aggrieved petulance.

But, the choice of words—

“Eternal…” Eddie mouths, the implications swirling, dizzying, almost too vast to conceive let alone accept, but Steve seems to cling to something else, and Eddie doesn’t quite follow, not at first, save for the inexorable, undeniable wash of affection in it all:

“I did not wish to leave you in such distress, love, and I regretted wholly that I could not explain in the moment,” and Steve’s hands on his skin are the only thing holding him together because there’s no need to elaborate, Eddie knows exactly the moment he means, when Eddie's hands felt the lifeblood push out of Steve’s body, felt him fade, felt him—

But Steve is here, and his hands are warm and sure. It still devastates him, but it doesn’t wholly destroy anymore, like this.

“But when another form, a mortal form, sustains a mortal injury,” and Eddie cannot help but whimper a little, but to lean closer into Steve’s solid warmth; “I am bound to retreat to my First Form,” and he goes back to stroking Eddie’s hair, his voice pitch low and soothing like the subtle shift of low tide; “because it isn’t mortal, and such injuries mean nothing to it,” Steve explains in a hush, his voice and the motion of his hands matching the tide-beat in Eddie’s breast in perfect harmony and it doesn’t merely soothe something in him; it starts to truly heal something in him. “I let the waves restore me before I return, but,” and Eddie can hear the drone in Steve’s voice as he admits, so apologetic: “I have never gauged the timing for it all, never had reason to think on it, not until—“

And he cuts off, moans a little in sympathy, in remorse as he gives up on words and pulls Eddie tight to him, back into his chest and it’s odd, because the speed and strength with which he finds himself crushed to that broad chest is impressive, catches Eddie’s clinging hands against his own sternum where his head’s cradled to the center of Steve’s. And it’s not as if he hadn’t spent minutes, maybe hours nestled there as Steve’s body returned to its human appearance, as Steve’s presence proved real and tangible and not just a heartbroken hallucination. But now: now Eddie recognizes something in the heartbeat under him. Because if Steve had lent him some eternal magic from the making of the world, his heart should feel,should sound like the waves beating through his own veins but: no.

No: Steve’s heartbeat is human. And not just human: Eddie knows his own pulse. And that, that is—

“You meant it,” Eddie whispers, because he cannot manage more strength, is too overcome for the reality of it, the crashing impact of the rhythm against his hands versus the percussive drumming under his ear.

“You left me your Heart,” Eddie breathes, can scarcely comprehend, feels tears at his eyes he can’t even explain; “is it—“

“Your own felt in need of restoration, though I think it was simply shock, despair in a moment of high feeling,” and Eddie can feel it under his hand, the more-human flutter that’s pounding like Eddie had expected in his own chest: but there’s something dulled about it, like a shield maybe. Some…protection.

Eddie doesn’t know quite what to make of his heart, literally outside his own body—

“It’s still here, the physical form of it, though it is still troubling that I have to remind you that you very much need to keep that here,” Steve lays his hand on Eddie’s chest, like he could hear Eddie’s thoughts—wonders if he could hear their conclusion too: to live in Steve’s chest would be a gift.

“But there are perks to being of the Earth in this way,” Steve shrugs a little, and massages at Eddie’s chest, the pulse of his own Ocean heart above and stronger than Eddie’s own nestled safe below, Steve’s somehow feeding, sustaining, healing the damage wrought upon Eddie’s mortal heart with a chrysalis of the Ocean, the Heart of the Ocean at that, given to Eddie to help, to keep, to—

“But I would never try to, to drown the precious movements of your perfect self, your beloved heart,” and for the first time in a while Eddie consciously feels his own heartbeat in his own chest kick up toward the blanket of Steve’s Ocean heart and it’s the strangest thing to hear it under his ear the same inside Eddie’s chest, like he’s being tending to on both sides of a coin greater than any man could earn, but then, and more: his Ocean heart trills, like a playful breeze on the water, like it rejoices just for the proof of Eddie’s healing, or Eddie being able to reconstruct himself after breaking entirely: of Eddie’s heart remembering how to beat again when it’d resigned itself to slowly petering out, and in face of losing his everything Eddie’d had no intention to fight it, just to plead the inevitable to hurry itself long, but Steve: Steve had stepped in immediately, threw the core of his eternal fucking being into Eddie’s chest and…prioritized Eddie even as he remade the form holding Eddie now, from the water itself?

Eddie almost can’t breathe for the immensity of it; all for him. How—

“I am sorry that I took it in exchange without asking there and then,” Steve looks down, breaks eye contact for the first time in long enough for the loss to be jarring and Eddie: Eddie extracts one hand from between their chests to catch Steve’s chin and tilt it back up because how could he even begin to consider it something to forgive, not merely saving Eddie’s life but saving, restoring Eddie heart, and with his own—

“Did you think it was a lie,” Eddie breathes, desperate now in this new way this; this need for Steve to comprehend and know through the whole expanse of his elemental being: “did you think it some idle exaggeration, just a silly, mortal whim, every time I pledged that heart, my heart, to you? My everything—“

“I wanted to believe,” Steve demures, almost, while he simultaneously tries to infuse the words so fervently so that the doubt lands not upon Eddie, never upon Eddie, only his only bewilderment, the beautiful idiot, how can he not see his worth; “I wanted to hold it close from the start,” and there’s a heat that spreads through Eddie because he could have, he did, as much as Eddie could throw his everything into the waters far and near. More than he even suspected he was allowed: greedy. Needful.

“I came here seeking you for that very reason, you must know that.”

Eddie blinks; no. No he did not know that, but, now that it’s said, now that Steve’s eye on him are so dark and so deep, gaze unwavering, it, it could; he sees—

“You were,” Eddie grasps back to their meeting, to finding Steve at the first; “you said,” Eddie slides his, replays the first words they exchanged: “disoriented.”

Steve nods, looks pleased to have been remembered so clearly—as if another option existed at all.

“I followed a few schools of fish for company, some with poorer senses of direction than I’d banked on, more dizzying circles were involved than I’d have preferred,” Steve confirms wryly, but then? Then those words snap another puzzle piece into place because:

“Fish,” Eddie exhales, marveling again; “that’s how you—“

“You would not wish to eat the young, anyway,” Steve waves a hand but doesn’t hide a little grin. “Your taste is to those in the lifecycle that have mostly lived out their own purpose, and are then best suited to serve on last purpose,” then he flattens his hand to Eddie’s chest purposefully as he intones: “sustaining you.”

And somehow the magnitude of two things strike Eddie hard in just those words: this is an elemental force responsible for balance among so many things, the lifes and deaths of no just beings but of…so much of the world Eddie knows, and that elemental force is sat before him, cradling him close, valuing him in honest care—him, Eddie fucking Munson—and then second: Eddie loves him so fiercely, the love alone could kill him, and he’d be grateful for the privilege of a death at its hands.

“The gold?” Eddie presses, more pieces falling into place despite world-tilting revelations. “The jewels?”

And Steve just smirks, tilts his head slyly:

“Darling, imagine,” he almost drawls; “would the Ocean not know intimately, where every shipwreck sank?”

And it’s too much, the casual teasing, like the sharing of a secret, the little intimacy, the growing feeling in his chest where his human heart is finding footing, and the Ocean wreathed around it crests in jubilation through his veins: it’s too much.

“I’ve loved you since I was small,” Eddie breathes out, shakes his head slow because no words could say it truer, but they’re far too small nonetheless.

“I know,” Steve nuzzles the cook of his neck; “you piqued my interest from the start. Such conviction. Such feeling. I’ve known worship, but you,” and Steve’s lips graze his skin and Eddie’s pulse skips, and Steve kisses the line of his neck gentle, swift and soft.

“You loved, and you did not waver, or age beyond it,” Steve’s nose brushes Eddie’s hairline as he shakes his head then, and Eddie can feel his awe in it; “it was sustained, like a part of you that you did not outgrow but grew around,” and Steve’s hand curls over to Eddie’s chest again, presses with meaning: “intrinsic. Embedded in you as a rule.”

Eddie breathes in; Steve’s words are like flame to the kindling of his own abandoned, unfinished—he’s ready now to give them.

“I fell in love with you the moment I pulled you onto this ship.”

Because there’s nothing for it but the truth. The fact that Steve could have taken his whole heart; because Eddie meant it the whole time that the Sea had him but to know Steve—

Eddie would deem his life well lived, just to have loved Steve, with all that he is.

Steve stares at him, lips parted, eyes so wide and then he’s reaching, scrambling Eddie’s hands into his own and pressing them between their chests again, his grip so, so strong.

“Which,” Steve marvels, there’s no other word before he heaves a deep breath, seems to gather himself a little bit where he gathers is a solemn place, too far from euphoria, where living should be.

“Eddie,” Steve speaks gently, just firmly. “I am not human.”

And maybe it’s not the appropriate reaction, but Eddie cannot stop the chuckle that bursts out from his lips.

“Yeah,” Eddie huffs fondly; “yeah, I’m seeing that,” and something in Steve does ease at that, something that twinkles in his eyes and quirks at his lips.

“I am considerably less see-through, give me some credit,” he volleys back, and even if it’s a little strained, Eddie is grateful; squeezes Steve’s hands tight.

“You are stunning in every shape and form,” Eddie murmurs, and means it: “as a given,” and he tugs at the last bit of something closer to kelp than hair at the back of Steve’s head; “that is your natural form—“

“First Form.”

Eddie blinks to be interrupted so firmly, so sure, and frowns for the confusion of it.

“What do you mean?”

Steve is silent for a few breaths, and then he starts lacing their clasped fingers, one between them other, meticulous and intertwined.

“When I came to you? I was curious,” Steve says careful, just as meticulous; “but once I found you,” and his breath catches, and the Ocean-heart still blanketing Eddie’s mortal one does the closest thing he can imagining to skipping;

“You were more than I could have imagined.”

The flush that floods Eddie’s cheeks, then, is…a profound, unprecedented thing.

“I have felt, what it means when mortals use the word love,” Steve near-whispers, but alongside the pulsebeat of the Ocean and the fumbling of blood through arteries beside, it is the clearest, most powerful wash of sound? Of >i>feeling:

“I have known it before, though very few times in all of time, a kind of love but Eddie,” and Steve tips his head to kiss their joined hands before looking up, locking his eyes with Eddie’s and somehow its a brand new sensation to stage into them, like Eddie had never seen his whole soul before? Because he’d have known it: what he sees now shines bright enough to blind but much like his heart he feels shielded, protected. Then Steve tests that protection when his next words nearly stop his mending heart entirely:

“I know now what is meant when my kind speaks of love.”

And Eddie can’t quite conceptualize what that entails, which he thinks is the point; but he can feel the echo of it in the Ocean-heart under his breastbone, tendrils almost too much to reach out for but they are of Steve so of course Eddie’s reaches anyway, no question.

“For you,” Steve breathes against Eddie’s ear; “only you.”

And Eddie has to squeeze his eyes shut not this time to save himself from the blinding light of a soul more vast than Eddie can imagine; no. No, this time Eddie has to close his eyes to keep from sobbing. It’s so much.

It is so much, and it is love beyond love and it’s for him.

“And then, I didn’t just feel it,” Steve continues, his tone turning even more dumbstruck, overflowing entirely with awe: “I knew it, returned to me,” and Steve pulls back only enough to narrow his eyes just the slightest bit, like the next thing he’ll say is monumental in ways not touched just yet—almost inconceivable.

“Which is impossible, you understand?” his eyes rove Steve’s face, imploring him to grasp the magnitude, the certainty. “It is impossible for a human to feel love as an immortal feels, and yet,” Steve considers him like an unfashionable thing, like a myth made flesh as he hardly breathes, enamored and awestruck:

“I think you taught me from the very start,” Steve’s smiles grows with every breath, breathtaking and blinding; “you impossible wonder, miracle beyond the laws of being,” he murmurs, tracing eddies gestures so gentle, so reverent:

“You loved with the endlessness of my kind.”

And Eddie…feels the gravity of the statement of it, as one impossible thing. The weight of it as truth, and just for the natural inclination to love Steve in wholeness forever, and no less…

“I felt it from the start, and, here,” Steve touches their joined hands to his own chest, Eddie’s heartbeat there a bird chasing release within and then he turns their grasp to Eddie’s chest, presses their hands him to the center: “here, I can feel it just the same. Undeniable,” he shakes his head but stares at Steve with such wonder, such unending…love.

“Impossible, but unquestionable.”

Eddie feels the tears make their way down his cheeks but thinks nothing of him. He barely breathes, cannot risk shattering this moment of perfect splendor, the kind legends are written about.

“To be with you is the most natural thing I have ever known,” Steve bows his head to the line of Eddie’s shoulder, breathes and balances there as he speaks straight into Eddie skin; “to lie with you is a gift, and a joy,” and his smiles stretches wide where Eddie can feel it, and cannot help but let his own mouth curve to match; “to love and be loved by you is in the scope of the eternal, but the shape of humankind and the form I take to do, to give and receive that, to know that, to be that,” and he glances up then, not all the way but far enough he can look Eddie straight on their his lashes:

“Just because it came after does not mean it is less precious,” he tells Eddie with such feeling; “just because it was not First does not mean it is less,” and suddenly Eddie understands. It is not about the Form.

It’s about loving that much. That…that beyond the entirety of everything.

Eddie’s breath catches more than once and he almost laughs—would, if his breath weren’t already the issue at hand—when the Ocean-heart in him prods at his lungs helpfully, in soul-deep concern, with the protection afforded him as a rule now, it seems; he almost laughs, because how is this reality? How is this his life?

How did he find a love willing to match the way he’s given all of him?

“What does it all mean?” is the way his giddy, wobbly, breathless incredulity comes out. But then it cools, dampens a little as desperation seeps in because:

“Am I,” Eddie swallows hard, still doesn’t try to stop the tears even if they’re sharper, sour;

“Am I allowed to love you?”

Steve’s eyes go wide and he holds Eddie tighter but Eddie has to speak it, he needs to ask and say the words.

“Am I allowed to have you? To >i>keep you?” Eddie chokes on the fear in him, focuses in on the constancy of the wave-beat in his chest not smothering, or downplaying the growing strength of his own human heartbeat as it thunders; just holding it, cradling it almost like it’s treasured.

It makes he feel brave enough to try and be bold enough to act like he believes he deserves either of those things; to ask one more:

“What does it mean, to keep a,” wonder, a marvel, a heart and soul too generous and depthless and enticing and beautiful for this world or any other—

“An Elemental being?”

And something in that questions softens the tightness that had started to settle in Steve’s expression at the questions that had come before and Steve leans, kisses him so light on the surface but so deep that Eddie’s pulse somehow finds, alongside Steve’s heart, a way to pound with at least half the strength of the Ocean in response.

“It means as much of forever as you desire,” Steve mouths against Eddie’s lips then pulls back only to look him straight on when he adds; “and know with everything that less time does not mean lesser feeling.”

He means it. And Eddie believes him. But.

“I don’t want less time,” Eddie’s quick to make clear, to lay his leaping heart bare: “I want all of time, but…”

He trails off, but Steve only leans back in, seals their lips again like reassurance and whispers against him:

“But?”

“I’ll age, and die,” Eddie’s voice is small as he voices the truth of it, the heartbreak at the end of the tale, but further still:

“Is it worth it for you? When my time is,” Eddie shakes his head the slightest bit, unwilling to knock Steve away even an inch; “so small?”

He might fear that the most. Losing Steve at all has already proven unsurvivable. But knowing he’s only wasting Steve’s time—

“Understand me.”

Steve is a being of unfathomable power, Eddie knows this now. But the grandeur, the imperious striking might beneath his words is…undeniable.

“No time, spent with you, is small.”

And Eddie nods, and accepts Steve’s kiss and it’s wild endless depth without question and only with exhilaration, because what more can be done, not in the face of such power.

Not when he’s suggesting, hinting at everything Eddie would ever want.

“I have never given my Heart before,” Steve’s whole hand splays out to cover Eddie's chest, now, his voice lower and a rumble; vulnerable but unafraid; “not ever.”

And there again: the stability that Eddie’s human heart’s reclaiming gives way to trembling, and the beat gets knocked about but then right there is Steve’s heart: wholly given.

For the first time. And to Eddie.

Good fucking gods—

“It would keep you, it you wished it,” Steve tells him, simple and plain again about something Eddie can already tell is about to change his entire world yet again; “you would not wither. You would stay with me hale and whole and vibrant always, until the ending of all things.”

An Elemental being. Eternal in the…literal sense.

Eddie’s flesh heart trembles. His hand goes to cover the steadier one splayed atop it, next to Steve’s own hand.

“Don’t you need it?” Because, because it’s a part of Steve, and not something simple or extraneous, no, it’s his heart—

“Only mortals need a heart inside their breast, and,” Steve pauses, tilts his head; “if you,” and he lifts his eyes, grasps the hand eddie’s not holding to both their hearts inside his chest and lists it ever so tenderly to his lips:

“If you do me the honor of letting me pledge forever, and keeping mine in your sweet breast,” Steve mouths against Eddie’s knuckles, a little bit…shy; “perhaps you’ll be unthinkably generous and allow me to keep yours.”

And fucking hell, in all the history of idiotic questions, of obvious things—

“It is yours,” Eddie drags Steve’s hand from his mouth back to Eddie's chest, both hands there to be so fucking clear: “it is yours.”

And it always was.

And Eddie doesn’t have to think about eternity, or immortality, or forever on this sort of scale. He doesn’t. Because the answer was always and will always be Steve. But once Steve’s kissed him to breathlessness once, twice, their hands still pressed to Eddie’s chest to feel the effect of their fervor on the pounding met with the immediate embrace of Steve’s heart around the whole of it, like the Heart of the Ocean itself relishes the racing of Eddie’s pulse so long as it’s there to hold it safe, and properly adored, all the whole—but once Steve kissed him thoroughly, he leans back and looks Eddie square in the eyes:

“But know this too, my most beloved,” and Eddie’s pulse skips again, and Steve’s heart rejoices again, an addictive sensation is there ever was one:

“You gave yourself to the Sea,” Steve reminds him, as if it’s a thing to ever forget; “if you live and die as your perfect mortal self, in this perfect mortal body,” Steve keeps one hand on his chest but lets the other rove across his ribs, over his arm, up his neck to cup his face:

“If then you are consecrated to me in the end, as humans on the water tend to do,” and Eddie’s heart kicks—and Steve’s holds it dear—at the subtle suggestion of how Eddie thought he lost this, lose all of this—

“I protect and keep every soul that falls into me,” Steve murmurs with the cadence of the water he is, and all the more in him beyond only that; “and you,” he traces Eddie’s lips so gentle: “you would only come home to me in the end either way, if that was still what you wanted.”

Eddie is stunned still, a little, and Steve takes the space to speak further:

“If what you want is forever, the time it takes, whatever the route or its shape, it is,” Steve smiles so sweet, so encouraging; “that is of little consequence to me outside the happiness it brings for you,” and he plays with Eddie’s bottom lip, moves his hand against his chest through the curls there in time with the thump of his human heart.

“Time doesn’t, feel the same, for me,” Steve confesses, again apologetic all of a sudden for fuck knows what reason—he is here, alive, their hearts literally belong to each other, and he’s telling Eddie it can be forever, that he would want forever—

“I only knew you were hurting so badly when you spoke to me, and I was shaped enough in this form to know your distress,” Steve confesses, and it takes Eddie a moment to put it in context: before. Hours before and yet lifetimes before, it feels so far in so many ways from here: “I focused mostly on keeping your body safe,” he adds but quickly, like he sees it as an excuse he doesn’t deserve to lean on; “I am sorry you were in such pain for so long before I was strong enough to come to you,” and that part he says, far too close to something like a failing.

“Forgive me?” and his eyes are so big and Eddie wants to laugh but he can’t, he can’t, he just needs Steve to know— “You’re alive,” are the only words that come before Eddie kisses Steve with everything he has, and presses their hands again to his unbridled pulse, hoping he’s desperate enough, and that Steve’s own heart next to the pounding can feel enough, to know the rest with absolute certainty.

“Oh, sweet angel,” Steve mouths against him, and the tone is watery; Eddie knows he feels the breadth of what Eddie needs him to know; “my angel.”

“Yours,” Eddie nods; “entirely yours,” and he kisses Steve hard, just shy of rough before he pants between them, their foreheads bowed together.

“Entirely yours, and here to feel it, to be held in your arms,” Eddie shakes his head and beams at Steve; still holds his hand right to his heart:

“There is nothing to forgive.”

And Steve gapes at him a moment before he starts to speak:

“You are a,” but he doesn’t finish, just dives back in and kisses Eddie with an abandon that Eddie suspects only the elemental beings that shape the foundations of the world can reach, and love enough to drag mere mortals to the brink of alongside them.

When they part Eddie is weightless, buoyed on a novel ecstasy, but Steve is clasping their hands against his raving heartbeat somehow all the tighter.

“The love you’ve given to me wasn’t a thing I knew I could wish for,” Steve murmurs low; “but can you feel, here?”

And somehow Eddie knows Steve doesn’t mean the rabbiting of the flesh heart, he means the Ocean-heart, and how it flawlessly anticipates and shapes itself to Eddie’s human heartbeat, dances with it like an art form: immaculate.

“It never moved like that, before you.”

And somehow hearing those words are what breaks Eddie open, and leaves him to choke on a sob and cling to Steve because…

What else do you do in the face of the impossible? In the fulfillment of your every dream?

“You not only have the heart of the Ocean,” Steve breathes against Eddie's temple now, holding him close. “You are my heart. You reshaped and remade it indelibly. No matter what you choose, or how,” Steve flattens eddies palm against its rhythm: “it will never be as it was.”

Then he nudges his nose at Eddie’s jaw until their eyes meet and he says more like a bow:

“I will never be as I was.”

And part of Eddie wants, needs to sob some more; but more of Eddie needs Steve to understand one more thing, beyond any lingering doubt:

“I surrendered myself to the Sea,” and now it’s Eddie who can speak truth plain, and simple, when they are both even if they’re also life-altering and heart-shaping and soul-making, too: “and I know you are the Sea but,” and he reaches, then, and cradles Steve’s face in both hands:

“I give myself, heart and soul, to you,” because Eddie thinks the secrets the Sea whispered to him inside shells were his heart, sure, but that was the point. Because his heart is Steve’s now, and Steve’s is his, and maybe the secret was always that secret. Eddie gave his heart to the Sea before he knew there was more beyond to give to.

The secret was always Steve, wonder beyond and above all wonders.

And here they are.

“Forever,” Eddie tells him with no hesitation; gasping a little, heart tripping a little but always into the hold of Steve’s own, a home already, and better suited than Eddie’s chest alone had ever been. “I want forever. If you want—“

And with Steve’s lips on his immediately, rapturously, giving and taking, gifting and treasuring every offering that is Eddie, only Eddie, all of Eddie—

Hell, even without any of that: Eddie knows from the Heart around his heart and the way it moves—as it never has before, and Eddie knows—to curl around him with such absolute certainty, to almost nestle against him inside his chest like he’s making a home there for always, a life eternal protecting the heart he’s stretched around?

Steve wants forever, too.

divider credits here & here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

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hitlikehammers · 21 days

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After The Storm (Steddie Pirate AU)

(you guys totally made it through the storm fine, right? no issues, all good?)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Seven: As Offering or Mercy

ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // SIX // FINAL CHAPTER on 7 April 🌊

also on ao3

In the days that follow, only two things remain constant.

The first is perhaps most obvious, most inescapable: Eddie Munson is, in the aftermath, no more than the shell of a man, hollow and barren, though the prices of him meant to be hollow, to fill with air and blood and bring life to the whole of him—those hollow parts are leaden, now. The chambers of his heart struggle endless, the expanse of his lungs shriveled; calcified.

He wishes both would just…give up the ghost already. The rest of him’s managed it well enough.

The crew somehow pried him from Steve’s body the night of the attack; Eddie doesn’t remember. The next thing he does recall is stumbling onto the deck again to see the last of the bloodstains being scrubbed away, no bodies in sight and panicking, where was Steve, where had he gone—

A burial at sea, of course. But Eddie…Eddie had come undone.

He’d screamed and lashed and…and he doesn’t recall what all he’d said or done but he knows they don’t bother thinking, his crewmates. They leave him to his hollowness within the quarters that were Steve’s. That were theirs, together. They either respect his space, or expect him to rot.

Either is…sufficient.

The second constant, though, are the questions. Because he is silent, winnowed to only bones he can’t comprehend as still possessing the capacity to stand, to hold weight and move, until he does both and leans dependent at the edge of the shop in the dark and asks whatever listens, in the water or beyond:

“Was I,” he croaks; the first time in particular; they’re the first words he didn’t speak over Steve’s body, and then scream for the faceless loss of even that; “did I disrespect you?”

He addresses the Sea; thinks he’s doing the closest thing to offering prayer, or maybe the opposite of prayer—more that he thinks he’s speaking to the closest thing he’s ever felt to a deity; divinity as understood in Eddie’s frame of comprehension.

At least: how he understood it, before he knew Steve’s touch.

There is no reply.

“Was I,” he clears his throat the next time; it grates like glass, to no avail; “was I selfish?” And he shakes his head and feels faint for it, for so much more than it too—feels like he may fall, his body finally processing the message that he is finished, and he may simply tumble into the Waves: where he gave his heart first.

Where they threw his heart last.

“What did I do,” he asks but in truth he begs, and the barest spark in him left sees fit to flare, and almost try to demand; “was wanting him like,” he licks his lips, cracked and bloody, iron against the salt on the breeze that’s not comfort here, now, where always it was: it mocks him.

It tastes like Steve.

“Was wanting him an offense to the universe, to the gods themselves, if there are any?” He barely huffs the question, cannot laugh, no capacity for it left in him; “or whatever’s out there instead of them, if they’re a lie?”

He suspects they’re a lie. He hopes they are. He doesn’t want to believe in a cosmos as callous as this by design. With intent.

And of course there are no answers. It makes him fear a little, for the inherent heartlessness of the universe.

“Was loving him a sin, like,” he gasps the next time, In the very depths of the night; “can I sin if I don’t believe in what I’m sinning against but if I can and if I did,” he babbles, rough and breathless, manic as he pants;

“Was being with him, someone like me just, presuming I could,” he shakes his head, and then can’t seem to stop as he rails hoarse and shaky against the ship’s wake;

“Was simply holding him a desecration, did I defile him by default?” Eddie feels sick for the thought, for the seed of the idea planted in his head. “Was it an insult on, on some level deeper than,” and he looks out into the endless shift of waves and asks it, this thing that was once unthinkable:

“Deeper maybe even than You,” he addresses the Ocean, this thing that he’s loved, he asks one love to explain the loss of another:

“Was it a violation, somehow of something I couldn’t know, merely to think that I deserved to love him?”

He doesn’t wait for any answer before he tries to defend himself because:

“Not even to be returned, not,” Eddie’s voice catches, and his tears sting on the wind; “I never expected it back, not from someone,” he shakes his head, and almost doesn’t mind the way the words choke; he wouldn’t mind these being the last truths he speaks; “he was beautiful but not just his face, his,” and he shakes his head; swallows; swallows—his pulse is mallet in his throat and by every hid and devil he wishes it would burst forth and finally drain him dry—there is not pain in it that could outstrip what consumes him as a rule.

“I’d never seen the shade of his eyes. I’ve never felt magic like it could be real, until he looked at me and then,” Eddie’s chest flutters, a vivacious reminder of what he had and lost and then clenches, back to the present truth:

“Then he touched me, just the once, just the first time and—”

Eddie falls, that night, to his knees. It’s been weeks, by now. He doesn’t know how long he sobs.

He doesn’t know how he gets back to the bed that was theirs, where he wakes only to sob harder.

It takes him more days than it should to return to the edge of the ship, but then; he’s mostly lost track of time. It has no real meaning.

“Was it a test?” he whispers, tone flat and eyes dim, any color in the stars washed out entire; “If so it was foolish, and not on my part,” he accuses, maybe for the first time, the whole of the Sea he trusted for so long, with so much, because—

“I was never strong enough not to fall for that,” he doesn’t even argue, just states the fact for what it is: unquestionable. “No one could be, but,” and Eddie’s throat closes, his pulse feels faint and he wonders if he’s staring it down, finally, finally: an end. A release from this kind of hurting.

But no. Not yet.

“His heart was,” Eddie’s words find him without thinking; his blood trips and he lifts a hand to rub his chest, the stutter like a reminder alongside the roil in his stomach as he amends: “is,” because that was the last he had of Steve. To be given his heart.

And Eddie, for punishment or restitution or something else entire: Eddie gave his heart to Steve, but possesses a beat in his breast here, still.

So Steve’s heart is, not was.

“It is goodness,” Eddie declares to the night sky, to the Sea almost in defiance; “it is all-consuming, it is the thing people treat like revelation, that once you know it you can’t breathe the same again,” and even in his devastation, Eddie cannot help but marvel because—

“It moves mountains and, and,” he shakes his head, seeks the right words; “it’s power, isn’t it, it’s the like life itself, but wielded to, to,” and Eddie’s breath escapes him, and he brings his other hand to his chest, too, presses there and the beat should be heavy and frantic and flooded with all of Eddie’s heartbreak but maybe the broken part of the concept itself is what wins out: it’s unsteady, but it’s constant. It’s wispy, somehow; like the slow push of low tide.

“It’s almost cruel that even like this,” Eddie cups the beats between his hands against his chest; “even when it isn’t mighty enough, powerful enough to, to,” even when it’s a fledgling thing, like a baby bird, it is strong enough Eddie wants to praise the impossible, inexplicable strength of this heart, of all that Steve still is, that he left behind in Eddie, deserving or otherwise—but there’s so much of him that wants to break more for it, because why must it be enough to keep him in his world, when, when—

“Was I not allowed to love him?” Eddie murmurs, tears streaming without relent; “Was I not allowed to love him alongside you?” he demands of the Sea, almost hysterical before he dares speak it, dares mouth it to the breeze:

“Above you?”

He clutches to the wood of the gunwale until it splinters his skin, lets the weak push of his own blood pool against his flesh.

“I would give everything to have him back,” he barely breathes, watches the blood on his pale palms as they tremble; he is weak, he knows this. He barely eats. He does not brave the day.

“But if even you can’t give me that,” he doesn’t know what prompts him this night, after so many nights, too many nights without: he doesn’t know but he presses the blood-stained hand to his heart, Steve’s heart, the fluttering bird in his chest and heaves a sob as he begs, bargains:

“Take it from me as an offering,” he speaks it clearer, plainer, truer than his voice has managed in ages; “either as an exchange for him, or a,” his voice cracks but he clenches his teeth, his jaw;

“Or else as a mercy,” Eddie whispers, but it’s fierce; “take it from me so it can no longer torment me, and let me lie with him in the depths.”

He’s clutching his chest, he cannot look down to his bloodstained shirt because he knows he will only see Steve, see him at the end and he can’t, he simply can’t—

A pressure curls around his hand, upon his chest—if a hand were cool and wet as a rule, before being solid underneath, it would be a hand, too. Maybe it is.

He looks down, braves the memory: it’s a hand. It’s not flesh colored, or else not entirely, like it’s only shaded in three-fourths the way it’s meant to be.

It is stronger, though, than any three-fourths grip has the right to be.

“Please stop trying to give me your heart,” a voice murmurs, close to his ear and Eddie’s hollowness is taking hold, it seems, emptying his mind of reason because: that voice.

That voice—

“You mortals rather need those,” the hand presses harder than a whole hand should be capable, at least that Eddie’s ever known, but it feels as if the beat below rises to the pressure somehow, some way; “and I happen to be singularly fond of you, so,” the hand taps his chest, something almost playful but far more instructive, chiding even:

“Keep that in here, please.”

And Eddie’s pulse should be a torrent, now, or else a scared bird’s wings fluttering, terrified to fall but: no.

No; everything in Eddie’s body is running circles, frantic and confused, heartsick and panicked and beyond reason: but his heartbeat when he listens, for the first time since his heart was lost—

When he listens, his heart is a mirror of the waves: the same tempo.

The same quiet might.

He slips one hand away from his chest and dares to cover the watery touch, test its solidity: it holds. Eddie gasps.

It turns; laces their fingers: Eddie knows the fit of that hand.

Eddie knows that touch.

He turns, and braves to be undone by the final fracturing of his sanity for wanting too hard.

But there stands…something not quite human. Eddie heard the words in the voice he loves just moments before—you mortals—and if the hair is part kelp and coral, the shape and sweep is the same. If the eyes are nearly translucent, they are no less drawn from the wellsprings of the flame where sunset meets the surf. If the frame of him seems malleable, it is not lesser for the give and flow: it is greater.

Eddie gapes, marvels: it cannot be.

But this, this: this otherworldly being, wreathed in power and beauty and wonder and a tangible regality, a palpable sense of a thing that exceeds Eddie’s comprehension, save to feel reverent, worshipful, grateful beyond expression in its presence—

This being inspires those feelings for something like divinity among legends, but at the same time, the same feelings for a desperate love in a heart Eddie’s starting to feel the beat of in his chest as something other than an albatross, or a noose.

More like a miracle.

“Keep this safe here, please,” Steve—because no matter the changes Eddie knows beyond doubt or question this is his Steve—Steve’s hand flattens full against Eddie’s chest and holds there like he needs to impress his desire as more accurately a need, then he glances up through lashes just as long and languid but more intangible, like a sunburst caught on the water.

Eddie swallows, not daring to blink, and Steve’s growing more flesh colored, more solid with every breath Eddie gasps in awe before he cups Eddie’s cheek and Eddie nearly comes undone; he’d lost that, he’d believed with the whole of him that he’d lost this forever and how, then, how is it here now—

He nearly comes undone for it; only nearly though.

Because the words Steve speaks to him next do the job entire.

“Keep this here,” Steve says once more with his hand to Eddie’s heart but…if a voice can hold the tides then his does, bears their strength and endlessness, before they disperse and it’s just the gentle hum of Steve when he adds, somehow stronger, somehow more:

“Unless, of course, you truly mean to give it.”

divider credits here & here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

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hitlikehammers · 22 days

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Hi hi hello! I have been following Turn and face the strange on Ao3 and I am in love!! I’ve been in love with your writing for some time but waah this might just be my new favourite! - Breadbirdlives

Hi there! I do think you're intending to address this to the inimitable and ineffably talented @pearynice, as Turn and Face the Strange is their incredible masterpiece; I just get the absolute privilege of reading it over a little early now and again!

@pearynice, my lovely: your adoring (and so VERY well deserved) fans are calling!

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hitlikehammers · 23 days

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@hbyrde36 and @withacapitalp made me start a redbubble. So I have a redbubble now.

#penny00dreadful art #gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous #penny00dreadful #how are you so skilled?

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hitlikehammers · 24 days

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The After the Sex and the Love and the Calm Storm (Steddie Pirate AU)

(I regret to inform you this is the end storm wherein bad things do in fact befall the boys)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Six: Quite So Cruel

ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // FIVE // Chapter Six on 5 April 🌊

also on ao3

They are about as far from land as they ever venture—they’re risk-takers, and they’re foolish, the lot of them, you don’t become a pirate in the abundance of fucking self preservation and brains—but they’re not suicidal.

So: this is familiar, but further would be more than they venture toward.

That’s not to say others abide by the same limitations.

Steve stiffens in Eddie’s arms for no apparent reason; though the important observation is apparent, because Steve…does very little without reason.

He grabs Eddie’s hand, squeezes it and draws it to his lips for a kiss to the knuckles before untangling himself where they’d simply been resting, pressed body to body in comfort, where if Eddie concentrated very hard he could make Steve’s pulse out where he sprawled in Steve’s lap, pressed tight to his chest; but then Steve’s standing, letting go of Eddie’s hand with an apologetic grimace before he breathes low:

“Only a moment, angel,” and Eddie does melt easily at such ineffable endearments; “just need to test the currents.”

Which isn’t outside the norm, by any means: Eddie doesn’t comprehend how it’s done, or what it entails, or indeed the purpose it serves but Steve stands—sometimes with Eddie at his side—

Only…it’s not sometimes that Eddie’s stands at his side.

It’s most times. All times, Eddie would venture the wager blind.

Which sinks through the split of his heart right to his guts, when he lets the implications of this time, pursued alone, to sink in.

Eddie is barely on his feet to follow Steve unbidden, heart ricocheting, quaking from his ribcage and up his throat, when his arm is caught. All motion in his frame arrested for the hand on his sleeve, clenched around his limb: vise-tight and commanding, unforgiving, but desperate.

Eddie looks up, knows the touch is not its tenor simply for the shape of the hand, and Eddie needs to amend his assessment: his figure is frozen. His lungs are stuck.

His heart is shaking, for the wide frenzy in Steve’s eyes.

“They are almost upon us,” Steve pants, chest heaving, his hands on Eddie heavy, his hold so impossibly tight; “too swift and too much heft,” and his face drops, his breath catches and his eyes look bright almost stung to tears as he reaches a hand, cups Eddie’s face so soft, almost terrifying for how it juxtaposes to the death-grip he keeps on Eddie’s shirt, Eddie’s arm.

Eddie can near feel the break of his vessels to shape a bruise in the shape of Steve’s hand and he hates, he hates how his mind immediately whispers poison:

To keep for when he’s go—

No. No, Eddie doesn’t even know what’s happening, what’s the matter; he can’t afford to jump to conclusions—

His heart won’t withstand jumping to those conclusions—

The rest of the ship takes time to be roused, and if they did not trust in Steve’s uncanny intuitions they’d stay put but he’s not been wrong yet: a vessel is gaining on them, larger but somehow faster, pirates alike but no pirate crew is an ally to another, especially not in open waters, and Steve is certain they seek to do harm. They seek to plunder, certainly. But then: worse.

Eddie grabs for him, pulls him around a corner and asks how he knows it’s worse, where his fear is rooted and Steve stares at him, those sea-shift eyes flashing before he grabs Eddie’s face and draws him in, kisses him harder and needier than he’s ever done before and Eddie’s heart skips then surges for all the worst reasons when Steve pulls back, bows his head to Eddie’s brow and breathes:

“Blood,” and Eddie shivers for the closeness, for the word, for the promise of violence in the waves; “blood in the air, in the water,” and how Steve knows Eddie cannot guess, supposes it another talent learned where he hails from a world away, but Eddie never once thinks to question it. Because this is Steve, with whom he shares a bed. With whom he shares his heart.

If he’d had doubts, though, the way Steve looks at him—soft but unafraid, remorseful and yet so tender as he traces Eddie’s features, caresses his face; Eddie could never question this. No part of it. Not for an instant.

“I am sorry, my darling,” Steve breathes almost sorrowful, and the tides dip a little, the ship along their lead, as if Steve’s grief is deep enough to stir the fathoms below; “I’d have stopped them if I could.”

And Eddie cannot have that sorrow for nothing; reaches swift to catch Steve’s hands and brings them close first to his lips, then to his chest.

“You’re not to blame for pirates who seek to raid other pirates,” Eddie reasons, lifting one hand back now to cup Steve’s cheek just as dear, likely moreso, unable and unwilling to mask the depth of his feelings in a moment such as this. “It comes with the territory,” he tries to lighten the breaths between them, tries to reassure and steel them as one, together and united.

And Steve does not deny him, but outstrips him without seeming to intend it at all: he stares at Eddie as if he sees him in shades and frames beyond the perception of an ordinary man, watches him as if he can see the pump of his heart stripped bare and still he is steadfast: steadfast and unwavering, but then atop it all he is dangerous and somehow alight as he vows:

“I will not let you come to harm.”

And he draws Eddie in to kiss near violent for feeling, but this Eddie won’t be outstripped in, and meets him for every scrape of teeth and thrust of tongue.

And when Steve pulls away, the cries of the approaching enemy no longer approach, no: now they are here—but when Steve moves to meet them, Eddie stops him, traps their hands together against Eddie’s fitful heart and breathes:

“I pledge the same.”

And Steve’s eyes do impossible things, catch impossible light, before they settle on a soft regretful thing, an affection that fears but will not yield, and he holds tight to Eddie’s hand as he leads them to where the noise grows, swells: they’re being boarded.

“Stay close,” Steve breathes as he reaches for the pistol at his hip.

“Steve, I,” Eddie isn’t even sure what he means to say but Steve halts it quick enough he has no reason to learn; jerks him to a stop and hisses with the depth of an Ocean until himself:

“Stay close,” and Eddie nods, words beyond him, and draws a sword. Steve eyes him sharply.

“They will not all keep to the blade,” he warns, and Eddie nods, understands, then tips his head to Steve’s own firearm.

“I am quicker with this,” he assures, and Steve, bless him, doesn’t argue, doesn’t quest: trusts in kind.

Eddie’s heart still proves fool enough to swell, even as they cross into the fray.

They’re surprisingly not wildly outnumbered, and the invading parties expected to catch them wholly unawares: they press an advantage for it, and more than even the odds within mere minutes. But once they are evened, Steve is correct: they favor pistols.

And they are quicker than Eddie with them.

Eddie watches his crewmates fall, and slits throats without thought, quick and reliable, one after the next and they fall, and he doesn’t bother to think that he hasn’t found need to dodge a blade or a bullet yet, especially as his compatriots cry out or fall still and half-cold before they even can.

He doesn’t think, until he feels the impact: not of a bullet. Not of a blade.

But a body. One he knows so well, so intimately, pushing him with a purpose.

The way it slumps, a good five feet from where Eddie lands, and the groan that creaks from that direction, the way beloved hands clutch against the broad span of a chest: Eddie’s entire world shudders, goes dark at the edges when it becomes very fucking clear what the purpose was.

He sees the perpetrator, stalking close to finish the job and Eddie doesn’t think, sees the gleam of a gun held loose in dead hands and he grabs, aims, and pulls the trigger. And again. And again.

When he is certain the assailant is good and dead, he scrambles to Steve, still splayed on the deck, still clutching his chest.

His chest blooming red swift beneath his palms.

“How,” Eddie gasps, his vision still tunnelled, his tongue too thick; “why did you—“

“You were about to come to harm,” Steve croaks, simply, but as if the words cost him gravely; “what did I say, about that?”

He quirks a brow, even as the stain spreads beyond the cover of his hands, stretches rhythmically, as if, as if…

“Steve,” Eddie gasps, pleads, breaks because the stain spreads to a rhythm, and the would is in his chest—

Eddie reaches, moves Steve’s hands that are just resting, barely keeping pressure, and tries not to think of what it means that Steve maybe cannot hold with pressure as he leans his weight, his whole self onto Steve’s chest, the flutter of his heart that’s coloring his clothes, that’s draining his flesh to match the moonlight: far too pale already and no, no—

“But I gave you my heart,” Eddie insists, confounded, because the scene before him is impossible, it’s not possible even as that same heart trips frantic; even as he’s just barely keeping the words from spilling forth on a sob; “I gave you my heart, so you’ll be fine,” because he will, he must be, Steve must be; “you’ll be fine, because it’s still beating,” and Eddie’s hold is pressed tight to the hole ripped through Steve’s chest but he can feel the beating beneath it, because he can hear his own pulse in tumult but Steve’s heart is slower, the gush of blood between Eddie’s fingers gentler, the pulse driving it is sedate, even; is slowing, is fading, is leaving—

Eddie’s breath only manages to barely wheeze from his lips in a whine, because this cannot, he cannot—

“The heart of the whole Ocean, you said it,” Eddie gasps, whimpers, pleads because Steve told him, because Steve said so, and—

“The Seas would be dry, and I would be dust if you,” Eddie shakes his head, rakes denial over hot coals that will envelop him if he cannot blink and awake for: this nightmare, this hell, this—

Steve’s shirt is crimson, now; the blood pooling its own ocean beneath him, soaking the boards. Eddie cannot breathe.

“Beloved,” Steve barely manages to mouth the words, but Eddie feels them in the way his blood insists on continuing to move, and the same in the way Steve’s seems impossible to tempt into staying in motion, staying with Eddie—

“Take my heart, in this,” and somehow he mustered the strength to cover Eddie’s hand over the barest twitching left in it; “it’s been yours already, long enough,” and then Steve’s hand slips, and the less-than-a-beat under Eddie’s palm flees, and he presses harder, he tries to find it, how could he have lost it, where is it, where is—

“Steve?” Eddie is foolish enough to choke the name, when everything in him knows, and refuses to accept, that there will be no answer.

Ever again.

“No,” his voice shakes, though its steadier than any other part of him, and then, then—

There are no words for the sounds that escape him, animal and visceral, wrung to splatters and shattered beyond recognition, to less now than dust: more fitting, in honesty, than any words could have struck.

There are no curses, in any language or tongue, fit for gods quite so cruel.

divider credits here & here & here & here

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hitlikehammers · 26 days

Text

The Sex Really, It's Just Feelings and Sex Calm Before The Storm (Steddie Pirate AU)

(because nothing BAD could POSSIBLY HAPPEN to them in the REMAINING THREE CHAPTERS OR ANYTHING 👀)

🌊Under the Water (Our Hearts Will Dream Again)🌊

Chapter Five: The Heart of the Ocean

ONE // TWO // THREE // FOUR // Chapter Six on 3 April 🌊

also on ao3

It isn’t even a gradual shift, exactly. Not all of it, at least.

One wildly successful raid that funds the warming of the beds of the crew come next dock? That alone earns Steve and Eddie appreciation: Eddie’s called Munson without a single modifier on the name for the first time…ever on this ship. Steve gains a certain…deference. It’s probably the lack of any lingering suspicion toward him matched with respect but…it feels a little biblical-parting-of-the-Sea, if Eddie’s honest. Not that he’s complaining. It has its perks.

Not least among them an understood avoidance of the overhang near the bow after full-dark. Because there are no dunes to hide in on a ship and…well.

Once Eddie’s had Steve, like this? Like hell he intends to stop.

And if Eddie’s of such a mind? Steve is…intent near-beyond human reason. He is insatiable, but at the same time the most tender, most attentive, most intuitive partner—no. Most giving and generous and talented and staggeringly skillful lover, that Eddie’s ever had the privilege to touch, to feel, to take inside himself like he’s made to be there only and always.

And it takes only one near-brush with their nightly routine, the first sunset after that first raid—the boy Emerson being canny enough to take the hint of Eddie’s admittedly unrestrained moans, because restraining any reaction to Steve’s ministrations would be unfathomable as a universal rule, how he stretches Eddie like he’s delicate and still resilient, like he is known wholly in solidity, none of the weaknesses and faults he’s been highlighted for his entire life: Steve’s lips and Steve’s hands erase them entirely as his deft fingers quirk in angles more perfect, almost incomprehensible as they seem to swell, the rise of a tide almost within Eddie’s body to fill him better than he’s ever known, to nip at the most sensitive of his flesh like Scylla and suck at the tender rim of him like godsdamned Charybdis, and it’s impossible, Eddie is certain that it’s impossible to slip one’s tongue across the nub of pure abandon inside of him but sometimes Steve will place lips to the puckered center at the cleft between his cheeks and somehow slide the rush of pure sensation, the rightness Eddie’s chased his whole entire life—

Well. Eddie challenges anyone not to tremble, not to be dismantled, not to come wholly undone cry to the heavens and beg to the Sea below—and, in fairness.

Emerson was sharp enough to turn heel before he laid eyes on them, and ran his gob predictably to warn off the rest because the crew is depraved, but voyeurs among their own?

They’d prefer not.

Regardless: it’s a shift in esteem, really, that first time the ship’s laden with loot, after weeks of full bellies and pockets for trading the rest of their catch. And Eddie doesn’t mind it one bit—most significantly for how it allows him to…not merely indulge the glory of falling into Steve, of sinking wholly into his presence and power everywhere surrounding Eddie, pumping into him like he pumps Eddie’s blood, conducting his heartstrings like a song; more than.

It's rightness, and homecoming, pure belonging and release and above that, encompassing that: a beauty in it that thrums in Eddie’s veins so much like the tide, in and out, in and out: promising endlessness, somehow—more impossibilities.

But still without question.

So then, when it happens again—two ports, two hauls in a row: unprecedented luck, to be sure. But hell if Steve’s not offered a berth, which Eddie’s never seen a single member of the crew offered, ever—was not even aware they had those and Steve seems hesitant, aware he’s cutting corners somehow that the crew seems mostly too in awe of the gold on top of all the fish of late to wholly protest; Steve’s hesitant, until his eyes rake up and down Eddie’s frame, top to toe, and accepts the offer, graciously despite the catcalling of the men who noticed his not-at-all-discrete appraisal.

Eddie’d blushed, and dared to fear reprisals from the crew for the favoritism but there was…a shift, in Steve, as soon as he offered his hand to Eddie and didn’t lead him, walked at his side like an equal into modest but private quarters.

Eddie’s heart had leapt when Steve had fucked him in the open air, still, hands twined tight, before making love to him in their quarters—theirs, unquestioned—and perhaps they never use the word, and perhaps Steve only touches him with the feeling, and doesn’t feel it in his own chest, but Eddie feels it in every motion, every brush of skin, every breath and word and through the bones of his body, with certainty.

And that holds weight either way.

By the time their fortunes on land fill coffers and slake lists a full three times in a row, though? Eddie, Steve, or both together might have had a good case for mutiny, just for the lock on a door in the Captain’s Quarters—and would have had a strong shot to gain it in full, too; they’d grown close to revered.

Steve rationalized it all easily: middling ports attract many ships in distress, there are often coves with hidden bounty never retrieved, for every time the distress proved just too great—Eddie’s never heard of such a thing but perhaps there was sense in it. Certainly proof in his hands, all their hands for Steve’s cunning. Plus, as Steve argued: piracy upon the pirates, it actually seemed quite neutral from an ethical perspective, for Eddie’s benefit. And he leaned into Eddie when he said it, every time, and Eddie’s heart swelled so often as a result he feared for the integrity of his ribs, but also.

He welcomes the way this feeling will overcome his own skeleton one day. He relishes knowing his bones will be found some day hence by pirates of another age to ask why his, unlike his comrades, were blasted outward from within.

What a privilege that would be. Will be.

For Eddie’s part, though: he doesn’t question it. Any of it, really. He’d kept a firm stance on the question of looking gift-washed-up-on-his-metaphorical-shore in the mouth from the beginning. He had no desire or intention of looking this gift-born-miracle-lain-wonder-of-wonder-at-Eddie’s-own-feet as anything less than a boon, and a miracle, and the most precious thing Eddie’s ever beheld with his gaze, let alone held in his own hands.

And Eddie has spent his life beholding his beloved Sea.

So part of Eddie is uncomprehending, though it is a small inconsequential part. The other part, that knew his love would need to comprehend his heart was with the Sea—that other, larger part wonders if the Sea would share. He does not wish to take his heart back whole and yet—

Steve must have it just as much. Whether Steve wishes to give in kind is immaterial. Steve has as much right to his heart, now, as the water‘s lain claim to it, always.

Anyway.

It’s how they lie now, bare and entangled, salt of exertion matching salt on the wind; thoroughly sated and smiling to the stars, and truly: all the better that the crew’s mostly just taken to deferring to them in their odd little ways; that Steve finds it baffling, and Eddie finds it hilarious.

This way, they can hold these moments sacred. His thighs astride Steve’s hips until they burn. Steve’s body, and how it moves against Eddie’s and never ceases, never serves to be any less a revelation, even as it remains incomprehensible for it. The way he moves that’s not even againstEddie, really, no: it’s a glide, a give, a flow around and into every part of Eddie he didn’t know within himself had been waiting not merely to be touched, but to be found, awoken almost inhuman, beyond the moral coil and something transcendent. Steve’s hands idly cupping him long after he’s spent, cleaning him pristine like he cannot bear to leave a drop of Eddie to the cool night, greedy and adoring all at once, and it never mattered that the touch was never coaxing, never expectant, more a soft way to just hold onto more of Eddie—it taught Eddie’s heart to pound in a whole new way: contented beyond measure, but wildly overfull, only able to beat with all that it has.

It’s like that, here; now.

It’s magical.

And then Steve’s free hand twines with his, Steve’s lips come to Eddie’s as their fingers fold between each other’s: and Steve has this ineffable flavor, salt but not like food, or even just like waves but closer—it’s like what Eddie imagines salt strikes on an elemental level, pure and addictive, sweet underneath and savory everywhere, an indulgence that’s offered to Eddie without limits so that he can be greedy and adoring, too; and then now, he tastes himself under Steve’s tongue and that’s, that’s—

That tangles with the heady pulse of him and ramps it up a little bit extra. Just because; just as he kisses all the deeper.

They pull apart only when they’re gasping, smiling in the parting so wide, so overcome as Steve traces Eddie’s lips, his jaw, his cheekbones; as Eddie admires the splay of Steve’s lashes, diaphanous like sea foam—the freckling on his neck so like constellations guiding his eyes home, his hands true.

And Eddie thinks he might fall asleep despite the thrumming of his heartbeat, he is so impossibly…happy but then—

“Listen,” Steve’s mouth is at his ear, the word mostly breath. All Eddie hears are the waves—agitated. Or, no. No: just stirred to motion. They’re not angry. They’re…

“Now feel,” and Steve brings their still-laced hands together and presses them to Eddie’s chest where he can feel the heavy beat and it skips—the water sloshes below—and Eddie feels, and listens, and is breathless, and listens: the waves undulate too fierce, no reason, save that they match—

“Yours truly is the heart of the Ocean,” Steve kisses along his jaw, presses tighter to his chest until his mouth makes its way there, kisses Eddie’s pounding heart: “through and through.”

It’s an impossibility. It’s nonsensical. But…Eddie is in love; his heart is in that water as much as in Steve’s chest.

Maybe some impossibilities are a given.

divider credits here & here & here & here

🌊ao3 link here

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