STRANGER THINGS
5.07: The Bridge
LOOKIN AT DUSTIN DRESSED LIKE EDDIE AND STEVE DRESSED LIKE EDDIE YOU KNOW THAT MAN IS LOOKING AT HIS SON AND HIS HUSBAND FROM HIS BASTARDIZED VAMPIRE AFTERLIFE SCREAMING HIS HEAD OFF AND GNAWING AT STICKS
Joe Keery widening his stance unnaturally to lessen the height difference between him and Gaten and putting Dustin right at heart level on Steve is so important to me actually
Tell me that Dustin isn’t listening Steve’s heartbeat and then apologize because you’re wrong
Steve: Man, my throat is so sore.
Eddie: Yeah, sorry about that.
Mike, confused: But why would you apologize for Steve's sore throat?
Steve: ...
Eddie: ...
Mike: *eyes go wide*
Mike: Never mind, I can see how this is a very dumb question.
Dustin: It is?
Eddie survives, but barely, at the end of their first battle with Vecna. He spends his first week and a half in a coma, the splitting of the world and the mass exodus that followed enough to make the remaining people of Hawkins avert their eyes from his presence.
When he wakes up, it's to the sight of his uncle. He can't speak, he can't move, he can barely open his eyes. He can't manage to spend more than 15 minutes awake at any given time, but every time he is, he's surrounded by his new friends.
Dustin never leaves. He stays firmly at his bedside, singing his praises and getting him sips or water whenever he needs it and allowing heavy silences to build between them when his energy runs out, things left unsaid.
Wayne never leaves. His job went with half the population, so he has nothing to do but relentlessly make sure his nephew is breathing. He holds his hand and wipes the sweat away and keeps his questions deep inside.
Steve never leaves. He understands it, and he doesn't. They hardly knew each other, but they're inextricably bonded. They share responsibility for Dustin, but they also share that little stone of jealousy. They care for one another. They can't say it. Just bask in the easy company they create together.
In one of his bouts of wakefulness, near a month in, he hears Steve, Wayne, and Hopper whispering.
"...talk about the "ash" coming up. Clahan let it slip they got a call. Something about quarantine."
"We need to move him."
"Why? No sense in agravatin' his injuries more than they already are."
"Steve's right. These guys, they're not going to be some first responder goons, they're going to be military. The real shit, and I guarantee you, they're not going to let some kid who got pumped full of demo-saliva sit peacefully in the clinic."
"We move him tonight."
It's so fucking hard to do, but he makes himself open his eyes. Makes himself grip the bed sheets and speak. "M'not going. You can't make me go."
Wayne rushes to his side, shushing his nephew and petting at his overgrown bangs. "Shh, shh, Ed. It's gonna be alright. You just gotta listen."
The adrenaline that kicks in at the thought of being moved, at being forced to leave behind his friend, Dustin, before the battle his done is enough for his body to kick it into gear. It hurts in a way that he never could have imagined before the day he almost died, but he makes his legs kick out anyway, pressing at the sheets, trying to get away, to make a stand.
"Hey, hey! Knock it off man, you're going to hurt yourself." Steve comes to the bed, trying to hold his legs and arms still without doing further damage.
The desperation in his heart must show in his face, because Steve stills as their eyes meet, expression falling. "Don't let them take me. I need to say, I want to stay. I can help," he pleads, trying to move under the gentle hands holding him down on both sides.
"Eddie, it's okay. It's okay, you just need to stop. Stop." Steve says. He looks away, and Eddie knows he's made up his mind. He makes himself tear his arm from Wayne's hand, reaching for the tube in his nose like it's the thing that's been keeping him in this bed. People around him are shouting and he forces himself throguh the pain, bile rising in his throat and dribbling down his chin.
A sharp pain in his thigh and the sound of Steve's desperate "I'm sorry" are the last things he remembers.
He wakes up in the back seat of Wayne's truck. The gentle rocking of the cab sends burning jolts through his tight skin and bruised muscle, but it pales in comparison to the stab of betrayal. Of defeat.
"Fuck you, old man." It takes him what feels like an eon to get out of his throat. His gaze is soft, too tired to muster any kind of glare, staring at where the steering wheel meets the sky through the windshield. The sky is so blue.
Wayne says nothing, just tightens his hands on the wheel.
They end up just over the border in Kentucky. Wayne has family there, but they don't go to them. They call in some favors and get access to a dilapidated cabin in the middle of nowhere. No phone, no town, no way out. He tries not to think of it as a prison, knows his uncle is putting his money where his mouth is and doing anything and everything he has to to keep him safe.
His recovery is slow and brutal without the things he really needs. Wayne cleans him and moves him to avoid sores and gives him his best approximation of physical therapy while Eddie watche him distantly. He can stay awake now, but he's less alive than before the coma. He's struck by sudden and near violent bouts of anger, bolting up in bed and beating on the window and begging to go back.
Every moment of every day he thinks of what might be happening in Hawkins. He wonders if they're dead. He imagines Dustin's hat full of blood and brains. He thinks of Robin's converse covered feet severed from the body. Nancy's gun turned against her. Max's bones snapped back. Steve's beautiful brown eyes, caved into his skull.
Wayne reads to him. Wayne feeds him. Wayne takes care of him.
Eddie loves him.
Eddie hates him.
It's over a year until he can stand all the way up again. Another two months until he's walking.
He stands at the window while Wayne is at work. He thinks of walking his way back to Hawkins. Could he find a way in? Is there anything left for him to find there? They track the news religiously with their radio, the only station they get a fuzzy AM news talk show. Every now and then they get crumbs, little updates about the continued quarantine across the border. Military presence. Metal band-aids.
Mandatory medical check-ups.
He won't say it, but if their only goal was to keep Eddie safe, then they made the right call.
His scars and raised and bumpy, red and tight across his damaged muscles. His left leg feels tight and loose at the same time, unable to support his weight without the use of his beat-up cane.
But there's something else. Something that he couldn't identify until his body started to feel a little like his own again.
There's something under his skin. When Wayne is gone, working the handful of hours he allows himself at the corner store three miles out, he stares at his hands. He stares at his feet. Feels at the space between his shoulder blades.
He faces north, imagining the distance between himself and them.
One day as he's staring, he gets up. The sky is the same. The grass is the same. The window is the same.
Something is wrong.
The tearing of flesh at his back is easy to ignore. The curl of claws through his socks and nailbeds is secondary.
Something is wrong.
He lifts into that northern sky and doesn't stop for miles.
Hawkins looks the same. It looks irreconcilably different. It doesn't matter. He shoots through an attatended rift, the red sinewy flesh of it not registering despite all the nights he'd screamed awake to the beat of its pulsing walls.
The sky is falling. The earth is red. There's screaming.
None of it matters.
There's a body falling through the sky.
That matters.
He doesn't feel the weight hitting his mangled arms. He doesn't register the snap as his wing clips the tower on his way up. Doesn't hear the screams below him as he brings the two of them up above their heads.
"Hey, sweetheart. I always knew you'd fall for me."
Steve's raucous laughter is the best thing he's heard in two years.
