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projectcampbell · 1 year

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This is one of my favorite fanfics of all time

Too Long In The Midnight Sea - Part Eleven

Rating: Mature, minors DNI (standard for my fics).

Pairing: Eddie Munson/Original Female Character

Wordcount: 4.8k

Summary: December makes its presence felt in Hawkins. Despite a couple of tactless slip ups, Steve continues to prove that training to be a counsellor is definitely the right path. Lori has a breakdown and a breakthrough. The party make a long overdue appearance.

Notes: Holy rapid update, Batman! Apparently after weeks of no writing at all, my brain’s decided it needs to write ALL THE TIME. This is the result.

Masterlist

The postcards start to arrive five days after Lori discovered the note at her front door. A bundle of them arrive at once, all sealed inside a worn brown envelope, her name and address etched on the front in neat, old-fashioned cursive. Four postcards fill the space inside, two decorated with images of Seattle at night, one with a lush green view of the Olympic National Park, the fourth with an idyllic image of Mount Saint Helens. Lori’s name is written in familiar messy handwriting on the back of each card, below it a small blue ballpoint indentation where the writer looks to have considered adding more text before deciding instead to leave the rest of the card blank.

As certain as she is that the cards are from Eddie, she is equally certain she doesn’t want to look at them for a moment longer than necessary. She stows the first batch back in the envelope they arrived in, slipping it behind her grandmother’s gaudy pink clock that sits on the mantle above the log burner in the living room. The next day another card is pushed into her mailbox, this one covered in elephants advertising Portland’s Oregon Zoo. It too gets hidden in the envelope behind the clock, along with the next to arrive, a gleaming vintage Shelby Cobra on the front, a sign for Sacramento’s Automobile Museum hanging above it.

Steve, being Steve, doesn’t let the cards lie hidden in the envelope for too long. He pins each one to the wire of the multi-colored Christmas lights Lori had strung up across the wall, each card tracking the Munsons’ zig-zag journey from the West Coast homeward.

“You should frame them, y’know? Turn them into a collage or something, give it to Eddie for Christmas.”

Lori wrinkles her nose, feigning concentration on the copy of Cosmo she’d picked up from the store on her way home from work that night, suddenly heavily invested in an article detailing what exactly makes a man sexy today.

Steve pokes at her thigh with his foot, stretching out across the gap between the couch and his armchair and needling his big toe into her leg until she tosses the magazine down in annoyance. “What, Steve?”

“You heard me. The cards? Frame them, give them to Eddie when he gets back.”

“Why would I give them back to him? You know he’s not the one sending them, right?” She tosses the latest torn envelope to him. “Look at the writing - too neat to be Eddie. It’s his uncle mailing them to me, not him.”

Steve tosses the envelope back; it flutters aimlessly through the air, skimming along the floor and disappearing under the couch. “So?”

“What do you mean, ‘so’? Eddie left, Steve. He dumped me at the diner and didn’t look back.”

“Yeah, ‘cause he’d just beat a guy to a pulp and probably thought the cops would have his ass for it -”

She shakes her head quickly, tugging on the cuffs of her sleeves until they cover her knuckles, caught between anger at the memory and the shame of it all. “No, Steve, it wasn’t that, it was me. Jimmy went through me to get to him. It was my fault, I should have warned Jimmy to stay away that day at breakfast, should have been much firmer, should never have let Eddie go near the shop.”

At that Steve snorts in amusement, shaking his own head before tucking the long strands of his hair behind his ears. “You really think you could’a stopped him? Eddie ‘Never Knowingly Stopped From Doing Anything By Anyone’ Munson? That Eddie? Do you know him at all?”

“Better than you.”

“Y’sure about that, shortstack, because the Eddie I know? Nothing gets in his way. When he’s set on something, that’s it, his way or the highway. If he was determined to beat the shit out of Jimmy that day, nothing you could have said would have stopped him.”

He turns his attention from his cousin to the only other item behind the clock, the notebook Lori had all but ignored yet also warned him off reading. Not that her warnings had stopped him from sneaking a glance while she was at work; he’d seen one all-too lifelike drawing of a demobat and hastily put the book back exactly where he’d found it, not needing the daytime reminder of the creatures he knew were waiting in his nightmares. “Have you read it yet?”

Lori doesn’t need to raise her eyes from her cuffs to know what her cousin is talking about. “No”, she states firmly.

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t seem relevant now. Eddie’s gone.”

A whine of exasperation spills from Steve’s lips as he gets to his feet and pulls the book from the mantle. He tosses it into Lori’s lap, ignoring her shout of frustration as she smoothes out any crinkles in the cover, turning the notebook over in her hands to check for any tears. “Lori, listen to me, please. You’ve gotta stop being angry with him and blaming yourself for whatever shit it is you blame yourself for, okay?”

“Stop Steve, you don’t get it…”

“What’s not to get?”

She places the notebook carefully on the coffee table then tips her head backwards against the back of the couch, her eyes closed tight as she turns her face to the light of the lamp hanging above. “He beat the shit out of Jimmy. There was blood everywhere, and the whole time they fought I enjoyed it. I stood back and watched while Eddie smashed the guy’s face to a pulp and I liked it, Steve. I didn’t want him to stop. Fuck, I wanted to join in! What sort of person does that make me?”

“Lori -”

“No, it’s worse than that. What if Eddie had gotten hurt? Real hurt, I mean? What if Jimmy had gotten the better of him and beaten him badly? Put him in hospital, or worse? I would be the one to blame, and you wouldn’t be telling me to just get over it then, would you?”

Steve leans forward, his pointy elbows digging through his long sweater sleeves and into the space just above his knees. He jabs one finger into the arm of Lori’s couch, trying to emphasise his point through stabby-handed gestures alone. “He didn’t, though. Eddie’s fine. Even Jimmy’s fine - he’s got one hell of a bruised ego, sure, but last I heard he was healing fine. His shop’s fine. Cops are fine. Everyone’s fine.”

Lori gives up on trying to make him understand, snapping her head up from the couch and flying to her feet. She takes two steps toward Steve’s armchair, her thumbs spearing into the empty belt loops of her jeans as she tries to control her actions, to stop herself from taking him by the shoulders and shaking some sense into him. “Have you stopped for one second to listen to yourself? You keep saying everyone’s fine, fine, fine, and maybe that’s true, but…”

Her words slow, the gravity of her thoughts stopping them from flying from her mouth. “…god, I wanted it to be me, okay? I wanted to be the one to make Jimmy hurt. It should have been me.”

Lori loves her cousin, probably loves him more than she loves anyone else alive, but as his expression changes from one of concern to a patronising, overly kind smile, she’s never wanted to slap the look off his pretty face more.

“C’mon, kid. You’re a girl. You’re a great girl, but Jimmy Mullins is -”

Rage catches up with her and makes her storm upstairs before Steve can finish his sentence, her bare feet slamming against each wooden step until her bedroom door slams hard behind her, the notebook and the postcards and the boy left in her turbulent wake.

*******************************

It’s late, a later hour than Steve would ever normally dare knock at Lori’s bedroom door. He knows she’s still awake, can tell from the noise of some metal shit she’s got blaring from the stereo system she keeps balanced on top of her drawers, and there’s an uncomfortable guilty boulder sitting in the pit of his stomach that won’t let him sleep until he’s at least tried talking to her.

He knocks again, harder this time, not stopping until he hears the click of the stereo switching off.

“Lori? Can I come in?”

The door opens an inch, one bloodshot blue eye peering up at him from through the gap.

“Why? So you can call me a silly little girl all over again? Tell me to go back to braiding my hair and painting my nails while the big important men sort out all my problems, hm?”

Fuck.

“I said something dumb, I know, and I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Lori. Please, can we talk?”

She makes him wait until the last moment before he’s about to give up, pulling the door open before she turns on her heel and makes her way back to her bed. She sits cross-legged in the middle of the mattress surrounded by a tangle of blankets, one arm pointing to the tiny occasional chair sitting in the farthest corner, yesterday’s clothes hanging off the back.

“You can sit there.”

He sits, knowing he looks like Alice in Wonderland after taking a bite from the Eat Me cake, far too big for the seat. He folds himself up like an awkward origami in the tiny chair, drawing his lips into a forced smile when he sees Lori’s self-satisfied smirk from her side of the room.

“Listen… what I said earlier about you and Jimmy, I’m sorry. It came out way worse than I meant it.”

“How did you mean it, exactly?”

He’s careful with his words, knowing he’s already on thin ice with his cousin. “I just meant that… Jimmy’s known for being a guy’s guy, y’know?”

“No. Enlighten me.”

Fuck.

“He’s an asshole, always has been. A loud mouth, dumb as a box of rocks, total jock douchebag who still thinks…”

“‘…he’s the king of Hawkins High.’ Jeez Steve, sounds kinda familiar doesn’t he?”

It’s a low blow, she can tell from the way the crinkle in the middle of his forehead deepens, in the way his left eye narrows just a touch more than the right. To her eternal surprise he bats off her barbed jibe, focusing on trying to get back in her good graces.

“Whatever, he’s a dick. And you’re good. You’re great - I know you could kick my ass any day of the week and twice on Sunday’s if you wanted. But going after a guy like him alone would have been a really…”.

He stops himself, quickly editing what he’d almost let slip. Calling her dumb again would not end well.

“…he would have messed you up, Lori. Badly. Honestly, I’m surprised Eddie got him as bad as he did - I woulda put money on Eddie getting his ass handed to him if someone had asked me before.”

Lori lets him ramble. The apology, such as it is, is so perfectly Steve Harrington that she can already feel her earlier red-hot anger toward him start to cool. His words taper off and the two cousins sit in a companionable, if slightly tender, silence, only Steve’s shuffling as he tries and fails to get comfortable on the little chair disturbing the peace.

She takes pity on him, pointing to the edge of the bed. “For god’s sake, Steve, get off that thing. It’s for clothes, not idiots.”

“Idiots. Thanks.” Relieved at her olive branch, he untangles his limbs and quickly moves from the chair, taking the allotted spot on the edge of the mattress before Lori has a chance to change her mind.

Lori waits for Steve to sit comfortably, picking at the chipped peppermint green nail polish decorating the ends of her fingers while Steve makes himself comfortable. It’s only when he stills that she picks up the conversation again.

“I hate bullies, Steve. Always have done. I don’t know if it’s just the permanent new kid status I had in school, or if I’m a sucker for looking after the underdogs, whatever, but I hate guys like Jimmy. Girls like Jimmy, too - I hate them. Lisa and Michelle from the salon were bad enough, with their dirty looks and sly comments when they thought I wasn’t listening, but when I saw them at the diner that morning with you and realised they all knew each other, it made me so damn angry…

People like Jimmy, like Lisa and Michelle, they torture people like me all the time. I’m not saying the way they were with me was that bad - I could deal with it, it was just words and looks, it’s whatever… but when Jimmy saw Eddie pick me up outside work? The way he screamed, the look on his face? It would never have been just words between them. Jimmy looked like he wanted to hurt Eddie right away, Steve, and it just…”

“Scared you?”

“No, it made me angry. Angrier. Then the morning in diner, when he was saying all those things about Eddie while Lisa tried to pick you up, the feeling just got worse and worse and worse. It was like this rock, this bright hot coal, burning in the space where my heart oughta be. I wanted to shove Jimmy’s face onto the counter. Stick my fork in his eye. Drag him outside and make sure the whole town knew what a shitty little bully he was. But I couldn’t do that, could I? Because I’m just a girl.”

Steve cringes, shame and regret at his earlier flippant words eating away at his insides. “M’sorry, Lori. I’m an idiot -”

“You were only being honest. I’m not really angry at you for that.”

He takes his silence again and waits for her to finish, knowing there’s more she needs to get off her chest before the night draws in.

“Do you remember freshman year, when I played basketball on the mixed team?”

Steve nods at the memory, a warm smile enveloping his face. “You got the record for the most three-point baskets that year. Which I hated, obviously, because -”

“…because you came second.”, she finishes with a grin. “And do you remember sophomore year, when I came back to Hawkins after Christmas, the year Mom kicked me out for the second time?”

Steve frowns, his brown eyes focused on a spot on the floor as he tries to work out what she’s referring to. “Y-yeah, you’d… cut your hair?”

Lori tosses a pillow toward the boy’s head, groaning when he catches it with ease and throws it right back to her. “No, dingus. I’d stopped playing ball. Know why?”

“No mixed team that year.”

“No team at all, for me anyway. The principal told me I could be a cheerleader instead. I could dance around in a pretty little skirt with stupid fluffy pom-poms while the real players missed baskets that I knew I could score with my eyes shut. Do you have any idea how shitty that felt?”

Steve thinks back to his own days on court, when he went from being King Steve to stumbling around at Billy Hargrove’s feet, the bleachers awash with laughter from the whole town. The memory leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. “I have an idea, yeah.”

“So imagine that, over and over. Knowing you’re good - no, knowing you’re better but but you’re not allowed anymore, that you’re no longer of any worth. Knowing that every time you want to do things your way, the world tells you you can’t. It fucking sucks, Steve. So when assholes like Lisa and Michelle and fuckin’ Jimmy set their sights on people like me, on people like Eddie, it… god, I wanted to kill the guy. I wanted Eddie to kill the guy. That makes me a shitty person, maybe even shittier than Jimmy and all the jerks like him. I would have let Eddie ruin his life for me, because he was doing something I’d never be able to do.

“It didn’t frighten me, seeing Eddie fight like that. I’d heard all the stories of the big bad Munson freak in town right, and now I was seeing the Freak of Hawkins in action. I watched him break Jimmy’s nose, break his eye socket, crack his ribs and I didn’t bat an eyelid. I liked it.

“But the way he looked at me, in the van right before he kicked me out? That scared me. He was so cold, Steve, like, like he wasn’t Eddie anymore. The Eddie I knew, the Eddie that I… that I care about, was just… gone.”

Steve drags himself from the edge of the mattress to the centre, an arm slipping around Lori’s shoulders as she talks. He’d known that she’d felt bad about the fight, and that she believed she was the catalyst for it, but had no idea just how deep her anger and misplaced guilt ran. He holds her, rubbing her upper arm reassuringly as she leans into his embrace, her head on his shoulder as she weeps.

“You know how you told me not to touch the book he gave you?”

Lori sniffs, taking one of the many crumpled tissues scattered on the bed and rubbing it under her nose. “Let me guess, you ignored me?”

“Yep”, he nods with a pop of his lips, not giving Lori the chance to admonish him. “I didn’t read it all, just a few pages, but that was enough. You really need to read it, Lori. It’ll help.”

“Help with what?”

“Understanding what he went through. What we went through.”

A pang of guilt runs down her spine, slow, cold and slippery. It’s too easy when she looks at Steve, to see the scarves and the occasional rolled-up turtlenecks he wears, see the long sleeves that flap with open cuffs around his wrists and think it’s all just a fashion choice, that he like slayers, that he feels the cold and dresses for it. To think that he’s fine, unmarked and unbothered from his time in the Upside Down, when the opposite is true. “You and Hopper told me that already -”

He hushes her with another squeeze before drawing his arm back from her shoulder, hands soon busy picking nervously at the ragged skin around his fingernails. “We told you the basics, like a rough outline of what happened. I got bit a few times, no biggie, that sorta thing. The things Eddie went through, from Chrissy Cunningham, to the whole town hunting him, to how he got Dustin out of danger then went back in and got hurt? That’s his story to tell, and kid he’s telling you it all in that book.”

“He did what?”

He tries hand waving the enormity of Eddie’s heroics away. “Yeah. It was a dumb as fuck, total self-sacrifice thing. Look, under all the weed haze and shitty rumours Eddie’s a good guy but he’s been through hell and back, and I guess that makes him… prickly? Prone to emotional outbursts? Hard to get a read on?”

Steve frowns at his crude attempt at psychoanalysis, knowing that Lori’s witnessed a much broader spectrum of Eddie’s emotions than he ever has. He stops pulling at the skin around his fingers, biting off one ragged end between his teeth before he busies his hands with his glasses instead, flicking the legs up and down as he talks.

“…and the way the town is with him, folks like Jimmy especially, none of that helps. Read his story, and if you’re still scared of him or whatever after that, I mean…”

He offers Lori a smile, warm and gentle, gathering all the crumpled tissues in his big hands before rolling them into a tight ball and dunking it neatly into the wastepaper can in the corner. Still got it, Stevie…

“… give him a chance, that’s all I’m saying. Read his story and see how you feel then.”

“And what if I read it, and he doesn’t come back? Like, I know I should have read it sooner. Maybe if I had, I would have done things differently, he wouldn’t have fought Jimmy? Or I wouldn’t have pushed him away, made him leave?”

“You didn’t make him leave, Lor. He chose that himself. And, y’know, he’s not been able to make big choices like that for a long time. Let him have this one, hey? He’ll be back, and the two of you can go back to being weird awkward dorks again.”

Her giggle is damp but honest, her hands wiping her eyes before she elbows her cousin in the side. “We’re not awkward dorks!”

“Liar. You’re a couple of idiots. Idiots who totally wanna bang -”

“Don’t be gross, Steven.”

“Notice you’re not denying it -”

She throws her arm toward her bedroom door, jabbing her finger in the air as she ignores the sudden heat in her cheeks. “Out. Now.”

Steve slopes out of the room with a grin, his work done, his cousin calmer and back in her good graces.

*******************************

Days turn into weeks, December rolling in slowly as Hawkins edges toward Christmas, bringing with it the promised snow and ice. Where once the streets would be festooned with lights and garlands, since the events of ‘86 the city’s celebrations had been much more low key, just a single tall Christmas tree decorated in the green and orange of Hawkins High standing proudly in the school’s parking lot beside the memorial to the victims, a small abstract statue cast in bronze.

The community centre buzzes with life, keeping Lori’s work days hectic and busy as she organises groups, directs the car-pool drivers, keeps the library’s shelves full, and steadfastly ignores the two salon girls. To her eternal relief both Lisa and Michelle make it their mission to ignore her just as much, both women refusing to meet her eye at the front desk, the ever-patient Bea thankfully happy enough to deal with them whenever they appear.

Bea tries, just once, to ask Lori about the rumours in town.

“You know Helen, the red-haired woman who works in the Dollar Store? She asked about you last night. Wanted to know if the rumours about you and Eddie Munson ‘terrorising’ Jimmy Mullins were true. Of course I told her no - you’re no delinquent, and the Munson boy’s gotta keep his nose clean after all that fuss last year… but still, Lori. If there’s anything you ever need to get off your chest, you know you can talk to me and it won’t leave these four walls, right?”

Lori had smiled and patted her hand, telling her that of course she knew she could talk to her if she needed to. Not that she ever did, choosing instead to keep the events inside Jimmy’s shop close to her chest.

Despite Steve’s encouragement, it takes Lori right up until December the seventeenth before she lets herself read Eddie’s book. Steve had brought Dustin and his friends over to the cottage late that afternoon, arms heavy with gifts the kids had asked to wrap “at Steve’s place”, away from the prying eyes of their parents and siblings. When she’d come home from work the cottage had been awash with music, laughter, and more glitter than she thought possible (courtesy of the Hopper/Byers kids), and she’d let herself be drawn into the mix, ordering the group take out for dinner and helping them to wrap all their awkward-shaped gifts, calling on her rusty cursive to write their gift tags for them.

Dustin had been the first to spot the string of postcards suspended across the wall. She’d caught him running his fingers over the card, surreptitiously flipping one over in the hopes of reading whatever might be written on the other side, only mildly disappointed when Lori approached and told him they were all blank.

“They’re taking the scenic route, huh? Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Denver…”

“Albuquerque and Dallas”, she finishes off for him. “I keep trying to guess where the next card will come from, but I’m never right.”

The boy tries to hide his amused smile, flicking his thumb against the card from Dallas. “Steve said… he said that Eddie wasn’t allowed to talk to us. That it hadn’t been his choice to hide. Is that true? Or did he say that just to try to make me feel… to try to make me hate him less?”

“That’s what Chief Hopper told us. Said Eddie had conditions he had to meet, things he had to agree to in order for the cops and FBI or whatever to leave him alone. I believe the Chief, and from my time getting to know Eddie, I don’t think he’s the kind of person to abandon his friends willingly. Not without a really, really good reason.”

“He left you.”

The sharpness of the boy’s three words sting, a rush of harsh defensiveness threatening to spill into her response before she catches his expression, wounded and scared and young. She lets it slide.

Dustin falls quiet for a moment, his expressive eyes fixed on the Dallas skyline as he gathers his thoughts and picks his next words with more care. “I would have kept it a secret. If Eddie had called, or come over, or wanted to stay friends or something. Even just to play D and D. I could have kept quiet.”

“He wouldn’t want you to have had to do that, he’d never ask you to keep that kind of secret. You would have been lying to your mom, the others, the cops too.”

The boy rolls his eyes. “It’s not like I’m not keeping a shit ton of secrets already. Literal nightmare world under the town, girl who can move things with her mind, remember?”

“Yeah, but this would have been Eddie’s secret. You have enough to hold on to, he wouldn’t have wanted you to take on his secret too.”

Dustin lingers by the cards a little longer, tracing his fingers from Seattle to Dallas and back again before he rejoins the group, helping them pack up their gifts and craft supplies before Steve can shepherd them all out of the cottage and into his car. The kids file out of the cottage and into the shiny BMW one by one, each thanking Lori for her help with the wrapping and for giving them food, Jane and Will wearing more glitter through their hair and across their faces than they’d managed to fix to the gifts they’d bought for their family. Dustin’s the last to leave, a small purple gift bag tucked under his arm, the label spelling “MOM” in shining gold ink.

“Arkansas. Then St Louis.”

“What?”

“Eddie’s next cards. Arkansas, then St Louis. Probably north to Chicago for one last trailer, then Wayne will leave the truck in Indianapolis before they come home.”

Lori’s brows rise to the heavens. “How the hell did you work that out?”

“Didn’t I tell you? Wayne calls my mom every Tuesday and Saturday to let her know he’s still alive and tell her where they’re going next. According to his last call, it’s Arkansas, St Louis, Chicago then back to Indiana. All being well, the Munsons will be back in Hawkins on the twenty-third.”

With that he flashes Lori a mischievous grin and steals from her a slice of leftover pizza from the box she’d been about to stow in the fridge, then runs to the car before Steve can make good on his threat to leave him behind.

Cottage now quiet and empty, Lori slumps onto the couch and watches the flames dance inside the log burner. Her cheeks ache from smiling, her modest Christmas tree in the corner sparkles with new glittering lights and strings of paper chains and popcorn made by the gang that night, and her heart is more full than it had been in a long, long time. She knows Steve will be out for a while; Will and Jane aside, all the kids live on the far side of town, in the newer residential area hastily built to house those whose homes were damaged in the quake. He’ll take each kid home, lingering in the car to watch them walk up the paths to their front doors, and won’t leave for the next kid’s house until he’s seen each one get inside safely. She knows he’ll take Dustin home last, and that his mom will invite him inside, keen to get an update on her son’s state of mind from his sort-of, somehow, surrogate brother. She’ll be happy to hear he’s doing better, having fun, acting up less, almost back to his old self. She’ll make Steve stay a while, make him a drink and let Dustin persuade him to stay for a movie. Yeah, Steve will be out for a while.

Safe and warm in her quiet cottage, fire burning in the stove and music on low, Lori takes Eddie’s notebook from its spot behind the clock and, at long last, turns the page.

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