#My brain: the kindest thing Steve Harrington ever did was let somebody else shower in front of him

[capriciouslyterminal]

46 for the love prompts!

Thank you for the prompt! I kind of went off and wrote a whole thing so now it's on AO3 and here it is as well. I've become tempted to try and answer all of these.

Prompt: "You can go first."

Eddie had always assumed that when Wayne had first put his down-payment on his trailer (exactly ten miles from his childhood home) he hadn’t really investigated the bathroom before agreeing to cash up front. It’s the only logical solution for his uncle who can mount frames and change oil and caulk to accept a bathroom like theirs.

Sometimes he imagined a Wayne like Springsteen, born to run with the sleeves shorn off his flannels and hair that was tickling his neck, positively bursting at the seams for a place to call his own. Without his father and brother hooking him into their schemes, leaving their evidence under his bed because if anybody was likely to get off on morale alone it was Wayne. Community college drop out with his head on straight, nothing worse on his name than a parking ticket, looking out and seeing only horizons.

New job at the plant, new lumpy bed to call his own, and too delighted at Carol from the office calling him “Sir” to realize that the shower was practically a squat little spigot with lukewarm water no matter which way you turned the handle.

Just a jumping off point to get him through trade school at nights, a home to trade up for one day. And then that Hawkins mud got around his ankles, and there was no moving. And then there was Eddie with a backpack and a prayer.

Even on his first night (he wouldn’t have been crazy enough to say it) Eddie had wondered why Wayne had chosen to hitch his life, his mug-collection and MVP award from basketball and his old dog, to a one-post little box of a building with a shower that was only better than a hose because it had a bit more privacy.

Now though, now Eddie got it.

If you’d told him that all he had to pay to get out of Hawkins was to have to lower his head and limbo his body around a bit to get clean then he’d trade that easy.

But it was nice to learn, in Max Mayfield’s trailer, that apparently piece of shit showers were the unifying design feature of the park. The same way suburbia seemed to be playing fast and loose with the same brick floor plan, each trailer had a shower that was designed to foster scoliosis and wash either your hair or your body. At least Mrs. Mayfield had apparently splurged for a clover-green floor mat and a pale blue curtain that didn’t match the mat but did remind Eddie of her daughter’s eyes.

The mat was already soaked through, so the curtain wasn’t apparently very effective. Or maybe Nancy and Robin had just been too tired to care, too kind to want to take any more time than they had to leave Eddie and Steve dripping in lake water and muck in the kitchen with a litter of children who were starting to get a little too uppity about helping to save them.

The lake water had only just started to dry crusty while Eddie sat in the kitchen and he had been oddly grateful.

It wasn’t the weirdest thing about the so-called “Upside Down” (Eddie was sure that he would’ve found a more creative moniker for the place if he’d found it but he’s too tired to formulate anything good now) that they never dried all the way out from the dive. If you asked him for the weirdest thing Eddie wasn’t sure what he’d say, but he’d get you an alphabetized list once he had some sleep. 

But Eddie was gonna feel the cup of wet denim around his legs, silt in his sleeves, in his nightmares if he’s not careful. And that was before the gunk and the blood and the mold and the fear-sweat made the feeling even heavier.

Needless to say it wasn’t the weirdest part of the Upside Down that made them all smell like a compost pit, a mosh pit, a pig carcass, and an old gym bag left in the rain had a nightmare baby. But it was currently the best reminder of a new chapter in the worst story Eddie thought he’d ever live through.

The kids, after the hugging and Henderson wiping a single relieved tear and Mayfield dumping the contents of her sparse cabinets out for them on her kitchen table as their legs all but collapsed back on ground that was finally the right-side up and Nancy Wheeler telling them how the world was going to end, eventually demanded they shower before considering rest or their next step.

Eddie, hoisted up on a kitchen counter as he jammed an entire pack of saltines in his mouth, was immediately drawn to walking across the way to use his own shampoo and Wayne’s Irish Spring before realizing that being naked down the hall from a tear in dimensions would probably be a bad idea.

Max hadn’t even looked put upon, just gestured down the hall and pulled exactly four towels of different faded colors out of a cabinet.

“Just don’t get gunk on the towels,” Max had said, head completely stationary beneath her headphones in a way that Eddie had never mastered. “My mom’s got a thing about the towels.” Instead of crawling down her spine, jangling in her elbows, it was like Eddie could almost see the music tethering her to the ground.

Apparently she was floating earlier. That was the end of a long list of things Eddie’s almost buzzing with questions about, almost shoving his hands into his mouth to stop. But did you feel it?

He also wondered what constituted as gunk, and where else it would go other than the towels or the shower drain. They’d each already tracked footprints all over Eddie’s living room. If there wasn’t already a huge hole in the ceiling he might be worried about how Wayne would react. Eddie saw Wayne sitting in his recliner in the way he does when Eddie has bad news, after the school’s called or a squad car’s dropped him back home, like a lighthouse in the dark when he was biking down an alternate version of a street. He’d felt like he’d crawl on his knees through broken glass just to have lived through everything to tell Wayne what had happened.

Granted, Eddie might have just put his head on Wayne’s thigh and cried like a little kid. All this time getting Wayne to see him as a man, to see that Eddie could handle it all, and once Eddie saw him again he knew he’d just bawl till he was empty.

Maybe that was how Mrs. Mayfield would react to seeing bat guts on her towels.

At this point Eddie was glad that the trailer was empty when they had burst in with a suddenly conscious Nancy Wheeler just because watching somebody’s mom blow a gasket about towels might have given him an aneurysm.

“Seriously, if you don’t shower soon we won’t live to see tomorrow,” Dustin had said, shoving Steve Harrington away from him but not so far that he would have been out of reach.

For a second nobody had moved from the kitchen, teens ravenously shoving anything they could find into their mouths and kids looking at them like if they blinked for too long they might flicker away, but of course it was Steve Harrington who got shit moving.

He was apparently one of those let’s hustle kind of guys, who probably woke up early on Saturdays to get shit done and started a light jog as soon as a crosswalk told him to use the crosswalk. 

He’d distinctly, in fact, told Eddie to hustle when he was trying to extricate himself from an outcropping of Skull Rock that was laced with a spider-web of living roots. Like Eddie wasn’t clearly trying for stealth here, Steve.

“Ladies,” Steve had said almost imperiously around a spoonful of peanut butter that he was demolishing by the jar around bites of a not entirely ripe banana. Eddie supposed it was post-workout food, just another day in the life of a jock who had somehow been involved in saving the world three separate times before now.

The purple lash about his throat bobbed oddly as he swallowed, Eddie was trying not to watch it go. Trying not to think about Steve Harrington, shirtless and covered in hair that definitely wasn’t there in fourth grade P.E., and dripping soupy black blood from between his teeth.

“Oh, chivalry isn’t dead?” Robin Buckley from band’s leg was jogging beneath the table but she still had a sour twist to her lips around the sandwich she’d made with Harrington’s peanut butter and half a sticky jar of marshmallow fluff. “Steve, ladies first is not–.”

“A good way to show I respect girls I know, I know. Girls aren’t objects I remember. All I’m saying–,” Steve Harrington popped a fourth of the banana (all that remained of it) into his mouth and finished his thought around a mouthful of mush. “–iz tha’ id’ll take less time.”

He gestured at his own hair and then Eddie’s, which was beyond rank and drying crunchy at this point before sucking peanut-butter off the flat of his palm.

Eddie, in the middle of a genuine crisis, couldn’t help but stare. At this point he would take what he could get. On one hand, Robin Buckley looked like she wasn’t buying it, but on the other she also looked like her principles were quickly losing the fight to her physical discomfort.

But Eddie also had a feeling that what Steve wasn’t mentioning was the way Nancy Wheeler hadn’t stopped shaking since she’d come back, that she looked like it was February and she’d run out to get the mail in just a long sleeve and no shoes. That she’d been demolishing the remaining half of a bag of shredded sharp cheddar mechanically, far-away, but had perked up slightly at the prospect of a shower.

And so Nancy and Robin had gone off together, nobody choosing to go anywhere alone, and the familiar kick-thud of the shower running almost made Eddie want to lull to sleep while the sight of Steve Harrington putting away a whole pack of baloney by himself kept him awake.

They didn’t talk much other than Henderson, who proceeded to talk about any and everything because apparently it had been a while since he’d updated Erica on his cat.

Eddie learned in no uncertain terms that Dustin’s first cat had apparently been eaten by a multidimensional slug that had become quadrupedal and the size of a pretty big dog. He also got to hear a play by play about Steve Harrington protecting three of the gaggle before them in a junkyard from a pack of the things.

All Eddie could consider was the fact that he had seen Dustin Henderson every Friday for a whole semester, he’d called the kid Weird Al for a month straight to haze him after his fucking t-shirt, and before any of that he’d given a real monster that gap-toothed smile and named it after a musketeer.

When the girls had come back (Nancy in a robe of Mrs. Mayfield’s and Robin left in an oversized pajama shirt of Max’s that fit her like normal), they were more pink than they had been with hair that had been toweled to fluffiness and a warm mist practically hanging off their shoulders.

It had looked beyond nice, and proved that any kind of shitty shower was worth its weight in gold.

Eddie had followed Steve Harrington to the bathroom in some sort of trance, his life a swirl of exhaustion and strangeness, and that didn’t improve when he and Steve Harrington faced each other in the yellow of the bathroom. Eddie fully clothed, Steve’s chest still peeking out from between Eddie’s own vest and half of Nancy Wheeler’s shirt.

“Do you think this shit’s infected?” Steve asked poking his makeshift bandage like they were making small-talk that didn’t mean anything over the counter at Family Video.

“Probably,” Eddie said, and found himself turning away on instinct when Steve started peeling the makeshift bandage back. That’s when he took note of the clover mat and the blue curtain, suddenly feverish with the need to look away from Steve Harrington’s glorious bod and its slightly squelching wounds.

It’s fine, Eddie had told himself, thinking of skinned knees and fake blood pouring up from a guy blowing on a blood tube under Kevin Bacon’s bed and the time he’d gotten his head cracked open from falling on a bleacher and needed staples. You should be fine to look.

And yet he found he couldn’t turn around. There were two sets of shampoo and conditioner in a little shower caddy. A strawberry shampoo and a nondescript white bottle that boasted treatment for dry hair. A strawberry conditioner and a similarly slim white bottle of conditioner. One cake of lavender soap and a loofa. A hair-trap bound up with red curls like copper wire in the drain.

There were heavy chunks of…something in the hair trap like pebbles speckled along the bottom of a fish tank.

Eddie looked back at Steve before he could take stock of the qualities of the chunks, and found Steve Harrington looking at him in the mirror.

“You can go first,” Steve said with a hand in his hair that was clearly tugging at something that had only just stopped bleeding based off his face. The ruin of Steve’s hair would almost be a comedy if Eddie hadn’t almost died earlier today.

“Aw, Buckley was right about chivalry,” Eddie cooed around a smile that had suddenly appeared. “But shouldn’t you…deal with that?”

“It’ll take too long. Better I go last just in case, yeah?”

Eddie fanned seductive fingers against the curtain of his bog-weed hair. “With these curls? You’ll be lucky if the hot water’s not gone.”

“I’ve had worse,” Steve Harrington said in a way that was radiant for how strange and heroic it was. For how suddenly almost an action hero he looked. Guys who kept going and going because they had to. “What about you? Anything to deal with?”

“Few scrapes,” Eddie said with a catalogue of aches to his name. Scrapes and achey muscles and a few times he’d got honest to God gnawed on. But none of that stopped him from fluttering his eyelashes and smirking. “Why? You offering to help me with them?” 

Again Eddie sees the movie-like picture of Nancy Wheeler’s field medicine over Steve’s heaving chest. He imagines himself, hands splayed across the planes of Steve’s body.

Steve Harrington huffed out a breath like finalizing a decision. “I would,” Steve said easy as anything, almost in a daze himself. Almost offended, like he was pissed Eddie wouldn’t assume that yeah he would help with the wounds in the way Eddie’s gut suddenly dropped at the thought. “I’ll be right outside. Say the word if you need…help.” 

And then he went to stand outside, like a guard. Like a promise. Like Christmas Eve as you fall asleep, the lure of it just outside your bedroom door. And Eddie didn’t have to wonder about why Steve didn’t just leave. Why nobody wanted to be alone.

And as Eddie shucked off his pants, as he cringed at the strange bruising of his body and the thought that once he got out of the shower nothing would have changed, he tested the water with his hand and found it to be slightly warm.

It was only once Eddie tilted his head back, curled up like a pillbug with his arms close to his chest, to let the water sluice through his hair that Eddie considered Steve Harrington’s willingness to help in abstraction under a cottony layer of exhaustion from being a wanted man to leaving reality behind.

Under the relief and the wonder of warm-ish water that wasn’t from a lake there was a thought about sharing water for efficiency’s sake. Beneath the pool of pink strawberry shampoo in his palm there was the consideration of somebody else’s fingers rubbing it in. Lathering soap that stung on his scrapes, the idea that if he could only remember the words to one he would be singing Steve Harrington a song. In the chill of his face, suddenly devoid of warmth as he scrubbed at his shoulders, the wonder that it was Steve Harrington of all people who would come if he called.

Who would cram his body into this shower of his own free-will and gently wash Eddie’s wounds.

Who let Eddie shower first.

And it was Steve Harrington for whom Eddie made sure there was still hot water. Steve Harrington, for whom Eddie left his towel on the sopping floor because the mat was kind of useless.

It was Steve Harrington that Eddie bowed for, bid him enter the bathroom, and for whom Eddie planted his back against the wall just in case he needed help. Just in case he called for Eddie. Just in case he needed him.

(AO3 Link if you need it: https://archiveofourown.org/works/43846077)

#steddie fic #stranger things fic #my writing #stranger things #Eddie Munson #Steve Harrington #My brain: the kindest thing Steve Harrington ever did was let somebody else shower in front of him #writing fast and loose here and still had to Google like eight random things