#blame spotify for putting song of achilles up for free on premium i am drowing in pining rn

[alchemistc]

"What's this?" Eddie asks, wide eyed and curious as he shifts the papers on Steve's desk, shuffling past unopened mail and timestamps for the page buried beneath it all, and Steve has just enough time to turn in horror before Eddie unearths it.

It - his shame, his fear, his heart laid out in graphite against a backsplash of fine white paper. He'd splurged on the stack of it hidden in one of his desk drawers, a luxury he couldn't really afford anymore but one he'd decided was worth it now that his parents had made it clear they wouldn't be back any time soon to take it from him.

He knows every line of it, every piece of shading, all the highlights he'd agonized over and the spots where he couldn't be satisfied by the shape of the nose, the angle of the jawline.

Eddie takes it in for long enough that Steve can feel time dilating around them, an infinite gasping maw of nothingness and everything all at once.

And when he's taken his fill of it, his gaze flits up again. Meets Steve's, and holds.

"It's me."

Steve breathes. In, out, two careful measures. He swallows. He contemplates, just for a moment, leaping out the window. He breathes. He swallows, again, his throat tight. He breathes.

Eddie in profile, bottom lip pinched by his teeth. Eddie, with dark shadows tilted across his jaw, his nose, his Adams apple, where a curtain of hair blocks out the light. Eddie, eyes crinkled at the corners, smile lines rushing into the heavy dip of a dimple barely visible beside the fall of his hair.

Eddie.

"But -." Eddie stares. At Steve, for a moment, before his eyes flit back to the stark lines of the portrait Steve had liked just enough not to take out and burn with the rest of them.

"I'm sorry," Steve tells him, and he means it. Sorry, for not saying anything earlier. Sorry, for accepting Eddie's friendship and taking advantage of his easy way with people. Sorry for drinking in the sight of him and squirreling away the details of each moment, hoarding each memory away for the long winter that would come to be when Eddie eventually moved on.

"You..." Eddie swallows. Breathes. In and out, a rattle of bones and teeth and sinew Steve is intimately familiar with. "It's me," he says, again, confusion furling out over his brow.

But it's not - he's not -

"I thought you'd be mad."

Eddie startles. "Mad? Mad for - why would I...?" Eyes dart to Steve, studying him. And he knows - Steve has recounted to him every missed birthday and every cool and quiet dinner with his parents, every detail of his surface level friendships before Robin, every hurt he and Nancy ever doled out to one another in their anger and fear and pain. He knows.

He knows Steve just as surely as Steve knows him.

"Sweetheart," Eddie says, in that soft, sweet voice he has for broken things he means to repair.

Steve swallows, and he breathes.

#steddie ficlet #idk what this is i woke up out of a dead sleep with only one thought: #'steve is a Secret Artist and Eddie finds one of Steves portraits of him' #blame spotify for putting song of achilles up for free on premium i am drowing in pining rn #steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #steve x eddie