Chapter Text
Things could not have gone the complete opposite of the plan.
Sure, Eddie had provided one hell of a distraction. Played the fuck out of the guitar, his fingers bordering on the line of raw and bloody by the time he'd stopped white knuckling the fretboard. He'd successfully led the demo bats away from Harrington, Buckley, and older, more badass Wheeler. Dustin had looked at him like he'd hung the moon, all up until he'd cut through the rope like it was a piece of thread.
He'd stared down through the gate in horror, and the expression on his face Made Eddie almost regret his decision in the end. He almost regretted it, as the demo bats took chunks from his torso, his arms and legs and neck, and he would've apologized for his rash behavior, if he didn't blink up lifelessly at the kid that cried above him.
Eddie would've said he was sorry, if he lived to see the other side once more.
But he didn't. He took his final breath, and watched Dustin cry over his body from a third person view. Watched the older teens come back, their efforts fruitless to wrench the sobbing kid away from his corpse. Wanted to cry, when Harrington took one last look at him, and reached down to shut his eyes.
It should have been it. The final moments of his consciousness should've been watching them leave him behind, watching them yank his necklace from his body and limp their ways back to the gate.
Eddie never did have the best of luck, though. Instead, he watched his body slowly turn into the ashes that the demo bats had, until nothing was left, but a tiny, stupid looking bat. A normal one, not something with a disgustingly large wingspan, or a whip for a tail.
No, where his body had once been, lay a stupid little short-nosed fruit bat. Unmoving, lifeless, wings torn in the most vile way. Eddie couldn't help the confusion that flooded him, until he felt himself drift. Like a raft, lost at sea.
Minimal food, no clean water to drink, and the large, looming storm clouds drawing him deeper and deeper into the eye of the storm. Menacing and deadly, and Eddie couldn't find it in himself to mind, because he was already dead to begin with. He was dead, and his friends were gone. His trailer, his uncle, his chances of graduating high school, his body. Gone, like the bright eyes of Chrissy Cunningham.
He was dead, until he wasn't.
Dead, until he felt himself opening eyes that had been shut for an awfully long time. So light on his face, as if they had never been fully shut to begin with, yet so heavy, weighed down by invisible anchors. Everything hurt, residual aches and pains and burns, until he realized, that it was not his body.
It wasn't his, and he was positively screwed, in every single sense of the word.
-
If one was to ever ask Eddie Munson how he had managed to end up on Harrington's doorstep, a day after his death, no longer a human, he would never be able to tell them the answer.
Never, because Eddie rightly didn't know. The last thing that he could remember, was the ever present fear of waking up as a goddamned bat, all torn and weak wings, stupid little feet that hurt with every step. With no true clue as to how he'd wound up on the chilly pavement of a porch step, he sat and waited in the dim, yellow porch light of the evening.
Steve's car wasn't in the drive, when he could register his own surroundings. There wasn't a single sign of life at all, not a chirp of a bird, or a single shoe to drop, just himself. Himself, in his inability to move.
If everything had hurt when he'd regained consciousness, everything was in agony, then. Maybe it was exhaustion, dehydration, malnutrition, any other scientific word Eddie could remember, but it was miserable. It was white hot, coiling in his stomach, a snake ready to lunge and strike it's killing bite.
He drifted from consciousness on the porch, once again finding it rather easy to identify with a shipwrecked safety raft. Identifying with inanimate objects because his passed time there, flat against the grey stone and staring off at the trees blowing in the cool, spring breeze. Howling wind, and passing cars, until the rumble of Harrington's BMW assaulted Eddie's oversensitive ears.
Eddie flinched, squeezing his eyes shut, tensing as much as he could. He knew what would happen.
There would be no way in ever-loving hell that Steve Harrington, of all people in the universe, would do anything but squash him into the pavement. Steve, who too had been attacked by the vile demo bats, sporting wounds that would resemble Eddie's, if he'd still had his body. Steve, who had expressed his clear disinterest for bats to Eddie, in a stolen RV.
He would be a corpse once more, as Steve slowly approached the steps, eyes wide at the sight of the creature on them.
Eddie prepared himself for it, shutting his eyes once more. Begging the universe for forgiveness, as he didn't know quite where he'd gone wrong to deserve this. Had it been the drug dealing? The only means of money he could acquire, after being turned down by nearly every business he'd applied to? Had it been weighing down his uncle, being the reason he was in financial debt, struggling to get by, despite living in a one bedroom trailer and buying nothing but canned soups and frozen microwavable meals?
Instead, Eddie felt himself warmed by the gentle hand of Harrington, scooping him up from the cold pavement and holding him at arm's length away. He slowly peeled his eyes open, daring a peak at the boy's face.
Steve's eyes were comically wide, staring ahead at the bat like it had fairy wings instead of torn up, black ones. Staring at it like it had a head of luscious locks, more perfect than his own. His mouth opened, shut, and opened again, hanging there as if he was trying to catch flies.
''Holy shit, little man, what happened to you?" Steve's voice was painfully soft, filling Eddie's ears like a melody. He'd whispered it, sounding so awfully normal volumed to Eddie that it made his head spin.
How could Steve be so unconditionally kind to the same creature that had almost taken his life?
His fingers curled up, securing Eddie in his palm like a precious jewel, and drew him closer to his chest. He gazed down at the bat, his eyes having a new form of fondness in them, the kind Eddie had only seen when Steve looked at his corpse-
"You're shaking!" He exclaimed, voice a bit too loud for Eddie's liking. Eddie flinched a bit, shutting his eyes again, still scared that Steve would change his mind. Steve had every single right in that moment, to spin around, face his yard, and lob Eddie into the yard like skipping rocks in a pond.
But he didn't, his fingers still curled around Eddie, his other hand coming up to- to rub at his tiny head with one finger. The obscenity of the situation was not lost to Eddie, feeling dizzy from the sensation.
"Let's get you inside, hmm?" Steve hummed softly, a rumble in his chest that made Eddie's body vibrate. With that, the chill of a late-night Hawkins spring had dissipated into a soft warmth.
Steve Harrington's foyer, and the lapel of his soft, pillowy letterman jacket.