for inhairently

[thefreak]

( senior year, at last. eddie is one step closer to finally having an excuse to get the hell out of hawkins. outside of his band and hellfire club, eddie has felt so inescapably alone here, and while he prefers having no deep friendships over incessant bullying, it does get old, especially when his locker is often used as a prime makeout spot for those who don't really care about hiding their pda.

eddie is actually surprised when he walks into the halls and sees nobody in front of his locker for once. who would have thought that the major reason eddie has been tardy to most of his classes lately is trying to shoo underclassmen away from his locker so he can grab his books? his teachers sure as hell don't seem to care.

though while he is able to get to his locker no problem, he can't help but eavesdrop nancy and barb close by, keeping his gaze onto the contents of his locker lest he make his nosiness apparent.

it's steve harrington's name that really gets his attention. steve is a grade below him, and is known for making his way through the entire female population. but nancy wheeler never struck him as someone that steve would be particularly interested in.

not that eddie pays that close attention to the ladies steve ends up with. no, that would be ridiculous.

speaking of steve, while nancy and barb seem to have gone off to class, the aforementioned man has made his appearance. there's something different about him, though. it's in the way he carries himself, less pompous asshole and more...no, eddie's probably imagining things. maybe he's just not feeling well. )

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[inhairently]

( steve is pretty sure he's lost his entire goddamn mind. one minute he'd been watching ash fall from the sky and the next? he was getting gently scolded for zoning out in first period english.

it’s the full alex p. keaton experience. he’s somehow gone back in time and he’s pretty sure he needs to get back to the future and… oh, yeah. okay. he gets the name now.

he’s already on a roll, too. he’d left a note for nancy to meet him in the bathroom between second and third period, but instead of quick makeouts he was there to rant to her like a madman about how they definitely needed to figure out what was going on, and definitely needed to get back to 1986, and she’d definitely looked at him like he had lost his mind. so she wasn’t in on this; it was just steve. he laughed it off as the monologue he’s practicing for his drama club tryout because he’s thinking about branching out from sports, you see. it was totally smooth. she definitely bought it.

he definitely resolved to avoid her at all costs.

almost immediately after that, he’d told tommy h. to go fuck himself over some shitty comment about the byers family, then told carol to get a goddamn life when she’d stuck up for tommy. needless to say neither of them would be attending his upcoming pool party.

now he’s waiting at the end of the hall, watching nancy and barb with an ache in his chest. he knows why he's here now. he has a chance to save barb's life, and bob newby's. and eddie's. he can fix things.

speaking of, he spots eddie and his first instinct is to have an emotional breakdown, right there in the hallway, but that would be weird, right? so he goes with the totally normal, totally not weird option and smiles. then does a goofy little wave.

like he and eddie are friends. like he hadn’t stood by and even laughed when tommy and carol used to talk shit about eddie and his friends.

he follows up by actually approaching eddie. )

Hey, man. So this is probably totally out of left field, ( he starts, dropping his voice to something barely above a whisper as he continues, ) but you feel like cutting class and hanging out? Like, you know. In the woods?

( he doesn’t actually have a plan here. it’s not like he can tell eddie anything about anything, and he doesn’t really want to buy any weed. he just needs to get out of the school building for a minute and… yeah, okay. he could have just ditched on his own but eddie was right there.

… and that’s a terrible reason but give him a break, he doesn’t have a doc brown to help him through this time travel experience. )