Chapter Text
Being an alpha or an omega is actually pretty rare. If Steve actually believed the number of guys who claimed to be alpha males in the halls of Hawkins High, he’d think it was one in five instead of one in fifty. He knows a few alpha girls, sure, but he also knows a few redheads.
Plenty of girls claim to be omegas, too, even though it’s not actually a great thing and everyone knows it’s super rare. Apparently only one woman in five hundred is an omega. Omega males are one in a thousand.
It’s, like, linked to chromosomes. Nancy definitely explained it to him more than once. Of course, Steve studied it in health class. His pediatrician also explained it.
But the thing is that no one has to know that Steve’s anything at all unless he tells them. His parents are both betas. Of course, John Harrington tells everyone he’s an alpha. So, Steve has always found it easy to tell people that he was too. It didn’t even feel like a lie. At first, it wasn’t. He just didn’t know.
Girls usually figure it out, if he’s with them more than once. Plenty of them consider it a good thing. No need to worry about condoms.
Well, as long as they’re not alphas.
“As long as you’re not in heat, it’s not a risk, right?” Nancy had asked after she figured it out. Because, of course, Nancy Wheeler is one in a hundred.
“Yeah,” Steve had said. “Besides, do you really want to do it like that?”
He still remembers the sharp, considering look she’d given him. “Not really.”
Steve started on his medication after the first heat. Now they come at controlled intervals every few months, when he’s taken 90 suppressant pills. He’s pretty sure they’re not, like, viable? Fertile? One of those words. They’re not real. He wants a family someday, but not when he’s 19 and working for minimum wage and monsters keep popping up out of holes in reality.
Nancy knows. He’s pretty sure she told Jonathan, because she told him that Jonathan is an omega, too. That’s fine. There are like fifteen thousand people in Hawkins, apparently. There had to be others, right? Maybe she thought it would… do something? Turn Jonathan into Steve’s friend. It makes Steve feel for the guy, yeah, but they have plenty in common besides shooting blanks and having…
“Do you think it feels like a pussy?” Tommy had asked once. “Like, inside? Or does it feel like regular anal, just wetter?”
He had been talking about female omegas, obviously, but male omegas have the same parts.
Robin knows. Because of the Russians. “Tell me a secret, something nobody knows about Steeeeeeve Haaaaaarrington.”
“Well, some people know,” he’d said. “Mostly girls.”
He had smiled at her. She had wrinkled her cute little nose.
That little wrinkle and the wide-eyed, open-mouth look that followed are in Steve’s head when he tells Eddie Munson. Eddie has only been awake for a day, but Steve swings by to visit as soon as he can.
“They have you on the good drugs,” he says.
Eddie makes a sound like a groan of agreement.
“You too, though?” Eddie says. “Not the only one that got all gnawed on.”
“No way,” Steve says. “Nothing stronger than aspirin.”
Eddie’s face scrunches up. “What? Why?”
Steve doesn’t want to say at first, but Eddie pushes.
“I haven’t been out that long,” he slurs. “You’re not healed up. It must hurt. You just hate seeing the doctors? You didn’t get it checked out? I’ll call the nurse…”
Steve reassures him that he got stitched up properly.
“You allergic?” Eddie asks. “Come on, you can tell ol’ Ed, it’ll be good. I’ll know not to offer you any… any opiates. Not that you would. I mean… I’m not calling you a junkie. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a junkie. Some of my favorite people were junkies.”
Steve huffs out a sigh. Eddie asks him why again. “You can tell me,” he insists.
“They don’t give that stuff to people who… who can get pregnant,” Steve says.
Eddie’s face scrunches up even more. “You can’t…”
Then his whole face relaxes at once, going wide and open. He looks at Steve.
“You,” he says. “Really?” The R is all soft and mushy because Eddie is on a lot of pain killers and his cheek got all fucked up. It must hurt for him to talk this much. Or maybe he can’t even feel it.
“Yeah,” Steve says.
“We match,” Eddie says.
Steve’s eyebrows climb up his forehead. There is no way every guy who gets caught up in this shit is an omega.
“Yin and yang,” Eddie says. “Omega and alpha.”
“Oh,” Steve says.
Eddie smiles at him. “Thanks for… For trusting me.”
“You kind of made me tell you,” Steve says. “Pretty pushy about it, actually.”
The part of Eddie’s face not covered by a bandage shows off his smirk. “Well, what can I say, it’s in my nature.”
Steve’s throat feels dry and tight. He swallows.
Eddie gets out of the hospital before Max, because he didn’t break any bones. Plus some other things happen before Max wakes up, the kinds of things that make Steve think… This isn’t over. But Robin and Nancy still go off to college. Robin stays closer than she had planned to, though. Jonathan doesn’t follow Nancy. He stays. Because Joyce Byers stays. She says she’s been as far as California and Alaska and couldn’t escape.
“Maybe we could move to Japan,” she jokes.
The trailer park moves nearly out of the town limits.
The high school doesn’t hold classes again until September.
Steve tells his new boss Kathy — a stern woman who told him Robin Buckley “wasn’t much of a reference” — that he won’t be available on Tuesday and Friday mornings. Retail pays him fucking dust, but at least he can make himself available to drive Eddie to his twice weekly appointments.
Eddie doesn’t mention it again. There are no thinly veiled jokes, no sideways glances at Steve when someone mentions omegas, no puns or quips or even whispers. Eddie doesn’t even hold doors open for him.
Instead, Steve opens the passenger door of the bimmer for Eddie to collapse into.
“Thanks, man,” he says, if he’s got the energy.
It’s often quiet, but when it’s not, it’s a great way to get to know Eddie. Tapes of Metallica, Judas Priest, and Iron Maiden start to pile up in his glove box and around the parking brake. They trade off. Eddie bitches about the music that Steve chooses, but Steve catches him moving his fingers along to “Separate Ways.” Almost like he’s trying to figure out how to play it? Steve doesn’t want to get hopeful.
At least Eddie likes Springsteen.
“Yeah, Wayne’s super into him,” Eddie explains. “And a lot of blues. Like, uh, Muddy Waters?”
“My mom listens to Muddy Waters,” Steve says. “Or, uh, she used to.”
They fall into a friendly pattern. Before his appointments, Eddie wants a distraction. He wants to argue about the best sandwich fillings or why P.E. class is mandatory anyway. He wants to give Steve a hard time about how little he learned about movies in his few months before Family Video fell into a fissure in the earth.
“Clothing retail suits you,” he says. “You’re basically a mannequin already. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear the same polo twice.”
“I wore this last week,” Steve insists, plucking at his shirt.
“Don’t recall,” Eddie insists, smirking.
At first, Steve joked that Eddie had to tell him when he was cleared to drive himself.
“I want control of my stereo back.” As if Robin or Erica or Dustin ever let him pick his own music. Eddie’s been the most fair about things.
Besides, he’s gotten really invested in hearing about the farm kids that Eddie has night classes with to finish his credits. There’s this girl who moved here from the Philippines to get married to some farmer and she’s been trying to get a high school diploma. Steve thought Eddie was making that up, actually, but Robin says the Philippines is a real country.
The days and weeks drip past, measured in hours of retail and long drives with Eddie, or Dustin, or Max. He goes running with Lucas. He lets Max and El watch movies in his empty living room so that Will can have some time for himself and his brother.
Steve uses a wall calendar to count against the pills in the clamshell case. The white ones will start on a Saturday, which means his heat will definitely still be happening on a Tuesday. He calls off of work, but calling Eddie is harder.
“Do you remember, uh, when we talked about pain killers?” Steve asks, over the phone.
“Yeah, I told you that I’ve been off the prescription stuff for a while,” Eddie says. “And I swear I’m not holding onto any to sell.”
“No, no,” Steve says. “When you were in the hospital? Do you, uh, not remember that?”
The line goes so quiet that Steve thinks maybe the call dropped.
“Yeah, I remember,” Eddie says.
“Well,” Steve says. “I’m going to hit the sugar pills in my suppressants at the end of this month.”
More silence. “Alright, Harrington, don’t say shit to me about my academic record, alright, but I don’t know what that means.”
Steve swallows. He can say it. He’s told girls before. Yes, they were girls he was sleeping with. They were girls who wanted to know why he was canceling a date. They were girls who would flirtatiously offer to lend him a hand.
“I can’t drive you on Tuesday that week,” he says, instead.
“Oh,” Eddie says. “That’s all? I’ll figure something out. Jeff could probably take me. Thanks for the head’s up!”
After he hangs up, Steve puffs his cheeks up and huffs. It’s none of Eddie’s business anyway.
It’s not anyone’s fucking business but his own.
Steve never shares, has never shared his heat with anyone. It’s probably for the best. It makes a mess. He has to put down towels and trash bags. He even got a plastic drop cloth, like for painting. There are special plastic mattress protectors available, but they’re clearly branded for female omegas even in catalogs.
Also, he gets kind of weird. The hormones make it like being drunk or high (or drugged). He can’t control his thoughts. He thinks of all kinds of weird, gross stuff that he doesn’t really want. Before Nancy, he once spent a full day just touching his cock and thinking about being blindfolded and tied to the bench in the locker room. If he wasn’t willing to touch the wet, aching thing inside him then all the alphas and betas in Hawkins High would surely be happy to do it for him.
After Nancy, he’d think about her touching him there, the way her whole small hand might fit in him, the way she got big during her rut and that might fit so nicely inside. It wouldn’t hurt at all.
But Nancy didn’t want that. She really didn’t want that. He was dreading how it would feel, touching himself to thoughts of her, after she’d called the thought of having kids with him “a total nightmare.” He would definitely still think about it, while his brain turned into horny, hormonal soup.
Sometimes, Steve thought about Robin, too. But not like that. He thought about her holding him, looking him in the eye, and telling him it was fine. She’d tell him that he was safe, that it would all be fine while some faceless alpha male fucked him. That was… Weird. Definitely not the kind of thing to talk about.
He still had the locker room fantasy, too. That didn’t go away. None of it really ever went away. He just didn’t think about it outside the heat.
For the next few weeks, Steve drives Dustin to school and picks up the packet of work for Max Mayfield. He drives nearly out of town to deliver it before he has to go open the boutique, which is thankfully only another forty minutes in the same direction. If he’s not also closing, Steve usually picks Dustin up, too. Or he carts all the kids around somewhere.
On Tuesdays and Fridays, after he drops off Max’s schoolwork and makes sure that she has something to eat for lunch, he holds the door of the bimmer open for Eddie, who hobbles down the steps from his uncle’s new doublewide. Sometimes he has to work when they get back to Hawkins, so he can’t always pick up Dustin on those days. Apparently, he usually gets a ride with Will and El? Steve doesn’t always find out until he picks up Dustin the next morning.
On Fridays and Saturday evenings, he usually has a date. When he doesn’t, he does the more arduous chores like grocery shopping and laundry. Lately, with the fissures through the town and the way people keep moving away, he’s had a lot more time for laundry.
At the end of each day, no matter what he does, Steve calls Robin on her dorm room phone and talks until the handset of the cordless phone beeps at him that its battery is dying.
“How is Eddie holding up?” she always asks.
“Have you talked to Nancy lately? How are her classes?”
Finally, she asks, “Hey, isn’t your, uh, thing coming up?”
“Yeah,” Steve says, pacing his parents’ cavernously large dining room. “And it means I can’t drive Eddie to his Tuesday appointment.”
“That blows! Did he have to cancel?” Robin asks.
“No, no, I think his friend is taking him,” Steve explains. “Jeff was in your class, right?”
“Oh! Yeah, yeah, we had English together in junior year,” Robin offers.
“What about you?” she asks. “Will you be OK? Got someone to bring you snacks?”
“I’ll stock up,” Steve promises.
That weekend, Lucas and Mike want to take Will to the nerd shop that opened last year just outside Fort Wayne. Erica invites herself. Erica and Lucas get into a fight over riding shotgun. Mike tells him that his music sucks and “Can’t we listen to anything good? Eddie said you have good music.”
Will rolls his eyes and spends most of the ride staring out the window at Indiana‘s drying corn stalks.
In the front seat, Erica opens and closes the case for “Defenders of Faith.” She leans over and turns up the Madonna song on the radio.
When they get back, Dustin radios that he’s at Eddie’s and they’re both “so pissed that you guys went to Idyllwild without us!”
“Call me if they need rides home,” Steve tells Eddie.
Eddie leans heavily against the doorframe and taps his fingertips against the door.
“You doing alright?” he asks.
It’s the closest he’s ever come to acknowledging all of this since he was in the hospital. Steve rocks back on his heels. Keeps his hands in his jeans’ pockets.
“Yeah,” he says, “of course.”
Can Eddie smell him, he wonders.
Steve figures that stuff — alphas being able to just smell when someone is horny or going to go into heat — is all urban legends and romance novels from the grocery store. Steve does feel like his nose is sharper, because he took the first sugar pill last night. Isn’t that the placebo effect?
But Steve imagines he can smell the leather of Eddie’s jacket.
“You look tired,” Eddie says.
“Gee thanks,” Steve replies.
“That’s not —“ Eddie’s lips peel back from his teeth. “I’ll call these shitheads’ moms to get them, or they can just sleep in a pile on the floor. Don’t worry about us, Harrington.”
Steve peaks around the leaning tower of Eddie’s body to see Dustin swatting Lucas with a notebook emblazoned with a flaming skull.
“Whatever you say,” Steve says. “You should worry about yourself, maybe.”
“Go home and get some rest,” Eddie says, with finality.
Steve forgets to buy snacks on the way.
He wakes up already wet and sticky. He gets the sheets off the bed and replaces them with some that are already stained, plus the drop cloth. Towels go on top of that.
Prickly heat skitters around under Steve’s skin in a way that sets his teeth on edge. Something inside him starts cramping.
It aches.
He curls up in a ball and tries to get some more sleep.
When he wakes again, his mouth and throat feel like a desert. There’s a wet spot on the towel under his hips. He’s already come in his sleep.
Steve peels himself off the bed and staggers downstairs to get a glass of water. Slick dribbles out of his asshole — or it’s not his asshole right now? — and rubs between his cheeks in a way that makes Steve gag. Some of it runs down his leg and drips on the kitchen floor while he gets ice water from the fridge dispenser.
He drinks it down in big gulps and nearly comes again right there in the middle of the kitchen. The cool water makes him moan. Steve looks around to make sure no one is home. He gets another glass of water and puts his hand down his briefs. The fabric is more wet than damp still, but his cock is hard.
Most of the time, Steve doesn’t think too hard about his body. It does what it’s supposed to (sort of) and it looks the way it’s supposed to (sort of). He never had the grades or the inclination to take human anatomy; everything he’s learned about it has been second hand. Apparently male omegas don’t have real testicles? Steve’s rolling his balls in one hand while he finishes his second glass of water and they sure feel real to him. But what does he know. He’s never touched any other balls.
“Fuck,” he says, feeling like his skin shrank overnight. He can feel the roots of his teeth and hair. The thing inside him cramps up again. He’s dripping on the kitchen floor.
Steve grabs some paper towels to shove into his briefs so that he can get upstairs again and won’t have to clean up too much mess out of the carpets.
The fantasies, the thoughts, don’t hit Steve until he’s really jerking himself. Grabbing his balls in the kitchen doesn’t count. In the en suite bathroom, Steve shoves the paper towels into the wastebasket and washes his hands. The towels on his bed are damp, sticking to his already sweaty skin. He pushes his briefs down and kicks them to the bottom edge of the bed. One hand on his balls, Steve puts the other around his cock.
While he jerks off, the cramping eases. There are no sudden spikes of pain. It just feels like he’s sick to his stomach, instead of like he’s going to shit his guts out immediately. Not that he can shit at all right now.
“This is so gross,” Steve says to himself. His next groan is more frustration than anything.
He tries to think about something sexy, something to take his mind off the aching, leaking mess that his body has become. As if being scarred over and broken wasn’t enough, he’s always got this hanging there in the back of his mind. Would he have been less bullshit if he was an alpha or a beta instead? Or if he’d been able to embrace being an omega, like Jonathan apparently has?
Does Nancy touch Jonathan there? Does she put her small hands —
“Jesus Christ,” Steve hisses out. “Just think about Phoebe Cates. Think about Phoebe Cates.”
Dripping wet and smelling like chlorine. Clean. Steve tries to imagine the wet spandex of a bikini under his fingers or against his mouth.
Instead, he thinks about Robin, because fuck him, right?
Robin told him to get snacks and he didn’t, which means he’s going to feel like absolute dogshit by Wednesday morning. He imagines her hands on his face, reaches up and touches his own sweaty cheek with his too-warm hand. He can picture her face, open and sweet and blue eyes laughing at him a little.
“Come on, dingus, you’re not that gross,” says fantasy Robin. “This is a normal bodily function. And not even one of the actually nasty ones!”
The fantasy Robin in Steve’s head rambles just like the real Robin. It’s realistic, but not too realistic. First of all, the real Robin Buckley wouldn’t even want to be in the room with him if he was jerking off. Second of all, the real Robin Buckley had the grades to take Human Anatomy. He’s never asked her about it. He doesn’t want to know what’s going on inside of him right now.
The aching inside matches the way his other muscles flex as he gets close to orgasm. It would feel so good to have something inside him, wouldn’t it? He actually doesn’t know. He tries not to touch that.
But it feels like it would feel good.
“You’re not gross,” says Robin’s voice in his fantasy.
“Don’t worry,” he imagines another voice saying.
Steve can picture it perfectly, right here in this room. He’d love to have them both in this room. He’d love to not be alone in this stupid, enormous, ugly house with its double doors and plate glass windows.
He could be on his knees at the foot of the bed, with a pillow under him. Robin would be laid out on the bed on her stomach with her feet up in the air, like she usually is, but holding Steve’s face in her hands instead of her own.
Eddie would kneel behind him, pushing the head of his alpha cock against the mess between Steve’s legs until he slides into him.
Steve groans so loud and low that it rattles. Wetness gushes out of him. His thighs go tight, squeezing shut like he can keep it inside of him.
“Fuck,” Steve says, squeezing his eyes closed like he can stop seeing things in his imagination. “No, no, no.”
This isn’t some faceless alpha or beta hard-on he’s imagining. Eddie Munson has a face that Steve can picture all too clearly after months of driving him to and from the VA therapist the feds assigned to him.
“I can’t,” Steve says. “I can’t.”
When he comes, it’s clear and abundant, the same watery consistency as the stuff leaking out his other hole.
His dick stays painfully hard.
Eddie would have a big dick — all alphas do, right? Male omegas are supposed to have small dicks, so Steve really got lucky there. But alphas have, like, really big dicks. Which means that Eddie has a really big dick and a knot that would make it even bigger if he came hard enough.
Steve could make him come hard enough.
“No, fuck,” Steve says, out loud. His hand on his balls slips back, moving over his open hole. Steve rubs at it, which makes his guts cramp up.
Fine, he maybe couldn’t make Eddie come hard enough the first time. Because first times usually suck. But maybe he’d get lucky.
Eddie would certainly deserve it if Steve made him pop a knot.
Steve thinks about Eddie pulling Robin out of danger, putting his body between her and vines or bats or whatever. He thinks about Eddie swinging an oar side by side with Nancy to save his sorry ass. He thinks about Eddie’s hand in Robin’s, pulling her to her feet with him.
Eddie deserves to feel so good. Steve could do that for him. That’s what this fucking hole was made for, right? Like Eddie said: They match.
“We match,” Steve mumbles to himself. He turns on his side and curls his knees toward his chest. He’s not even touching his dick anymore.
“We match.”
His finger slips inside. It doesn’t feel like pussy, all soft and textured inside, but it’s not tight like a beta girl’s asshole. Inside, Steve’s just loose and wet and aching.
Two fingers fit easily and he knows that his fingers aren’t small. Eddie’s aren’t either.
Steve imagines how it would feel to have the metal of Eddie’s rings press against the edges of this hole in him. His whole body jerks. His teeth grind together.
Eddie nearly died — would have died — to keep Dustin safe and — and — Steve’s mind stutters over that. He can’t think about blood on his hands when there is so much wetness pouring out of him and into his palm. It’s body-hot like blood, but without the metal taste in the air.
“Oh, fuck,” Steve says, as he thinks about Eddie tasting him.
He’s done it himself, spent so long between a girl’s legs that he slipped his tongue into her there for some variety. In alphas (Nancy) and betas (Heidi), it’s usually kind of bitter. But in omegas there was a starchy sweetness to it. Something that he could even smell before he tasted it, like baking bread or freshly boiled pasta.
When the cramping has eased up, Steve staggers downstairs again with two pairs of briefs and some sweatpants on. He scrambles eggs and makes toast. Carrying it all upstairs, Steve eats in bed, because it doesn’t matter if he makes a mess.
He has already made a mess.
Eddie, he knows, doesn’t care about mess. Steve has seen the inside of his trailer — in the Upside Down, in its crime scene state, in the brand new double wide at the town limits. Eddie doesn’t give a fuck about mess. He laughs about spilled beers and bong water. He shrugs off flimsy paper plates that let slices of pizza drop cheese-side down onto the rug.
“Waste of food,” he might say, “but you’re the one paying for it, right, Harrington?”
Steve wants to see that same smirk between his thighs, framed by Eddie’s hands on his knees.
By nightfall, after a dinner consisting of pre-packaged sliced ham and a piece of string cheese, Steve has gotten tired of fingering himself. His wrist fucking aches with the repetitive motion. The pads of his fingers wrinkled hours ago and haven’t returned to normal. He feels slimy from his lower back down to his ankles, all over.
His fingers are thick, but not long. At least, they’re not long enough for what he wants. It feels good, it turns out. The cramping eases if he’s got something in him.
If he had Eddie’s huge alpha cock in him, he probably wouldn’t cramp at all.
Steve goes to wash his hands in the en suite. He comes back with a condom and an old roller brush from freshman year, when he was first developing his look.
He tries not to think about what he’s doing as he opens the condom and rolls it onto the handle of the hairbrush, but the bristles dig into this palm. There is no way this is going to feel good.
Steve lays back on the soiled towels and draws his knees up and back, toward his shoulders. His arms squeeze down between his thighs. He switches hands, because his right forearm still aches.
The hard, blunt end — slippery with latex — pushes into him easily. Steve hates that it’s easy, wishes that it hurt or something. Maybe he really is made to be fucked.
He draws in a deep breath as the muscles inside him, inside whatever hole this is, relax.
“Oh, fuck me,” he tries saying.
A little louder. “Fuck me!”
“Come on, Eddie, fuck me like you mean it.”
He holds the bristles of the brush so tight, moving the hairbrush fast and hard. It hurts his hand, but it feels so good inside him. There’s something hot about it. The sound is wet and syrupy — ketchup in a bottle, mashed potatoes with too much cream. The handle pushes a little air into him and it comes out in bubbles.
“Aw, gross, gross,” Steve says, before getting back to the fantasy.
Eddie doesn’t mind mess and he doesn’t mind gross either. He showed Steve his skin grafts in the hospital because he thought Steve didn’t believe that his nipple could just be gone.
“I don’t really care about the nipple,” Eddie had told him, “but the tattoo was expensive. I paid for that! The nipple was free.”
He had grinned when Steve laughed, despite himself.
If Eddie were here, on top of him, thrusting into him and making the same loud, wet noises come out of his hole, he’d probably like it. He likes loud (music) and fast (driving) and messy (bedroom) and gross (skin grafts, scars, blood).
“Fuck, don’t think about that,” Steve tells himself. “Stop it, stop it.”
Think about Eddie now, Eddie healed and almost cleared to drive places. Approved for “light activity.”
Was sex a light activity? It burns like two hundred calories an hour, Steve had heard that somewhere. Maybe from Carol, who heard it from a friend who had read it in a magazine.
It probably counts as light activity if Eddie doesn’t have to do any of the work.
Steve rolls onto his side, hand letting go of the hairbrush. Then he pushes up onto his knees. The headboard is too low to hold, so Steve leans an arm against the wall. He braces himself against his aching right forearm and wrist. His dick, almost entirely forgotten about, has started to flag. At least he can’t feel his pulse in the head of his cock anymore. But it’s still hard enough that he’s going to drip all over his pillow in this position.
Steve holds the condom down around the handle, but takes a looser grip on the bristles. He pushes himself down on the handle of the hairbrush, angling it forward inside him so it points toward his dick. That nudges something good inside him. The cramping muscle eases up.
The clear, sweet-smelling slick runs down over Steve’s hand and the bristles of the hairbrush.
“Gross,” Steve says, again. It would get all over Eddie’s hips and thighs. It would drip down his knot, down his balls, and —
“Fuck,” Steve hisses. It felt really good at this angle. Like nothing he’s felt before. Steve feels light-headed. Electricity runs up his spine and all the way into the roots of his hair. The breath shudders in his chest.
He wants to make Eddie come inside him, plug him up with his knot, and keep it there. It would — it could — well, no, Steve takes the fucking pills for that. It wouldn’t. It couldn’t.
But it’s his fucking fantasy and it isn’t like this is really about Eddie. This isn’t the real Eddie Munson. This is just a fantasy. It’s about Steve’s stupid fucking heat and his stupid fucking hormones.
Steve grinds his hips back against the hairbrush until he feels bristles at the edge of his hole and flinches back. His thighs ache. His toes curl.
Eddie could just lay back and let Steve have everything he wants. Doesn’t Steve deserve that? He’s always driving him around like his personal fucking chauffeur. Steve always pays for the pizza and beer. The least that Eddie could do would be let Steve touch his throat on the unscarred side and use that huge alpha cock he must have to massage the aching muscles inside him. Wait, are they even muscles?
“Fuck, I don’t,” Steve says to himself. “He doesn’t owe you shit, asshole. Just be happy he’s alive.”
Steve is happy Eddie’s alive, because that means Eddie can pump him full of alpha jizz and then knot him. During heat, that’s a guaranteed pregnancy.
Steve comes so hard that his vision whites out.
He scrambles to yank the hairbrush handle out of himself and falls off the bed. Once on his feet, Steve rushes to the bathroom and turns on the shower with shaking hands. Cold water blasts down on him.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.” His voice echoes off the bathroom walls.
Clean and dried off, but still shaking, Steve lays down some fresh towels. He wipes the slick off the headboard and wallpaper with a damp cloth. The condom goes into the trash, but Steve sets the hairbrush on his bedside table beside the lamp. He always sleeps with the lights on, but that makes it even harder to fall asleep tonight.
As best he can, Steve tries not to think. He touches the whorls and dips of the scar on his side and the fainter one on his throat. He can sort of feel his own touch. Maybe he just imagines it.
Clearly, he has a pretty active imagination.
Steve wakes up even more desperate. He has to jerk off three times just to get downstairs for some water. The thought of breakfast makes bile rise in his throat. He tries not to think about Eddie, just a warm body pressing against him and into him. Or no body at all, just a dick.
But he knows what Eddie’s hands look like — the pink scars on the knuckles that he massages with lotion every day. “Can’t lose my moneymakers.” Steve could probably find all the scars on Eddie’s body blindfolded in the dark. He knows the dark circles under Eddie’s eyes and the way his top teeth show in his smile when he is really amused by something and not just smirking.
Eddie is so good with the kids. Eddie likes kids. He tries hard to roughhouse with Dustin and Lucas even though he’s still getting the strength back in his core and his leg. The one side of him is so much worse, but Steve could… Steve would…
Steve slips another condom over the handle of the hairbrush and fucks himself until both wrists are sore.
He feels bruised inside, but it feels good to poke at that feeling. The wet sound of the hairbrush handle moving in and out of him still bothers him, but Steve isn’t alert enough today to care as much as he did yesterday.
He presses his face into the towel over his pillow and reaches back over his hip to push the hairbrush into himself, slow and deep. His cock drips clear, slick fluid like a broken faucet.
Eddie could frame his hips with his perfect hands — calluses from his guitar strings, metal rings, the scars of a hero — and Steve would push his hips back just like this. Steve bites down on his forearm.
In this position, Eddie could just close his eyes and pretend it was someone he actually wanted. He could just pretend Steve’s weird omega hole was a girl’s tight pussy. Steve could be real, real quiet. Maybe Eddie would keep his jeans on — or Steve could shave his legs like he had for four years of swim team. He could make it feel a little more like a girl for Eddie. He’d do anything at all if Eddie would just come inside him. It would just take one heat, a quick hump and dump.
Steve imagines his belly growing swollen and heavy with Eddie Munson’s baby, his pup, his little nugget. Sometimes omega males even lactate when pregnant. Would that happen to him? How much of a mess could Eddie make of him in one night?
Or maybe it wouldn’t be one night.
Steve’s hand is numb as he fucks himself. His spit runs down his arm into the towel. The wet sound of the hairbrush handle moving inside him drowns out Steve’s breathing and the thud of his heart in his ears.
Once Eddie knows that Steve is an easy hole to fuck, he might come back for seconds. If they fuck while Steve is pregnant, it won’t be this hole. It would just be — it would just be sodomy, right? But Eddie seems like a guy who might like that, the kind of bad boy who likes girls with tattoos and piercings and lots of turns around the block.
Steve can’t be most of those things, but he certainly has some notches in his imaginary bedposts. He could be that girl, at least he fantasizes that he could be. The fantasy is enough to make him shake and grunt.
It’s just hormones, just the heat.
Between fucking himself until it hurts, Steve tries to remember to drink enough water and eat some toast. He feels like a walking bruise and he can’t stop thinking about holding a baby with big dark eyes and curly hair.
Which, actually, horrifyingly, isn’t new.
What’s worse: fantasizing about getting knocked up by his ex who has moved on or his straight friend who relies on him to take him to doctor’s appointments? Because the fantasy baby looks about the same in his heat-boiled brain.
“Eddie would be a good dad,” Steve says, clutching his glass of ice water.
Who is going to hear him?
Steve guesses that his heat is breaking because he’s standing in the kitchen and doesn’t feel a waterfall dripping down his leg. It’s uncomfortably wet between his cheeks still and he feels open in a way that he hopes will be over by tomorrow. He’s got work.
The phone rings while Steve is in the kitchen, still, working on his third glass of water. He picks it up, thinking it’s Robin.
“Harrington residence. This is Steve speaking.”
Eddie’s giggle fills the shell of his ear. Oh, there’s the waterfall.
“Holy shit, dude,” Eddie says. “You say that every time, but it’s never any less funny. Jonathan, hey, Johnny, have you heard the way Harrington answers the phone?”
In the background, Steve hears Jonathan Byers telling Eddie not to call him that.
“What do you want, Munson?” Steve says, like he’s not crossing his legs as tightly as he can.
“Just calling to check in on you,” Eddie says. “Like, because of,” Eddie’s voice drops to a whisper. “Your thing today.”
Steve feels all hot and wet again. He tries to clench harder; that makes the cramps come back.
“It’s fine,” Steve says. “I’m fine.”
“Good,” Eddie says, “good.”
“Did you get a ride alright?” Steve asks.
“Yeah!” Eddie says, bright and cheerful. “Session sucked today. Legs, you know.”
Steve winces in sympathy. His thighs still hurt from trying to ride the hairbrush handle yesterday.
“But, oh you’re going to love this, Harrington, you fucking jock, I did a thirty-second plank today.”
“Holy shit, man.” That does not sound like light activity to Steve, but what does he know? He thinks about Eddie on his elbows laying out flat on top of him.
“Yeah, watch out, I’m coming for your role in the party. Going to multiclass as a bard and a fighter.”
Steve laughs even as he starts to say, “Hawkins High doesn’t have a class in—“
“Don’t be cute,” Eddie says, and Steve’s mouth snaps shut. “Maybe you tune out Henderson when he’s talking about this shit, but I know you listen to me.”
“Oh yeah?” Steve asks. “How can you be so sure of that?”
“Because you ask questions,” Eddie says. “And I am ever so happy to elucidate you, my curious friend, no matter how many times you say —” Eddie’s voice drops into what Steve realizes is an imitation of him, “Elves? Like Keebler?”
Steve feels something drip down his ankle onto the floor. He reaches for his glass of water.
“Maybe I just like to hear the sound of your voice,” he says. Jesus Christ.
Eddie giggles again and the phone drills the sound directly into Steve’s brain through his ear canal.
“Anyway, Jonathan drove me today, so we’ve been studying,” Eddie explains. “I checked on Mad Max for you. She joined us for lunch, but not the studying.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “Of course.”
“Actually, after the studying, I smoked Jonathan out,” Eddie says, as if that explains everything. Maybe it does. “You know, as a thank you.”
“He was just forcing me to listen to R.E.M and Dead Kennedys, because I made him play actually good music on the ride to and from the hospital,” Eddie explains. “You ever listen to the Dead Kennedys?”
“No?” Steve asks.
“Don’t,” Eddie says. “They’re shit.”
In the background, Steve can hear Jonathan’s voice go, “Hey! That’s just your opinion.”
“Your taste in music is already hard enough on me,” Eddie tells him. “Don’t go down this dark path.”
“Wasn’t planning to,” Steve says.
“OK, that’s settled then,” Eddie says. “But ol’ Jonathan here played me a song and said, ‘This reminds me of Steve.’ ‘Harrington?!’ I asked, like there’s some other Steve in our lives.”
Steve just listens.
“And it reminded me of you, too, so I just had to give you a call,” Eddie says. “Also, Jonathan put me up to it.”
“Did not!” Jonathan shouts, muffled.
“So, Harrington,” Eddie says. “Steve Harrington. Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do for you?”
Fuck me blind and mute, Steve thinks. Blind and mute and pregnant.
“I’ve been kind of hungry,” he says, instead. “I forgot to buy snacks.”
Eddie gasps. “What? No snacks? Not even cereal?”
“Breakfast cereal is not a snack,” Steve says.
“No time to debate this,” Eddie says. “Again. What kind of pizza do you want?”
“Supreme,” Steve says.
“Supreme for the supreme,” Eddie says. “You got it. Hey Jonathan—”
The line clicks dead.
Steve cleans up the kitchen with a towel that he presses between his legs afterward. He takes a shower and puts on two pairs of clean briefs. He pulls on a pair of long johns over that, to go under his sweatpants.
The doorbell rings while he’s trying to dry his hair. Steve pulls on a robe to cover everything and keep him warm.
He only opens one of the two doors. Eddie nearly falls into him, because he was leaning against that door. Instead of falling, Eddie grabs Jonathan by the shoulder and nearly knocks the pizza out of his hands.
“We’re not staying,” Jonathan says.
“Just delivering!” Eddie says.
His eyes are red and watery. The end of his nose flushed.
“Have you been crying?” Steve asks.
Eddie’s smile starts small, tight-lipped, but breaks out like a rash. His dark, bloodshot eyes sparkle.
“Not any more than usual,” Eddie says, giggling.
Jonathan starts laughing too, which is when Steve notices that his eyes are red too.
“Oh,” Steve says.
“Oh!” Eddie repeats. “My mistake earlier, on the phone, telling you not to be cute. You just can’t help it.”
Jonathan jostles Eddie’s shoulder. “Don’t be a weirdo!”
“He can’t help it,” Steve says. Eddie starts giggling again.
Steve hadn’t even noticed the smell, because Eddie usually smells like weed. It’s sort of soaked into him, his hair and his clothes and his bedroom. Shit, Steve cannot be thinking about this right now.
“Can I have my pizza?”
“Yeah, babe,” Eddie says, “but is there any chance I could get a tip?”
“If anyone should get a tip, it’s me,” Jonathan says. “I drove — wait, shit, don’t get me involved in this, Munson.”
Eddie throws his head back and cackles. The scar on his throat looks more pink than white, like Steve’s but far more… Metal.
“Here’s your pizza, Steve,” Jonathan tells him.
“Thanks,” Steve says.
Steve takes the pizza box with one hand and shuts the door with the other.
“Bye-bye!” Eddie shouts through the door.
“Hope you feel better tomorrow!” Jonathan shouts.
Steve takes the pizza upstairs and obsesses about whether Eddie could smell him. Obviously, Eddie knows he’s in heat. Steve basically told him so. “Your thing today.” Eddie knows. Eddie knows and probably Jonathan knows. And they brought him pizza because… what? They pity him? An omega male with no one to spend his heat with.
Sullenly, Steve chews through green peppers and olives and sausage. The pizza’s good after days of toast. He’s sitting in a puddle of his own wetness and Eddie Munson probably knows what he smells like when he’s horny now.
As long as he doesn’t somehow know through sense of smell that Steve is horny for him, then it’s fine. Steve goes downstairs for the phone.
“Hey, Rob,” he says.
“Steve! Holy shit, I thought you’d be dead to the world,” she says.
“I have a weird question,” he starts, “but you took Human Anatomy, right?”
“Yeah, it sucked, I had to memorize all the bones in the human hand. There are twenty-seven bones in your hand, Steve! Twenty-seven! And they all have different names. Distal, middle, proximal, metacarpal—”
“How good is an alpha’s sense of smell?” Steve asks. “Like, is it like those dogs with the droopy eyes?”
“Bloodhounds?” Robin asks. “I’unno, I guess, as close as a human being can get? But I think it changes with hormones. Like I bet your sense of smell is just as good right now.”
“Yeah right,” Steve says. “I couldn’t even tell that Eddie and Jonathan had been smoking weed.”
“Well, that’s on you, because if Eddie and Jonathan are together, they’re going to be smoking weed,” Robin says. “Ugh.”
After talking with Rob, Steve carries the low-battery phone and the cold pizza downstairs. Phone in the cradle. Pizza in the fridge. He showers one last time before going to sleep on fresh towels.
Eddie would make a great dad, he thinks again, and a great husband. For some girl with tattoos and a tongue ring.