Exalted

Eddie was in the hospital for a week, and the nurses swore the doctor wanted to keep him for two but they had threatened to kill her if she didn’t sign him out. He had been irritable, bored, resistant to medical advice, and overall as bad of a patient as someone so generally likable could possibly be.

The only time there was any peace was when Wayne visited, whereupon Eddie would keep his grumbling to a minimum but still wouldn’t eat, or when Steve came after work. The first time Steve had visited a young CNA had gone in to pick up Eddie’s dinner tray, expecting it to be untouched as usual, only to come back out empty-handed with her eyes like saucers. Steve, it transpired, was feeding Eddie his pudding, and Eddie was letting him with an angelic smile. The lead nurse had snorted, but a meeting after Steve left had established a suitable blackmail situation, and a detente was reached. Eddie would eat his breakfast and lunch without complaining, and the nurses wouldn’t tell Steve he could eat just fine on his own. 

Which was how Eddie had ended up on his couch the evening of his release from the hospital, tucked among pillows and blankets like a fragile invalid child, while Steve made sure the curtains were closed and the lights were bright enough not to cause eye strain, but not so bright they might trigger a headache. He was standing across the living room, holding a lightbulb in each hand, glasses slid down his nose as he compared wattage, and Eddie felt the laughter bubbling up and out of him before he could stop it.

Steve looked at him, eyes peeking over wire frames, and smiled - looking a little confused, but pleased Eddie was happy. “What’s so funny?” 

“Nothing, nothing,” Eddie chuckled, wiping his eyes. “The lights are fine, really. Come sit down.” He held out his hand, and Steve carefully set the bulbs on the coffee table and joined him on the couch.

“I’m not sure about the light in your room,” he fussed. “I want to check it before you go to bed.”

“It’s fine; I just won’t turn it on,” Eddie promised as he tugged Steve down to lay on the couch with him, poking and prodding at him until he had maneuvered him into a position where Eddie could curl into him under his arm, resting the uninjured side of his head on Steve’s chest. Eddie sighed happily, and Steve wrapped his arms snugly around him.

“Wayne is going to call an hour to make sure you are resting,” Steve warned him, and Eddie stuck out his tongue.

“This is resting,” he insisted. “I am relaxed. I could fall asleep right here.” Steve arched a brow in disbelief, and Eddie closed his eyes and pretended to snore. He could feel Steve’s laugh rumbling through his chest. “I really am resting. I will reassure Wayne that you are taking excellent care of me, and he doesn’t need to drive back and take turns hovering.”

“He’s just worried,” Steve said, stroking a gentle hand down his back. “That was quite the blow to the head.”

“The doctor said it was a miracle that I didn’t get a skull fracture,” Eddie said smugly.

“The doctor also said you had a thick skull,” Steve reminded him, laughing again when Eddie swatted his chest. 

“She meant that medically, Steve.” Eddie pretended to pout, then broke into a grin. “I can’t really argue it either way, though.” 

Steve was right, too, Eddie thought. He’d thought his earlier concussion had been bad, but apparently being a few years older and having other injuries had made it harder to heal, and his head still swam if he even sat up too fast. Luckily his abduction hadn’t yielded any broken bones, just a now-fading array of bruises that even the doctor had winced over. Eddie had looked at Steve and Wayne, waiting at the foot of the hospital bed side-by-side and been surprised by the unexpected resemblance between the two men that were physically so different. It seemed that rage sat the same on both their faces.

The relationship Steve was building with Wayne was fascinating to Eddie - he’d always brought his friends around, and Wayne liked them all well enough. He loved Chrissy like another adopted child, and Gareth could always get him talking about baseball, but this was something different. Eddie had asked Wayne about it, trying to sound as casual as he could, but Wayne had just leveled a serious look at him and said: “hard not to like someone willing to walk into their own personal hell for the people you love.” Eddie hadn’t asked again.

The week in the hospital had been punctuated by visits from various police officers, answering the same questions over and over, signing statements, looking at photos he couldn’t identify because he’d had a head injury, did I not mention that part? There’d been doctors and nurses asking how he was feeling, Chrissy with and without Robin - also asking how he was feeling, which was maddening, but sneaking him in candy so he forgave them. He didn’t miss the way the girls held hands as they sat together on the foot of his bed, but other than a single wide-eyed look at Chrissy - which she had dodged - he resolved to hold his teasing until he was back at full capacity and able to make a run for it if Chrissy decided she’d had enough.

Steve had been there whenever he wasn’t at work, coaxing him to eat ‘don’t make me make airplane noises, I swear I will do it’ and setting him up with an account at the library for the audiobooks ‘don’t play it too loud, but we’ve got all the fantasy you could want, just keep the screen turned low.’ Steve had insisted on helping get Eddie settled when he was released, and Eddie had basked in both the attention and in just watching Steve fuss around his apartment. So the last week had had a lot of talking, and a lot of Steve generally, and even a lot of talking with Steve, but there hadn’t been talking with Steve. But now they were alone, out of danger and comfortable, and Eddie found himself scared to bring it up.

“I think we need to talk,” Eddie blurted out, and the hand stroking his back stilled. “Not in that ‘we need to talk’ kind of way, I mean we said we were going to talk, and we haven’t talked, and I know I’ve been in the hospital, but I’m really okay to talk now, and…” The rumbling in Steve’s chest had become a definite shaking now as his chuckles gave way to full laughter at Eddie’s babbling.

“Eddie. I get it, it’s fine.” Steve dug his phone out of his pocket. “I have a couple of pictures to show you.” Steve held the phone where Eddie could see it and pulled up a photo of a young man in a basketball uniform, smiling at the camera. “That was my senior year in high school.”

Eddie stared at the picture, Steve looking impossibly younger, no glasses yet, more slender and long-limbed. “Baby Steve,” he cooed, and Steve chuckled again.

“Robin found that picture on the school’s website, it’s the only one of me I have from before,” Steve said. “My parents moved us to the farm a few months after that was taken.” He flipped through photos until he pulled up another one of himself, standing awkwardly with Robin in front of a stone building. “That’s me and Robin about two months after I left the farm and started living with the Buckley’s, on the day they adopted me and I changed my last name from Harrington to Buckley.”

The young man in the photo was still recognizable as Steve, but he was thin, with hollows under his eyes and clearly growing out an unfortunate haircut. All the easy confidence of the early photo was gone, but the incandescent smile was unmistakable. 

“How long were you there?” Eddie asked hesitantly. He had gotten the rough outline of what had happened to Steve, between Wayne, the police, and being there himself, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to fill in the details. Thinking of Steve being abused by the leader like he had been, possibly for years, made Eddie feel sick.

“A few years,” Steve said quietly, taking back the phone and turning it off. “It started off just a little too religious, but not so bad, and ended up - well, exactly how you think.”

Eddie swallowed. “I put a target on your back, asking you to be in the show,” he struggled to sit up enough to look Steve in the eye. “I’m so sorry. It was selfish of me, and if it had been you they found instead of me…” Eddie’s voice trailed off, and they looked at each other solemnly. They both knew Steve might not have been sitting there if he had been the one brought into that basement with the leader.

“It’s not your fault, Eddie. You didn’t know anything, and I should have told you. I should have said no, but I wanted to help.” Steve dropped his eyes, plucking at the edge of Eddie’s sleeve. “I just wanted to be normal, and help you like anyone else would be able to, and all it did was get you hurt.”

“How about we blame the people actually responsible?” Eddie asked quietly, gently tugging on Steve’s chin until their eyes met again. “None of this is anyone’s fault except the people on that farm. Okay?” Steve nodded, and gave him a shaky smile. “What are you going to do now?”

The question wasn’t an idle one, and Eddie had been dreading it. The police had gone to the farm, only to find that the fire department had been called for a structure fire and found the whole place empty. They had told Wayne that it looked like some of the houses hadn’t been lived in for years, while others showed signs of being hastily abandoned. Eddie had overheard the officer telling Wayne that the house Steve had lived in with his parents was disturbing, with religious passages scribbled on the wall of a small bedroom upstairs and splintered furniture that looked like someone had attacked it in a frenzy and left it to be buried in dust for years. Eddie had no doubt that the leader had done it and ordered it left untouched as a message if Steve ever returned, and to warn the rest of his followers. There was evidence of Eddie having been held in the basement - vomit and blood, Eddie assumed - of the chapel, but the most disturbing thing had been outside the chapel.

A wooden cross had apparently been very recently erected in front of the entrance, the wood wholly unblemished by weather or time. A cross might not be strange to find in a religious compound, but this one featured what were clearly intended as restraints, to bind a person to the cross bar by their arms. A small peg on the upright of the cross was likely meant to restrain the person’s feet, to allow them to relieve the pressure on their arms until that, in turn, became too painful and they dropped again. A very public torture and a very slow death, and one that had been hastily implemented, according to the police officer talking to Wayne - possibly even overnight.

Eddie had a vivid nightmare that night, setting nurses running to his room as he screamed and thrashed in his bed, unable to escape an image of Steve hanging there above him as he sprawled on the ground, held prostrate by a white-clad foot. The shadow of the cross had fallen across Eddie like a curse, and he had only found refuge in sedation for the remainder of the night. 

He knew Wayne had been there when the police told Steve what they had found, but Steve hadn’t mentioned it to him when he’d joined him in Eddie’s room later, looking a little strained but coaxing Eddie to eat and promising him ever wilder combinations of food when he was released if he just ate the soup now. He’d fulfilled one of those promises tonight, arriving with steaming takeout ramen and a bag of Twizzlers. Eddie had not eaten them together as he’d threatened in the hospital.

“Well, tonight I’m going make sure you get enough sleep,” Steve answered softly. “And I’m going to go to work tomorrow, and stop at that burger place on the way home to bring you a double cheeseburger and a side of onion rings, and I’m going to watch you put the onion rings on the burger and eat it, because you’re a heathen.” Steve stroked the hair back from Eddie’s face, sliding his fingers gently along his jaw. 

“I’m going help Wayne pop the dent out of the door of your van this weekend, and we’re going to put a new battery in it because it died and Wayne doesn’t trust it now. I’m going to help Robin and Chrissy paint the living room at my place while you sit on the balcony because the fumes are bad for you, and you’ll laugh at me when the girls bully me,” Steve continued.

Eddie rested his forehead against Steve’s, his eyes closed like a prayer. “Then what?” He asked.

“Then we’ll dance in the kitchen again. You’ll take me to shows with songs I don’t understand a word of, and I’ll bring you to library fundraisers and let you get cooed over by all the little old ladies. You’ll make me buy cooler sneakers, which I will not admit I like, and I’ll make you wear gloves when it gets cold, even though you will tell me you don’t need them.” Steve was murmuring promises against Eddie’s lips, his hand moving in a mesmerizing circle on Eddie’s back. “We’ll live a life. It’ll be weird, and loud, and funny, and ours.”

Eddie closed the gap between their lips, returning all the promises Steve had given him between kisses, their tongues sliding together, parting only to rejoin, breaking apart only when Steve remembered Eddie wasn’t supposed to engaging in any physical activity and carried him, protesting through his laughter, to his room.