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Steve’s always kind of found comfort in it.
Many of his friends growing up complained that they thought it was weird. Creepy. Inconvenient. Steve remembers Tommy keeling over in the middle of a little league game, being out of commission for the weekend, and then coming to school on Monday to talk about how his parents predict his soulmate won’t have an appendix when he meets her. He had complained about how his soulmate’s stupid organs were ruining his life.
And… okay. Steve had never experienced pseudo-appendicitis, but he still found Tommy’s pessimism a little ungrateful.
Steve has oddly always relished every sting, aching muscle, twinge, pang, and cramp. Every experience was a reminder that there was someone out there meant just for him.
A random shooting pain in his foot connects to the thought that, somewhere out there, his soulmate just stubbed their toe. He imagines some faceless person hissing in pain and maybe getting mad at whatever object they neglected to fully step over. It’s an endearing thought, that his soulmate is a real breathing person with everyday experiences.
Bumps and bruises.
He’ll admit it isn’t all rainbows, though.
From around ages eight to eleven, Steve used to feel particularly sharp, sudden bursts of pain over his back and arms. Repetitive ones. Usually in the evenings. It would always make his stomach twist and his mind picture a kid his age in pain at the hands of someone else and probably scared. He never liked to dwell on the implications, and the episodes thankfully seemed to stop altogether when Steve hit middle school. It did make him wonder if his soulmate was ever bothered when his mother would knot a tight fist in his hair to drag him close and whisper some command about behaving or staying quiet or not making a fuss.
Still, his point stands. The pains have always been a reminder that there’s someone. Someone who’s supposed to love him. To feel his pain and be reminded of him. He longs for the day he’ll be able to soothe his soulmate’s aches in person.
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“Jeez,” Steve whispers under his breath, scratching at his forearm again. The incessant prickling beneath the skin has been constant for about almost ten minutes, and it shows no signs of letting up.
He’s on the fence about it, almost leaning towards annoyance, but is kept steady with the euphoric stream of thoughts. Thoughts like:
They're probably thinking about you.
No way you haven't crossed their mind at least once.
I mean, who can go into a situation that willingly inflicts pain on themselves and not automatically think of their soulmate, right?
Steve's never been able to even nick himself shaving without thinking of the quintessential tie that marks him as one piece of a duo. The runes etched into the marrow of his bones that tether him to some stranger.
No, every bruise from basketball or scratch of nails up his back from some hookup make his stomach flutter with the reminder. The consciousness that someone else is feeling it too.
Granted, the flutter was more of a guilty churning when it came to getting hit shit rocked by Jonathan Byers and then, even worse, Billy Hargrove. Last winter, Steve had wasted away in a concussion-fueled, hangdog pit of apologetic guilt just imagining his soulmate experiencing even a fraction of the agony in his skull.
It's not a fun memory. The migraines still come with the guilt prepackaged inside them.
He sighs and itches at the dull stinging over his arm.
“Nicotine withdrawal finally catching up to you, sailor?” Robin smirks from where she’s leaning against the counter, wiping up drips of melted ice cream.
“No,” he scoffs. He rubs over the sore skin in lieu of scratching. “I think they’re getting another tattoo.” The buzzing pain in his arm moves in thought-out strokes, a familiar sting. He’s felt it on his chest, his bicep, and the back of his shoulder over the past couple of years. Tattoo is his best guess, though he’s never gotten one himself.
Robin’s usually listless and annoyed face perks up in genuine interest. “Oooooh, your mystery biker babe?”
Steve smiles and rolls his eyes. “Yeah. She’s spending all her hard-earned blood money on ink again.”
Robin seems to have invented for herself the perfect image of Steve’s soulmate: a mythical, tattooed goddess who rides a motorcycle and could totally bench-press him.
He doesn’t necessarily mind that vision, but he thinks his gut is telling him to look for something else. Some deep, stirring nonsense from the inner recesses of his most unknown center tells him to expect the unexpected, and it never gives him any details.
He spends the next hour slinging ice cream mindlessly, his thoughts drifting toward a vague idea of a form. A person with ink over their body, and a fresh work being etched into their arm.
The echo of a tattoo stings under his skin for the rest of his shift, and he loves it.
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Eddie Munson's head is fucking pounding. What else is new? His soulmate must be Wile E. Coyote, getting anvils dropped on his head every other weekend.
“Maybe he’s a boxer,” Eddie mutters from where he’s lying strewn across the couch, the cold of the ice pack seeping into his throbbing skull. “Or a crash test dummy.”
The headaches had come on after a sickening and splitting pain had attacked him one afternoon during his first senior year. It had hit him like a brick wall, hot and hard flashes of pain battering him like he was a punching bag with an invisible foe. An invisible foe who had hammers instead of hands. It was the kind of pain Eddie could only recognize as coming from impact. The ache in his knuckles seemed to confirm that this was the aftermath of a fight.
After the pain had subsided to a steady ache, he tried to imagine what his soulmate possibly could have done to earn a beating like that.
Once was bad enough, but November of 1984 had brought a whole new hell. It was well into the evening when his head suddenly exploded with a hot fury of pain that would not stop . He had keeled over in the kitchen, and Wayne had nearly called an ambulance (the only thing that kept Eddie from thinking he was having some sort of spontaneous brain hemorrhage was the presence of that familiar aching in his knuckles).
The headaches got worse after that, turning from an annoying occasional ache to extreme bouts of searing pain that lasted for a couple of days sometimes and left Eddie wilted and groaning.
After a couple of way-too-expensive doctor visits and medication that did jack shit , Eddie was confident in his theory that this was all his soulmate’s doing. And that he would just have to weather the storm until he found that fucker and made him do something about this shit.
It’s the 4th of July now, and Eddie is laid up with that freshly beaten pain for the third time in the past two years.
“Maybe he was testin’ out some gnarly fireworks and got himself in the eye with one,” Wayne suggests cheekily. He’s bent over a pot in the kitchen, cooking Eddie’s favorite in his usual attempt to ease his boy’s unchangeable pain. It’s a tradition at this point.
“You see, I’d think the same thing if he didn’t already have a track record for this kind of shit.” Eddie gripes back. “I swear, the reason I haven’t found him yet is because he’s in and out of jail for assault. That’s just like me, to have a felon for a soulmate.” He moves the ice pack down to his mouth for a moment, there’s a stinging at the corner of his bottom lip that is particularly eye-watering.
Wayne rolls his eyes. His boy was always one for dramatics. “Oh, calm down.”
“ No , Wayne,” he whines, “my soulmate is a total asshole delinquent who people can't resist punching in the face…”
“Well, maybe he’s just misunderstood. That’s where a lot of delinquency seems to come from… in my experience.” Wayne pauses his stirring to cast a knowing side-eye toward his nephew.
He continues when all Eddie does is lift the ice pack to give him an unimpressed glare. “Besides. I’m sure you’ll purge him of all his assholishness once you meet ‘im. He’ll have no time to get beat up if he’s busy keepin’ you outta trouble.”
That day can’t come soon enough, Eddie thinks almost fondly as he sinks deeper into the couch cushions.
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There’s a cheerleader dead in Eddie’s living room. From the less-than-welcoming embrace of a stagnant boathouse, Eddie wonders if she’s still there or if someone has found her yet. Fuck. If Wayne has found her yet.
He wonders if this is his destiny. To be driven mad and then charged with murder, put in the same cell block as his old man, and maybe find his roughneck of a soulmate there too.
It’s quiet, save for the gentle lapping of the lake’s waves against the shore. That, and Eddie’s heart, which hasn’t taken a fucking break since he sprinted out of the trailer in the dead of night. He’s tired. And scared. And guilty. And alone.
He wonders if the pain in his chest, the nausea clawing at his throat, and the sharp stabs in his gut are going through to someone. Wishes he could feel the presence of some sort of pain on the other side. Just to know that even in this nightmare, he’s not completely alone. He has someone, right?
Someone, someone, someone–
There’s gravel crunching outside under the roll of tires, and Eddie’s diving to find cover.
The creak of a door. Voices. Footsteps.
The rustling of the fucking tarp he’s hiding under and Jesus Christ, Munson, do something.
There’s no time to think, no use waiting to be killed. He’s up in a flash, hand wrapped around the cool glass of the neck of a broken beer bottle, lunging towards the first moving thing he sees and pinning it. Pinning… him?
Is that fucking… Steve Harrington?
Everything is flying past him in a melted flurry of dread and adrenaline. He hears panicked voices yelling but can’t hear them over the blood roaring in his ears.
He presses the jagged edge of the broken bottle against the skin of Harrington's neck and–
Ow. What the fuck?
Eddie jolts away when he feels a stinging pain in his own neck, just beside his jugular. The pain dulls and disappears as soon as he releases Steve. God fucking damnit.
He pulls back and looks up at Harrington with wide, disbelieving eyes. It's like time stands still for a moment. Their eyes meet in a treacherously knowing stare and Eddie feels something inside him lock. Like a seal binding closed.
Harrington must feel it too, because his eyes go even wider.
Eddie's shaking. As if today couldn't get any fucking crazier.
“You!?”
Steve Harrington sputters out a disbelieving laugh and says, “I… me.”
And for too many reasons, Eddie’s life is never the same after that day.
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“Lemme go down and get you an ice pack. I'll be right back, okay?” Eddie tucks a strand of Steve's hair behind his ear. He gets a little hum in response and takes it as an affirmative.
Six months in, Eddie swears his head still aches a bit every time Steve has a migraine. Robin always laughs and tells him sympathy pains are a real thing.
He knows deep down that she's right. The ways of soulmate bonds are shrouded in mystery, but everyone knows that the shared pain bond vanishes the moment you truly meet your soulmate. It’s something about the pain bond no longer being necessary once soulmates meet, as the pair now has the freedom and proximity to share their life with the one they're bound to. Or that's what philosophers say, anyway.
Eddie snags an ice pack from the freezer and bounds back up the stairs. He helps Steve lay it carefully across his head and then resumes his position sitting over his curled-up form. It’s a strangely intimate ritual to Eddie, caring for Steve when he’s caught in the throes of a migraine.
“Wish I'd met you earlier,” he hums, gently stroking his lover's hair while watching with pinched eyebrows.
“Why, so you wouldn't've had as many of my migraines?” Steve accuses, half-joking.
Eddie rolls his eyes. “No, sweetheart. So I could’ve helped you.” He keeps his voice soft and low. He wishes he could take the pain for himself. It’s a bittersweet sentiment that Steve always dismisses whenever he hears it.
“Mmm,” is Steve’s response, which is his way of showing he’s still listening. That he wants Eddie to keep talking but can’t muster the energy to speak back.
“They did suck, the migraines. Don’t know how you do it.” Eddie sighs, fingers still carding through Steve’s soft locks. Steve’s still fucking gorgeous, Eddie thinks, even miserable and bedridden.
“M’sorry,”
Ah, Eddie can’t have that. His chest twinges at the mumbled yet sincere apology. “Oh, baby, no. It’s not your fault. I’d face a hundred migraine headaches a week if it meant I got to keep you.”
He adjusts the cold pack and smiles at the relieved hum Steve lets out as he tilts his head. “To be honest,” he continues, “they were a pretty consistent reminder I had a soulmate. Kept me from getting lonely.”
The corner of Steve’s mouth twitches up, and Eddie warms inside.
“I liked…” Steve gathers the effort to speak, pain muddling his thoughts a bit. “I liked you getting tattoos.”
Eddie lets out a soft, amused breath. “Really? I thought for sure I was annoying the shit out of whoever was on the other end of me.”
“S’nice,” Steve breathes. He lifts a lethargic hand to Eddie’s forearm. Without looking, he knows he’s tracing the ink bats sprawled across his soulmate’s skin. The very ones that he felt buzzing under his own skin when they were drawn. “Loved it. Love you.”
Eddie’s grin is too big for the thousandth time hearing those words, but he doesn’t care. They strike him deep every time. He moves the sheets so he can curl closer around his soulmate.
“I love you too, Stevie.”