Despite the good days, there are also plenty of bad ones: ones where Eddie seems more exhausted than usual, where despite Steve putting on the worst movie he can think of Eddie barely musters the energy to make fun of it. He starts calling himself Eddie The Banished again, staring longingly past the dead flies in the windowsill and asking Steve if people still talk about him in public. Steve lies and says they don't.
Steve tries to sleep over more, specifically trying to measure if Eddie has any more nightmares, but Eddie is usually awake before him (which is also unlike him, being nocturnal), so Steve can't tell, and Eddie waves him off whenever he asks about it.
He starts playing a lot of this particularly depressing band (the Coco Twins? The Cactus Twins? Steve can't remember but it's something like that) and laying on the floor, arms behind his head and eyes closed as ambient music surrounds him. He's still playful, still dramatic, still near-overwhelmingly affectionate towards Steve, but there's something... else there, too, an undercurrent of tension underneath everything he says or does. In the absence of much else to do, the others start playing his campaign with him, a modified version of one called Castle Amber which he says is "designed to be as unsimilar to the shit with Vecna as humanly possible", which is probably a good idea. He also starts giving Max guitar lessons, who takes it up like a pro, her hearing and her physicality heightened even if she sometimes gets frustrated that she can't see her fingers to check if they're in the right spots. Shit goes on, like it tends to, and they all pretend that they're fine even though the Upside Down is eating them alive, like it tends to.
That all seems to help at least a little, and the next bad day where Eddie doesn't even seem like he wants to get off the floor ends with them curled up, spending the rest of the night finally watching The Breakfast Club while Eddie mumbles a running monologue into his chest about which parts he thinks are accurate and which parts he thinks aren't. "The jock should be more insufferable."
"Are you implying something?"
"Maybe." Eddie says, looking up at him and wiggling his eyebrows. "What do you think I'm implying?"
"That that's who I am."
"Nah." Eddie says, fingers curling in his shirt. "Nancy was right. You're Claire. The Princess."
"I'll take it." Steve says, shrugging. "She's the most interesting. Does that make you Bender?"
Eddie shifts against him. "...Nah. He literally, like, assaulted her, dude."
Steve grimaces. "True. Alison, then?"
"She's better. Probably going to give her an awful anti-goth makeover or something before it's over, though, I can feel it."
When that does indeed happen, he throws his hands up. "What did I tell you?" He lets his head fall back, arms lifted in exaggerated agony. "This is square propaganda is what it is, Steve, do you understand that? How many cool people became less cool after seeing this? How many baby freaks felt like they needed to...to..." he drops his voice, sounding truly disgusted, "to... brush their hair?"
Steve snorts. "Haven't you heard It's Hip to Be Square?"
"If that's a Huey Lewis reference I'm going to have to ask you politely to vacate the premises before I set the bats on you."
"Just the fact that you know it's Huey Lewis means I've won."
"You've corrupted me, yes, but at what cost to your own soul? You were humming Def Leppard the other day, I heard it."
"That's only because you always put them on when we make out—"
"Exactly. I'm creating a Pavlovian response in you."
Eddie has more complaints throughout the rest of the movie, ironic for someone who will defend every single horror movie plothole for the sake of escapism but who can't sit through a single other movie without picking it to pieces.
"Honestly, this would be better if Claire and Alison got together in the end." Eddie says, dropping back down against Steve's chest. "But people are cowards."
"C'mon, give the end a chance. I always hear good things."
Eddie sighs. "One chance."
Twenty minutes later, as the credits roll, he sounds annoyed. "...Okay, not a terrible ending. Still needed less square propaganda."
"I like the song." Steve comments, used to Eddie's endless critiques of films by now and knowing better than to say anything that might be construed as disagreeing.
"...It's not terrible." Eddie sounds tired, voice getting slurry the way it goes when he's trying not to fall asleep. His hand comes up to push Steve backwards so that he can get more comfortable. "Pretty catchy."
Steve lets the credits go until the screen goes blue then black, refusing to get up for anything, the room around them hazy with the tv's dim glow as he lets his eyes slip shut, lulled by Eddie's breathing and the feeling of his cold skin warming up ever-so-slightly against him.
