Rock Steady (Steddie)

I Never Pegged You For A Metalhead

Eddie stood next to the stage at The Hideout. He was looking towards Gareth, setting up his drum kit, but his mind was on the dream he'd had the night before. It had started innocently enough. He'd been dreaming about the head cheerleader, Chrissy Cunningham. That wasn't anything new. She was cute and he dreamed about her a lot. He'd never really met her or spoken to her, except that one brief encounter at the talent show in middle school, but he'd always had a thing for her. The first time he'd ever jerked off he'd been thinking about Chrissy.

His dream the night before started like all of his dreams about Chrissy started. She was getting ready to give him a blow job. Normally, when he had this dream, he either woke up right before she started, or right before he was about to finish in her mouth. It always left him with a raging hard on. But not this time. This time, just as Chrissy was going down on her knees in front of him, she suddenly faded away and Eddie wasn't in his bedroom in Wayne's trailer with Chrissy anymore. He was in his bedroom in his mom and dad's house, and he was only ten again.

Eddie was lying in bed, his covers pulled over his head, reading a comic book with a flashlight. He was supposed to be asleep, it was a school night, but he was almost done with the comic book, and he needed to see how it ended so he could talk to his friends about it at school the next day. He had just flipped to the last page when a loud bang, like a door being kicked open, startled him into dropping the comic book. He could hear loud, angry voices coming from the living room. He switched the flashlight off and burrowed under his covers. He stayed perfectly still. He could hear his mother crying and his father's angry voice arguing with another voice he didn't recognize.

There was another loud bang and then his mother screamed. That one had been a gunshot. Eddie knew that sound well. His father had taught him to shoot squirrels the summer before. He knew what a gun sounded like. Eddie was out of bed in a flash. He went to his closet and crawled in, burying himself under the pile of winter quilts on the floor. Tears streamed down his face as he listened to the sounds of a struggle from across the hall. His mother was crying, begging someone to stop, to please not hurt her. It went on for what seemed like hours. His mother's cries, the sound of a man grunting, telling her to shut up. And then suddenly it was silent. Eddie peeked out from under the quilts just as another gunshot sounded.

Eddie heard footsteps coming across the hall from his parent's room to his. The door opened and someone came in. Eddie could hear him, muttering curses under his breath. When the closet door opened, Eddie lay still, biting hard into one of the quilts to stifle his own crying. The man kicked the piled of quilts and Eddie wet himself, terrified that he was going to be found. But after a moment, the man left the room. Eddie listened as he moved around the house. He didn't hear his mother or father, just the heavy footsteps and the occasional crash of glass or something being knocked over.

At some point Eddie had fallen asleep under the quilts. Hours later he had been found by the police. They had carried him outside, but Eddie had seen his mother's bloody, naked body on her bedroom floor and his father lying on the living room floor. He'd been shot in the face and Eddie only knew it was his dad by the clothes he'd been wearing and the tattoos on his arms. Outside, his Uncle Wayne had been waiting and he took Eddie away. That was what had happened in real life, anyway.

But in his dream last night, his mother and father had come to get him out of the closet. His father had no face, just a gaping wound where his face should have been. His mother was bleeding from between her legs, her face was a beaten, bloody mess. They pulled Eddie from the closet and his mother held him as he cried. But then she was shaking him. Why hadn't he helped? Why had he hidden like a coward? Why'd he let that man rape her and beat her? Then it was his father's turn. He was disappointed in Eddie. Eddie should have done something. Eddie should have saved them. He knew where they kept the gun. He knew how to use it. Why didn't he save his parents?