AU-gust, Day 5: Pet Sitting
“Nope, no way. Absolutely not.”
Six sets of puppy-dog eyes stared back at her. Lucas, the ham, even pretended to start whimpering.
“Stevie, please,” Dustin whined, “Eddie needs a safe place to stay.”
She stared at Dustin for a few seconds before glancing down at the shoebox in Dustin’s hands. Inside the shoebox surrounded by a few of Claudia’s oldest and fuzziest kitchen towels stood a bat, a small black bat with big black eyes that looked almost just as pathetic as the rest of the kids.
(Almost.)
“I’ve done this song and dance with you before, Henderson, and I told you when you got rid of the alien lizard - ”
“D’artagnan was a cryptid, Stevie!”
“ – alien lizard that I wasn’t going to help you keep playing monster vet. I still haven’t recovered from seeing Mews’ corpse!”
“Mews was my cat and I’m fine! Besides, Eddie’s just a normal bat!”
“Dustin, he has a full head of hair!”
Stevie and Dustin stared at each other before looking back down at the bat (Eddie). Who was running his little claws through his hair and preening. (Stevie could have sworn that he winked at her, but she wasn’t crazy; it was definitely just a trick of the light.)
Dustin’s face started to flush like he was going to argue with her but El (sweet, precious El) cut him off before he could really get going. “Stevie’s right. He is not normal,” El said, stepping forward to run her fingers against Eddie’s head. Eddie rubbed up against her fingers and chirped.
“See, I knew it - ”
“But he is a friend,” El said and fuck, the full force of El-most-likely-a-changeling-Hopper’s big brown eyes was something Stevie would probably never learn to resist. “And he needs someone to care for him while he gets better.”
“Better? What do you mean, better?”
“Bad man,” El replied matter-of-factly and, well, shit. She didn’t need to say much more than that.
Stevie sighed and turned her attention back towards the “bat” in question. “How long?”
/////
Just a few weeks, maybe a month or two, Dustin had said. “I would have kept him myself but Mom was worried that he’d eat Tews – ”
(“Oh, and you don’t care if I get eaten?” Stevie had replied. Dustin had just rolled his eyes and ignored her.)
So yeah, two months tops, just until Eddie was “healed” or what not. (He didn’t have any visible injuries that Stevie could see but then again, she was just a cosmetologist, what the fuck did she know about bat anatomy?) Until then, Stevie was going to have a tiny flying roommate who apparently “only likes to listen to metal music, so I’ve brought a few tapes and oh! He loves fantasy so you’ll have to read him this as a bedtime story,” at which point Dustin handed her The Lord of the Rings, “and he gets lonely at night so don’t lock him out, he likes to cuddle, and he should be able to fit in your jacket pocket when you go to work during the day - ”
“No, nope, no way, none of that is happening,” Stevie argued and she really had been planning on sticking to that – no metal music, no bedtime stories, no cuddles, and definitely no work trips, no way, no how.
(She’d folded by hour two of Eddie’s stay at Casa de Harrington.)
/////
“You get this is weird, right?”
“Hmm?” Stevie was cutting apart some strawberries to blend with whatever “protein drink” Dustin kept dropping off at her house. “What’s weird?” She turned to look at Robin, who was watching Eddie shimmy up and down the dining room table to “Rock Me Like a Hurricane.”
“Stevie. This is not normal bat behavior.”
“So? It’s normal Eddie behavior,” Stevie shrugged. She tossed the berries into the blender and, once it was a fine red concoction, put it in a little cup with a little straw and walked over the table. Eddie slid his way across the polished wood and wiggled when he saw her, chittering happily before going to town on his fruit smoothie.
“Yeah, well, this isn’t also normal Stevie behavior!” Robin threw her hands up in the air. “You’re letting a wild animal sleep with you in your bed!”
(She’d tried to encourage Eddie to stay in the guest room that first night all those weeks ago but she’d barely laid in bed for all of two minutes before a dark shape flew through the dark and landed on her chest. She’d screamed and leapt out of the bed but Eddie had somehow managed to grip his claws into her shirt and no amount of arguing with him was able to get him to let go.
“Fine,” she’d finally growled, “but if I roll over and squish you, it’s not my fault.”
When she’d finally woken up the next morning, she was still lying on her back and Eddie was still nestled onto her chest. They’d been going to sleep every night that way ever since.)
“Hey,” Stevie replied defensively, “he’s not a wild animal, he’s totally tame.”
“Uh huh,” Robin replied queasily, watching as Eddie happily slurped up his smoothie. “Just because you play dress-up with him doesn’t mean he’s tame, Stevie.”
The tiny vest was from El and Will, something about how Eddie looked “wrong” without it (whatever that meant. Stevie had to admit it did look really cute on him.)
“He looks adorable, Robin!”
“He’s totally taken over your life,” Robin shot back dramatically. “He goes shopping with you, you take him to work – Stevie, he sits with you when you take bubble baths, for Pete’s sake!”
(Hey, Eddie was a gentleman, he always waited until she was covered by bubbles until coming in and sitting on the little nest of towels she’d made for him on the set of drawers by the bathtub and okay, maybe Robin had a point here.)
“And that’s not to mention that I’ve been trying to get you to read a book for literal years now and this bat shows up and suddenly you’re reading Tolkien to him every night?”
“It’s actually a good book, Robin,” Stevie said defensively.
“I know that, Stevie, I just can’t believe that you’re not seeing this! Like, there are so many red flags! He’s literally drinking blood right now!”
Stevie huffed and leaned over the table, like she was physically covering Eddie from Robin’s criticism. “It’s rude to judge somebody else’s eating habits, Robin. Or did you forget our conversation last month when you tried to go vegetarian?”
“That’s different and you know it!” Robin exclaimed.
Eddie, because he was a little drama king, took the last sip of his smoothie while making eye contact with Robin before letting out an exaggeratedly content sigh.
“See?!”
Stevie rolled her eyes and set her hand down. Eddie scurried onto her palm, letting out a series of happy chirps. She lifted him up and set him on her shoulder where he waddled to her cheek and pressed his little face against it, like he was giving her a little kiss. “You’re being overdramatic, Robin.”
“Fine, whatever, just don’t come crying to me when he makes you his eternal vampire bride or whatever,” Robin huffed before getting up and stalking out of the kitchen.
“He’s just a bat!” Stevie called after her. Robin responded by slamming the front door after he on the way out.
Sighing, Stevie turned to look at Eddie, who was currently making a home for himself in her curls. “You are just a bat, right?”
Eddie turned and shot her a wink before wrapping his little body in one of her ringlets.
“Yeah, that’s probably fine.”
/////
One of the best parts of having Eddie around actually was nighttime. She hadn’t gotten so many nights of uninterrupted sleep in years. He was like some sort of nightmare repellent or something; in fact, the only dreams she’d had recently were of a shrouded figure with long dark hair and a sexy laugh and teasing cool hands and other things –
And when she woke up a month and a half into Eddie’s residency in her home, she probably should have been more shocked at the fact that her bat had turned into a very pale, very sexy and very naked man with long dark hair and cool skin and –
“God, Robin’s never going to let me live this down,” Stevie murmured as the man stirred above her. He opened his eyes and yep, yeah, those were her bat’s eyes.
Eddie’s grin grew sharp as he pressed her further into her bed. “I’m sure I can find some way to make up for it,” he said as he drew close enough to kiss her.
“How do you feel about a Halloween wedding?”
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