Don't Blame Me, Love Made Me Crazy

one

Steve Harrington didn't care much for first impressions. He never held them against anybody. There were reasons people did what they did. Some people held up walls, some people you had to get to know them to judge them. Steve never cared much about first impressions because he knew the first impression people got from him was never right.

Most people, the first time meeting Steve, thought he was a right asshole and he had been until he'd grown up. Just about everyone still in Steve's life still had that impression of him. Just about everyone who didn't know him thought he still was. He wasn't. Steve tried not to be at least. He had changed. Steve had wanted to change more than anything and for the most part he had. 

Steve hated first impressions if he was being honest, so he had tried his hardest not to hold the first impression he had of Eddie Munson against him, but it was hard. Eddie 'the freak' Munson, was exactly that; A freak. Steve had first come into contact with Eddie when he was a freshman in high-school and Steve had been terrified of him at first. Eddie gave off scary dog energy, it was hard not to be scared of him.

Steve had been walking in the hallway, on the way to his fourth period of the day when he had seen Eddie, a junior at the time, chewing someone out in the hallway and that was being generous.

"Is there something wrong with your head? Have the chemicals from the hairspray you use every day finally affected your already pea-sized brain?" Eddie had screamed at a sophomore, standing in front of his locker. "Or maybe because your mom is dead and your dad's a fucking dead-beat, you have no one to teach you common fucking sense," He had snapped, causing the younger student to run away in fear.

Steve had been terrified, then he had changed. He wasn't a terrible person anymore and had thought that maybe there was a reason Eddie had been so rude. Maybe he had been running late to school and was having a bad day. Maybe Eddie had found out absolutely horrible terrible news a few minutes before. Maybe the day before Eddie had been diagnosed with an absolute gut-wrenching, world changing disorder.

Steve had. Steve remembered exactly how pissy he had been the day after finding out he had inherited that horrible illness from his mother. He had seen it coming from a mile away. Steve had known immediately when he couldn't get out of bed for three weeks the summer before his junior year and he felt like he was on autopilot. His fate had been sealed once he was lucid and realized he was bipolar, just like his mother.

Maybe that was the case for Eddie, not bipolar but something else, something just as bad. Steve wasn't just going to jump to the conclusion that someone was a horrible person because of his first interaction with them. He had been on the receiving end of that far more than he had liked.

Unfortunately though, Steve's first impression of Eddie was enough to stick with him. It was just right enough to forever stay on some part of Steve's brain because Steve was a curious person, he wanted to know the inner-workings of Eddie Munson. Steve needed to know what it was exactly that made Eddie tick. That's how he found himself here, standing in front of him in the library.

Eddie was staring up at him, an amused smile playing on his lips while he was tapping on the table with a red pen. Eddie had been studying Steve. That part had been obvious the way Eddie's eyes were rapidly searching Steve's face. It seemed he wasn't the only one trying to figure him out.

His brain was going a mile a minute, a heavy weight on his chest while his heart was trying to escape the confine of his ribs. This was a mistake. What was Steve thinking? Trying to analyze someone in the Hawkins High Library just because he intrigued him? God, he was pathetic. Eddie could totally tear him apart and Steve would let him. It didn't matter what Steve's first impression of Eddie was. Eddie Munson was intimidating with his metal band t-shirts, his metal rings that could make anyone bleed after the first punch, the doberman energy he gave off, and the rumors that he was a devil worshiper. Steve was going to be torn to shreds.