By the time the doorbell went, Steve had some clean dry clothes and Eddie actually had some clothes, but they were both still wrapped in their blankets and Robin had made sandwiches. When both of them had inhaled what was put in front of them, she had made some more. Everyone had also migrated to the living room where it was warmer and there were more seats.

Steve did his best not to start at the sound of the bell because, after being stuffed with food and hot chocolate, Eddie had decided to doze on his shoulder. It was either an A+ avoidance technique or Eddie was still that tried, but Steve didn't want to disturb him either way.

He was quite surprised when Will came straight in and sat down next to him on the couch.

"You too, huh," Will said.

"Me too, you mean..?" Steve asked.

Will looked at the coffee table, held out his hand and narrowed his eyes. The ugly ashtray in the centre of the table slid towards him.

"Will," Joyce chided gently as the kid wiped his nose with a Kleenex he pulled from his pocket.

"El's been giving me some pointers. Didn't think of raising the dead though," Will told Steve with a smile, as if he wasn't stressed about any of the situation at all.

"He wasn't dead," Steve protested in his own defence.

"Just kind of on the undead side," Eddie muttered around a yawn. "Hey, Will the Wise, long time no see."

"I didn't know you two had met," Steve said, because it was easier than anything else in his head.

"We met at the beginning of the school year, and Henderson and Wheeler have regaled me with many tales of their campaigns," Eddie said. "Will would have been great for Hellfire if he hadn't been called to adventures in California."

"Oh yeah, forgot Starcourt was in July, but everyone was still here until October," Steve realised.

"I feel it should be worrying that you can't keep the dates of all your brushes with death straight in your head," Eddie commented, sitting up and away from Steve.

He did his best not to feel bereft.

"Excuse me for being distracted by the end of the world," Steve bitched back.

"Hi," El said, coming to stand in front of him and dragging his thoughts back to the present.

She was looking at him with the wide-eyed stare she sometimes got when trying to puzzle things out. He used every trick he knew not to fidget.

"Hi, El," Steve replied. "El this is Eddie, Eddie this is El, or do you prefer Jane now, sorry I keep forgetting."

"I do not mind either from my friends," El replied and gave him a smile. "Nice to meet you, Eddie."

"Hi, Supergirl," Eddie replied, "Steve filled me in on how you saved the world again. Nice to meet you too and I would like to offer my personal thanks for ending that bastard for good. I did not like being a minion."

"You are welcome," El said, "I do not think I would like being a minion either."

Steve found himself smiling at the little exchange even though it was utterly bizarre. He caught Joyce and Hopper giving them all a look which he suspected reflected something of a similar reaction. Robin was rolling her eyes and he refused to look at the other three because he really didn't want to know what Nancy was thinking.

"Steve," El said with a serious little brow furrow, "could you tell me what happened with Eddie please?"

"Yeah, okay," he said and did his best to put it all in order in his head. "It began right after they let us go home," he started and proceeded to explain everything he could, as well as he could.

He wasn't well versed in the whole psychic area, but he did his best to describe what had happened, at least mostly. At the mention of Eddie biting him there was a short pause for Eddie to demonstrate he no longer had fangs, but that was the only interruption. After that he also did his best to answer any questions El had. Robin also mentioned how suspiciously fast her cuts and bruises from the final battle had disappeared, at which point Steve had to admit that his bat bites and the road-rash on his back had also almost completely stopped hurting where they had been giving him trouble up to the final battle. Robin gave him yet another disapproving look for that. He may have failed to mention it before.

"Biokinesis," El decided once he had finished speaking.

"Bio what now?" Steve asked.

"Biokinesis," El repeated. "It is the ability to affect other living things. Like when I restarted Max's heart."

"And you think I did that to Eddie and Robin?" he asked.

"And yourself, but less so," El replied with a nod.

"Trust you to forget to fix yourself, Dingus," Robin commented.

"You used your own energy to boost and enhance Eddie and Robin's healing abilities and undid what Henry had done to Eddie as well," El said with perfect confidence.

"But I don't have powers like you," Steve said, because it didn't make any sense.

"You did not use to," El said, her thinking face firmly in place again, "but neither did Will. We think Henry chose Will in the beginning because he had latent abilities Henry could use, but they stayed mostly dormant when he was no longer possessed. Maybe you had them too, you just never realised."

"You have taken enough punishment in the past to kill a lot of people," Nancy added her two cents. "You always bounced back remarkably fast."

Steve couldn't help thinking of the comedowns he had experienced after every major event and how it always seemed to make him feel much better afterwards. He'd never healed himself completely, but he had to wonder if he'd been doing something on a less grand scale completely unconsciously.

"And what, the psychic blast at the end of the battle brought them out?" he asked, because he still wasn't sure how to take it all.

"We think it connected us to El's power, which blasted open whatever was dormant in us," Will said from beside him.

"Well fuck," Steve said, because he didn't know what else to say.

He did manage to make El giggle at the naughty word, which was at least one plus.

~*~

Eddie didn't seem to be able to keep his eyes open for more than about ten minutes at a time. Then again, what with the whole rebirth thing, Steve couldn't exactly blame him. He was feeling a bit fuzzy on the edges himself, but since he had a house full of people he refused to just check out. The longer he was awake, the less shaky he was feeling, however, so that was one good thing.

Will, it turned out, was just as nonchalant about having powers as he had seemed over their first interaction. Of all things, it seemed to have boosted his confidence rather than anything else. In their preparations for the final confrontation with Vecna, Will had been quiet although resolute. He seemed calmer now. Steve couldn't really fathom it because he was decidedly still freaking out. He could only speculate that Will's past experiences with the psychic side of things gave the kid a very different outlook to him.

He had listened attentively as Will had explained how he had kind of suspected something after the whole El needing help incident and so, once he was no longer on a government base, had spent the better part of a day seeing if he could do anything to no luck. Then El had scared the hell out of him accidentally when he'd been concentrating and one of his paint pots had shot across the room.

"We were going to come and talk to you," El assured him after Will's story, "but we wanted to make sure Will was getting on okay first."

"I probably wouldn't have believed you," he admitted, glancing over at where Eddie was curled up like a hibernating squirrel in the corner of the couch.

The sight made his heart beat a little faster for reasons he refused to dwell on, at least not yet. Denial was a wonderful thing and too many shocks in one day would not be good for him.

"So do you have all the same powers as El?" he asked, looking back to Will.

"We're not sure," Will admitted.

"All of us in the project had different strengths and weaknesses even though Papa wanted us all to be strong in some things," El explained in a sagely tone. "Will will get stronger over time, like I have, but he might be better at some things than me, and not as good at others. I think the only one who was as good at biokenisis as you seem to be, Steve, was Henry."

Steve's mind flashed back to Max floating in the air, eyes misty and rolled back. It filled him with horror. A hand firmly taking hold of his own dragged him back to the present.

"You are nothing like him," El said, looking him straight in the eye. "You heal, he destroyed."

That did, however, spark one idea in his brain.

"Do you think I could help Max?" he asked as he made the mental connections.

Max might have been awake, but she was almost completely blind, and the doctors were still worried about the way her limbs were healing. They hadn't been able to get all the details, but they knew that much.

"Definitely not yet," Hopper said from where the man had been pretending not to be listening. "We need to have a long talk about your self-sacrificial tendencies."

Steve hadn't actually been thinking about right then, well at least not much.

"What Hop said," Robin agreed and pinned him down with a glare.

Clearly, he was still in so much trouble with his best friend. It wasn't even like he had done this one deliberately, well not until the last part anyway. Will had the audacity to give him a look, as if Will wouldn't have been thinking exactly the same thing he was if the kid had been in his place. He wasn't the only one with occasionally problematic instincts.

"Maybe," was El's informed opinion on the subject, "but Dad is right, not until you are stronger. You could hurt yourself and Max."

"I didn't mean right now," he protested, but nobody seemed to believe him.

"When you are stronger, we should also see if you can do other things too," El told him, and patted him on the leg.

And didn't that just fill him with trepidation.