Chapter Text
Bad dreams in the night / They told me I was going to lose the fight / Leave behind my wuthering, wuthering—
- Kate Bush / Wuthering Heights
g o d can’t save the king, but g o d can kill the king. don’t you want to become a G O D?
What?
you are thane of hawkins. the d e v i l speak true. let his blood spill upon your cheeks like the way the california sea once sprayed upon your face. the raven himself be hoarse to croak the final entrance of the k i n g.
King?
the k i n g that your fists lay upon bare. twice fallen by others hands; will you let him rise again? or will you t a k e the t h r o n e.
I know what I have to do.
Hawkins, Indiana / November 1984 / 20 Minutes After Saving the World
When the world didn’t end for a second time, Steve Harrington knew some things were going to be different.
He knew, for one, that he was going to have a killer headache for the next few days, because Billy Hargrove cracked a plate over his head and god damn it still hurts.
He also knew, on some deeper and instinctual level that he hadn’t quite acknowledged yet, that he might never move on from the events that occured on that breezy November night. He knew that he wasn’t going to be able to waltz on home, kick off his shoes and collapse into bed for a well-earned rest. He had a lot to think over, after all. He’ll probably think about Nancy Wheeler first (since if one thing wasn’t going to change, it was that Steve Harrington wasn’t fair in love but way too fair in war), and about how he's a pretty shitty boyfriend but Jonathan Byers will do damn better by her - it’s okay, Nance. It’s okay.
He’ll think about Billy Hargrove, and wonder how Billy will react to him next time they pass each other in the halls of school, or how they might fare at sports practice. Considering that Max-Not-Maxine-Never-Maxine Mayfield decided to seize Hargrove’s car, almost crashed the car several times and now Steve’s driving the thing back to the Byer’s place… yeah, there’s no chance in hell Hargrove is just going to forgive and fucking forget. Not even a nail-bat might be enough to make Billy ‘understand’ Max’s wishes for very long.
And Steve knew, on some much deeper subconscious level, that he was going to have nightmares - again. As if he hadn’t already been haunted by dreams of Barbara Holland’s echoing, ghostly cry for help in his backyard pool, and a grotesque creature screaming at him whilst a plethora of technicolor lights hung around the Byer’s residence blaze in his eyes. He’ll fall asleep to visions of mutant dog-like beasts prowling in the fog, and have his dreams haunted by sounds of children screaming whilst the tunnels burn and the demodogs feast on Steve’s broken promise to keep them safe.
He knew the kids will be alright though. Even though they’ve just crawled out of the sweeping expanse of eldritch tunnels that stretch through Hawkin’s crust (although now reduced to ash and decay, hopefully), and even though Steve and Dustin were almost mauled to death by a horde of alien rabid dogs ( it was a close call, such a close fucking call) , they were still the same annoying dipshits that they had been all fucking day. Whilst Steve remained stony-faced and silent as he drove them back to Mrs. Byer’s house, the kids in the back were raucous and rowdy. Mike kept insisting that Steve ought to hit the gas because he has to see El and make sure she’s okay; Lucas kept shooting Mike down, repeatedly phrasing: “we’ll get there when we get there” as if it was meant to make Mike feel any better. Meanwhile Max, wedged right in the middle of the boys with her arms folded and looking extremely disgruntled, was telling anyone who was listening that Mike Wheeler and Lucas Sinclair don’t know shit about girls.
Dustin Henderson, who delegated himself both shotgun and Steve’s caretaker, reached for the stereo. Steve slapped his hand away without even tearing his eyes away from the stretching road ahead.
“Leave it alone, Henderson.”
“Okay, jeez, sorry.”
Dustin fell into an awkward silence, and it didn’t take long for Steve to feel a twinge of guilt. His eyes remained firm on the road ahead, but he quickly muttered: “Sorry, man.”
“It’s okay.”
“I didn’t mean– I just…”
“I get it,” Dustin offered, with a slight nod and a short smile. “It’s been a tough night for you. It’s okay.”
Steve didn’t like the patronizing tone, but the reasonable part of him that was somehow still conscious knew Dustin was just trying to be nice. Steve opted to relapse into his concentrated silence.
The headlamps of the ‘borrowed’ car searched into the darkness ahead, catching the shadows of the forests that surrounded the small town. There wasn’t a glimpse of light anywhere else; sunset was hours ago, and fuck knows how late it must be now. Steve was probably more tired than he’d ever been in his life - even more in the morning after that party in his freshman year with the basketball team after he performed a successful half-court shot seconds before the clock went to zero, and even more beat a fucking demogorgon half to death in 1983. Yet his mind was fully alert, ready to swing over and clamber for his bat if he needed to go another round.
The Gate’s closed; it’s over. Calm the fuck down, Harrington, you’re paranoid.
The adrenaline is wearing off. He knew he could make it back to Mrs. Byer’s place, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get himself out of the car. Maybe he’ll just take a nap on her porch. After everything, she wouldn’t mind, right?
“You okay?” Dustin inquired; both of them have tuned out the argument in the rear, which has changed into an argument about Will potentially missing their next D&D session and doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon. “How’re you feeling, buddy?”
Somehow, despite the overwhelming fatigue, throbbing pain across half of his face and the temptation to strangle the kids in the back, Steve was able to crack a half-grin. “Am I still gonna be pretty once this all heals over?”
“‘Course you are,” Dustin replied, breaking out into a swift smile too; but it’s quick to fall back into one of concern. “Does it hurt much?”
“Ah, it’s fine. You don’t need worry about me.”
There’s a brief gap of silence, but it’s not awkward this time. Steve just focused on the road, hoping that the endless tarmac would come to a stop soon.
“You know why they call it ‘shotgun’?” Dustin piped up suddenly. “Sitting in the passenger seat, I mean?”
Steve shrugged. “I dunno, dude. I bet my ass that you do though.”
“Back in the Old West, people would ride in wagons, right? And in the front, there’s like a - a bench, and you can fit two people in front. You got the driver, of course, who mans the reins and the horses and keeps the wagon moving. And the passenger can sit beside him. But, you know - it’s the Old West. There’s bandits and robbers and stuff. So whilst the driver - y’know, drives… the passenger sits next to him with a shotgun and protects the wagon. He protects the cargo, and protects the driver. He’s his bodyguard, and drives off anyone who’s gonna stop him.”
“That makes sense,” Steve replied. “But if this is a ploy for me to get you a shotgun or something, then you got another thing–”
“My point is,” Dustin interjected, as the lights of the Byer’s house suddenly come into view around the dusky corner, “I might not have a shotgun, but I still want to keep you safe, you know? The way you’ve done for us.”
The car parked up in front of the house, and the kids in the back immediately scrambled out. Mike was out first, of course, rushing towards the house and barging through the front door like he was raiding the place. Lucas ran in behind, and Max brought up the rear with a huff. None of them closed the doors, but Steve didn’t even bother to scold them. For the first time since he got into the car, he wasn’t looking straight ahead. He sure as hell wasn’t quite meeting Dustin’s eyes yet though.
“Steve?” Dustin implored; his voice was low and congested with worry, enough to make Steve feel a brief sweep of childish annoyance. Why does Dustin have to keep worrying about him? What’s this kid’s deal? So what - they hang out for a day, and now Dustin’s convinced they’re best friends or something?
In the same fell swoop, Steve realised that - considering everything that’s happened recently, and the fact that his former ‘best friend’ Tommy H never looked at him this way, not fucking once - Dustin is the closest to being a genuine ‘best friend’ that Steve might’ve had in all his life.
“I promised Nance I’d keep you safe,” Steve murmured; to his fresh horror, his voice was hoarse and trembling like he was holding back the fear of unconfessed peril. “And I… I don’t know if I did.”
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / 4 Months After Saving the World
Steve’s eyes were usually hazel; a rich, warm brown with lashings of yellow and green. Under the reflection of the afternoon sunlight, they shine like burnished copper. But tonight, his eyes are tinted with traces of scarlet. The whites of his sclera are scarred with red and pink veins; his cheeks are flushed but the rest of his face is shadowed in a monotony of a clammy gray. He doesn’t show any signs of distress; he lies there on his bed, one arm swung underneath his head, and gazes at the same spot at the ceiling as if something might change.
In concept, the act of going to sleep was meant to provide a state of non-existence; a state of being where he was temporarily liberated from his daily troubles. But for the past few weeks, it seemed that going to bed only encouraged the churning nausea of anxiety in his stomach, the throbbing headaches and the constant foreboding that encompassed his chest.
He’s lying in bed, surrounded by an abundance of blankets and pillows that he stole from the cupboard under the stairs, staring up and watching the shadows on his wall twist and churn. Everything’s the same; nothing’s changed in his bedroom. He’s still got the closet door half-open, some old and used clothes draped over his chair, an ashtray stained with the cinders of the cigarettes he’s not allowed to smoke inside of his room, and the portable radio that The Party gifted him as a sort of ‘thanks for making sure we didn’t get killed last fall’. It’s all the same, yet he can’t shake off the feeling that he’s an alien within his own home. He’s not the same Harrington that he was a year and a half ago.
Steve releases a rattled sigh, as melodramatic as he can get without internally cringing. In his mind’s eye, he pictures a number three on a scoreboard - the kind of scoreboard that marked every shot Steve took when he still played basketball - being flipped over and replaced with a big, fat, round zero . Three day streak of not waking up from a nightmare shouting or crying or retching… boom, gone.
As Max would put it: bummer, dude, you lost your high score!
Wow. Even in his head, she’s less than empathetic.
Steve initially tried to start the trend with a simple How Many Days It’s Been Since I Had A Nightmare , but the zero on the scoreboard remained stagnant for an entire fortnight. It was unrelenting; he woke up every night with tears threatening to conjure, with one of the kid’s names caught in his throat, or instead coughing out his lungs as though spores were still clinging to his lungs.
So he switched it up, and tried to make it easier for himself: How Many Days It’s Been Since I Had A Nightmare About What Happened Last Fall. His record had been two, but he considered it a fluke: the night before he dreamt of his father full of rage and his mother telling Steve to go back to his room, and he woke up in his own fit of fury. The night before that, Steve didn’t sleep at all; instead, he found Jonathan Byers on a whim and shared three smokes and a joint with him in Fair Mart’s parking lot.
So he changed it up again on New Year’s Eve. (At 12:01am specifically, because he’d seen Nancy Wheeler kissing Jonathan Byers at 12:00am and Steve decided something needed to be done). How Many Days It’s Been Since I Had A Nightmare And Haven’t Woken Up Screaming/Shouting/Crying etc.
Three day streak broken. You’re out, Harrington! And he’d hoped an abnormally early night might’ve made some difference.
This time around, it was the tunnels. If it wasn’t the foggy junkyard, it was the tunnels. Those goddamn awful fucking tunnels that stretched and wrapped underneath Hawkin’s soil, with the broad tentacles coiling across the walls like rattlesnakes, and the spores that hovered in the air like an inbetween of snowflakes and ash. And the fucking smell, the smell that a tightly wound bandana couldn’t suppress. A horrific amalgamation of damp soil and thick chemicals and death and decay - even just thinking about it made Steve want to scramble for the nearest toilet and upheave the contents of his stomach. And then there were the dogs… where does he even start with the demodogs? When Steve closes his eyes in the dark, he can see those fucking things emerging from the fog or charging down the tunnels - their faces split open, emitting inhuman guttural shrieks and growls –
And the kids are screaming at him, Dustin is screaming – why didn’t he pull Dustin up the rope? Why did he freeze? They could have made it, Dustin could have made it — they’re coming, they’re coming and Steve can’t move — they’re on top of Dustin, tearing into him whilst he screams for help whilst Steve just fucking watches —
Steve is up and out of bed before his brain even registers that he’s on the move, pulling his jeans on and donning his jacket. He moves in a thick haze as he tries to drag his mind out of the past – no, not the past, Dustin didn’t die – and before he knows it, he’s stepped out his door and onto the front porch. The automatic lights flicker to life, and his first instinct is to eye the tungsten bulb with unnatural vigilance.
The rain sobers up his fatigue swiftly; it’s March, and it hasn’t stopped raining in three days. A rushing rumbling of rainfall provides a quiet sense of consistency that’s almost therapeutic, and draws the numbing panic and anxiety out of his lungs. There’s a sense of relief as he feels the raindrops relentlessly downpouring atop of his head, soaking into his tousled brown hair.
Relief is addicting. But it’s never enough.
Steve strides towards his car, but he doesn’t go for the driver’s side; for once, he’s not interested in cruising around in his BMW. (Who's left to impress, anyway?) Steve aims for the trunk instead, cracking it open and instantly spotting his prize: the bat with nails hammered in, the one that’s split open a Demogorgon’s face and smashed open a couple more Demodogs alongside it.
(“You’re practically synonymous with that bat now,” Dustin quipped as he spotted it wedged inside Steve’s trunk.
“Practically what now?” Steve questioned, slapping Dustin’s hand away as the younger boy tried to make a grab for it. No way was he letting him get ahold of it. Last time one of the little shits had it, Max had almost crushed Billy Hargrove’s dick.
Dustin rolled his eyes and idly stepped away, circling around towards the passenger’s side of the car. “ Synonymous. Y’know - being so closely associated with one thing, that mentioning one thing suggests the other in your mind? Like Han Solo and Chewbacca, or Batman and Robin?”
“Oh. Oh , so like… we’re one and the same?”
“... I mean, you’re on the right track, at least? ” )
“Synonymous,” Steve tries, furrowing his brow and swilling the word on his tongue, as if he’s putting it on a trial for a spot in his vocabulary. Steve and His Nail Bat; that’s all he needs to protect himself from anything that threatens him or anybody he gives a shit about. He just needs a bat and a little bit of bravado.
“Damn straight, Henderson,” Steve decides, and slams the trunk shut.
The rain is still thundering and pounding the streets as Steve wanders aimlessly, strolling down the center of the road with his bat slung over his shoulder. There’s something oddly freeing about just walking down the middle of the road, sidewalks disregarded. Maybe it’s that idea that the road wasn’t meant for him to walk, but he’s doing it anyway. There’s always a lingering sense of paranoia in the back of his head, expecting a car to swing around the corner and catch him, but it’s not difficult to forget about that thought.
Instead, he can just enjoy this solitude for now: wandering around in the dark, illuminated by the streetlights above and the warmth of the other wealthy abodes that surround House Harrington. The reasonable part of him knows that he probably looks like a fucking freak just walking out in a downpour with a nail bat at 6 in the evening, but he can’t bring himself to really worry about that anymore. His neighbors were probably glued to their televisions or eating dinner to busy themselves with parting the shades and wondering why Richard Harrington’s son is out in the rain with a weapon that would class as a potential felony. Although Steve gave up caring about their opinions in the fall of 1984.
The district Steve lives in is much further away from the majority of the kids, with exception from Will who lives just on the other side of the woods. Most of The Dipshits - or ‘The Party’ as Dustin insists on calling it, and by association everyone who ‘Knows ’ - live in a cul-de-sac hell only houses away from each other. Identical two-storey houses built on ‘four inch minimum’ lawns, with their moms balancing checks and dads juggling credit cards – good old America and their monotonous streets, they never change. Not that he couldn’t speak about white suburbia, with the Harrington palace and timer lights and automatic sprinklers and heated swimming pool. It was the same bullshit, the same kind of bullshit Nancy preached about when they broke up. Just a different class.
Bullshit. All bullshit. Yeah, he can totally see what Nancy means.
“Oh yeah, I’m sure everyone’s real sorry for you, Harrington,” Steve bitterly berates himself with a heavy scowl. “Must be so hard for a rich kid like—”
“Harrington!”
Steve skids to a halt and curses under his breath as some water from a puddle soaks through his shoes and into his socks. Shaking his foot limply as though the water might just pour out, he spots the source that had called out his name - and his heart instantly drops.
It’s Jim Hopper. Sat in his police car that’s parked up on the other side of the road, hat on, a tired scowl that’s almost always permanently drawn into his expression and the window rolled down halfway. Steve copies the frown on the Chief, and a sense of nauseous anxiety swells within his stomach. If Chief Jim Hopper is calling for Steve, then that means one of two things: either Steve was about to be carted off to the station for a misdemeanor or felony that he may or may not have committed, or Something’s Happened. With a big fucking capital ‘S’ for Something. Only one thing links Steve Harrington and Chief Jim Hopper, and it’s the same thing that’s been haunting him since 1983.
Monsters in the fog. Alternate dimensions. A government that swears it can make you disappear. Tunnels.
“What’re you doing in this rain, kid?” Hopper calls out.
Steve shrugs nonchalantly at Hopper, childishly hoping that Hopper will just ask him to move along or go home or some other cop dismissal. But he doesn’t; instead, Hopper beckons with one finger for Steve to come toward the car window.
Okay - trouble, then. Steve approaches, swinging the bat idly by his leg, and stops just in front of the window. Hopper rolls the window down completely, leaning out slightly but not enough to get caught in the downpour.
“Why do you have that bat?” Hopper asked, cocking a bushy eyebrow and eyeing it suspiciously.
Steve shrugged again. “Protection.”
“Against what?”
Steve shrugged a third time and stayed silent. Uncharacteristic of him - he’d usually have a good quip to make Hopper laugh or make him annoyed, but Steve’s just tired. He’s not in the mood for jokes or witticism right now. He just wants to be left alone to wander around as if he’s patrolling the streets as part of a neighborhood watch scheme. Yet, surprisingly, Hopper doesn’t lecture him; instead, he jerks his thumb towards the passenger seat and says: “In. Need to talk.”
Okay… if the Chief wants Steve to ride shotgun, then it probably means he’s not being arrested or anything. Unfortunately, the second option of a potential End of the World Part-Three situation isn’t much of a superior alternative.
The first thing Steve says as he wedges into the passenger seat and slams the door shut is: “Are the kids alright?”
Hopper twitches and furrows his brow, confused for a moment, then suddenly seems to come to an understanding. Steve can see the lightning bolt of realization in Hopper’s pupils - the reason why Steve Harrington is walking around in the thundering rain in the dark wielding a baseball bat with nails is the same reason why Steve’s first instinct upon seeing Chief Hopper is to ask if the kids are okay. Protection.
“They’re fine, they’re safe,” Hopper quickly states. “Nothing’s happened like that.”
A little pressure comes off Steve’s shoulders - just a little, but it feels like the equivalent of Atlas shrugging off the weight of the world. Steve used to be good at self-assurance, but only when it came to vanity and basketball and how good he was with hitting it off with the ladies. He’s certainly not good when it comes to assuring himself that everything is fine, he’s safe, it’s going to be alright. But when it comes out of someone else’s mouth - most of all Chief Hopper, who is protective but not a liar - then Steve knows it’s fine.
“‘Kay,” Steve just replies, not looking Hopper in the face and instead wedging the bat between his spread-open legs. The nails scrape at the edge of his jeans, only adding to the ruggedness of the denim.
“You don’t need to carry that everywhere around with you,” Hopper continues, giving a nod towards the bat. “It’s over. You know that.”
“It’s for protection,” Steve reiterates, as if it’s meant to smooth things over. “I can’t shoot, and I can’t talk my way out of being eaten by those dog things or - or being disappeared by the government or whatever. I get the pen is mightier than the sword and all that… but a bat’s been pretty effective so far.”
It’s a good one, but Steve’s tone is dry and humorless, and neither of them laugh. Steve just keeps slowly rotating the bat between his legs, watching the points of the nails graze against the hem of his trousers. He doesn’t look up at Hopper, but he can feel the older man’s gaze pressing on him.
“Could you do a favor for me tonight?” Hopper asks, and quickly adds as an afterthought: “Might take up your whole evening though.”
“Sure.”
Steve’s fallen quiet again, and it’s uncharacteristic of him - even Hopper knows that, because Steve usually doesn’t know when to shut up - but Steve’s nightmares just leaves him quiet and drained. Hopper’s cautious gaze lingers for a moment.
Please don’t ask if I’m alright, please, I don’t want to have to keep lying about it.
He doesn’t. Instead, Hopper leans towards the back of the police car and brings out a grocery bag. It’s filled to the brim with general goods, most of which are canned products with long expiry dates - peas in a can, rice and pasta, cereal, crackers… as well as frozen Eggo waffles, lots of them.
“Guess your diet didn’t go too well, huh, Chief?” Steve quips dryly as Hopper drops the bag on Steve’s lap. All of Steve’s humor feels unnaturally forced tonight, like he’s someone else trying to perform as Steve Harrington and only doing a half-baked attempt.
The corners of Hopper’s mouth twitch. “You know where my cabin is, kid?”
“Oh, you mean the cabin where you’ve been secretly harboring a psychic teenager, who a quarter of Hawkins thinks is a Russian weapon designed for assassination?” Steve replies with a snarky tone. He rectifies himself, speaking much more polite afterward: “Can’t say I do. Where is it? You want me to drop this all off for you?”
Hopper apparently ignores Steve’s sarcasm, although there’s a subtle twitch in his eye that Steve doesn’t miss. “There’s a big oak tree on Denfield - swing right and you’ll hit a dead-end. Five-minute walk from there.” Hopper states and Steve makes a mental note - but Hopper pauses, as if he’s cautious to ask something. Steve raises an eyebrow; what was the fuss about? “I’m gonna be working real late tonight, I think… but El is gonna be on her own, so–”
“Ah,” Steve declares. “Babysitting duty. Gotcha.” He pauses, and he can still tell that Hopper is wary, so he quickly throws in another joke to ease the Chief’s nerves. “Maybe I should start charging for my services.”
“I’m asking you to do this because I think you’re responsible, and dependable,” Hopper says, twisting in his seat to really look at Steve. He’s got that serious look on, the kind of expression where things are really crucial - similar to the one he wears when he tells the kids to stay put when the stakes turn into a no-joke, life-and-death matter, or a way to really articulate how much deep shit you’re in if you’ve royally fucked-up. “And I wouldn’t call even half the men on the force that, kid, which means I’m trusting you with this.”
“I’ve taken care of the kids loads before, don’t sweat it,” Steve begins, but Hopper’s shaking his head.
“This is different, this is - you can’t tell anybody what you’re doing tonight. El is at far greater risk than you or your family would be if you talked–”
“I’m not gonna to say anything to–”
“ Listen to me, Harrington - nobody can know she’s there, you cannot tell anybody what you’re doing tonight–”
“I haven’t got anybody to talk to who doesn’t know about her anyways, man!”
The conversation stops for a moment, grinding to a shuddering halt as Hopper blinks and Steve curses himself for not keeping his mouth shut. He hadn’t admitted that fact, not even to himself, but saying it aloud only put into perspective the sheer honesty of it. Nobody really talks to ‘King Steve’ anymore, especially not since he and Tommy H and Carol stopped hanging out. (Because were ‘friends’ really friends if they wouldn’t buy him a can of Coke and some aspirin without making him pay them back? It was only a dollar fucking twenty.).
And especially not since the whole school found out that Billy Hargrove kicked Steve Harrington’s ass in a fight. Now that everyone knew Steve Harrington wasn’t tough shit after all, just all bark and no bite – if they really knew the truth, that he was even weaker than they chalked him up to be–
“I didn’t see her,” Steve mutters, avoiding eye contact. “Didn’t do anything tonight. I-I was at home listening to Bon Jovi and pretending to study.”
Hopper seems satisfied - or, at least, close enough to it. “Take a flashlight; there’s a tripwire going around the perimeter, you’ll want to watch out for it. And you knock on the door like this–” He raps his knuckles on the wheel, one-two – one… one-two-three. “--that’s the password, so she knows that it’s me. Or someone… someone safe.”
Steve mimics the knock on the dashboard (one-two – one… one-two-three) and nods in affirmation.
“And just so you know,” Hopper continues, with a slight edge to his voice. “El’s can be… a little, er…”
“Different,” Steve offers, which is probably the most delicate way you could describe a somewhat socially underdeveloped teenager with telekinetic powers.
“Wary,” Hopper provides. “When it comes to people knocking, I mean. Just say that I sent you, and that you got Eggos, and she’ll open up. Make sure she eats dinner before dessert though, including her vegetables. TV off at 8, bed by 9. You can, y’know - stick around until I get back, watch TV. Should be some beer in the fridge. You’re eighteen now, right?”
“Do I have to worry about any nightmares?”
The question slips out before Steve stops himself, but he’s lucky - it’s framed in a casual way of just genuine paternal concern, and Hopper doesn’t need to question why he really would ask that. Steve Harrington was hoping he wasn’t the only one having nightmares.
Hopper shifts uncomfortably for a moment, and he loses eye-contact on Steve. “Uh… yeah. Yeah, she… her powers won’t… if it’s bad, she’s allowed an extra Eggo, it’s a… a kind of rule.”
“Dinner before dessert, eat your veggies, bed by 9. Extra waffle if the nightmares are bad.” Maybe he should start warming up desserts whenever he has nightmares - or would that just actively encourage nightmares to happen? “No problem-o, Chief-o.”
“You don’t have to do this if you—”
“My schedule is pretty clear right now,” Steve says with a half-grin, though it’s not even close to genuine right now. “I really haven’t got anything better to do. Catch you later.”
His hand is on the door handle, ready to slip out, and the dreaded question finally comes out from Hopper.
“Hey - you sure you’re doing alright, kid?”
Steve pauses for a moment. He doesn’t know why Hopper bothered asking, because he knows Steve will say ‘fine’ regardless. Courtesy, probably. But for a moment he’s tempted to spill - to tell Hopper that tonight he dreamt about those fucking tunnels, and that the Demodogs that ran past didn’t in his dream, that they leapt on to Dustin first and tore into his guts whilst the kids screamed and wailed above him whilst another Demodog barreled towards him—
“I’m fine, Chief,” Steve says. In the reflection of the window, he can see Hopper has finally taken off his hat.
He opens the door and he’s greeted by the thundering rain. It’s okay, his house is only a 15-minute walk and he’ll dry off properly at the cabin. He leans out to leave, but Hopper taps him on the shoulder. Glancing back, he can’t help cock a little grin as he sees a $20 bill wedged between Chief Hopper’s forefinger and thumb.
“You’re right,” Hopper says, smiling - genuinely smiling, a small half-cocked smirk of amusement and a little bit of fondness. “You should start charging us.”
*
The cabin is sequestered in the middle of the woods, surrounded by greens and yellows of trees that rustle ominously above his head under the twilight. It’s beaten and weathered, battered by the elements and close to being overwhelmed by the wild, untamed nature that thrived around it. It seemed like a good storm might sweep the whole thing away. Yet there is something homely about it too. That aesthetic of being untidy contributed to the knowledge that the entire house was used, that every floorboard and every bit of foundation contributed into making this place a ‘home’. Much unlike Steve Harrington’s home, where his mansion just feels too empty and large to contain a largely independent and mostly self-sufficient teenager.
Stopping at the door, Steve puts the bag of groceries down by his feet and pauses. Hopefully he gets this right - it’s one thing for property owners to defend their land with shotguns and rifles, but another to defend it with telekinetic powers that could snap your neck with a simple twitch of the head.
“Don’t be paranoid, Harrington,” he growls under his breath, and raps on the door with his knuckles.
One-two – one… one-two-three.
He pauses. Waits. No response.
“El?” He tries cautiously, a hint of caution in his voice. “Hey, it’s - it’s Steve. Steve Harrington? Uh… I was at Mrs. Byer’s place last fall?” He pauses, expecting a response, but there’s nothing. “I was the one with the nail bat and the good looking hair?”
Nothing, still. Maybe she snuck out. Wait, there’s something else he could try—
“Uh, the Chief said that you might like these Eggo waffles that I brought for you…?”
There’s a light pattering of footsteps, the sounds of several chains being undone, and the wooden door creaks open, barely inviting Steve into a glimpse of the threshold within.
Eleven is standing there, the door only a few inches wide, and staring up at him with an air of confusion and wariness. The first time Steve had seen her, she was rocking some punk with slicked-back hair and heavy eye-makeup. Now clearly back under the direction of attire by Chief Jim Hopper, she was in overalls with a faded plaid shirt underneath. Her hair had grown out way past her ears, a halfway between straight and curly. The new look is cute, to be fair. Countryside cute, the kind you might associate with farmer’s daughters that look after horses or some other crap.
What’s not cute is the way she’s staring at him, with an intense and vigilant glower, and Steve reminds himself that she could just snap his neck right now, close the door and go back to watching cartoons if she even just felt like it. Not exactly a settling notion, considering he has to babysit this kid for the next few hours.
“You’re not Hop,” Eleven states clearly.
Steve blinks, caught off-guard, and stumbles over his words. “Uh - no. No, I’m not.”
“You’re… Steve.”
“Steve Harrington,” he replies stupidly, and he’s suddenly self-conscious of the fact that he had never interacted with Eleven before. He’d seen her briefly after she flung a Demodog through Joyce Byers front window, but they hadn’t exactly had time for conversation. He understands that her social development was more than just a ‘little behind’ - but she’s not nerdy Dustin, or stubborn Lucas, or jerk-face Mike, or brash Max. She’s probably a whole lot worse, and for a whole bunch of different reasons.
“I, er… the Chief sent me,” he says, and picks up the bag of groceries as though it were a peace offering to apologize for his intrusion. “He’s… not gonna be home ‘til late, so he sent me to - you know, make sure you’re taken care of.”
“Okay,” Eleven remarks, apparently not very impressed.
“I have Eggos,” he adds hopefully, as if that might make some difference to his unexpected - and possibly unwelcome - social call.
They stand there staring at each other for a moment - Eleven just gazing, still wary, and Steve bouncing on his heels and wishing he’d asked Hopper for $10 extra. And here he thought Dustin Henderson was a pain in the ass to manage.
“Can I come in?” Steve finally asks, unable to bear any more staring and awkward silence.
Eleven blinks, then pulls the door open wider and walks back into the house.
Great. This was going well.
The inside is at least cozier than the exterior. Something of a home is being made here. There’s a thick layer of dust hovering constantly in the air, and it mildly reminds Steve of the fucking tunnels - but it doesn’t smell terrifying. It smells like his house after his mother has just finished vacuuming. The low orange lights are pleasant against his fatigue, and the TV is running on nothing but static—
Oh, that’s not creepy at all.
“Is your TV busted or something?” Steve asks with an edge of apprehension, moving into the kitchen and dumping the bag of groceries on the table. There’s a plate of half-eaten Eggos already there, and Steve has a sneaking suspicion that Eleven might not have been allowed to eat that. Not that he was going to narc, anyway.
Eleven, who has apparently resumed her position of sitting cross-legged in front of the television, shakes her head. “I’m watching.”
Oh yeah. Really, really not creepy. Not at all. Steve was pretty sure he’d seen something like this when he watched Poltergeist. Didn’t that film end with the whole house exploding or something? Maybe he should preemptively throw the TV out now whilst he still has the chance.
“They’ve got better shows on than TV static, I promise,” Steve nervously continues as he unpacks the grocery back. “I can take a look, usually if you just whack it really hard–”
“Not the TV,” Eleven states, and picks up a piece of cloth. “Watching people.”
“Oh,” Steve says, finally clicking onto what she’s saying - kind of, probably, maybe? “ Oh, right, I remember Nance— uh, somebody telling me. You can, like… track people, right? That’s how you found Will when he…?”
Eleven nods, and wraps the blindfold around her eyes. Steve watches for a little bit, out of mingled trepidation and curiosity, but she’s completely still and disregarding Steve as if he’s not there.
“Are you tracking Russians?” Steve asks, and nearly smacks himself in the forehead for asking such a stupid question.
Eleven jerks her shoulders, and doesn’t reply. Steve gets the feeling that he might’ve overstepped, so he leaves Eleven to it as he unpacks the groceries - slowly, because he really doesn’t want to finish up and interrupt whatever Eleven is doing. He slowly makes his way around the kitchen, putting things away and readjusting other items and moving things around - he needs something to do. He gets the feeling that he’s already left a bad impression on Eleven; it’s going to be doubly hard to convince her to eat her greens and not feast on frozen waffles.
“I watched you once.”
Steve’s hand slips on a tub of ice-cream and it clatters onto the floor, leaving a thin wet patch on the wood. Holding back a swear word behind his teeth, Steve whips his head around towards Eleven. Her blindfold is still on, she’s facing the television, but it’s clear as daylight that she’s talking to him .
“Me?” Steve asks, and stupidly adds: “Why me?”
“I watched everyone,” Eleven replies quietly. “Everyone who was there. At Will’s home.”
(Dustin talked about found family once with him, when Steve had reluctantly decided to sit-in on a Dungeons & Dragons session at the Wheeler house. Steve pretended like he didn’t really want to be there, but he didn’t actually mind the company. The little shits were loud and obnoxious, but they were also passionate and full of heart. Not that Steve was ever going to say that to their dumb, prideful faces.
Steve had been sitting on the couch ranting about his stupid Dad, how they just had another argument for the third time that week and he just wishes that his family gave a shit for once - gave a shit about Steve , not his grades or his job prospects—
“I care about you,” Dustin said, as if pointing out the obvious.
“Sure you do,” Steve shrugged, not unkindly. “But we’re not–”
“ Blood is thicker than water is a bunch of bull,” Dustin stated firmly, folding his arms and apparently trying to look much more mature than his round, youthful face appeared - and it kind of worked, too, because he suddenly didn’t seem quite the same as the little pipsqueak that he was a couple of months ago. “It’s all about found family, and that’s what we are - right? Found family.”
“So what - does that make us brothers?” Steve snorted. “If that’s the case, I’m just gonna preemptively disown you right now–”
He did earn that smack with the pillow behind his ear, but both he and Dustin were grinning).
“Well, uh…” Steve mutters, scratching the back of his hair as he awkwardly glances from the back of Eleven’s head into the vague reflection against the static of the television. “What did you… what did you see? What was I doing?”
He expects a pretty off-handed response - that he was just in bed asleep, or playing, studying at school, or just wandering around Hawkins like he does every now and then after a nightmare. Just existing in the weird lapse of a present he was scraping by in.
Instead, Eleven turns pitifully sad and almost angry, and replies with a thick gesture of bitterness in her voice: “A… A man was hurting you.”
The first image to come into his mind is Billy Hargrove, kneeling over him and beating him senseless, beating him until his body and mind became nothing but blood and disorientation, until his world was spinning and vague, and all he could think of was that he can’t let them get the kids—
But Billy hasn’t touched him since then. He’s been subject to his ribbing and taunting, sure - but he’s not in Steve’s face yet.
Someone else has though—
“Who was he? Why did he hurt you?” Eleven asks. She’s pulled off the blindfold, still remaining cross-legged on the floor, and stares at Steve with a doe-eyed mixture wavering between vague curiosity and heedful concern. Her innocent question puts him off for some reason. Even though the answer is there, it remains jammed in his throat. Burning, pounding away like an irregular pulse. The inside of his mouth feels dry, and Steve turns away from her do-eyed and innocuous face to keep putting away Hopper’s shopping.
“It was just some asshole,” Steve replies with a shrug, reaching up to shove some tins into the cupboard. He figures that if he’s busy doing other things, the conversation feels less serious, like it’s not a big deal. “World’s full of ‘em, and Hawkins is no different. It was just… just a grade-A asshole, you know?”
“A mouth-breather,” Eleven states with a scowl.
An involuntary snort puffs out from Steve, and he breaks into a smirk. “ Mouth-breather? Wow. I think Carter was in office when that phrase was going around. Who taught you that one? Wheeler, right?”
“What… What’s wrong with mouth-breather?” Eleven questions.
“What’s wrong with mouth-breather?” Steve snorts again and shakes his head, reaching up to put some more goods on the highest shelf of the cupboard. “It’s old, it’s not cool anymore. Don’t take ‘cool’ lessons from Mike Wheeler, or any of the twerps.” He pauses, thinking for a second. “On second thoughts, Max isn’t half-bad.”
“Can I say… grade-A asshole? Is that… cool? ”
Ah, shit. “Nope, definitely not, and don’t use that kind of language around Hop, alright?” Steve quickly reprimands, turning around. “He’d whip my hide if he—”
Steve almost jumps out of his skin. Eleven’s not in front of the television anymore; she’s moved closer, apparently having silently approached Steve whilst his back was turned to her. There’s tears in Eleven’s eyes, turning her soft brown eyes glassy and flooded with emotion. For the first time, Steve isn’t wary or cautious around her; instead, he feels a pang of sorrow towards her. There’s a look of understanding around her, like somehow she knows…
“Who hurt you, Steve? Nobody hurts my friends,” El growls dramatically, and she gently holds Steve’s wrist. “And friends don’t lie.”
“I’m not lying,” Steve replies irritably, but doesn’t pull away. It’s true, he’s not really lying, but—
“Lie of omission is still lying,” El interjects.
Steve scowls for a moment. Okay, she definitely picked that one up from somebody else. It’s his guess as to who. It sounds like a Hopper thing, but it was Wheeler who apparently started this trend of ‘friends don’t lie’, thus making Steve’s habitual lies of omission being more difficult to continue without feeling some twinges of guilt.
Instead, he crouches down a little in front of El - just enough to make eye-level, and not to seem patronizing - and clasps a firm but gentle hand onto her shoulder. Brown eyes gaze back into hazel.
“Look - appreciate your concern, kiddo, but…” He swallows, trying to read behind her confused and still adorably innocent expression. “This is just… it’s not something I wanna talk about. Maybe another time. Kapeesh?”
El’s brow furrowed, and she tilted her head like a curious owl. “Ka-Kapeesh?”
Steve groans and resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “God, Wheeler really taught you nothing . Kapeesh is like, you know… like, you understand what I’m saying.”
“I understand.”
“Okay.” Satisfied, Steve goes to stand. “Good, then–”
“No,” El says, shaking her head, and tugs on his wrist to drag his attention back to her. “I understand ‘kapeesh’. But I don’t understand why you won’t tell me.”
Damn it. Why was she so insistent on knowing the truth? He turns up at the cabin out of the blue with Eggos, and suddenly they’re just ‘friends’? Sure, they’d sort of met and helped in their own ways to save Hawkins from being Mind Flamer chowder (or whatever that goddamn monster thing was called), but it didn’t make any sense why she cared. He was just the babysitter, and he wasn’t even her babysitter until about 10 minutes ago. She didn’t know him from Adam. Or was Eleven just someone who got attached too quickly? Sort of the way he hooked onto Nancy Wheeler too quickly (and screwed that relationship up)?
“‘Kay, how ‘bout this,” Steve says cautiously. “If you eat your dinner and all your greens tonight… then maybe I’ll tell you all about it. Later. Fair deal?”
Ha. Little does she know, there’s one important fact that Steve’s been able to pick up from hanging out with Dustin Henderson and the rest of his gang of losers for too long: middle schoolers have a shitty attention-span and short-term memory loss. He’s counting on Eleven forgetting this bargain.
El folds her arms impassively and taps her foot, twitching her nose. Steve’s seen that look before; she’s absolutely replicated it from Chief Hopper, and she wears it just as well. “It’s a… compromise. Meeting halfway.”
“Sure, we’re making a compromise,” Steve shrugs, and sticks out a hand to make the deal. El hesitates, reaches out – and Steve pulls his hand back, poking the tip of his nose, waving his fingers and mimicking the sound of a fart. Even that’s enough to make El crack, and her displeased scowl twists into an absolutely endearing grin. It’s cute enough to make her cranky attitude thus far all worth it.
The pair collaborate to make dinner, and Steve starts to learn the habits of Chief Hopper as he’s living in the cabin. Much like Joyce Byers (as Steve has gradually come to learn over the course of half a year and a Christmas Eve), Hopper apparently wasn’t exactly a Martha Stewart when it came to the culinary arts. In the year and a quarter that El had been living in the cabin, Hopper’s dinners were usually TV dinners or ‘twenty minutes in the oven’ kind of meals. Steve gets it; he’s a cop working in a so-called quiet small town, he gets home and he’s tired. Still, it couldn’t hurt to cook up a homemade curry or something every now and then?
Steve and El spent the evening under the orange lamplight as he taught her how to make a real meal. Maybe with enough practice, the Chief wouldn’t have to cook all the time and El could treat her Dad to some meals. It worked on Steve’s Dad, after all.
(Kind of.
Once, maybe.
Okay, it hadn’t exactly gone off perfectly. His desperate plea for his father’s attention at age thirteen, in the rare instance that Richard Harrington had actually been around Hawkins, had resulted in Steve telling his nanny to take the rest of the day off and he attempted to create a cacio e pepe. It wasn’t half-bad really: nothing as good as the nanny made, but it at least had flavor. In the end, his parents had at least sat down for a family meal and his Dad said the meal ‘fine’ when Steve prompted for his Dad’s opinion.
After that, the nanny in question ‘retired’ six months later, and his parents missed Christmas Day for the first time that year).
“Hey, gremlin, get your hand out the food,” Steve says as El reaches into the pot of pasta he’s stirring together. “Don’t want your dirty paws in my food, you’ll poison it. Anyway, it’s almost done.”
“I washed my hands,” El pouts. “I’m hungry. Can I have just a little–?”
“No! You can either eat, or you can eat well - all it costs is a little patience.”
“No patience. Only food.”
“Go set the table, you cretin,” Steve grins, pausing to ruffle her head of curls to show no ill-intention. El grins back, teeth displayed in full, and dashed off.
After setting aside a couple helpings for Hopper for when he’d arrive home, and Steve ducking around some flying forks and knives, the pair finally start to demolish their way through the chicken alfredo - or at least El does, whilst Steve hovers between polite consumption and stirring his food nervously whilst his mind occasionally flickers back to his bad dreams. At the very least, El seems extremely impressed with his cooking, considering the way she was wolfing it down… or maybe she was just rushing it so she could have her Eggos as quickly as possible.
“Hey, you’re not being timed on that, y’know,” Steve says, cocking an eyebrow as El accidently releases a particularly loud slurp of the spaghetti. “I said hey, slow down or you’ll choke.”
“Sorry,” El said, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. “This is good.”
“Yeah? Better than the Chief?”
El hesitates, apparently mulling over her moral stance on this question. Steve gets it: The Party tends to have some unspoken rule about saying genuinely unkind things, but on the other hand: ‘friends don’t lie’.
El finally settles with: “You’re a good cook.”
Steve grins, really and genuinely grins, and tucks into his meal with greater gusto than prior. “Well, I’ve had enough time to practice. My, er - my folks don’t really cook, on account of them not being around to do so. Eventually after enough frozen meals and TV dinners, I started to figure that cooking is a decent hobby to kill time.”
“You like it?” El asks, cleaning off her plate. “Cooking. It’s fun?”
“Yeah, it’s fun. Maybe I should enroll you into the Harrington Cooking Programme for Extremely Annoying Kids. Hey - don’t lick the plate, use some bread to mop up your sauce! Jesus, you’re worse than Dustin.”
After dinner, El shows Steve the extent of her own culinary skills by introducing him to a Triple-Decker Eggo Extravaganza, complete with whipped cream and jelly beans (“It’s only 8000 calories,” El remarks, and Steve is dead certain she stole that ‘excuse’ from Hopper). It’s delicious, admittedly, but also puts into perspective the reason why Chief Hopper’s diet plans have failed so often.
The television goes on afterwards, with Steve agreeing to half an hour of cartoons before she’s put to bed - but only fifteen minutes in, her attention wanes.
“Steve?”
“Yep, that’s me.”
“You said you would tell me about that man. Who hurt you.”
Steve, who’s reclined on Hopper’s extremely comfortable chair and enjoying a can of beer, scowls and averts eye-contact. Damn, his fool-proof plan of distracting El enough to make her forget didn’t work out in the end. She’s wiser than the other dweebs.
The young girl turns, attempts to force eye-contact with him and opens her mouth to speak.
“Friends don’t–”
“I’m not trying to lie to you,” Steve insists softly. His gaze doesn’t meet hers. “It’s just… hard to talk about it.”
El falls silent, struggling with herself; Steve wonders if she’s suddenly wildly uncomfortable, but then realizes she was just trying to think up a question to coax the truth out of him when she says: “Was it… bad?”
Steve sips his beer and leans his head away, still not looking straight at her. He hesitates - friends don’t lie. They’re not friends , are they? But what kind of a babysitter would he be if Steve kept internally insisting they weren’t? Dammit, when the hell did he become such a pushover for kids?
“I’ve had worse,” he shrugs half-heartedly. He glances over when El doesn’t respond, and sees her arms folded and an eyebrow raised. He almost spits his beer out, choking slightly on the drink, and bursts out laughing. “Holy shit, you look exactly like Joyce Byers when she’s mad.”
“Why do you lie?” El asks, her voice quivering slightly. That sucks the joy right out of Steve, and his face falls.
“I’m not… okay, yeah, it wasn’t great.” Steve knows he is not gonna win with this kid, so he might as well get this all over with. “The guy who did it was… he’s someone I care about a lot. Or cared, I guess - I guess I still do.”
“Friends shouldn’t hurt each other,” El points out.
“You know it’s more complicated than that, kiddo. It’s like… you fight with the Chief, right? And you might hurt each other, or say mean things - but at the end of it, you still care about each other. Right?”
El nods; it’s her turn to avoid eye-contact, and Steve has the impression she might be reflecting on a pretty bad argument with Hopper. He didn’t mean to bring up bad memories, but it works for the analogy.
“It’s the same situation here,” Steve continues. “But he… well, he went too far. And it’s stupid and awkward between us now. But he’s not gonna do it again. You don’t need to worry, okay? He won’t hurt me.”
“Why not?” El turns around completely, TV disregarded, and sits on her knees in some vague attempt to bring herself to his level. “You - You could be in danger—”
“He’s not… he’s not in Hawkins right now,” Steve replies. “And won’t be for ages. And by the time he is, I hopefully will be out of his hair and he won’t even need to see me.”
“Out of… his hair?”
“Yeah, you know… like, I won’t be around him anymore. Understand?”
“Kapeesh. Word for the day.”
Steve grins broadly. “Exactly. And that’s the word you’re gonna show Hop tomorrow morning, not all the curse words, right? Speaking of, it’s almost 9. Time for you to sleep, and for me to watch TV and get drunk on the Chief’s beer. Also, don’t tell the Chief. I like to overstay my welcome.”
“I want to watch more TV,” El pouted as she slowly dragged herself towards her bedroom.
“Nope. This is Steve Alone Time. Do you need me to read you a bedtime story?”
“Not a kid anymore,” El says, and she really means it - although, in Steve’s respectable opinion, she doesn’t look it. She hesitates, then suddenly jolts forward and goes in to hug Steve around the waist. Her little arms wrap around his hips as he lets out a gentle ‘woah’, and her face buries into the lower portion of his chest. He grins amicably and runs a hand through her hair, feeling the brown curls entwine around his fingers. He already somewhat understands what it’s like to have a younger brother, of which he sees in Dustin; maybe this is almost what it’s like to have a younger sister.
“Thanks for coming today,” El murmurs.
“No problem, kiddo.”
“Will you come again? Make more… al-fre-do?”
“If you want me to come,” Steve says, a little surprised. “I can arrange something with Hop.” He flicks her on the forehead, extracting her from around him and shepherds her into her bedroom. “Go to sleep, or I’ll eat all your Eggos.”
That threat seemed to be enough to spur her into action, and El is tucked in bed within minutes with the lights off. Steve makes a mental note to suggest that technique to Hopper.
Now with the psychic teenager tucked up in bed, it’s the perfect opportunity for Steve to walk the thin line between being a polite house guest and taking Chief Hopper for all he was worth. With the recliner poised at its lowest and a half-downed can of beer, Steve relaxes into the sofa and begins half-watching some old gangster film from the ‘50s. He’s only half paying attention, really; his mind has already returned to being occupied with thoughts of the past few months, and of tonight - of the indistinct images of twisted nightmares that had been haunting over him like a thunderstorm overhead. Not to mention the fatigue that’s starting to sink into his bones; certainly, the warmth of the cabin and the mindless drone of the television doesn’t help.
“It wasn’t him, Charley.” The voice on the television resounds out towards him, but it’s barely comprehensible to Steve as he sinks into his contemplation, his drowsiness and his alcohol. “It was you.”
Steve releases a long yawn. Hopefully Hopper will be back soon. Maybe they could share a beer and a smoke and watch the rest of this film.
“Remember that night in the Garden - you came down to my dressing room and said, ‘Kid, this ain’t your night’.”
Yeah, no shit - this really isn’t Steve’s night tonight. It hasn’t been his night for a long time. Maybe since his house party, where he had some real fun and managed to make love to Nancy Wheeler - but even then, Barbara Holland had died in his pool whilst he was being a self-centered douchebag concerned only about how much fun he was having and how little consequences he could avoid.
“You should’ve taken care of me just a little bit so I didn’t have to take a dive for a short amount of money.”
If only his parents could have taken care of him a little bit more, maybe he wouldn’t have turned out to be such a fucking asshole. But who was he to complain? He had the two-storey mansion, the heated swimming pool, the wealth and the great car. He shouldn’t be moping. Why should he be sorry for himself? Why should anybody feel sorry for him? Wasn’t this just him facing the consequences of his actions, and in his inaction?
“I could’ve been a contender! I coulda been somebody!
Was he somebody?
Hopper wouldn’t mind if he shut his eyes for a moment…
Steve lay his head back on the recliner, slowly closing his eyes as fatigue began to overwhelm and surpass his introspection. His beer lay forgotten on the side table, partially empty. The TV screen flickers.
Turn your back to me, Steven.
The TV dial snaps and switches into static on its own.
Steve jolts upward, eyes wide open, and a terrible feeling crawls across the back of his neck like a cold wind.
That voice. But it couldn’t be—
The lights in the cabin flicker above him, convulsing between life and darkness; the static on the television rolls within its image, and the sound slowly begins to grow into a dull roar.
It’s not over. It was never over.
Eleven–!
Panic set aside, Steve stumbles from his chair and practically launches himself into Eleven’s door. His shoulder rams straight into the wood and he staggers inside–
Gone. El’s bed is vacant.
“El!” He bellows out, stumbling back into the main part of the cabin. The lights continue to shudder, and the static from the television has risen into a screech. “ Eleven! Where – what the – ?”
I said - turn your fucking back to me.
A lump, raw and burning, catches in his throat and remains stuck there. His mind is swept up in a confusion of terror and panic, and his thoughts race – the voice – no, Eleven – he needs to find —
I won’t ask again, Steven.
A flash of light almost feels like it burns at his retinas, and within an instant he’s plunged into complete darkness. Yet it’s not darkness, not quite. His surroundings are pitch black around him, like he’s been swallowed into some endless void. Beneath him, a thin sheet of water ripples underneath his bare feet. Panic threatened to consume him once more. Spinning on the spot, his heart ramming against his chest, Steve opened his mouth to shout out once again —
Two figures in the distance catch his eye, and his urge to vomit suddenly rises tenfold.
One of them stands above the other, holding a sense of empowerment that’s enough to chill Steve’s blood. He’s tall, imposing, dressed in a work shirt and a loose, plain black tie. Knelt directly in front of him is a younger man, shirtless and his back turned to his superior – with floppy and soft brown hair that nobody else in Hawkins could match —
Don’t do this, don’t do this, c’mon —
I’ve told you again, and again, and again, but the lesson just doesn’t fucking sink in for you –
Dad, please–!
A lashing sound echoes through the void. Leather hitting against flesh. Steve holds back a choked sob. He’s been hurt worse, Billy Hargrove was nothing compared to this – nothing —
Steve - the real Steve, the Steve watching this unfold like some sick and twisted performance - staggers back as nausea unfurls and churns in his stomach. This is crazy – how is this happening? How is he seeing this? What the fuck is going on?!
w i t n e s s. i swallow your f e a r s.
This voice that calls out now is different; it’s not familiar anymore. It was foreign and unearthly, hardly comprehensible behind it’s ripped vocal chords and snarling. Still blindly staggering within the darkness of nothingness, Steve’s gaze rips away from a performance of his memories and back into the void.
His eye catches something else. There’s a mass on the ground, only a few feet away. This time, Steve doesn’t even need to walk towards it to know what it is. A horror beyond anything else begins to surge within him, choking him and igniting every sense and nerve in his body.
“No,” Steve whispers, but not even a sound seems to come out; only something shaken, broken and wretched. “No, no, no… Dustin, no… ”
Dustin’s body lies before him - or what is left of it. Ripped to chunks, consumed alive: blood seeps out from the savaged wounds from where pounds of flesh had been mauled, and a part of Dustin’s young and once constant, beaming expression has been mutilated to the bone. He could see parts of his jawbone, his cheekbones, the new teeth – his face ripped open, flesh exposed, torn open by hellhounds—
Steve stumbles forward, the bottom of his jaw quivering, and collapses onto his knees. He can’t tear his gaze away, even despite the horror crashing and engulfing him. Steve can practically hear the ghost of Dustin’s terrified and agonized screams ringing in his ears and reflecting off the non-existing walls of this black hell.
“This can’t be real,” Steve breathes, then tears his gaze away and upwards, as though confronting some cruel God above. “ This isn’t fucking real! You hear me?! Dustin Henderson is alive! What - d-do you think I'm an idiot, like everyone else does?!”
Rage flares in front of him like a defense mechanism, and Steve leaps up onto his feet. He has no idea what he was facing, or if there was anything at all, but he sure as hell is going to confront it the Steve Harrington way: on the offensive, using himself as a shield, ready to be met with violence and blood.
“You think you’re gonna get me, but I’ve dealt with this kind of thing before, you know,” he calls out, circling on the spot as though he were sizing up some great enemy. “I beat the shit out of one of monsters with a fucking baseball bat! So come on! Come on! Show me what you’re fucking made of!”
a s k not for whom the bell tolls.
A wind blows against Steve’s nap once again, and the goosebumps rise up against his skin. A shadow looms over him.
it t o l l s for t h e e.
He looks up, and immediately wishes he could have the old nightmares back. They’re nothing compared to… this.
Steve almost vomits from the shock, the horror, the sheer terror that pumps through his veins in a single burst and almost causes him to pass out. The bulging mass above his head feels as though it encompasses the entirety of the airspace above his head, stretching forever – but the center shows it’s full form of… of… of something. Flesh, maybe. Or the innards of the human body. It’s bloody and pulsating, like the insides of someone’s guts still squirming in place. Right in the dead-center is an eye: a single eye that stares back at him.
It’s hazel, just like his.
No. Not his. Richard Harrington’s.
Steve’s jaw hitches open, but nothing comes out: he’s paralyzed, maybe out of fear or perhaps this creature is holding him in place. Frozen to the spot, the pulsating mass of gore above him shifts slightly. From within its depths, something akin to its jaw hinges open to reveal a bottomless maw. It’s jaws widen —
The creature stops, frozen, and the paralyzing feeling that encompasses Steve in it’s entirety seems to wane. His knees give in and he slumps backward, hitting the ground and feeling the thin surface of water underneath him seep into his trousers. It’s hazel eye shudders, and swivels towards the shadows. Scrambling back, Steve squinted into the darkness within the same direction. Something was coming – no, somebody was coming.
She appears through a veil of smoke, dressed in the pajamas Steve had put her to bed in, hand outstretched and a nosebleed trailing down her upper lip. Eleven marches slowly towards the creature, her face contorted with a deep expression of fury and resentment.
“El,” Steve managed to croak weakly, still reeling from the shock of seeing this amalgamation of flesh that formed a creature to even comprehend the fact that Eleven was here.
The eye of the creature narrows, glaring at El with a look of bitter malice. At the same time, a sinister feeling creeps across his shoulders. Something was wrong, something was fucking wrong.
A small gasp emits from Eleven, and her hand begins to quake. A gradual fear begins to manifest and grow, and her anger slowly transmutes into anxiety. Then into fright. Then into horror.
Just as she’s about to scream, the creature’s gaping maw turned on Steve and struck.
The screeching of the static was far too loud—
Steve sits up from the couch, finally releasing the scream that had been grappling to escape from his throat. And from the other side of the cabin, Eleven is screaming too.
Notes:
Author's Research No.1: The Cars of Stranger Things
We're going straight into a tricky subject, because the author doesn't know shit about cars - but they do know a lot about film and TV production, and it's interesting to see the level of detail the showrunners put into picking cars for the characters. Our main character, Steve Harrington, drives a BMW 733i, the first generation of the BMW Series 7 luxury cars. It includes some very fancy features, like an on-board computer system and some complex climate control systems. A perfect luxury car for a guy who needs to keep up appearances. His model was probably somewhere between 1981-82, which makes sense for a guy who probably got his licence at sixteen. No wonder the chicks dig him.
Meanwhile, Jim Hopper drives a 1980s Chevrolet K5 Blazer - a tough, no-nonsense car for a tough, no-nonsense man. A standard for rural law enforcement, even beyond 1991 when the model was discontinued.
Although not present in this chapter, Joyce Byer's car is an interesting one: a 1976 Ford Pinto, a cheap but not so reliable transport for someone strapped for cash. This model was actually defective; it's fuel tank was manufactured in the rear axel, causing it to be vulnerable to spontaneous combustion in rear-end accidents. An estimate of 27 estimated deaths were caused by this, and the car was put in a 'voluntary recall' program in the very late 70s. Stranger Things takes place in 1983... so maybe Joyce missed the memo, or simply cannot afford another car.
Chapter 2: The Raudive Voices
Summary:
“It’s an EVP,” Dustin explains, as if it’s meant to explain everything. Steve shrugs, and Dustin scoffs. “Jesus, do they teach you anything in high school?”
“Yes, useful shit, not about ghost hunting or whatever!”
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
And then for better or worse you'll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you've got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.”
― House of Leaves
Hawkins, Indiana / November 1984 / 35 Minutes After Saving the World
Steve somehow heaved himself out of Billy Hargrove’s Camaro and managed to plant his feet for about seven seconds before his knees hit the ground. The world turned sideways and his body caved in on itself, the leaf-strewn soil smacking him right on the side of the jaw.
The pain came first, blossoming and aching and joining the symphony of dulled agony that had already been coursing across his body. His hearing came back second, albeit muffled as though it was pounding from the other side of a firm, solid wall. Through the indistinct haziness of his hearing, Dustin’s voice was speaking urgently, panicked and extremely worried. Steve just didn’t understand what the hell all his fussing was about. There’s no demodogs left to swing–batter-batter , and the tunnels were cooking up a barbeque, and Steve was just lying down in the dirt.
His vision came back third, hazy and foggy, and he was promptly met with the realization that the others weren’t going to let him commit to his plans of living the rest of his life in the soil. Dustin had apparently rushed off to fetch help, and he was swiftly joined by what seemed like an entire crowd of onlookers. Steve spotted the kids first in the background, lingering around the doorway with mild concern and morbid curiosity. Rushing out past them was Joyce Byers, who was speaking to Steve in rushed and worried tones that made something in Steve’s heart twist - as well as Nancy Wheeler who seemed twice as distressed as Joyce and watching him with that melancholic, sympathetic expression she always seemed to wear around him lately.
Oh God, not Nancy. It hurts seeing Nancy.
“No,” Steve mumbled incoherently as the two unknown persons either side of him hauled him to his feet. Steve wasn’t sure what exactly he was saying ‘no’ to, but it just felt like it needed to be said.
“-- get you inside, buddy, it’s okay,” a voice on his left said, and Steve instantly recognised it as Dustin’s. Then who was on his right…?
Oh. Okay. It was Jonathan Byers. He wasn’t looking at Steve, just carrying most of his weight (as Dustin seemed to be more interested in just being next to Steve than really helping) and instead spoke to the kids as they practically marched Steve into the house.
“How the hell did this happen?” Jonathan asked as they trooped inside, aiming straight for the couch. “I’m guessing it’s something to do with that car, right? It’s not Steve’s.”
“It’s Billy’s,” Max replied. She continues as the group heaved Steve onto the sofa that was pushed against the rear wall. “He came to get me and attacked… attacked Lucas. Steve stepped in.” She folded her arms and looked away, suddenly angry and sulky; it’s a touchy subject. “Thought Billy would still be here when we got back.”
“Nobody was here,” Jonathan replied. “He must’ve ran off. Steve stopped him?”
“He did his best,” Dustin offered kindly.
The next few minutes (or hours? It was really difficult to tell) progressed within a blur of misshapen colors and thoughts. From the snatches of lucidity that Steve occasionally grasped onto, he was almost forcibly given aspirin to help with the concussion-induced migraine, spotted Nancy lingering between the front door and the couch as if she still was picking between Steve Harrington and Jonathan Byers, and attempted to ignore with an intense shouting match between Dustin and Joyce when she opened her fridge to scrape together something for food and instead found a dead demodog tumbling out and onto the floor.
“Who’s the President?” Dustin said roughly, appearing by Steve in between his snatches of lucidity, and dropped a full bag of frozen peas on top of Steve’s face. The young boy was still fuming about Joyce’s indignant refusal for Dustin to keep the goddamn demodog.
Steve scowled and pressed the frozen peas to his head. “Reagan. Why?”
“What year is it?”
“Uh - 1984? What, is this some pop quiz?”
“Mrs. Byer’s said I have to ask you in case you’ve got brain damage or something. What’s your parents names?”
“Marie and fucking Richard. I prefer Dick, ‘cus he is. Anyways, you don’t even know my parents' names, so how d’you know that I haven’t got it wrong?”
“I don’t,” Dustin shrugged. “But I don’t think you’ve got brain damage - or at least, any worse than you did before.”
“Eat shit, Henderson.”
Chief Hopper and Eleven returned eventually, prompting an extremely emotional reunion between her and Mike (ah, young love). Hopper seemed equally surprised and impressed to hear Steve had protected the kids from Hargrove’s aggression, but became very aggravated to hear the kids impromptu expedition to the fields to burn the tunnels. The arguments died down when the kids finally apologized (except Mike, who venomously huffed and stalked out the room to visit Will). Unfortunately, the peace was short-lived as Hopper found out about the dead demodog dumped on the kitchen floor and kicked up another argument with Dustin. (The kids didn’t defend Dustin this time, and the demodog was tossed in the backyard and Hopper vowing to burn the thing the moment he gets his hands on some more gasoline).
Steve didn’t care about any of this - mostly because he barely had the mental capacity to actually care at the moment. His state of existence was shifting in between vague snippets of consciousness and painful, primordial blackness. Everything was painfully hot and bloody, then sometimes just non-existent. Sometimes it felt like he blinked and everything had changed - like when you space out in class, then suddenly everybody’s moving and you know you’ve missed something important.
An inordinate amount of time passed; or, alternatively, none at all. True consciousness and lucidity finally started to rouse him from his deep sleep, as his limbed and headed physical form of pain and exhaustion began to fire-up.
Blinking awake, Steve squinted into the vague darkness of the Byer’s living room. It was quiet, somehow. As his sight gradually adjusted to the darkness, he slowly began to pick up on the subtle sounds drifting in the room. Breathing, muffled and slow - people were sleeping around him. His eyes scanned the room, taking everybody into account.
There was Chief Hopper on the seat to his right, reclined somewhat uncomfortably in the chair with his police hat fallen low over his face. And there was a pile of kids heaped up in the center of the room, surrounded by a mass of pillows and blankets - yep, he can see Dustin’s brown curls on top, with Lucas and Max sandwiched together. The others are unaccounted for. Will was probably in his own room, and Joyce was probably with him… Mike and Eleven would be together, obviously, and Nancy and Jonathan… oh…
Something nauseating grew in the pit of his stomach - something biting and harrowing. Nancy and Jonathan, Hopper and Eleven, Jonathan and Joyce and Will, Dustin and the Kids, Nancy and fucking Jonathan – Steve was the odd one out. He wasn’t meant to be here. He shouldn’t be here - what the hell was he still doing here? He wasn’t ‘one of them’, even if he was ‘in the know’. He stumbled into these events, twice, on complete accident - the first, he staggered into the Byer’s house just to make some peace with Jonathan and ended up sparring some freakish lizard monster with a baseball bat, and the second time he was dragged into a storm shelter by Dustin because he was the only person around at the time.
No-one is around. Why do you think I’m with Steve Harrington? Did Dustin think Steve hadn’t overheard that? Why did he say that with so much venom in his voice?
Forcing his aching bones into action, he slowly wrenched himself from the sofa and felt a blanket fall onto his lap. Steve paused for a moment, staring oddly at the fabric, then heaved himself onto his feet.
Okay. He was dizzy and queasy, and his body ached like someone might’ve rammed a semi into him - but he’s doing better than before. Marginally better. As in, he can probably stay conscious and form words for the next thirty minutes or so.
Moving cautiously through the room, he purposefully made an effort not to wake up Hopper nor the kids as he made for the front door. Steve froze for a moment as Dustin shifted, but he only rolled over and flung an arm over the top of the small pile the trio had made.
Swallowing a painful lump in his throat, Steve stepped out of the house.
Holy shit, holy shit, it was cold. The warm interior of the Byer’s house made the outdoors beyond feel sub-fucking-zero. But it’s okay, it’s fine - if anything, the cold was sobering. Among the dried, fall leaves that surround the rural exterior of the Byer’s residence, the driveway is pretty full. There’s Joyce’s old Ford Pinto, and Jonathan’s beaten Ford Galaxie, and the Chief’s Chevrolet police car. Billy’s Camaro is still here - he must have scarpered and hiked home on foot then. And, of course, Steve’s sweet baby BMW.
His car’s not far. Home isn’t far, either. He could make it. Totally.
He took a few steps forward off the porch, then his feet betrayed him and he instead careened forward, slapping a hand on the hood of his car to keep upright.
Oh no. He’s not gonna make it. He’s gonna fucking blow.
Staggering forward, Steve’s back arched as he upheaved the contents of his stomach into the bed of dead leaves outside the house. His ribs began to throb painfully from the exertion, and the temptation to collapse back into the dirt became alluring once again. Wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, he released a struggling grunt for air and leaned his hand on the hood of his car—
“You okay, hon?”
His hand slipped and Steve turned around, almost spinning over from the velocity of twisting around so sharply. Joyce Byer’s stood on the edge of the porch, damp with sweat and appeared absolutely exhausted. There was an unlit cigarette clinging between two of her fingers, and an almost full packet in the breast pocket of her faded flannel shirt.
“You’re not planning on driving home, are you?” Joyce continued, staring intently at Steve.
Steve struggled between a multitude of responses for a moment, umm-ing and err-ing in a hushed voice. There was a stark difference between lying to the kids or to Nancy and lying to Joyce Byers, but he really hated the way she was looking at him. Maybe it had something to do with the onslaught of guilt that was currently eating away at him - the same kind of guilt he had whenever he looked at Jonathan or Will.
He opted for a safer option instead. “Can I get a smoke, Mrs. Byers?”
Steve lit the cigarettes with Joyce’s lighter, on account of his lighter probably destroyed and Joyce’s hands shaking too much to properly light them. The two inhaled and puffed out the smoke at the same time. Steve’s nose wrinkled; this was a shitty brand. But the nicotine helped, it was bringing back a sense of sobriety that the cold couldn’t.
“Bad habit, you know,” Joyce said quietly. She’s taking drags much faster than him.
“What?”
“Smoking, I mean. Especially at your age, with your fitness…”
“I quit,” Steve said, then eyed the lit cigarette between his fingers.
Joyce cocked an eyebrow. “You quit, huh?”
“Look man, you know, yeah.”
“I hope this doesn’t mean you’re going to continue smoking.”
“No, ma’am,” Steve lied.
To his surprise, Joyce responded with a shaky but genuine grin. “It’s alright, really. I said I would quit, too, for Bob, but… but, well…”
Her smile disappears an instant, and Steve is lashed with another strike of guilt. Good job, asshole, you just reminded her of her dead boyfriend. Congratu-fucking-lations, Harrington, you’re—
“Sorry,” Steve muttered, looking awkwardly away. “About, um… I mean, I didn’t know him but… but he sounded like a great guy. Like, Mike was saying he founded that - that radio club and stuff…”
He was making it worse, surely - but Joyce instead broke into a watery smile, tears glistening in the corners of her dark eyes. “Yeah, he’s… he’s smart. Really smart. Think it’s why he gets on with Will so well, they’re both smart.”
“Nerdy, too,” Steve offered, and Joyce grinned. Steve teetered on his feet as another spell of dizziness washed over him; his free hand caught the railing lining the porch with a white-knuckled grip, but his unsteady lurch didn’t go unnoticed.
“I really hope you’re not planning on driving yourself home,” Joyce said sternly. “I made up the couch for you, I’d like you to stay there overnight so we can keep an eye on you, okay?”
Steve shook his head; one hand was still gripped onto the wooden railing, and the other was tightly holding onto the cigarette that had a narrow mass of ash progressively extending outward. He didn’t understand, he just couldn’t comprehend a reasoning as to why Joyce Byers was being so nice to him. He’d been so cruel to her and her family. Destroying Jonathan’s camera, acting a bystander to Tommy H’s and Carol’s jests of calling her son a brother-killer, getting into a fight with Jonathan. For fuck’s sake, he called Joyce’s entire family screw-ups and disgraces – so why, why was he being shown this worry? He deserved every fucking punch he got from Jonathan, not… not this…
“Honey,” Joyce’s warm voice softly called out, and he realized with a pang of horror that he was on the edge of tears. Her arm slid over his back, pulling him closer into a one-arm hug. “It’s okay… it’s okay…”
“I don’t… I’m fine, really,” Steve murmured, horrified to find his voice shaking almost as bad as Joyce’s. “My house, it’s not too far… really, you’ve already done enough.”
“God, no, we haven’t,” Joyce responded with another watery, trembling smile. “You’ve done so much for us today by protecting the kids, you know? Dustin was telling us all about it. You looked after them in that junkyard—”
God, was that tonight? That felt like fucking years ago already.
“-- and then you stood up to - to Billy when he threatened the kids, and even after that, when they took you to those tunnels… you made sure they were all safe, that they were all alright.”
“I was just… I didn’t…” He stumbled over his words, searching for excuses and reasons to put himself into exile. He didn’t belong there within those walls, in the company and protection of people who said they cared about him.
“You’re staying here, kid.”
It’s a new voice; this time, Steve doesn’t react with the same amount of panic (maybe it’s the nicotine alleviating the paranoia that had been settled around him). Chief Jim Hopper is up, a cigarette jammed between his teeth and lighting it already. He joins the pair by the railing and continues in a firm voice, as if he’s already made the decision for Steve. “Sentimentality aside, you’ve got a severe concussion that’s gonna make you disorientated for the next 24 hours, probably some fractured ribs and cheekbones - so no, you cannot drive yourself home.”
“Then drive me home,” Steve said, a slight plea to his voice.
“Did you miss the part where you need to be watched over?” Hopper’s tone forced - genuinely concerned, but obviously growing with frustration. “You’re staying here.”
“But–”
“You can stay here, Steve,” Joyce interjects. Her voice was so soft and so warm, so caring, and everytime he heard it Steve just wanted to burst into tears. When the hell did he get so damn emotional? “You know you’re safe with us, right? You know you’re welcome? You helped the kids, you helped Will… you saved Jonathan’s life. Jonathan and Nancy.”
“What?” Steve said stupidly, blinking in confusion. When did that happen tonight? He’d been with the kids practically all night…
“Last Fall, Jonathan told me,” Joyce replied. Her voice was becoming overcome with emotion, and fresh tears sprung in her eyes. “H-He told me that the demo… that monster, it - it came out and attacked him and Nancy – but you came, and you fought it. You fought it, you saved his life. You saved my son. ”
Her voice broke on the last word, and the pair moved toward each other on some strange instinct. She pulled him into an embrace, arms around his shoulders, weeping freely into his collarbone. In the peripheral of his hearing, Steve heard her hushed, weepy mantra: thank you, thank you, thank you.
He still doesn’t believe her gratitude is merited. But he might be able to stay here tonight, after all, without the guilt eating him alive.
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / 4 Months After Saving the World
When Hopper arrives home, Steve Harrington is smoking on his front porch and the police chief is momentarily taken back in time. He pauses amongst the fresh spring leaves and instead sees a different scene entirely: the Byer’s little home, when the leaves were down and there was finally a moment of respite, where Joyce’s grief was fresh and the teenage boy had insisted on driving home with a half-swollen eye, a severe concussion and a probable lack of self-preservation.
It’s the same scene all over again, except with notable differences: the green and yellow trees are overhanging his cabin, featherlight, free and everlasting, and Steve Harrington is smoking in solitude. His head rests on his open palm, his fingers comb through his unruly locks of brown hair, and he drags on his cigarette as though it might very well be his last smoke.
As Hopper draws nearer, Steve finally glances up - then sits up straighter, attentive, guilty. Hopper registers how exhausted Steve really looks, pale with slightly sunken eyes and a lethargic expression.
“Got a smoke?” Hopper asks with a small smirk, but his smile disappears as soon as the front door opens. A warm light bathes the stretch of spring forest that surrounds the cabin, and Eleven peeks out to see who’s arrived. Her curious expression quickly shifts into relief, and she practically bounds out of the house and straight into Hopper’s arms.
“You should be in bed,” Hopper scolds. There’s no real antagonism to his voice - although he shoots Steve an odd look, who continues to sit and smoke on the porch and avoid eye contact.
El pulls away, and Hopper realizes she’s shaking. It’s not from the cold. “We had a nightmare.”
“We?” Hopper asks incredulously, cocking an eyebrow and looking in between Steve and El.
El turns around and looks at Steve expectantly. The young man sat before them stares back in silence for a moment, taking an extra long drag of his cigarette, then stubs it out on the wood of the porch and tosses it into the forest beyond. “Hey, El, did you finish your waffle? Why don’t you try going back to sleep whilst I talk to your Dad, yeah?”
El breaks away from Hopper and approaches Steve, gripping one hand onto the shoulder of his jacket. Her eyes are round and glassy, full of an unsettling anxiety, and she stage-whispers: “Will you be okay?”
“Promise,” Steve replies quietly, quirking his lips up in a faint smile. It’s not very reassuring, but El eventually nods and slips back inside.
Hopper doesn’t speak; he’s worked enough years in the field to know that those with a story to tell will tell it, eventually, but with time. Instead, he takes a seat on the steps beside Steve, who’s already patting himself down for something - more cigarettes, apparently. The teenager curses under his breath, and Hopper suddenly registers something else off about the Harrington kid - he’s not just exhausted, he’s scared. So was El. Something’s happened to frighten the hell out of some of the hardiest kids Hopper knows.
A rare stab of sympathy strikes through Hopper, and he fishes out his own pack of smokes. He hands one to Steve, who takes it with a quiet ‘thank you’ and lights it. Hopper waits for a moment before lighting his, almost expectantly – yep, there it is: Steve suddenly chokes and coughs, then shoots out a well-aimed spit onto the leaf-covered ground by his feet.
“Shitty brand,” Steve rasps.
Hopper can’t help himself, and smirks. “Ah, I remember my first cigarette too.”
“Shut up. No wonder why you can’t keep up with Officer Powell anymore, if you’re smoking these straight.”
“Problem is you teenagers, you just smoke to look cool now - can’t actually handle it.” Hopper’s smirk fades and he shakes his head. “Now shoot, Harrington, better tell me what the hell’s happened. This is more than just a regular nightmare, isn’t it?”
The words are unspoken, but they both understand it: this is some Upside Down shit, isn’t it? Steve drags on his cigarette, holding the smoke in his throat and chest for a moment, then exhales.
“Well, I did all that you said,” Steve began. “Made her dinner, waffles afterward, bed by 9. I think I did a good job. Until I fell asleep.” He pulls another drag, and the butt of the cigarette flares orange then dies down. “You know when you’re dreaming, and you think that this is real, definitely real - and then you wake up, and you know for 100% certainty that this is real and that was a dream?”
“Sure, kid.”
“I didn’t get it this time,” Steve says quietly, with an eerie hoarseness and quake to his voice. “That nightmare, and this reality - still feels the same.”
“El said that she had a nightmare too,” Hopper urges. He appreciates that Steve’s shaken, but Hopper needs answers.
“Yeah, that was the funny thing,” Steve says, although his expression denoted that there was absolutely nothing funny about this whatsoever. “This dream I had… I saw… there was a monster, I guess, and…” He stops short, and a shadow flickers over his expression; something haunted and afraid, but it’s gone hardly a moment later. “Then El appeared. She tried to… I dunno, fight this monster thing, but it - it turned on me and… and I woke up. And so did Eleven.”
“You woke her up?”
“No, no.” Steve shook his head and pulled on the cigarette, hard. “We woke up together. Same nightmare. Exact same.”
A long sigh escapes from Hopper and he grazes the palm of his hand against his jawline. An overwhelming tiredness came over him, accompanied with a foreboding dread. It’s never going to end, is it? All these problems, all these terrible things happening to what was meant to be a small, quiet town…
“What did you see?” Hopper asks, although he wishes Steve wouldn’t provide the answer. “In this… this dream of yours. This monster, what did it look like?”
Steve shifts his shoulders, drawing himself away from Hopper and focusing every fragment of his attention onto the slowly dwindling ashes of his cigarette. This is clearly a topic he’s not happy about approaching. There’s something personal about it.
“It wasn’t like the demogorgon, or that Mind.. Flamer, thing. It looked…” He pauses, and shivers - again, it’s not the cold. “I don’t know. Some kind of big mass of flesh. It had an eye. A big one.”
“And it, what… you said it went for you? It hurt you?”
“El appeared before that,” Steve explained. “Using her powers to stop it before it did, only it… it like it threw her off or something, And then it tried to - I dunno, eat me? And then we woke up at the same time. El came running in, and we both confirmed we had the same dream. She saw me, I saw her.”
Hopper pulled on his cigarette hard, and thought even harder. There were so many discrepancies and contradictions with Steve’s story. Not that Hopper thought Steve was a liar, of course, but all the questions burning in Hopper’s mind just went against the facts they already knew. Like, for starters—
“The Gate,” Steve began. “Is it… it can’t be open again, can it?”
(Steve’s blinking hard, trying to focus. Nicotine must be knocking him on his ass, Hopper thinks with a little bit of humor.)
“Not a chance,” Hopper refuted firmly. It wasn’t reassurance, it was fact. “After that disaster in fall, the ‘Department of Energy’--” Hopper mimed quotation marks, causing Steve’s brow to rise in confusion. “-- cleared out real quick. I’ve not been back, but I’ve been monitoring the place. Apart from some middle schoolers who wanted to try some urban exploration, nobody’s been in or out of that place.”
“There could be a Gate somewhere else,” Steve suggested. “Or - Or they’re sneaking in right under our noses–!”
“Steve, the people there…” He huffs through his nose, rubbing his fingers over his temple. “Look, it’s up for debate whether they really wanted to close the Gate, but they definitely never intended to open it. They were burning it, trying to control it so they could study it. They wouldn’t open a new Gate, and they definitely don’t have the means to. The only person who actually could is currently sitting in that cabin right now.”
“Then how is this happening?” Steve implores, frustration and desperation building. “I saw - that thing, it was… it was real! And El saw it, too!”
“I don’t know, okay?!” Hopper snaps, causing Steve to flinch back in surprise. Hopper quickly pulls himself together with a long, heavy sigh. “I don’t know, kid. We don’t know a whole lot, really. But I swear to you, I swear, there is no Gate, and the government is not making a new one. Understand?”
Steve still looks unconvinced, but he doesn’t pursue it anymore. Instead, he throws down the finished butt of his cigarette and hungrily looks for Hopper for more. The chief hesitates: chain smoking at 17, or 18, whatever damn age this kid is now, is not a healthy sign. There’s a haunted look in Steve’s eye that reminds him of something sinister. The kind of look Hopper saw in the young soldiers during the Vietnam war, or whenever Hopper looks into the reflection of his mirror. Steve deserves another smoke, and the teenager gets it with a low utterance of gratitude.
“Couch is open if you want to stay the night,” Hopper asks stiffly; he’s still smoking his first cigarette.
Steve furrows his brow. “What? Why? You want me on babysitting duty, after this? Or is this another ‘watch over me’ situation?”
“You look dead on your feet, kid. I don’t know if it’s safe for you to drive home tonight.”
“I haven’t got a concession this time. I’m fine.”
“No, but you did have an encounter with this… you know, this bullshit .” And by ‘bullshit’, Hopper means Upside Down shenanigans. “Considering that there’s nothing we can really do for now but wait it out ‘till we learn more, I want to keep an eye on you and make sure you’re not…” He shrugged lamely, struggling to find an excuse.
Steve offers one with a morbid, half-cocked smirk. “Ambushed and mauled by some monsters in the dead of night?”
“I was thinking more that we won't get a repeat of last fall.”
“Ah, you got me Chief. I’m a spy for the Mind Flayer and we want to invade this planet.”
“That’s cute, Harrington. Now finish your smoke whilst I set the couch up. You’re staying. It’s not best for you to go home.”
Steve’s brow furrows, picking up on Hopper’s far too casual tone on that last sentence. “What? Why? What’s wrong with home? Something’s happened?”
Damn. If the Harrington kid wasn’t exactly an academic genius, but he was observant. No use in hiding it - besides, it’s probably on the safer side to admit the truth.
Hopper takes off his hat for the first time, taking a particularly long drag off what’s left of his thinning cigarette. “That call I got to keep me out late… it was for your place, kid.”
Steve’s face drops. Hopper rushes in to rectify himself. “There’s no serious trouble, kid. It’s dealt with. Your neighbors called for a noise complaint, and I thought it was a house party, but it was your parents–”
“They were having a fight,” Steve finishes glumly, and goes back to smoking.
(Steve’s dealt with Powell and Callahan one too many times whenever his parents took the rare opportunity of actually visiting Hawkins and starting up an argument - usually concerning botched real estate affairs, or dissent on covering up some financial records to pin mistakes on someone else. Mostly about Steve, though - always about Steve whenever he was involved. Steve’s poor grades, Steve’s poor GPA, Steve’s abysmal chances of college acceptance, Steve’s inability to acquire a ‘real job’, Steve’s frequent habit of holding house parties, even though he hasn’t thrown one since Barb died in his fucking backyard, or his infrequent tendency to get into some brutal fights. Steve is wrong, Steve isn’t good enough, Steve isn’t going to live up to the expectations that Richard Harrington has already paved out for him).
“The street,” Steve says, realization slowly dawning on him; it’s rare for Steve to connect the dots independently, but always important if he does. “When I was walking down that street - it wasn’t an accident that you found me, was it?”
Hopper doesn’t say anything. He just looks away.
Steve looks away, too, bitterly sighs and growls to himself: “Fucking Dick Harrington.”
“They were worried where you went, kid.”
“What’d you say?”
“Said you were old enough to do what you wanted, and to keep the damn noise down.”
Really, when it came to the Harrington household, neither Hopper or any of the officers on the force really knew how to deal with the infamous Harrington situation. Everyone in that office knew that Richard Harrington wasn’t exactly winning any ‘No.1 Dad’ mugs, but there was nothing they could do to really resolve the tension between father and mother and son. They’d had more than their fair share of noise complaints from a Harrington house party, but this was his first for an argument. He was just glad Steve hadn’t been around for it.
Hopper throws the cigarette into the twilight beyond the front porch, idly watching the remains of the pinprick of fiery orange light vanish into the gloom, and said once again: “Sofa will be fixed up for you, kid.”
“Thanks.” Steve’s reply is quiet, but meaningful.
“You got school tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Gotta pick up the gremlins from AV Club after school, too.”
“Tell Mike I say hi,” comes a small voice from the doorway. Hopper and Steve whip around, but there’s already pattering of fleeing feet and a door slams shut. There’s a fleeting interlude of silence for a moment, then Steve finally exhales and breaks out into a short-lived but genuine laugh.
“Is there really nothing we can do?” Steve asks, his grin faltering. “About… this , I mean.” He spreads his arms wide, as if it’s meant to indicate what he’s talking about.
Hopper pauses, thinking, and finally exhales. Peace of mind - that’s all he can offer right now.
“I’ll call Sam Owens tomorrow and see if he’s got any… if he knows something. Now finish that goddamn cigarette already, Harrington.”
“Right-o, Chief-o,” Steve says, turning his back on him - but the Chief has already stepped back into the cabin’s threshold, leaving Steve in the company of nothing but the spring dusk and the wisps of smoke that dance under the outdoor lights.
Steve’s popularity in high school has seen better days, honestly. He practically ran the school before fall of 1983 - ‘King Steve’ and all that shit. But then he got his ass kicked by Jonathan Byers, and he told Tommy Hagan and Carol Perkins they were assholes, and Steve’s popularity waned because he ‘turned bitch’ for Nancy Wheeler. Obviously the truth behind that was he discovered a scary-as-shit alternate dimension and fought off a flesh-eating creature with a baseball bat - but telling people that was out of the question. His crazy ass would be kicked into Pennhurst – or he would meet a ‘tragic and fatal accident’ on the way home. The government needed Steve to keep silent, after all.
So yeah, as far as Hawkins High was aware: Steve Harrington turned bitch.
And according to popular opinion, he’s turned into an even bigger bitch once word spreads that Billy Hargrove knocked Steve Harrington’s lights out. He had no idea how that got out - Steve obviously hadn’t said shit, and Max Mayfield swore up and down that Billy’s kept his word and kept his mouth shut. If you had to ask Steve, it was probably Dustin shooting his mouth off, and word from the middle school ended up trailing down the road and over towards the high school.
Everyone ribbed Steve for a week. How’s that pretty face of yours, Harrington? Not King Steve anymore, now, are you?
It didn’t matter, not to him; King Steve abdicated his throne. He hasn’t got the energy these days to fucking care. He hasn’t got the energy or patience for any of that, and a whole lot of things too.
Today’s Friday, which usually means basketball practice; he knows this by heart, because he’s sweat blood every Friday afternoon with the rest of the team since he was a freshman looking for approval from his father and the rest of the jocks in school. Except he was benched a week after the events last fall, and he hadn’t shown up to practice in the last six weeks.
Instead, his Friday afternoons afterschool now consist of sitting in the parking lot of the middle school and waiting for Dustin and the rest of his nerdy little gremlin friends to scurry out the front doors, dive into the back of his car and listen to them beg for a trip to the nearest joint that sells slushies or plead for quarters for the arcade. Steve complains every time, claiming he’s got ‘better things to do than follow you shitbirds around’. But he hasn’t ever said no; he’s always taken them, every single time. And seventy five percent of the time, he’s volunteered to foot the bill.
Okay, sure, he’ll admit it - he doesn’t mind the chauffeuring. It’s ten times better than being stuck in his house dealing with either shitty parents who are too busy to give Steve the time of day, or stuck in his house with nothing but himself for company. And he gets an excuse to lounge around in his car, cycling through smoke after smoke, and listen to some not half-bad tunes on a mixtape that Will made for him (with some help from Jonathan).
He doesn’t mind at all. Except it’s gone past 4 o’clock and they still haven’t left.
Radio crackle distracts his smoking, and a voice emits from the other end of the walkie talkie the kids gifted for him: “ Steve? This is Dustin, do you copy? ”
Cigarette jammed between his teeth, Steve snatches up the radio and tugs the antenna up. “Yeah, it’s Steve - where the hell are you little shits? I’ve been waiting for ages, you better get your asses up here or you can walk.”
“10-4, Steve, but you gotta come check this out. Come to the AV Club room. Don’t forget to say ‘over’. Over.”
“Into the…?” Taken aback, Steve scoffed and practically slammed his finger onto the button to respond. “Henderson, I’m not joining your nerdy radio club. When are you wrapping up?”
“ No, seriously, come check this out, Steve! Mr. Clarke taught us about EVP’s at the club, and we might have picked some up!”
Before Steve could even begin to ask what the hell an EVP is, a loud and disgruntled voice booms out from the background: “ Ugh, seriously, Dustin? It’s not real, it’s just interference.”
“We don’t know that, Max! We’ve seen interdimensional creatures and shit - paranormal activity couldn’t be out of the question!”
“Paranormal what now?” Steve asks, almost choking from the smoke; apparently, his opposition to joining in the antics of a middle school club has been forgotten. “Like - Like ghosts and shit?”
“This is why I’m saying you gotta come find out, Steve! Over!”
A gravelly, dramatic groan escapes from Steve and he slumps the back of his head hard against the soft pillow of his seat. These kids were nothing if not persistent. His eyeline scans the horizon of the parking lot, amongst the few middle-schoolers still idly lurking around and the few parked cars apparently waiting for kids late from their clubs or detentions. Reputation be damned and all, but did he really want to be spotted stalking into Hawkins Middle when everyone knows Steve Harrington is an only child and has no business being there?
Screw it. Nobody’s looking.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming,” Steve sighs into the walkie, and he vaguely picks up the sounds of unruly approval on the other end. “But it better be quick if you little dipshits still want to go somewhere for grub afterwards.”
Slamming the antenna back into its slot, Steve swings his legs out of the car door and climbs out. His cigarette is almost done, and he spends a moment puffing away and savoring the rush of nicotine in his brain that quells the nauseating anxiety that he’s been carrying around all day. Aside from Hopper and Eleven, nobody else knew about his terrifying, otherworldly nightmares and the almost sleepless night he spent on Chief Hopper’s couch.
As he stomped out his cigarette and began the walk up to the doors, he internally debated on whether he ought to tell the kids about it. How would they react? He knows the gremlins pretty well, he knows how they’ll react. Dustin would ask a lot of questions, Lucas would be skeptical, Max would be even more skeptical, Will would probably freak out and Mike wouldn’t give zero shits. Yeah, that about summed them up. He can’t spare the energy to deal with that. Best if he and Hopper just deal with it.
The middle school corridors were quiet, which was a nice change of pace from high school. The hallways in Hawkins High were usually loud and bustling until about 5pm, as people would usually still be hanging around, attending extra-curriculars or rampaging about being stuck in extra classes because of their shitty grades. Middle school was different. Kids wanted to be out of those classrooms the first chance they got and running amok on the streets. Apart from his little group of nerds, apparently.
He found the AV Club swiftly: the first time he had to physically knock on the door to drag the little bastards out, he’d gotten lost and resigned to taking up Mr. Clarke’s guidance (who talked a lot about the eighth grade class’s topic of Newton’s law of motion, or whatever the hell it was, some crap about how things can’t move unless you make it move which just seems like a ‘well duh’ kind of concept). Now, however, he was well adjusted to having to barge on the nerds in the middle of their club, so he easily found the room and entered without knocking.
Big mistake on his part, if you asked anybody but Steve, because his immediate greeting was not a stadium of applause that he believed he so rightly deserved but rather a gang of asshole pre-teens turning around and shushing him in unison.
“What?” Steve snapped, momentarily off-put, but continued in a lowered voice: “Don’t shush me, I–”
“Listen,” Dustin whispered, jerking a finger at the complicated radio set-up they had on the table.
Steve took the spare chair that surrounded the table and overlooked each of the kids - a routine inspection, assessing for damage or signs that the kids are getting too old for his liking. Dustin’s just Dustin, his usual self, with his trucker cap ( synonymous with Dustin, Steve’s added that to his vocab) perched atop his dark curls. His brown eyes are alight with curiosity and wonder, staring at the radio as though it were speaking a sign of God. Mike is next to him, arms crossed and leaning back on his chair; he’s got this air like he’s got somewhere better to be - he’s been developing a real sour attitude recently, and it’s getting harder and harder to put up with him. Lucas is leaning on the table, looking torn between being intrigued by whatever the hell was going on but just as skeptical as his girlfriend beside him: Max, equally if not more disgruntled than Wheeler, is slumped back in her chair and occasionally blowing wisps of ginger hair out of her face. The only other person who looks just as equally excited as Dustin is Will - quiet and meek as ever, almost hiding in the shadows of the low-lit room, but eyes wide with an innocent, child-like wonder.
Dustin flashes a grin in Steve’s direction and turns the knob of the radio. The frequency stumbles through swarms of static noise, with split second snippets of chatter or music – then the dial settles on a frequency. Steve strains to listen; there’s definitely something. Conversation, maybe. Two people talking.
He dragged his ass out of his car for this? “Oh, wow, people talking on the radio. The magic of technology. Henderson, you know that’s what radios are used for, right?”
Dustin shakes his head, baring a joyous grin. “But it’s more than that, Steve. You ever hear of Raudive Voices?”
“The Raw-div what?”
“It’s an EVP,” Dustin explains, as if it’s meant to explain everything. Steve shrugs, and Dustin scoffs. “Jesus, do they teach you anything in high school?”
“ Yes, useful shit, not about ghost hunting or whatever!”
“It means Electronic Voice Phenomenon. They’re voices, but not just any voices–”
“Ghost's voices,” Will cuts in, bouncing on his toes and apparently too excited to allow Dustin to create a pause for dramatic effect.
“Allegedly,” Lucas adds, rolling his eyes.
“Spooooky,” Steve hums. “But Halloween was months ago.”
Mike snorts, and a few - including Steve - look round. Mike scoffs, smirking at Steve and glaring in a way that a lot of his classmates did when he asked a perfectly reasonable question. “Ghosts don’t appear only on Halloween, dumbass.”
It’s Max’s turn to scoff now; it’s apparently just that kind of day, where everyone scoffs and belittles each other. “Well, we don’t actually know that, because ghosts don’t fucking exist. ”
Dustin plows on, unperturbed by his companions' skepticism on whether paranormal actually exists or not. “Mr. Clarke was telling us all about EVP’s today for AV Club. They’re voices of the dead speaking to us through radio wavelengths. A famous example is this guy called Friedrich Jürgenson, he picked up voices on his radio that spoke to him – as in, they spoke to him. ” Dustin’s eyes glittered with excitement. “Addressed him by name, had knowledge of his thoughts and actions - claimed to be the voices of deceased friends and relatives. All that jazz.”
A sharp shiver rolled up Steve’s back, and he had to suppress the urge to shudder. Something about that lit up some vague recognition. It was a weak connection, but that sounded a lot like his nightmare. He’d heard a voice - several voices. His father’s voice, his voice, and then… another. Unfamiliar, but monstrous.
“Yeah, but ghosts aren’t real, ” Max said, leaning forward and slamming her elbows against the table. “They don’t exist. How many times– ”
“Sorry, Max is right,” Lucas shrugged. “It’s probably just radio interference. We get it all the time.”
“You’re just saying that ‘cause Max is your girlfriend,” Dustin growled, causing Lucas’s brow to knot in annoyance and Max to scoff angrily.
“I’m not just saying that!” Lucas snaps.
“Yes, you are! You always agree with her so then you can impress her!”
“ Impress her? I’m just being rational, ‘cause only dumbasses actually think that ghosts are real!”
“Oh, so kids with superpowers and alternate dimensions is reasonable , but spirits of the dead are too far out of left field for you, huh?”
“He could’ve been lying! You know, doing it for attention!” Lucas flings his hands forward toward the radio, as if to make a point. “Same goes for here, we haven’t really picked up on dead people—”
Steve reflexively jerks and sits up. “Woah, wait - you guys are hearing dead people’s voices? Like, you actually picked some up?”
“No,” Lucas and Max said in unison.
“Yes, we have,” Dustin cut across, and leaps into action as he began to twiddle with the dial again - this time, more minutely and with much more accuracy. “Check this shit out.”
The radio static is still heavy and intense, but through the thick waves of noise, pieces of conversation are starting to become more and more decipherable. One voice is still cut up in the static, but another is becoming clearer: a girl’s voice, a teenager. Her words slurred, rolling them on her tongue as she snarled at whoever she was speaking to:
“-- y-you wanted - you wanted this!”
“Wait,” Mike says, leaning forward with a raised eyebrow; for the first time, he looks genuinely intrigued. “Wait, that’s - that’s Nancy’s voice. The fuck is Nancy doing on the radio?”
It is Nancy’s voice - drunken, slurred. Familiar. Too familiar.
“Nancy isn’t a ghost though,” Max mumbles, bewildered. “She’s definitely alive, I saw her and Jonathan leaving the school.”
Dustin smirks. “Maybe she and Jonathan got into a tragic accident on the way home and are now speaking to us from the Great Beyond.”
“Hey, that’s my sister, asshole!”
“When did you get so protective, Mike?!”
“Maybe she’s on the radio and we’re getting interference, like I keep saying,” Lucas persists, still stubbornly rebuking their excitement.
“No,” Steve interjects, leaning forward so far that his ear was practically next to the radio. His head’s starting to spin and there’s a deep, heavy fear weighing down on his chest that drew all the energy out of him. “No, this is…”
His hand lunges out, whacking Dustin’s out of the way, and twiddles with further, deeper accuracy on the knob. The static slowly begins to reduce even further, still speckled within the snatches of conversation, but it’s becoming much more clearer:
“No, you. You’re… bullshit.”
“W… What?”
“You’re - You’re pretending like… like everything’s okay. You know, like… like we didn’t kill Barb…”
“That’s totally Nancy,” Dustin breathes, eyes wide with delight. “Is she speaking to Jonathan? Is that who the other–?”
Steve shakes his head. This conversation, he knows it - he knows it. Of course he fucking knows it, every word had played on a loop for months afterwards until he memorised every stutter, every stumble, every word that pierced his heart the most.
“ Like we’re in love?”
“It’s… bullshit.”
“You don’t love me?”
The soul and delight in the room is sucked out. All eyes in the room turn on Steve.
“That’s your voice,” Will whispers shakily, rattling the words in his lungs. “Steve, that’s…”
“It’s an old recording, right? Like a phone call?” Lucas justifies, staring at Steve for confirmation. But Steve’s face has turned ashen-gray, and his hands are clenched until the knuckles shift pasty white.
“This is… how the fuck… ” Something swells in Steve’s throat; nausea, churning in his stomach, fighting to be released. “This is from the past. This was from last fall at a house party. When Nancy… Nancy told me our entire damn relationship was…”
“Bullshit.”
The radio finishes his sentence for him. A silence settles in the room as everyone stares wide-eyed aghast at Steve. The entire room feels like it’s twisting, contorting, the shadows growing more and more opaque–
A light shatters and sparks burst. Shrieks fly into the air and Steve staggers back, throwing his hands in front of his face. The room burst into complete pitch-darkness – and then deeper darkness. Deeper, deeper, darker, until there’s nothing but darkness – nothing but Steve, standing alone in a vacuum of darkness, an empty chasm containing nothing but him and – and…
l e t u s i n
“No - no no—”
This isn’t real, this isn’t happening. There’s nothing but emptiness and fear here. Fear, so much fear, so much darkness. He’s an alien here, he’s out of place. This realm wasn’t made for him. It wasn’t made for anybody, and especially not him.
c l o s e a door, open a w i n d o w. isn’t that what your m o t h e r said?
“No, God, fucking stop–!”
Mother, his mother. She still loves him, right? He got his dad’s hazel eyes, and his dad’s nose, and his dad’s ideology that men are in charge so Steve needs to stop being a bitch - but he didn’t get his dad’s thin black hair. He got his mother’s brown locks. He still remembers the way the strands fell over her face and gently brushed his soft, youthful cheeks when she still kissed his cheek.
t h o u g h t s will be bloody, or be nothing worth.
“What the fuck do you want?!” Steve screams, or at least he thinks he does - he doesn’t know where his voice begins, where his thoughts end. They taught him to shout from your diaphragm when he started basketball, so as not to harm his throat, but he doesn’t know where it is anymore. He knows this, this void, and he knows his mother once loved him.
“What the fuck do you WANT?! ”
o p e n a w i n d o w. s h e opened a door. we will be here to stay.
STOP STOP IT STOP IT FUCKING STOP GO AWAY–
Steve’s lungs finally wrench for air and his eyes snap open, and an immediate hoarse, wretched burning encompassed the surface of his throat. Above him, the lights of the AV Club room are flickering - but a second later, they burst back into darkness and gradually fade back into a low tungsten. The kids are all surrounding him, his name already halfway shouted for. Dustin is closest, knelt beside him – and with that, Steve realizes he’s lying on the floor.
“Steve, holy shit! Are you okay?!” Dustin yelled, his hands clutching the fabric of Steve’s shirt. The delight and awe of their discovery on the radio has been eaten up with apprehension and horror. “What the hell happened, dude?! The lights burst, and you collapsed and - you starting seizing or something, and the lights–”
“The lights were flickering–”
“-- just like - like when El uses her powers –”
A cacophony of voices as all the kids shout over each other, battling to be overheard Steve’s horrified silence.
“We heard voices on the radio!”
“Your voice, and another voice–”
“I couldn’t understand what it was saying, though - but we heard you–”
“What? But I understood–”
“Are you hurt? What happened?!”
“Steve, you’re bleeding!”
Dustin’s hand presses against the back of Steve’s head, and Steve hisses from the pressure. There’s blood already staining the roots of his hair, and a small thin trail runs down the back of his nape. Dustin’s hand rummages in the locks of his hair suddenly, causing Steve to snarl, but his hand pulls away and reveals something clutched in the palm of his hand.
A porcelain shard: narrow and fine, shattered from a—
“A plate,” Lucas whispers. “Did you get hurt?”
“That’s the same plate Billy hit you with,” Max says loudly, dropping to her knees next to Dustin and wrenching his fingers apart to closely examine it. “That’s definitely the same. I pulled that one out of your hair myself, it almost sliced my finger open.”
“ Steve ,” Dustin mutters; his words tremble, dense with anxiety.
Out of nowhere, Steve thinks about something: a memory from the depths of winter, where he was driving down the road so he could just kill some time, and was randomly struck with the thought of careening the car his father bought him off the steep bank just by the ‘Welcome to Hawkins’ signpost and watch the front bumper crumple against the bark of a tree. He was so shaken by the idea that Steve had to pull over and put his hands in his head for ten minutes. Immediately after, he drove to Dustin’s house like it was a first instinct. Dustin didn’t ask questions about why Steve turned up, unprompted, but did say something else:
“You know you can tell me anything, right?”
He can. He can tell Dustin anything. Right?
“It’s not over,” Steve finally croaks, and the familiar, incomprehensible apprehension floods the room like a dam being released. “I had a - a vision, a dream - last night, and just now. The Upside-Down - all that bullshit, it’s not over. ”
Notes:
Author's Research No.2: Cigarettes
The kind of cigarettes one smokes can make for some interesting characterisation - so, of course, I was not surprised to read that Jim Hopper smokes Camel non-filtered cigarettes. This is some strong stuff, and explains why Joyce Byers coughs whenever she smokes his cigarettes (case in point: middle school parking lot during the Snow Ball). She also picks at her teeth when she does, because bits of tobacco gets into her mouth. Without a filter, you're pretty much smoking extremely large tar particles, which can cause intense discomfort on the throat. Very strong, and the nicotine will knock you on your ass if you haven't built up tolerance.
I'm not 100% certain as to what other characters smoke - such as Steve Harrington, who I think only smokes once at the pool party in S1, or Billy Hargrove who is obviously a constant smoker all throughout Season 2 especially. Both my research and educated guessing points towards Malboro Reds: popular, strong Americana image, a bit of a go-to, but a good quality brand.
Chapter 3: The Radio and the Revolver
Summary:
Steve swallows a hard lump, and doesn’t respond. He can’t bring himself to tell Will, who’s sitting there with a dread in his gaze that makes Steve’s stomach hurt - he can’t bring himself to speak with open honesty and say aloud: I think there’s another Gate. He doesn’t want to be the one to tell Will Byers that hell is coming back to Hawkins.
“Then let’s find it,” Dustin declares. Steve’s eyes flash towards the seat beside him for a moment. “This Gate, I mean. If it’s open again, we can find it, and El can close it. Cut the brain from the body, like last time, and problem solved."
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Young witch, let me speak wisdom to you: we begin and we end, at night, in the woods. But that is not the whole of the story.
- Night in the Woods
Hawkins, Indiana / November 1983 / 1 Month After Saving the World
Steve Harrington was sitting in the parking lot of Hawkin’s one and only middle school, debating if progressing from Babysitter-With-A-Bat to an eight grader’s personal taxi service is a relegation or a promotion, when the double doors leading to the school’s gym finally burst open. From within, a horde of young teenagers and ‘hardly-constitute-as-teengaers’ dressed in their Sunday-best swarmed out like rats, chatting animatedly and dashing across the parking lot to find their ride home. There were definitely a lot more of them in pairs compared to when Steve had arrived earlier this evening. Some of them were still holding hands.
(Steve remembers his last Snow Ball, in his final year at Hawkins Middle. He’d never failed to attend with a date, but he’d always wanted to ask out Carol Perkins. He finally asked two weeks before the ball, but she was going with Tommy Hagan instead - just like every year prior. Steve settled with a girl called Melissa Zimmerman instead. She wasn’t so bad; she had cute strawberry blonde hair and a nice pink dress, and her smile met her eyes.
She moved to Michigan halfway in their sophomore year and didn’t say goodbye to him.)
From within the mob of excitable school kids, a small detachment suddenly broke away and made a beeline for Steve’s parked car sitting idly in the parking lot. He spied Dustin Henderson’s thick curls first, still styled in that lamentable attempt to replicate Steve’s own signature flair. Steve identified the rest of the group shortly after: Wheeler in his brown suit and jumper that his Mom obviously picked out for him, looking happier than he had in a while. His hand was grasped around a young girl in a very pretty blue dress, who Steve vaguely recognised but couldn’t quite put a name to yet. Sinclair and Mayfield were together, also holding hands with bright grins emblazoned on their expressions and laughing cheerily at something extremely funny. Byers was taking up the rear beside Dustin, quiet and a little skittish as per usual, but looking much brighter than he has in a long time; he waved towards a girl only a few meters away, who blushed from being caught watching him and waved back with a grinning, bashful expression.
Steve leaned back in his seat a little, waiting for Dustin to turn and bid his adieus to the rest of the group before tearing off towards the BMW - but realized, when they’re all about 10 feet away, that he hadn’t yet and they’re all rushing towards his car.
No. Nope. Not a chance. He locked the car from the inside just as Dustin stopped at the passenger door, his cavalry of prepubescent dipshits behind him, and tugged on the handle with such force that the door felt like it may get pulled off its hinges.
“Your doors are locked, man,” Dustin stated, as if Steve hadn’t realized this yet.
“Yeah, no shit!” Steve spat, rolling his window down to confront Dustin and his Motley Crew. “I’m only chauffeuring for one tonight, that’s what I agreed on!”
The entire group, save from the young brown-haired girl and meek Will Byers, broke out into a rush of loud and venment protests; lucky for Steve, he was one of the only adults besides Hopper who actually has the balls to put his foot down. “I’m not spending all night as a taxi service for all you little meatheads! Hands off the car, Wheeler!” He added loudly as Mike attempted to yank open the back seats on the other side of the car, as if it might make some fucking difference.
“You’re not dropping us home, we’re going for food at Pizza One,” Dustin rebuked crossly, as though this was meant to make Steve change his mind. “And then most of us are coming back here, ‘cause Mrs. Byers is here and so’s the Chief and they’ll drop us all–”
“Pizza One?” Steve remarked, and stared at them as if the group had just spat all over him; god, whatever happened to standards ? “Pizza One?! You don’t wanna go to Pizza One , man, their pies are hot garbage!”
“No they’re not!” Lucas snapped, and earned a chorus of approval from the rest of the kids.
Steve could hardly hear what he was hearing. These children were uneducated. Clearly brainwashed by the garbage their imbecilic classmates filled in their heads about what constituted good food. “Yeah, they are garbage! It’s all grease, man, all the cheese just frickin’ slides off! You want pie, good pie - you go to Roberto’s.”
“Then take us there, then!” Came Dustin’s dulcet tones, and began furiously tugging on the door handle repeatedly. “C’mon, Steve –”
“No! Haven’t you guys got bikes? Roberto’s is only 10 minutes down the–”
“It’s too cold to bike!” Lucas insisted. “We’re just gonna grab some pizza, and then you can drop us off back here!”
“Tough shit!”
“We’ve had such a rough few weeks recently, you know,” Max pouted, sticking out her bottom lip. “It’s been so hard on all of us - especially El, and Will–”
“Don’t try to play that card, dipshit, I’m not playing babysitter again –!”
“If you don’t open the door then El will use her powers to do it,” Mike hollered, and the entire party fell silent at his threat.
Oh. That’s who Wheeler’s date was. She wasn’t in her punk get-up anymore so Steve didn’t recognise her, but now he did - especially after Eleven’s innocent expression suddenly shifted like a shadow into a firm, resolute gaze.
“You wouldn’t,” Steve tested, narrowing his eyes.
Mike folded his arms, raising an eyebrow and bringing up a cocky smile - the smug little bastard . Eleven’s eyes locked onto the car door, and her expression darkened even further. A sharp chill sparked into life and ran like electricity up Steve’s spine. Oh God, I don’t think I want these kids anymore.
“Alright! Alright!” Steve yelled, reaching over towards the doors quickly and releasing the locks. “Jesus, what the hell did I do to have to put up with a bunch of shitheads like – hey, hey! You can’t all come in the car!”
Steve’s protests fell on deaf ears as five kids attempted to cram into the back of his car; three of them had already begun brawling and wrestling over each other as they battled for a window seat. Will and Eleven harmlessly surrendered to whichever seat was left unoccupied - or more like whichever gap is left to squeeze into, because the back of Steve’s BMW is a three-seater but there were five pre-teens wrangling for space. The passenger seat had already been filled by Dustin, who was watching his friends sparring for space with an amused grin.
Steve was less than happy about the arrangements. “Nope, two of you - hop out. I can’t fit five of you. This is illegal. D’you understand what that means? It’s against the law. ”
“We’re fitting in fine, nobody will notice, let’s go already,” Max insisted, then promptly pierced Mike in the ribs with such ferocity that Mike yelped in pain. “Move, shit-for-brains, you’re crushing me.”
“I’m not crushing you!”
“Yes, you are! Lucas, tell Mike he’s crushing me!”
“I got my own situation here, Max, I’m practically on El’s lap right now!”
“I swear you’re good for nothing sometimes, stalker, you know that?”
“Two of you just walk , you’re gonna damage my car seats!”
“Maybe we should make ‘em duke it out for car privileges. Fight to the death!”
“Don’t encourage this, Dustin, this is all your fault!”
“ My fault-?!”
“Yeah, I only promised to pick you up and drop you off home, that was it! ”
“It’s only a trip down to the goddamn pizza place! You can come too!”
“I don’t wanna – leave the stereo alone, dude!”
“Hopper’s coming!”
Will’s warning broke through the raucous yells of teenagers crammed into a BMW, and the arguments quickly broke off. Steve spotted Hopper straight away, still smoking by his car with Joyce almost firmly attached at his hip. He locked onto Steve, sitting sheepishly in the front of his car, and boomed across the parking lot: “Bring those kids back here at 9 - that clear, Harrington?”
“Crystal!”
“He hasn’t noticed, he hasn’t noticed,” Max dramatically whispered from the rear, and seized the back of Steve’s seat and shook it wildly. “Floor it, Steve!”
There were five children squashed in the back of Steve’s BMW, even though it can only room three. Under the watchful eye of Chief Hopper, Steve prayed to God that Hopper’s making an exception of the law tonight for Eleven’s sake, and hit the accelerator before the chief of police could start a head-count.
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / 5 Minutes After Steve Harrington Collapses at the Hawkin’s AV Club
Steve Harrington tells his story of his close encounter with a new, malformed creature from another realm, and how a telekinetic teenage girl woke up just as terrified in the night as he did, and he realizes that his predictions on the party’s reactions weren’t totally on the nose.
For starters, the most surprising thing is how much of a shit they actually give - especially Wheeler, who looks actually venomous with anger. Steve knows how the Wheeler’s work: they’ve got fire in them, and their fury is usually a defensive mechanism for their real feelings of anxiety and concern. Steve’s mistaken for a moment to assume Mike is actually concerned for him, but he quickly realizes it’s actually concern for El. Nobody told Mike that El was in danger, and therefore it’s somehow Steve’s fault.
He also underestimated Max and Lucas. They’re not skeptical or disbelieving, they’re just confused. They ask good questions as Steve regales his story - clarifications, mostly, or filling in gaps that Steve deemed unimportant. They’re both smarter than anyone gives them credit for. They’re rational. Maybe that’s why the pair get on so well (when they’re not bickering).
Steve also somehow underestimated how much Dustin actually cares. The kid’s furiously loyal and considerate: whilst Lucas and Max ask like they’re detectives on a case, Dustin instead asks questions like he’s a therapist. He makes sure that Steve is alright, ensures he wasn’t ‘mentally fucked up’ from the voices and visions brought on by this beast. Although, predictably, Steve can see that Dustin’s itching to dig into this mystery and start asking the real questions.
The only one he did hit on the mark was Will Byers, although sort of in an inverted sense. Will’s freaking out, it’s clear as daylight on a summer’s day: the color has drained from his expression, his anxious brown eyes flickering between the occupants in the room like he’s watching a tennis match, and he’s silent as the grave. Steve doesn’t blame him for one second; everyone who’s ‘in the know’ knows that Will’s been through hell and back, and Steve has just waltzed in here as a harbinger, dragging that hell right back to him.
The story finishes, and Steve realizes how much detail he’s purposefully omitted. He didn’t mention how his night began, waking from nightmares - normal nightmares, if demodogs in flaming tunnels constitute ‘normal’ - and patrolling the streets in the thundering rain with his nail-bat. He didn’t mention the things he saw in his first dream, or vision, or whatever the hell it was; he summarized it as ‘bad memories, and bad thoughts’, knowing there was no way in hell he was going to describe Dustin’s mangled and half-consumed corpse (and even less chance Steve was going to describe his father). And he didn’t mention Hopper informing Steve of his parents' domestic row - not that it mattered, it was completely irrelevant, but he didn’t need anybody else getting mixed up in his family business. Including the kids. Especially the kids.
There’s a tense period of silence as everyone absorbs and contemplates what’s happened, and doubt brushes across Steve’s mind. Do they not believe him? Or do they actually believe him, and now he’s dragging these kids into unknown territory where they don’t belong?
Dustin, predictably, breaks the silence. “I’ve got questions.”
“Me too,” Mike concurs.
“So do I,” Steve agrees, and rounds on Max. “You said you were the one who took care of me after I got into that fight with Billy?”
Max folds her arms and shrugs.
“So you were the little shit who put the useless band-aids on?”
“That was me, actually,” Dustin says proudly, as if it’s meant to be something to be proud about. Steve’s mouth hitches open to curse Dustin out for taking the idiom ‘put a band-aid on it’ way too literally, but Dustin’s questions beat him to the punch. “The voice on the radio before - you and Nancy, that was… both of you? In the past, on the phone?”
“On the – no, it wasn’t,” Steve growls irritably, nursing his scalp. The blood from the mysterious wound is already drying out; it stings like a bitch, but not any worse than when Billy had actually smashed his head with a plate. “As in - no, it wasn’t on the phone. We were in a bathroom at Tina Milligan’s halloween party, last fall.”
“And Nancy broke up with you there?” Mike said, with a stupid twisted smirk on his face.
Steve scowls, and is hit with the violent urge to throw something really hard at the smug little bastard’s face. “No! No, I mean - it’s not even relevant, Wheeler!”
“So a conversation in the past ended up being broadcasted on the radio?” Max asks, interjecting before another argument can be ignited. (Steve just glares daggers across at Wheeler, who folds his arms and sits triumphantly).
It’s Lucas who shakes his head. “No, this was different. Whilst you guys were freaking out about the lights and Steve, I noticed the frequency dials. They were jumping all over the place, but the sound was the same. Nancy and Steve’s conversations kept going, and then it changed to just Steve’s voice saying…” He pauses, and dismissively finishes: “Stuff.”
“I was saying stuff?” Steve asks, furrowing his brow. There’s suddenly a guilty look on everyone present - the kind of look you might have when you’ve been caught overhearing something you definitely did not mean to have overheard. Something private, something exposing.
Dustin grimaces guilty, sharing uncomfortable looks with the rest of the party. “Just, stuff, you know, like… ‘no, please stop, fucking stop, what do you want, stop it’–”
He’s trying to be casual about it, and it just makes it worse.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Steve growls, reluctant to be reminded of the sheer terror he experienced. “That was me, yeah - just now, I mean. Not, like the past. In my… dream. Or vision. Whatever the hell.”
“So this - this dream took over the radio signal then,” Max says. “So it was broadcasted everywhere across Hawkins?”
Great. Just what he needs - for all of Hawkins to hear Steve Harrington freaking out.
“No, just here,” Mike says, shaking his head. “It’s like when El was trying to find Will. We heard his voice on the radio, where he was stuck in the Upside Down. Maybe… maybe this is similar.”
Steve actually perks up at this. “Woah, wait - are you saying I’ve got powers?”
Mike snorts, actually and genuinely snorts with amusement, and brings on that smug face again. “Yeah, you wish, Harrington. I’m just saying the way it was on the radio was just similar, you’re not El. And about El - you said she came to you, the first time that you had your dream or whatever?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah - that shouldn’t be possible.”
“What?” A chorus sings in the room, as all eyes whip curiously over towards Mike.
He stands up, placing his palms onto the table and taking up his mantle as the leader of the group - right, this is why he’s the paladin. “We know that El can find people, with salt water and stuff - but now, she can do it without those things. She just needs background noise, like TV static, and a blindfold. I’ve seen her do it.”
“It’s true,” Steve says suddenly; everyone looks to him, and the back of his neck grows warm. “I mean… when I went over last night - she was sitting in front of the TV doing exactly that.”
Mike nods, although there’s a weird bitter look in his eyes, and continues without even meeting Steve’s gaze. “Using those things, she can physically find people, right? And in the bathtub, she can even find people in the Upside Down - like Will. She also told me she can access people’s minds, in a way… like their memories and stuff.” His dark eyes turn on Steve now, and narrow as though he were studying the older teenager. “But she can’t get in through people’s dreams. She never has.”
Great. That just brings in another sub-mystery to this onslaught of sub-mysteries within a collective of fucking mysteries. How was the radio picking up a conversation of the past? How did it pick up Steve’s voice as he went through his weird dream/vision/seizure thing? Is there another Gate? How did Steve end up with a head wound and a plate shard in his hair? And now… did Eleven suddenly have the ability to enter people’s dreams?
“But why not, though?” Dustin says loudly; his gaze, previously focused on a point on the table, travels to meet Mike’s. “Think about it. Long-term memories are controlled in the hippocampus of the brain. Dreams are also controlled by the hippocampus, since it often relates to memory.”
(Dreams, memories, the thin line between them bordering when Steve slept – they would run through the tunnels, hounded by fire and snarls of demodogs, and most of the time they wouldn’t escape. More often than not, he’d awaken drenched in pinballs of sweat and vehemently reminding himself that they didn’t die, the kids are alive, they’re safe.)
Mike shrugs, understanding Dustin’s mumbo-jumbo science-y point that Steve only mostly understands, but replies: “I’m just saying - that’s all El can do.”
“She did it though, somehow,” Steve says, driving the conversation back on-topic before a debate could start up; besides, he wasn’t sure if science could apply to a kid who can literally move things with her mind. “She was there. She tried to fight it.”
“And ‘it’ is that other voice on the radio?” Max asks.
“Other–?”
The door suddenly rattles and swings open, and everyone in the room almost leaps out of their skin - with Steve and Will even emitting small whines of surprise. Their fear is unfounded; standing in front of the door, an innocent and pleased smile on his expression, is Mr. Clarke.
“Hey, kids - everything okay down here?” Mr. Clarke asks, moving between each of their pale and anxious expressions. “We had a little trip in the power, so I just wanted to make sure there’s no issues - you know what happened to the last Heathkit - oh, Steve Harrington!” His eyes meet Steve’s, who just grimaces in a sheepish greeting. “Glad to see you here again! Are you all alright?” He glances between everyone, raising an eyebrow. “You look like you’ve all seen a ghost.”
Dustin instantly dives in with an excuse already on the tip of his tongue. “Funny you say that, my lord! That’s exactly what we were doing. Ghost-hunting. On the radio.”
“Oh, wow, excellent,” Mr. Clarke positively beams. “And how did you fare? Catch any spooky ghosts on the frequencies?”
“I think we heard some pretty spooky ghosts,” Steve manages to croak, somehow, behind the nausea churning in his stomach. “Maybe enough for the day, huh, kiddos?”
There’s a hard pronunciation in his voice, egging the kids on to understand: let’s get the hell out of here. Even though the threat is over, Steve’s sweating pinballs and there’s a lingering paranoia that the radio is going to kick into life again and send Steve into another fit of strange voices. Everyone catches on and hums in agreement - except Dustin, who opens his mouth to protest but is quickly prevented by Max who aims a kick in the shin from under the table.
“Well, it’s probably for the best, it’s getting after hours,” Mr. Clarke hums, checking his watch. “How about we pick it up next week? Maybe you’ll even be able to replicate Jürgenson’s Raudive Voices . Wouldn’t that be something, huh?”
“Wouldn’t it,” Steve replies in a forcibly cheerful voice, and starts snapping his fingers to spur the kids in action. “C’mon, grab your shi – er, stuff, grab your stuff, let’s go or the arcade will be shut by the time we get there.”
It’s polarizing, the speed that these kids could haul ass: on a normal day, they’re packing their bags at a tantalizingly slow speed as if they’re conducting an experiment of how far they could push Steve’s patience. Today, they just seize their backpacks and hurl themselves out the door without even slinging the bags over their shoulders. Mr. Clarke seems unperturbed as ever, reacting only with a mildly curious quirk of the eyebrow, and thanks Steve for watching over the kids and wishes him a marvelous evening.
(Steve wishes he paid more attention in Mr. Clarke’s classes. Not just because it turns out some this science-y crap is actually pretty relevant, but Mr. Clarke is a super stand-up guy.)
They’re not going to the arcade; everyone knows it as they parade out of the building. The group march through the corridors, Steve in a dark and contemplative silence as he leads his troop of muttering gremlins out into the parking lot. It’s much more deserted than before, with only a few empty cars left lingering in the parking lot that more than likely belong to school staff. Indiana’s winter is still dying, and the sunset is already beginning its slow march towards the horizon. Though the sky is still a clear azure, the clouds bespeckled within the blue are starting to take on a mild yellow hue and the middle school’s parking lot is gleaming with soft, subtle sun rays that bounce off the brick walls and shine on the reflection of the cars.
“You didn’t answer my question earlier,” Max says, catching up to walk beside Steve as they all make a beeline for his car (he has to stuff four kids into the backseats, again, and he’s damn lucky that Powell or Callahan hasn’t pulled him over for it yet). “About the other voice on the radio. What was it saying?”
“What d’you mean?” Steve asks, puzzled. “You couldn’t hear it?”
“No. It just sounded like a garbled mess of… I dunno. Growling, snarling. Not like those dogs, though… like something - something else.”
The doors around the BMW open up, but nobody gets in; they’re all waiting on Steve’s response. He looks between the kids, nervous and still confused, and says: “I dunno, it… a lot of what it said made no sense. Like it’s speaking in a code or riddles. Said stuff like… like you close a door, open a window - she opened a door… thoughts will be bloody, and - and, isn’t that–”
“Isn’t that what your mother said,” whispers Will Byers.
A massive pit opens up in Steve’s stomach, and the most terrible feeling comes over him. His hands grow clammy, and the usually fresh springtime air tastes sour to breathe. Everyone’s eyes turn and center on the young, meek little Will Byers: his face is pale, and he’s shaking, and there’s a fresh horror in his eyes that isn’t even comparable to everyone else’s.
“Will?” Mike says it, quiet and hushed, but the pitch is high - higher than even before his voice broke.
Will shivers and gulps. “You… You all said that you didn’t understand it - what the creature was saying on the radio. But I did.” He looks at Steve and says quietly, almost so inaudible that Steve almost doesn’t catch it: “I understood it.”
Everyone ‘in the know’ knows that when it comes to danger like the Upside Down, everyone is in the shit - but if Will Byers is getting dragged into the midst of hell in it, then everyone is going to be buried .
For the first ten or so minutes, Steve just drives around aimlessly. Dustin has taken the seat beside him, of course, because he always does: he’s nervous, biting the bottom of his lip and bouncing his leg up and down in a jittery fashion. The kids in the back are unnaturally silent. They’ve wedged Will in the middle, who is pressed up shoulder-to-shoulder between Mike and Lucas. Max has withdrawn in on herself - if frustration is Mike’s defensive mechanism, then Max’s is distancing herself. She sits by the window, arms folded and gazing out with a dark, ruminative expression. She’s not an odd one out for it - everyone is deep in thinking, likely procuring questions to throw at Steve once he’s finished having an anxiety attack at the front wheel.
He pushes on through, driving subconsciously through the Hawkins suburbs and trying to think what the hell they can do about this mess. It wasn’t like last time, where he could just face this head-on with a baseball bat with nails hammered into the wood. This thing they were facing was, for the moment, intangible and possibly omnipresent. They didn’t know what it was, where it was, and why it was targeting Steve-fucking-Harrington of all people.
That was another question that he hadn’t considered - why him? Why was it targeting him? Surely, he was bottom of the list of people for the Mind Flayer to target. Would they not target Eleven instead, who was the one with literal superpowers? Or invade through Will again, who they’d already used as a reliable vessel? Or why not someone else more relevant to this war against the Upside Down? Why not Joyce Byers, the leading protector of Will? Or Mike, who protects Eleven? Or Hopper, who protects everyone?
“Close a door, open a window,” Will says suddenly from the back of the car, causing everyone to jerk in surprise. “That’s what that - that thing said. What do you think that means?” He’s not asking anyone specifically, but rather for group opinion.
Dustin scratches his chin contemplatively. “Well, in a general context, it’s about opportunity. If one thing fails - in this case, the door closing—”
“Then you have the opportunity to succeed at something else,” Max finishes. “A window opens. And this - this creature thing, it said: she opened the door. ”
“What if it means El?” Mike declares, sitting up straight; his eyes are alight with a fire that Steve has seen countless times in Nancy’s own eyes. “It’s a door, right? So what if this door is the gate? El closed the gate - so what if the window is another gate?”
Will visibly trembles.
“Hopper said there isn’t another gate,” Steve says - but he fails to hide his disbelief, even as a reassurance to the kids. Just the same as last night, he sounds unconvinced.
“You don’t believe him, do you?” Will whispers. His wide, brown eyes sparkle with fear.
Steve swallows a hard lump, and doesn’t respond. He can’t bring himself to tell Will, who’s sitting there with a dread in his gaze that makes Steve’s stomach hurt - he can’t bring himself to speak with open honesty and say aloud: I think there’s another Gate. He doesn’t want to be the one to tell Will Byers that hell is coming back to Hawkins.
“Then let’s find it,” Dustin declares. Steve’s eyes flash towards the seat beside him for a moment. “This Gate, I mean. If it’s open again, we can find it, and El can close it. Cut the brain from the body, like last time, and problem solved. We can do it, we almost found it the first time this all happened with our compasses.”
“Compasses?” Steve cocks an eyebrow.
“A compass always points north, but in the presence of a stronger electromagnetic field than the north field, it’ll point towards that source instead - it literally leads us right towards a Gate. The first time this happened was when we first met El. Our compasses–”
“ My compass,” Lucas reminds him loudly from the rear. “Whilst you guys were busy pining after a girl–”
“We weren't pining!” Mike retorts.
“-- I used the compass to try to find Will. It took me right to Hawkin’s Lab.”
“Where the big Gate was, right?” Max asks, glancing around for confirmation. “That’s the Gate that El closed. So… So you think it’s…?”
“I have a compass on me, all the time,” Dustin says. “If we go to the Lab right now–”
“No, no way,” Steve states, and the car instantly bursts in a furious tirade of protests. Steve raises a hand, eyes still fixed on the trailing road he’s been meandering around for the last few minutes, and continues loudly: “I meant not tonight!”
“What?” Dustin squawks from the front seat. “Whaddya mean, not–?”
“Because it’s already late, and we don’t have the time. If we’re out all night, your parents will start kicking up a fuss - especially yours, Will. God bless Mr. Byers but she worries.”
The kids' protests turned into angry, low mutterings, and Steve continued before Will could get the impression that it might be his fault (which it wasn’t, but that kid was full of self-blame). “Look, we’ll rendezvous tomorrow morning at Byer’s place because it’s closest to the lab. And we’ll go there, outside of the fence–” Another chorus of protests which Steve loudly drowns out with his shouting. “-- And we’ll check for your electric fields or whatever–”
“Electromagnetic fields, thank you–”
“Or whatever, ” Steve repeats, rolling his eyes at Dustin. “And if there’s no Gate, then… then I guess we just have to get this - this thing out of my head somehow.”
“And if there is?” Lucas prompts, leaning forward in his seat. “If there is a Gate?”
“Then we tell Hopper,” Steve declares. “It’ll be his call after that. That Gate being open is - is way out of our hands. You remember what happened last time.”
The kids turn quiet, each of their gazes turning to stare out of the window; they all knew what happened last time. A young Byers possessed by a demon from outside their realm… a monster loose in the wilds of Hawkins… demodogs prowling in the fog… monsters ravaging the Hawkins Lab and tearing Bob Newby to pieces… tunnels on fire, lives at stake. The kids are stupidly courageous, but they know they can’t refuse to involve Hopper when things are on the line again.
Still, Steve thinks it’s a good compromise that he’s even letting them get involved in the first place. It’s not really because it’s their place to be involved, but rather Steve knows they’re going to stick their noses and go full investigative mode anyway, so it’s better if Steve’s around to make sure none of the little shits die. He also needs their brains and their quick-thinking; there’s still a lot of unsolved questions that Steve hasn’t got a clue where to start with. If the Gate wasn’t open, how could this creature be getting in? Can El really enter people’s dreams now, or is it something else causing that? How the hell did Steve get injured again and end up with a plate shard stuck in his hair? He knows that the kids will figure it out; they’re the smartest ones, and the ones who are willing to open their minds beyond what a bunch of high school teens and some paranoid parents can.
The kids are dropped off one by one: Will first, where his anxious mother waves to them from the front porch and Steve politely declines a cup of tea, and Lucas second who parts with a farewell and a warning to keep the radios on overnight. Mike is dropped off third; he casts concerned glances between Dustin and Steve before muttering ‘see you’ and stalking into the house without another word.
Most nights, Steve drops off Max last - he’s always gotten the shivers whenever he’s pulled up outside of their small home on the edge of the poorer end of the suburbs, knowing that her aggressive stepbrother and even more violent stepfather were demons in their own right that haunted the inside of their house, and therefore had created a habit of idling outside the house for a few minutes before pulling off. Just in case something turns ugly, and Max needs to make a run for it.
(He knows. He understands. Nobody’s there to be his getaway ride, he is the getaway ride, but he sure as hell is going to be Max’s if it comes to it).
But, for the first time, Dustin insists on being dropped off last. Steve can’t bring himself to tell the truth of why he drops Max off last, and Max really couldn’t care either way, so it’s Max that’s the fourth one to depart the car.
“Keep your radio on!” Dustin hollers as she shuffles out of the car.
“Yeah, yeah, keep your hat on,” Max mutters, slamming the door shut. “Don’t wake me up early though, or I swear to God…”
“Take care, Red,” Steve calls, lifting up two fingers from the wheel as a goodbye. She actually smiles, and it meets her eyes, and flips them off with a smirk before vanishing within the threshold of her house. Steve remains idling outside, engine and headlamps on, and busies himself with pretending to find his cigarettes and lighter as an excuse for hanging around.
Dustin watches him suspiciously for a moment, then curls up a nostril. “Oh God, you haven’t started smoking again, have you?”
“What?” Steve asks innocently, eyes wide and a cigarette already stuck between his teeth. “No. What’re you talking about?”
“You’ve literally got one in your mouth, dude, don’t play innocent. I thought you quit?”
Steve shrugs, lights his cigarette and starts to put the car forward. “Yeah, well, I did quit. And then… I stopped being quit.”
“When?”
“Dude, I dunno!” Steve shrugs, veering off the sidewalk and beginning his advance down the road and towards the Henderson house. “Few days, maybe.”
“You said you quit for Nancy when you were still together, and then you started again after you beat that demogorgon at the Byer’s house. Then you quit for Nancy, again, and started smoking literally right after the stuff last fall on Mrs. Byer’s porch—”
“Oh, what, you’re keeping track now?” Steve says, his voice dripping with scorn and puffing at the lit cigarette that’s balanced in the corner of his mouth.
“And then - then you quit for my sake, and now you’ve started it again! It’s just on - off - on - off – you can’t commit, can you?”
“Dude, stop giving me shit for it, already!” Steve groans, rolling his head back as he turns a corner; the lights of the surrounding Hawkins homes become obscured as they turn into a road flanked with tenebrous, lofty pine trees. “I’m eighteen now, you know, I can make these adult decisions!”
“It was Hopper, wasn’t it? He got you smoking at his cabin last night.”
Steve’s hand slips on the wheel, and the car jolts. “Shit, what the – how the hell do you–?”
“El told Mike , obviously,” Dustin replies, folding his arms and rolling his eyes as though it were the most obvious piece of logic in the world. “That’s why Mike was giving you shit all day, ‘cause he was jealous.”
Steve snorts. “Yeah, uh - El’s out of my age range, bud. Mike’s got nothing to worry about.”
“It’s not all about that, dumbass. He’s jealous that you got to see El. She says Hopper’s being nicer about her going out, but he’s still super stringent. She’s only allowed out on the weekend, and has to be back before sundown. Plus Mike reckons Hopper’s got it out for him - gets all sour whenever Mike’s at the cabin.”
“Yeah, well, it would help if Mike and El would do something more than just make out. Remember when we were at my place for your birthday bash last month? And Mike and El kept running in and out, and we found out it was ‘cause they were practicing kissing in the guest bedroom?” Steve scoffs and rolls his eyes. “If you ask me, he can take some pages from my book, or whatever the damn phrase is - show her that you just don’t care—”
“Steve, slow down - something’s blocking the road.”
Dustin’s voice is low and serious, enough that a cold external from the early Spring chill runs through his body as though his nerves were doused in freezing water. He glances up to see a car parked horizontally right across the road, headlights glowing an blaring yellow-white that casts intense beams into the shadowed depths of the pine woods encompassing the road. As Steve’s car slows to a crawl, he squints into the darkness and spots a silhouette posed in front of the car door. A man ahead leans against the closed front door, a lit cigarette unfurling wisps of smoke between his teeth, his long, curled hair rolling down the sides of his neck and barely touching his shoulders.
“Shit,” Dustin hisses, sinking in his seat low enough that his cap is almost obscuring his face. “It’s Billy. Shit, shit shit…”
Oh, fuck, of course it’s Billy Hargrove - it’s one of those days, so it makes perfect sense that Billy Hargrove is apparently here to kill Steve. Great. Billy doesn’t move; he’s waiting, like he knows Steve is going to come out and confront him rather than turning tail and running. Shit, when did Steve become so predictable?
“Stay in the car,” Steve orders; predictably, this causes Dustin to jerk angrily.
“No, dude, let me be your back-up!”
“I said - stay in the car,” Steve snarls, his voice so dangerously low that it would almost put the Chief to shame. (Somewhere across Hawkins, Chief Jim Hopper inexplicably puffs out with pride). “If this gets ugly–”
“It will, it’s Billy.”
“Stay low, and stay in the car – if it gets ugly, run. Get your radio to tell someone to call Hop out here, then hide in the woods until they get here. And don’t get involved.”
“But–”
“Don’t get involved, or I’ll lock the car doors!”
Without another word, Steve steps out of the car and slams the door loud enough to drown out Dustin’s fumbling dissent. He avoids Billy’s gaze for a moment, almost acting as if he’s not there, as Steve quickly begins to draw on the rest of his cigarette with deep, rushed inhales that could compete with Joyce Byers.
“Well, well,” Billy drawls out in his low, gravelly voice. “Steven Harrington.”
“The one and only.”
There’s an audible hissing noise as Billy inhales more smoke into his lungs from his cigarette, whilst Steve drops his own and puts it out with the toe of his shoe. He glances up, finally meeting eyes with Billy–
watching.
Steve’s heart almost slams against his ribcage as a lightning bolt of fear strikes through him. The world around him splutters for a moment; the headlights of Billy’s Camaro flicker ominously, and Steve swears on his mother’s life that Billy’s appearance seems to change for a moment into something - something darker, more terrifying –
“You hear him too, don’t you?”
“Wh… What?”
“I said: fancy seeing you here, Harrington,” Billy responds, his crooked and mocking leer growing more intense. “Did our last little meeting knock a few screws loose in that head of yours or what?”
“What do you want ?” Steve groans, leaning his hip against the front bumper of his car. His head is feeling light again - is the stress and paranoia getting to him so severely that he’s hearing things, or has the creature really targeted Billy? “If it’s about your sister, man, I already dropped her off–”
“This ain’t about her,” Billy snarled; his smirk is wiped off, and his face has contorted into genuine, seething hatred. “This is about you… and me.”
A glint of metal catches Steve’s attention in the corner of his eye, and his heart leaps into his throat. Revealed from the back pocket of Billy’s jeans is a - oh shit, oh fuck, he’s got a fucking gun …!
“Nice toy,” Steve says, keeping his eye trained on the silver revolver that’s slowly being withdrawn. “Did your daddy give it to you?”
Billy visibly jerks upon hearing his father’s mention, but doesn’t strike. He lifts the gun up, rotating it in his hands as though casually inspecting a fine antique. “You like it, Harrington? I pulled it from my old man’s safe. He keeps it for emergencies - protecting his land and all that Third Amendment bull.”
“Ah… I’m more of an up close and personal type, you know?” Steve shrugs. His bat is in the back of his car - maybe, if he’s really lucky, he could make a run for it — or trick Billy into following him around the rear —
“Really now?” Billy says, obviously feigning interest. “Well, I wanted to do this using the old man’s shotgun - he sawed off the end, you know. Bigger spray of bullets. But it’s harder to smuggle out under his nose.” Billy shrugs and lifts up the revolver, the metal glinting against the lights emitting from the headlamps of both cars. “But you can’t get everything in life. You wouldn’t know much about that… being a rich boy and all.”
“What’re you planning to do with it?” Steve says carefully, rounding himself towards the front of the car to block Billy’s sight from the passenger seat; at the very least, he could prevent Billy from spotting and shooting Dustin, or else use himself as a human shield…
Billy takes another puff out of the cigarette and pushes himself off the car, slowly approaching Steve whilst circling the revolver around in his hands. “Funny you ask, Harrington. You know, just last night, I was thinking about you. I was thinking about us, and our little… rivalry that we have going on. And I took a look at this weapon, and I just felt it calling out to me.”
He slowly approaches Steve, who keeps his feet planted.
screw your c o u r a g e to the sticking place, and we’ll not f a i l.
Steve hears the voice this time, resounding and booming in his mind, but he doesn’t flinch - and yet, he gets a queer instinct in his stomach that, somehow, Billy has heard it too.
“Don’t you want to become a God?” Billy’s tongue rolled in guttural snarls and hisses that almost seemed unearthly. “Let his blood spill upon your cheeks - the King that your fists lay upon bare. Will you take the throne?”
“You’re gonna shoot me - is that it?” Steve asks quietly, refusing to pull his gaze away from the weapon. “You’re here to kill me?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think I am, King Steve. That ain’t a problem, is it?”
“Chief Hopper will have you for it.”
Billy booms out a single bark of laughter that reverberates in the cold air and swirls around the pine trees, and pulls the dying light of his cigarette out from between his teeth. He leans forward, staring Steve right between the eyes - and stubs the fucking thing right on Steve’s left bicep. Steve cringes, hisses, tries to hold it in - it’s happened before, Harrington, man the fuck up - but can’t help but release a low, jarring ‘f- fuck ’ from the pain.
Billy tosses the smoldering remains of his smoke into the depths of the woods beyond, and leans forward so close that Steve can see the inflated pupils in detail. “You think some drunk cop high off his own meds fucking scares me?”
No, Steve thinks bitterly to himself, clenching his jaw as he ignores the throbbing pain on his arm. No, I don’t think he does scare you.
“It’s real easy, Harrington. I’m gonna put a hole right through that thick fuckin’ skull of yours, and then I’m gonna drive outta this shithole and back to California. And I know those bums they call a police force ain’t even gonna bother investigating past the Indiana border.”
“This isn’t you,” Steve pleads quietly, his voice low and steady, reaching out into Billy’s subconscious - he knows there’s good in there, surely. “That - That voice in your head telling you to do this? That’s something else, man—“
lying lying he’s l y i n g you want this
“Not me? Don’t give me that bull , Harrington. This is me.”
“But you’re kidding me with the - the gun, right?” Steve tries, even flinching into a shaky grin. “After everything, you’re just gonna shoot me like some pussy? No fight, no nothing, not gonna be a real man about it? Neither of us really won our last fight, so - so why don’t we do it one last time? You and me. Like real men.”
He’s thinking on his feet, but Steve knows he’s got Billy good. If there’s one real common ground they have, it’s that they both have shitty father’s with warped perceptions of masculinity. Richard Harrington’s used those arguments against Steve before, and so Steve’s striking low and hard. Pussy. Fight like a man. Be a real man for once in your life.
Billy’s scowl lowers. He’s thinking about it, he’s really considering it. Steve breathes in, holding the oxygen in his lungs—
“Fine,” Billy spits, and he tosses the gun aside. It clatters onto the road, right on the edge where the concrete meets the bedding of grass that borders the street. “Lemme see that fire , King Steve.”
Steve’s jaw clenches. He's in some deep shit now. No time to regret it though. His basketball training fires up like an engine, and his knees bend as he feints in front of Billy, who instantly tenses and lunges forward with a right hook. Miraculously, Steve manages to dodge and sinks a fist straight across Billy’s jaw. Billy grunts, lurching back as flecks of spit fly out between his teeth.
“Screw you, man,” Steve snarls as he swings in for another throw, but Billy's quick; he's gotten better, maybe gained more experience. Billy's bicep flies up and blocks Steve’s punch, whilst another set of knuckles rams into Steve’s stomach. Steve fucking retches , staggering back as a burning pain blossoms in his abodemn. Then his scalp feels as though it's being torn apart as Billy’s fingers grip into Steve’s brown locks and wrenches Steve so close that Billy’s teeth almost scrape against his ear.
“Lost your fighting spirit or something?” Billy snarls as Steve struggles to pull himself out of his grip. “This is some pussy shit.” He spits out the ‘p’ in that, like it doesn’t belong in his mouth. “Even Sinclair could put up a better fight.”
“Fuck you!”
Maybe it was because of the mention of one of the kids' names that did it, but a surge of hot, scalding rage suddenly overwhelms Steve. His hand grips into the back of Billy’s nape, fingernails digging into the skin, and his fist slams into Billy's chest and stomach. Billy yells out in pain, and Steve rams into him again - and again, and again - over, and over, and over, and over, until the skin over his knuckles tears open to reveal flesh and blood underneath–
RAGE RAGE RAGE R A G E
Steve slows down - big mistake. Within the tiny gap where Steve lets up, Billy throws one of the hardest punches Steve’s ever fucking felt. His vision blackens and blurs, his head bursting into a nebula of blood and stars, and he vaguely registers himself staggering like a drunken man. As his vision returns to low clarity, Billy’s white-knuckle grip clutches Steve’s scalp and pushes him forward, then throws him downward. Steve’s head smashes into the hood of the Camaro, and the throbbing agony is so bad that he almost completely loses his senses.
Billy's got him pinned good, arms twisted behind his back and locked by one hand whilst an elbow nestles painfully between Steve’s shoulder blades. One hand is still gripped into his hair, pushing down Steve’s cheek into the metal hood of Billy’s prized car.
“Not bad, Harrington,” Billy hisses, his chest puffing up and down rapidly; he's not without damage, with the fresh markings of a bruise forming across his lower jaw and likely even more underneath his tank top. “Not bad at all. Finally learned how to fight dirty. Round of applause.”
c r a c k his head open let it spill like california waves on the seashore kill a king to become a king
(It’s not for him; these words aren’t for him. But Steve can hear it anyway, and it only adds to the terror. Oh God. Oh God. He’s going to die here, isn’t he?)
“Good call on ditching gun, too. It is pussy shit. Think it’ll be more fun if I split your skull open instead.”
Billy lifts up Steve’s head, barely a few inches, and slams it back down against the hood. Steve chokes back a wretched gasp of agony, blinking back stars that burst in front of his eyes.
(He’s only eighteen. He’s going to die. He didn’t even get to say sorry.)
“Or would you rather it be your daddy’s fucking car instead?” His head lifts, and slams down again. “I wouldn’t wanna ruin my paint job, after all. What's it like - having a fucking daddy that pampers you the the prince you are?”
Steve chokes as he feels vomit churn in the back of his throat. “He doesn't… love me. Don't give a shit. Yours doesn't either… right?”
“Are you trying to relate to me?” Billy pulls his hair up, and pounds Steve’s head against the car once more. “Fuck you, you privileged fucking douchebag—”
“Leave him alone!”
Steve’s entire body jerks from the shock of hearing a voice that isn’t Billy’s or his own, and instantly almost bursts with indignant desperation - why didn't these kids listen ? His eyes swivel up, traveling to find the silhouette reflected against the lights of Billy Hargrove’s Camaro that's aiming the gun at its owner—
Oh, God. Oh, fucking hell . Dustin Henderson stands in the middle of the road, dead right in-between the two cars, filled with a mix of fear and rage whilst pointing the previously discarded revolver dead straight towards Billy. Dustin's hands are trembling and his muscles are tensed up, but there's a fiery look in his gaze that's pushing him forward past the fear. It's enough to make him a real threat.
Nothing compared to Billy, of course. But even Billy knows better than to underestimate an idiot with a loaded weapon. Hargrove doesn't move from his position, but locks eyes onto Dustin and speaks in the lowest, most gravelly snarl he can summon: “Put that fucking thing down.”
Dustin visibly flinches - but makes up for it by lifting the gun higher, stretching his arms outward more, and his trembling visibly reduces by a margin. “I said… Leave. Him. Alone.”
(He’s an idiot, is all Steve can think about. Dustin thinks this is some kids movie, where the underdog is going to scare off the top dog with the Power Of Friendship. He’s a boy genius and an idiot, all at once.)
“Or what?” Billy snorts. “You gonna shoot me, kid? Look at you - you're about to fucking wet yourself.”
“Maybe I will shoot you.”
“You haven't got the balls.”
“Get outta here, dude,” Steve rasps, one arm scrabbling against the hood of the car to reach out towards Dustin. He can feel trails of blood starting to break out from the roots of his hair and flow down his skin like beads of sweat. “Go, just - get Hop–”
“He hasn't got the balls ,” Billy hollers, his confidence bursting in full - he knows Dustin won’t shoot, and he's ready to take advantage of that. “Just trying to play the hero, huh? Go on, why don't you listen to your King Steve? Go running home to your Mommy and fucking Daddy, whilst I bash this guy’s head in like he fucking deserves—”
BANG.
A blast of fire. A terrible ringing. A shattering of flesh. A hole has gone through Billy Hargrove’s cheek. Blood drips as his jaw hangs open, balancing off a hinge, and yet stares back at Dustin impassively as if nothing even happened. More and more blackish liquid pours from underneath his tongue and down his chin, spilling out in a waterfall of scarlet and dripping onto the tarmac below. A boy in a trucker cap starts screaming incoherently behind Steve, torn with horror—
l o n g l i v e t h e k i n g
No. This isn’t real.
That thought alone renders Steve back into reality; this is the work of the monster, he knows it, intent on terrifying Steve - and with that, his world shudders back into reality. The gunshot that rang out hasn’t pierced through Billy’s face at all: it’s ruptured straight into the Camaro’s side mirror, shattering the glass into a million tiny beads and leaving a hole straight through the thick metal. Hargrove’s revolver is clutched in Dustin Henderson’s hands: his palms are thick with sweat and shaking like a leaf, and there’s a fresh fear in his eyes that’s been forcefully stomped down - he’s contorted his expression into one of rage, determination and sheer loyalty.
“Leave him alone, you bastard,” Dustin snarls, nudging the gun to the side so the barrel is really staring at Billy right between the eyes. “Or I won’t miss the next one.”
Dustin’s braver now, and much more steady on the gun, but Steve knows better. He will miss. Steve knows this - and the look in his eyes says that Billy knows this, too. Dustin’s never handled a gun before except the toy ones; Lucas has taught him how to relax his shoulders, how to position his feet, how to not keep your elbows straight… but a plastic bullet is different from one made of lead.
“Oh, you’ll miss,” Billy hisses between teeth. “You’ll miss like your life depends on it.”
Dustin’s eyes narrow. “Maybe from here. What with the distance of about eight feet and my inexperience - maybe a 30% chance of hitting you, and most of that’s just luck.” He turns breathless, and his eyes glitter. “But from here–!”
He leaps forward, and Billy lurches - but Steve reacts first, driven by adrenaline and the primal desire to protect, protect , protect Dustin Henderson (protect his brother). Steve seizes Billy the hem of his tank top shirt and wraps a foot around the back of Billy’s leg, effectively pinning the both of them in place. Dustin darts forward and places the barrel of the revolver directly against Billy’s temple. He’s barely suppressing his fear, and he’s still trembling, but it’s more imperceptible this time.
“100% chance,” Dustin breathes.
Billy bares his bloodied teeth like a hound. “You wouldn’t. ”
“One of my best friends has killed, right in front of me. Have you ever heard that Hawkins rumor? That Mike Wheeler kept a fugitive in his basement, even though his family denies it?” Dustin inhales through his gritted teeth, his gaze burning into Billy’s. “Well - it’s true. Twenty government officials cornered us, and she killed them all.” Dustin cocks the gun and presses it harder against Billy’s temple. “So try me. ”
Shit. If it’s a bluff, then Dustin’s doing a good job at keeping up the pretense that it isn’t. The metal of the barrel presses against Billy’s skull, whose eyes are locked with Dustin’s; all Steve can do is lie there on the hood of the Camaro and pray to God that Dustin won’t be stupid and pull the trigger.
There’s a tense silence. Nobody moves, and nobody dares breathe. A cricket chirps quietly in the background of the stand-off, and a single headlamp of Steve’s BMW flickers for a brief second.
Then the back of Steve’s shirt is wrenched upward and he’s hurled backward, away from both Dustin and Billy. He stumbles over his feet and tumbles backward, falling flat on his ass and scrambling away. Blinking away the blood that’s trailed down his forehead and over his eyelids, he watches Billy take a few paces back from Dustin who keeps the weapon still trained on him.
“I’m coming for your ass, Harrington,” Billy snarls, baring his teeth like a vicious hound. “We’re not done. Got that?”
Steve doesn’t reply. Dustin keeps the gun aloft, shuffling like an idiot to keep the barrel pointed right at Billy as the older man ducks back into his car. The engine roars to life, and Steve literally has to stumble back onto his feet, seize Dustin by the scruff of his neck and yank him out of the way to avoid the Camaro almost barrelling into the younger boy. Within seconds, it skids straight past them and bullets down the road, in the opposite direction of the Mayfield-Hargrove home, and slowly swallows up in the darkness ahead.
As soon as the yellow pinpricks of light from Billy’s car round the corner and vanish from sight, Dustin drops the gun with a wretched exhale of relief and Steve vomits in the middle of the road. With an instant, Dustin’s behind him and rubbing circles on the small of his back.
“It’s okay, dude, it’s okay, it’s all over - shit, that was crazy, that was crazy –”
“Are you insane?!” Steve gasps, his hands on his knees as he suppresses the nausea building in his gut. “What the hell was that?!”
“He had you pinned! He was gonna kill you!”
“I had it under control!”
“No, you really didn’t! He was slamming your head against the goddamn hood!”
“You almost shot him! What if you hit him, huh?! Even Hop and his goddamn government chums wouldn’t be able to pull you outta – outta–”
He retches, and deposits another torrent of spew onto the road. Dustin shuffles behind him for a moment, then shoves a half-empty bottle of water into his hands. Steve chugs several mouthfuls into his mouth, savoring the fresh cleansing of insides, and splashes a generous amount on top of his head for good measure. His breaths come out slower and raspier, but the dose of water on top of him sobers him up enough to finally get some real visibility. God, his head is pounding, way worse than any hangover he’s ever had.
“You good?” Dustin asks quietly.
Steve just shakes back damp threads of hair from his eyes. “You weren’t really gonna shoot him, were you?”
“If it was you or him? Yeah, I’d shoot him.”
“No, you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t let you.”
Dustin’s jaw clenches resentfully. “Shut up. I’m not letting you die, especially a stupid death like that.”
“I’m not letting you become a goddamn murderer either! Jesus Christ…”
Steve pulls himself upright and slams his hand onto the hood of his car, using it to balance himself as he unsteadily lumbers to the driver's side of his car. Ignoring Dustin’s background vitriol of protests or whatever the hell he was rambling about, Steve yanks open the car door and practically collapses into the driver’s seat.
“You’re not driving,” Dustin says, leaping forward towards the driver's side where the door was still wide open. “You’ve probably got a killer concussion. I’ll drive.”
“No,” Steve’s grumbles indistinctly, his head resting on the wheel as though it might cure his pounding headache. “No chance.”
“C’mon–”
“No, Henderson, it’s - it’s literally a ten minute drive back to yours. It’s fine, it’s fine. Get in the car, goddamn…”
“The gun,” Dustin says quickly, his eyes flickering towards the road where he had unceremoniously flung the revolver away in a fit of panic. “What are we gonna do about it?”
Steve lifts his head up and spots it glinting in the headlamps of his car, and with that comes a tumbling feeling in his gut that reminds him of the severity of the situation. Oh God, Dustin really tried to kill someone. He almost murdered someone. And Steve was an accessory, and the almost-murder weapon was sitting right there. What was the best way to avoid the police tracking down evidence? Was it better to toss the thing in the goddamn woods, or keep it and hide it?
“Take it with us,” Steve mutters. “We’ll hide it in my car.”
(For some reason, Steve’s suddenly very attracted to the idea of giving it to Nancy. It’s no secret among the boys of the Monster Hunter Group (that group being Steve and Jonathan) that Nancy’s been carrying a gun in her purse since 1984. She’s a crack shot, apparently.)
“And - And put the goddamn safety on, please. Y-You know where the–?”
“Of course I do, I’ve held a gun before,” Dustin says. Steve cocks an eyebrow and Dustin does his best to nonchalantly shrug. “Will showed us that rifle he kept in the shed when we were in the second grade. Don’t tell Joyce.”
Steve grumbles a torrent of mutterings and curses as he slams the driver’s door shut whilst Dustin circles around to grab the gun. This time, he’s more careful with it, holding it loosely in his hands as though it might burn him. He fumbles with it for a moment too long, and Steve’s about to break out into a shout for him to get a move on before Dustin finally marches into the car and drops the passenger seat. As soon as he’s in, Steve puts the car into gear and drives on, leaving nothing but stains of blood and vomit behind.
The car ride is silent all the way there, except for Dustin briefly voicing his worry that Billy might be following them, which Steve feebly denies. He drives 20 in a 30, but they’re parked outside the Henderson house before they know it. Dustin sits in the seat for a moment, fumbling with his rucksack, and Steve swallows. He needs to say something. He tries to summon the courage to say something, anything. Something witty, maybe, or something genuine and meaningful–
Dustin speaks first. “I didn’t mean to shoot. My finger slipped on the trigger.”
He’s telling the truth, sire, a little dramatic voice whispers in Steve’s head. It wasn’t an excuse to deflate Steve’s nerves… It was a confession. Dustin looks scared, really fucking scared.
“I’m… glad you did, in some stupid way,” Steve says weakly. “It scared him off.”
“If it was you or him, then you know who I’d pick,” Dustin continues. His voice is low and hoarse, and suddenly he looks older than Steve can remember him. He’s not the stubborn, foul-mouthed but endearing little boy that Steve remembers meeting on the Wheeler’s lawn – he’s become a full-fledged teenager, with a weight of trauma in his past that his youthful, innocent outlook prevents him from even noticing. “But I almost - I almost killed him. Shit, dude.”
“I know. It’s okay, bud.” Steve’s not sure what to say; contrary to his prior belief, Steve might not be great at consoling the kids after all. Maybe he’s not even a good damn babysitter. “I think Billy’s under that - that creature’s control. The one that’s targeting me.”
“He is?” Dustin asks, looking up at him. “How’d you know?”
“He was speaking to me, but it sounded like that… sounded exactly like that monster. Did you not hear him?”
“I couldn’t hear shit, I was hiding.”
“Either way,” Steve mutters. “I don’t think this was Billy at all. I mean, he’s a huge asshole, but - but I don’t think he’d actively go out of his way to kill someone. Maybe this creature is making him… I dunno, act super violent and try to target me.”
“We could ask Max tomorrow,” Dustin suggests. “See if he’s been acting differently.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we can. Now get going, else your Mom’s gonna worry.”
Dustin nods, jaw clenched, and pushes the car door open. Steve’s fingers clench around the wheel.
“Henderson?”
“Yeah?” Dustin says, stopping short of closing the door.
“Thanks. For, uh - your help back there.”
Dustin smiles, but it doesn’t meet his eyes. “Yeah. Radio me when you’re home, please?”
Steve nods. It’s not the first time Dustin has asked Steve to do that, but it will be the first time Steve actually does. He owes that to him, at the very least. He remains seated in his car as Dustin heads up the path and into the threshold of his home, and remains there still even when he’s vanished within and the window of his bedroom blazes into light and life. God knows how long he sits there, staring at the Henderson home’s front porch whilst nursing his killer headache and thinking about how warm and homely it is within.
His hand reaches for the walkie talkie; he’d gone back for it in the morning before school, sneaking in and out without his parents even knowing he was back, and now he was going to keep it on his person for the rest of his damned life. His thumb flickers through the frequencies until he settles on one. Not everyone was special enough to be reserved a special band of frequency for private communication, but there was one particular party member that did.
His thumb hits the transmit button. “Hey, El? You there?”
The response is immediate. “Steve?”
As Steve’s thumb hits the transmit button to respond, he thinks about his bed in the Harrington house. It’s a double, king-sized, and it’s been cold to lie in ever since Nancy Wheeler left it on November 8th, 1983.
The sofa in Hopper’s house has lots of blankets and three pillows, one of which is El’s, and it’s infinitely warmer.
He hesitates, but only for a moment. “Could you ask your Dad if I can stay the night again?”
Notes:
Author's Research No.3: The Geography of Hawkins
Feels like I keep giving myself difficult subjects on purpose. Identifying the geography of Hawkins is pretty difficult because there's no offical map of Hawkins... except one, if you can call it a map.
This is an offical artwork promoting Season 4, and gives us a rough estimate of where places are - or where one place is nearby to.
The rest is just based off dialogue from the show. We know Mike and Lucas live very close to each other, practically on the same block. Dustin doesn't live far off, but not around the same area. We're not sure where Max is in Season 2/3 (she moves into the trailer home as of Season 4), but it's likely in a less well-off area because of her situation.
There's one very important bit of information that's highlighted in Season 1 by Jonathan Byers, which is also shown on the map: "That's Steve's house. That's the woods where they found Will's bike, and that's my house... it's all within a mile or something." The Harrington home, Mirkwood, and the Byer's home is all very close to the Hawkins Lab. The Demogorgon did not leave this mile radius until it went to the school on the other side of town.
Chapter 4: The Venn Diagram
Summary:
Somehow, even though Steve knows that the building inside is decommissioned and (supposedly) vacant, the chain link fence seems more restrictive and foreboding than ever. Barbed wire coils around the top, and several signs are slapped on top to create even more of an uneasy tension amongst them: RESTRICTED AREA: PROPERTY UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
“And by ‘prosecuted’, I bet they mean, ‘shot on sight’,” Lucas mutters.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
There is no truce / with the furies. A mirror’s temperature is always at zero / … It is a chalice / held out to you in / silent communion, where gaspingly / you partake of a shifting / identity never your own.
– R.S Thomas
Hawkins, Indiana / December 24th 1984 / 1 Month After Saving the World
If Halloween was deemed the best day of the year by the kids, then Christmas Day was very quickly ramping up to be the second best day of the year. Even though it was still only Christmas Eve, Steve felt as though he was already celebrating Christmas Day. Everyone a part of Hawkin’s Upside-Down Assault Squad has congregated at the Byer’s home for ‘a spot of festive lunch’ - which ended up being a whole-ass Christmas dinner in itself. The Byer’s home was dressed up from head to toe in decorations, with a small pine tree pushed between the sofa, garlands draped across the ceiling and a wreath on the front door. (The multicolored lights remained in the shed.)
It was the damn best dinner Steve had ever sat in on. Joyce spent the first ten minutes dishing out the kid’s food and ensuring everyone got a fair helping, until Will and Jonathan finally managed to get her to eat her own food. Hopper was intermittently stuffing himself with serving after serving whilst fruitlessly encouraging Eleven to eat her greens. Dustin was loudly encouraging Steve to come over to his house after Christmas Day and watch Gremlins on the new VHS player he’s certain his Mom had got for him, Mike and Nancy had kicked up a sibling argument across the table, and Max and Lucas were sporadically switching between bickering and laughing their asses off with each other.
Steve just grinned all the way through it. This was so, so much better than anything he’d ever had with his own family: there were never a plethora of dishes on the table, no jolly music on the tinny record player, no lighthearted and jovial conversation flooding the room. It was just an almost silent and awkward twenty minutes over a single plate of lobster and truffles and goddamn pâté and champagne, as if all the wealth splashed onto the bite-sized bits of food could make up for the meals Steve would have to make for himself for the over 364 days of the year. Then his parents would fuck off to some Christmas work party, without inviting their son, and Steve would spent the rest of the evening demolishing a tub of ice-cream and channel hopping between channels.
As the winter sunset dropped below the horizon and cast deep yellow hues on the west side of the building, the atmosphere began to humble and relax. The record player spun some soft jazz tunes from Hopper’s personal selection, and most of the teenagers and adults congregated into the sitting room to drink and chat. The kids had vanished into Will’s room for an apparently impromptu AV Club meeting, because they wouldn’t let Joyce in and grew rowdy when Steve tried to see what the fuss was about.
It didn’t matter, anyway, because Steve received his summons a few minutes later with a raucous screech from Dustin. Sighing dramatically, he abandoned his Buck’s Fizz (Hopper was stringent on indulging the teens in underage drinking, even if it was Christmas) and entered Will Byer’s bedroom. From within the lamp-lit room, the kids broke out of their collective stage-whispers and turned to face Steve as he stepped in and folded his arms impassively.
“Secrets secrets are no fun, secrets secrets hurt someone,” Steve announced.
“That idea would just ruin Christmas,” Dustin replied, and he stepped up towards Steve with his hands positioned very conspicuously behind his back. He glanced back towards the rest of his crew, who each nodded enthusiastically in return, then faced Steve with an eager grin. Dustin breathed deep, then stretched out to reveal a box-shaped present, wrapped extremely clumsily in two different Christmas wrapping papers and with a red and gold bow slapped on with scotch tape.
“Merry Christmas,” Dustin beamed, practically quivering with excitement.
“Thanks, dude,” Steve said, taking the box and turning it over experimentally in his hands. It wasn’t too heavy, and there were no tell-tale clunking sounds from within. “But, er - I’m pretty sure you already gave me a gift.”
“It’s from all of us,” Will replied. “We all saved up to get you this, ‘cause they’re pretty pricey.”
By ‘saved up’, Steve knows they mean they rationed their arcade change supply and begged their parents for a few dollars. Still, it’s sweet of them to make some sacrifices.
“All of you? Seriously?” Steve smiled. There was something small and warm coming to life in the center of his chest, and it was soft enough that he didn’t have anything snarky or sarcastic to add - he was just genuinely touched.
“Open it up then,” Dustin declared.
“What - now? Here?”
“Yeah, here! We want to see your reaction!”
“Isn’t it, like, bad luck to open your gifts before Christmas Day? Wouldn’t Santa curse my family or something?”
Max scoffed and rolled her eyes. “You seriously still believe in Santa?”
Eleven’s face fell. “Santa… doesn’t exist?”
“Of course he does, Max is just a stinky non-believer,” Steve quickly countered, earning him a flip of a middle finger from Max. He dug his nails into the wrapping paper, fighting past the translucent tape almost covering the box from head to toe, and unceremoniously ripped past the paper to uncover–
C.B. 3-Watt 3-Channel Walkie Talkie: TRC-214
“Oh. Oh, wow.”
It was exactly like the ones that the rest of the kids carried around like a lifeline. Avoiding the pleased, grinning faces of the kids watching him like a hawk, Steve dived into the contents of the box. He’d held one of the walkie’s before, he’d even reluctantly sat in on Dustin’s lessons to Max and Eleven when they received their own (although he didn’t get why Eleven needed one, she was a literal human telephone herself, right?). But there was something different about holding this fresh-out-of-the-box one in his palm, knowing that this was his, this was his own…
“Everyone who gets one is a party member, and - well - you’ve kind of been like, an honorary member for ages now,” Dustin was saying, hopping from foot to foot and growing increasingly anxious as if he was expecting Steve to hurl it at the wall and declare his deep, ancestral hatred of wireless communication. “But we all voted, as a Party, whether or not you can become, like, an official one - because, you know, you’re our friend now–”
“It was a unanimous ‘yes’, obviously,” Lucas piped up, his eyes shining excitedly.
“Yeah, even Mike said it was okay, I guess ,” Max added with a roguish grin, earning her a punch in the shoulder and a low ‘ you goddamn narc ’ from Wheeler himself.
Dustin’s ramblings continued as though he hadn’t been interrupted. “But having it means, like - like, you’re one of us now, a real party member – you can talk to us whenever you want, and you can be our fighter. If - If you want.”
The young boy’s eyes dropped to the floor, and Steve felt the sarcastic remark itch at the back of his throat: Hah, why would I ever wanna talk to you nerds? He’d left that opportunity golden for Steve, after all.
It didn’t come.
“Thanks, you guys,” Steve said, willing himself not to get choked up (because that would be stupid.) “That’s, er… this is really nice of all of you. But I swear, if you call me up at stupid-o’clock in the morning or something, then I’m gonna rip out the damn battery–”
And that set all the boys off, who were suddenly diving into an uproar of complex explanations and instructions about how “it’s actually got eight batteries, eight double-A’s, they’re the sorta mid-sized thin ones”, and “apparently you can even charge it in your car, but you need a special power cord from RadioShack” and “make sure you release the transmit button to receive communication, else you won’t hear anything at all”... as if there wasn’t a manual sitting right there in the box.
Clearly, Steve wasn’t quite off the hook yet even after the boys had finished their ceaseless explanations when Joyce Byers distracted them with dessert. He only put one foot in front of the other when the bedroom’s doorway was blocked off by Dustin, clearly itching to tell Steve something else. Steve waited in silence, eyebrow raised, whilst Dustin watched Mike and Eleven peel off around the corner before bursting out his question.
“What’re you doing tomorrow?” Dustin asked loudly.
Steve’s brow quirked up in surprise, then furrowed as he thought about the question. “Uh - on Christmas Day?”
“No, on goddamn Fourth of July. What d’you think?”
“Jeez, sentimentality is over, I guess. Er… I have dinner with my parents at noon, but then they’re out for the evening. Why?”
Dustin huffed through his nostrils and smirked. “Screw. That. Dude. Come over to my place after you’ve had your parents-son conference. My Mom’s making gingerbread, and we can watch some movies together.”
There was that opportunity again, opened wide for a sarcastic remark: Ew, Christmas Day with you?
But hell, it’s fucking Christmas, and Steve didn’t want to spend another one alone.
“Alright, you’re on,” Steve grinned, ruffling Dustin’s curls as he moved to squeeze past. “So long as it isn’t that goddamn film with the giant turtle, again. ”
Dustin broke into the biggest, endearing grin that Steve had maybe ever seen, and the pair headed down the hallway together to make claim on the disaster of a Christmas pudding waiting in on the kitchen table.
Hawkins, Indiana / November 1984 / 16 Hours After Billy Hargrove Tried To Kill Steve Harrington
The radio call comes in a little after 9am. It wouldn't be so bad, but it's a weekend, and Steve’s collapsed on the sofa at Hopper’s cabin, with a full canteen of water on a side table and a half-empty bottle of aspirin beside it. Hearing the radio crackle and distorted voices calling in just makes him groan in protest, roll over and try to fall back asleep.
Chief Hopper asked questions when Steve turned up in the early evening sporting a scarlet eye, an indigo bruise to his temple and dried blood in his hair. Steve chalked it up to be a fight in the yard after school, ( just some rivalry bullcrap about basketball, you wouldn't get it, Chief ), and although El stared at him and mouthed ‘ friends don't lie’, they seemed to buy it. Or they let it go. Steve made up for it by soldiering on past his headache and cooking up a healthy vegetable stir fry, a la Harrington style (“You can't speak French for shit,” Hopper had chided with a smirk, stealing a green bean from the saucepan then swearing when it burnt the tips of his fingers). Even El managed to eat most of it, earning the trio a beautiful pile of waffles with extra whipped cream.
Hopper had tried to coax some truth out of Steve, and the young Harrington reluctantly obliged in short answers. The Chief had asked why Steve didn't want to go back home, and Steve excused himself as still being frustrated about their parents' fight. He didn't expand further, and Hopper just accepted that. Steve was able to ask if there was any update about a potential gate – and Hopper’s answer just left him more crestfallen.
“I spoke with Dr. Owens earlier today, and he said that there's nothing - no Gate,” Hopper had replied. “The whole project has been 100% shut down ever since that piece about Barbara Holland came out.”
(Steve didn't read the news a lot, on account of hardly being interested in world affairs situated beyond Hawkin’s borders (and, more previously, the high school hallways), but he did watch a news piece on the television about it. Of course he did, because Nancy was involved. Her name wasn't pinned to it, only some ‘batshit crazy psychoanalyst freelancer’ called Murray Bauman, but it had Nancy Wheeler written all over it. An exposé tape that hit Hawkins Lab right where it hurt, all whilst hiding both the real absurd truth and getting justice for Barbara Holland? It couldn't have been done better. She'd earned the ghost of Barb’s forgiveness; he wasn’t allowed to have that.)
“But they said that about - about El’s project too.” Steve deliberately lowered his voice, glancing towards Eleven’s closed bedroom door. “That, and that MKUltra crap too.”
“Different men. Different people.” Hopper huffed and leant forward on the sofa, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I get it, kid. You see the government as some - some big, conglomerate entity hellbent on keeping secrets and silencing people who get too involved. But we can trust Owens. He's half the reason that El–” He pointed towards the bedroom door. “- is in there, and not some… some government lab rat.”
“But–”
“If he says there's no Gate, then there's no Gate. ” And there’s a finality to it like the discussion is over, so Steve shuts up.
There were no significant nightmares that night - absent of any extraplanar creatures, anyway. The demodogs nipped at his ankles, but they ran past both him and Dustin in the tunnels… but the smoke filled his lungs to a choking point, and he awoke unable to breathe. At least that creature hadn’t appeared again, and he had been glad he hadn’t woken anybody up this time.
When Steve finally awakes, the morning sunlight is filtering through the glass windows in soft, light golden hues. Last night’s dinner is sitting unwashed in the sink, and there’s an abandoned mug left on the dining table filled with coffee dregs. A quiet wind rattles against the aged wooden infrastructure surrounding him - gentle, peaceful, a hushed spring ambience. It’s quiet, but not the void of silence he’s used to in the Harrington house. Here, it’s just peaceful. Hopper has probably left before Steve woke up, on account of work, and Eleven’s likely still sound asleep. But the voices on the radio are growing louder, and it’s getting harder for Steve to shut his eyes to them.
Emitting a dramatic, low groan that put his grouchy fifteen-year old past self to shame, Steve tosses over and yanks up the antenna to it’s full height.
“-- is Dustin Henderson, Steve, do you copy?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m up, you little shit,” Steve grumbles drowsily.
“ Finally , Steve. Feels like I’ve been talking to myself over here.”
“Maybe if you were talking to yourself for so damn long, you’d have realized how much of a dipshit you are.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” Dustin snapped, whilst the background noise suddenly rose into an uproar of laughter. “Where are you? We’ve been up since, like, seven–”
“Bullshit, you literally woke up, like, ten minutes ago,” comes Mike’s irritable voice from the background.
“Woah, you’re all together already?” Steve says, blinking in surprise. Hey, at least he didn’t have to waste gas on picking them all up.
“Yeah, we’re at Will’s house,” Lucas says, apparently taking over the radio. “ Like we said we were going to be. Are you coming or not? Over.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming.” Steve swung his legs over the sofa, cringing as a stab of pain rolled over his scalp and in through the side of his brain. “Gimme five, okay?” Another stab of pain in his brain. “Mm, make that fifteen.”
“And in Steve Harrington time, that totals to half hour,” Dustin says, and Steve flips him the bird - then remembers too late that the kids can’t see him. “It’s okay, we’ll be here waiting - over and out.”
There’s an added patience in that last sentence, and Steve guesses that Dustin’s probably only just remembered that Steve got a second ass-kicking from Billy Hargrove last night and is currently paying for it.
As Steve begins to dress himself to the best of his ability (in the same clothes he’d been wearing since yesterday, ew), Eleven comes slinking out of her bedroom with those big, sleepy sad eyes. Her hair’s in a mess of natural brown curls, and she rubs her knuckles into her eyes sleepily.
“You’re going?” She asks quietly.
“Yeah - you coming?” Steve asks, remembering it’s the weekend - if Dustin was right, then technically she’s allowed out.
But El just sticks out her bottom lip and shakes her head. “Can’t today. Nancy is coming.”
“Nancy?” Her name slips out of his tongue in a stumble, like he’s just tripped and hit his head on something. There was something off-balancing about hearing her name thrown out so unexpectedly and casually, especially by someone he considered extremely unlikely to do so.
“She tutors me in the mornings,” El explains, waddling over to the fridge and yanking the door open, likely on the hunt for leftover waffles to make up her breakfast. “With Math and reading. Hopper asks.”
Of course Hopper asks Nancy to do it, because Nancy’s smart and driven like that - and he’s not even trying to be sarcastic or spiteful about it. That’s what Nancy is. She tutors for Eleven, and she probably doesn’t even get paid to do it. Does it out of her own volition, because it’s ‘the right thing to do’. Steve’s here because he’s got nowhere better to be, right?
And of course Nancy didn’t tell him. They don’t tell each other anything, it’s just been heavy and awkward between the pair of them since last November. Yeah, sure, sometimes they sit at lunch together, with Jonathan Byers making them tree, and sometimes she still accepts his begging for her academic expertise with that funny, sympathetic grin and helps him turn his essay from an ‘F’ to a ‘C’ - but they don’t talk, not like they used to. They don’t tell each other things, real things.
“Steve?” El asks, and Steve realizes he’s just spent the last ten seconds staring off into space whilst half-hazardly attempting to tie the laces of his sneakers. He hops up instantly as though he’d been hit with a shock of electricity, and shakes Nancy Wheeler out of the foreground of his mind (although she remains in the back, itching and scratching like a constant sore reminder).
“Yeah, yeah - Nance is tutoring you? She tutors me, too, kind of. I’m already a genius, so there’s only so much she can actually teach me.”
“Did that bad man hurt you again?” El asks, turning to face him with a box of Eggos clutched in her arms.
For fuck’s sake, this kid was so unrestrained. She didn’t care about what you thought, about how you would react, she’d just swing the bat and hit you in the face with these heavy and personal questions as if it was completely her business. But it was only a matter of time that she would ask: he’d seen his bruises blossom overnight in the bathroom mirror, much unlike the last time where they appeared almost immediately: a small shade of purple underneath his left eyelid, some patches of red and indigo against the skin of his temple. There’s way worse against his chest, his ribs and stomach painted violet, and he was wheezing in the cold evening air when he’d staggered out of the car last night. There was a flawed, raised ring against his forearm where Billy had stubbed out his smoke, burning a hot pink and already flaking with dead skin. It would permanently scar, he just knew it.
Steve’s jaw remained set. “No - no, nah, it wasn’t. It – just some other douche.”
“Some… other douche?”
“Some other douche.” Thinking about Billy was making Steve’s blood boil, hot enough that he didn’t even bother correcting El on her obscene language. “When’s Nance coming?”
El’s eyes glance over to a digital wristwatch strapped against her wrist; a Christmas present from Wheeler, he thinks. “Nine-oh-three-zero. Um… nine-thirty.”
9:30. Bright and early. Steve doesn’t want to be here for it.
“I’ll probably see you soon then,” Steve says, and his hand slips around the door knob – and El suddenly bounds forward, the box of Eggos quickly abandoned on the tiny dining table, and crashes into Steve in a huge hug around his waist. Steve practically stumbles from the impact, motionless for a moment, then nervously grins and combs his hands through her curls.
“Friends,” El whispers.
Steve’s heart almost fucking bursts, and he almost fails hiding it. “Yeah. Yeah… we’re friends.” She releases him, and he yanks the door open. “Brush your teeth after breakfast, or I’ll tell Hop you had those Eggos in the middle of the night.”
Steve doesn’t knock when he pulls up to the Byer’s house, but apparently he doesn’t need to. The moment he puts his car to a stop, the front door bursts open and the kids come charging out faster than Steve had sprinted from Claire Reynold’s house when Hopper and the rest of the police department showed up to bust their intimate ‘my parents are in Europe, let’s get the entirety of our grade shit-faced’ get-together. The doors are wrenched open, and four kids scramble for window seats whilst Dustin claims his throne beside Steve.
“Jesus, fucking – what the hell’s going on?” Steve asks, twisting around as the doors slam close. “Did you piss Mrs. Byer’s off or what?”
“No, we just wanna get to the Lab,” Mike says, then leans forward as he registers Steve properly for the first time. “ Woah, what happened to your face, man? It looks, like, kinda messed up.”
“Funny story,” Steve says. “So there it was just me and this really angry bear–”
“Oh yeah, ha-ha. So funny,” Mike scoffs, even though Will beside him actually grins and giggles a little bit. (Steve considers it a win.) “Let’s haul ass already - Lucas thinks he’s made a battle plan for this.”
“Yeah, I did make a battle plan, and it’s a good battle plan.”
“Asking Steve to park the car five minutes away from the lab is not a battle plan!”
“ Why are we doing that?” Steve asks incredulously, silently refusing to start their journey until he’s got a full jist of what exactly these fuckers were actually planning. “You do realize the car is where we want to be? Where it’s safe?”
Max scoffs and rolls her eyes at the boy beside her. “Lucas has it in his head that even though the lab is completely decommissioned, their security system is still online–”
“-- and the military are keeping tabs on the lab, just in case there’s another Upside-Down breakout, or one of us tries to break in!” Lucas bounces in his seat as he explains, almost rocking the entire car from his energy. “I’m telling you, they’ve still got eyes and ears all over Hawkins! You know the phone lines are still tapped, right?”
“The phone lines are tapped?!” Steve yelped, and the kids gawked at him like he’d just spit all over himself. “What?! Nobody tells me anything!”
“Clearly not!” Mike yelled back with a snide tone. “Jesus - I thought Nancy told you this!”
Steve’s jaw opens on instinct, then clenches back shut with his teeth grinding against each other. Nancy doesn’t tell him shit, not anymore. Instead of replying, he forcefully twists back around and slams his hands onto the steering wheel, turning the car out of the driveway and onto the street. A low muttering reaches his ears from the rear, and he slowly realizes that the kids are chastising Mike.
“Sorry,” Mike finally calls from the back.
Steve just shrugs. “Whatever.”
As the car pushes onward down the road, Steve’s suddenly hit with the realization that Dustin - sat beside him, head resting against the cool glass window and staring out at the blur of green from the Hawkins woods encompassing the road - hasn’t said a word since he’s been in the car. Just as Dustin had remembered that Steve had gotten into another totally unfair fight last night, Steve recalls that Dustin literally almost murdered a man last night.
(The gun’s stuffed and hidden away in the bottom of his trunk, even underneath the baseball bat. Maybe he should have tossed it after all.)
“You okay?” Steve quietly asks, taking advantage of the rising volume from the rear as Lucas and Mike bicker over the ‘battle plan’, whilst Will and Max look like they’d rather be anywhere else right now.
Dustin jerks his shoulders, glancing over as if he’s only just realized where he is, and shrugs. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Why wouldn’t you be? Because you’ve been in my car for all of five minutes and you haven’t talked my ear off yet.”
“Yeah, well…” Dustin seems like he has something funny to say, but just nonchalantly shrugs and moves his gaze back to the car window again.
“Is it about last night?” Steve tries, his voice so low and quiet that he almost doesn’t even hear himself.
Dustin’s shoulders stiffen and move closer in on himself, and he spends a moment struggling to decide if he should put his hands in his lap or against his chin. He compromises by wrapping one hand around his elbow, and stubbornly avoids meeting Steve’s eyes. “Yeah. Guess I’m still just… thinking about it.”
Steve leans over and stabs his thumb into the car stereo, playing a random tape already slotted in to drown out the conversation from potential eavesdroppers. Not that it matters too much, since the rest of the kids are deeply engrossed in another endless argument, but Max is giving Steve a suspicious look and Will is pretending he’s not trying to hear.
“I think you did the right thing,” Steve offers.
Dustin shrugs. “I didn’t sleep well last night. My Dad once said that if you don’t sleep well over a decision, it probably wasn’t the right one.”
“Dude, screw your Dad,” Steve drawls, rolling his eyes dramatically. After Dustin had divulged the bitter story of his parent’s very sudden divorce, which culminated in some therapy sessions between the pair that involved a lot of cursing Dustin’s father’s side of the Henderson name, Steve had grown a bitter resentment for the man he’d never actually met. “He doesn’t know jack shit. Screw him.”
“Yeah, but what if he’s right? What if - what if I really fucked up? What if Billy ends up coming for my ass too now? Or - Or if he just kills you outright next time?”
“Dude… dude. ” Steve reaches out with one hand, the other still on the steering wheel, and affectionately tousles the top of Dustin’s trucker cap. “If you hadn’t done what you did, would I even be here right now? Or do you think I’d just be some scattered brains on the road right now?”
The bottom of Dustin’s jaw shakes, and he folds his arms stubbornly and looks away. There’s a look on his face that says he knows Steve has a point, but he’s just too stuck in his thoughts and his opinions to change his outlook.
“Just don’t… don’t dwell on it, okay?” Steve finishes awkwardly, and Dustin just silently nods and turns to face the window. It’s always a bad day in Hawkins when Dustin Henderson isn’t in the mood.
But the conversation doesn’t progress any further, because Mike suddenly sits up so high that it’s a fucking health hazard and shouts loudly: “Pull over here!”
The car wheel is yanked sideways, and they park what appears to be the middle of nowhere. The wheels of Steve’s BMW scrape against the leaf-strewn ground where it meets with the road, and the kids all scramble out of the car and prepare themselves for the walk ahead. It’s not exactly bright outside yet; it’s still early March, so it’ll be a while until the days become long and sunny. There’s a mellow, pale light streaming through the leaves and branches overhanging above their heads that’s pleasant to bathe in. Surrounding the car and the peculiar entourage extracting from within is nothing but forest - Hawkins has a lot of woods, and Steve’s taken enough walks through it to know it almost like the back of his hand. Like he knows that there’s an abandoned restaurant nearby that some of the guys on the football team partied in once… and, of course, the road where Cornwallis and Kerley met that rolls past Hawkin’s Lab.
As the kids prepare for their trek, tying their laces and pulling out their compasses (Dustin’s is homemade), Steve digs in the trunk and pulls out his spoil of war. The nail bat is back in his hand, weathered as ever from its year and a half of service, and it feels good. It’s relieving, and he’s abruptly aware of how vulnerable and wide open he’d felt without it.
“So… what happens if we find out the Gate actually is open?” Max asks. She doesn’t have a compass, and Steve’s glad he’s not the only odd one out. “Should we, like - break in with El and–?”
“Uh, yeah - that’s a no.” Steve’s quick on the mark; he’s already had to deal with these kids rushing off head-long into danger without his permission before, and that was a headache of a few hours. “That building’s far too dangerous for any of us.”
To his surprise, Mike agrees. “Steve’s right. I was there last time.” He side glances at Will, who’s suddenly nervously fiddling with his compass, but doesn’t rope Byers into it. “That place was swarming with hundreds of those demodogs. If the Gate’s open, who’s to say that the basement of that Lab isn’t filled with them again?”
There’s a discomforting quiet as everyone silently agrees with Mike’s point. Bad memories start to cloud Steve’s mind, fogging up his surroundings as he remembers the fucking demodogs – prowling in the junkyard, ripping apart hunks of metal of the bus they trapped themselves inside of, Max’s dulcet screams of terror as one breaks open the ceiling and screeches in it’s primal hunger, and Steve runs up with the bat in hand ready to swing it back to where it fucking came from –
Did you miss? Did you miss your mark? You’re out, Harrington–!
“Steve?” A meek little voice calls out to him, and Steve pulls himself from his fugue state. Will is staring up at him, eyes wide and face drained of all color. “Did you… hear that?”
A chill runs up Steve’s spine. He forgot that Will could understand that voice when the others couldn’t… he’d heard it last night, too, when it was talking to Billy… did this mean the monster was targeting Will…?
(He can’t be the one to do it. He can’t put Will through hell again.)
“Hear what?” Steve says innocently, moving forward and clapping Will on the shoulderblades. “Let’s hustle.”
Steve led the way in the tunnels when there was serious peril within the bowels of Hawkins, but this time he’s sent to the rear since he’s the only one without a compass. TThe group is congregated tightly enough together that it doesn’t matter too much… if something was to ambush them, Steve would be fast enough to act on the defense. Still, there’s something a little degrading about having to trail the horde of kids who march up the hill towards ‘Mirkwood’ as though he was just a chaperone on the world’s worst school field trip.
Max, the only other one of the group who was compass-less and thus deemed useless for the time being, joins Steve at the back and the pair walk side-by-side for a while in silence, switching between delving into thoughts and half-heartedly listening to the mindless chatter of the boys ahead. At least Dustin’s back in his element, Steve reflects, as he watches the young boy lead the pack through the winding woods ahead. His compass is stretched out in front of him, and Steve can occasionally see his expression screwed up in deep focus.
“Feels like this always happens when things go to shit,” Max says as they continue their trek. “We go on a hike in the forest.”
“Hawkins is nothing but forest,” Steve replies.
Max sniggers a little, her nose rolling up. “Yeah. Too much forest. You guys should expand more.”
“They’re building a mall right now, actually.”
Max’s eyebrows raise up in an instant, and she genuinely looks not just surprised but also intrigued. “Wait, really? A mall - in Hawkins? ”
“Yeah. My Dad works in real estate, told me all about it - keeps saying if I flunk high school, he’ll make me work there over summer before I join his firm. They’ve already purchased it, says they’re building it over greenfield land – that’s land that’s not been used before – and it’ll be open by June.”
“Cool.” Max pauses. “You sound like you know your stuff.”
“I dunno. I don’t even wanna work for my dad, really. It’ll have, like, health insurance and all that adult stuff, but… me? In real estate? Plus, my Dad’s a huge prick.”
Max snorts, but it’s not mocking; it’s empathetic. She knows.
“It’s a mess,” Steve continues. For some reason, he doesn’t feel any urge to have to be embarrassed or uncomfortable about this stuff around Max. “They’re never around, and when they are… my old man’s an asshole, and Mom is basically invisible. Like she doesn’t wanna be seen. Barely feels like the Harrington family is even a family. ”
“Who d’you like better?” Max asks, hands shoved deep into the pockets of her jacket.
“Huh?” Steve questions, cocking his eyebrow.
“You like your Mom better than your Dad?”
Steve grimaces and shrugs, turning his gaze to the forest floor below. “Maybe. They’re both screwed.”
Max shakes her head. “No, I mean - if you had to choose between them…”
Oh. Steve gets it now, it clicks - slowly, eventually, but it always clicks.
“I dunno,” Steve mumbles, staring at his sneakers as though they were suddenly the most interesting thing in the world. “They’re not usually around enough for me to have a favorite. Dad’s a douchebag, though, so I guess…” He trails off; it’s enough for Max to understand, but she’s suddenly gone quiet and looks off like she’s overstepped. Steve swoops in to recover the damage. “What about you?”
“What?”
“I mean, I know your parents…” His words slip into a mumble, wondering if he might have just assumed; it’s common knowledge that there’s tension and fire in the Mayfield household, but maybe it really was just between the two men.
“Oh - my Mom, probably,” Max says instantly. “I guess I’d rather be with the bystander than the instigator, you know?”
Oh, Steve knows. It’s quickly occurring to Steve that there might be more in common between himself and Max than he first realized, even despite their economic disparity. Why hadn’t he talked to her more before? He’s far from an expert when it comes to consoling and comforting the kids (that’s more in Joyce’s area of expertise), but he vastly improves whenever he can relate. Maybe the two of them, Max and Steve, should sit over some milkshakes and talk through it. Figure out some ways to improve her home life, and make sure she’s got a safe ‘out’ if things end up escalating.
“Dustin says that Billy attacked you last night,” Max says.
Steve, midway through drinking up a water bottle, splutters and spits down the top of his shirt. Max can’t help but smirk mockingly, nudging Steve with a teasing smile as they walk. “For God’s sake, Dustin tell you lot everything ?”
“He doesn’t really shut up, actually,” Max says, grinning amicably at the back of Dustin’s hat who was still eagerly leading the way. “He told me that Billy pretty much man-handled you on the hood of his car, until Dustin managed to scare him off with your nail bat. Thank God you keep that around.”
Scared him off with the nail bat. Dustin lied about the gun situation then - and Steve’s glad about it. Even though there’s a mutual hatred of Billy, and the sheer hell he seems to bring to Max’s life, Steve knows she would be less than happy if they found out Dustin nearly painted the window of the Camaro red with Billy’s brains.
Max kicks up a bunch of leaves as she walks, her chin jutting out from her grumpy expression, and idly watches them flutter behind her. “For the record, I’m sorry about Billy.”
“Jeez, don’t be. He’s an asshole, that’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, I know, but still…” Max shrugs. “I thought he’d leave you alone after the last time, but I guess I didn’t scare him good enough.”
“You did.” Steve pauses, staring at the backs of the kids for a moment, then lowers his voice and mutters: “I kinda think that this - this thing we’re dealing with, this creature, might be involved. Like, he’s awful, but he wouldn’t try to kill anybody–”
“He almost killed you last fall,” Max points out, then tuts loudly when Steve pulls a dubious look. “Don’t be an idiot, Steve, he almost split your head open.”
“But he hasn’t bothered me since. Has he been acting weird at home?”
Max pauses, glancing up as she thinks hard about the question. “Uh… no. He’s an asshole, but nothing extra weird. Although I saw him once pacing and muttering in his room, I guessed he was just worked up about something. Do you… Do you think that he’s, like, possessed or something?”
Steve’s brow furrows and he follows her eyeline, where her gaze has fixed anxiously onto Will Byer’s back. He stares for a moment, then finally registers what she’s getting at.
“Not possessed,” Steve says slowly. “Something else. We haven’t figured it out yet.”
He glances at her again, and he’s almost taken aback to the expression written into her face. She’s locked in deep thought, holding a brooding frown and flexing her suddenly clammy hands whilst her eyes dart around the forest laid out around them. Is she… worried? Worried about Billy?
Steve doesn’t get time to question it, because Dustin shouts up from the front that they’ve arrived and the entire group skids to a halt, kicking up dried leaves leftover from the fall. Somehow, even though Steve knows that the building inside is decommissioned and (supposedly) vacant, the chain link fence seems more restrictive and foreboding than ever. Barbed wire coils around the top, and several signs are slapped on top to create even more of an uneasy tension amongst them: RESTRICTED AREA: PROPERTY UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
“And by ‘prosecuted’, I bet they mean, ‘shot on sight’,” Lucas mutters.
“Compass check,” Dustin announces, and the four boys present each whip out their compasses. Max and Steve wait, arms crossed in anticipation – and Steve feels his stomach grow hollow as their expressions turn, one by one, from concentration into frustration.
“What?” Max demands impatiently. “What - what is it?”
“Nothing,” Dustin says, looking up. “What about you guys?”
“Mine’s normal,” Will says, and the other two boys nod in confirmation.
“Nothing?” Steve strides up to Dustin and snatches the compass from his hand, turning it in his hands left and right and watching the dial gently spin in place. “See, look – it’s spinning.”
“That’s because you’re spinning it, dumbass,” Dustin rebukes, and grabs Steve’s hands to gently twist the dial so the needle hovers precisely over the N symbol. “ Now it’s pointing north.”
“It’s pointing north ‘cause you turned it to point north!”
“Have you never used a compass before? It’s pointing north on the compass, and that way–” He points in the direction that the needle is facing. “-- is actually north. It’s not being screwed with, which means there’s no greater source of an electromagnetic field nearby.”
“So…” Will murmurs, glancing up from his own compass lying flat on his palm and looking towards the friends around him. “So does this mean the Gate isn’t open?”
“It’s gotta be, how else could it be getting to Steve?” Lucas states, and promptly turns on his heel and heads towards the largest, thickest tree in the nearby vicinity. He wiggles his waist and leaps to grab onto a branch, and starts to ascend. Dustin ditches his backpack and follows suit, whilst the rest watch in bewilderment from the bottom. However, Dustin’s plan comes to a problem as the pair find themselves fighting for climbing space.
“What the hell are you doing?” Steve asks loudly from the bottom, staring at the pair with a tilted head and a furrowed brow, his mouth slightly open from a mix of perplexion and disbelief.
“What I did last time - recon. ” Lucas twists and swipes his leg at Dustin, who’s only a foot below him. “Get the hell down, this was my plan first!”
“I don’t care! I wanna see the lab too!”
“Find your own damn tree!”
“Screw you! This is the best one!”
“Suck my dick!”
“If I could find it, asshole!”
“Hey, hey!” Steve claps his hand hard enough to break off the argument; Dustin and Lucas glare daggers at each other. “A little less fighting like a married couple, and more hustle up there! What kind of recon are you even planning?”
“The useful kind!” Lucas hollers from the top, and settles down on the peak of a tall branch and rummages in his rucksack for his binoculars. As he puts them to his face whilst Dustin joins him from behind, Steve hears Mike scoff from behind and start pacing. Steve tears his attention away from the boys high above and watches as Mike paces among the trees and dried leaves underfoot, but the anxious energy from the young boy just pisses Steve off.
“Have you lost your shit?” Steve snaps. “What’s with the pacing?”
“I’m thinking ,” Mike replies, his ceaseless pacing continuing. He keeps it up for a moment more, causing both Steve, Max and even Will to grow restless with impatience before Mike comes to a halt. He turns on Steve, snapping his fingers to direct his attention. “You said El came to you in your dream, right? When that monster attacked you both times?”
Steve nods mutely, raising an eyebrow - where was this going?
“And this dream you had – what did your surroundings look like?”
Odd question, but Steve thinks hard about it. There’s not much to really describe, honestly. It’s dark. There’s a lot of ‘dark’. How else do you describe darkness, really?
“It’s dark?” Steve tries.
“Wow, that’s really useful, thanks.”
“Screw you, man, I don’t know what else to say. It’s dark, but I can still see like I’m in daylight or something. And there’s… there’s water underneath me? Like a huge puddle? And there’s this… this feeling…” Something cold crawls up his spine, and a set of goosebumps across his forearms suddenly rise. “Feels like I’m somewhere else completely. I guess, like, another dimension… but not really.” He snaps his fingers suddenly. “I felt like that in the tunnels. I knew we were in Hawkins, but not really – like, we were–”
“Somewhere in between,” Will murmurs, and locks eyes with Mike with the same, shared, foreboding look. The pair incline their heads at each other, a silent indication that they were having the same thought.
But before either Steve or Max could ask what the hell they were thinking about, Mike cups his hands around his mouth and bellows: “HEY! Get your asses back down here, now!”
“Why?! We’re spying!”
“We don’t need to be here anymore!” Mike yells back, and looks back to Steve with a deathly serious look. “We need to go see El. Right now.”
There’s an uneasy look in his eye, and Steve has a feeling that things have just shifted from a Code Orange to a Code Red.
Under normal circumstances, the kids would be delighted to have the opportunity to visit Hopper’s cabin - but right now, they’re in a ‘Code Red’ stage, so it’s turned into a rare moment where a trip to visit Eleven isn’t boding well.
The cabin, admittedly, looks almost charming in the daylight. Under the soft rays of the early spring’s golden hour, a resplendent stream of yellow filters through the fine branches and leaves overhanging and surrounding the worn-down cabin. A soft breeze whispers through the wilderness as the group slowly pick their way through the leaves and shrubs, steadily stepping over the tripwire surrounding the property and making their way towards the front door of the cabin. It’s quiet within - although Steve really strains his listening, there’s an almost inaudible and muffled murmur of the television from within.
He might be abusing his privileges of knowing where El lives, and knowing what the secret knock it - no doubt, Hopper wasn’t going to be chuffed about Steve bringing along a bunch of kids. But now wasn’t the time to worry about the chief’s opinions. They needed their mage. If they were lucky, they might be able to fix this shit without even needing to further involve Hopper.
The front door opens, and Eleven positively bursts with excitement at seeing all of her friends on her porch. For a brief and beautiful moment, their anxiety and trepidation is forgotten: all six of the kids practically leap on top of each other, wrapped within a tight and unabashed embrace. Steve gives them that moment; they earned it.
Dustin manages to twist around within the hug, making eye-contact with Steve, and relinquishes an arm to hold it out towards the older teen. Steve raises his eyebrows in surprise, trepidatious: even if they might have given Steve a radio as some kind of formal induction into the Party, he doesn’t belong there in their hug.
Steve doesn’t get a choice. Something seems to knock him forward gently, as if an invisible force had gently nudged him forward; Dustin grabs his wrist and pulls him into the bundle of kids hugged around each other. Squeezed within the middle, Eleven wipes away a small nosebleed and grins amicably at Steve as he wraps his arms around the group.
(Nancy isn’t here, but there’s the remains of some grade-school level homework on the coffee table. He must have just missed her. Steve’s not sure if he’s glad about that or not.)
Once the moment is over, the group settle themselves in around the main living room of the cabin and get each other up to speed. Eleven recounts her story, similar to Steve’s own, in her broken and trying sentences: she describes waking up in her ‘Inbetween’ realm where she ‘watches people’, and seeing Steve being threatened by some creature lurking above. She talks about how she tried to banish it, akin to how she tried to expel the demogorgon from the middle-school classroom in 1983, but found herself waking up in a fit of terror before she could destroy it. The boys - with exception of Will and Steve, who just sit silently in their own hellscape of contemplation - collaborate to tell Eleven a rushed version of their trouble with the Heathkit in AV Club, the voices on the radio, Steve’s second confrontation with the monster, and Will’s disturbing ability to decipher the distorted snarls that everyone else heard over the radio.
“Does this mean… the Gate is open?” El asks hesitantly; she’s cross-legged on the floor, back turned to the television that is still playing some old cartoons. Steve’s glad that Will had the wisdom to turn the volume way down.
“We don’t know for sure yet,” Max replies, chewing the bottom of her lip. “Still kinda… up in the air. But we don’t think so, the Lab’s deserted.”
“But how else could this thing be getting to me?” Steve asks, looking between Mike (who is squashed next to El, hands held with an almost white-knuckle grip). “The Upside Down - it can't get to us, if the Gate is closed, surely.”
“That’s what I thought too,” Mike murmurs slowly. “But in the forest, I was thinking… and you said that El came to you in your dream, and your surroundings… it was dark, like - like liminal space.”
“It sounds like the Inbetween,” El murmurs. Steve shoots a confused look, and El rectifies: “The place I go to watch people.”
“Exactly,” Mike says, gesturing animatedly as he speaks. “And I said yesterday, El can’t go into people’s dreams. So - So what if Steve isn’t dreaming? What if El didn’t come to Steve, but Steve came to El? What if Steve’s actually in the Inbetween?”
The group all shoot each other looks, and the reaction is mixed: Dustin and Steve share alarmed glances, whilst Max and Lucas look actually doubtful for the first time. Will just looks terrified, but what’s new?
“How the hell is he getting there though?” Max questioned. “You haven’t got powers.”
“Maybe this creature brought him there,” Dustin suggested. “You know how El can influence the Inbetween? Maybe this creature can, too.”
“I’m still really confused,” Steve says, shaking his head. “What the hell is the Inbetween exactly?”
Dustin’s ready; he rummages in his rucksack, lls out a notepad moments later, large with thin, faint lines within, and flips open to a blank page amongst the rushed notes and sporadic doodles drawn within. With a pencil, he draws a circle on one side of the page.
“Picture this circle as Hawkins - our world.” He draws another circle, but the sides overlap with the first circle - a venn diagram, Steve at least knows this. “And this second circle in the Upside Down. The space here–” He signals into the small, squeezed bit of space where the circles overlap, “-- that’s the Inbetween. It’s what it is on the can - this bit of space where the two dimensions meet and overlap. When El met a demogorgon in the Inbetween, our worlds collided–”
He stabs the pencil through the middle of the paper, making Steveand Will jump. “Boom. Gate. And maybe these bits…” He taps the point of the pencil to where the lines of the two circles meet. “These are, like, spots where Gates can open. It bypasses the Inbetween, you see?”
“I think I got it,” Steve groans tiredly, rubbing his eyes. All of this thinking was starting to hurt his brain. God, there were so many questions and all of this was just turning into guesswork… and his head was still killing him from— oh shit, there was another topic they hadn’t broached.
“We also gotta figure out this,” Steve says, pointing towards his scalp. “How the hell I ended up nearly getting another split skull and a shard of a plate in my hair back at the radio lab. That was the same plate shard that Billy hit me with, right?”
He looks expectantly at Max, who nods. “I’m dead certain - like I said before, it almost sliced my finger open.”
“It’s the same wound,” Lucas says. “This creature must have attacked you from the Inbetween, then, and then - then carried it to the Material Plane. To here. Maybe it sort of… hit you, in the exact same way?”
“Or maybe it’s the exact same attack,” Dustin says slowly; he’s got that wide-eyed, unblinking look on his face, the exact kind where the cogs are turning in his brain as he pieces everything together. Steve’s not exactly great at judging intelligence, since his standards are pretty low, but he’s convinced Dustin is probably gonna be a future MIT-applicant. “This monster thing, it’s already transcended time by broadcasting a conversation from last fall. Maybe it did the same, with taking an attack from the past and causing some serious wounds on Steve whilst he had his… fit?”
“Can we stop calling it a fit? ” Steve snaps, standing up abruptly and causing poor Will to jerk reflexively. “It’s obviously just a dream, I clearly fell asleep–”
“Steve!” Mike’s voice is so loud that Steve’s first instinct is to kick up a fuss about how Mike had been snubbing him all shitting day, but swiftly realizes that Mike wasn’t being insulting - it was alarm. “What did you say this creature looked like again?”
For the first time, there’s something else behind Mike Wheeler’s determined and impatient fire - it’s fear. A minute sliver of real dread. Steve’s throat clogs up for a moment, worse than anything that Hopper’s filterless cigarettes could do, and he rasps out: “Like… this flesh creature, I guess - flesh and gore, and… an eye, just one, really big. Fuck, dude, I don’t know, everytime I try to describe it, I just get–”
“Scared,” Mike finishes. “Really, unnaturally scared. Hold on a moment.”
He practically dives out of the room, leaving the rest confused and Eleven looking crestfallen, but he’s back in an instant: clutched between his arms, borrowed from Eleven’s small bookshelf, is a huge hardback tome with writing etched onto the front in red and yellow text: Advanced D&D Monster Manual.
“Oh, c’mon, can we stop with the comparisons to this goddamn game already?” Steve drawls, rolling his eyes and dropping back onto the couch.
Mike ignores him, flipping through page after page, and speaks to Steve without making eye-contact: “What kind of things did this monster do to you when you saw it? And what kind of… of symptoms did you have? Even before these nightmares started? Anything odd, anything that’s just… weird for you?”
Steve stops and really racks his brain. It’s kind of hard to pull apart what actually might be a ‘common response to trauma’, as Jonathan Byers once put it when Steve described his period of intense insomnia, but there were definitely some weird things. Things he considered as a ‘trauma response’, or just some weird depression phase he was having—
“I mean, aside from the monster nightmares and a full-time babysitter, I guess?” Steve jokes, but Mike doesn’t even break a small smile. “Okay, uh - I mean, whenever it’s happening, it’s when I’m sleeping. Or last time, it just put me to sleep. And when I see this creature, or think about it, I get… scared. Usually when I’m scared, I can still fight back - fight or flight, right? But no, I just get scared . Last time, I barely even saw the creature, my mind just totally blanked.” He tapped the surface of his forehead with the palm of his hand. “You know? Like I couldn’t move. And then… then there’s the head wound. I’ve also been… I mean, it might not mean anything, but I’ve been really tired recently. Just… no energy, at all. Not for anything.”
“Sleep spell,” Mike recounts, his eyes skimming over passages within the manual laid out before him. “Fear spell. Cause Serious Wound. Slow spell.”
“One eye… Oh God,” Will breathes; under the low, tungsten light, he looks even paler than before. “That sounds like—”
“The Beholder,” Dustin declares. There’s a graveness in his voice that he might’ve announced something truly terrifying - and for once, even with the nerdy Dungeons & Dragons reference, it’s actually got an effect on everyone. Max and El aren’t strangers to the game anymore, and neither is Steve. He’s been roped into a few games, and he’s learnt first-hand what this creature is—
“The Beholder is similar to the Mind Flayer in ideology - it’ll attack anything that basically isn’t like them. It’s also a spellcaster,” Mike continues seriously. “It casts spells that impede its enemies before absolutely wiping them out. Like Sleep, Fear, Slow… and then there’s the other spells, ones it hasn’t cast yet. Like Charm Person, Telekinesis… and Death Ray.”
Death Ray. Oh, the ominous vibe on that one. 10 Ominous Points for you, sir!
“It also has an anti-magic ray,” Dustin picks up from where Mike left off - he’s slipped off the sofa and sits cross-legged by the open Monster Manual. “Basically prevents people from casting spells. Do you think that might affect Eleven?”
Dustin glances up, first to Steve, then to Eleven, and finally to Mike. Mike just shrugs, but both Eleven and Steve look away. Conjured from a memory, he recalls Eleven during his first dream: clad in her soft pajamas, hand outstretched and blood rolling down her upper lip, face contorted with rage and fear as her arm trembled as though pushing against an intense force. Is this the work of the anti-magic cone?
No, this is stupid, that’s what it is. “Look, I appreciate the nerd games to use as a… a metaphor–”
“Analogy,” Dustin unhelpfully corrects.
“An analogy, whatever,” Steve growls, and continues on. “But that’s a game, and I just want this thing out of my head, alright? So why don’t we just go on a full-front attack? If we lure this thing out, use me as a bait–”
“-- no, no way!”
“-- then El can destroy it,” Steve finished, cutting over Dustin before his protests could persuade the rest of the group. “If we do this, it’ll be over quickly. Hopper doesn’t have to get involved.”
“Nor will the government,” Lucas concedes with a nod. “They’ll never even know.”
“No way, we’re not putting you at risk!” Dustin leaps back onto his feet, rounding on Steve who defiantly folds his arms and glares daggers with the younger boy. “Did you miss the part where Mike said it has a death ray?!”
“That’s just assuming it does, we don’t really know,” Steve argues back. “I want this out of my head, and this is the easiest way.”
“And you can’t just put El in danger like this!” Mike hollers, taking his turn to involve himself in the argument. “She’s not just some weapon–”
“I can do it,” El says; she’s got a determined expression glazed across her face, with a fire gleaming in her eyes. “I can fight.”
“I’m not saying you can’t!” Mike cries out, flinging his hands up and into his thick locks of black hair. “I just don’t want you to put yourself in danger, just for - for–”
“For what, Wheeler?!” Steve’s up on his feet now, flaring up in a hot rage. “For me? You don’t want El to be in danger for Steve, right? Steve fucking Harrington, your sister’s ex-boyfriend?!”
“That’s not what I meant!” Mike shouts back defensively, but there’s something guilty stirring in the back of his eyes. It only enrages Steve even more; this bastard isn’t sorry, he’s just guilty because he’s been caught out.
“What the fuck did you mean then, huh, Wheeler?” Steve steps forward, glowering into Mike’s black look. He can hardly believe his ears right now - after everything they’d been through, with demodogs in the junkyard and fires in the tunnels, after their afternoons dumping quarters in the arcade and their evenings cruising in Steve’s car… sure, he and Mike hadn’t always gotten along and they’d butted heads before, but did Mike really not fucking care? “I can’t believe this - this is crazy. I thought you gave a shit about me!”
“Shut up! ” A high-pitched voice shrieked; Steve and Mike whipped around, alight with rage and frustration, to glare at Max who has scrambled to her feet and attempts to wedge herself between the pair. “Jesus, would you both stop acting like children?! Have you considered just leaving this choice up to El rather than deciding for her?!”
A screeching honk rips out from outside, and the entire group whips around towards the front door. They all freeze in horror – it’s not Hopper, he would just let himself in… then Max scrambles to her feet and dives towards the window, peeking out from the gap. Her entire body stiffens.
“Holy shit,” she hisses. “Steve - it’s your dad. ”
Steve’s blood runs cold. Everyone stares at him for a moment in horror - and much to his bitter fury, Mike’s lips mouth the word: spy.
“Get under your bed and hide there,” Steve says suddenly, looking over to El. The young girl’s jaw clenches, but she nods and scrambles out of the room and into the bedroom. His heart slams against his chest as he rises to his feet, and his knees wobble in place whilst a hundred million questions burn through his mind. What the hell was his Dad doing here? Why was he even here? How did he know to come here? How did he even know about this place? What the fuck was going on?
“Steve–”
“Don’t follow,” Steve says, putting out a hand and quelling the start of Dustin’s protest. “Please,” he adds imploringly, hoping it might make a difference in changing their minds. He feels like he’s walking onto the battlefield, or a gladiator’s arena – but he breathes out between his teeth, hard and still, rolls back his shoulders and marches out of the front door without a second glance.
He knows Richard Harrington’s car by sight: a Mercedes-Benz W126, freshly manufactured with a polished cyan paint and custom-made license plate (because his Dad’s just an ass like that). His father is leaning against the driver’s door, already with a cigarette between his teeth as though he’d been expecting Steve to take a while to walk out. He’s got his hair freshly trimmed and his work outfit on, minus the blazer; his Rolex watch on full display on his wrist. His father’s face is impassive, unreadable as ever. Of course you need to develop a poker face when you’re a Harrington.
“Station told me you’d be here,” his father says.
Steve leans against one of the wooden posts holding up the front porch, folding his arms and staring his dad straight in the eyes, but his stomach has twisted into a tight knot. Did Hopper really rat him out?
His dad continues. “Went to report you missing, boy, considering you vanished in the middle of the night and didn’t come back. You know what this town is like these days. But the old lady at the desk says you were bunking with the Chief. Gave me the address. Here I am.”
“Aren’t we all lucky for it,” Steve grumbles under his breath. His father either doesn’t hear him or pretends not to.
His father’s never been soft or considerate in conversation; he’s straight as an arrow, sharp and straight to the point, grown and nurtured to negotiate the best deal for his own selfish desires. That’s what happens when you rear your first-born to become nothing but the breadwinner of the family, making sure they were prepared and willing to become the stone-cold, stoic and callous business-man they’re bred to be. But, of course, in complete Harrington style, they’re first trained to become exactly what Steve Harrington used to be: a pretentious, self-entitled douchebag.
Thank God Steve was the first in the family to break the cycle.
“What the hell are you even doing here, Steven?” Richard asks, curving his back against the car door as he leans to try snatch a glimpse into the windswept shack behind Steve. “Vacationing in a hovel like this?”
“I got ill. Hopper wants to keep an eye on me.” Steve knows it’s a shit like the moment it leaves his mouth. Richard Harrington isn’t buying it, and he’s not going to pretend to either.
“Awful kind of him.”
“Chief’s a stand-up guy.”
“Not worried that those kids are gonna catch anything?”
His father doesn’t even need to point. Steve twists around towards the window of the cabin just in time to see a few heads, including Dustin’s distinctive trucker cap, ducking down out of sight. When Steve turns back, Richard’s face has dropped his stoic and hard expression into one twisted with cold anger.
“Well?”
And for some stupid, dumb fucking reason, Steve pulls out the slightly crumpled twenty dollars that Chief Hopper gave him two nights ago and says: “Gotta pay the bills somehow, right, pops?”
Richard Harrington’s jaw fucking sets. It clenches so hard that Steve can practically hear the teeth grind against each other, and a fire ignites in his hazel pupils like a forge’s bowels set aflame. Steve’s twisted, amused grin fades and he stuffs the money back into his pocket like it’s going to undo the damage.
“You’re a fucking imbecile, boy.”
Steve knows that already. But it hurts to hear it come from his father, especially when Richard means it more than any ‘I love you’ might have ever meant.
“Get in the car.”
“I gotta take care of the kids–”
“I don’t give a shit, Steven, get in the goddamn car.”
“What about my car?”
Richard spits out a roar, and Steve realizes after a second that it’s laughter. Genuine, tyrannical laughter, mocking Steve like he’s said the most idiotic thing one could say in that situation. “ Your car? Your fucking car ? You’re goddamn lucky I’m not towing it to scrap metal right now, what with the goddamn attitude you’re giving me. You can pick it up tomorrow, or next Monday, whenever you’re gonna be allowed to leave the house next. Now get in the FUCKING car!”
His father’s fist slams against the top of the Mercedes as he curses, the hollow sound ringing out and echoing against the trees, and Steve numbly remembers what Billy said last night:
Or would you rather it be your daddy’s fucking car instead? I wouldn’t wanna ruin my paint job, after all.
Steve spares a few glances back towards the cabin as he numbly treads through his thick haze of anxiety towards the passenger side of his father’s car. As Richard ducks back inside, Steve spots a shadow in the window: Dustin’s face peeks out from over top, emblazoned with terror, and lifts something up on display:
A walkie-talkie.
Steve’s walkie-talkie is still in his car.
“Hey, Dad, my stuff is–”
“Get your ass in. You can come back for your stuff another day.”
There’s a hard, sore lump in his throat, and Steve reluctantly ducks into the vehicle. The engine snarls into life, and Steve keeps his stare locked onto the window of the cabin as the rest of the kids gradually begin to appear to watch his sudden, inescapable departure. Amidst the growls of the car’s engine and the sounds of tyres scraping against dead leaves and sticks, an all too familiar voice hisses in the foreground of his mind.
you would my father look’d but with your eyes; sin’s of the father laid upon the child.
Nausea rocks Steve’s stomach, and there’s only one resounding idea booming in his head as the Mercedes-Benz pulls out of the woods: he needs to get back to the cabin
Notes:
Author's Research No.4: TRC-214
One of the most famous props of Stranger Things, except from the bikes, are the walkie-talkies that the kids use to communicate with each other. In Season 1, each of the four boys - Mike, Will, Lucas and Dustin - each have their own. In Season 2, Dustin gets an upgrade to include a headpiece connected to his walkie. By Season 3, Max and Eleven each have their own as well.
The make in question, at least for the boys, are the 'Realistic TRC-214'. Produced by RadioShack, this brand of walkies were actually produced in 1985 - two years after when the first season is set. These walkie-talkies come with channel crystals that allow you to tune into any three of fourty frequencies, ranging from 26.965 to 27.405 MHz, include ranger boosters and squelch control (for removing background noise), and a charger jack for recharging nickel cadmium batteries. These devices require eight - yes, eight - double-A batteries to operate. Buildings absorb transmitted signals, especially if they contain metal; trees and even heavy cloud formations can also affect signal. However, lakes and other large bodies of signal provide excellent transmission as they help signal propagation.
But hey, why not do your own little deep dive by reading the manual here?
These walkies are no longer produced, but RadioShack supplies TRC-214 t-shirts and phone cases. Pretty neat.
Chapter 5: The Father
Summary:
For a moment, Steve takes himself away into some bliss, idealistic world where his parents were more present than they’d ever been in years. They could’ve had a family like the Henderson’s, before it got ripped apart by divorce… where they called out to each other across rooms and told each other ‘love you, too’ before they left the house. They could’ve had a family like the Wheeler’s, or the Sinclair’s, where his mother cooked fried eggs and bacon whilst his Dad talked about the goddamn weather this weekend whilst reading the paper. Maybe if they were really lucky, they could have had a family like the Byer’s.
(Joyce Byers could tell her youngest’s breathing down a phone line, and knows that her eldest has wanted to go to NYU since he was six. Richard Harrington couldn’t say what his son wanted to be when he grew up.)
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
- This Be The Verse, Philip Larkin
Hawkins, Indiana / January 1985 / 2 Months After Saving the World
Max was the last one of the party that Steve dropped off home after their impromptu trip to the arcade, followed by a visit to the worst burger joint Steve had ever stepped foot in but the kids somehow seem to enjoy. He didn’t know how these brats find taste in literal grease and oil, but it’s cheap and they’re happy.
Except Max, who didn’t seem to have much pep in her step anymore. When Steve’s BMW pulled up in front of the little home of the Hargrove-Mayfield family, Max didn’t immediately get out but instead sat there, arms folded, staring sullenly out the window and with her gaze fixed on the front door.
Steve didn’t say anything, nor did he judge. He’s slowly becoming accustomed to the kids lingering in his car for a moment, which usually means they want to talk about something private and not for the ears of the rest of the party. Dustin was the first and the most consistent, although his is usually advice on styling his hair or figuring out how to ask out some girl in the grade above him.
(Will had been second, who just quietly and suddenly broke down whilst Steve could do nothing but hug him and offer his apologies.)
Max was the third. Quite honestly, Steve had put her in second to last place for the line-up of Harrington Advice. She had her problems, sure, but she was resilient and stubborn and a ‘I can manage on my own’ kind of person. (She’s not last though. He expects that Mike would probably rather walk into the Upside Down than come to Steve Harrington for advice.)
Steve finally broke the silence, because he can’t sit around on the side of the road for the rest of the evening. “What’s up, Red?”
“ Red?” Max snorted and slumped in the car seat, arms folded. “That’s the best you could come up with?”
“I thought about Gingerbread, but thought you wouldn’t take to it.”
“No, I wouldn’t have,” Max replied with the ghost of a grin, then her smile faded. She was quiet for a moment more, and then muttered: “I don’t really wanna go home. It’s been such a fun day, you know? And I’m gonna have to go home to… you know.”
Steve eyed the house in front of them. It’s small, inviting enough, but just a carbon copy of the ten dozen other houses on Max’s block. Only a few know the real horrors residing within those walls though. “I bet.”
“Billy’s been a huge douche lately.”
“Oh yeah, I know all about that,” Steve replied quietly - and he does. Billy Hargrove had just been promoted to co-captain of the Hawkins basketball team, and he’d been swaggering around the halls pretending like it’s not a big deal whilst licking his teeth whenever Steve walks by.
Max’s face contorted as if taken by a hideously rapturous headache. “He fucking threw a lampshade at my head last night.”
“Are you serious?!” Steve yelped, jerking up in his seat. “The hell?!”
“Yeah,” Max scoffed. “I gave him a good reminder of what happens when you fuck with me, though.” She violently mimed a stabbing motion and screwed her face up angrily. “I didn’t actually though. I just told him.”
"Jesus..."
"He gets it from my step-dad. In some stupid way, I - I don't even blame Billy. I blame my fucking step-douche. He made him like this."
Steve blew out air from his cheeks and slid his gaze away from the house and towards Max. She had folded her arms again, glaring at the house for a moment more, then finally huffs and moved towards the door handle. “Sorry. I don’t want to dump my shit on you. I’ll just–”
“You wanna get slushies?” Steve said suddenly, and Max halted in her movement. Turning around with a puzzled expression, Steve shrugged and quickly continued as casually as possible: “Well, so long as you don’t tell the others. But, like, there’s this new ice-cream place that just opened up downtown? And it’s apparently got these killer fucking slushies. Got these insane different flavors, too – like honeycomb, and candy cane, and strawberry lemonade.”
“Strawberry lemonade sounds rad,” Max grinned, and closed the door with a loud click. “Fuck yeah. Let’s get slushies.”
Steve’s engine purred as the car moved away from the house and down the street, aiming back in the direction it came from with a red-headed middle-schooler and the former King of Hawkins High seated in the front. Max Mayfield isn’t going home for a few more hours, and she was fucking happy about it.
Steve Harrington’s was also not going home for many more hours than her. And he was almost just as happy about it too.
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / 4 Months After Saving the World
The Harrington house is situated in the wealthier section of town, with the block consisting of several other sizable houses and mansions manufactured for the affluent and prestigious members of Hawkin’s community. Steve’s house was huge, with beige paneled walls and a set of crimson double-doors underneath the automated lamps affixed above. There’s a garage fixed to the side of the house, usually only home to Steve’s BMW… and, of course, the heated pool in the backyard with decking chairs strewn around it. Steve used to love that pool; he’d practically bounded around with excitement when he first learned it was getting installed back in 1970-whatever, when Steve was still in grade school. His mother used to do some laps in the morning, and his father only ever held work parties around it, but the highlight of Steve’s week was leaping in and splashing around on the weekends with Tommy, when they were still friends. He got so good at swimming, he even became the Hawkins High swimming team’s co-captain and a certified lifeguard.
(He dropped swimming a month after Barb died. He couldn’t look at pools the same way anymore.)
Steve figured out a few months ago why his father had never even dipped a toe in the pool, even though it cost tens of thousands to construct: it was just for fucking show. The same reason why his father drove a shiny Mercedes-Benz, and had the big house in the shitty little town, and always wore a button-up and tie regardless of where he was, and had family photos hung up on the wall with none dated after 1978: it was all a big goddamn show. Anything that wasn’t part of Richard Harrington’s affluent, pristine and esteemed reputation was kept locked behind those two red double-doors.
Just like the argument his parents had two nights ago, when Steve had ditched the house. Just like the argument brewing like a thunderstorm right now. As soon as the Mercedes-Benz pulls up in the front driveway, Steve practically bangs the passenger’s door open, swings out the car and marches towards the house before Richard even shuts off the engine. He swings open the front doors and marches into the hallway, eyeing the staircase and formulating a plan in his head. He knows enough escape routes in this house, and he knows his father well. The front doors and back doors will be locked once Steve storms up into his room, but that won’t stop him – he’ll sneak out through the window, easy. Down the drainpipe, into the backyard, past the fucking pool, over the fence, into the woods.
Stealthy. Like a ninja.
The front door bangs as Richard thrusts it forward and causes it to ram against the wall.
“Babysitting?!” Richard bellows, slamming the doors shut hard enough that the foundations of the very house tremble in fear. “Fucking babysitting?!”
“Where’s Mom?” Steve asks, staring up at the staircase idly with his arms folded, his back turned against his father.
“In the goddamn living room - don’t ignore me, Steven!” Richard’s voice carries through the house and Steve kicks off his shoes, his teeth gritted hard, and he stalks straight past his father and into the living room as Richard’s dulcet tones continue: “What the hell do you mean by babysitting?!”
“What do you think it means, huh?” Steve responds loudly, restraining himself from shouting as he stalks into the living room, running his hand across the mantlepiece and feeling a thin coat of dust trail across his finger. “It means I’m doing Chief Hopper a favor. I mean, you keep telling me all the damn time – pull yourself up by your bootstraps–”
His father chokes out a ridiculing scoff, glaring at Steve with such intense incredulity that it only enrages Steve further. “For the Chief? You mean goddamn Jim who overdoses himself on antidepressants just so he can show up to work? You think I want a son that spends his life herding children like - like a school fucking chaperone?”
Steve ignores his father, again, and moves from the living room and into the kitchen. He finds his mother there: her back is turned to him, soft brown locks tumbling down her back, pouring a single champagne glass to the top with an already partially empty white wine bottle. She turns around slightly and spots Steve as he walks in, her mouth opening up to address him, but the father’s voice drowns out her attempts.
“The hell do you think you’re playing at?” Richard asks; his tone is strong, steady, unlike Steve’s that is so damn close to breaking. “Running out in the middle of the night, huh? I thought you packed that shit in. Did you go to see that Wheeler girl again?”
“ Nancy? I’m not interested in–”
“Interested in what then?!” Richard advances on Steve; the teenager turns around, finally, and holds his ground, giving his father a black look dead in the eyes. “What are you so damn interested in? Is it herding around those retard kids around town?!”
“Don’t fucking call them that!” Steve bellows. His fists clench hard enough for his already bruised knuckles to burn, and his body rattles from fury. “You–”
“It’s that Henderson kid again, isn’t it?! Following you around like a lost puppy? Or are you visiting the Byer’s again, huh? Hanging around those two queer boys of their lunatic mother?”
“ Don’t you call–”
“Or is it fighting you’re so interested in?” Richard’s hand leaps out and snatches Steve around the chin, twisting his head painfully to the side to examine the still fresh bruises over his temple and cheekbone, but Steve jerks out of his reach. “Who the hell are you brawling with? The fucking Hargrove boy? Or someone else?”
“Like you give a shit,” Steve snaps, venom filling every word, and knocks his father’s outstretched hand away with his wrist. He throws a sharp look at his mother, whose mouth is wobbling and looking between the pair of men like she’s watching a tennis match, but can’t bring herself to speak. With a gruff snarl from between his teeth, Steve practically launches himself past his Dad, pushing him in the shoulder as he stalks past, and back into the living room.
“The hell did you say to me?” Steve can hear his Dad hot on his heels as he walks right through the living room again and towards the staircase – he puts one foot on the bottom step –
“ Don’t walk away from me!”
An intense force grabs him by the shoulder and launches him back. Steve staggers, alarmed by the sheer force of his father’s intense strength, and his back hits the wall near the front door. There’s a shock of fear in his gut for a moment, and Steve’s suddenly taken back in time – eleven years old, cornered by the predator that is his father, a freshly swelling bruise rising on his jaw –
But he’s eighteen years old now, and he’s fought off fucking monsters. He’s not afraid.
“The hell do you–”
“You heard what I said!” Steve yells, stepping forward and glaring his dad dead in the eyes. “You don’t care! You’ve never cared, so why are you pretending to now?!”
Richard pulls an expression like Steve had just socked him in the jaw. “ Pretending… ?!”
Steve mirthlessly laughs, throwing his head back and spinning in a half-circle whilst running his hand through his hair. “Oh, c’mon, pops, don’t be stupid. You ran off for most of my senior year, didn’t give a damn about me! You weren’t here for homecoming. You weren’t here when I got my first ‘A’. You weren’t here when we won the winter championships against Pawnee!”
“I – Steven, my work is–”
“I got the winning shot. Did you know that, Dad?” His throat burns suddenly and his eyes traitorously swell up with tears; his nails dig deep into the palms of his hand, and his eyes trail up behind his father to the staircase. There’s a photo of the three of them, professionally shot, with little Steve sitting in the middle baring a toothy grin whilst his parents wear a glazed smile. “I got it from the three-point line. Ten seconds on the clock. But you weren’t fucking here. ”
Something flashes across his father’s hard and stony expression. Something that Steve’s never seen before. For a moment, Richard Harrington seems genuinely regretful. There’s a flicker of hurt in his eyes, real and naked remorse for his actions - or, more accurately, his inaction. For a moment, Steve takes himself away into some bliss, idealistic world where his parents were more present than they’d ever been in years. They could’ve had a family like the Henderson’s, before it got ripped apart by divorce… where they called out to each other across rooms and told each other ‘love you, too’ before they left the house. They could’ve had a family like the Wheeler’s, or the Sinclair’s, where his mother cooked fried eggs and bacon whilst his Dad talked about the goddamn weather this weekend whilst reading the paper. Maybe if they were really lucky, they could have had a family like the Byer’s.
(Joyce Byers could tell her youngest’s breathing down a phone line, and knows that her eldest has wanted to go to NYU since he was six. Richard Harrington couldn’t say what his son wanted to be when he grew up.)
Steve moves past his dad again, but his dad grabs him by the shoulder and shoves him back again. A shadow crosses across his father’s face. The hurt is gone, vanished altogether like a spark dying on a blown out flame. His jaw sets impassively, and there’s a deep rage flaring into life against those eyes.
“Thought I raised you to be better than this, Steven.”
“You didn’t raise me, that’s the whole point!”
“I clearly goddamn didn’t, if you’re acting so childish!” Richard bellows, his face burning a hot scarlet from the intensity of his rage. “Ditching school, skiving off your sports, your goddamn GPA’s gone down the–”
“You weren’t here to care about that before! The hell do you want now? To fix your mistakes?!”
“You’re always trying to pin mistakes on me, Steven! Always trying to villainize me! I’ve tried to do more than just have a roof over our heads and three meals at the table, I tried to make something of our family name in this goddamn shithole town – the least you can do for us is honor that!”
“What do you want from me?!”
“To sort your shit out, Steven!” Richard roars, and he moves so close that all Steve can see for a moment is a physical embodiment of loathing and rage. “I could live with a bit of misbehavior, but time and time again - you’re proving to me that you just don’t care !”
He’s faced down monsters before, goddammit. He beat a flesh-eating monster with a nail bat. He swung weapons with mutant brain-eating dogs in a foggy junkyard. He ran through the bowels of Hawkin’s whilst fire and creatures nipped at his heels. Why is Steve flinching now?
“You’re playing hooky from school, fucking up your grades, getting into fights! And then there was that mess two years ago when that Beatrice girl went missing from my house–!”
“Barbara…” Steve’s voice comes out in a hoarse, vicious snarl like a deranged hound. “Her name was Barbara fucking Holland.”
“Beatrice, Barbara, fucking Brigitte Bardot - who cares, Steven? You didn’t give a shit back then! More upset about us finding out about your goddamn slumber party–”
“No, I–”
“But now -! Oh, now you’d rather play truant and roll around in the garbage with those retard grade-schoolers–”
“ Stop fucking calling them that!” Steve’s vocal chords almost tear apart from his scream. His throat burns hoarse from the intensity of it; a flash of overwhelming rage courses through every vein and nerve in his body. At the same time, he sees a shadow of movement in the corner of his eye. His mother has come round the corner, a half-empty glass of fizzing liquid clutched in one hand, and a vague, glazed look in her eyes. She looks between Steve and Richard, alarmed and her mouth continuously slack-jawed as if she’s about to say something. The sight of her just makes Steve’s anger rear up even further; somehow, his father’s to blame for this. He knows it. He fucking—
“Oh, are they your friends, Steven?” His father takes a step forward, the floorboards creaking; he hasn’t noticed his wife behind him. “What wonderful company you keep, Steven! I’m sure a bunch of kids and goddamn teens that’ll probably run themselves into the ground when they catch AIDS in ten years time really—”
“Don’t you dare insult them, don’t you d-dare!” Steve takes a step down on the staircase, just as his father advances forward with a finger jabbed straight towards him. Their voices overlap, drowning each other out.
“Bet they love hanging out with the town idiot with the company fucking card–”
“They’re my friends, Jesus Christ–!”
“-- the Wheeler girl fucks someone else behind your back and you pull a year-long hissy fit over it?”
“It’s not like–”
“-- pussy of a fucking child that I’ve somehow raised!”
“Maybe I don’t want to be your goddamn son!”
“It’s fucking lucky you’re not then!”
“What–?”
His father’s fist strikes against the wall, and Marie Harrington recoils like she’s the one in danger. The framed photograph of the smiling parents and their heir to the Harrington estate of the family drops, clattering down a few steps of the staircase, and comes to a rest face-up with the smashed glass and beaming faces pointing upward.
“You’re not a Harrington , goddammit! You’re not my son! ”
Steve’s mind is rendered blank. He didn’t know before this that words could actually physically hurt someone this badly. He didn’t know that it could cause a deep, swooping sensation in his gut like a rollercoaster dropping from the top. He didn’t know that it could make his heart painfully clench, then ram against his chest like the drums of war.
The pool is just for show. The car is just for show. His son, his own goddamn son, is just for show.
“The hell are you talking about?” Steve breathes, and winces from how painfully hoarse his throat has become. His gaze flickers between his mother and father, breathing uneasy and his sanity spiraling. “What – are you disowning me?”
Richard doesn’t reply. His jaw sets and wobbles, and he glances towards the doorway as though he’s known his wife has been standing there all along. Marie remains silent, eyes foggy and glazed, but there’s tears springing in the corners of her eyes. Subtly, ever so slightly, she shakes her head at Richard.
Steve blinks. “What–?”
“It’s all the same with this generation, you know,” his father says, turning to face Steve again. Richard’s not angry anymore… or he’s suppressing it. It’s hard and cold, but there’s a virtually imperceptible tremor within each word. “It’s all the same with the goddamn kids. You all think it’s my fault, the father’s fault, that we’re everything that’s wrong with the family. Everything’s wrong with the fathers. We’re never there enough, never good enough, always goddamn assholes in your eyes.”
Steve thinks of the kids. Lucas Sinclair’s parents are fine, but what of the rest? Mike Wheeler’s father is a tired airhead who doesn’t pay attention to anything beyond the TV set. Will Byer’s father is a deadbeat asshole that wants nothing to do with his two boys. Max Mayfield’s father is a tyrannical dickhead that’s turned her life and her brother into hell incarnate. Dustin Henderson’s father is unforgivable.
That’s Steve’s dad too, surely – unforgivable, cruel, Grade-A Asshole–
“Didn’t stop to think about your goddamn mother though. Always been a mommy’s boy, right, Steven? She’s the one who fucked another man behind my back.”
“Laid with…? But you’re–”
“A hook-up in a motel just outside of Chicago. Right, honey?” His father glances towards Steve’s mother, who flinches and recoils from the condescension. “That’s what you told me. The goddamn office-worker from New Jersey at an exec’s retirement party. You wanted someone that wasn’t a Harrington for a little while, didn’t you?”
“You’re lying,” Steve says. “Everyone’s said, our whole lives – look exactly like each other –”
Richard snorts. “You actually believed that?”
A cold settles on Steve’s heart, immediately interrupted by a stab of disbelief. No, that was bullshit, they looked just like each other. He’d always seen it, even though he never wanted to.
But now that Steve looked, there were imperfections he hadn’t noticed. In his effort to hold onto a grudge about being his father’s visual match, Steve hadn’t noticed that there wasn’t anything to begin with. Richard Harrington’s nose was longer, his jaw was much more square, … it was only the eyes that gleamed hazel. Even then, green brushed within Richard’s irises much more than Steve’s did.
His dad lies all the time, and Steve’s good at catching him out now. This isn’t one of those lies.
With that comes a burst of rage that he hasn’t felt in a long, long time.
“No wonder she ran off and slept with another man then,” Steve says, feeling his fury bursting in his lungs and between the bones of his ribcage. He keeps his tone casual, but his voice quakes with each word that sneaks around the hard, heavy lump that’s swollen in his throat. “I’m not even your son and I have a hard time standing in the same room as you, no wonder she can’t stay in the same bed.”
Richard’s pupils shrink into dots at the sound of his son’s (son? He’s not his fucking son anymore!) open defiance. “Don’t you dare speak to me–”
“Maybe if you did us all a favor and drew up the divorce papers already, we’d all be a lot fucking happier. You can go fuck off back to New York and reign over your business empire, and maybe Mom can go back to Chicago and chase her dreams, instead of drinking goddamn wine like it’s water just so she can survive being around you!”
“ Steven–!”
Queer. Lunatic. Retard. These are the people who looked at hell dead in the eyes and stood their ground. Kids who ran into the jaws of death with steadfast determination and came back out as heroes. Fellow high-school peers who battled against horrifying forces of governments and monsters and those in between. Parents who fought like tooth and nail for the truth and for their kids, and for those who weren’t their kids. These were people who were trying to love him, really love him, even despite everything that’d he done to make himself so unloveable. And his father dismissed them like they weren’t even worth his fucking recognition.
“I don’t even blame her, you know?!” His voice rips out of his throat once again, hoarse and painful, burning at his vocal chords and trembling like he can’t cling onto the words he’s saying, but there’s so much hatred and rage behind it – and for the first time in his life, he sees fear in his father’s eyes. “I blame you! I blame you!”
His vision goes black, and Steve wonders for that brief second before the pain comes that maybe he passed out from his rage. Then agony blossoms across his cheekbone, flaring up towards his eye socket, and he feels his knees buckle and his back hit the wall behind him again. Through his blurred vision, he sees his father’s expression contorted with seething rage, his fist raised up–
further. harder. don’t let him dethrone your empire.
That voice. That goddamn voice again. It’s not speaking to Steve. Of fucking course, the Beholder hasn’t just got to Billy. It’s got his dad, too.
He can’t help but let the words fall from his mouth as he leans against the wall, one arm outstretched against its surface whilst his other raises its elbow, almost of its own accord, to block another hit. “Billy Hargrove hits harder than you.”
His father’s fist shakes, and Steve waits. There’s a seething rage in his eyes, and it seems like he wants nothing more than to rearrange the soft feature of Steve’s face (that maybe he got from his mother after all–)
beat the shit out of him, whip him like your fucking father did, fuck him like your old man fucked you open, it’s only fair
“Richard…” The voice of Marie Harrington calls out over the ocean waves of hatred and anger shared between the two men of the house, pulling them out from the pulsing of the hearts in their ears. Steve’s mouth falls open, and on instinct he feels a childish urge to run to his mother – who, despite everything, seems still so faultless and perfect in comparison to the monster of his father.
Richard beats him to the punch. “Marie. You can’t think you’re getting away with this either.”
Steve spits in his face. The saliva strikes his father on the cheek, and Richard reacts instantly by seizing Steve by the scalp and swinging him away towards the staircase. He staggers, and grabs the railing to stop himself from falling.
“You’re grounded.” Richard’s voice has returned to being tense and level, but it only makes him so much more authoritative. “That means you stay in the house for a week . No guests, no midnight excursions, no favors for the goddamn Chief. Even if it’s the end of the damned world. I will be dropping you off at school, and picking you up. Is that clear?”
It’s ironic that his dad’s mentioned ‘end of the world’, because that’s literally what could be happening right now. It’s also ironic that, a few years ago, the idea of being stuck at home with his parents would have been a good thing. Evening dinners occupying themselves with conversation at the dinner table, talking to his mother in the kitchen about school or girls… maybe he could have even convinced his father to crack open a couple beers and watch some sports on the television.
Now, however, the idea of a big, empty house with just Steve inside of it seems like a blessing.
Steve doesn’t even respond. Rubbing the side of his cheek, he strides up the staircase two at a time, bounds into his bedroom and slams the door shut. The door rattles against the wall and he can’t help but wince, but there’s no tell-tale sign of the pounding of footsteps against the staircase, which means he’s being left alone. In fact, the house falls eerily silent now that the argument’s done.
All that’s left is the ringing words in his ears.
You’re not my son - two queer boys - always been a mommy’s boy – everything’s wrong with the father’s – you’re not a Harrington –
His eyes scan his bedroom, flickering from spot to spot. The handset phone he keeps in his room is gone; his father probably expected resistance, and preemptively confiscated the phone line from Steve. The walkie-talkie is a mile and a half away outside Hopper’s cabin, locked away tight in his car, and the kids are probably still trying to call in without realizing that Steve hasn’t got it. It’s almost noon already, and Steve gives it till 1’o’clock until Dustin inevitably figures out that they’ve got no form of communication left with Steve.
Steve sinks, lowering himself down onto the floor and leaning the curve of his spin against his back. His legs draw up against his chest, and he buries his hands into his hair. His fingers pull into his locks and his muscles stiffen.
He thinks he ought to be congratulated, really. He kept his shit together, in retrospect, in the face of total, unrelenting insanity. Sure, he effectively told his father to get fucked, get divorced and get the hell out of his life… he spat in his dad’s eye, figuratively and literally… but he reasoned that a worse person than him might’ve gotten violent.
Steve’s not keeping it together now, though, and he knows that much. In fact, he might be having something called a ‘nervous breakdown’. Although he’s not feeling particularly nervous. He doesn’t really know what he feels; it seems like his entire brain has just completely switched off from reality, and all he’s experiencing is the passage of time flowing around and past him.
The clock chimes. It’s 1’o’clock.
It keeps ticking.
“Steve?”
It’s his mothers voice. He hadn’t even heard the door creak open. Steve’s painfully aware of an ache in the base of his spine.
“Steve. There’s some lunch downstairs, if you’d like it.”
His mothers words aren’t strung together naturally. Everything about it seems fake.
“I’m - I’m sorry about your father. But you know he only wants what’s best for us.”
“Is what he said true?”
There’s a beat of silence. Steve can’t see her, because at some point he’s moved to press the palms of his hands against his closed eyelids, but he can hear the hurt from his harsh sentence.
“Yes,” Marie finally whispers.
“He’s not… I’m not his then? I’m another man’s son?”
“We don’t know for certain, honey.”
If she said ‘yes’, then it would have been etched into his mind forever. Steve’s not sure if he prefers it being kept vague for him, like some form of protection, or if he would rather be like Nancy Wheeler and claw for the truth - even if it leaves a mortally fatal wound.
“I love you,” she says, and she leaves before Steve has an opportunity to say it back - even though he can’t bring himself to right now.
The clock chimes three more times in the space of Steve’s complete mental shutdown. Within that time, the early Spring sun begins its descent over the horizon and casts soft hues of yellow and gold into his bedroom. His window faces the west; it faces the swimming pool where Barb died.
Fucking hell. His whole life’s being turned into a fucking nightmare.
… Shit. That was it. That was the answer. Had the kids already figured that out? That’s what the Beholder’s goddamn deal was, wasn’t it? It wasn’t possessing him, and it wasn’t possessing Billy Hargrove or his father either. It was making his life a living nightmare. In the past two days, Steve’s nightmares that had plagued him enough already had ramped up into insanity territory, Billy Hargrove was out for blood and his father had effectively demolished everything he’d known about himself and his family. And it wasn’t even just Steve getting affected. Eleven had woken up screaming, haunted by the monstrosity that was the creature in the Inbetween. And Dustin, poor fucking Dustin, was getting torn apart by the idea of almost killing a man. And once Max finds out about that? Maybe it could tear apart the whole party.
His mind still feels blank and numb as he staggers to his feet, but he can finally feel some semblance of clarity gaining into his vision. Steve closes his door, locks it with the spare key he got cut for emergencies, and rams his desk chair underneath the doorknob for good measure. He even considers putting a bunch of pillows underneath the blankets of his bed as some makeshift dummy, but that’s fucking stupid.
Instead, he sticks on the pair of shoes kept underneath his bed (again, for emergencies; he’s always prepared these days), wrenches open the bedroom window and climbs out. Steve slides down the drainpipe, and he’s briefly wrenched back into the past–
Sixteen years old, King Steve climbs down from his bedroom window and easily lands on two feet at the bottom. His heart’s racing from the adrenaline. He’s never actually snuck out before to visit a girl, and the fact that it’s the beautiful fucking Nancy Wheeler makes this even better. He’s a real Romeo now.
A year and a half later, Steve Harrington’s climbing out the window so he can save his shitty hometown.
He hikes the full mile and a half; three-quarters of the way there, it starts raining. By the time he arrives in the woods, the sun has dipped past the trunks of the trees surrounding him and there’s only a ghostly remains of dusk left in Hawkins. The rain thunders down around him, pattering against the dried leaves that crunch underneath his shoes and against the branches of the woods still waiting to bloom into full springtime. The tungsten lights of Hopper’s cabin are in full flare, and there’s a low hum of chatter from within that melds with the hiss of rainfall. Hopping over the tripwire that surrounds the property, he staggers to the front door and rams his fist against the wood.
One-two – one… one-two-three.
There’s a pause. And then a loud shout of surprise from within. The locks of the house slither open with resounding clicks, and the door slowly creaks open of its own accord. Standing within the threshold, all the kids are there: Eleven, Mike, Lucas, Max, Will and Dustin, of course, holding a walkie-talkie in his hand and staring at Steve like his hero’s just returned from the battlefield.
Steve’s hand pushes his soaked fringe from his eyes. “We need to kill this thing. Right fucking now.”
It’s Mike’s call to wait for a while before they do it.
It turns out, they haven’t been sitting around this whole time and twiddling their thumbs. Eleven, out of her own instience and volition, volunteered to break through the Inbetween and search for Steve herself. She had described to the kids present that Steve was, in fact, at home with his parents and had engaged in a fight with his father that consisted of a lot of shouting and a lot of ‘bad words’. For the first time, Steve’s pleased that Eleven’s limited vocabulary means she doesn’t need to share these private revelations with the rest of the class.
“And then you sat alone,” Eleven finishes. “For a long, long time.”
“I was in a bad mood,” Steve limply offers, but it’s not enough to throw off the suspicious looks of the kids. He shakes them off by standing up sharply and begins his pacing, lengthways of the living room. “But I figured it out - the Beholder, it’s not possessing Billy or - or my Dad–”
“You think the Beholder got your Dad?” Dustin exclaims.
“Uh, rewind – how is Billy involved in this?” Lucas shouts.
“He - look, it’s…” His hands gesture wildly for a moment, then spins on his heel and continues his pacing with further vigor. “Billy got into a fight with me last night, and Dad was a huge asshole tonight. They both said some things, and tried to hurt me, and were huge assholes, but more than either of them have ever been. They’re not possessed, they’re being, like… influenced. Like all this violence is being targeted against me. ”
“Why you?” Max asks quietly. “I mean… why not El? She’s the one with the powers.”
Steve shakes his head. “I don’t know. I don’t. But with these ‘symptoms’, and these guys trying to hurt me, it’s like the Beholder is trying to really hurt me.”
“Or it’s playing with its food,” Dustin mutters darkly.
Eleven’s constant check-ups in the Inbetween had drained her. Despite her persistence that she could carry on, Mike insisted that they let her ‘recharge her batteries’ before they use her powers again to access the Inbetween.
That’s the plan. Encourage the Beholder to put Steve into his sleep-coma thing, then send Eleven in to kick the fucking thing’s ass.
“And I was trying to tell you, but you weren’t responding!” Dustin says, waving the walkie-talkie in Steve’s face. “I thought you saw me indicating this earlier?”
“The goddamn thing was locked in my car,” Steve replies from the kitchen. He’s taken the courtesy of washing up a leftover of dirty dishes that Hopper hasn’t finished yet, with Will helping out without Steve asking him to. “Dad wouldn’t let me grab my shit.”
“You didn’t take your talkie, didn’t take your bat, even though you’re in literal mortal peril…!” Dustin scoffs and shakes his head. “You sure you haven’t lost your goddamn weiner too?”
A stab of defiance runs through Steve like a bullet going through him. Maybe now’s a good time to say words like ‘fuck’ and ‘ass’ and so on; that’ll sort things out.
“I know where it is,” Lucas hollers from the other side of the room by the window. “He left it at your mom’s after he fucked her all night.”
Max bursts out laughing, clutching her ribs and throwing her tangles of ginger hair back wildly. From the other side of the room, Steve throws out a fistbump; Lucas grins and returns it.
“What?” Dustin yells out from the other side of the room. “What’d you say, Lucas?!”
“I didn’t say anything!”
“Will, what’d he say?”
“No. I’m not gonna say it.”
Dustin distracts himself as Max and Lucas continue to tease his ignorance, and Steve glances over his shoulder towards the front porch. From the low light pouring out of the window, he can see Mike and Eleven together and leaning against the railings. His hand is placed on the small of her back, and he’s muttering to her quietly.
“I’m sorry about Mike earlier,” Will murmurs to himself, and Steve marks this as the third person today who apologized on behalf of someone else being a douchebag. “I think… I think he’s just really protective of El.”
“He’s out of line,” Steve declares in a huff.
“I know,” Will quickly amends. “He shouldn’t have implied that stuff at all. But he does like you, you know? He just - you know, he spent a whole year thinking El was gone, and… I think he’s just terrified of losing her again.”
Steve doesn’t respond, instead occupying himself with trying to remove a particularly adamant stain on a plate. But the quiet is too much, and Steve, incessantly himself as ever, snaps with the need to fill the silence with something .
“Are you nervous?” Steve asks in a low voice. “I mean, I know this is… after everything…”
“Not just about this… this thing,” Will replies, and his voice drops into a whisper. “Nervous about - about you. I know how it feels, remember? To - To be targeted by these… these things. I don’t want that to… break you.”
For some reason, Will’s foreboding words does not cause Steve to flinch or cower with fear - instead, he’s filled with a strange, soft warmth in the center of his chest. Will Byer’s nightmares are coming back to haunt their hometown for a third time, and yet all the kid can do is fill himself with concern for others around him. Breaking out into an amicable grin, Steve throws his hand onto Will’s god awful excuse for a haircut and ruffles his soft hair. “That’s it, Byers. You’re my new favorite child.”
“Dustin’s your favorite, everyone knows that,” Will replies, smiling for the first time in hours. His grin slips quickly though. “I’m just saying this to - to help you, though. The Mind Flayer… when it got to me, it… it wanted to make you feel like you were alone. That you were misunderstood. That you had to face this - this thing all by yourself. I don’t want you to feel like that.”
“I don’t,” Steve says - and he’s not sure if he’s lying to himself or not.
“I don’t just mean feeling isolated,” Will continues earnestly. “I also mean playing the hero. We all know what you’re like - don’t throw yourself into danger just to take care of us, okay? This isn’t… this isn’t Billy Hargrove. This is real danger; something worse than death.”
Remember when Steve was giving away Ominous Points earlier? Well, Will Byers has just won the game. Congratulations, Will Byers, the most ominous person that Steve now knows. Write that one in your yearbook.
Mike and El shuffle back into the house not long after. Whilst El’s got that brave, determined expression on her face that radiates with a sliver of an anger that Steve can’t comprehend, Mike’s throwing Steve odd glances. Steve wants to say it’s guilt, or loathing, but he can’t put a finger on it.
Whilst Mike runs through El the plan one last time, and tries to coerce her into backing out if things get too risky, Steve stands alone by the doorway, arms crossed and staring at his shoes sullenly. Now that he’s here and doing this, he doesn’t even know if he wants to. What if they’re all right - what if this does put El in danger? What if they’re not fighting a monster, but lining themselves up at the gallows?
Dustin slides in to stand beside Steve, obviously noting the glaring unoccupied space around him. Now, there’s two of them sitting in the audience of the preparation for battle: one tall and slim with rain-soaked hair and an uncharacteristic nervous fidget, the other small and sturdy with a bed of curls and a trucker cap nestled on top.
“Hey - was your Dad, uh, okay?”
Was your Dad being a douche? That’s what Dustin means.
“No,” Steve replies stiffly, in a low voice. “No, he’s pissed.”
“What’d he say?”
More like, what didn’t his dad say? In a sense, that fact is more frightening than anything else his father has presented to him. Was this revelation even the worst of Richard Harrington’s secrets? Or were there worse skeletons rattling in his closet?
“He’s mad ‘cause I left the other night without telling him,” Steve grumbles, his eyes still locked on his Nikes. They’re caked in a thin layer of dirt, and there’s a shredded dried leaf stuck to the sole. “And then that turned into some stupid argument about school, and basketball, and driving you lot around.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him he should divorce Mom and fuck off to New York.”
Dustin chokes a spit of laughter, but realizes Steve’s not even smirking and masks it as a particularly nasty cough. “Jesus fucking Christ, dude.”
“Yeah, well…” He huffs and leans his head back, bouncing the scalp off the wooden paneled wall. Steve’s words trail off, trying to think of something to say that would fit right - something to downplay it, by first instinct. Or by his inner feeling in his heart, maybe he should hug Dustin and cry it out. But he just shrugs and doesn’t look at Dustin.
“How did your Dad know you were here?” Dustin asks, bringing his voice to a whisper; he’s got an unsteady gaze lingering on El, who’s fine-tuning the television into static. “Do you think he knows about…?”
“About El?” Steve shakes his head. “No. He said the woman at the desk in the station – Flo, I think – told him where Hopper lives.”
“She wouldn’t snitch. Hopper wouldn’t either.”
“You don’t get it, dude,” Steve responds impatiently. “My Dad, he’s – he’s respectable around town. Money equals respect. I guess all Flo saw was this respectable, rich father trying to track down his trouble-making teenage son. They don’t see past that.”
And they never will. Steve only just realizes it now, and it brings a hard, cold feeling into his chest like a lump of steel. It’s all for a show, a big theatrical performance, and it’s audience will never be interested in how it’s directed. Steve Harrington isn’t Richard Harrington’s son, but nothing’s going to change. His father will hate him more, and Steve will never love his father again, and that’s it. There won’t be a theatrical pulling back of the curtains, no dramatic exposure of his father’s dirty fucking secrets, no flourishing signature on a set of divorce papers. They’ll persist, and continue to pretend to be that happy family in the photo, whilst Steve fights to break out and leave this shit behind.
“So what now?” Max’s voice calls out over the rather subdued commotion filtering within the dusty cabin. “Do we, what… just wait for Steve to catch some z’s?”
“Whatever we do, we do it quickly.” Mike checks the digital watch strapped around his wrist. “Can’t let Hop see what we’re doing.”
“I think I can get it’s attention.” The phrase doesn’t feel right on Steve’s tongue, like it doesn’t fit the jigsaw piece, but he doesn’t know how else to explain it. “As soon as I’m passed out, give it a minute and then…” He looks towards Eleven, who’s staring back at him resolutely. “Then come find me.”
She nods. The expression on her face is nearly identical to the one that she walked into the Byer’s home with: firm and resolute, a strong and ceaseless gaze staring back. A stray thought flickers in Steve’s mind: where does she find her strength?
He shakes it off, fishes into his pocket and tosses his car keys to Dustin. “Go get my bat. Just in case.”
Steve sits cross-legged on the sofa whilst the kids sit on the floor, staring at him in awed silence - all except Mike, who couldn’t handle the tension and took himself outside to pace up and down on the porch whilst casting worried glances at the open front door. The hum of TV static is the only other sound that occupies the room, filling up the space with its continuous hiss. He has no idea what he’s doing, but he knows that the Beholder will come.
Come on, Steve implores in his head, jamming his eyes shut. Come fucking get me. I’m taking you on.
The TV static drones on. A heavy weight overwhelms him. It feels like, these last few months, he’s been crawling on his knees, dragging himself across the ground whilst his head is fuzzy with convoluted nightmares and his eyes burn with flickering, multi-coloured lights. His hair is sticky with damp rain water and sweat. He’s dragging himself through the mud, but it’s okay… maybe after this, he can pull himself out. Maybe he can overcome this. Maybe.
I’m Steve fucking Harrington. I’ve got a nail-bat that’s made for killing monsters. I’m a pretty damn good babysitter. And I’m gonna kill this monster.
His eyes open into darkness. There is nothing but primordial black once again, and it’s unnerving. Steve realizes, for the first time, that the Inbetween isn’t dark. It’s like when someone’s been blind for their entire life, and you wonder - what do they see? Is it darkness? But it can’t be, because darkness means there can be light. There’s no light here, and no darkness - just nothing.
Precariously, Steve takes a step forward. That endless extent of water ripples like a pebble skimmed across a lake, and extends outward forever. There’s a constant, ebbing sensation that he’s trespassing on someone else’s territory. Steve’s not allowed to be here. He’s broken in through a gap in the fence.
A shadow shifts in the swathe of non-existence pressing in on all sides. Steve turns around, ready to confront the Beholder–
Instead, he sees something ugly and bloated on the edge of his feet. Her face is pasty white and streaked with indigo veins all across her mottled skin, eyes half-lidded and completely devoid of any evidence of previous life. A thick layer of slime, ooze and congested water coats her body, layered with broad sets of web-like sludge, inky-black vines and blood, oh God, the fucking blood – so much of it, still preserved and fresh, and her fucking chest is ripped open with guts and gore –
Barbara Holland’s corpse stares into nothing, and Steve starts screaming.
The floorboards of the porch outside Hopper’s cabin ache and complain with each footstep Mike takes. It’s probably faced a lot of angry or impatient pacing within the years it's weathered, and sometimes it feels as though it can barely sustain the weight of a very stressed young teenager.
The floorboard gives out an extra creak that Mike knows it’s his own, and he spins on the spot to face the doorway. Will stands nervously within the entryway: he leans his small body against the doorframe, one arm clutching the crook of his elbow nervously, head looking down but eyes looking up. Jeez… since when did Will start catching up to Mike’s height?
“El’s in, by the way,” Will nervously says, as if he’s preparing for Mike to chastise him for announcing it. “Just thought you ought to know.”
“Is everything going okay?”
“Yeah. It’s like Steve just… passed out or something. El’s quiet. But I guess no news is good news, in a way?”
Mike shrugs. His pacing fever all drained out, he leans his elbows against the porch and gazes out into the shadowed darkness of the forest beyond. Will slides in beside him, their arms almost touching, and they spend a moment just staring out in silence and occupied with their thoughts.
“I didn’t mean that stuff about Steve,” Mike says.
“I know you didn’t. But you really hurt his feelings.”
“I didn’t think he’d care that much. Honestly, I thought Steve didn’t even like me.”
“What?” Will stands up straighter, apparently alarmed by this news. “Why do you think that?”
“‘Cause I’m Nancy’s brother, and I always thought he was an asshole and sometimes he kind of still is, but I know he isn’t really. He’s obviously, like, trying to improve himself. I didn’t mean to say that I didn’t want El getting hurt for him, I just…” His ramblings stumble to a halt, balancing the words carefully before letting the rest fall loose. “I just lost her before already, and I’m - I’m scared of losing her again.”
A silence hangs in the air, palpable and tensing on that last sentence. Mike looks away from Will, gazing almost angrily at nothing in particular. Beside Mike, Will shuffles uncomfortably, playing with a loose thread on his jumper.
“I know you’re scared…” Will’s voice seems stuffy, as if he’s got a blocked nose. “But this is more than just about Steve, you know? If the Gate’s open, and this Beholder thing gets through… Hawkins could be in danger again. The whole world… ”
For some reason, Mike can’t help but laugh a little. A faint little breathy chuckle escapes from his throat, and he digs his hands through his mop of black hair and grins sourly.
“Jesus… saving the world. ” He lets out another snigger. “That really puts things into perspective. God, doesn’t it feel like… like if we keep going on like this, we’ll go absolutely crazy? What will it be for?”
Will pauses solemnly, his dark brown eyes shining against the light of the lamp hanging overhead, and replies: “For the greater good.”
A chill wind breezes through the Hopper household. The trees above sway and rustle the beginning fruits of their annual labor of growing leaves, and a region of dead leaves bristle in response. Far away, Chief Jim Hopper is almost finishing his work for the day in the office: his throat is hoarse from his shouting match with Flo, and the unsettled rage of his house being compromised by that bastard Dick Harrington melds with fear. Not too far away, Jonathan Byers and Nancy Wheeler are together at the former’s home, sitting in his room whilst The Smith’s ‘84 debut album plays on a quiet record player; both deep in a quiet discussion about the things they’d endured, holding hands all the way through. Joyce Byers set the dinner table for three, a lonely and lingering grief set in her heart today, and none the wiser about the hauntings occuring in their small town.
Mike’s ears pick up ragged breathing beside him, and he glances over towards Will - and his heart lurches. There’s fresh terror glazed across Will’s eyes, and his hand is pressed against the back of his neck. Goosebumps have elevated against his skin, his hair standing like raised hackles. Will's becomes deep and heavy, and he turns to Mike with unparalleled horror.
“I can feel him,” Will breathes.
Mike feels a chill go through him. “Feel… who?”
“ Him . The Mind Flayer.”
Suddenly the wood of the porch doesn’t seem like it’s enough to grip onto.
“What… What do you mean?” Mike whispers, barely able to hear himself over the thundering heartbeat in his ears.
Will shudders and gulps. His hand instinctively jerks, his knuckles brushing against Mike’s fingers. “I’ve felt this feeling before when… when he was close…”
A shadow in the drawings. Tall, skeletal, long-limbs stretching out like a spider.
Mike’s jaw wobbles, his mouth opening and closing, and he whispers: “But… the Gate is…”
Closed. The Gate is closed.
But the words link together; words that Steve shared with the group, words of the Beholder.
Close a door, open a window.
El couldn’t stop the Beholder the first time…
If this spell is used against a creature, the target can't cast spells or can't use supernatural or spell-like abilities...
She opened a window.
No… the Gate was closed. And it’s not closed anymore.
“Trap…”
“What?” Will whispers.
Mike’s head flies up and he grabs Will by the shoulders in a frenzy. “ It’s a trap!”
Without sparing a glance back to Will, Mike leaps into the threshold within and hurtles towards El. She’s cross-legged on the floor, back to the television and facing a prone, comatose Steve on the sofa, blindfold around her eyes. The others stand around in a half-hazardly made circle, watching silently with anxious expressions. Paying no heed to the squawks of protest and questions, Mike seizes her and forcefully shakes her, yelling into her ear: “ El! El, you’ve gotta get outta there! It’s dangerous, it’s–”
Breaking through the rest of his friends, Dustin’s hand seizes the back of Mike’s shirt and relentlessly tugs, screaming to drown out Mike’s yells. “What are you doing?! What’re you doing?!”
“I’m saving El!”
“If she stops, Steve will die!”
“And if I don’t then they both will, Dustin! It’s a trap, it's a goddamn trap and we walked right into it!”
“What are–”
“It’s not after Steve, it’s after El! Dustin – the anti-magic ray, it’s to stop El! It’s immune! ”
Dustin’s jaw falls open – and a split second later, Eleven starts screaming.
A wretched yell emits from Mike’s throat, and by sheer instinct he yanks the blindfold wrapped around her eyes, but they don’t open. Blood is pouring out of both nostrils, trailing down her lips and her chin – and there’s more blood coming down, streaming from both earlobes and running down her jawline, and running from her eyes and down her cheeks –
“El! EL!”
“Steve, wake up! STEVE!”
El’s screams echo and bounce around the cabin as she sits there, seizing in agony and unresponsive, whilst Steve remains completely comatose despite Dustin’s desperate yells. Will bounces on his toes, both hands clutched around the back of his neck, whilst Lucas and Max alternate between shouting for both of their unconscious friends.
The lights quake, and a high-pitched scream from Max punctuates the blaring tumult as a rising shadow forms in the corner of the room. Something’s appeared on the ceiling: a bulging, bleeding manifestation of gore and body parts, pulsating like an erratic heartbeat. One eye swivels between the screaming kids, its iris flickering a multitude of colors, before it locks onto Eleven. Some kind of appendage conjures from within the bulging mass, flexing its talons experimentally, then lunges forward towards El.
“GET DOWN!”
Lucas’s roar is almost too late, and nearly everybody dives out of the way – except Mike, who leaps on top of El without even thinking. The pair collapse into a heap, with El still shrieking incoherently underneath him, whilst the bloodied appendage rushes towards them—
WHAM! The sound of metal and wood splintering and cracking resounds around the room, just as a silhouette darts in front of Mike and Eleven. Steve is on his feet, his chest pumping up and down and sweat pouring from him like he’s walked out of a rainfall, but he stands tall and resolute with the nail-bat clutched in his hands. The Beholder pulsates menacingly as the lights of the cabin flare in and out of life.
“Come and get me!” Steve roars, raising his bat higher, putting himself in front of the kids. “Come and fucking get me!”
“Steve, no–!”
A grisly, nightmarish screech reverberates around the cabin. The lights scintillate faster than any of them can blink, and the walls of the cabin seem to quake from sheer terror. Another appendage lunges out and Steve bellows out a battle cry, swinging the bat and smashing it right into the limb. Blood and gore flies around the room, splattering the walls and the furniture. But the appendage clings onto the bat, pushing as Steve holds onto both hands, releasing a strangled and continuous yell.
Ash begins to conjure around the Beholder like snowfall. Mike Wheeler, Lucas Sinclair and Dustin Henderson have seen it before – and they know what’s about to happen.
Dustin’s the only one who doesn’t stay frozen. Falling over himself, he wrenches himself past Mike and Eleven, a hand outstretched–
“DON'T!!”
The ash bursts outward and their vision is obscured – the lights flash and burst from darkness to life –
Then darkness. Total darkness, and total silence, except from choked and ragged breathing. A moment later, a light bursts forth as Lucas turns on his flashlight. Immediately, the gleaming blaze of white turns onto the spot where the monster is…
Standing where Steve Harrington and the Beholder was is nothing. Nothing but the remains of blackened ash, and the tear-streaked and sobbing form of Dustin Henderson.
Notes:
Author's Research No.5: Dungeons & Dragons and the Beholder
A prominent feature of the show, Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated to D&D) is a tabletop RPG first published in 1974, with it's updated Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) released in '79. Interestingly enough, it's difficult to piece together which edition is being played by the kids between Season 1 and 3. Although Will places down a book in Season 3 that is very clearly the Basic Rules set, the kids use the monster manual from AD&D. Additionally, they play classes that are only available in Advanced D&D.
(Another fun fact: in Season 4, Erica claims to play a Level 14 rogue. The rogue class did not exist until AD&D 2nd edition in 1987.)
The Beholder is a pretty famous monster within the D&D world, even appearing on the front of the 5e's Monster Manual. However, I wanted to make sure I referenced this properly and I'm using stats from AD&D's very first monster manual. This is the same one they found the Mind Flayer with in Season 2! Depicted as a floating orb of flesh with only one eye and several eyestalks, the Beholder is notorious for being a powerful spellcaster with magical attacks and defences. The Beholder is hateful, aggressive and avarcious; it will attack enemies instantly, but will negotiate when confronted with a powerful party. According to the manual, it has a lawful evil alignment, 4-6 feet in diameter, and has exceptional intelligence.
Chapter 6: The Vanishing of Steve Harrington
Summary:
He’s gonna die here. He’s really going to die here. Maybe it’s just karma – he’d been at fault for Barbara’s vicious and miserable death, and he’d been a bystander and instigator for all those cruel things he, Tommy and Carol had said about Will Byers and his family. So if he got ripped apart by monsters from the Upside Down, wasn’t that just… fitting? What goes around comes around and all that shit? He’d lived for eighteen years, how many of them had he even spent being a good person? Has he even changed at all since then? So what… he shared a smoke with Joyce and Jonathan Byer’s, he picked up some stray kids, he cut himself off from his two shitty friends - does he think he’s a good guy or something?
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self-place; for where we are is hell, And where hell is, there must we ever be.
- Christopher Marlowe / Doctor Faustus
Hawkins, Indiana / January 1985 / 2 Months After Saving the World
It was unusually warm for late-January weather. Okay, it was still exceedingly cold, with puffs of wispy smoke exhaling between lips and curling in the frozen air, and touches of dew and frost clinging onto the dead tree branches. But it wasn’t frozen enough to retreat into the bowels of Hawkin’s residents homes just for a reasonable amount of warmth. For those who dare risk it, it might just be safe enough to actually step outside and enjoy a smoke or something without catching frostbite.
The can of Diet Cola that Jonathan Byer’s had clutched in hands numbed his fingertips, leaving them raw and pulsing from the cold. Stuck between his teeth was a rolled up joint, its smoke merrily intertwining with the occasional breath of cold air he released. Jonathan didn’t smoke pot often - in truth, he’d gone off it after last year because it just wasn’t doing much for his paranoia. But he’d got this off a classmate, who knew a guy, who knew another guy, and that guy apparently had the ‘real shit’ up up from Oregon, not that ‘locally-grown shit’.
… Well, it hit no harder than Indiana pot did, but it tasted like shit.
Jonathan was sitting on the hood of his car outside of Fair Mart, legs dangling off the edge whilst he alternated between drinking and smoking. Above him, a blanket of stars swept across the dark indigo sky; tiny dots of light winking from within the darkness, congregated around a crescent-shaped moon. The night sky in winter was always just… ethereal, in a sense.
Jonathan suddenly sat up slightly as he heard the dull thumping of footsteps gradually growing louder from around the corner of the parking lot. He wasn’t curious; he reacted more like a cat, listening warily and preparing to dive out of sight if need be. It wasn’t the police he was concerned about – if it was Chief Hopper, he’d just tell Jonathan to clear off and go home for the night – but rather he was concerned about it being anybody that he didn’t like. Or if it was someone that didn’t like Jonathan, which probably consisted of half of Hawkins.
Instead, it’s a gray area: appearing from around the corner came Steve Harrington. Hair askew, gray and tired, looking like he ought to be wearing a jacket instead of just a sweater in this freezing cold. His sneakers skidded against the concrete ground as he spotted Jonathan looking right back at him, who was staring like a deer caught in headlights. The joint continued to smolder between two fingers.
There was an awkward silence. Hardly a stand-off, but rather two people who couldn’t seem to decide where exactly they stand right now. Jonathan hadn’t really spoken to Steve much since last fall – I mean, what exactly do they have to say to each other? Sure, there was that ‘real shit, shared trauma’ thing that Murray Bauman seemed to hold above all as the interpersonal connection of all interpersonal connections… but what is there beyond a ‘thanks for getting your face rearranged by a psychopath whilst my and my family exorcized a demon from my little brother’?
Steve swallowed and spoke first – because of course he did, since Jonathan sure as hell isn’t going to start. “Uh - hey, man.”
“Hey yourself,” Jonathan replied quietly.
Another gap of silence. Steve’s eyes draw away from Jonathan’s face and towards the joint. “Is that… is that pot you’re smoking?”
“Yeah.” Jonathan hesitated, then shuffled on the car hood to make room. “You want some?”
Steve blinked, apparently surprised but far from offended at the offer, and stepped forward. “Yeah. Sure.”
Jonathan’s gaze remained staring forward out into the quiet and deserted suburbs stretching ahead and around him, and the car sank down a little closer to the earth as Steve sat down beside him. There was a respectable gap between them, a space not quite large enough to fit another person but enough to make them look as though they weren’t quite together. As much as the two young men were in each other’s company, they seemed to be alone; their eyes never met. Jonathan merely passed over the joint without looking over to Steve, who took it with an imperceptible yet nervous glance and began to take a slow, meaningful inhale. There was a complex isolation between the pair.
“Never took you for a smoker, Byers. Let alone marijuana.” Steve twisted the joint between his fingers experimentally, raising an eyebrow. “Where did you even get it?”
“From a guy.” Jonathan paused, realizing he was probably being very skeptically vague by accident, and quickly continued. “Er - guy in school knows a guy who gets exports from Oregon… or something.”
“Cool.” Steve took another pull on the joint and glanced over to Jonathan - who was watching, shit, their eyes met and Steve just barely managed to save the awkwardness by pulling a grin and stating: “Hey, if you don’t tell my Dad, I won’t tell your Mom.”
Jonathan couldn’t help but smile, just a little. “Yeah. Yeah, you got a deal.”
Steve leant over and passed the joint back to Jonathan. “Seriously though, Indiana should just legalize the damn thing already.”
“Mississippi decriminalized in ‘78, you know?”
“So it’s still illegal?”
“ No , you just don’t get put away for it.” Jonathan expected that Steve would appear at some point - the Steve Harrington that’s not book smart, that let the simplest things go over his head. Or, as Nancy puts it, ‘he’s doing his best’. “Some other states might follow suit, hopefully.”
“Utah would never .”
“Utah?” Jonathan questioned, passing the joint back to Steve.
“Yeah.” Steve puffed on the joint, wrinkled his nose up and started to rummage in his jean pockets for a lighter. “Mormons. ‘Nuff said.”
Jonathan was quicker, and pulled out his lighter with the flame sparked before Steve could even withdraw his hand. The butt of the joint flared up orange as the fire met the end, and a shadow of anxiety seemed to flicker in Steve’s gaze – Jonathan barely caught it, and maybe it was a trick of the light, because it was gone by the time Jonathan withdrew.
“I’m… kinda glad I bumped into you, actually,” Steve murmured, and Jonathan found himself overwhelmed with the desire for Steve to shut up for once. The silence doesn’t have to be awkward, and yet Steve needs to fill it. “I wanted to apologize–”
“You don’t need to,” Jonathan said quickly; he had no interest in taking any apologies from people today.
“Yeah I do, are you kidding me? I was a huge douche to you.”
“So was I.” Jonathan’s brow knitted together in frustration. “I shouldn’t have taken that photo of Nance at your party all that time ago. It was… I just did it on a whim, and I didn’t think anybody would find out. You were just… protecting her from creepy Byers.”
But Steve was firmly shaking his head. “Screw that. I went way out of line. Said all that stuff about you, and your family. Broke your camera–”
“-- you bought me a new one.”
“That’s not the point.”
Jonathan didn’t want this. He didn’t want to sit on top of his car on a freezing-ass winter’s night getting high and going in circles with Steve Harrington about who’s more in the wrong.
“It’s okay if you hate me, Jonathan,” Steve murmured quietly, holding out the joint back to Jonathan.
“I don’t hate you.”
“It’s okay if–.”
“I don’t.” Jonathan took the joint off Steve and stuck it between his teeth, puffing away on it. “I don’t hate a lot of people, hate’s just - just, like, reserved for only a couple of people.”
His Dad. That’s who it’s reserved for. Lonnie fucking Byers. Why didn’t his Mom just drop the last name already? Why couldn’t they just be the Horowitz family, rather than dragging this dirty last name of an asshole around like a ball on a chain?
“I don’t even dislike you,” Jonathan quietly added - and he was surprised that he was telling the absolute truth, even if the look on Steve’s face is dubious. Jonathan disliked most people, but for some reason he can no longer bring himself to dislike Steve Harrington - even if, by all accounts, he had every reason to.
“So - So where do we stand then?” Steve nervously asked.
Jonathan remained silent for a moment more, rolling the joint between his fingers. The smoke curled and twisted into the air, almost like a dance routine. Silence hung like a weight.
“Do you remember when we went on that field trip to Ohio in the sixth grade?” Jonathan said. His voice had grown lighter somehow, as if the pleasant memory was giving him a tinge of that rare Jonathan happiness. “On that camping trip, and we got put into partners for the whole three days we were there?”
Steve nodded. “Yeah. Holy shit, I haven’t thought about that in years. They took us to that river where the rocks were orange. I can’t remember why…”
“Iron. Iron turns the rocks orange. And it was weird, ‘cause all the other rocks were normal, and these rocks were different.”
“You pushed me in the river.” Steve looked up at him, their eyes meeting each other for what seemed like the first time. “And I wasn’t even mad, I thought it was the funniest thing ever. And then you jumped in, and we splashed about for half hour–”
“-- and then Mr. Havens shouted at us, and we splashed him back, and he made us set up most of the tents for the night as punishment.” Jonathan grinned weakly. “Do you think, like, we could have been friends? ‘Cause it felt to me, like, in that moment, we were friends. And we were for that whole camping trip, until we got back to school and suddenly it was just - King Steve and Creepy Byers all over again. Like it never happened.”
Steve’s jaw shook, eyes wide as their shared connection of this distant memory extended like a thin thread, binding them for only a moment – then he sighed. “I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I just – I’m sorry. Like, I’m really–”
“Steve. Just don’t.” Jonathan didn’t need Steve’s apology. He didn’t need to hear it, because he might’ve unconsciously forgiven Steve when the other teenager leapt into their house with a nail-studded baseball bat and swung at a Demogorgon.
Jonathan kept his eyes trained on Steve as he looked away, drawing his legs up to his chest and letting out a long, despondent sigh. He looked like a different man to the one he got into a fight with all that time ago. He looked as though there’s a world of weight on his shoulders. And Jonathan knew that when Steve would apologize for everything he’s ever done – because he will apologize – then Jonathan would not say a word about the look of guilt that overshadows the remnants of light left in his eyes. It’s something that’s been there for a long time. Lingering, festering, plaguing him.
Jonathan understands it all too well.
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / 30 Seconds Before Steve Harrington Vanished
Do not interfere with an army returning home, Steven.
Steve could hear the Beholder. Finally, he could hear it – and he knows their plan is fucking shot. They walked into a trap that should have been obvious. He could hear Mike’s screaming from the bowels of the Inbetween, all whilst Barbara Holland’s corpse stares vacantly at him and the Beholder screeches a blaring, raucous battle-cry.
Goddamn trap – after El – anti-magic ray – immune –
You knew. You knew, Steven. You knew.
Shit. Hopper’s going to be really, really mad.
He had seen the Beholder appear in the darkness, an omen of death that manifests from the void of nothing. And he had seen Eleven conjure from the shadows moments later, exactly as it was last time – hand up, face contorted with a focused rage. The Beholder had looked at him and grinned.
Welcome us home.
Then El started to scream. Blood drenching her quickly paling face as she vanished into the darkness, leaving Steve alone with his foe. The Beholder corners him, pulsing in the dark and baring ripping, gleaming fangs, and Steve knew he was going to die. He knew he was looking into an oblivion where the soft parts of him were going to be gored–
I DON’T EVEN NEED YOU ANYMORE.
Then he hears the kids screaming, all the way in another universe, and that courage that he never knew he had until he charged head-first into the Byer’s home and picked up his baseball part wakes up. All he knew is that he needs to wake up, wake up right fucking now–
DON’T–
And he does. Steve wakes up and launches himself upright, bat already mid-swing, protecting these kids that he’d swore his fealty to. He’s screaming, a twisted and intangible roar of heroic anger and terror, whilst everyone else screams and yells behind him. He hears Dustin’s cries, and then some kind of ash began to spread across his vision –
The lights go out. All the lights.
And air pulses back into his lungs like fire. Steve’s head wrenches upward from the floor as he gasps for breath. The adrenaline still thumping in his heart and blood makes him skid back from where the Beholder had been, his shaking hands gripped tightly on the bat.
But the Beholder wasn’t here, and the kids weren’t either. He’s still in Hopper’s cabin, but the environment has taken a drastic change in decor. A cold blueish darkness irradiates all around him, and the whole place looks as though it had decayed a hundred years. The wood is rotting, the sofas are frayed with springs rupturing upward, the television is pitch-black with silvery cracks spread like fractured ice. Worst of all were the vines, blackish and oozing, crawling up every crevice and encasing every bit of decrepit furniture left standing. Spores float in the air around him, ignoring all laws of gravity as they drift gently…
The tunnels. The fucking tunnels. This was exactly what it was like, but this – oh God, this is so much fucking worse –
This is the Upside-Down. Just as the demogorgon had taken Will Byers in November 1983, the Beholder has taken Steve Harrington in March 1985.
Instantly, Steve rolls onto his stomach and vomits. The remnants of his stomach acid spew onto the floor, creeping in between the gaps where the vines were. He stays on his knees until he releases nothing but bile and spit onto the floor, severely regretting his decision to not raid Hopper’s fridge this morning for breakfast, or ask his mother to bring up lunch this afternoon. Once it’s all out, he sits up properly and leans his back against the edge of the sofa, being extremely cautious not to touch any of the vines out of sheer paranoia, and dug his hands into his hair.
Well. He’s fucked now. Completely, utterly fucked. He’s stuck in another dimension with no way out. And as far as he’s aware, the Gate’s closed…
Or maybe it’s open. Because the Beholder got in. It got in from the Upside Down and into the Inbetween, and from there into their world – and Steve had done so too, vice versa. That meant, surely, a Gate was open. Maybe.
… But from where? It might not be Hawkin’s Lab, the compass didn’t freak out when they got near. It could be anywhere in Hawkins. There’s no feasible way a rescue party could get to him… cause Steve’s not going to pretend to be humble, there’s going to be a rescue party. He knows at the very least that if anyone is going to storm the Upside Down on a desperate hunt for his friend, it’ll be Dustin Henderson. And no force on earth was going to stop him, not even the likes of Jim Hopper, or the terrifying storm that was the faceless conglomerate of the governmental ‘bad men’.
But there’s no Gate, and if there is then who knows where it is, so therefore - there’s no way out of this.
And what are Steve’s odds of survival right now? He can calculate the plus side first, just because he’s an optimistic guy. For starters, he’s still got his bat: it might not be enough to kill any monsters, but it's good for defense so he’s not torn apart into chunks straight away. He’s also young, fit, and in his prime, so he could outrun a few monsters. If he’s lucky.
And the negatives? Well, he’s not eaten anything since a TV dinner the night previously at the Hopper household, so that therefore cuts down the ‘three weeks without eating’ to 20 days. But he’s also got no water, so unless he relents and tries to drink the sludge that’s Upside Down water, then that cuts his survival down to 3 days. And this is all assuming he doesn’t go insane from the Beholder’s mind torture or get eaten by Demodogs before his time is up.
So what’s his odds? If Steve currently wasn’t trying to prevent a complete and utter mental breakdown, he’d probably play with the math. Except he’s not very good with ratios. Nor much else that’s meant to be confined to a classroom, really.
No, wait. Will Byers made it an entire week in the Upside Down. How did he do it? How did he even avoid the monsters for so long? Wasn’t it because he was hiding, and the demogorgon didn’t know where he was?
… Oh. Oh shit. The Beholder fucking knows where Steve is.
Steve’s up on his feet in an instant, jumping over the vines and the furniture and booking it out of the door. Staggering outside, he twists and turns as he takes in the environment around him that is the Upside-Down. The forest that was previously basked in an early spring golden hour is now smothered with darkness, only illuminated by a dull azure that seems to spread everywhere. A thick fog spreads in the distance, hazing the background of shadowy trees that rise into the stormy sky like mountains. The dead leaves that were spread across the forest floor are now completely swallowed up by an outspread abundance of thick vines, none too similar to the ones that had been stretched around Barbara…
A crack of thunder booms above him, illuminating the dusky forest around him a bright scarlet for a second. The image of Barb’s sunken and dead eyes makes Steve’s stomach curl in on itself, so he turns and runs.
He keeps going. Sprinting around the trees and leaping over the vines, running a track record that would make his coach proud. Some tiny voice in his head tells him not to touch them, don’t fucking touch them (because maybe Dustin told him not to one time, he doesn’t know). He keeps going, putting distance between himself and the cabin – if the Beholder knows he’s there, it’ll come looking for him there…
Thunder and lightning booms above him, illuminating the forest red, and he finally stumbles to a halt as exhaustion overwhelms him. He bends over, hands on his knees to catch his breath, then hits his back against a tree and slides down. His hand pulls through his hair, matted with sweat and Upside-Down grime… man, he’s gonna stink.
He’s gonna die here. He’s really going to die here. Maybe it’s just karma – he’d been at fault for Barbara’s vicious and miserable death, and he’d been a bystander and instigator for all those cruel things he, Tommy and Carol had said about Will Byers and his family. So if he got ripped apart by monsters from the Upside Down, wasn’t that just… fitting? What goes around comes around and all that shit? He’d lived for eighteen years, how many of them had he even spent being a good person? Has he even changed at all since then? So what… he shared a smoke with Joyce and Jonathan Byer’s, he picked up some stray kids, he cut himself off from his two shitty friends - does he think he’s a good guy or something?
Yeah. He was a huge jerk. But he was trying, wasn’t he? Trying to be a better person?
For some reason, memories flash in his mind’s eye. He thinks of the kids all sitting in a booth at Robert’s pizzeria, cheese and tomato sauce sticking around their mouths, grinning and agreeing that this was the best pizza joint in Hawkins. He thinks of Jim Hopper catching him after the winter basketball tournament, clapping him on the shoulder and congratulating him on the awesome shot. He thinks about Joyce Byers inviting him around for some tea and sympathy after Will tells her that Steve’s ‘down in the dumps, more than usual at least’. He thinks about Jonathan Byers giving him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a way of thanks for telling Tommy H to fuck off and stop making jokes about ‘Zombie Boy’. He thinks about Nancy Wheeler, and her soft smile and even softer eyes…
The fuck is he doing, sitting here and pitying himself? To hell with this. He’s got to get out of here. He can basically hear Dustin’s voice right now, kicking his ass into gear and raving about some science-y shit like electromagnetic fields and… and…
The compass. Oh my God, Dustin’s fucking compass, and Steve’s breath quickens as he rummages in the pockets of his jacket – he has Dustin’s fucking compass! He took it from Dustin when they argued about how a compass works, and he didn’t give it back!
His hands almost slip on the damn thing as he turns it between his fingers, watching the needle twist on its point – and keep fucking twisting. The whole damn thing is freaking out, even though Steve’s got it perfectly balanced. It twitches and quivers in place, remaining faithfully in a general direction but shaking as if it’s having a fit.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. That’s all that spews out of Steve’s mouth as he rocks to his feet, slipping against the soaked leaves and slime underneath his shoes. Quivering needle, holy shit, there’s a Gate! There’s a goddamn Gate, and he has a chance of getting out of here after all—!
His shoes slide and stumble against the tree roots and the leaves as he breaks off into a sprint, his bat firmly grasped in one hand and the compass slipping in his sweat-soaked fingers in the other. Steve half-stumbles and half-runs through the corroded forests, his heart thumping against his chest as a way of thanks for it’s second chance of life. He could live - he could survive after all, he could go home…
Steve trips. Stumbles over his foot. His shoe presses down on a thick vine laid out innocently against the damp ground, and something in the distance shrieks – a terrifying, beastial howl like a wolf summoning its pack to stalk its prey. Steve freezes in place for a moment, his weapon and his guide still gripped in his hand, and stares out into the distance… and bolts, sprinting like wildfire with the compass held out in front of him. His breath comes out in intense gasps for air, his lungs burning and the sodden ground beating out a war drum with each pace he takes. But he keeps fucking running, praying that whatever’s out there doesn’t find him first.
A heavy weight barrels into him, and Steve finds himself hurled across the forest and skidding in the mud-soaked ground. Something dark and shadowy claws on top of him, and he feels the smooth yet slimy skin of a creature raking its claws into his clothes, its four flaps opening wide to show a circling plethora of teeth –
Demodog, demodog, demodog – kill it, fucking kill it, Steve!
The demodog’s jaws snap open and dig into his arm that’s instinctively thrown out to protect himself. Talons rake against his chest and fangs bury into his forearm, and Steve fucking howls from the pain. Blood pours from the torn sleeve, staining his clothes and trailing down his arm. Steve’s hand fumbles desperately, clawing at the vines and leaves underneath his fingers, until he finally brushes against the familiar wood of his faithful, constant weapon. With only one hand, the bat swings and strikes the demodog straight into its torso. The creature shrieks and its weapons pull out from Steve’s flesh, stumbling over the leaves as it attempts to regain balance. In a flash, Steve staggers up to his feet and primes himself – legs apart, back hunched, bat poised in front of him with the iron nails glinting against the occasional crackle of red thunder.
“Yeah, that’s it!” Steve snarls, circling the creature that shakes itself off from Steve’s attack. “You guys remember me and my little friend?!” He raises the bat, and a streak of scarlet lighting illuminates his prized weapon.
A snarl rips out from the demodog, it’s mouth opening up as the shrill noise reverberates, and it charges. The bat swings, a perfect strike across its face, and it’s flung backward a couple feet. The creature’s claws skitter against the ground and leaps in for a second attack, but Steve strikes again. Blood gushes out from where the nails have lacerated against its fleshy skin, pouring down its sides and drenching the leaves scarlet. Yet it leaps in again for another, and Steve raises the bat to meet it —
Misses by an inch. The nails scrape against its side as it latches onto his leg, teeth sinking into his limb. Steve lets out a wretched yell in pain, hopping backward as his mind is rendered blank from the agony as the demodog tries to completely tear his limb off. His instincts flare to life and he flings his bat down, smashing the wood and the nails right into the head of the demodog. It’s jaws release as it howls in agony, and Steve wrenches on the bat to rip it away from his now bloodied ankle. With a pained yell, Steve flings the creature away; it skids against the forest floor and comes to a stop, prone and bleeding.
Steve is caught up in his rage and agony. He bolts forward, ignoring the burning agony spreading up his left leg and his right arm, and absolutely wails on the fucking demodog. His bat lurches forward and smashes into the half-dead monster, tearing it apart over and over and over. Dark blood gushes and splatters all over his knees, chunks of the creature flying in the air and spreading across the ground. He’s not taking any chances. These fucking things were supposed to be dead. He’d be damned if he wasn’t going to make sure the job was done.
He only stops when he finally exhausts himself. Steve struggles for a moment to wrench the bat out from what’s left of the demodog — now only reduced to spilled guts and chunks of meat, no messier than roadkill on the highway. Steve’s breaths come out in intense and panicked gasps for air. He staggers, throwing his hand out to lean against a tree, and takes a moment before carefully examining his wounds.
Okay. Not looking good. He’s not exactly a medical expert, but he knew from his basic medic training during his stint as a lifeguard that this could be a lot worse. The demodogs worked in packs for a reason: it can’t get deep bites in the way a demogorgon probably could. It works better as a team to take out multiple chunks, rather than working solo for any fatal ones. Blood is leaking from his forearm and ankle, pooling into the soles of his shoe and staining his clothes. His chest is okay, for the most part. It couldn’t quite penetrate his jacket, besides a few stinging but unconcerning scrapes to abdomen. But in a rancid environment like this, infection was more than likely.
… oh. Oh, fucking shit. He’s bleeding. He’s bleeding a goddamn river here, and the demo-monsters are attracted to fresh blood. It might even apply to the Beholder. This demodog had just painted a target on him.
His swearing increases in gruffness from a mixture of pain, frustration and fear, and he uneasily begins to limp ahead. The compass in front of him is still quivering, flickering left and right, and all Steve can do is stumble forward through these woods and hope that he might be able to find the Gate… surely, if it wasn’t as powerful as the one in Hawkins Lab, it couldn’t be too far–
“ Steve!”
Steve stumbles to a halt, his heart lurching against his ribcage. His chest pumps up and down, and every single one of his senses is ramped up to high alert. Was it the blood loss causing it, or did he really just hear…?
“Steve, we’re right here! We’re right here!”
“N-Nancy?” His words break out into a shocked murmur, then he summons his courage and spins on the spot, bellowing: “NANCY! Nancy, is - is that you?!”
“Steve!”
Holy shit, that’s Jonathan’s voice. Jonathan and Nancy. Their voices are like ghosts on the wind, almost ethereal, and by all accounts Steve shouldn’t trust them - could it be a trick of the Beholder? But he’s got no choice.
“C-Can you guys hear me?!” He twists and turns on the spot, wincing as a stab of pain bursts up his leg. “I need help! I’m stuck in—“
“We can hear you!” Jonathan’s voice rings out around the trees, bouncing and lifting in the air.
“You need to follow our voice!” Nancy calls out. “There’s a Gate out of here!”
There’s a way out — holy shit, there’s a way out! His heart pounds against his chest as he stumbles forward, one arm held aloft with the compass in hand whilst he presses his blood-soaked elbow against his side. The bat hangs limply in his injured arm, dripping flecks of fresh blood onto the leaves.
“Keep saying stuff!” Steve calls out desperately.
“We’re here!” God… for the first time in a long time, Nancy’s voice sounds like an angel. “We’re here, Steve — just follow the sound of my voice!”
“We’re right here!” Jonathan shouts out. Even goddamn Byers is a welcome blessing.
Steve stumbles forward, tripping over his feet and stepping over the stretching vines. His vision’s starting to blur and blacken around the edges, and it’s getting harder to concentrate. It kind of feels like when he’s pitch-black drunk, except not incoherent with intoxication but rather terror and blood loss. He marches onward anyway, watching the compass needle jitter in place—
He finds it. It catches his eye almost instantly, the only shed of warm color in a monotone world. A slice of orange bursts out from within the trunk of a thick, decayed tree, as if a huge blade might have cut through the wood. Strange slithering noises snarl from within its depths, like squelching guts. It’s encased with slimy webbing all over and within, but it looks as though there’s a tight opening within the tree…
“Guys?!”
“You need to crawl through!” Jonathan yells through the gap. “We got you, don’t worry, we’ll pull you through!”
His vision blurs and dulls for a moment, and Steve’s head spins. His knees meet the ground, and it takes almost everything he has not to keel over and probably die right now. He’s almost home free, he’s incredibly fucking lucky… he can do this. The gap is tight and thick with ooze and webbing, but he’s got no time to sit and wonder if he’ll make it in.
Stowing the compass in his pocket and sitting the bat at an angle, he crawls on his knees towards the slice of orange slashed through the tree. Jonathan and Nancy holler encouragement through the tree as he squeezes one shoulder in, shuffling on his knees through the intensely narrow gap. Sludge and webbing catches across his face and hair, and he grits his teeth and he pushes himself forward. He flings out an arm through the gap, clawing the air from the other side —
Two hands grab his loose arm, and the force of two other teenagers wrench him out from the tiny gate and out the other side. The trio collapse onto the forest floor on top of each other, heaving and gasping. Steve chokes back on a cough and rolls over onto his back, gazing up at the sky above him. It’s normal… oh man, he’s never been so glad to see a normal sky in his life. Dusk has set in Hawkins, and the forest is illuminated by the barest sliver of light blue from the remains of daylight.
“Oh my God, Steve, you’re bleeding.”
Ever the worrier, Nancy Wheeler appears from the corner of his vision and instantly begins to press her soft, delicate hands on top and around the worst wounds on his body. He sees her, and his heart seems to painfully clench in a way he doesn’t understand. Her hair is shorter, a little curlier maybe. There’s an intense look in her gaze, so much more different than the one he remembers her with. It’s the same one she had when she declared to Jim Hopper that yes, she can use a gun (and she loaded the bullet and cocked it and everything, since when did Nancy know how to use a fucking rifle?). It’s hardened, fiery, intense with focus and determination.
“Oh hey, Nance,” Steve says with a weak grin. “I-I’m actually really glad to see you. Listen, I… I need your help, I got this chem test on Monday–”
“Shut up, Steve. God, I’m so glad you’re alive…”
Steve tenses and hisses as her hands peel back his torn clothing to examine his wounds, eyes scrunching up for a moment. When he opens them again, he can see someone else peeking in whilst Nancy dresses his wounds with her own torn clothing.
“Byers.”
“Hey, Steve.”
Jonathan hasn't changed much. He used to have a kind of cool side parting going on, but it's been given up for a much shorter haircut - in fact, Steve’s convinced it's the disastrous results of Joyce’s own home hairdressing skills. At the very least, it looks like he might’ve picked up some of Nancy’s own flare: he looks a little bit more sure of himself, for once.
(Good for him. Really, good for him.)
Nancy’s got her hand on his back, and he finds himself gently steered to sit up. Rolling his tongue in his dry mouth, a million and one questions burn against his mind and fight to be asked first.
He starts with the present. “How… How the hell did you find me?”
Jonathan lifts up a compass, almost identical to the one Steve has stowed away. “This is… this one of Will’s. He told us on the radio that it's pulled towards electromagnetic fields. To gates and portals… and stuff.”
“You’re - You're with the others? You know ?”
“We know, Will told us everything. My Mom knows, Hopper knows. He sounded pretty angry, actually.”
“I figured.” Steve glances towards the compass still pressed in Jonathan’s palm. “So that compass - it led you to this gate? To me?”
“Kind of.” Nancy glances at Jonathan nervously, then looks back. “Steve… I don't know what you did with that - that Beholder thing, but… but I think Eleven making contact with it caused a repeat of ‘83. The Gate in the lab… it’s open again.”
Bile and terror rises to the back of Steve’s throat. There's an intense weight of guilt pressing down on his back all of a sudden. This is his fault.
Nancy carefully continues; there’s a look in her eye that indicates her mental noting of Steve’s dreaded reaction. “The compasses were pointing towards the Lab, but we knew you wouldn't show up there. We had a hunch you'd appear here instead. This is…” She swallows, and that fire in her eyes gets eaten up by a glimpse of apprehension. “This is where I got stuck in the Upside Down, almost a year and a half ago now.”
“What?” Steve gawks at her, mouth half-open. He knew that Jonathan and Nancy had endured some extremely close calls with the demogorgon, but he never knew Nancy had a first-hand encounter in that place too…
“I don’t know, it was a real shot in the dark, but we were right. You were here, thank God.” Nancy speaks quickly, as if it’s to overshadow the dreadful truth dawning on Steve. Close enough to a year they’d dated after everything happened, and she’d never even told Steve that she had been in the Upside Down. Never told him that she had endured exactly what he had just now.
God. He really had been a shitty boyfriend, hadn’t he?
“Can you stand?” Jonathan’s voice comes out, cautious and almost as timid as Will Byers. Steve nods trepidatiously and reaches out an arm, slinging one around Jonathan’s neck whilst Nancy tucks one underneath his other armpit. The trio lift him up with a heave, and Steve almost snarls from the intense bolt of pain that floods his system – but once he’s up, he can plant his feet well enough.
“Is everyone at the cabin okay?” Steve asks through bated breaths.
Nancy and Jonathan catch each other’s eyes and grimace uneasily. “We don’t know. All alive, but kind of… shaken up. Apparently Eleven is… she’s out cold.”
“We’re kind of screwed without her, honestly,” Jonathan mutters.
“So - So how did everyone find out?” Steve asks quietly.
Jonathan and Nancy share another uneasy look, but this one is worse. Way worse. Bad enough to make Steve’s heart drop like he’s fallen from the peak of a rollercoaster.
“Once you vanished, the others sent out an emergency call to us on the radio” Jonathan explains quietly. “To us, to Mom, and Hopper was already there. They explained what they could on the radio, about you disappearing and everything with the Beholder. Except… well, we… we kind of…”
“We already knew about the Beholder.” Nancy’s firm focus is back, and she doesn’t even show a sliver of aversion to making eye-contact with a discomposed Steve. “Steve, you’re not alone. We’ve been hearing it too.”
A cold spreads across him, a dark and hollow feeling in his stomach. The wind creates goosebumps on his skin. He’s not alone. Maybe it’s meant to be a consolation, but it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it. Steve’s not just a prime target; it’s been preying on others this whole damn time.
“How long?” Steve croaks.
“Not as long as you, apparently,” Jonathan murmurs. “Nancy since this morning. Me - since, like, this afternoon.”
“I had a vision about Barbara,” Nancy whispers. A haunted look glimmers in her gaze, and she breaks away her look from either of the boys. “I saw her in the pool…”
A shiver runs up Steve’s spine, and the image of Barra’s pale, corroded expression flashes in his eyes. He can’t fucking shake it.
“And the monster kept trying to tell me it was my fault about - about all the stuff that’s happened to Will,” Jonathan murmurs.
“Shit.” Steve runs a hand through his hair, cringing at the sweat and blood and grot causing his usually soft locks into a dampened, grimy mess. “ Shit. Why? Why us?”
“I don’t know.” Jonathan shakes his head. “Look– we haven’t got time to sit and debate. We need to get back to the Chief’s place. I think they’re planning for El to close the Gate again–”
“We need to kill the Beholder,” Steve declares gravely. “If we don’t, it’ll keep targeting us.”
“But Will says El’s powers don’t work on it. Like it’s- it’s immune or something.”
“Then we do it the old-fashioned way.” Steve lifts up the bat, twirling it in his hand. “Let’s hustle. Nance?”
It’s only just occurred to Steve that Nancy’s been quiet for a little bit. He glances towards her uneasily, and notes her expression: wide-eyed yet thoughtful, thinking hard but steadily drawing herself to a very, very unnerving conclusion. A shiver rolls over Steve’s skin, and by instinct he finds himself reaching out and gently pressing the tips of his fingers against Nancy’s elbow.
“Nancy?” He prompts again.
Nancy breaks out of her haze, meeting her eyes with Steve. There’s a new horror reflected inside of them. “Steve… this Gate. El didn’t open this one.”
“She didn’t…?”
“No. The Gate’s in the lab. But when I got caught in the Upside Down, we found a Gate just like this one because of… of–”
“The demogorgon.” Jonathan finishes her sentence, his voice low and intense, and both of them catch onto Nancy’s fear like an infection. “Which means–”
“A demogorgon opened this one?” Steve murmurs, his mouth drying up.
Nancy nods the affirmative. “And if it’s still open… then it’s still in Hawkins.”
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / 20 Minutes After Steve Harrington Vanished
Chief Hopper approaches his house on foot, flashlight piercing through the darkness as he treads unsteadily up towards his cabin. He’s tentative – and if anyone asks, he’s not afraid. But he is, deep down; he’s actually really fucking scared. He’s also fuming. He’s furious at Flo for being so careless and bowing down to the graciousness that is Dick fucking Harrington marching into his office, demanding a case file be opened for his missing son and instead having Hopper’s very private address given up. Now El is in danger of being compromised, and Steve is in danger of his father’s rampage. If he’s here, then Hopper knows he’s got every bit of common sense to hide El before Steve faces down his father… but if Steve isn’t here, and Richard decided to do some of his own dirty reconnaissance…
But his home is lit up like a goddamn beacon. Richard Harrington’s car isn’t here, but Steve’s is – and worse yet, the front door is pulled wide open like it’s welcoming an entire goddamn party in. Flicking off his flashlight, Hopper furiously grunts and stomps into his home, ready to give a stern lecture to the occupants within – then almost stumbles to a halt.
His cabin is full. All the kids are here. Lucas is pacing up and down in front of the television set and muttering wildly whilst Max bounces up and down on her feet only a few steps away, chewing her lip like it’s a bit of gum. Will Byers is pressed up against the wall so hard that he might just sink into it. Dustin’s on the sofa, head in his hands and violently shaking. Mike and El aren’t accounted for; neither is Steve.
“The hell’s this?” Hopper asks. His voice is low, but dangerous – he wants answers first before he starts fucking shouting. Instantly, all the kids freeze up and whip around to face Hopper like deers caught in headlights – everyone except Dustin, who doesn’t move an inch other than maybe burying his hands deeper into his face.
Nobody moves or answers. Frustration mounts up in Hopper’s heart. “I said– ”
Mike Wheeler appears from the bedroom, ashen-gray and shaken. He’s the only one who faces Hopper and speaks. “I’m sorry. But we were stopping that creature bothering Steve… but it went wrong.”
Hopper blinks, and decides that for the betterment of the Hawkin’s law enforcement that he should not strangle Mike Wheeler right now. Setting aside his anger, he asks: “Okay. And where is El?”
Mike swallows, and steps aside.
She’s asleep in her bed, and Mike tells Hopper that she’s been like that for twenty minutes already. Her face is cool and damp from where Mike’s been wiping her down with a wet cloth, and it’s drained of all color – greyer than Mike’s, who already looks clammy and pale from worry. Blood stains her nostrils and earlobes and around her eyelashes. Her breathing is steady and rising, as if merely in a deep sleep, but she’s completely unresponsive to any attempts to rouse her.
They tell them everything. A combined story from all the kids except Dustin, who remains hidden in the living room and curled up on the sofa in a wreck of silent tears. They’d heard voices on a radio and Steve had collapsed; Steve and Dustin had been attacked by Billy Hargrove on an uncharacteristic level (even for Billy fucking Hargrove). They’d ignored Hopper’s insistence and tried to track down the Gate to the lab, but failed to pick up any electromagnetic disturbance. Richard Harrington had arrived at the cabin (“he didn’t see El, Steve told her to hide”), picked Steve up and taken him home - only for Steve to return hours later in the pouring rain and propose to kill the Beholder. They’d staged a plan of attack, only for it to backfire. El was ‘out of action’, and Steve had vanished before their very eyes.
“Into the Upside Down, we think,” Lucas concludes, his arms hugging his chest and glancing nervously towards the sofa where Dustin’s hands were buried in his face, shoulders clenched together. “But if there’s a Gate, then we could–”
“You’re not doing anything.” Hopper turns around from the bedroom entrance, taking a few paces to the kids who each shrink back in fear. “You’ve already made a shitshow out of this. You leave this to me. ”
“No way!” Max says loudly, stepping forward as the only brave one to attempt to defy Hopper’s orders. “No - we gotta get to the Upside Down, we gotta rescue Steve!”
“What - you gonna stick some chain cutters into the fence?” Hopper snarls mockingly, striding the length of the cabin past the kids. “Try to break into the lab, yeah? Here’s some news for you, kid - there is no Gate.”
“Yes, there is.”
Will’s shaken voice quietly chimes in through the conversation, and all faces in the room glance over towards him. He lifts his compass up into the air: the needle is violently twitching in its place, shuddering like it’s in a seizure, but pointing in a general direction towards–
“The lab,” Will declares gravely. “It’s pointing towards the lab. Electromagnetic fields disturb a compass’s trajectory, and the Gate is one of them. When we went earlier today, we didn’t get anything because it wasn’t open… until now. Because of what we did.”
“The Beholder…” Mike quietly mutters, his gaze skittering across the room and over people’s heads as he thinks. “When El opened the Gate for the first time, it’s because she made contact with the demogorgon in the Inbetween. And the same thing has happened here… just with the Beholder.”
“All the more reason why you’re all staying put and letting the adults deal with it,” Hopper states firmly. The kids' mouths open in indignant protest, and Hopper’s temper finally meets it’s breaking point; he spins around on his heel, looking each of them in the eye. “No, this is non- negotiable! You ran off and tried to deal with this problem yourself, trying to act the heroes - and you’ve hurt El, my goddamn daughter. You’ve put Steve in danger!”
“That’s your fault!”
Dustin’s voice breaks for the first time in twenty minutes. His face sears red and his eyes are bloodshot from his despair, and there’s a terrible hoarseness to his throat. But he’s broken out of his anguished condition and stands up, turning to face Hopper, face contorted with anger. “Y-You… you didn’t listen to Steve! You told him that there was no Gate, told him not to worry about it. What else could we have done?!” Dustin angrily taps the side of his temple. “Let it infect his mind?!”
“I told Steve not to do anything because I was doing something about it! ” Hopper yells, stepping forward towards Dustin. “Dr. Sam Owens is helping us! Tomorrow morning, he’s going to send soldiers and military scientists into the lab to check for a Gate. They’re going to set up outposts across Hawkins to pick up electromagnetic anomalies, and they’re going to talk to Steve to better understand the threat. We were going to fix this in a safe manner. And you all SCREWED IT ALL UP!”
Dustin’s expression screws up in a mix of loathing and anger. “ Screw the goddamn military! We can’t trust them! Not after last time! But Steve =- Steve’s saved our asses so many times, and we need to repay the favor! He already saved my ass last night, and I tried to help him but almost shot Billy and–”
He cuts himself off abruptly, eyes widening and face turning from beet red and into a waxy, pale white. Hopper feels a bead of sweat run down his forehead, and a few appalled gazes turn from Dustin to the dulcet, angry tones of Max Mayfield.
“The hell do you mean, you almost shot Billy?” Max snaps, stepping forward into Dustin’s face and roughly shoving him. “You said he cleared off when you grabbed the bat!”
“I lied, alright?!” Dustin’s face remains tense and shaky as he faces the wildfire of unpredictability that is Max, but he holds his ground. “Billy threatened Steve and almost killed him, so I… my finger slipped, okay? I was just trying to protect Steve and make sure he didn’t get killed–”
“Are you saying you almost shot my brother?!”
“Your step- brother, and – look, yeah, I didn’t mean to! He was gonna kill Steve!”
Max furiously pushes Dustin in the chest, causing him to stumble back. “You’re a goddamn idiot!”
“It was either Steve or Billy!”
“Screw you, Dustin! Who the hell do you think you are, making that kind of a choice?!”
“Shut up!” Hopper barks. The two kids jolt from shock, and look to Hopper apprehensively. “You can solve your lover’s dispute another time, but right now–” His voice twists to take an aggressive timbre to it as Max and Dustin share furious glances at both Hopper and each other, “-- right now, we’re going to get in contact with everybody, and we’re gonna get some back-up to protect this cabin until the military arrives in the morning–”
“You’re kidding–”
“Are we clear on that?” Hopper finishes, speaking over Dustin’s bitter protest. There’s a low hum of disgruntled agreement from the kids, each one of them not looking at each other. Dustin folds his arms, turns on his heel and strides outside to take his turn of despondency on the porch. Hopper’s eyes remain trained on his back for a moment, anger ebbing away into pity and sympathy. He’s furious that these kids had led their suicidal charge at attacking creatures they didn’t understand or comprehend, but he understands why they did it. Hopper was trying to look out for Steve, and so were the kids. This whole time, Steve had been their protector; in turn, they’d unconsciously taken on the role of protecting Steve as well. And that had cost them Steve Harrington himself.
Hopper screwed up, again. He should have kept Steve in the know, told him what he was planning with Owens. But he’d kept quiet in hopes that Steve wouldn’t worry himself over it, or object to Hopper’s actions because of his ingrained vigilance against anybody with ‘government’ in their job description.
Now he had a ‘November 6th,1983’ situation on his hands.
Whilst Dustin glooms in his wretched defeatism on the front porch, Will makes the radio call to the Byer’s household - the only people not present for their fight. Everyone who’s ‘in the know’ needs to be here. (Because maybe Hopper really can’t wait until morning to rescue Steve). Jonathan’s the one on the other end, apparently in possession of his own walkie-talkie for ‘emergency purposes’. Nancy’s there, and Joyce jumps on the line immediately after being flooded with worry and concern. The kids debrief them as quickly as possible, skimming over the minute details, and summon them to the house as quickly as possible.
Joyce gets off the line instantly; forever the mother of every kid in Hawkins, apparently. But Jonathan and Nancy have other plans.
“We’re gonna make a detour,” Nancy says. “We’re just… it’s a shot in the dark, but we might be able to help Steve.”
“Too dangerous,” Hopper remarks instantly, snatching the radio from Will’s hands. “You need protection.”
“I have guns, Chief. We’ll be alright, we’ll keep in contact. Please - just trust us on this one, alright?”
Joyce Byers arrives at the cabin in record time, and begins her ritual of Kid-Inspection instantly. Much to Hopper’s surprise, Dustin is the first one she goes for – although maybe it’s because he’s still wrapped up in his disconsolateness on the front porch. After much embracing and tears from Dustin, she busies himself with checking over the others. Lucas insists he’s alright; so does Max, although she sounds more irritable about it.
Mike is in the bedroom, on his knees beside El, with a tense and shaky Will sitting on a rickety chair in the corner, looking like he would like to sink into the floor. One of Mike’s hands is intertwined with the young girl’s, still wrapped up in blankets and sleeping without fear, whilst the other gently combs through her dark brown curls. Hopper pauses by the doorway as Joyce approaches the bed, kneeling down and taking over Mike’s duty of intertwining curls between fingers.
Joyce clears her throat, looking towards Mike and giving Hopper an occasional worried glance. “You - You said once, the more energy she uses, the more tired she gets. Like a… like a low battery. Right?
Mike quietly nods. “Yeah. I guess she overloaded herself against the Beholder.”
“Or it overloaded her.” Will speaks up quietly from the corner. Joyce turns instantly, extending her hand outward and flexing it as an invitation for Will to join. He nervously rises and joins the pair, his fingers sliding between his mother’s and gently squeezing it for comfort. “Do you remember that Steve said the Beholder was making him tired?”
“Sleep spell…” Mike murmurs quietly, glancing over towards El. There’s an alarming amount of concern and care irradiating just for Wheeler’s gaze alone that agitates Hopper a little. How could they be so young, and yet hold onto each other so tightly and so desperately like they’re certain of being soulmates? Mike’s gaze returns to Will’s. “Do - Do you think, maybe… maybe El’s still in the Inbetween? Maybe she’s still fighting the Beholder?”
Will’s mouth opens, and something catches in his throat. Then a flash of alarm flickers to life across his expression, and he points. “Mike, look!”
All eyes within the room turn to Eleven. Although she’s still completely unconscious, there’s a sign of life: blood. A thin trickle of it conjures from the edge of her nostril and trailing outward. Mike’s finger reaches out carefully, wiping it across the point of his finger and raising it upward so the light above causes the scarlet to glisten – then his face falls into absolute, unparalleled dread.
“The Gate,” Mike murmurs quietly; his hands start to shake, and Hopper feels his fingers instinctively trace against the metal of his holstered revolver. “The Gate is open… which means the monsters can get in.”
“Wh… What does that mean?” Joyce asks, her voice shaking.
“Blood.” Mike whispers, lifting his finger where a bead of Eleven’s scarlet blood rests on the tip of his finger – and then adds. “Fresh blood…”
Chief Hopper’s heart drops from his chest and to his feet. “The demogorgon. Shit. ”
Without even taking one last look behind his shoulder, he marches out of the bedroom and makes a beeline for the front door with one destination in mind: his shed, where his prized Remington 870 shotgun is stored for emergency defense only. The kids stand up as he enters the room, perplexed by the sudden rise in activity, and start their onslaught of questions that Hopper ignores.
From the other side of the cabin, Hopper hears Will’s terrified voice. “Mike… I can feel–”
Far off in the shadowed, moonlit distance of the woods, something bestial and primal screeches. The occupants of the cabin rocket to a halt, horror-struck, as they hear that echoed, terrifying howl that puts the fear of God into their hearts.
“Get into the bedroom, all of you!” Hopper bellows, and there’s a flurry of rushed movement as everyone scrambles from the living room space and packs into El’s small bedroom. Hopper sprints outside, leaping off the porch and tearing towards the shed. Fuck the lock on the door – he tears the double-doors open and breaks the bottom hinge, causing it to half-collapse into the ground. There’s his prize: his 12-gauge riot shotgun, always loaded because he doesn’t have the fucking time to load it. He cocks it, savoring that angry growl only a firearm can make.
Oh yeah, that’s the sweet noise of American home defense.
“Get away from the windows!” Hopper barks as he marches back in, and Max scampers away back into the bedroom. He turns angrily to reprimand the other occupant of the room, but instead is confronted by Joyce Byers. Her brow is knitted with an anger only seen in battle, unswerving and unshaken, clutching the ax that Hopper uses to cut wood outside.
“Get in the bedroom,” Hopper rebukes, but the look in her eyes tells him it’s a losing battle. Only one person can win a battle against the Chief, and it’s Joyce fucking Byers. When she’s cornered, she becomes a wild animal – relentless, indomitable, baring her teeth and refusing to go down without a fight. She doesn’t even need to say anything but give him a decided look, and Hopper turns the barrel of the gun to the door.
A silence hangs in the cabin. Heavy breaths pant from every corner, shaken and unsteady. One of the lamps squeaks out a rhythmic creak and flickers only an infinitesimal amount before turning steady again. The floorboards underneath quietly complain as Hopper’s boot presses hard, and he gently moves the barrel from the door and toward the closest window. A wind whistles through the skeleton of the small cabin; cold and dry from the late winter chill. Then it parts around the house entirely. It’s keeping its distance.
“Hop, I–”
The window to the left of Hopper shatters, spitting out shards of glass like a spray of shotgun shells, and the kids shriek from the bedroom. All the lights in the cabin flash in a panic, flashing its warning signal. The barrel of his weapon turns, and he sees the fucking monstrosity. It’s head opened up, rows of barbed teeth within its flaps, leaden and skeletal body clambering through the window.
Hopper’s mouth curls back into a snarl and a resounding crack bursts through the house, lighting up the living room a bright yellow. The demogorgon emits a high-pitched shriek as a slug punctures through its upper torso. It staggers back, and Hopper cocks the shotgun and aims for a second shot–
The monster strikes first, pitching forward and striking Hopper right across the chest. Claws rake down the front of his uniform, and it hurls him backward, right into a shelf that gives way on top of him.
“HOP!” Joyce shrieks, and she slams the blade of the ax straight into the demogorgon’s back. It instantly throws it back outward, launching its head to the ceiling and screeching in agony. A claw swipes behind it and Joyce barely ducks, feeling the talons brush against the top of her hairs. With a strangled cry, Joyce rips the ax out from its flesh and causes the demogorgon to screech again, stumbling in a circle from the pain. Blood gushes onto the floor, seeping in between the cracks of the floorboards and pooling by the monster’s feet. It’s face opens up as Joyce stumbles backward, freeing a grating roar of vengeful fury.
“Hey!”
The demogorgon’s head twists, just as a small projectile launches right across its face in the shape of a walkie-talkie. Will Byers stands in the entryway of the bedroom, chest pumping up and down and glaring at the beast with deep, chasmic hatred. “Leave my Mom alone, asshole! ”
The demogorgon opens up and shrieks, and another boom rings around the cabin. Hopper unloads on the demogorgon, firing one - two - three entire rounds into the demogorgon. The monster staggers with each shot, then plants its feet. Turns to face Hopper, a low snarl bubbling from its stomach, then screams and jolts forward towards him–
Another shot rings out. Sharp and precise, a bullet penetrates one of the open flaps and leaves a gaping hole that bursts open with blood. Within the exchanging blaze of yellow and darkness, a group of silhouettes bursts forth from the entrance of the cabin and practically streak towards the demogorgon. The monster turns to meet its new adversaries, then shrieks as one of the assailants begins an almost ceaseless bludgeoning against it. Hopper squints, his shotgun still raised up, and slow identifies who’s joined the party – because there’s no mistaking that lanky teenager, and that strong femine form, and that mess of brown locks–
The teenagers are on the scene. All three of them.
Flesh and meat sprays against the walls, and the entire house rises into an unhinged tumult of screaming, shrieking and the striking of something firm and hard pounding against the demogorgon. Steve Harrington bounces on his feet, only as expertly as a basketball player in his absolute prime could, turning the demogorgon towards the smashed window. From the rear, Jonathan Byers and Nancy Wheeler raise their guns, and the latter fires first. Precise shots straight into the demogorgon’s open face, piercing once again through the open flaps, whilst Byer’s unsteadily unloads rounds into its torso (as well as the wall behind it).
The demogorgon’s being absolutely abused. The creature’s head sweeps across the room as it releases another grotesque, ear-splitting scream of rage, then turns heel and leaps towards the window. More glass cracks as it scampers out, and its howls become more and more faint as it vanishes into the night.
The lights have stopped flickering, leaving a dull tungsten glow into the room. Hopper blinks and stares as the three teenagers turn around, breathing heavily and clutching their weapons of choice with an iron grip.
Jonathan looks shaken, pale and sweating up a rainfall. “That thing’ll be back…”
Nancy staggers back a little, catching herself before her knees can give in, and exhales. “Yeah… yeah, I think it’s just gone to lick its wounds.”
And then there’s…
“Steve…?”
Dustin’s voice, wavering and shocked, breaks through. He steps out from the bedroom, brushing past Hopper and pausing a few feet away.
Steve Harrington glances up, his chest pumping up and down. He’s filthy, matted with slime and sweat and even more blood. His face is drained of color, and there’s a terrified darkness in his gaze. Yet as soon as his gaze turns onto Dustin, he breaks into a warm, cocky grin. “Hey, Dustin. Had to return your compass, didn’t I?”
Tears are falling down the young boy’s face. Dustin Henderson chokes back a half-cry, half-sob, and barrels straight towards Steve. His arms wrap around Steve’s waist and he breaks down into full, relentless sobs. All Steve can do is smile amicably, trying to hold back the dam of his own tears. The sadness, the stress, the failures of the past and the present, the weight of being Steve Harrington – for the first time in years, Steve can’t feel it.
Notes:
Author's Research No.6: Guns of Stranger Things
Did you know that there's a whole ass wiki page for every single weapon used in Stranger Things? Gun-nuts really love their weaponary in media, I guess. Here's a quick breakdown of a few weapons that get the spotlight in his fic.
The shotgun that Hopper acquires from his shed appears in Season 3, wielded by Nancy against the meaty Mind Flayer, is a Remington 870 magnum riot shotgun. Typically used by law enforcement for riots, but also popular as home defence for American citizens.
Hopper's choice of firearm is his nickel-plated 4 inch Colt Python, a .357 Magnum, used to replace his Smith & Wesson Model 66 that was lost in the first season. This was a favoured weapon among law enforcement, with the 4-inch typically being used for plainclothes usage. Curiously enough, he returns to using the Model 66 in the third season.
The weapon Nancy uses in this chapter is Smith & Wesson Model 10, stolen from Lonnie Byers right after Will's funeral. Wildly popular, it has an extremely long history dating back to the previous century. It doesn't seem to appear past Season 1, although I can't see why Nancy would get rid of it as she states she owns guns in Season 4 so likely still has it.
(Side note: this is totally irrelevant, but halfway writing this chapter I got my first nosebleed in years. Sadly, I did not have any powers.)
Chapter 7: The Monster and the Men
Summary:
Steve almost chortles. “I’m not smart - if I was smart, then I wouldn’t have caused this mess.”
“You didn’t cause anything,” Nancy retorts.
“Yeah, I did. I tried to fight this thing, tried to take the easy route - and, y’know, everyone in this room almost died for it.”
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity.”
- Sun Tzu / The Art of War
Hawkins, Indiana / February 1985 / 3 Months After Saving the World
“The head of the dire wolf is slashed clean off, blood spraying everywhere, and your lives have been spared another day! As you look upward to your savior, you finally see the - the hero who stands before you: a man in steel-plated armor wielding a heavy mace on one hand–”
“What’s up, a-holes!”
“Steve. What have I said about being in-character?”
“What? Oh, yeah, right, um… greetings, er, fellow adventurers! I am Sir Steve–”
“Okay, first of all – you’re not a sir, because you’re not a knight. The United Kingdom of Ahlissa doesn’t just knight anybody. And second, you’re not Steve. I thought Dustin picked out your name?”
“Oh, shit, yeah, that’s right. Sorry, Wheeler. Okay, okay, do-over. I decapitate the wolf, blood everywhere, etcetera… I am the mighty warrior, er - Stefan! Is that how it’s pronounced? Yeah? Okay, er - I have heard, um… tales of your adventures, and have come to, uh - to lend my strength on your… er… mission. Quest. Thing.”
“Dude, you don’t have to talk like you’re straight out of Lord of the Rings. ”
“What? But I thought this was a fantasy game. Fantasy people speak fantasy.”
Mike rolled his eyes and dramatically sighed for what felt like the fifth time that session - and they were only fifteen minutes in. It had been Dustin’s idea to bring Steve into their D&D campaigns… in fact, anything that involved Steve with the party was almost always Dustin’s idea. Mike had been very opposed to it at first (“we don’t need another party member!”), but he was unfortunately outvoted by the rest of the party (4-1, with Eleven nervously abstaining over the radio) and found himself with his friends on a Sunday evening introducing Steve Harrington to Dungeons & Dragons.
Luckily, he wasn’t the one to roll Steve up a character. He’d considered just throwing a pre-made fighter character sheet and calling it a day, but Dustin had cheerfully taken up the duty of helping Steve make a character a few days before. Apparently, Dustin did most of the math whilst Steve threw out wild ideas that Mike venomously shut down via the radio (“No, you can’t be a bear disguised as a human, that’s ridiculous and it’s not even a real thing!”)
Steve was not the only one new to the party; Max had joined the session before, albeit very reluctantly. Maybe she just got tired of sitting around on the sofa and watching, but she had joined the party ‘for a little while’ (her own words) as ‘Jayce the Zoomer’, a thief dedicated to running around the battlefield and stabbing people’s backs. She was good at the math with dice-rolling and a tactical smartass on the battlefield, but not so great with the whole ‘cooperation’ thing.
As the session progressed, Steve slowly began to assimilate with everything Dungeons & Dragons. He still relied on Dustin to count up most of his dice rolls, and didn’t seem to understand the concept of checks (“why do I have to check when I could just, you know, do it?”), but he actually seemed to be enjoying himself.
Of course, this was not something Mike was going to stand for.
“As you all enter the cavern, a tense and cold silence hangs all over you. You hear nothing but the gentle dripping of water from the cave ceiling above, and an endless darkness continues for what seems like forever in front of you. Anyone have infravision active?” A silence followed his question; with a shrug, Mike said: “Okay. Everyone roll for Wisdom.”
“Roll for what?” Steve asked, looking confusedly around as everyone grabbed their D20’s..
Dustin quickly shot a hand out, grabbing Steve’s own dice and rolling on his behalf. Much to his and Steve’s surprise and elation, the dice settled with a big ‘18’ on top.
“Anyone score higher than fifteen?” Mike asked, and Steve was the only one to raise a hand. A small smirk pulled across Mike’s expression, and he continued in a dark and sinister voice: “Stefan… as you follow the rest of your team through the darkness, the light behind you grows thinner and thinner. Then… something shifts in the darkness.”
Steve visibly swallowed, and the rest of the party shared trepidatious expressions.
“You pause to listen, wondering if it was just a trick… and then a shiver crawls down your spine.”
Steve shuddered and drew his arms closer together, as if protecting himself from a sudden chill.
“Then… a feeling, in the very pit of your stomach. A gut instinct. Something is wrong. Something… is watching you.”
“What if it’s the Beholder?” Dustin remarked loudly, partially breaking the tension (much to Steve’s relief, and Mike’s irritation). “Oh man, we’re so screwed if it’s the Beholder-”
“It’s not the Beholder,” Lucas responded harshly.
In the corner of Mike’s eye, he spotted Will visibly shrink in on himself and look away from the table. Mike remained watching his friend for a moment, who finally looked up and grimaced at Mike. Keep going.
Mike kept a steady eye on Will in his peripheral vision, even as he turned to address Steve once again. “What do you do, Stefan? Should you warn your companions, or–”
“Hell yeah, I am,” Steve replied, looking among the party. Dustin shot him a look, nodding as though to remind him to do something, and then Steve’s eyes sparkled. “Right, yeah, in-character. Um… guys, something doesn’t feel right about this…”
Max rolled her eyes. “Oh, now something doesn’t feel right? Even I could have told you–”
“STEFAN!” Mike’s voice boomed across the room as his fist slammed against the table, causing the little mini-figures and the Dungeon Master’s screen to rattle; the rest of the kids, and Steve, almost jumped a mile high in their seats. “In the depths of the shadows, a single eye opens and its pupil twists to stare you down-!”
“I told you it was the Beholder!” Dustin bellowed loudly, looking as if he might overturn the table.
Mike continued loudly over Lucas’s retorts. “A high-pitched screeching noise roars in your ears as it charges up it’s spell–!”
“It’s a death ray, oh God, oh God, ” Dustin yelled in a frenzy of panic, causing most of the other kids to erupt in a cacophony of shouting.
From within the midst of yelling, Steve managed to break through and ask at the top of the voice: “The hell is a death-?!”
“One-hit kill!” Lucas roared, seizing Steve by the shoulders. “One hit, no saving throw –!”
“No way, Mike wouldn’t do that,” Will insisted, shaking his head. “That’s unfair! Steve only just joined! It’s clearly just Disintegration, or - or just the Sleep spell–”
At the DM’s corner of the table, d4’s clutched in his hand, Mike hesitated as Will’s voice cut through. His gaze flickered across the table as each of his friends' raucous yells echoed throughout the basement, and briefly caught Steve’s eyes. Maybe he was absorbed in the game or just putting on a show, but he actually looked… concerned. And a little disheartened, too.
Mike dropped the d4’s back into his collection. “Steve… make a saving throw.”
Hawkins, Indiana / November 1984 / 4 Months After Saving the World
“Your compass,” Steve breathes into Dustin’s curls, pressing his nose against the young boy’s hair and willing himself not to cry. “Your goddamn compass saved my ass, Henderson.”
Dustin sniffles and responds, muffled from the tears and from his face squashed against Steve’s shirt. “G-Glad that you learnt how to use one.”
Steve grins, despite himself. “Yeah. Never did find the appeal of Boy Scouts.”
“You’d have been a camp leader.” Another sniffle from Dustin, then breaks down into loud and raucous sobs that leaves Steve simutatenously touched and embarassed. “I-I thought you died! I thought - I thought I’d never see you again…!”
“You think you can get rid of me that easy?” Steve tutted, as though shaming Dustin for underestimating him. “You’re stuck with me, Henderson, not the other way round.”
Dustin chokes back a half-sob, half-laugh, then blinks and stares in shock as one of his arms comes away stained with blood. “Oh my God, I’m bleeding–!”
“No, no, that’s me,” Steve says, and there’s a sudden rush all around him as people begin to really clock onto his injuries. Joyce Byers is there first, putting a gentle hand on the small of his back and guiding him into the bedroom, whilst Hopper dives into one of his cupboards to search for medicinal supplies. Dustin’s by his side the whole time, chattering away between streams of tears.
Steve’s heart lurches and grows cold at the sight of Eleven, rolled up in bed with a small stain of blood under her nostril. She’s pale and clammy, yet in a deep slumber as though she might never rouse from it again. A sickness rolls in Steve’s stomach even as Joyce guides him to sit on the edge of the bed and rolls up his sleeves to check the gash on his arm first. He did this; he’s at fault for this, he caused this to happen to El…
Hopper enters the room and opens his mouth, but a call from the other side of the house interrupts whatever he’s about to say, as Lucas hollers: “ Dustin! Get your butt in here, we’re putting up defenses!”
As soon as Dustin scampers out of the room to assist the rest of the kids in moving cabinets to the windows and doors, Hopper crouches down in front of him. Steve puts his hands behind him on the bed and looks away awkwardly as the Chief speaks: “How’d these happen, kid?”
“Demodog,” Steve murmurs quietly, trying to block out the echoed sounds of the deranged alien mutt screeching and snarling in his ears. “Jumped me, the dick.”
“Demodog? So you really went to that… what is it, the Upside Down?”
“Yeah. No clue how.” Steve pauses, and his brows furrow. “I think the Beholder cast Teleportation. How long was I gone? Sun was only just setting when I… when, you know…”
“Kids say almost an hour,” Hopper grumbles, and Steve feels a shiver crawl up his skin. It hadn’t felt like he’d been in the Upside Down for that long. Maybe he just lost track of time. Or maybe, more likely, he’d been unconscious longer than he thought. Hopper cuts in between his thoughts. “You want your arm fixed up first, or the leg?”
Steve risks glancing down and winces. There’s an intense incision on his right arm, spreading from a few inches to his wrist all the way to his elbow. His leg looks almost mangled, with deep punctures that’s stained with thick amounts of blood. He’s not oozing blood anymore, which is a good sign if he remembers correctly. The blood was meant to stay inside his body, after all.
“They both hurt like a bitch, Doctor-Chief, but the leg feels worse. Not gonna need stitches, am I?”
“We’ll let a real doc decide that later, but we haven’t got the time for a check-up at the moment.” Hopper rolls up the hem of Steve’s jeans further, produces a washcloth and soap and carefully approaches the wound. “Lucky for you, I know that peroxide doesn’t do much other than irritate the skin… but this will still sting.”
Steve cringes and bites his bottom lip as Hopper makes contact, but at least allows himself the comfort of not being exposed to any alcohol or disinfectant, then quickly bites out in between the pain: “Y’know - I heard that, like, the more concussion you get, the worse the next one will be.”
“Steve…” Hopper’s voice lowers and he shakes his head, and there’s a stinging sense of intense disappointment in his voice that makes Steve twice more conscious of Hopper’s adoptive daughter lying beside him. “Jesus, kid… what were you even thinking, doing all of this? I told you not to worry–”
“I’m sorry,” Steve murmurs, but a stab of defensiveness rolls through him. “I’m sorry, but - like… I had to do something, man, you don’t understand. It was in my head, it was on the radio, it was - it was ruining my life. It was infecting people, trying to torment me. Billy, and my Dad! I mean, what if it got you as well? What if it - it made you aggressive towards me? Or El?”
“I needed you to trust me. I was fixing this. The military, Dr. Sam Owens, people we can trust - they were coming to fix this, but now this - this has gotten way worse. You got the Gate, the demo-thing…” Hopper sighs, a loose and gravelly one, and bows his head as though he’s in prayer. “This could expose Jane.”
Jane. Ouch. Usage of Jane instead of ‘El’ makes Steve feel the pressure.
“I didn’t know you were doing that for me,” Steve murmurs guitility, avoiding eye-contact (then winces as Hopper moves to clean his arm). “I didn’t… I’m sorry. I thought I could - that I could beat this thing. We didn’t want to involve you.”
“Why?” Joyce whispers, blinking so frequently that she might be trying to hold back tears; that thought alone makes Steve’s heart clench and stare at the corner of the room. “Why, Steve? We - We could’ve helped you, talked you through this…”
“I didn’t - I didn’t want to worry you.” Steve shuffles uncomfortably as the back of his neck grows hot. “You know, you’ve got - you’ve dealt with a lot already, and you’ve got work and family… you didn’t need to, like, worry about some random ass teenager–”
“Steve, honey, we need you to understand.” Joyce speaks in a desperate whisper, reaching forward and taking his hands. Her hands are thinner than his, so much less muscle, and shaking, yet infinitely warmer and kinder. “You - You’re not just some stranger to us, okay? You’ve put yourself on the line for us, for this town, for the kids, so many times. It’s okay to let them - to let us - help you too. You know, we care about you. We care. ”
“I know…” Steve’s blinking back tears, refusing to let any of the pair see his vulnerability. He could barely understand why he couldn’t listen to this, why this just felt so wrong. Like they were violating some moral principle or some basic form of understanding by caring about Steve Harrington. He’d put their children at risk, he’d hurt them – and this is how he’s repaid? With some kind of unconditional understanding?
Something in the other rooms thumps loudly, and one of the kids swear at the top of their voice, followed by a frantic round of dramatic hush-ing. The sound alone brings a small comfort to Steve, for some reason.
Hopper withdraws, putting away the soaked washcloth aside and taking some gauze out from an open med-kit bag. “I should have kept you in the loop, kid.” He gingerly takes Steve’s leg and entwines the bandage around his ankle. “I shouldn’t have just… done the same as you, really, run off to fix these things without worrying you, and in the end I just worried you more. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Steve looks away once again. “Please. Don’t be.”
He doesn’t deserve these apologies. They shouldn’t be given to him. He should be giving them to others.
“D’you think it’s coming back?” A harsh whisper reverberates from the other room, belonging to a tense Max.
“No chance that it’s gonna admit defeat,” Lucas replies, his voice firm and steely. He’s got his slingshot - sorry, wrist rocket, Steve’s made that mistake too many times now - clenched tightly in one hand, as if it’s really going to make difference between the two revolvers and a shotgun that’s in the room. “Just a matter of when…”
“We can’t let it go far,” Hopper says, moving out from the bedroom and striding into the living room. Steve’s bewildered expression follows Hopper’s back as the chief police officer picks up his shotgun and cocks it. Everybody stares at him in absolute puzzlement – except Dustin and Nancy, who have solemn expressions of understanding. “If it gets to town, then there’s going to be trouble.”
“It didn’t last time,” Jonathan murmurs. “Barely left the stretch of woods between my house and the lab.”
But Mike shakes his head. “It went to the school.”
“Blood attracted it,” Dustin adds quietly. “All those people that - that El killed… so if you want it back, then I guess we can, like, nick our fingers or something.”
“We don’t need to,” Steve mutters, drawing everyone’s attention. “Sure, I’ve stopped bleeding, but…”
He leans forward, and El comes into view. There’s a fresh flow of scarlet liquid coming from both nostrils. Mike jerks from the other room and almost instantly bolts forward, brushing past the rest of the bedroom occupants and coming to the bed.
“She’s gotta be using her powers,” Mike says, putting hands on her forearm and gently shaking her. “El, can you hear me? El?”
“It’s coming.”
Nancy’s low and focused voice cuts in, and the entire house falls silent for a deadly second. In the distance of the cabin, a high-pitched shriek reverberates in the late winter’s air, and it feels as though the entire cabin trembles in fear. Hopper twists around and commands all the kids into the bedroom, who all scramble for safety (although Lucas and Dustin both need to be told twice). Steve grabs the handle of his bat, pulling himself onto shaky feet, but Joyce puts pressure on his shoulder.
“You need to sit, honey,” she whispers. “Please–”
“I have to fix this,” Steve responds in a firm, steely voice. “I caused this.”
“Steve, you’re–”
He ignores her protests and proceeds into the living room, spinning the bat in one hand, and glances over towards the comrades. Hopper’s got his trusty shotgun, Jonathan has Nancy’s pistol that had once been pointed right into his face, and Nancy has–
“Billy’s gun,” he comments.
Nancy shoots him a puzzled look, and shrugs. “Dustin got it out of your car. You stole Billy’s gun?”
“I was probably going to give it to you, actually. You’re a crack shot.”
“Save it,” Hopper snaps, and the pair fall silent (although Nancy manages to share a small and subtle smile that makes Steve’s heart physically wince).
The four of them turn, pressing themselves almost back to back and facing four corners of the house: Steve towards the window, his eye on the bedroom door; Nancy has her gun firmly pointed towards the window that the Demogorgon first crashed through; Jonathan’s hands are shaking on his weapon that’s pointed at yet unbroken window; Hopper’s eyes are narrowed down the barrel of the shotgun, aimed dead-on at the front door.
The lights above begin to flicker, as if trembling from fear, and a few of the kids in the other room quicken their breaths. The wind creaks against the wood panels of the house, its source difficult to locate.
Quiet. Utterly resounding, booming silence.
The the roof creaks hard, and a spray of dust and wood chips filters out from the cracks like a burst of snowfall. The small squad in the main room twist at the same time, a trio of gun muzzles snapping up in an attempt to follow the spray of dust and grating wood.
Something’s fucking crawling on the roof…
It stops. Silence fills the room. Steve hears his heartbeat pounding in his ears.
S H O O T.
A crack ruptures the silence and a blast of orange fire detonates, as Hopper’s shotgun fires at the ceiling. Screams flood the house as the lights begin to flash erratically, and a shadow passes by Steve’s vision - followed by a grating, piercing screech -
He turns, his bat swinging wildly and missing whatever target he was aiming for, and spots Hopper. The chief’s shotgun has clattered to the floor as he stumbles back, pressing the palms of his hands against his ears and murmuring inaudible words in harsh, whispered mutters.
“Chief–”
“Sara…” Steve only just catches Hopper’s horrified whispers. “Sara…”
“ Jim–!”
“STEVE!”
Someone roars out, Steve doesn’t even know who, but he doesn’t get a chance to figure it out before something heavy strikes right against his ribs. The air chokes out from him as he’s hurled backward, ramming against the wall and collapsing onto the floor. A picture frame wobbles and drops, cracking across the side of his head and causing his vision to blur from the shooting agony. As he blinks back his obfuscated vision, terror leaps in his heart and up his throat as he sees the wide open jaws of the demogorgon only a foot away from his face–
Another boom of gunfire, and the room bursts into yellow again as the shotgun goes off. The demogorgon screeches and steps sideways as the shells rupture into its skin, and it turns. Nancy Wheeler holds her ground, aiming the shotgun with an expression contorted with utmost desire for vengeance.
Then another strike of gunfire, this time from Jonathan’s revolver. He steps back a few paces, his hands trembling on the weapon as the demogorgon’s temper snaps and reaches out to lunge at Jonathan.
Steve bounds onto his feet, bat in hand, practically leaping over a virtually inert and terrified Chief Hopper, and strikes. The sharp nails stick into the demogorgon’s flesh, lacerating into its skin. The demogorgon’s screech echoes around the cabin and it swipes its claws, raking against the side of Steve’s temple as he almost dodges. Ignoring the blood leaking down the side of his face, he strikes again and relishes in the satisfying impact - an intense, heavy force pounding against the monster’s flesh and muscle –
“Steve, it’s–!”
Jonathan cries out, but his voice is drowned out by the most deafening scream that the demogorgon’s emitted so far. Saliva and blood sprays out from between its teeth. The cabin rumbles, and a lightbulb from a lamp completely shatters. The demogorgon swipes, striking Steve around the chest and pitching him into a shelf and tumbling to the floor. In it’s newfound bloodlusted rage, the creature revolves around and leaps at Nancy. The shotgun fires again, piercing it in the chest, but it seems to only shrug it off. Its claws grab around Nancy’s torso, lifting her up and slamming her against the wall. The screams grow higher in pitch, and Steve scrambles to his feet screaming out her name–
Then a new burst of orange joins the room, different to the detonation of shotgun shells. Someone charges out of the bedroom, carrying a piece of plywood wrapped in gauze, the end lit with blue-tinged flame. The wood strikes against the back of the demogorgon, who howls in wretched agony and drops Nancy to the ground. Jonathan dives out of the way, pushing a half-dazed Hopper aside as he does so, as the demogorgon is herded backwards towards the shattered window by its new assailant.
“Get back!” Lucas Sinclair bellows, jabbing the lit piece of wood at the demogorgon, resistant against fear even despite the monster’s convulsing jolts and roars. “Get back! Get the fuck back!”
“Sinclair…!” Hopper’s voice breaks through, shaken, as he stumbles in his half-reactive state with a hand out, but Lucas presses forward. His teeth grit together, eyes narrowed, facing down the monster with an unmatched fury–
Then the demogorgon freezes in place for a second, its limbs turning rigid and immobile, then slowly begins to hover a couple feet in the air. Steve’s jaw drops and he staggers back a few feet, bewildered and horrified by the unseen power… until somebody brushes past him, hand raised aloft.
Eleven walks slowly towards the demogorgon, her own fingers stiff and crooked as she holds the demogorgon skyward. The creature’s roars have turned into struggling groans and grating snarls, its limbs twisting and contorting.
“El,” Mike’s voice cries out from afar, but is cut off as El releases a furious scream. Her hand closes into a fist, and the demogorgon’s head bursts. Blackish, oozing blood erupts outward, splattering against the walls and the ceiling, and it’s body falls limp. The monster is dropped back onto the floor, irrefutably dead, and El drops down onto her knees with a enervated sigh.
The lights remain static, and everyone’s breaths fill the room as nobody is able to comprehend what the fuck just happened. Finally, movement - Mike rushes out from the bedroom, staggering past everyone else and throwing his arms around El’s shoulders.
“Don’t do that again,” he murmurs, nuzzling his nose against El’s cheek. “God. I thought I lost you.”
“Wasn’t going anywhere,” El breathes, falling into his embrace.
Steve’s mind finally catches up with him, and he twists to look towards Nancy - but she’s taken. Jonathan had apparently moved to Nancy before Mike even had, perhaps discreetly, and speaks in quiet, muffled tones to her. The rest of the cabin reconvenes inside, with the majority of the kids rushing off to poke a stick at the demogorgon’s dead and contorted body with morbid curiosity; Will is stuck to Joyce’s side, although it’s pretty undetermined if it’s by choice or not. Instead, Steve directs his attention to Hopper.
The Chief leans against the wall with one hand, one hand clasped around his mouth and jaw as though he were about to hurl at any second, whilst beads of sweat roll down his temple. There’s a shaken look in his gaze that unnerves Steve. He’s always seen the Chief as someone immovable, standing unshaken, always seeming like a mountain that nobody could frighten, that nobody could stop. Driven by some unknowable force to press onwards. The fact that Chief Hopper is sitting there, white as a spirit and discomposed, gives Steve a sickening feeling in his gut as dreadful as a gathering storm.
“What happened?” Steve asks; he’s still got the bat clutched in his grasp, even though the demogorgon’s head literally exploded. “You just kinda… dropped out…”
“I think it got me,” Hopper breathes behind his hand, then lets it drop to his side. “That… Beholder thing, whatever you’re calling it. I think it got me too.”
Nausea churns in Steve’s gut, and he feels his heart drop into the pit of his stomach. It’s got somebody else. Not just anybody, but one of the most competent people in their group…
“I kept seeing Sara,” Hopper mutters, his eyes glazed over, and he goes back to rubbing his jaw as though it were a source of comfort. Steve’s brow knits, but he knows better than to ask who ‘Sara’ is… although if town rumor (or more specifically. Mr and Mrs. Harrington drunken gossip) proves correct, then Sara was Hopper’s daughter.
Was Hopper’s daughter. God, that hurts to think.
“I’m sorry,” Steve says quietly.
“Me too,” Hopper says in a low voice. “I’m sorry that it took this long for me to understand what you’ve dealt with.”
There’s an awkward gap in the silence as Steve’s gaze trails down to his feet, shuffling some loose shards of glass under his trainers. The uncomfortable moment breaks as Dustin appears by Steve’s side suddenly, proclaiming: “Sorry about the mess of blood and glass, Chief Hopper, we can help clean up–”
“We ain’t done yet,” Hopper declares gravely. “We’ve still got this Beholder threat to deal with.”
The entire occupants of the cabin fall silent, their independent conversations falling flat as the gaze turns onto Hopper and Steve. A heat travels up Steve’s neck as he feels the weight of his grave mistake hang over his shoulders again, but Hopper instead takes up the lead - a natural born commander, or perhaps simply nurtured through the tumult of his life. Bred in warfare - like Steve, perhaps neither of them had a choice at taking the position of leadership.
“We can’t leave this thing unchecked in the Upside Down. It got through once, it can do it again. How’re you feeling, kiddo?” Hopper asks, turning to face El. She’s wrapped up in Mike’s embrace, because some things never change, but her expression is stone-cold and ready. “We need to kill this thing, but if you haven’t got the energy–”
“It doesn’t matter if she can or not,” Dustin cuts in. “The Beholder is surrounded by an anti-magic cone – it’s resistant to El’s powers,” he quickly clarifies to Hopper’s confused and vexed expression. “She can’t put a dent on it–”
“I can do it,” El remarks. “I was with it. In the Inbetween.”
Steve blinks, and his jaw falls open a little. “You were getting nosebleeds…”
She nods. “I was fighting it. It’s strong… but I was stronger. You hurt the demogorgon–”
“Hive mind,” Mike says. “Maybe it was connected to the demogorgon, and now that it’s dead… killing it weakened it. If we were to weaken it – use something that isn’t El’s powers–”
“So what, the plan is to just… blow it up with grenades or something?” Max asks.
“Not grenades,” Hopper replies, striding over to where Nancy has left the shotgun. He picks it up and checks the bullets within. “A shotgun works, but a pistol isn’t gonna cut it. I can get equipment from the station. Stuff to make fire, too.”
“You won’t - You won’t get in trouble for it?” Joyce asks, almost skeptically. “Won’t they notice that you’ve taken an arsenal of weapons?”
“I’m the Chief of police. I can cover it up.” He rounds onto the rest of the group and points at El. “Then you, and me, we’ll go back to the lab – the gate’s re-opened, so we go back in–”
“I need to be there,” Steve declares; in the corner, Dustin makes an indignant whine of protest which Steve ignores. “I started this. It’s after me, mostly. I have to be there.”
Hopper’s jaw sets for a moment, his brow knotting and an indignant fire flaring in his eyes, but Steve’s own resolute intensity outweighs Hopper’s own. “Fine, but–”
“You need firepower, too,” Nancy says. Steve takes a good look at her for the first time since the fight ended; she’s drained of all color in the expression, but she almost looks more hardened by the close call with the monster. “You’ll need an extra gun. I can do it.”
“Alright, but you–” Hopper snaps his fingers towards Jonathan, who’s already stepping forward with his mouth open. “You stay here, with Joyce.”
“But–”
“I need you to look after the kids,” Hopper responds firmly. Jonathan’s jaw wobbles, his resentful objections still balanced on his tongue, and Hopper’s tone shifts to be much more aggrieved. “You do as you say. That goes for all of you. No running off, no heroic shit. We are going to go in there, do our thing, and end this for good. I don’t want a repeat of last year with those damn tunnels.”
Hopper prepares to set off to the station, trying to prevent Joyce from rushing off along with him, whilst Steve laments in the corner with his arms folded, the bat rolling in between his knees whilst Dustin sits silently beside him. His attention catches a flash of ginger as Max Mayfield approaches - but not Steve, but rather Dustin.
“Hey,” Max says quietly, avoiding eye-contact, and Dustin looks up in surprise. “Look, I… I’m sorry about, like, our argument, or whatever. You’re not an idiot. You were just… you know, protecting Steve.”
“What’s this about?” Steve asks, eyeing the pair, throwing himself into his role as the babysitter as ever.
“Dustin said he almost shot Billy.” Max’s steely gaze turns on Steve, as if she’s about to round on him next. “Is that true?”
“I’m sorry, too,” Dustin cuts in, standing up. “For, like, blowing you off about it. I figured that you hated him, but - but it was stupid to think you wanted him dead.”
Max shrugs lamely, clutching her elbow and her shoulders hunched tight together. Man, she looks like she doesn’t even care; if she was a dude, Steve thinks, then she’d be top of her game at the Steve Harrington Dating Techniques. “I mean, he makes my life a living hell, but… yeah, I don’t really want him dead. But if I had to pick between Steve and Billy…”
She trails off, not saying the answer, but Steve’s at least a little complimented that Max would rather have Billy get a stray bullet in the jaw than Steve’s head cracked open on a car hood. Which isn’t much of a compliment, really, but Steve can’t afford to be picky.
“Wouldn’t recommend pressing charges, you know,” a low voice says to Steve’s right, and he glances over towards the front door; Hopper’s got a hand on the half-open entryway, apparently seconds from leaving.
“I… I didn’t even think if I wanted to or not,” Steve admits. “Why can’t I?”
“Can if you want. Reckon Billy will get put away. Unfortunately…” His eyes trail to Dustin, whose face falls in dread. “Gonna be a hell of a court trial, trying to explain why pointing a loaded gun at a guy was self-defense.”
Shit. Even though Dustin’s got a leg to stand on, because it’s fucking self-defence god damn it, it’s going to make a huge mess of Dustin’s life. The whole town will talk about it. Steve’s been raised in the Harrington household, he’s spent his whole life studying how gossip works. The facts will distort and lose focus, even beyond people stopping in the streets to swap and compare knowledge, until a rebounding version will meet Steve Harrington’s ears. Did you hear about the Henderson boy? Almost shot a man. Got a hold of a loaded gun and fired. Never thought he’d do something like that.
Steve doesn’t respond, but his silence is enough to confirm his standing on the matter. Hopper leaves without another word, with an insistent Joyce Byers at his heels who refused to let Hopper navigate Hawkins at night alone when the goddamn Gate was open.
“Steve?” A quiet voice calls out from the opposite corner of the house, and he’s bouncing off the walls in an instant. He’s heard that quiet voice in almost every corner of Hawkins High for almost two years, growing stronger and more confident with each semester that passes. Steve bounds over to where Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers are sitting on the sofa facing the television, shoulders pressed together. Jonathan’s still got his gun in his hand, although it seems almost unnatural pressed against his sweaty palms, like it’s not meant to belong between his fingers. But the stolen revolver is right in Nancy’s hand, like it’s just second-nature to have one on her at all times now. In fact, Steve’s partially certain it is; didn’t she once say that she always kept one in her purse?
“How you guys holding up?” Steve asks almost casually as he takes his place on the sofa, sitting to Jonathan’s left. For a bit, it just feels like their very irregular meet-ups in the school parking lot on top of one of their car hoods. It was awkward, mostly on Steve’s part, with mostly only small-talk and discussion about the kids, but sometimes Steve would share around some of the packed lunch that he didn’t feel like eating that day.
Nancy grimaces. “I mean… I dunno. This whole thing got real pretty quick.”
“I wish I knew it had been getting to you both,” Steve murmurs quietly, kneading the nails of the bat into the floorboards with low scrapes. “Maybe we could’ve, like, worked this out together. You’re smarter than I am.”
“You’re smart,” Jonathan rebukes unexpectedly.
Steve almost chortles. “I’m not smart - if I was smart, then I wouldn’t have caused this mess.”
“You didn’t cause anything,” Nancy retorts.
“Yeah, I did. I tried to fight this thing, tried to take the easy route - and, y’know, everyone in this room almost died for it.”
Nancy sighs. “You can’t shoulder this guilt, Steve. Like… you literally can’t.”
There’s something off about the way that Nancy says that, and he looks up with a quizzical expression. Jonathan looks unperturbed, but there’s a deep, melancholic expression.
“I came up with a… a working theory, I guess, about why this is targeting us,” Nancy says. “Targeting you, and us, and Hopper. Y’know, I thought at first it was just giving us bad memories and our worst experiences, but then I realized… you know, it’s showing me Barb. It’s showing Jonathan Will’s disappearance…”
“I saw Barb,” Steve mutters. “And the kids being hurt. The tunnels. And Hopper - he said he saw his daughter.”
A flicker of sympathy glances across Nancy’s expression, and the softness of it makes Steve’s heart yearn. “Yeah… I thought so. Guilt, Steve - that’s what it’s preying on.”
The cold, unsettled feeling in Steve’s stomach just feels like confirmation. Ever the unseen genius, Nancy Wheeler, and he knows that she might just have hit the nail on the head. All he’d seen, all those visions and nightmares, maybe they did originate from his guilt and his regret. He couldn’t keep the kids safe in the tunnels. He couldn’t make his father love him. His jerk-ass and uncaring attitude caused Barbara Holland to die.
“So, what, we gotta like… go to therapy to fix this shit?” Steve jokes half-heartedly.
Even Jonathan twitches into a smile, but he shakes his head. “No, you just… gotta think of it all differently.” He glances up to Steve, with a stronger and more self-assured gaze that Steve might have ever seen before. “Look, this thing - when it got to me at first, I was shit-scared. Seeing all those regrets laid out in front of me, it kind of… came back. But I figured it all out beforehand, you know, that I can’t blame myself for everything. I can’t blame myself for Will disappearing, it’s not like I caused it.”
“I caused Barb’s death,” Steve blurts out, before he can even think about keeping his shit together. “Because I was a fucking asshole. I couldn’t keep the kids safe when we were in the tunnels – they almost died! And now – now, with the Beholder–”
“You sound like Nancy last year. She was saying the same stuff.” A visible wince flashes on Steve’s expression, and Jonathan sympathetically grimaces. “Look, I just know how this stuff works. We can’t just… spend our whole lives regretting the things we did do, or we didn’t do. We can’t tell ourselves that, like - maybe if I had done this, maybe if I hadn’t done that, things would’ve worked out differently.” Jonathan shrugs, and his fiddling of the gun ceases as he places down on the table. “But we don’t know that in the moment. Even when the chips were down, none of us knew that in the moment.”
“But, I – Barb –”
“You both didn’t know that sending Barb home meant she’d… she’d die.” Jonathan shoots a nervous glance to Nancy, almost imperceptible, but her face remains collected enough for Jonathan to press on. “And I didn’t know working late would mean Will would get taken. Hell - maybe if we’d done some things differently, things could have ended up worse. Maybe if I’d been home, the demogorgon would’ve taken me, or both of us, or killed both of us. And Barb - she cut her finger either way, right? Maybe if Nancy went home with her, she’d have been killed too. Maybe you both would have.”
“Are you saying like… this was all destiny?” Steve asks, almost wounded by the implications being presented. “That it was all just… planned out?”
“I’m not saying it was predetermined, I just mean like… like this stuff happened. And we just did the best we could at the time without losing our shit. And sometimes, when we made the bad choices, we didn’t know the consequences would be so - so drastic. But that doesn’t mean we’re at fault. Us being ignorant doesn’t mean we were to blame.”
Steve’s jaw opens up, a retort or an excuse or a protest tied around his tongue as usual, but - much to his own alarm alone - he closes it shut. Even though there’s that self-damaging part of him that refused to believe this to be truth, that this was just some mindful bullshit engineered to twist his own stupid beliefs into something self-loving, there’s a reasonable part that know that it is true. He didn’t know that night, when he’d encouraged Nancy Wheeler into his bedroom, that his simpleminded and guileless decisions would create tragedy.
“Your camera,” Steve tries.
Jonathan shuts him down, again, because he’s ten times smarter than Steve Harrington could aspire to be. “We’ve talked about this. We both screwed up, sure, but that’s water under the bridge. I was a creep, you were just protecting Nance.”
“In the most stupid way possible,” Steve murmurs.
Jonathan doesn’t reply to that, or maybe he just didn’t hear, but it doesn’t matter. It’s water under the bridge.
“I know it’s hard, Steve,” Nancy says, and her hand actually reaches out over Jonathan’s lap, snakes over the top of his hand and presses her fingertips against her knuckles; despite everything he’s done to stop things like this, Steve’s heart wilts like a flower. “I know it’s difficult to… to change your mindset on these things you’ve taught yourself for your whole life. And I’m not just asking you to do it to - to save the world or whatever, but it’s because I care.” She shuffles up, pressing her shoulder even closer to Jonathan and causing the other boy to press uncomfortably closer to Steve. “Steve, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about everything. We should have talked more after last year, we should have… you know, done this properly.”
‘This’ - he doesn’t know if ‘this’ means breaking up their relationship more smoothly, like sliding out of it gracefully with a handshake rather than leaving Steve in pieces on the ground, or if ‘this’ means everything Upside-Down. As if the three of them were meant to sit in Ms. Kelley’s office, hold hands and talk through their ‘trauma’ together.
“It’s not your fault,” Steve tries, again, but Nancy shoots him down this time.
“No, it is. I disappeared. I don’t even know why, I-I guess I… I was just trying to put distance between us, because I thought it would be better.” She withdraws her hand, and Steve’s own hand feels colder without it. “I was wrong. So, so wrong.”
“And you’re not usually wrong,” Jonathan adds with a small smirk; it’s not disingenuous or snarky, but it’s a little funny, and even Nancy smiles a little.
Steve doesn’t smile though, because there’s dead weight on him. He’s got this feeling, this cold and ominous feeling like a storm about to break, that he needs to be truly open and to shed his armour, because maybe he might not get another chance to. “I’m sorry. Really. For the way I treated you both. For being… a douchebag, basically.”
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry for.” To Steve’s surprise, it’s Jonathan says that.
“I’ve got lots to be sorry for. I don’t even want to be forgiven–”
“Steve…” Jonathan’s voice breaks into a soft, low murmur that feels oddly like Nancy’s. “Don’t be stupid. Everybody’s already forgiven you, except yourself.”
Something hollow and swift dives through Steve’s gut, like a low blow to the stomach, except there’s something soft inside of it as well. It’s like it left a hole in the walls he put up around himself subconsciously, something that’s finally letting in the light, and this tiny ray of possibility: maybe, just maybe, he can forgive himself. Maybe he’s allowed to forgive himself. Maybe, on some shred of impossible possibility, he doesn’t need everyone else’s permission to even do that.
The door knocks loudly, and the entire occupancy of the cabin startles and dive for the nearest piercing or bludgeoning weapons of choice, until the door swings open on its own. Chief Hopper steps into the threshold, his heavy boots creaking underneath the dusted floorboards, holding a hefty shotgun in his offhand (a Winchester Model 1200, Steve will learn later from an oddly excited Nancy) and his own standard-issue pistol in the other. His glare flickers around the room, then orders at the top of his voice: “Alright, get moving, you got five minutes!”
Steve feels like that’s mostly aimed at him so he scrambles to his feet, the other two teenagers leaping up beside him, and makes a beeline towards the bedroom. He’s got a grand plan for weaponry; if this thing is scared of fire…
“You got any booze, Chief?” He asks as begins to wrap some of the gauze used for mending his wounds around his bat, sliding the tears caused by the nails down the thin iron and towards the wood.
“So long as it’s not for shots on the way there,” Hopper mutters, not quite in the tonal mood for jokes, and tosses a half-empty Jack Daniel’s.
Nancy preps herself with the borrowed shotgun from Hopper’s shed, still eyeing the Winchester with envy, whilst Hopper preps the van for travel. El in Mike’s arms providing promises of a safe return, and Joyce–
“I’m coming with you,” Joyce Byer’s loud voice calls from outside, almost as loud as her stomping footsteps climbing down the front porch. Steve pauses in his self-service medical check-up to eavesdrop, subtly poking his head out of the open doorway.
“No, you stay here,” Hopper responds firmly; by the sounds of the car engine turning on, he’s not even turned to face her.
“No, I - I have got to come with you! What if you need help getting out? What if none of you can drive when you get out? What if you don’t get out? Who’s going to notice ‘til it’s too late?”
“Joyce…”
“If you don’t let me come with you, I’ll drive my own damn car to the lab!”
“Hey, Steve?”
Steve’s head almost hits the doorway, his scalp scraping against the timeworn oak, and turns to face Lucas. The younger boy still had his slingshot - sorry, wrist rocket, can’t ever get that wrong - clutched in his sweaty hand, and his arms are trembling like he’s been carrying a weight for hours.
“You’re not coming,” Steve says instantly, swinging the bat over his shoulder.
“Wasn’t asking that, and I knew I wouldn’t get a yes anyway,” Lucas retorts.
“You also pulled a stupid stunt earlier, trying to fight that thing.” Steve’s jaw tenses, and he sighs. “But it did save our asses, so - thanks.”
Lucas shrugs, as if saving a bunch of people’s lives is just kind of ‘no problem really’, but then his demeanor flips on itself completely. “I know it’s… kind of a weird time, but… like, I was just wondering… after this is all over, and it starts getting warmer… would you, like, teach me some basketball?”
Steve jolts a little. He wasn’t expecting that. “Uh… yeah. Yeah, totally. I didn’t know you were into that kinda stuff.”
“I’m a Pacers fan, didn’t you know?” Lucas grins. “I also just wanna try, y’know… fitting in, I guess. D&D is fun and all, but I just kinda wanna try… other stuff.”
Popularity; he wants to try being normal.
Steve grins back. “Alright. You’re on. Better be in shape, though, ‘cause Coach Harrington doesn’t hold back.”
Lucas breaks out into a huge beam and his eyes sparkle, lighting up with genuine excitement. Nodding and bouncing on his toes, he backs up and departs.
“Harrington!” Hopper calls out from the front yard; inevitably, his argument with Joyce has resulted in her joining the Chief in the front seats (leaving Jonathan Byers as the babysitter, which is a nice change of pace). “Move, or I’m leaving you behind!”
“Stay safe,” Jonathan says quietly.
“Yeah, kick some ass,” Lucas adds.
“Don’t die,” Mike and Max say at the same time, and the two share irritated looks.
“Please be careful,” Will pipes up.
Dustin doesn’t speak, but he doesn’t need words anyway, because he just rushes in for a hug. Steve grins lopsidedly, ruffling Dustin’s trucker hat.
“Don’t miss me too much, gremlins,” Steve says, finally pulling himself free and smiling. He glances towards the truck where his team are waiting: Eleven, sat in the back and staring out the window; Chief Jim Hopper, leaning against the hood and smoking; Joyce Byers, comfortable in the passenger seat and trying to light her own; Nancy Wheeler, arms folded over the shotgun in her lap in the middle seat.
They’re going to the lab. He’d never been there before, not properly, and it was intimidating to think that he was going to be stepping foot into the place where this had all begun. Because he’d learnt since November 1983 that these monsters, just like the one that they were about to face, didn’t come for no reason. And it didn’t come because some evil men in business suits with lit cigars decided America was worth dooming for some cruel, contrived reason. It began with an accident fuelled and influenced by fear - just like this time around, too.
Steve had clung to this idea, ever since November 1983 when he had to sign a hefty load of documents ordering to keep his mouth fucking shut, that it was much better to imagine the face of evil as the demogorgon that stormed the Byer’s household. The one with the rows of barbed teeth and spit flying out with every pained screech. But somehow, Steve discovered that it was easier yet to imagine the face of evil were a group of men sitting in a white-tinted conference room, with no windows and no decorations, all dressed in the same black suits with spreadsheets and cigars splayed out in front of them, cynical and drunk on their power blessed by the United State government; discussing how to trick and deceive the parents, not even fifty, saying the Kaddish over their children’s caskets. But it was harder to accept that these men could be among them, any time and any day, watching and preening themselves, waiting for one slip-up, one mistake, one step over the line. It had been impossible to accept that maybe the ones who earned a nail-bat to the face wasn’t a monster from another dimension, but a few men of their own who were hellbent on destroying lives in the name of self-importance.
Steve puts the bat over his shoulder, turns away from the cabin, and walks towards the police truck.
Notes:
Author's Research No.7: MKUltra and Project ARTICHOKE
I wanna state, firstly, that I'm not throwing this in as a red herring. I didn't really do a lot of research in this chapter, besides the usual glancing through character and location Wiki's, but I thought I would share the details of MKUltra and its sister project: Project Artichoke. Just for a bit of fun but not-so-lighthearted research.
In the show, MKUltra is introduced as a program that Terry Ives - Eleven's mother - took part in to create mind-control techniques against enemies during the Cold War. After the program closed, Martin Brenner continued it with children born from special mental abilities.
MKUltra was a real program, used to see if drugs like LSD could force confessions during interrogations with the use of brainwashing and psychological torture. It also used other chemicals and techniques, including electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation isolation, and types of abuse I won't list here because this is a Teen fic. It was halted for good in 1973... but maybe it could have continued. Who am I to say?
Project Artichoke is, in my opinion, slightly more terrifying. Created before MKUltra, which was inspired from the experiments of LSD-induced psychological brainwashing, it instead toyed with the idea of making people involuntarily perform an act of attempt assassination. The simple idea of the project was founded through a memo:
"Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?"
(I suppose, in a way, you could compare that to the Beholder's control on those who threaten Steve and his allies...)
Chapter 8: The Red
Summary:
We are at the end of the world. The end of this world. And it may be born renew again; the never-ending cycle of lifelessness and destruction.
(No - No, fuck this. Screw you, I’m killing you.)
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
This is real darkness. It's not death, or war... Real darkness has love for a face. The first death is in the heart.
-- Disco Elysium
Hawkins, Indiana / February 1985 / 3 Months After Saving the World
The days were getting steadily warmer - or, to put it more precisely, a little less cold. The time of the year couldn’t quell the chill that could run over skin and leave goosebumps in its wake, or suppress the wispy fog that would exhale from between gritted teeth and curl into itself. But the snow had moved on from being slush and left the roads and the grass soaked, and enough time outdoors could be enough to help you forget the cold.
Steve was still thinking about the cold, though, even as he marched up the dew-engulfed hill, slipping and sliding in the mud and feeling the cold water soak into his socks. Wheezing his irregular breaths out between his lungs, he called out: “Seriously, what are we doing here?!”
“Enough of the questions, just trust me!” Dustin Henderson called out, twisting his hips and beckoning Steve to hurry. He was several paces ahead of Steve, but it felt like miles instead; the distance between the pair felt glaringly pronounced.
“I’ve got mud all up on my brand new sneakers, dude,” Steve complained loudly, as his brand new converses slipped and slid in the dirt (at least he didn’t buy those all-white shoes he had been eyeing). “And it’s freezing.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t let Mother Nature stop a curiosity voyage!” Dustin proclaimed proudly. He took a few leaping strides forward, then came to a hop on top of the hill and put his hands on hips. “See? We made it!”
Still heaving his lungs out, Steve trudged the last few steps to the top of the hill and pressed a hand on Dustin’s shoulder to carry half his weight. Sprawling ahead was Hawkins, most of it coated in a deep darkness where the forests and woods surrounded the town, but there was a glimmer of yellows and oranges further into the distance.
Steve stared out into the distance, admiring the view just for a moment or two, before heaving out a long and rough sigh. “You took me all the way out here to… what, admire the view?”
“Not that one,” Dustin replied. Steve looked over; the younger boy wasn’t looking out into the distance where Hawkins lay, but instead directly above. Steve’s gazed turned upward–
… Je- sus.
Above was a sweeping starscape like no other. A glitter of stars spread out like a collection of silver dust upon a blanket of deep cobalt blue, and more seemed to catch Steve’s eye the longer he stared. The varying degrees of brightness were contrasted against the endless, beautiful expanse of blue and darkness behind it; rising above as the reigning lord over the light in the dark, the glowing white crescent moon watched over the earth below.
“Was the view worth it, then?” Dustin grinned.
Steve wanted to say yes, hell yes it was, because this is one of the prettiest things he might’ve ever seen and he’s not even high. Instead, he says in a light voice: “Eh… jury’s still out.”
Dustin turned to press his back against Steve’s, his shoulder blades lightly tapping against Steve’s spine (who idly wonders when the hell Dustin had gotten so tall), and the pair began a strange, almost waltz-like spin as they slowly rotated to take in the landscape of stars above. For a while, that’s all they needed: the winter’s night sky, the crispy breeze against their exposed skin and one another’s company.
“Kinda makes you think about how insignificant we are,” Dustin murmured.
Steve tilted his head, raising an eyebrow. “Huh?” Was this the route they were gonna go down? Philosophical debates about their existence on the earth? It wasn’t difficult, actually - it was just being born and dying, and a weird in-between where the strange would happen.
But Dustin talked anyway. “You know, like… there’s a huge universe out there, and we might never comprehend how impossibly huge it is, and in the perspective of the entire universe we’re just… just little blips. Tiny little blips that just happen in the blink of an eye. You know - by the time the light of those stars in the sky reaches us, nobody will even remember us.”
That didn’t make Steve feel scared, or relish in awe. For some reason, that idea just made him feel sad. A peculiar, grieving kind of sadness. “Does that not mean it matters, then?”
Oddly cynical, Dustin shrugged. “In the grand scheme of things? No, probably not. Universe is way too big for us to be even remotely significant.”
“I think it matters,” Steve replied stubbornly; maybe it’s genuine, or maybe it’s just desperately and naively trying to believe that it did matter (because it had to, surely). “I think we still matter. Like, yeah, maybe I’m not gonna matter in the eyes of the universe. But I got a really good grade on my paper today, and I got an extra bag of chips from the vending machine at lunch, and I’m on this hill with you, and it matters to me. It matters to me.”
“Matters to me, too,” Dustin says quietly, almost so imperceptible that Steve almost doesn’t catch it. “Maybe we can put a positive spin on it. Like, if it really doesn’t matter in the end, then it’s okay to… make mistakes. It’s okay to fail and stuff.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, so kindly, that it brought a heavy weight against Steve’s chest. Something like… denial. An idea of yes, Dustin is right, it is okay to make mistakes and to fail, but not for him. Not for Steve. Like he’s an exception somehow, for no other reason than he’s existing in his own body so he is some kind of exception.
“Does it matter to you?” Steve asked. “Y’know - your place in the universe, and stuff.”
Dustin didn’t reply - not straight away. Their gyrating dance as they witnessed the starscape above stopped as Dustin came to a halt. By the feeling of elbows scraping against Steve’s back, Dustin puts his hands into the pockets of his heavy coat. Dustin was wrapped up tight like he was off on an expedition to the deepest circles of the arctic; Steve’s had a jacket on, with a hood at the very least, because the cold hurts… like it’s meant to hurt.
When Dustin next spoke, it’s still light - yet there’s a dull and heavy weight to it, as well. “Will said that he didn’t want to exist anymore.”
Steve jerked on instinct, as if he’d been violently shoved.
Dustin continued. “He said that after everything, when he learnt that everybody has almost given their lives to save him, and to solve everything with the Upside Down… it didn’t make him feel any better. It didn’t make him feel worthy of all that. He said it made him feel less worthy. And then he started getting episodes, like he was back in the Upside Down and that he was carrying this knowledge like - like everything had changed, and that it was going to come back. He said it made him wish he didn’t exist. Said to me: if someone presented a button that could just make him vanish, right there, completely painlessly and sparing everyone he knew of the grief… he’d press it. Right there.”
There was something appealing about that idea. But something so terrifying about it, too. How someone could just intrinsically devalue their own existence in a constant, steadfast manner to the point where they would happily allow themselves to be scrubbed off the planet. As long as they were spared the pain, as those they cared for were spared the grief. It wasn’t a question of sacrifice, or dying for a cause or for somebody, or maybe even ending the pain. It’s just not giving existence the decency of their time.
“I said I kinda knew how he felt,” Dustin said in a low voice. Finally, there’s an incredible darkness in his tone. “Like I felt that way too.”
“When?” Steve asked, the word spilling out by an instinct.
“I dunno.” Dustin shrugged. “Probably when Dad left.”
It was thrown out so casually, and it took Steve off-guard. Two kids (he has to prevent himself from saying, ‘two of his kids’) have been in darker places than they’ve let on; how many of them are in the same boat?
“Have you ever felt that way?” Dustin asked quietly.
Steve paused. A shadow of a thought brings him back in time into a darker period in the Harrington household, where empty chardonnay bottles filled the recycling bins and Richard Harrington was rageful beyond ten-year-old Steve’s understanding.
A second was all it took.
“I have,” he replied, and he never elaborated.
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / The World Is About To End (Again)
“The bench,” Mike repeats irritably for the fifth time. “I can’t believe we’re on the bench. Again.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” Jonathan replies harshly. “Just… sit down, okay?”
It’s been almost half an hour since the others had left. The tension in Hopper’s cabin was palpable: confined between the moth-eaten furniture and the creaking, oaken walls that were still stained with blood, the remaining fighters had nothing to do. They’d already taken the dead corpse of the Demogorgon out, carried it far into the depths of the woods and buried it underneath the damp soil (much to Dustin’s displeasure, who still hadn’t forgiven Hopper for doing the exact same thing to do the demodog last fall). Jonathan leads the operation of cleaning the blood off the walls, because it at least preoccupies everybody instead of doing what Mike was doing - pacing up and down, fists clenched by his sides and making everybody else either annoyed or nervous.
“They’re walking into a death trap,” Mike says, the floorboards creaking with each step. “The Beholder’s going to kill them. We’ve got to go after them.”
“And what? Get killed too?” Lucas snaps, finally having enough of Mike’s incessant mutterings, and he throws down a soaked, blood-stained cloth onto the floor with a wet slap. “You just gotta trust them! The chief wouldn’t take them all if he didn’t think they stood a chance!”
“The chief’s got it wrong!” Mike yells back, coming to a stop to direct his venting at Lucas. How could Lucas not understand this? “You saw the Beholder in the house, Lucas. You saw what it did to El. That thing might be way worse than a demogorgon. We’re talking Mind Flayer level.”
“Look, this is the only thing that they can do, alright?” Jonathan says, turning around and stretching out a hand, trying to resolve the argument before it could turn nasty; the last thing they needed right now was to start bickering with each other. “The Gate’s gotta close, and the Beholder needs to go down. We’ve got the best people on it–”
“Best people?! What about the military–?!”
“The military can’t close the Gate!” Lucas replies loudly, apparently eager to get right back to their argument. “Only El can close the gate, and you know that!”
“The Beholder will kill them before they close it!” Mike retorts, his voice rising over the rumble of thunder in the distance. In the corner of the room, Max turns to the window.
“Lemme explain this to you, doofus,” Lucas says importantly, and points out the back window. “The demogorgon’s dead, that was the Beholder’s footsoldier to finish us off. We killed it. It’s a hive mind, so that weakened the Beholder too. And because El was fighting it in the Inbetween, which is her domain–”
“Just ‘cause it’s stronger in the Inbetween–”
“GUYS!” Max bellows, her raucous tone cutting in between the argument. Her red hair flies as she turns her head back to the window. “D’you hear that?”
The occupants of the cabin pause, just as another rumble of an oncoming storm shakes the foundations of the cabin. Dust sprays from in between the breaks of the wooden rooftop.
“It’s just thunder,” Jonathan says with a nonchalant shrug.
“No, it’s not.” Max and Dustin’s voice speak in direct unison, and they share terrified, unsteady glances. The thunder continues, and a spray of lightning lights up the outside of the window, a shocking white – but the ominous rumbling doesn’t stop, it just keeps getting closer and closer.
It’s not thunder. It’s a car.
Everyone dives towards the windows, noses practically pressed up against the cold glass and their hot breaths leaving traces of steam. A pair of headlights pierce straight through the cabin, into the cracks and crevices and the partially smashed-open windows, and the door of the deep blue Camaro swings open. A tall, bulky figure steps out, his teeth clutching onto the butt of a lit cigarette that he tries to finish quickly.
“It’s Billy,” Max breathes.
“How the fuck he find us?!” Dustin snarls, his eyes narrowing. “Do you think… the Beholder was spying…?”
“It knows ‘cause it was here,” Mike mutters.
Billy’s leaning against his car, sitting on the hood and apparently enjoying his cigarette. Smoke trails up from the tip of his smoke, the tip glaring scarlet with each inhale. Jonathan’s nose curls up on instinct; he’s waiting. Like he’s cornered his prey inside a hole, and all he has to do is wait for them to step out.
Well, shit. Billy’s beaten Steve in a fight, but Jonathan’s beaten Steve too (kind of) - did that put him at a fighting chance against Billy Hargrove? It may as well be him who finds out.
“Stay inside.” Jonathan pushes himself off from his spot staring out the window. “I’ll deal with this.”
“No.” Max seizes Jonathan by the arm and tugs him before he can even put a foot forward towards the front door. The look on his face creates a sickening, curling sensation in the pit of his stomach; it’s fear and concern, despite the fact the pair had never even interacted before. “He’ll kill you.”
“I’m just going to–”
“He almost murdered Steve,” Dustin adds. “He wouldn’t even back down from a goddamn gun in his face.”
Jonathan shrugs the pair off, wrestling his arm out of their grip and putting a hand onto the front door before he could really think about what he was doing. Hopper’s front door creaks open as the rest of the kids dived out of sight, hiding underneath the window or else rushing into Eleven’s room. Jonathan steps forward onto the front porch, closing the door shut behind him, and turns to face Billy.
Hargrove glances up and shows no visible reaction of surprise, just takes a long drag on his cigarette, then pulls it from between his teeth and says, without looking up: “Basketcase Byers. Why am I surprised to see you here?”
“I can say the same to you,” Jonathan replies coolly, leaning his back on the doorframe, as if it’s going to block Billy out from entering. It won’t. He knows it won’t.
Billy takes another long drag on the cigarette, then tosses it out into the depths of the black forest around him. The tiny glow of orange and red winks from the leaves it's nestled into. Billy heaves himself off the front of the car and slowly moves towards Jonathan a few paces, moving casually as if merely on a stroll, each stride heavy against the leaf-strewn ground. “You know, this is giving me some major deja vu. I turn up at a weird house in the woods owned by someone else, and the first person that comes out is someone who had absolutely no reason to be here. Kinda weird, right?”
“Funny world,” Jonathan remarks simply.
“Funny.” Billy tries out the word, rolls it on his tongue, then runs his tongue over his front teeth. “Very funny. So… a little birdie told me that Steve’s been hanging out here.”
Jonathan pulls a puzzled expression and jerks his shoulders back, as if to say ‘I dunno’. “Steve?”
“Yeah, Steve Harrington? About this high–” He pulls a hand up, measuring Steve’s height slightly smaller than his own. “Stupid hair, can smell the dumbass on him a mile away?”
“And you thought you’d look for him…” Jonathan surveys the area with a raised eyebrow, as if to demonstrate his point. “Here?”
“Yeah.” He taps his nose and smirks. “I have my sources.”
“Who told that crap then?” Jonathan asks as casually as possible, raising an eyebrow, but his heart has contorted in his chest. The Beholder knows we’re here. He’s sending his infantry.
Billy ignores the question and instead paces up right to the front steps, putting the sole of his foot onto the edge of the first step. “C’mon, Byers… let’s put our heads together on this. I know you two don’t get along. I heard you kicked his ass a couple years back, actually… you and me, we can see eye to eye. If we find him together, I’ll let you do the honors.”
“Honors of what?” Jonathan asks, this time in a much more accusatory tone.
Billy throws up his hand in a mock surrender and takes a step back, shaking his head innocently. “Oh, you know…” He deflects it expertly, and casually. “See, he borrowed something of mine, that’s all. I just wanna take it back.”
TAKE IT BACK AND PAINT THE WINDOWS OF HIS STUPID FUCKING MANSION RED WITH THE INSIDE OF HIS HEAD
The voice strikes through Jonathan like a bolt of lightning, and rattles him to the core; he can feel the sheer rage and the bloodlust of the Beholder even from Billy. It’s influence is growing stronger. Shaking his head, Jonathan keeps his cool as he replies: “Look, I’m not interested in whatever you’re doing, and I don’t know where he is.” He shrugged lamely. “Probably hanging outside the Fair Mart, or - or at home, in his stupid mansion.”
Billy tuts then hisses between his teeth, shaking his head disapprovingly. He paces slowly up the porch, each step causing the wood underneath to groan under his weight, and comes face-to-face with Jonathan. Jonathan doesn’t move, or flinch; he keeps his cool, relying on sheer nerves of steel whilst his racing heart contains all the fear for him.
When Billy speaks next, his voice is low and gravelly, the few years of smoking shows off its toll like an achievement. It sounds like death itself. “I don’t like liars … Byers.”
From within the inside of the house, Max Mayfield presses her back against the door as if she’s the barricade that would save all of their skins. Every word that Billy pronounces feels like a drop of venom, even if it’s directed at someone else. Her fleeting gaze meets the eyes of the rest of the occupants in the room every now and then, including Mike Wheeler who’s propped open the window ready for everybody to dive out of just in case.
“I literally haven’t seen him.” Jonathan’s good at hiding the fear in his voice, just like Steve. They both have a cool head when it comes down to it.
Billy says something in response, something cold and biting, but Max doesn’t even hear it over the second voice that suddenly booms in her head–
HARRINNGTON’S BEEN HERE, ELIMINATE THE COMPETITION, THEY’RE IN THE WAY.
In the way… in the way…
Max’s gaze trails across the room and lands upon the coffee table. Billy’s gun is lying on its surface… she could do more than just give it back to him…
“What’re you doing ?” Dustin hisses from behind the couch.
Max blinks. She hadn’t even registered that she’d taken a step forward towards the table, her body moving on its own instinct as if obeying her dark thoughts. She pauses for a moment, her gaze hovering on the weapon.
“I… just… I’m…” She pauses, her hesitation and internal conflict palpable, then releases a rough sigh and shakes her head. “Fuck it.”
She practically tears across the room, ignoring the dramatic whispers of questions and indignation from the boys, and takes the gun into her hand. Without pausing to think, without even stopping, she marches straight to the front door. It swings open with brute force, and Jonathan is forced to stumble out of the way as it knocks him in the back. The barrel of the gun meets between her older brother’s eyes.
“Get out of here!” Max yells.
Billy’s eyes widen, equally alarmed and bewildered by her sudden appearance and her surprising aggression - so much so that he doesn’t even appear angry. “The hell are you–?”
“I told you to leave me and my friends alone!” Max bellows, her throat scratching from the fierce scream. “And you said you fucking understand !”
“The hell is this?!” Billy snarls back; he is angry, he’d simply been in shock to get to that feeling quicker. “The fuck are you-?!”
The gun snaps upward and Max cocks it; to the left of her, Jonathan makes a low, guttural noise and jerks forward, but she masks it by shouting over the clamor of Billy’s fury: “I’ve had it up to here with you bothering my friends all the time! Get the hell out of here or I’ll shoot your damn head off!”
You’re not part of my plan.
That voice burns through her head again, just as she sees something evil glint in Billy’s eyes. Something bloodthirsty, something feral - that look when even death isn’t frightening anymore. In an instant, a paralyzing terror suddenly floods through Max’s veins. Her grip of the weapon tightens on instinct, her knuckles turning pasty white and the metal leaving painful indents on her palms. But for the life of her, she can’t even move her finger onto the trigger. Billy’s face contorts, transforming into an unnatural rage – and a visage of Neil Hargrove’s fury flickered before her eyes –
The gun’s ripped out of her hands, and Max shrieks in desperation - and Jonathan steps out in front of her –
There’s no discharge of the gun. Jonathan strikes Billy straight across the face with the grip of the gun, and a loud crack resounds through the night as Billy’s nose shatters from the impact. He staggers back off the porch in a plethora of cursing, clutching his face as blood begins to splatter down his jaw and the front of his shirt.
“Get outta here, man,” Jonathan snaps, shielding Max and the front door - where the rest of the kids have not-so-stealthily gathered - and pointing the gun straight toward Billy. Max watches aghast with horror as Billy glares at Jonathan with the expression of deepest hatred, his chest pumping up and down slowly and rhythmically.
“Do it.” Billy’s deep and twisted scowl twists into a blood-stained grin, baring his teeth and drawing grating coughs between lungfuls of air. “You’ve got what it takes, Byers. Wouldn’t pick anybody else.”
Max’s good at reading people; she’s a people-person who can’t conform, and is forced into the role of the wallflower, so she knows how people function. And she’s better at reading Billy Hargrove than maybe anyone else in the world - and she knows that Billy means it. Unlike the rivalry with Steve Harrington, Billy’s hate for Jonathan is merged with a hint of respect. The kind that a warrior might have for another on the battlefield. Billy would not take defeat from someone like Steve, but he would accept it from a fighter like Jonathan Byers.
Max hesitates, fearful of what she might see next, then glances up to glimpse Jonathan’s expression. It’s hard, and steely… and she’s truly frightened, for a moment, that Jonathan might just–
He doesn’t shoot. There’s another blur of gray and a loud crack. The butt of the gun strikes Billy across the temple (who just closes his eyes and lets it happen, as if it’s Billy sparing everyone else), and the Hargrove boy collapses into the dirt in a heap. He doesn’t get back up: sleeps, rage dissipated from his inert state.
Silence is all that is left, except from the harsh and ragged breaths from the stunned audience.
“Holy shit,” Max said under her breath, then louder: “Holy shit. One more stunt like this, and we all might get institutionalized.”
Jonathan blows air from his cheeks, shakes his head and looks at Max. “Sorry about your brother.”
“Don’t be - I’m glad he’s dealt with.”
“No, I meant I’m sorry that you have to deal with him.” He manages a sad smile. “It’s his Dad, isn’t it?”
Max draws her shoulders closer inward and hugs her elbows, averting eye-contact, but is abruptly reminded that Jonathan’s gone through a similar thing. And so has Steve, now that she thinks about it. And Dustin, to an extent. And maybe Mike, if she had low standards for who constitutes a shitty father. Maybe that’s where all of this starts: shitty fathers.
“He was insane.” Unexpectedly, it’s Will who speaks: situated at the rear of the room, shaking his head in amazement. “What does he have against Steve?”
“It’s the Beholder,” Dustin says, stepping up to the doorway of the cabin. He stares down impassively at Billy’s motionless body, slumped in the strewn brown leaves whilst a trail of scarlet sticks in his hair. “It’s his footsoldier.”
“It’s getting stronger,” Max says, but doesn’t say anything else. She understands where Steve was coming from, hiding his secret from everyone else; there’s something strangely exposing about admitting the Beholder had a grip on you, especially now they’d figured out it was something to do with bad experiences of the past. She had absolutely no desire to open up old wounds to a bunch of dorks and her friend’s-sister’s-boyfriend. Instead, she looks to Jonathan and tries to lighten the situation. “At least Billy’s gonna avoid you in the school halls from now on, huh?”
Despite the gravity and weight of the situation, Jonathan manages a casual shrug and a small smile. “Let’s be honest, this isn’t what I expected when this whole monster-hunting thing started. But - every day tells you something new about yourself. Turns out, pulling a gun out on the local school bully isn’t something I’m squeamish about.”
“You stay here, like we agreed! ”
“I gotta go in there with you! I–”
“I took you so you can be out getaway in case things go wrong - you be that!”
“I’m not just gonna… sit out here–!”
Whilst Joyce and Hopper’s dulcet tones rang out behind him, Steve had approached the gap in the chain-link fence surrounding the lab. Other kids had apparently been breaking into the lab, eager for some urban exploration (after all, who could resist a top-secret government lab?), and had been kind enough to leave behind the evidence of a gap to crawl through. From behind the fence, the hulking shadow of the lab built in the shape of a plus sign seemed to tower above him. With one hand gripped against the handle of his trusted bat, and a partially empty bottle of whiskey poking out of the pocket of his jeans.
“You okay?” El says, slowly approaching Steve from the side. Her hand slips into his free one; it’s small and thin, particularly compared against Steve’s own.
“Mhm,” Steve replies quietly. It’s a complete lie, of course, but it’s not for the reasons he’d usually expect. He’s afraid, but not for himself; for the others. Hasn’t he dragged enough people into this mess?
El shifts next to him, pulling her weight from one foot onto the next, then says in a voice that’s so quiet that it’s almost imperceptible. “I saw… the bad man again. In the Inbetween.”
“Right.” Steve turns his gaze the opposite direction from El, the back of his neck growing warm.
El blinks back up at him, her gaze sympathetic and unwavering. “It was your Dad… wasn’t it?”
Steve nods, his throat constricting. He can’t think about it. His own father had denied him absolution. There’s a sickening longing, even despite everything, to grasp for his father’s attention, even though the arduous years (especially of recent) have proven that it was futile. He’s still a fucking child.
“It’s okay,” El continues quietly, her voice hushed. “My Papa hurt me too.”
Steve whips his head round like a bullet, resisting the instinct to jerk his hand out of her own. “Wh - What…? Hop–?!”
“No, not Hop.” Her doleful brown eyes grow dark and dense from an apparently onslaught of stormy memories. “ Papa. From there.”
Her other hand points towards the lab before flopping back to her side. Beside her, Steve’s gaze moves towards the shadow mass of the lab that haunts the forests of Hawkins. From what Steve had gathered from Dustin’s incessant ramblings, El very rarely spoke about the lab at all. She had rarely illuminated the rest of the kids upon what they did to her there, and she’d never spoken about her treatment (or mistreatment, more suitably). It was an unspoken rule to just not bring it up around her at all. But he’d never heard of this other person, this ‘Papa’, who Steve guessed to be the head of the operation. He could only imagine what kind of a person that must have been. What kind of a manipulative snake that man was.
“Well, you have a better dad now,” Steve replies awkwardly, unsure of what else might comfort her, but it seems to work: the ghost of a smile appears on El’s expression, and she gives a nod of agreement.
Something gentle nudges him in the back of his shoulder and he steps sideways to allow Hopper to pass, who is moving towards the gap in the fence. The Chief has his police uniform on, with his cool-ass stetson straight from some spaghetti western and state-supplied jacket with the stripes and stars sown in. A representative of the law, breaking the law. Hopper’s fingers curl around the wiring and lifts up the break in the fence, exposing the hole so they could squeeze in.
Eleven ducks through first; the smallest of the group, she didn’t even need to get onto her knees. Nancy almost doesn’t need to either, although it’s a little awkward to climb through with the shotgun clasped tightly in her palms. Steve takes a final glance back towards the car: Joyce Byers is leaning against the front, already smoking, apparently under Hopper’s orders to stay where she was. Seeing Steve watching her, she tearfully grimaced and nodded. That indication spoke a thousand and one meanings. Good luck. Stay safe. You can do this. Don’t do anything dangerous. Come home safe. I love you.
“Shake a leg, Harrington,” Hopper’s rough voice commands him, and Steve doesn’t spare a second look. He had to crawl his way through the gap in the fence, dragging his bat in after him, and sprung up onto his feet to join the others. Hopper came through last, throwing his own shotgun through the gap first before army-crawling his way through the gap.
“You all stay behind me,” Hopper says in a low voice, crawling back onto his feet and taking the lead on the troop towards the lab. “Do as I say. I tell you to run, you run. I tell you to hide, you hide.”
“Tell you to shit, you shit,” Steve muttered under his breath; it was on instinct, a witty comment to lighten the mood. Beside him, Nancy muffled a snort of laughter with a cough.
Hopper wasn’t so receptive and turned around on his heel, staring Steve down between the eyes. “You wanna go sit back in the car?”
Steve swallows. “No, sir.”
“This isn’t a basketball game.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
He’s genuine, and it seems to at least satisfy Hopper, who scowls, turns and continues to march up towards the lab. Eleven’s hot on his tail; meanwhile, Nancy gently nudges Steve and gives him a small smile that makes his heart twist.
“I thought that was funny,” she said quietly.
Steve grins weakly. “Me too.”
The pair follow Hopper and Eleven up towards the hulking building of the lab, now decommissioned and eerily silent. With the lab being so close to his house, Steve had grown accustomed to the odd noises that he would hear from his bedroom, or - even more rarely so - the suddenly scintillating lights in the night that would then plunge into absolute darkness. It was odd when the lab had been abandoned completely. He was used to seeing the sleek and polished cars driving up his street in the mornings and evenings, from the mysterious men and women who were occupied within those walls. Now it stood in the backwoods of Hawkins, terrifying and lonely, with nothing left remaining but it's haunted reputation.
Eleven’s usually silent, but right now she looks afraid of what’s waiting inside the lab. As soon as Steve looks at her expression though, she twists it into her usual focused expression, just as the locks on the door go snap as Hopper cuts the chain.
The inside of the lab is cold, with whispers of the late winter wind seeping and echoing within the hallways. With his weapon raised, Hopper moves in first; Eleven goes in second, fists flexing, whilst Steve and Nancy arm themselves and move in after them, a couple of paces behind. A silence sinks within the abandoned laboratory, with nothing but the wind’s sighs and their echoed footsteps resounding within the building. Hopper’s torchlight flickers on; Steve blinks in surprise and another dazzling gleam lights up beside him.
“Where’d you get that?” Steve asks, keeping his voice low but not able to keep the surprise out of his tone.
Nancy’s eyebrows furrow and she shrugs. “Uh… the Chief’s glove compartment?”
“I didn’t know we had those. I’d have grabbed one.”
“Well, you can just stick close, okay?” Nancy says with a smile. They fall silent for a brief moment, following Hopper down the stretching hallways, until Nancy speaks again. “Never thought I’d come to this place, you know.”
“Yeah,” Steve replies, tilting his spiked bat side-to-side gently. “Me too. I had my fill at the front entrance, honestly. Being inside just gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
“I just can’t help but think of all that’s happened here, you know?” Nancy says, bringing her voice down into a whisper. “Everything that happened, you know - it always just leads back to here. Eleven, Will disappearing, the Demogorgon… all just ‘cause some horrible men thought it was okay to play gods in our lives.”
There’s a shaky bitterness and resentment in her voice that makes Steve’s heartburn in agony, and he risks a true glance towards his ex-girlfriend. Soft, light blue eyes are looking back at him. Suddenly, it just makes sense… why they didn’t work out. Why maybe they never could have. Nancy simply burns brighter than Steve Harrington ever could. The last thing Nancy could ever do was give into anything. She would die fighting on any hill she chose to stand on. Steve couldn’t compare to that.
“We’ll get rid of this thing.” Nancy’s voice draws him out of his thoughts; she’s seen the worry in his eyes, and she thinks it’s because of the Beholder. “We will.”
“I’d say you don’t have to do this,” Steve says with a weak smile. “But I know better than to even try.”
“You know me.”
“Never change, Nancy Wheeler.”
Nancy grins brilliantly, and Steve’s heart twitches. He can’t help it – maybe he should ask –
Hopper turns and pushes open a door, putting out a hand to indicate for everybody else to stop. Steve almost collides into El’s back as she stops suddenly in place, and the trio wait in a tense silence for Hopper to sweep the room – a stairwell, with a flight of stairs curling and descending into the darkness below, as if it’s some walkway into hell itself. Finally, he silently indicates for the group to follow. Hopper leads them down the staircase, his torch light sweeping around each corner. Steve and Nancy don’t say anything else to each other, aside from sharing the occasional cautious glance; their eyes are trained on Hopper and Eleven, who have both taken this walk before.
The atmosphere changes when they leave the stairwell. The next set of hallways they enter are dimmed in a hue of green and yellow, with the two flashlights acting as stray fractures of blue. Worst of all… worst of all doesn’t even cut it – there’s slivers of ash-like flakes floating in the air, making his lungs and his throat suddenly restrict. He knows, whatever is ahead, he won’t like; he will never un-become it.
“Stay sharp,” Hopper orders quietly, as if speaking to comrades of a platoon, and slowly advances forward. The others follow; El’s fingers are flexing, and Nancy’s got her finger on the trigger. Steve lowers the bat, almost dragging it against the floor, ready to swipe against any demodog that might come charging through those doors…
Hopper stops, and his weapon lowers slightly. Eleven moves forward to join him, her jaw setting tight. Nancy goes forward, too, without hesitation, and Steve joins them. Through the smashed glass of what used to be a barrier that protected the lab, they see it: a black and red scar against the concrete wall, pulsating like a slow heartbeat.
“Smaller than last time,” El says quietly.
“This is small?” Steve croaks. The only Gate that he’s ever seen was in the trunk of a tree, and that was probably only a few feet in height. This was huge. This was bigger than this damn house. This… he opened this…
They take the elevator down. It swings in the darkness, metal grinding against each other. Eleven holds Hopper’s hand, and Steve has to resist reaching out for Nancy’s - yet they still stand next to each other, shoulder-to-shoulder, their gaze fixed on the wound in the wall. The beam of scarlet reflects off their pale faces, ash hovering around them like snowflakes frozen in time.
It deposits them on the ground, deep into the bowels of hell. The light of the Gate bathes them in scarlet, and Steve swears that the Gate’s abnormal pulsating has quickened in pace – or is it just him? Hopper steps out first and advances forward, without hesitating. Steve gets it; if they back down now, if they let a stray sliver of doubt infect their mind, then they would turn back. They just have to keep moving forward.
Eleven breaks through the mold and the blackness of the Gate’s with her powers, tearing open a gap that could be wide enough for them to easily step through. Hopper goes in first, disappearing in the black and the red, with El close behind him.
“God, I never thought I’d have to go back,” Nancy says quietly, and there’s a hint of desperation in her tone. She wants to go back, deep down, but Nancy doesn’t give in.
Steve puts a foot in—
It goes black.
Has the Gate swallowed him?
No. He’s here, again. In the Void. The Inbetween. The gap between the Upside-Down and reality. He’s sideways…
The Beholder is watching him. Everytime that Steve’s looked at it, he’s been filled with an incomprehensible level of fear so intense that it distorted the very visage of the Beholder. It had been a terrible, incoherent image of blood and hell. But it’s not happening this time; it’s powers are focused on something else instead to bother terrifying him. And Steve sees it for the first time, in its true form: rough in its skin, scarred and pieced together with clumps of meat that’s been knitted, with a blinded eye staring back at him.
We are at the end of the world. The end of this world. And it may be born renew again; the never-ending cycle of lifelessness and destruction.
(No - No, fuck this. Screw you, I’m killing you.)
We are the only ones who listen. We are the only ones who understand. We are scratching in that head of yours, feeling our way through every nervous system. Yours is emptier than we expected. Devoid, a dust-barren wasteland of material concerns. Not like the others. Him, with the nervous disposition and internal conflicts; her, with the sharp eye and sharper mind, refined like the magnum opus of the whittler with wood.
(How the – what the fuck? How long have you been in our heads for?! Who the hell are you?!)
A black hole of guilt, just like James Hopper. Just like Maxine Mayfield. You remind us of the younger one, the one who wields our infection like a coat. We resided in his head and in his lungs, too; wherever there was space. William Byers. We felt his isolation. Palpable. Imperceptible to the naked eye.
(No, wait - you’re not the Beholder, you’re the Mind Flayer?)
We were both there. We were w a t c h i n g. All of you are the same, both carrying the weight of condemning yourselves, refusing to absolve yourself. And guilt. So much g u i l t.
(We were right, we were fucking right. Guilt, that’s what you’re after - that’s why you pick on us.)
As a plant feeds on the light energy to sustain itself, we will prey on your fears and your sorrows. Your guilt.
(What do you even want from us? You want to destroy the world, right?)
We want to create it. Replicate it. Perfect it. It will be messianic. Ethereal. Crown of the World. Yours will be the negation of being. Ours is representative of what should be. The world that will end your world ought to be more beautiful.
(Screw you, man, you think we’re gonna just let you do that?!)
Screw your courage to a sticking place. You are something else, Steven Harrington. You wield your courage like a weapon. You bear your guilt in your stomach. You’re a fuck-up.
(Screw you, man, you don’t know shit!)
We are in your temporal lobe, your frontal lobe, your parietal lobe. We know ‘shit’. You fucked up. All your friends, your family - you failed them.
(Fuck you! I haven’t! I - I haven’t!)
4,784,011,621. 4.7 billion people living and breathing and existing on your planet, and you’ve failed every single one of them. You’ve really fucked up.
(I-I can come back from this. I can - I can –)
This act is wearing thin. You are not coming back! Stumbling and fighting, pretending that it’s your disfigured version of protection . Tripping over your clumsily disguised trauma and pretending everything is okay; flipping between whether or not you have deserved your ‘redemption’ or not. It is exhausting.
(You don’t know anything about me!)
I know everything about you. I’m living inside you. All of you. James Hopper thinks you have post-traumatic stress disorder; he thinks you are haunted by memories of your past in this war against us. But this whole time you have been fighting this war, you have never shaken from fear. You have kept your hand steady. Even right now, you are fighting like a dog. He has got it all wrong, but you subconsciously agreed with him.
(Shut up shut up shut up–)
You are not afraid of the war, Steven Harrington, you missed it. All that action, that adventure, that sense of belonging. Knowing that, for the first time in your shitty little life, you are doing the right thing.
(How the hell… how the hell do you know all of this…?)
A whole year you pretended to be normal; you pretended that everything was okay. You would not look Nancy Wheeler in the eyes whenever she brought it up. But you kept a nail-bat in your trunk that entire time, because you didn’t want it to be over. But now that it is happening - you really fucked up, Stevie-boy. You fell for our trap the first time, and now you have done it again. Led exactly who we needed straight into hell.
(What…?)
Michael Wheeler. He figured it out first. We were never after you. And now you are here, we don’t even need to kill you. We can dispose of you in a different way. And we know you’ll be drawn to it, like moths to a flame.
Steve Harrington, the party’s over. It’s time to w a k e u p.
It’s May 1985. Today is a beautiful day in Hawkins, Indiana.
End of the world? What are you talking about? It’s just an exam, Steve Harrington… nothing’s wrong at all.
Nothing is wrong.
Notes:
Author's Research No.8: 1985
This story takes place in Spring of 1985. I didn't put a specific date, but it's pretty much very early spring, since it's still cold. And boy, do our characters have a year ahead.
It's 1985. Here's how your finances are. The average price for a new car is $9,005.00. A gallon of gas is $1.09. A movie ticket is $2.75 and the average salary is $22,100.00. It's also a dollar for 5 pounds of potatoes, if you were wondering.
Here's some exciting things that took place in 1985:
- The world Live Aid concert would take place in July 1985, raising money to help the famine relief in Ethiopia. Notable acts included Bob Dylan, Cher, David Bowie, Duran Duran, Elton John, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Queen and U2.
- Coca-Cola introduces 'New Coke' in April 1985, the worst marketing blunder in history. They created a sweeter version that had been preferred in taste tests, but fans of the brand protested the decision in an overwhelmingly negative response.
- The east of the U.S. would face the worst winter yet, as a result of a polar vortex moving further south than what was usually observed.
- Route 66 is removed from the United States Highway System. The iconic road spanned a total of 2,448 miles in length, running from Chicago, Illinois to Santa Monica, California. It soon fell into disrepair as it was replaced by the Interstate system.
- The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) was released in North American markets during October of 1985. With Nintendo’s U.S. release of their breakout game “Super Mario Bros.” later that year, the NES soon caught on in the U.S. and was a popular item distributed throughout stores across the country in 1986.
Chapter 9: The Fire
Summary:
Well, it's gonna be another beautiful summer's day out there in Indiana, we're looking at 70s out there with some highs of 80 in the midday - clear skies and sunshine all week, so make sure you enjoy it!
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
"You've sacrificed your entire life to be who you are today. Was it worth it?"
-- Richard Bach
Hawkins, Indiana / May 1985 / What? The world never ended. What are you talking about?
God. It’s such a beautiful day today.
The azure cloudless blue sweeps above the suburban rooftops of Hawkins, and the white sun beats down on the endless swath of white house and picket fences. There’s a joyful atmosphere that seems to leak from every corner of the town. Summer is coming, and the weather’s giving all signals that it’s gonna be a good one.
Steve leans back in the seat of his car - his prized BMW 735i, upgraded since ‘83 to include a facelift, a 4-speed automatic transmission and electrically adjustable power seats. His father had bought it for him on his eighteenth in April as a congratulations for getting into college. A full-ride sports scholarship into Penn. The speakers of his shiny new ride blast out his music: an upbeat rock tune from across the Atlantic—
Better stop dreaming of the quiet life
'Cause it's the one we'll never know…
Tapping one finger against the driver’s wheel and bouncing his head to the song, his other hand flicks his shades up from his eyes and onto his forehead, grinning a lop-sided beam as the front door of the house he was parked in burst open. Nancy Wheeler comes almost toppling out, her soft and freshly-shampooed curls beautifully combed, clutching a pile of textbooks across her chest. She threw a hasty farewell to her parents within the threshold of the house, and ran for Steve’s car. As soon as she flung herself into the passenger seat, she throws her arms over Steve’s shoulders and plants a kiss on his cheek.
“Hey, you,” Nancy beams, depositing her books into the foothold.
“Hey yourself,” Steve grins, turning the knob of the stereo so the music’s volume dimmed slightly. “Nice day today, huh?”
“Yeah. Real warm. We still have time to kill until we gotta get going.”
“Today’s going to be a good day,” Steve remarks, leaning back in his seat and throwing his hands behind his head, as though he were sunbathing on a deck chair. “So… a little birdie told me that someone got a promotion.” He breaks into a huge grin as Nancy glows with pride. “Chief of the school paper, and you’re not even a senior yet!”
“Yeah,” Nancy replies, her eyes sparkling. “It’s exciting. Lots of responsibilities, but I love the challenge. Plus, it means Barb gets to move up too. She’s helping manage all the field reporters.”
Steve provides a lop-sided grin. “Just make sure you tell the sports photographers to get my best side.”
“Every side is your best side,” Nancy teases, and Steve couldn’t resist swooping in to kiss her on the lips.
And stop apologizing for the things you've never done
'Cause time is short and life is cruel but it's up to us to change…
In the corner of his eye, something else grabs Steve’s attention. Three kids come trooping out of the front door, quietly mumbling amongst themselves. Two of them pick up the discarded bikes left on the lawn, whilst the other moves to extract his from the garage. They’re close-knit, almost impenetrable; like nobody else could join their circle, even if they tried.
“Henderson looks down,” Steve remarks without thinking.
Nancy twists to look outside the window, watching her younger brother and her friends for a second, then looks back to Steve again with a strange look. “Yeah, I guess - I didn’t know you two were friends?”
Steve blinks, and a queer feeling overwhelms him for a second. A spreading fear, like something was really fucking wrong – but it passes quickly, and Steve’s reasoning comes back. Why did he say that? He’s not friends with Dustin Henderson. He’s his girlfriend’s brother’s friend. Why would he be? That would be weird, right?
“I was thinking…” Nancy’s sweet voice calls him back from his daydreaming; he blinks and pulls the world back into focus. “This weekend – you, me, Tommy and Carol could–?”
“Mm…” Steve bites the bottom of his lip and hums, shaking his head. “I dunno, Nance - they’re fun and all, but I thought we could do something with just us two. My old man’s taking me to a baseball game on Saturday in Indianapolis, but Sunday we could, like… see a movie…?”
His voice trails off again as he watches the group of young boys circle several feet away from his car and make their way down the road, pushing their bikes, walking shoulder-to-shoulder, and quietly talking amongst each other. There’s a somber aura around them that’s uncharacteristic about them… but is he meant to care? He didn’t mean that in a sarcastic manner, he was genuinely wondering - was he meant to care? Because it felt like…
Nancy’s reply to his previous question is drowned out by the music as it picks up, upbeat and loud as a reflection of the hot and sunny day blessing their little town—
Bah-bah-bah-ba-baba-bah
Bah-bah-bah-ba-baba-bah, oh…
(He’s taken back in time. He sits in the front seat of his car, rolling through the countryside pastures and backyard woods of Hawkins, slush caught in the grooves of his car tires. Two kids are in the backseat – one with a mane of dark curls tamed in vain with a baseball cap, and the other’s home-cut hair ruffles in the wind as he truly smiles for the first time in weeks – and Steve’s glad, after the talk they had about dealing with ‘passively suicidal’ thoughts, and the three of them bellow the songs lyrics out at the top of their lungs–)
Steve grins and bobs his head along, singing along under his breath. The action seems to enthrall Nancy, who beams at him with bright eyes.
“I didn’t know you liked this song,” she says.
“You kidding me?” Steve grins. “Of course I do. It’s one of Will’s favorites, he loves singing to this bit – well, you know, Jonathan showed it to him first, and then Will–”
“Will?” Confusion laces Nancy’s tone again, and she shakes her head, nonplussed. “Steve, is that your idea of a weird joke? You know that Will is…”
She trails off, solemn and shaken.
Steve’s relaxed and contented grin drains. That feeling comes back to him again: a sickening, repulsive apprehension that something wasn’t right. It wasn’t grief, or that kind of shock where news of someone’s death rattles you from the inside and out – it was just this unnatural fear that screams: but that’s not right.
“Will’s… what?” Steve asks confusedly, apprehensive to hear the answer.
Nancy looks at him weirdly again, raised eyebrows and everything. “Steve.” He doesn’t like that tone; that tone that it’s obvious, but Nancy’s too nice to chastise him for it. “You know this, don’t you? He died a year and a half ago. They found his body in the lake. And Jonathan Byers…”
His name draws some upset into her, and she shakes her head and looks away. All she can manage, suddenly, is: “Their poor mom…”
“But…”
It doesn’t make sense. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s different from the confusion he draws in a complicated class or something; in that position, he knows he’s just being a bit slow. Here, it’s like it just is impossible. That there’s a contradiction somewhere that he’d meant to know about to dispute these facts.
“Steve, what’s going on with you?” Nancy looks back. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I…”
His reply is automatic, but it trails off nonetheless. Gears were turning in the back of his head. That wasn’t right at all. Will Byers, Jonathan Byers, they weren’t dead – not at all, he was just with them, wasn’t he…? And Will, they never found him in the lake, he was… he was somewhere else… and come to think about it, Dustin Henderson - they were friends, weren’t they? He watched Star Wars with him like a million times, even though Steve still kept mixing up the plot all the time and couldn’t remember the name of the little teddy bear things. And what about Max, where was she in all of this? Where was Eleven? Where was he?
“... Steve?”
He and Nancy broke up, and she got with Jonathan Byers. He and Dustin Henderson are like brothers. It’s meant to be the middle of winter. Max Mayfield was meant to be part of the boy’s entourage. Steve didn’t get a nice car from his father this year, or get into Penn. He wasn’t a success story. And Will Byers – they found a fake body in the lake at Sattler’s Quarry, because Will Byers was actually in–
“The Upside Down.”
It slams back into him, all the memories paired with the electrifying realization, and Steve’s insides feel as though they’ve been flooded with freezing ocean water. This was a trick, an illusion to distract him. And all this time, Nancy Wheeler stares at him in bewilderment.
Steve realizes he has a choice.
He could stay here. He could tell Nancy it was nothing, he was just spacing out, and he’d hit the acceleration of his shiny upgraded BMW and hit the road. They’d study at school for their finals today, then hang out after school in his car and make out. They’ll ditch Tommy H and Carol this weekend and go see a movie. He'll graduate next month, and have a killer summer playing sports with Tommy H and making out with Nancy in between, and next fall he’d bid farewell to this boring town and make his way to Pennsylvania and study there. His dad would be proud of him, and his mother would be happy and sober. And Steve would marry Nancy Wheeler and make her Nancy Harrington, and they’d have five or six little Harringtons, and one day they’d road trip around the US in a huge van. He could drive away right now and make it happen. Everything he wanted, everything he needed - the perfect life. What would happen to his ‘real body’? Who knows – die, maybe? But it didn’t matter. The Beholder was giving him mercy, in a way. It wasn’t tormenting him anymore, it was giving him what he’d always wanted. Success, unconditional love, and the ability to accept that.
But he worked for years to figure out what the right thing to do was, and he realized what that was when he took up a bat spiked with nails in the house of some guy who hated him, and faced down a monster that he didn’t know the name of without a second thought. He couldn't just erase that so he could live the perfect life he wanted, because he hadn’t worked for that. He gave all of that up because it was the right thing to do.
So Steve turns, and he kisses Nancy on the lips, and holds it. Her body is close to his, radiating warmth. There’s warm exhalations against the side of his mouth, her tender soul moving through his. And he holds it until the warmth inside of her fills him full of life and courage, then let's go.
“I love you, Nancy Wheeler. It’s okay.”
Steve gets out of the car and he doesn’t look back. He approaches the trunk of his BMW and cracks it open. The interior isn’t clean and empty, like this universe would have willed, but a mess of junk and spare jackets and sports gear, and he spies exactly what he needs. From within, he extracts his prize: the nail-bat that he’s come to treasure so deeply. It’s not just his defense against his fears, but it’s the weapon that protects others too.
As his world dissolves into an inky black, taking away the life he had dreamed of having, Steve turns to confront the giant blind eye that glares back at him with utmost loathing.
Without flinching, Steve lifts up the bat.
“Batter up, motherfucker.”
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / Saving The World, One More Time
A wretched gasp rips out from Steve’s throat, struggling for air as if he’s just surfaced from the depths of an ocean, blinded by the darkness and the brief burst of agony in his brain. Steve vaguely registers his knees hitting the ground; his palms fall forward to catch him, and they find dirt and ooze underneath.
What the fuck was that–?
That wasn’t just a dream, was it? It felt so, so real. It was another one of the Beholder’s dreams, surely, like the one he had at the very start of all this in Hopper’s cabin… except it had fashioned a world for him, one that was painful to leave.
And now you are here, we don’t even need to kill you. We can dispose of you in a different way. That’s what it had said, right? It was just planning to trap him—
A struggling cry reaches his ears, and Steve finally zones in back into the real world.
They are in the Upside-Down, no doubt about it: they had stepped out from one side of the world and into the other, moved from one decommissioned lab to another. Except this one was beyond decommissioned. This was the very heart of the Upside-Down, where it’s corruption grew and festered the most like a cancer. Vines wrapped around every crevice of the lab’s bowels, fierce enough that the concrete walls were festering and crumbling to dust. That unnatural ash hovered in the air, practically in a tangle of clouds and a miasma of death and decay. Steve’s lungs wheeze from a mixture of the toxic atmosphere, and the paralyzing realization that he’s back in the worst fucking place in existence.
Around him, Steve sees his companions, and they seem to still be stuck in a strange state of being that Steve was likely under the spell of too. Nancy’s on her knees, one hand gently touching the ground, unfocused and confused, as if she’s recovering from a marathon; Hopper is doubled-over, shaking as though overcome with a cold fever, head in his hands and vaguely murmuring a string of inaudible nonsense.
“Nance?” Steve gasps, still trying to draw a reasonable amount of air into his lungs. His hands reach out to grab her shoulder, roughly shaking her, but she doesn’t even seem to acknowledge him. He looks to the Chief, who responds in the exact same manner.
Another yell catches his attention; the source, Eleven. Apparently the only one not to have been affected by the dark spell, she’s on her feet with a trembling outstretched hand in front of her, fingers contracting as if she’s trying to squeeze the monster to death. And the creature itself looks exactly as Steve saw it, now unearthed in it’s true form – a blind, horrible behemoth with a gaping maw and mass of gore and blood.
“El,” Steve rasps out. Eleven spares a quick glance behind her to look at him, and a glimpse of relief falls over her otherwise fuming and concerned expression. There’s already two trails of blood running down both nostrils, curling over her lips and in between her gritted teeth.
“I’m holding it back,” El says, and she staggers back to join Steve. He understands what she means; the Beholder is contorting in such a way that it looks as though it’s trying to push itself against a barrier.
“El, I can’t wake the others.” There’s real panic lacing his voice. “What do we – what can I do? I need them, we–”
“It’s like me,” El murmurs; her face is ashen-gray, and eyes set on the Beholder.
“Yeah, it’s - like - supernatural, it’s put a spell on–”
“No…” Eleven shakes her head. There’s a streak of genuine terror on her face that deeply rattles Steve. “Do you see? Not spells. Powers.”
“What…?”
“Powers l-like mine…”
Like the hand of a clock ticking towards its final minute, Steve’s head ticks towards the horrifying conclusion.
He had wondered, sometimes, about the origins of this monster and its sheer complexity. The demogorgon and the demodogs were two birds of a feather: man-eating and flesh-rendering monsters with no goal other than to mindlessly tear apart whatever living and breathing creature stood in front of it. But the Beholder was different; it had some kind of consciousness , a form of superior intelligence. When it had spoken to him before he has ‘passed out’, he had assumed that it was some kind of mad reincarnation of the Mind Flayer, or more likely it’s puppet – and maybe it was true, but the Mind Flayer didn’t have ‘spells’, it didn’t have abilities in the way Eleven did…
In the way Eleven did.
“Fucking hell,” Steve rasps, a sickening queasiness suddenly contorting in his stomach. A sweeping realization had just come over him; the Beholder wasn’t a monster, it was a consciousness – and it’s body, the form it was taking, it was… made of things. Made of bodies. Made of people, people it was absorbing, absorbing everything that came with it – people like Eleven–
“Sisters,” Eleven breathes. Steve notices with a heartbreaking tug in his chest that there are tears brewing in the corners of her eyes. She’s grieving. “Brothers.”
The urge to vomit becomes almost difficult to suppress; yet the realization is enough to draw a fiery courage in him that pulls him off his knees and onto his feet. The end of his bat grips firmly in his hand, and Steve can hardly stop himself from shaking – not from fear, from rage.
This was injustice. The Beholder had taken the bodies of children, and used it against the world they hailed from, the world that had wronged them…
He glances at El; for some reason, he can’t bring himself to launch an assault if El stands down. But she wasn’t going to. In fact, there’s a terrifying and dark rage brewing like a storm behind her dark eyes. Glowering with seething hatred, Eleven charges a few steps forward and throws her hand forward with a strangled scream behind clenched teeth.
The body of the Beholder tightens, and an inhuman screech of pain rattles from within itself. Eleven’s anger is infectious, and suddenly Steve’s seized with reckless abandon. He bellows out and charges, flinging his bat and striking the Beholder with as much might and force that he can muster. As the Beholder snarls in fury and draws out one of its tendrils to lash out, Eleven’s fingers contort once again to hold it in place.
BANG. The sharp crack of a heavy shotgun rips and echoes throughout the chamber, and the darkness is briefly illuminated by a burst of fiery orange. Nancy Wheeler, drawn out from her stunned state, rises to her feet. Strands of her fall over her face, but her angry eyes are locked on nothing but the Beholder; it’s as if it never had a grip on her in the first place. She cocks the shotgun and rips out another blast, creating a second puncture within its form.
Steve’s still wailing on the bastard, striking it with a savage ferocity. Still locked in place by Eleven’s resolute psychic grip, it can only thrash out a few tendrils in a desperate attempt to fend off its enemies. A few of them strike Steve, battering him and leaving bleeding welts, but he battles through the pain—
(Billy Hargrove licks his teeth as he staggers towards his car, as though he were a drunken fool, the top of his head bleeds copious amounts of blood. Somehow, he falls into the driver’s seat with the headlights still gazing into the now vacant cabin, and rests his forehead on the driving wheel. He can’t bring himself to be angry at Max for pointing a gun at him, and he isn’t even furious that Basketcase Byers knocked him cold. He’s still the fucking king of Hawkins, right? Right?)
Another blast of yellowish-orange light ruptures through the darkness. Hopper has broken out the spell, and he pumps the monster with as much lead as his weapon can muster. The Beholder’s grip on reality is weakening.
(Joyce Byer’s grip is iron-tight against the car wheel, her head resting against the top but eyes fixed on the Hawkins Lab right ahead. That fucking building has been haunting the last few years of her life. Everything from Will disappearing, arresting her because she was becoming too close to the truth, experimenting on the bowels of her town, killing Bob… almost killing her, and Hopper, and Mike, and Will one too many times… her patience is wearing thin. Screw Hopper for making her wait. Her hand finds the handle of the car door).
Steve doesn’t know where the beginning of his hand is and the end of his bat is anymore. All he knows is that this thing needs to die.
(Marie Harrington is on her sixth glass of wine for the evening, the television blaring a chat show that she’s hardly even paying attention to anymore, savoring the buzz in her mind that distracts her from the agony of living. With every glass she pours, she’s lifting a little bit of the weight of the world and passing it off to her only son. She doesn’t even realize it.)
“Can you kill it?!” Hopper’s bellow echoes in the depths of the Upside-Down, bouncing off the surfaces and resounding eerily for longer than it should have. “El – can you—?!”
“Need… more time…” El breathes, her chest pumping up and down; there’s blood leaking from her ears now, rolling down her earlobes and leaving beads of it dripping onto the ground. “It’s hard…”
(Richard Harrington’s foot presses on glass, and he looks down. There’s a photo of a family, almost unrecognizable now, sitting together and smiling. Richard’s got a button-up shirt on, but no tie: a family-man and a hard-worker, all-in-one. Marie is sober, as she was when she wasn’t drinking alcohol back then, with her face refreshed and her smile whole. Steve, barely on the cusp of true teenagehood, grins up at the camera, bursting with life and mischief. Richard feels a pang of regret in his chest.)
One of the tendrils blitzes forward, long and outstretched, and the tip of it pierces into Nancy’s clavicle. It’s only by a few inches, but the agony of it is evident in Nancy's expression. Combat forgotten, her back hunches and her hand instinctively crawls to clutch where it’s stabbed into her flesh and bone. A burst of fury engulfs Steve, who lets out a pained and feral roar and strikes his bat straight into the tendril. It’s strong enough to cleave it in two.
(Jonathan’s foot presses on the acceleration as he speeds behind Nancy Wheeler’s cat, racing down the strips of concrete making up Hawkin’s forests. They could not stay in the cabin anymore; if Billy Hargrove had turned up, who’s to say another one of the Beholder’s lackeys/Steve’s enemies might next? He could not compromise Hopper further. With the shadows of the pine trees blitzing past the windows, the kids crammed unceremoniously in his car – Dustin, Lucas, Max, Mike, and Will in the passenger seat – egg him on to ignore the speed limit and get a move on. If they make it on time, maybe they could find his mother and go in together…)
The sight of Hopper’s shotgun lines up with the eyeball of the Beholder, who is gouged with wounds and holes, bleeding a waterfall of thick, blackish blood – if you could even call what’s coming out blood… as Steve backs away with his bat in hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, the eye turns on Hopper –
It’s eye, usually whiteish with the contracts faded like its blind, shifts. It turns blue. A stunning cerulean, glinting with life. Just like Sara’s.
His finger trembles on the trigger.
(Will Byers has been making mixtapes; he’s got one for almost everyone now. He finished making Steve’s a few days ago. He just wants to give it to him.)
Another burst of orange lights up the darkness, but it’s not temporary; it stays, the light flickering and dancing against the blackened, shadowed walls of the Upside-Down. A guttural cry of rage and anguish drowns out all sounds as Eleven throws out her other hand, and the Beholder’s entire body begins to shudder and scream like a cornered animal.
(Dustin Henderson sits in the back of Jonathan’s car, wedged tightly between Mike and Lucas, one leg bouncing up and down at an uneven pace and shaking from head-to-toe. He doesn’t even know if Steve is alive or not. They could all be dead. They could be dead, and Dustin wouldn’t even be able to tell Steve how much he looks up to him, how much he’s sorry, how much he really, really cares, even though they’re two different birds of a feather. All he can do is hope that Steve knows.)
The flash of orange was not from Hopper’s shotgun, nor Nancy’s. The end of Steve’s bat is wrapped in rayon fabric. He knows, from one of Dustin’s many wild experiments, it’s very fucking flammable - which is why he brought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a lighter, too.
His bat, his lifeline and his defense against the world, bursts alight with a rageful flame that illuminates his equally furious expression.
(Jonathan’s car pulls up in front of the lab, just as Joyce slams the door of Hopper’s truck and makes a few paces towards the broken gap in the fence. As the kids in the car practically fall out in a rush, chaos ensues: Jonathan’s trying to simultaneously prevent his mother from rushing into the lab as well as yell at the younger kids to stay the fuck in the car. In the chaos, Dustin slips under Jonathan’s arm and ducks under the chain-link fence.)
As the body of the Beholder begins to creak and pulsate, it’s body bubbling and on the cusp of imploding in on itself, Steve’s bat strikes. Flames blitz in front of his eyes, streaking across the contorted flesh. The Beholder screams – and at the same time, the Upside-Down screams too. He can hear Hopper bellowing behind him, probably ordering to back off, but it’s drowned out by Eleven’s rageful screams of despair and fury.
He continues his assault, even as another one of the Beholder’s weaponised tendrils tries to lash out in a desperate attempt to throw Steve off. He deflects it, again, and again, and with each hit the flames spits out its ashes. Flames spread across the flesh and muscle of the Beholder, which writhes and screeches in wild agony; more fire and cinders catapult into the bowels of the lab, catching the vines on fire.
He’d forgotten how flammable those bastards were. But he hadn’t forgotten the smell of smoke and decay – it was the tunnels, all over again, but this wasn’t a stupid flashback. This was now–
“I never frickin’ backed down!!” Steve yells, and he knows under the frenzy of bullets and fire and screaming that the only thing that can hear him is his foe. “Remember that!”
El’s screaming reaches its loudest yet. From the corner of his eye, he sees her. Tears flow down her cheeks, and she’s raging with grief. The veins in her flesh have turned dark, like a corruption is seeping into her. Steve’s grip on the handle of his weapon holds tight. This was the home run…
(Steve Harrington tried out baseball, before he tried out basketball, in middle school. He remembers the tryouts – he remembers lining up on the plate, hands gripping onto a bat that was heavier than the one at home, wiggling his butt as he got into position, sizing up the swinger…
“Go get ‘em, son!”
His father’s encouragement spurred him on as Timothy Burness threw the ball and Steve raised the bat, knowing it was going to hit perfectly.)
Steve’s flaming bat strikes the rearing monstrosity in front of him as it tries, desperately, hopelessly, to strike for one last kill—
We failed. This isn’t fair. We were meant to be victorious. We were trying to help you.
(You’re not helping. Our world is fine, we don’t need yours.)
Your world is burning, and you are the ones doing it. With your burning air. You’re destroying yourselves. We are in unanimous agreement that you are going to destroy us all. You’re going to wipe everything out, and return our worlds to dust. We were trying to save the worlds.
(Better than two Upside-Downs. I’d rather see both worlds die than have our world turn into a shithole like this!)
...
That is not your call to make, Steven Harrington.
Steve’s bat shatters. The brunt of the impact, with the combination of his fire that had been wearing down the old wood, breaks the thing into jagged chunks. At the same time, the monster contorts and swells, then detonates. He expects it to burst into chunks of meat and gore, but it doesn’t. Instead, it disintegrates into flaming ash. It gathers and spirals into the air, like rising smoke, leaving nothing but a ghostly, hallowed wail behind.
As soon as it’s over, El is the first to drop to her knees; Steve follows next only seconds later. Clutching his ribs and exhaling deep, wretched breaths, it takes a few moments until a heavy weight uncurls itself and lifts off his shoulders. He has no idea if it’s just relief, or the weight of the Beholder’s influence coming off him, but he feels freer than he has in a long time.
“Steve…” Nancy’s soft, concerned voice catches up to him, crouching down beside him. One arm grabs his shoulder, and the other pressing her palm down hard on the bloody wound clavicle. “We gotta get out of here. The place is on fire, and El needs to close the Gate–”
“Your bat.” Steve shakes his head numbly, staring at the fragments of cindered wood. “I broke your bat.”
“It stopped being mine months ago. Let’s go.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll buy you a new one.”
“Steve, come on!”
She practically has to drag him a few paces until he snaps out of his stupor. Leaving one final and fleeting glance towards the remains of his prized weapon, he leaves behind his defense against his fears. They stagger out of the thinning gap, feeling the spores and the ash lingering in their lungs, back into the real world – into the lab bathed in scarlet light. Steve can still smell the smoke and the death on him as he turns to watch El, still shaking from grief and tears, face the Gate for a second time.
There’s no presence of the Mind Flayer to watch or fight back this time. Maybe it knew it lost this battle. Her hand outstretched one final time, and the gap between their reality slowly seeps shut. The scarlet light that seeps through it’s narrow slit thins, and the four of them – Eleven, Jim Hopper, Nancy Wheeler and Steve Harrington - watch until the doorway between the worlds closes and the red light is extinguished from the room.
Notes:
Author's Research No.9: Alternative Dimensions
There are several variants and ideas of different dimensions existing around our own. An alternative universe is an interesting idea: it's a self-contained plane of existence, but exists as a variant of our own whilst co-existing together. Plato, and his philosphical systems of Platoism, derived the idea that parallel universes usually exist of an 'upper' reality being perfect, whilst the 'lower' reality is an imperfect shadow.
Our first assumption is that our world would be the upper reality, and the lower reality - the Upside-Down - is the imperfect shadow. But what if the Beholder believes in the vice versa? What if it believes that its world is perfection, and it is doing us a favour by spreading that perfection into the next world?
One of the first science-fiction examples of alternate dimensions is from the 1934 story 'Sideways In Time', in which travelling along a latitude results in time travel and travelling along a longitude is akin to travelling to other realities -- although that's kind of simplfying it...
Another interesting thing that I realised was that, during Season 1, Mr Clarke doesn't talk about parallel or alternate dimensions at first. Instead, he says:
"You guys have been thinking about Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation, haven’t you?”Which begs the question... is the venn-diagram theory I posed obselete? Is there more parallel dimensions out there? Maybe the Duffer Brothers will expand on that in their 'expanded universe'... or, should I say, expanded universes?
Chapter 10: The Worlds Apart
Summary:
When the end-of-the-world days were over – the days of monsters in flames, of dogs and flames in the tunnels, of blind creatures in nightmares – the group, the peculiar mismatch of individuals from this little town in Indiana, would see the sunrise, watch the rest of Hawkins wake up and continue to exist. The feeling was difficult to describe, but the best Steve could compare it with was when you’d finish all your exams in the early summer. That whirlwind of your life being nothing but studying and revising and stupid flashcards for weeks and weeks, then suddenly it was all done. You would feel odd waking up the next day and not having to study. All you could think was – what now?
Notes:
This chapter includes explicit reference to suicidal ideation and suicide attempt(s), please proceed with caution!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“...at times, the greatest courage of all is to live.”
- David-Clement Davies, The Sight
Hawkins, Indiana / March 1985 / One Week After Saving The World (Again)
“Mmm,” Dr Sam Owens says as he bites down into his burger; some of the cheese and the sauce slips out from the other end, landing onto his plate with a wet and greasy slap. “You know, these burgers are great. Really great. Almost makes visiting here worthwhile. No offense, of course.”
“Little taken,” Hopper replies almost stiffly, though the corner of his mouth twitches slightly, and he takes another sip of his black coffee.
Across the now early Spring blooming town of Hawkins, there is a fast-food joint renowned as Hawkin’s greasiest burgers. Sitting within one of the booths is an ex-government doctor and a town’s chief police officer, both convening under the guise of being two old friends having a catch-up. In reality, they’re soldiers of a transdimensional war, sitting on the town’s stage and both pretending that they know their lines.
“So - the Harrington kid…” Hopper presses quietly, clearly wanting to skip the small talk and dive straight into business.
Sam Owens, who’s entire military career revolves around adhering to the people who don’t have time for small talk, wipes his mouth with a napkin and nods casually. “Yeah. Yeah, results all came back, no abnormalities whatsoever. If there was some kind of presence, it’s gone. Of course, we’re not gonna close the book on anything yet – so, you know, keep me up to date for a few months, just a telephone call every week, let me know if there’s any changes.”
“Anything I should be looking for?”
“Odd behavioral patterns, really. Anything that draws similarities to what young Will went through last year.” Owens bites down into his burger again, licking his lips and apparently refraining from letting out another satisfied noise. “Of course, you’ll have to avoid mistaking any of that with the, er… psychological symptoms we discussed.”
“Sure,” Hopper replies quietly, turning his gaze back to his coffee. He never thought that he’d have to one day find the guts to sit down with Steve Harrington, son of Dick fucking Harrington, and inform him that he might be suffering from traumatic stress…
“How’s sweet Jane doing?” Owens asks casually, politely, and Hopper’s gaze flickers upward to analyze the doctor before him. Hopper couldn’t say that he didn’t trust Owens – after all, he was half the reason why El was safe and away from monsters like Brenner – but he always got a bit stiff when Owens would check up on her.
“Took on a bit of a fever after everything,” Hopper replies smoothly, sipping on his coffee and staring out the window, even though the fog is obscuring the glass. “But she got through it.”
“She’s a tough cookie. But her immune system is not great.”
“Yeah, never seen a kid catch so many colds at once in the winter. Dunno how she survived out on her own for so long.”
Owen’s smile rises, his eyes genuinely lit up. “Yeah, she’s an oddity in more ways than one. And - And how’s her education going? I mean, last I heard from her, she was still only picking up a few words—”
“Oh yeah, she’s doing good.” Hopper rests his coffee back on the table, half-wishing he’d ordered some food after all; Sam Owens really likes to dodge around the issues sometimes. “Reading and spelling isn’t amazing, but she’s good at her math. Definitely enjoys learning.”
“Good. Good, that’s very good. Good that she likes it, too.”
A silence settles between them as Owens continues to chow down on his food, and Hopper sits in his booth contemplating everything over his coffee. After this, he’s going back home to an empty house – since El is off marching around Hawkins suburbs with the rest of the kids today, which is fine, it’s safe enough now – where he’ll put his feet up, crack open a beer and watch some reruns of M*A*S*H …
“There’s, ah – something else I should let you know…” Owens drops his burger onto his plate, only a couple mouthfuls of being finished, but apparently has decided this bit of information was worth giving it up for. By the look on his face, which has turned deadly serious and intense, this was a bit of news he had been wrestling with. “I need to find out… how many of you have been exposed to the, er… the toxins of the other dimension? You’ve seen that, y’know… that kind of spore stuff that floats around…”
Seen it? Hopper’s breathed that stuff. “I mean, a fair lot of ‘em have…”
“I need numbers, names. Jim, how many of you have been in there without protective equipment? And I mean protective, like the suits they gave you when you went to look for Will. Using a makeshift doesn’t…”
He trails off, and Hopper’s brow furrows as he does a headcount. Who had been in the Upside-Down? Who had been in the tunnels, who had been exposed? And the answer to it gives an anxious twist in his stomach.
“All of us,” Hopper replies quietly.
Owens looks incredulous. “ All of you…?”
“Apart from Byers – Jonathan Byers, he’s the only one. Me, Joyce, El, Will – all the kids, the teens…”
Hopper’s sentence comes to a standstill as he sees Owen’s reaction. The man sighs, pressing his hands against his closed eyelids, apparently trying to compose himself. Hopper can only guess that he’d been expecting less than half of them, not this many…
“There’s a reason why they wore those suits, y’know.”
“What’s gonna happen?” Hopper asks in a low voice. When Owens doesn’t respond straight away, Hopper leans in with his brow furrowed and presses, again, in a more dangerous tone. “ Sam , what’s going to–?”
“We’ve been doing testing,” Owens continues, not making eye-contact. “And - And, well, we can only really measure the short-term effects at the moment – this isn’t something we’ve dealt with before, there’s no comparisons we can make – but inhaling those toxins, they’re from a different world, we don’t fully know what it’s capable of–”
“Just tell me.”
Owens sighs again and sits up, rubbing a hand over his clean-shaven jaw. His fingers are trembling. “We’re looking at a lot of long-term impacts on the immune system and the body, specifically within the respiratory system but others, too. Pneumoconiosis, lung cancer, heart disease, pulmonary fibrosis – maybe even fungal diseases. And we haven’t even taken into account any foreign diseases – stuff that isn’t meant to exist in our world.”
“And - And you know this, for sure…?” Hopper tries to keep his composure, but he can practically feel the weight of his lungs against his ribcage, as if his breath is rattling between the bones. “The kids, they’re… how long until this all sets in, what about - about life expectancy…?”
He almost fucking chokes on the last part.
Owens continues quietly, soberly. “Well, again – it’s hard to say for certain, like I say, we have no solid idea of what to expect – but depending on factors like amount of exposure, whether it was in the alternate dimension or here in Hawkins, if you’ve had a direct inhalation of the spores, your immune system and your health… if we take the kids, for instance, we’re probably looking at, ah… 40s, maybe, we’ll see some signs. Probably a lot earlier for Will, maybe Jane.”
Hopper’s palm grinds into his forehead, feeling the sweat rub into his skin, and closes his eyes. He can’t bear to think of these children building up their lives right now, saving the world, only to eventually perish from painful diseases because of the right things they did…
“What about me?” He asks quietly. “Me, and Joyce?”
Owen’s tired and gray expression falls into condolence and, surprisingly, a sense of grief. “You, myself and Mrs. Byers, I… well. I’d give us about a decade before it starts showing up. Maybe… maybe less for us two, considering… well, considering everything.”
Hopper knew his days were limited. His military career, his days in Vietnam, the things he’d done and seen, the way he’d abused his body ever since – he’d been surprised to make it this far. Yet there was something agonizing about realizing it, about knowing that in maybe ten years time he’d be sick beyond sick, or quite possibly dead. Who would look after El? Who could even take care of her? Joyce would, surely, but how long would it be until Joyce would die, too?
“It’s not fair, I know,” Owens continues morosely. “You all risked your lives to save this town, to save this world… this isn’t what you deserve.”
No. It’s not what they deserve. It’s not like they were expecting credit or accolades, a thank-you from President-fucking-Reagan and a shiny medal, but at the very least they didn’t deserve to have their own lives cut short by potential disease and sickness. Sure, he could accept it eventually, with enough time and enough booze – but how could he tell these kids? How could he tell Joyce? How could he look them in the eyes and tell them there’s no point in building up their lives – no point in saving their money, working hard to achieve their dreams, getting married and starting families, because they might not live to even see it?
He couldn’t.
“Can I leave you to… to inform them?” Sam asks. He’s not touching his burger.
Hopper raises his coffee mug to his mouth, drinking it in, and his eyes make contact with Sam’s. He puts it down on the table, grimaces and nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll tell them in… y’know, when the time is right.”
It’s not a difficult lie to tell, but it hurts nonetheless.
When the end-of-the-world days were over – the days of monsters in flames, of dogs and flames in the tunnels, of blind creatures in nightmares – the group, the peculiar mismatch of individuals from this little town in Indiana, would see the sunrise, watch the rest of Hawkins wake up and continue to exist. The feeling was difficult to describe, but the best Steve could compare it with was when you’d finish all your exams in the early summer. That whirlwind of your life being nothing but studying and revising and stupid flashcards for weeks and weeks, then suddenly it was all done. You would feel odd waking up the next day and not having to study. All you could think was – what now?
Nothing changes after those days, not with the rest of the world. Not with the world outside of Steve’s world. In fact, things only seemed to go further downhill for him. Of course he wasn’t going to just get away with running away from home after that reprehensible argument with his father, especially after all the things he said.
All he gathered from his father’s deafening and foul-mouthed bellowing was that nothing had changed. The Harrington parents were not going to divorce: his mother wasn’t going to flee and chase her dreams in Chicago, his father wasn’t going to pack his suitcase and walk, good riddance, into the sunset and never show his fucking face again. They had a reputation to keep up, after all; divorce papers weren’t presentable. ‘Any press is good press’ wasn’t a benefit to the Harrington’s, they strived for nothing but decency and respect.
However, Steve was only let out of house arrest after six days because his father vanished overnight, leaving only a message that came out of his mother’s mouth—
“Quarterly reports meeting,” she says, even though the quarter doesn’t end for another three weeks; it’s 10am, and she’s on her third glass of wine. “Had to fly out to New York.”
It’s early morning, and the soft sunlight streaming through the tall windows of their home light up their house in an almost heavenly radiance. With the winter dead and spring being born anew, there was a fresh, newborn beauty in Hawkins that Steve’s learning to appreciate. The Harrington house is quiet without his father. Not silent and isolated, like when he was alone, but strangely peaceful… but still empty. Like there were mournful spirits living between the walls.
“Right,” Steve replies, not sorry at all, and not looking directly at his mother but instead towards the floor.
Dick Harrington not being around means that there’s no longer rules imposed on Steve anymore. It’s not like his mother ever has the energy to enforce them. He turns to leave the dining hall, intent on leaving Marie Harrington to her wine and contemplation so he can finally go to see Dustin, but she speaks before he can go.
“You shouldn’t have said those things to your father, you know.”
Steve turns around. There’s a glassy look in his mother’s eyes, but it’s not a vague sense of detachment that she usually has when drunk. They’re glassy from the tears springing in the corners of her eyes; it makes them shine in a way they haven’t in years.
“He deserved it,” Steve replies, low and bitter.
“Your father had a plan for himself for his entire life,” she continues. She doesn’t just look sober all of a sudden, she sounds it too. “He knew what he was doing after high school. He used the money he earnt working to go to business school, then open up his own, then expanded until he made it to New York. Until we made it to New York. He was always planning for the both of us. I was never factored out of the equation. But you, Steve… you just seem too scared to figure out what to do.”
Steve swallows a harsh and burning lump choking the middle of his throat. It feels like it’s burning; any words that he wants to reply with are incinerated before they can even reach the tip of his tongue.
“So is this what you’re going to do again?” Marie asks, softly and quietly; it feels like she’s begging. “Run away like a child and just… hope all your problems go away on their own?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steve replies roughly, trying to toughen himself up, make himself appear as though he’s not being wounded. “Where is all this coming from, Mom? Are you seriously still trying to defend him after everything–?”
She stands up suddenly, leaving her glass of wine behind, and turns her back on him. The morning sunlight exudes from the glass and casts a glow on his mother that makes her look beautiful. But her expression isn’t. She wants an answer.
Steve breathes in and sighs, as if relenting. “I’m gonna be better.”
She looks at him, mournfully. “...What does that mean, Steve?”
He opens his mouth to reply, and his jaw wobbles and his breath hitches in his chest. He doesn’t know why he even went to speak, because there’s no words that could justify himself to her. There’s a sudden understanding about the situation he’s in that he gets, and with that comes a mournful, deeper understanding of how Nancy felt, too. Knowing what he knows about the Upside Down, about the Hawkins’ Lab, about the world and all the worlds surrounding it… it’s like they’d never really left the Upside-Down. He, and the others, were worlds apart from everyone else on Earth. He was worlds apart from his mother and from his father. He couldn’t tell them he was going to be better, he could not show them any proof that he could be. To them, he had no reason to be better.
So he turns, picks up his bag waiting by the front door, takes his car keys from the counter, and walks out of the front door. As he moves to close the door shut on his way out, he hears his mother unscrew the cap of the wine bottle.
Steve’s BMW pulls up in front of the Byer’s house, his flashy car making Joyce Byer’s Ford Pinto look like a goddamn rust bucket, and he sees her already on the porch. She’s got a cigarette between her teeth, halfway through smoking, but her tired expression seems to light up somewhat upon Steve’s arrival. After sliding out of the front seat, he raises an arm in greeting and begins to stroll over.
“Heard the munchkins are in the neck of the woods today,” he says. “Castle Byers?”
“Ah…” She leans back and cranes her neck, looking outward into the woods. “It’s, uh… I don’t know the way without showing you, er…”
“I can take him.” Jonathan Byers pops out of the front door, zipping up his rugged blue denim jacket and giving Steve a surprisingly warm grimace. “I was about to go out there, anyway.”
“Thanks,” Steve replies with a small twitch of a smile, and nods to Joyce. “Watch the cigarettes, Mrs. Byers.”
“Have you quit yet?” Joyce replies, with a teasing grin as Jonathan treads down the porch and slopes off towards the woods. Steve grins back, pats the top pocket of his jacket, and taps his nose. Joyce grins again as Steve pivots on his heel and jogs a little to catch up with Jonathan.
The pair boys stuff their hands into their pockets – spring is truly here, but it’s not warmed up enough yet – and tread through the forest in silence for a while, with nothing but their asynchronous heavy breaths for company.
“Nancy isn’t with you today?” Steve asks.
Jonathan shakes his head. “Study group.”
Steve nods. For the first time, he’s not sorry that she isn’t around. Ever since his odd vision conducted by the Beholder, performing in his one-act tragedy play, the heartbreak of losing Nancy was palpable; it was as if they’d broken up all over again. That memory of kissing a fake Nancy, a ‘dream’ Nancy, had felt like it was a memory and not a dream – and in that moment, he’d forgotten how much he actually missed her. Seeing her now would just be awkward – but more than anything, it would just hurt. Although he reasons, this time, he might be able to move on. There’s a feeling that in a few months time, he might be able to spend a day without her lingering in his mind.
Jonathan awkwardly clears his throat. “You haven’t seen her at all since… you know…?”
“I haven’t seen anyone, man,” Steve replies with a shake of his head. He moves his quiff from out of his eyes with a hand, the inbetweens of his fingers breaking through his brown locks. “How much has she told you?”
“Uh… just about everything, I guess. About how El basically collapsed after she closed the Gate, and how Nancy almost did too. She’s not even worried about the injury she got – she was just, like, shaken up about that… weird vision thing.”
Steve hadn’t told anybody about his own vision. Not a fucking soul. He’d abbreviated that fake ‘world’ that the Beholder created to just ‘it tried to trick us’, and that was it. There was no way he was going to divulge anybody about what he experienced, about who was part of his world and who wasn’t. In fact, he’d judged himself harshly on it – was he really so irredeemable that the Beholder’s vision of Steve’s ‘perfect world’ did not include Will and Jonathan Byers even being alive? Or was it just because it wasn’t really Steve’s perfect world, but the Beholder’s instead?
Finally, Jonathan breaks the silence. “So, er – Will told me that your Dad put you on, like, house arrest or something.”
“Sort of,” Steve replies quietly.
“Bad argument?”
“Yeah. Kinda my bad.”
“What’d you say?” Jonathan asks, then quickly adds: “I mean – you know, if you… if you don’t…”
“That he should divorce my Mom and get the fuck out of our lives, basically.”
Jonathan lets out a low whistle; out of the corner of his eye, Steve spots Jonathan cast a sideways glance to Steve to see his reaction. Seeing Steve’s constrained yet self-satisfied smirk is enough to make Jonathan grin a little bit too. “Wow. Bet he loved that.”
“Yeah, totally. He’d probably have beat my back blue if I hadn’t booked it.” Steve looks over to Jonathan and sees the grin sliding off his face, making way for surprise and concern, and Steve almost stumbles over himself trying to repair the damage. “That was – it was a dumb joke, sorry…”
“Did he hit you?” Jonathan asks quickly, his soft yet piercing gaze looking at – no, through – Steve, who internally cowers from the look.
Steve’s learnt that Jonathan hates liars. He’s a brutally honest person who doesn’t keep a layer of white lies or deceit around anything; he’ll call you a dick to your face. So Steve shrugs lamely and says, “Yeah. But, like… I can fight back, you know?”
Jonathan seems to struggle with himself for a moment, then thickly murmurs: “My Dad hit me too. And Mom… a few times.”
“Shit. Sorry.”
“Yeah, well…” Jonathan shrugs and looks away, casting his melancholic gaze back to the ground, where they always are naturally drawn to. “Maybe I could have done more to protect Mom, I don’t know. But I’m just grateful that it was never Will. If that shithead ever tried to lay a finger on Will…”
He cracks his neck, his nose curling in disgust, and Steve is violently reminded why nobody should fuck with Jonathan Byers.
“Totally,” Steve replies, really unsure of how to exactly support Jonathan here, so instead he slightly shifts the direction of their conversation. “So you’ve been, like, looking after Will?”
“I’ve been looking out for Will since he was born, dude.”
“Cool. Do you wanna join my club?”
Jonathan shoots him a very puzzled look, as if Steve was talking in a cryptic language. “Huh?”
“I call it the Babysitter’s Club. Members: me. No t-shirts yet, sorry.”
For what feels like the first time since they were kids playing in the copper river, Jonathan actually gives Steve a bright and brilliant grin. He almost didn't look like the surly and aloof Jonathan he was used to. “Yeah. Yeah, alright. Babysitter’s Club.”
He raises his hand, and Steve slaps with furious precision; he never leaves a high-five hanging.
They stalk in between the trees and the rays of the early noon sunlight streaming through the first leaves of the season until they finally come across a small group of kids surrounding a makeshift fort seemingly placed in the very middle of the woods. There’s six of them around the fort, shifting large branches and half-hazardly hurling leaves and ivy onto the top of it. There’s signs made out of wooden planks decorating the top of it – not words of warning, but words of friendly greetings: CASTLE BYERS. HOME OF WILL THE WISE. ALL FRIENDS WELCOME.
Dustin Henderson, stupid trucker’s cap atop his dark brown curls as usual, is the first to spot them. Halfway through repainting the faded words of ALL FRIENDS WELCOME (using a wobbly log as a stepstool), he looks over, grins and lets out a raucous yell of greeting. Second to notice, before his call, is Eleven. Her growing hair has a few leaves and a twig poking out of it, and there’s a spot of dirt on her nose, but her cozy jumper (which Steve is fairly certain belongs to Mike) makes her look really cute in this weather. She pauses in her fortification of the fort’s walls, and waves enthusiastically with a toothy grin, which Steve returns. The others – Lucas and Max, who are the ones trying to improve the cover of the fort with the leaves, and Mike and Will, who are both sharing the duty of attempting to scrub a soaked and filthy American flag clean – give a smile or quick wave of greeting and get back to their tasks.
“Dickhead Harrington finally let you out, then?” Dustin smiles as the two teenage boys approach.
“He’s run off to New York on some job, so he can’t stop me,” Steve replies with a shrug, his gaze steadily watching Jonathan slope off towards Mike and Will. He turns “What’s this, then? A tree house?”
“Tree houses are in the trees,” Max says from afar, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “This is a tree fort, cause it’s on the ground.”
“‘Scuse me, then,” Steve grins, raising his eyebrows. He turns his attention back to the makeshift fort, looking it up and down as if he’s a critic judging an art show. “You guys built this?”
“Just Will and Jonathan,” Lucas replies, collecting some of the damp and dead leaves on the ground and throwing it onto the top of the fort. “But we’re all allowed in. Friends only.”
“Magic spell wards off bad people,” Eleven pipes up, and by the sound of her tone, she probably believes that to be true.
“Cool,” Steve replies. “So you guys are, like – rebuilding it?”
“Kind of,” comes Will’s quiet response, yet he sounds genuinely happy (for once). “The winter rots the wood and a lot of it falls apart, so we come every spring to fortify it again.”
There’s a hint in the tone of his voice, and within that rare sparkle in his eyes that was robbed from him, that says this means something to him. The idea of the four boys – now two girls and two teenagers, apparently – trooping out at the beginning of the spring’s season to rebuild his second home from winter’s damage, means more than just the world to him.
The kids get back to work, apparently over the joy of seeing Steve again, but someone else grabs his attention. Lucas, who had been kicked out of the position of roof reinforcement by Max, appears by his side.
“Hey, Steve, now that you’re out of house jail–”
“-- the hell, does everyone know that I was grounded or what?”
“-- you can come teach me some basketball stuff this weekend, right?”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, why not?” Steve replies with a beam, before he can stop to think about it. It’s his first instinct to make these kids happy, and seeing Lucas’s face light up like a Christmas tree is enough for him. “Have you and Max had a falling out?” He adds, casually looking over towards the ginger haired girl, who looks more irritable than usual – if that was possible.
Lucas casts a fleeting glance and grimaces. “We, er – kinda broke up.”
Steve gapes. “No way!”
“Yeah, way. I mean, she broke up with me a month ago, too – but then we got back together… so, like, maybe it’s just a matter of time…”
Ah, young love.
Nobody questions why Steve hangs around all day to help a bunch of middle-schoolers (and Jonathan Byers) fortify a tree fort in the middle of the woods. If only Tommy Hagan and Carol Perkins could see him now. He could clearly picture their expressions, noses curled up with disgust and eyebrows raised in shock, smirks curdling into scoffs, relishing in the privilege of being the ones to tell the entire school. You know Steve Harrington, right? The only friends he’s got are Creepy Byers and a bunch of middle school kids. Weird, right?
Yeah, weird, so what?
He was happy about it.
… Yeah. Now he gets Jonathan. He’s understanding people a lot more often.
The hours pass on, and the sunshine rises and falls in the sky. Castle Byers is fortified with more than enough logs and branches, and they celebrate by attempting to create a little fire by the logs. Jonathan shows them the proper structures on how to make a good campfire by putting twigs in a teepee shape with dried dead leaves for kindling, explaining that it burns fast but is hot and easy to make. They skip the idea of trying to find some flint to light it up, and Steve uses his lighter. They even have time to sneak off and share a cigarette together (ignoring Dustin’s pointed, accusatory looks) before they put the fire out because Eleven starts to try to juggle fire twigs with her mind.
The sunlight is hitting their backs as they troop back to the Byer’s house, coats wrapped tight around their torsos to maintain some warmth. Steve lingers at the rear, stuck in his own thoughts, and is surprised when none other than Mike Wheeler falls back and walks in line with him.
“Hey, look,” Mike says awkwardly, running a hand through his jet-black curls and his nape. “You know, I never - I never really said sorry about the stuff I said last week. About, like…”
“For using El to protect your sister’s ex-boyfriend?” Steve suggests with a tight grimace.
“Well, you’re our friend more than - than that now,” Mike responds – for the first time, it doesn’t feel like he’s had to force it out of his throat. “But it was stupid of me to imply that. I’m glad she protected you. I was just terrified, you know – like, I’d lost El once—”
“For a year,” Steve nods in understanding. “No, yeah, I get it. That would suck. And then not really being able to see El – like, I can tell you guys mean a lot to each other. More than just a normal… relationship thing.”
Mike’s high cheekbones flush red and he looks away stubbornly, and mumbles thickly: “Sure. Yeah. I just… I’m sorry, man.”
“Don’t sweat it.”
“And I’m sorry I treat you like shit sometimes, too.”
“I treat you gremlins like shit all the time.”
“Yeah, but I give you real shit,” Mike insists earnestly, apparently desperate to resolve himself. “I just – you know, you upset Nance, and you were a douche, you were the kind of person I hated the most. Big, douche, jock bullies who pick on… weird people like - like us.” His dark eyes scan over the heads of his friends in front of them, referring to every single one of those weirdos. “And that puts me on the defensive. But Dustin vouches for you, dude. He’s obsessed with you, it’s kind of annoying, but I see why. You’re cool now.”
“I’m always cool,” Steve responds with a twitch of a smirk, brushing off his shoulder.
Mike scoffs and rolls his eyes, trying to suppress an affectionate grin. Steve grins back, gently nudging Mike in the ribs. There’s something brotherly in those gestures.
They let the Byer’s go back into the house with a wave, and Steve turns to the rest of the group, ready to let them all come barrelling into his car – but to his surprise, they’re all on bikes – except El, who unsurprisingly is squashed on the back of Mike’s seat with her thin arms wrapped around his waist.
“You guys aren’t bumming a ride?” Steve says in surprise. “Color me surprised.”
“We biked here, we can’t just leave ‘em on the lawn,” Lucas replies.
“I can,” Dustin says suddenly, dropping his bike on the grass and practically skipping towards the car. “My throne awaits – my throne being, y’know, the front passenger seat.”
“You can’t just leave your bike on the grass,” Lucas says, again.
“Yeah I can. I’m going to Will’s tomorrow anyway to lend him X-Men #191, he’s gonna go wild over this one. I’ll just grab it then.”
“You just can’t be fucked to bike,” Steve grins. Dustin throws him an innocent smile, shrugs and takes his seat in the front like he was always meant to belong there. Shaking his head, Steve raises an arm to the rest of the group who start to rev their engines (or begin to pedal, more accurately) and calls out: “Stay safe, bastards!”
“Bye Steve!”
“See you later, Steve!”
“Come arcade with us tomorrow!”
“On your life,” Steve says, getting into his car. The keys rattle and the engine purrs to life, and the car moves out of the driveway and onto the main road. As they pass the kids on the road, he blares his horn; Dustin throws his head out of the window, waving merrily as they blaze past their own grins and swear words, and the BMW hurtles into Hawkin’s late evening.
“Spit it out then,” Steve says as Dustin pulls his head out of the car window. “Any reason why you wanted to come in the car, or did you actually not want the exercise?”
“I just wanted to talk with you,” Dustin replies softly, and Steve’s slightly taken aback by the strange seriousness in his tone. “Y’know, we haven’t really… we haven’t talked about what happened last week.”
Right… of course. Everyone wants to talk about what happened last week, especially since Steve was the centerpiece of it all. In fact, it’d been a bit odd that the kids weren’t clamoring for answers – and it occurs suddenly to Steve that maybe they were being sensitive about it, for once. In fact, Hopper or Mrs. Byers had probably told them to keep their traps shut about it.
“What’s there to say?” Steve shrugs, twiddling the steering wheel with one arm and fiddling with his radio’s dial with the other hand. “We went to the lab, we kicked its ass, we closed the gate. For real this time.”
“El says you saw the Beholder,” Dustin pressed. “In it’s real form.”
Yeah. He’s being sensitive, and Hopper 100% told him to. Because the ‘normal’ Dustin would be brutally direct with this entire conversation, and would have reworded it to: “Eleven said the Beholder might’ve been made out of dead children.”
Fuck. Steve’s hands feel oddly clammy and sweaty all of a sudden, and he’s having a harder time focusing on the road.
“Yeah, and it was…” He pauses, searching for a word to properly describe how it makes his stomach churn and twist with nausea, how it feels like it’s an otherworldly, vile act that seemed inconceivable to even exist. “Evil. It was fucking evil.”
“But it’s gone now.”
“Yeah.”
“And it’s not coming back?”
“It’s not coming back.”
Not to Hawkins, anyway.
The car breezes along the cracked roads of Hawkin’s forests and finally enters civilization, away from the haunted woods encircling the town like a trap. Rows of the suburban houses within Dustin’s neighborhood fill up the land by the sidewalk, each building more uninspired than the last, yet clamored with attempts to brandish a little bit of individuality on the front lawns – through early spring flowers, or shitty little garden gnomes, or signs jammed into the dirt with faces of their favorite politician emblazoned on the front. 2886 Piney Wood Drive, sequestered atop a hill amongst the thin birch trees, seemed the same as ever: peacefully existing, the house unbeknown to what it’s only son had been put through.
“Did your Mom ever find out about the hole Dart put in the storm cellar?” Steve asks suddenly, pulling up by the side of the road as Dustin busies himself with grabbing his stuff.
“No, she doesn’t go down there,” Dustin replies casually. “Although if she ever did, what the hell am I supposed to say?”
“Tell her it was a mole. A giant mole.”
“Moles don’t make holes that big, and not through brick walls.”
“Uh, yeah, giant moles do.”
Dustin laughs with a big toothy grin, then spots Steve’s bemused expression, and his face falls. “Wait. You’re not serious.”
“Of course not,” Steve says, maybe a bit too quickly. “Hey, Henderson. Gimme a hug.”
Steve doesn’t give Dustin a chance to protest or refuse, although the younger boy makes no attempt to. Steve awkwardly cranes his arm around and brings Dustin in, pulling him into a bit of an awkward but still nice enough one-armed hug. Dustin leans in close, leaning his brown curls against Steve’s chest, apparently enjoying the hug for a moment, before falling back into his usual self. “That’s out of character for you. Are you alright?”
Steve just shrugs, letting Dustin go with a somber smile. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Just making sure.” Dustin opens up the car door and swings a leg over– “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“My hat!”
Oh, crap. Steve didn’t even notice that Dustin’s stupid trucker cat, red and white and blue, maybe his Dad’s, was missing. It was so often perched on top of his curls that it always felt uncanny when it wasn’t there. How could Steve have completely missed it?
“Don’t stress, dude, it can’t have gone missing,” Steve says, although Dustin’s irritated expression indicates that yes, that hat is very much missing right now. “Did you leave it at Castle Byers?”
“No. Maybe a tree branch knocked it off on the way back.”
“Did you leave it somewhere in the car?” Steve asks, twisting around towards the back seats and scanning around the footwell behind him for any sign.
Dustin just heaves himself out of the car with a grimace. “Maybe. I dunno. It’s fine, I’ll just check around Will’s place tomorrow. And if you find it in your car, you can bring it to me when we’re going to the arcade.”
“I never agreed to go arcade,” Steve says.
“Yeah, you did.” Dustin grins and closes the car door. “See you tomorrow!”
“Twerp,” Steve says quietly, with an affectionate smile, but it slowly drains as he watches Dustin troop towards his house. He stays watching him all the way along, the same way he does when watching Max get back home – up the driveway, to the front door that’s left unlocked, knocks his trainers against the side of the door to get rid of the mud, and shuts it, blocking off the warm, orange interior light from within.
Steve sat there for a moment in the quiet, the cold wind rattling against the glass windows of his car, staring mutely up towards the little house on the hill. Finally, he moves into action, almost half-consciously, his mind still in a haze of his own thoughts. The keys go into the ignition, the engine rumbles to life.
(As his car pulls away, Dustin’s head pokes out of the window facing the street, but the BMW is already racing down the Hawkin’s lanes and into the night.)
Steve’s foot presses hard onto the pedal, his eyes lingering for a moment on the speedometer.
- 30.
His fingers clasp around the steering wheel tightly, his reddish-purple hued knuckles practically glowing. Sweat forms on his palms, sticking his skin onto the wheel. He can feel every inch of himself, and it’s almost painful.
- 40.
A flash of images rattle in his mind, as if it’s itching to spill out and flicker in front of his eyelids. A pajama-clad Eleven screaming in the void. The tungsten amber of a lamp flickering above a radio. The roar of a gunshot piercing through the night air and goring straight into Billy Hargrove’s jaw. The shriek of a car’s horn echoing through a cabin like a warning cry. Glass shattered on the floor, littered around the absent, glazed smiles of a family photo. The bared teeth of a demodog lashed around his flesh. The rupture of fire bursting through the flesh of a demogorgon. The pulsing red of the Gate. The feeling of grief, of leaving a world intended for him, turning his back on everything he ever needed –
- 50.
The BMW races down along the road, slowly and gradually picking up speed. Away from civilization, away from the picket fences and iron gates and uninspired white suburban homes with their nuclear families – out back towards those forests with monsters and ghosts. Out toward the steep bank on the edge of town, just by the ‘Welcome to Hawkins’ signpost, which Steve knows dips into mud and grass for about five feet until it meets the forest with tree trunks thick enough to penetrate through metal. Metal going at a high enough speed.
The darkness grows heavier around the white beams of the car. Steve’s hands tremble on the steering wheel for a moment, then slowly slide away and rest as his sides. His foot is still on the accelerator; it’s in fate’s hands now.
- 60.
Dustin Henderson once told Steve that just before you die, your entire life flashes before your eyes. Steve used to think it was total bull – he’d almost died like twenty times, off-handedly, and he’d never had anything stupid like that happen. He’s seen something terrifying instead, like the jaws of a demogorgon or the eye of the Beholder.
But he saw it this time. This time, he saw his life flash. The first thing he noticed was that it didn’t last a second, like the way Dustin told him it does, but instead seemed to last for a near eternity. For Steve, it was lying on his back and gazing at the stars with Dustin whilst they talked about their place in the universe. It was skipping rocks across the lake and watching the ripples spread across the surface whilst a younger Jonathan Byers grinned on by his side. It was swinging a nail-embedded wooden bat at the screeching face of monsters. It was his dad telling him he was proud of him for the first time Steve could remember. It was Nancy’s soft beam and bright eyes as she gazed toward him, shyly, and moved to meet their lips.
He saw his mother holding a wine glass. El’s sheepish grin. The bumpy texture of a basketball under his fingertips. The loneliness of a vacant mansion. The taste of strawberry slushies and pizza lacking in grease. He saw – he saw –
- 70.
Just as the welcome sign draws closer, Steve sees a flash of white and blue and red in the corner of his vision. And his foot slams on the brakes.
Reclined on the chair, with his legs up and a bag half-full of somewhat now chewy, buttered popcorn from the movie theater, Jim Hopper is fast asleep. His head lolls back, deep and long snores emanating from his half-open mouth. One hand is still buried in the bag, fingers spread between a generous handful of snacks; the other is clutched a little more tightly around the open can of beer resting precariously on the arm of his recliner. The cabin is dark and apparently vacant, save for the blue light from the TV still playing shitty sitcoms and the dull yellow pouring from the crack of Eleven’s bedroom.
The door raps, loudly, and Hopper jolts with a somewhat drunk murmur of surprise. The popcorn falls from his lap and onto the floor, but he’s at least able to save the beer. Blinking back sleep, Hopper looks around blearily and practically hurls himself off his chair.
“El,” he murmured. “That you?”
“No,” came a somewhat surly response from behind her bedroom door.
Rubbing his eyes with the bottom palm of his hand, he turns towards the door – and it knocks, again, in that steady and trustworthy rhythm:
One-two – one… one-two-three.
El’s door very slowly and carefully cracks open, apparently curious to see who this visitor was, whilst Hopper stumbles towards the front door, muttering under his breath something about fucking visitor hours, it’s practically the middle of the night–
Steve Harrington is standing on his doorstep. There’s a resigned and slightly disheveled air about him. Compared to a week ago, he looks more tired and perhaps even thinner. There’s a forced, twisted little grimace set into his expression, like he’s accepted the position he’s been forced into. As Hopper cracks the door open wider, Steve glances up as if he’s only just registered where he is.
“Hey, Chief,” Steve says. “You got a smoke?”
There’s a haunted ghost in his eyes that speaks a thousand words to Hopper; it’s a look that Hopper’s seen in the mirror one too many times. It’s real and genuine fear, melded with agonizing depression and trauma – and desperation. I need help, right now, and this is the only time I’m going to ask for it. Hopper had seen it in the mirror after he swallowed 50 Xanax pills and woke up the next morning in his cold sweat and vomit. He’d never, not in a million fucking years, thought he’d seen it on Steve Harrington: that fear of dying, and that fear of knowing that he’d just tried to.
Hopper’s arms reached out and pulled Steve in, closing the distance, dragging the young teenager close into his chest. Steve’s fingers seized the front of Hopper’s shirt, clutching tightly as if a force might wrench them apart. The younger man’s body began to shudder with muffled sobs, still trying to keep his shit together.
A light pattering of footsteps on the wood marked the arrival of El, conjuring from her bedroom and advancing quickly towards the pair. She didn’t say anything, and there was no need for her to – she simply circled around the two on the doorstep and hugged Steve around the waist. She didn’t ask why her unusual friend and babysitter was sobbing into her father’s chest, but instead just gave Steve what she believed he deserved.
Eventually, Hopper would sit Steve down on the sofa, and El would give him a big mug of hot chocolate with a generous amount of marshmallows and throw her favorite blanket around his shoulders, and Hopper would coax everything out of the boy. About the nightmares even before everything had begun, and the nightmares preceding that that the Beholder burdened with him – the visions of Dustin’s mangled body, and his father whipping his back with hard leather, then Barbara Holland’s mutilated and rotting corpse, and all the guilt that he’d been carrying since then. All that fucking guilt – about Barb, about Nancy, about Jonathan, about Dustin, about the kids, about his parents, about his existence.
And he’d tell Hopper that the guilt had almost eaten him alive. About how he tried to send himself and his BMW down the bank past the Hawkins signpost at seventy miles an hour.
“What stopped you?” Hopper asks, quietly, his voice low yet gentle.
Steve buries his hand into the pockets of his jackets and pulls out a slightly crumpled red, white and blue trucker cap.
El’s light little gasp answers for him. “Dustin’s.”
“Dustin’s cap?” Hopper asks, confused.
“He lost it, and I saw it in the footwell just before I was about to drive off the edge,” Steve replies. “And I thought – well, Dustin needs his hat back. I gotta give him his hat back.”
“Steve—”
“I can’t make him cry, Chief. Not again.”
“Steve.” Hopper leans forward, rubbing his chin with one hand, feeling the barbs of his graying stubble of his chin against his scarred palm. “Listen. Sometimes, when people go through traumatic experiences, they’ll – they’ll come out of it with… you know, mental scars.”
“Like the vets,” Steve remarks, then flinches when he sees Hopper shuffle nervously in his seat. “Sorry, man, I didn’t – I meant –”
“It’s alright.”
“I just – My old man never went in. To Vietnam, I mean.”
Hopper nods, because he lived it, and there was a saying that all the boys used to have: if you got the dough, you don’t have to go. Dick Harrington most fucking certainly didn’t go, that’s why Hopper was having this conversation. Because Richard wouldn’t know the signs.
“Some of those people came out of that war with - with psychological scars,” Hopper continues slowly. His gaze flickers to El, who is standing nervously between her bedroom door and the two on the sofa, watching silently. “Scars that might not be too different to yours.”
“You’re saying I’m like, what… traumatized?” Steve asks, with a strange expression, like he’s testing this idea out on himself. Wondering if the term ‘traumatized’ was meant to be a label that fits on him. “I don’t know…”
“You need support,” Hopper finishes, “And I’m saying – you’ve got it. Don’t ever feel like you’re alone in this, kid. Your family might not understand, but we do.”
“They tried to kill me. The Upside-Down.”
“I know, kid.”
“And maybe it was just payback for what happened to Barb. Like her ghost was getting retribution.”
“I don’t – that’s not on you.”
“Maybe it isn’t, I dunno. But they tried to kill me, and for some reason, I’m still here.” Steve takes a deep breath, and his shoulders finally fall lax; Hopper hadn’t even noticed they had been tensed up around his neck. Finally, for the first time, Steve’s eyes draw up to meet Hopper’s. “So I’m gonna be better.”
Steve would stay over that night, and the next, and he wouldn’t be sent back home until Marie Harrington also left Hawkins, where they would not reappear until later that summer. And Steve wouldn’t tell the kids about what happened with the car, but El would tell them that Steve was having a ‘bad time’, so they all came to the rescue. Mike would finally crown Steve’s D&D character as a knight, and Lucas would play basketball in the outdoor courts when the weather grew a little warmer. Will would make another mixtape for Steve, a joint one built between Will and Jonathan’s music taste, and Max would try (and fail) to teach Steve how to skateboard. Dustin would get his cap back, and the two of them – Steve and Dustin – would practically become best friends.
(Steve and Dustin. Synonymous.)
Steve would graduate from Hawkin’s High school with below-average grades, and his father would shout so badly at him that the walls would shake, and Steve would be forced to get a summer job slinging ice-cream – whether as ‘preparation’ for a position at his father’s company or merely punishment, he wasn’t sure. And there he would relive his traumas, fight some Russians, watch a mall burn into cinders and find an unlikely friendship with classmate Robin Buckley. He’d find work at a video store with her, and chase the tail of a creature they named Vecna. He’d watch Hawkins, his home, fall.
He’d keep going, beyond all of that, despite everything. Maybe he’d join the police force and serve alongside Jim Hopper. Or else play coach at Hawkins High, if he dared return. Maybe he’d have five or six little nuggets with Nancy Wheeler, or another pretty girl, and go on roadtrips in a big camper van. He’d stay best friends with Dustin Henderson and Robin Buckley, and everybody else.
He’d keep going.
And eventually, people would stop saying: “You used to be such a douche in high school.”
And instead, they’d say: “You’re a pretty good guy – you know that, Steve?”
And, sometimes, Steve would grin back and reply: “Yeah. And a pretty damn good babysitter, too.”
Notes:
Sorry for the wait on finishing this.
When I first started thinking about writing a Stranger Things fanfic, it was wildly different from what it is now. It wasn't even a longfic. It was titled 'Nothing But Hellfire' and was set at the end of Season 4, and would depict Steve, Nancy, Robin and Dustin escaping the Upside-Down. But I kept thinking about other things about Steve, specifically a scene in Season 3: Steve and Dustin's reunion at Scoops Ahoy.
When we left the pair in Season 2, they were certainly amicable but not enough that Steve would get THAT excited to see Dustin. What could have happened in that gap between the second and third season for the pair to greet each other so excitedly?
That was the main focal point of this story was. That, and the idea of Steve wrestling with his redemption arc. To me, there always seems to be something missing from his redemption arc that has only been shown a little, which was remorse for his actions. I feel like he got a bit too quickly redeemed. There wasn't enough guilt.
So that created this story!
Here's some fun facts about how this story was pieced together:
- Chapter 5 was originally going to be the hook for the entire fic, instead taking place as early as Chapter 2, and a lot of the fic would be more about Steve being in the Upside-Down and fighting the Beholder from there.
- Several times, the timeline for the story almost moved from Spring '85 (post S2) to Autumn '85 (post S3). I really wanted to include Robin, who is one of my favourite characters, and I wanted to include a b-plot involving Richard Harrington and Starcourt. I scrapped this, because the main focus was Steve and Dustin's relationship, and Steve's loneliness. But the scapped b-plot is very subtly nodded to in the fic!
- Murry Bauman would have been involved, initally -- either with the Starcourt plans, or the gang would find him outside the lab trying to break in. This was because many of the lines the Beholder has when he breaks down Steve's characters was Murray's lines.
- The fic title comes from the song 'Rhinestone Eyes' by the Gorillaz. The song doesn't really have a lot to do with the fic, but the title was great -- the idea of the storm (the Upside-Down) bringing people who would not normally even like each other together.
Lastly, I would like to thank you for reading. 10 chapters, almost 100k words, over 20k hits... it's insane, the response has been truly great. When I first started writing this, I had a lot going on and was extremely uncertain about my future, but writing this kept me calm and happy. Since then, I've graduated university, got an amazing job that I love, moved to a brand new town, and got my own place.
So thank you for reading, really! Hopefully I'll find the time this year to write some more things... but in the meantime, if you'd like to find me elsewhere, come say hi to me on Tumblr!!
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