Chapter Text
He used to lie on his mother’s chest under the TARDIS console and listen as she told him stories of time and space and everything in between. He’d listen to the vibrations of her breath in her chest and he’d reach out and rest his fingertips of the floor of his father’s ship and feel the shiver of the past, present, and future colliding in her heart. When he couldn’t sleep he’d look up at the glowing underside of the console’s control panels and let his mind wander over all the strands of time twisting and curling above, over and around the bright spot of him, his parents and their mad little box.
…
Hawkins, Indiana, August 1983
“We’ll only be gone a week, your time,” his mother tells him as his father scampers around and behind her, fussing and fidgeting as only a Time Lord inches from an adventure can.
“Or so,” his father prevaricates, “you know, time can go a bit…erm, wibbly. Yes. Wibbly. These days. Or any days. All days? Rose, did we pack the – ”
“Yes, we did.”
A head of wild brown hair pokes itself out of the blue box parked in their living room, dark eyebrows tugging together skeptically, “Hey now, you have no idea what I was going to say.”
“Yes, and we packed it.”
“But how did you – ”
“I didn’t.”
“Hey!”
“But I know you and if we didn’t pack it, the TARDIS packed it for us.”
“I keep telling you that’s not how she works!” his father gripes, voice disappearing into the depths of the time machine.
His mother turns to him, a mischievous smirk tipping her lips up in one corner, flashing a bit of tooth, “That’s what he thinks,” she says conspiratorially, smoothing wild brown hair out of wide, young brown eyes, far younger than either of his parents’. “You’ll be alright,” she says, voice certain but soft, meant to comfort, “The ambient emotive what’s-it –”
“Array!” his father’s voice echoes from the depths of the TARDIS.
“That,” Mum continues, “is supposed to gently suggest you’ve always been here or aren’t very interesting.”
“Which is of course, ridiculous, you’re very interesting,” Dad reassures him unnecessarily.
“So people should leave you alone,” Mum finishes, “And this is one of Uncle Jack’s safehouses, so it’s fully stocked. And if he shows up and doesn’t remember you – ”
“Don’t take it personally, it’s just time travel, yeah, Mum, I know,” he tries to shrug her hand off but not very hard. She tugs on a strand of his hair, her brown eyes warm.
“It shouldn’t be for too long, love.”
“I know, Mum.”
“It’s just not safe for you.”
“I know, Mum.”
“You’re always saying how you want a chance to be ordinary for once,” she smiles sort of ruefully, tongue poking out between her teeth just a little, “Well, this is as ordinary as it gets.”
That’s not what he’s ever really meant. He wants to be ordinary in a distant, not-to-be-fulfilled kind of way. The way other kids want to have superpowers or go to the moon. He’s gone to the moon, and he sort of has superpowers, there’s just a tiny sliver of him that wants to go to high school too.
“Yeah,” he shoves his hands in his pockets and looks away, not bothering to try dislodging her hand a second time.
The Bad Wolf’s eyes twinkle at him, “We love you.”
“Yeah, I know,” an eyeroll and a shrug this time. He’s a teenager. He’s a little too old to wrap his arms around his mother’s waist, bury his face in her shoulder and beg her not to leave him in a strange house, in a strange time and place. Even if it’s only for a week and just to keep him safe. It’s no big deal.
He laughs in just the right way, the studied nonchalance that has the whole school trailing after him not matter what school on what planet he’s in, the student body wanting some ineffable quality of his that escapes concrete categorization. His mum says it’s ‘the Time Lord charm’ and his dad always protests there’s no such thing. “No parents for a whole week, it’s a teenager’s dream.”
“That sounds sinister, or terrible.” Dad quips, “Your mother and I were once – ”
“- on a planet with no parents – ” he finishes the thought.
“- and it was undeniably sinister in nature.” Dad announces definitively.
Something beeps in the TARDIS and his mother stiffens, “Doctor, we’d better get going.”
“Ah, yes, right, well, time waits for no man! Except for this one…Me! Time waits for no one but me!” The Doctor says in a tone of gleeful surprise, like he just had this incredibly important thought.
Something beeps imperiously in the TARDIS, telling him on no uncertain terms that she is not in the mood to wait. Whether she would or not.
“Bye, Dad,” the boy says, kind of nodding in the Time Lord’s general direction before getting swamped in a hug.
“No parties or unsupervised frivolity of a dangerous nature for a week,” the Doctor reminds him, tweaking his nose for good measure, making his son’s face scrunch up in displeasure.
“So unsupervised frivolity is okay if we’re in town?” Rose Tyler, the Bad Wolf, and the boy’s mother, asks archly, barely quelling a laugh at her husband’s expense.
The Doctor’s face contorts at that. “Just don’t do anything too dangerous. We’ll be home before you know it!” He ruffles his son’s hair and scampers off.
One last goodbye hug from his mother later and the son of the Doctor and the Bad Wolf, currently known as ‘Steve Harrington’, although, as everyone knows, Time Lords keep their true names secret, running through aliases like water, although, at the very least, the ‘Steve’ part is his own (Jackie’s insistence, rather than a Time Lord identifier like ‘The Doctor’ or ‘The Master’ Steve has a human nickname. At least there aren’t many other Time Lords running around so he doesn’t have to worry about anyone calling him ‘The Steve’ on accident) watches the TARDIS disappear from Jack Harkness’ safe house’s immaculate living room, leaving behind nothing but empty space.
But it’s alright. They’ll only be gone a week.
…
Hawkins, Indiana, September 1983
Steve feels when something tears in the world and the wrongness settles in. He wakes in the night, covered in a sheen of cold sweat, tasting rot in the back of his throat, knowing, knowing that something has gone incalculably wrong somewhere and unable to put his finger on what or why. He feels the earth turn under him, he feels the stars burning but it all feels strangely muffled and beneath it all he can smell the must and mildew of death.
His parents have not returned but in that instant, he knows, for absolute certain that they won’t be able to. That whatever this infection is, it will warp the fabric of reality to keep the Doctor out.
And Steve is trapped here with it.
…
Steve registers himself for school, uses psychic paper to fake all his identifying documents, leans a little too heavily on the ambient-emotive-whatever array to hand-wave his sudden presence in town. Mimics everyone’s accents until his own is flawless midwestern American neutral.
He finally gets to be normal.
He’s utterly terrified.
…
He’s popular in school because he always is. Mum might be onto something about Time Lord magnetism. It doesn’t hurt that he’s good at sports and has great hair. He collects new friends like trading cards and buries himself in parties and basketball and swim team and whatever is hot, whatever is cool, whatever is bright and shiny and in and tries to forget the taste of mold on his tongue and the feeling of disaster creeping in all around.
Nancy Wheeler hits like a lightning strike and he wants her, wants her to look at him, to see him. Wants to show her the stars. Wants to take her hand and start running.
He settles for making her laugh and roll her eyes and say “You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington,” with a smile tucked away in the corner of her mouth.
It’s almost enough.
…
Hawkins, Indiana, October/November 1983
It’s been months and the hole where his parents should be is starting to pulse and ache like an infected wound deep in Steve’s chest.
Steve’s head aches. He sits in class and tries to drop into the trance state his father told him about. The one where he can feel time teasing at the edges of his senses, and the sixth sense that allows him to feel seconds tick across his skin and the earth roll beneath his feet as the planet spins through space and time come to violent life somewhere behind his eyes. He tries to untangle the lines of possibility. Eternal permutations of the future, infinite variations on the past, all spinning on the axis of the present. All infected by the spreading stain of the wrongness.
And he can’t find his parents in any of them.
He rests his ringing head on the smooth fake wood of his desk, hearts hammering in his chest. He’s not a full-fledged Time Lord. His kind of hybrid could only happen to the Doctor and the Bad Wolf, after all. Maybe he’s just not old enough or clever enough or Time Lord enough, but he can’t find his mother and father.
…
The emptiness in his house (Jack’s house, really, though he hasn’t seen even a hint of Jack Harkness in all the months he’s been here) and the emptiness in his chest makes everything vulnerable and soft in him ache like a torn muscle. It shakes something mean and sharp out of him, the same mean and sharp thing he sees lurking deep in his father’s eyes when he’s being petty with intergalactic forces, the same mean and sharp thing that haunts his mother’s conversations with Uncle Mickey about ‘the old days’. None of them are proud of it. But it’s in all of them. It’s the curse of being self-aware, Aunt Martha once told him; you can see yourself saying and doing stupid things but the monster growling in your guts tells you it’s just fine, you deserve the instant gratification coming to you.
Steve picks at Byers more because he can and it’s that or beat his head into a wall or crawl screaming out of his skin demanding to know what happened to the world, what happened to his family.
So your little brother disappeared in the woods? MY PARENTS VANISHED INTO ALL OF TIME AND SPACE, MIGHT BE DEAD, AND EVERYONE ON THIS PLANET MIGHT BE NEXT.
He doesn’t say it, but he thinks it with every petty word that slips past his lips.
He still looks for the kid, though. Late at night he walks the woods with a backpack full of Uncle Jack’s gadgets, a veritable treasure trove of futuristic sensory tech and finds nothing. No signs of life. And still the rotting meat taste of the wrongness haunts his dreams.
Nancy is a bright spot. She’s sweet and sharp in equal measure and he likes to imagine what it might be like to see her inquisitive eyes widen at the vastness of the universe. He thinks she would be good at time travel. She’s smart, adaptable, brave. All the things he worries he isn’t enough of late at night, when the wrongness presses in on his dreaming mind.
He doesn’t tell her any of that. He buries his face in the soft crook of her neck and tries to forget time unfolding all around them. Because despite their name, time has never been on a Time Lord’s side.
He invites her and Tommy and Carol to a party at his place because he doesn’t know what else to do. Because he can’t find Will Byers and the wrongness is crawling all over him like fire ants and he just wants the people he cares about all happy and in one place where he can keep an eye on them. He feels bad for lying about his parents, for making them seem like assholes, for implying his dad would ever cheat on his mom (he wouldn’t, he’s only ever had eyes for her, it’s sickening how in love they are, really), but it’s what he needs to say to convince his friends to come to his place and it works. And things are almost normal, and he can almost pretend everything is fine until the bickering starts and Barb gets hurt and he tells her, he tells her to come inside but he guesses she didn’t listen and it isn’t his fault, but it kind of is and –
And Barb’s disappeared out from behind his painfully empty house and it might be his fault for being too selfish, too focused on what he wanted, on filling the emptiness he can feel collapsing him from outside-in and inside-out with people who were good enough to pretend they liked him.
And then there’s Nancy and Jonathan and he sees the writing on the wall. He sees all the ribbons of the maybe-futures unrolling all around him and none of them have him-and-Nancy in them. He tastes the rotten slime of the wrongness on the back of his tongue and he’s afraid something is happening, something is coming for them and he isn’t going to be able to see it or stop it in time. He’s afraid something has already happened galaxies away and his mother and father won’t be coming home to help him out of this one.
So he does some stupid things and his head gets knocked around by Jonathan’s fists and he almost doesn’t care because he’s hysterical with the way the world feels like it’s all falling down around him.
He breaks Jonathan’s camera and he does feel bad about that one. In hindsight.
…
He goes to make things right and sees something he never thought could have been possible. Really, traveling with his father ought to have taught him better by now. It’s not the monster bursting through the walls so much as the way it seems to…smother everything. Like a heavy blanket has been thrown over Steve’s head, cutting off…something.
Nancy and Jonathan are still shouting, still fighting, they don’t suddenly feel as if they’ve been plunged into darkness, thrown not into a pool of water but into a sudden and inexplicable abyss. A void…a…
This thing. This monster Steve is blindly beating on with a nail-studded baseball bat. It’s somehow out of time. Like a weeping angel, except time doesn’t twist around it, it doesn’t bend or tie itself in knots; it’s just gone. Dropped off the radar of Steve’s senses.
He thinks of Barb. He thinks of little Will Byers. Young victims, both of them. If Steve can’t sense the collision of past, present and future in this thing, then that must mean it feeds on…potential futures. Not the way the Weeping Angels suck up leftover time energy, these creatures eat the everything-that-could-have-been. Where the Angels are scavengers, these are hunters. And they’re hungry.
Steve grips the nailed-up baseball bat until his knuckles creak. His ears are ringing and he can’t see straight and the sixth sense he’s lived with all his life is gone, amputated. But he is the son of the Bad Wolf. A child of Gallifrey, even if he’s never seen its’ rolling hills. And he isn’t letting this shitstain eat anyone’s fucking potential futures.
…
Later, Hopper will tell him with quiet words and a growl in his voice that they found Barb’s body in the Upside Down with a tentacle shoved down her throat, terrifyingly well preserved even after days. Steve thinks of all the choices she could have made. Turning left instead of right – two distinct lives she could have lived. Peanut butter and jelly instead of ham and cheese for lunch – two distinct futures she could have lived. A million possibilities tied up in every choice that was never made.
She must have been a feast for these things.
It makes something coil in Steve’s stomach and he can’t eat for days. He sits alone in his empty house and drinks tea until the tannins make his skin glow gold as the fucking time vortex, but still he can’t forget the person Barbara Holland could have been.
Nancy wants to remember her, to get justice.
All Steve wants is for her to stop haunting his goddamn empty house.
…
Hawkins, Indiana, November 1984
It happens again and Steve wants to pull his hair out. Or maybe just hit himself in the face with that goddamn nail bat, put himself in a coma, and just sleep off all this alternate dimension insanity. Maybe when he wakes up his parents won’t have disappeared into space and time and his father will be here, waving his sonic screwdriver around and threatening government agencies until they all play nice. Or his mother will just rip open the space-time vortex and settle everything with a word.
And this time he’s been hijacked by a gang of very obstinate pre-teens and he did not beat up a monster a year ago to have to listen to this nonsense.
(He understands his father a little better now – no human being has ever apparently learned the meaning of the words “just stay put, it’s fucking dangerous and you’re squishy and vulnerable”.)
Steve isn’t afraid of monsters. His childhood babysitters were Madame Vastra (a prehistoric lizard woman), her sidekick Strax, and her wife Jenny. Out of that lineup only Jenny is human and only Jenny is particularly concerned about child endangerment. Strax cheerfully hauled pint-sized Steve through all manner of adventures, each more violent and monster-infested than the last, until his mother put her foot down.
Jenny still taught him to sword-fight and pick locks because Jenny is a cool aunt.
But he is afraid of these monsters. He’s afraid of them consuming him, erasing him from the future as completely as they erased Barb (she still haunts him, hunts him in his dreams. He never understood why anyone would want desperately to change the past at the expense of reality until Barb died in his backyard when he should have kept her safe.).
So when Dustin tries to hijack him in pursuit of a cat-eating creature from a hell-dimension, Steve insists on a detour back to his place for weapons.
Dustin rolls his eyes but agrees under protest. His protests stop when he learns that Steve means the sword Aunt Jenny gave him for his fourteenth birthday.
…
“Why do you have a sword, Steven?” Dustin demands as Steve slides the bookcase back in place over the secret storage compartment (there are multiple, his father and Uncle Jack gleefully adding them to every safehouse until each was honeycombed with secret passages than the last), “Scratch that, why do you have a secret passage? Is this what all rich people do? Hide swords behind bookcases? Steven, answer me!”
“Would you quit calling me ‘Steven’, that’s weird. And put that down before you poke yourself in the eye.” Dustin is holding the sword in two hands, pointed straight up at the ceiling like it’s Excalibur. Nerd.
Dustin gestures broadly with the sword, Steve just barely swerving out the way in time to avoid getting sliced.
“Dustin! Sword! Down!”
“I’m just saying it’s a little suspicious that you apparently have some secret medieval armory stashed away in your house!”
“Dustin Henderson, I am not kidding, put that sword down right. Now.” Steve’s hands are on his hips and his voice is doing that thing it used to do when Tommy was being his particular brand of life-endangering idiot. (Steve misses Tommy – he shouldn’t, but he does.)
Dustin scrunches up his face at him like he wants to argue but he puts the sword down.
“So,” Steve continues – the threat of a sword-wielding tweenager temporarily abated, “What size creature are we catching?” he holds up what looks like a butterfly net but is actually one of Jack’s many gadgets, “Little guy or,” he holds up a larger, weighted net that looks like a prop from a corny stage play but is actually from another galaxy and century entirely. “Big fish?”
Dustin’s eyebrows have climbed up into his bangs and seem to be making a break for his hat, “Who areyou?”
Steve stuffs both into a backpack. “Both. We’re taking both.” He sheathes the sword and slides it through the loop on the top of the backpack to hang between the backpack and his back once it puts it on. “Come on, shithead, there’s a monster on the loose and we’re losing daylight.”
Dustin, blinking like the world has slid sideways and shaking his head, follows Steve out the door.
…
The monster isn’t where Dustin said it was. The monster has actually escaped. The monster has escaped and Dustin isn’t sure how big it is now beyond ‘big and getting bigger’ and Steve is pretty sure they’re fucked.
They’re walking down railroad tracks, making a trail of meat to tempt the creature with and Steve is well past questioning his life choices and fully settled into regretting them.
“So…” Dustin begins with the I Have a Question tone of voice he seems to say everything in.
“What?” Steve replies in as flat, firm and No, You Do Not Have a Question a tone of voice he can manage. It does nothing to discourage Dustin because of course it doesn’t.
“Are we going to talk about the sword and the nets and the secret compartment behind a bookcase thing?”
“Hadn’t planned on it.” Time Lord 101, anything worth lying about is worth trying to brazen out for better or worse.
“Are your parents spies?”
“What? No.” No, they’re just a space alien and a woman from the future who briefly was all of time and space, no big deal.
“Are they…no, sorry, can’t think of any better reasons for there to be a weird vault of futuristic technology in your house, Steve.” Dustin says his name with a strange sort of emphasis, like he wants to impress upon Steve that he knows exactly who his is and what he’s about and he’s not going to get away with any of his shenanigans while Dustin is about. Steve wishes Dustin would clue him in on who Steve is and what he’s about because he’s beginning to wonder who and what that is exactly, if he ever knew in the first place.
“Oh, look, a whistle, maybe it’ll attract your hell creature,” Steve says, pulling what looks like a plastic coach’s whistle out of his pocket but what is, in fact, one of Jack’s many gadgets.
“D’art is a ground-breaking scientific discovery, not a dog,” Dustin scoffs, “He isn’t going to respond to any old whistle.”
“Oh, and he’s going to drop everything to snack on the cheapest steak we could get at the grocery store?” Steve asks archly.
“Uh, yeah,” Dustin defends, “He has a proven habit of favoring raw meat. It’s a good lure.”
“From what you told me, he has preference for fresh meat,” Steve points out, blowing on the whistle. It produces a variety of sounds on a variety of spectrums beyond human perception. Needless to say, his ears are ringing, Dustin is looking at him like his whistle isn’t just dumb, it’s defective, and no hell-beast has emerged from the tree line.
“This is fresh! What about this isn’t fresh?” Dustin grimaces as he drops a chunk of meat on the railroad tracks.
Steve just blows the whistle again.
They walk in what Dustin probably perceives as silence for a bit, Steve periodically blowing on the whistle despite Dustin telling him how useless it is.
“I wasn’t just keeping D’art to keep him, you know,” Dustin says abruptly.
Steve lets the whistle fall from his lips to hang from its lanyard around his neck. “Yeah?”
“I thought…well, he’s an important scientific discovery, you know? He’s groundbreaking!”
Humans and their discoveries. It’s like they want their planet destroyed and/or conquered. They have terrible self-preservation instincts.
“And I thought…it might impress Max.”
“Who?”
“Max! The new girl! She’s so cool, she’s from California, and she rides a skateboard and no one can beat her high score at Dig Dug!”
“Dig what?”
“Oh my god, for a cool guy you are so lame.”
“Hey, I have a closet full of swords,” Steve says, like that will somehow amplify his cool factor.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re losing serious sword-induced cool points with your ignorance here, Steve.”
“Shut up,” Steve groans, then, after a pause, “Okay, tell me about this girl.”
Dustin waxes poetic about Max and Dig Dug (which is apparently an arcade game), and what am important advance for science D’art the hell-creature is for at least another mile and Steve just sort lets the lecture wash over him. It’s nice, actually. Soothing in a weird way. He’s still blowing the whistle occasionally, although he doesn’t really see it having any effect other than giving him a headache and making Dustin look at him pityingly. Dustin’s chatter is, at least temporarily, filling up the holes Nancy’s words tore inside him last night.
Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.
He knows he isn’t the best person, the best boyfriend, the best Time Lord. If his father were here, Will would have been found so much sooner, and Barb wouldn’t have died, and there wouldn’t be the lingering feeling of sick, wrongness still coating everything about this town, this world, this moment in time even after the events of last year. But Steve isn’t the Doctor. And this isn’t one of those times where everyone lives.
He’s drawn out of his mental spiral by Dustin asking a question and somehow that turns into Steve telling him how to style his hair and giving him romantic advice.
“Act like you don’t care,” Steve says and then stops himself. “Okay, no, sorry, that’s shitty advice.”
“No, come on, you’re supposed to be Mr. Popular, you can’t wuss out on giving me love advice now!”
“One, don’t call it ‘love advice’, jesus. Two, okay, here’s the thing. Acting like you don’t care only works if you actually don’t care, right?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Fair enough. Acting like you don’t care works if it’s true. If you really just…don’t care either way if she says yes or no to a date.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, who said anything about a date?” Dustin wheezes, “I do not think I’m on that level of seduction mastery yet, Steven!”
“Don’t call it ‘seduction’, gross. And don’t call me Steven. And don’t make that weird purring noise, you sound like a creature from outer space!”
“A sexy creature from outer space?”
“NO.” Steve breathes deep, collects himself, and continues, “But sometimes, she won’t know how you feel about her unless you tell her. So, if it’s really no big deal to you, play it cool and see if she comes to you. Or, put your heart on the line and let it get stomped on if it’s gonna get stomped on.” Steve thinks of all the happy couples he knew growing up. His parents. Martha and Mickey, Vastra and Jenny, the Ponds. He always wanted a love like that. He thought maybe he’d show Nancy the stars one day.
“Seriously? Those are my options?” Dustin frowns at him. “Ignore it and hope for the best or be vulnerable and get squashed like a bug?”
“You asked for my advice.”
“Yeah, and it sucks!”
Steve tries to throw his hands in the air only to remember he’s carrying a bucket of meat and a spiked baseball bat. “You asked!”
Dustin opens his mouth to say something when they both hear a weird growling, trilling noise somewhere behind them. It’s the kind of sound that doesn’t occur in nature. The kind of sound that raises the hairs on the back of your neck and makes your blood run a little colder. And it’s right behind them.
Steve slides over, subtly putting himself between Dustin and the source of the noise as he turns slowly, ever so slowly, around to face it. Dustin’s eyes are huge under his mop of curly hair, darting this way and that like the gaze of a trapped animal.
“Stay calm, and be ready to run,” Steve mutters under his breath. Dustin makes a wheezing sound of confirmation.
Steve finishes his slow rotation around to face the sound.
Up the train tracks, several yards away, is a creature. It looks sort of like a Demogorgon, but quadrupedal instead of bipedal. Like a medium-sized dog if medium-sized dogs were a slimy green with flower-faces full of teeth. It keens at them again, then bends its horrifying head down to slurp up some raw meat. Steve feels Dustin’s hand clench in the back of his jacket.
“It’s D’art,” Dustin whispers in quite possibly the most un-whisper-like-whisper on the planet, “We found him!”
Steve knows that intergalactic law states he needs to try to establish communication, to give this creature a chance. But he’s pretty sure talking to it is going to result in his face getting bitten off, or worse.
D’art slinks closer, snuffling at the meat and slurping it down whole. Steve holds his ground. “Dustin, get the big net out of my backpack,” he murmurs out of the corner of his mouth. He has no idea if the net is going to work or not, this thing is bigger than he anticipated.
He hears the zipper slide and Dustin dig out the net. “Heeey, D’art,” Dustin croons.
“No, shithead, shut up,” Steve hisses back. The creature’s head pops up at the sound of Dustin’s voice and it gives a high-pitched, undulating keen that Steve does not like and creeps even closer.
“You know me, D’art, it’s Dustin, your friend.” Dustin keeps talking, like an idiot, and Steve does not deserve this. “I have some Three Musketeers for you…”
The creature is within striking distance now, but it doesn’t seem to be striking. It seems to be eating the last of the meat chunks.
“Dustin, net, now,” Steve says, setting down the bucket and reaching back for the net, keeping the bat at the ready in his other hand. Dustin, apparently interpreting that sentence as ‘Dustin, please throw the net yourself’, lunges forward and hurls the net clumsily over D’art, who howls in protest and jerks towards him. Steve jumps forward to grab the net and activate the controls that spin the fibers around the creature’s body, trussing it up like a turkey and muzzling it for good measure.
“I MEANT GIVE ME THE NET, DUMBASS,” Steve yells as the adrenaline spike peters out and the terror comes crashing back in, “IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO GET YOUR FACE BITTEN OFF!”
Dustin is unfazed by his near-death experience, “We caught him! Steve! This is scientific progress in the making! We’ve got to take him to the junkyard to show Max and Lucas!”
Oh, good, no questions about the indisputably future-tech net.
“And you have got to tell me how that net works! Is your dad an inventor? Is your mom? Is that patented technology? Are you sure your parents aren’t spies? I never bought that whole ‘works in insurance’ line anyway – ”
Never mind, Steve is screwed.
…
“Okay, shitheads,” Steve jumps in before Dustin can start talking at Lucas and some red headed girl Steve’s pretty sure he’s never met before, and make things any worse, “We don’t know if there’s more of these things so we’re fortifying the bus and you’re all helping me.”
“Steve!” Dustin complains, “Science!”
“Dustin!” Steve counters, “Not dying!”
“He’s got a point,” Lucas says.
“Holy shit, what the fuck is that thing?” Max says, pointing at the trussed-up Dart. Steve had undone the netting to try to walk it on a harness only for the thing to lunge at him and try to claw his throat out over Dustin’s vocal protests, so it’s almost fully cocooned in smart fiber now. Steve carried it most of the way because, as Dustin put it, “I’ve never been the muscle of this operation, Steven.”
“He’s a new species, possibly from another dimension,” Dustin babbles, “His name is D’art, after D’Artagnan from the Three Musketeers. It’s actually a funny story – ”
Somehow, despite being shocked and alarmed by the trussed-up creature before her, the strange child is being the most helpful in barricade-construction.
“How come the only person helping me is this random girl?” Steve asks semi-rhetorically.
“We’re nerds, we’re built for thinking, not manual labor,” Dustin says. Steve has to admire his honesty.
“I respect the honesty. Now move your asses, nerds, we’re losing daylight,” Steve tells him.
“Fair enough,” Lucas shrugs and starts moving sheet metal with the random girl, who is apparently the Max Dustin was talking about, which seems to inspire Dustin to get up and help too.
“So, interdimensional monsters.” Steve hears the girl say.
“Told you so,” Lucas tells her.
“Do you really think there’s more demodogs out there?” Dustin asks Steve pensively. D’art is quiescent on the ground, softly whining as the sun goes down.
Steve can feel time unfolding in all directions. He can feel the wrongness like an infected splinter beneath his skin.
“Yeah,” he says, “I do.”
Distantly, something howls in the woods.
…