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Steven Harrington would later find, or claim at the very least, that it was difficult to cast his mind back and pinpoint the main factor that had drawn himself and his uneasily fussing Sorrel stallion, Beamer, so very close to the humble but picturesque Henderson cottage that was tucked near the edge of the woods in the sleepy and previously unremarkable American town of Hawkins in 1883 and the very young man who would eventually grow on him until they were as close as brothers.
The comparison of a favored child and a very beleaguered nanny could also be very wisely applied to their relationship.
He was fairly sure that all the running for his and other’s lives and the nearly countless head injuries that he had managed to stagger his way through from that long ago day also had a significant impact on his vision in his left eye, the constant ringing in his ears, his willingness to flinch away from danger when somebody he loved was in the path of it, and his ability to remember half the stuff that he was supposed to.
Regardless, the first crisply vivid memory of that life changing moment that Steven could recall was Dustin, or young Master Henderson, as Steven had known him up to that vital point in his life, screaming his head off in a terrified yowl in perfect synchronization with his armful of his lovely orange tabby cat Mews as he fled from a demon that could’ve been fetched straight from Hell.
(Steven only found out the name of Dustin’s non-homicidal pet who had a perfectly rational amount of sharp teeth to face afterwards, once all three of them had all stopped hysterically screaming at each other and had more importantly hastily galloped a sufficient distance away from an equally expeditiously clubbed to death Democanine corpse that Dustin insisted was his other pet turned would-be-killer.)
(Dustin had even named it D'Artagnan, for the love of all the Gods above and below. Steven could not even. A character from a book by the fine Alexandre Dumas should not have suffered from having such an unholy beast named after it, as Robin, or the delightful Lady Buckley when Steven was addressing her in more prim public arenas, had told him.)
The second clear memory Steven had of that encounter was staring at the nightmarish slavering creature in a state of numb horror as it recklessly chased Dustin and Mews in a headlong sprint that brought its bizarre snapping petal shaped jaws all too close to the backs of Dustin’s desperately scrambling feet.
His third memory was of diving off of Beamer’s back and near blindly seizing a stray fence post that had strong nails driven through it but hadn’t been planted in place with its fellows before he started frantically beating the Democanine, or D'Artagnan, as Steven absolutely refused to think of it as decades after the fact, to death as he feverishly howled at Dustin to get on the fucking horse and run away, Henderson, that damn cat could fit in a saddlebag just fine if it didn’t want to stay still, yes, he was fucking serious, neither one of them should be there while that thing was still breathing until Dustin finally fucking obeyed him after the injured creature tore a chunk out of Steven’s outer thigh and somehow convinced Beamer to help out by stomping on the brute’s spine and crippling it to the point that it could be more easily killed at.
Steven’s final memory of that gruesome encounter admittedly involved a lot of hysterically wheezed and faintly crazed inquiries about what the hell was that thing, was Dustin and his quivering but mercifully alive cat alright, and how the actual living fuck was that monster related to what had happened to the youngest Byers lad earlier that autumn when he had temporarily vanished from Hawkins?