Chapter Text
Steve couldn't run anymore. He'd tried so hard, but they had underestimated Vecna. They'd been sure they had hurt him when they had faced him in the Upside Down, only they hadn't realised how much power completing his plan to open the fissures had given him or what the monster had done with it.
Being faced with twisted versions of Eddie, Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick had been utterly horrifying. But that hadn't been the worst, at least not for Steve. At first, he hadn't even realised it had happened. He'd been standing in the Upside Down with the others, axe strapped to his back, nail-bat in his hands. Only when Robin had turned to him and laughed, sound twisting like nothing he had ever heard, he had known that Vecna was inside his head.
When the caricature of Eddie in front of him had melted, the monster they had come so close to defeating stepping out of his skin, Steve had run. Like Max, he hid in his memories, good ones, only Vecna smashed into them all.
Now he was trapped.
He couldn't move. Couldn't run, couldn't even blink.
Vecna was standing right in front of him, and he could do nothing. As that twisted claw of a hand reached out towards him, all he could do was watch. He knew the moment it touched him it would be over, he would lose.
It felt like time was running at a quarter speed as those fingers slid towards his throat. With them they brought death, and all Steve could do was whisper how sorry he was that he wasn't strong enough to keep going. How he was too weak to protect those he loved.
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He felt the first touch on the side of his neck. Pain ripped down his arm, but rather than his screams, the sound of an explosion filled the air. A huge boom, followed by chaos.
His vision whited out only to be filled with too many things moving too fast as memories flashed before his eyes.
"Broken!"
"Untrainable…"
"Disappointing … weak …"
One voice echoed through his head. A man's voice.
"Obey me!"
"No."
His own childlike voice answered, strangely calm and resolute.
He saw a man with white hair and a grey suit over and over again, sometimes calm, sometimes angry, always serious. He felt the ghosts of old pains, the confusion of a child, and the agony of betrayal. It barely made any sense.
"Seven."
The one word bounced through his head and in that instant he understood. The memories were confused and muddled, but that one word, a name, brought everything into stark relief. Instincts that had been dormant nearly all his life flashed into reality. Acting without proper thought he protected himself. In his mind's eye it looked like a bubble, but it slammed shut around him with the force of iron.
Steve landed with a thump, coming down on his wrist that screamed in pain, but that was trivial compared to the maelstrom going on inside his head.
“Steve, oh thank god.”
That was Robin’s voice, and he used it to centre himself. As a hand touched his shoulder, he forced himself to stand, opening his eyes and taking in everything around him. Things had moved on since Vecna had invaded his brain, but not by much. Trying to think clearly was too hard as he did his best to understand.
“Steve, Steve, can you hear me?”
He looked at Robin and nodded. Only one thing made sense in his brain: he needed to protect those he loved.
“Get to El,” was the best he could do out loud.
Before Robin could say anything there was screeching above them. He looked up as the demobats dove towards them. Without considering what he was doing he thought of another bubble, throwing it like an invisible barrier over the bats. As one the creatures screamed, twisting in the air as if they suddenly had no direction control, before trembling like they were caught in a net and falling from the sky.
“What the fuck?” he heard from Dustin.
“El,” Steve said, looking back at Robin and wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
There was a small amount of blood on his skin that he cleaned off on his pants, before setting off. They were the distraction group, everyone except Hopper, El, Will, and Joyce. They were never supposed to have engaged the enemy, just drawn them away, but when Eddie and the others had appeared, that had scuppered that plan. Steve walked straight towards where the caricatures of their friends had Nancy, Jonanthan, Argyle, Wayne, Lucas, and Mike hemmed in.
They could really have done with military backup this time, but as ever the government had completely screwed things up. Owens was back in town with his people, but so was the apparently insane colonel who wanted to lock all of them up rather than deal with the real danger in Hawkins. Owens was working on getting the man out of the way, but of course, it had taken too long to be of help. That left the usual suspects and the few new people they had picked up along the way.
The advantage Eddie, Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick had on their group was that no one seemed quite able to just shoot them. Eddie looked the closest to human, still in the clothes he had died in, even if they were ripped to pieces, but all four had wings and claws and fangs and eyes straight out of a horror movie. Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick were naked, as if they had been plucked straight from the morgue, which was a distinct possibility, and it almost looked as if they were held together by vines.
Whatever Creel had done to them to kill them, he seemed to have undone and augmented to bring them back as monsters. A small part of Steve hoped there was still something human under what had been done to them, but even if there wasn’t, he knew what he had to do.
Eddie was the nearest. The moment Steve was close enough, he created another mental bubble. When he threw it this time, he felt resistance, like a knife that wasn’t quite sharp enough going through a stalk of celery. For a moment it held, but then his knife sliced through snapping the connection and popping through more until he had Eddie completely surrounded.
For a second Eddie froze before crumpling like a marionette whose strings had been cut. As he hit the ground he began to scream, curling in on himself. The sound cut to Steve’s heart, but he could not stop. He had just enough time to see the tips of Eddie’s wings beginning to melt, before he moved to his next target.
Chrissy was hovering in the air, red eyes fixed on Eddie. Her face, although twisted with the changes Creel had made still showed obvious confusion. Steve enveloped her in a bubble before she could remotely connect what was happening to him. As if he had snapped her wings, she plummeted to the ground. She made no sound, which was somehow worse, as she convulsed like she had been connected to the mains.
Steve didn’t let himself think about it as the other two both turned towards him.
“You!” Patrick screamed, pointing a taloned finger at him.
He didn’t even try to reply, throwing out his own arms and encasing them both in one big bubble. It was hard, he already had two bubbles he could not let go, but he pushed and the connections to Creel, to the Upside Down snapped from them both. Fred’s eyes rolled back in his head and the boy collapsed into a heap. Patrick tried to stagger towards Steve, arm still out, but the basketball player only made it a couple of steps before his legs failed him.
Steve could feel the energy he had dissected, snapping at his barriers like snakes, trying to break through. There had been no resistance with the bats, once the connection to the hive mind was broken that was it. This was different. This felt alive. This was Creel. The madman did not like being thwarted.
He did not move, standing there holding his force fields in place as those inside melted like they were made of wax on a hot day. All the additions sloughed off their bodies leaving behind now motionless humans. Whether they were dead or alive, Steve couldn't tell, but he did know the moment Vecna gave up trying to get them back.
The stinging attacks just suddenly cut off. One moment tiny little knives were stabbing at his awareness and the next, they were gone. He held on for several more seconds, just in case it was a bluff, but when there was no sign, he released his bubbles. It occurred to him that everything else had gone quiet too. The bats and the demodogs that had been harassing the rest of their party were gone.
"What the hell?" Robin whispered from beside him, even as Dustin dashed past them towards Eddie.
"Wait," he said, but he was too slow to stop the kid.
Luckily Nancy was right there and stepped in front of Eddie before Dustin could get there.
"We have to…" Dustin protested.
"Yes," Nancy agreed even though Dustin hadn't finished, "but not yet."
Eddie was surrounded by goop that appeared to be being absorbed straight back into the ground, but it hadn't finished. He still had vestigial wings that were melting, not quite gone.
"What did you do?" Robin asked in little more than a whisper from beside Steve's shoulder.
"Cut off," he replied, even as his thoughts kept spinning.
This time there was more than a spot of blood as he wiped his nose.
"Dude, how did you do that?" Argyle asked what everyone was clearly thinking.
"What I would like to know also," Hopper's Russian friend agreed from where he was standing with Murray.
Almost everyone was looking at Steve now.
"Help," he said, because words were harder than they should have been. "When Vecna," he tapped his head rather than trying to explain because everyone had to have seen what happened, "help."
"Steve, is someone else in your head?" Nancy asked.
He nodded, it wasn't quite the truth, but it would do. Seven wasn't him, not really, not anymore, and that was who knew how to do this. The truth was too dangerous to just blurt out in the middle of the Upside Down. They had no idea who might be listening.
"Must get to El," he added.
"So, it's not El, but they can help El?" Mike all but demanded.
Steve nodded again. If he could shut Creel off from his power source of the Upside Down, El would have a much better chance of taking him down once and for all.
"Cut off," he did his best to explain.
At least the confusion in his head gave him an excuse not to have to be clearer. He wasn't sure he could lie to his friends convincingly if they were to ask him too many questions, but they could all see he was having trouble. Luckily for him, Eddie chose that moment to groan.
"Holy shit, he's alive," Dustin all but yelled.
It was a close thing who got their first, the kid or Wayne as they both descended on Eddie. Jonathan went over to Chrissy at the same time.
"She's got a pulse," he announced.
That started the others moving, with Nancy going over to Fred and Lucas to Patrick. Steve really wanted to help as well, but he was too aware there was no time.
"El," he said to Robin. "Plan," he waved at everyone else.
"I get it," Robin replied. "Russian guy," she immediately called out, "make sure the plan happens. We're going to El."
Steve gave her a look.
"Like you think I'm leaving you," Robin said. "Now go."
The way Robin lifted her eyebrows at him when he didn't immediately move said everything that needed to be said. For once Steve chose not to argue. He nodded off to the right and set off at a jog.
The distraction was supposed to have been blowing up the Upside Down's version of the hospital, the group had some serious explosives and everything. Steve only hoped the others could get it done now they had four injured parties to deal with as well.
"Wait, how are they going to find El?" he heard someone ask.
They didn't know where Vecna was hiding now, but El had been sure she would be able to find him. What the others couldn't know was Steve was just as sure. He couldn't exactly see the connections that Vecna had to everything in the Upside Down, but he knew they were there, and he could sense which way to go to trace them back to their source. In this, the hivemind was a weakness, not a strength. He just hoped he and Robin could get there before it was too late to help El.