Chapter Text
Eddie maintained that his reaction was perfectly reasonable.
For one thing, he was on an incredible amount of drugs. Like, seriously, so many drugs.
For another, he’d been dead asleep when Henderson had thrown open the door to his hospital room, so even ignoring the drugs, he was not firing on all cylinders when Dustin started speaking.
So Eddie could be forgiven for his reaction.
It went a bit like this:
Dustin opened the door so hard it banged into the wall, startling him awake. Dustin then proceeded to shout, at a volume that had to be against some sort of hospital policy, “Steve was kidnapped!”
And so poor, drugged, still healing, only barely awake Eddie threw himself out of his hospital bed and directly onto the floor in his attempt to get up to go save Steve.
Except, not five seconds later, he was being lifted back into his hospital bed by a disgruntled Steve Harrington.
“Oh, look, Dustin!” Eddie said (slurred really, but that was the drugs’ fault. Because, again, he was on an incredible amount of drugs), happy. “I found him!”
Steve, smiling faintly, patted Eddie on the shoulder companionably.
“You sure did, buddy,” he said, or might have said. Maybe Eddie imagined it as he fell back asleep, exhausted by his sudden burst of energy.
But that’s not the beginning of this story.
Despite what people thought of him, Steve Harrington wasn’t an idiot. He was just surrounded by tiny super geniuses who spoke mostly in references that he didn’t know. Sure, he had been a C student at best and reading made his head hurt, but he wasn’t stupid.
All that to say, he knew that this was how it was going to play out.
Which is why he’d told Nancy to help Robin park the car when he took Eddie into the hospital.
“You can’t carry him and Robin can’t drive. Just don’t scratch my car, okay?” There hadn’t been time for much else, Eddie’s blood still seeping out between their fingers, his pulse beating weaker and weaker with each passing second.
Steve had known what was going to happen when he burst into the hospital waiting room, shouting for help. Eddie was a wanted man. Here was Steve, covered in blood (Eddie’s blood, but the cops in Hawkins had never really cared about the facts) and trying to save the life of a suspected Satanic murderer.
The nurses took Eddie from him and loaded him on a stretcher. They took him away and Steve had only their word that they would try and save him. But nurses and doctors had sworn an oath to save everyone, Steve knew that much.
“You have to help him,” he grabbed at the sleeve of the nearest nurse, an older woman with dyed red hair and bright blue glasses, leaving a handprint of blood (his own, Eddie’s, indistinguishable), on her blue scrubs. “He’s innocent, he didn’t hurt any of those people.”
“We’ll do our best, dear,” the nurse said, patting him on the hand, heedless of the blood on her clothes. But she was looking somewhere over his shoulder, like the bloody spectacle that he had just made wasn’t the most interesting thing in the room anymore.
“Steve Harrington?”
Oh. That explained it.
Steve turned. He’d honestly thought that this would have taken longer. That he would have had time to explain it to Robin or Nancy, maybe tell them where the phone number for the Harrington lawyer was.
Chief Powell was staring at him, looking vaguely haunted. Which, join the club, buddy.
“You’re going to need to come with us.”
Like he said. Steve wasn’t an idiot. He brought a suspected murderer into the hospital, they were both covered in blood.
Of course it was going to end up with him in this tiny interrogation room somewhere in the hospital basement, Eddie’s blood (his own blood too - less important, he had more) drying into his clothes.
They hadn’t cuffed him, not at first.
They did take his finger prints, like they didn’t know who he was. Like Callahan hadn’t busted a dozen of his parties over the years. Like Hopper hadn’t taken his prints before, that one time he got caught joyriding his dad’s precious Porsche.
Like they hadn’t needed to clean the blood off of the tips of his fingers to get the ink to stick.
Whatever this tiny room was supposed to be, maybe a file office, maybe a break room, they had done their best to turn it into the station’s interrogation room, complete with the shitty rickety table and three matching metal folding chairs.
They probably only really needed one chair, Steve was the only one sitting.
His face probably said plenty throughout the whole process - how Steve wasn’t stupid but this whole charade definitely was.
But he’d refused to say anything out loud beyond “I want to call my lawyer” for so long that Callahan had snapped.
“You didn’t see what Munson did to those kids!” He had shouted, banging his fist on the table like he was “bad cop” in a police procedural.
“Eddie didn’t do anything to anyone,” Steve snapped back, hands flat on the table as he pushed himself out of his chair, the legs squeaking sharply against the floor. “He’s innocent, he’s got an alibi for all of the murders, but you two were too wrapped up in Jason’s witch hunt to do your fucking job.”
Stupid.
Lost his temper.
They had left then, but not before they had cuffed him to one of the table legs for being “uncooperative.”
Steve’s smile as they had left had not been a nice one, he knew.
“My lawyer’s gonna love this.” A promise.
Not a threat. His father had taught him that much. Never threaten someone, because threats could be empty. Make a promise, instead, because those should always be kept.
A man always kept his word, Steve.
But that was not really the beginning, was it?
Linda Harrington hadn’t been quite right for a while now. Her husband, Richard, knew that. That was why he had taken her on this vacation. The last stay in the hospital didn’t work, didn’t fix her the way it was supposed to. So they were going to go away for a while, Richard said. Go visit some place where there wouldn’t be any expectations on her. Where she wasn’t going to be forced to “act right.”
The rolling hills were beautiful, and the wine had been delicious - thick and juicy on her tongue, all ripe plums and dark cherries.
The bitter aftertaste reminded her of the pills.
The most wonderful part of the whole trip had been the boy.
He was darling. Small and toddling in that way that children were when they didn’t have complete control of their limbs. Big brown eyes and soft floppy hair, dotted all over with moles like tiny stars. Usually followed around by an older boy - less pleasant, less darling, scowling and hunched in the way of teenagers.
But he was alone today. Alone and smiling up at her and showing her his raggedy little bunny toy, beaming up at her with that gummy smile like she was a good person.
He was alone.
And Linda Harrington was not quite right.
They left him alone after that, cuffed to the table in that shit box of an interrogation room.
He wasn’t worried.
He wasn’t.
He wasn’t thinking about the last time he had been restrained and left alone (but he hadn’t been alone, because Robin had been there at his back). Wasn’t thinking about Russian fists and questions he couldn’t answer and -
It didn’t matter. He wasn’t thinking about it.
He also wasn’t thinking about the pain in his sides. The pain of the bites had been reduced to a dull throb while he was still running on adrenaline, but now that there was nothing to do but wait, every heartbeat was a spike of pain.
He was fine.
He was doing better than Eddie, who had been bleeding so badly he was cold to the touch when the nurses had taken him.
Doing better than Max, who he hadn’t even seen yet. He didn’t even know if she was alive, but the ground had cracked open and they hadn’t killed Vecna and Steve wasn’t stupid.
He was fine.
He was also out of patience.
But shouting brought no one, even when he tried yelling “fire” just to shake things up.
He was stuck, and could do nothing but wait until Callahan and Powell came back, or until Nancy worked her reporter magic and got the feds to whisk him out of here.
His internal sense of time wasn’t the best - one of the reasons that he had always been late for first period - but it had to have been almost three hours that he had been in that room, cuffed and bleeding, when the door practically flew off of the hinges.
In the doorway was a man, clearly a fed. So Nancy had managed to work her magic. He looked a bit rumpled, like he had just thrown on the closest suit and rushed for the door when he heard about what had been happening in Hawkins. He was also clutching a file folder that had to be about an inch thick.
He was also (incidentally) built like a brick shit house. Easily over six feet tall, his dark hair was cropped close in the military style that gave Steve hives to think about.
The last few times the feds had approached him with paperwork, Steve had signed it all without hesitation. He just wanted the entire thing to go away.
This time though, he wasn’t going to give this guy a single inch, not until he knew they weren’t going to try and pin this on Eddie.
“Like I told the cops, I want my lawyer,” Steve bit out, trying hard to sound like his father. When Dick Harrington demanded his attorney no one kept him in a room for hours.
The man blinked, like he was just now realizing what he was looking at. His gaze darted from Steve’s face to the cuffs on his wrists and something that might have been fury flashed across his face - a twist of his lips, really - before he slammed the file folder down on the table and turned towards the still open door behind him.
“Do one of you asswipes want to give me the keys to these cuffs?” He called down the hallway behind him. There was enough of a southern twang in his voice that even if he hadn’t been dressed in that suit, Steve would have been able to tell that he wasn’t a local.
…Steve didn’t think that was how federal agents were supposed to talk.
Wait, was this one of those Hawkins lab spooks? Was this guy only here to get more information about El? Or the gates? Aw fuck, Steve was gonna get vanished, wasn’t he? He was going to get a bag shoved over his head and he was going to get loaded into a black van and he would never get to see Robin or Dustin again.
But he had bought Eddie a fighting chance, and that had to have been worth it.
“Why was he even hand cuffed? What are you charging him with?”
“He brought a serial killer to the hospital covered in blood.” Callahan said, appearing from the hallway like he hadn’t fucked off to who knows where for the last three hours. He even had a donut in his hand, because he clearly learned everything he knew about policing from watching buddy cop comedies.
“So he saved a man’s life and you left him cuffed in a room for three and a half hours? Did you even get him some fucking water? Or, I don’t know, medical attention?” The fed waved his hand at Steve like he was a circus side-show.
“Eddie Munson is not an innocent man, he killed at least three people,” Callahan spat, spraying his stupid ideas and also donut crumbs everywhere.
“I’m so glad to hear that this shit hole town has a working court system even in times like this. Even better, they were able to dispose of all pre-trial motions, empanel a jury, run a trial, and render a verdict in less than a day! Amazing! Washington could learn something from you.” The fed’s voice was thick with sarcasm. Callahan went almost purple with rage.
“Look, we don’t need you coming in here, telling us how to handle things in our town -”
“Really? You don’t? Because your town was torn apart by an earthquake, there’s a serial killer likely still at large, and you bum fuck cops locked a good samaritan in a room for the crime of helping! Now one of you get me the fucking keys to these cuffs before I decide to take a real close look at all those files you chucklefucks have in the shit box you call a police station and see what else you might have fucked up in the course of your illustrious career.”
Steve disguised his laugh as a cough into his shoulder, which no one in the room bought for a second, because Callahan spun to face him, finger up like he was going to point Steve into prison, and the fed hid the twitch of his own lips behind his hand.
Callahan fished the keys out of his pocket and held them out to the fed, before dropping them on the floor in a move that would have gotten Steve the backside of his father’s hand.
Sometimes Steve really missed Hop.
Callahan turned and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him in another show of disrespect that Mr. Harrington would not have tolerated. The fed rolled his eyes and scooped the keys up off the floor before coming over to unlock Steve.
Given how big the man was and the fact that Steve was cuffed to a table, the looming was sort of inevitable, but the man was quick and efficient with his movements before he got out of Steve’s space.
The cuffs had left welts where Steve had pulled at them, but in the catalogue of his injuries from the past few days, they barely registered. The fed was eyeing the marks like he was considering some kind of violence, for some reason, so Steve folded his hands in his lap.
After a moment of contemplation, the fed sat across from Steve, his back ram-rod straight. He opened the file folder in front of him to a picture of a discarded stuffed rabbit laying in the dirt and spun the folder so that Steve was staring at the sad, abandoned child’s toy.
Looking at that rabbit made something in Steve’s chest hurt, a pain so sudden and sharp that it made him forget about the burning agony of the bat bites.
“I’m agent Jacob Hunter,” the fed said, looking directly at Steve like he was trying to memorize his face. There was something almost familiar about the man’s eyes, but Steve couldn’t put a finger on it. “I’m with the missing persons department at the FBI.”
Okay, that was a surprise. None of the other feds that Steve had interacted with had ever given an actual department. They’d just shoved a stack of papers at Steve to sign and had mentioned ominously that ‘they’d be watching.’ None of them had given a name, either, come to think of it.
The only reason that Steve could think of for someone from a missing persons department to be in Hawkins was someone looking for El. Or Barb.
They were too late in either case.
Steve just blinked at Agent Hunter, waiting for him to elaborate. He’d learned a long, long time ago that volunteering information was how you got in trouble. Don’t confess to anything just because your father was staring at you from across the dining room table in complete silence. Wait for him to make a specific accusation.
“How long have you lived in Hawkins, Steve?” Agent Hunter asked finally, breaking the silence. Which was, honestly, a weird fucking question. Unless Agent Hunter was going to start asking about the lab or something. Honestly, with the adrenaline crash and the bat bites, Steve was sort of dying for this guy to just get to the point.
“Uh, about fifteen years? We moved here right before I turned five.” He did not ask why Agent Hunter was interested in these things. He could have clammed up again, should have asked for his lawyer (again), but he’d spent too long hanging out with Dustin and curiosity got the better of him.
“Where did you live before you moved here?”
“Chicago.” Steve had no memories of living in Chicago, but that was what his parents had always told him. They moved from Chicago to Hawkins so that he could grow up in a small town.
Agent Hunter pursed his lips, like that was not the answer he had expected.
“Look, Steve, I’ll be honest with you.” He tapped on the photo of the discarded stuffed rabbit to draw Steve’s attention back to it. That same pang echoed in Steve’s chest, like a long forgotten injury was flaring back up. Steve’s ears were ringing. “I joined the FBI to solve one specific case.”
He didn’t wait for Steve to ask.
“When I was fourteen years old, my little brother was kidnapped. No ransom demand was ever sent, no body was ever found. The only thing left behind was his favorite stuffed bunny. He called it Bubby because he had problems with his n’s, and my mother still has it.
My parents…I don’t want you to think that they gave up, because they didn’t, but they couldn’t go out chasing every lead. I could. I did.”
Steve realized abruptly what was so familiar about Agent Hunter’s eyes.
They were exactly like his own.
“Fifteen years my little brother’s been missing. But three hours ago his prints were run from a small police station because some hick cop wanted to try and intimidate a witness.”
Steve’s blood was rushing in his ears, the ringing sound was a roar that almost, but not quite, drowned out everything around him. The tips of his fingers were tingling.
“It took me fifteen years, but I found you, Steve.” Agent Hunter reached across the table for the first time and put a hand on Steve’s wrist, heedless of the dried blood on his skin. “I’m just sorry it took me this long.”
If anyone asked, Steve was going to blame the blood loss as his vision narrowed to a pin prick and he slumped in his chair in a dead faint.
He had screamed, inconsolable, for days.
Linda had eventually discovered that her bitter pills worked wonders on the boy, making him sleepy and soft again. He would let her hold him and sing to him and only cried a little bit after he took them.
Richard bought the first house in a small town that he could find.
Somewhere where no one would ask them any questions.
Somewhere where no one knew that Linda Harrington had never been pregnant.