Chapter Text
When the phone rang, Steve was already awake.
Lately he’d been waking up before the alarm anyway. Lying flat on his back, staring at the ceiling where shadows crawled and disappeared, listening to his dogs snore. He never knew what woke him up. Maybe just nerves. Maybe that nagging feeling he’d forgotten something. Something important. Whatever it was, the harder he tried to remember, the quicker it slipped away.
Most mornings he’d give up trying to catch some sleep, slide quietly out of bed — careful not to step on any paws — and wander into the living room. No lights, just muscle memory. He’d jiggle the front door handle (people in Hawkins still didn’t bother locking up), check that his service weapon was in the safe (always was), and take one long look at the iron in the laundry room (always unplugged). Sometimes he’d stand in the kitchen, listening hard, like he could catch the hiss of a gas leak just by sound.
That’s what the phone interrupted.
Steve snatched the receiver up fast so the dogs wouldn’t wake. Only then did it hit him — who the hell was calling this early?
“Hello?”
“Steve! Finally!” Dustin’s voice blasted through, all bright and chipper. “Hey, man!”
Steve squinted into the dark at the wall clock. Six-fifteen. A.M.
“What happened?” he asked, skipping over any small talk, his shoulders already tightening.
If it was three in the morning back in California — Dustin’s time — it couldn’t be good news.
“Oh crap, is it that late?” Dustin must’ve just looked at the time, because he gave a little laugh. Steve could hear background noise, stuff crashing around. He frowned. Was the kid drunk? Twenty-three now, legally could be, but still.
“Did I wake you up?” Dustin asked. He didn’t sound guilty — just curious.
Steve shook his head before remembering Dustin couldn’t see him.
“Nope. What’s up?”
The unease wasn’t going anywhere. If anything, it got sharper.
“Well… uh — hang on a sec.” Dustin sounded like he’d tripped over something and started pacing. “I’ve got a question for you.”
“Okay…”
Big inhale on the other end.
“You wouldn’t freak out if somebody wanted to write a book about what happened in Hawkins, right?” Dustin blurted, all in one breath.
Years of Robin-training meant Steve caught every word, though the meaning itself slid right past him.
“A book?” he echoed. After all these years, he should’ve been used to Dustin blindsiding him — but somehow he never was.
“Yeah, Steve. A book. Pages, cover, binding — you know, old-fashioned thing people read?”
“I’m hanging up now, smartass.” Steve cut in, almost without heat.
“Sorry, sorry! I’m just — really excited!”
Dustin’s voice practically buzzed through the line. Steve could picture him bouncing on his heels, grinning like an idiot.
Jesus. Something was definitely wrong with this kid.
By now the sun was pushing in through the kitchen window. Steve flipped on the light anyway. The bulb was weak, did more to stretch the shadows than kill them, but the yellow glow gave the room a little warmth.
“So, hypothetically,” Dustin said, “what would you say if somebody wrote down our whole story? All the crazy crap we went through? That’d be pretty cool, right?”
The only thing Steve had ever considered “cool” about all of it was that they somehow lived through it.
Still… putting it all out there? Hawkins, the Upside Down, Vecna?
And what would the Bureau do if they found out?
Maybe nothing. Maybe Hopper was right and they’d stopped giving a damn years ago — about them, about the town, about everything left behind.
Or maybe not…
He didn’t know. Nobody did.
Steve shivered, suddenly cold. He pinched the phone between shoulder and ear, opened the cupboard slow so the hinges wouldn’t squeak, and pulled down the tin of instant coffee. He dumped the stale water from last night out of a mug, dropped in two spoonfuls, and set the kettle on the stove.
He didn’t drink coffee much — and when he did, instant was good enough.
He needed something to focus on.
“Wait — why are you even asking me this?” he said.
That bad feeling was starting to feel real.
“’Cause Eddie wants to write it,” Dustin announced, all proud, like he was dropping the winning card on the table. Then he went quiet, clearly leaving space for Steve’s wild applause.
“…Dustin.”
“No, listen!” Dustin’s voice jumped an octave. Steve yanked the receiver away from his ear. “We’ve thought this through, okay? I know you’re gonna say nondisclosure agreement —"
“Correct.”
“— but one, Eddie’s literally a fantasy author!”
As if Steve could forget.
Edward Munson — rising star of modern fiction. Fancy awards, swarms of fans, hundreds of copies sold right out the gate. His debut novel had dropped two years back, got crowned “Best First Book of the Year” by the New York Times. Even Steve, who’d never cared about books in his life, knew that was a big deal. Then came short stories, anthologies — Dustin wouldn’t shut up about them for weeks at a time. According to him, Eddie’s books stayed on bestseller lists for months. At a fair in Chicago, people supposedly lined up three blocks for his autograph. Some book club in Portland even renamed themselves after him.
Yeah. Steve knew.
“So what?” he said.
“So what is nobody’s gonna believe it’s real. Not if it’s in one of his novels.”
Okay, that… made a kind of sense.
“And second,” Dustin barreled on, not even letting him argue, “he’ll slap on a disclaimer. You know, the classic ‘any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental’ — that thing.”
Steve wasn’t convinced that would keep them out of legal trouble. Or protect them from the people who didn’t bother with laws at all. He’d seen those status lines in the reports: no warnings, no subpoenas. Just, at some point — Cleanup Protocol activated.
“And third — he’ll change all the names and places. Like, instead of Indiana? We’ll make it Maine.”
That sounded way too specific.
“…Okay,” Steve said finally, realizing Dustin was done. It wasn’t like he planned to fight about it, but surely there were reasons to say no. “What’d everybody else say?”
“So far? Nothing.”
“You called me first?” That, somehow, surprised Steve more than the book idea itself.
“Of course not.” Dustin snorted. “First I tried Nancy and Jonathan — got the machine.” Steve made a mental note he should probably get one of those. “Then El and Max, but after the first ring the line got all staticky. Then Mike. Then Lucas. Nobody picked up.”
Not shocking, given the hour.
“Will?”
“Oh, Will knows. He’s fine with it.”
Steve frowned. “What about Hopper and Joyce?”
Heavy breathing on the line. Steve was pretty sure that, for all Dustin’s bravado, he didn’t have the guts to cold-call Hopper.
“I’ll call them later, Steve. So? You in, or what?”
Steve thought it through. It didn’t sound… completely insane. Eddie was talented — everyone knew that. Steve himself hadn’t made it past the title page, but even that was enough to feel the scope.
And it wasn’t like this would be the first time Dustin dragged him into something questionable.
The kettle whistled. Steve poured the water over the granules.
Maybe a novel really wouldn’t change anything. If it read like fiction, maybe no one would bother to step in.
He mentally ticked through the risk boxes, the exact wording he kept typing into reports cycling up on autopilot:
Names — changed.
Locations — shifted.
Direct references — none.
Technical details — missing.
Unclassified. Non-hazardous.
God. He even thought in Bureau lingo now.
Maybe he was overestimating the danger. Maybe that was just Hawkins talking. Dustin had left and wasn’t afraid of anything anymore. Maybe the kid… was right.
If it’s just a novel and not some front-page exposé, then… maybe it’s fine?
It’s not like things could get worse.
“Fine,” he said at last. “Okay. I’m not against it.”
“Yes!” Paper rustled — Dustin crossing Steve’s name off a list, no doubt.
“Just — no real names,” Steve muttered. His eyes landed on a postcard stuck to the fridge with a magnet. “I dunno. Call the place Montauk or something.”
“Montauk?”
“Schmontauk — whatever.” He exhaled. “Just not Hawkins.”
“Totally. Speaking of Hawkins, Steeeve…”
There it was — that drawn-out Steeeve.
Steve could see Dustin in his head: chin tipped, mouth pulled into a goofy Kermit-the-Frog grin.
He was about to ask for something Steve definitely wouldn’t like.
“Eddie wants to come back to Hawkins. Y’know, check out the key spots, get the atmosphere right, map it all out…”
Dustin kept talking, but Steve lost the thread.
Eddie wants to come to Hawkins? No way.
He hadn’t set foot here since the summer of ’86. First Chicago, then New York, then bouncing around the country with random bands until — bam — suddenly he’s an author.
Steve only knew any of that because Dustin told him.
When Eddie left, he didn’t say goodbye to anyone. No calls, no explanations — just a note. For Dustin.
Then he vanished. For almost six months.
After that, he started resurfacing — still only with Dustin. He called rarely, every couple of months. Always remembered birthdays. And nothing lit Dustin up like those calls.
Later, once Dustin left for college, they apparently saw each other more often. But never in Hawkins.
So Eddie — in Hawkins? Funny.
No, really. Most of them had left. Most of them still came back.
Nancy and Jonathan made it home for Christmas every time.
Dustin showed up for Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day, every year.
El dropped by every couple of weeks and on the Fourth of July never left Hopper’s side.
No matter where he was, Will came home on November 6th. Every year.
Robin visited Steve once a month and never missed New Year’s. Okay — except the one she spent in France. Which, fair.
And Eddie…
Eddie was the first to go. He never came back.
Steve knew that for a fact. Steve never left.
“So you’ll be there anyway,” Dustin was saying like it was obvious. “You know where everything happened. Where it’s safe to walk and where it isn’t. Like, built-in insurance.”
“Uh-huh,” Steve said, not really thinking. He took a sip of coffee to focus and winced — it came in too hot and scorched his throat.
“So you won’t mind helping Eddie?”
Steve wasn’t sure how they’d gotten here.
“With what?”
“The book stuff. Fieldwork, not prose.” Dustin started pronouncing each word very carefully, fully aware of how much that bugged Steve. “Please focus.”
For whatever reason, that’s what got under his skin. Small thing. But the irritation flared fast enough to color his voice.
“Dustin, he doesn’t need me. He knows the town. He remembers the spots. It’s quiet, mostly. Nothing with teeth’s been sniffing around here the past couple years. Just — tell him to stay out of the woods,” Steve said, clipped. “And anyway, I’ve got more important things to do.”
“If Hop’s overworking you…”
Steve had to bite back a lecture about how only he got to call him “Hop.” To the gremlins, he was still “Hopper” or “Chief.”
And Hopper wasn’t overworking him. If Steve pulled too many hours, that was on him — because he wanted to be useful, okay?
Truth was… there weren’t other “important things” anymore. Not beyond work.
Behind him, the calendar hung on the fridge under a swarm of magnets. Shifts. Meds for the dogs. The kids’ birthdays. Next up: Mike. End of September.
He had the time. He just didn’t want to spend it on Eddie.
“It’s not about Hop,” Steve said, low.
“Then why don’t you want to help?”
“I don’t ‘not want to.’ I just… don’t think he needs it. And I doubt he’ll come at all. Seriously — when’s the last time he showed up?
Silence. Steve lifted his mug toward the window in a small, mocking salute.
“See?”
More silence.
He waited. Thought maybe the line had dropped. He almost wished it had, because when Dustin spoke again, his tone had gone school-principal stern:
“You’re still mad, Steve. Admit it. It’s stupid. It’s been two years, and he apologized.”
Steve set the mug down too hard.
The last thing he wanted was a lecture from Dustin. Especially about that night. And yes, of course he was mad. Eddie humiliated him — in front of the kids, and his then-girlfriend. An apology passed along through other people wasn’t worth much.
“You know what?” he said. “If Eddie really needs my help — he can ask me himself.”
It came out sharp and petty. Childish.
Steve didn’t care.
If Eddie wanted something, he could say it to Steve’s face.
Which Steve was sure would not happen.
On the other end, the quiet turned… suspicious.
For a second, Steve thought the call really had dropped. He reached to redial — when he heard footsteps. Then a voice. Low, rough. Familiar in a way that hurt.
No.
He went very still. Something lit in his chest and burned. His heart stalled, then kicked hard enough to drown out thought.
What if it was him?
What if Eddie was right there with Dustin — just off to the side, silent. A shadow at the edge of sight. Close. Too close.
The picture formed in Steve’s head like it had been waiting there the whole time: the two of them at the table in the middle of the night. Talking, laughing, passing ideas back and forth — what if we wrote it all down? Dustin grabbing a pen, making lists, and then calling everyone in manic order, no pause, no delay.
Very Dustin.
It would explain everything.
And any second now Dustin would just… pass the phone over. And Steve would hear Eddie’s voice. Hear it and —
“He’ll ask you,” Dustin said evenly. “Personally.”
Back to normal, like nothing had happened.
Steve swallowed and tried to steady his breathing.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Eddie. Just some roommate. Caltech had to be full of night owls.
And if it was Eddie — didn’t mean they had to talk right now.
He wasn’t disappointed. Not at all.
Tiny claws clicked down the hall. A second later Roggie appeared in the kitchen doorway.
She was still groggy from sleep, and Steve couldn’t help smiling. She yawned, trotted over, and nudged his leg with her nose.
She was all brown except for the lighter paws and the big white marking patch between her ears. Max had named her after some comic book character. Steve had seen the splash page. Aside from the marking, he didn’t see the likeness. Roggie was small, smaller than the others, and since he’d taken her in as a pup, she stuck to him like glue.
Of course she’d be the first one to come look for him.
Screw Eddie. Screw this whole conversation.
He had Roggie. Hard to stay mad with her around.
“Hey, baby girl,” he murmured, scratching her head.
“What’d you say?” Dustin asked.
Roggie nosed his knee again, insistent — time for a run, and not the lazy kind, the full sprint kind.
“I said I gotta go,” Steve answered.
No point dragging this out.
“…Okay. But you’ll be around next week, right?” Dustin yelled over the line.
“Yeah, sure,” Steve said — and hung up.
—
Eddie didn’t show up a week later.
He didn’t show up two weeks later, either.
By the third, Steve was so buried in work he forgot Eddie was even supposed to come to Hawkins.
That was how it always went: a lull, then trouble piling up all at once. Some of it normal. Some of it… not.
It was supposed to be over, eight years ago. The summer of ’86, when El closed the gates, when Vecna was gone — done, finished. Life was supposed to go back to normal.
It lasted maybe two weeks.
Then the weirdness started creeping back in.
And of course, who else but him and Robin stumbled into it first?
They’d just walked out of the store and were crossing the empty lot toward Steve’s car when he caught movement at the edge of his vision. He barely had time to turn before a shadow hit Robin full-on. She yelped, dropped her bag, and in the next second some thing slammed her to the asphalt.
Steve didn’t even process it. Time snapped into fast-forward — like a switch flipped him into combat mode. They were close to the car; his hand yanked the trunk without thinking. He grabbed the bat and brought it down, again and again, across the attacker’s back.
Robin twisted, choking, trying to pry herself free, but the thing cinched her throat and held on. Another hit, then another — the grip slackened. Steve tore it off her and struck once more. Something crunched. The body finally went limp.
He hauled Robin up. Scrapes along her cheek, hair matted at the crown.
She stared at the thing on the ground.
“What was that?” she breathed.
Steve had no idea.
Time slotted back to normal. He nudged the body with the bat — no reaction. Rolled it onto its back.
Human… kind of. Skin an ashy gray, clothes shredded to rags. Missing parts: a few fingers, the left foot.
“What the hell?”
That, of course, became a question for all of them.
Steve called Hopper — who else was there to call? Together they hauled the body into a squad car and drove it out to his cabin.
The others were already gathering. They crowded around the open trunk, flashlights cutting across the thing lying stiff on its side. The cabin’s porch light flickered weakly, plunging the body in shadows.
Jonathan said it reminded him of the people who’d been taken by the Mind Flayer, but… not quite.
El and Will edged closer for a better look.
Steve automatically stepped between them and the trunk, bat ready in his hand. Nancy stood behind him with her gun raised. Hopper had his lighter out, like he was ready to torch the thing — car and all — if it twitched. The rest hovered in a nervous half-circle, trading looks but staying quiet.
Steve’s grip on the bat tightened. His pulse hammered. Please, God, let it be over.
El reached toward the body and shut her eyes, like tuning a radio. A minute later she opened them, puzzled.
“It’s just a person. And he’s been dead a long time. But it’s like…” She searched for the word. “Like a shadow from the Upside Down stuck to him. Like it left a —"
“An imprint,” Will offered — then jolted, grabbing at the back of his neck.
Everyone tensed. But luckily it was only the first drops of rain slipping down his collar.
Later Nancy traced it back to the town cemetery. The thing had clawed out of a grave. Worse — there were several disturbed plots.
“And it's like… a zombie?” Robin asked.
But they all knew the answer.
“God, I hate this town,” Eddie muttered.
He’d only just gotten out of the hospital — paper-white, fragile. Looking at him made something pinch tight in Steve’s chest.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Steve promised.
He wanted to take his hand — no rings now; they slid right off his fingers, he’d lost so much weight — and say something that might land.
Eddie just rolled his eyes.
(And when he left less than a month later, Steve couldn’t even say he was surprised. Almost couldn’t.)
They handed the body over to Owens. He sighed like the weight of the whole damn world was on his shoulders.
A couple weeks later, after tests and “further analysis,” he gathered them again at Hopper’s cabin. His verdict was basically what El had said — just in science-speak:
“Through the cracks opened to the Upside Down, energy leaked into our dimension. It’s created residual anomalies — mutations, morphologic changes. Animals, humans, even plants could be affected.”
Of course Dustin couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“So… like Chernobyl?” he blurted.
Everyone flinched. The disaster had been all over the news — Steve even knew about it — and the room, already tense, went darker.
Owens hesitated, then gave a small nod.
“It looks similar, yes. But over there it was radiation. Here, the source is… entirely different.”
“And there they evacuated the whole town,” Mike snapped, clamping El’s hand.
The words dropped heavy. Nobody argued.
Later Steve watched Hopper corner Owens and demand federal backup. Owens promised he’d “work something out.”
But first the funding dried up.
Then the leadership changed — and control got handed to a nameless structure everyone just called the Bureau. No announcements, no intros. The old contacts disappeared. What remained were messages on a secured line — short, unsigned, explanation-free.
Help came only in dribs and drabs: transport, treatment of the “possessed,” the odd sample pickup. No guarantees. No feedback.
“I need people to fight this,” Hopper kept repeating — into the locked channel, over the old secure phone.
The answer was always the same: “Resources allocated. Object under control.”
In the end, it was just Hopper. And Steve.
Not that Steve had planned it that way. It just… kept happening.
One day he’d stumble across something weird by accident. Another day Dustin would rope him in. And after a while, it just became routine.
In his off-hours, he was out with Hopper, combing the woods, chasing things that sounded an awful lot like werewolves in the reports. Isolating people — or animals — who’d been touched by the Upside Down. Sometimes even whole places. Always temporary, just until the so-called “specialists” arrived.
Funny thing, though. The specialists only ever showed up at night. They never gave names.
Nothing ever made the papers. Inside the system it all got tagged as “unidentified behavioral incidents.” Hopper swore that was the official phrase. Steve once caught a glimpse of one of those reports — government header, acronyms stacked like bricks, half a page of exceptions. Nothing useful, nothing specific. Just template garbage.
So the reports went upstairs, and he and Hopper stayed on the ground.
Their teamwork back then was nothing but clipped orders: “Move.” “On your mark.” “Target at twelve.” “Clear.” Steve could almost feel how much Hopper hated it. At first, he looked for any excuse to run missions alone. And Steve couldn’t blame him — Hopper needed backup from professionals, not some idiot swinging a bat.
But eventually Hopper seemed to resign himself to it. Maybe he finally accepted that the most important thing was keeping the kids out of danger this time. On that, at least, they were on the same page.
And that, weirdly enough, felt… good.
Which honestly surprised Steve.
Because yeah, he respected Hopper — just like he respected anyone he’d fought beside. But outside of battle, Hopper had always just been the gruff small-town sheriff. Steve saw the way people followed him, how the kids trusted him, even how Mike flinched around him.
But what really stunned him was how different Hopper became around El. Beneath all the hardness, there was this softness. With her he was almost clumsy — in a good, goofy way. All that tough-guy posturing just melted.
Hopper was still the complete opposite of the kind of person Steve usually valued. He didn’t try to look better than he was — sometimes went so far the other way it bordered on ridiculous. Steve still remembered those awful summer outfits and almost pitied Joyce for having to see them.
He didn’t adapt, didn’t bend. He bulldozed through. Sometimes openly aggressive, overly suspicious, blunt to the point of stupid.
And yet…
At some point, Steve realized he felt a strange kind of kinship with him.
And, against all odds, it calmed him.
At least until he did what he always did — screwed it up.
—
It happened late one night. Steve was driving back into Hawkins after a weekend out with Robin — too much noise, too much smoke, glitter still clung to his cheek; a fading stamp ghosted his wrist. Someone else’s cologne hung on his collar. He was sober — who else was going to get Robin back to campus? He pulled into a gas station to save himself the time in the morning. Wrong place, wrong time.
Steve was bone-tired and basically sleepwalking. That’s how he ended up at the back of the store, studying the soda aisle and trying to guess which can had the most caffeine. He crouched to read the price tags. Why were the letters microscopic? Who was supposed to read that?
That’s when the idiot with the gun showed up.
Door slammed, way too loud for the hour. Then a yell:
“Money! Now! Move!”
Steve snapped awake. He peeked around the endcap. The guy hadn’t clocked him — Steve was still crouched. All he could see was the man’s back and the pistol leveled at the girl behind the register. She’d frozen, eyes glued to the barrel.
Something in Steve flips when it isn’t his neck on the line. When Nancy aimed a gun at him — or when Eddie pressed a broken bottle to his throat — he could hold it together. Barely, sure. But he could. Put someone else in the sights and the switch flips: remove the threat, whatever it takes.
The man yelled again, voice cracking.
“You deaf?!”
He was strung out, jittery. Not good.
Steve nudged a can off the shelf. It hit the tile with a sharp clack.
The guy spun, gun jerking toward the sound.
“Who’s there?!”
Perfect.
Steve moved. Came out fast from the other end, shoulder slamming into the man’s ribs. They both went down hard, gun skidding across the floor.
For half a second Steve thought — okay, maybe I’ve got this.
Then a fist caught him in the face. White flash, cold tile against his back.
“Son of a —" the guy growled, trying to pin him.
Instinct took over. Steve kicked, hard. The man folded, and Steve caught his arm, twisted it, shoved his face into the floor. Not clean, not pretty, but enough.
Steve’s chest heaved. The cashier was gone — hopefully to the panic button.
Outside, sirens wailed. Lights hit the windows.
Less than a minute later, it was over.
The drunk was hauled off to a cell. Bought the gun at Walmart, reeked of booze, dumb enough not to notice a car parked out front.
And Steve? They threw him in a cell too. Which — fine. He had jumped a guy with a gun.
His knuckles were split, lip crusting, t-shirt no help against the draft in the station.
The other guy passed out fast, snoring like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Steve sat there, wide awake, running the whole thing on a loop.
Yeah, he’d been reckless. Idiot move. What if the gun had gone off? What if the girl had taken the bullet instead? He hadn’t even thought about it in the moment. And now all he could think about was how badly he’d screwed up.
If Hopper hadn’t ditched him before, he definitely would now. No more patrols, no more helping. Then what?
By the time the sky started to pale, Callahan showed up, unlocked the cell, and marched Steve down the hall.
He ended up in Hopper’s office, feeling like a kid summoned to the principal’s. Funny thing was, in all his years of school, he’d never actually been sent there.
Steve waited. The clock ticked. His lip throbbed.
An hour later, the door finally creaked open and Hopper walked in. He shut it behind him, heavy and final, then dropped into the chair across from Steve with a grunt. He didn’t say anything at first — just stared, then pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, smoothed it flat, and looked at him again.
Steve braced for it. The lecture, the yelling, the whole “what the hell were you thinking” routine.
Instead Hopper sighed.
“I wanted you kept out of all this. But you, Harrington — you’re hard to get rid of, huh?”
Steve wasn’t sure if he was supposed to agree. Hopper shook his head.
“I’m not good at speeches, so let me just say it.” He tapped the paper. “I’ve got an opening. We’re looking for someone new.”
Steve frowned. “And…?”
“And I think you’d fit. Or — stand out, sure — but I need somebody who can actually do the job.”
Steve blinked at him. “You’re offering me… a job? For real?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
Steve rubbed at his neck, trying to think. Twenty-four years old, kids all gone off to college, and he was still rewinding VHS tapes at Family Video. He didn’t have a plan. Hopper’s words landed heavier than he wanted to admit.
Hopper mistook his silence for refusal. “Don’t say no yet. I know it sounds like a bad idea. But you’re already in the middle of this mess. You’ve got the instincts. You’re in shape. Аnd people trust you. That’s not nothing.”
Nobody had told Steve he was good at anything in years. Hearing it from Hopper — who never handed out praise — hit harder than he expected.
“The academy’s six months,” Hopper added. “I’ll give you the referral. Hold the spot open.”
“You’re not… going to tear into me?” Steve still didn’t buy it.
“For what?”
“I jumped the guy.”
“Yep.”
“Reckless.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And the girl could’ve gotten hurt. Because of me.”
“True.” Hopper’s voice didn’t waver. Steve felt sick. “Look, it wasn’t great. But it wasn’t the end of the world either. You can learn. That’s the point.”
Steve just stared.
“So think about it,” Hopper finished. “Alright?”
He waved him out.
Steve nodded, stood, numb. His car was still sitting at the station. He was already late for his shift. Keith was gonna lose his mind.
He was halfway out the door when Hopper called after him.
“…She at least pretty?”
Steve turned. “Who?”
“The girl at the station.”
Steve blinked. Tried to remember her face. Came up empty. “Uh… maybe?”
Hopper shook his head.
The next morning, Steve drove to Indianapolis and filled out the papers for the academy.
And he never once regretted it.
—
Okay — sometimes he did. Especially now.
Problems were coming from every direction, and Steve couldn’t remember his last real day off.
It started with a murder — the first one in a long time. The victim was a nothing-special guy just passing through Hawkins.
“Couldn’t he have waited and died in Marion?” Hopper grumbled as they handed the body to the coroner.
Then it turned out the dead guy used to run with a crew and was in witness protection. Cue the feds, who immediately had Hopper — and by extension, Steve — jumping through hoops: re-check every witness and their friends, sweep every gas station because “maybe he stopped somewhere.”
And then another artifact showed up.
As long as there were cracks left open, some genius would keep slipping through — military perimeter or not — and hauling stuff back out. Clothes, tools, random tech. One guy even somehow boosted a red Plymouth from the other side.
Dustin had called them “artifacts” first; the name stuck — with him, with Steve, even with Hopper. And those artifacts “broadcast,” as Dustin liked to say. Plain English: they got into your head.
Worst part? They looked like ordinary things.
This time it was a book.
Nothing to it at first glance: old, scuffed cover, the title rubbed off like sanded down. Bright red, black trees on the front. First line read: Where the forest ends, the voice begins.
Classic.
Of course the librarian went first. He called the station twice about “voices in the vents.” Hop didn’t take it seriously; they got there an hour late.
By then he was tearing around the stacks, flinging books, repeating the same line on a loop like a stuck record. Questions bounced right off him.
“Mr. Fraser, knock it off,” Hopper groused.
Fraser acted like he didn’t hear, backing away and whispering, “They’re coming. They’re coming. They’re coming…”
“You think he’s drunk?” Hop muttered.
“Maybe…”
“Great. We’ll have to drag him.”
Hop started forward, but Steve caught his elbow. “Let me.”
He slipped around the shelf and crouched beside Fraser. The man had wedged himself into a corner in a drift of hardbacks, rocking back and forth.
“Mr. Fraser? I’m Steve Harrington. You probably don’t remember. You once tried to teach me the card catalog. You were a saint — I didn’t get a word of it.”
No answer, but the rocking slowed.
“You’re exhausted, huh?”
A faint nod.
“Let’s get you somewhere you can rest.”
Steve held out a hand. No pressure. Just waited.
After a few seconds, Fraser took it and let Steve pull him up.
Hop patted him down and pocketed a pen and a ring of keys.
“No booze on him,” Steve said under his breath.
“Yeah — so it smells like Upside Down crap,” Hop muttered as they walked Fraser outside.
Then they started digging in.
Once Fraser steadied, they learned it began with an unlogged book. He’d found it on a windowsill. Opened it. Read a line. After that — blank.
“Seriously? A book?” Steve said.
Hop arched a brow. “What?”
“It’s just — feels like we’re drowning in literature. Munson’s book, now this.”
“Maybe you’ll finally learn to read.”
“Hilarious.”
They burned a couple of days tearing the library apart. Nothing.
A day later, new cases popped up.
Same symptoms: memory gaps, looped behavior, scrambled thinking. No aggression. No obvious threat.
Nothing flashy. But that same red book kept turning up nearby.
Victims were random: a high-schooler, a woman from the shelter, a music teacher. No thread between them.
It took him and Hop four days to trace the route.
Once it surfaced at a thrift store — the owner swore he’d brought it in months ago. Paperwork said otherwise: nothing.
And then it just… came back. To the library.
Steve dropped in to clarify a couple of search questions and caught a red square at the edge of his vision. The book lay open on the sill, cover up. He flipped it. The letters wobbled a little, but there it was again: Where the forest ends, the voice begins.
He looked at the line. Blinked.
And didn’t read another word. He shut the book, carried it outside, and called the response team.
They showed up after dark. No chit-chat, no names. Took the item and left.
Later, in the digital ledger, Steve saw: OB-M217-94. Seized. Contact — brief. Side effects — reversible.
Everyone did come back within twenty-four hours. No memories — just that floaty, fogged-up sense that someone else had been talking through you.
You know. A normal week in Hawkins.
But Steve was wrung out.
And that was before he even sat down to file the reports. One went into the police system. The other up the secure line — the one with its own access, its own computer, its own passwords, and its own liability.
On paper, Hopper was supposed to handle all that. In practice, Steve always did.
First, because Hop never really learned the system. Instead of uploading, he kept doing it old-school — scribbles on random scraps, a nod, “I’ll enter it later.” He never did.
Second, because one day Steve picked up the desk phone and a mechanical voice said: Data transmission is mandatory. Compliance is monitored.
Hopper was out of town. He never even heard about the call.
Steve did. And from then on, he uploaded everything himself — every file, every line, by the book.
Third, because he was the only one who could actually wrangle the computer and the system without cursing at the screen. Hopper kept grousing that screens gave him a headache (maybe Steve’s did too — but he didn’t whine).
Fourth… who else? Handing off Classified to anyone outside the circle was a hard no.
So after a day of calls and containment, Steve sat and typed, eyes aching at the glow, peering through the reading glasses he only wore for screens. He proofed everything ten times. The editor’s red squiggles did most of the heavy lifting; left to his own eyes, he’d miss half the mistakes.
Long story short: Steve was wiped.
But at least a day off was finally coming. He was going to sleep. Or at least try.
—
They were just stepping out of the station when Hopper said, out of nowhere, “Drink?”
Steve tensed.
Drinking with Hopper was a special kind of hell. The man wasn’t chatty sober; with a couple in him, he went quiet and heavy, like he was arguing with ghosts only he could hear. Sometimes that weird calm — radio humming somewhere behind the bar, headlights sliding past the windows — almost helped. Mostly, it wore Steve down.
He was used to Robin. To the way she could talk without taking a breath, hop from topic to topic, and smother any anxious thought before it even had a chance to bloom. If he started worrying at the top of her sentence, by the end he’d forgotten what it was about.
She made things easy. After their first botched run at Vecna — when the cracks split the town and Eddie and Max were laid up in the hospital, busted up and half-dead — Robin kept him afloat. She was one of the few who knew how much he could think. Too much. In too much detail. Most people never credited him with that — which stung, even if he could see why.
But Robin knew.
She knew how often he ran the loop in his head, again and again and again, like a lousy ride where everybody pukes at the end. And she’d shut it down — just talk his ear off until the noise in his head went quiet. And it helped.
With Hopper, that sometimes worked too — but only when Joyce was around. She’d start talking — about anything, from anywhere — and he’d jump right in. Cut across her, argue, toss in commentary. Half the time off-base.
Steve pictured himself in Joyce’s seat and knew it would drive him nuts. He wouldn’t last; he’d lock up, get prickly. But with those two, somehow, it worked.
They seemed to have a rhythm they both felt. Their talk stitched itself together — into a dialogue, a spat, a story. Sometimes it was funny, especially when they bickered. Sometimes it got almost uncomfortable, because suddenly it was too personal — like someone cracked a door on an old, very real history.
And Steve envied it.
He’d once thought he and Nancy would end up like that. That shared trauma — Robin’s phrase — would make them kindred. It didn’t.
And tonight — especially — he had no juice for silence or for other people’s happiness. He wanted to go home, walk the dogs, and disappear under a blanket.
Maybe, just for a bit, not think about anything at all.
“Sorry, can’t stick around. If I’m late, Bloop will shred a pillow, eat the stuffing, and then puke on the couch.”
Hopper looked at him like he’d miscounted to five.
“You should’ve left him in the woods.”
Yeah, well.
Steve remembered exactly how he’d found him — tied up off a back road so he couldn’t make it home. At first he figured the dog wouldn’t have gotten far anyway, not on three legs. Later he realized how wrong he’d been. Bloop could move — wild, gremlin-fast — and he didn’t howl or bark so much as yell.
Steve assumed the noise meant pain; the missing leg didn’t help. But the vet — older woman, eyes like she’d seen everything — looked him over and said he was fine. Lost the leg as a pup; he’d long since adapted. And the yelling? Looked like he just liked it.
When she heard where Steve had picked him up, she double-checked, just in case:
“No tattoo, no microchip. There’s no way to trace an owner.”
As if Steve would return him to the jerks who’d ditched him once already. The idea felt unbearable. He hadn’t planned on getting a dog, but leaving him there would’ve been a second betrayal.
He had no clue what he was doing.
That first night was chaos: the dog howled in the bathroom, and Steve paced in circles, tired enough to cry. Robin called to check in, and he snapped into the phone:
“He ate the remote, Robin. He’s not okay. I’m not okay!”
El was in town then and jumped in with both feet. They scrubbed the dog clean; turned out he wasn’t brown at all, but white-gray — almost the same washed-out blue as his eyes. (El swore he looked like a husky; Steve voted demon.) They picked out food, a dog bed, and a ball that Bloop ignored completely.
They were sitting on the living-room floor with him when El said, like it was obvious:
“I think his name is Bloop.”
Steve blinked. “Why?”
Right then the dog, chasing his tail, caromed off the wall and hit the floor with a soft bloop.
El smiled. “Hear it? Bloop.”
She got so attached Steve briefly considered handing him over, but she was still renting with Max in Indy — no pets allowed.
Pretty soon, Steve couldn’t imagine the house without the idiot.
All the more reason he hadn’t left him in the woods.
“Don’t say that.” He knew Hopper didn’t mean anything by it, but he still appealed to the man’s better angel. “El actually likes him.”
“She also liked Mike,” Hopper grumbled. “I love her more than life, but her taste is… eclectic.”
Steve thought Mike had actually been better lately — they’d had a decent, adult-ish talk when Steve called for his birthday yesterday. But he let it go.
“By the way,” Hopper added, “El’s coming next weekend. Swing by. And no, Harrington, that’s not a request. Show up. You’ve been too gloomy after… you know.”
After getting dumped again.
Oh, Steve knew. Very well.
Hopper pushed the door open, and Steve followed him out into the chill. He closed his jacket.
And then he saw Eddie.