Chapter Text
Steve Harrington woke, heart racing. Something was terribly wrong.
He sat up. Butter-yellow light spilled through plaid curtains. The house was quiet. The morning air was biting, especially compared to his bed’s plush warmth, and he grimaced as he rose. He got dressed: jeans, a collared, long sleeved shirt, and a jacket to cut the spring chill. He brushed his teeth, painstakingly shaped his hair, and stared at his reflection.
All was as it should be. Yet, something was wrong.
He leaned in. Fingers traced his jawline. Did his face seem…younger? That couldn’t be right. Shaking off the bizarre feeling, Steve abandoned the mirror. He couldn’t afford to be late – one more demerit and his parents would get a call from the school. Or, their secretary, Janet, would be getting a call. Word would eventually make its way to his parents, though, and then Steve would have to endure an inevitable lecture over the phone where his father would detail Steve’s many disappointments. Yeah, he’d do just about anything to avoid that.
He took the stairs two at a time and reached for his Nikes. He stopped, hand extended. A baseball bat leaned against the wall. He knew why it was there. Yesterday, he stood in the field near his house, tossing balls in the air and swinging the bat with viscous accuracy to smack them across the green. Stress relief after his English teacher returned his latest essay with a fresh, bright red F.
It was just his baseball bat. Nothing unusual about it. Sure, he should have put it away. But it wasn’t like his parents would be back from their trip any time soon. No one would lecture him for leaving it out.
There was something about the bat, though. Steve stared at it, and he felt, absurdly, like he was forgetting something. It was a tickle at the back of his brain. An echo of a dream.
Abandoning the shoes, he reached instead for the bat. His fingers met cool, polished wood and –
Multicolor lights strobed in a dark room. The wall was peeling open, wallpaper splitting and tearing, as something, oh god, crawled through. A grotesque wail. Horror. Fear. The staccato pounding of his heart. Blackness. A junkyard. Kids? A bat’s familiar weight in his hands. Fog. Four legged shadows stalking through mist. More fear. Nauseating fear. Determination.
Steve stumbled back. His heels hit the bottom of the stairs, and he sat back. He blinked wildly, taking in the familiar, sterile, sight of his house.
What the hell was that?
Pressing his palms to his face, he squeezed his eyes closed, half afraid the dizzying visions would return. They didn’t. When he opened his eyes, he saw the ornate front door, his Nikes, and the plain bat. Scrubbing hands down his face, he stood.
Whatever. He must have slept weird, or something. He had serious concerns – like figuring out how to convince his English teacher to bump his F to a D. He resolved to forget about the bat and the vision of that thing – inhuman, slimy limbs – crawling out of a wall.
Despite his resolution, Steve glanced at the bat one last time. Was it missing something? Steve saw a flash of rusted metal.
Any hope of a return to normalcy was dashed when he swung himself into his car and another vision overtook him. For a split second, he saw a kid – a boy with curly hair – in his passenger seat. Then, the boy was a teenage girl. She was putting on makeup. Then the passenger seat was empty, but he could hear squabbling kids in the back.
Arriving to campus, he blinked away the dizzying sight of angry red cracks splitting the pavement.
The visions were warped like dreams, and familiar like memories.
Steve hurried to his locker, fighting down a rising tide of panic. Was this, like, some kind of mental break? God, it better not be. His parents were going to be pissed enough if Steve was late to class again. What would they do if their son totally lost his marbles?
At his locker, Steve smoothed his hair back. With slow, deep breaths, he gathered the books needed for his first two classes. He imagined he was at a swim meet, drawing oxygen deep into his lungs.
“Harrington! Steve!” Tommy's voice cut through his attempts at calm.
Closing his locker, Steve dredged up a smile. Seeing his friend should have brought some comfort. But the sound of Tommy’s voice made Steve’s skin prickle with something close to unease. He watched his friend jog down the hallway, grinning, all teeth. When he slapped his hand on Steve’s arm, another vision:
Tommy, his face washed in blue, beer in hand, laughing cruelly. Spray paint smeared the striped movie theater sign. Sharp guilt. Tommy bumping Steve, expression mean, voice turned mocking.
Steve blinked back to himself. He looked at Tommy’s face, and thought to himself, what a jerkwad. Guilt followed. Because what had Tommy done?
Steve forced himself to speak. “Hey, man. What’s up?”
“What’s up with you? You’re acting weird.” Tommy leaned in, sly. “Did you slip something before class?”
Steve scoffed. “Come on. I'm trying to convince Mrs. Shepard to bump up my grade. Need a clear head for that.”
Tommy just laughed, clapping him on the arm again. Steve flinched, but a second vision didn’t come. Over his shoulder, Tommy called, “Whatever you say, Harrington. Whatever you say.” He then purposefully shoulder checked a freshman, knocking the kid into a locker with a bang.
Steve flinched at the exchange, feeling a little sick, and the thought came again: what a jerkwad.
So maybe he was going crazy. Still, the essay situation wasn’t going to resolve itself.
By the time third period English rolled around, Steve had prepared his strategy. He entered the room, greeting Mrs. Shepard with his most charming smile. He complimented her new glasses, explained how concerned he was about doing well in English, and couldn’t she bump his essay grade from an F to a D? Just this once?
Smiling, she replied that he’d just have to do better on his next essay, wouldn’t he? Maybe he should get a study partner?
Steve dropped bitterly into a desk. As other students arrived, he was trying and failing to calculate when his next essay was due, and whether that would get graded in time for it to impact his next progress report card. Of course, it was a moot point if he didn’t do any better on his next essay.
Nearby, a pair of boys laughed as they jostled one another. They must have knocked into someone, because she gave a startled curse before bumping Steve as she passed.
The classroom blinked out. In its place, blue, lapping water. The sharp smell of chlorine. Crimson blood dripping from a finger. A little girl was screaming. Gone! Gone! Gone! Steve felt sharp horror, then, even sharper guilt. His fault. A funeral. A mother and father, tear-drenched and hollow-eyed. His. Fault.
Steve came back to himself with a ragged gasp. Students were still taking their seats. The two boys were still laughing. He struggled to breathe. Mrs. Shepard was calling the class to order.
Steve swallowed, heart in his throat. He looked over his shoulder, and met the unimpressed gaze of Barbara Holland, with her big glasses and practically cut hair. He jerked back to the front.
Steve managed to make it through the rest of the day. More than once, he thought about cutting class and just going home – but if the school called his parents about the absence, and his dad called Steve – well, that might actually be Steve’s last straw.
So he grit his teeth and sat through the rest of his classes, taking useless notes and absorbing nothing. He managed a few bites at lunch, avoiding Tommy’s touch, and listening, with growing unease as Tommy and Carol shit-talked whoever they’d most recently decided to hate. He made it through basketball practice, and drove home, though he barely remembered the drive. Once home, he stripped his clothes, drew his curtains closed, and slipped under the covers, laying in the dark. His temples pounded, and he rolled over, pressing his face into the cool fabric of his pillow as he thought, and then thought some more.
In the dark room, he replayed the visions, and considered the emotions that accompanied them – how strong they were. Despite how disjointed and confusing the images were, the emotions that had shot through Steve when the creature crawled through the wall, when he listened to the kids chattering in his car’s back seat, at the smell of chlorine and blue, lapping water were nearly overpowering. They felt true and real. And they lingered still.
Steve considered each individual vision, doing his best to replay the sights and sounds. He thought most of all about the vision for Barbara Holland. The bloody finger. The pool. The funeral. He shuddered, feeling even more ill.
Steve continued thinking, then, eyes growing heavy, he drifted off. Upon waking, he tossed and turned and thought some more. His was no great mind (his father had made that clear), but even Steve knew something was going on. The obvious answer was that Steve had cracked and his parents were about to be in for what would probably be the second greatest disappointment of their lives. It was the obvious answer, but it didn’t feel like the right one.
The things he saw – they felt real, and they felt incredibly dangerous. The kind of warning you didn’t dare ignore.
If his feelings were correct, then he was seeing something real – something that hadn’t happened yet, but maybe someday would? The thought was horrifying, but it settled like truth in his gut. If he was seeing glimpses of the future, then Barbara... Images flashed: blood, a pool, a grave. His fault. Steve swallowed back bile, and tried to think. Why was this so hard for him?
Something was going to happen to Barbara Holland, and it was going to happen at a pool. Someone was going to take her, and they were going to murder her. At the back of Steve’s mind, a voice whispered that someone might be a something. He pushed the thought down and away.
If someone was going to kill Barbara, what the hell was he supposed to do about it? It wasn’t like he could warn people. What evidence did he have? They’d think he was crazy. At this point, Steve wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t crazy.
He couldn’t tell people, and he couldn’t just…let it happen. For an instant, he felt that heavy guilt – guilt from another time, another place. No. He definitely wasn't going to let it happen. But what was he going to do? The vision hadn’t given him much to work with: a pool, blood, and the bone-deep knowledge that in the not too distant future, Barbara Holland would die.
It was dawn before Steve had the beginnings of a plan. He didn’t have enough facts to put a stop to Barbara’s killing. So he needed to stay close – gather more information. Maybe even be there to stop the kidnapping and murder from happening.
Step 1: Steve was going to become Barbara Holland’s new best friend.