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It starts at the first end of the world, the one that was merely an appetizer for the next four ends-of-the-world that followed.
After the nightmare in the Byer's house has been fought off with fire and gun and bat, after he limps home with his first concussion and a bottle of less-than-legal painkillers begrudgingly sold by the local drug dealer, after a ten-minute ordeal of carefully maneuvering out of ruined clothes with bruised ribs and a bleeding mouth, Steve catches sight of the pale, sketched lines bleeding up from the thin skin of his left hipbone, over a tiny scar he'd somehow earned earlier that year during the spring training season.
In a haze of drugs and pain, he thinks he's hallucinating. There's no new texture under his fingertips and nothing tingles strangely like the movies romanticize, but the lines fade in like tentative pencil strokes, darkening slowly under the surface as he scrubs fear-sweat and blood and otherworldly ichor from his body in the shower. The sight makes him smile bitterly, doped up and heartsick. He doesn't quite believe they're real.
In the morning, though, the lines are still there, fresh and pale under the yellows and purples of emerging bruises. Like all soulmarks, it is formless in its newness, sketching the theory of a shape but hiding yet its final form. It may take months to settle, if not years. The location is strange; arms and legs are normal placements, and even necks are not unheard-of. Visibility is a hallmark, unlike the tucked-away shape just above his waistband, placed far enough behind the protrusion of his hip that he has to twist awkwardly to get both eyes on it. That doesn't stop his heart from fluttering happily while his fingers trace the indistinct lines, the proof that he'll never be alone again. He can't wait to show Nancy and see what their marks form together.
In the direct aftermath of the events of November, hollow with the echoes of trauma, he and Nancy don't go further than light kisses and fingertips under shirt hems. He shows her his mark as soon as he has the chance, eagerly exposing the skin and asking after hers, but she doesn't return the favor for weeks. When she finally reveals it—and it too is strangely placed, sitting over her rib cage, nestled just under the thick band of her bra—the first few lines, pale as they are, match. The delay leaves a lingering unease in pit of his stomach, but the rush of elation when he finally lays eyes on the real thing makes it easy to ignore both his misgivings and the tightness around Nancy's eyes.
He thinks, We were made for each other.
He thinks, I love her.
After that first glimpse of Nancy's mark, however, Steve is not given another.
Their courtship is a slow one enforced by the hidden nature of their marks. At Nancy's request, he keeps his covered by an innocuous band-aid in the locker room, and thus the expectations of soulmates aren't placed upon them by the gossip mill, and the expectations of their parents keep them chaste. Nancy's mother in particular watches them like a hawk, no longer letting Nancy stay over at Steve's and preventing him from sneaking in to her room, and Nancy admits to him that her mother knows what they did together in his bed. He resigns himself to stolen moments in his car, in the school bathroom, in the sundry corners of Hawkins that only outcasts and misfits and drug dealers frequent.
Even in those moments, intimacy continues to be sparse. Initially, the layers of winter keep her softer parts from his hands, but even when spring trickles in and then warms to summer, she remains buttoned-up and prim, pushing away wandering hands and allowing only short kisses that never leave marks or smudge her makeup. He only feels the direct warmth of the skin beneath her clothes with glancing brushes at rucked shirt sleeves and at the crescent of modest necklines. There is always a good excuse—work, school, family obligations, new mysteries to investigate—and she never denies him company, merely intimacy.
Frustration is held at bay by conviction; he's a true believer at heart, and he convinces himself that her reluctance towards romance has a purpose.
That lasts until Halloween, when a drunk Nancy collapses the house of cards with bitter words and a bitter splash of red. Later, in the alley between the gym and the cafeteria, she pulls up her sweater and shows him why it's all bullshit, shows him the long spikes that sprout from the nascent lines of her mark—thin, harsh slashes outward that his faint mark doesn't mirror.
Even that isn't enough to crush his belief. He buys flowers and returns with words in his head about unconventional marks and unconventional circumstances and falls head-first into an unconventional friendship that derails everything.
Dustin is an odd duck, and an unafraid one too. In the days after the second end of the world, Steve has a hard time fending off the questions lobbed at him while in a post-concussion haze, and the inevitable interrogation about Nancy descends before the bruising has faded from his face.
"So her mark is different?"
"Kinda," Steve says reluctantly, staring at the painful glare of the red light and regretting ignoring the hospital's advice to avoid driving for a while.
"Can you be more specific?" Dustin asks, arch and petulant. Steve reaches over to push on the brim of Dustin's hat but the kid is too wily, dodging the uncoordinated swat with an offended screech.
"Volume!" Steve hisses.
"Don't blame me for a problem started by—Hey, it's green now."
The car behind them agrees with a honk and Steve grumbles about pests in passenger seats as they cross the intersection. Dustin talks right over him.
"When did you first notice them? Is hers a completely different shape now? Is it so light that there's not much to see yet? Is hers light too? Where is it located? Is it in the same spot? Do you two compare them on a set schedule—"
"Henderson, geez. Slow down. Don't you know it's rude to ask all that stuff?"
"To a stranger, yeah. But we're friends."
Steve glances over and finds a gummy grin direct his way. He sighs and attempts to roll his eyes. The resulting splitting pain leaves him gritting his teeth and gripping the wheel too tight.
"Okay, but it's kinda rude even among friends. Marks are really private."
"But they're so visible. Everyone talks about them."
"Oh yeah? What do all your little buddies talk about?"
"Why some people have identical animal marks and some have identical object marks and some are hybrids. Why only some people get them. What placement means. How long it can take for marks to form. How direct interaction matters more than just passing by someone every day. Why they only start to form on people older than sixteen. Why a small, seemingly random subset of the population never gets marks at all. How rare it is to get cross-country or cross-continent matches, with the occurrence of matching marks being astronomically higher for people living in the same town. What is means when—"
"That was a rhetorical question, man."
"Your tone wasn't rhetorical," Dustin says haughtily. "Marks are not a taboo topic and you shouldn't be suppressing the genuine curiosity of a younger peer about a natural phenomenon. Plus, if you've got a special case, it could be important information for the rest of us."
"Jesus christ, you're relentless. It's not a special case, alright? We just don't have matching marks anymore."
"Ah, but 'anymore' is a key piece of information. They used to look alike?"
"In the same way that a few random lines can look alike, sure. Nothing really changed all year, I was just—just—"
He nearly jumps at the soft touch on his arm. In his periphery, Dustin's expression has morphed into sage sympathy. Steve hates it.
"I get it. I saw the flowers. You're a hopeless romantic."
"I'm not hopeless," he mutters, slowing the car for the turn onto Dustin's street. The ache behind his eyes intensifies as they face into the late afternoon sun.
"A year though?"
"It can be that slow! Slower, even."
"Not if you're going out on dates every week."
"Alright smartypants, who between the two of us is even old enough to go on dates, huh? It can be that slow. My parent's marks were that slow."
"Right."
Dustin turns quiet; Steve attributes it to the appearance of his house, which features a worried-looking Mrs. Henderson wringing her hands on the porch. Her face turns relieved when she spots them.
When Dustin exits to the harried embrace of his mother and her effusive thanks for Steve's near-daily chauffeur services, he leaves Steve with a parting comment and a threatening jab of his pointer finger.
"We have more to discuss here, Steve. Next time."
Steve pastes on a strained smile for Mrs. Henderson's questioning concern and wonders how he ended up adopted by the world's most meddlesome thirteen-year-old.
To his dismay, Nancy formally breaks up with him a few days before the Snow Ball. Knowing it will hurt, he asks if Jonathan has her matching mark, and comes away reeling from Nancy's firm assertion that not only does Jonathan lack a mark, they both prefer it that way.
"A soulmark isn't always a good thing," she tells him, and he wants to argue, but the pity in her eyes as she adds, "Just ask your parents," shuts him right up. The sting is only slightly lessened by the delicate hand that wraps around his fingers, the squeeze Nancy gives him as she buries his hopes for another chance beneath her staunch disbelief in the power of a soulmark. She promises to stay in touch and he doesn't point out the irony as she lets go.
The winter is lonely even with a new middle-schooler for a friend. He's isolated at school, crawling through the last semester with lunches seated alone in a corner of the lunchroom while he avoids eye contact with the local drug dealer whenever the guy climbs up and rants on the table next to him, and classes spent ignoring any and all interaction with the popular crowd. He drops out of basketball and his parents make it clear that his dying college prospects leave him with few options for his impending graduation, so his evening are split between listening to them micromanage his choices when they bother to come home and slogging through job and college applications when they're gone.
Dustin drags him into driving other Party members around during his scant free time, and never stops asking about soulmarks. The rest of the kids delight in following Dustin's lead; Steve dodges the personal questions, but somehow becomes a de facto source for all sorts of inquiries that they can't seem to get answered from their parents. All of the soulmate talk starts to feel like picking at a fresh scab, and he avoids looking at his mark entirely, trying to divorce himself from caring so much like Nancy and Jonathan seem to be able to do.
The spring of 1985 creeps by in painful increments. He graduates by the skin of his teeth and waves Dustin off to summer camp the day after.
A week later, he starts his first job and meets Robin.
"You want to know why I got so hung up on Tammy?" Robin whispers to him in the tangled sheets of her bed the night Starcourt burns down. The Russian drugs left their systems hours ago, so Steve cracks open his swollen eyes and tries to make himself focus on what Robin wants to tell him of her own volition.
When she doesn't immediately tell him, he prompts hoarsely, "Why?"
Rather than answer with words, she pulls back from the hollow that the parentheses of their bodies form and lifts the hem of her oversized sleep shirt. Dizzy from exhaustion and pain, Steve blinks unevenly at what she shows him imprinted on her rib cage.
"It was so small then, but I was convinced it was her. A whole semester for the barest of marks. It could have passed for an old scar. When we stopped sharing classes, the mark stopped changing and I knew who it was for. I just couldn't figure out why trying to talk to her after that didn't do anything. Not until a few days ago."
"Is that the handle of a baseball bat?" Steve asks, vision wavering as his heart thumps like an unbalanced washing machine. It looks roughly like Nancy's mark, with spikes emerging from a long, curved line, but there's far more detail beneath that, at the base of the line.
Robin cranes her neck down and squints at it, stretching the skin out with a finger.
"I guess? That's what yours looks like?"
"No?" Steve says uncertainly, twisting his hips into the bed and reaching back slowly for the ridden-up waistband of the old bottoms Robin stole from her dad's dresser. He pushes the fabric down, ignoring Robin's momentary squawk of worry about him flashing something inappropriate, only to let the elastic snap back against his skin in shock at the first glimpse he's had of it in weeks.
"Holy shit. I knew it," Robin whispers as Steve fumbles at the band again and bares his mark to them both.
The upper section now features thin lines spread from the center, a little like Nancy's and Robin's, but they arch out differently, like reaching fingers. More shocking, though, is that the bottom is much more like Robin's—it's unequivocally the leather-wrapped wooden handle of a baseball bat, drawn out in thick, dark lines.
"It's so dark," Robin says on an awed breath. The contrast on his skin is stark, the baseball handle etched in like they've known each other for years instead of weeks. A glance at Robin's mark shows the same, resembling a freshly-inked tattoo. Steve frowns and traces over the spreading shape of his own, letting his fingers linger at the tips of the thinnest lines.
"Just the bat bit, though. The rest looks…"
"Mismatched," she finishes for him, matching his frown as she pokes at her own mark. "Is that a thing? Have you ever heard of mismatched soulmarks before?"
"I haven't," he says uneasily.
"D'you think it's because of the, uh—my—"
He pulls his gaze away from studying his mark as Robin's voice trails off weakly and finds her biting her lip nervously and studiously avoiding his eyes. Confusion creases his forehead.
"Your what?"
"My thing. Y'know, the thing. From the bathroom." When he still just stares at her blankly, she huffs in exasperation and shoves him on the shoulder, causing his borrowed pants to snap back and cover the new lines on his hip. She hisses over his yelp, "My lesbian thing, dingus!"
"Oh. How would that change a mark?"
"Well, maybe we have two soulmates. Platonic and romantic."
"I thought platonic soulmates were a myth? It's just a fake thing people say when they're—" He stops himself abruptly, flushing.
"When they're what, Steve?" Robin has the same look on her face that she always has when she catches Steve saying something stupid behind the counter of Scoops Ahoy, and her voice enunciates every consonant in a way that makes him flinch.
"It's just something people say when they're hiding that they're gay," he mumbles.
"Uh huh. And do we look like a gay couple to you?"
"I've never met one, so how do I know if we do or not? Maybe there's a lesbian who looks just like me!" He runs a flustered hand through his limp hair, and when he drops it, she captures it between her two and smiles fondly.
"Or a gay guy who looks like me."
For a brief moment, his thoughts stutter on that image and his stomach swoops. The laugh he forces out is disjointed.
"There's your answer, then. We could look like a gay couple."
"That wasn't the point," Robin says, fondness disappearing beneath a quirked eyebrow. "A platonic soulmate isn't a euphemism for a gay soulmate. I mean, sure, maybe some gay people use that to keep from being outed, and maybe straight-looking platonic soulmates let people assume they're romantic soulmates because it's easier, and—Sorry, I'm supposed to be making a point. Platonic soulmarks are absolutely a thing, between all sorts of people. My parents know a pair of brothers that have them."
Despite the rambling, Robin is confident as she pokes a bunch of holes into something Steve thought he had a pretty good understanding of, and he has a hard time coming up with anything to respond with except—"Brothers?"
"Dude, you watched Star Wars, didn't you? Don't you remember Luke and Leia's twin marks? That was like, a whole big twist in the third one."
"I thought that was just another sci-fi thing they made up for the movie, like all the robots and teddy bears!"
"I know you know they're called Ewoks. Dustin corrects you every single time. I've seen you laughing at him with my own two eyes as you rile him up—Wait, I'm getting distracted from the point again. Platonic soulmarks are totally a normal, non-gay thing. Rare, but normal. And apparently great for slightly incestuous plot twists."
"Then what about this?" He gestures helplessly at her mark, partially peeking out from where her shirt has begun slipping back down. Having seen his now, the divergence of the upper portion is jarring. He's never encountered genuine marks that don't perfectly match. The matching was the whole point.
Robin grimaces and flops onto her back. "I don't know. There's definitely a platonic thing going on, because, as already established, lesbian." She gestures to herself and Steve nods along agreeably. "It only makes sense from there that the rest of it is for our romantic matches, but…"
"That means we've both already met our other soulmate," Steve says. He turns a few ideas over in his mind, but keeps running into the ultimate problem of a small town.
"And it could be anyone in this podunk town, because we've likely talked to everyone in it at some point by now," Robin groans, seemingly plucking the thought right out of his head.
"I used to think mine matched Nancy's," he blurts out, then immediately regrets it when Robin shoots up to her elbows and stares at him like he's grown a second head.
"Did you really? With those piddly little lines? Didn't you two date for like, two years?"
"It was stupid, I know. I was stupid," he says, hiding his reddening face in the rumpled bed sheets beneath his cheek. He's been lectured enough times by Dustin by now to know that his own parents' marks are not a standard he should be comparing himself to. His next words are muffled into the fabric. "She doesn't believe in soulmarks anyway."
He can feel Robin's wince through the mattress. A tentative hand brushes against his hairline, running up into his hair. Without meaning to, he turns into the contact, watching Robin through drooping eyes, and when she sees him looking back, her nails start scratching at his scalp.
"That sucks, though I kinda get that. Lots of people get stuck in shitty relationships because of soulmarks. Besides, there are like, five billion people on the planet. It's a little crazy to think only one person will work for you forever just because the universe gave you matching marks."
"Well. We apparently get two."
Robin's nose crinkles with a smile that shows all of her front teeth. "Yeah. Suck it, universe. We're special. Double trouble."
"Double trouble," Steve parrots softly, closing his eyes. The AC works against the summer night, gusting over their exposed skin, but Robin's room is otherwise blanketed in quiet. The only things he can hear are their breathing and the scratch of fingernails against skin.
Exhaustion pulls him down into the mattress. Similarly, Robin's hand slows in his hair, but when she starts to pull it away, he captures it. Her fingers are cold and slim, fitting neatly around the meat of his palm as she immediately holds him back. Their joined hands rest between their bodies and as he drifts off to sleep, he vows that he'd gladly trade a hundred more black eyes and every last one of his fingernails for the privilege to know her.
It's easier to ignore his malformed soulmark when Robin slots into his life, and the shift in his dating strategy—namely, trying to forge a genuine connection before anything intimate—highlights how much he'd been pinning his future romantic prospects to an easy, predetermined solution. By the time the world starts to end again, he has almost entirely moved on from the whole business with Nancy, but the universe seems to have a strange sense of humor about his love life.
After having kept his distance from her for over a year, it's a small shock to meet up with her again at the outskirts of Fred Benson's murder scene. The pang in his chest is an old wound and smiling at her hurts less than it used to be, but the what-ifs still haunt him. She may not believe in soulmarks, and he may have found Robin, but his heart is a stubborn bastard. It makes him sensitive to her proximity as they get sucked back into the worst Hawkins has to offer, and he's reminded of all the little things he used to love about her: her strength of conviction, her decisiveness, her intelligence.
Flushed with adrenaline and pain from nearly dying to the small, vicious mouths of a brand new awful creature from the Upside Down, he welcomes the soft touch of her hands as she dresses his wounds in the hellscape version of the best makeout spot he used to know. She reminds him of princesses in the movies who tend to their chosen knights, until the conversation veers towards Nancy's partiality to guns. Eddie and Robin are enamored with her hidden skill, and Steve can't blame them for it; the memory of staring down the barrel of a revolver in Nancy's tiny hand is as fresh as the day it happened, and he doesn't stop himself from injecting a bit of fondness into his voice when he tells them she almost shot him.
"You almost deserved it," Nancy tells him, her eyes sly as she sways back into Steve's space. He feels an old scatter of sparks up his spine as their eyes meet, but then her attention catches lower and she goes tense with surprise, a hand reaching back out like she means to adjust the makeshift fabric wrap against the weeping bat bites. Her mouth drops open slightly into a surprised huff, as though she's just been winded by a punch.
"Steve," she whispers, flicking a glance up to him as one finger trails down his bloodied side and touches at the spot he's left uncovered since he found a piece of his soul in Robin. Anxiety twists in his stomach and he hurries to brush her attention and her hand away, but shock freezes him too when he looks down. The waistband of his sweatpants hides the bottom half, leaving only the thin, starveling lines exposed, except—
"It's grown. This is—" Nancy's other hand moves to touch against her shirt over the spot where her mark sits. His heart gives a painful lurch when her wide-eyed stare catches his. Hushed, her voice trembles. "Steve. It looks like mine—"
Heavy denim wacks him in the face, and he grabs at it reflexively.
"For your modesty, dude," Munson says loudly, grinning smugly and swaying in place insouciantly. There's a minute flicker of his eyes down though that betrays him, and Steve flushes as the present comes rushing back to him. Over Munson's shoulder, Robin seems to be the only one who missed Nancy's comments, throwing him a questioning look that he shakes his head at slightly—later.
She purses her lips like she wants to argue—and he's not sure he'd stop her, because suddenly all of his dead hopes and dreams are straining at the seams like an over-packed backpack—but the ground shakes and tosses them off their feet. He's crushed against Skull Rock with Nancy bracing him, sending sharp bolts of pain through his torso, and all thoughts of marks and soulmates pale as the danger of the Upside Down reasserts itself.
When they head off through vine-infested woods in search of Nancy's guns, he thinks about how close he'd come to dying again. Trailing at the back of the pack, he rakes his eyes over the three people who dove into almost certain death to save him. His attention lingers on Munson, who twitches at every little sound, whose head is on a constant swivel, who doesn't have any reason to care about Steve's sorry life and yet is here anyway braving the horror of the Upside Down. A warm surge of sympathy and gratefulness overtakes him.
Lightheaded with blood loss, it takes most of his energy to put one foot in front of the other, but he breaks into a jog to catch up, determined to thank Munson. As if waiting for an excuse to talk someone's ears off, Munson starts babbling immediately, deflecting Steve's thanks and going on and on about metal and eating bat heads and Dustin. It's probably all very interesting, if only he had the attention to give; as it is, he's distracted by anxiety-bitten lips and ratty, teased hair swaying into his space, and he can't help comparing the proximity to when Munson manhandled him in Reefer Rick's boathouse. His neck still stings from the nick left by the glass held to his throat, somehow more noticeable than the throbbing bites in his side.
There's no rush of danger to explain the swoop in his stomach this time. The flattery and the big, wet eyes gazing his way are enough to make him sway in, curious about how Munson's voice seems to sink into his bones like soft honey.
Weirdly enough, Munson has no qualms addressing what Nancy implied, and starts going on about "true love", eyebrow wiggle and all. With a touch on his shoulder, Munson leans in and points at Nancy, and the warmth in his bones seeps up to his skin like groundwater, turning to a flush up his spine, spreading from the point of contact. He almost misses the underlying intensity in Munson's little speech, but as the finally words sink in, Steve realizes that Munson definitely heard more than either him or Nancy would have liked.
He reluctantly looks away from Munson's expressive face and follows the pointing finger, watching as Nancy strides confidently through desiccated trees and trailing vines. The lingering attachment is undeniable; as Munson shifts next to him, hand still resting lightly on arm, his pulse picks up and he imagines what would be different this time, if Nancy decided to care about soulmarks.
Another earthquake sends him and Munson careening into tree roots, and by the time he's upright again, Nancy has taken off.
Don't let her go, he thinks, shaking off the embarrassment of falling against another guy, and chases after her.
Nancy walks out into the field with Max trailing behind. A brand new shotgun and a saw dangle from Nancy's hands. Steve watches them go, torn between wanting to follow like a hopeful puppy and hide like a guilty one. She hasn't looked him in the eye since the drive to the War Zone.
Proving once again that they're genuine soulmates, Robin appears to read his mind.
"Why did I have to hear you embarrass yourself earlier to Nancy Wheeler? Six kids? Six?" she whispers harshly.
He shies away from Robin's judgemental look, fiddling with the empty bottles at his feet as she pauses in uncapping the kerosene canister. It had hurt more than he expected, when Nancy had laughed at him in the RV; he'd been so thrilled at the successful car-jacking and Munson's funny little, Harrington's got her, and combined the pep talk in the woods, he'd been swimming with confidence. With one short conversation it'd been utterly crushed, though, and Robin's current displeasure makes him feel even worse.
"Well, if it's real, I should be honest about what I want, right?"
"If it's real," she says, a dubious frown pulling at her face. "You didn't even really get to see hers, and I don't know that dropping the 'I want six whole kids' bomb on her of all people is going to help, matching soulmarks or not. Plus, you already have a bunch of little dinguses to finish raising."
She flaps a hand behind them at the RV, where three more of the teens he's reluctantly been watching over for two years are making a racket unpacking the rest of the things they just got from the War Zone. It sounds like a madhouse in there, between Erica and Lucas bickering and Munson screeching at Dustin as the clatter of several somethings falling echoes out of the open door. Most of them file out a moment later with armfuls of weaponry, grimacing wordlessly at him and Robin's raised eyebrows as a few stray nails roll out behind them and bounce down the steps. Munson's irritated muttering remains behind, accompanied by the clinking of the fallen nails being picked up from the floor.
Robin levels a hard stare at him as the three teens head into the field. "And you want more?"
"Maybe," he says weakly. "That was the dream, right?"
"Why're you asking me? It's your dream."
"Yeah. I just…want a happy house, that's all."
"You're not the one who has to birth all of them," Robin says with surprising vitriol, startling an uncertain laugh out of him.
"What?"
"Did you think of that? Did you think of Nancy having to do that six times? All while being a leading investigative journalist, or whatever brilliant career she's going to get?"
"Well—I mean—"
"No, you didn't. This is why we've both got your stupid baseball bat handle on each other, Steve. It represents me beating some sense into you every time you imagine that your other other half, who may or may not be Miss Nancy 'Guns in the Closet' Wheeler, is going to be your perfect upper middle class soulmate who pumps out babies purely for continuing the Harrington family name—"
She cuts herself off for a moment as Munson trips loudly down the RV steps, badly balancing a pair of trash can lids upside down with a pile of loose nails clattering inside. He doesn't look their way as he bounds off toward Dustin, hollering about needing a hammer and a, "Strong, willing squire!" Steve tracks the flail of long hair and long limbs and considers it likely that Munson is going to trip and eat shit in the uneven grassy field. A brief flare of anticipation curls in his belly as he watches the other guy lope away, waiting for the moment when awkward grace turns ass over tea kettle.
Robin lowers her voice back down and he snaps his attention to her before he can see his prediction come to fruition. "You both deserve better from a partner. She's got big dreams that probably don't include kids any time soon and you've got an unexamined patriarchal view of what a long-term relationship should look like. It's more than making a bunch of babies together."
Chagrined, he stares at his own feet, covered now in fresh, stiff boots. The desire for commitment had driven all of his recent dates away, a fact he thought he'd made clear to Robin. He'd pictured himself becoming a family man, someone completely opposite from his own parents, raising and loving a household and taking time to travel with them instead of away from them. He didn't know how to explain that the size of the family wasn't the important bit. It just made the dream rosier. He liked the certainty of a big group, liked that a household like that would never be lonely.
Having someone to come home to every day was all he wanted.
"Mark or not, she doesn't believe in the destiny part of it all anyway, so it probably doesn't matter," he deflects, attributing the stinging in his eyes to the open canister of kerosene between them. Blinking rapidly, he reaches down and grabs one of the many empty beer bottles they'd pulled from the RV and holds it out to Robin. She gives him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder as she ignores the bottle and tugs up her shirt hem.
"I just hope that the upper halves of our marks don't end up looking stupid with the—"
They both stare at Robin's mark. The change is subtle, much like Steve's, barely noticeable next to the thick, dark lines of their matching baseball bat handle.
"Do you think…Vickie?" he says.
Robin frowns slightly as her fingers skim at the feathery edges creeping out from what used to be long, plain lines. "But I didn't even talk to her in the store."
"You did at the game."
"Like, two whole words," she scoffs.
"Aren't you checking after every single interaction?"
"No! I didn't want a Tammy repeat, alright?"
"Uh-huh. And how's that been working for you?"
"I'll admit, I checked a few times before game day by squinting my eyes almost shut and taking a real quick peek. The result so far have been inconclusive. Maybe the lack of exchanging actual words was the cause—"
"Since you make me check her out every time she comes in to—"
"—Or maybe I was mistaking the new feathery bits for my own eyelashes," she says over him, before dropping the hem of her shirt with a huff as her whole body slumps. "But I shouldn't get my hopes up. She was in the stupid War Zone with a stupid boy. Maybe we're both doomed in romance. That's why we have each other instead."
With a finality, she swipes at a bottle and shoves the funnel in, waiting for him to pour the kerosene for fresh molotov cocktails. Steve obliges quietly, puzzling over Robin's lack of optimism. He's not as convinced as she is that Vickie is a lost cause after one measly public sighting, and he settles into the motion of repetitive work with Robin as he thinks of how to open the topic back up.
A bit down the hill, the Sinclair siblings cobble together a spear. Beyond them, Dustin and Munson start pounding nails into trash can lids. Furthest away, Nancy's hair is limned by the afternoon sun as she starts sawing at her shotgun barrel. Max crouches next to her, fiery hair even brighter. Their backs hide their faces, but determination lines Nancy's shoulders as her hands move decisively. She seems more untouchable now than ever before, lost in her own world as she turns slightly to speak to Max, saw digging in to metal with a grating rasp that echoes across the field over the sound of nails being hammered. Max asks her something, the words lost to the wind rusting at the grass, and Nancy's back tenses further as she doubles down on the saw.
She'll always choose something like this over a family, he thinks when Nancy stands up and hefts her newly-shortened gun. He tries not to dwell on how Robin's words have already dug under his skin, making him question why he so readily equates family in that thought to me. The realization is a new ache under his breastbone.
He's pulled out of his melancholy when Robin, who is also looking out across the field, swears and drops the bottle, splashing kerosene over the ground.
"Sorry, sorry," she stutters, bright red, making a worse mess as she tries to recover the bottle and spills even more of the noxious liquid.
"That's it, butterfingers. We're swapping," he says in exasperation. Robin takes the canister he shoves in her hands with an uncharacteristic lack of arguing, eyes averted and flush stronger than he thinks is warranted for a simple slip. Concern tickles at his conscience, so Steve makes himself stop looking over at Nancy as he grabs the funnel and a fresh bottle, determined to focus on the person next to him whose mark is already a clear match to his.
Dragging himself and Dustin away from Eddie Munson's body is harder than anything else he's ever done, and he's ashamed to admit that it's not because the kid thrashes and wails with inconsolable grief in his arms.
He doesn't confront the bitter, awful truth until much later, after they've returned to a Hawkins rent asunder by a parallel world, after they leave an unconscious Max behind in her hospital room, after he stumbles into the pristine coldness of his parent's empty house with fresh stitches and zero pain meds. Historically, he'd visit the local weed dealer for something to take the edge off, but—
That guy is dead now, and the upper half of Steve's soulmark has turned into a silvery scar.
He stares the whole thing in the bathroom mirror, sick with the weight of confirmation. The most shocking part is how complete it is, even interrupted by souldeath, though the stark asymmetry is a close second for unsettling new developments. From a few feet away, it looks like the solid black lines of the baseball bat handle cut off abruptly, except for when the light hits at the right angle and shimmers off the rest.
There is a fresh scar in the shape of a bat wing that crawls up his flank, joining what will soon be many other new scars from otherworldly creatures bearing similarities primarily in name only. It is detailed with fine hairs and the impression of veins, and it would blend seamlessly into the handle were it not for the shift from mark to scar. It's nigh unheard-of to have dual soulmarks—Robin did some not-so-subtle research with Dustin in the early days of their friendship that let them know how exceedingly rare it is to get both platonic and romantic marks—let alone one with a dead soulmate who didn't do nearly enough to earn the completed mark.
He finds he doesn't much like the idea of being stuck forever with a half-scarred mark and a dead man attached to it. Being a freak was Eddie's shtick, he thinks, waiting for the sting of tears that never arrive. All he's left with is a hollow emptiness and a stubborn ember of anger, both reflecting from dull eyes in the mirror. He turns away from his own face and goes to rub at his dry eyes, only to stare, frozen, at his hands.
There's still blood under his fingernails from his attempt to get Eddie's heart beating again. The phantom sensation of ribs cracking beneath his interlaced hands remains, as does the afterimage of a bite-torn, fading soulmark etched into Eddie's side. He'd paused for a few moments when he'd spotted it, an eternity held in the beat of his own heart. Despite the bottom half of the mark being ripped to shreds, there'd been enough to see the broad strokes, like the world's worst connect-the-dots puzzle. That fleeting glance had planted the seed of suspicion in his mind, and the mirror confirms it now.
His other soulmate was Eddie Munson and he learned too late to do anything about it.
He slams off the lights and showers in the dark for what will be the first of many nights.
The fourth end of the world is messier and bigger than the previous three, but for him, it is eclipsed by the personal identity crisis that he tries desperately to hide. He doesn't allow himself to cry at first, maintaining a facade of normalcy as they all reel from losing so much to Vecna's schemes, but the lack of sleep and food finally catches up to him, resulting in a week-long breakdown about the cruel fate of the universe with Robin as the sole witness. He emerges only slightly more capable of taking care of himself, with Robin's flabbergasted face upon seeing his scarred mark imprinted on his mind. He vows to avoid any romantic relationships for the foreseeable future and to do better at burying his problems, and then swears Robin to secrecy about the state of his mark.
Hawkins is far emptier than it ever was, and the chasm splitting the town apart alongside the infiltration and subsequent quarantine by the military separates and isolates their small group even further, so it's not hard to keep his head down in the wake of his breakdown, but there is an inevitable closeness to their group that makes privacy a tricky tightrope. He's grateful for Robin roping them jobs at the radio station, because he spends days at a time talking to no-one else except his platonic soulmate and sometimes even that feels too much.
At first, the radio is just a job, another company suckered into taking both of them at once. Robin eventually comes up with the idea to start sending coded messages for local military sightings in town, but he's the one who finds the songs. It gives him an excuse to listen through the enormous store of tapes in the building without needing to hold a conversation, and it introduces him to varieties of music that he'd never given a chance before. Surprisingly, he develops a taste for jazz and classical, and the only coherent explanation he can give Robin is that the complexity keeps him from getting stuck in his own head.
She doesn't quite believe him when he says the same for metal music, and he can't blame her. He is lying, after all. He doesn't listen to metal music for any pleasure, and while the genre does lean more towards non-traditional structure and unusual sounds, there's a predictability to it that leaves his thoughts free to catastrophize.
Realistically, it's the only link he has to Eddie, even if that's exactly the reason why listening kind of fucks him up. The unfairness of it all never fails to hurt; the music is loud and brash and alive, and when he can decode the screaming and the growling words, a lot of it resonates with him. Half of it rails against the things he's come to hate too, and the other half is aggressively romantic. The turmoil seems to be the point. He understands Eddie more than he ever did when Eddie was alive, and yet he hates him even more, for choosing to sacrifice himself and leave them all worse for it. Dustin hardly speaks to him, when he even bothers to visit, and the other boys avoid anything to do with metal or D&D. There is a gaping hole in all of their lives where Eddie used to be, and Steve only knew him for a few days.
It's hard to reconcile those complicated feelings with the knowledge that they had matching marks. He can't imagine how he ended up with a guy as a non-platonic soulmate.
How was it ever going to work, he thinks in the darkest moments. Maybe it's been doomed from the start, like Robin said. The universe gave me Robin to make up for matching me to and then killing someone I wasn't even going to be attracted to.
"You're sure you weren't secretly hung up on him before learning about the mark?" Robin asks, leaning back as the station switches from her mic to the next queued song, Van Halen's "Why Can't This Be Love". He busies himself with resetting his soundboard rather than look back at her assessing stare. He'd flinched during her pre-song spiel about the band and its eponymous guitarist. Hearing the name Eddie out loud had caught him by surprise, something he really wishes Robin had missed.
"No, I didn't think twice about him. Why do you ask?"
"It's been months, Steve. I feel like it'd be a lot easier to let go if you weren't already a little, you know—"
"I'm not—I wasn't. I don't like guys like that," he says quickly, but even to his own ears he sounds too defensive. In the corner of his eye, he sees Robin frown hard.
"You never considered the possibility?"
Not until Eddie, he doesn't say. He'd been so sure of himself before his stupid mark turned traitor. Now all he thinks about these days is Eddie's dark eyes and big laugh and how neither are in the world anymore bothering him and the rest of Hawkins. Longing has never felt like that to him, like worrying at the hole of a missing tooth, leaving him cold instead of warm.
"I like boobies, Robin, which guys famously do not have."
"Ew, I told you, don't—whatever, you're deflecting. That's not what I asked. Now that you know your mark was on another guy, don't you think maybe you were missing some other signs?"
He wrinkles his nose and picks up a record he'd set down at his elbow before the show started. "Like what?"
"Well, you're the one who was telling me that Vickie was definitely interested even though I couldn't see it. And when I did finally ask her out, she was surprised that I liked her back. It's harder to tell when you're both girls, I guess. What if it's the same for guys? What if you were, like, thinking or feeling something about him, but you didn't recognize—"
She finally takes the record he's been holding out and wiggling pointedly, a Diana Ross single he'd dug out from the section labeled 'Billboard 1975-1985', and then does the exact kind of comical double-take he'd been hoping for when she sees the title.
"—Upside Down?"
"Seems perfect for signaling a good time to start Hopper's first mission, right?"
"I think we decided to call it a crawl," she says, glancing furtively out through the big glass window of the studio. There're no visitors, but he copies her. Months with an occupying force has left them all more paranoid than ever, even with twice-a-day sweeps for bugs in the station. "And yeah, this looks perfect. I'm actually kind of mad I didn't think of it myself. It was all over the radio a few years ago. How'd you think of it?"
"Vickie, actually. She was humming 'I'm Coming Out' and I went looking for the album. Forgot this was on the track list and nearly dropped the damn record."
Robin's expression looks torn between worry and amusement. "She's more nervous than me about anyone learning about us. We haven't really talked about it yet." Her hand touches to her side, where her mark is hidden.
"You haven't seen each other's marks yet? I thought yours was basically complete."
"Every time I try to bring it up, she clams up, Steve!" Robin bemoans, dropping her forehead against the edge of her soundboard with a thunk that makes her headphones flop forward and him wince in sympathy. "Her family's traditional. Marks are a big religious thing for them, only fit for talking about after being introduced to her parents for approval just to start dating because they believe the universe pairs men and women together before they even know that they match. There's no way we can announce our big lesbian romance to them. I can't even get a hand under her shirt right now because she's so worried about the rules. And I don't want to push her about it if she's not ready, especially since we've got all of this—" she waves vaguely towards him.
"That does complicate things," he agrees, swallowing down the little bruise of hurt that appears any time his own mark is mentioned. It's hard to ignore its existence sometimes, because the scar tissue pulls the same as the scars from the demobat bites. He's glad she's gotten sidetracked from grilling him about Eddie, because some days he's sad about it, and others, like today, he's just so fucking angry. The last memory he has of the guy alive was a stilted conversation about not taking risks that Eddie had apparently been lying through his teeth during. There'd been a moment right before they'd parted that sticks in his craw—something Eddie had said, "Make him pay," that hadn't felt honest, like he'd changed what he meant to say at the last moment. Steve wonders sometimes if the truth was waiting behind Eddie's teeth at that moment, the words that would have betrayed his true intentions to leave him and Dustin behind with his blood on their hands.
Robin shoots him a sympathetic look and then jerks up as the song piping into their headsets starts to trail out. He welcomes the extra distraction and for a few minutes, they do their job, trading Robin's quips with his sound effects, and by the time another set of songs are playing, Nancy has arrived outside their booth.
"Morning," she mouths through the glass, holding up a crumpled paper bag with grease stains darkening the bottom. There's no sign of Jonathan behind her, which probably means he's been asked to shadow Will again by his mother.
Robin hollers a happy, "Wonderful Wheeler's here to save Rockin' Robin's morning!" and Steve rolls his eyes as he double-checks that she left her mic off; her current comfort with the large soundboard was hard-earned, and he's still not certain how they kept their jobs after the sausage party comment made it on-air. When he's satisfied that their jobs are safe, he unearths the third ratty chair from the pile of records he'd tossed onto it during the previous shift and smiles at Nancy as she slips quietly into the door. She flashes him a quick smile of her own as she takes the seat he offers, but it's lined with the same discomfort he always sees now whenever they're in the same room together. As far as he's been able to suss out—mainly through Robin's clumsy investigative questions and a few offhand remarks from Jonathan—she's still under the impression that their marks are matched again, and he's been too mixed up about the Eddie of it all to tell her otherwise. Knowing her, she'd want visual proof if he told her that his is different, and he's nowhere near ready to show the disfigured thing marring his flank to anyone else.
Fortunately for both of them, Nancy is still a steadfast disbeliever in the destiny of soulmates. It helps, too, that she and Robin get along like a house on fire. While Nancy unloads steaming sausage biscuits onto the very edge of the soundboard's surface, Robin launches into a rant that she'd been saving up just for Nancy about the sad state of feminine hygiene product availability under quarantine.
He would've been jealous of Nancy getting Robin's undivided attention a year ago. Doubly so, even, with Nancy barely sparing him a glance as she warms up to Robin's newest favorite complaint; seeing his ex-girlfriend and his platonic soulmate get along without his help would have offended his past self, but he's filled only with a vague sense of comfort now as he's allowed to fiddle with his presets without being forced to hold up his end of the conversation.
There are crumbs scattered all over the floor by the time Nancy interrupts Robin's spirited complaints about one particular unit who always delivers supplies late.
"Speaking of deliveries," she starts, and Steve perks up as she pulls out a manila folder and opens it to reveal sheets with huge tables of itemized data. "Murray found out how to sneak out copies of any paperwork submitted through the approval office. There's a special shipment going out in three days. We think it's as good a time as any to test the first crawl."
"By out, you mean into—"
"Yes, Robin," Nancy says, giving her a brief indulgent smile that Robin flushes deeply at and Steve blinks at, before turning to Steve. "Are you and Dustin good to track?"
Forgetting about Robin's sudden moment of fluster, Steve tries not to let his expression sour. "I'm good if Dustin is."
"You haven't spoken to him about it?"
"Haven't seen him since the last meeting." It's not a lie, but he's being generous regarding any implied interaction. Sure, he'd seen Dustin—from across the room. Ever since school started back up, Dustin has been more and more difficult to track down for a chat, rivaling his own isolation earlier in the year.
"I thought you guys talk on the radio once a week," Robin interjects.
"Not after he gave me a lecture about forgetting all the code speak. Now he refuses to answer unless I use all the stupid fake names he came up with, and when I try that, half the time he blows me off to talk to Suzie," Steve says, earning a sympathetic pat from Robin and a small sigh from Nancy. It's hard to tell if it's directed at him or what he said, but then she gives him a determined nod.
"I'll have Mike check in on him during homeroom tomorrow then. Is the radio tower's signal strength calibrated correctly?"
He grimaces, already knowing what he's in store for when he gives her the answer. "No."
Behind Nancy, Robin gives him a commiserating look. He wishes she wasn't deathly afraid of heights. He's not looking forward to the solo climb that Nancy starts telling him to prepare for.
"Security was too tight to get any closer on the way out, but someone else got killed in the base camp and stashed in that locked room. Same place, same guard," Hopper says gruffly, wiping the accumulated grime of another successful crawl off of his scraggly beard. Steve trades a grim look with Dustin, whose lengthening curly hair is matted to his forehead with sweat. They're both red-faced and breathing hard from having to engineer a last-minute distraction to help Hopper sneak back to the tunnel on the other side, and it feels a little like a team-up of times past, from before Eddie died and Hawkins became an active military zone. Crawls bring that out, especially since it's one of the few times he gets to work directly with Dustin without a radio or group of people in the way.
Even so, it feels like Dustin gets a little quieter, a little meaner, every time they drive out after Hopper.
"Did you get anything useful this time?" Dustin asks.
"Watch your tone, Henderson," Hopper growls over the rattle of the WSQK van traversing over the dirt and gravel leading from the semi-demolished diner lot where they'd parked, several blocks down from the former site of the library. "I checked off another one of your grid squares. I'm doing you an extra goddamn favor trying to get the base camp mapped, and if a bunch of idiots who got themselves chomped on by alien monsters are being locked into a fucking meat locker, I figure it's probably pretty damn important."
"You're sure they're putting dead ones in there?" Steve asks before Dustin, whose red face is turning purple in advance of an angry retort, can blow up at Hopper.
"Whole lotta fresh blood on the ground outside the door."
"That doesn't necessarily mean dead," Dustin says.
"It does when there's already a triage hospital set up on the other side of the base, with proper medical equipment and—"
"You haven't mentioned that before," Dustin interrupts, tone sharp and accusing, though Steve's glad to notice that the color on his cheeks has faded to a less-concerning shade of red.
"Because I was gettin' to it before you started insulting my surveillance abilities."
"Okay, so what else did you see?" Steve asks placatingly. The road turns back to cracked asphalt and the cabin becomes much quieter as the messy destruction of downtown turns to open streets. He leaves his headlights off to avoid the attention of the checkpoint two streets over and Hopper's voice drops automatically.
"Dr. Kay's packing for a move. There was a truck half-full of weird equipment I haven't seen before. It was near the meat locker, so I couldn't get a good look, but it reminded me of something out of those superhero comics you all love so much."
Dustin twists in his seat and points excitedly at Hopper. "Maybe it's all that laboratory annex equipment from the shipping list! They're not putting dead people in the meat locker, they're experimenting on them!"
"Could still be dead by the time the experiments're over," Steve mutters. Dustin shoots him an unimpressed look.
"Experiments that kill people are a lot worse than a room storing dead bodies, Steve."
"I never said it wasn't!"
"It was implied!"
"It was not!"
"Boys! Save the bickering for later, alright?" Hopper barks, and Steve flinches when one of his big hands points out through the windshield, where the bright flash of a searchlight crosses the intersection ahead of them. He almost misses the sweeping beam, distracted by the dark shape on Hopper's inner forearm filling his periphery. There're lines of a soulmark etched in, sharp and pitch black, and he think it must be new.
"Steve—" Dustin warns, cowed into a low murmur as the searchlight creeps closer.
"I'll take Juniper Street." He feigns nonchalance over the rapid thud of his heartbeat, ignoring the heavy weight of Hopper's hand landing on his shoulder as he takes the turn.
"It cuts too close to the hospital," Hopper says.
"We could park in the lot and duck down for a bit."
He can't see it, but he can feel the glare Hopper gives him, and the squeeze on his shoulder is tight enough to convey the man's displeasure.
"And how're you going to explain the big radio station logo on the outside?"
"Yeah, Steve, how're you going to explain that?"
He glares over, secretly a little hurt by the flat-eyed scorn in Dustin's face, and attempts to swipe at the bill of his baseball cap, but Dustin's much better at countering him these days and smacks away his hand with an offended sound. Hopper releases a put-upon sigh and lets go of Steve's shoulder to grip his wrist before he can try to swipe again. The soulmark is an inch from his face now, covered in curling body hair and leftover Upside Down gunk, and he can't help staring. It's in the shape of a bear and it's the first non-hybrid mark he's seen outside of a book. Something complicated twists in his chest at the sight of someone like Hopper getting a new—and rare—soulmark, while he's stuck with the mess wrapping around his side.
"I've just about had it with you two. Next time I'm sleeping in the station and one of you can take the trip," Hopper says, seemingly unaware or uncaring of Steve's staring. Dustin is less oblivious, and his eyes flick from Steve's face over to where Hopper's wrist flexes, leading to the formation of a small crease between his brows.
"Has the package been received yet?" comes from the radio in the back.
Hopper gives the two of them another warning frown and releases Steve to clamber back to the handheld transceiver to provide an update. Steve forces his eyes back on the road, thinking through potential safe routes back instead of lingering on someone else's soulmark. Dustin's eyes burn a hole into the side of his head, but in a rare exercise of restraint, he doesn't say anything, and though Steve's glad that Dustin does him the courtesy of leaving it alone, the lack of probing is yet another new piece of uncharacteristic apathy in the once-incorrigible teen.
He misses when the snark came with a toothy smile to blunt the sharp edges, when secrets weren't so easily kept from observant eyes and a curious mind. He misses the kid who once grilled him on soulmates and soulmarks any time they came up and who'd probably have something smart to say to him about his own stupid mark. As the three of them sit in tense silence and creep through streets crawling with the invasive species calling themselves the military, he hopes Dustin's withdrawal resolves soon. Maybe then they can both talk about Eddie without the grief turning them both into bitter, angry messes.
In November of 1987, in the wake of the final end of the world and the grief and shock the collapse of the Upside Down leaves behind, one small spot of true happiness shines through: now sixteen, Lucas and Max gain matching soulmarks.
Dustin tells Steve almost immediately after he spots the telltale lines on Lucas, pounding on his apartment door with the news. Steve has to take a moment to scold Dustin for taking away the opportunity for the two to tell everyone themselves—and to come to terms with the kids continuing to grow older on him—before he lets Dustin in to relay what he saw.
Steve doesn't get to see the marks personally until he's dropping Max off for physical therapy at Hawkins General a few days later. The withdrawal of the military is nearly complete, and the lack of checkpoints makes the drive between his little apartment and Max's new trailer a breeze, so they make way better time than he's expecting.
Lucas tags along and there's definitely a difference in how they act around each other; he's never seen Max look quite as fond as she does whenever Lucas stumbles over himself to help unload her wheelchair, and their hands brush against each other with such intentionality that he considers saying something just to see them blush in tandem.
He holds back mostly because he knows the blush would be followed by a verbal lashing from Max's tongue, which has not weakened at all after her months-long coma, as evidenced by the way she jumped on him as soon as she caught him looking for her mark when he first picked her up in his new used truck. He doesn't think he was obvious about looking, but Max saw anyway and gave him an earful about staring at fresh meat now that it's sixteen. Ashamed even though sarcasm dripped heavily from her words, he did a bad job defending himself, but his awful, stumbling excuses had pulled out a small curling smile from her that lingered long after they pulled up to Lucas's house.
The winter chill means Lucas is just as covered up as Max, so he has no better luck spotting a mark on Lucas's long limbs when he squeezes into the cabin with them. With Max's baleful, glasses-magnified eye on him and conspiratorial whispers shared between her and Lucas next to him, he keeps his eyes glued to the road and doesn't bring it up the whole time driving to and then checking them into the hospital reception.
Just before Lucas rolls Max through the door to the little exercise room held open by her physical therapist, she kicks out a foot against the door jamb and brings the chair to a stop. With a big fake sigh, she turns up to Lucas, who suddenly looks fit to burst with suppressed laughter.
"Alright. I guess we should show him now. He's the only one left."
"Wait, what? Everyone else has seen it already?" Steve says, dismayed.
"Sorry, man, nothing personal. We just haven't seen you until now. It was hilarious watching you squirm on the way over, though," Lucas laughs, rolling up the sleeve of his sweatshirt to reveal the rough outline of a hedgehog climbing up the outer surface of his forearm. Max does the same with her sweater to show its match and Steve forgets to be annoyed as a smile splits his face.
"Y'know, I don't think I've ever been less surprised by a pair of marks. Prickly on the outside but soft underneath? That's the two of you to a tee."
"Shut up." Max mutters and leans out to give him a hard punch on the thigh with a bony set of knuckles. He lets out a yelp and dances out of reach before she can take a second swing, certain the first spot will bruise. It's worth it, though, because Max can't hide another smile tugging at her mouth as the PT gets impatient and shoos him away. Lucas, who hasn't stopped smiling since he uncovered his mark, rolls Max into the exercise room with a, "See you in a few hours, Steve."
Riding the high of the reveal, he ambles back towards the entrance, passing through the big junction connecting the hospital proper from reception and the emergency room. For once, he's not stuck on how his soulmark turned out. There's only room for happiness for the two teens, who he's watched struggle through growing into their relationship for years. A rare animal mark seems perfect for all that they've accomplished.
Just before he exits, there's a commotion that draws his attention down the long hallway to the ER, and when he glances over at the sound of raised voices, he sees the long, dark hair of a dead man.
Eddie Munson—gaunt, pale, looking ten-years older and dressed in torn, baggy military fatigues—is propped up between two thunderous-faced nurses who are dragging him straight towards Steve.
"Vickie, I need your help! We have a situation," Steve hisses as he bursts into the little office she uses for lunch breaks.
"Steve—"
"Robin?" He stops short, noticing too late her blotchy red face and the wetness she hurriedly dashes from her eyes. Across from her, Vickie looks just as distraught, her outfit curiously rumpled. His already-upset stomach goes into freefall.
"Um, my break's over now," Vickie says, voice thick with tears and hands clutching at the hem of her nurse's apron, and she hurries out without looking either of them in the eye. Robin drops down into the only chair like her strings have been cut.
"What happened?" he asks her. She gives him a half-hearted glare and sniffs wetly as he hovers awkwardly.
"What do you think, dingus?"
"You broke up?" At her nod, he asks, "But why? I thought—"
"So did I! But no, she doesn't have anything. No mark at all. We don't match!"
His mouth gets stuck on a round oh of surprise. In an attempt to soothe her, he reaches a hand out and pats her on the head, which just causes her to slap weakly at his wrist until he stops.
"You don't think it'd work out anyway?" he asks.
"I did, even after I showed her mine, but I told you, she's traditional." Robin gives another miserable sniff. "She said I shouldn't choose her over my real soulmate, that it's not fair to the other person, especially since it's so complete. She, um, implied that she thought it was you."
"Didn't you tell her my bit is platonic?"
"Her family doesn't believe in platonic soulmates," Robin says with a grimace. Steve huffs and puts his hands on his hips, wondering how it all went so wrong so quickly.
"What, does she want proof? Because I can show her my fucked-up mark if—oh shit! Eddie! I found Eddie!"
Robin makes a displeased noise as he shakes her by the shoulders. "What the hell are you talking about? Eddie Munson? Your dead soulmate Eddie Munson?"
"He was—and the nurses didn't—I was going to ask Vickie for—fuck, I need your help. We've gotta get him away from here before the nurses call someone else to take him away."
He yanks her up, ignoring the fountain of rapid-fire questions she throws out, and rushes back towards the entrance, hoping the sack of skin and bones he left at reception is still there. His heart stays in his throat even when they round the corner and he sees the crumpled pile of army green waiting in one of the shitty hospital chairs.
Robin gasps and nearly drags him to the ground as she stumbles on her own feet.
"Oh, the ghost's got a friend," the sad lump of military fatigues croaks out in Eddie's voice before bruised eyes close and his body goes limp.
They very quickly realize they're out of their depth when they drop a groaning Eddie onto Steve's tiny twin bed and get a glimpse of what he looks like under the baggy clothes. Alongside the awful thinness, he's covered in infected cuts and fresh bruises, dotting the landscape of his scar-riddled torso.
They share a glance and agree out loud—"Nancy."
When Steve tries to walk away to find the phone handset, a trembling hand claws weakly into his shirt.
"What's the ghost's girlfriend gonna do?" Eddie slurs, having been swimming in and out of lucidity since they carried him out of the hospital. He's also referred to Steve as a ghost several times throughout, refusing to call him by name.
Concern colors Steve's voice as he reaches down to carefully peel Eddie's stiff fingers out of his polo shirt.
"Nancy has a direct line to Murray's stash of medical supplies. It's going to be harder to sneak anything out of the hospital now that—"
He glances at Robin apologetically. Her lip wobbles but she's holding up better than he expected, almost like she long ago accepted that there'd be an ending like this. It must be the same pessimism that prevented her from asking Vickie out in the first place, he thinks, feeling awfully sad about that.
"Now that—?" Eddie parrots tremulously.
"Uh, now that our friend Vickie isn't on shift. And Nancy's still my ex, Eddie."
Big brown eyes blink unevenly at him. The hand he'd pried off is still somehow clutched in his own, his warm fingers curling around cold, clinging ones. It's been a long time since he blushed, but between Eddie's staring and Robin's staring—sharpening when he artlessly tacks on that last little tidbit of information for no good reason at all—his face heats as he reluctantly separates their hands.
"Look, man, you need antibiotics and probably some painkillers, right? Nancy's got access to those. It'll help, I promise."
"Promise?"
"We promise," Robin says, aimlessly fluffing at the pillow that Eddie isn't really using. His hair —matted and greasy, a little longer than it was before he died—covers most of the pillowcase, but he lays on the bed at a slight angle, tilting his head toward his own chest at the very edge of the pillow. Her movement and proximity distract Eddie long enough that Steve is able to slip away and track down the phone without being grabbed again.
He doesn't give details on the call, not even a name, so when Nancy shows up an hour later with a pack stuffed to the brim and a shiny new revolver holstered on her hip, he realizes she assumed the worst. Her eyes are flinty and restless as he stalls a moment at the door, trying to figure out how to break the news.
Robin does it for him, careening down the hall while whisper-yelling, "Steve! Code red! Eddie says he has to pee!"
"That's not a code red," he hisses over his shoulder, just before she runs into his back with enough force to push a pained oof out of him.
"It is when he's asking me to help him do the whole shebang because he can't stand at the same time as hold his—Oh! Hey, Nance!" she finishes in a falsely-bright tone.
"Did you say Eddie?" Nancy asks, spine ramrod straight and hand resting on her holster.
"Did I?" Robin's hands clench into Steve's sides a little too hard, and her chin digs in to his shoulder as she tilts her head down to stare at Nancy's gun.
"She did," Steve says, giving Robin an exasperated elbow to separate them and let Nancy inside. "He's in rough shape, but trust me, it's really him."
Nancy wears a skeptical frown as she hefts the bag of supplies and heads towards his bedroom, and he feels Robin staring at the back of his head. He knows she saw the same thing he did beneath the fatigues and the blood and grime. A distinct sense of inevitability sits on his shoulders like a vulture on a power line, and he figures they have only a small window of time before Nancy's intuition picks up on all the things they haven't yet told her. He's not ready for her to know, but a grim sense of peace starts to settle over him at the thought of finally putting things to rest with her.
"Hey! Just the ghost I need. I gotta piss," Eddie says as Steve approaches his bedroom door. He's crumpled at the foot of Steve's bed, like he'd been crawling towards the door. When Nancy appears behind Steve, Eddie lets out a too-loud whisper—"Ah shit, she's here,"—and turns pleading eyes up to Steve. Putting on a faux-polite voice, he clears his voice and asks, "Would his ghostliness mind helping a man out in his time of need?"
Rolling his eyes, Steve provides a helping shoulder for Eddie to use the bathroom, politely turning his head away while Eddie mutters more nonsense about ghost physics. His arm is wrapped tight around Steve and he stinks of a long time spent unwashed, but the solid shape of him against Steve's side brings back the flush in his cheeks. He has to resist the urge to seek out direct skin contact where his hand nearly dips under the hem of Eddie's shirt. Robin's question months ago—Don't you think maybe you were missing some other signs?—rises up unbidden and he mentally swats it away with the desperation of a man being chased by a swarm of more intrusive thoughts.
When they emerge to find the floor covered in the contents of Nancy's bag, her expression is hard to read. That breaks as soon as they get Eddie's shirt off and she sucks in a shocked breath.
"S' just burger meat, yeah?" Eddie tries to joke, slurring growing worse as the two painkillers he'd swallowed down before the bathroom break start to take effect, but Nancy's fingertip traces in the air over the scarred soulmark on his side, ignoring the rest of his injuries. Laid out on Steve's bed with his head tipped up to stare at her face, Eddie doesn't seem to notice, but Steve's composure slips as the flush in his cheeks travels further down.
There's an argument to be made for plausible deniability, but he knows Nancy's memory is strong and the tell in his behavior haven't been missed by her sharp eyes. He's not sure whether to be grateful or not when she elects to say nothing. He has the sense that she wants to say something, but other than a significant look that lands on the side where his mark hides, she keeps it to herself and starts directing them to help dress Eddie's wounds.
Little pained noises come from Eddie as they wash and cover the worst of it, but he doesn't outright complain. Any words he does try to say run together, coming out as murmurs too low to distinguish. When they finish, Eddie's eyes have closed again, but he's also eased into slow, deep breaths that suggest he'll be out for much longer.
The peace lasts for a full five minutes.
"Hey, whoa!" he yelps when Nancy ambushes him where he's washing stained bowls and rags at the kitchen sink and yanks up his shirt. Her other hand is a vice on his bicep, keeping him from twisting away.
"What the hell is this?" she says.
"I'm sorry! I tried to explain," Robin says from the doorway, wringing her hands.
"Badly," Nancy says, though her shaky tone is wry rather than angry. "She said that you have a hybrid mark with Eddie. But why is only half of it scarred?"
"It's a mixed mark, not just hybrid. The other half is Robin. Did you miss the platonic part of the explanation?" he asks, glancing over at Robin, only for Robin to groan as Nancy shakes her head.
"I forgot that even though we've been telling everyone we're platonic soulmates for years that a lot of people think it's fake," Robin says. "Me and him both have his bat handle." She lifts her own shirt for Nancy to see the lines that flow seamlessly into the soft vane of a feather, only for Nancy to turn white as a sheet and step away from them both.
"Yours is complete too? For how long?"
"Uh," Robin shares a worried look with Steve, letting her shirt drop back down. "A few months? We thought we knew who it was, but…we broke up when it turns out that wasn't the case." Her wobbly lip returns and Steve starts to move towards her, but Nancy beats him to it.
"Vickie broke up with you? When?" she says in a much softer voice, rubbing a hand against Robin's back.
"How do you know it's Vickie?" Robin asks with wide, watery eyes.
For her part, Nancy looks suitably stricken. "Was I not supposed to? It's just—I thought everyone knew, and then she joined us for the fight—and with Will—and the way you two—"
"I guess maybe we weren't as subtle as we thought."
"Or maybe I was just looking harder than most," Nancy says, eyes downcast and uncharacteristically quiet. Her free hand rests for a moment at the spot where Steve knows her mark sits. Dawning with the inklings of a realization he's not sure could possibly be true, his breath hitches.
"Nancy—" he starts, but she shakes her head fiercely, and when her head lifts back up, the last thing he expects to see is the glimmer of tears.
"Isn't it funny? You think fate is bullshit, and do everything you think to avoid it, until it seems like you've got it all sorted out. But somehow it snares you anyway, and you don't even want to fight it this time."
Robin opens her mouth like she wants to say something, turning to Nancy, but Nancy turns faster and grabs her hand. Robin's ears immediately turn pink while Nancy takes a deep breath and lifts her shirt high enough to expose the band of her bra. A sharp corner of lines peeks out, different from anything Steve ever saw years ago. Ignoring Robin's squeak, Nancy hooks her fingers into the band and awkwardly lifts it higher to show the rest.
Robin's feather is drawn into Nancy's rib cage, finished at the bottom by the fine point of a old-fashioned pen nib.
A feather…pen? he thinks at the same time as Robin says out loud, "A quill pen!"
"I didn't think it was a hybrid mark," Nancy says, brushing absently over the outer edges of the feather. "I actually—this might sound bad, but I thought that, since I wouldn't choose Steve, because I was selfish and didn't believe in marks, we got something that only represented me."
Steve feels guilty and sad at all the months the two of them wasted being torn up by the lines etched into their skin, and when he meets Robin's eyes, he sees the same reflected back. Without needing to say anything, he and Robin close ranks into a shared hug, enveloping Nancy's small, tense frame between them.
"But instead you got me," Robin says into Nancy's shoulder, and Nancy finally lets out a little sniff as the tension drains out. She pulls apart from them both and smiles softly, resting small hands on each of their forearms.
"I did. I'm really glad I did."
"Even though it's maybe not platonic?"
Nancy gives a self-deprecating laugh and admits, "I don't think I've felt platonic about you since I first saw you and Vickie kiss."
"Really? When was that?" Robin asks, looking flabbergasted.
"After we finished working on Operation Beanstalk at the Squawk. We had to leave Vickie and Max behind, and you went missing with her for a bit before, so I went looking, and—" Nancy blushes pink but recovers after only a brief stutter. "I saw you saying goodbye. I was really upset about accidentally seeing you two kiss. I was genuinely mad about it, actually. At the time, I thought I was being bigoted, but I probably just wanted it to be me all along."
Nancy reaches out and tucks some of Robin's hair behind her ear, then leans in for a quick, tentative peck on Robin's cheek. Robin turns so red she could audition for a crayon, and Steve can feel her vibrating with excitement next to him. He steps away from the two, nudging at Robin's elbow as he does, and directs a pointed look between her and Nancy when she glances questioningly at him.
"What's that look for?" Robin says. Nancy laughs while Steve heaves a disappointed sigh, and then her hand captures Robin's and she pulls her towards the kitchen doorway.
"Let's talk. I think Steve can handle Eddie for a bit, yeah?" Nancy says, and disappears around the corner with a stumbling, stuttering Robin. The front door slams a moment later, leaving Steve with his own thoughts, a warm heart, and, for once, a place that isn't empty.
He, Nancy, and Robin agree to wait for Eddie to get better before telling the rest of the party who they found, so he comes up with an excuse about catching a winter cold to avoid driving anyone around for a few days, apologizing profusely to Lucas when he calls he hospital to tell him that Nancy will be showing up instead for the ride home. He dreads the inevitable conversation with Dustin as much as he looks forward to making the kid's day, because he knows he'll be in for an earful about hiding Eddie first.
With Eddie occupying his bed, he elects to use the lumpy sofa crowded into his living room at night, and he spends the next week alternating between shitty sleep and tending to Eddie's various ills, which grow worse before they get better. After the first day, Eddie falls into a raging fever that leaves him even more incoherent than before, rambling about blood and needles and locked rooms that reminds Steve uncomfortably of his time under Starcourt. There's very little strength in Eddie, so even if he struggles deliriously against Steve when it's time to take antibiotics, it's shockingly easy to hold his brittle body down and wait for him to give in.
The more direct contact they have, the more Steve realizes he's been deluding himself for years. The flash of heat he experiences when their skin touches takes his breath away every time, and at night, he finds himself missing the feeling of Eddie's weight draped over his shoulder from whenever he has to prop him up for short walks between the bed and the toilet. Wrangling Eddie into a shower after the first week only highlights the problem, because he finds himself struggling to keep his eyes staring at anything other than Eddie's pink, wet mouth. He does stay strong enough to avoid looking lower, but the fact that the urge tempts him, that he considers such an urge resisted to be a part of surviving locker rooms all throughout school, alerts him to the possibility that he has indeed been missing some signs.
He's confused about what he should do about it, though. He barely knows Eddie—at least, the Eddie that doesn't live in his head, the one who disappeared for almost two years and came back looking almost as bad as Steve left him the first time—and he's not about to spring the we have matching marks conversation while the guy is high on painkillers, especially when he doesn't know if Eddie is even open to having a man for a soulmate. The past year and a half of agonizing over his mark and what it means doesn't make the prospect of actually addressing the reality any easier.
Robin tells him he's scared. He doesn't have a good retort, especially when Nancy teams up against him and says the same.
When Eddie starts weaning off the painkillers, spending longer and longer stretches in lucidity, he can't seem to find the right time to bring it up. Eddie is a lot less talkative when drugs aren't loosening his tongue, and his dark, intense stare whenever they're in the same room makes Steve nervous in a way he hasn't experienced since he was psyching himself up to ask Nancy out on a date in 1983.
What finally breaks the impasse is the whole ghost situation.
"Are you really him?" Eddie asks out of the blue, two weeks after he was brought to Steve's apartment, and minutes after being unwrapped from the gauze and bandages covering his torso. Steve puts down a ladleful of the stew he's spent two hours cooking in preparation for what he suspected would be an exhausting and vulnerable aftermath and squints over at Eddie sitting at the rickety table. The color has gradually returned to Eddie's ashen skin, but he's still pale from what Steve suspects is a long time spent out of the sun, highlighting the raw red of the badly-healed scars on his thin, shirtless torso. Right now, high spots of color have formed on his cheeks, but he seems determined not to look away from Steve's confused stare.
"Am I really who?"
For a long minute, it doesn't seem like Eddie intends to answer. His face twitches through several emotions that Steve has a hard time pinning down. Finally, like the effort costs him greatly, Eddie says quietly, "You're Steve?"
"Of course I am. Why do you think I'm not?" he says, trying not to sound hurt.
"I didn't know it was almost 1988 until this morning," Eddie says, and though it seems a non-sequitur, he continues in an anguished tone, "I was down there for almost two years."
He'd been told by Robin, who'd done some research at the library in the next town over with Nancy and also cleared some things up with Vickie in order to provide advice about treating people who were messed up like Eddie, to let Eddie lead any conversations about what happened to him. That doesn't stop curiosity from bubbling to the surface, too strong to deny.
"Down where?"
Eddie's face crumples, and though his clasped hands shake on the tabletop, words start pouring out.
"The Upside Down, I think. It smelled like it. I don't know how I survived or when they found me, but I was locked in a room with this horrible old scientist who'd dissect monsters on the table next to me and then drain them of blood. She kept trying to put it into me and make me do all sorts of tests, like I was supposed to get powers from it, but all it did was make me sick. Eventually she stopped visiting as often, and the dissections stopped. She moved a lot of the equipment out, and she'd only visit every few weeks to try another infusion, though it didn't hurt me like before. Still didn't give me any stupid powers. Then, a few—uh, weeks? Ago? They moved me to another locked room, but it didn't stink of that place, so I think they pulled me out of the Upside Down. I was just…left there, for days. I thought they'd forgotten about me. Next thing I know, they've knocked me out and I wake up in the back of some sort of transport truck and they dump me outside Hawkins General."
"And then I found you," Steve says, thinking breathlessly of how lucky the timing had been.
"And then a ghost found me," Eddie whispers. For once, he's not looking at Steve. He stares at his hands and Steve spots the shiny trail of tears creeping down his cheeks, and then Eddie wipes them away and tries to get up out of his chair. Filled with a fresh wash of concern, Steve abandons his station at the stove and tries to catch Eddie, who's only barely strong enough to stand unassisted.
When he grabs Eddie's sides, Eddie's breath hitches on a soft sound, somewhere between a sob and a whimper. His hands cling to Steve's forearms, keeping a small distance between them, and his head stays bowed.
"Eddie, why do you think I'm a ghost?"
"In that room, I had nothing. I knew nothing. I saw one person for months and months who just wanted to hurt me. The only thing I had left of the outside world was this—" Eddie lets go of Steve's right arm and covers his own left side with his hand, right where the scar of his soulmark sits. Steve's heart jumps and it feels like he stops breathing entirely as Eddie then reaches for Steve's shirt and pulls it up to show its mismatched twin. Eddie's eyes lock on it and his voice trembles as hard as his body does beneath Steve's hands. "but—but it—it was scarred. I fought off demobats and said goodbye to Dustin and then I woke up in agony with a scarred soulmark. I thought we'd failed, and you'd died."
"You knew it was me? How?" Steve asks dazedly, feeling Eddie's trembles as his own.
"Robin. 'We've both got your stupid baseball bat handle,' she said, before we went into the Upside Down the second time. I couldn't believe it when I checked, but there it was, fresh and dark and with the wing fully formed, matching the top part that I'd seen growing on you when Wheeler patched you up. It seemed too good to be true, and also the worst possible outcome. I'd been looking for years, wondering who I'd talked to, wondering if I could ever even ask, because I was sure it wasn't—it wasn't a girl. And not only was it not a girl, it was you, talking to Robin about wanting a wife and six damn kids. I almost said something, before we split up at the end, but I chickened out."
"I knew you were hiding something. When it seemed like you'd died, and left me and Dustin behind, I thought you were planning from that moment to get yourself killed."
"I didn't want to die," Eddie says fiercely, raising his face up to look Steve in the eye. "Even when they were pumping me full of monster blood and I pretended to talk to your ghost to keep myself sane, I wanted to live. I wanted to see Dustin again, to talk to Wayne again. Find Robin, if she was alive, and ask about you. Every minute of every day, I hoped I'd see the real world again."
Eddie is warm and animated against him, and as he speaks, leaning closer as his legs struggle to hold him up, Steve can feel the crackle of electricity that Steve once told Dustin about. Puffs of breath brush over his face, smelling of Steve's own toothpaste. The pulse of his heartbeat rattles in his chest. Heat spreads from wherever their skin presses together.
"I never thought I'd get to talk to you again, let alone touch you—" One hand cups at Steve's side, spread over the scarred bat wing, while the other clutches at Steve's lower back. "Let alone have you let me touch you," Eddie finishes quietly, and his eyes flicker down to Steve's lips.
Steve's whole body flushes hot. He knows what he wants, but he's scared. There is a man in his arms and a mark shared between them and a hand on the mark, and yet he's frozen, wondering if this is really how it's all supposed to go. He's never felt so uncertain about all the signs telling him to lean in.
"Steve, you don't have to—" Eddie whispers, sounding just as uncertain as his knees buckle slightly and he sags further in Steve's hold, and that finally breaks the spell.
"I want to," Steve says, feeling the truth in the words as they spill from his mouth, and he closes the gap between their mouths to kiss his soulmate for the first time.