Chapter Text
Steve Harrington dies with a plate to his head at the age of 18. It’s not the plate that does it, but the plate certainly helps the process along. There’s blood everywhere, pooling beneath Steve’s skull and dripping from his nose; there are lesions on brain tissue from rough handling and cracked bone from drilling punches.
Steve’s brain flickers, electrical and alive, desperate for a last-ditch attempt at survival. It receives no help – there’s too much blood, too much damage for a group of pre-teens to do anything meaningful. The intercranial haemorrhage happens sometime between Billy’s plate and being dragged into a car of screaming children - sweat, blood, and cloying fear.
No one notices. There are other things to worry about. Like demodogs and inter-dimensional rifts. The kids drag his body like an overstuffed duffel bag and pile him unceremoniously into the car. Steve dies quietly, his body a heavy weight under gripping young hands.
The car races across the Hawkins back roads as what is left of Steve leaks out through cuts, and his heart thumps one last time. There is no time for mourning, no time for death to settle like winter over Hawkins. No time for it to stick. Max turns the wheel sharply, and everyone shrieks as they’re tossed about. Steve’s head - already going dark from that internal fire - bangs hard against a door handle, not enough to cause a dent but enough to flip a switch.
You enter Hell Hawkins enough times, breathe in enough weird pollen, accidentally swallow enough demon creature blood (all at once or interspersed over months or with enough head trauma), and it’s probably - maybe - going to do something to you. Or maybe it’s not that at all, maybe Steve was just never meant to die, or he’s superhuman, or perhaps he’s God’s favourite. Whatever the cause, the synapses sputter back to life, bursts of power that get nerves tingling and a quiet heart pumping.
Steve wakes up the same way he died, in fits and starts, blood oozing from the gaping wound on his forehead, and his face a mess of ache. He takes a breath, sucking in chlorine water during a relay, Upside Down ash thick on his tongue, the bitterness of medicine forced down his throat, smoke from a poorly rolled joint, and somehow manages to crack his eyes open.
He does not know he has died, the children yelling and pushing at him don’t know either.
Together they stumble from the car. They’re a buzzing hive of fear-adrenaline-determination, their moods light up Steve’s brain – a light show of firing nerves and cells – and drive him forward. One foot in front of the other, hand curled weakly around a bat. He’s hardly coherent, blinking away black spots and slippery words. He knows they shouldn’t be doing this, but the knowledge is far away, tucked under the fever-hot terror and sour worry, sand grains compared to the vague remembrance that a child is in danger – somewhere, somewhere.
Steve remembers one thing in that moment, and that is that he is their babysitter. He is responsible for these kids. And they are in danger. So he moves, with irregular, lumbering steps that drag him forward. The ground changes, then disappears, and the air becomes thick and murky with rot, but he keeps moving.
He finds his breath slowly, much like waking, and with it manages to curl his hand firmer around the bat. Smooth and hard. A weapon. It’s going to keep them safe.
The tunnels are dark, tainted blue with otherworldly light, and along the walls, vines slither and rustle. Nothing happens, but they keep walking – there’s a reason they’re here, even if Steve doesn’t really remember it.
Just as the kids’ terror-worry starts to morph into frustration-uncertainty-concern, a shuddering howl echoes down the cave, and it spikes wildly back into terror.
He’d started flagging despite his determination, but this jerks him back into full wakefulness. His eyes dart wildly through the dark, hyperaware of the shuddering breaths and shaking hands behind him. He knows without looking that the girl’s jaw is set in determination, that the boy with short hair’s mouth is pursed to fight the tears.
The curly-haired boy – he has a name, something with a B, or a D – is closest, and his fear is acrid. The stench of rice burnt to the bottom of a pot, the creeping weeds that strangle a rose bush, leaving it to rot under the summer sun. Steve doesn’t so much smell it as he can feel it, see it. It’s hardly physical, hardly tangible. But Steve feels it all the same, just a split second, a wave of all-consuming panic - there then gone - which sets his heart pounding and ears ringing.
A creature, a monster that Steve knows should have a name but the syllables fail him, bursts from the gloom with a large petalled mouth open.
The boy’s mouth is open too in the precursor to a scream, muscles still struggling into tenseness. His hand curled like a claw into Steve’s side.
There’s no thought to his actions, no logical or rationale behind the way he rears up and slams himself forward. It’s pure adrenaline. Instinct honed through millions of eons of evolution. As simple as breathing.
(Some indeterminable time later, Steve will reflect on this. How the kids joke that Steve’s never won a fight, that his bluster and protectiveness are all bark and no bite. They snicker about Jonathan – Jonathan Byers! – beating him up, like this is the universe’s sign that he is no good. He has won, though, stupid little things, those kinds of fights where kids push and shove at each other. He’d wrestled a drunk party crasher on the front lawn and elbowed an asshole in the face after he’d come on to Carol a bit too strongly. Steve has won fights, but they’ve never really meant much; had done little more than leave both parties hissing like territorial cats. That fight, the one on the night of the gate’s closing, held a different weight to it. It meant life or death. That fight determined whether Steve had a bunch of shitheads to ride around after all was said and done.)
At this moment, though, he can’t grasp the magnitude of what he’s doing, how it will shape his future. All he knows is that he needs to keep these kids safe. So, he does.
Steve tackles the thing – monster, dog, hell beast – with his shoulder. It feels the same as slamming into a wall. Unyielding. They fly into the side of the cave with a nauseating crunch. They’re on the floor, on the ceiling, floating in mid-air – weightless and yet leaden. Steve has no time to examine it, and does not know if it’s him or the monster that’s whining pitifully. He’s got kids to protect; there’s no time to waste.
Without pause, Steve drives his bat down - again and again, like a pendulum, like the never-ending cycle of the seasons. Up, down, up, down. As easy as breathing, as easy as dying. The creature gives as good as it gets, snarling and sweeping out long claws that rake at Steve’s shins.
The bat slips, its handle bloody and slick, going too wide on the next swing. Steve lets it fly from his grasp, bringing down his clenched hands in its place.
This drags him momentarily to a dimly lit living room, beneath him is golden hair and too-blue eyes, teeth sharp as razors grin up at him, bloody and gleaming. “You like hurting people, princess?”
When it’s over, Steve collapses. He is both hot and cold, his body alight with pain and sinking into horror. But he does not get time to dwell on his bloody hands or the sight of the eviscerated creature – not, not him, not a person. No, there’s no time for that. Someone, one of the kids, presses the bat back into his grip while another set of hands pushes and pulls him back up to his feet.
He’s got kids to protect, and they’re not out of danger yet.
Their fear hangs stale in the air - a fear of him, of the gore he’s kneeling in. He sees himself as if from beyond the confines of his physical form, sees the mess of his face caused by…by Billy? And the redredred of the rest of him. He hears their ragged breaths, strained and scared, as they stare at him and glance nervously down the tunnels.
“We need to go,” the girl says, breaking the tension with a confident glare. She’s fire and starlight, vibrant in the dim light of the deep Hell tunnels. Steve feels like he knows her intrinsically. He’s not sure if she’s always been with them – whoever ‘them’ are.
She’s right. It’s echoed in the wave of relief-determination. Steve blinks, head dipping just a bit too far before he corrects it. Steve clears his throat, finds blood there, and mumbles something like, “Okay.”
The girl and Luke - Luca? - do not wait for Steve to gather himself, pushing forward towards a goal – a girl, somewhere, scared-lonely-resolved. Dustin (ah ha!) wrangles him like a particularly unruly cat – there’s a distant part of him that finds this hilarious.
They trudge through the dank and musty, and then there’s fire. Fire and screaming. Gasoline and smoke. This is concerning only peripherally. Steve’s head pounds, his body trembling as he tackles another monster. Then, as suddenly as it had all started, it’s over.
He collapses into the car – Billy’s car, he realizes, partly smug at the blood he’d dripped everywhere, and partly horrified that in addition to drugging a man, the girl had also partaken in a spot of grand theft auto. He means to say he will drive – if only to save them from her manic racing – but the words get lost within the blink of an eye, trailing off on a dense cloud of satisfaction.
Some indeterminable time later, Steve finds himself back on the Byers’ couch, a pack of peas pressed to his aching jaw as Mrs Byers gives a valiant lecture on safety and makes little disappointed noises every time one of the kids tries to defend themselves. He has found the little box of names rattling around in his head, has fit each of them to a weary face, and ties little imaginary bows so they stay attached this time.
Even so, he finds his mouth struggling to connect what he thinks to sound. Thus far, he has relied purely on grunts and the occasional facial expression. No one seems to mind his nonvocal responses, just looking at him in pity and cringing if one of his cuts oozes.
Steve is…tired. So very, very tired. He hurts, worse than basketball practice after two weeks with the flu, and much worse than Jonathan Byers beating his face in. He wants to sleep so badly, but every time he closes his eyes, someone shakes him awake again. Little jostles to his shoulder that sparks fire over his skin and sets his bones grinding. He’s sure he groans every time it happens, he’s definitely cussing them out in his head, but he’s too far gone in the swill of his mind to take notice.
He wants desperately not to physically exist anymore – at least until his head stops feeling cracked open.
After the (possibly worst ever) weekend, Steve sits in his beemer, sunglasses on, eyes tightly squeezed shut, head pressed into the steering wheel. The sun looms over Hawkins High and burns in Steve’s eyes. It’s too bright, even if it’s overcast. Fucking Fall.
It’s been a few days since Billy Hargrove busted his ass, and he still can’t sit up too fast without feeling like he’s going to puke.
After making vague hand gestures as to his well-being and pouting his way out of a hospital visit, Chief Hopper had driven him home, Jonathan Byers following in Steve’s car. He’s spent two blissful days in the silent dark of his bedroom, occasionally dragging himself to the bathroom to flush his mouth with water and wipe ineffectively at the blood matting his hair. On the third day, Dustin knocked on his door, and all pretences of living in a void ended abruptly.
Thankfully, whatever stunt he’d pulled in the tunnels – it’s the kind of vague memories that feel like snatches of nightmares – had either scared the other lot off or had them resting their fitful dreams. All alone, Dustin’s still a whirlwind, and Steve spends the majority of his forceful sleepover reaming Steve about the lack of food in the fridge and calling Steve disgusting when dried blood flakes off when he moves.
If Steve had the energy for it, he’d have thrown the kid out, but he’d subjected himself to the fluttering and locked himself in the bathroom on multiple occasions, at least until Dustin started banging on the door. That too had slipped away in bursts marked only by the swell of nausea in his throat.
It's Monday now, and Steve kind of wishes they’d left him in the tunnels, if only because there’s no sunlight, and he could have died in peace.
His face is a mess. Swollen and splotchy with ugly yellow-black bruising. There’s a line of neat stitches at his hairline courtesy of Mrs Byers, his lip is split and held together with a crusty red scab, and while his nose isn’t broken, it’s sore to the touch, and the one time he’s tried to clear it had resulted in a wash of blood.
“Do you need me to call Doctor Hanson, Steve?” His mother asked. There’d been the distinct sound of conversation and laughter in the background. A party, then.
Steve was bent double over the kitchen counter, temple resting on the cool granite. He could hear the buzz of the refrigerator and the barking of a dog a few houses down; they were too much, overwhelming in that they wouldn’t stop. “No,” he says, feeling close to tears. “No, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure, darling?” Her voice was grating in its warmth, harsh over Steve’s pounding head and settling like a spill of needles into the soft tissue of his eardrum. She laughs lightly at something someone says and shushes them. “You have his number if you change your mind.”
He’d murmured something like an affirmation and stayed lying there long after his mother hung up.
Dustin, too, had tried to convince Steve to go to the hospital after he forgot how to drink from a glass for a minute. He’d managed it and waved off Dustin’s pinched scowl with the blasé nature of one too tired to care.
Now, though, with his brain trying to leak through his ears, and the dancing of a rainbow behind his eyelids, he thinks maybe he should have gone to the doctor. At least to get some intense fucking pain pills.