Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.

Chapter Text

Eddie likes Fall, likes it more than the itching pollen of spring, and definitely likes it more than the sweaty humidity of summer in a trailer. When the sky greys over and the chill sets in, his hair is easy to keep loose, free as it is from sticking to his neck and driving him mental. Today is particularly gloomy, very foreboding. Nice.

He crushes his cigarette beneath his boot, huffing out one last white puff, and tilting his head to the right until his neck cracks.

“Catch you later,” Gareth says. He’s bundled up in the dorkiest fucking winter coat Eddie’s ever seen, and it makes him look like a middle schooler. As soon as the seasons had started to shift, Gareth became a walking Patagonia catalogue, complete with the brightest blue Eddie’s ever seen. He complains regularly about the cold despite the double layer of socks he wears.

Eddie waves him off, content to lean against the back of the van and enjoy the mildew carried on a slight breeze. It’s much better than smelling the generously applied cologne and unbrushed teeth of the high school population. He’ll wait right there until the last possible moment.

The parking lot clears out rather quickly, not nearly as fast as it would in winter proper, but at least it’s quieter than the rowdy infestation of summer. It’s quiet enough like this that Eddie can hear the click of his rings sliding against each other every time he drums on his knee.

Despite this being his second shot at senior year, it’s been pretty uneventful. The year before, he’d been floundering, lost to the system of routine and just uncaring enough that he’d managed to fail at writing essays about literature he actually enjoyed. This year, though, this year he’s made an effort to get to class on time, has tried to chew his way through incomprehensible lecturing drones about thermodynamics.

Fuck it. He doesn’t really care about this shit but he cares about Uncle Wayne having to pay tuition and the way his mouth had pulled tight the third time he’d been called in about Eddie arguing with a teacher. For Wayne? He’d try.

He’s actively trying, even if it does feel like he’s giving in to the Man. He gets back at the system in other ways.

The first bell rings. Eddie pushes himself up, stretching his back as he goes.

He’s got to walk around Steve Harrington’s shiny little BMW to get to the school entrance. It’s…a nice car, Eddie’s not got the appreciation for cars that his old man had, but he’s not fucking blind. He could have walked in front of it, but then he’d miss the opportunity to check it out.

He hums appreciatively. The car is about two years old, still glossy with a flawless burgundy base coat and a spotless white leather interior. Compared to his beat-up 13-year-old van with all its stains and dents, this thing is a runway model. Like car, like owner.

Eddie rounds its left side and pauses when finding it occupied.

When Steve hadn’t been at school by the end of the previous week, there’d been a few rumours. Eddie likes a good story, chews on it the same way he tends to chew on his hair. Hargrove is an asshole – more than Hagan, or that dickweed Federa – so Eddie’d listened to the rumours of his dethroning King Steve with a healthy dose of scepticism. Sure, Hargrove had looked a bit tenderized, but there’s no way he’d beaten Harrington up bad enough that the man couldn’t come to school.

Eddie barely holds back an impressed whistle. “You wander into a mosh pit, Harrington?”

The colourful Harrington-shaped lump groans, head tilting back from the BMW’s gorgeous steering wheel. And Eddie had thought he looked bad from the side. He winces in sympathy.

Harrington’s croaked, “What?” is really not enough to deter him. His sympathy mingles with barely suppressed morbid curiosity and it’s by the pure grace of Judas Priests’ bare muscled chests that he doesn’t reach out and poke the giant bruise that is Steve’s face.

“You look like shit.” He shoves his hands into his pockets to ward off any further touch-related desires. There’s an angry red gash peeking out from under some butterfly band aids, a wealth of scratches over his cheek. The bruises are yellowing in some areas and a sickly blue in others. The splotches make him look gnarly as fuck.

“Fuck off.” Steve’s voice is a low rasp, achy and quiet. He squints out the car window with the kind of struggling focus that comes from having too much weed too fast. The way his brow furrows looks like it hurts.

Eddie sucks his teeth in consideration. On one hand, he owes the asshole nothing. King Steve has never outright antagonized him, but he also hasn’t done shit when his cronies bother Eddie’s Hell Fire fledglings. On the other hand, Harrington really does look fucking awful and must be sporting one hell of a headache. On that, Eddie can commiserate.

He asks, “You good, man?”

Steve snorts, that looks like it hurts too. “Do I look good?”

That’s a trick question if Eddie’s ever heard one. He glances away, laughing a bit stiltedly. He frees his hands from his pockets just to ground himself through the clicking of the rings. “Not gonna get me to change my statement, King Stevie.”

In a show of the most puppy-like confusion, Steve squints further, tilting his head until it almost falls to the steering wheel again. After a long moment, he blinks, mouth twitching. “Oh, yeah. Hargrove did a number on me.”

“You don’t say.” The second bell has rung, but Eddie’s rooted to this spot. His eyes keep finding new cuts on Harrington’s face, keeps mapping out the shape of fists over his jaw, the indent of fingers over his neck. Eddie’s always thought Harrington was particularly golden. Sun-kissed, blessed by Helios and Apollo to inhabit the form of little gay boys’ wet dreams. But under the dull grey of the sky, against the yellow and purple of bruises, under the angry red of cuts, he’s pale.

The urge shifts suddenly from poking and prodding to soothing and Eddie bites his lip hard enough to draw blood. He blames this on Uncle Wayne. Eddie The Freak Munson is not a nurturer (Hell Fire doesn’t count, fuck off), he’s cold steel and burning ash. The nurturing? That’s all Wayne. Fuck him and his harbouring strays nonsense. This is his fault.

“Looks like you lost the war, general.”

He gives a choked laugh. “I mean, yeah? But Max got ‘im back for me.”

“Max what you’re calling your dog?”

Steve leans forward, mouth forming a devious little smirk. It makes Eddie’s chest squeeze. “Hargrove’s little sister. Fucking firecracker.”

His brows shoot up, and Eddie rocks on his heels. He fiddles with some hair, glancing toward the school building as he debates skipping class entirely. “You’ve got to give me that story. Hargrove didn’t mention a little sister.”

Quick as a whistle, Steve’s face shutters, giving evidence to how open it had been earlier. “Not a good story.”

“You drive like this?” He asks. He’s never had a concussion before. His old man had hit him upside the head plenty, grabbed his hair, and pressed his face against the dirty counter, sure, but he’d never smashed Eddie’s face in to the point of needing medical care, and none of the bullies he’s found himself facing have done so either. Yet. He thinks that when your eyes are that bloodshot and your every movement looks like torture, you probably shouldn’t be driving, you probably shouldn't be vertical at all.

Steve hums his answer, eyes blinking slow and sticky.

He isn’t concerned. He isn’t. He owes Steve nothing and fuck the guy anyway – in some convoluted way he probably deserved to get beat by Hargrove. But Eddie’s a man of strategy, and he knows what a player looks like when the inevitable end is near.

And, yeah, Jeff and Gareth might call him tactless. In their defence, Eddie’s kind of made a name for himself as someone who doesn’t care about social niceties. But he was raised by a raging narcissist and then the kindest most gruff man on planet Earth. Eddie’s got some tact.

He clicks his tongue, leaning forward too, so he’s resting his hip on the BMW’s door. From here, he’s got to tilt his head to look down at Steve, can see the rumpled state of his dark shirt and the tremor of the man’s hands. “Listen, Harrington, the bell rang five minutes ago, and from the looks of you, I don’t think you’re making it to class. Are you heading back home, or do I need to share my favourite hooky spot?”

He breathes heavily through his nose, head tipped back so he can look up at Eddie. And Eddie? Eddie is a sucker for soft murmurs and hooded eyes, long lashes that flutter; it’s a flaw he’s working on. It’s a sight for sure, and Eddie’s got to bite his lip again. “D’you think I could get away with it?”

“You kiddin’, Stevie? I think Ms D would see what’s left of your pretty face and send you away herself.”

Something in the man’s head must be seriously cracked, Steve Harrington grins dopily, blinking dark, bruised eyes up at the town freak. “Think I might scare the kids?”

He laughs, it curls up from his belly, rusty and true. “Just might.”

Steve seems both pleased and saddened by this, if his pout is anything to go on. “Fucking Hargrove, man.”

Yeah, fucking Hargrove. Billy’s been nothing but a pain since he arrived, climbing the Hawkins High social ladder with arm muscles enough to put Bruce Baumgartner to shame. Eddie isn’t big on wrestling, considering he’s been gifted spaghetti arms by the Fates, but he can appreciate the art of body-slamming another man into the floor. Hargrove has the arms and the anger issues for it. He valiantly does not imagine Hargrove body-slamming dear Stevie into the ground, no siree. Not thinking about it.

The point is, Billy had arrived, climbed the ranks of high school court in a startlingly short time, and beaten the resident king. He’s the kind of jerkwad that might actually kill you if you piss him off, as evidenced by Harrington’s face. Say what you want about Steve and his court of dick-suckers, he’s mostly words and an occasional shove into a locker, easy to work around. Eddie does not need a new King.

“Tell you what, sunshine. You hold on to that throne of yours, and I’ll give up my best hangover spot.”

Harrington hums; he seems dazed, lost in the confines of his likely dented skull. “Not sure I’ll manage, but y’know, sure.”

Sucker, he berates and finds himself detailing the best way to get to his dealing bench. He knows Harrington smokes, but he’s never really sold to him directly. Most of their dealings are done through Hagan or another of the basketball lackeys.

While he looks like he might knock himself out falling over a root, Harrington squints his way through the directions, muttering them back slowly.

“You not skipping?” He asks.

Eddie’s incredibly late and there’d no point getting himself a detention for tardiness, but he doesn’t think he could survive a morning joking around with Steve The Hair Fucking Harington unscathed. He’s already planning to spend the rest of History in the senior bathroom, checking on his stash and counting his earnings from the weekend. “Nah, I need to pass this year. ’84, baby. It’s my year.”

Steve’s face does something funny, twitching and pulling at odd angles. Finally, he lands on a sympathetic grimace. “Yeah. Yeah, man. Applications and shit.”

“Applications and shit.” Eddie echoes. He wants, somewhat desperately, to pick through Steve Harrington’s brain with a fine-toothed comb. He imagines it’s an interesting place. Eddie hits the side of the BMW, causing Steve to flinch violently. He doesn’t feel bad, he doesn’t. “Get going, your majesty.”

His smile looks a bit wobbly, “Thanks, asshole.”

When he rocks up to American Lit in second period Gareth eyes him suspiciously. Eddie’s pretty sure you don’t carry around filthy gay thoughts on your face, so Gareth can go fuck himself. Eddie sneers back at him, satisfied when he rolls his eyes and turns away.

Chapter Text

Steve’s been too disorientated to make and pack his own lunches, which is why he finds himself puking cafeteria turkey and peas into the trash can in the school parking lot. It doesn’t taste much better coming out than it did going in.

Every inch of him, from the roots of his hair down to the beds of his toenails, throbs with blinding pain.

The girl he’d yanked out of the way of a carelessly reversing pickup hovers close by, making panicked sounds and fluttering her hands wildly.

For a hot minute, he’d thought his day was going well. The first two periods are blurs in his mind, but he’d at least attended them. After math, a migraine had sent him to the bathroom floor, where the cold tiles helped gather some of his willpower back. He’d eaten lunch in the cafeteria, seated at the closest table he could reach that wasn’t directly in the sight line of Hargrove and Tommy...Hagan. The food tasted like ash and blood, but he’d swallowed it and even nearly finished his tray before walking into someone and spilling the rest over the floor.

The girl fluttering around him is babbling to herself, short keening bursts. He does not bother trying to decipher it, too busy fighting the bile that sends convulsions from the very bottom of his spine. Her frantic energy is not helping.

“Maybe I should call someone. Should I call someone? Is there someone who knows what to do with…uhm, oh God, you look awful. A teacher? Or, like, the hospital?”

He grunts something resembling a no, eyes squeezed shut against the pulsing that threatens to pop them right through his lids. His stomach makes one last attempt to heave pure bile from his lips, then settles mulishly into fluttering cramps. Steve sags against the trashcan, uncaring of how disgusting it is, thinking only of the jellied quality of his knees and how much worse falling would make him feel.

“Steve? Steve, can you hear me?”

He peeks an eye open, finds the girl crouched in front of him, eyes wide, hair the shade of a sunset. She is familiar in the peripheral way most Hawkin’s High students are, but mostly he doesn’t recognize her face in this scrunched up worry. “What?” He mutters, and her answering smile is blinding, if not watery. “Oh. Chrissy,”

“Hey, Steve,” she whispers, conspiratorially, kindly.

Her face morphs, slack and coated in viscera, and Steve flinches back, knocking his head against the trash can.

“Oh God, Steve, do I need to call your parents?” Her smile is gone; her face pinched with worry. “Your nose is bleeding.”

She shoves something in his face, urges him to hold it against his nose.

“Is this from when Billy…” She cringes, shuffles closer in her crouch, tucking the ends of her skirt under her thighs. “I knew he was an asshole, but this is too much.”

The morning had been heavy with a thick white mist that cleared mostly through the course of the morning. It’s back now, low to the ground and swirling with vapour that catches the watery afternoon light. The droplets cling to Chrissy’s brows and hair, damp and shimmering; she looks soft. Her face is contorted in a shivering scowl, eyes just as wet as her hair.

“I told Jason he was bad news, I told him, ‘Jay, Billy doesn’t have restraint, he’s gonna hurt someone.’ Did your parents take you to the hospital? Is there a doctor I need to contact?”

“I’m fine,” he says, and her face scrunches up even further. “It’s just- I have a concussion.”

One of her hands comes up, then freezes, hovering between them. She waits, and when he doesn’t do anything but frown at her, she closes the distance and gently touches the cut on his forehead. “No stitches?”

He blinks. He’s pretty sure Mrs Byers had poked him with a needle at some point. “Yes?”

“My dad’s a surgeon,” Chrissy says, her eyes glued to him with an intensity that feels threatening. When it becomes apparent that he has nothing to say, she continues, “Maybe you can stop by my house later, let him have a look.”

He cringes, pushes away her hand as kindly as he can while the whole of him feels like a tender bruise that’s just been poked. “I’m fine.”

“Come by anyway, as a thanks.” Her nose scrunches. “I don’t imagine being knocked over would have been fun.”

He tries to imitate the smile he’d practiced in the mirror that morning, the one that doesn’t pull too much on his sore jaw or look like a feral beast. He’s unsure whether he manages it, and Chrissy looks at him dubiously. “I gotta get home soon. Mom worries, you know.”

This seems to do the trick; she nods slowly and drops her hand. “How’s your nose?”

He pulls the fabric away; realises it’s a gym shirt. Now stained brilliant red. “Fuck, sorry-”

She waves a hand, “I have a spare. The bleeding has stopped at least.”

She makes a few more attempts to assist him, offering to call his home or get Jason to drive him. He laughs it off, pulling on the careless charm that had shuffled him up the Social Ladder and only just succeeding because Chrissy chooses to let him.

He sits in the beemer with his eyes closed as the parking lot empties, hubbub fading away with the revving of engines.

Steve’s not the best with admitting his faults. He’s got a bit of a history of having friends who suck up to him and make him feel like a figurehead. That kind of devotion does something to a person. Gets into your head. He’d watched a documentary on the People’s Temple a month or two ago, had been only half paying attention, and it was in the weeks after that he began to make connections between the rabid popularity and the smug little tilt of Jim Jones’ mouth up on a podium.

He should have taken a larger step back at that point, but he’d still been trying to figure out what was going on with Nancy, and stepping away from the position of advantage that King of Hawkin’s High afforded him had felt more daunting than throwing himself at an interdimensional monster.

Fat lot of good that had done him in the end.

He'd fucked that up, too.

The house is empty, as it always is, and the lights are all on because without them the panic is enough to choke him.

He heads straight to his room and wakes up a few hours later, arms draped over his eyes and mouth bitter from the pills he’d swallowed without water.

He lies there long enough that by the time he gets up, he knows he’ll be late for school.

There’s less mist and less absent staring into vague corners, and he makes it to third period before his brain tries to make a valiant escape attempt by oozing out his ears. He must look truly pathetic because Mr Turner grimaces at him before waving him away.

For the second day in a row, he spends an hour on the bathroom floor, occasionally shoving his face under the unnecessarily frigid tap water in the sink. The cold is good. The humour behind the repetition does not escape him.

Sometimes the headaches leave him seeing things, flashes of wide open mouths, the smell of sickness, and sweat. Bodies beaten and bloody and twisted with enough odd angles that they’re clearly dead. Cracks form along the core of him, shuddering open like the gaping maw of some eldritch beast or the very bowels of the earth peeling apart, seeking vengeance by spewing horror directly into Steve’s chest.

Other times, the headaches are just that, headaches. There’s a little sound distortion, a high-pitched ringing in his right ear, and the world goes fuzzy around the edges.

Today’s headache is one of the first.

Just before the bell rings, he fumbles to a stand and stares himself down in the mirror.

Mirror Steve is a disaster, hair flat, clothes rumpled, face an ugly mottled mess. He has not showered in two days, and he can’t tell if he stinks yet. He grins, and it does nothing for the sad dog look of him. He tells himself, “Bullshit. You’re bullshit. It’s all bullshit.” It aches something fierce, a heavy emotional hurt rather than the untethered terror that’s made itself home in his veins; it’s enough to pull him back into his body. It feels meaningful in a way he cannot explain that this is happening in a bathroom. Maybe bathrooms are a significant literary theme.

Steve liberally splashes his face again and practices a wan smile until it looks marginally human. Then he pulls his shoulders back and plods from the bathroom.

The cafeteria is already flooded with students. Their voices are an unending roar of sound that feels physical, that feels like the screech of a demodog as he beats it with his fists, a scream to “stop, God, please stop, you’re going to kill him!”

He has not eaten since yesterday’s lunch crawled back out of his throat, and while the smell in the cafeteria is revolting, he has the presence of mind to know not eating is the wrong choice. A voice he does not know scoffs within the pounding of blood in his temple, “You have to eat something, dingus, you can’t sustain yourself on sunlight.”

Chrissy corners him as he’s trying to find somewhere to sit. “How’re you feeling today?”

“I’m fine,” he insists even as the tray wobbles in his grasp.

“Won’t you come sit with me and Jason?”

He’d much rather be used as bait for a Demogorgon. “Thanks, but I’m good.”

Her face does that thing again where it can’t decide if it’s devastated or annoyed, “It is because Billy’s sitting there? I can ask him to leave.”

The Byers’ home is awash in yellow light from the scattered lamps, but all Steve can see is Hargrove’s snarling mouth, all he can hear is the chant of “He’s gonna kill me,” punctuated with another fist to his face. He thinks the kids are screaming, but the sound is more an emotion than something he can hear. “He’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna kill me.”

“No, I’m already,” he clears his throat, mouth wet with iron and bones creaking. He’s gonna kill me. “I’ve already got somewhere to sit.” He tells Chrissy, and she doesn’t look disappointed.

“Well, alright, you’re welcome to join us any time. Don’t be a stranger, Steve.”

He blinks, and he’s at a table, seated beside a group of band kids that scowl and whisper over their sheet music.

Across the cafeteria, he can see Tommy and Carol laughing at something Hargrove has said. A few tables over, Nancy and Jonathan have their head bowed close together, shoulders touching. In a moment of desperation, the anxiety of pre-battle, he’d told her it was all right, that she could leave. Steve thinks that perhaps it had been a test for both of them, and he realizes – sunken and shaking with chemicals bursting over his tongue, “I don’t know what you’re talking about! I work minimum wage!” – that he’d bluffed and lost.

He breathes through his nose, forces himself to look down at the tray in front of him.

He does not know what he’s eating, cannot taste it beyond the blood in his teeth, the ash that fills his lungs with each breath. Lucas was scared of him. Of him.

“Fucking hell, Harrington, I can’t watch you waste away. What’s it gonna take to make you eat? Do I need to shove a pipe down your throat? I’ll do it, you know I will. Get the fuck out of this bed and eat something.”

He comes to when someone jostles his shoulder, causing him to drop the fork that’s been hovering in the air for a good solid minute. He stands, needs to escape. Needs fresh air.

The cafeteria is silent. The calm before a monster bursts through a wall, the split second before Nancy Wheeler pulls a trigger, and a crack rends the air. I'm going to die. We're all going to die.

His head snaps up – vision swimming, black spots manifesting the flapping of bat wings, diving towards him. He tenses for the fight, for teeth and claws. But there are no monsters, only a boy standing on a central table.

Just arms spread and a human mouth wide. Steve chokes on his inhale, blinking away the panic. No danger. No stupid monsters. Just a boy – a man – amid trays, his hair a voluminous cloud of brown curls.

Like a hazy dream. I’ve seen this before. I know this.

He throws his head back for a moment, like a singer at a chorus, or a battle cry in the dark tunnels of the Upside Down. A tornado of bats and ash. The man punctuates his words with a manic grin, rings glinting under the florescence, and teeth gleaming white. But that’s not what sticks.

He blocks a particularly glaring light in his promenade, and Steve blinks him into place. The throb of a headache and the way a boy leans down to him, hair taking up the sky. Shadowed by backlight and still his teeth seem to gleam, “Tell you what sunshine.”

Car guy.

He’s wearing that devil shirt today, the one that Steve knows makes little old ladies turn up their noses and the teachers’ mouths thin. He can’t remember if he’d worn that shirt earlier in the week. Remembers only the brightness of the grey sky, how Eddie’s dark form had blocked it from his view. A fucking angel of mercy disguised as a frizzy dark blob.

Eddie the Freak.

Eddie the Guardian Angel of Migraines.

Steve watches him unashamed – everyone else is watching him, even if they are pretending they’re not. It’s better than feeling the hollow discomfort in his chest, better than getting stuck in his aching head.

Technically, Steve’s close enough that he should be able to tell what Munson’s saying, but he’s wrapped up in shooing away the screeching that comes and goes, a fusion of terrified children and angry monsters.

For all his grandiose displays, tongue out and snarling like a bull, for all his play-acting as the demon most of Hawkins High like to consider him to be, Eddie’s just a guy. A guy with frizzy hair and weed breath and eyes so intense they gleam in the shitty cafeteria lighting.

He’s real, and it feels like taking a breath after swimming laps for thirty minutes. There can’t be monsters here; there’s nothing Steve needs to kill, to defend himself from. Not when the scariest thing in the room is a boy with a bad hair care routine who plays a nerd game for fun. Steve’s safe. Eddie Munson, apparently, is the key to curing Steve’s chronic tension.

Eddie the Fucking Cure-All.

Some sickly, desperate part of Steve wants to crawl across the sticky flooring and prostrate himself. If something happened to Munson, his little band of nerds would sniff him out, check that he’s alive. Steve wants that suddenly and with so much fervour that it makes his eyes sting.

“You make me want to vomit, Munson.” Someone jeers.

Instead of shying away, Eddie spins in their direction, arms wide. He tuts, “If a little debate scares you so much, Ruthman, I fear for your English scores.”

There’s a spattering of snickers from those brave enough. Steve’s not sure what he’d been ranting about beforehand, can barely bring himself to focus on it now. He misses the next minute of heckling as he tries to force his thoughts into some semblance of order.

At some point, someone throws an apple at him, he catches it with only some fumbling and continues to bite into it through his tirade. Eventually, his friends coax him off the table with whines about detention, and he disappears into the sea of brown and blonde perms.

With nothing else to stall him from leaving, Steve shuffles to his feet. He immediately bumps into someone.

The tray clatters to the floor, a sound that pierces through Steve’s head like nails. “Fuck,” His hand twitches toward his temple. The second fucking time. Jesus H Christ. Is this going to be a thing?

“Watch it, Harrington.” The collision reveals a girl only marginally shorter than him. Even still, the way she looks down her nose makes her seem tall. Her gaze snags on his mottled face, hers pales, but she does not falter. “Did you lose your sight along with your dignity?” She snipes with an expression so condescending that Steve, for a moment, tries to place her from the cheerleading squad. The memory doesn’t come, but he feels a sudden overwhelming mishmash of affection and terror. Imagines her sneer marred with blood and fear, blue stripes.

He blinks; she’s just a girl. There’s nothing scary here.

Maybe he’s stuck in yesterday, stuck with a recurring headache that leaves his food on the floor and a cheerleader peering at him with pity. He curls his fingers, presses nail to the meat of his palm. He’s awake.

He shrugs. The pounding in his head is minimal, for a relieving fucking second. He has no dignity to spare and even less desire to defend it. “Sorry,” he says and reaches for the fallen tray, the movement swings the pressure in his skull forward and back. When he straightens, he finds the girl still glaring at him.

He waits for a second, imagining she’ll either laugh it off or roll her eyes, almost hoping she will. She does neither, but rather continues to stare at him with barely concealed suspicion that makes her brows twitch. A weirdly insistent urge to crumple into her makes him sway forward.

Steve steps back. Horrified at himself, horrified at the way his mind is trying to form connections where there are none. He mumbles some approximation of a parting and stumbles past her, feeling inexplicably bereft.

As if coming back to herself, she snarls, her dirty blonde hair swaying wildly at the sudden movement. Too short. It should be longer. “Watch where you’re walking.”

“Sure,” he murmurs, already a few feet away. Bile rises in his throat, rotten and spoiled like milk left out in the sun. Fucking great, he’s gonna spend today throwing up lunch again.

Chapter Text

“Did you see Steve today?” She asks. Her hands are sudsy, and the pile of dishes insurmountable.

Jonathan doesn’t answer, so she peers over her shoulder. He’s sitting at the dining table, homework spread out before him in a messy white arc. He looks back at her, blinking as if dazed. “What?”

She frowns at him, the red that seeps over his cheeks and down his neck. She raised this boy all on her own, she knows when he’s being cagey. She clucks her tongue, flicking water from her fingers. “Steve Harrington. Did you see him today? Yesterday?”

He shrugs, ducking his head down to examine his calculus homework with a determination that she is familiar with when faced with his photography habits. Jonathan is not determined about math; he is very much whine-about-it-and-hope-it-goes-away about math. Will, on the other hand, always furrows his brows in seriousness when calculating numbers. She loves them both, loves their eccentricities, their pleased smiles, and their continued depth.

She cocks her hip and stares.

Jonathan twitches, keeping his head down. She waits.

He gives in under three minutes, which means he feels guilty. His head comes up, mouth pert and eyes pleading. “Mom,”

The plea does nothing to dissuade her. If she hadn’t learned to side-step her sons’ desires years ago, they’d have run her over. They’d be living in a treehouse out in the woods, eating nothing but refried beans and chocolate chip cookies. She has more dignity than to give in to Jonathan’s wet begging eyes, more dignity than her kids will probably ever realise.

“Talk,” she commands, and softens it by plopping down in the seat opposite him.

For a moment, it looks like he might fight against her again, but he quickly gives in under her unrelenting gaze. He runs a hand through his hair, huffing, eyes skittering across the room, across his books, anywhere but at her. “I didn’t.”

Joyce twitches. She breathes out long and low, stepping on the tidal wave of panic and shoving it down and down until she is capable of rational thought. “Was he not at school?”

She’d seen his face, his head. When she’d walked into the house to him passed out on her couch, she’d been convinced for a good long minute that he was dead. Up until a week ago, Steve Harrington had been nothing but the sweet boy who sometimes chaperoned Will and his friends. He’d been a vague thought. Jonathan had admitted to punching him at some stage, and Joyce had been almost in tears, wondering where she’d gone wrong, why her baby was using his fists when she’d only ever known him to use words. He hadn’t explained his reasons, only assured her, with vehemence that corroborated his story, that she didn’t need to know and he wouldn’t ever do it again.

Whenever one of her boys tenses up, their mouths tight and eyes shifty, she thinks of Lenny. Thinks of his breath soaked with alcohol and how he’d kicked Jonathan’s chair out from under him. She thinks of her own bruises, the hot desperation that caused her to chuck him out of her home for the last time.

She still thinks of him, but now she thinks of Will’s empty bed and flickering lights and the deep dark smudges under Jonathan’s eyes. She thinks of fire damage on her wooden floors and the way Will’s screams cut off when she shakes him from a nightmare.

Steve Harrington was just a boy. But he’d been lying on her couch, bloody and bruised, with his chest barely moving. Once the kids had calmed her down from a spiral of pure anguish, she’d wiped the blood from his face with shaking hands. Steve had mouthed his soundless thanks with a lopsided smile and left her to scrub his blood from her floor. He’s just a boy, and he probably has parents of his own to check his bruises and help clean his cuts, but Joyce aches for him as she does any one of Will’s or Jonathan’s friends. She would not have let him go to school this week in his state; she’d have taken him to the hospital and waited until he was rolling his eyes at her fussing.

It doesn’t surprise her that Jonathan did not see him; still, it aches.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan murmurs.

She blinks, momentarily sweeping her eyes to her spotless floor. There’s a patch she’d scrubbed especially hard; the varnish on the wood has lifted. “You didn’t think to check?”

“Mom,” he sighs, and it sounds like an admonishment, a prayer.

“What?” And she knows she sounds snippy, knows her pain is written across her face, because Jonathan winces and reaches for her hand. She allows it, squeezing his cool fingers. “Does some past squabble exempt him from human decency?”

Jonathan’s mouth twitches. She is perhaps being too harsh, but she imagines what Steve’s mother must have said when he came home looking like he’d died and pulled himself back from the brink by sheer will alone. “You know that’s not it.”

She sniffs and uses the back of her wrist to wipe at her eyes. “Then tell me. Please, Jon. Please.”

He looks uncomfortable. “We aren’t friends. I’m pretty sure he hates me.” He stops, breathes out a shuddering breath, holds her hand like a toddler scared of getting lost. “I, back in, um, November, when Will.” He shudders at the same time as her. “I messed up. I just, I was looking for Will, but I. I did something stupid.” Here he offers another plea, ducking down over their joined hands. She squeezes his fingers but says nothing. “Okay. I took, I took some photos. It was, really not. It wasn’t okay.”

She nods. She doesn’t know really what that means, but she has a million guesses and doesn’t like a single one of them.

“Steve found out. He, he called me some things. Horrible things. And I, maybe I deserved it, maybe he was right. But it was horrible and I… you know. And, since Halloween, since, since things started again. Nance and I, we. I really like her. I might love her, Mom. She’s so smart and funny and determined and so pretty. But she was, her and Steve were dating before Halloween. I don’t know,” he stops, shaking. There are warm tears on her knuckles, and Joyce squeezes her eyes shut.

“Were they still together?” She asks quietly, wondering again if she’s somehow failed him.

Jonathan looks up at her, eyes red at the corners. “I don’t know. You need to believe me, I wouldn’t- I’d never-”

“I do.” And she does.

She’d once believed that Lenny loved her, that he’d always love her and treat her well. He’d press freshly picked flowers behind her ear and whisk her around the room, singing low and out of tune. She’d believed that Bob was her second chance, the way he made an effort with Will, the way he pressed kisses to her throat. She’d also believed Will was alive, that she’d get him back no matter what.

She firms her voice, holding his hands tight. “I believe you.” It isn’t absolution, that isn’t hers to give. But she’s his mother, and she believes him. “Steve, he, he’s entitled to be mad. You can’t let that stop you from caring about people, Jonathan. None of what’s happened is good, don’t let it turn you into something bad.”

He looks stricken, eyes too wide, mouth open.

“I’m not asking you to be his friend.” She wants to find Steve, wants to whisper fervent apologies into his bruised temple. Tell him not to blame her baby, to blame her instead. “Please, baby, just make sure he’s okay.”

Jonathan looks down at his homework, nods once, a small wobbly thing. “I’ll…I’ll try.”

She presses a kiss to his knuckles. “Thank you.” She holds him there for a long while, drinking in his presence, safe and close and not a spot of bruising on his lovely face. Eventually, she sighs. “Do you think Will would like to make some cookies with me?”

He huffs a laugh, finally extricating himself from her hold to wipe at his face. “As long as there’s chocolate chips.”

Chapter Text

 I’m drowning.

The thought surfaces with the certainty of an experience currently underway.

I’m drowning.

He’s thrashing about, trying to find which way is up. He shouldn’t be drowning; it’s bright out. Drowning is supposed to happen at night, when it’s too dark to find the sky, and there’s alcohol in your veins and monsters prowling close by.

He shouldn’t be drowning. But he is. Drowning.

He’s not sure how he got here, not sure what led up to this - chlorine in his nose, the water brackish with algae and runoff over his tongue. (Something curled around his ankle, dragging him down down down, to the bottom of a lake, a pool, a bathtub the size of a house-)

He’s nearly certain he shouldn’t be drowning, that there’s no water in the pool anymore. He made sure of that. Drained it dry and pumped the water over his mama’s wilting roses so that the bottom of the pool was smooth pale blue like the endless sky, like the blinding light above your head before a car runs you over or when a little girl gets dragged up and up, a reverse rapture. Oh god. Fuck.

Maybe the water isn’t climbing into him, maybe it’s trying to climb out. Maybe that’s vomit. He’s trying to expel the water. Stop the endless drowning. But there’s a vice around his neck, and Barbara Holland scream-cries again his cheek, her thrashing is dragging them away from the surface - wherever the surface is - if he could just shake her off - but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t, he’s gotta save her, or else-

“Bullshit. It’s bullshit,”

Steve falls and his eyes open to a cream carpet, his gasping breaths tickling his throat with dust. He’s wet. Sweat wet, not swimming wet. But the difference matters little. He kicks himself free of blankets in short jerking movements and curls up on the floor, face pressed into the ground, smearing his bloody nose across it. The room is bright, every light he could fit into it, fitting to torture the thin membrane of his eyelids.

Eventually, his muscles stop spasming, and a dull throb starts at the base of his neck. Familiar at least.

He reaches blindly for his alarm clock. The time blinks back at him: 03:27.

He lies there a while longer, blinking at a wrapper sticking out from under his nightstand. The next time he checks, it’s just after four, so he forces himself up and drags himself into the bathroom. The thought of a shower makes his stomach roil, so he wets a cloth and starts wiping himself down.

Steve does not keep his promise to Eddie Munson. He doesn’t even try, and he should probably feel bad about it, but there’s nothing he could have done.

He’d fallen from school royalty with no way to drag himself back up – he didn’t want to anyway, not after the shitshow of the last year and a half. If being King Steve means he has to go back to snide comments in the locker rooms or making tiny freshmen nerds flinch away from him in the passages, he’d rather not, thanks.

As much as he’s lonely, he’d rather be alone than let Billy’s casual racism and feral cruelty be something he allows. He’d overheard one of those tatted-up road junkies muttering about misogyny and the casual degradation of the critical mind – he hadn’t entirely understood what it meant, but thought he probably agreed. Tommy doesn’t seem to mind it, and it’s a kicker to realize the Steve of two years ago maybe wouldn’t have either.

It’s better this way.

Peaceful. Probably.

Billy’s apparently decided smashing Steve’s face in was enough; nearly killing a classmate is surely the tipping point. It has to be. Or maybe he’s scared of Max, which he probably is, which he probably should be; Steve would be if he had any reason to fear her. He is afraid of her getting behind the wheel, but that’s an entirely different dilemma.

The fact of the matter is, Billy’s fallen from crazed murderer to middle school bully levels of aggression. There’s a lot of sneering and name-calling and occasional shoves. Steve can’t be sure; he hasn’t been in middle school for a hot minute, but this level of harassment could likely be explained away with an eye roll. Or like, a slap on the wrist or something. Listen, he doesn’t know how this shit works; all he knows is that Billy Hargrove isn’t trying to cave his skull in and hasn’t made an effort to attack any of Steve’s kids again.

Besides being shoved into the lockers or having his books hit out of his hands a couple of times, he’s receiving a lot of space. A leniency that others don’t seem to be privy to. He is...both relieved and ashamed. It’s a puzzling mishmash of feelings. Feelings that last long into the evenings when he’s lying awake with the shadows of the Upside Down flittering in the corners of his room.

“Retard,” Billy hisses as he passes by. And Steve’s brain offers an image of Billy with eyes black as night, veins bulging on his forehead, with the cheery knowledge that even when the guy was attempting to smash Steve’s head open, he’d still looked reasonably composed.

It’s not the name-calling that bothers him, not really. Hargrove is full of shit, and Steve doesn’t care what he thinks about him. It’s not being called names that gets under his skin; it’s the remembrance of what it used to feel like to say them. The hazy memories of kids with wobbling lower lips and downturned eyes. He’d certainly said things bad enough that thinking of someone saying it to one of his dweebs makes his molars grind.

The worst part. The worst part is — and maybe this, too, is something of a shameful relief — he doesn’t remember who he said what to. Can barely remember the faces of his classmates beyond the classes he pulls himself into.

Even if he knew, he wouldn’t know how to make it better again.

Steve shrugs his backpack over his shoulder, shoves his locker shut, and waits for a moment for Billy to slip further down the hall before starting to walk. Although Billy’s not shown an inclination toward a repeat performance, Steve would rather avoid any chance, no matter how mild.

“Hey, man.”

Steve turns his head, finds Jonathan Byers shifting from foot to foot. He’s always been squirrelly and unkempt, a fact King Steve took advantage of. He hasn’t changed much since the Upside Down chewed them up and spat them out. He doesn’t carry himself like he helped save the world, hunching into himself and fiddling with his fingers, eyes downcast. He could, though. Steve has seen him confident before, well-dressed, and carefully groomed. Seen him romancing Nancy with weirdly stilted flirting — which, how the fuck did that even work? That is not the Jonathan that’s standing before him. Steve wets his lips, shifts his weight. “Hey,”

They stand in silence for a long stretch. Steve’s had maybe three conversations with Byers since the fuckery of Halloween, and two of those had consisted of child exchange plans.

“How’s…um, how’s your head?”

“Fucked,” he does not say this, even though it’s true. He hadn’t been smart before the concussion, and the concussion had certainly not helped. It’s been a little over two weeks since Billy Hargrove smashed a plate over his head and a group of middle schoolers dragged his unconscious body into a death hole. Despite the passage of time, the overhead lights in the house are still too bright. The school hallways are too loud. Sometimes his scalp itches until it aches, and his nose bleeds as if there’s still a fist coming at his face.

The words in his assigned reading slip from his mind, slippery as wriggling fish, skidding across the throb of his brain and out of his reach. He can read; he’s always struggled a bit, but he can do it. It strains too much now to force that focus, to pull letters into discernible lines, recognizable patterns, eating away at his sanity and pulling ringing to his ears.

He does not tell Jonathan that he hears the howls of demodogs floating from the depths of an empty pool, that he sees glimpses of vines from the corners of his eyes in fully lit rooms. He doesn’t tell him about throwing up when his head starts to spin or the way he swears Barbara Holland’s ghost cries at his window on cooler nights. What he says is, “It’s fine.” He looks down the hallway, and Billy is gone, and so is half the student body. “Are you, uh, okay?”

Jonathan nods quickly, a bobble head, limp hair wiggling in protest around his face. Steve thinks Jonathan is carrying something heavy, not like something real, something unseen - invisible? Intangible? His shoulders bow under it. If he stepped wrong, maybe it would drag him down to the ground, into a hole filled with teeth and darkness and claws that sink into the flesh of your exposed stomach-

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay. So is Nance-” He cuts himself off, head jerking back and forth, eyes wide. The look of someone seeing ghosts over their shoulder.

Steve does not look. The ghosts aren’t real. They’re in his head, or in Jonathan’s head? Whatever. “Cool, man,” Steve says and begins to inch himself away. He’s having a somewhat decent head day despite the way he woke up, and he plans to utilize it for passing the year. He might, maybe, for once, pick up something useful in English today. “I’ve got, you know, class.”

“Oh,” Jonathan says, he seems to deflate in a modicum of relief, “sure. Good, um, good luck.”

“You too,” Steve calls over his shoulder as he strides down the hall.

Only when he’s around the bend does he allow himself to close his eyes for a moment. Just a moment. One, two, three. Quick as a clock hand. He breathes in deep; at least he isn’t drowning. If he’s had three conversations – now four – with Jonathan since Halloween, then he’s maybe had two with Nancy. Both had been fucking awful, neither of them willing to own up to their mistakes, both talking with pursed lips and lifted chins.

He’s trying to own up to his mistakes, but it’s fucking hard when it hurts so bad.

Steve pushes into class before the bell and throws himself down in his seat with little care.

“You good?”

“Hm?”

Richie Myers is the opposite of Jonathan Byers – ha, that rhymes. He’s straight-backed, hair dark and curled, eyes focused, hands still. Richie carries himself with the confidence of someone who knows what they want and is willing to fight for it. Steve doesn’t think Richie’s particularly talented in sports or academics, but he does well enough not to get into trouble. Most importantly, he doesn’t show up dead in any of Steve’s dreams. The guy started talking to Steve after Hargrove knocked some of the screws loose in his head. Steve doesn’t think Richie ever spoke to him before that. Not that he remembers. He thinks, maybe, that seat used to belong to Barbara Holland.

“Are you all right?” He asks, eyes maybe a bit too attentive.

Steve focuses on pulling out his notes, his pen. He does not allow himself to feel discomfited by Richie’s assertiveness. “Yeah, I’m fine. I-” he stops, swallows as he pushes his pen around the desk. Tastes chlorine, feels water block his ears. He blinks away a blur. “I just want to fucking graduate and get out of this town.”

Richie makes a noise, an almost-laugh that’s more air than sound. “Shit, dude, don’t steal my plan.”

Despite himself, Steve feels his mouth twitching. He thinks, given they lived in another reality, Richie would have been popular, he’d have been King, and he’d have ruled with more dignity than Steve ever managed. “Wouldn’t dare.”

This time, he laughs outright. “Lots of space in the corps, wouldn’t mind a familiar face.”

The thought of fighting for his life, of shotgun blasts over his head, and screams of terror sinks cold as stone in his belly. He could no more join the army than he could sit in an office and listen to his dad berate him the whole day. And that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Steve wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he managed to leave Hawkins. There’s nothing out there for him.

The bruising is mostly gone now, save for a spot on his jaw that he keeps thumbing. The smallest cuts are shiny with new skin, but the larger gashes are hard and yellowed; the skin there is resistant to healing. He picks at it sometimes. The boy in the mirror at home doesn’t look too different, but he feels like a stranger.

Steve ignores him unless he needs to; he has given up on practiced smiles, since they don’t seem to work anyway.

“Wouldn’t we all,” he says.

Chapter Text

“Get a grip, Sinclaire,” he hisses out.

The house in front of him is big, carefully manicured. Houses shouldn’t be intimidating, but this one is.

He bounces on his toes, hands tightly grasped around his mom’s casserole dish. It’s still a bit warm, and he’s spent the last ten minutes huffing at it like a starving dog in the back of the car. He’d told his mom not to bother with an entire meal, but she’d insisted and politely added extra broccoli just to spite him.

He’d told her Steve was probably out. He’s a high schooler and a jock, according to Dustin: he’s a ladies’ man. Jocks don’t spend their Saturday evenings at home – at least that’s what Lucas assumes. If he had a choice and a car, he’d be hanging out with Max, no question about it.

But Steve’s car is in the driveway, so here he is. Casserole dish in hand. His parents, a few houses down checking on the Johnsons’ yard.

“You’ve got this. Just knock on the door. Nothing’s gonna happen.”

Erica scoffs, and Lucas turns his glare in her direction.

“Shut up.”

“I didn’t say anything.” She says, nose wrinkled and lip pulled up in disgust.

He flushes, jaw tensing. “Your face is annoying me.”

She rolls her eyes and, not for the first time, Lucas wonders where he went wrong that his parents brought her home instead of a puppy. “Holy popsicle stick, just knock on the door already. I want to go home.”

“You knock on the door,” he blurts.

And, well, he doesn’t mean for her to actually do it, but he should know better than to tempt her with chaos. He’s got half a grunt of protest out before she’s banging on the door.

“Erica!” He hisses, eyes darting about. He’s not sure what he expects to happen – maybe Billy Hargrove is waiting around the corner to jump him, and Steve’s protection had been a carefully orchestrated ruse. Maybe Lucas had dreamt the entire night up, and there’s no such thing as possession or demodogs. He kind of wishes he’d wake in his bed now, entirely free from giving a casserole dish to Steve Freaking Harrington.

There’s a long minute in which nothing happens, and he breathes out, the fizz over his skin starting to wear down. He laughs, a tad breathless, mostly relieved. “Looks like no one is home after all.” He turns to Erica, grinning. “Let’s head to the car-”

Erica starts slamming her palm down on the door again, her face scrunched up in what Lucas likes to call her ‘Mandy Halloway is wearing the same hair-bows as me’ expression. It sky-rockets Lucas’s heartbeat, and he makes a series of unintelligible noises.

“What the fuck!” The door swings open without a warning to reveal Steve, rumpled and scowling. He freezes, eyes darting between them. “Sinclair? Sinclairs?”

Lucas cringes at the confusion in his tone. He told his ma it was weird. He told her Steve Harrington doesn’t need anyone to bring him food when he probably has a personal chef. Or a stay-at-home mom who buys their groceries at a Whole Foods Market. Or maybe Steve survives on protein shakes and sunshine. “Hi,” he demurs, shooting a quick glare at Erica lest she say something stupid. “My ma wanted me to give you this,” he thrusts the casserole dish against Steve’s chest, “to say thanks. For the Billy thing.”

“You saved this idiot from becoming mincemeat,” Erica interjects despite Lucas’s warning, “I guess that makes you okay or something. Although you should have let him be roughed up at least a little. Might have taught him some manners.”

“Manners?” Lucas squawks, turning to wag his finger in her face. “You’re the one who was banging on Steve’s door like a crazed orc!”

“Don’t talk to me about your stupid nerd game, I’m perfectly civilized.”

“Guys,” they both turn to Steve, faces pinched in offense. His face cracks into a smile, and Lucas realizes for the first time that he’s never seen Steve smile. He’s seen him beaten and bloody and awash with terror, seen his face stern with resolve for the upcoming battle, and he’s never seen him smile. There’s a discoloured line across his forehead, but the bruising is gone. It settles something fiery and hard into his lungs. “This for me?”

Erica scoffs again, and Lucas is glad he’s not the only one who gets to witness her blatant disrespect. “Who else, Hairspray Harry?”

While Lucas is mortified, Steve seems amused. “Just checking, Mini Sinclaire.” He shuffles the casserole dish around in his arms, holds it like a baby. He looks at Lucas, “You didn’t have to.”

Again, before Lucas can say shit, Erica butts in, chin up and face scrunched, “If you don’t want my mom’s cooking, all you need to do is say so.”

Steve laughs. “Oh, I want it. Haven’t had a mom-cooked meal in a good while. Thanksgiving was kinda lonely. You know, I…I appreciate it. I didn’t expect anything for, well, that, though. Seriously. It’s the least I could have done. It’s the least anyone should do. But, um, thanks. Tell your mom for me, yeah?”

Either he doesn’t realize he’s said it, or he doesn’t care if they know, but Lucas and Erica share a quick, terse glance before Lucas finds himself shrugging. “I’ll tell her, but she’d probably like to hear it from you.”

“You should join us for lunch next week,” Erica says, blunt and conspicuous. God, she’d have such an awful sneak stat. The whole party would be dead with how easily she gives away the gambit.

“At least to bring back the dish,” Lucas adds, plastering on a smile and shoving his elbow into his sister’s side. It’s the least she deserves. “It was my grandma’s.”

The man is glancing between them, eyes scrunched in amusement. “Sure, if your mom’s cool with that.”

He suspects Erica will run her mouth, and Steve’ll be invited to every Sunday Lunch for the foreseeable future. Ma will be more than cool with that. Knowing her and Dad, he’ll be surprised if Steve isn’t adopted within a month. He always wanted a brother. Guess he’ll have to work on a plan to kick Erica out again. Steve could stay in her room; the view isn’t too bad, and it’s next to Lucas’s. Visions of secret knocks on the wall and hours spent in the yard throwing a ball clutter his mind.

Something suspiciously hope-shaped rises in his throat.

“She’s cool,” is what Lucas says in the end, and barely contains himself from pushing Erica down the steps when she mimics him.

 Predictably, his mom presses affectionate kisses against his face while he cringes. “You’re growing up so fast. Look at you, little gentleman.”

“And me?” Erica demands with her arms crossed and brows raised. “I also invited him. Doofus here didn’t do it on his own.”

Which is how Lucas ends up grocery shopping with his mom the next weekend.

 And fending off Dustin’s increasingly whiny demands to join them for lunch.

The cereal aisle stretches out on either side of them, colourful, cheery. It’s getting on Lucas’ nerves. His mom and Mrs Henderson had wandered off with their baskets full of vegetables, leaving him at Dustin’s mercy.

“I don’t understand,” Dustin says. He’s got a box of Cap’n Crunch in his hands and is shaking it around like a maraca. Lucas hopes he’s planning to buy it. “Why do you get to have Steve for Sunday lunch? It’s not fair. I’m the one who made him shower! He was disgusting, Lucas, so disgusting. Like covered in blood and muck and sweat, I don’t know why anyone would leave the Upside Down and not immediately throw themselves into the longest shower in existence. But I did that! I made him shower! At the very least, I should be at this lunch.”

Lucas rolls his eyes. Thankfully, the aisle is empty and no one is around to hear Dustin prattle on about things that they’d totally get in trouble for. He’s been at it since Tuesday, when Lucas let the whole thing slip by accident. Apparently, Dustin called dibs on Steve — “You can’t call dibs on people, Dustin, that’s stupid. And slavery,” — and he’s spent the week trying to stake his claim.

“Dude,” he says and knocks the box of cereal out of Dustin’s hands. The damn rattling is going to get him certified. “There are, like, six other days in a week. Six! Just invite him to your house on one of those. Why do you need to take my Steve Time? I asked him. I did the work. You don’t get to ride on my back-”

“Mom’s working Saturdays, Lucas, you literally chose the only afternoon!”

“Then you should have asked him sooner.” Lucas did not plan on dibs-ing Steve back. He stands by what he said. And he’s maybe had three conversations with the guy — and had his life saved by him twice already, but who’s counting? But Dustin’s irritating enough about it that Lucas might have to monopolize Steve’s time, for Steve’s safety, of course.

Mike and Will hadn’t made it a Thing - granted, the only thing Mike seemed capable of talking about was El, and Will generally looked so haunted Lucas was mildly surprised he spoke at all. Max thought Dustin’s insistence was hilarious and creepy, and Lucas only half agreed.

Steve was a badass. Steve had put himself between them and the Demodogs in the junkyard; he’d protected Lucas from Billy Hargrove; he’d bled on Lucas so much that Lucas had trouble convincing his mom it was from trying to clean up the Byers’ floor after the fight with Billy. He’s no doctor, but he thinks you’re not supposed to lose that much blood. Surely people die from that kind of thing. Maybe he has his own claims to Steve Harrington, ones just as pertinent as Dustin’s. But he at least has the dignity not to call dibs. What are they, seven?

Dustin groans in frustration, “Come on, man, please.”

And, for a moment, he’s almost worn down enough to agree, but then he remembers Steve saying how lonely he’s been — how he’d said it so mildly, like it was just the way of things, how the idea of a home-cooked meal had made him light up — and thinks, fuck it. “No. Get your own Steve Time. This is mine. Ma’s letting me help make the cornbread." 

Chapter Text

His mom calls a week before Christmas. It’s a Monday, and although he’d spent Sunday afternoon watching a basketball game with Mr. Sinclair and eating the best sweet potato he’s ever tasted, he’d had to go home to the big empty house and woken up in a cold sweat Monday morning to the phone’s shrill ringing.

He stands in the hallway, skin tacky and shirt stuck to his back. Outside, the sun has barely started to turn the horizon a limpid grey. The evening before had been awash with sleet, and Mrs. Sinclair had phoned Steve in a panic to check he’d gotten home safe. He’d stood in this same spot talking for over ten minutes, listening to the background noise of Erica and Lucas bickering as their mom continued with gossip about Mr. O’Brein across the street. It’s the second week Steve’s joined them for lunch, and the second week in with Mr. O’Brien had been found trying to cut down his neighbour’s lemon tree.

Steve’s mom’s voice is breathy and far away. She greets him, “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

He knows already what she is going to say. Steve sinks against the wall, staring at the spotless floor, his socks white. “Hi, Mom.”

“Steven, darling.” She says, and there’s the whistle of wind. “We’re snowed in at the lodge, and your dad’s throwing a right fit about it. You know we’d be home if we could.”

Their flight was supposed to land later that day. Steve had gone grocery shopping the morning before and planned to try his hand at a paella recipe Mrs. Sinclair had suggested. He doesn’t like shellfish, but his mom does, and he’d spent a good ten minutes choosing the best of the limited selection offered in Hawkins. “I know,” He says.

He leans his head back so he can trace the coffered ceiling. He’d swept away cobwebs using a broom, had squinted up at the room until his head started to pound, and he’d been forced to stick his face under a cool running tap despite the chill in the air. His parents had cancelled the maid service shortly after Steve’s second ill-advised rager had left the house in shambles. His dad had said something about learning responsibility, and his mom had lamented what state the lack of maid service would leave her perfectly styled house in.

He hasn’t had a party in over a year. He still cleans it every Friday like his parents might show up on Saturday morning to cast disappointed eyes across the dusty mantel.

“It’s okay.” He listens for his mom’s quiet sigh of relief. “I miss you.”

“Oh, baby,” his mom coos, “we’ll try to make it to Hawkins for New Year’s, before our trip South. Why don’t you go visit your aunt Gina for Christmas? They’re spending the week at a lovely resort in Houghton. You could stop by, spend some time with your cousins. Hudson is turning four soon, and little Emma’s just started teething. I’m sure Gina would be happy to see you. Lord knows she could use an extra hand with those kids of hers since Larry got his promotion. They’re enrolled in this fancy pre-school that makes the babies wear white, can you imagine? Absurd. You were constantly covered in dirt as a child. I thought you and Thomas might never get clean again.” She laughs and it’s a clear tinkling thing, reminds Steve of wind chimes, the start of summer sat by the pool.

His father, in a rare show of candor, had told Steve that he’d fallen in love with that laugh first and Patricia’s sharp tongue second. Steve had always liked her laugh, had tried to imitate it, had tried his hand poorly at comedy to illicit it more often.

“She keeps on about how boring Hawkins must be. Really, I keep telling her that the housing is cheaper. Even if it’s a bit...modest. I can’t imagine maintaining a house out in Washington. We were there just two weeks ago, and it’s truly another world compared to Hawkins. We went to the loveliest drive-in theatre down in Olympia. Granted, it was rather chilly, but I think you’d have enjoyed it-”

He closes his eyes, imagines what it would be like if she were sitting here in front of him, how her eyes would light up and her hands might move when she spoke. He remembers that her cheeks pinken when she’s excited, but he can’t remember if her eyes crinkle like Mrs. Sinclair’s or if her hands will linger on his shoulder after kissing his cheek. He would like to imagine it does, but she’d never really been physically affectionate.

“Have you watched The NeverEnding Story?” He interrupts.

“Is that the one you told me about? With the dragon dog?” She asks.

“Yeah,” he twirls the cord around his index finger. He’d watched it with Dustin shortly after his concussion had finally started to fade. It had been weird and wonderful and so different from anything else he usually be in to. Granted, he’d cried so hard at Artax’s death that they’d had to pause it while Steve suffered through a migraine so intense he’d laid on the kitchen floor with a frozen pack of peas over his eyes.

Dustin, had waited it out, occasionally prattling on about the themes and character growth and generally being a nuisance.

Steve hadn’t entirely understood the subtext and was unwilling to sit through more of Dustin’s rambling to figure it out. Later, alone in the house, he’d watched it again and again, stuck on “People who have no hope are easy to control. And whoever has the control has the power.” He’d thought of Will’s slightly vacant stare. He’d thought of King Steve. He’d thought of El’s narrowed eyes, how she had wrestled power back from the people hoping to keep her caged forever. He’s spent much too much time thinking about how children have been made to save the world.

She hums, and there’s the distinct sound of a waiter in the background asking about tea. “Not yet. I’ve been meaning to; you know how busy we get. First Los Angeles, then Washington. And of course, Milan. Just yesterday we went skiing in Akakura and spent the evening at a wonderful little onsen with your grandfather, you know how he gets about his arthritis after a flight and your father is weak towards his complaints. It’s been a struggle to deal with those two sniping at each other the whole week.”

“Did Nonna go with?” He asks around a swelling ache in his throat.

“Of course, as if we’d ever leave her home alone.” She laughs again. “She’s barely seventy but still as fussy as a child. She’s been forcing your father to finish his vegetables at dinner every evening.”

Nonna has the face of a severe bird of prey and the cackling laugh of a witch. Steve has a vivid memory of her pinching his cheeks, tutting about how he’s too skinny. While he hasn’t seen her in years, he still knows she smells of peppermint and that she’d snapped at his father once after he’d tried to send Steve to bed hungry. He misses her in the same way he misses being tucked in to bed, the same way he misses his mother scrubbing dirt off his cheek with a rough cloth.

“Do you think she’d come visit? Here.”

His mother falls silent; if it weren’t for the background noise, he’d think she’d hung up. “You know your nonna can’t travel that far, Steve.”

He bites his tongue hard enough for it to burst copper between his teeth. He decides not to answer – does not trust himself to stay calm or be kind. He wonders briefly when they decided he wasn’t worth the effort they put into their vacations.

“I can ask her to come to the phone. She’s just in the dining room. We ordered dinner a few minutes ago.”

“No, no, it’s okay.” He clears his throat, thinks about how Mrs. Sinclair had pressed another casserole dish into his hands as he was leaving the night before. Thinks about Erica saying, “I guess you make okay company,” and Lucas tentatively asking if Steve wouldn’t mind giving him some pointers for basketball. It doesn’t ease the blockage in his throat, but he finds it leaves him able to breathe, nice and slow. “It’s fine, you enjoy your dinner. Tell- tell everyone I said hi.”

“Sure will,” And her voice sounds like relief, like a burden has been lifted from her shoulders. Like he is the burden and the distance is the balm. “We’ll try to be there for the New Year.”

“No rush,” he says, and can’t tell if he means it or not. Can’t tell if the ceiling is shaking or if that’s just him. “Love you, mom.”

There’s another small pause. He imagines what he’d like her to say, imagines her pulling him into her arms, pressing a kiss to his forehead, laughing her windchime laugh and promising him she’ll watch any movie he finds even remotely interesting.

She says, “Bye, Steven. Have a good evening.”

The line clicks dead, and Steve blinks his eyes towards the back window where the morning sun has only just started to paint the overcast sky a pale grey. “You too,”

He sits there until he hears his alarm go off upstairs. The house is cold and clean and empty. He takes a scalding shower before getting ready for school.

There’s a sick churning in his gut that promises another day of food tasting like blood and ash.

Once when he was about nine, one of the last times Steve was taken anywhere, they’d gone to a resort in Omegna for the summer. Nonna was childhood friends with the couple running one of the lakeside restaurants, so Steve had spent the summer alternating between floating in the scorching heat and stuffing his face with porcinis dripping with butter, rosemary, and fonduta. His parents had gone off to shmooze with local cheese makers and sip wine on shaded porches, while Steve’s nonna had dragged him by the ear down to the dock where a group of women sat scaling fish.

He’d learnt that summer that food was labour. Food was community. Every hazelnut gelato that melted on his fingers as the local teens splashed nearby. Every bite of robiola dripping with honey as the sun set on their dinner party. Every satisfying bite of a hand-pinched pasta he’d made himself with nonna smiling, pleased, and smug over his shoulder. There’s a lot of weight to food, a lot of history and contemplation. Steve hadn’t thought, at the age of nine, that food could ever be a thing he dreaded.

He dreads it now, though, the mere thought of it a labour. Seated with the Sinclaires, it had been so easy to taste the soul that went into cooking, to appreciate the use of crushed black pepper, and live in the moment. It had lasted too. Belonging. Love in the form of salted corn and Erica’s frequent eye rolls. After lunch, Erica forced a doll and a hairbrush into his hands as Mrs. Sinclair mixed up some custard over the stove for dessert.

Today, the cafeteria has green apples and some unidentified meat in red sauce. Steve’ll take his chances with the apple. And, determined to find a dark corner somewhere to feel sorry for himself, nearly walks right over Chrissy Cunningham.

She raises a brow at him, lips frosted pink and a thin line. “I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you aren’t avoiding me like I’m Carol Perkins after another breakup with Tommy H.”

He blinks at her. She’s bundled up in a fluffy cream sweater and holds herself like an angry kitten. He waits for the dread to come, but it doesn’t. “I’m not avoiding you, Chrissy.”

“I know, I just said that.”

He sighs and massages his thumb and pointer over the bridge of his nose. “Look, I’m sorry that I’ve been...distant? This month, Jesus, the last two months have been a lot.”

Her face softens considerably, and she reaches out to grab his hand. It’s a weird feeling, they don’t have the kind of relationship where you hold hands, they don’t like...have a relationship. Before he’d yanked her out of the way of a pickup, they’d interacted only in relation to basketball games and an occasional party. But she’s got a disturbingly gentle tilt to her eyes now, and her fingers are long and cold; they squeeze his twice before letting go. “I know,”

She doesn’t. She really doesn’t. But Steve can’t disillusion her. He literally signed so many papers saying he couldn’t.

He still sees her dead sometimes. He sees so many people dead. In his dreams, in the disorienting rush of the school passageways. Barbara Holland is haunting him, and her death moans sound squealing tyers. One of Nancy's journalist buddies will look at Steve in passing and, and he fractures into shadow, the distant wail of a car horn blowing him apart. 

He doesn't think anyone knows...that anyone can know. There's probably something wrong with him beyond a little trauma—something like the creeping Nothing. Something like the Upside Down and distant prisoner camps nestled into frigid snow. Something like, like the last time his nonna pinched his cheek or the first time someone called him stupid.

“Tell you what, Harrington,” she says brightly, “I’m helping at the Hawkins’ Volunteer’s Christmas at the church on Christmas Eve, you should come by. Help me whip up some mean green beans."

He doesn't have anywhere else to be. He's sorely hurting in the friends department. If he doesn't get the fuck out of that empty house, maybe he'll waste away into Nothing.

Chrissy tilts her head, just so, and she looks alive. Like Something. "There are going to be tons of families coming for the food bank and some Christmas Cheer. There’s a blanket drive and a donated gift station for the kids. You get to meet some really cool people. I promise it won’t take away from your Christmas plans.”

He snorts but finds himself smiling at her, a bit strained, a bit desperate. Genuinely hopeful. He’s abruptly so thankful for the stupid, irresponsible driver who had nearly knocked her down. “You know what? I’d really like that, Chrissy.”

Chapter Text

She’s not planning to attend the year-end Christmas Dance. It’s a waste of time and money, and honestly, a buy-in to mass consumerism. That does not mean she’s not mad that Tammy’s going to it with Gordon Fredricks. What a prick. He eats his own boogers, she’s seen him do it!

She kicks at a fallen poster for good measure, and it flutters sadly in the air before getting stuck on someone’s leg.

She hates this. Fucking High School and shitty stupid boys and the god-awful tacky mess left behind in the school cafeteria that makes her shoes stick to the floor. It’s enough to drive her mental.

“What’d the poster do to you?”

She glares up at Munson with enough vitriol to murder a bat-shaped cow. “What do you want?”

His brows raise in that way that reminds her why the teachers all hate him.

She sneers, “Go away.”

“You’re kind of blocking the door.” He tells her. His hair is damp, glistening with dew under the shitty overhead lights. There’s a pin on his jacket that looks kind of like the demon he pretends to be.

They stare at each other.

Unfortunately, Robin’s never stayed still a moment in her life, and Eddie’s the kind of guy who would gouge his eyes out to win a challenge. She blinks first, and he smirks. “So, what’d the poster do? Offend your light-up strappy sneakers?”

“They don’t light up, you dickwad.” She vibrates a bit before turning so he can move past her. “Even if they did, though, they’d be cool.”

“Sure,” he says, wearing another one of those This Is Why People Hate Me facial expressions. He does not move past her. Asshole. “About as cool as Jason Carver kissing Billy Hargrove’s ass.”

She kicks at his shin successfully and then shoves him so that he nearly trips over a bench. “Gay,”

He twists to kick back at her. “You talking about your shoes or your haircut?”

They very nearly get stuck in another staring contest, but a freshman shoves past them, seemingly in a rush for the bathroom.

They both stare after him for a long moment. “Mystery meat, today?”

She sighs, “Yeah, but there’s also green apples. So.”

He shrugs, and a droplet of water leaks over his nose. He flinches. “I hate winter. Do you see this frizz? Do you?”

“Pretty sure that’s just how you look,” Robin says, ignoring him as he splutters. She reaches for the poster and shoves it into his chest. “Did you see this shit? Tell me you aren’t going, Munson.”

He uncrumples it and wrinkles his nose. “They're doing this again? It’s a farce of a Dead American Dream. A consumerist hellscape fit with wasteful expenditure and the degradation of-”

“Yeah, that,” Robin pokes the poster into his chest before he can draw this tangent out. “You’re not going, right?”

“Why would I go to a winter ball, Buckley? Have you met me?”

“Unfortunately, I have. Are you going or not, jerkface?”

“Of course I’m not going, you couldn’t get me there if you promised me Prince would be on stage in nothing but leather pants and chaps.”

“What are we not going to?” Someone asks.

Both of them jerk a little, turning to find Steve Harrington’s perfectly punchable face.

Eddie laughs, a strained, high-pitched sound that has Robin looking him over for possible hysteria. “Nothing, man, I-, we’re just, you know.”

Harrington’s face says he clearly does not know, and also that he thinks Eddie is very clearly insane. “Sure?”

“We’re boycotting the Christmas dance,” Robin cuts in before Eddie can commit social suicide in the cafeteria. “Down with The Man or whatever.”

Harrington nods. “It was boring as fuck last year, anyway. I don’t imagine it’s going to be better now that Nan-, just because the band isn’t playing.” He pauses, looks at Robin with eyes that seem too light to be brown, “No offense.”

She wants to take full offense, kick him in the balls, but he’s right. Apparently, last year, the specially chosen band members had put on a soul-sucking rendition of elevator music. Even if they’re not playing again this year, Tammy Thompson is singing in their stead, and Robin’s feral enough that she might spend the whole event crying her eyes out.

She shrugs and then realizes that Steve Harrington apparently knows she’s in Band, so she glares at him instead. “It’s a consumerist farce,” she sneers, “geared towards meat-heads and their equally brainless arm-candy.”

Munson whistles as if these aren’t his own words being regurgitated with much less melodrama.

If Munson looks impressed, Steve looks, well, she’s not sure what that facial expression means, but she assumes it’s one of judgment, so she sneers even harder. After a long moment where she’s trying to decide if he’s attempting Munson’s eye contact thing, he huffs and makes a hand-wavy gesture. It seems vaguely condescending. “Don’t let me disrupt your riveting political debate. If you wouldn’t mind…” He stands there for a minute – there’s a lot of glancing back and forth. He sighs and, in a shocking bout of déjà vu, it reminds Robin of her mother. “Could you guys do it, like, not in the doorway?”

“I’ll have riveting political debates wherever I want.” Munson jumps in, even as he takes a step to the side. His face is a mess – kind of splotchy and pale and weirdly pinched - and Robin plans to tell him so as soon as Harrington’s moved along.

The man looks at him much like Robin’s little brother looks at slugs he’s found on the windowsill – she’s not sure what it means, but it’s probably something about superiority. “I mean, I really wouldn’t expect anything else from the guy who gives speeches on the cafeteria tables.”

“Are they riveting?” Eddie asks, eyes slanted just-so and lips pursed. What the fuck.

“I guess? I really don’t listen all that much, but I guess it’s…commanding or whatever.”

Munson makes a sound like a kettle – very fitting for his constipated face. “You- How do-”

“You’re breaking him.” Robin cuts in. She bounces on her toes and wags a finger in Harrington’s face – he squints at her. “Go, get. We don’t need riffraff like you ‘round these parts. Get!”

They both freeze. “Is that supposed to be-”

“I swear to god. Harrington, please don’t-”

But his eyes are crinkling, and he snorts, a dorky sound that Robin would love if he weren’t a monumental asshole, and making fun of her. “You a big fan of westerns?”

“The Lady said get, scoundrel!” Munson near-yells, making them all jump.

Whatever amusement had been building fades from Harrington’s face like a sun sinking over the horizon. He’s left looking like a sad puppy, and it’s honestly so unacceptable. But she’s got priorities, okay? No feeling sorry for bullies. Bullies get what’s coming to them.

Thankfully, he doesn’t decide to lunge for either of their jugulars, instead taking a step to the side and squeezing past them out of the cafeteria.

“What the shit?” Robin gasps as soon as he’s gone. She turns towards Eddie, her shoulders all tense and her jaw kind of aching? What. “Why are you like this?” Eddie makes a dying whale sound. “No, seriously, what the fuck, Munson?”

He gestures wildly, eyes too big, and his shoulders doing a jig of their own. “You’re the one who started it!”

“And it was embarrassing!” She hisses and pokes at his chest. “You yelled at Steve Harrington. You made him look like a sad puppy! I’m going to be murdered by cheerleaders, Eddie. I don’t want that. They kick for fun! Fully. It’s going to be brutal, teeth everywhere. Do you know how much my parents paid to get me braces in middle school? Do you?”

He rolls his eyes, but his arms are crossed and his fingers drumming, so she knows he’s not entirely immune to the horror of death by cheerleader. “He’s fine.”

“Do you have eyes?” She demands. “Or did they get lost in all that frizz?”

He gasps and tosses his head. Hair flies everywhere; it’s a miracle he doesn’t choke on it. “My eyes work just fine, unlike yours. Harrington’s perfectly fine.”

She throws her hands up and very nearly gives in to the urge to kick him again. “If I get accosted by cheerleaders in a dark alley, I hope you are swamped with guilt and are forced to wear a proper jacket to the funeral.”

“As if I’d actually go to the funeral-”

Robin gives in to the urge and sends him careening backward into a table.

As if life could not be any more cruel, she overhears Tammy sighing over Steve Harrington outside English, and after class, gets to witness Martha Davis’ stomach peek out when she stretches to find something in the top of her locker.

“I hate him,” Harriet is saying, leaning next to Martha, two lockers away from where Robin is trying to cram her history notes between a literature textbook and a paperback copy of My Life In New Orleans. Harriet's face is a mask of the disgust she’s pumping into her tone. Her Jheri curls catch under the indoor lighting. Robin is kind of jealous of how perfect they still look, considering the last bell just rang.“He’s just really...”

“Racist?” Martha says, eyeing her friend.

Harriet nods, “And that’s why I kneed him in the balls.”

“I guess you can have a pretty face but a rotten core,” Martha says and whips out a compact mirror and some lip gloss. Her red curls are up in one of those preppy cheerleader ponytails, and it's fine. It's fine, really. Robin isn't overwhelmed by the freckles at the back of her neck. Not at all. “Carol, for example,”

“Please don’t start. She’s a frigid bitch, you need to have better standards.”

“Excuse you,” Martha gasps, “you like Billy Hargrove’s face.”

Harriet makes a sound of annoyance, “Did we or did we not just talk about me kneeing him?”

“Eh,” Martha shoves her lip gloss into her friend’s hands. “God, did you see Chrissy Cunningham cozying up to Steve in the cafeteria?”

“She already has a boyfriend, the absolute slut.”

“You’re not allowed to call her that, only I am.”

“Because you mean it with love?”

“Because I mean it with love.” Martha agrees. “How hot would they be together, though? Can you imagine?”

“I’d really rather not.”

“All that athleticism.” A dreamy sigh.

Robin slams her locker shut, face burning. She shouldn’t have listened in that long - this hot embarrassment is entirely her fault - but, well. Growing up in a repressed shit-hole like Hawkins does things to you. Sneaky things. Things that make conservative moms’ eyes bug out.

And apparently, it's turned Robin into a sneaky little sneaker who sneaks. Gesundheit.

Anyway, why would you talk about your illicit sexual preferences in the school hallways if you didn’t want to be snuck up on? Huh? If Robin had any faith in the educational system, she’d think it a clever ruse to get unsuspecting closeted gays to out themselves. Well! She has no faith in the educational system, and also! She’s too fucking smart to be drawn in that easily.

If any queer-adjacent looking idiot was gonna get her to rip open her chest and bare the shameful lust for a woman’s soft smile to the greater trash heap of a world, it would be Eddie Munson, and he’d probably do it entirely by accident because he’s infuriating. And sometimes, most times actually, she just wants to yell at him. And cut his hair. And maybe bite him. Entirely non-sexually. Gross.

“You is vewy wed.” Jay says in the blunt honesty of a sticky toddler as soon as she settles into the back seat of her dad's beat-up Ford. His hair is matted to the side of his head in evidence of a recent nap. He holds out his spit-shiny sucker to her and looks increasingly distressed the longer she doesn’t take it and put it in her own mouth.

“And you’re very stinky.” She retaliates and shoves the sucker back into his mouth. He seems to accept it without problem.

“You have a good day, big bird?” Their father asks.

“It was fine.”

“Just fine?”

Robin can hear the raised eyebrow over the discordant twang of cymbals and throaty yodeling through the speaker system. Literally everyone else’s parents are detached at best, but her parents care. It’s incredibly annoying. She isn’t allowed to sit and sulk; she has to talk about feelings.

For a moment, she considers rolling her eyes and sticking to the “it’s fine.” But if there’s anyone who will happily listen to her talk for hours, it’s her dad. Talk his ear off, she does, regularly. But some things aren't for her to say, and she still hasn't decided how she feels about Martha Kelly apparently liking girls - popular girls, but girls nonetheless.

Robin chews on her nail. “Tammy is going with Gordon Fredericks to the Christmas Dance.” She settles on eventually and is greeted with a commiserating tut from her father and the jangle of his beaded glasses strap. She sucks in a breath, “He’s a complete and utter waste of space that eats his own boogers. He's not even Steve Harrington, who’s a douche, but a douche with some self-respect, unlike Gordon. After English, he dropped a cold Hot Pocket on the floor, then picked it up and ate it. He didn't even try brushing off the dust like a normal human being. And this is the guy Tammy is going to the dance with? She’s Tammy Thompson: she’s gorgeous and funny and ambitious. She could, like, do so much better. But no, apparently no one in this godforsaken town has any dignity. She’s going with him - him! Gordon Eats His Boogers Fredericks - to a school dance.”

In a fit of word vomit and morphine, she’d outted herself to her parents a year ago following the removal of her wisdom teeth. In true Buckley fashion, there'd been a lot of ‘I told you so’s and she’d been forced through a second mortifying Sex Talk and had to listen to her mother talk about the experimentation she’d done at some ‘truly radical festivals’ in her youth. It's a testament to how much she loves her parents that she didn't turn them in for emotional abuse.

She laughs a bit manically, “It’s almost horrifying how tragic it all is. Who cares about school dances and dancing with a cute girl under fairy lights anyway? Not me, no siree.”

Jay is not literate on the finer anxieties of teenhood, but he’s remarkably savvy for a three-year-old. He reaches one of his sticky hands out and pats her arm. “Is okay, Wobbie. I dance with you.”

Her lips tremble.

“We don’t need a school dance to have a good time. Besides, you can dance with whoever you’d like to at home.”

She doesn't want to dance in the safety of their home, though. She wants to dance out in the open, unjudged, unassailed. “It’s unfair.”

“Life tends to be.” Her father reaches a hand back and holds it there until she curls her fingers around his and accepts a squeeze. “The boxes they try to put us in are restrictive, which is why-”

“We defy conventions and say fuck off to the government. I know.” She sniffs, juts her jaw, “What if I want to be like everyone else? What if I want to go to a stupid school dance and, and have a pretty girl whisk me around the floor in full view of everyone? Be normal.”

“You can’t and shouldn’t change yourself for their normative standards, or lower yourself to fit the status quo. We’re all climbing different hierarchies of need, Robin, theirs is just closer to the ground.”

She closes her eyes. “It’s like they’re taunting me with belonging, dangling the carrot of acceptance and joy at my nose with no likely payoff. It’s cruel, it’s rude, and it makes me feel like I’m going to be torn in two. I know I should hate it because of the materialism of it all, it’s like that frizzy-haired flake Munson said, there’s no ethical consumption in a shit-hole governed by intolerance and greed. But I don’t hate it for that, Dad. I want to fit in. I want them to accept me for who I am, not who I’m expected to be. And I, I refuse to bow to a system that is built on conformity and hates me for simply existing.”

“I, for one, like that you exist. I like that you’re you, Robin, and so does your mother. You don’t need their validation. Fuck them.”

“Fuck!” Jay crows at a pitch likely to leave Robin deaf. She cackles, wiping at her face.

She catches his smile in the rearview mirror. Her father says, “Viva la revolution.”

“Viva!” Robin and Jay howl together as the rolling growl of a trumpet spills through the car.

Chapter Text

He’s outside the junkyard. It’s dark out, and he doesn’t know how he got here.

Well, he does. He’s clearly in his car. But he doesn’t remember getting his keys or getting in the beemer or driving across town, so. He doesn’t know how he got here.

Great.

The beams of his headlights catch bright on frosty patches of mud and outline the decrepit husk of a rusted-up mustang. The darkness beyond this is only broken by the haze of deep red on the horizon that marks the treetops jagged black knives, a kiss goodbye to the year in blood and foreboding. If he squints just right, he could swear there’s a swarm of something flying towards him.

The broken-down school bus is grey in the low light. Silent. Undisturbed. No kids are screaming in his back seat, no demodogs prowling toward him with stretched mouths.

He’s utterly alone.

It’s good that there’s no one else here. No one else should be here. Certainly not the kids.

He stares ahead into the growing shadows, the dull throb of a headache behind his eyes. He’s supposed to be somewhere else. He knows this. But the memory of where and why eludes him.

Unlike his plans for the evening, he remembers the fight against the demodogs in excruciating detail. Or rather, he remembers the wet pounding of his blood in his ears, Max’s screams, the weight of a bat in his hands, remembers thinking: we’re all gonna die, it’s gonna eat me.

Something within the junkyard topples over, and Steve flinches hard enough to knock his elbow. He cusses, scowls at his windshield and out into pure night, feels completely and achingly ravaged, although nothing has happened today. Nothing has happened for a while. No monsters, no fists in his face, no midnight calls from Dustin checking if he’s still alive.

“I’m fine. I’m alive,” he tells no one.

He throws open the car door and stands out in the cold and dark, aware now of the way his hands are shaking, how his breath creates erratic plumes in the air. The floodlight is out; it’s just his headlights illuminating the uneven ground.

Another clatter sounds, and he turns around, half reaching for a bat that isn’t there, half trying to shove invisible children behind him.

Not them. Not them.

He doesn’t know how he got here, but he knows he is where he needs to be.

He stumbles forward, away from the car, away from the safety of the headlights, away from home and steady exhales and the promise of sanity. But he can’t stop. They need him.

He shakes his head, but the ringing in his ears persists. There’s something out there. Probably, possibly, something that wants to eat him. Eat the kids.

His chest hitches. He croaks, “Dustin?”

There’s no response. There isn’t meant to be a response, because Dustin’s at home where he’s safe and sound, and the demodogs are gone. They’re gone, El made sure of it, and Lucas and Max are at home too. They’re supposed to be. It’s cold and dark and New Year’s Eve, so they must be at home.

But they could be out here. God knows those kids have no self-preservation instincts, no concept of when to back the fuck down.

Get back. Stop screaming. Stupid fucking kids. Jesus. Do they want to die?

Steve tumbles over something in the dark, landing in a heap, and scrambles back up to his feet, trembling like a leaf. He clears his throat. “Max? Lucas?” His voice echoes with the distant growl of a monster.

He can’t see shit in the dark. The beemer’s headlights are too far off now to do anything other than act as a beacon.

He is, maybe, going to throw up. He spins in a circle, but nothing becomes clearer, nothing stands out. He can’t hear the monsters - he can, he can, he can - but they’re probably waiting, breathing just behind him.

“Brats!” He yells, feels how the word gets tangled in his lungs, and wrenches free something vital. He’s bleeding, gushing blood everywhere, making a total mess of Mrs Byers’ carpet and Billy Hargrove’s upholstery and the shitty plaid bedding in his room. The steel walls are closing in on him, alarms blaring. He’s fucked up somehow. Dustin is going to be insufferable about it.

“Are you trying to be the grossest person alive?” Dustin says, “You’re flaking everywhere. You know the demogorgon can smell the blood, right?”

The blood will lure the demon dogs away from the kids, though. A lure. A trap. He knows a good setup. Confuse your opponent, fake left. He’s ready for them even if all he has are his hands.

He stumbles further, breathing loudly, feet scuffing at half-frozen dirt and knocking over bits of abandoned metal. “Human tastes better than cat. C’mon, you want to fight?” He picks something up. Metal. A rod of some sort, frigid against his palms. Long. Good reach.

A flap of wings brushes by Steve’s ear, and the rod whistles through the air. Something screams.

Steve screams back, tense as a bow string ready to be released. There’s something wrong with his body, something like adrenaline or fear or, or something. It’s in his throat, in the heaving planes of his stomach, in his ears. He can’t hear past his blood, past a flutter that circles him.

He turns. Swings. What is that? What is it? He doesn’t know. He needs to get the kids, keep ‘em safe. It’s all he’s fucking good for.

Where are they? Where are they? Where are they?

Fucking kids. Fuck.

The darkness swallows him up, drags him kicking and screaming, a metal rod slashing through the air. “Answer me!”

He trips, goes down hard in a pokey patch of bush. It scratches at him, holds at his clothes, yanks him back down when he tries to get up. Like tiny clawed hands, like vines. He retches.

For a moment, he tries to fight his way back up, tries to use the rod to fend off the monsters. But there’s only brush, only frozen ground and branches and dead grass. He sags, lies there staring unseeingly into the dark, body heaving and shuddering as no monster comes forward to chew through his thin shirt.

The fluttering is gone, and he’s abruptly aware that he’s wandered off in some paranoid fugue state, fighting monsters that are gone. Because they are gone. There’s nothing to fight. The kids aren’t here.

“They’re okay. They’re okay. Fuck. The kids are fine, you absolute moron.”

Some time later, once the worst of the shudders has died down and the air no longer feels as thin and sparse, Steve untangles himself from the bush, feeling like a right idiot. He’s cold, in a peripheral way, realizes he’s only wearing a t-shirt and pants, that his toes are stiff and bloodied in the damp sand.

“That’s embarrassing,” he tells the ground and the wet and the shadowed trees, but they don’t respond.

He blinks, realizes the world is infinitesimally lighter. The sky tipped from a black ink spill to a deep, stretching blue dotted with twinkling stars. Trees tower all around.

It’s enough to realize he doesn’t know where the fuck he is. The beemer is entirely gone, consumed by distance or darkness or whatever pulled Steve into the thick of trees and bush.

As he looks around, he catalogs his hurts: his hamstrings and calves are tremulous under his weight, his right ankle burns and buckles on the next step he takes. He’s sore. Not Billy Hargrove Bashed My Head In sore, but Coach Made Us Do Suicides For An Hour sore.

He is damp, possibly from sweat and possibly from the night air. He wipes his face, finds his hand covered in a dark ooze. More blood? There’s nothing he can do about it. What he can do something about is his feet. He can’t see the extent of the damage, but from the way they throb and sting, they must be pretty torn up. He pulls off his shirt and rips it up, winces while tying the strips around his feet.

This somehow reminds him of Nancy. Nancy’s face pinched in worry, Nancy tearing her shirt to bandage him up, which is only mildly strange because she’s done only one of those things while he’s been present. Not that...not that he would mind having her here. Having anyone here. Someone to support him as he tries to figure out which way leads back to his car. To civilization.

Someone to speak some sense into the disorienting swirl of his mind.

He grits his teeth and uses the metal rod he’d been fighting invisible monsters with as a crutch. It’s bloody, either from his nose or feet, he’s not sure. It’s a comfort in his hands, though, not nearly as useful as a bat embedded with nails, but it’ll do in a pinch. And this is a pinch. His whole body is pinching.

Eventually, after shuffling about in the darkness for an indeterminable amount of time, he says fuck it to trying to figure out where he came from and starts hobbling in the direction of the toenail-shaped moon.

He’ll end up somewhere. Eventually.

To think, he could have been eating dinner with a friend. A real, adult friend. Instead, he’s out in the middle of ass-fuck nowhere, feeling even more shitty than usual.

He’d spent Christmas Eve dishing out food at the church with Chrissy. It was exhausting in the good way, the same way swimming feels, expansive rather than reductive. Growth. And, maybe, maybe Steve spent the majority of that time hoping his parents would be home when he returned, maybe Chrissy hadn’t filled the aching hole in his chest with her upbeat introductions and flinging of peas at his face. But it felt like another revelation. He can have good things, he can have friends, and find joy outside of the horrors of monster fighting.

It’s his luck then that he’s bailed on Chrissy to have a mental break in the middle of fucking nowhere. Great friendship maintained there, truly a masterclass in how to mess up the one good thing you’ve got in under an hour. At this rate, he’s beginning to think he’s cursed to be stuck with middle school dweebs and their —admittedly cool mothers — for the rest of his existence.

His legs buckle out from under him, so he slides down the side of a tree, cursing all the way down, trying not to succumb to tears of frustration as his calves spasm through a vicious round of cramps.

Back in middle school, he’d tried joining the track team. The coach was a right piece of work, though, and had run them ragged. One of the girls, a year below him, a stick figure with too large eyes and messy hair, was pushed so hard, even after complaining of feeling ill, that she had passed out on the track. Steve remembers how he’d struggled to catch his own breath, how he’d slowed down but hadn’t stopped to help her, too afraid of the coach making him run another lap. Too tremulous and weak to get himself through the last half a mile to even consider stopping for her.

A boy, dark-haired, equally as wide-eyed as the girl, had dragged her back, sweating and wheezing. Steve remembers being jealous that the boy was still standing, still powering through the physical agony. Not even relieved at the girl’s return. Steve himself had been on the floor, clutching his aching sides, already formulating the complaints he’d be passing on to his mother that evening.

Like any other time he remembers snippets of the past like this, shame wells up in his throat. He tries to comfort himself, remind himself that he went back to help Nancy and Jonathan, that he put himself between the kids and the demodogs, that he faced off Billy and the Upside Down when it really mattered. These reminders don’t remove the guilt, but they’re something to hold on to.

When it matters, he can make himself move. He pushes himself up, breathing sharply through his nose. “You can fucking do this, Harrington.”

A twang sounds through the air, piercing. Steve flinches, nearly falls back down.

It comes again, this time more noticeable: music.

Steve’s body spasms. He’s back in the Byers’ house, Nancy’s face set in determination as she lifts a pistol. Behind her, the Christmas light glowed, and the pain radiating from his temple made the horror of dying seem all the more real. “You need to leave. Right. Now.”

When it matters. He moves.

Chapter Text

They’re spending New Year's Eve with the Cunninghams, an invitation which is not entirely unexpected. Philip and Laura are pillars of the community and are well-known for their holiday dinner parties. Karen’s been to a few before, brunches with the ladies of the church, Easter picnics complete with egg hunts for the kids, and fundraisers for public restoration efforts.

She’s not close to them, but the kids have found themselves their own entertainment for the night, and she’d much rather spend the evening with a glass of champagne and a finely curated menu than listening to Ted snoring in his favorite armchair.

She presses her lips together and corrects the smudge of lipstick at the corner of her mouth. “Ted, darling, does this look okay? I’m not sure it matches my sweater.”

“You look great,” he says, but she can see in the mirror that he hasn’t looked up from the newspaper.

She scowls and looks back at her reflection. It is only dinner, but it’s a New Year’s Eve dinner, and you’re supposed to go into the new year at your best. Her mama - rest her soul - had been a firm believer in dressing for the role you wanted, which is why she never stopped Karen from experimenting with the increasingly wild trends of the 60s.

Karen had married into a decent family, moved into a decent neighborhood in a decent little town, and popped out three marvelous children. Headstrong, passionate children who know what they want, what they like. Karen had felt proud of the life she’d built, after all, Nancy had turned out proper and pretty and perfect, and Mike was maybe a little bratty, but he had a caring heart and was ardent in all he did. Holly was still so small, but already she seemed brimming with joy, potential.

It does not make sense then that she feels trapped. But she does.

“We’re going to be late. Are you done? You look fine, Karen.” Ted says while pulling on a sweater of his own. She hates his outfit, finds it tacky and stiff.

Mike’s face is pinched, as it often is these days, but he still helps bundle Holly into her jacket and then the car.

They drop Holly off at the babysitter first and Mike at the Byers’ second.

The Byers’ little house is familiar, the lights shining through the windows into the chill evening air.

Joyce Byers had not had Karen’s luck. Her home was shabby, her work was menial, and her husband was a prick. Karen adores Joyce. As opposite as they might be, they get along fairly well in the way mothers tend to when their children are joined at the hip. She’s always thought Joyce a bit frumpy, but the woman is fiercely loving and never backs down from a challenge. Karen, maybe, envies her.

As a consequence of Will and Mike becoming inseparable since kindergarten, Karen’s spent her fair share of time at the Byers’ home. Birthday parties, Fourth of July, and an occasional dinner when Will and Mike pleaded. More so after Lonny fucked off - good riddance.

Despite Mike’s protests, Karen walks him to the door, and at her knock, they’re greeted by Will Byers dressed in a smart, collared shirt and tinsel atop his dark head. “Hello, Mrs Wheeler. Hi Mike,” He says, face scrunched into a sweet smile.

“Hello, daring,” She pulls him in and relishes the way he still fits beneath her chin. For a horrifying week, she’d thought she’d never get to do this again. “You’ll let me know if Mike gets too rowdy?”

He pulls a face she can’t decipher, and she’s reminded of how quickly these boys are growing and changing. “Sure.”

“Let me quickly say hi to your mom.” She veers for the kitchen, where she is most likely to find Joyce, and leaves Mike to his own greetings. “Joyce,” She greets, and immediately is confronted with a woman covered in flour. “What in the world happened?”

“I let Jane help with the baking.”

Karen’s mouth wobbles into a smile. Mike has been very cagey about his little girlfriend. “Is she here?”

“I’ve sent her to wash; she looked worse than I do, if you believe it.”

“I can only imagine.” She indulges and passes a wet cloth from the sink to the other woman. “I made sure Mike packed in Will’s vest this time. I swear he’s been forgetting it deliberately at this point.”

Joyce huffs, “It’s fine. I’m sure Will has more than a few of Mike’s items squirreled away here somewhere. Oh, you look nice. I like what you’ve done to your hair. You and Ted headed out for the night?”

Karen touches her hair, pretending to be cavalier but secretly pleased. “We’re heading to one of the Cunningham parties. I was a bit worried about this sweater, to be frank.”

Joyce looks her over, in that unaffected, gruff way that Karen’s always thought rather endearing. “It matches your earrings.”

Karen is not above looking for compliments. She was a dashing young thing in her youth and knows she’s maintained herself well since Holly came along. But she’s found the most startling of compliments tend to be those about things she controls and actively works towards. She smiles brightly at Joyce, warm in the cheeks, pleased as punch.

After a few more words exchanged about the boys, Karen heads out to find Ted scowling at her from the driver’s seat. He grumbles the whole fifteen minutes it takes them to arrive at the Cunninghams, and at that point, she’s about ready to tell him to go home.

She doesn’t wait for him to open her door; he hasn’t done so in years. She does, however, wait for him to reach her side before approaching the Cunninghams’ large neutral monstrosity of a house. No matter how mad she is at him, she can’t arrive in an obvious huff.

The Cunninghams are perfectly done up, but there’s a tension to Laura’s eyes that’s more than party planning stress. The reason for this becomes apparent when their daughter, Christa? Christine? comes marching to the door, face scrunching unhappily.

“Fine, I’ll walk then.” She’s saying, chin jutting in a way Karen is intimately familiar with, given her own teenage daughter.

“Christina Elizabeth,” Philip comes marching after her, the anger radiating in the set of his shoulders, “you will stop this foolishness at once. I will not have you running after some boy-”

“Philip, dear,” Laura interrupts, eyes darting between her family and guests. “Perhaps we should discuss this in a different room?”

“He’s not some boy! He’s my friend,”

“I don’t care what you call him, I won’t have you galavanting in the middle of the night with some boy like a whore.”

“Oh, tell me what you really think, Dad.” Christina sneers.

“Both of you!” Laura snaps. Her face smooths immediately into a terse smile, “We have guests. Control yourselves!”

Karen stares wide-eyed. Notices a few faces peeking through a doorway at them.

Christina seems to shake in place; she avoids her mother and turns to Karen, only halfway in the door, and fixes on a strained smile. “Hello, Mr and Mrs Wheeler. I’m sorry, I need to get past.”

“You aren’t going anywhere but your room.”

“He could be hurt!” Christina yells, and Karen notices the way her bottom lip trembles. “I told you. I told you that he’s alone and, and he promised he’d be here.”

“Chrissy,” Laura tries to corral her daughter away from the foyer, the veneer of calm slipping through her fingers and leaving behind a tight smile and hard eyes. “He probably fell asleep early-”

“No!”

Karen’s chest clenches, and she’s momentarily breathless, thinking of how Will fits under her chin, how his face has been too pale for months. How broken Mike had been when they’d found the body in the quarry. “Who’s missing?” She asks, unashamed to get involved in this family drama when a child could be missing, a child could be hurt.

“Steve,” Christina says, with large watery eyes, “he promised he’d be here. His parents still aren’t back, so he’s alone, and he promised me he’d be here.”

Karen thinks of Nancy, how she’d woke up one night to her daughter gasping for breath in the bathroom, body trembling with suppressed sobs. Thinks of the way her daughter clung to her and shook her head and kept saying, “I miss Barb.”

“Why don’t I drive you over to check on him, hm?” She steps forward and takes Christina’s trembling hand between hers. She does not care if the Cunninghams are mad. She barely knows them. “As soon as you know he’s okay, we’ll come right back.”

The girl’s breath shudders through her. “Please.”

“Karen!”

Karen turns a scowl at Laura Cunningham, “I watched my son and daughter bury their best friends last year.” The horror of it still prickles her skin, burns the back of her throat. “Unless you know that pain, I’ll not be taking direction from you.”

“It’s...well, of course. That’s very kind of you, Karen,” Laura says. “Chrissy, your coat.”

The two of them huddle into the car, and Karen waits until Christina’s seatbelt has clicked. The girl is still sniffling, rubbing the sleeve of her sweater over her eyes.

There’s something holy about this moment, Karen thinks. Something precious about a child determined to protect their friend, something visceral about defying parents for the brutality of childhood. Love, in a form. Something with teeth and blood and longing.

“Where am I taking you?” Karen asks and fixes her eyes forward.

“Do you, do you know where the Harringtons live?”

Karen’s breath catches. She forces herself to loosen her grip on the steering wheel. “Your friend, it’s Steve Harrington?”

“Yeah. He promised.” She says suddenly, as if the knowledge of who it is would make Karen change her mind.

She liked Steven, liked how easily he’d played with Holly, liked how he’d made Nancy flush, liked his manners and his carefully styled hair. She thought Steve was much like she was as a child, willful and curious and looking for direction. She’d been rather pleased when he and Nancy started dating. He was safe and responsible, even if his parents were never around for Karen to meet.

Karen closes her eyes for a moment and carefully does not think of Nancy’s quiet, “We-I- I broke up with him. We weren’t good together.” The little determined pout Nancy wears when she’s trying to convince herself of something.

She carefully doesn’t think of Mike recounting how Billy Hargrove almost killed him.

“I know where,” She says and starts the car.

The car ride is quiet, the radio off, the world around them gearing up for midnight.

“Is Steve, are you and Steve together?” She asks eventually, not as subtly as she’d normally try for.

“He’s my friend.” Christina bites out and falls quiet again. They turn another corner, and she sighs, “He saved me a few months ago. After-” she cuts herself off and heaves a breath. “I’m worried about him. He gets these...headaches, bad ones. He’s good at hiding them, but his eyes get all glossy and far away, like he’s...gone.”

Karen breaths carefully, focusing on the road.

“I know, I know we haven’t been friends for long, but he’s the kind of person who follows through. He’d have let me know if he couldn’t make it.”

“You said he’s alone.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Christina nod and start picking at her lip. “His parents were supposed to come back, but they haven’t been here since before Halloween. They missed Christmas and promised to be here yesterday, but they never showed up. I told him. I told him to come to us, that Mom wouldn’t mind one more person, and he agreed. I swear it, Mrs Wheeler.”

“I believe you,” Karen says and blinks at the dark roads.

The Harrington house is lit up like the sun, light shining through every window behind closed drapes. Karen stares at it, half-horrified at the electrical bill, half-hopeful that this means Steve’s parents are home now.

“His car is gone,” Christina says and throws herself out of the vehicle.

Karen scrambles to follow her. The driveway is empty, but they head for the door anyway. Find it open, letting light blaze out into the cold night.

“Steve?” Christina lets herself in.

Karen swallows and follows, hands clammy despite the chill. “Steven?”

There’s no response and no evidence, except for the light indicating that someone has been home recently. They split ways, Christina bounding up the stairs and Karen sweeping through to the living room.

She hasn’t been in the Harrington home before, but now that she’s here, she’s put off by the sterility of it, like someone took a picture from a magazine and stuck it up. She moves through the space, uncertain, feeling suddenly like they should be contacting Chief Hopper instead of skulking around an empty house.

The sliding door out the back leads to an empty pool littered with fallen leaves and half-frozen puddles. Karen shivers, casts her eyes to the rows of trees butting up to the property, and lets dread settle low in her stomach. “Steven? It’s Karen Wheeler.”

When there’s no response after a minute, Karen retreats inside, where it’s barely warmer, and calls, “Christina? Did you find anything?”

“Mrs Wheeler,” the girl gasps as she rounds the corner. “Mrs Wheeler, he’s not here. His shoes are still at the door, though, and his- his wallet and coat are in his room.”

She blinks rapidly, remembers Joyce Byers’ frantic phone call asking if Will was still at her house. She. She doesn’t know what to do. What if. What if it’s last year all over again?

“I’m calling Mom to see if he’s shown up,”

The girl scampers away, and Karen is left standing there, staring at a family portrait of three forced smiles and neatly coiffed hair. Steve’s parents have been gone for months. Months. If Chrissy hadn’t bothered to invite him to her house, who knows how long it would have taken anyone to notice the boy was gone?

The flowers on the mantle are fake, the shelves carefully dusted, the pillows neatly arranged.

Karen hates it. There’s no life in this. She wonders how Steve lives in this pristine hell.

She follows Chrissy’s voice to an equally pristine kitchen. There’s a single apple on the counter, green and bright and round.

“Hello? Yes, this is Chrissy Cunningham, I’m at the Harrington house in Loch Nora- Yes. No, I can’t find Steve. He was supposed to come to my house-” She makes a sound of frustration, stamping her foot. “You aren’t listening to me.”

A hot ball of annoyance tangles in her stomach. These kids and their impulsive decisions. Karen reaches out, “Give me the phone.”

Christina’s lips purse, but she gives up the receiver. Karen clears her throat.

“Hi, this is Karen Wheeler.”

A sigh, “Officer Callahan, ma’am,”

“Officer, I’ve driven Miss Cunningham to Loch Nora to look for her friend. He was supposed to join her family tonight, but never showed up.”

“Mrs Wheeler, he’s likely gone off to join other friends or stopped at the store.”

“Officer Callahan.” She says and waits for another sigh. “Christina’s been waiting for him for over four hours.”

“Do you have anything to suggest he isn’t out partying it up? It’s New Year's Eve, Mrs Wheeler.”

“We arrived at the Harrington house to find the door open and all the lights on. Steve’s wallet, shoes, and coat are all still here.”

“Is anything broken? Trashed?”

“What? No. It’s all perfectly neat.”

“If he hasn’t been gone for more than twelve hours and there’s no evidence of foul play-” He continues at this for a while as Karen’s jaw clenches tighter. The logical way of things dictates that he’s probably right, Steve’s possibly just forgotten his things and the lights...and the door. Maybe because of one of those headaches Christina mentioned.

But the dread does not flee. She’s a mother; the worry was hardwired into her. She says, “Get me Chief Hopper.”

“He’s not in tonight.”

“You get me the Chief, Officer Callahan, or so help me God, I will force you to reread Barbra Holland and Will Byers’ case files every day for the next year. I will not have a child hurt on my watch, and I’m horrified you would suggest, after everything that happened in the last year, that a missing child is not of any importance. Now. Get me the Chief.”

There’s more grumbling and sighing, but eventually Callahan agrees and hangs up.

Karen takes a deep breath, turns to find Christina gone. “Christina?”

“In here,”

Here turns out to be Steve Harrington’s room. It’s an...interesting choice of wallpaper.

The room is clean and mostly devoid of personal effects. There are four floor lamps stationed around the room, all on, and two flashlights on the nightstand beside a wallet. On the bed is a dinner jacket and a pair of socks, at its foot is a pair of dress shoes.

“My God,” Karen says, eyes fixed on a carving knife half tucked under his pillow, “what is going on?”

“He has nightmares.” Chrissy answers. She’s standing by the window, frowning down at an empty pool. “I don’t know about what. We haven’t been speaking for, like, years or anything. But he mentioned it, said he was struggling to sleep because of the nightmares.”

Karen’s only nightmare in years has been waking up to find Holly missing in Will’s place. It had been soothed away by crawling into her little girl’s bed and pulling her close. Mike and Nancy have had nightmares more often recently. Terrors that leave one or both of them screaming, gasping awake in the middle of the night, and seeking each other out. Mike’s at an age where he’s too embarrassed to ask to keep the hall lights on, but Nancy had no qualms telling Karen to give him one of Holly’s night lights with that serious little frown she gets.

Karen wonders how it must feel to wake up all alone after a nightmare, what the nightmares are about, that there’s a knife under Steve’s pillow, and a furniture store’s worth of lights in the room.

“I thought- it’s so stupid, I thought I could help. That’s what friends are supposed to do, right? Help. But he couldn’t even tell me properly about his headaches; he just waved them off like they were no big deal. And he seemed happy, really happy at the Volunteer Christmas charity. I thought he’d be okay. And, jeez, it’s so stupid, Mrs Wheeler, I’m so stupid. One night can’t fix someone, can it?”

Chrissy nudges something on the desk, and Karen steps closer, realises it’s a cookbook, notes sticking out from between the pages.

“No, it can’t,” She soothes. “But it’s not stupid of you to hope. You said Steve hasn’t told you what’s happened to him. Only he knows the extent of what he’s going through. You couldn’t fix him, even if you did. He’s got to do that himself; all you can do is be a support.”

She smiles, it's a strained thing, tired. “That’s so much easier said than done. I’ve already lost him.”

“We don’t know where he is, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone.”

‘’You don’t think he would have...” Christina is looking at the knife, so Karen does as well. There’s nothing special about it. It’s just a knife.

“No.” She says, although she doesn’t really know. She’s never been the greatest at things like this. Emotional things: devastation and hopelessness, fear. She hopes, though, Christ Above does she hope that she never has to see another child buried in this awful town.

Still, Christina nods. She starts talking, telling Karen about the Christmas Eve they spent giving piggyback rides to kids and flicking peas at each other. She talks about how Steve made sure every plate he dished up had enough food and how he made sure she, too, ate enough. “He gave me this blue hair bow, and he was so nervous. And then he started crying when I gave him a copy of The NeverEnding Story. It’s...just a children’s movie. I liked it, it was a bit weird, but I thought he might enjoy it since he babysits and gives rides to those middle schoolers.”

The middle schoolers. Her middle schoolers. Her kids. What if Steve isn’t okay? How does Karen even bring it up to Mike? To Nancy.

A crackle makes her jump.

“Oh,” Christina holds up a familiar walkie; Karen often sees it clutched in Mike’s hands. She stares. When did Steve get one of those? It’s crackling. Christina presses a button. “Hello?”

The line stays dead. Crackle gone.

“Hello?” Christina tries again.

“Who is this? Over.” A lisping voice demands.

Karen’s brows raise.

“This is Chrissy.”

There’s a long pause wherein Karen’s trying to process Dustin Henderson’s voice crackling over a walkie in Steve Harrington’s very strange room. “You’re supposed to say ‘over’. Over.”

Christina rolls her eyes, “Sure. Whatever. Are you one of Steve’s nerds?... Over.”

There’s a scoff, “What do you-”

“Jesus, Dustin, give that to me. Why do you have a walkie? Who are you really? Are you working for the lab?”

Karen startles at Mike’s voice and steps forward. Mike is supposed to be at the Byers. They dropped him off there a few hours ago. She stares at Chrissy as the girl glares at the walkie.

“Are you gone? Did you hear me?”

“You didn’t say ‘over’.” She snarks. “This is Steve’s walkie. I’m at his house. Over.”

The walkie crackles a bit, snatches out half-formed words crackling through the line.

“I told you he’s fine,” Mike complains, a bit further away than before. “He’s got a girl over. He’s clearly fucking with us.”

A sigh, “Listen, Chrissy, this walkie is only for emergencies and Party members. You aren’t permitted to use it. Remind Steve that he can’t just let any old-”

Karen snatches the walkie from Chrissy’s hand. “Dustin, Mike. It’s mom, Karen Wheeler... uh, over.”

“Mom?” Mike demands.

“Yes, your mother, Michael. And best believe you better still be at the Byers’.”

“Of course I am. Oh my god. What are you doing at Steve’s house? What the hell?”

She closes her eyes, pinches the bridge of her nose. “Listen. Steve isn’t...here. Chrissy and I are looking for him. Have you heard anything about plans for today? Over.”

There’s an extended silence in which she and Chrissy look down at the walkie with matching scowls.

Eventually, “Um, no, Mrs Wheeler. I haven’t seen him since Boxing Day when he dropped me off at Lucas’. Mike hasn’t either. I mean, I spoke to him yesterday on the phone. He didn’t say anything except that he’d be having dinner at a friend’s house. If he’s got his...um, well. Did he take his bat? Over.”

“Bat?”

“A baseball bat? He keeps it at his door. It’s, well, it’s pretty noticeable. If he hasn’t taken it, then he’s probably okay? Or maybe it’s worse if he forgot. Shit. Sorry. Sorry, Mrs Wheeler. Over.”

She turns to ask Chrissy to go check, but the girl is already gone. “Boys, whatever happens, I want you to stay at the Byers. I’ll come get Mike as soon as we’ve sorted things out-”

“Mom!”

Chrissy sprints into the room, in her hands is a baseball bat studded with nails. It’s clearly stained in some spots. Karen’s mouth falls open.

“Oh my word. Mrs. Wheeler,” Chrissy whispers. She holds the bat out like it’s a snake. “What do we do?”

“Why does Steve Harrington have a bat full of nails?” She asks the children, pretty sure she’s keeping her tone calm, although she feels like she might explode. From anger or from the sheer horror, she’s not sure.

“Oh. So he left it. That’s probably a good thing? But, it could also be a really, really bad thing? It’s really a mixed bag. Uh. He pretty much keeps it with him all the time, so it should be in the car if he’s gone out, but if it’s at the house and he isn’t, it could mean he left against his will? Oh, holy demodamn. What if it's-”

The line cuts off, leaving Karen wide-eyed and brimming with something she can only describe as ‘The boys are going to be so very grounded after this’.

“Put it back,” Karen says, eventually, staring at the sharp tips of the spikes.

Chrissy’s throat clicks as she swallows.

A few more attempts reveal the boys are no longer willing to communicate with her. She keeps the walkie close, though, and leaves Steve’s room.

Growing up, she, along with most of her peers, was not rich enough for a landline. Karen would write letters and stuff them into her friend’s mailboxes, with the abandon of youth. Occasionally, she’d pop down to the telegraph office and peer imploringly as a young woman would type up her telegram. It was only when she married Ted that having a phone in the house became affordable for the average American, and she’d discovered the joys of pestering her friends back in Jersey at odd hours of the day.

When Mike first asked for a walkie, she’d been mildly annoyed that he wasn’t going out to deliver handwritten notes to his friends as she had done. But she’d caved and was rewarded with Mike’s excited chatter in the late hours of the night.

She’d never thought, as a child, that it would be so easy to reach someone across town. That checking in with friends or kids or the local grocer’s stock would be this easy. Still, it’s not enough. Wherever Steve is, he doesn’t have a telephone, he doesn’t have a walkie. No one is going to reach him.

She finds Chrissy standing at the closed door, staring down at the bat.

“I should take you home,” she says.

Chrissy whips around, fully devastated before she even drags in a breath. “No, please. No, I can’t go home until I know he’s okay. Please, Mrs Wheeler.”

She’s so incredibly tired. She wants to be at home in her bathrobe with a glass of pinot in her hand. She wants her kids sleeping soundly and safely upstairs where she can touch their cheeks and soothe away their fears. The world has been so harsh on them at such a young age. Was rest too much to ask for?

“Chrissy,” she says, “sweetheart, this is too much. I’m going to take you home, and I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”

“I’m not leaving.”

And Karen sees a familiar stubbornness in her, sees the way this girl will forge her own path in the future, sees the possibilities flowering like a spring day. One day, Chrissy will be standing in front of her own teenager with a headache, fully exasperated, and know that Karen was right. But right now she’s seventeen and her friend is missing.

“You don’t get a choice in that, sweetheart.”

“What if the phone rings while we’re driving?”

Karen sighs. She has a point, but Karen can’t let the girl stay here. “Call your mom, ask her to come fetch you.”

Chrissy’s mouth compresses; she clearly still wants to fight, but Karen isn’t going to back down, and if the options are to leave Steve’s phone unattended or have her mom come through, the answer is pretty obvious. “Fine,” she bites out and stalks away.

Karen rubs her thumb over the side of the walkie, imagines Mike on the other side — safe at the Byers, full of roast and pudding — worried for a friend once again.

Chapter Text

“We have to stop meeting like this,” Eddie says.

‘This’, of course, referring to: bloodied and near catatonic.

The best Dungeon Masters know how to roll with the punches, so it’s no surprise he’s kept his cool despite a zombified version of Steve Harrington stumbling out of the bushes and passing out in front of him. There was no one (awake at least and not within half a mile) to hear the scream he scrumpt so he thinks it doesn’t count. If a tree falls in the forest and all that yap.

It is concerning that there’s a bloodied King at his feet, for all intents and purposes, possibly comatose. Although it would make for an awesome campaign. He’s not thinking about that now; there are other things to focus on...like what to do with an unconscious man in the middle of the woods.

...Oh god. He’s too wiry to go to prison; he’d get absolutely wrecked.

He nudges Steve with his foot. “Hey man, you still alive?” There’s no response, which Eddie expected considering how hard the man went down, but it severely fucks with his calm. He yanks at his hair. Iron Maiden is blaring behind him from the van’s stereo. Way to set the tone.

He does not want to touch the body. That’s like evidence, right? That’s how they’ll pin this on him, his grimey little fingers leaving chip grease all over Harrington’s mole-spotted neck.

“Please be alive, I really don’t want to explain this to my uncle.” He crouches down, unlit joint forgotten as he plucks up a stick to poke the man’s cheek. He flinches. So, alive, that’s good at least. Eddie licks his lips, “Think you can get up for me, man? Pretty sure you weigh more than an amp.”

Harrington does not respond. Again. Rude, actually. What a douche, passing out and leaving all the gross, humiliating aftermath to the Town Freak.

Satisfied that he’s alive at the very least, Eddie switches the stick for his hand and pushes Harrington over. There he is, The King with his defined jawline and plush lips. Bare chest. And blood. “Christ on a carnal carnival ride, Steve-o. What did you do to yourself?”

Now that the fear of death has passed, Eddie takes some time to examine Steve’s bloodied face to discover he was not beaten up, this time, and seems to instead have undergone some other unseen horrors. Eddie pushes some of his hair away and flinches at the cold skin of Steve’s forehead. Not good, not good at all. Further examination (he has eyes, okay, but he’s been a bit distracted) reveals Steve’s in dress slacks and literally nothing else.

“I’m not even high yet, man. Why are you doing this to me?” Eddie shrugs out of his jacket and wraps it around Steve’s shoulders. They’re too far out from the last street of houses for him to call for help, and he’s not stupid enough to leave Steve’s freezing, bloodied body in the woods unattended. “Guess you’re getting a ride in the Munson Mobile, both of our lucky day, ain’t it?”

When asked how he’d like to spend the first morning of the year, he’d probably have said: high and full of good junk food. He would not have said: completely sober, trying to drag an unconscious body into the back of his van.

What a fuck up. Steve’s not light, and Eddie was not built for lugging dead weight around, the heaviest thing he’s had to deal with is the couch, and that’s only to shove it around while he looks for the lighter he dropped.

The first attempt to get Steve into the van results in him tripping and bashing his elbow on a stone. He collapses with Steve on top of him, cussing up a storm and wishing ill omens on the pebbled ground. The second and third attempts fail mostly because Eddie’s arms go wobbly under Steve’s weight. Eventually, Eddie all but throws himself and Steve into the van, like a beached whale. He lies there for long agonizing gasps for breath, surprised at his success and maybe just a bit concerned that Steve hasn’t woken through the ordeal.

“Either you’re a deep sleeper or you fucking died on me in the last ten minutes. If it’s the latter, I’ll sic Robin Buckley on your sorry ass; she’s got a mean bony elbow and the tongue of a bard rolling nat 20 for vicious mockery. That’s a DnD reference, in case you care. No? Typical. Not even a thanks.”

He rolls himself up, somehow manages to get Steve’s legs stuffed inside the vehicle, and takes off at a breakneck speed back into town. The van judders and makes ominous clanking noises over gravel, but Eddie pats the steering wheel; he trusts her.

They emerge alongside the construction of the shiny new mostly built mall; it’s a mess of rebar, concrete, and glass panes. As much as Eddie hates the idea of a central hub of materialism, he can appreciate that there’s nothing to do in Hawkins, and maybe having endless shopping prospects will keep some of the assholes busy and away from him. There’s a song in that, he’s sure.

He taps his thumb on the wheel and peers back at Steve Harrington, checking for any movement. It’s too dark to see shit, but Eddie isn’t going to let that kind of small inconvenience stop him.

He accelerates over a speed bump, feels his teeth rattle, and his stomach swoop. “You alive back there, princess?”

There’s a slight groan, barely audible. Eddie grins, maybe a bit maniacally, but whatever. He’s a goddamned hero. He’s carting the injured deposed King to safety; it’s got to count for something. Fuck that would be good for a campaign: coming across the former king brought low, for all intents and purposes, barely clinging to life, trying to save him in a kingdom that will kill him on sight. He needs to write this shit down. He’s got a good memory, but even that is subject to distraction.

“Talk to me, man. Where do I take you? Hospital? Home? Police station? I like Chief Hopper as much as one can like a pig in this economy, but I don’t fancy rolling up to the station with an injured Golden Boy at... three in the morning. Jesus, Harrington, what were you doing out there anyway? It’s way too far from any make-out spots, just so you know, so I know you didn’t get kiss-and-ditched.”

There’s a low moan, and a “Wha?”

“Good to see you finally participating. I was starting to think all those rumours about your exploits were false. No one enjoys someone who just sits there — well, actually, that’s wrong, I’m sure there are a few people who are into that. But it’s not likely to be the entire female population of Hawkins High School. Not that, not that I pay attention to your dating life, man, it’s just really popular gossip. You hear things, you know? At parties and when you’re doing shady drug deals in the bushes. Not that I’m shady, but...yeah, never mind.”

Steve doesn’t make any meaningful remark, just hums this low guttural thing that makes Eddie unsure whether to find it hot or incredibly worrisome.

He manages maybe a minute in silence.

“Dude. I’m taking you to the hospital, as much as I’d love to avoid this whole matter entirely and drop you off at your house to be nursed on by mommy dearest, I’m only, like, maybe 60% sure you’re not gonna die on me. And, as I said before, I would not do well in prison. My whole shtick, the devil-worshipping, nerdy drama guy thing, is not gonna curry any favours in the slammer when I’m convicted ‘cause you fell and hit your head. While I’m open to a little rough play, I don’t think I’d survive that. Shit, forget I said that. In fact, forget everything I’ve said tonight. Go back to sleep.”

His foot is bouncing on the gas pedal, and while it might be nothing new, the way it makes the van jerk about makes his blood rush just that much faster.

The town has quieted down from the revelries of New Year's Eve, leaving the streets slightly messier and no less well-lit. Eddie had sat in the trailer just long enough for Wayne to drink himself to sleep before the fireworks began. Then he’d stood around in the trailer park, watching kids run around with sparklers, and dreading heading out to Cherry Avenue to peddle some wares to the young and restless. As much as he wanted the money, he did not want to see Hargrove’s smug face. The exchange had gone off without a hitch, though, and the basketball jocks had nearly cleared out Eddie’s stash.

He’d thought the rest of the night would be relaxed, unproblematic. But he’d had too much faith in Hawkins yet again.

The hospital rises before them, a beacon of light. It’s probably overrun with firework injuries and alcohol poisoning. Eddie considers rolling Harrington out of the van and riding away before anyone realizes it’s him dropping off Hawkins Royalty.

“You should count yourself lucky that I’m a decent human being. I could leave you right here, but I won’t. Because even dickheads deserve to live — sometimes, can you remember that piece of shit we learnt about in history? Talk about a psycho. Reminded me of the Creel family. I know they said the dad did it, but they were a group of loons, gentle loons, if you ask me. Uncle Wayne said he doesn’t believe Victor did it, but well, who else would’ve, the dog?”

He stops beside the building, not sure if this situation and Steve’s lack of awareness called for a drop off at the ER. He turns in his seat, notices Steve’s done a bit of a shift around, and looks mildly less like a pretzel. Like this, Eddie can see bloody rags wrapped around his feet. “Uh, damn, don’t imagine you can walk on those, can you?”

One of Steve’s eyes glints in the indirect light spilling through the windshield.

Eddie is having thoughts of vampires in murky castle tunnels and werewolves crouched in dark forest bushes. While it would make sense for Steve to wander from the forest post monster attack, Eddie is pretty sure a werewolf/vampire would not attack solely the soles of someone’s feet. Heh.

“Yeah, I thought not.” He revises his plan and pulls up to the Emergency entrance.. “Hang tight, man, gonna go get one of those wheeley beds for you - make sure the King travels in style, amiright?”

He’s barely out the door before the ER doors swing open and a nurse rushes out to meet him. “What now?” She demands. She’s shorter than him, rounded face, her shoulders drooping from exhaustion.

“Yeah, uh, ” Eddie gestures at the van, “He just stumbled out of the woods-”

But the nurse is yanking open the back of the van already and making concerned sounds. Eddie edges closer and nearly falls back when she spins and starts back towards the hospital.

“Hey, wait!”

“Get him up, seated,” she instructs, and Eddie is at a loss for what else to do, so he follows orders. Like a good little devil worshipper.

He says, “Fuck me two ways to Sunday, Harrington. Nurses are scary as all hell. Pit one against a demogorgon and see who comes out on top. I’ll give you a hint, not the monster.”

Steve slow-blinks at him like a particularly obtuse cat and offers no assistance getting himself up.

And Eddie’s just a man, alright? He’s a teenager if you squint and a queer little freak, so he does notice the smoothness of Steve’s skin beneath his palm, he does notice the thick hair on his chest, he does notice the moles on his shoulder. But for all the depraved things he holds within his ribcage, Eddie is also very good at pretending.

“Dude, you’re cold as Helheim. What idiot wanders around in the forest without a coat in the dead of winter? Are you trying to turn into an icicle?”

Steve slow-blinks again, his head lolling forward and falling on Eddie’s shoulder. His breath puffs there, uneven but warm along Eddie’s collarbone. “No,”

But then Steve’s whisked away by a trio of nurses, and Eddie’s jacket got swept away with Steve The Hair Harrington, who knows if he’ll ever see it again. He’s left staring out into the early pre-dawn, cold, overwhelmed, and lost in thought. Steve’s skin is like a brand on his palms. Steve’s breath echoed in the frigid breeze, a caress of icy fingers around his collar.

He eventually pulls himself together and moves the van, just far enough from the entrance that he can freak out in peace.

There’s no release from the cold clutches of panic here. The buzz of it grips his jaw in a vice, grinding his teeth, setting his blood on edge. Maybe a fantasy creature is going to crawl out of the shadows when he least expects it.

He isn’t supposed to feel like this. Wayne would probably hit him upside the head for thinking that, but Eddie knows. Knows there’s something fundamentally wrong with him, ants in his blood, sin in his heart, a brain full of tangled threads. His pa had seen it in him, seen the wrongness, had gripped Eddie’s hair and spat in his face and said, “No son of mine. Now get on yer knees and pray, boy, before I make ya.”

No matter what Wayne says, no matter what Eddie tells himself and how he pretends to be fine with it, he knows. It is in him, a virus, something that saps at his concentration and pulls jitters up from the ground like the dance of a demon summoned from the deep, an infection of rough fingers brushing his knuckles, and a low chuckle close to his ear. “It’s okay, kid, I got you. Now breathe the smoke in deep.”

There’s bile in his throat, and he’s cold. The world is too crisp. He spins a joint between his fingers, considering hitting it right here outside the hospital, feet away from where Steve Fucking Harrington breathed against his skin. Feet away from a slow cat blink and the promise that this isn’t something repugnant, rather it’s holy, seeped in the golden glow of nephlim reaching through dimensions with a wingtip to bless him, a mercy unlike anything else Eddie’s been granted.

This is who you are, Eddie, it says. This is who you are meant to be. He wonders if his mama would have thought the same, had she the time on this pitiless rock to form such opinions about her little boy. Maybe she would think him just as disgusting as his father and all the other people who look at Eddie and see a freak.

Maybe once Steve is awake, he’ll be repulsed by Eddie touching him. Maybe he will throw Eddie’s jacket in the trash and wish he’d frozen in the forest instead of being infected with this wasting illness that floods Eddie’s veins.

Just as he raises the blunt, though, Chief Hopper’s blue lights screech into the parking lot, and a gaggle of what looks like children spills out.

Eddie shoves the joint under his thigh and grips his steering wheel with both hands, breathing shallowly through his nose. Hopper tends to treat Eddie with the gruff annoyance of an uncle lacking sleep, but he’s still a cop, and Eddie wasn’t kidding when he told Steve he wouldn’t do well in prison.

When he’s sure the Chief and his children (where the fuck did the Chief find all of them?) are indeed headed to the hospital and not Eddie’s shitty van, he slams her into drive and peels out of the lot. There are better places to get high anyway.

Chapter Text

The two days after New Year's had been strange in that she’d spent them being glared at by a group of middle schoolers as Steve insisted he was okay from a hospital bed. He wasn’t okay, though; apparently, he hadn’t been okay for months. She’d said as much, hadn’t she? Figures that Steve would have to go through a harrowing near-death experience before he let himself receive help (still unwillingly, but beggars and choosers).

She’d received a call from Mrs Wheeler the afternoon of the first to let her know Steve had been recovered and was at the Memorial Hospital. Her mom was too busy yelling at her to let her leave until the evening.

Someone had brought Steve in, said he’d stumbled from the forest, and the evidence suggested Steve was an absolute idiot. Hypothermia, a sprained ankle, an unknown allergic reaction, and overexhaustion. The physical prognosis aside, Steve was near catatonic when he eventually woke up, staring at the window with a look of horror that persisted and only worsened into agitated keening as his gaggle of kids tried to shake him out of it. The kids, and Chrissy, had been removed from the room, and when they’d finally been allowed back in, Steve was asleep, his face slack and unbothered thanks to a heazy doze of lorazepam.

The next morning he was rolling his eyes, play-acting at annoyance, and whining about being stuck in bed. In their brief moments alone, Steve would reach out to her and hide his wet face against her shoulder while Chief Hopper and Mrs Byers had a heated argument with the hospital staff about his test results.

Chrissy hadn’t been allowed to see any of the results of the various scans and tests, but she’s pretty sure she has an idea of what they said anyway.

Steve does not bring it up except to insist that he’s fine, and so Chrissy doesn’t either. She knows the kids have been haranguing him about it, and their parents have been no better, bothering Steve with questions and pleading with him to take it seriously. She’s intimately aware of not wanting to talk about something or trying to hide inside herself, while her mother breathes down her neck.

With school starting up again, Chrissy is tempted to wheedle the information from one of the adults who seem to frequent Steve’s house now. But she already knows the persistent little brats Steve makes gooey eyes at have tried and failed.

Either he’s feeling better or has effectively masked any discomfort, because Steve made a pot of spicy tomato soup yesterday, humming and making a general mess of his kitchen; the soup and the toasted sourdough grilled cheeses he made to accompany them steadily dwindled in the bowls and paws of an eager group of thirteen-year-olds and herself.

Once the kids had left, Steve had placed the bowl and plate in front of her at his hauntingly big dining table in his equally haunting dining room, and had sat down and proceeded to ignore her as she nibbled meekly at the bread and nearly licked the bowl. She appreciates his discretion, but he’s also so obvious that it’s kind of sad.

The fact that he hasn’t been left alone since he got home does nothing to dispel the compounding worry that makes Chrissy compulsively get up to check that the nail bat is still at the door. He hasn’t moved it (or the knife in his room) even though Mrs Wheeler had made a few not-so-subtle hints about it not being safe to keep around the kids.

Whether his parents have noticed it is up for debate. Chrissy saw them briefly the night before when they’d gotten in, already fighting. Steve’s mother, at very least, had paused in yelling at her husband to brush an air kiss over Steve’s cheek and comment on how well he was looking. If they’d mentioned anything about the hospital or Steve’s scans or the fact that his BMW was only recovered on the fourth, then they must have done it when she was gone.

A few days ago, Chief Hopper had spent a good few hours lecturing Steve about road safety while he charged the beemers' battery and helped scrape several days' worth of rotten leaves from the layer of frost coating the exterior. As much as Steve bemoaned it and the Chief complained about Steve’s lack of motor knowledge, Chrissy could see they were enjoying themselves. She thinks Steve’s never done something like this before, not with someone who could feasibly be a father figure.

If she were any good at poetry, she’d spin this into the grand tale it’s waiting to be: something something finding family, something something finding home.

She’s part of that, though. Isn’t she? She wants to be, hopes to be. There must be a place for her here, because she doesn’t fit into her mother’s mould, and Jason’s idea of her is becoming increasingly difficult to uphold.

She thinks of his red face, the snot and tears, of him saying, “Please, please, Chrissy, I’m sorry, baby. You know I didn’t mean it.’

Chrissy fiddles with her spoon, twisting it round and round on the glossy table top. Her stomach aches. “I’m going to break up with him this time, I swear it.”

Steve hums, staying focused on his bowl of lukewarm water and the assortment of hair sprays scattered over his dining room table. “Sure.”

“Steve,” she complains.

“I’ll believe it when I see it, Chriss.”

“I will.”

He looks up at her, “I don’t know what you see in him, this coming from a former jock, still active jerk.”

She rolls her eyes. While she’s annoyed with him, she’s incredibly glad that he’s present. That he’s awake.

“He’s sweet,” she insists. She’s, of course, referring to the way Jason smiles at her, all secret-like, how he peppers kisses on her face, how he makes her feel loved even when she feels unlovable. Jason isn’t perfect, no person is, but he cares for her, treats her like his queen. He compliments how her waist fits in his palms and rubs his thumb over the inside of her wrist after pulling her closer. From the way Steve purses his lips, she’s sure he understands anyway. “I am breaking it off, though. For realzies.”

“Listen,” he turns away from the hair care spread across the dining room table, momentarily giving up trying to find out which one was making his scalp itch. There are no bruises on his face as evidence of his ill-advised adventure; there’s nothing except a wince when he walks and fading scratches from when he tumbled into some bushes that evidence his terrible foray into the wilderness. But Chrissy is unwilling to believe this act of normalcy; no one can be okay like this. Not really.

The yellow sweater he’s wearing dips low at his throat, exposing the red trails of where his nails had dug when the door had slammed shut from the wind. “I think you should. You deserve better than Jason Carver. You definitely deserve better than his shitty excuses.” His hand twitches up before he places it neatly, palm down, on the table. “I also don’t think you have the pluck to do it.”

She flicks his arm, “I do too. I can do anything. I’m resilient. I’m savvy. I’m smarter than you’d think a ditzy blonde could be.”

He smiles, “Yeah, I know that. I saw you strong-arm Dustin out yesterday, and you wheedled Mike into washing his own dishes. You could take on an interdimensional monster if you wanted.”

He says stuff like that sometimes, talk of monsters and threats like they’re real. Maybe they are to him. Maybe, somewhere along the line, monsters were easier to believe in than parents who came home after you’d been hospitalized and didn’t bother to ask about the results for the many, many scans you’d been forced to have. Maybe monsters don’t have to be creatures. Maybe Chrissy would be able to sleep more easily at night if she imagined her mother as a monster. Perhaps that’s the secret to making it through life.

“Chrissy, you’ve been saying you’d break it off since Christmas, and every time you see him, you come back with an excuse. ‘Steve, he gave me flowers,’ and ‘Steve, I think he meant it when he said sorry,’ I think... I think you forget that being resilient doesn’t mean you need to take responsibility for his actions. You don’t have to take his shit or anyone else’s; you’ve done nothing to earn it.”

She wants to throw it back in his face, because he’s the same, isn’t he? They’re two fractured mirrors looking back at each other, reflecting insecurity and bone-deep separation of self. They’re peeling apart at the seams, and sometimes something seeps out - truth, maybe. She hasn’t told him about how her mom locks the kitchen door, and he hasn’t mentioned the empty spaces where family should be, but he knows and she knows, and they know each other.

She has other friends. Girls from the cheer squad, boys from the track team, and kids from the Youth church. People she’s laughed and cried with before, people who judge each other and themselves, people who she’s grown up with and grown in to. She might have considered them best friends or acquaintances at varying times, but she’s never felt raw in front of them. Seen.

If the times were different, if she’d met Steve first, would she have fallen in love with him instead of Jason? Or is this vulnerability only possible because she doesn’t think she could ever love him like that? Only possible because she sees herself in him and wants to protect him the way he seems to want to protect her?

She doesn’t know.

She chews her lip, reaches out a hand, and he slots his fingers through hers. Easy. Uncomplicated. She thinks that Steve is an asshole. “You’re an asshole,”

He barks a laugh, and she smiles. “You’re probably right.”

“Will you come with me? When I do it? I think if I face him alone, I’ll cave again.”

“If that’s what you need, sure.”

They work through the spread of products and find the culprit: a hair mousse that, after testing on Chrissy’s wrist and then on her hair, gets shuffled into her bag.

“Tomorrow morning, before home room.” He says, and she nods fiercely.

She wants to break up with Jason; she does. But the thought of it makes her feel ill. She doesn’t think about him holding her wrist too tightly, doesn’t think about his pleading tears. Steve is going to be there; she can do it. “Tomorrow morning, before home room.” She repeats and pulls Steve into a quick squeeze. He tenses in her hold before melting, squeezing her back.

“You can do this, Chriss.”

The next day, the first day of school back from winter break, she finds herself sitting in front of the principal. She’s a severe-looking woman with dark hair and thick glasses. Chrissy has only ever seen her during assemblies.

“You have a perfect record, Ms Cunningham,” Principal Lawrence says and taps meaningfully at the pages on her desk, “this is your second last year, arguably the most important for university applications. Explain to me why you’re trying to ruin it.”

Chrissy is shaking, tremors running up her spine and down to her fingertips; she’s shoved her hands beneath her thighs to stop herself from knocking anything off the principal’s desk. The room is an ugly, stained yellow, and the filing cabinets are an off-putting grey. It smells like mothballs and old perfume. She doesn’t want to be here. “If defending a friend means I lose standing with a college, then it’s not a college I want to attend.”

The woman sighs and leans back in her seat; it creaks ominously. “Christina, let me be clear, we do not tolerate physical violence between our students-”

“Don’t you?” She bites out with sudden ferocity. “This school is a hotbed of bullying and violence, Principal Lawrence.”

“I’m not superhuman-”

“I know you can’t catch everything, but the sheer amount of bullying that goes unpunished is absurd. If you and the teachers here aren’t going to do anything about it, why shouldn’t we protect ourselves? My friend sustained severe head trauma back in November from another student. He was protecting a middle schooler from a racist asshole and...and he has to see that asshole every day in class. Excuse my language. So I, I apologize if my standing up for said friend is somehow offensive to you.” She sucks a breath in between her teeth, “No, actually, I’m not sorry.”

“Ms Cunningham,” she interrupts. And Chrissy sees the age in her eyes, the furrow where a frown has worn itself permanently into the woman’s pallid skin. “What are you going on about?”

Chrissy can’t take it. She pushes herself up, starts moving around the small space like a caged tiger. She thinks her skin is too tight, her blood electrified. It’s wrong. It’s all wrong. “I’m talking about the cheerleaders who are starving themselves and the nerds who are afraid to go to gym class because dickheads like Billy Hargove shove them to the floor or throw balls in their faces while a teacher watches, and people like, like Jason Carver pinch at little girls’ butts and people like Tommy Hagen scratch slurs into people’s lockers.

“I’m not, I’m not blameless, Principal Lawrence. I’ve been popular way too long to be as sweet and innocent as the teachers like to make me out to be. You think I didn’t snigger about Nancy Wheeler and Barbara Holland maybe being queer? You think I didn’t turn a blind eye to some of the heinous things my classmates have said and done? None of us is faultless here. And no teacher, no adult, has seen fit to put us in our place. We’re disgusting. Absolutely putrid creatures. But you haven’t done anything about it, so you’re no better.”

“Jesus Christ,” Principal Lawrence runs a hand over her face.

“Don’t bring Him into this,” Chrissy snaps, pretty sure that if she continues, she’s either going to cry, throw up, or combust. Maybe all three. Her mother is going to be pissed.

“Take a breath, will you?” The woman stands, and Chrissy flinches back. She stops and raises her hands. ”I’m just gonna get you some water. Take it easy.”

In the minute that she’s gone, Chrissy decides she’s not going to throw up, because throwing up is gross, and she does that enough after dinner, she doesn’t need to do it here, too. She stares vacantly at a photograph of an athletics team, the kids’ faces stretched in joy as they hoist up a golden cup.

There are similar photos of her, in a trophy case and at home on the mantel, where her parents can brag to their stuck-up friends. Where her mom can point to it and complain about Chrissy gaining weight since she was a fucking twelve-year-old. Where she can look at the little girl she used to be and feel envy for that brief moment of happiness that feels so far away.

Steve’s right, the world is full of monsters. But the monsters are people, aren’t they? And Steve said she could defeat them, didn’t he?

“Here, drink.”

Chrissy jumps, knocking into a filing cabinet and banging her forearm. She rubs at hit with trembling fingers.

Principal Lawrence shakes a bottle of water at her. “Why don’t you sit down, back in that chair, nice and easy.”

Chrissy obediently sits and sips at the water. It’s lukewarm, but it keeps her from shaking away on a breeze and stops the bubbling acrid thoughts from overflowing again.

“I’m sorry you’re feeling this way, Christina, we - educators - enter this profession so we can help children. Maybe not all of us, but most. If we’re letting things like this slide, then we’re failing you and the rest of the student body. Which means, unfortunately, I cannot turn a blind eye to you hitting someone with a hockey stick either. You understand?”

She nods.

“When you’re proper calm, I’d like to hear your list of complaints again. Maybe this time with less hysteria. So I can look into these incidents and work with my staff on fixing them. That sound good to you?”

She nods again.

“All righty-o. In the meantime, let me get this straight: you hit Tommy Hagan over the head because he was threatening your friend?”

“He was actively hurting him.”

“And your friend, it’s Steve Harrington?” Her raised brow implies things; Chrissy sees it on her mother, too, a questioning of integrity.

She clutches the water bottle to stop from flinging it across the room. “Yes,” she says, with perhaps a bit more bite than someone calm would, “Steve Harrington. He has severe long-lasting brain trauma- he, he can’t.” She stops, forces herself to drink some more water. “Getting hit would be very bad.”

“So, hitting someone else is okay then?” Chrissy glares, and the woman puts up her hands. “Alright, calm it. Why was Mister Hagan trying to fight Mister Harrington?”

Chrissy’s jaw works. She looks to the singular window, which is covered in a God-awful paisley chiffon curtain. “I was breaking up with Jason. Steve was there for moral support. Tommy said, he said Steve was- was ‘trying out the used-up goods’, that’s, that was about me, and Steve called him a-” she sniffs and wipes at her nose, pulls her lip into her mouth.

“What did Mr Harrington say?”

“He called Tommy a sad little boy who follows others around because he doesn’t know how to think for himself and, and he said Tommy shouldn’t comment on other people’s love lives when he can’t keep his di- um, privates to himself.” She turns to the principal, “He was just defending me.”

“It’s none of my business who you are dating, Ms Cunningham-”

“We’re not. Steve is, he’s just my friend.”

“Again, that doesn’t concern me; what concerns me is my students fighting in the hallways.”

“Tommy was the one who turned it physical,” Chrissy says. “I only stepped in because of Steve’s...” she gestures at her head. “He didn’t even get a defensive swing in to defend himself, before I, you know.”

She sighs, “That really doesn’t help your case.”

“Would you rather have a dead student or a student with a glancing bump in your passages?”

They stare at each other.

“I’ll have to suspend you, even though it was in defence of a friend. I can’t let behaviour like this slide.”

Chrissy cringes, “Is there any way we can do this without contacting my mom?”

As she’s leaving the office a few minutes later, she finds Steve leaning against the wall, a frown etched deep into his forehead, a darkening red spot on his jaw, and his arms crossed.

The first thing he says is, “Christina Cunningham, you did not have to do that.” The second thing he says is, “Thank you.” He pulls her into a hug, and she wraps herself around him, feeling the tears she’s been fighting break through.

“I couldn’t let him hurt you.”

Steve huffs, and she feels it against her temple, like her late grandma rocking her to sleep on the porch swing, like the time she twisted her ankle climbing a tree and her babysitter picked her up. Safe. Worried.

“I can handle myself,” he tells her.

“You don’t need to do it alone,” she responds, because that’s what he’s given to her.