Chapter Text
May 1985
Steve sat at the small dining table in the cabin, picking at his reheated Eggos. El had insisted on slathering them with whipped cream and maple syrup. He didn’t want to make her feel bad by not eating them at all, but the idea of eating was turning his stomach. Steve reached for his coffee instead, downing a large gulp.
El was most of the way done with her sugar-slathered Eggos and Hopper was across the table just sipping on a black coffee.
“So about our ghost problem.” Hopper said the word ghost like it didn’t fit in his mouth right, “How do you normally make them go away?”
“I mean usually I don’t, not the normal ones anyway. Ghosts tend to stick around a specific place or person, and as long as I don’t bother them then they don’t bother me.” Steve answered.
“The normal ones? Are there not-normal ghosts?” Hopper’s tone was mostly sarcastic.
Steve contemplated how much he really wanted to get into it. But if he was in this deep he might as well go all the way.
“When I was a kid, I didn’t really see ghosts like I do now. Like, sometimes I’d get a strange sense of something or know something that I had no way of knowing but I didn’t actually see the spirits. But that changed when my Dad took a job as the winter caretaker of this hotel in Colorado. The Overlook. It got all boarded up for winter and the roads weren’t passable so they needed to pay someone to stay in the winter to look after the building.” Steve paused, staring at the wood of the table for a long moment. He had never actually told this story before.
“How do you look after a building?” El asked, licking the last of the maple syrup off her fork.
“Like making sure the pipes work and stuff.” Hopper answered half heartedly, gesturing for Steve to continue.
“Right. But The Overlook, there was something wrong with that place. I guess you could call it haunted but that doesn’t really explain the scale of it. Loads of places are haunted and they aren’t like that. I guess I kind of felt like the upside down. Like it was just hungry for something. And it was haunted to be clear. I started seeing ghosts of people that had died there; it just got worse and worse. And then my dad went kind of … crazy. He tried to kill my mom and me, but we escaped with the help of a man who worked at the hotel during the regular season. We had met him before the winter and he realized that I was like him. Or rather that we could do the same thing. He called it the Shining and he said that everyone had a little bit but sometimes someone had a lot. And that was us. His name was Dick Halloran and he died helping my mom and me get out of there.” Steve let it all spill out all at once. It felt good to say it, even if he was messing up telling it. It just felt good to say the words about what had happened after so long just trying to pretend it never did.
“And your dad?” Hopper’s tone was grim.
“He died. It was Colorado in a blizzard and he wasn’t in his right mind, so.” Steve shrugged.
“Good.” El piped up.
“Good?” Steve couldn’t stop the question from slipping out.
“He tried to hurt you. He was a bad man. It’s good.” El’s logic was simple and Steve wished that he could be so certain. Then again, this was the girl who called her imprisoner Papa, she probably knew a thing about complicated relationships.
“That’s really rough, kid.” Hopper said, “And these ghosts from the Overlook, they were the not-normal ghosts?”
“Yeah. After everything that happened, they would show up again from time to time. I guess they got kinda attached to me somehow so they could find me even not at the Overlook, though they were weaker. But the man that helped me, Dick Halloran, sometimes I see him sometimes too. He’s not like the others though, I think because he has the Shine, and he taught me how to trap them in my mind and then they can’t escape.” Steve explained.
The teen got up to pour himself another cup of coffee. It was too early in the morning for all this. Technically, he should be getting ready for school, but he didn’t think that Hopper had any intention of forcing him to go.
“Okay, so why can’t you use your mind trap on normal ghosts?” Hopper asked, holding up his empty coffee mug. Steve brought the pot back with him to the table.
“Well, I could. It’s just that I don’t normally need to. And maybe it’s silly because it’s not really a person but I still feel bad trapping it. I don’t really know what it’s like after I trap them.” Admitting his rationale felt like admitting weakness. Both Hopper and El had killed people before. Not that Steve thought that they wanted to, but they were willing to draw blood when they needed to. Meanwhile, Steve didn’t want to hurt the feelings of a ghost. It was stupid.
“But you said that ghosts were just like a part of someone that gets left behind, not that person. You wouldn’t be trapping her.” El said in the matter-of-fact manner that Steve had come to expect from her.
“You’re right.” Steve admitted, “But just because I know that doesn’t mean it feels like it. There’s still just so much I don’t know.”
“What about this friend that told you how to trap them in the first place?” Hopper asked, “Can you, I dunno know, contact him and ask him for solutions. Seems like he knew more about this stuff than any of us.”
“I wish.” Steve said, “He kinda just shows up whenever and I haven’t seen him in a while. I don’t think it’s pleasant, being here instead of where he is supposed to be.”
Steve could see the moment that Hopper processed the implications of what he said. That there was somewhere that he was supposed to be. It wasn’t like Steve could give any more insight into that then anyone else could. He just knew there was something, whatever it was.
“Can you let it out later?” El asked.
“The ghosts I trap?” Steve asked to clarify. El nodded. “I guess I could, but I’ve never had reason to.”
“Then you trap her now and when your friend comes back you can ask him about other ways.” El said.
“Huh.” Hopper said as he contemplated the plan.
Steve felt about the same way. It was a solution, but with the ability to fix it if it turned out to be a mistake later.
“Yeah, okay.” Steve said, warming up to the idea, “That’s a good plan, Ellie.”
She beamed under the praise.
“Are you going to try now?” She asked, “I can go with you.”
Steve shared a look with Hopper. It was one thing for her to be there when something like this happened by accident, it was another to willingly agree to let her go when she didn’t need to.
“Maybe later.” Steve said. “We can spend the day together while Hopper goes to work. I don’t think I’m up for school anyway.”
Hopper nodded as he got up and started collecting the dirty plates, “That sounds like a good plan kid. We can head over once my shift ends.”
Steve and El spent the rest of the day messing around while Steve tried not to think about the impending confrontation. He had taught her how to play poker and blackjack a while back with the faded deck of cards he had found stashed in the cabin.
El had proved a quick study, though Steve’s powers often gave him the edge. He didn’t really mean to do it, he often just knew her cards without trying. Once he had the knowledge, it was hard to ignore it. But they could only play cards for so long.
“I’m bored.” El moaned, “Why can’t we watch TV?”
“Because daytime TV is awful. It’s all soaps and game shows.” Steve replied, throwing a baseball up in the air and catching it from where he was laying on the carpet.
“Can we go catch the ghost now? Then we could go swimming later.”
Steve shot up into a sitting position so he could look at El where she was slouched on the couch. She had an innocent looking expression on her face but Steve knew that she knew exactly what she was asking.
“What? No, obviously not. We told Hopper that we were going to wait here. We can’t just go without him.” Steve couldn’t help but remember how the rest of the party had instigated the event that left him alone with a group of kids in the tunnels last Fall. What was it with these kids and wanting to jump into danger constantly?
“Is there anything that Hopper can do about ghosts?” El asked instead of addressing Steve’s actual protests.
“Ellie, I know that you want to go swimming but we can’t just go running off when we said that we would stay here. I know that your friends tell you how you shouldn’t lie. Isn’t breaking promises without any reason just as bad.” Steve thought the other kids really wouldn’t care about breaking a promise like this to Hopper based on their track record, but he could always try. Based on the glower that El gave Steve, she knew it too.
“If we can’t go now, then I’m watching TV.” El stated.
Steve made to grab the remote off the table before El could but she used her powers to pull it towards her before he had a chance. She wiped the blood from beneath her nose with a self satisfied look.
“I’m going on a walk.” Steve pulled himself up off the floor. He was serious about his distaste for the soap operas that El had a tendency to watch. He had tried to put up with it the first time that she had put them on but he really couldn’t stand it.
Steve threw open the cabin door and had barely made it two steps out onto the front porch when he saw something moving in the woods. He blinked quickly as though the figure would go away if he just looked at it long enough.
Walking slowly towards the cabin, as if burdened down by her broken body, was the ghost of Barbara Holland.
“El!” Steve shouted, stumbling back through the doorway of the cabin. He didn’t dare close the door and lose sight of the ghost. Not now that he knew she could move from the pool where she had died.
“What?” El shouted back over the sound of TV. She didn’t even bother to turn around.
Steve quickly grabbed the remote from El’s hand. He hit the power button, silencing the sound of some kitchenware commercial.
“The ghost followed me here.” Steve said quickly, cutting off El as she began to protest. He couldn’t bring himself to call the ghost Barb.
El snapped to attention, quickly scanning the room as if she could see the ghosts too.
“She’s outside the cabin. It’s like she’s taken all night to walk here.”
“We can stop her now.” El said with certainty, “Put her in your mind box.”
“Right.” Steve said, nodding. Despite his agreement he didn’t move back to the doorway.
He could hear his own heart beating rapidly as he tried to convince his feet to move. It was like he was a child again facing the ghost of the woman in the bathtub. For all his experience he had never had to put a ghost that he had known in life in one of his boxes.
Steve had always dreaded the thought of the ghost of his dad following from the Overlook. Somehow, this felt just as bad.
“It’s not really her. Just like an echo.” El said with intensity. It was the same words that he had told her, but he still needed to hear them.
She grabbed his hand and Steve let her lead him back to the doorway. Barb was just some twenty feet from the porch. Steve thought that it was a misconception that these things looked less scary in the daylight. Instead, he could see every mark left by her death that much clearer.
“Can I see too?” El whispered, squeezing closer to Steve to look out to the woods as if she would be able to see Barb if she could get the right angle.
Steve squeezed El’s hand and shut his eyes.
In a moment, he was in the same frozen maze that he always went to in his mind. It was the place that had let him escape as a child and now it served to trap all his monsters. In more than one way, he owed his life to this barren place.
A single steel box laid half-buried in the snow. Steve leaned down in his mind, popping open the lock on the box with a tug and swinging open the top.
Steve opened his eyes again. The next step Barb’s ghost took forward to the cabin, her foot didn’t land on the porch but instead she fell through it and into the open chest that he had laid as a trap with his mind. Steve slammed the chest shut once more and secured the lock.
It shook as though something was trying to get out. Steve paid it no mind, they were always restless at first.
The moment that it was done, Steve felt the adrenaline leave his body and he might have fallen over if it hadn’t been for El being right there to support him.
“She’s gone.” Steve said, knowing that to El it might look like nothing had happened at all.
“I know. I saw.” El said much to Steve’s surprise.
“You saw the ghost?”
“I saw the maze in your mind.” El answered, “You have so many boxes.”
“El.” Steve leaned down to meet her eye level, his exhaustion leaving him in a second, “Promise me that you will never do that again. It’s a dangerous place and I made it full of traps. I didn’t know that you followed me in there. What if I had thought you were a ghost trying to trick me? I could have hurt you.”
“I could have escaped.” El sounded insulted by the implication that she couldn’t have.
“No, El. I know that you are really strong but this isn’t like fighting demogorgons. Please, just promise me.”
A moment passed where Steve thought she would refuse before she nodded.
“I promise.” The words sounded sullen but sincere.
Steve took a deep breath of relief.
“Does this mean we can go swimming later?”
Steve thought that if they managed to convince Hopper to leave him alone with El sometime in the six months it would be a miracle.
June 1985
The rest of the month seemed to pass quickly, and before Steve knew it Memorial Day had come and gone. He had gone to visit his mom as promised and it went better than he could have imagined. There were moments of awkwardness, just as he had feared, but for the most part it just felt like he was with his mom again.
Despite Steve’s misgivings, Hopper hadn’t blamed him for Barb following him to the cabin. He hadn’t been happy about it for sure, but Steve supposed that raising El had given him a high tolerance for unpredictable powers.
Overcoming one hurdle by caging Barb’s ghost didn’t mean that the rest of the ghosts went away. Instead, it seemed that the frequency that he saw them was increasing by the day. As was the tendency for them to notice that he could see them.
It was wearing on him day by day as he increasingly had to put more ghosts away. It took energy every time he needed to trap them, both mentally and physically.
Almost as exhausting was the constant dodging of questions as graduation grew closer. Every one of his classmates wanted to know what he was doing with his life and it made Steve feel a little more out of control every time they asked.
There was less than two weeks left of high school and he couldn’t be more excited to be done with it forever.
He was going to miss picking up the kids from their stupid club, he thought in a moment of sentimentality as he watched Dustin approaching his car.
“So are you going to actually let us actually let us do something for graduation, or is this going to be like your birthday?” Dustin asked as he claimed the passenger seat.
“Are you still going on about that?” Steve asked, "It's been like two months.”
“You’re going to be hearing about it until your next birthday if Dustin has something to say about it.” Max said. Lucas and her happily took the backseats.
“Wow. Just no support.” Dustin huffed.
“Look, you want to do something? We’ll get some pizza and you guys can use the pool.” Steve offered, mostly to get Dustin off his back. It was hardly different then every other time he let them free in his house.
“I like pizza.” Lucas offered in support.
“That’s just like a normal thing. You only graduate once.” Dustin complained.
“Getting pizza and swimming at my house is a normal thing? Well maybe you’ll only get to do it once all summer. How about that?” Steve replied. These kids were so ungrateful. His big house was always enough for the teens he used to party with.
“Oh, come on.” Max said from the backseat. “How long would that last?”
“Maybe two weeks.” Lucas piled on, “If that.”
“Okay.” Steve cut them off, “Pizza and pool is my final offer. Take it or leave it.”
“Uhggggggg. Fine.” Dustin groaned like it was an imposition on him.
“How about the weekend after graduation?” Steve offered. He thought The Harringtons would probably have vacated Hawkins again by then. There was no way they were missing his graduation, it was a prime opportunity to be seen being ‘good parents’ by all the other people in town. Maybe the last opportunity if Steve didn’t end up doing anything that they saw as worthwhile with his life.
“You haven’t told him?” Lucas punched the back of Dustin’s seat.
“Ow.” Dustin said, “I was going to.”
“Tell me what?” Steve asked, glancing away from the road to try and figure out what the boys were talking about.
“Do you remember that Summer Camp that I mentioned?” Dustin asked.
“The nerd one.” Max added like that wasn’t already a given.
“Uh huh.” Steve said, “So you’re going to be gone that weekend? We’ll do it the next one.”
“Well.” Dustin cleared his throat. “The camp is actually for a few weeks.”
“Dude!” Steve said emphatically. He couldn’t believe this little shit was still on him about his birthday from two months ago and here he was not giving Steve important information.
“How about the weekend before graduation?” Dustin offered like they could just move on. Steve wasn’t about to let him off that easily.
“Nope. You were keeping that from me. You’ve lost shotgun privileges until you get back from summer camp.”
Dustin immediately burst into protests as Max and Lucas began laughing uproariously.
Steve spent the rest of the ride brushing off every one of Dustin’s attempts to make amends. He thought it was extremely fair and he had something to prove after the entire car had just called him a pushover minutes before.
He did agree to let them have their graduation party the weekend before though as Dustin and Lucas slipped out of the Beamer with their backpacks.
Max got out and slid into the front like she always did when it was just them left in the car. She normally got dropped off last, both because her house wasn’t in the same neighborhood as Dustin and Lucas and because it was a bit of a dance to drop her off.
As they neared her house, Steve saw the sign that he had recently been using to indicate to himself that Billy was home. The woman in the white dress, Billy’s mom, was standing in the front of the house. She never tried to approach Steve, but she was always watching when he was near. He wasn’t quite sure what to think of it.
Regardless, it was a good sign that he needed to drive around the extra bend in the road before dropping off Max. She hadn’t questioned it yet.
“Hey, remember, if you ever need anything.” Steve said, the same offer that he made every time he dropped her off.
“Like you can even take him.” She brushed it off like always but Steve could see the little smile as she did. It made it worth repeating himself.