Chapter Text
There is no single impetus. Still, Dustin tries to pinpoint the last straw, the first domino to fall, and he always comes back to this—
After the tunnels. After Steve dug their way out from six feet under, he drove them back home. He took a shower—last, dead last after Dustin and Robin, even though there were five showers—and then he went to bed.
He didn’t get up again for three days. Maybe four, five. Robin could never keep the days straight and Dustin stopped counting after the first.
Robin was the one to find him after his alarm went off and he didn’t hit snooze. Her ears were magic, she said, so she could hear his watch beeping and beeping and beeping. And it was odd, because she was used to—
The alarm, she said, was academic. That was Steve’s thing—he got up at first light.
But he didn’t wake up this time, until she got into bed screaming. Steve, Steve, Steve, no, God, no, Steve, no—
She screamed for him to wake up and she screamed for Dustin to call the hospital and then—
She found a pulse.
It was fast, and it was steady.
Steve, she whispered again, and Dustin steeled himself along with her to—
Steve stirred. He didn’t open his eyes, but he rasped out, “Close the curtains.”
They were already closed. So she biked out to buy blackout curtains from Melvald’s and came back and hung them without making a sound.
Dustin sat on Steve’s bed, mute, and waited. He knew Steve wasn’t dead. He knew what the dead looked like.
He waited for a resurrection and he waited for himself to spring into action and he waited for Robin, because Steve always found it within himself to perform miracles for her.
Robin came in with a glass of water and a wet towel. She draped the towel across his eyes and inserted a straw between his lips and waited.
Then she set the glass on his nightstand, silently, and crawled into bed with him. Dustin watched them, dry-eyed, and wished—
Be kind, he heard Steve say in a distant memory, and rewind.
--
If Dustin could—
He couldn’t, but if he could, he would drag Steve away from Nancy before she asked him to check out the tunnels. The ones under Merrill’s farm, she said. Because you’ve been there before.
It seemed to be his calling. The very first time he talked to Steve, he dragged him away from the Wheelers’ front lawn. Took the bouquet of roses from Steve’s hands and tossed them into the backseat of the Beamer and told him, we’ve got bigger problems than your love life.
He should have made a career out of doing that. Turned it into a habit, a reflex.
Focus on me and Robin. Forget about Nancy. Forget about—
--
Steve never forgets. And so Dustin adapts.
--
One foot before the other. Steve said that when he was too tired to pretend he wasn’t just slogging through each day. It’s what sticks to Dustin’s mind now, because he has a new goal: he wants Steve to make it to twenty.
(And then twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on until they reach that nebulous number he wants to call infinity, because Steve isn’t allowed to die.)
It’s a milestone birthday.
(No it isn’t, Steve says. You’re thinking of a twenty-first birthday.)
It’s a milestone.
There are no plans for a party. It’s obscene, Steve says, and Robin doesn’t correct him, only says gently that they might do a movie night and dinner.
Just the three of us, she says.
Dustin spent three, four, five nights in Steve’s living room watching whatever Robin put on to keep track of time. The TV was always on mute; he doesn’t remember the films. He remembers ejecting the tapes and putting them into the rewinder because it’s muscle memory.
He remembers being on autopilot.
It’s a habit he’s trying to shake; Nancy keeps him on his toes. She has her tells—the way she parks, how hard she’s gripping the marker as she writes, if she’s stealing glances at Steve when he isn’t looking. (Is she gauging how pliant he’ll prove to be?) It’s like reading a barometer. Dustin knows when they’re due for a twister.
(Their friendship started in his storm cellar.
This, too, is vital.)
The point is this: she’s predictable, and so is he.
He telegraphs the signs. Predictability is the precursor to ritual, to habit, to inevitability. A migraine strikes and he needs.
And Steve, their connoisseur of headaches, is the only one who can provide. The initial rush of endorphins as he pulls Dustin in for a hug, the sense of peace—however tenuous—when he calls it a day.
He understands that comfort is the first-line treatment.
On these days, he gets Steve’s bed. It’s big, familiar, so different from his own (and he concedes readily that he has never been good at taking care of his belongings).
Steve switches out the sheets every week.
Robin’s taken to calling his bedroom the sickroom. She mutters about fengshui and luck and paint fumes and mold (the bedroom was painted back before I was born, Steve says, nonplussed, and the house is mold free, Robin, what the hell), and she’s even bought a pack of glow-in-the-dark stars.
“So you can sleep under a good sign,” she says. “I know this probably won’t work, but like, what if it does? On the off chance it helps, I’d like us to have all the luck we can get.”
It’s a solid reminder that she doesn’t believe in divine interference, but she does believe in UFOs.
So Dustin lies under a constellation that even he can’t make out and counts down the hours until daylight. There is an argument to be made for counting sins instead of sheep, his latest lies of both commission and omission, but—
Steve is here. He flits in and out, always soundlessly, to switch a towel, press a straw against Dustin’s lips, draw the curtains.
If he suspects—
He doesn’t let on.
It’s early June and Dustin is trying to outrun the twister. He’s close, so close, and in a month, he can point to Steve and say, I got him to twenty.
That’s the win he wants with every fiber of his being.
Robin wants it too. Dustin knows because on the night of the solstice, he leaves Steve’s bedroom to—
He doesn’t mean to eavesdrop. But he’s on the balcony overlooking the great room (just call it the living room, Steve says, because he’s always imprecise) and they can’t see him because they’re sitting at the dining table.
He can’t see them either, but he can hear them and that’s enough to set the scene.
They’re slumped in the dining chairs. They sound tired, defeated.
Robin says, “I do want to throw you a party. Or a celebration, even if it’s small. I’m so sick of movie nights.”
“That’s because you had them with Dustin,” Steve says. His voice is a little muffled, so he’s probably cradling his head. “I’m fun.”
“No, you’re not getting it.” There’s a noise between a screech and a squeal—probably Robin dragging her chair closer to his. “I want to celebrate that you’re alive. You scared me.”
Silence.
And then a soft hey, hey, no. Some sniffling. I’m sorry.
Robin, despite what she says about her messiness, is a quiet crier, so there are no ugly, heaving sobs. It’s just Steve holding her, probably.
“It won’t happen again,” Steve says. He even manages to sound certain. “Come on, Robin. Compared to the Russians, that was nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing.”
“It wasn’t that bad.”
“It was.”
Back and forth they go. And then Robin, again, still tremulous—
“Why don’t you want a party? I want one because I want to flip, like, life and Vecna off. Stick it to them, you know?”
A beat.
“Yeah.” Steve sighs. “I know. But the mood isn’t there.”
“It’s just the three of us. Or do you mean, Dustin won’t be in the mood.”
“The kid watched Eddie get eaten alive. He gets migraines now.”
“I don’t really think he does.”
Dustin finds himself holding his breath.
Steve doesn’t deny what she says. “Maybe,” he says. “But doesn’t that just prove my point?”
He doesn’t belabor his point. He doesn’t even name it, leaving Dustin in the dark.
What is his point?
“Is that it?” Robin’s stopped crying. She just sounds curious now. “You’re worried about how he’ll react, so you’d rather make no memories than bad memories?”
“A movie night is still a memory—”
“You fall asleep on movie nights.”
Steve falls quiet.
“Yeah, well,” he says eventually. “I’m tired.”
Another beat, too long for Dustin’s comfort.
“I don’t think the migraines are because of Eddie,” Robin offers at last. “I think it’s just—well, he gets it from you.”
“I got a C+ in bio,” Steve tells her, “and even I can tell you migraines aren’t contagious.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean the whole—”
A gesture, presumably, that Dustin can’t see.
Steve says, “I don’t know what that means.”
“Remember when we were on the bathroom floor? And I told you I’d peed myself, just a little?”
“Yeah. Kinda hard to forget.”
“And you said something like, guess it’s still in her system. But it was out of yours.”
Dustin was never there for that conversation. He doesn’t know what they said to each other—didn’t even know until now that they still remember, because they were drugged out of their minds.
He thinks he should move before he eavesdrops on a second (and more intimate) conversation. But his feet stay rooted to the carpet.
(He wants to know, because this sounds like the beginning of an accusation, and he needs to know if he has to step in—)
Steve says, “Yeah.”
“Mm.” She makes this sound like a somewhat triumphant aha! “I kinda figured when you rammed the Toddfather into Billy. You kept saying you weren’t in love with Nancy anymore, but you were full of it.”
“Yeah,” Steve says. “That’s me.” And then—“But I did mean what I said to you.”
“The nice things you said about me.”
“Yeah! Robin, you know—”
“Yeah, I do—this isn’t the point I’m trying to make here, Steve. Although in retrospect, I think you only said you liked me because you thought I was in love with you and you wanted to make me feel better. Or maybe you were hurt and you wanted to hear something that would make you feel better. I feel like you know that I love you? You know that, right?”
She’s rambling again, but he just sounds amused when he says, “Yeah, I do.”
“Okay, but my point is—Nancy was the one who called you bullshit, right?”
The pause on Steve’s end emanates confusion. “Yeah?”
“You said it was Dustin. You said he called everything you cared about in high school a bunch of bullshit.”
“I did?”
This, too, is news to Dustin. He called the construct of popularity primitive, but he doubts Steve was even listening.
“Yeah, I didn’t buy it at the time either. But see—you were about to cut out Tommy H and replace him with Dustin. You did do that, actually. And Nancy hurt you, and you had just been tortured, and I think you were ready to cut her out in that moment too and replace her with. I don’t know. Maybe Dustin and me? I know it sounds weird when I put it like that, but it was all you at the time.”
Her point, however convoluted and roundabout, is surprisingly coherent: Steve wrote a story for himself, and he was going to commit to it.
Steve gets it too, loud and clear.
“You think Dustin does that too?”
“You said it yourself. You thought Suzie didn’t exist.”
Despite his eventual vindication—
(Because Suzie feels—
She became meaningless and irrelevant in the wake of Eddie’s death, but to think of her is to prod his tongue against the space of a missing tooth.
Her absence makes itself known.)
—that lack of faith still hurts.
“Again—proves that it was just me all along. Dustin’s not the type to lie.”
“You think he’s lying right now.”
“That’s different. It might not be a migraine, but it’s something.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. Like, he’s committing to a story, right? I mean, I don’t know why this one, but. Like.”
Dustin can picture a shrug.
Steve nodding, or sitting stone-faced because he doesn’t know what to say.
“All I’m trying to say,” Robin says, “is that he gets that from you.”
--
So it is a roundabout accusation.
--
Here is Steve’s story, as witnessed by Dustin, as told by Steve—
He didn’t get up. He couldn’t get up. It was the migraine, and then it was vertigo. Robin tried to help him sit up and he fainted. His eyes were closed, but his face went slack and he went limp in Robin’s arms, and Dustin thought she might start screaming again, but she only wiped at the wetness at the corner of his lips and patted his cheeks and—
He woke up again, as was par for the course (according to him), but he didn’t open his eyes.
This would have been a good time to call 911 or the hospital, but Robin didn’t want the government to get their hands on Steve, and anyway—
The hospital was full. It would have been harder on his body, Robin said, to subject him to that.
She didn’t elaborate on what that meant.
She left him in the room and told him to make sure Steve kept breathing. I’ll be back soon, she said, and once again, she didn’t quantify soon.
It was two hours by Dustin’s estimation. He didn’t have much to do other than count the rise and falls of Steve’s chest.
When she came back, she had a bedpan and nothing else. She didn’t speak to Dustin, only made the universal gesture for scram, and he watched as the door closed behind her.
It never occurred him to go home. Back to his own home.
Instead, he sat in the living room and watched more films on mute. She came down the stairs hours later, arms overflowing with soiled sheets, and she didn’t say a thing as she kept marching downwards, downwards, straight into the basement.
He followed her after a beat.
Stood in the doorway as she stuffed everything into the washer and cried silently into the comforter.
He would have gone to comfort her, but he didn’t think she wanted him in the same room. His presence was already an intrusion.
She filled the little measuring cup to its brim with detergent and poured it over everything. Then she started the load and clapped her hands at him, another gesture that meant up, go, away.
He watched as she ordered takeout with Steve’s credit card. She called Dustin’s mom too and said that he was spending the night at Steve’s. He didn’t know what excuse she gave, but his mother liked her.
She thought Robin and Steve made the sweetest couple.
(And wasn’t that yet another story?
It had been the only one the cops wanted to hear when their little group made their way to Hawkins General, bloody and bedraggled and mute with horror. Steve wasn’t there. Dustin didn’t know where he’d gone, but Robin, in the middle of hysterics, had made it clear that she had been driving around with Steve to round up the kids. He’ll be back soon, she said over and over again. He’s helping someone else.
Steve came back in the morning, sooty but in a fresh sweater. She ran into his arms and he hugged her and then he came over and hugged the rest of them and—
All the questions evaporated in the face of young love. Here they were, Hawkins’ perfect couple, ready to take charge and make sense of an apocalypse.)
So Dustin didn’t have to go home, and he didn’t have to go to school either. There was nothing to break the monotony of dread.
He watched films when she didn’t want him in the room. He ate lunch and dinner with her (no one was in the mood for breakfast) and watched as she dissolved honey in water and carried it up to Steve.
Again and again, rinse and repeat.
And then there was a crash.
He was getting good at differentiating the bangs and thumps and thuds. Something metallic, loud enough to echo, was Robin being a klutz. A thud—the toilet seat falling down. He never got a thump. He didn’t know whether a person falling to the ground sounded like a thump, but—
When it came, he knew.
Robin was shouting and he raced up the steps to see the door flung wide open and Steve and Robin in a tangle of sheets on the carpet. She was propping him up, easing him back, easing him down, something, and she was crying again.
“It’s okay,” Steve was muttering again and again, and—
He had an arm under his bed. He was leaning against the side of his bed and he was reaching for—
Out came a blade. Steve had it by its hilt but it was unsheathed and gleaming and Robin was gasping, and then it came to an end and out followed a bottle of alcohol, a lighter.
Steve’s eyes were still closed.
(This, Dustin thought hazily, was rote muscle memory taken to dizzying heights.)
“Out of the way,” he said to Robin, and she was still whisper-shouting what are you doing as she took a step back so he could balance the blade on his knees.
He didn’t open his eyes and his head was still tilted back and his breathing was too ragged, but he uncapped the bottle and emptied it over the blade. Then he flicked open the lighter, dragged the flame over the edge and—
Dustin made a play for the blade, but he was too late.
Steve’s palm closed over it and—
Robin was screaming with abandon now as the blood dripped down onto his shirt, his sweatpants, his sheets, staining his forearm and the strip of his belly and—
He opened his eyes.
“I knew it,” he said, matter-of-fact. “It’s the toxins from the bats. I just needed to bleed it out.” Then he gave Robin something that might have been a lopsided smile and added, “I promise it’s not rabies.”
Robin was beyond answering. Dustin—
(What was there left to say?)
“See,” Steve said, mostly to himself. The bleeding hadn’t stopped yet. “Good as new.”
--
Two days later, he got out of bed and went to the meeting at the station.
Mind over matter.
This would be Steve’s story, as long as he drew breath.
--
Another story he taught Dustin right after the demodogs and Billy Hargrove—
They don’t do their secret handshake anymore, because Dustin can’t bear the thought of disemboweling Steve. That it’s fake and pretend and for fun no longer matters. That it was invented in the first place so Steve could give Dustin the upper hand in a fight (because they both knew Dustin was probably never going to win one of those) matters even less.
What matters is the promise.
I’m always gonna bounce back, Steve said, taking the hand thirteen-year-old Dustin Henderson extended him.
Doesn’t matter if he’s spilling his guts and bleeding out.
Steve always, always, always gets back on his feet.