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He feels like shit warmed over.
No, not even warm -- still on fire, being run over by a herd of dump trucks. And they're on fire too.
Every inch of his body aches once the adrenaline from the tunnel wears off. Things he didn't even think could hurt hurt, right down to his bones and his hair and his goddamn fingernails. It's like Coach making him run five million suicides while also getting punched in the face.
Oh right.
He's still got blood crusted in one eye and a marching band parading through his skull, but he manages to get the kids back to the Byers' in one piece because he'd meant what he said to Nancy (not the it's okay, though christ he wishes he actually did). He takes it seriously, looking after the kids, and not as some kind of scoring-points-with-big-sister-slash-probably-ex-girlfriend thing. They're good kids, and they don't deserve this shit, and if the least he can do is make sure they don't get themselves eaten by demodogs or crashed into a ditch or help them maybe have a shot at a date to the Snow Ball, he's gonna.
It's the least he can do (bullshit, Nancy whispers, you're bullshit) and he's not sure if that feels better or worse than Billy Hargrove's fist in his face.
--
It's Hopper who patches him up, after he maneuvers the car back to the Byers' and peels himself out of the driver's seat. Nancy had gasped when she'd seen his face -- Steve -- his name leaving her like a breath. She'd stepped towards him, moving to help, but he couldn't -- he just couldn't -- think about her hands on him, how gentle they would be and how it wouldn't mean a goddamn thing, and he'd thanked every god in this universe and the Upside Down when Hopper had volunteered to do it first.
"You need to see a doctor." Hopper finishes swabbing the grossest-looking cuts on Steve's face, a roadmap of bruises and bandages and dried blood. "If you were out that long you probably have a concussion. Need to have that looked at."
"Yeah, sure." He's not trying to be a dick but the exhaustion's creeping up on him again and sleeping into next week is sounding really good. "We done?"
"See a doctor," Hopper growls. "Before you sleep."
Steve throws him a mock salute and an aye aye, captain as he stands up from the edge of the bathtub, because apparently all the beatings and mutant demon dogs in the world can't quite shake the sarcasm out of him.
Home, he thinks. Forty thousand Tylenols. Bed.
He's almost out of the bathroom when Hopper speaks again.
"Harrington. Thanks, for --" He waves one hand around, aimless, like the words are trapped somewhere just out of reach. "If you ever need anything, you let me know."
What he needs is a freaking nap and an ice pack. He needs to know what the hell he's going to do with himself the day after tomorrow, and next week, and the week after that, because right now playing basketball and working for his dad's company and doing keg stands at Tina's house seem like memories that belong to another guy, a million universes away. He needs Nancy not to look at him like that, because otherwise it's too easy to pretend that still belongs to him too.
What he says is: "I will."
And he walks straight out of the Byers' house without looking back.
--
The rest of the school year?
It blows.
His face takes almost three weeks to heal and the concussion means he's benched from the team and misses all his college application deadlines (so much, he thinks, for working his sweet ... what's the word ... allegory about monster-hunting into his admissions essay). Nancy avoids him between classes with a soft-eyed look that lands somewhere between pity and guilt and regret, and Billy starts calling him weirdo perv babysitter to all the people who used to be his friends.
Silver linings: his grades get way better, on account of his black hole of a social life, and Dustin and the kids are good company most of the time. He learns way more about Dungeons and Dragons than he ever thought possible? Eh, he'll take what he can get.
He's invited to Nathan Whitaker's post-grad party mostly on nostalgia, and he only goes because it seems like not going would make the end of his senior year even more depressing than it already is. It's pretty much exactly what he imagined, though -- warm beer and some junior puking in the hydrangea bushes out front and dozens of people who think he's a freak or a perv or a loser.
Steve commits himself to a solid hour of hanging awkwardly in the corner nursing a beer and then slips out through the back patio door. It's not late, the streetlights just blinking on in the warm blue-black air, so he wanders down to the street and realizes pretty quick that the houses and trees are getting familiar.
He's almost to the Wheelers' street. Jesus Christ, he's pathetic even when he doesn't mean to be.
He rounds the corner to where the rows of houses give way to a stretch of park. Grass, trees, a playground thing, some swings --
-- and Nancy.
(Yep, he's got a freaking radar for misery these days.)
She's sitting on one of the steps of the play structure, fingers wrung around each other and watching the toes of her shoes move through the sand.
He coughs and shoves his hands in his pockets by way of greeting.
"Hey."
Nancy glances up, startled.
"Hi -- Steve, hi," she says, taking him in with wide eyes. "What're you doing here?"
"Party at Nathan's. Up the street. It was shitty, so --" He breaths out, turning his body to gesture to the park. "A walk."
"Oh."
She lets the syllable drop and disappear into nothingness, and that's it, Steve thinks, that's all we've got left in us after seven months of not talking at all?
He decides to give the conversation a last gasp of breath, because he's spent enough nights in her basement watching D&D to know he'll never get away from her completely, and sits down on a corner of the play structure. They're close enough that their knees almost knock.
"Why are you out here?" Fuck it. Might as well rip the Band-Aid off. "Where's, uh, Jonathan?"
"Will emergency." Off Steve's alarmed look, she adds: "He's fine, don't worry. Just came down with the flu and Joyce's still so worried about him all the time. Not that I blame her."
"You didn't go with him?"
Nancy's gaze flits up to his, hard at first, like she expects it to be cruel. It softens when she sees his face and realizes there no bite behind the question.
"They're a unit, you know?" she shrugs. "The Byers against the world. I just think they -- they forget about other people sometimes. I mean, it makes sense after all they've been through. Jonathan's so used to it being just him and his brother and his mom. He wasn't even really that close with Bob when he, um, when he was killed. It's just --"
Their eyes meet again and Nancy stops herself mid-sentence, like cold water on her words.
"Steve, I'm so sorry, I shouldn't be talking to you about this." She looks genuinely remorseful, and he hates that even the smallest kindness still makes his heart clench. "I'm just, uh, I'm feeling -- I don't have many people to talk to, anymore? Not Barb and not you and Jonathan needs to be with Will all the time, and I can't tell anyone else what happened, and I feel like I'm still pretending half the time --"
Her voice wobbles and her eyes tear up, and Steve really cements himself as frontrunner for the Stupidest Shit You Can Do With An Ex-Girlfriend Award when he leans forward and pulls her into a hug.
This, this he remembers how to do. How their arms fit around each together and how long to hold her and how to broadcast I've got you into the press of his fingertips against her back, the frame of his hand around her shoulders. He was good at this part, even if he crapped out on the actual listening.
They just kind of hold each other for a long time, neither of them pulling away. Nancy's curls are pressed up against his nose and her breath's ragged against the collar of his jacket and Steve knows this is dangerously close to becoming something he'll have to name, because they're both still fucked up and confused and should probably should be in therapy until they're ninety, and because Barb is still dead and the Upside Down is still out there, and because he still wants to kiss her and maybe she'd let him. He could turn his head, brush her hair back from her face, and it could be real --
Nancy throws herself back like she's been burned.
"God, Steve," she gulps, still on the edge of tears. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean -- I'm not trying to make this weird, I swear. I'm just -- I'm sorry."
"You are, though," Steve interrupts, his anger wild and sudden, feeling shattered for the millionth time, feeling exhausted by the bitter disappointment. "This isn't fucking fair. I'm -- I'm a good person, Nance. Maybe I wasn't before or maybe I'm still just kinda average on the good-person scale, but I don't deserve this. And I have no fucking idea what I'm doing either and I feel like shit all the time too, and you're just making it harder."
"Steve --"
"No, Nance, okay?" He holds his hands up, imploring; just stop. "No. I'm not some runner-up prize until Jonathan starts paying attention to you again or you decide you don't actually love me, again, and go back to him, or whatever fucked-up game you're playing."
"Steve, it's not a game!" Nancy's crying for real now, though it doesn't do anything to tamp down on the venom and heartbreak in her voice. "I never --"
"I don't care, okay?" (God, he does. He does.) "I just need you to stay away from me."
For the third time in twice as many months, Steve leaves her behind and pretends he doesn't feel it in every single step.
--
In the end, he takes off and backpacks around Europe.
It's nothing he'd ever planned for himself, but Hawkins is damn near unbearable with Nancy and Jonathan just existing and everything else is a giant question mark, so when his parents finally separate for real and throw money at him trying not to seem like deadbeats, he books a plane ticket to London without giving it much more thought.
He sends a postcard to Dustin from every stop -- Dublin and Paris and Amsterdam and Rome -- and one night, drinking shitty wine on the overnight train from Lisbon to Madrid, he flips to a fresh page in his notebook and it's Nancy's name that gets scrawled out on the paper.
Dear Nance -- he starts.
Stops.
I'm sorry.
He stops again. The pen hovers over the paper. In the next compartment over, someone's playing U2 on guitar.
Sorry for not paying enough attention? For not taking her seriously? For steamrolling her into normal because he'd thought if he could just love her enough, they'd both be fine?
I'm sorry for everything.
After that, every postcard to Dustin is followed by a letter to Nancy -- scribbled down in cafes, at bus stops, in a cramped hostel bunk -- about things he'd seen that day (La Sagrada Familia is a badass church!) or some memory (kinda thankful for Mr. Hunt's WWII history class right now, so I don't feel like a total douchebag American) or what he'd been thinking about (I wish I'd taken the time to get to know Barb). He gets as far as folding the letters into envelopes, even writing her address on the front, but he can't bring himself to send them.
Why the hell would he? They're not together, they're not even friends -- they're acquaintances who sometimes pass each other on the way to the Wheelers' bathroom (I love you, he'd said, and he'd meant it more than anything else in the universe), and whatever the hell he's doing, he's doing it for himself.
(Four weeks later:
"Hey," says Duncan, the Irish guy he's been travelling with since Munich. He's packing the last of their grappa into an already-overstuffed knapsack. "You owe me 20 pounds for stamps."
"Huh?"
Duncan shrugs. "I mailed your letters for you. There was a whole pile of 'em on your bed."
Steve freezes and does a half-second calculation about how much the hostel would charge him for barfing on the floor.
"Sure," he says instead, his stomach still twisting and dropping like he's on some rollercoaster at Indiana Beach. "Thanks."
His next three post cards to Dustin get scribbled on and tossed in the trash, has Nancy said anything? crossed out with strong, black lines.)
--
Somewhere on a beach in Malta, sun breaking across the water and Duncan passed out in a recliner beside him, Steve decides he needs to face his demons.
The trip's been amazing -- like, incredibly, unbelievably, why-didn't-I-blow-Mom-and-Dad's-money-doing-this-sooner amazing -- but still, his thoughts are straying back to Hawkins more and more. He knows the kids would have started high school a couple months ago, and he wonders how Hopper and Eleven are doing, and y'know, if any more inter-dimensional holes has been ripped in the fabric of space and time. (Thanks, Dustin.) The usual stuff.
Even more than the itch of home, though, he's still thinking about what the hell he's going to do after he runs out of money and patience from his parents. He can't just dick around Europe for the next decade and college seems pretty much out of the question at this point, but he can't stomach working for his dad now -- it, whatever it is, has to mean something.
He has to mean something.
You're bullshit.
I could be around for your senior year, just to look after you a little bit.
I promised I'd keep you shitheads safe, and that's exactly what I plan on doing.
You let me know.
He's survived Billy Hargrove and demon dogs and mutant dudes without faces and losing --
(I love you, he'd said, and it feels like it'll always be true)
Well.
He sure as hell can deal with whatever comes next.
--
He gets back to Hawkins almost exactly a year after everything started again. It's November and the air's grey and sharp with rain. The town feels like it's full of ghosts as his mom drives, winding through the streets, but he's not haunted by them anymore. This is a place where weird shit happens. Bad shit. And good shit sometimes, too.
Does he have an ever-loving clue what he's doing? Nope. Is there a very real possibility he's come back to Hawkins just to fall flat on his face again? Yep. But he feels ... more okay than he has in a year; maybe the most okay he's been since he realized that all he can do is try to make more of the good shit happen. To Dustin and the kids. To people like Eleven. Hell, to Nancy and Jonathan.
And that's okay. That's enough.
His mom, when they get back to the house, won't leave him alone. She's saying something about needing to iron his shirt for his appointment with Hopper in the morning and not to have the car home later than ten from Dustin's, and Steve knows he smells like 20 hours of airports and greasy breakfast and underwashed T-shirt but all he wants to do is crash in a way he hasn't since right after the tunnels.
He throws himself onto his bed --
-- and lands with a crunch.
"Oh that," his mom says, offhand, still puttering around his room. "It was the strangest thing -- I went out to get the mail this morning, before I left for the airport? There was that stack of letters. They were all addressed to you."
--
Dear Steve --
You're not just a good person -- you're one of the best people I know.
--
He smiles.