Chapter Text
Not for the first time, Steve Harrington wishes that life was like the movies, that he could close his eyes and skip this part, jump forward to a few days from now when the horrors are over and he’s back to putting the pieces of normalcy back together, like he has so many times before.
There’s no skipping this.
At least, not the way he would like. There is no fade to black and easy transition. Instead it’s a series of terrible and awful images and sensations as time ever-so-slowly crawls on. His brain catches snapshots of it.
The strangled sob of a voice he knows by heart, his feet pushing him through the dark wasted land, over monstrous death bodies, skidding to a stop next to a small body in the middle of all that horror.
“Dustin!” He doesn’t recognize his own voice, nor the desperation of his grip on the boy’s hoodie. “What the hell man? What are you- why are you here? What happened?! Dustin, what happened, are you okay? Are you hurt?”
There is no answer. One moment he is at the edge of panic and the next he has an armful of a sobbing kid.
Time stops. But it doesn’t.
There’s Dustin sobbing against his chest unconsolably, making awful heart-breaking sounds Steve never wants to hear again in his life.
There is him holding on to this kid as tightly as he can, eyes locked on Eddie Munson’s unseeing gaze.
There’s blood around his neck and bite marks all through his body and Steve knows personally the pain he must have gone through before it was all over. But there’s no time for mourn —not for Steve— because they aren’t out of the woods yet and he can’t lose himself to horror and grief just yet. Maybe ever.
There’s Nancy’s insistent hand on his shoulder, urging them to leave, and the weight of Dustin’s body as he uselessly struggles against Steve’s iron grip.
He’s not leaving the kid here, no matter how much he yells and screams at him. Only after a few dozen feet does he let go and that is when he realizes that Dustin is hurt too. Steve’s blood runs cold as he catches the boy before he stumbles. He daren’t ask, not yet. Get him out of here. Get them all out of here. That’s all he can focus on at the moment.
Returning is a mess. The gate is gone. Or, to be more precise, it’s gone from a baby gate to a mama gage. It’s like someone teared the world in two. There are a couple of complains, but Steve refuses to let anyone other than himself go through first. It’s weird and hard and it involves him jumping from a chair and crawling his way up/down into a torn part mess of metal that was once Eddie Munson’s home.
“Fuck,” he sighs looking at the size of the divide, but can’t let himself take in what a gate this big and here, in the middle of a trailer park, even means.
They need to get out of here first. Fast. He helps Dustin’s up, doing his best to avoid doing any further damage to his leg. Then Robin, then Nancy. That’s it. They are one man down, no one else coming through. The others take the situation in with stunned silence until he reminds them they aren’t quite out of danger as it is.
Steve doesn’t know who finally reaches out to Lucas, but the sound of his broken voice is burnt into his brain as he tells them, between sobs, he’s waiting for an ambulance for Max.
He’s holding her, he tells them. She’s breathing, but she wasn’t before.
He’s so scared.
There’s the highway and the roads and Steve driving a goddam trailer like a maniac on their way to the hospital. His fingers clench painfully around the steering wheel.
There’s no sound other than the car’s engine and Dustin’s occasional strangled sob.
They get there just in time to see the paramedics pull her out of the ambulance. Max, bloodied and pale, her little bones snapped in awful ways that make Steve’s stomach turn with horror.
He can hear the others move and get out of the car, but his body won’t answer his commands. He can’t move. And then he sees Dustin, limping forward and instinct kicks back in. “Henderson wait!” He manages as he throws himself out the trailer’s door and after him. Dustin won’t even look at him, but he let’s Steve help him forward into the hospital.
Lucas is there already, eyes reddened with tears and twisted with desperation. But that’s about as much as Steve expected. What he didn’t see coming is the bruises on his face, there’s blood and a broken lip and a darkened eye.
“What the hell happened?” He asks, tilting the boy’s chin.
He knows these wounds intimately, he knows what did them. Fists. Anger. Another kind of violence. Lucas dismisses him, only wants to focus on Max and Steve has to bite back the bitter bile in the back of his throat and let him have it for now.
They are too late. Max counted on them, trusted them to kill Vecna before the asshole got to her. They failed her. Steve failed her.
The thoughts bounce around his head as they sit on the hospital’s waiting room.
There’s so much movement around, people screaming and rushing over. He was vaguely aware of rubble and caos as he sped through the city but couldn’t focus on any of it. Still can’t.
Max is estable, a doctor tells them, though her voice sounds unsure. She’s not responding right now, she adds carefully, but she is breathing and they are going to operate on her legs and arms as soon as an OR is available. The fact that she doesn’t ask how the hell this happened is just another worry to add to the ever growing list in the back of Steve’s brain.
Once the news settle, in comes another round of arguments to get everyone else to get checked out. Lucas wants to go in immediately to see Max but Steve refuses. He’s had too many dangerous concussions of his own to let him go unchecked. “You’re no help to her if you pass out of brain bleeding, Sinclair,” he snaps, a bit harder than he intended to, but it works. Dustin hasn’t said a word and won’t let anyone check his leg. Robin and Nancy actually look at him, expecting Steve to know what to do but he is at a loss here. Something about the kid’s pain terrifies him into stillness.
Get over yourself, Harrington.
“Hey, buddy?” He tries, crouching next to him. Dustin won’t meet his eyes. “Let’s get your leg checked out, okay?” Dustin just shakes his head. Steve bites the inside of his cheek so hard it almost hurts. What would Eddie say? “Listen, Henderson, this tough-guy thing you are doing? This isn’t any good to anyone, okay? There’s- there’s another battle coming, for sure. And we still have to make that fucker pay. So- so if this was- if this was one of your adventures, what would you do?”
Dustin glares at him, but the eye contact is enough to egg Steve on.
“You’d heal yourself and be ready for the next battle or whatever, right? Hey! Look at me,” he demands when Dustin’s gaze trails off into the distance. “I need you to be ready and good next time we go to Murdor.”
“Mordor.”
“What?”
“It’s Mordor.”
“Okay, Mordor. Whatever. Now, would you please go get that leg checked?”
Miraculously, Dustin nods cleaning snot off his face and finally lets himself be led away by the nice nurse that has been giving them space.
He is left with the girls. Nance, Robin, Erica. They whisper with each other, trying to piece together what happened. He lets them, as he paces around. He’ll undoubtedly get the infodump by Robin later, when she’s made more sense of it than he can right now.
Time becomes a blur again for a little while.
Parents arrive like a hurricane. Not his, mind you, the kids’. The nurse is in the middle of telling them that the kids are getting checked out and how lucky they were that their siblings brought them over. Said “siblings” stand up all at once at the sight of the adults (real, responsible, honest to god adults and not the three of them pretending to be strong for the children).
The Wheelers rush to their daughter and embrace her like she’s a little girl and not the woman that just shot round after round into a murderer’s chest. The Sinclairs bounce between yelling and fretting over Erica as she assures them she and her brother are alright (they haven’t seen Lucas’ wounds, but someone must have filled them in as they came in). And Mrs. Henderson makes a beeline straight towards Steve, who can feel every single muscle in his body tense with anticipation of an epic dress down. Behind him, Robin shuffles and at least he has her now (at home, when this happens with his dad, it’s so much worse to face it alone).
“It’s okay. He’s okay,” he rushes while he can staring at his feet. “I think he hurt his leg a bit but he’s getting it checked. I’m- I’m sorry, I-“
His voice cracks. What possible excuse could he give Dustin’s mother. He can’t even defend himself because he knows he fucked up. He wasn’t there. He shouldn’t have left them alone. He shouldn’t have put that responsibility on them, on Eddie. It could’ve been Dustin. God, it could’ve been Dustin and as horrible as losing Munson is, the possibility of losing that kid is like ripping his heart out.
Steve expects a slap. Honestly, he deserves it. So, of course, he flinches when the woman throws herself at him and wraps him into a bear hug.
“Thank you,” Dustin’s mother says and it’s all too much. He doesn’t get it. His eyes well up with tears.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats.
Sorry won’t fix this. He failed them.
At some point, there’s a series of movements he is vaguely aware of
The Wheeler’s take Nancy home. There’s a look, he thinks, sent his way, but he probably hallucinated it.
Dustin and his mother, silently attached by the hip, leave with a quick quiet goodbye.
The Sinclairs have to plead with Lucas until he agrees to go home and clean up but only if they will let him come back here to spend the night with Max.
Max’s mom, pale and ghostly, assures then he can come and stay with her as much as he wants. The quiet and sad resignation in her voice terrifies Steve more than any monster. It’s the sound of someone making peace with goodbye.
And just like that, they are all gone.
Steve is exhausted to the very bottom of his soul but Robin will not let him go until he gets his wounds checked out too.
“I’m fine,” he tries but she will not shut up about rabies and internal bleeding and other infections until he agrees.
Nurse Kelly is nice and after three years of misfortune they are well acquainted with each other. As usual, she gives him a very disappointed look but doesn’t ask where the wounds come from or why in the name of the Lord he keeps getting the shit kicked out of him. There’s more stitches than he can count and some wonderful painkillers (he hadn’t even realized how bad it all burned until they kicked in). She does say they would usually keep him in observation, but there’s too much going on and they have no beds left. He should really find out what the hell happened in town.
Robin is waiting for him when he comes out, half dozing off on the waiting room chair. Everyone has gone home but she is here… for him. Relief and affection rush through him as soon as he sees her perk up.
“All good, no rabies,” he assures her. Her shoulders finally relax as she gives him a smile.
It’s Robin who points out they probably shouldn’t keep moving around on a stolen trailer.
They walk. The city is loud and chaotic. They are quiet.
There’s smoke in the sky and from where they stand it seems like downtown is on fire. Part of Steve wants to go check it out, but his body is at its limit and his brain can’t focus on much more than: get Robin home and go get in bed.
The noise dies down as they make it out of the city and into the residential area of town. He drops her off at her front door with a tight hug and a promise to talk tomorrow. She’s reluctant to let him go alone but Steve promises it’ll be okay. It’s a short walk to his place and, really, after everything else that’s happened he probably won’t find trouble on the way. Nothing he can’t deal with.
By the time he makes it home it’s light outside. His folks are probably sleeping. He saw people out there in the streets, shouting names and trying to call their loved ones or waving photographs around in hopes that someone would identify them. Though he hasn’t seen his parents or been home in the past three days, he knew better than to expect any missing posters for him. If things had gone wrong today on the Upside Down, he is sure it would’ve taken them at least a couple weeks to realize he wasn’t around. He knows all that.
There’s still a pang of disappointment in his chest as he climbs up to his bedroom and, quietly as he can, closes the door.
He sits in his bed and thinks tears will come, that horror and fear will finally hit and that he will come to terms with everything that happened. Eddie, Max, Dustin, Lucas… but all he gets are those snapshots, those vivid memories here and there in between the blanks. Before he can even begin to put it together, exhaustion beats him to it and knocks him out in one fell swoop.
The horrors in his mind don’t sleep. It doesn’t stop.