Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The ground below them shudders. Instinct alone has Steve’s hand shooting out to curl around Robin’s bicep, tugging her into him as they’re stumbling along through the ashy haze, and she snorts a low laugh that feels too far out of place in all of this. He takes it as gratitude; they both know she’d have been sprawling on the ground in front of him if he hadn’t.

“We’re almost there.” Nancy’s voice sounds as heavy and tired as Steve feels, and he’s about to comment on the fact that they all need a year’s worth of rest after this when the words are cut off in his throat by an awful keening that echoes through the world around them. It doesn’t even sound human, and for a moment, he almost hopes that it isn’t.

Because if it is… oh god, if it is.

“Steve.” The alarm in Robin’s voice is evident, and he realizes two things at once: his grip has tightened uncomfortably around her arm, and more importantly, he needs to go.

His hand falls away, and he doesn’t pause to explain as he reaches over his shoulder for the ax that’s jutting from the bag on his back. The bandage around his abdomen pulls, one of the wounds reopening, and he can feel a trickle of blood snaking down towards the waistband of his jeans. He grimaces, but it doesn’t stop him from picking up the pace and leaving the two girls struggling to even try to keep up.

The entrance to the trailer park is a few yards away, and though the wailing has stopped, he catches the sound of a harsh sob even over the thundering of his own heartbeat in his ears. His feet pound the pavement, skidding as he rounds the fence and sees a figure hunched over in the dirt. “Oh no.” The words tumble from his lips as he feels his breath catch in this throat.

He sees long legs and dark jeans first, and he knows that those are not the legs of a fifteen-year-old boy who hasn’t quite hit his last big growth spurt yet. He knows what that means, but that doesn’t make him ready to face the sight in front of him as he drops the ax and falls to his knees opposite the crying teen.

“You have to do something. Steve, you have to do something.”

Dustin is sobbing, rocking Eddie’s body against his chest. Eddie whose dark eyes stare blankly at a stormy, crimson sky - the spark in them gone. Steve’s hand is shaking as he moves to press his index and middle finger against the older boy’s carotid artery. He’s still so warm, and for a fraction of a second, he lets himself think that maybe this is just a dumb joke because why wouldn’t Eddie ‘The Freak’ Munson be the kind of person to play dead and let someone fawn over him?

But he knows that’s not true because Eddie would never do this to Dustin. He doesn’t even think Eddie would do that to Steve - at least not now.

Not after the past few days.

There’s no pulse, and its pure instinct again when he tugs Eddie’s body away from the sobbing boy and starts pumping his chest. Despite the years he spent as a lifeguard, he’s never had to do this, and he isn’t even sure that he’s doing it right anymore in the blind panic that’s bubbling up inside him, but he doesn’t have a choice. All the times they’ve saved the world, and somehow, he’s never lost someone in front of his eyes like this; somehow, that it might be Eddie who is the first pulls at something even deeper inside him.

‘Harrington’s got her. Don’t ya, big boy?’

It’s not the first time the thought has rolled over in his mind over the past several hours, the teasing lilt in the older boy’s tone seeming to rattle something loose inside Steve’s chest, but this is the first time that it’s rolled through his mind and evoked any kind of audible response. The noise is some bastardized mix of a laugh and a sob, and he chokes it back long enough to bring his lips to Eddie’s, to puff two breaths into those still lungs, before he’s back to compressions. He feels something crack beneath the heel of his hand, and he thinks that it’s one of the boy’s ribs, and for the briefest moment he almost stops.

But no, this is right.

It can happen like this.

“Come on, Munson. Don’t do this to me.” There's a kind of desperation in his voice that he's never heard before, and it's like a knife twist to the gut. He's not in the position right now to even try to decipher what it means, and he wants to tell Eddie that this is why he needs to come back; so that Steve can selfishly figure out why four days ago he didn't ever want to hear the name 'Eddie Munson' from Dustin or any of the other little shits again, and now the knowledge that he won't makes his chest ache. He's not always the most self-aware, but even he's pretty sure it isn't just because of how hard the kids are going to take this loss.

He can hear Nancy and Robin now, someone’s soft voice coaxing Dustin upwards and away from where Steve is trying to work. The ground shudders again, longer, and more violently this time, and he knows they’re running out of time. Something is happening to the world around them, and as the minutes tick past, he has no idea how much longer the portals will remain open - assuming they still are.

“Steve, we have to go.” The rumbling has evened out, but it hasn’t fully stopped, and he doesn’t think it will anymore. This is it… this is the end. “It’s too late. We have to go now.” It’s Nancy, sounding more panicked than he thinks she ever has before, and she’s tugging at his arm. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows that she’s right, and it only makes things worse.

His hands still on Eddie’s chest, vision blurry as he draws in a shaking breath. He licks his lips, the metallic taste of the other boy’s blood on his tongue, and his head is still bent as he brushes the tears away with dirty knuckles. The evidence of their existence is still there, though, in the clean tracks on his otherwise filthy cheeks.

“Get Dustin to the trailer,” he says softly, voice barely audible over the sound of the earth quaking around them. “I’m not leaving him here.” His gaze is still locked on those sightless eyes, and he swallows hard as he reaches out to lower the other boy’s lids with a gentle brush of his fingertips.

He’s never had to carry dead weight before, and it’s harder than he was expecting to pick Eddie up in a messy bridal carry. The boy’s head lolls, cheek against Steve’s chest, and he sucks in another sharp breath as he starts to move. The door to the trailer is propped open, and he can see Nancy helping Robin climb the precarious pile of chairs and boxes they’ve stacked in the center of the room. She looks back, relief evident on her face as she sees him coming, and he nods upwards in a silent plea to just - go.

He can see the hesitation etched in her features, but she trusts him; after everything they’ve been through, she trusts him too damn much, and so she starts to climb. And he has the best intentions to follow, to get on the chair tower and push Eddie’s body upward because the landing doesn’t matter much anymore, does it? It doesn’t matter if he’s in a heap on the right side because at least he’ll be there.

Steve can’t do anymore damage to him than this place has done.

Dustin is shouting to him from the hole in the ceiling, but he can hardly hear what the kid is saying because the quiet, constant rumble has become something else. The world around him jolts, sending him sprawling onto the sofa with Eddie on his lap, and it reminds him of the earthquake that had happened the one time his parents had actually taken him with them to California. Mugs clatter from the wall, some shattering on the ground around them, and another hitting his shoulder and making him wince. His hand curls around the back of Eddie’s head, holding it to his chest as if he’s going to shelter him from this nightmare, and for a fraction of a second he’s able to forget that this is pointless. There’s nothing for him to protect Eddie from because there’s nothing left to hurt him.

There’s no Eddie left to be hurt.

“Steve, you have to get up. Steve! Now!” Robin is screaming, her voice hoarse, and she looks like she’s ready to climb back to the other side. Were it not for the fact that Nancy’s hands are locked around her forearms, holding her back, he thinks she probably already would have. The little tower they had created has collapsed, and the trailer is shaking so much that he knows there’s no way to rebuild it. He’s not even sure that he can stand anymore; the exhaustion weighing on him is so heavy and the open wounds hurt so much that shifting to try to move Eddie’s body causes his vision to momentarily go white.

Something is screaming around him, and it takes a moment for him to realize that it’s the metal of the trailer as it starts to come apart. The girls are shouting for him, and Dustin’s sobs reach his ears and snap him into motion again. He shuffles Eddie’s body to the side, scrambling to his feet. He knows he should leave it - should leave him behind - but he grits his teeth and reaches down again as the metal continues to screech.

His breath comes in ragged gasps, and he pulls upwards but whatever strength and adrenaline was left in him from the fight is gone. He’s not even sure he could lift himself through the portal now, let alone someone completely unable to help. Steve doesn’t mean to fall to his knees, but the world bucks beneath his feet again and he’s landing hard on the thinly carpeted floor before he can do anything to stop it.

Giving up isn’t a conscious decision that Steve Harrington ever thought he might make. He’s survived nineteen years of shitty parents, impossible expectations, and literal monsters, and somehow this has become the breaking point. The weight of years of failure is finally too much: a futile attempt at CPR the final straw because he was supposed to protect them. He’s not smart, at least not in the same way that people like Dustin and Robin and Nancy are, and he’s not the one who usually figures things out, but he always manages to keep them safe.

He can’t even say that anymore.

“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t know who he’s talking to; it could be to Robin, Nancy, and Dustin on the other side, or it could just as easily be to Eddie because it’s all the goddamn same in the end, isn’t it? His hands fist into the other boy’s jacket, and he leans in against a solid, motionless chest. Eddie’s blood is on his hands, still lingers on his lips, and Steve shifts until their foreheads are touching. It doesn’t matter that there’s no one left to hear him, that his words literally fall on deaf, dead ears, because even as the world around him starts to cave in, he’s whispering all the same, “We’re okay. It’ll all be over soon.”

For the briefest of seconds, Steve feels relief as the noise around him reaches a roaring crescendo –

And then he feels nothing at all.

Chapter Text

There’s a bang on his door, sharp and annoyed, and the clipped voice of his mother immediately follows. “Steven, I have run out of patience. If you miss another practice, your coach is going to bench you, so get up now or you can forget you ever had a car.” This threat, empty as always, would typically have no real effect on him anymore, but today he snaps to attention with a suddenness that might have given him whiplash were he not still laying down. His mother shouldn’t be there; currently, she’s somewhere in Belgium with his father on one of their many vacations away from their disappointing son and the tarnished family name.

More importantly, Steve should not have practice because he graduated in 1985.

He scrambles out of bed, feet tangling in the sheets and sending him sprawling across the carpet with a thud that rattles the swimming trophies sitting atop the dresser. He grits his teeth, waiting for his mother to start shouting again, but the air is filled with the dead silence he’s so accustomed to after years of her absence. In truth, it’s too quiet: quiet to the point where he swears he can still hear Dustin Henderson's sobs from the portal above him and the screeching in his ears as the metal walls of a battered trailer gave way. Extricating his snared foot with a deepening frown, he resists the urge to just roll onto his back and stay there rather than try to decipher whatever the hell is happening that apparently made the otherwise level-headed Mrs. Grace Harrington lose her goddamn mind.

A sigh escapes him in a quick huff of breath as he pushes himself up until he’s able to stand, shoving the blankets back onto the bed without a second thought as the initial shock starts to wear off and panic sets in.

Steve doesn’t remember coming home.

In fact, he doesn’t remember shedding his battle clothes or washing the blood off his hands or leaving the Upside Down in the first place. He just remembers the metal and the screams and the weight of a dead boy’s body in his shaking arms.

He turns, reaching for the doorknob and stopping short when he catches his reflection in the mirror beside his closet out of the corner of his eye. “This can’t be happening. This is just a dream. This can’t be happening,” he murmurs, watching as the boy in the mirror’s hand moves in time with his own to brush through his, decidedly awful, hair. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

Yanking the door open, he’s down the stairs in a matter of seconds, colliding with the wall as he takes the corner into the kitchen a little too sharply and finds himself on the receiving end of one of his mother’s trademark scowls. He ignores her, a feat made significantly easier by the anxious monster that seems to be clawing at the insides of his chest, trying to get to the newspaper sitting facedown on the countertop just a tiny bit faster.

Steve flips it a little too roughly, ink smearing across his fingertips as he swallows around the lump in his throat.

The Hawkins Post

November 6th, 1983

“Mom, what’s this doing here?” His voice is weaker than it should be, and he’s glad for the fact that his father isn’t there because he knows the other man would have some snide remark to make. Stoicism or bland indifference are the only approved emotions in John Harrington’s world, and his son is currently displaying neither of those two options.

His mother glances over, brow knitted in the kind of look he knows she hates - that she claims causes wrinkles - before giving him an exasperated sigh. “Where else would I put the paper, Steven?” She turns away again, drying her coffee mug and carefully placing it back in the cupboard where it belongs. “Your father had to run to the office, and I’m meeting him there to drive to the airport, so just throw that away when you’re done. We won’t be back until the fifteenth, and by then I don’t think either of us will be particularly interested in reading it.”

The temptation to ask if it was the current paper almost takes control, but he pushes it down because he thinks he already knows the kind of response it’s going to earn him. He drops the paper back onto the counter, already backpedaling out of the room and towards the front door.

It occurs to him as he’s grabbing his car keys from the dish on the entryway table that he’s still wearing the worn, flannel sweatpants and faded t-shirt that he woke up in, but that realization isn’t enough to send him back upstairs to change. He shoves his sneakers onto his bare feet, doesn’t even tie them, before tugging the door open and crossing the threshold into a crisp, mid-autumn morning so far removed from the warmth of spring that he left the day before.

“1983. It can’t be 1983.” His words are soft, spoken only to himself as he clicks the door shut behind him and walks a little too fast down the sidewalk to slide behind the wheel of his BMW. A pile of textbooks are on the passenger seat, and his stomach does another nervous flip.

At first, he doesn’t realize where he’s going. The car is running and he’s pulling out of the driveway, turning onto the main road and pushing the pedal down a little more than is strictly legal. He passes the quarry, breezes past the road that veers off into downtown Hawkins, and it isn’t until he’s zipping beyond the Creel house that it dawns on him - 

He’s on his way to the trailer park.

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The car glides easily to a halt in front of Eddie’s trailer, and he realizes even as he’s throwing it into park and turning the key in the ignition that this is a mistake. For starters, he doesn’t even know for certain that Eddie lives there yet, but more importantly, even if he does, the boy that Steve was in 1983 is not the kind of person that Eddie Munson is going to welcome into his trailer with open arms. Hell, even the Eddie he’d briefly known in 1986 had still seemed wildly hesitant to have him anywhere near the space, and that was after Dustin had seemingly spent hours talking him up and proving he wasn’t the douchebag he’d once been. He didn’t have the benefit of Henderson’s faith in him to help now.

He also didn’t have a reasonable explanation for being there, not even one that he could justify to himself, because there was nothing reasonable about this burning need in the pit of his stomach to see the spark back in those eyes again.

For a moment, Steve’s gaze flickers towards the trailer across from where the Munsons presumably live, and his stomach twists into a knot. It’s more than two years too soon for Max Mayfield and her mother to live there; it’s a late autumn day in 1985 when he helps her carry a box into the tiny bedroom in the back and he reaches out to flick one of her braids in a lame attempt to get her to crack a smile. She doesn’t, and he can’t blame her because even though her stepbrother was an asshole he still knows none of this can be easy for her.

He wonders, now, if Eddie had been watching them that day, and if he had been, what had he thought about King Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington stepping foot in a trailer park?

Steve shakes the memory away, grabbing his keys and moving to stuff them into the pocket of his sweats as he steps out of the car. The air is still, and it’s cool enough in these early dawn hours that he can see his breath. He shivers, though how much of it is because of the chill and how much is because of what he’s doing is beyond him; he’s not sure he even wants to try to figure it out. Gravel crunches under his feet as he moves closer, drawing in a ragged breath and forcing it out in a slow, steady flow as he stops in front of the trailer door. He doesn’t realize how hard he’s biting his lip until he tastes the blood in his mouth, and his stomach flips at the memory of the metallic taste of someone else’s on his tongue. He grimaces, licking it away, and he tries to school his face into something casual as he finally reaches out to knock.

Minutes pass in silence, and he’s fidgeting, running his tongue along the back of his teeth as he raps his knuckles against the flimsy metal of the screen door once again. There’s someone stirring inside, he can hear the rattling of bottles like they’ve just been accidentally nudged, and the gentle sound of cursing, though whether it’s because the person on the other side has tripped or because they’ve realized who’s standing outside is lost on him.

The door swings open, and his hair is shorter and fluffier than it was yesterday, when Steve’s hands had been tangled in it as he’d clutched the other boy’s body against his chest, but it’s undoubtedly Eddie Munson staring at him from the other side of the screen with a vaguely astonished expression on his face. “It’s seven in the morning on a Sunday,” he says, and it’s not at all the response that Steve has expected. “Looking for a little pre-church buzz?”

Of course it makes sense that’s why Eddie assumes he’s there, even though Steve Harrington has never once bought weed in his life, just benefited from the generosity of his partygoers in his big, empty, parent-free house, because there’s no other explanation for it, is there? It’s what he should have thought of in the first place, and it’s almost a blessing Eddie has supplied it because he can’t exactly say he’s there to stare into a pair of stupidly large doe eyes that have no business set into the face of a metalhead like Munson.

“Something like that,” Steve finds himself saying, though he realizes a second too late that he’s wearing fucking pajamas, his wallet is almost definitely still sitting on the top of his dresser, and the last time he want to church was Christmas Eve, 1978. Eddie is looking at him critically now, the surprise worn off and the suspicion seeming to kick into overdrive as he notices at least part of what has just clicked in Steve’s mind. The other boy’s brows rise, lost under his messy fringe, before he can see them furrow. His gaze moves past Steve, and if he had to guess, he’d say the other is on the lookout for whomever his visitor might have in tow. It doesn’t matter that he’s never been in the habit of getting into fights - all of those come in his future, starting in a few days when he gets his ass neatly handed to him by Jonathan fucking Byers of all people - because he’s sure Eddie has been burned a few too many times in the past. The words are undoubtedly meaningless because Munson has no reason to believe him, but it doesn’t stop him from softly murmuring, “I’m not here to fuck with you, I promise.”

Eddie’s eyes lock onto Steve’s once again, and he seems to shift uncomfortably for a second, looking over his own shoulder before reaching out to flick open the lock on the screen door and tipping his head in silent invitation.

The trailer is almost exactly what he remembers, right down to the mugs sitting on shelves all around the living room, and his mouth twitches up into the smallest half-smile. Everything looks so normal, chaotic and the polar opposite of the Harrington house’s stark, showroom qualities, and now there’s no glowing gash in the ceiling and the world isn’t tumbling in around them. He’s struck by the realization that he’s standing in the exact duplicate of the room he died in the night before, three years in the future, and his heart hammers a little harder in his chest. Tonight, Will Byers is going to go missing and the Upside Down is going to be locked in this day forever, and Steve is here; somewhere he was never meant to be at all.

“You normally buy drugs in your pajamas?”

The question jars Steve from his thoughts, sending his mind reeling back to the present, and he turns to look at the boy who’s boosted himself up onto the kitchen counter and is now staring down at him like he’s a bizarre specimen in a zoo that’s meant to be studied. He guesses, in Eddie’s eyes, he probably is: a stupid, sad jock with enough money to pay problems to disappear; if only it was really that simple. He sighs, and the sound is more tired and broken than it should be coming from someone who’s only meant to be sixteen.

He doesn’t know where to go because he’s not used to being out of place somewhere, the world having always seemed to naturally align itself around him wherever he chose to stand, and god does he feel out of place in Eddie Munson’s trailer with that curious gaze transfixed on him. He finally shuffles into the kitchen to lean against the opposite counter and the space is so small that Eddie’s sock clad toes gently thump against his thigh, swinging legs immediately stilling and drawing back towards the cabinet as if he’s been bitten.

Steve hates this.

The last time they were together, those toes would have kept nudging at him and Eddie’s brow would have been arched in the way that sent sparks down his spine and made him question every single thing he thought he knew about himself. He’s always thought he valued his personal space, but that was before he knew someone so unabashedly prone to just inserting himself into it as if he’s always belonged. He’s King Steve, though, and Eddie is afraid, even if he’d never admit it aloud; Steve can see it in the careful way that he shifts and glances towards the door again, like he’s realizing now that he’s too vulnerable with Steve on one side and the wide world on the other.

He bites the inside of his cheek, worrying at the flesh there, because he thinks it’s the only thing that’s going to keep him from crying.

“I’m not here to buy,” Steve finally admits, holding his hands up with his palms out, as if that might be enough to prove that there’s no reason for that panicked expression he can already see etching itself on the other boy’s features. “I just… I know this is going to sound stupid, but I wanted to apologize.” Even as the words are falling from his lips, he has no idea where he’s going with any of this. He has no idea if it’s going to mean anything or if it’s even going to be believed, but once he starts he can’t seem to stop himself. “I know I’m an asshole, and I say dumb shit that I shouldn’t or I don’t say things when I should, but I don’t wanna be that person anymore.”

Eddie wears an expressionless mask for a face, seeming to watch impassively as Steve rambles, and it isn’t until the words finally stop that he shakes his head. “And so you what... want to commit social suicide by befriending the town freak? Man, that’s bullshit, and you know it.” The tone isn’t inherently cruel, but it still cuts more deeply than the boy speaking those words can possibly know. The conversation at Tina’s Halloween party between Nancy and himself is still almost a year away, but Steve can hear her ragged voice repeating ‘bullshit’ in his ear all the same. Eddie slips off the counter, turning to head towards the living room, and Steve doesn't pause long enough to think about his actions before his hand is reaching out to curl his fingers around the older boy’s wrist.

He feels that same spark ( he’d called it sexual electricity once, walking with Dustin in 1984 on a train track and leaving behind chunks of meat for his pet demogorgon to follow ) but then Eddie is tugging his arm away and he looks like he either wants to punch Steve in his perfect mouth or dart into the woods and never look back. “Get out of here, Harrington.”

And it doesn’t matter how much he wants to argue or reach out and touch Eddie again, to memorize the feeling of his thready pulse under his fingertips because he can’t. He swallows hard, gaze dropping to the peeling linoleum floor, and nods. In a moment, he’s past the point where Eddie stands, and then in a few more he’s back in his BMW with the keys in the ignition.

Steve doesn’t know where he’s going, and he guesses it doesn’t really matter. It’s November 6th, 1983, and he’s missed practice, and there’s nowhere in particular he needs to be until tonight when he saves Will Byers and finds Eleven.

Because somehow he’s going to fix this, even if it fucking kills him.

Chapter Text

It’s probably a good thing that Steve’s reputation in Hawkins is at its most sparkling peak in 1983 because otherwise someone might have questioned why his car has been parked across the street and one house down from the Henderson residence for over an hour now. He’s watched Claudia walk past the window three times, once with a cat in her arms that he can only assume is the infamous Mews, but so far Dustin hasn’t been anywhere in sight.

Maybe it’s better this way; frankly, he knows it’s a little bit unhinged to be stalking a twelve-year-old who he isn’t meant to know, but the desperate desire to appease the worry tearing up his insides demands it. His last glimpse of Dustin had been through the hole in the ceiling, his dirty, tearstained face etched in Steve’s mind, and even though he’s seen the kid smile more than he’s ever seen him frown, there’s nothing he can do to call that grin to mind. It’s all an endless loop of horror and crying, and he just can’t shake it off.

He wants to apologize, but how can he when the shit he’s done - the blood on his hands - hasn’t gotten there yet?

The house’s front door finally opens some indeterminate amount of time later and Steve flinches, sinking lower into the seat of his car and peering over the door to watch Henderson bound towards his bike with the kind of energy that he’s always wished he could bottle and steal for himself.  There’s a fond ache in his chest, but it’s overshadowed by one that threatens to teeter him into the edge of despair.

If everything goes well tonight - if Will Byers never disappears - Steve and Dustin will never have a reason to become friends.

It seems stupid to lament the idea of not befriending someone barely in middle school when Steve is a junior right now (or at least he’s meant to be, never mind the fact that he still feels like he’s nineteen and well beyond high school at this point), but it might be one of the realest fears that he’s ever had. Because as unlikely as it might have been, Dustin had been his first actual friend; how does he prepare himself for the loss of that?

Steve knows the answer doesn’t lie there, nor will he find it following the kid to sit outside the Wheeler house for hours on end, and that he knows will make people suspicious. He’s meant to be pursuing Nancy right now, and he can imagine the looks that Karen Wheeler would throw his way if she caught him lingering on the street in front of her house. He sighs, watching as Dustin bikes up the hill and out of sight, and his gaze shifts to the sweatpants he’s still wearing and he knows it’s time to admit defeat and go home.

At least by now the house will be empty, his mother and father off on their way to Indianapolis to catch their flight. He doesn’t think his mother would have noticed anything amiss in the first place, but at least now he’s sure there isn’t a chance he’ll have to play the part of a well-adjusted teen for the next handful of hours. He’s more than welcome to throw himself onto the couch in their impersonal living room, blank walls pressing down on him like suffocating hands, and fall apart.

________________

The problem with Steve’s big, empty house is that it gives him too much time to think. If Robin were there, she would tell him not to hurt himself and her smile would be so wide, as if she’d made the most clever joke imaginable, that he wouldn’t be able to do anything but laugh even if she was more right than she could possibly know about what thinking was doing to him.

It did hurt.

As a matter of fact, Steve feels shattered.

He isn’t the right person for this, and he wonders who or what entity out there decided that allowing Hawkins, Indiana a do-over with Steve Harrington as its savior was a grand plan. He also wonders, a little more vaguely, if this is actually just Hell and he’s been given a fresh opportunity to play out an even more terrible outcome than before. What could be worse than taking the loneliest, most broken boy in the town and stripping away the only people he’d grown to rely on to keep him stitched together?

Honestly, he couldn’t think of much. He hasn’t believed in God or the concept of Heaven and Hell in years, but he’s already beginning to wonder if maybe that was his first mistake.

He lies on the couch, eyes closed and fingers pinching the bridge of his nose as he tries to use sheer willpower to keep the pinprick headache behind his eyes from forming into a full-fledged migraine. He wants to believe that at least that will be easier now because he’s days away from his first concussion, and if he does things right, he might never have one. If he saves Will, there’ll be no need for Jonathan and Nancy to investigate together, so he’ll never catch them in her bedroom and misread the situation, and -

And what, exactly?

Steve knows that he’s supposed to be calling Nancy today to plan another date. He’s supposed to have a party on Tuesday, and Barb Holland is supposed to disappear, and he’s supposed to cling on to a relationship that in all likelihood would have never worked in the first place. Even now, before Nance’s deep dive into investigative reporting in the face of losing her best friend, he knows that she has a drive and passion that he’s never going to possess. He wants summer trips in an RV with noisy kids and off-the-wall adventures, and she wants her name in a byline and awards on her walls, and there’s nothing wrong with either of those dreams.

There’s nothing to fault her for, and he knows that now, but he isn’t supposed to.

Is it easier to hurt her for both of their sakes, and does he have the capacity to do it in a way that keeps them friends? Because he would rather play all this stupid shit out, concussion and all, the exact same way it had gone the time before if it meant keeping Nancy Wheeler in his life. He has to hope that course correcting himself will be enough - that becoming just Steve Harrington instead of King Steve or ‘The Hair’ a little bit sooner will be enough.

He thinks of Robin, and he wonders what will happen if he turns around in history class on Tuesday morning and says ‘hello’. Will she flinch away like Eddie had done? He feels like he knows the answer, as much as he hates it, and he wonders what it will take to fix that. Steve doesn’t want to live in a world where he isn’t friends with Dustin, but he can't live in one where he doesn’t have Robin Buckley stealing his clothes and invading his personal space as she curls around him like he’s on this Earth for no other reason than to be her pillow on nights when she can’t sleep and the only thing grounding her is the sound of his heartbeat.

On those nights when neither of them can quite shake off the nightmares of what the Russians had done, and no amount of talking to the others can ease the panic because they can never understand.

Steve doesn’t mean to fall asleep on the couch, a throw pillow wrapped in a vice grip against his chest, but he does. He wishes he could say it was dreamless, but it wasn’t.

________________

Mike Wheeler looks at Steve like he has sixteen heads, and like he probably just sprouted horns or something on each of them, when he answers the pounding at the door and is met with frantic rambling about needing to talk to Will. The look might have bothered him a little more if Mike ever liked him in the first place, but he never has, and frankly Steve doesn't have any interest in the bullshit way he's rolling his eyes. "Everyone went home ten minutes ago, weirdo," he says, pulling a face like he's annoyed by that even more than by the intrusion.

He’s already darting back to his car before Mike can shut the door.

“Fuck fuck fuck.” A hand slams against the steering wheel as he twists the key and the engine roars to life again. He’s too late; of course he’s too goddamn late.

Steve has never been clear on the timeline of this night, or of the next few days if he’s being honest, because he’s never needed to be. This was King Steve’s time, and King Steve had never cared about the missing Byers kid because it had been below him. Jonathan and his family had been just a little too weird to be on his radar for anything good, despite the fact that the sophomore had never done anything to him personally and his younger brother had done even less. He's pretty sure he's going to regret all that by the time this is over.

The one thing he does know is where the Byers family lives; despite the very real possibility that he’d sustained some minor permanent brain damage in their living room, it was still hard to forget the place where he’d fought a demogorgon and had the shit beaten out of him by the raging lunatic that had been Billy Hargrove. If he can get to the house, maybe he’ll be able to figure things out from there. Even if it’s not the best option, he can recognize that it’s his only one because he’s entirely alone in this.

He tears through Hawkins, foot too close to the floorboard of his car even for his own comfort, and it’s a minor miracle that the police are nowhere to be found because he knows that even the Harrington name won’t be enough to get him out of the giant speeding ticket they’d slap him with and there’s no time for that anyway. There’s no time for anything but finding Will Byers and keeping the kid safe from whatever monster is about to snatch him and drag him into the Upside Down.

Tires hit gravel, kicking it up as the car briefly skids, and he’s pulling into the darkened driveway of the Byers house with teeth gritted so hard that they chatter over the bumps. It’s dark inside, and for a moment, as he slams the car into park and the headlights wash over the little porch, he thinks he’s too late. His hand is on the door handle, about to pull it open and step out into the chilly autumn air, when there’s a thud on the passenger side and he looks over to see the pale moon-face of a terrified twelve-year-old through the window.

He doesn’t stop to think, just jams the button to unlock the car doors as he’s gesturing wildly and shouting, “Get in. Now!”

To his credit, Byers hesitates for a moment before glancing back over his shoulder and seemingly deciding that getting into a stranger’s car is a better option than whatever it is that lies behind him. Even Steve doesn’t know the answer to that question - to what it is - because he’s never asked what exactly brought Will to the Upside Down, and he isn’t particularly interested in finding out right now. The door swings open, the tiny boy tumbling inside, and he doesn’t even wait for the kid to do anything more than slam it shut behind him before he’s thrown the car into reverse and is gunning it back down the driveway towards the road. He’s still going too fast, the pair jolting around as he hits a particularly nasty little pothole, and his head bounces against the roof when they finally hit the lip of the pavement that indicates he’s reached the road.

“What was that?” Will’s voice is small, as small as the boy is himself, and Steve glances at him out of the corner of his eye as he shifts into drive and heads back into the direction of the town. Now that the boy is sitting beside him, he realizes that he has no idea where to go. He can take him to one of the other nerds’ houses, but how is he supposed to explain himself? The only one of these kids who knows him at all is Mike Wheeler, and that’s only because in 1983 Steve is putting the moves on his older sister.

He knows that his parents are gone, just like he knows that they won’t be coming back on the day they say they’re going to - not even after Steve throws a party and a girl disappears. No, that lecture and the promise of consequences comes over the phone, just like nearly everything else seems to - but how can he justify bringing Will to his house?

Steve’s jaw is tight, and he licks his lips as he adjusts his grip on the steering wheel and lets his gaze briefly flicker in the direction of the passenger’s seat. “I don’t know…. something bad.” It’s hardly an answer, but it’s the only one he has. “Where should I take you?”

There’s silence from the other side of the car, and Steve hazards a longer look over at the kid; he’s shaking, and he can feel his heart break just a little bit.

Even in 1986, he doesn’t really know Will because of all the members of The Party, he’s the only one besides El that Steve has spent the least amount of time with, and he has no idea how to even start to comfort him because that’s never been his strong suit anyway. John and Grace Harrington had not been comforting parents, and so their son had never learned from experience; it took befriending Robin for him to ever get even remotely okay at it, and not for the first time, he misses the girl fiercely. The desire to veer in the direction of her house strikes him like a physical blow to the chest, but he can’t. He’s already turned up unannounced and unwelcome at one person’s house today, and he doesn’t think he can stomach the look of distrust he knows he’ll see on her face if he does that to her.

“My mom works at Melvald’s. She might still be there.”

Steve nods, lifting a hand from the steering wheel to run it through his hair and grimacing when it comes loose far too soon. God, why did he ever think this was a good look? He almost laughs at how stupid it is to be thinking about his hair right now, but despite the brevity it’s also almost a welcome distraction from the gravity of the rest of the day.

He’s really doing this. He’s really back in nineteen-fucking-eighty-three, and he’s really just saved Will Byers from a goddamn monster. He doesn’t even know how to begin to process that, let alone where to go from here… because the realization hits him like he’s just been doused in a bucket of ice water - he has no idea where to find Eleven, and now there’s no reason why the nerd squad ever will.

What the hell was he supposed to do?

Now that there’s distance between them and Will’s house, he slows the car to a more reasonable speed and forces himself to take a few steadying breaths. “Right… Melvald’s.” The words are spoken more to himself than anything, and he remembers now. Joyce Byers has been a fixture at the little area general store for as long as Steve can recall, and when he was a kid she would slip him a piece of chocolate whenever his mother would drag him in with her on ‘unavoidable’ trips. Even though Grace Harrington spent the entire time lamenting the fact that there just wasn’t enough time in her day to drive to 'the city' for something better, Joyce was never unkind.

He wishes those were the kinds of things he’d thought about the first time all of this had happened, instead of laughing the Byers family off as being crazy or poor or whatever other bullshit Tommy H. had been spouting that Steve had gone along with. And that, at his worst points, he had participated in.

There’s a heavy silence in the air between Steve and Will as they drive through downtown, streetlights throwing shadows that leave his shoulders feeling tense, his body teetering on the edge of dipping into fight or flight. What he intends to fight is beyond him because there’s nothing in the shadows, but maybe that’s even more unsettling in the end. The little town is dead quiet, and he thinks his nerves are about to fray to a breaking point as they pull into one of the empty spaces in front of the store and he shuts off the car.

It’s hard to say if going in with Will is going to be better or worse for either of them in the long run, but he’s too worried to second guess himself as he takes the keys out of the ignition and opens the car door. Somehow, he thinks it’s gotten even chillier in the short time that they’ve been driving, and he shivers as he pulls his jacket around himself a little more tightly and tips his head towards the storefront.

Will just nods, but Steve can see that the kid is still shaking as he walks towards the door and gives the handle a tug. It’s locked, but the lights are still on, and Steve can see the top of Joyce’s head from over one of the aisle dividers. He steps up behind the boy, giving a quick knock on the glass that seems excessively loud with the absence of other sounds around them.

Joyce peers around the aisle, her curious expression twisting into something deeper as she catches sight of her youngest child huddled too close to someone she doesn’t immediately recognize but knows is not Jonathan. There wasn’t much distance between her and the door to begin with, but she crosses it in seconds, twisting the lock and opening it to pull her son into her chest.

“Will, what’re you doing here? Where’s Jonathan?”

The woman’s gaze shifts upwards, meeting Steve’s, and her brow creases. He wishes he had a good explanation for her - or any - but he knows that nothing he can say is going to sound believable at all. He hates that, after fighting monsters and Russians, all of this seems almost anticlimactic by comparison.

It’s almost a blessing when Will’s quiet voice breaks through the tension as he murmurs, “No one was home and there was something chasing me in the woods… some kind of monster. He saved me.”

Neither Steve nor Joyce seem to know what to say. He wonders if she’ll believe Will’s story about a monster, if she’ll keep an extra close eye on him over the days coming up or if it’ll all get written off as an overactive imagination and a wild animal. He remembers the stories of Joyce Byers frantically rushing through town looking for her missing boy, not believing him to be dead even after a body was buried, and Jonathan’s haunted face as he hung up posters around the school.

He thinks that if anyone is going to believe their son about monsters being real, it will be Joyce, and he hopes that he’s right.

“I should probably go.” Steve glances back at Will, half the boy’s face still buried against his mom, and he can’t help but be a little bit jealous of this spooked twelve-year-old kid. His own mother has never hugged him like that; he can’t remember the last time she even touched him. “Be careful, Will. Okay?”

A worn half-smile briefly flickers across Steve’s face as he gives an awkward wave goodbye before slipping back into the night. Through the window, he sees Joyce’s eyes linger on him for a long moment before her attention is fully on her son, running her fingers through his hair and looking him over for bumps or bruises.

He drives in silence back to his house, pulling into the driveway and staring at the darkened windows for a long moment before getting out. When he finally wanders into the kitchen, the first time since he rushed out that morning, he’s not especially surprised to see that there’s no note left on the counter, just a neat stack of twenty dollar bills that are expected to tide him over until the elder Harringtons make their grand reappearance. His wallet is still thick with the last batch, but he never bothers to tell them that he doesn’t actually need that much because, if he tries really hard, he can sometimes convince himself that there really is a price tag on love… and that his parents love him a lot.

Steve takes the money, carrying it upstairs with him when he goes to bed and sitting it on his nightstand. When he falls asleep that night, his old baseball bat dug out from the closet and lying on the bed next to him, the stack of bills may be the last thing he sees, but Will Byers is the last person he thinks of.

And he hopes, not for the first time, that none of this was a mistake.

Chapter Text

Gravel crunches under Steve’s feet as he runs, the sound of his own pulse in his ears drowning out the cracks of thunder in the roiling, red sky. Somewhere behind him, he knows that Nancy and Robin are trying to keep up, but he can’t wait for them because there’s a terrible feeling blossoming inside his chest that something is wrong.

The sign for the trailer park is in front of him and even though his legs are pumping harder and faster than he thinks they ever have before, it doesn’t seem to be getting any closer. Someone screams, and he can’t tell if the sound is being ripped from his own lungs or from something outside himself; maybe the world itself is screaming.

He stumbles forward, palms slamming into the hard ground and sending a shockwave through his bones. His chest is on fire, Nancy’s torn shirt sticking to the bites on his sides and shifting to a deeper shade of red as blood starts to flow from the ruined scabs once again. He knows he needs to get up, but he can’t find the energy, and when he turns his face to the side to draw in a breath he realizes that - somehow - he’s already there.

Steve would give anything to force his eyes closed, but he can’t tear them away from the crumpled figures of Dustin and Eddie, the blood on their cheeks still wet and looking too much like tears where it seemed to trickle down from empty sockets.

He wakes up screaming.

The bat is in his hands, but his room is void of life; the only motion comes from his own jerky scrambles to push himself against the headboard, and the only sound is his own ragged breathing.

It takes too long for him to come down, minutes dragging out as his arms grow tired with the tension of holding the bat and his lungs burn from the frantic gasps he’s fighting to even out. The clock radio next to his bed says that it’s six-forty-five, and a vaguely hysterical laugh finally shatters the spell he’s caught himself in because this is when he would have been getting up for school if yesterday had been real.

But it couldn’t have been. There aren’t fixes for things like this; there’s no rewinding a life, no matter how poorly lived.

Still, he gets up anyway and moves down the stairs a little too quickly to get the paper from where he knows it will be resting at a jaunty angle against the house: their paperboy’s aim is a little too tried and true.

Except, it’s not.

It’s a few steps down the sidewalk, half in the grass that glistens with frost. He pads barefoot across the concrete, an involuntary shiver running up his spine, and plucks it up. Biting his lip, he flinches when a fresh scab easily opens beneath his teeth, and unfolds the paper to look at the front page.

The Hawkins Post
November 7th, 1983

Somehow, Steve manages to make it back inside before he leans against the wall and collapses down to sit with his legs stretched out in front of him. His hand is shaking as he drops the paper on the floor next to him, running his fingers through his hair and down over his face. “Jesus Christ. It’s real.”

The house is silent around him, the only sound another fresh bout of panicked giggles that leave his chest aching and his stomach sour. “It’s fucking real.”

________________

School is the last place Steve wants to be, but he doesn’t really have a choice. He doesn’t know when he’ll make it back to his own time, or even if he ever will, and so he has to go through the motions. The books are in the backseat of his car, scattered across the bench, because last night he’d flung them back there to free the seat up for Will Byers in case he found him.

And he had found him; he’d saved him from being dragged to Hawkins’ own, personal hell.

He’s got the back door open, bending to scoop them up and into his chest when he hears someone clear their throat behind him. In no way does Steve remember the intricacies of this day; at some point this morning, he’s supposed to sneak a note in Nancy’s locker, and later he’s going to go over to her house to ‘study’. The rest is lost in the haze where all unimportant things go to die in his mind because at this point there was little else he’d really cared about but swimming and the idea of Nancy Wheeler as his girlfriend.

All of that mental rambling aside, he can say with absolute honesty that he has no idea who’s waiting for him. Steve turns, arms laden with texts, and stiffens as if he’s expecting a blow.

Jonathan Byers is standing a few feet away, hands in the pockets of his jean jacket, and he’s looking at Steve with an expression he can’t even begin to decipher. He shifts the books, and when it doesn’t seem like the other boy is intending to come at him, he side steps towards where his backpack sits atop the trunk of his car. “Hey man, what’s up?” he asks, hoping that his voice sounds more casual than it seems like it does.

“Why were you at my house last night?”

It doesn’t exactly surprise him that this is where the conversation has already gone; he can’t imagine another reason in the world, at least not right now, why Jonathan might have been looking for him on what should have been some random Monday morning. He’s a year below Steve, in the same grade as Nancy and Robin, so they don’t share any classes, and they sure as hell don’t run in the same crowd. In another life, his last life, they hadn’t spoken today.

The ripples are already starting, and he has no idea how big the tidal wave is eventually going to be from this.

“I saw your brother crash his bike by the road… just wanted to make sure he was okay,” he replies, offering a little shrug. “He seemed freaked out and there wasn’t anyone home, so I brought him to your mom.”

The lie is near enough to the truth, but it’s also far too translucent. He’s never gotten close with the Byers family, especially not since they left after the mall fire and Hopper’s death, but he knows that Will and Jonathan are as much best friends as they are siblings - which means he also knows that if Will was going to tell anyone the truth about what he thought he saw outside, it’d be the boy staring him down.

“He said he saw a monster,” Jonathan says, hesitating for a moment before adding, “and that you said it was something bad. Why would you tell him that if he seemed ‘freaked out’ already?”

The sour feeling in his stomach is back in full force, and he sincerely wishes he could just turn around and go back home. He can’t keep turning the idea over in his mind that it wasn’t meant to be him here. If it had been Nancy, she would have known what to do immediately because she’s studied every minute of these next few days, and she would be able to anticipate the way the world is shifting around him. He isn’t cut out for this, and this moment with Jonathan is indication enough.

“Jesus, I don’t know what to tell you, man. It was probably a bear or something. Last I checked, that was something bad.” There’s annoyance in his voice, but he knows that it’s forced, and for the life of him, he can’t decide if he wants Jonathan to see through it.

He wants to tell someone about what’s happening; he wants help, even if it comes in the form of one of the only people in his age group he knows the least. 

“I’ve gotta get to English. Tell your brother not to run around in the woods at night.”

“Because of the bears,” Jonathan comments dryly, tossing Steve another one of his indecipherable looks.

“Yeah… or mountain lions. Whatever.” Steve hoists his backpack onto his shoulder, stepping past the other boy as he makes a beeline for the school.

Even if he was planning to slip a note into Nancy’s locker this morning, he thinks it’s probably too late now. He’ll catch her at lunch, see if she and Barb want to sit with him even if he knows it’ll annoy Tommy H. and Carol even more than it would have after the party he’s supposed to have tomorrow.

He already doesn’t care; as far as he’s concerned, today marks the beginning of the end for King Steve.

________________

There’s a bang against a locker down the hallway to his left, and Steve pauses mid step as something seems to shake loose in his memory and a chill runs down his spine. If he rounds the corner, he’s going to see three of his teammates from the basketball team surrounding a boy with eyes like a deer in headlights, with soft features doing their best to school themselves into something more severe, and with those dorky dragon books about to be snatched from his arms.

Three years ago, Steve walked past Eddie Munson being harassed by Jason Carver and his friends, and he’d done nothing but nod his head to the trio as he, Tommy H., and Carol had headed for lunch.

He doesn’t know where Tommy and Carol are. They had met outside Carol’s class the last time around, but Steve didn’t head over there today and wonders if they’re still waiting. He hopes, in a way, that they are even though it’ll expedite his fall from grace if they were to bear witness to this moment.

Steve turns down the hall, and it feels like there’s a knot forming inside his chest as he glances past Jason’s blonde head to meet Eddie’s eye. That same nervous edge that he saw in the boathouse is there in the other boy’s gaze, the same mix of defiance that refuses to give in completely to the wild fear raging under his skin. Suddenly, his mouth feels far too dry, and his pulse kicks up; he knows he needs to do this, but he can’t pretend anymore that he’s not a little bit afraid.

He’s about to destroy his whole damn life.

“Carver,” Steve says, his gaze shifting from Eddie and back to the kids who are supposed to vaguely be his friends. “What’s going on?”

The way the kid laughs makes him tighten his jaw, and maybe it’s because he knows that in March of 1986 Jason is going to literally try to hunt Munson down, but he swears he can see something dark in the eyes that stare back at him.

“Harrington! We were just having some fun with The Freak. Right, Munson?” One of the other boys reaches out to snatch one of Eddie’s books from his hands, flipping it open like he was actually going to read it. He sees the way the boy against the lockers flinches just a little when he hears the sound of paper being torn, and Steve’s gaze hardens as his arms cross loosely over his chest.

“Seriously? Do you think the three of you knocking him against lockers and messing with his shit makes you look cool?”

For a long moment, the hallway is silent as four sets of eyes stare at him incredulously. It’s as if they can all tell this moment has gone differently in the past - as if this, more than saving Will Byers, is what’s going to throw the entire world for a loop.

He closes the distance between them, taking the book and the ruined pages from the boy who was holding them before gesturing for them to go. Jason doesn’t, though, planting his feet with squared off shoulders and furrowed brows, lips twisting into a sneer. Absently, Steve thinks Billy Hargrove would have been proud were he here to see it. “Hope your boyfriend’s worth it, Harrington. No one’s gonna be bowing to King Steve when they find out you’re out here defending freaks and faggots.”

“Guess they were bound to find out King Steve was bullshit eventually,” he remarks with more surety than he thinks he’s actually feeling. He knows he won’t be able to move Jason, but his friends are another story and so Steve doesn’t hesitate to shove past them, dropping a hand on Eddie’s shoulder and nudging him along the line of lockers until they’re through a set of double doors and out in the open air of the parking lot in front of Hawkins High.

The other boy drops his books on one of the benches, doubling over with his palms braced on his thighs and seeming to take a minute to just breathe. Steve glances away from him to the book he’d taken from Jason’s crony, opening it to where the pages were pulled out and frowning deeply. It was well and truly beyond repair, and a fresh wave of disdain washes over him - for himself and the person he’d been once. This had been worse before; most of Eddie’s books had ended up wrecked, and he wonders if he was ever able to replace them. Steve can throw money at his problems without blinking, but he knows the same isn’t the case for the boy who’s righting himself now and staring in his direction with - contempt ?

“Thanks. They’re never going to leave me the fuck alone now because of you.” There’s venom in his voice, but a hint of fear too, as if he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop and for this to turn around on him.

For his ‘savior’ to become the next person to try to victimize him.

“I’m sorry. I was just trying to help.”

Eddie snatches the book from his hand, running his fingers over the binding. For a moment, the mask slips, and Steve can tell how much this hurts him. He knows that he didn’t make it worse, but there’s no way for Eddie to know what would have happened if he hadn’t stepped in. One of the pages is still in his hand, and he shifts it behind his back to tuck it under his shirt, into the waistband of his jeans where the other boy won’t see it. He has no idea if it’ll be enough for someone at a bookstore to figure out which one it came from, but it’s better than nothing. He can’t fix everything, but maybe he can do this one thing.

Assuming he would even accept it in the end.

“Well stop. We’re not friends, Harrington.” He turns to grab the rest of his books from the bench before casting a long look in Steve's direction. “We’ve never going to be friends.”

This time it’s Eddie that walks away, shuffling off towards the football field and the picnic table that Steve knows is in the woods over on the other side. As much as he wants to follow, he doesn’t; instead, he runs a hand through his hair before heading back into the school.

Word has traveled quickly, and he can feel the eyes on him as he walks through the cafeteria towards where Nancy and Barb Holland are sitting at a table in the corner. The former looks up at him with a curious expression, the latter barely-contained hostility. Steve forces a lopsided smile onto his face as he tips his head towards the hallway and asks, “Hey Nance, can I talk to you for a sec?”

She nods, confusion flickering across her features, though she doesn’t hesitate to slide from her seat and fall into step beside him. The hallway he’d left a few short moments before was empty, no evidence at all of what had happened there, and he leans against what might have been the same locker that Eddie had been shoved into. His head tips back to rest against the metal and he closes his eyes for a second as he tries to wrap his mind around what he’s going to say.

He’s never been good at breakups, even when he and the girl haven’t really started, and he knows this is going to be worse because he doesn’t want to burn their bridge. If anything, he wants to reinforce the foundations and make it into something better than it ever could have been after the disaster they’d turned out to be. He wishes he could tell her the real reason, but he’s not even sure about all of them anymore. Yeah, one is definitely the fact that their life trajectories will never be the same, but he knows that’s not the singular cause.

That there’s one taking shape inside his heart and in the back of his mind; one that looks a lot like a weird, messy haired boy with dark eyes.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call you yesterday,” Steve says, finally turning his attention fully back to the girl in front of him. Her smile is so easy and trusting, and he’s forgotten about this softness. The Nancy Wheeler standing in front of him has never shot a gun or fought off demobats trying to tear him apart in front of their eyes. She’s sweet and driven and so innocent that it makes his heart ache even more for what he’s doing.

“It’s okay! I have a huge chemistry exam this week, so I really needed time to study anyway.” She’s looking up at him, and he thinks he’s also forgotten about how easily she can read him. They don’t even know each other that well yet, but she can already read him like a book she’s studied forwards and back for years. “It’s also okay if you don’t want to.”

“It’s not…” Steve sighs, biting the inside of his cheek to give his torn lip a break. “I’m not a very good person, Nancy. I don’t think I’ve ever been, but no one’s ever cared enough to tell me.” Except her, at Tina’s party next year, even if she does it in the worst possible way.

She laughs, but it’s not cruel and despite the state he’s in, he knows that. “I think you’re being a little melodramatic. You aren’t a bad person, Steve. Maybe a little careless sometimes, but that doesn’t make you inherently bad.”

Nancy reaches out, resting a hand on his arm with a gentle touch. “I’m gonna go back. I’ll see you around, okay.” He doesn’t know what to do except nod stupidly, but as she breaks contact and the warmth of her skin against his fades, he can feel something inside him crack. He doesn’t have Dustin and Robin, he’s pretty sure Eddie actively hates him now, and Nancy is about to walk out of his life and he can’t do this alone.

He can’t be alone.

“Nance, wait.”

She pauses, turning to look at him with that same calm, but curious expression she wears so well.

“I don’t actually like Tommy H. and Carol. Honestly, I don’t actually like any of my friends, and if any of them really knew me, I don’t think they’d like me either. They probably already don’t, but I have a big house and parents that are always gone. Maybe you and Barb won’t really think I’m a good friend either, but can we try?” He runs a hand through his hair, hoping she doesn’t catch on to what he’s just noticed; it’s shaking. “If you guys wanted to come over this weekend, maybe we could… I don’t know… do homework and watch a movie? My parents’ pool is heated, so you could bring your little brother and his friends if they wanna use it.”

He shouldn’t offer the pool, and he knows that, but there’s a desperation in him that says it’ll be fine. He knows what’s out there in the dark now; he knows to watch out for blood and never leave anyone alone.

Nancy has watched him in silence, her expression unchanging until the very end - and then she smiles, and it’s so much brighter and more open than any of the other smiles he thinks she’s ever given him, even if there is still a flicker of surprise evident in it.

“I told you you’re not a bad person.” She steps back towards him, her hand on his shoulder as she shifts onto her toes to press a light kiss to his cheek. It’s over quickly, and he can’t pretend that he doesn’t feel like at least a tiny weight has lifted. “I’ll ask Barb, but I’m sure she’ll say yes. And I’ll… let you know about my brother. They can be kind of overwhelming when they’re all together, and a pool isn’t going to help.”

Steve can’t tell her that he knows - that he hopes it’s the case because he feels adrift with it.

Without them.

“Cool. So, I’ll uh… see you tomorrow.” He doesn’t wait for a response, tossing her a quick wave as he turns away from the hum of the cafeteria she was heading back to and cuts a path towards the parking lot instead. He’s sure he’ll hear about it from someone, but he’s had enough of school for the day.

There are things he needs to do tonight because Eleven is out there somewhere, and superpowers or not, she needs his help.

Chapter Text

There’s a little store in Hawkins that sells nerd shit, and before Dustin Henderson and his friends had invaded Steve’s life, he never would have been caught dead inside.

A handful of cars are parked in a neat row along the stretch of road downtown where it’s located, but if he had to guess, he’s probably about to be their only customer. It’s not even one o’clock in the afternoon, and unless someone exceedingly lame is playing hooky right now, the place’s typical clientele are all still in school.

It’s where Steve should be, or if not there, then in the forest between his house and Hawkins Lab scouring for any sign of a runaway preteen. Instead, he’s sitting behind the wheel of his BMW, carefully flattening the page that he’d pulled from his jeans when he’d made it to the student parking lot outside Hawkins High fifteen minutes earlier. This trip shouldn’t have been made into a priority; in the grand scheme of keeping the town safe, replacing a destroyed Dungeons & Dragons book doesn’t fall anywhere on a list of tasks that will help accomplish it, and yet he’s there all the same, wasting daylight on a boy who told Steve they would never be friends.

He slips out of the car, crossing the sidewalk to pull the door open and trying to bite back the snort of laughter at just how right he was. The only other person there is the clerk, a man who looks like he might be in his mid-twenties and near bored to tears. He has a sprawling array of papers lined up on the counter in front of him, tapping the eraser of his pencil against the tip of his nose as he glances up at the chime of the doorbell.

Steve doesn’t recognize him, and if he’s lucky, maybe the guy won’t know who he is either because he’s already tired of being King Steve; he doesn’t understand how he managed to survive it the first time around.

There isn’t a point in wandering. He might know where the books are, assuming not much changes in the span of two years, but he’s also able to admit that he’s totally out of his depth. His gaze sweeps over the papers - a map of some kind - as he steps to the counter and holds out the tattered page. “Hey man. I was wondering if you could help me figure out which book this came from?”

The guy quirks a brow, gaze sliding from Steve’s face, to the paper, and back again. He tries to will one of his more charming smiles, though he’s pretty sure it falls flat if the expression on the other’s face is any real indication. He takes the paper, though, turning it over in his hands. “The hell did you do to the rest of it?”

“A friend had his stuff wrecked… you know how people can be,” he says, as if in 1983 he wasn’t one of those people who might do something like that, as if he’s always been the defender of nerds. “I just wanted to try to replace it.”

Even if it’s a largely honest answer, the guy still looks skeptical and Steve tries not to breathe out a frustrated sigh. Does he need to start wearing a sign that says ‘Reformed Douchebag’ on it? Even three years from now, it still seems too far out of the realm of possibility for most people to grasp. For a moment, he’s considering just going to grab an armful of the manuals from the shelf and slapping down his father’s AmEx card, even if there’s no guarantee the right one would even be in there. He doesn’t have time to search every page of every book, not if he’s going to try to find Eleven.

The problem is Eddie.

He didn’t need to be the guy’s best friend back in 1986 to know that his appreciation of the ol’ “Harrington Fix” would be essentially nonexistent. It was going to be a minor miracle to get him to accept Steve’s apparent charity in the form of one book; if he showed up at the trailer park with an entire box of guides, they were probably going to find their way into the nearest lake rather than on someone’s bookshelf.

“Please,” Steve says, his tone softer and considerably less self-assured. “This is really important.”

The clerk looks down at the page again, and though his expression never quite shifts to anything friendly, Steve is at least vaguely encouraged by the fact that he slides from his chair to round the counter. He strides towards the back, looking as precisely in his element as Steve used to think he did on the basketball court, and he wonders what happens that makes the guy leave in the time between this moment and his visits with the little gremlins in the years to come. Hopefully it’s something good, though it’s hard not to think of the disappearances from the summer of 1985 and wonder.

“We don’t have the exact book but,” the guy calls out, glancing back to where Steve is peering around the end of the row before bending to slide a red volume from the shelf, “this is the revision. Should do the trick.” He hands the book to Steve before stepping back into place behind the register and tapping a few buttons.

Steve has spent an absurd amount of money on things here over the time that he’s known Henderson and his friends, but never has he wanted to hug one of the damn books to his chest like a girl with a love note until now. He thinks he’s probably setting himself up for disappointment, that this stupid little gesture is going to backfire completely, but it’s hard to care that much because it’s not as if any reaction that Munson might have could possibly hurt worse than holding the boy’s dead body in his arms.

Behind the counter, dice are lined up in neat little rows, and he gestures towards a set the same smokey shade of red as the guitar pick that he’s seen around Eddie’s neck. His wallet is out, credit card sliding easily from its designated spot as he asks, “Can I get those too?”

________________

It’s a conscious decision to drive to the trailer park this time. The side trip to the hobby store had taken less than twenty minutes in the end, and he thinks that he can spare another few to drop off his prizes. Steve tries to reason with himself that it’ll be easier this way, if he doesn’t have to see the rejection, he can live in the ill-advised belief that the gift was accepted. With everything else that he thinks is going to happen over the course of the next several days, he could use that tiny flame of optimism burning somewhere in his chest.

There are still too many variables that he can’t keep track of and too many things that can go wrong. Saving Will was only one piece of a puzzle that he’s trying to put together without the benefit of a clear picture on the front of the box.

Maybe even without the benefit of having any lights on in the room while trying to feel out the edges to slot them together into something cohesive.

He stops outside Eddie’s trailer for the second time in as many days, but there are no lights on and no cars outside this time. If the other boy left school after his run-in with Jason in the hallway, he hasn’t come home.

Steve tears a sheet of paper from the binder on his passenger’s seat, his messy scrawl filling the page:

Eddie,

I hope this is the right book. The guy at the store said it should be, but he might have just been trying to get rid of me. I know they didn’t take your dice, but these looked like that necklace you wear which seemed kind of cool. I get it if you don’t want to keep this stuff, but please don’t throw it away. Just give it to someone else or something.

 

Your ______,
Steve
(I know you said we aren’t friends, so fill in whatever.)

He slips the paper inside the book, in turn putting that back inside the brown paper bag the store had given him, and leans it against the front door of the trailer. Maybe it’s naive to think that no one will bother it before either Eddie or his uncle gets home, but he has to hope that there’s at least some honesty amongst neighbors.

People would leave a package outside Steve’s place alone, but then again, it’s the Harrington house.

With this one, small thing accomplished, he slides back behind the wheel of his car and veers off towards home to gather his supplies.

________________

In all the years of his life, Steve can’t call up a single memory of his father holding a tool. There’s a metal box of them in the garage, everything neatly stacked and sorted within, and a thick layer of dust betrays how long it's remained there untouched like so many other possessions in the parts of the house where Steve rarely treads.

His old bat from Little League is caught in a vice, a bucket of random nails open at his feet, and he’s regretting the fact that he didn’t bother with any kind of shop class as he tries to hammer through the wood with enough force to make something akin to a viable weapon. He misses the nail bat he acquired from Jonathan, but there’s a very real chance that the younger boy will never have a reason to make one since his brother hasn’t been dragged to the Upside Down.

He wonders what his parents would say were they to come home right now and catch him creating a deadly weapon in the middle of their picture-perfect garage. Would they even notice or would they pull the car into its spot and head immediately into the house like he’s little more than a ghost haunting these walls in this year he’s already lived through once?

Would he just be an echo?

Steve bites his lip as he inspects the nails jutting wildly from the barrel of the baseball bat before plucking a final, large one out of the container and driving it home. It isn’t perfect, but he knows that it’s necessary. He might have prevented Will from being taken, but his interference has done nothing to prevent the Upside Down from bleeding into Hawkins.

Really, all he’s done is manage to strand himself in this mess with no support and no one who will believe him, but he knows there’s nothing else he could have done. Letting history repeat itself exactly as it was written had never been a thought that had crossed his mind.

He loosens the vice, giving the bat an experimental swing and already feeling at least vaguely better prepared as he hears the familiar whistle of air through the field of nails studding its surface. He grabs a flashlight from the shelf, checking the batteries before grabbing a spare and stuffing them both into the backpack waiting beside the bench. Dustin’s little preparation checklist runs through his mind, and with the first aid kit already buried in there with his water bottle, he thinks that this is as ready as he’s ever going to be.

Steve hasn’t gone wandering in the woods alone in years. Not since all of this nonsense with demogorgons started, and even when he’d been with the kids it had still filled him with a sense of unease. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but he realizes as he takes his first step past the line where the concrete edge of his parents’ patio ends and the trees begin that nothing could have actually prepared him.

The forest isn’t especially thick here; it never has been, but the dead underbrush and bare branches makes it seem even more sparse and while it should have been reassuring, the sounds his feet make as his sneakers tread over dead leaves and fallen twigs makes him jumpy. He keeps his grip on the bat loose but ready to swing, his eyes scanning the area ahead and taking in as much detail as he can.

But the problem is that he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

He knows the kids found her in the woods, but he doesn’t know if it was closer to Will’s house or Steve’s or the lab. He just knows they were looking for Will, and they found El, so he’s starting here.

There are other things he doesn’t know: too many things that make him wish he’d done a better job of paying attention the first time around. Nancy knew all of this, and Jonathan, but Steve never asked and now he can’t. There’s no connection to the Hawkins of 1986 that he left behind, and as his mind briefly - and stupidly - shifts to the book on the trailer steps and the boy who should be dead but isn’t, he knows that he can’t pretend that he wants there to be. If he has to do all of this - wander by himself through the woods to find a missing girl, finish high school a second time, be alone because the only bonds he’s ever forged will never have a cause to exist - so that the kids can live a normal life and Eddie can live, it’s worth it.

He can’t pretend that it isn’t, even if it hurts.

The gentle hum of life in the woods around him is the only thing that keeps Steve on the edge of calm as he presses in deeper, pausing occasionally to glance at some broken branches or disturbed earth like it might hold some clue he’s capable of deciphering. There’s no sign of anyone or anything beyond the little bursts of birdsong and the occasional chittering of a squirrel, and he doesn’t really know what he expected. If she’s out here, she’s probably hiding, and he doubts he’s going to find her just leaning casually against a tree trunk.

“Eleven!” Steve’s voice cuts through the quiet of the world around him, and he cringes at the sound. Even though he rarely feels like a true adult, at seventeen he sounds too much like one and for what little he knows about El, he can say with certainty that at this point in her life, adults hadn’t given her much of a reason to trust them. Steve never would have thought he’d wish for the presence of Mike Wheeler, of all goddamn people, but as he steps over a fallen branch, he realizes that’s exactly what he’s feeling.

The two of them had had a connection once, in the life Steve had left behind - and Mike’s whiny, prepubescent voice could never be mistaken for a grown man’s.

“Eleven! I’m here to help!”

The sun slips nearer to the horizon as he presses on, the air taking on an even deeper chill, and Steve shudders as he tugs his backpack off to grab the flashlight. In the distance, he can just make out the line of fence for Hawkins National Lab, and he knows that he either needs to pick a different direction or turn back. Even with the light in his hand, there’s only so much he’s going to be able to do, but he dreads throwing in the towel. He can’t say nothing has gone to plan because that would imply having a plan, but he knows it’d be a lie to say that the day has been anything other than disheartening.

Discouraging.

He doesn’t think he’s cut out for this, but there’s no one else to do it. If he could just convince Nancy or Jonathan -

But he also knows he doesn’t want to put them in danger. It doesn’t matter that, in the time before, they had been the ones to know first. They had been the ones to willingly put themselves in danger while trying to keep him out, and maybe he wants to return the favor. He wonders if that’s really so bad.

“El, please! Come on!”

There’s a scratching in the undergrowth, the space too dark for his flashlight beam to penetrate. Steve grips the bat a little more tightly, ready to drop the light to the ground and swing if he has to as he creeps a little closer. Something growls, low and menacing, and every muscle in his body tenses. And he’s afraid, terrified to his very core, because he’s not ready for this. He has the bat, and he’s done this before, and he’s still not ready for the idea of facing a fucking demogorgon in the forest alone.

He’s never had to do this alone.

Eddie’s voice rings in his ear, saying that there’s ‘no shame in running’, and Steve is supposed to be the hero of this - and every - story, but he can’t. Not right now, and not like this. If he tries to fight a monster in the woods with nothing but a bat, he is going to die and there’ll be no one left now to help El after what he’s done.

So, he runs. Dead leaves crunch underfoot, and he can’t tell if he’s being chased or if the thundering sound around him is just his own pulse in his ears. He jumps over fallen tree limbs and catches his foot on a rock, only saved from falling completely by the tree trunk he steadies himself on. He can see the glow of his parents’ pool ahead, and it fills him with a different kind of dread.

It isn’t safe; even if he gets to his house, it isn’t safe. Steve’s not sure anywhere near here is, but he doesn’t have anywhere else to go unless he’s willing to convince Tommy H. that what happened with Jason was a misunderstanding - that he was actually trying to keep the trio out of trouble when he stopped them from harassing Eddie, not the other way around.

But there’s a book on a doorstep in the trailer park that tells another story, and Steve wants things to be different this time too much to give in to old bad habits. He wants to go to school tomorrow and turn around to talk to Robin in Mrs. Click’s class; he wants to have lunch with Nancy and try to convince Barb he’s not really that bad; he wants Eddie to find the book and realize that this is real… that this is who Steve Harrington actually is.

He wants.

And so, when he reaches the house, he runs inside rather than darting for his car. All the lights are blazing downstairs, and he leaves them that way as he locks the door and shoves a chair under the knob. It’s a false sense of security in the face of floor-to-ceiling windows, but he does it all the same.

Tonight will be largely sleepless; he already knows, and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. Tomorrow - tomorrow, he’ll call Hopper. Somehow, he’ll convince him.

Somehow, Steve will figure this out.

Chapter Text

It turns out, Steve was wrong about the night being sleepless. He sleeps, but it’s hardly restful, and when the alarm goes off entirely too early in the morning he hits snooze.

And then hits it again.

When it goes off a third time, there’s a part of him that wants to skip and just sleep off the exhaustion that seems to be the weight of years finally catching up with him, but he knows that he can’t. Of all the days that he has to be at school for first period, it’s this one: Mrs. Click’s history class, Robin Buckley’s sophomore year.

‘I sat behind you two days a week for a year.’

It’s stupid, in a way, that this feels so important. It’s a free country, and there’s nothing stopping him from just walking up to Robin in the hallway and saying hello, beyond the knowledge that she’d look at him like he was crazy before fleeing - maybe the school; maybe the whole damn country. No matter what she said about the band kids and nerds wanting to be noticed, he’s not entirely sure that’s true. Being noticed by Steve, especially now, means losing the anonymity she lives in. It means being involved in his very public social downfall, and maybe even taking unnecessary blame.

He doesn’t want any of that for her, but the ache in his chest isn’t something he can ignore. It’s only been three days since the last time he saw her, but the sensation of being without her is like having lost a limb in the war; it’s codependent to an extreme, but he doesn’t care. She’s on the other side of the classroom door now, already sitting with her head bent over a book like she can block out the whole world if she tries hard enough.

‘Do you even remember me from that class?’

Steve thinks it’s hard to reconcile the girl he knew from Scoops Ahoy with the one sitting in the seat behind the empty space waiting for him. He sees Tammy Thompson through the window of the door, and she tosses him a wave as she pops her gum. Robin looks up, gaze flicking to Tammy for a second as her cheeks flush, and his heart breaks a little. She looks back down, and she seems so diminished compared to the person who’ll spend the bulk of June 1985 laughing in Steve’s face - and somehow, making him laugh in the process.

He swings the door open, tossing Mrs. Click his most charming smile as he crosses to his seat and slinks into it. Stupidly, he wonders if Robin notices that he doesn’t have a bagel today; he thinks it’ll be one less reason for her to scowl at him when he finally turns around.

The opportunity comes sooner than he’s expected. There’s a knock at the door, and someone from the office gestures for Mrs. Click to step into the hallway for a second. Despite the frown, she does as asked and the room erupts into exactly the kind of chaos she likely feared. Tammy is turning towards Steve to say something, but he spins in his seat before she can even start her sentence, his arm hanging casually on the back of his chair as he finds himself staring at the top of Robin’s head. She’s bent over her book again, and it takes everything in him to school his face into something neutral.

Steve reaches out, tapping a fingertip lightly on the page, just underneath her nose, and it’s almost comical how slowly her gaze trails up from his hand to his face. “Hey, you’re Robin, right?”

Her mouth opens, brow knitting, but all she seems capable of doing is staring, and now he can’t help but grin. He wants so badly to tease her, but he knows that he can’t because this isn’t where they’re at now; they might never get there again, no matter how badly he wants them to.

“Hey, I’m -”

“I know who you are,” she says quickly. “Everyone knows who Steve Harrington is.” Her cheeks are an even deeper shade of pink, and she looks like she wants to melt into the chair she’s sitting in.

“Right. So, I kind of hate to ask but do you think you could help me with this assignment that’s due next week?” Steve’s not surprised to see that she looks irritated, and he can’t really blame her. This is the first time they’ve ever talked, and he’s asking her to do him a favor. The problem is, he doesn’t know how else to do this. He sighs, running a hand through his hair before adding, “I know you probably think I’m an idiot, and I mean you’re not really wrong… I’m a junior in a sophomore class, but people can change… you know?”

His gaze had fallen to the books on her desk as he spoke, but he forces himself to look up and actually meet her eye. She looks like a deer caught in the headlights, and he misses when things were easy. He misses when he could just reach out and flick her hair or pull her into a hug because it’s been weeks since anyone’s touched him and he’s feeling that familiar ache inside.

“I want to change,” he says, his tone soft enough that he’s not even sure she’s heard him over the sounds of the rest of the class talking until he sees her bite her lip and glance skyward for a second.

“I cannot believe I’m saying this, but I’m free on Saturday. At least try to start it, okay? I’m not doing all the work for you. So if that’s what your angle is, you might as well forget about it.”

It’s been days since Steve thinks he’s really smiled, but there’s one tugging at the corners of his lips and it feels wrong somehow - like it’s too premature. So much can happen between now and Saturday, especially since he still needs to find a missing superhero, but still… he feels hope.

It’s something he hasn’t felt in a long time, not since before Vecna. Maybe it’s been even longer than that.

“You got it, Buckley,” he says with a grin, tapping her book one more time as he turns back to face the front of the classroom and the wide-eyed gaze that Tammy Thompson is throwing his way. He wonders what kind of rumors are going to stem from this, and he doesn’t really think he cares. Running late means that he has yet to hear about the fallout from the day before, and it’s just another log to add to the fire. He doesn’t think that it could possibly be any worse.

The bell chimes, and Steve gives Robin a quick wave goodbye before stuffing his binder in his backpack and heading out into the hall beyond. There’s a momentary flicker of relief in his chest at the sight of the empty space around his locker, but it doesn’t last long. He wants to believe he’s just imagining the voice of Tommy behind him, a flashback to the time before when he was popular and trying to date Nancy and the most complicated thing was making sure there was enough beer at his house for the next party.

“What the fuck, Harrington. I was looking everywhere for you yesterday.” Tommy’s irritation drips from his voice like venom, and Steve can feel his stomach sink. From the moment he realized where he was and what he needed to do, the awareness that he was going to make people angry has been sitting like a time bomb inside his chest, and it’s never been comfortable because he hates having people angry with him but this is almost unbearable.

Maybe there’s something in hindsight, in knowing things about himself now that he didn’t back then, because he thinks he knows now why this hurts so much even if it’s the right thing - even if it’s the only thing that he can do. He thinks about Eddie, about the complicated mess of emotions surrounding the other boy, and he knows that this is right.

And even more than that, he knows that this never could have been anything; this feeling in his chest that he didn’t understand before and sees now in startling clarity never could have gone beyond a hopeless wish for things to be different. Even the knowledge of years to come isn’t enough to change this - to fix something inherently broken in them, this hatred for a thing that he knows - knows - lives inside Tommy too.

He wonders if, in another life and another time when the world was kinder and softness wasn’t seen as a crime, he could have loved this boy. Maybe not, but the thought hurts all the same.

Steve hasn’t said anything, and Tommy shoves him a little harder than is probably necessary just to get his attention. “What’s up with you? Jason told me about the shit with Munson yesterday. Didn’t know you had a thing for queers.”

He leans his head against the cool metal of his locker door, licking his lips.

“Just stop, okay. I really don’t wanna do this.”

Steve turns his face just enough to catch Tommy rolling his eyes, and he leans his back against the locker beside Steve’s to stare over at him. Carol hovers at his shoulder, popping her gum and looking at Steve with raised brows.

Tommy is standing too close, and it’s never bothered him before, but now he just feels sick. “Come on, Harrington. Let us use your pool and we’ll forget that ‘bleeding heart’ moment yesterday. You know Carver will do whatever the hell we tell him.”

It feels like the oxygen has been sucked from the room, and this isn’t the first time Steve has been on the verge of a panic attack. He knows how to work through it, at least on some level, but he has no idea if he’ll be able to claw himself into something resembling control anytime soon.

This is it; this is the moment it all comes crashing down. Jason was one thing, but this is Tommy H. This is his best friend since first grade, and his chest is aflame as he forces himself to stare back with a cool detachment that he doesn’t really feel. He wonders if Tommy can see through him; he hopes not. He doesn’t think he’ll have the strength to do this again if it doesn’t work the first time.

“It wasn’t a moment,” Steve says softly, shutting the door to his locker and crossing his arms over his chest. “I’m done, Tommy. I’m tired of pretending that all the shit my dad wants for my life is what I want too, and Jesus Christ do I wish I thought you’d get it. I might be an idiot, but even I’m not dumb enough to think that’ll ever happen.”

“You sure about this, Steve?” There’s a finality to Tommy’s tone that says his next words are what will make or break this moment, and he wonders if he should be thankful he’s been given an out. Even if he can’t take it, even if he doesn’t really want to anymore, it means something all the same. He thinks it means that maybe he wasn’t the only one who felt it once.

“I’m done. Guess it’s time for you guys to crown a new king.”

Tommy’s lips form a thin line, and Steve thinks this might be the first time he’s seen the other boy without some kind of smirk dancing across his freckled face. He shifts his backpack, throwing one last look between Tommy and Carol before stepping past both of them.

“We’re not gonna forget this, Harrington. Your life is over. Do you hear me? Fucking over.”

The words wash over him as he walks away, students parting in front of him like the Red Sea, but he’s too focused on the doors ahead of him that he doesn’t bother looking at any of their faces. He doesn’t notice Eddie Munson’s ducked head peering at him through his curtain of bangs, curiosity etched across his features.

Steve doesn’t stop walking until he gets to the payphone outside, and only then does he allow himself to press a palm against the wall and force in a handful of ragged breaths. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ . He’s gonna kill me. My goddamn dad is gonna kill me,” he mutters, running his free hand through his hair before resting his forehead on the wall too.

“Fuck.”

The bell rings again, and he knows he’s going to be late to his next class, but it doesn’t really matter. It isn’t like he hasn’t done all this before; it isn’t as if he’s going to do better the second time around.

Steve’s hand slips into his pocket, digging out some change and nudging it around in his palm until he finds a quarter to deposit into the phone. He’s known this call was coming since he thought about it last night, but as he asks to speak to Chief Hopper and waits on hold, he knows that even Eddie’s presence here hasn’t prepared him for a conversation with this ghost.

“This is Hopper.” The voice on the other end of the line is gruff, heavy with the annoyance of living, and for a second Steve can only bite his lip as he tries to fight back a fresh wave of ache. “Hello?”

Steve clears his throat, shifting the phone from one ear to the other. “Yeah, uhm. Hi Chief, it’s Steve Harrington.”

“Harrington? Shouldn’t you be at school, kid?” He sounds even more annoyed now, and Steve supposes he can’t really blame him. His parents’ might be respected, but it doesn’t mean they’re liked, and he knows that there’s history there - that his father and the Chief had gone to high school together and hadn’t particularly liked each other much.

“I am. I just… I saw something in the woods outside my place, and I wasn’t really sure who to call. It looked like a kid, but no one I recognized. Shaved head… kinda weird looking.”

It’s not the best description, but the truth is he doesn’t really know what Eleven looks like now. By the time they meet in 1984, she has slicked back hair and looks like she might hang out with Munson’s crowd. He’d heard about the shaved head once, in passing, but not much else.

“You think there’s a missing kid hanging around? We haven’t gotten any reports.”

A frown tugs at Steve’s lips, and he knows he probably should have seen this coming. There isn’t much of a reason for Hopper to believe him when no one has filed a missing persons report - and most people notice missing twelve-year-olds.

He tries not to think about the fact that his own parents wouldn’t.

“Maybe they’re a runaway?” Steve tries to reason. “You know there’s a lot of forests and shit out there. I don’t know… if you get a chance, could you take a look?”

He hears Hopper sigh, and he can imagine the older man running a hand over his scruffy face. He wishes he could see him, but he doesn’t think he could do it without wanting to throw himself into an unwelcome hug. In a life severely lacking in father figures, somehow, this man who seems like he’d get along with no one at all had managed to become exactly that to him. Just like everything else today, this hurts.

Steve wonders if things will ever stop hurting.

“Alright, kid. I’ll check it out when I can.” It’s not as serious of an answer as Steve is hoping for, but he knows it’s better than nothing. It has to be.

He considers leaving, but he knows he can’t get away with doing it two days in a row without his parents’ finding out somehow, not to mention his grades getting worse than they already are. So, he goes through the motions, sitting through algebra and turning his pencil over in his hand as he tries to concentrate on what his teacher is saying. It doesn’t help that he didn’t get it the first time around, though he’d been too embarrassed to ask for help before - not that he knows where he’ll get it to begin with, everyone he’s even trying to befriend is younger than him besides Munson, and the guy fails senior year twice so how much can he really be trusted?

Somehow, he makes it to lunch.

Walking into the cafeteria is like every dream he’s ever had of presenting a project naked. The world seems to stop, all eyes shifting towards the door he’s stepped through, and there’s a part of him that wants to turn and just run. He doesn’t think Robin has ever once had lunch in the cafeteria; maybe he can take a page from her book and find a classroom to hide in.

And then he sees Nancy.

She’s tucked into the same corner she was yesterday, Barb at her side like always, and she waves. She actually waves, gesturing for him to come over, and he swallows around the lump in his throat as he walks through the center of the room. He can watch the ripple form as he passes, people leaning into each other and whispering, and he hates how much this matters. He’s told the kids that it doesn’t, and at nineteen he’s mostly believed it, but now that he’s back here he realizes how much easier it’s said than done.

He’s never felt eyes on him like this before.

Steve slides into the seat across from Barb, forcing a lopsided smile onto his face, though his heart isn’t in it. “Hey guys. So uh… crazy day, right?”

Barb’s gaze shifts from the table beside theirs to meet Steve’s eye, and she offers him a small, half-smile. “I didn’t actually believe Nancy when she told me what you’d said yesterday.” The girl beside her gives an affronted click of her tongue, and she holds up a placating hand. “Okay, so I believed her that you said it, but I didn’t believe you meant it.”

And really, he thinks that’s probably fair. If he was in anyone else’s position, he doubts he would have believed it too. There’s a part of him that’s still not sure he believes it, and he’s living it.

“Maybe you’re not actually an asshole.”

“Thanks, I think?” Steve says with a clipped chuckle, resting his elbow on the table and his chin on his palm. “I probably just ruined my life. There’s no way I’m going to be able to play basketball after this; they’ll keep me on the bench.”

Nancy rolls her eyes, giving him a smile that holds a fondness that he doesn’t really deserve. “I’m pretty sure there’s more to life than basketball. We could always use help with the yearbook if you’re bored.”

Steve snorts out a laugh, and it’s as close to genuine as he thinks he can get right now. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll ever be that bored.”

The rest of lunch passes that way, silly comments about things he could do with all his free time as a social pariah, and Steve should be more bothered about it, but it helps. It actually helps for a time, though it doesn’t last. The period ends, and he’s off to his next class, and he can feel Nicole’s eyes boring into the back of his head from where she sits behind him. He can see Tommy talking quietly to Carol from two rows over.

Steve ducks his head. Just two more classes, and then he can go home. He’s dealt with worse.

A lot worse.

________________

Maybe Steve shouldn’t be drinking.

Really, he knows he shouldn’t be because he should be out looking for Eleven, but as soon as he gets home from school he makes a beeline for his father’s liquor cabinet and grabs the first bottle of vodka he finds.

It’s a Tuesday night, and in another life, he’s on a lounge chair in his backyard watching Nancy Wheeler shotgun a beer, and Barb Holland is about to die. There won’t be a party now, though, because he and Tommy H. are no longer friends, and Steve should not be destroyed over that fact, but there’s a part of him that is.

He’s sitting in the living room, his gaze on the windows overlooking the pool, and he can see the ghost of a scene playing out on the other side. Laughter, blood, splashing. Tommy throwing Carol in the pool and Steve pushing Nancy in. He should have followed Barb inside; he was already a lifeguard then, he knew basic first aid, and maybe he would have seen how bad it was and sent her to the hospital for stitches.

None of this will happen now, but he can’t stop dwelling on what he should have done right the first time. Maybe he and Nancy wouldn’t have fallen apart. (He’s pretty sure they still would have, but maybe.)

The doorbell rings, and his stomach twists. No one is supposed to be here; there isn’t going to be a party tonight. Steve thinks about ignoring it, but the idea of leaving someone outside in the dark when there are monsters in the woods is even less appealing than dealing with whoever might be on the other side. He drags himself upward, and he realizes that despite the fact that he’d fixed a drink early, he’s too sober for this.

He doesn’t even know what this is, but he knows he’s too sober.

There’s another ring, and he sighs as he tugs his sweatshirt down from where it’s ridden up in his lounging, a hand still on the hem as he pulls the door open with the other. For a moment, his mind goes blank, though for the life of him he can’t decide if that’s a pleasant fact or not.

Eddie Munson is staring at him from across the threshold, one hand in his pocket and the other still hovering over the button as he prepares to press it again.

“What’re you doing here?” he asks, his hand on the door in a grip that’s tight enough to turn his knuckles white. He’s not in the mood for a fight, and if the past two times that he’s seen the boy in front of him is any indication, that’s probably what’s coming.

To his credit, Eddie looks at least a little sheepish as he shifts on his feet and stuffs his other hand in the pocket of his shredded jeans. Steve can’t tell for sure in this light, but he thinks he might be blushing, and even the idea of that seems to speed up his heart a tick.

“Can I come in?”

Steve considers saying no for a fraction of a second, but hasn’t he wanted this? He’s wanted so badly to talk to Eddie, and now that he’s here, Steve is too nervous to know where to start. He realizes he’s waited too long as he sees the other boy’s face start to fall. “Oh… yeah.” He steps back, gesturing towards the living room with a quick wave.

Eddie brushes past Steve, their shoulders grazing, and he draws in a sharp breath. The door clicks shut, and he turns to watch as the other boy’s gaze moves around the room, undoubtedly taking in the sanitized quality the place possesses. It’s nothing like the cluttered home that Eddie lives in - cluttered, but full of the kind of life that the Harrington home will never possess.

“I uh… I found the book… and the dice.”

Steve nods, sinking tiredly back into the spot on the couch where he’d been planted since he’d gotten home earlier. He doesn’t ask if Eddie wants to join him, but it doesn’t seem necessary because he’s doing it immediately. And despite the fact that there’s a loveseat and matching armchair in the room, not to mention the empty spaces further down the couch, Eddie places himself directly next to Steve. He’s sitting sideways, leg folded up with his calf pressed against Steve’s thigh, and he’s looking at him with such open interest that Steve is at a total loss for what to say.

“You didn’t have to do that. I know I said some shit, but it wasn’t actually your fault.”

“I know,” Steve murmurs, clearing his throat and finally looking up to meet Eddie’s eyes. He regrets it immediately because once he starts staring into them, he can’t stop. “But I wanted to.”

Eddie is the one to finally break eye contact, glancing down at his ringed hands for a moment as he spun one absently on his finger. “When you showed up at my house I didn’t get it. Honestly, I still don’t because it makes no sense at all for King Steve to want to hang out with me, but…” he trails off, gesturing wildly at nothing for a moment.

“You were the talk of the school today, you know. Even the drama nerds wouldn’t stop talking about how you’d dumped Tommy.” Steve’s heart clenches, and he wishes that Eddie would have used any other word but that. “And then Robin Buckley told me that you turned around and talked to her for the first time all year, saying you ‘wanted to change’ right beforehand, and I had to wonder if maybe I’m wrong.”

Steve bites his lip, picking absently at the skin around his thumbnail until he feels a hand settle on his to stop it. He stiffens but doesn’t pull away, though Eddie’s doesn’t linger for long after he’s gotten Steve to still. It moves to rest on his own leg, but his fingers are curled around the calf and his rings press into the skin of Steve’s thigh. He’s not sure his brain has the capacity for this.

“Maybe Steve Harrington isn’t actually a bad guy after all.”

Though it’s not the same conversation, it’s near enough that it takes Steve back to the Upside Down, the two of them walking side by side and Eddie leaning into his space even more than he is now. There’s a strangled noise in his chest, and he wants to bite it back but he can’t. His eyes are locked on Eddie’s, lost in a color as rich as dark chocolate, and every warning alarm in his skull is chiming at once, but it’s not enough to stop him from leaning in.

It’s not enough to stop him from tangling his hands in Eddie’s hair and crashing their lips together in a messy, unanticipated kiss.

For a split second, it feels right. The other boy seems ready to melt into him, his own hand shifting to cup Steve’s cheek, and then the moment is gone. Eddie is stiffening, using the point of contact to push Steve away rather than pulling him closer, and after everything else that’s happened today, he thinks this might be the thing that finally breaks him in half.

“Sorry, Harrington. I’m not interested in being your little experiment.

He’s standing before Steve can stop him, and he wants to reach for him but he doesn’t think it’ll help. He wonders, in some small and hysterical way, if this is one thing he can’t fix. If he was never meant to have this. “Eddie, that’s not it at all. Please, wait…”

“I’ll see you around.”

The door shuts with more force than before, and a handful of seconds later, he hears Eddie’s van roar to life. Steve’s glass sits on the coffee table, and he downs the rest of the liquor in it without pausing. He turns it over in his hand, crystal and part of his father’s bar set, and he’s going to regret it eventually but that’s not enough to stop him from caving to the impulse to throw it. He watches it burst, glittering fragments peppering the floor like ice in a winter storm, and he crosses to the wet bar to grab the vodka bottle.

He falls asleep with it on his nightstand, significantly emptier than it had been in the hours before.

When he wakes the next morning, mouth cottony and tasting like something has died in it, it’s to the sound of knocking on his door. For as long as it takes him to drag himself downstairs, he thinks he can convince himself that maybe Eddie has changed his mind, but the reality is far stranger than anything he could have imagined.

It’s seven in the morning on a school day -

And Will and Jonathan Byers are standing on his doorstep.

Chapter Text

There was enough of a chill in the autumn air that Steve thought he could write off the shiver that coursed down his spine as being because of that and not the sight of the Byers brothers standing outside his front door with grave looks on their faces. He didn’t think he could do the same to the sick feeling in his stomach, though, but maybe that was just the hangover. He hoped it was just the hangover, but there was something ominous that seemed to hang there between them. When he’d stopped the demogorgon from taking Will, he’d wanted to believe that the boy’s part in this story was done, but now he thinks that was probably unreasonable optimism.

When does anything ever go the way Steve hopes it will?

“Can we come in?” Jonathan finally asks after a long minute of staring has passed between the three boys, and Steve nods as he drops his hand from the doorframe and steps back. His gaze flickers towards the shattered glass at the base of one wall right around the same time that Jonathan’s also seems to, and he can feel his face start to flush.

“The kitchen’s back there,” he says with a tip of his head. “I have a feeling I’m gonna need coffee for this.” Honestly, it doesn’t matter what they’re there to talk about because he definitely needs coffee after his date with the vodka bottle the night before. He shuts the door behind them, twisting the lock shut out of habit, before following the pair down the hallway.

Like the rest of the house, the kitchen looks vaguely like a showroom, even if it’s the place that sees the most use beyond Steve’s own bedroom. It’s all just neat, an orderliness to the few appliances and containers that actually rest in sight, and he hates it a little. He wishes there were stupid pictures hanging from magnets on the refrigerator like he knows he’d find if he went inside the Byers’ house right now; he thinks of the picture that Will drew of Bob as a superhero and the ones of the kids as their D&D characters, and he wishes that he had something like that. His parents had never hung anything he ever did, not even on the rare occasions he’d actually done okay on a test - back when he did still do okay.

Steve pulls one of the containers closer, opening it and filling the room with the aroma of coffee beans. It’s not quite enough to perk him up, but he thinks that it helps. He slips a new filter into the basket of the coffeemaker, measuring the grounds into it as the Byers brothers lean against the counter. With his back turned, he doesn’t catch the look that passes between them.

When he does finally turn, it’s to boost himself up on the counter beside the coffeemaker, leaning his head back against the cabinet and glancing between the two younger boys. “Alright, so I’m guessing you guys aren’t here at the crack of dawn just to say hi.”

Will looks at Jonathan, his expression pained, and it’s the elder of the two that finally speaks. “Something… ate our dog,” he says, and his younger brother leans into his side. Even if Steve had any idea what he should have been expecting, he knows that it never would have been that. He didn’t even realize they had a dog. Did the demogorgon eat it the first time too?

“Okay,” Steve says slowly, looking between the two of them. “And you think it was the bear?” He still doesn’t know why they’re here but he doubts it’s just because the woods bordering their house are the same ones bordering his, and they’re just being neighborly.

“Why are you lying? You know it wasn’t a bear,” Will finally says, and the look on the boy’s face immediately fills Steve with more guilt than he’d thought possible. Dustin is usually the only one of the little shits to get him to feel this guilty about something. “You saw it too. I know you did.”

The coffee needs to brew faster. Steve needs some kind of distraction because he doesn’t know what to do in the face of this. He doesn’t know what will happen if he tells these two the truth or if anything will happen. Is it even possible to destroy whatever this situation he’s found himself in is? He didn’t realize how afraid he was to return to 1986 until now - hesitant to consider, maybe, but the fear is new.

“I don’t know what I saw,” Steve says carefully, and it’s not totally a lie. He’s heard it was the demogorgon that had taken Will, but the only time he’s ever seen it has been at the Byers’ house with Jonathan and Nancy. It could have been something else that had taken Will, he reasons with himself.

“But you saw something!” Will insists. “You knew something. Otherwise, why were you there? Why were you at my house?”

He realizes the kid fucking has him there. He maybe could have convinced Jonathan that he’d seen Will crash his bike and wanted to check on him, but there’s no way to convince Will of that, and he knows that there’s no way Jonathan will believe him with his brother there declaring that Steve Harrington is full of shit.

“You don’t want to know. It’s better if you don’t,” Steve says, and his tone is so close to pleading that it makes him cringe.

“It. Ate. Our. Dog,” Jonathan says slowly, looking like he wants to cross his arms over his chest were it not for the kid stuck to his hip. He shifts his weight instead, wrapping an arm around Will’s shoulder and glaring at Steve. “We want to know.”

Steve looks at Will now, locking eyes with the kid and desperately wishing they’d gotten a chance to know each other better before. He doesn’t want them involved, but after yesterday he’s never felt more alone in his life, and he doesn’t know how to survive this without someone. Out of their entire group, the duo in front of him never would have been his first pick, and if they knew everything, he hopes they’d understand.

“You guys aren’t gonna believe me anyway, so what the hell,” Steve finally mutters, throwing his hands up a little too dramatically and thumping one against the cabinet. He winces, finally sliding off to cross to the fridge for the container of milk. He grabs two mugs and a glass from one of the cupboards, filling the latter three-quarters of the way with milk, sliding it and a canister of chocolate powder towards Will before turning back to the coffeemaker to get his own shit together. He pours a cup for Jonathan too before finally settling against the counter again.

“They’re doing experiments at the Hawkins Lab, and something happened… they opened some portal or whatever into a weird dimension, like a dark version of Hawkins. I don’t know, I never was really good with the details part,” Steve says, trying to ignore the looks on both their faces as he presses on. He’s looking at Will now, staring into those wide eyes, and he wonders what saying this is going to do. All he wants is to keep this kid - all the kids - safe, and is he ruining it now?

There’s no way to know.

“It wasn’t a bear in the woods. It was some kind of monster, and it’s still out there. So is the girl that accidentally let it out. Even if you guys don’t believe me, you can’t say anything to anyone, especially not your friends,” he says, narrowing his eyes Will’s way. “The last thing I need is to worry about them running around out there with all this shit going on.”

Jonathan is looking at him like he’s insane, and Steve can’t really blame him. He feels like he’s gone off the deep end and he’s forgotten how to swim.

“Where do you think she is?”

Steve’s brows knit as he looks at Will, and there’s no way to hide the way his own eyes go wide in surprise at the boy’s question. Out of all the Party members, he wonders if he should really be surprised by the fact that Will is the one who’d be most likely to believe him. He knows that Mike and Lucas sure as hell wouldn’t. Dustin, well, that kid was always a toss-up.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe the woods, but I haven’t found her yet. I didn’t look yesterday… I should have but…” he trails off, not knowing what to say. From the way Jonathan is looking at him, though, he has a feeling the other boy can piece together why Steve wasn’t hunting for missing phantom children. Jonathan undoubtedly has heard all about what happened with Tommy in the hallway yesterday.

Steve takes a sip of his coffee and tries to ignore the way his heart seems to stutter as he thinks about his former best friend.

“I want to help.”

He glances over the top of his mug, watching as Will’s gaze drops from his face to where he’s holding the glass of chocolate milk between his small hands. Steve’s expression is soft as he nods, his attention shifting towards Jonathan. The elder Byers has been silent, just watching Steve as if he might be able to see through this story to the other side - to see the point of this cruel trick he probably thinks Steve is trying to play. He wishes he could know what Jonathan is thinking, and isn’t that a trip? Even when the other boy was breaking him and Nancy apart, he’s never wanted a window into the guy’s mind before.

Jonathan nods, and Steve breathes out a soft sigh.

“Okay. Go home and get some stuff together… flashlights in case we’re out late. If you guys have a baseball bat or something grab that, anything you can use as a weapon. I know it sounds stupid but we’ve gotta be safe.” Steve tips his head upwards, in the direction of his room, as he adds, “I’m gonna get dressed. Meet back here when you’re ready.”

Jonathan nods, dumping the remnants of his coffee in the sink before setting the mug inside and heading towards the door. Will, on the other hand, hesitates. His gaze follows his brother as he steps through the kitchen door, and then he’s drifting closer to Steve until he’s right in front of him and looking up with an expression that makes Steve’s anxiety spike. There’s something unsettling in this moment between them, and he realizes he doesn’t want to know what - wants desperately to avoid whatever this boy is about to tell him.

“I think the monster is after me,” Will whispers, tugging his sleeves over his hands like some kind of protective layer. “I can feel it… like there’s something watching all the time.” He hesitates, glancing back towards the door like he’s making sure Jonathan isn’t around to hear before adding, “I don’t think you were supposed to save me.”

Steve sets his coffee aside to pull the kid into his chest, wrapping his arms around him. He’s never hugged Will before, never even wanted to, but now he wants to cling to the kid as if doing so might keep him in some bubble where nothing else can ever touch him again. It’s unreasonable, and impossible, but he wants it all the same.

“Doesn’t matter what I was supposed to do. Nothing’s gonna get you, okay? I won’t let it.”

When Will glances up at him, Steve thinks it’s with a lot more trust than he deserves. They have no history, Will doesn’t know Steve as anyone other than the douchebag who was - albeit briefly - kind of dating Nancy Wheeler, and yet the look is there all the same.

He forces a smile, ruffling the boy’s hair, before finally letting go. “Go on, Jonathan’s waiting. I’ll see you guys soon, okay?”

Steve picks up his coffee cup again as he hears the front door opening, closing again a few moments later, and heads upstairs. He figures he has about twenty minutes before the pair return, and he hopes it’s enough time. Really, the odds are it’s going to be more than enough for what he’s intending to do.

He throws on a pair of jeans and the same green sweatshirt he wears the night he fights the demogorgon in Jonathan’s living room. Maybe it’ll bring him good luck; he hopes so. Checking the clock, he draws in a shaky breath before picking up his coffee mug again and heading back to the kitchen to hop up onto the counter beside where the phone is hanging.

Eddie’s voice answers on the fourth ring.

“Hey, it’s Steve,” he says, hesitantly. “Steve Harrington.”

“Yeah, I know which Steve, thanks.” There’s no avoiding the annoyance in the voice on the other end of the line, and Steve grimaces as he takes another sip of bitter coffee. “What do you want?”

“To apologize. I shouldn’t have done that last night, but it’s not what you think. It’s not an experiment.”

“Harrington, you tasted like liquor, okay… which might be the weirdest thing I’ll say all week,” Eddie mutters, and Steve can’t help but snort out a low laugh. He gets it. Before yesterday, he wouldn’t have been able to say what Eddie had tasted like either. In his case, it was cigarettes and chocolate, a combination way more pleasant than he might have expected.

“That’s why I shouldn’t have done it.”

“Oh? So that’s the only reason? You being the straightest fucking guy in Hawkins has nothing to do with it?”

Steve rolls his eyes, finishing the last of his coffee before reaching over to set the mug in the sink beside Jonathan’s. “I’m not that straight, Eddie. I figured at least that part was obvious, even if the rest didn’t make sense.” He knows that he can’t tell him about what the future holds, about the way they’ll flirt in a motorhome and walk closer together than could ever be deemed necessary,  and in truth, he doesn’t even want to. He doesn’t want Eddie to ever know that they meet for real when the whole town turns against him someday and he dies in a teenager’s arms inside a hell dimension because, if Steve has it his way, it’s never going to happen. He’s going to stop this.

“No one’s ever said anything nice about me without some kind of shitty motive behind it,” Steve finally says, breaking the awkward silence that’s settled on the line in light of his admission. He wishes he could see Eddie’s face, that he could read whatever expression is there now. If he had to guess, there’s surprise etched on his expressive features, but he wonders what else might be there with it. “And I maybe overreacted a little.”

“A little? You kissed me. You don’t just kiss people who say nice things about you.”

“I know. If it makes you feel any better, I wouldn’t just kiss anyone who says nice things about me. I’ve got standards.”

There’s a laugh from the other side, and he imagines Eddie pulling hair in front of his face, brushing some against his lips. “Am I dead right now? Is Steve Harrington actually flirting with the local freak? What weird universe did I fall into?”

Steve closes his eyes, wishes he didn’t as soon as the vision of a bloodsoaked Hellfire Club t-shirt and shredded flesh plays like a movie against the darkness of his lids. He can hear Eddie’s gentle breathing through the phone, and he tries to focus on that instead. By the time he’d gotten to the older boy’s side in the Upside Down, his chest had been still; his breath was gone.

“What if I am?” he asks, popping his eyes open and trying to shake off the memories of a future he hopes he’ll never see. “I get it… you don’t really know me, and I don’t really know you, but I want to, okay? Isn’t that how these things always start?”

“I wouldn’t really know. There’s not a lot of dating opportunities in Hawkins for… people like me,” Eddie replies, and there’s a heaviness in his voice that Steve thinks he’d do anything to lift.

“I wish I could change everyone’s shitty attitudes, but I can’t,” Steve says softly, running a hand through his hair. “But I’m not like that… at least not anymore. I’m sorry if I was ever like that to you.” He sighs before adding, “If you want me to leave you alone, I will, okay?”

Were it not for the fact that there’s static on the line rather than the tone indicating they’ve been disconnected, Steve might have been certain Eddie had hung up. He sits in silence, twisting the cord around his finger as his gaze shifts to the clock on the microwave. Jonathan and Will are going to be back soon, but he doesn’t want to cut the conversation off - at least not yet.

The minutes stretch, and he’s about to say something when he hears a quiet response. “No. You don’t have to. I just… it’s just weird. If someone told me last week that Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington, Hawkins jock extraordinaire would be calling to ask me out, I’d have asked who sold them the good shit because nothing I’ve got produces hallucinations this ridiculous.” There’s hesitation again before Eddie adds, “That’s what’s happening, right? You’re actually asking me out?”

Steve wants to laugh at the incredulous tone, but he knows there’s no chance that it won’t be taken entirely wrong. “Yeah, Eddie. That’s what I’m asking, if you want to. I know we’ve gotta be like… subtle or whatever, but I want that. Maybe it doesn’t work out, and if that’s the case then no one will ever hear a word about it from me, but… maybe it does, you know? I think it could.”

“Jesus. I don’t know what happened to you, Ha- Steve,” Eddie says, correcting himself and causing Steve’s pulse to kick up a notch. It wasn’t the first time the other boy had said his first name, but this felt different. Important, somehow. “But okay…. we can go on a goddamn date. If you’re fucking with…”

“I’m not. Eddie, I swear.” On Dustin’s mom , he thought, even if it was meaningless. Even if the other boy would never remember holding Steve against the wall of a boathouse with a broken bottle to his throat as the group of them pledged oaths on a woman he’d never have a chance to meet.

The doorbell rings, and Steve bites back a groan. He knew it was never going to be a long conversation, but he’d hoped to have more time, especially once it was clear the other boy wasn’t hanging up on him. “Listen, I’ve gotta go. Can I call you tonight?”

He hears a breathy laugh, can picture the bewildered look in those wide, dark eyes. “Yeah. Sure. I’ve got band practice, but I’ll be home around nine so anytime after that.”

Steve nods, realizing stupidly that the object of his attention can’t actually see him doing this and says, “Cool. Tonight then.”

“Yup.” The other boy pops the ‘p’, and his tone is one filled with too much amusement. “Tonight.”

“Right. Okay.”

“Okay. Christ, okay. I’m hanging up now. Never would have guessed Steve Harrington was such a dork.” He can hear Eddie laughing, and there’s no stopping the blush from creeping across his cheeks. “Bye, Steve.”

The line goes dead, and it’s for the best because there’s another insistent knock at his door. Steve hangs up the phone, running a hand through his hair and grinning as he wanders out into the hall to snag the backpack from where it sits by the foot of the stairs. The nail bat is sticking out from the zippered pocket, and he decides to keep it in there for now as he crosses to the door and pulls it open.

Jonathan and Will are back, each with their own backpacks on; Jonathan carries a baseball bat of his own, sans modifications, and Will is empty-handed, though he’s not really surprised. They look like the least likely rescue party in the history of the world, but he hopes they’ll be enough.

The door shuts at his back, and he tips his head in the direction of the woods behind the house. “We’ve got this, guys. Just stick close, and we’ll be fine.”

They have to be; Steve won’t allow them to be anything else.

Chapter Text

The knowledge that he isn’t alone should be a comfort, but as they push deeper into the forest, Steve can’t shake the feeling that this is a mistake. Will is quiet as he walks by his side, sandwiched between himself and Jonathan, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world right now. In no way does Steve blame him because, the truth is, there are countless other places he’d rather be too.

His confidence in all of this has never been particularly strong, not since the moment he deposited Will in Joyce’s arms and realized that he had no idea what came next, and it only seemed to waver with every passing hour. He wonders how many mistakes he’s made and things he’s changed that he shouldn’t have; he wonders if he’s made everyone’s lives infinitely worse by shifting the balance of his own before its time. If what the younger Byers said is true and something is watching him, has Steve simply delayed the inevitable?

Leaves crunch underfoot, the woods a little too quiet around them, and it’s the worst possible time for his brain to detour into irrelevant territory, but he finds himself thinking of Robin and Eddie all the same. 

He knows that he’s doing this wrong; he’s selfishly drawing them in when he should be using every fragment of his limited knowledge of all the things to come to push them out of the line of fire. Even if there are infinite endings to the culmination of this story, Steve knows that realistically his piece in it will all boil down to one of three outcomes: he’ll find El, help her close the gate, and everything will be fine; he’ll find her and die trying to help her; or he’ll die in these woods today or tomorrow or some other day in the future while he’s searching.

Were it not for Eddie and Robin - and Nancy and Barb, if he’s being honest - his death would be nothing more than a footnote, something skimmed over once and never considered again, and he shouldn’t be trying to build things. He shouldn’t be trying to get his best friend back or trying to piece together his feelings for the boy whose life he couldn’t save, and yet -

If Jonathan and Will’s presence at that moment is any indication, Steve wonders if even his best intentions of keeping them uninvolved are no real guarantee it won’t happen all the same. 

He doesn’t understand time travel, doesn’t even get the hypotheticals and has never read the stories in all the science fiction books the kids keep lying around. He’s never even watched Back to the Future , not since those brief glimpses in the theater after the Russians drugged him, and he’s never wanted to because even the thought of Alex P. Keaton on a screen makes his skin crawl now.

But even if he had, it’s all fake; none of it could have possibly prepared him for whatever it is he’s living through now.

At least he’s finally starting to believe that he’s actually living it, not waiting for the moment when he snaps back to reality and the trailer is in tatters and he’s alive but Eddie isn’t.

“I still don’t understand. How do you know all of this stuff about the lab?” Jonathan asks, breaking through the sea of thoughts that Steve didn’t particularly want to wade in the first place, and he’s simultaneously thankful and wary. He wants the distraction of conversation without the necessity of lying, and it feels like all he’s been doing for the past handful of days is lying - either outright or by omission.

“Believe me, it’s so much better if you don’t know,” he replies, glancing over Will’s head to meet Jonathan’s critical gaze. “I still barely have a clue what the hell is happening; knowing isn’t going to help. I wish I didn’t, but I’m not that lucky.”

The snort of laughter from Jonathan feels so out of place that, for a moment, Steve almost stumbles over himself because he’s too busy staring at the other teen than watching where his feet are placed. His brow furrows, and while he’d love to ask for elaboration with just a look alone, he knows that’s not possible because they don’t know each other. They never have, and he wonders if they ever truly will. “I didn’t realize I was that funny,” he finally remarks, turning his attention back to the bat that swung loosely at his side and the fallen branch that he needs to step over.

“I mostly just can’t believe Steve Harrington doesn’t think he’s lucky,” Jonathan comments dryly, and Steve sighs, pushing a hand through his hair before letting it fall back to his side with a slight shrug.

“My life isn’t as charmed as you think,” Steve says, glancing down at Will for a second and wishing that this conversation could just be between Jonathan and himself, if it needs to be had at all. “I get it… big house, parents always gone. Every time I throw a party, I hear about how great it must be to do whatever I want, but I think I’d kill to have a mom who cares about where I am and what I’m doing like yours probably does.”

The brothers walk in silence, and Steve catches Will stealing a glance at him out of the corner of his eye. He wonders if the kid regrets having come yet, if he’s finally realized that Steve is just about as useless as most people seem to think. He sighs, adding, “I guess I’d rather be a different kind of lucky is all I’m saying.”

“Mom would probably strangle Jonathan if she found out where we were. It was my idea to come, but he’s the oldest,” Will says, toeing at some leaves as they start down the gentle slope in front of them. “Our dad sucks, but we are the good kind of lucky.” It’s such a simple statement of fact, but the way Will says it makes it sound like empathy, and Steve thinks he’d probably hug the kid if it wouldn’t make him look a little bit deranged. He hopes that luck will hold now and that this moment is nothing more than a tiny speed bump in the life that Will and Jonathan deserve, no matter how painfully optimistic the idea seems.

Silence settles over them, though it seems at least a little less oppressive than it had such a short time before. There’s nothing about this situation that’s normal and even in his future-past he’s spent such little time with the duo that it’s hard to judge if this is simply what being in the presence of people like the Byers tends to be. If that’s the case, he thinks he understands now why Nancy was drawn in - why the quiet intensity of Jonathan was a better match than Steve’s tendency to showboat.

Never in his life would he have imagined hoping that Jonathan and Nancy might find their way to each other, but he does; he hopes that all the things that he’s done hasn’t stolen something precious from them in Steve’s desperation to secure such a thing for himself. Because he knows himself well enough to acknowledge, even if only ever to himself, that this is not all about Will Byers.

This has, and always will be, just as much about Eddie Munson’s eyes and smile and life . A life that Steve probably doesn’t deserve a part in but knows that he wants one all the same. He’s always fallen a little too fast and too hard, first for Nancy and then Robin -

And now Eddie.

It takes a physical shake of his head to draw his thoughts back to where they belong, and he gives Jonathan a shrug at the quizzical look shot his way. He doesn’t want to make up an excuse for the way he’s acting and doesn't want to add an unnecessary lie onto the pile of ones far more vital to this whole quest.

(He thinks that Dustin would love to hear him refer to it like that, and he tries not to let that thought take him on another spiral.)

Steve gestures to the right with a tip of his chin. “Maybe this way? We’re almost to the fence, and I don’t think she’d stay this close.” He doesn’t want to say that he’s not entirely convinced she’s still in the forest at all because he needs her to be. If she’s already been found and dragged back into that hell, he’s not sure what he’ll do. He barely knows El, even after three years, but he knows that more than any of the kids, she deserves better. She deserves a life with Hopper and someone who’ll love her like a kid should; he tries not to think about the fact that he wishes he’d had that too, that in some small ways, he and El are a lot more alike than they should be.

Jonathan nods, pushing his hair out of his eyes and peering around with a gaze more cautious than Steve might have expected from someone he wasn’t entirely convinced believed in anything they were doing. He must really trust Will, Steve thinks, and wonders if this is just what it’s like to have a sibling - unbridled, unquestioning trust and love. Selfishly, he almost hopes not because it’s easier not to long for something when it seems like a myth instead of a reality he’s currently staring down from his end of their search line.

They turn, heading deeper into the forest under the soundtrack of bird songs and dry leaves, and there’s a nagging thought in the back of Steve’s mind: something about Benny’s and the diner suddenly closing in November ‘83, and Steve having to find somewhere else to get breakfast on Saturdays when he’s too tired to cook and too lonely to sit at home. It was just something he had accepted, especially after the demogorgon and the realization that there were bigger things to think about than good pancakes, but now he wonders.

Benny’s death had been overshadowed by Will’s false body being found and Barb Holland’s disappearance, but should it have been?

It’s on the other edge of the woods, probably an hour’s worth of walking or more if they continue their slow pace, but it’s a destination.

A goal.

Steve has never been especially good at goals, but he thinks maybe now is the time to start.

The sun filters down through the bare trees, throwing shadows across their faces, and Steve can’t stop glancing at Will’s out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t understand how or why he thinks something is still after him; he knows about what happens in 1984 and Will’s possession, but it doesn’t make sense that he feels any kind of connection. He’s never been taken into the Upside Down, never been infected with the rot that grows there in snaking vines and dusty particles in the air. Steve has saved him from that; it should mean that he’s saved him from all of it.

And he can’t ask how Will knows or beg for elaboration because Jonathan is there, throwing looks his way less frequently than he probably should considering Steve has never given the other boy a reason to trust him, and it will only be so much worse if he tries. Will has trusted him with this, and that trust isn’t something he can break if this is going to work - if he’s going to save himself from going at all of this alone.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Jonathan’s voice catches him off-guard, shaking him a little in the soft, sudden change. There’s a part of him that’s afraid to say yes because in no way does he think he can possibly predict what’s going to come next. Their conversations had always been strained, even after Steve’s popularity shattered under the weight of Billy Hargrove’s pummeling fists, and despite Nancy not hanging in the space between them he hasn’t expected that to get better. He’s never spoken the cruelest of his words to Jonathan, probably never will now, but they’re not friends.

Maybe they will be someday, but they’re not yet.

He glances at Will first, but the kid seems content to just walk between the pair in companionable silence, and so his attention shifts to the elder brother. “Yeah, man. What’s up?”

“What happened to you?”

If either Jonathan or Will notice that Steve’s steps momentarily falter, they keep quiet and he doesn’t think he could possibly find words to express how much he appreciates that fact. Because he needs a minute or twelve or a fucking lifetime to try to figure out how to explain the tilt in the axis of his world without truly explaining anything at all.

But he’s too quiet for too long, and Jonathan doesn’t seem particularly interested in sugarcoating anything when he speaks again. “Last week you were a total dick. I watched you laugh when Andy ‘accidentally’ knocked Mark’s art project off the table in the cafeteria on Friday, and then on Monday you’re defending Eddie Munson from him? And then yesterday with Tommy…”

Steve scrubs a hand over his face before running it through his hair in that familiar nervous tick that’s been present his entire life. He doesn’t want to talk about Tommy, doesn’t even want to think about him because it’s still too raw, but there’s no way for him to say that without saying too much , and somehow he doesn’t think Jonathan will care but he’s not ready for that level of analysis.

“I guess I realized that none of this shit is going to matter by the time next year’s through,” Steve finally replies, a frown tugging at his lips. “Being popular isn’t going to help me figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life or get me into college. If anything, it’ll just make it harder because my grades already suck. I’ve been thinking about it for a while… just finally seemed like the right time.

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to be the person I thought my dad would be proud of, but turns out that guy is kind of an asshole. You’re both a lot braver than I am, you know. I think it would’ve been harder to be who I actually am, but I might have been happier. You nerds probably had the right idea all along.”

Jonathan, for his part, looks a little dumbstruck and Will just smiles. Steve wishes he knew what his own face was doing, but he can’t tell. Maybe he’s a little stunned too; this isn’t the first time he’s ever spoken words like these, though it was only ever to Robin and that feels so much different somehow. He doesn’t know if it’s because it’s Robin or because of everything else he experiences that gets him to that point. This isn’t supposed to be his future yet, but he’s not interested in waiting, not when he has no idea how much time he truly has.

“I know I don’t really deserve a chance to be friends or whatever, but I’m still sorry for anything shitty I probably said… or didn’t stop people from saying. That part seems like my speciality.”

“Kinda feels like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone,” Jonathan murmurs, voice barely audible over the sounds of their footsteps. All Steve can really do is laugh because the other boy has no idea just how accurate that really is.

The conversation lulls again, and after the heaviness that it’s left in his chest, Steve is glad for the reprieve. It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know the answer to whether or not he’s fixed things with Jonathan, not like he did with the immediate flare of warmth in Nancy’s eyes when she looked up at him, because at least it’s a step. At least it’s probably hard to question his sincerity when there’s no one here for him to put on a performance for.

“Let’s head towards Benny’s.” He offers it like a suggestion he’d only just considered, not something that’s been clawing at his consciousness for the better part of forty-five minutes. “If there’s a kid out here, they’re probably hungry right? If not, maybe he’s seen something.”

Jonathan nods, and Will tugs a compass out of the pocket of his jeans, pointing in the same rough direction that Steve thought they’d need to go. He seems pleased when Steve gives him a quick thumbs up and a grin. It isn’t a perfect plan, but nothing about this is or ever will be - not with Steve at the helm, maybe not with anyone . He’s back to hoping that it all works out in the end and needing that to be enough.

________________

When the trio finally break through the line of trees and into the gravel parking lot outside Benny’s, they’re met with the sight of a lone truck sitting in it. The words stenciled on the side make it impossible to mistake for anyone else, and Steve’s stomach sinks when he realizes what this probably means. If Hopper is the only one at the diner in the midmorning of a Wednesday, there’s something wrong. He might not know the details, but he knows what it ultimately boils down to.

Maybe there was never a chance that he could make it through this without a single body left in their wake.

The other two hesitate for a moment, Will’s face uneasy as he tugs at Jonathan’s sleeve. “He’ll tell mom.”

Steve thinks that’s probably true; Hopper will probably try to tell his parents about the fact that he’s skipping school to go for a hike in the woods with a baseball bat struck through with nails, but he doubts they’ll ever get the message. Even if they do, it won’t be the first or last time Steve finds himself on the receiving end of John Harrington’s violent verbal outbursts.

“If you guys wanna hide around back, I’ll talk to him. Maybe he’s just getting coffee or something.” He knows that he doesn’t sound convincing at all, but Jonathan nods and nudges Will towards a spot around the corner, near the back door. For a moment, Steve hesitates before slinging the backpack off and dropping it and the bat to the ground beside Will’s feet. His gaze locks with the younger Byers’ for a second, and he forces a smile. “I’ll be right back.”

He moved along the outside of the building quietly, thoughts briefly slipping to the dumb comments he’d made once about being ‘like a ninja’, back before he’d ever truly known the gravity of what even the tiniest slip of noise might mean. There was a time when he’d wished he could go back to those silly moments before he knew, but now that it’s happened he realizes there’s nothing about that he can possibly change.

There’s silence on the other side of the door, and he knows there shouldn’t be; the air is never this still at Benny’s and he realizes that the usual smell of fried food isn’t lingering the way that it always seems to. Somehow, that thought only serves to make his stomach sink even further.

Steve steps in to a gun pointed in his face, and it’s not the first time this has happened but it never gets easier. “Shit… wait wait wait. Hopper, it’s Steve Harrington,” he stammers, hands shooting up in front of his face as if that might actually help were the gun to discharge. He’s peering through the space between his splayed fingers, watching the look on the older man’s face shift to one of annoyed confusion before he’s lowering the weapon back to his side.

Lowers it, but doesn’t slide it back into its holster.

“Harrington, why aren’t you in school?” Hopper asks, as if that’s the most concerning part of this whole situation and not the slumped body that Steve can see behind where the chief of police stands. He wonders if this is how it happened the first time or if it’s another ripple spreading out from all that he’s already changed.

“The kid I called you about yesterday… have you found them?” he asks in response. Hopper’s hand scrubs over his face, and he seems to hesitate for a moment before shaking his head. STeve’s not surprised, and in a way, he’s not even disappointed. He might have asked for Hopper’s help, but he still wants to be the one to find her because at least he understands - in some small, rough way - what he’s getting himself wrapped up in.

“I figured it was quiet today, so I’d take a look around. Didn’t really plan to stop, but it’s not normal for Benny to close up. I don’t know what I expected to find… not this.”

Steve nods because there’s nothing else he can do. He can see the gun on the table, but it doesn’t mean anything; he’s been to this diner hundreds of times over the years, but he doesn’t know Benny. He can’t know for sure this isn’t a coincidence, no matter how little it feels like one, but he almost hopes it was, if only to alleviate the sense of responsibility that always seems on the verge of drowning him.

There’s a thud from outside, like something heavy has been flung against an immovable force, and Steve curses, already bounding towards the back as he shouts, “Jonathan and Will Byers are out there.”

The door flies open, Steve’s foot catching on the step, and he barely manages to keep himself upright as he stumbles out into the open air.

Jonathan is crumpled against the side of the dumpster, an arm curled around his torso and a pained look on his face. Will hovers over him, wide eyes shifting from his brother to where a small figure is darting towards the trees. The yellow t-shirt is so big that it might as well be a dress on her slight frame, billowing around her knees and standing out in stark contrast to the muted colors of the fall day around her. It’s not hard for him to piece together who it is he’s looking at, even from behind, and even having never seen her exactly like this before.

“Eleven, wait! We’re not gonna hurt you.”

Steve doesn’t expect it to work, doesn’t anticipate that she’ll pause at all, but she stops dead in her tracks and turns to stare with an expression that lingers somewhere between curiosity and fear. Her eyes search his face, and he thinks he knows what she’s doing - comparing his features to everyone she’s ever seen in the hell she’s been kept in all these years and trying to place them, but she can’t. He knows her, but she can’t possibly know him, and that fact puts him even more on edge. He doesn’t know how to convince her that it’s safe: that he’s safe.

“My name’s Steve.” He glances over his shoulder for a second, catches Hopper standing in the doorway he’d just emerged from and is so incredibly thankful that the man doesn’t have his gun raised now. “This is Hopper, and that’s Will and Jonathan. We wanna help.”

She’s still standing in place, her gaze flickering from him to the other three and back again, calculating. He doesn’t know how strong she is; he knows that in 1984 she closes the gate and in ‘85 she loses her powers, but he doesn’t know about this moment now - right around the time when it all begins. He doesn’t doubt she could easily destroy them all, though, and really that’s the last thing he wants.

He has a date.

“I know about the lab. Or… well, sort of. I know they did really bad things to you, and I know they made you do things. Made you open a gate that should have stayed closed.” Steve has no idea what he’s doing, if he’s helping or if somehow he’s making it all worse, but he sinks down to his knees all the same and holds his hands out to his sides. She’s too far away from him to really judge, but he thinks he’s near enough to her height now and the best he can hope is that it makes him less threatening. Not that he thinks he should have been much of a threat in the first place if she flung Jonathan into the side of a dumpster; he doesn’t even have his nail bat on him.

The other three watch in silence, and out of the corner of his eye, Steve sees Hopper holster his handgun, sliding out of the doorway and kneeling in the grass. He’s nodding at Steve, and there’s another wave of relief, even as he’s struck by the vague fear that he probably doesn’t deserve this level of faith that’s being placed in him.

“He’s telling the truth,” Will offers softly, glancing Steve’s way before turning his attention back to Eleven again. “We’ve been trying to find you… there’s a monster; it’s not safe.”

Steve doesn’t know what finally breaks through, if it’s the comment about the monster or the fact that Will is so young and soft, so easy to trust, but all that matters is something does. She moves with hesitance, but she’s moving all the same, drifting silently closer to them on dirty, bare feet. She’s looking towards Will at first, and Steve half-expects her to head to his side, but she doesn’t. Instead, she makes her way to him, pausing when they’re almost near enough to touch and looking at him with knitted brows and an expression older than the twelve-ish years he knows her to be.

“You know. How?” There’s a demand in her tone, and he glances towards Jonathan and Will for a moment. He doesn’t want to tell her; he thinks he’s going to have to.

But he can’t do it here and now, and he hopes that a promise will be enough.

“Let me bring you somewhere safe first,” he replies quietly, his gaze not wavering from her own steady one. “And then I promise I’ll tell you. I’ll figure out how to tell you everything, okay?”

Steve thinks his relief might be a tangible thing when she nods, reaching out to take one of his hands as he clambers back up to his feet. He turns, looking at Hopper with an apologetic half-smile. “Think you could drop us off at my place?”

“Yeah, kid. I’ll drop you off, but we’re not done. I’ve gotta…” Hopper’s words falter for a moment, and Steve knows that he’s thinking about Benny’s body and what, as the police chief, he needs to do. “Once I handle this, I’m coming back, and you sure as hell better be there. All four of you.”

He wants to say no, to tell Hopper that Jonathan and Will can’t be involved in this anymore, but he knows that this is a battle he isn’t going to win. He didn’t need to see what happened to Jonathan to understand there’s no easy method to explain away what caused it, and the best he can hope for is to limit how much they know - how present they are for everything that’s probably still to come. The Byers boys nod, and Steve gives them a solemn smile.

“Sure. We’ll all be there.”

Chapter Text

As he stands in front of his closet with his hands on his hips, Steve realizes he should have asked Will to bring a change of clothes with him when he and Jonathan had run home earlier. Some parents hang on to every item of clothing their children have ever had, but Steve’s have never been those kinds of people, and there isn’t a single thing left from his younger years that won’t leave the little girl sitting on the counter in the hall bathroom looking like she’s swimming in them. He sighs, shutting the door and stepping over to his dresser to grab a worn-in t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants with strings he hopes he can tie tight enough to keep them on her.

The sound of voices carries from the living room downstairs, a low hum of indecipherable words cutting through the silence that typically envelopes the Harrington house, and under better circumstances Steve would have smiled. The only times he hasn’t hated this place has been those lazy afternoons and evenings when the kids have laid claim to his cavernous living room, pillow and blanket forts set up like outposts on a battlefield while movies played in the background with only flickering moments of attention cast their way. Ironically, of everyone who’s ever been a part of those nights, the trio moving about Steve’s space now are the ones who’ve been there the least.

He pauses at the open door to the bathroom, clothes in hand, and El cocks her head as she stares at him through eyes that don’t look like they belong to a twelve-year-old girl. She looks tired and worn, skittish like a caged animal, and he gives her his best reassuring smile as he sets the shirt and pants down on the counter beside her and steps in to open the door to the linen cupboard across from where she’s seated. There’s a neat little stack of washcloths and fluffy towels, and he grabs one of each. The towel he sets atop the toilet seat, but the washcloth stays in hand as he gestures towards the sink.

“I’m just gonna help you clean your face and check out those feet, okay? Then you can finish washing up.” Steve turns the water on, adjusting the taps and watching as she stares at the flow of it without any real interest. He realizes with a vague flicker of anxiety that he has no idea if she’s ever taken a shower or if that’s something that’s handled by people at the lab; he might be a great babysitter, but even he has his limits. Wetting the cloth and wringing it out, Steve dries his hand with a quick swipe on his jeans before reaching out to gently steady her chin, jaw tightening as she flinches a little at his touch. He thinks he’d hug her if she’d let him, but he doubts it’d end well if he tried, and he’s not all that interested in explaining to his parents why there’s a dent in the wall the shape of a person from her flinging him like a ragdoll.

“It’s okay,” he says softly, slowly moving to try again, and there’s still an undercurrent of anxiety in her expression but this time she lets him make contact. Her nose wrinkles as he wipes at the dirt on her forehead, and for a moment she reminds him of what he was like at twelve and how much he sulked when he was told to clean up. In his case, he almost always was clean, but never to the exacting standards of his parents because if they were commenting on his appearance it was probably because someone was coming over and they needed to put on a show. “Don’t worry, I always hated this too.”

“Why?”

“My parents made a big deal out of everything,” Steve says with a shrug, and he has no idea if she understands. By the time he met El, she’d already had experience talking to people beyond the lab, and she was quiet but it wasn’t like this.

“Your papa is not nice. Like mine,” she mumbles, and his brow raises in surprise. He knew that Hopper had taken her in after everything that happened the first time around, but he never realized that she’d had anyone parental in her life before that. Though maybe it wasparental in the loosest sense of the term.

“Yeah, you could say that,” he remarks softly, swiping at another splotch of dirt on her face before tapping the tip of her nose with the washcloth; he’s surprised that it earns him a smile. “Feet now, and then you’re on your own for a few minutes to do the rest.”

Steve wets the cloth again, kneeling on the mat in front of the sink and gently lifting her leg with a palm against the back of her ankle. The truth is that he’s expected her soles to look a lot worse from the days of wandering barefoot in the woods, and he wonders how long she was hiding out at Benny’s before they caught up with her. Even more than that, though, he wonders if she was there when he died, and he finds himself hoping that wasn’t the case. He knows that the Eleven of his own time has seen more than her fair share of death, and there’s a pathetic hope in him that - somehow - he’ll be able to prevent that from happening this time.

“I’m going to put some stuff on these cuts when you’re out of the shower, okay? Not bad, but maybe we should find you some shoes.” He wonders how weird it would be to ask Nancy to take him shopping for a wardrobe for a preteen girl, knows he’s entirely aware of the answer. “I’ll be downstairs with Jonathan and Will. Come down when you’re ready,” he adds, straightening up and setting the cloth down on the edge of the sink.

For a moment she just stares at him, a bewildered expression on her face, and he glances over at the tub. “If I start the water, can you take it from there?” he asks. “I’ll show you how to shut it off… or leave it running for all I care. My parents pay the bills.”

“Then you will tell me how you know?”

Steve breathes out a sigh, looking at her carefully. He wonders if it’s possible to get by without explaining, but somehow he doubts it. Especially not after his promise. He’s not sure all of what Eleven’s powers entail, but the last thing in the world he wants is to face her wrath because she finds out he’s lying to her. He thinks about Dustin and the others, their motto that “friends don’t lie” emblazoned in his mind, and he thinks that he’s going to have to anyway because he doesn’t want to tell Will and Jonathan the truth. Even if they believed him, he has no idea the damage that it might cause, and telling Eleven is risky enough.

Not for the first time, Steve wishes that he knew how and why this had happened and where he can find the rulebook for time travel.

“Okay. Yeah. How about I tell you now?” Steve asks softly, glancing towards the door for a second before reaching out to nudge it shut. A sharp draw of breath stays his hand, and El’s eyes are wide as she shakes her head and tosses a panicked look in the direction of the hall. “Shit… sorry. Open? Can I crack it a little?” He moves the door so there’s still a few inches of space between the panel and the frame, turning his attention back towards her and waiting until she gives a hesitant nod of approval. It’s less than ideal, but he hopes the two boys will be busy enough that no one will try to eavesdrop.

Steve settles in on the floor in front of the tub, patting the spot on the mat beside him and giving her an easy grin as she hops down, opting to sit cross-legged in front of him instead. It’s close enough, at any rate, that talking quietly is still an option so he’ll take it. For several minutes, all he can do is sit in silence as she stares at him expectantly, and he knows that there’s no good way to begin. Even as he starts to speak, he doesn’t know if a single damn thing that’s about to come out of his mouth will make any sense at all.

“So, you have powers, right?” Steve prompts, and her brow knits but she nods like this is quite possibly the stupidest question she’s ever heard. To be fair, they both know she flung Jonathan into a dumpster, so maybe he has to concede that it is. “I sort of do too, I guess? It’s hard to explain, but I know things that might happen in the future because I… well, I’ve lived it before. That’s how I had an idea of where to look for you and how I knew about the lab. I know that there’s a gate, and I know about the monster that got through. It was going to do something bad to the boy downstairs, but I stopped it, and now everything is different.”

“Different how?”

Steve pauses for a second, biting his lip. “A lot of bad things happened when Will disappeared, but they aren’t going to now because he’s safe. But that also means that we’re going to have to find a new way to make the good things happen… like getting rid of the monster and closing the gate. And making friends. You and Will… Mike, Dustin, and Lucas… you’re all supposed to be friends, and we have to fix that too.”

“Friends?”

“Yeah. Like… people you can count on. People who’ll take care of you.”

“We are friends?” 

Her words hit him like a punch to the chest, and for a moment, all Steve can do is look at her with the softest expression that’s ever settled across his features. For the second time in a handful of minutes, he wants to hug her - because he doubts the girl has ever been hugged in her entire life.

“Yeah, El. We’re friends,” he replies, grinning at her. She reaches out, pressing a fingertip into the dimple of his cheek before slowly mirroring the expression on his face and reaching up with her other hand to touch her own.

“You didn’t get to smile much there, did you?” he asks softly, and she shakes her head. “Hey, that’s okay. We’ll make up for it. Now, let’s get that water started. Hopper’s gonna be back soon, and we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to tell him.” Really, Steve needs to figure out what he’s going to tell him because keeping Hopper out of the loop isn’t an option. He knows better than to think that he can take Eleven in, even with his parents gone all the time. Things would have been different in ‘86, and if he’d needed to take in any of the kids then, he would have done it in a heartbeat, but he’s a high school student again. As much as he hates it, unless he ends up back in the future, he’s stuck going through the motions for two goddamn years. Besides, he can’t imagine taking this from Hopper, even if the police chief has no idea what it is he’ll have lost.

Steve stands, twisting the knobs in the tub and setting the shower to run before pointing to them. “Just turn when you’re done. I’ll be downstairs with Will and Jonathan.” She nods, and he heads for the door, pausing with his fingers curled around the handle. “Cracked?” he asks, gesturing towards it with a tip of his head. She nods, and he shoots her a thumbs up before partially shutting it and heading down the stairs, hoping she’ll be able to sort everything out from there.

Jonathan is slumped on the couch with an ice pack on his chest when Steve rounds the corner, Will sitting on the coffee table across from him just staring at his older brother’s face as the former speaks. He’s caught at least part of the conversation on his way in, nose wrinkling as he drops into one of the chairs and leans forward with his elbows on his thighs. “So she was in the dumpster?” If nothing else, he supposes it explains why her feet aren’t more torn up; she’s probably been in there since shortly after Benny died.

“Yeah… I’m not sure if hearing us talking scared her, but all of a sudden she was running. I started to go after her, but you saw how that worked out,” Jonathan says with a vague gesture towards his torso. Steve, for his part, can sympathize considering the number of times he’s found himself in a similar situation since getting involved in the Upside Down. That the aches and pains of years of abuse haven’t followed him into this new life is something like a miracle.

“I hate to say you got off easy, but -” Steve starts, words cut off by the sound of the doorbell chiming. Given the scene they’ve just left at the diner, it feels too soon for Hopper to be there, and Steve hesitates for a moment, looking between the Byers brothers with raised brows before slowly slipping out of the chair and heading for the door. Not for the first time, he curses the fact that there are no windows on or around the solid panel in front of him, but as the door swings inward and his eyes lock with the person on the other side, he realizes that maybe it’s for the best.

Because if he had known that it was Eddie Munson on the other side, he’s not sure he would have answered.

Steve stands in silence, lips parted slightly as his mind turns over all the things that he wants to say and all the things he should, but he’s not given a chance to decide on a course before the other boy starts to speak, “So, I know I shouldn’t just show up unannounced all the time, but you’ve been acting weird for days, and you called me this morning but then didn’t show up for school. I guess I was worried. It’s just like… my luck that I’d score a date with the hottest guy at school only for tragedy to strike.”

There’s a sound from somewhere off to Steve’s left, a gasp of breath that shifts to a tiny choking noise, and his eyes widen as he spins to lock his gaze with Will’s. Jonathan is standing just behind the younger boy, the same indecipherable look that Steve has already begun to know so well etched on his face, and he can feel his stomach sink. He wants to shake his head, to tell them there’s some massive misunderstanding, but he can’t bring himself to do it because he knows what it will mean to the boy on the front step who’s peering over his shoulder at the unexpected duo.

It doesn’t prevent the fear from creeping across his face or stop him from biting his lip to keep from babbling out something stupid. The worst things he’s ever said to Jonathan Byers hasn’t happened yet, never will happen now, but he knows that the other boy has heard shit like that from Steve’s mouth about other people before. He knows almost everyone probably has, and he has no idea how to explain. He can’t even try to justify any of it either because he knows there isn’t any justification for being a homophobic piece of shit with an apparent bisexual streak a mile long.

“Shit. Oh shit. Steve, I’m sorry.” Eddie’s voice is so small behind him, and Steve glances over his shoulder to see a look of utter devastation on his face. He knows the gravity of what’s happened; he knows what it’s like to be the subject of rumors and face the absolute persecution for who he is, and he doesn’t need to say it aloud for Steve to know that he’d never want that for him. It doesn’t matter how awful he’s been in the past.

For a moment, he’s torn, stuck there between asking Eddie to go and stepping aside to let him in, and it’s the latter that wins out in the end. He wonders if he’s going to regret it, letting Eddie join in this awful thing with him three years too soon, but he thinks that maybe it’s too late. The idea of turning him away feels like it will mean so much more now after what’s just been done, that there’s no way he can make the situation feel like it’s about anything but that.

Steve reaches out, his hand finding Eddie’s and giving it a gentle tug. “You didn’t know. Just… come inside, okay?”

He nods, crossing the threshold and nudging the door shut behind him with the toe of his boot. He doesn’t try to pull his hand away despite the fact that Steve knows that it can’t be comfortable given how slick his palms are with nervous sweat.

It’s Jonathan that breaks the silence, his gaze flickering between the pair before a half-smile slips across his face. “Man, I knew you liked him, but I would not have expected this to actually happen. I guess I should say congrats?”

Steve’s eyes are wide, but they’re fixed on the boy beside him now instead of the ones in front of him. There’s a part of him that wants to make some smug remark, but it’s that part of him he killed a long time ago. The King Steve part that took too much pleasure in knowing that he was the subject of a lot of dreams. “Okay, number one, I didn’t realize you two were friends… and number two, I can’t believe you had a crush on me even though I was the world’s biggest asshole,” he mutters, almost in wonder.

Eddie looks like he wants to melt into the floor. “What can I say? I wasn’t lying when I said you’re hot. So uhm… you wanna tell me what’s going on here because I didn’t realize you two were friends either.”

“It’s kind of a new development,” Steve replies, offering the pair a small smile. Before he can say anything else, there’s movement at the top of the stairs, and Eleven glances down at the new arrival with a worried expression. Even though he’s speaking to the room as a whole, Steve’s gaze never leaves hers as he says, “Why don’t we go sit down? I think we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

Chapter Text

I feel like I need to apologize to everyone that's bookmarked this fic so far. Unfortunately, I won't be continuing it as is because school dragged me away and, in the end, I wasn't satisfied with the pacing. I'm hoping to make edits and finish it eventually, but it's hard to say when. Thank you all for the love and support, and hopefully you'll give the updated version a read once it's available.