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Chapter Text

Eddie’s failing gym again.

Everything else is finally back on track. Sure, he’s recycling some of his old essays from previous years, but since they were original Munson works, none of the teachers seem inclined to call him out on it. History hasn’t advanced much year to year and it’s finally clicked that if he writes down his thought process on a math test, the teacher doesn’t just assume he’s cheating when he scrawls out the right answer. Add that to the fact that the new English teacher picked a different and far less shitty set of books for the year—Sci-fi’s not his favorite, but Eddie is more than willing to argue over Vonnegut—and it’d been starting to look like ’86 was gonna be his year.

Only…

Eddie’s failing gym again.

He groans dramatically and throws his head back. There’s a slight smoke discoloration on the paneled ceiling. He’s pretty sure his guidance counselor, Ms. Brooks, smokes between students. He doesn’t blame her.

“All you have to do is attend class,” Ms. Brooks says.

Eddie groans louder.

“You’ve done all the work,” Ms. Brooks consoles. “But only dressing out in two gym classes feels a lot like self-sabotage. Just show up, Eddie. That’s all you have to do. ”

Eddie hates everything about gym class. From the teacher to the locker room, to the forced participation. He’s firmly against running unless being chased and sometimes the gym class smoke under the bleachers is the only reason he survives his PM block of classes. He levels his head. “Give me another option.”

Ms. Brooks pushes through the pile of papers on her desk. “The only other thing that Hawkins High considers acceptable credit is participation on an athletic team.”

“Does D&D count?”

“I think you know it doesn’t, Edward. There’s only a few sports even offered in the spring semester. Track and field or baseball. If you’re interested, I know that the track team is willing to take all who try out, it’s just a matter of finding the right distance for you.”

Ugh. Running. Running is the worst. He can’t imagining joining a team for running. Except…

He perks up for a second. “Wait, is spear throwing part of the whole track and field shtick? Because I could actually get behind spear throwing.”

“Javelin is not offered in this county,” Ms. Brooks answers, killing all of Eddie’s dreams. “There was an unfortunate incident a few years ago. Eddie, I have to remind you that this is all moot if you simply participate in your gym class.”

Eddie folds his arms over his chest. “Fine.”

“I know you want to graduate,” Ms. Brooks says. “I want you to graduate. But you’re on your last strike. No more unexcused gym absences this semester.”

“Yeah, I got it,” Eddie shrugs into his jacket, eyeing the time. “Gym class or running sports. I’ve got it.”

Eddie misses gym the very next day.

He doesn’t even mean to do it. He’d been caught up at lunch plotting a tricky part of his campaign and when the room cleared out, he’d walked himself straight into the library, his head buried in his notes.

He notices when there’s precisely ten minutes left in class, throws his notes into his backpack and blitzes through the hallway, hoping that he can sneak into the locker room and pretend like he was there the whole time.

It does not work. Not even a little bit.

Gareth and Jeff are entirely unsympathetic to his plight.

“Look, I know gym is terrible, but they never even cared if you walked the mile so long as you did it.”

“And now my woes are entirely running based,” Eddie says.

“You could always go for the baseball team,” Jeff puts in. “They’re not so bad. My little brother’s one of the pitchers. Says they mostly just shoot the shit during the game.”

That throws Eddie for a complete loop. Jeff’s little brother, Jordan, is the poster child for high functioning autism. He could and would rattle off statistics of all manner of asinine topics, but baseball has always been his favorite. The kid hordes newspapers to pour over box scores, half the time compiling his own stats. Eddie had figured the jocks on the baseball team would eat someone like him alive.

“And what,” Eddie drawls, “pray tell, is the amount of running required in this baseball venture?”

He asks Wayne if he can borrow his old baseball mitt.

The old man raises and eyebrow at him, but manages to dig it out from the back of his truck without much problem. The glove’s a ratty old thing, the leather soft and peeling. Wayne plucks one of his extra hats from a peg and plops it on Eddie’s head.  “Come on then.”

“I just need the glove,” Eddie says.

“You say you’re trying out for the team?” Wayne prods. “So you can get the gym credit.”

Eddie crosses his arms defensively. “Yeah. Jeff’s little brother says that the pitchers mostly just get to hang out after the game starts.”

“You’re gonna throw to me then. Maybe after that I’ll see if I’m able to lend you the glove for the season.”

“Is this one of those tryouts I’ve been hearing so much about,” Eddie sputters. “Am I being asked to try out for tryouts?”

“Not gonna let you embarrass yourself if I can stop it.”

Eddie bites back his habitual response that he’s immune to embarrassment because Wayne knows that’s not actually true. Just like he knows he’s not getting Wayne’s glove unless he humors him. He could just wait until Wayne leaves for his shift and steal it, but he’s spent the last decade trying to be better than his dad and stealing from the only family that tolerates him feels like a shit move.

He shakes his head and tugs the brim of the baseball cap down before following his uncle to the old field by the trailer park. The place has been overgrown for years, the grass weedy and too high, half the lot nothing but brown dust.

Eddie’s only ever seen people out here letting their dogs have a run so it only just occurs to him that it’s supposed to be a baseball diamond. Wayne points him to the strip of rubber in the middle of the field and trudges to the white pentagon—home base, even Eddie knows this—in front of a weirdly high chain link fence.

“Don’t I need a glove for this?” Eddie protests.

“Only got the one and you’re lucky we’re both left-handed. You said you wanted to pitch. We’re here to see if you can throw.” He pulls a baseball out of the glove that he’d apparently stashed without Eddie noticing and tosses it to Eddie in a soft underhand.

Eddie edges sideways and lets it bounce next to him. The reaction, he realizes, does not bode well for his hopes of athletic success.

Wayne gives a long-suffering sigh. “Pick up the ball and toss it over here. Whatever motion feels natural to you. Start it off slow.”

As much as Eddie appreciates the instruction, he doesn’t like the undercurrent. There’s never been a single facet of his life that came easy to him. The system of movements and points the first year of D&D was nigh incomprehensible. He’d had to actively train his ear when starting on the guitar because the sounds that reverberated in his head were apparently a half note lower than the ones everyone else hears. And the less said about Eddie’s woes in the educational system, the better.

He clutches the scuffed baseball in his hands, thumb trailing over the red seams, catching on one that has started to come undone.

Growing up, he’d never been the kind of kid who went out to play catch. Back before she’d died though, Mom used to take him to the lake and help him find the kind of rocks that you could make skip across the surface of the water. They’d spent hours at it, trying to see who could make the rocks skip the farthest, who could get the most consecutive bounces. Eddie has kept at it on and off through the years. Whenever he needs to get out of his head, he drags himself to the lake and spends an hour or two mindlessly skipping rocks.

He turns the baseball over in his hand. Natural. Okay.

He imagines he’s skipping a rock and he tosses the ball to Wayne. Wayne has to move the glove a little to catch it, but he doesn’t have to move his feet.

“Interesting technique, kid,” he comments as he lobs the ball back.

This time Eddie takes a stab at catching it. It hits the meat of his hand and he has to juggle a little to keep it from hitting the ground. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Wayne shrugs and turns his glove. “Nothing at all. Just an unusual motion.”

They play catch like that until Wayne seems satisfied that Eddie had properly warmed up his arm. Then he drops to one knee in front of home base and says, “Now, let’s see if you can actually manage some speed.”

Eddie has never really tried to throw hard, but he can grasp the basic concept. He steps forward, with his right foot for power, slings his arm sideways on a horizontal plane and sends the ball careening towards Wayne.

It hits the bottom edge of Wayne’s glove and deflects down into the dirt, skipping back into the chain link fence.

Eddie winces as Wayne meanders over to collect it.

“Sorry,” he mumbles. Maybe this was a bad idea after all.

“Don’t worry about it,” Wayne says, giving him a slow looping ball back. This time Eddie catches it easy. “Ball’s got some movement on it.”

“And that’s… good?” Eddie guesses.

“Depends on if you can do it again,” Wayne says and they spend the better part the next hour throwing until Wayne calls the outing on account of his old man knees.

When they get back to the trailer, Wayne presses the glove into Eddie’s chest and tells him good luck.

The first two days of tryouts, Eddie’s sure he’s going to fail and be forced to pick between another senior year or running non-stop.

He can’t seem to do anything right. During batting practice, he swings feebly and doesn’t manage to connect with a single pitch. The coaches take turns hitting balls that bounce through the dirt to him and he’s not sure what’s wrong with the ground, but every bounce seems to carom in a slightly wrong direction, skirting under Wayne’s borrowed glove. He fairs a little better when the ball’s in the air, but he constantly second guesses himself, dancing under the ball until it hits his glove.

It’s a disaster, but Eddie can pretend to be immune to embarrassment to anyone who’s not Wayne so he sticks it out until the last day when the guys trying out for pitcher throw a live batting practice.

Eddie is the third to throw. He hears a couple snickers from behind him as he approaches the mound, Wayne’s borrowed glove and Wayne’s borrowed hat the only armor to protect him.

The catcher seems to get a truly unfair amount of armor. Eddie notes the details absently in case he wants to change up the normal D&D stuff. Leather chest plate. Shin guards that extend all the way from ankle to over the knee. A wire mask that covered the forward half of his head while leaving room for the eyes.

His first opponent is a lefty. Eddie hasn’t actually thrown a ball with someone trying to hit it before and the guy seems way to close to home plate for comfort. But getting to hit some jock with a hard round object sounds likes Eddie’s idea of a good time so he decides not to worry about unfortunate accidents.

The catcher tosses him the ball. Eddie gets a glove up in time to stop it before it hits him in the chest, but the ball deflects down and into the dirt instead. Eddie picks it up to a chorus of laughter. The jock by the plate waggles the bat menacingly.

Eddie considers how badly he actually wants to graduate this year.

Decides he’s come this far already.

He throws.

Eddie’s left handed and so is the batter, his motion a lot more sideways than any of the other pitchers who’ve thrown today. It must look like the ball is on a collision course with hitter because he flinches away. The catcher, not quite ready for it, has to move his glove to Eddie’s right at the last second to make the catch. It bounces off the end of his mitt, but he scrambles upright quickly to stop it from getting too far away.

From his vantage point behind home plate, Coach’s eyebrows raise. “That’s a strike.”

Eddie catches the ball as it’s returned to him with a little more confidence.

Then he does it again.

Coach Dave corners him after the day’s over.

He’d been Eddie’s history teacher freshman year, a class Eddie had passed only because Coach Dave counted his final paper on Incan ritual sacrifices as fulfilling the prompt ‘describe the culture of an ancient civilization.’ Eddie likes him as much as he’s liked any of his teachers.

“Question for you, Munson,” Coach Dave rumbles.

“No guarantee our answers match, but shoot.”

The other kids are filtering back to the locker room to dress out. Only a handful of them bothered to hit the showers the last couple days. Another reason baseball is definitely his most tolerable option. Coach waits for them to pass before asking, “How serious are you about this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Munson, so far as I’ve heard you show up to maybe a quarter of your Phys Ed classes. If you’re gonna quit two weeks in, I’d rather cut you now and give the spot to someone who wants to be here.”

Eddie can’t have heard that right. “My spot?”

“That wasn’t my question,” Coach Dave presses. “Munson, why are you here? Do you even like baseball?”

It’s a fair ask. Eddie knows he doesn’t like basketball, and he would rather die than set foot in the football stadium. His parents used to pay attention baseball back when he was little, but he doesn’t have many memories of the games good or bad, just the patter of the announcer’s voice on the radio like an almost hypnotic lullaby. Wayne obviously likes it enough to keep a glove around, but he’s never invited Eddie to watch or play with him before this week.

He thinks of all the dropped catches and no-contact at bats over the last couple days.

He thinks of the face of the batter after his third strike out.

He answers truthfully, “I don’t know yet, but it’s better than gym. Ms. Brooks says she’ll sub in sports for the credit I need to finally graduate.”

And Eddie, really, really wants to see the look on everyone’s faces when he graduates.

Coach Dave studies him for another moment and then his face breaks out in a smile. He claps Eddie on the shoulder. The contact sends reverberations straight down his spine. “Ideally, I’d have been able to work you out on the JV squad since you were a freshman, but since you’ve aged well out of that, I’ll have to take when we can get. Pity you weren’t around last year. I can’t imagine what the other teams would have made of you if we threw you out there after Harrington.”

Eddie doesn’t think he’s ever been mentioned in the same sentence as Steve Harrington before. He’d never really been in Eddie’s crowd. Captained the swim team. Played on the basketball team. Starting pitcher since his freshman year. Eddie didn’t pay much attention to Hawkins royalty as a whole, but he knew that Harrington and his golden arm had been signed to a professional contract out of high school. A ticket out of this dump of a town that didn’t even need a college education.

“Why’s that?” he asks, hating his curiosity.

“Harrington was a classic. Throws hard, throws accurate. Fastball, changeup, curve. I don’t think we’ve got a single other sidearm pitcher in the division, and you might just be the only submariner in the whole state. People wouldn’t know what to look for. Especially if we’d had you following Harrington.”

Eddie has been lost since ‘changeup,’ but he gets the gist. “Wait, did I actually make the team?”

“Got some work to do with you, for sure, but yeah Munson. Welcome to Hawkins baseball.”

Gareth and the D&D guys give him a mild amount of shit for making the team, but with Jeff’s kid brother also in the bullpen it fizzles quickly. Practices tend to be Monday, Thursday with games Tuesday and Friday during the season, which still leaves the window for D and D on Wednesday. He has more than enough time to plot on the bus to away games. He talks it out with his guidance counselor and while most of his teammates use the free period that would otherwise be a gym class for weight training, Eddie opts for a study hall that leads to him finishing most of his work before he’s even out of the school building for the day.

Of course, baseball practice usually keeps him at the school for an extra ninety minutes every day, but Eddie’s taken to treating it all like a role-playing venture. He likes all the rules of three. Three strikes. Three outs. Three bases and the points only count if you escape containment to make it home. Coach Dave has drill him on shifting when the ball is hit. Eddie forces his brain to log it as battle formations so it actually sticks to his long term memory.

Most of the other pitchers on the team double as position players, especially the starters. But it seems that Coach Dave has figured Eddie has his hands full learning one position. His plan for batting is mostly just to hold still and hope the other guy misses the plate. Instead of outfield shifts and cutoff men, he learns how a different grip on the baseball can actually make it go slower. He would have guessed throwing slower would have just been a matter of throwing softer.

He fucks around with grips for most of the practices leading up to the season and it tickles his brain in ways nothing but the guitar ever has. He settles on three pitches: sinker, changeup, fastball. When the sinker’s rolling, it breaks late and dives on a near horizontal across the plate. Because Eddie releases his pitch maybe six inches off the ground, his fastball appears to rise.

The other guys on the team initially give him a wide berth and Eddie doesn’t really feel the need to reach out. It’s always been the basketball team that fucked with Eddie’s bands of misfits, but it doesn’t mean Eddie’s inclined to give any jock the benefit of the doubt. The coaching staff doesn’t seem to notice or care, which suits Eddie just fine. He mostly keeps his headphones on when he’s in the locker room, his newest cassette getting a workout in his battered tape deck.

He doesn’t actually get into either of the games the first week of the season. They’re both tight ones, the starting pitchers going late into the game before their closer, Big Bob Reedy, lumbers out. Bob’s a freshman, already almost six foot three, and with a frame almost twice as wide as Eddie’s. He’d broken hearts during basketball season when he sat out tryouts, unwilling to participate in a sport that did a running drill called suicides in any facet of training. Eddie respects the hell out of Bob’s moral stand.

Bob manages to win one game for them, but they lose the second because of a misplayed ball to one of the outfielders. Eddie watches both of the games implacably, challenging Jeff’s little brother to see who could balance spare baseballs on the brims of their caps the longest. The second week of the season is a complete wash out due to thunderstorms that rattle the Munson trailer and keep him up all night.

Eddie’s first time on field is a game that’s already lost. He’s thrown out to start the fifth inning on the front end of a double header and immediately walks the bases loaded. Coach Dave walks out to the mound as Eddie turns the ball over and over in his hand, wondering what everyone would do if he tipped his hat into the dirt and walked off the field.

“How’s it going there, Munson?” Dave asks.

“Is it too late to run?” Eddie asks, thinking of track and that elusive gym credit.

“We’re in the front end of a double header,” Coach Dave says. “We’re down by six. I need the bullpen for the game we have a shot at winning. Do you think you can figure this out?"

Eddie glances around him, the opposing team with their white home jerseys standing neatly one to a base.

“No,” Eddie says.

“That doesn’t matter,” Coach Dave replies. “A ten run lose ain’t much different than a six run loss. Give it your best.”

He walks off the mound. Eddie watches him go, calm descending over him.

He’d never been given permission to fail before. He’d been expected to fail, of course, but no one has ever given him permission.

He adjusts his grip on the baseball, sets his feet and throws.

The lead runner scores when a poorly hit ball squeaks into right field and the runners all click one base forward. He strikes the next one out on a sinker that bounces in the dirt. The inning ends with a weakly hit ball to second that the defense turns into a double play. Just like that, he's out of the self-inflicted situation with only one run ceded.

Coach Dave claps him on the back as he sits at the end of the dugout. A couple of the other guys tap gloves with him, a gesture that Eddie has decoded means, nice work. He watches the Hawkins team send three batters up and almost as quickly right back down.

Eddie pitches two more scoreless innings, strikes out looking and the team loses nine runs to two.

His teammates don’t quite warm up to him, but some of the kids in stands weirdly do.

Or at least that’s what Eddie thinks is happening.

A tiny girl with a mop of curls that reminds Eddie of his own growing-out-the-buzzcut phase approaches him after one of the games to point at his jersey. “You are wearing my number,” she announces.

“El!” a redhead shouts from behind her, pulling at her hand. “You can’t just say that to people.”

Eddie touches the number on his shirt. The team picked numbers first based on sizes available and then seniority. There were only two left in Eddie’s size by his turn and he’d picked eleven without even looking at the options. A couple of his teammates had given him weird looks for it, but Eddie hadn’t cared enough to ask.

“Technically,” a boy with curly hair tucked under a baseball cap and what looks like a scorebook tucked under his arm, corrects, “he’s wearing Steve’s number.”

“Steve wore it for me,” El says. “And now he wears it.”

“I’m Eddie, by the way,” Eddie cuts in, waving his glove at them. “Hi.”

“We know,” the redhead says with an eye roll. “It’s on the roster.”

“I’m glad you like the number?” Eddie guesses. “I mean I like it too and I’m a little late to trade it in.”

This seems to be the right answer, because El breaks out in a toothy smile and says, “It’s okay, we can all share.”

Her two friends drag her back into the stands.

Steve Harrington’s a ghost over the locker room, a name spoken in tones of hushed reverence. Harrington’s one of the few players from Hawkins to ever be drafted to pro baseball. Harrington spent last year, his first out of high school in AA ball. Probably would have gotten a look in the majors if an injury hadn’t precluded him from participating in the September call-ups when major league teams expand their roster from twenty five to forty potential players. Eddie had never actually managed to say to a word to Harrington even though they’d shared several classes last year, but he’d heard it all. King Steve. The guy with the golden arm.

And if the arm wasn’t enough, Steve’s bat also caught notice. He’d been the team leader in average, never anything for power, but he’d been precise, finding gaps in the defense that let him sail safely into first base time after time. Eddie can barely make contact, much less aim. Steve had played second base on days he wasn’t starting at pitcher, a feat even more baffling to Eddie whose ability to catch a ball plummeted as soon as it had its first bounce. He’d even filled in spots in the outfield in a pinch.

Completely by accident, Eddie wound up with Steve’s old locker, his old jersey, hell, he wouldn’t be surprised if the second hand cleats Coach Dave found for him to replace Eddie’s ratty sneakers the second week of practice had been Harrington’s too.

Eddie wants to hate the guy, but Harrington had gone and graduated so it feels petty. He missed his prime hating Steve Harrington time by at least a year. And he’s starting to recognize that doing all that baseball shit and doing it well wasn’t just a matter of natural talent. It was work, too. Work, and skill, and sometimes nerves of fucking steel.

The season goes on. Eddie gets used to locker room smell and dirt stains on all of his socks. One bus trip, the starting catcher, Ollie, tugs the headphones off of Eddie’s ear and cedes him control of the boom box for the ride.

He learns later that several of the infielders had bets on the kind of music he constantly played pregame. His usual attire should have given them a pretty good idea, but apparently the team had mistaken metal for punk except for the third baseman, a junior name Kyle, who put money on it being classical.

“You seem, like, very zen before you head out there, man,” Kyle shouts over Judas Priest.

Eddie gives him a flat stare. Eddie is the least zen person that Eddie knows.

Ollie shoves Kyle. “And you are the least observant person I’ve ever met.”

Eddie grins and turns up the volume. He gets a couple winces, but no one asks him to turn it off.

Eddie pitches more and more. Big Ben’s still their closer, but Eddie’s a useful bridge, his style so wildly different than the rest of the pitchers that it leaves most of the batters off balance if they have to face him between more conventional arms. Sometimes, when his sinker is breaking well, Coach Dave keeps him out for an extra inning. He has a handful of games where he manages to retire the opposing team on three pitches, the defense cleaning up feeble ground balls and sending them to first for a quick one, two, three.

He would have traded gym for this freshman year if he’d have known it was an option. Might have graduated a year earlier. Might have been on the team that went to the regional playoffs with Steve Harrington as their anchor.

The team can all tell this isn’t a championship year, but that doesn’t matter to Eddie who sets up on the mound and settles his fingers into his changeup.

Eddie could live here, sitting on strike two. It’s the same high as a really good campaign. Perched at a narrative apex, all the possibilities stored up in his arm and the slight variations in the catcher’s stance. Baseball’s about skill, sure, but what people don’t like to admit is how much is also up to chance. Eddie’s watched enough to see that the very best hitters are successful one in three times, the bottom rung closer to one in seven. Eddie hasn’t managed to get a single hit all season. The odds are atrocious. Far worse that Eddie tends to throw up for victory in even his most sadistic campaigns.

Ollie sets up inside. There’s two strikes, no balls so Eddie doesn’t have to throw a pitch in the strike zone. Eddie can bounce his pitch in the dirt and it wouldn’t matter.  

And that’s what he does, throws his very best changeup. When it breaks it bounces on the white rubber of home plate as the batter chases it for strike three.

Eddie could live at strike two, the anticipation of it, the chance of success or failure all in a saving throw.

Strike three’s growing on him.

Wayne makes what turns out to be the very last game of the season. He’d been trying to rearrange his schedule to catch one for most year, but while Eddie gets some innings in most games, he doesn’t appear in all of them. It hadn’t been worth the risk to lose the day’s income since Eddie’s contributions from his usual… side business have taken a nose dive since the team started eating up most of his afternoons.

Wayne hasn’t complained about the loss of income, has in fact seem pleased by the turn, but the money has been an unspoken problem since Eddie first moved in.

Wayne sits like a lot of the other players on his team leaning forward, elbows resting on knees as his eyes track the ball. He’s on the first base line, just above the dugout and Eddie hadn’t even noticed he was here until he trots out for the bottom of the sixth inning. They’re already down three to one, but it’s the second game of their three game playoff series and if they drop this one, they’re done for the season. Eddie’s job is to keep them within striking distance for as long as he can.

He catches Wayne’s eyes as he sets up on the mound and freezes for just a moment. Wayne taps the brim of his hat in acknowledgement and Eddie, grinning, flaps Wayne’s hand-me-down mitt in his direction. Coach Dave had offered to find him a replacement glove a couple months back but Eddie turned him down. He likes having the totem, a reminder that his uncle cared even if he couldn’t make most of the games.

The batter doubles up the middle when Eddie’s sinker breaks right into the center of the plate. The second squeaks out an infield single on a ball that ball barely taps forward off the end of the bat. Ollie leaps out of his crouch to grab it but holding the lead runner to second means that the batter has enough time to get safely to first.

The third batter hits straight up the middle and Eddie, with the ball sizzling at his head, gets his glove up to make the catch rather than get decapitated. Someone in the dugout shouts, “Second!”

Eddie, who no longer feels like they’re speaking in code tosses the ball to the second baseman. The runner had broken for third on contact, and the ball easily beats him back before he can tag up. A double play.

He glances to the stands. Wayne looks nonplussed.

It takes Eddie nine pitches to get the third out and end the inning, but he doesn’t cede any runs.

He pitches the seventh and eighth innings as well. It’s not his cleanest outing, but in baseball terms it’s a successful one. He winds up with a pair of walks in the heart of the order because the batters refuse to swing at anything out of the zone and Eddie refuses to give them anything to hit. While some of the other batters make contact, none of it is clean contact. Over his three innings, he walks two, strikes out two, and strands six on base. No one scores.

Coach Dave taps him out of the lineup in the ninth inning because his slot is up in the batting order and Eddie still doesn’t have a single hit to his credit all season. They’ve been trailing since the first inning and they need a few runs to keep the season alive.

Hawkins is still trailing after their last turn at bat so the teams shake hands rather than play the bottom of the ninth, the game already decided.

In the locker room, Coach Dave looks over his dejected team and says, “No one expected us to even make the playoffs after the players we lost last year. You guys have a lot to be proud of. Those of you underclassmen, we have a lot to look forward to next year. For you seniors, I hope that the last season only leaves you with good memories. I only wish we had more time together.”

“Don’t put that out there,” Eddie says when the room lulls briefly to silence. “Do you know how long I’ve been trying to graduate?”

The team cackles, bittersweet moment broken. Dave shakes his head and grabs a stack of what looks like felt from the ground before walking through the team to distribute it. He ends with Eddie, passing him what turns out to be a green H. “Glad you stuck it out, Munson. You surprised a lot of people.”

“But not you,” Eddie guesses.

Coach Dave shakes his head, but doesn't confirm one way or the other. “I’ll see you at graduation, Eddie.”

Eddie turns the letter over in his hand. He glances over to Ollie, also toting an H. “What the hell kind of weird hazing is this?”

Ollie answers, “You lettered, dude. You get it the first varsity season you play in more than half the games.”

“Wait, letter like the jock thing? The jacket thing?”

“Welcome to the dark side, dude,” Kyle says, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Where’s the rest of the jacket?” Eddie asks, baffled.

Wayne sees the letter the next morning, right under the Hawkins High baseball cap that Eddie isn’t sure if he was supposed to return with the uniform or not. “Guess I wasn’t the only one who thought you could play.”

Eddie spins one of the rings on his finger, already missing the feel of a baseball spinning in his hands. He feels off balance without it. He’s never been a natural at anything before. He almost gets Coach Dave’s sentiment, because now that it’s over, Eddie wishes he’d started earlier. Wishes he could head back to the field tomorrow.

His fingers twist into the grip for his changeup. “Did they know they make you buy the jacket?”

Eddie graduates. He’s managed at least a C in all of his classes and baseball doubling as his gym credit is the last piece. He follows through with his plan to give the principal the finger and dashes off stage, giggling and euphoric. He can hear cheers from not just his D&D friends, but from the smattering of players from the baseball team.

After the ceremony, Wayne rolls his eyes but tugs him into a warm hug. He’s wearing Eddie’s Hawkins High baseball cap. They don’t linger long because of a thunderstorm rolling in, but they drink a few beers to celebrate at home. Wayne heads off for his night shift just after dinner.

Eddie spends the night after graduation with his guitar, watching the diploma like he’s afraid it might disappear. In a fit of nostalgia, he starts trying to piece together the cords for John C. Fogerty’s Centerfield.

Chapter Text

Steve Harrington plays his first tee ball game at age three and a half. He spends most of the game sitting in the infield, shoveling dirt into his hat. The ball is not hit his way. He can see his parents on the sidelines, looking increasingly distressed, but they don’t actually say anything so Steve figures it’s probably fine. Coach Hopper is in charge for the game so Steve has to listen to him. Hop is nice. He’s Sarah’s daddy and he pats Steve on the head whenever he comes to the dugout. He doesn’t yell if Steve drops the ball. Sarah is the tallest one on the team. She just turned six and she plays first base because she’s the best one at catching. Steve’s dad doesn’t like that the girls play on the same team, but apparently they don’t have enough girls for their own league so Steve thinks it’s good that they share.

At home plate one of the yellow team’s players swings and swats the ball off the tee. He seems surprised that he made contact, and only starts running when the parent coaching first base shouts to remind him. The pitcher runs and picks up the ball, chasing him to tag instead of throwing to first.

Steve thinks that’s a smart move. Even if Sarah is the best at catching, not everyone is good at throwing. They aren’t counting outs, which Steve’s dad hates, but they do swap offense and defense after everyone has a turn hitting.

Hopper calls, “Okay, back to the dugout. We’re switching!”

Steve looks down at his dirt-filled hat, shrugs and then puts it on his head.

Behind the home plate fence, he can hear his mother audibly groan. Coach Hop smiles at him though and Coach Hop is in charge. Steve likes batting the best. He’s usually not allowed to hit things with sticks and it only takes him two tries to knock the ball off of the tee and into the infield. He even gets all the way past first base, but he’s so excited that he forgets he’s supposed to stop and runs to second instead where the kid who’d fielded the ball tags him out.

He has to sit down for the rest of the inning, but after the game, everyone has orange slices and a juice box and Hop tells him he had a good game.

“Don’t lie to the boy,” his father says as his mother eyes his filthy uniform with distaste. “He’s been playing in the dirt, not playing baseball.”

Coach Hop tugs on his hat and says, “First off, it’s tee ball. And second, he’s three, I think he’s doing pretty good.”

“I’m three and a half,” Steve chimes in.

Steve gets to try pretty much every sport over the next couple years. He likes soccer best. Playing goalie means he gets to dive around in the grass and use his hands at the same time. Dad doesn’t like soccer, says things like football and basketball and baseball are the way to make a name for himself, so he only gets to play the one season.

Steve is pretty sure he already has a name for himself and he hates peewee football. He hates the pads and the heat and the way his head feels when other kids crash into him. His dad says it will toughen him up, but when Steve breaks his wrist the second week of practice, Mom says she has better things to do than sit in the hospital. The next year, Steve gets to swim instead, so Mom can at least sit by the pool if she has to supervise. Of course, the older he gets, the less supervision he requires. His parents start dropping him off at practices or games.

They show up to baseball longer than they do for anything else. Dad played in college. He was a shortstop with quick hands on a team that didn't win much. He swears he could have made it in the pros if he wanted, but Mom confides with an overly wide sweep of her wine, that he never figured out how to hit a big time fastball.

Steve resolutely tries every position except shortstop. He’s pretty good at outfield. He's got the arm for it and a good enough sense of the field that he can break in the right direction at the crack of the bat, but in little league, most of coaches keep their better fielders in the infield so that's where Steve settles. He plays third in a pinch, but he doesn’t quite have the reflexes he needs to excel. He has the hands for first base, but teams try to stick a lefty in that position. Steve doesn’t mind. He knows Sarah Hopper would have probably switched to softball by now, but first base still feels a little haunted. He mostly winds up at second, which is fine by him. He likes the rotation and the quick turns for double plays, even if he would have preferred playing catcher.

He loves catching. Reminds him of playing goalie in soccer. He doesn’t get to start in that position since he hasn’t quite grasped the art of framing a pitch, but he gets to play sometimes for double headers or late innings. And while he might not be great at showing an umpire a strike, what he has is an arm. People try to steal bases when they notice the backup catcher at the plate, and no matter how good their jump, Steve can almost always throw them out.

It’s a regular enough occurrence that the summer before he hits high school, his coach tells him to warm up his arm for pitching.

Steve walks everyone his first time out, maybe only one pitch in five anywhere near the strike zone. Coach doesn’t seem deterred. He’d been able to nail throws from catcher to second, so coach is convinced control will come.

The next few practices, Steve works out with the pitchers, trying to nail down a simple motion. Steve doesn’t really see the point. He’d rather stick it out as a position player. He’s always liked his turns at bat more than in the field. Doesn’t matter that he’s always been better at the defensive half of the game.

Pitching doesn’t seem worth it until coach says, “Kid, I don’t have a radar on you, but you’re thirteen and you’re throwing at least eighty miles an hour. Do that with any degree of accuracy young as you are and that arm will take you places.”

He only throws a few more games that season, but the words stick in his head.

Steve’s always been a good athlete, but never an exceptional one. He’s excelled in sports like basketball and swimming because he practices. He spends hours on the basketball court until his jump shot is automatic. He swims endless laps in the summer.

He decides the same kind of thing is in order for his arm.  Only it’s not as easy as the other sports. Swimming only really requires a pool. Basketball is better in a team setting, sure, but you can spent hours alone with a ball and a hoop.

Outside of a batting cage, baseball really needs a second person. But with Tommy off with Carol or at football practice, and his parents on business trips to who knows where, Steve makes do. He tapes off a tarp in the garage with a crude approximation of the strike zone and then grabs his dad’s old measuring tape and paces off the sixty feet six inches to an imaginary pitcher’s mound.

According to his coach, his speed is good, but speed doesn’t mean much if you can’t throw the ball over the plate.

Steve hauls a bucket of baseballs to the mound and glares the tarp down.

Time to learn the second part.

The only varsity sport Steve makes as a freshman is baseball. He tries out as a pitcher, boasting an eighty five miles an hour fastball, and the ability to hit any part of the strike zone with pinpoint precision. The summer after freshman year, he shoots up six inches and the added height is enough to tip him into the varsity basketball lineup. He's spent enough hours in the pool over the summer that he can step up his race distance and make varsity swim as well. But as a sophomore on varsity baseball, despite the fact that the starting rotation has three graduating seniors, he's selected as the pitcher for opening night.

Junior year, after puberty has finally ironed out the contours of his adult body, Steve’s fastball is regularly hitting ninety-seven miles an hour.

On his second date with Nancy Wheeler, Steve takes her to the batting cage. She lets Steve place his borrowed helmet over her skull and takes one of his bats from little league with apprehension. 

Steve asks, “You right or left handed?”

“Right,” Nancy replies and lets Steve gentle guide her grip into the proper position, tugging the bat so it sits on her shoulder.

“Okay,” he says with a grin. “You’ll want to step with your lead foot towards the ball and rotate you’re hips as you start to swing.”

“Like this?” Nancy says, taking a slow, lazy swing towards him.

Steve jumps out of the way, laughing. “See, you’re already a natural.”

“Natural implies something intrinsic,” Nancy corrects.

“You’re intrinsic, too,” Steve says. The unfamiliar word feels clunky in his mouth.

Nancy shakes her head fondly and leans over to give him a shy kiss on the cheek. “This isn’t the kind of thing I was expecting from a date.”

“Who says this is a date?” Steve says. “I thought we were just hanging out, getting to know each other. And this is one of my favorite places in the world.”

It’s totally a date. They both know it even if they play at being coy.

Nancy’s smile still looks soft, but there's a gleam of a challenge in her eyes. “How do I know you didn’t just take me here to show off?”

“You don’t.” Steve shrugs. “But you’ll have fun anyway, I promise.”

“We’ll see about that.” Nancy flashes him a grin and then heads into the batting cage, slotting a token into the machine to start it up.

She’s in the slow pitch area, the kind that Steve started out on when he was still in little league. She’s even got his old bat. It’s too short for him these days, but it fits Nancy’s smaller stature perfectly. Steve leans up against the fence, barely wincing as Nancy whiffs on the first pitch. She puts a hand to Steve’s oversized helmet to steady herself and says, “Harder than it looks.”

“Keep your eyes on the ball,” Steve coaches.

It’s the kind of advice that seems obvious, but is easy to ignore, especially during a game with the ball coming fast and a thousand other things vying for your attention. Nancy scoffs, and misses the next one as well.

“Closer!” Steve calls, trying to be encouraging.

Nancy sets her jaw, staring down the automated pitching machine and fouls off the next two pitches. On the third she makes contact, the ball sailing on a line right back where it came from. Steve whoops his encouragement.

Nancy’s grin sharpens and she zeros in, the next few pitches also hit in similar fashion, her power and confidence growing with swing. When the pitches run out, Nancy lowers the bat, her grin back to shy and girlish. “I thought you said this was supposed to be hard.”

“Told you, intransic,” Steve tells her with a grin. “Should have gone out for softball.”

“Intrinsic,” Nancy corrects. “And I’m a little busy with the student newspaper.”

The helmet is too big for her and it shakes when she moves, drifting low so it hides her eyes. It’s adorable. Steve could watch her all day. If she enjoys this even half as much as he does, he might just get the chance.

“What did you think?” he asks.

“I can concede that the batting cage might—maybe—be a little bit fun. Do you want your chance to show off now?”

Steve raises an eyebrow and walks several cages down, to where the sign reads ‘baseball fast.’ Nancy follows him out and hands him his helmet.

“Impress me then, Steve Harrington.”

There’s something in her tone that tells him baseball will not be enough to impress Nancy Wheeler. Not that Steve’s ever been a particularly impressive hitter. Steve has never hit for power, preferring to choke up on the bat and go for speed. He’s always had a good eye for picking up spin on a pitched ball and quick enough hands to get to where the pitch is breaking. He hits well for average, finding slots in the infield and sprinting in to first, rather than the grandiose swings that could end a game by themselves.

He does the same in the batting cage, making sure he can pick up the ball and spray it to all parts of the infield, keeping a pattern to it. Nancy doesn’t cheer him on, but he can feel her eyes on his back. When he turns back around, she says, “You were doing a pattern. Left field, right field, center.”

Steve beams at her. “Yeah. Helps to be able to place the ball.”

Nancy’s brow furrows for a second, like she’s thinking hard, but then her face breaks into a wide, pleased smile. “I hit it farther than you.”

The fact is debatable, but he concedes the point. He never would have expected that out of the two of them, fragile little Nancy Wheeler would be the one to hit for power.

“It’s not just about power,” Steve says, allowing innuendo to lace through his voice. “Sometimes you need a little finesse.”

“How about you show me a little of both,” Nancy challenges and oh, Steve might actually be in love.

When they leave the batting cages, Nancy tries to hand Steve’s old little league bat back. He waves her off.

“Keep it,” he says. “Never know when it’ll come in handy.”

The next time he sees the bat, it’s covered in nails and he buries it in a monster from another world.

He doesn’t take Nancy’s bat back. She might have warmed up to firearms, but those have the possibility to jam or run out of bullets and Steve feels better knowing she has backup. He’s assured through second and third hand information that the monster thing is dead, but that doesn’t quench his paranoia. He sacrifices one of his own bats to the nails as soon as his hands stop shaking. The nails add just enough weight to make his swing feels unfamiliar so he winds up purchasing bat with the same weight to use for the upcoming season. He’d hate to be even a little thrown off in a crisis.

And everything feels like a crisis these days. Tommy H. shows up just after New Year’s either looking to mend bridges or find some good booze. Steve, on the heels of an ugly nightmare, answers the door with the new bat and is halfway through a swing before he realizes who it is. After that Tommy isn’t within ten yards of him at school. Steve can’t bring himself to care. He’s got Nancy, so he holds onto her as tight as he can. They don’t talk about it, but she doesn’t mind that when they hold hands, sometimes he has to swing his fingers up to her pulse point just to make sure she’s really here.

He sleepwalks through the rest of basketball season, clinging to his starting spot by virtue of the muscle memory of his jump shot. But even that starts to fail him. The team loses in the first round of the playoffs. Steve misses a free throw at the end of the game that could have gotten them into overtime.

The next morning he’s at the batting cage with his new bat, the one that has the exact same weight as the nail bat and tries to learn how to hit for power. He thinks it works out pretty well, except the first day of practice, Coach Dave gets on him about forming bad habits.

Steve reluctantly reverts to form, chokes up, closes his stance and swings defensively.

That’s all he’s ever been able to manage.

His fastball’s picked up some velocity over the winter, but Steve’s been jittery and over-amped since the crisis and he’s back to spraying the ball all over the plate.

He wonders what would happen if he talked to someone. He has dreams of that monster every night and he’s afraid that speaking it out loud would bring it into existence, so he doesn't even talk to Nancy. The only reason Steve is sure that it happened is that they go to see Barb’s parents once a week without fail. He sits by Nancy’s side, making forced conversation with Mr. Holland. Barb had been on the softball team. A catcher. Her dad follows the Reds.

Steve hadn’t known that before the dinners. He likes to think he would have asked her to practice together. He hates that he missed the connection. If he hadn’t, things could have been different. If he hadn’t…

There’s a curly-haired boy that comes to all the baseball games. One of Nancy’s little brother’s friends. Dustin, Steve thinks. He wears a hat for the minor league team out in Evansville. Single A ball, but they’re a lot closer than the nearest pro team. He keeps score diligently, a radio receiver in his ear that suggests that he’s probably listening to a different game at the same time. Sometimes one of the other kids from mini Wheeler’s horde comes too, but never Mike himself and never Will Byers, the zombie boy.

Dustin catches attention as he’s leaving one of the games, his bag packed with his bat and glove, his cleats tossed over his shoulder.

“Can I see it?” he asks.

Steve frowns at him. “See what?”

“The bat!” Dustin insists. “Can I see the bat?”

Baffled, Steve starts to unzip the bat compartment. Dustin waves him off.

“Not that one! The other one.” He drops his voice into a whisper that somehow seems twice as loud as his speaking voice. “The one with the nails.”

Steve looks over his shoulder to make sure that none of his teammates hear him. The kid in front of him is young. The missing teeth makes him look even younger. “Do you know about everything that happened last winter?”

The kid does a full body eye roll. “Will’s one of my best friends. Of course I know what happened. Can I see it or not?”

Steve makes a split second decision. “Yeah. All right.”

Dustin follows him to the car and waits patiently while he opens the trunk. Steve throws his gear in first and then picks up the edge of the blanket. “It’s not the original. Nancy kept that one. You know, for protection."

Dustin prods the end of one of the nails, his smile wide. “Awesome.”

“Okay, shithead,” Steve snaps. “That’s not a toy.”

Inside, his brain cries with relief.

It happened. Someone else remembers.

It happened.

Steve zeroes in the back half of the season, muscle memory finally winning out over his jitters. Nancy comes to about half of the games, but only when she’s the one who has drawn the story assignment for the student newspaper. Dustin makes nearly all of them. When Steve hears him cheering from the stands, he tells himself he might actually like this better.

It blows up spectacularly Halloween of his senior year. Nancy breaks up with him. Dustin flags him down when he’s trying to win her back and instead ropes him into a hunt for his cat-eating pet slug.

Steve would have been surprised except he’s been expecting this since he remade the nailbat at the end of last year. In a way, he’s always known that he would wind up right here, tromping through the forest with a kid he barely knows, chumming the path behind him with monster bait.

“You know I always wondered why you were at some many baseball games,” Steve asks after a while. They’d already been through Steve’s dating tips, hair tips and why exactly Dustin thought it was a good idea to raise an unidentified alien slug. “Doesn’t seem like the sort of thing any of you little shitheads would go for.”

“You like baseball,” Dustin counters.

Steve shrugs. He can feel the weight of the nail bat in his backpack. Can move through any grip on the ball that might make it do something interesting. Can strategize pitches and hitters and defensive shifts like it's second nature, but that all seems like it might run counter to being good at transistor radios. “I mean, yeah, baseball’s awesome, but you and me don’t seem like we’d be into the same sort of thing. I’ve heard you in Nancy’s basement shouting about all your nerd shit.”

“Baseball is nerd shit. It's the most statistically driven sport out there. Or at least it could be. I have this theory that you could potentially create a world class team if coaches would stop paying attention to the kind of hitters that look good and pay attention to the ones who get on base. Because if you think about it, a walk is just as good as a single.”

“First off, that is blatantly untrue,” Steve starts.

“You’re right,” Dustin says. “A walk might actually be better than a single because it adds to the cumulative total of pitches thrown. You’re a pitcher. You get tired, right?”

“Henderson!”

The kit quiets for a second, touches his cap and then in a much lower voice, he says, “My dad used to take me. Back when I was really little. And when he died, Mom was too sad to keep going. I think she thought I wouldn’t remember. But I liked it. And I still like it. So I go. By myself if I have to.”

“Christ, kid,” Steve says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“You over-rely on your fastball,” Dustin says, looking away. “I know it’s like, really, really fast, but you actually strike more people out with your change up.”

Steve starts to deny it. Pauses. Considers.

“Huh,” he says.

Dustin beams at him.

Steve…

Steve doesn’t remember much between Billy smashing a plate to his head and hauling a bunch of toddlers out of what is essentially a tunnel to hell.  What he does remember is pretty traumatic, so the concussion seems almost like a blessing.

Nancy leaving him aches like a hole in his chest that’s never gonna fill back up, but he’s alive and the kids are alive and he’ll keep telling himself that’s a win until he believes it.

Things do not go back to normal. Billy, possibly content with Steve’s downfall, gives him a wide berth. Steve heads back to school after missing two weeks wearing sunglasses, because the light dances into auras when things get to bright. The fact that it hides his yellowing bruises is a bonus. He has a medically excused absence from gym that passes to his teacher and then immediately to both his basketball and baseball coaches.

He’s pulled out of his history class—which feels irresponsible given the state of his grades—and into the weirdest ambush he’s ever seen. Coach Dave sits in one corner, his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Coach Gall sits opposite him, his posture impeccable, making him seem a good head taller than everyone in the room. Ms. Brooks, the guidance councilor, sits behind her desk between them, looking harried and put upon.

“What’s going on?” Steve asks.

“These two gentlemen have expressed their concern about how you are faring in the wake of your unfortunate injury.”

No one has asked specifics, though the teachers must have heard the same rumblings as the rest of the students. Coach Gall just hasn’t asked because if he acknowledges what Billy is like, he’ll probably have to cut his best player.

“It’s been rough,” Steve says. The doctors haven’t cleared him for contact yet. The basketball team has already played two games without him. “But the symptoms are supposed to clear up soon.”

Ms. Brooks’s throat moves as she swallows. She glances first to Coach Gall and then to Coach Dave. She says, “I have also had some teachers express concern about your trouble focusing.”

“That’s the concussion.” Steve hasn’t taken the sunglasses off, thought it occurs to him that he probably should.  He reaches up slowly, wincing as the fluorescents return in full force. “I’m trying.”

Ms. Brooks nods, her lips pursed. “Steve, have you put any thought into your plan for next year?”

Steve has not thought farther ahead than next week since he found out that monsters exist. Steve checks in nightly on the radio with a half dozen children because he can’t focus on anything but making sure they all stay safe.

He thinks of his college essay that Nancy shredded with her red pen.

He looks at Coach Dave and Coach Gall in turn. “Why are they here?”

Ms. Brooks looks pained. “I have been reliably informed that some of your options for next year include athletics.”

“Your arm could take you places,” Coach Dave says. He taps the brim of his cap. “Colleges, sure if you’ve got the grades for it. If not, well, golden arm like yours will get some professional interest.”

“Professional interest?” Steve echoes. Steve’s head throbs. His father used to hint that a scholarship would be the only way to get him through college and that college is a ticket to an easy life at his father’s company. Steve’s brains were average at best but he’d never really considered that he could make a living using his body.

“We had some scouts asking after you last year,” Coach Dave says. “There aren’t many kids your age who throw as hard as you can. Even without college, you’d likely go in the first couple rounds of the draft.”

Steve might be a little slow, but he knows an opportunity when he sees it.

It’s a way out of Hawkins, one that was not tied to his father’s good will.

…He doesn’t even know if he wants out of Hawkins. Those little shitheads are stuck here as long as their families are and there’s no way they don’t get involved if the monsters come back.

And even if Eleven thinks the monsters were gone, Steve knows they can come back.

Instead of responding to the unspoken question about his future, he turns to Coach Gall. “Why are you here?”

Coach Gall shifts in his seat, his posture still ramrod straight. “Steve, you’ve been on my team since you were a sophomore. You’re a solid player, but given your injury, given the opportunities you could have…”

Steve cuts in, his voice flat, “You’re kicking me off the team.”

“Steven,” Ms. Brooks says. “It would be irresponsible of any of us to let you play a contact sport this soon after a severe—”

Steve tunes them out.

He loves basketball. He’s always loved basketball. More than he’s ever loved baseball. He loves the speed of it, the comradery. The way everyone is constantly in motion. He loves the sound of the ball when it kisses the backboard and the sound when it passes through the net.

Steve loves basketball, but he’s known for a long time that he’s not an exceptional baskeball player.

He can hit the open shot, sure, and he works hard on defense, but he doesn’t quite have the ball handling skills he needs to play a guard and he’s not tall enough to play anything else. With someone like Billy filling a spot on the starting team, Steve had been facing a senior year sitting on the bench. Add in the head injury, which the doctors warned might have symptoms for months, and Steve is a waste of a jersey.

“Okay,” Steve says, cutting Coach Gall off. “You’re right. If I stay on the team, I wouldn’t be helping anyway.”

“Steve,” Ms. Brooks says plaintively. “This is in no way a commentary on your ability.”

Except it’s absolutely a commentary on his ability. Steve is not fit for basketball this year. Everyone in this room knows it. He plasters on a smile, not caring about how it looks. He wonders if he should say something about what Billy tried to do to Lucas. Half of their team is black, including their best player. That kind of racist shit won’t go over well.

He figures Coach Gall already knows. If he’s decided not to care, it was already a team Steve wants no part in.

He stands up.  “I’ve got to make it back to class if I want to stay on track for graduation.” He lets his eyes skate over Coach Gall’s before landing briefly on Coach Dave’s. “I’ll see you this spring for tryouts.”

He doesn’t go to any of the basketball games. The only chance he gets to play is in gym and Billy Hargrove dominates him each and every time. He tells himself he doesn’t miss it.

The worst of his concussion symptoms subside, but the ringing in his ears never quite clears. When he has the option, he starts playing music to drown it out. He’s still not sleeping much, spends some nights on the floor with all the lights on, the nail bat clutched in his hand. He even makes a spare so he can keep one in the trunk of his car, the other one reserved for house use. God forbid his parents find either.

He’s somehow managed to lose all of his friends his own age. Nancy and Jonathan offer to sit with him at lunch, but while they’re nice enough, sitting with his ex and the man who stole her from him feels worse than sitting by himself. Just once he finds himself at the edge of the table where Eddie the Freak holds his court, but when Eddie decides it’s a speech on the table kind of day, Steve figures he’ll take his chances eating in his car.

It’s not all bad though. Steve walks Dustin through his hair care routine and drives him to the Snow Ball. He spends a baffling New Year’s Eve playing Dungeons and Dragons with a bunch of middle schoolers and gets the best night’s sleep he’s had in years when he passes out with Dustin on one side and Max Mayfield on the other.

In exchange for the D&D night, Steve pulls out his spare glove for Dustin the first decent day of the year he drags him out to the field to teach him how to throw. Steve talks him through the basics anyway, dredging up all the stuff he’d learned in little league. About how you formed a T with your arms as you wind up. The way you stepped with the foot opposite the hand you were throwing with.

Dustin’s hopeless. He has a terrible arm and he complains constantly that his missing collar bones are responsible for any deficiency in his skills. More often than not they spend the day scrambling after errant throws, and shit talking each other, but it’s a thousand times better than basketball practice with Billy Hargrove. Dustin beams ever time he makes a catch and it feels good to celebrate even those simple victories.

As the weather starts to warm, they amass extra players. Max shows up with a glove of her own and takes as many grounders as Steve is willing to hit for her. She has the kind of reflex you need to be a corner infielder and Steve thinks she’s a shoe in for the softball team if she decides she wants it. Lucas has a baseline level of athleticism that the other boys lack, but seems completely bored by the concept of baseball unless he’s actively at bat. Mike shows up mostly to mock the game, but the instant Will offers to shag balls in the outfield, he’s on his feet as well.

One unseasonably warm day he even manages to convince Hopper into letting Eleven join them. Hopper, citing the need for adult company, convinces Joyce to come watch. Joyce brings both Will and Jonathan. Since Jonathan’s there, Nancy’s not far behind, dragging Mike with her. Lucas, Max and Dustin show up together when they hear about the rest and from there it spirals into an actual game.

Steve digs a whiffle ball bat and its matching plastic ball out of the depths of his pool house so he doesn’t have to scrounge for extra gloves. They wind up playing girls against guys, with Steve being an honorary lady for the afternoon to keep things even.

Despite being shorthanded, the ladies wipe the floor against Hopper, Jonathan and the D&D shitheads. Dustin wails about Steve being an unfair advantage, but Steve is playing half speed at best, tossing easy pitches up for everyone except for Hopper to whom he throws nothing but curve balls, taking full advantage of the airflow in the weirdly cut plastic to make the ball drop precipitously. Hopper doesn’t have a single hit the entire game to the delight of Joyce who heckles him mercilessly from her half crouch behind their makeshift home plate.

Dustin’s complaints aren't genuine. If they were, they would be directed at El who, judging by the nosebleed, is definitely cheating. The surprise ringer, however, turns out to be Nancy who has apparently kept up a batting cage regimen without inviting Steve.

Not that the competition matters much. Joyce and Hopper are the only ones keeping score. The rest of them are like Steve, giddy and drowning in a day with this much family and not a monster in sight.

After baseball tryouts, Coach Dave bestows the honor of first jersey selection to Steve as the senior with the longest tenure on the team. He reaches into the bin of old uniforms, looking for number seventeen, which he’s worn since freshman year. But halfway through the pile, his hand catches on a different number.

Before he can overthink it, he pulls number eleven out of the pile of jerseys and shoves it into his locker.

Steve has a good season.

A great one even. He’s starting at least one game a week, playing second base when he doesn’t. He still can’t hit for power, but they’ve got him batting second. With his short, defensive swing, he’s the undisputed king of singles. Max keeps telling him he should learn to slap hit like some of the softball players, but he’s not sure if that’s even legal in baseball.

Dustin goes to every game, diligently keeping score in a thick book. Midway through the season, he’s got enough dirt on the other teams that he can call up stats and give Steve a rundown of what to expect from the various batters. Sometimes he manages to drag the other shitheads along with him. El smiles with toothy delight the first time she sees Steve’s new number. Will clearly has no idea what’s going on, but cheers whenever Lucas gives him a nudge. Mike mostly pretends he doesn’t care, but Steve catches him and Dustin arguing about the credibility of throwing weapons in D&D campaigns so he figures something has stuck.

There are scouts at the games where he pitches. They lean forward in their seats, occasionally jotting down notes as they watch him work through the opposing line up.

After a one hit loss, one of them bumps into Steve in the parking lot and says, “You throw like you’re angry, kid.”

Steve stares at him for a second, hiking his gear bag up on his shoulder. He takes a guess at the right answer. “Thank you?”

The scout laughs and gets in his own car. His voice is rough. “Keep it up.”

Dustin catches him before he gets to the car and slots into the passenger’s seat without asking if Steve’s willing to give him a ride back. He’s given up even pretending he won’t comply, listening as Dustin gives him a quick rundown on the scouts in attendance and then follows up with a scathing critique of his pitch choices.

Steve mostly tunes out the criticisms. He’s well aware that his off speed stuff is a jarring change for most batters and that kind of contrast goes a long way to strikeouts.

But he likes his fastball. He doesn’t get to overpower anyone when he’s fighting monsters.

The team wins the conference, but it falls apart their first game of the regional tournement. Unforced errors load the bases in the fifth inning and one of the hazards of being a fastball pitcher is that if someone manages solid contact, the ball tends to sail. The pitch is the first real mistake Steve makes, but they pay for it with all four runs. Eleven sneaks to the dugout between innings and asks if she can help. Steve turns her down, grounds out to second, and when he gets back to the mound, walks the bases loaded. He gets himself out of the jam with only one run ceded, but they can all tell it's not a day the team will be able to rally back from a five run deficit.

When it’s clear the game’s out of reach, Coach pulls his senior starters one by one so the crowd can give them a hand. Steve stalks off the mound after seven innings to unexpectedly thunderous applause.

When he raises his eyes to find the source, it’s not his parents or his teammates. It’s Dustin Henderson, flanked by El, Max, and Lucas. Jonathan and Nancy are in the row above them with Hopper and Joyce, their cheers a little less exuberant, but still resounding. Will and Mike sit together on the bottom row, Will whistling through his fingers as Mike gives the world’s most sarcastic applause.

Steve sits at the edge of dugout and tugs his hat down to hide his fond smile.

Steve doesn’t want to leave Hawkins.

Check that.

Steve desperately wants to leave, but the gnawing feeling in his gut promises disaster is just around the corner, routinely and loudly informing him that leaving would be irresponsible. It’s countered by the echo of Jim Hopper asserting the gates are closed like he can will it into truth just stating it with enough confidence.

Steve’s got options. A few schools are willing to take a chance on him with an athletic scholarship, but those are all contingent that he keeps his grades up. The better move is probably a year at a junior college to get his head on straight followed by a transfer.

There’s also…

He graduates the first week of June, within days of baseball’s amateur draft.

Steve could go for it. Sign with whatever team takes him, shove everything he owns in the car and drive out of this shithole town. He doesn’t think he’s parents would mind. The plan’s always been that he take over the family business, but for a lot of people a professional athlete is just as much of leader as anyone with a business degree.

He’s just not sure he can leave.

He decides to talk it over with Hopper, who surely understands the impulse to stay in one place and keep his family safe.

It backfires.

He’d forgotten that Jim Hopper coached Steve’s very first t-ball team. That before his marriage, Hop spent summers coaching a short season wood bat team. Steve probably should have noticed that the baseball field is one of the very few locations that Hopper allows Eleven to visit in public.

“Kid,” Hopper says, “if you don’t give a shit about baseball, that’s fine, but if you’re thinking about passing on this kind of opportunity out of some misguided sense of duty for a cause that I have been promised by a dozen government officials is dead, I will march you out of this town at gunpoint.”

Steve’s eyes widen.

Hopper dials it back ten percent, his face softening. “Your arm can take you places if you let it. Don’t tie yourself to this town unless you have to.”

He talks to Dustin about it later the same day.

“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not even going to be here most of the summer.”

Right, Steve almost forgot about his nerd camp.

“And it’s just summer, right? Minor leagues end in September.” His eyes dart up to meet Steve’s and then back down to the ground. It’s as unsure as Steve has ever heard the kid. He’s not entirely convinced it’s not an act. “You’ll be back.”

Steve reaches out and tips the brim of Dustin’s hat up, dragging his eyes up with it. “Damn right. You can’t get rid of me that easy. And if something goes, you know, Upside Down, you call me. Before you decide to do something dangerous.”

“Yes, Mom,” Dustin retorts.

Steve pretends not to hear the sarcasm.

Steve’s the penultimate first round draft pick in the 1985 amateur draft. He signs a contract the day after he gets the news, graduates the following morning and by the weekend he’s loaded up the car to join the season already in process. They’re starting him off in double A which feels like it’s probably far too high considering he’s thrown almost exclusively to teenagers.

When he arrives at the stadium he's given a very cursory tour of the ballpark by an assistant coach whose name he doesn’t catch. He gets both a locker and a uniform assigned before being deposited in front of a harried man named Sam in a team polo. Sam spends ten minutes making polite conversation while distractedly scribbling on a notepad. It’s only when Sam asks if Steve is ready to go on tape that he realizes he’s been talking to the team broadcaster who was looking for a pregame interview of their newest player.

Steve rambles through the interview. He never used to do that, but like Jonathan Byers broke his brain-to-mouth filter junior year and he never quite recovered. Steve can’t tell if the broadcaster is charmed or not. At some point in the past couple years the Harrington charm stopped being a given.

“Are you nervous?” Sam asks. “It’s a pretty big jump from high school to double A.”

“Why would I be nervous?” Steve answers. “Baseball’s the one thing I know I’m good at.”

Sam ends the interview with a smile, the tape clicking off. “Good to meet you kid. Love the confidence. I’ve got the address for your host family. Sorry I made you pay the new guy tax first.”

Steve frowns at the word tax, but after a beat it clicks that he meant the interview. He takes Sam’s offered piece of paper with a hesitant smile.

“Looks like they’ve got you staying with Gramps,” Sam said, leafing through his notebook. “They like to do that with the new guys, especially ones as young as you are. Coach doesn’t want to deal with a bender. Especially not mid-season. Gramps is a good guy though. Been here forever. You’ll like him.”

When Steve arrives at the address, he finds a makeshift game of two on two basketball in the driveway. He frowns, circles the block, and then parks on the street, squinting at the address. Finally, he knocks on the door. It’s answered by a broad man in a baseball cap with a sandy blond moustache. Steve only barely recognize the logo as the one from his new team. He coughs awkwardly. “I think I have the wrong house. I’m Steve Harrington. New pitcher. I was told I was going to be staying with someone called Gramps.”

The man stares for a second. He’s old enough to be the father of the kids playing basketball in the driveway, but no way is he grampa age.

“Who was it?” he asks. His eyes are a very sharp green.

Steve swallows hard and drops his gaze, he fumbles the note out of his pocket, hoping that there’s some kind of key, but he’s already forgotten both the coach and the broadcaster’s name. “Uh…”

The guy rolls his eyes. “Fine. Don’t rat them out. The name’s actually Matthew Shocke. I play first base, and I’m the oldest guy on the team by about eight years so at this point, sure, Gramps works.”

Steve has to clamp down the immediate instinct to confide that the middle schoolers he babysits occasionally call him Mom. He’s been in enough locker rooms to know that confession is a terrible idea.

Gramps, as it turns out, is the thirty seven year old father of five and—in a minor league rarity—has been on the same double A team for the past decade. Before his plateau, he’d played precisely two games in the majors where he struck out three times and committed two fielding errors. His look at the triple A level had been slightly longer, lasting an entire season, but he’d eventually fallen back to the highest league where he could make a difference and he’d stayed there.

“Why didn’t you quit?” Steve asks. “I mean after you realized you’d never hit the big leagues.”

Shocke stared at him. “Who cares if I’m never going to be in the big show? Someone’s paying me to play baseball. I’ll work a boring job in the off season, but they’ll have to pry the uniform off of my cold dead body.”

Steve starts his first game two days later and it’s a complete disaster. He gives up four runs in the first inning, all nine of the opposing team’s players taking a turn at bat before he’d finally manage to snag the third out of the inning by getting a glove up to stop a line drive before it decapitates him.

Coach put a hand out to stop him before he hit the dugout. “You good, kid?”

Steve has faced down monsters before. He doesn’t love a bad start, but he knows exactly how much worse he can handle. He gives coach a nod. “I’ll figure it out.”

He gets pulled in the fourth inning. Eight runs on fourteen hits. It’s the worst pitching outing he’s had since little leagues.

Five days later, his turn in the rotation comes up again. He last seven innings this time, three runs on five hits. He takes the loss since they’re trailing when he got pulled. Gramps ruffles his hair when he hits the dugout, the exact motion he used to do for Dustin.

His third start, he goes seven scoreless innings.

The Shocke house is everything Steve ever wanted growing up. And really everything he’s wants for his future. Gramps and his wife, Judith, seem to genuinely like each other, moving around the chaotic scene with practiced grace. They have five kids: two pairs of twin boys—currently ten and thirteen—and Kayla, the oldest, at fourteen.

Kayla is taller than Steve, incredibly poised, and can reportedly kick everyone’s ass in any athletic competition. Max would love her. Eleven too, now that Steve thinks about it. Dustin would have turned cherry red if she ever looked at him. She’s mostly silent while the twins talk over each other, all overly eager to make a point. Unlike with his shitheads, Steve can follow most of their conversations, but the chaos is similar enough to make him achingly nostalgic.

With Dustin at nerd camp for the summer, Steve’s best Hawkins contact is gone. He’d call Max, but with Billy in the house, that’s likely to get her into trouble. Steve doesn’t know the rest of the boys nearly as well as Dustin and calling Nancy after the breakup is painfully awkward.

He actually has the most contact with Eleven, but that’s only because he caught her—apparently with Max’s encouragement—spying on his dreams. He’d bartered weekly phone calls for guaranteed privacy. He doesn’t really hate the idea of El checking in on him in his sleep, but he really doesn’t want to explain if she happens to check in on him with a date.

Not that he’s getting much action. He goes out a couple times with some of the women who hang around the ballpark but sours pretty quickly on the idea of cleat chasers. Nancy ruined him for a lot of things and casual sex was apparently one of them.

His conversations with El start out stilted, but eventually loosen up. He tells her about the team. About the bus rides between cities and how different Appalachia looks compared to Indiana. She tells him about Max and Lucas’s drama, asks him for advice on how to get Hopper to like Mike, and on occasion drops incredibly disturbing information about her upbringing.

Steve misses her. All of them really, it feels weird to look into the stands and see a completely different set of kids. His teammates all tease him for being soft on the younger fans, but the extra couple minutes giving high fives and, on occasion, signing baseballs makes him a favorite. The reputation for being good with kids wins him a lot of the community outreach gigs meaning he spends a lot of hours reading for day cares or the the local library. He’s never been the smoothest reading, but the repetition gives him more confidence than he ever had in school and the kids forgive him any stumbles.

He hates Where the Wild Things Are, though. He’s not really up for encouraging kids to confront or befriend monsters. He’d much rather them develop the instinct to run the fuck away.

July drags into August. Steve’s still pitching well, but starting pitchers only play one game in five and he’s never been good at sitting still. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t really been sleeping and when he does manage a few hours, the nightmares are back.

He starts swapping tapes with other players, his taste in music tending louder and louder as he tries to stay alert the bus. The last thing he wants is to scream himself awake somewhere public. It’s easier when he’s back at the Shockes’. The full house seems to settle his mind.

The team’s not really a playoff contender this year, but minor league playoffs are always an odd affair. In September, the major league teams are all permitted to expand their roster from twenty five players to forty, which lets them audition future prospect on the big stage. Which means that double A teams often end the season missing some of their best talent. Steve figured he'd be heading back to Hawkins early.

Instead he gets his marching orders for the major leagues.

Steve heads back in his room in the Shocke house, in a daze.

He tells the kids immediately, who greet the news with enthusiasm. Gramps claps him on the back and says, “Don’t waste the chance. You never know if it’ll be your only shot.”

“I’ve seen that boy pitch, he’ll get more than one shot.” Judith walks into the kitchen and reaches up to ruffle Steve’s hair. “Your brother called by the way, no idea how he heard so fast.”

Steve frowns. When he takes calls from El, he always describes her as like my little sister, but that was mostly to avoid accidentally mentioning anything about her actual background. There’s only one of the boys who might identified himself as Steve’s brother, but Dustin had been at his nerd camp for the summer. It was supposed to have ended last week. When Steve hadn’t immediately gotten a call, he’d figured he wouldn’t get to hear from Henderson until he got back to Hawkins for the off season.

He flashes Judith a smile, a little embarrassed that he’s more excited to talk to Dustin than he is to put on a big league uniform. “Would it be a problem if I used your phone for a long distance call?”

“Steve," Gramps says, "go tell your family you got called up.”

He sprints up the stairs feeling just short of giddy and dials the number for the Henderson house.

Dustin answers on the third ring. “Who’s calling?”

“Dude, it’s Steve. I’ve got some news.”

“Steve?” Dustin says, “I was just trying to call you. You remember how you wanted me to let you know if something in Hawkins went… Upside Down? Well, we have a code fucking red.”

Steve tells the coach he has a family emergency. He promises it will be sorted out quickly and that he’ll report on Monday. He shouldn’t even have to miss a start.

The team, to their credit, is understanding. There’s enough hype over the eighteen year old who can throw one hundred miles an hour that they don’t give his spot to someone else. Steve checks that the nail bat is still in the truck, throws his travel bag into the passenger’s seat and drives to Hawkins at ten over the speed limit.

Steve doesn’t make it back for the September call ups.

Chapter Text

Eddie watches baseball with Wayne some afternoons. Rarely a full game with Wayne working nights, but a couple innings of the afternoon game becomes a staple of the trailer, Eddie critiquing pitch calls as Wayne spins stories about how the team has developed season by season. It’s the most Eddie’s heard his uncle talk since he was a kid, and he hates that it took this long to unlock it. He’s trying to turn the conversation away from baseball and into hopefully embarrassing stories of a misspent youth when there’s a rap on the trailer’s door

People, as a rule, do not come calling at the Munson household. Even Eddie’s band of misfits tends to give it a wide berth. Especially considering Gareth’s garage is big enough to host the band. Wayne almost always meets his friends at the bar. The trailer isn’t exactly big enough for entertaining.

The knock comes again, a trio of quick decisive raps.

Cop knock, Eddie’s brain diagnoses. Wayne raises an eyebrow. Eddie shrugs at him. Reefer Rick got picked up a couple weeks into baseball season and he hasn’t been able to make a run into Indy to hit up any of his other suppliers. His stash is more or less empty.

Wayne heads to the door and cracks it open.

Eddie hears Jim Hopper and tries to sink farther into the couch.

“Hey, Wayne, is Eddie in?”

“No,” Wayne answers shortly, grabbing his keys from the hook by the door without a glance back to Eddie. His wallet sits unused on the table.

Eddie fucking loves his uncle.

He hears Hopper from outside. “Christ, Wayne, I’m not here to arrest your kid. I couldn’t do that even if I wanted to. I need a favor.”

Curious, Eddie pushes himself up on the couch. On the screen, the fuzzy television notes that the count is two and two, runners on second and third. A mistake could lose the game. Eddie hesitates for a second, watching the pitch.

A foul ball. Stalling.

Eddie nods to himself and walks out of the trailer.

The late afternoon sun hits his eyes hard, along with the heat. His feet are bare against the wooden steps that lead out of the trailer. He runs a hand through his hair.

Both men spin to look at him. Wayne with exasperation, Hopper with something closer to relief.

And isn’t that interesting.

Eddie’s past interactions with Hopper always had an edge of antagonism to them—hazards of being a small time dealer—but more than that, Hopper used to have that look in his eyes that Wayne would get sometimes. The look that said, Eddie, you could be so much better.

“Chief,” he says. “I give my solemn promise that I renounced my criminal ways at graduation.”

“I could give two shits what you smoke, kid,” Hopper answers. “And it’s not Chief anymore.”

Eddie’s eyebrows raise. “When did that happen?”

“Mall fire.” Hopper ways a dismissive wave of his hand. “I made some decisions the mayor wasn’t happy about. Long story short, it’s Coach Hopper these days. I’m running the single A team in Evansville.”

Wayne says, “Mall fire? That was tragic business.”

“Don’t ask,” Hopper says. “Please.”

“Fine,” Eddie replies. “What the hell kind of favor could you possibly want from me?”

Hopper crosses his arms over his chest. Eddie sees that there are burn scars all up and down his arms, still pink and strangely textured.

Eddie feels a chill run down his spine despite the heat.

Hopper answers, unaware of his discomfort. “Apparently the double A club had a bit of an issue with partying and the bullpen catcher crashed his car sloppy drunk. Unfortunately, the crash took out four of the relief pitchers with it. Long and short of it is half of my pitchers got surprise call-ups to the Appalachian league and I’m short pitchers to fill out my roster tonight.”

“And you decided I was the best option?” Eddie asks, baffled.

“I’m a professional, kid. I keep track of the athletes in this town.”

“One—” Eddie jumps from the top step of their stoop all the way to the ground. “I’m mortally offended at anyone who calls me and athlete. Two, I would have noticed if you showed up at any of the Hawkins games, on account of, you know, me attending every single one.”

“Fine.” Hopper looked a little like someone was sucking on a lemon. “My daughter and her friends informed me that you were the best Hawkins pitching had to offer and one of the few who wouldn’t torch their chances to play in college if I came knocking.”

“You trust kids to scout?”

“If I’m honest,” Hopper replies with a laugh. “Only one of them and definitely not my daughter. But Henderson said you were good and it’s not like I’m signing you to anything long term.  I just need you for the weekend series until I can find a couple guys from the independent leagues. Munson, please.”

“Well,” Eddie drawls, “since you said please.”

Evansville is only a thirty minute drive outside of Hawkins—twenty if you drive like Eddie—and he reports to the stadium still toting Wayne’s borrowed old glove, half thinking it’s a prank. But it was Hopper who did the asking and as much as Eddie’s interactions with him have skewed poorly, he isn’t the practical joker type.

He’s hustled inside, hastily introduced to the pitching coach handed a jersey and heads immediately to the field to start loosening up. 

Eddie figures he won’t actually get in the game. It’s a professional team. They have better players than Eddie, who has thrown precisely one high school season. Still, it’s cool enough to see his actual name on the jersey’s nameplate. The high school just used the numbers without any adornment. He doesn’t know if he’ll get to take the jersey with him, but he’s planning on stealing the hat at very least.

True to Hopper’s word, the bullpen is thin today, just four guys including himself. The high school team had the same manpower, and they weren’t expected to play every day. It’s not a particularly welcoming group at first glance. Second glances tells him that the two Latino guys, Rafael and Alberto speak maybe ten words of English between them. Unfortunately Eddie only retained maybe twenty words from three year’s worth of Spanish clases and none of them were baseball terms. The English speaker is skinny black dude everyone calls Stretch who Eddie thinks is aloof until he hears his stammering speech and he revises the assessment to painfully shy. Which is cool. Eddie would have tried to adopt him for Hellfire during school if they’d been in the same place, but Eddie is actually several years younger that Stretch so that might be awkward.

Eddie can hang out with these guys for a week no problem. By the fourth inning, he and Rafe have cobbeled together enough of a mix of English, Spanish and pantomime to start cracking jokes at each other. Stretch hasn’t said a word, tilted back in his chair like he’s taking a nap, his glove perched over his eyes like a sun shade.

Evansville’s freshly affiliated this season and though the MLB ties brought a certain amount of interest back to the team at the start of the season, it’s late June and they’re well on their way to losing ninety of the summer’s one hundred and forty games. The crowd is sparse enough that you can hear individual hecklers and weirdly, they’re way meaner than the ones at the high school.

Eddie kind of loves it. He wishes it was acceptable to turn and talk shit back, but Stretch grabbed him when he started to try and gave a slow shake of his head.

And, okay, yeah. Eddie can maybe see where antagonizing people who paid to see you play is probably not the best move. It’s also incredibly unfair considering Alberto keeps a low running commentary in Spanish that Eddie is one hundred percent sure consists of nothing but shit talk.

The game itself exists in the same liminal place that D&D does, the action cresting and falling like it might go on forever. Eddie leans forward, elbows on knees, chin on hands, and tries to soak up the experience.

In the fifth inning Hopper shouts in the direction of the dugout. “Bullpen, Munson!”

And after a second the bullpen coach taps him on the shoulder and says, “Get going, new guy.”

Eddie grabs Wayne’s old mitt and throws all of seven warm up pitches before Hopper hollers, “Munson!”

He saunters out of the bullpen at a half jog. Behind him Rafe wolf whistles. It’s louder than the rest of the crowd combined, who at this point in a game down seven to nothing don’t feel much like cheering.

“Now pitching,” drones the PA announcer, “number eighty-six, straight out of Hawkins Illinois, Eddie Munson.”

At the town name, the cheers pick up a little. It’s the warmest welcome Eddie’s ever had in his home town and he raises an arm in sarcastic acknowledgement. He hears a single familiar whoop from the crowds and he finds himself smiling at the curly haired kids who used to haunt the high school games. Eddie grins and tugs his hat down low.

It reminds him of his first game, Coach Dave kicking him out with no preparation with the instruction to eat up innings and save the rest of the pitching staff. This game’s already lost. Eddie could give up another four runs and it wouldn’t make much difference.

He glances sideways to the dugout to find Hop leaning against the fence looking angry but interested. It was never a good mix for Eddie back when Hop was a cop. But Hopper took a chance on him.

It’s been a long time since anyone took any sort of risk on Eddie.

The batter’s a lefty. Their catcher sets up inside and he gives the signal. Eddie grins, his grip shifting automatically to his two seamer.

Up and in. With Eddie’s submariner delivery it’s a pitch that is both far too close for comfort and for most batters intensely weird.

He hasn’t thrown to a live player since he graduated.

“You got this Eddie,” the kid shouts from the stand.

Eddie doesn’t actually know that he’s got this, but he’s absolutely sure that his performance good or bad won’t make a difference in this game. Give it your best, Coach Dave whispers in his memory.

He throws.

He throws two scoreless innings. The only runner who reaches base is on Eddie’s fielding error when he boots what should have been an easy grounder back up the middle. Hopper taps him out in favor of Alberto for the last inning.

“Your fielding’s shit,” Hopper says lowly as the game winds down.

Eddie shrugs. “I played my first game like six months ago.”

“Good arm though,” Hopper continues like he hadn’t heard Eddie’s retort. “Weird delivery. But a damn good arm.”

“Didn’t call me the freak for nothing,” Eddie says.

“Practice at ten tomorrow. We can fix some of the fielding.”

Eddie expects practice to mean the entire team.

But no, it’s just Eddie, Coach Hopper and a whole gaggle of kids.

“What’s going on?” Eddie asks, eying the kids with suspicion. “Did you bring people to heckle me?”

“The only one I brought was Jane,” Hopper says, nodding at a serious girl, wearing a number 11 jersey with the name Harrington on the back. She clutches a bat in her right hand and holds a bucket baseballs in the other. “My daughter. The rest of the brats were not invited.”

The curly haired boy who’d been at every Hawkins High School game gives him a wave and a gummy smile. Next to him sits a red haired girl with a glove in her lap who punches him in the shoulder and says, “Nerd.” On the girl’s other side is a black kid grinning at their antics.

Hopper points them out in a row, “Dustin, Max and Lucas. Will and Mike are probably kicking around somewhere here too.”

“Hanging with Jonathan!” Lucas confirms.

“Jon’s our equipment manager,” Hopper says. “Will’s older brother. You can think of the kids like our mascots, annoying, but not actually something you want to get rid of.”

“You love us,” Dustin calls.

Hopper pulls a face that is meant to display annoyance, but really only confirms the fact. He turns back to Eddie and says, “Grounders.”

“Grounders,” Eddie echoes.

“Grounders,” Jane Hopper says with a solemn nod and hauls her bucket of baseballs to the plate.

Jane Hopper has just about the best hand eye coordination on the planet. She doesn’t wait for a pitcher, she just grabs a ball from the bucket, tosses it a few feet into the air and makes solid contact as it comes back down to earth. She doesn’t just make contact, she aims, too. And while Eddie has seen people like Coach Dave do things like that, it’s something different to see it from a tiny girl.

He fairs slightly better than he used to on the high school field, but that’s more a testament to the groundskeeper than any improvement in skill. The ball bounces true off the infield’s groomed dirt rather than the clumpy mess of Hawkins High. Hopper watches with a keen eye, offering him tips that amount to three simple rules.

Don’t take your eye off the ball.

Move your feet instead of stabbing your glove at the ball.

Keep your glove on the ground.

He’s relieved that Coach Dave’s drills about infield rotation proved true at least. And Eddie could catch most balls that were thrown directly at his face. As for the rest of it, Dave’s advice on grounds had been to get away and let the infield deal with it.

Unfortunately, according to Hopper, he’s the sort of pitcher that will generate tons of ground balls. Especially as the hitters start to catch up to his strange throwing motion. People still don’t tend to hit his stuff solidly, but the better the batter, the more contact.

And at a certain point Eddie’s going to have to make a play.

Except he’s only supposed to be here for a week. A player of convenience before Hopper manages to sign someone better from one of the independent leagues.

“It’s crazy how bad you are at this,” Max says. She’s been backing him up from somewhere around second base.

“I never claimed to be a jock,” Eddie says. He lifts his baseball cap enough to swab at the sweat on his brow.

“Munson,” Hopper says, his arms folded over his chest. “You’re literally a professional athlete.”

His contract with the team is supposed to last one week. Six games over seven days. Eddie winds up pitching in four of them. He makes two fielding errors but his ERA stays under two. At the end of the week, Hopper sidles over to him with a new stack of papers.

“Am I gonna need a lawyer?” Eddie asks.

“An agent, maybe,” Hopper replies. “But I doubt you’ll be offered prospect money before you stop booting grounders.”

Eddie stares at him. “You want me to stay?”

“The kids like you. And it saves me a round of scouting the independent league.” After a long moment of silence, he grudgingly adds, “And you’ve got potential. I haven’t seen anyone who throws quite like you.”

“Good to know I’m still the freak,” Eddie says and scrawls his name on the contract.

“Now pitching,” the PA announcer calls the very next game, “from right down the road in Hawkins, Indiana, number eighty six. Eddie “The Freak” Munson.”

A cheer rises up through the stands, just about as loud as it’s been all afternoon.

Eddie catches the ball and smiles to himself.

He wonders why no one ever told him that baseball loves their freaks.

Chapter Text

Steve Harrington closes his eyes and slowly rotates his left wrist. Tracing the alphabet the team trainer had instructed, like it’s supposed to be the cure all. Like the bigger problem isn’t the repeated head injuries and the problems with concentration.

“Steve?” Gramps asks.

Steve opens his eyes and looks at the little room where he’d spent his first double A season. With his call up last September and an invite to the MLB spring training this year, he’d thought he might never see it again, onto bigger and better things.

“Sorry,” Steve says. “Just thinking about how I’m gonna miss you guys.”

“You’ll be back,” Gramps says.

Steve grabs the duffle back and swings it over his shoulder. Last year Gramps seemed to think he’d never see double A again, but the marching orders this year are in the opposite direction.

You never know if it’ll be your only shot.

Steve grabs the walkie from the old bedside table, collapsing the antenna. He’s been out of range since Spring Training, but he’s had it set up anyway. El told him she could find a way to use it as a last resort.

“Sure,” Steve says.

He hasn’t made it past the fourth inning in a single start this season. He’s been on and off the DL as trainers searched for a rehab regimen that would get him back to one hundred percent. Steve’s pretty sure he’s about as close as he’s ever gonna get to one hundred percent. Honestly when you consider the hour plus torture session, it’s a miracle that he’s made it this far.

“It’s an opportunity,” Gramps insists. “I know the team’s close to where you grew up. Touch home. Get your head on straight. You’ve got great stuff. That hasn’t changed.”

Steve can still top one hundred miles an hour on a good day. But a golden arm isn’t much use when you can’t find the plate. The last truly accurate throw Steve can remember is the Molotov he chucked at the mind flayer in Starcourt Mall.

He regrets going back for the Code Red.

He would do it again a thousand times over.

He grabs the strap of his duffle bag and squeezes it. Anything to keep his hands from shaking.

“Right,” Steve says, not believing it. “I’ll be back here real soon.”

Evansville is close enough to Hawkins that the team does not offer to set him up with housing. His parents tell him he can stay at the house provided that he keep up its appearance. It’s a good deal. He knows other people whose parents would have made them play rent.  Steve stops at the house just long enough to remember how much he hates it and then heads to the stadium because, team or not, that’s where Robin will be. Hopper, who had been dismissed by the mayor following his actions around the death of the mall, had tapped his old contacts from when he used to coach a college wood bat league and wound up with the single A job. And bless him, he isn’t against pulling strings for family. Robin’s running the between inning entertainment. Jonathan’s the equipment manager and he’s got no doubt the kids are being used as unpaid labor along with half the kids on the Hawkins High baseball team.

If you had asked him at the end of senior year, Steve would have called it his ideal. Close to home. Close to the kids. Supporting himself the same way his dad always wanted him to on the strength of his golden arm.

Steve pulls the car into the stadium lot. It’s empty save about a half dozen cars. Probably the players who caught the sleeper bus to the away game. Steve parks next to a vaguely familiar white van and stares at the stadium.

He’s not sure if it’s better or worse that it’s not in Hawkins proper. That he has to commute from the hellhole that everyone thought he escaped. But he can’t live in Evansville if the kids are in Hawkins and the only way he feels even the least bit okay about this assignment is the fact that kids are nearby.

There’s a knock on his driver’s side window and he starts badly enough that he almost rattles his own brain. Which of course would make his problems worse.

Robin gives him a small wave.

Steve feels a huge smile spreading across his face as he launches himself out of the car so he can wrap her up in a hug.

“Missed you too, dingus,” she said, laughing and then she pulls back to punch him in his throwing arm. “And also, what the hell? You get transferred and I have to hear about it from a press release?”

Robin had in fact written the press release, part of her job as assistant director of media relations. 

“Seriously?” Steve says, dodging the question. “You know how this stuff works. You probably heard about it sooner than I did.”

“Not the point! I would have had someone here to welcome you home. I would have had your whole army of brats here.”

“This doesn’t feel like a celebration,” Steve rubs his elbow. “I mean I was supposed to be in the MLB by now.”

“And I wasn’t supposed to be running between innings entertainment for a baseball team. We’ve all got our crosses to bear. I’m just hoping I can finally get a good night’s sleep.”

“Did you really wait here for me?”

“Don’t get a big head about it. I knew you’d show up.”

He wakes up after a solid twelve hours of sleep and only then because one of Robin’s bony elbow catches him in the ribs. He’s called her in the middle of the night so many times, nightmares of the Russians and the mall echoing through his brain that it’s hard to believe she’s here. Steve hasn’t slept this long since he left for spring training.

“How am I still tired?” Robin moans.

“We’ve got a pretty big sleep debt,” Steve says.

“Fucking Russians,” Robin agrees.

They wind up in Steve’s kitchen, eating the end of an old box of cereal Steve bought back in February. They managed to talk a couple nights a week despite both of their schedules, but it’s somehow different in person.

“Any monsters?” Steve asks.

Robin snorts. “Not as far as we can tell.”

Steve nods, looking at his spoon. “Any Russians?”

“No,” Robin says dryly. “A couple Dominicans but not a single Russians.”

“Hopper any good at coaching? I’ve only ever seen him coach T-ball.”

Robin shrugs, tilting a hand side to side.

Steve fishes for another few flakes of cereal.

They head to the stadium just after lunch, Robin off to touch base with the staff and Steve to Hopper’s shoe box of an office. Steve knocks on the door and tries to offer a handshake in greeting only for Hopper to draw him into a huge hug.

“Sorry to have you down with this club, kid, but I can’t say it’s sad to see you.”

“Yeah.” Steve rubbed at the back of his neck. “Thanks, Hop. Same to you, I guess. Sorry about the other job.”

Hopper waves a hand dismissively and Steve lets his tension leave just a little. The Mayor had cut Hopper loose after the mall debacle. Apparently his snooping had involved a little too much by way of illegal searches to ignore. Add to that the Mayor had been in Russia’s pocket and it was a no brainer.

Nancy had been incensed.

Steve and Robin, after a late night helping Robin cram for a US government exam privately agreed that it was a good call.    

“Fewer Russians here,” Hopper said. “How long ago was your last game?”

“Three days.”

Steve barely made it out of the third inning.

“Five day rotation would have you for Wednesday. Last game of this home stand and then we’re away for the series this weekend. You got a preference for starting away or home?”

Steve shuffles his feet. Thinks of Dustin in the stands, Dustin who would have surely heard news of his demotion in time to show up at a game.

“Away,” Steve says.

Hopper must hear the words as the confession that it is because he asks, “Are you okay, kid?”

Steve plasters on a smile.

Hopper rolls his eyes. “Fine. I want you to throw today. Half speed. We’ve got to see what we’re working with.”

Steve throws half speed, focusing on mechanics. It all feels fine, feels normal. He’s worked hard through the years to groove a comfortable motion. And maybe the coaches were right. Maybe he just needs to work himself out of his head in a league without pressure. Maybe he needs to be close enough to Hawkins that he can see his gaggle of brats at least once a week.

Maybe this is a good thing.

The pitching coach calls it for him, tells him his motion looks okay and sends him to the trainer where he tries to awkwardly dance around his medical history without breaking any NDAs.

The assessment winds up being the same one the double A doctors gave him: Concussion symptoms are gone. Fingers healed straight despite the breaks. No lingering problems from the broken ribs.

Really, Steve had been phenomenally lucky. He’s still alive. All of his kids are still alive. The fingers aren’t perfect, but they’re on his glove hand and not his throwing hand. He’d sailed through the memory tests.

He got off easy.

He should be fine.

He wanders back through the stadium until he finds the home team locker room and then has to pause for a second to reconsider the probability of brain damage. Because sitting in the locker room, grinning as he shakes a ridiculous mane of hair out from under his cap as he chats half in English, half in broken Spanish with another player is Eddie Munson.

Steve stops, half thinking he’s hallucinating.

Munson makes him immediately, drawling, “Harrington.”

“New guy!” the Hispanic dude crows in accented English. When Munson doesn’t move, he crosses the room and slaps one hand into Steve’s while pointing at his chest with the other. “Rafael.”

“Steve.” Steve shakes the hand back. “Good to meet you.”

Rafael grins and slaps him on the back before heading back to his conversation. Steve watches, baffled. He wants to ask Munson what he’s doing here. He’s always been under the impression that the guy was allergic to team sports and he seems like he speaks Spanish pretty well for someone who failed the class at least once. But before he can get his act together to go talk to him, he’s already gone.

Steve bombs his start.

Seven runs in four and a third innings.

Robin is quick to point out that his eight strikeouts in the same time frame are actually pretty good, but Steve is more worried about the eleven walks that went with them.

At least he’d managed a pair of singles out of the outing, the opposing pitcher’s day almost as bad as Steve’s own.

The game settles down after the busy opening. Munson winds up mopping up Steve’s bad inning without giving up any runs of his own and then adds a second clean one. The bullpen cobbles the rest of the game together, but they don’t manage a comeback and it leaves the bullpen strung out and exposed for the next couple games in the series.

Steve stews on it.

He misses high school when he got to play on his rest days. Misses basketball season where he could ended every game drenched in sweat, but free from the jittery nerves he could never quite shake.

Munson pitches in all of the games in the series and Steve can see how he’s effective. His screwball motion seemed to come from every angle except the norm and his fastball moves almost comically slow compared to Steve’s own.

In better leagues they’d figure him out, Steve suspects. Most of what makes Munson work as a pitcher is misdirection. The better the scouts and the better the players, the less effective he’d be.

But right here, now, at this level?

He’s better that Steve.

It bothers him a little how much he hates it.

They drop all four games of the series before heading back to Evansville for the home stand. Eddie seems completely undeterred by the losses. He’d managed five scoreless innings over four games so Steve figures he doesn’t have much to feel bad about it. He goes to sleep in the back of the bus, headphones over his ears, cranked loud enough that Steve can hear the metal through his tinny headphones.

“No idea how he can sleep through that,” Steve says.

“He’s Dracula,” Rafael says from the bus seat behind him. “No sleep all night.”

“Kind of like you, Harrington,” Kyle says from behind him. He’d been the unfortunate soul who grabbed Steve for a roommate for this away trip. Steve hasn’t had many full night’s sleep since last September and unfamiliar places tend to make it worse. The nights hadn’t been restful for Kyle either.

“Trade?” Rafael says, gesturing between himself and Kyle. “Leave Draculas together.”

 “I don’t think that’s how trading works,” Steve starts, but Kyle and Rafael are already shaking hands.

In his sleep, Eddie scratches at his nose and starts to snore.

With how the games fall, the team’s return home coincides with Steve’s next start in the rotation. He rolls into the stadium earlier than the rest of the team is expected since it’s when Robin needs to be there and finds Dustin Henderson waiting for him in the parking lot.

Steve sits for a second, letting the car run, wondering if he should back right back out.

Half embarrassed by the demotion, he hadn’t told Dustin he was back in town.

Given Henderson’s thunderous expression, Steve’s about to pay for it.

“Look on the bright side,” Robin says. “Next start will go better than the last one and it’ll be good to hang with your gaggle of children without threat of the world ending.”

“Our gaggle of children,” Steve corrects.

“Don’t rope me into your shit,” Robin says, getting out of the car. She strides towards the stadium, giving Dustin a friendly hip check on her way.

Steve sighs, pulls the parking break and exits the car himself.

“I can’t believe you!” Dustin howls and Steve is struck with such a crushing fondness for this brat that he lets the kid yell at him until he’s nearly late for the morning meeting.

It takes a couple innings for things to go wrong this time, but Steve bombs his next start as well. The first inning had jumpy batters, all of them first pitch swinging, chasing balls out of the strike zone to the delighted whoops of Dustin in the stand. He’s not the only one of Steve’s kids watching either. Max is sitting in the row above him, El on one side, Lucas on the other. And considering Hopper managed to get Jonathan a job as the equipment manager, he’s willing to bet that Will’s kicking around the stadium somewhere as well. And if Will is here, Mike won’t be far behind.

He’s an out into the third inning, facing the opposing pitcher and the guy just…

Doesn’t swing.

He stands in the batter’s box, wincing as Steve hums a fastball a little too close to his face.

And he walks on four pitches.

Steve hasn’t actually managed to throw consistently in the strike zone all afternoon. He’s just the kind of pitcher who throws fast enough that the decision to swing for most comes as soon as the ball leaves his hands.

He squeaks out of the third inning on a lucky double play ball and he knows before Hopper sends him back out for the fourth that things will go from bad to worse.

He hits the first two batters of the next inning, one after the other and the umpire tosses him from the game thinking it’s intentional.

The only one in the whole stadium who seems pleased with this turn is Max who cackles from the stands.

After the game Hopper stops in front of Steve’s locker, drumming a hand on the metal. “We’re gonna try you in the bullpen for a couple games. Get you some consistent work before we try to stretch you back out.”

There is a roaring sound in Steve’s ears.

 “I can’t believe you’ve got the yips,” Dustin says over a milkshakes the day before they leave for a two week road swing.

“It’s not the yips,” Steve says, poking at the straw.

“It’s totally the yips,” Dustin shoots back. “How’d you fix it last time?”

Steve frowns at him.

“During high school?” Dustin prompts. “You were all over the place for your first couple starts.”

Steve curls his glove hand around the cool metal of the glass. He pointedly does not look at the fingers that healed a little crooked. The doctors gave him a clean bill of health. He’s fine. “It’s not the same thing. That part got better when I started sleeping again.”

“So start sleeping.” Dustin slurps at his straw through the gap in his teeth. “Doesn’t seem too hard.”

Steve only sleeps more than a couple hours at a time when Robin’s around these days. He suspects the real trick to cracking that particular problem would be to host a never-ending sleepover with all of his kids.

But he’s positive Erica would never allow it and he barely liked watching the awkward dance of teenage romance when he was part of it.

“Yeah, Henderson,” he drawls. “I can get right on that.”

Steve doesn’t think he was mean to Eddie in high school.

Well, that’s not true, Steve was kind of a dick to a lot of people, but Eddie was a grade ahead of him for most of their school days and the one year that they spend in the same class, Steve was preoccupied with the existence of monsters and his world had narrowed to baseball and Henderson’s little gang of misfits.

He has a vague memory of Eddie standing on lunch tables and lecturing the school. Steve thinks he might have thrown food at him a couple times, but considering most of the school did that, Eddie probably wouldn’t count it against him.

So it’s after a long awkward silence upon tossing their bags into the hotel room they’re supposed to be sharing for the away series that Steve says, “Since when do you even like baseball?”

Eddie scowls at him. “Since the first time I tried it, honestly. Someone should have told me about all of the superstitions and shit when I was a kid. Probably would have gotten beat up way less if I talked about that instead of D&D.”

Steve wrinkles his nose. Here he’d thought he might escape that game one day. “You play Dungeons and Dragons?”

Instead of answering, Eddie flops back on his bed and pulls on his headphones.

Steve slinks into the bullpen as awkward as he’s been in his life. It’s late enough in the season that most of the relationships have already been established and Steve’s habitual hyper-focus does not fit with this very loose bullpen atmosphere. Not to mention the half of the conversation that’s in Spanish sails right over Steve’s head. He spends most of the time tucked into corner, running through his rehab exercises.

The move to the bullpen has not fixed—or even changed—his pitching. Steve still throws hard. Harder than just about everyone else in single A ball by a good five or six miles per hour. He just can’t buy a strike. And the longer it goes without a decent appearance, the worse it gets.

Eddie on the other hand, cruises by with his cartoonish motion and blasé attitude. Steve has never seen an athlete so completely immune to the pressure. Looking at him you’d never be able to tell if he put the opposing team down in order or if he’d given up a dozen runs.

After a game, Steve always looks like he’s been through a battle, sweat pouring down his arms, his hands shaking with adrenaline. But he’s getting fewer and fewer chances. He can’t think of the last time he was in a position where he could make or break the game.

Steve can throw a baseball one hundred and two miles an hour, but that doesn’t matter if it doesn’t go where it’s supposed to.

Eddie and he have a détente for the road. They’re together because they’re both heinous insomniacs. Steve, because he can’t properly rest without knowing Robin’s alive and within arm’s length. Eddie, because he’s functionally nocturnal. Eddie doesn’t give him shit for all the noise from late night calls and Steve never mentions the music. It works better than Steve had hoped.

They don’t need to talk to be roommates.

Except after one game, Steve’s lying on his bed, running through his rehab exercises when Eddie says, “Okay, I’ll bite. What’s up with your hand?”

Steve freezes, feeling caught. He looks at his fingers, the scar tissue over the knuckles, the not-quite-linear bend to the bone.

“It’s honestly been driving me a little crazy,” Eddie says. “I used to do shit with fingering on a baseball when I was first started pitching. Like figuring out new cords on a guitar or something. But you’re using the wrong hand, and no offense but you’re fingers look a little...”

“Fucked up?” Steve supplies.

“Fucked up,” Eddie agrees. “Are you like, okay?”

Steve flexes both his hand. The Russians had stopped before they moved to his pitching arm. Stopped before they ruined not just his psyche but his career.

“Steve,” Eddie prompts, sounding close to gentle.  “What the fuck happened?”

“Classified,” Steve says and turns over on his bed, tucking his hand protectively into his chest.

He pretends to sleep so hard that he eventually drifts off for real.

Almost four hours later Steve jerks awake to a thump against his chest. He jolts upright, instinctively throwing a punch, but he catches nothing but air.

Eddie looks at him wide eyed from his own double bed. His battered old glove is sitting on Steve’s chest. “You were screaming,” he says. “And also what the fuck?”

Steve lets his heart throttle back to normal. The hotel air is stuffy like it’s been a while since anyone ran a vacuum. As his eyes adjust he can make out his suitcase and Eddie’s duffle. The yellowish street lamps seep through the cracks in the drapes, but it’s still clearly before dawn. He misses his nail bat, but it would be a little hard to explain to a roommate.

Into the darkness he confesses, “I was in the mall when it exploded last year. I was so panicked about getting the kids out, it didn’t really click until a lot later that I could have died.”

“Henderson?” Eddie asks.

It’s a good guess. The kid’s basically the team mascot and he’s one of the few people around who still vehemently defends Steve’s pitching.

“Yeah. Him and his whole troop. I was supposed to be heading the Major League team that same week, but well, now I’m here.”

Eddie’s quiet for a long time, enough so that Steve thinks he might have nodded off. But then he says, “Look on the bright side, you’re here.”

Steve opens his mouth to counter.

Closes it.

Thinks.

He’s still here. So are Robin and Henderson and the rest of the little shits.

Put that way, last year’s fiasco might almost be a victory.

In the light of day, it’s harder to find that mindset. He blows saves. He hits batters. And then one game, the one damn time all season he manages to find the balance between velocity and control for more than a batter, he gets through two outs clean before the batter makes solid contact and crushes it back up the middle for a two run homer.

Hopper takes the ball from him before the next batter. Steve wants to scream and not just because of the blown save.

It’s the first time all season that he felt even close to having his shit together and it still wasn’t good enough.

He doesn’t remember walking off the field. Doesn’t remember much of everything until he slams his locker shut with enough force to rattle the entire wall.

He can hear the distant rumblings of the game still in process.

He grabs his gear and walks out of the stadium. Gets in the car and drives back into Hawkins. Doesn’t realize where he’s going until he finds himself in front of the old batting cages. The lights are off, but he knew from one of his high school teammates what code unlocked the office and where to find the switches that boot up the machines. His gear is back at the stadium so he grabs a loner bat and the change from the car that he keeps for runs to the laundromat and walks into the cage.

He thinks about Nancy staring down a softball with just as much focus as she’d stared down Billy. Thinks about Robin, pressed up next to his back, warm and laughing and alive. Of Dustin heckling the umpires and Max’s feigned aloofness.

He puts a quarter into the slot, waits for the soft mechanical fwhump as the ball pipes through the machinery.

And then he swings as hard as he can for as long as he can.

The next day, an off day, he goes to the stadium by himself, his abs aching from all the swings at the cage last night and totes a bucket full of baseballs out to centerfield. Then he picks one up, sets like he’s throwing from the stretch and heaves the ball all the way to home plate.

It’s not until he’s at the bottom of the bucket and trudging his way back home that he realizes he’s not alone.

Eddie’s sitting in the stands, a guitar on his lap, strumming at a song that sounds just a touch out of tune. “You were throwing strikes,” Eddie notes. “You know if you were curious.”

Figures the only time he can do that is when he’s standing three hundred and fifty feet away.

“What are you doing here?” Steve asks.

“Dude, I live in a one bedroom trailer and my uncle just got off a night shift.” He plays another three bar riff. Steve doesn’t recognize it, but probably the heavy metal Eddie listens to just sounds weird on an acoustic.

“No, man, what are you even doing in town? On a fucking baseball team? We all thought you were gonna run away after high school. Try to make it with your band.”

Eddie huffs out a laugh. “Well thank you Harrington, nice to know I had a fan.”

“Fuck you, dude. That was all you talked about in high school. Your band, D&D and like, nonconformity. You’re not supposed to be here.”

Eddie settles the guitar in his lap, wrapping a hand around the neck. “You’re right,” he says. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be in jail, or dead in a ditch, or I don’t know, taking my forth lap at senior year. But someone gave me the chance to do this, so I grabbed on with both hands. It still kind of feels like a dream.”

Steve can’t remember the last time it felt like that. Nothing but the purity of the game and an absence of expectations. Like a fairy tale.

Eddie’s voice drops low. “I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I still try to dodge anytime someone hits the ball back up the middle. I fuck up pretty much any time I’m not throwing and I’m probably never going to hit any level higher than this. But that’s okay. Because it’s a damn sight better than not being here.”

Steve considers for a second, looking at everything but Eddie’s face. “I didn’t think you were gonna wind up in jail. The band thing maybe, but not jail.”

“Dude have you heard me play. I’m in tune with myself, but the rest of the world? Not so much.”

“So why play?”

Eddie strums again. “I love it, dude. Doesn’t matter if I’m any good. When’s the last time you did something like that? I’ve watched you pitch. You’re not having any fun at all.”

“I can’t just stop,” Steve says. “My whole life was building up to this. Me and my golden arm.”

“Yeah, but do you even like baseball?”

Steve sits down next to him, head in his hands. “Parts of it. I mean, I always loved hitting. And it was pretty great to overpower someone with a fastball. But that only works if you can throw the ball over the plate and I haven’t been able to do that since I got hurt.”

“Where there you go,” Eddie says. “Why would you expect you could still do it after you got hurt?”

“The doctor said I was okay.”

“Yeah, well I bet there’s a difference between being normal person okay and being professional athlete okay.”

Steve’s breath catches. Something in his chest cracks.

“Imagine my surprise,” Eddie continues, unaware that he’s shifted the ground under Steve’s feet. “All I heard on the high school team was about how much better we were with the great Steve Harrington anchoring the rotation. It’s like you were some kind of superhero. Not going to lie, it’s kind of okay to learn that you’re also just some guy.” He gives Steve a crooked half-smile. “Besides, you saved those kids, right? So it was worth it?”

“It was worth it,” Steve agrees.

“Then quit obsessing over what you can’t do and figure out something you can.”

Steve stays quiet for a long minute.

Eddie seems content to let it lie. His fingers curl over the neck of his guitar and it picks out the opening bars of Centerfield. The tune’s recognizable, but Steve can see what he meant about being a little off key.

Steve says, “I can tune your guitar for you.”

Eddie shoves him in mock outrage, but then he reconsiders and hands the guitar over.

It doesn’t happen fast.

Steve’s contract dictates that he keeps pitching, so he keeps pitching right through August and into the first days of September where there is no call up for a major league audition. He keeps putting the team in binds that Eddie and the rest of the bullpen drag him out of because no one wants to admit the tarnish has rubbed off Steve’s golden arm.

He spends the off season back in Hawkins, driving Henderson around, running basketball drills with Lucas and helping Max with her grounders when he can. He lets Eddie drag him and Robin to metal shows where the music rattles in his head and lets himself forget about baseball long enough to miss it. By the time spring training rolls back around Steve shows up with no contract and declares his intention to try out as an outfielder.

Eddie catches his eye from across the field, nods and joins the pitchers as they warm up.

And somehow, both of them keep holding on.