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Okay, so, Steve may or may not have something very bad going on. And he hasn’t told anyone. But when everyone else has something going on in their minds—do you expect him to just say "hey! I'm actually cursed to relive my past traumatic experiences, have my bones bent until they snap, and my eyes sunken into my head! Right now! What's your favourite ice cream flavour?" No??? Of course not! Everyone already has so much on their plates, especially Max. Poor kid's almost died twice in the same goddamn month.
And, plus, maybe he's just misinterpreting these symptoms. Due to a concerning amount of head injuries he sustained in the past three years, headaches have been an ordinary thing to wake up with. It was more unusual if he didn't wake up with one, even more so when they didn’t flare up at a random point of the day. And he learned how to live with it! He survived his whole life with periodical migraines, even with the surplus of them later in his life; what's one during maybe the end of the world? As for the nosebleeds, well, he suffered many head injuries in the past. They were also pretty normal for Steve.
And the nightmares…
An array of dead child bodies along the tunnels.
Nancy's words singing on loop.
His father's fist swinging as his life flashes before his eyes.
Getting dragged to the bottom of Lover's Lake, but there's no portal, no voices, no one swimming after him.
Barb's bloated body in his backyard pool.
A distant memory that always has him shaken and disoriented in the ass crack of dawn.
Safe to say Steve Harrington has had his fair share of nightmares for a while now.
So maybe the symptoms didn't ring alarm bells in his head. Though, subconsciously, maybe he might've picked up on it, which is why he has been listening to his favourite song in the car or on the radio most often these past three days, hoping someone would intuitively take note, and he'd be saved.
(Because Steve Harrington is not anything but a mess.
No, that's not right. When did his thoughts turn into someone else's?)
When Steve had his first vision, he didn't know it was a vision. Yes, he heard those deafening clock dings, just like what Max described when they sat her down and had her explaining her experience to the group. Four dings. Four dings that repeated and echoed throughout any victim’s head.
Maybe, in another world, he would snap out of it and immediately know what that dreading feeling in his heart was about. That he was cursed, and he would pick up his walkie-talkie and tell everyone on radio, or maybe take a drive to the Hendersons house and stay with them as everyone regrouped. That he would have his song ready, a tape of the singer's performance and a VHS player right in front of him.
But that wasn't what happened.
No, Steve Harrington didn't tell anyone, because just a few seconds after he heard a grotesque whisper in his ear, he woke up gasping.
It was a dream.
It was a dream.
Steve Harrington wasn't cursed, because as usual, it was all a dream.
(He ignores the part of him that still itches in discomfort, the 'you're next' he heard still ringing in his ears, and the feeling that it was never a dream.)
And now they're sitting in the Wheeler's basement on the fourth day, around a table with everyone leaning over a blueprint of the plan, and Steve's staring at a grandfather clock embedded in the far corner wall. It ticks. He doesn't move.
He's hallucinating.
Surely he is.
"Hey! Steve! Eyes down here!"
A hand snaps in front of him, pulling him out of the trance-like state he was in while staring at that stupid grandfather clock.
(It's still there, glaringly obvious in his peripherals yet no one seems to glance at it for even a second. Like it isn't there. Like he's hallucinating. Like he's cursed.)
He blinks a few times, before turning towards Dustin, dread pooling in his stomach. A few people are looking, staring, eyes boring into his soul, but they all turn back to go over the plan, crowding over the drawing of who-knows-what, leaving Dustin and Steve to themselves. Biting his bottom lip, he leans in closer to him and utters into his ear,
"Please tell me you see that grandfather clock in the corner."
There's a second of quiet, the kid's head snapping towards the direction he jutted his chin in. He's scanning the corner for something, anything, and he doesn't see it.
(But Steve still does.)
It lasts about a few seconds before he's shouting with a horror-stricken face, and Steve just wishes he kept his stupid mouth shut. His headache flares up.
"WHAT?! Steve, please tell me you're joking—"
And the room goes silent.
It's Robin who speaks up first. "What's up, little man?" She says, a smile on her face yet glancing at them worry and confusion underlying her words.
He should’ve kept his fucking mouth shut.
"Steve saw the clock!!"
Chaos erupted.
Robin’s eyes widened comically, before launching herself at him like he was immediately about to levitate and die. Jonathan held Nancy in his arms as they shouted questions at him, like what his favourite song is, when his symptoms started, whether or not this was a grim joke, alongside the rest of the kids. Many others crowded around him—Max, whose breaths were coming out as soft wisps, Eddie, who looked at him in horror, having watched two people die to something he was next in line for, Dustin, threatening him to stop shutting down or he’ll jump into his mind himself and kick his ass before Vecna even tried to kill him, Will and Eleven and Lucas and it was all so much to handle—
Suddenly everything went quiet, and he didn’t have to worry about getting overwhelmed anymore because, well, no one was here.
It was a black void, and he could see himself in the reflection of the floor, like he was looking through water.
(“HIS EYES!” Nancy cries, the only one watching as his eyes snapped upwards, his face suddenly losing all emotion.)
It brought him a horrible sense of déjà vu, like he was forgetting about something that happened a life ago, yet seemed so close. He called out his friends’ names as he thought of them, anxiously stumbling through this weird place like he was standing on wet tiles by the poolside. “Robin?!” He yelled, hands cupped around his mouth, then, “Dustin?!”
(Everyone goes stock still, the sight of whitened out eyes drawing out a sound of pain from both Max and Eddie. Robin barrels through, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking. “Wake up, Harrington, I swear to fucking god if you don’t wake up–”
He didn’t move, and she felt her heart drop into her stomach.)
Then, all of the sudden, he was knocked into a perspective that wasn’t his own; a blindfold getting pulled off of his head, the familiar feeling of tears falling out of his eyes, something leaking out of his nose. He reaches up to catch it before it falls onto the pristine white table below, but stops midway.
Blood drops onto the table, mixing with tears and staining polaroid photos of people he has never met.
(“Does anyone know his favourite song?!” Lucas’s voice cuts through the chaos, sending a select few people into silence as they scour their minds. Nancy leans defeatedly into Jonathan, tears welling up in her eyes as nothing comes up. Dustin doesn’t speak, neither does Max.
Then, Robin snaps her fingers. “Fuck! I don’t know the name! I think it’s made by Bonnie Tyler—Total…”)
Someone wipes his nose with a tissue from behind, the same person who pulled the blindfold off in the first place. He doesn’t know why he’s crying, why his nose is bleeding, why there is a glaring, emboldened ‘007’ embedded into his wrist or why his head feels so empty. Nothing about this feels normal.
He doesn’t feel like Steve Harrington right now.
(”—Eclipse of the Heart!!” Eddie finishes. Dustin, Robin, Max, and Mike all look at him weird, while Nancy sends Will, Lucas, and Jonathan out to get every cassette tape they had in the car, hoping, hoping that Steve has a backup favourite song just in case of the apocalypse because they’re really praying that he just has a stash of Bonnie Tyler cassette tapes in his car.)
There’s a mirror in front of him, he realises. But when he looks forward, he doesn’t see Steve Harrington. He sees a kid, with shaved hair and a hospital gown and a man behind him that sends chills down his spine. He’s never seen the man in his life, but something in his mind disagrees with that statement.
“Are you okay, Seven?”
Seven.
Is he Seven? The tissue’s still propped up against his nose but he pushes it away because he knows the bleeding stopped by now. With an involuntary smile, “Yes, Papa.”
Papa.
Papa.
Papapapapapapapap—
Seven—no, Steve—feels sick.
It’s like he’s living a memory. This doesn’t feel like something Vecna pulled out of his ass, but it starts to when the hands previously caressing his cheeks softly become firmer. More outwardly telling.
(Se—Steve has always been good at reading people’s minds. Tommy once called him a superhero in middle school.)
“You know what lying does to you, Seven. Do you not remember?” Papa—Dr. Brenner—Martin?—holds his face still, voice turning a bit more cruel at the end. A horrible feeling washes over him. “Or would you like me to jog your memory?”
That’s not Papa; is the first thought that crosses his mind. He never smiled like that. He doesn’t remember the man, but intuition knows. He gets half-a-word in before he’s falling to the floor, chair seemingly disappearing from beneath him, and all of his surroundings fading into a cruel black—the same void he’s become accustomed to for the past seven years.
No, that’s not right. What’s going on with his memories?
(When the boys don’t come back that soon, Robin sings to him. It’s not great, but it reminds her of the special time in the bathroom, injuried and drug-addled yet coherent enough to talk and laugh and sing Total Eclipse of the Heart in a stall after puking their stomachs out. Eddie looks at her weird, before he shushes everyone. Very aggressively.)
He screams his friends' names again. Desperation crawls up his throat, almost choking him, when the darkness snaps into light and there’s a man’s hand around his throat. It’s not Papa.
(It’s a guard, his mind whispers.)
There’s tables and chairs thrown across the room and it looks like a tornado ran through and Seven’s in the middle of it all, a guard’s hand making bruises around his neck, fighting for every breath. He sees Papa in his peripherals, crossing his arms like he always does, except his mouth is set in a fine thin line, disappointment curling around his stiff body, looking so playful but at the same time taunting.
His eyes flash, he covers them, the hand disappears into thin air. He’s half expecting to fall back on that cold, solid water floor, but he doesn’t. It’s colder, freezing tiles digging into his skin and when he opens his eyes he’s not sure he opens his eyes. They’re open, but it’s so dark he can’t even see himself.
Panic floods his veins involuntarily, and Steve’s back to watching farther behind his eyes as his vision blurs, and he bangs on a door in a dark room and gets no response.
When Steve opens his eyes again, he knows he’s in a different place before his vision makes out the shapes and stars and triangles that form before him. There’s spores floating in the air and a terrible, gut wrenching smell that comes from behind him. His stomach twists and twists until he’s back in the Starcourt bathroom, choking on his own vomit and Robin pulling him by the hair and whispering painful things in his ear. Then he’s back, like the bathroom was just a hallucination.
Steve hears a horrid series of cracking and snapping coming from behind him and it takes everything not to scream when he turns around. The kids are behind him, bleeding from the eyes and fingers bent in every wrong direction possible. There’s an eye popped out of Dustin’s face, veins and nerves and muscles the only thing keeping it from dropping to the vine infested floors. Max’s neck has a bone sticking through the side and her eyes are sunken through, fresh blood dripping onto the floor. Mike’s mouth is open in a silent scream. Lucas’s eyes are hollow.
They’re in the tunnels, and Steve was supposed to protect them. Protect them, even if it took his own life. Yet here he was. The only one alive when he was given one single thing to do properly.
Max’s neck twists some more, enough so her mangled face looks at him, and then twists again. A broken finger raises, and she’s pointing it to his heaving chest.
“You…”
“Why didn’t you save us?” Dustin rises from the floor, a never ending flow of tears accompanying the ever-present open-mouthed frown he has, blood leaking from his lips.
“I’m sorry– I-I-I—” He stammers, watching the other two limply standing on two twisted legs.
Max approaches him, uttering tears, pain, suffering—why didn’t he do anything?
Steve backs up, breath halted in disappointment and fear and pain and—
He’s falling.
Hesfallinghesfallinghesfallinghes—
Steve falls back-first into a body of water. It knocks all the remaining air out of his lungs before he could take a deep breath. His lifeguard instincts take over and he's swimming, swimming, swimming upward, waiting for a break in the water and for freezing air to envelope his body. But it doesn't come, and his swimming gets frantic, frantic, frantic, opening his eyes in whatever body of water he's in, risking the sting to see how far the surface is.
It's red, he can't see five feet in front of him. There's no walls, no floor, no sand, no creatures, nothing to indicate he wasn't swimming in the middle of the pacific ocean or a really deep swimming pool.
It's red, and he keeps swimming up, up, up, a harsh burning in his lungs telling him he doesn't have enough time left.
And then, Steve feels his hand get enveloped by a harsh winter breeze. But he couldn't get his head out of the water before something wrapped around his ankle and pulled him back. His mouth fell open in a scream and he unthinkingly gasped, desperately trying to get air.
A salty metallic taste fills his mouth, and his stomach drops.
It's blood.
He gags, tears being lost to the sea of blood as he tries to wrench his foot out of the hand's grasp.
Hand?
Steve forces himself to look down.
Barbara Holland's dead bloated face stares back at him, with clawed out eyes and sludge leaking out of her ears and mouth. Her body's discoloured, yellows and reds and blues and purples tainting what used to be freckled pale skin. Her lips are blue and so is her face, covered head-to-toe with scars and bloody abrasions and bruises.
Seven screams.
Seven?
(Nancy storms out the door when the boys don't return that quickly. Robin's still singing Total Eclipse of the Heart acapella, but her voice is breaking out into sobs, cracking, while everyone wonders the same thing.
Why is this taking so long?
They aren't sure if they're referring to Jonathan and Will and Lucas or why Steve hasn't started levitating yet. Does this mean he's successfully running for his life or does it mean Vecna's taking his sweet time in torturing him?)
There's that swooping feeling again, and he's throwing up all the blood he accidentally inhaled. He's choking on his tongue, hands bound behind his back, wearing scratchy clothes and sitting on cold metal and his face hurts so fucking much. Steve already knows where he is before he opens his eyes, before a rough calloused hand grabs his chin.
"Who do you work for?" A voice demands, a Russian accent tainting his pronunciation of the words, English falling out of his mouth unnaturally.
"Family Video!" He finds himself breathing out, blood falling from his mouth, "I work 't Family Video, you fuckin' bastard!"
The man sneers at him, then nods at the other man in the room, and he finds himself shaking his head.
"No no no—"
The man lands a punch on his stomach.
Steve coughs once, twice, then he throws up.
He’s dry heaving on the ground when he realises he’s no longer in the torture room. With monumental strength he didn’t know he still had, he opens his eyes and picks himself up. The taste of blood clings to his throat, his tongue, his teeth, but he resists the urge to gag again. He’s in a hallway, one that seems to stretch out infinitely in one direction, but ends right behind him. The doors don’t open, boarded up with wood and godforsaken barbed wire and Steve wonders how royally fucked he is when the lights start to flicker.
And, wow, does that start some conflicted trauma response in him because he starts immediately panicking.
Certified lifeguard for three years, huh? What happened to plan before panic?
Steve runs to the nearest boarded up door that has the least barbed wire and almost rips his fingers off trying to pull on it. The lights are still flashing (one explodes). The nails are rusted and old, so that contributes to the first plank getting pulled off, then the second. The wood is dusty and a horrible unnatural colour. It probably has four undiscovered diseases and he’s touching it with his bare hands, open wounds and all.
He’s onto the third (and last before the wires) wooden(?) plank when he hears footsteps behind him. His heart is in his throat and he can’t breathe properly, idontwannadieidontwannadieidontwannadie looping in his head over and over again when he hears that same whisper in his ear again just like in his dream-vision.
“Seven.”
Steve—Seven?—hears, and he almost drops a nail on his foot at the sudden panic of that name. It’s familiar and it seems to unlock something in his mind because now he can't stop thinking about it.
There's barely any barbed wire and the plank has considerably loosened, to the point where one single hard pull and it'd come off. The footsteps are getting closer, the lights exploding and flickering faster, and refuses to turn around, lest he be trapped by wavering fear and immediately forgetting that he has a will to live.
When the footsteps stop behind him, he has a half-baked plan and a few begging voices in his ears.
(Somewhere else, Steve Harrington starts floating.)
"Seven. Look at me."
Oh, and look at him he does. He turns around, wielding a wooden plank that he smacks that bitch across the face with. Steve relishes in the pained sound he makes, tiny itty-bitty pieces of flesh flying from the impact for one, two, and then he's running through the barbed wires and out the door. They catch on his arms, tearing through his sleeves, his scalp, his forearms shielding his face, and he runs.
Beyond the door is a red landscape. The clouds and the sky a deep blood colour like it's the apocalypse, bits and pieces of the rich wood the Creel house was made out of sticking out the floor and flying through the air alongside the vehicles that Max had to run past when it started raining cars.
There's three, four pillars made out of dark red vines. One holds the dead body of Chrissy Cunningham, eyes bleeding and hair messy, so unlike her perfect cheerleader ponytail he always saw her with. Her jaw is unhinged, but her arms and legs look bent perfectly, broken perfectly in half. Another holds Fred Benson, but unlike Chrissy, his looks physically painful. Every bone and joint in his body destroyed and mangled in different directions, not that unlike the nightmare he saw in the tunnels earlier. Then, Patrick McKinney. A mix of the other two. Sustained unbearable damage, but not soft and thorough like Chrissy, or painful and horrible as Fred.
He starts to wonder where the rest of the Creel family is when a vine wraps itself around his ankle.
—But he couldn't get his head out of the water before something wrapped around his ankle and pulled him back—
Dumbly, Steve remembers he has a pocket knife in his pocket when he's getting dragged to an empty pillar, one that looks like it was modified perfectly for Max before she escaped by the power of Kate Bush. He pulls it out of his pocket with trembling fingers and cuts his leg open sawing the tentacle off.
(Nancy bursts through the doors with the boys in tow, holding all the cassette tapes they could find in both Steve's car and Argyle's van. Will, Lucas, Jonathan, and Nancy dump them all on the table. Everyone starts ruffling through them all, but Robin doesn't move. She's staring into his whitened eyes, wishing that they'd stare back with that hazel colour she's grown to love. She doesn't want to leave him.
In another room, Eleven turns the TV on and wears a blindfold. She wipes her nose and tries again.)
It releases the vine equivalent of blood and hisses away, coming back with even more vines but giving Steve enough time to run like hell.
He doesn't know where he's going, just far enough away from the pillars that the vines don't have enough time to strap him to a pillar without getting cut off.
This place looks like a nightmare. Like a dark kingdom on an island in a world of magic. Spikes facing upward and everything twisted in the wrong way. He sees a small teddy bear, torn up and embedded in the red floors, and wonders if the little Creel girl or the boy owned it.
A vine sneaks up to him, because of course it does. It takes him so off guard that he drops his only weapon, because of course he does.
("I found it! I found it!" Dustin shouts, gaining the attention of everyone in the room. Eddie, who's staring at his levitating body, snaps his head towards the kid. In his hands is, indeed, Total Eclipse of the Heart, by Bonnie Tyler. Eddie doesn't grin, trauma shaking his very core, but he does grab the cassette tape from Dustin and throws the song to Max, who loads it up in her walkman and holds the ear pieces to Steve's ear. She's on his back, a few feet above the air, but holding on.
She only wishes he will, too.)
The beginning of Total Eclipse of the Heart starts up as he's fighting the vines dragging him to his almost inevitable doom. Vecna's there, staring, by the pillar and doing nothing, like he knows it's guaranteed he'll die.
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit lonely,'
'And you're never coming round.'
And, oh, doesn't that bring back memories? Memories of singing in a Starcourt bathroom with his best friend, making fun of Tammy Thompson, singing that same song horribly with Robin Buckley. They found out Russian secrets they shouldn't have, got pretty beat up in the process, drugged, sitting on the disgusting bathroom tiles after throwing up what was 20% blood, 40% stomach acid, 20% whatever food he ate that day, 10% whatever drink he had that day, and 10% whatever the Russians injected in their systems.
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit tired,'
'Of listening to the sound of my tears.'
But they were happy. Robin was happy to have someone accept her, Steve was happy to have a best friend he could be himself with.
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit nervous,'
'That the best of all the years have gone by.'
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit terrified,'
'And then I see the look in your eyes~'
The tentacle's grip on his legs slacked, and before he knew it, he was kicking them off and running in the direction of the portal back home.
Home.
'Turn around, bright eyes,'
'Every now and then I fall apart'
'Turn around, bright eyes,'
'Every now and then I fall apart'
Not a house, not Earth itself, not even his dimension, but the people that screamed his name, pulled on his legs, shed tears because he was Steve Harrington. Not just another Harrington, not a rich mouth breather, not King Steve.
Steve Harrington.
He ran towards home.
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit restless,'
'And I dream of something wild.'
Max wasn't kidding when she said that running to that portal was like an Olympic marathon but you're being chased by a bear. The adrenaline running through his veins, the crash of cars and debris, the slippery ground, the blast of Bonnie Tyler echoing through this desolate dimension. Steve kept his eyes forward even as he fell once, twice, because through that portal was home. Max clinging onto his back, Dustin, Robin, Nancy, Lucas pulling on his legs, praying that he'd come down, Eddie staring with the eyes of a man who doesn't want to witness another friend die to this again, Mike, Jonathan, and Will looking with their breaths halted.
Eleven…
(011, his mind whispers.)
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit helpless,'
'And I'm lying like a child in your arms.'
Steve's throat burned, but he didn't stop gasping for air. His legs ached and failed, but he never stopped running.
Because he is Steve fucking Harrington, 007, survived the lab and sure as hell won't die to something like this.
He'll survive.
("STEVE!!")
Because Steve has to.
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit angry,'
'And I know I've got to get out and cry.'
A van crashed in front of him.
'Turn around,'
'Every now and then I get a little bit terrified,'
'But then I see the look in your eyes.'
Steve breathed—
One, two—
And he jumps.
(His leg snaps.)
'Turn around, bright eyes,'
'Every now and then I fall apart,'
'Turn around, bright eyes,'
'Every now and then I fall—'
Steve crashed through the portal.
Coming back to his body after running like hell is a surreal experience.
His eyes snapped open, he took a gasping breath, and then he was falling, falling, falling, onto the vinyl floor of the Wheeler's basement, Max on his back. He landed on his feet, but a blinding white-hot pain exploded from his right leg causing him to cry out and fall backward. Max hugged him from behind, tears staining his clothes, and he found that he didn't care. He held her, and the kids and Robin as they jumped for the opportunity to feel his touch again.
"I'm here, I'm here—" Steve gasps out, barely believing it himself.
His eyes drift to the corner of the room, where he sees El, hovering in the back awkwardly, like she wants a hug but joining the crowd on the floor would overwhelm them both.
El.
Eleven.
Seven.
The tattoo on his wrist.
His head felt like it exploded.
He rolled up his sleeve carelessly, ignoring the looks and questions as he ripped his watch off and threw it across the room. On his left wrist, behind the watch, showed a perfect scarless and bruiseless patch of skin. It looked normal, completely normal, the exact same as his other wrist. He had no reason to think it was—but it's wrong. It felt wrong. It was wrong. Wrong.
"Steve? Steve, what are you doing?"
Lucas asks, and he hates to leave them all in the dark or worry them, but he doesn't trust his mouth right now, terrified that it'd start dribbling blood down his chin again.
Instead, he made a motion for everyone to step away.
They did. With some complaints.
Steve stared at his wrist. Pale skin greeted him, tattoo-less. He knew that wasn't true.
(—someone wipes his nose with a tissue from behind—)
So he brought his right hand up to it, and dug his nails into where he saw the 007 was. He pulled with all the might of a previous lab experiment. With all the might of an abused child with supernatural powers.
(—the same person who pulled the blindfold off—)
The room shifted into mild panic.
"Steve?"
"Are you okay?!"
"Did Vecna get him or something?!"
(—why his head feels so empty—)
Dustin went to try and pry his hands off but there was an invisible barrier. Everyone turned to the only person possibly responsible.
Eleven stood there, nose dripping with blood, hand outstretched. They realised they couldn't move.
She watched him scratch and scratch and scratch, ignoring the throbbing pain in her head, ignoring the cries of everyone telling her to stop, everyone moving at once. The blood flow grew heavier, longer, deeper, but she watched as his skin went red, except for a single pale patch of skin.
A patch of skin that was right above his left wrist.
The room was silent, watching.
Steve pulled, pulled, pulled—until the prosthetic was ripped off, alongside his first layer of skin.
His heart went still.
007.
His head blanked and he was falling, falling, fa—
…