Chapter Text
There’s no body so there’s no funeral: just a handful of people milling around awkwardly in Wayne’s single wide and not meeting each other’s eyes. In this crowd, nobody's got anything to say to each other. The Hellfire kids sit together on the couch talking only to each other—they don’t even give Dustin a nod or anything when they walk in, fucking assholes. Some folks Wayne must work with at the factory mill in the kitchen, nursing beers. A few neighbors who don’t think Eddie Munson was a serial killer—
Then it’s him and Dustin, standing uncomfortably in the doorway.
Steve hadn’t wanted to come but Dustin—
He couldn’t say no to Dustin. Not now, when the kid is barely holding it together. There are other things to worry about, bigger things to worry about, world altering things to worry about, but this is important to him.
Closure or something.
Whatever is coming for them is unpredictable and there is nothing Steve can do to protect him—or the others from that—so Dustin deserves at least this small piece of comfort.
Eddie’s uncle is the kind of unshaven flannel wearer Steve would expect to tell him Look for the Union Label on a commercial, but instead he offers a hand and says, “Thanks for comin’.”
Steve shakes his hand.
Neither of them know what to say, but Dustin has brought flowers—white lilies, probably at his mom’s suggestion—and he hands them to Wayne wordlessly, who takes them with a sad little smile.
“Can I get y’all a drink?”
They stay long enough for Dustin to get his first sip of beer from Steve’s quickly warming bottle and exchange funeral appropriate pleasantries with a few other guests before Steve is making their excuses and guiding Dustin back to his car.
They’re quiet for most of the drive back to Hawkins proper watching the sky grow darker and darker as they approach home. The craters have been spreading, shifting from one side of Hawkins to the other, and Steve has to take the long way back to his place. It’s been like this for a week now—something on the verge of happening as the other side rapidly bleeds into this one.
“Did you hear what Mr. Munson said?” Dustin asks after a while. His voice is uncharacteristically quiet, just staring out the window as they drive. Steve’s heart aches.
“About what?”
There’s no impatient tch. No annoyed, “ don’t you ever pay attention?” No jibes, no blustering. Just a plain: “About his lights.” When Steve says nothing, Dustin adds, “He said they’d been flickering.”
Steve thought maybe this would happen. Dustin’s optimistic. He’s carrying around a burden of hope so heavy it’s a wonder he’s still standing sometimes. He goes through the world believing in possibility because he’s been taught that all things are possible—through science, through magic, through sheer fucking audacity.
Grief and hope aren’t a good combination. They’ve twisted together into something impossible and terrible and despite watching Eddie Munson die in his arms, Dustin has hope.
“The power’s messed up all around town,” Steve’s trying to be logical. He’s trying to approach whatever theory is brewing in Dustin’s head cautiously. He’s been proven wrong so many times—so many times by Dustin even—that he can’t say Dustin is wrong. Will lived. Hopper lived.
Plenty of others didn’t.
“It’s probably nothing.”
Dustin doesn’t argue.
Dustin doesn’t argue .
Hawkins has always been a shithole but it’s only gotten worse. Fissures split the city into pieces and so businesses are closed, the school’s shut down. Anyone that could leave as soon as it all went down, and everyone that’s left is hunkering down to wait this disaster out.
Who knows how long they’ll be waiting.
The party has been using Steve’s place as a headquarters. It’s big enough to house most everyone if not comfortably, then at least in one place. His parents, who’d been away on business in New York, hadn’t been able to return because the roads are closed and it’s not like there were direct flights into Hawkins before all this.
He’s a little relieved, honestly, that they can’t come home to this. It’s one less thing to worry about, two fewer people he’s got to keep safe from whatever is coming for them.
Because something is coming.
The ground shakes every few hours and the sun seems to drop out of the sky with no warning. It’s growing a little bit darker each day, as if all the color is being drained from the world. They haven’t seen anyone from outside of Hawkins in weeks now—the phones are dead and the best they can get through on the bunny ears is a distorted broadcast from two towns over, but the anchor’s got Farrah Fawcett Charlie’s Angels hair and Steve’s pretty sure he heard her mention Gerald Ford losing to Jimmy Carter at one point, so who knows when that’s coming from.
He’d loved late nights once, but now they seem to plague him and he spends the small hours of the night shuffling from room to room to check that everyone is still sleeping soundly. Not that any of them are great sleepers anymore, but tonight, it’s just the three of them. The others are home with their families, but Claudia and Dustin always stay—Claudia sleeping in his parents’ bedroom on the second floor and Dustin in the guest room down the hall.
There’s a strip of light under the door, but when he opens it, Dustin is sleeping soundly, the covers pulled up around his head.
Steve turns the light off when he leaves.
It happens the next night, and the next, and when Will and El stay over on Thursday, he finds the three of them piled in the bed surrounded by what looked like all the lamps from all of their houses—Steve’s included.
It’s a bone-deep ache inside him: the sight of them, these hopeful little creatures all piled together on Dustin’s bed. He imagines they’d laid there together watching the lamps for any sign of something until one by one they fell asleep.
Hope is a burden and it’s grabbed hold of them.
Steve finds himself standing in the doorway too long, too, watching the lamps until spots blaze in his eyes.
Nothing happens.
Of course, nothing happens.
“Can I ask you something?”
They’re loading food into trays, slices of Mrs. Wheeler’s meatloaf and a pile of mashed potatoes that Dustin plops into styrofoam with a little too much force. He doesn’t look up at Steve when he hands it off for gravy, and thank god for the jock reflexes that keep it from splashing all over his sneakers.
Dustin just shrugs in response, plops another scoop of potatoes into another tray, and he doesn’t look at him. Steve realizes abruptly that Dustin hasn’t looked him in the eye in days. He’s been wading through the strangest sea and where Steve might have once been his anchor, he’s let him go adrift.
The ache is there—it’s always there—but it burns now as he pauses the assembly line, Dustin finally looking at him when he realizes that Steve isn’t going to take the tray of potatoes from him. He looks past him, not at him, his gaze landing just over Steve’s shoulder. Still, there’s a guardedness to his expression, a distrust that Steve is startled to see there.
He tries not to take it personally when he says, “What’s with all the lamps?”
There’s something in his face when Dustin looks away. It’s not hope, it’s goddamned determination.
Dustin used to tell him everything. Everything . Even the shit he didn’t want to hear.
Now, he seems to be weighing his answer and silence settles between them again.
Eventually: “El thinks she heard him.”
And yeah, hope is a burden. Hope is a fucking curse, but illogically, Steve feels something ease in his chest.
“How?”
Dustin sets his tray down in front of Steve, grabs another. He doesn’t look at him again, lets another silence spread between them. It leaves Steve wondering what he’d done to lose Dustin’s trust.
(He knows: he’d dragged Dustin out of the Upside Down, but he’d left Eddie behind. Dustin had begged, desperate in his grief for Steve to grab Eddie.
“We can’t leave him here!” he’d wailed as Steve had hauled him through the gate, but there hadn’t been time and Eddie—
Eddie was dead .
He was sure that Eddie had been dead.)
They continue again in the established rhythm: Dustin scoops mashed potatoes, Steve adds gravy, passes it down the line. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Eventually: “She has these dreams sometimes.”
Steve doesn’t say anything. He’s worried he’ll say the wrong thing—he always says the wrong thing—and spook him, keep whatever confession this might be from spilling out of him. Steve wants him to talk. He wants to understand.
Worst of all, he wants a little bit of that hope, too.
“They’re like the Upside Down without everything.” Steve doesn’t follow, starts to say so, but Dustin rushes on, eager to keep Steve from ruining this, too.: “She says it’s like walking around in an empty room. And then—he was there. Or he wasn’t there , but she heard his voice. Maybe.”
He wants to say: Or it could be a trap. It could be Vecna, playing off their shared hope and fear. It could really just be a dream. It could mean nothing at all. But Dustin’s heart is broken, and Steve—well, maybe his is, too.
“And the lamps?”
“We thought—Wayne’s lights were flickering, so maybe Eddie was trying to reach Wayne, like you guys did when you were down there. And we thought, if we gave him a way to reach us, maybe we could find him?”
“And did he?”
Dustin says nothing.
They lapse back into silence.
Night clings to him like a film and Steve doesn’t even bother trying to sleep. He spends the early hours out by the pool. It’s still too cold to swim, but he sits with his feet in the water anyway, smoking the last of his cigarettes down to the filter.
He can’t stop thinking about their non-conversation.
It’s a funny thing, really, to believe in something. Steve doesn’t have faith in much—not God or country or whatever a corn-fed midwestern kid like him should believe in—but he has a lot of faith in Dustin, crack theories and all.
He’s just—
He’s so tired of all of this: the grief and the fear and the uncertainty.
So, yeah, maybe he just wants it to be true.
Maybe he’ll let himself believe, at least until he finishes this pack.
The night drags on and he stays like a sentry in one place, watching the lights in the house turn off one by one.
All except one.
Light bleeds through the crack under Dustin’s door, and Steve hesitates in the hallway, straining to hear what’s happening on the other side. El and Will are here again tonight, and so the static isn’t just dead air in his ears: no, this has a purpose.
He’s not sure how long he stands outside the doorway, wiping his sweaty palms against his shorts. He could just open the door like he does every night to see them safe in their weird little fort of blankets and pillows and table lamps, but it’s the look on Dustin’s face at dinner.
He doesn’t belong here. Not with them. Not anymore.
He’s not sure how long he stands outside the doorway, straining to hear even the smallest sound on the other side, when the lights begin to flicker. Without thinking, he throws the door open and two things happen in unison: all three of the teens on the floor scream and the lights go abruptly out.
“Steve!” Dustin is angry . His grief is a storm, his words a lightning strike. Steve—like an idiot—is just frozen in the doorway, looking between the kids for some explanation of what he just saw. “You messed everything up!”
El removes her blindfold, a trickle of blood catches on her lip and she wipes it away hastily. “Dustin—” she starts, reaching a hand toward him, but Dustin shoves it away, rushing at Steve like he’s going to push him from the room. Steve’s bigger than him, stronger, too, but he lets himself get shoved, small steps stumbling back into the hallway.
They’re all speaking at once:
“Just go— ” Tears in his eyes, something between them breaks.
“Dusty, what’s—” Claudia appears in the hallway in her bathrobe, the noise apparently having drawn her to them.
“I’m sorry—” Steve starts, his own tears leaping into his eyes, fucking pathetic.
A lamp on the floor begins to glow: a familiar series of dots and dashes.
S.O.S.