Work Text:
It starts with the rationing.
In the ruins of Hawkins, kitchens collapsed, shops ransacked, the aid that will soon start to trickle in from neighbouring places yet to come, what is left of civilisation – those who couldn't, or wouldn't, run – manages to cobble together enough order to enact it. For the remaining kitchen cupboards and corner shop shelves to be emptied, for items to be logged and organised, for each person in the queue to leave the school hall with a carefully selected armful of goods.
Steve goes with everyone else the first day, leaves with bread and milk and rice, dumps it in the cupboards he'd taken half the hall's supplies out of only days earlier. The old, selfish version of him that lives deep down inside balks at the loss, his precious food distributed to everyone else in return for the same rations, but the new, battle-worn man that he is proud to be now is glad. He is useful.
He is useful, too, when the gang invade his miraculously-still-intact house and he lets Dustin have a second helping of the ice cream he snagged this week, when he insists Nancy have another cup of coffee, when he presses the Eggos he saved from the collection into El's hands and sees her world-weary face light up.
He is useful when this leaves him with a mere sad sandwich once they've all left, and, basking in the glow of community, he is okay with it.
But then it starts.
There's a voice, a voice that's part of him but apart from him, a voice that is neither moral compass nor internal admonisher. Not a supernatural voice, he knows that instinctively; this is no Upside-Down trick, just his own mind. But, his mind or not, it catches him pulling the next two slices of bread out of the packet and stills his hand.
You don't need it.
Food is precious now, remember?
He remembers.
It's there with him the next time he collects his rations, driving him to drop a bag of sugar into the pram next to a mother struggling to soothe her child, to grab a bag of sweets to give to Lucas next time he visits the hospital. He walks through the hall, giving away a pack of teabags here, a tin of fruit there, then pushes open the doors and realises he's barely carrying anything home for himself.
But that's okay, because other people are struggling more.
When he eats that night's sandwich, the taste of it is bitter in his mouth.
Lucas cracks a smile when he pulls the sweets from behind his back with a flourish, the expression incongruent with the tableaux of Max in a hospital bed behind him. Steve's heart hurts to see her like that, body so fragile with all the tubes attached, mind subdued deep down inside the coma. He feels it, he does, Lucas' brief gratitude subsumed once again by worry, the hopelessness of their inability to help her. But Steve finds himself staring at the feeding tube keeping her tethered to life, a sick part of him envying the ease with which it provides nutrients, bypassing the agonies of queueing in the school hall and deciding what he should spend his meagre budget on and trying to balance his own needs with everyone else's, all while another cowers in distress at the thought of the calories being forced into his veins, no knowledge of it, no control.
He stands up abruptly, forces himself to make up a commitment that he forgets as soon as the words have left his mouth, hugs Lucas goodbye. And then he wanders down the street by the hospital, finds a bench to sink onto, and stares blankly across the road.
Opposite him is a bakery. Steve almost wants to laugh.
It's transmuted, that's the thing. Somewhere in the hellish reality of the weeks since the chasms opened and the whole world suddenly knew something horrible was happening in Hawkins, his selfless desire to share his supplies became a deeply selfish maelstrom of feeling, subsuming him whenever he so much as thinks about eating. He's walking around like a ghost, Eddie's ghost and Max's slumbering soul and the distress of his destroyed town following at a distance, always in sight but never quite in focus.
He can't think about any of that.
So, instead, he thinks about his next meal. Counts out the pieces of pasta left in the box from two weeks ago and wonders how long he can make them last. Savours every bite he lets himself take, knowing the only way he could be more useless than wasting rations would be to let anyone know of his turmoil – to faint during one of the volunteer rebuilding sessions or to be so tired from the sleep stolen by hunger pangs that he can't talk to Robin properly. He learned about the low-blood-sugar dizzy spells and the brain fog the hard way, but he could pass it off as stress, once or twice. But not again. He can't afford it again.
So, even though there's aid now, now most people aren't going hungry, now the paralysis of disaster has faded enough that he can make this journey to the next town over and nothing is stopping him from walking into that bakery and ordering every fucking thing – well, there's the thing: something does stop him. The voice stops him.
It freezes him to the bench, staring at the croissants and doughnuts in the window, staring at the people that swing the door open as they come and go, staring while cars zip across his line of sight and the buzzing in his head thrums. It thrums, and thrums, and he's not thinking anything coherent, can't through the formless noise, the screaming in his head that started sometime around Barb dying and got louder, louder, louder–
He's on his feet before he knows what he's doing. On his feet, one in front of the other, purposeful, beelining for the bakery door as if there's a thread there reeling him in. He's sure he looks like a maniac when he asks for random item after random item, hands trembling when he points, but all of a sudden he's so focussed that he doesn't care what the assistant thinks, doesn't care what the voice thinks, doesn't care about anything except the magnetism of the smell now surrounding him inside the shop. He fumbles for the bills in his pocket and doesn't wait for change before he rushes out of the door, bag of pastries clutched in his hand. He doesn't think about rations or calories or half-dead friends when he's back in his car and pulling the first one out, barely inhales the intoxicating smell of it before he's got a mouthful. Flavour blooms across his tongue, and it's all that he's been craving, all that he hasn't let himself have, and – nothing. He feels nothing.
Nothing as he chews, swallows, takes another enormous bite; nothing as he brings the next one to his mouth when he's barely finished the first; nothing as it goes on and on, chew, swallow, taste but don't get any satisfaction, just eat, eat eat until there's nothing left but crumbs and his hands are shaking and his stomach is going to burst and he's going to cry, because what the fuck was that, what the fuck is his life, sitting in the driver's seat in a hospital car park with crumbs everywhere and and an empty paper bag and guilt, so much guilt, but fuck, he can't worry about all of that because he needs to be sick, fuck, he's gotta get out of the car and run to a bush and be sick.
He walks slowly, ever so slowly, back across the car park once he's wiped the back of his hand over his mouth, the mouth that was empty, then full of pastry, then full of vomit, now blissfully empty again. His stomach, too, is blissfully empty again.
He still needs to cry.
He desperately regrets the lapse of control, the moment of madness, the abandonment of his new regime, because everything is screaming.
The voice is screaming at him for ignoring it, even as the new one, the magnet that had reeled him in, sniggers at its success. His stomach is screaming at him for the influx of food after so long, cramping and roiling. His throat is screaming at him for shoving his fingers down it, a raw burn that reminds him of the shame every time he swallows, atop the awful taste that took three rounds of tooth-brushing to get rid of. And he's fucking exhausted – mentally, from the cursing and sobbing and self-pitying, but also physically, deep in his bones, like he's sucked out every ounce of energy the food could have given him. Well, he supposes he has.
But tomorrow, he's back to rations, and he'll never have to feel this again.
He'll be better.
He has to be.