Chapter Text
Day 003.
With the dial tone still blaring in his ears, Steve hangs up the phone, so full of pent-up frustration that he nearly sends it flying off the counter.
He’s rubbing the annoyance out of his eyes when he hears, “So. No luck, then?” from behind, and the tension in his shoulders softens immediately.
The smile on his face is involuntary but brief.
“You know, apocalyptic nightmare world? Not exactly a reason to come rushing home. Apparently,” he mutters under his breath.
“Steve,” Nancy starts, hesitant, this careful twinge of pity in her voice that he can’t stand to hear.
He’s the only one who’s parents are MIA by choice. If he thinks about it for two whole seconds, it’s actually the better scenario. Unlike Henderson, he isn’t having to cook up some lie all the time to skip out of parental lockdown to meet with the gang and figure out how the hell they’re gonna roast Vecna.
So he’s totally cool about it. He’s fine.
Turning to face Nancy properly, he catches sight of some sympathy too plain to miss, her eyes big and round and full of regret. He figures she’s gotta be here for a reason. She doesn’t stop by the video store without news, especially when Steve’s working a solo shift.
“Something wrong?” he asks while busying himself with some empty VHS cases, turning a pile into a stack.
“No, no, just…”
He looks up and catches her expression. “Nance?”
“It’s fine,” she chirps in a peppy voice that pretty much tells him it’s all he’s getting out of her for the moment. He’s a smart man, never let it be said otherwise, because he knows a sign to back off when he sees it.
He nods his head at her, gesturing for her to come around the check-out desk. “If you’re here to loiter, at least come back here and look busy.”
Rolling her eyes as she complies, she tells him, “To deceive your countless customers,” with a teasing lilt.
Yeah, okay, it’s a totally empty video store. Turns out, the rentals have run dry what with the world seemingly coming to an end. He’d blow the job off, but the group decided they should all play it normal in case the uptick in camo suits starts getting suspicious of them.
“Just, doin’ my part,” he drawls with enough self-deprecation, he feels the weight of Nancy’s gaze on him again as she settles beside him. Before he can endure another attempt of getting him to open up, he asks, “So how’d you manage to escape Wheelercatraz, anyway? Thought your mom had, like, a strict 3pm curfew in place? Thought you couldn’t be out alone?”
He doesn’t say it so directly, but he doesn’t see much of Nancy anymore without Jonathan by her side. Who tends to glower warily at Steve whenever they’re around each other. Gives Steve the heebs sometimes, the way he just… stares, eyes glassy and bloodshot.
“Yeah, well, my mom doesn’t exactly know. And I needed some fresh air.” Nancy’s got her lips pursed in that way that means she’s pissed off and trying to talk herself down from it. She grabs an empty VHS shell from his hands and places it on the stack.
He watches her do it, then hums out, “Uh-huh,” and waits.
She grabs another VHS shell, setting it down a little harder. “It’s nothing. Just. My mom keeps trying to make sure everyone’s comfortable and happy and safe, which means she’s breathing down my neck constantly, and we can’t exactly tell my parents the truth about—so we lie and act like everything’s fine while the military’s building a literal wall around the town. Meanwhile, Vecna’s… who knows where. We should be looking for him. The longer we wait, he’s got a better chance of healing, of getting stronger—”
“Hey, hey,” he cuts in gently, hand hovering over her shoulder like it’s got a mind of its own and wants to offer comfort. He turns it into an awkward reach for a different stack of tapes. “You know I wanna toast his ass, too, but Hop said—”
“Not the right time,” she recites, the same orders they all got before Hopper and El went underground.
“Trust me, I get it,” he tells her. “This?” He circles the air with a raised eyebrow. “Sucks. Military sweeps? Sucks. Lockdown? Sucks. Robin keeps joking I’m gonna get ‘recruited’,” he says with some sarcastic finger quotes, “and then,” he imitates the sound of an electric razor, “buzz cut. She’s fully psycho, by the way.” He can’t help but pat the top of his head, relieved he’s still got all his hair.
He catches Nancy smiling up at him and feels self-conscious for his two seconds of exposed vanity, but it’s a rare sight these days so he’ll take it.
To not sit in this feeling of wasted hopefulness, and the ache that typically comes with it, he reaches around her, careful to keep from brushing up against her, and grabs the movie he’s had lying in wait for an opening like this.
“Know what you need, Nance? I got just the thing.”
She takes the tape from him with some reluctance, eyes all beautiful and bright and aimed right at him before she looks down and reads the title. Risky Business. Then she looks up at him again, smiling bigger and more openly, almost laughing.
“You’re an idiot,” she tells him, and he could swear there’s some fondness there.
For just a second, he forgets the world is ending.
Day 012.
“—I’m just saying, how many more days do we show up—”
Robin cuts him off, “What, because you have somewhere else to be? The way I see it, the less conspicuous we are, the higher percentage the camo-creeps will leave us alone and—”
“No one’s here!” Steve gestures beyond the trio of Robin, Nancy, and Jonathan, at the empty video store where there’s dust visibly collecting on the rows and rows of fully stocked shelves. “You wanna talk conspicuous, you got the two of us coming into an empty store every day—no paycheck, by the way,” he adds just to needle home the uselessness, and Jonathan scoffs. “I’m just saying,” he backtracks to defend.
Jon goes, “Yeah, you would,” under his breath, folding his arms and ducking his head.
When Steve glances at Nancy to ask what her boyfriend’s problem is, she’s avoiding looking at him too.
“I was joking,” he tells them.
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s the wrong time for it,” Jonathan jabs, still in that petty, murmur-y voice of his.
Steve takes a step forward. “Yeah, or maybe—”
“Or nothing,” Nancy cuts in, her eyes slinging between Jon and Steve both with her demand to dial it down pretty damn clear. When Steve backs off with a he started it expression, Nancy’s anger cools off. She says, tentatively, “Steve’s right.”
Immediately Jonathan’s head jerks back up, his mouth dropping open like he wants to say something back. Steve isn’t dumb enough to gloat, but Nancy sticking up for him? He can’t help but feel good about it.
“We’re wasting time here,” she tells them. “You guys are putting in 8 hour shifts, for what? Steve’s high score in Pong?” She whips a hand in the direction of the arcade game that Steve has, admittedly, spent a lot of time recently playing. “What we need are eyes out there. Ears. We need feet on the ground. Because if we keep doing nothing…”
Robin’s hand shoots up. “Mind if I—? Because you said ‘ears’ and that perked my own… well, ears. Every day, Steve picks me up and we drive all the way out here—uselessly, I agree. But I live in what passes for the boonies, and you know what we drive past every damn day? The radio station.”
Steve exchanges a glance with Nancy, whose brow has started to furrow in contemplation. After, she trades a look with Jon, who still seems put-out but is listening.
“When I was a kid, we’d dare each other to climb the tower. No one was actually ever stupid enough to, high voltage shock risks and all, but—that’s not the point,” she tells herself, eyes squeezing briefly closed. “What do we hear on the radio every morning when you still insist on turning it on?” she asks Steve, starting to build up to something.
“Nothing, just some static,” he answers, not quite following along yet.
“Exactly! Because Jimmy ‘Fast Hands’ tucked and run before the gates got closed. That place is as abandoned as this is.”
“And your idea is… what? We start hanging out at the radio station instead?”
“Sure, colloquially, but I’m talkin’ we get on the air. Think about it, right now, we have this inane system of relaying information to each other, like a—a game of Telephone. But if we control the airwaves…”
Nancy has fully perked. She looks stoked. “We control the flow of information.”
“Exactly! And yours truly has always had this, you might call it a higher calling, to be a voice for the zombiefied masses. I say we go over, poke around, get ‘er up and running again and just…”
“Deliver the news,” Nancy finishes with that ambitious gleam in her eyes that means her mind’s made up and she’s mentally three steps ahead of everyone else.
“Not to be too realistic here,” Jonathan speaks up. “But how? Without suspicion, I mean.”
“Oh, ye of little confidence. You assume we’ve gotta ask. I’m saying, it’s ours to take.”
As they’re all beginning to grin back and forth at each other, feeling the awesomeness of a proactive plan falling into place, the shop door swings forcibly open.
Immediately three men wielding rifles enter, with a woman in a lab coat following right after.
Steve automatically reaches a hand out toward Robin, who slides off the checkout counter and gets close beside him. In his periphery, he watches Jon step protectively in front of Nancy, too.
“Sorry, boys,” Steve chirps, “we’re all out of ET. Real crowd-pleaser these days, don’t know why—”
“Form a line,” the tallest of the men says, taking up a front position while the two other men head toward opposite sides of the store, disappearing behind shelves of movies. He’s got beady-eyes and a jawline that looks like it got busted at some point and never surgically corrected.
Steve looks over to Nancy and meets her eyes. She looks scared but fiery, pissed off, nodding just barely to convey they should listen. Robin, at his side, has a hand’s worth of fingers digging into his work vest. Even Jon looks cautious.
So Steve curtails the urge to keep joking and lifts his hands in the air a little to say, look at us, doing what we’re told. No problems here.
They form a line in front of the counter with Steve in the lead, Robin behind, then Jonathan and Nancy.
The two men return from their sweep. One says, “Clear,” as they get back in formation.
The woman in the lab coat approaches them. Straight to it, she asks, “What was your exposure percentage?” She’s got a device in her hand that’s blinking red and green, showing flickering numbers on a screen. At the sight of it, and because she’s angling it toward him, Steve’s eyes widen.
“Right, okay, and you’re doing what with tha—”
“Answer the question,” jaw-face tells him.
“Percentage… what?” he says back, struggling to stay cool with a couple of guns pointed at him.
Maybe sensing his distress, the woman tells him, “This? It won’t hurt you,” in a tone probably meant to sound calming but isn’t. “It’s like a thermometer. Like when you’re sick. When the earthquake hit, do you remember what came from the sky?”
“Like, tiny… tiny little mystery dander?” Robin says. Steve can hear the nervousness in her voice, pitched higher than usual.
“Were you outside when it happened?”
“Nope,” Steve tells them after giving it a second to pretend to think it over.
Jaw-face’s eyes flick to Jonathan, down near the back of the line. He must look shifty because the barrel of the gun leaves Steve and lands on Jon instead. And Nancy, by proximity, which makes Steve’s heart rate race.
“Open your mouth,” the woman tells Steve, stepping forward, pointing the device at him.
“Yeah, no. Hell no, actually.” He’s backing up into Robin, who’s bracing her arms against him, his shoes sliding on the cheap flooring.
One of the other military men hits Steve in the ribs with the butt of his rifle, making Steve curl inward in sudden blinding pain.
“Steve!” Nancy yells out while Robin grips him around the elbows to help him stay upward.
The hit connected solidly with one of the demobat wounds that hasn’t healed yet. He winces at the searing sting that radiates up and down his body, making his breath catch and his vision get dark and splotchy.
The lady in the coat tells them in a robotically cherry voice, “Starting today, medical checkups will be mandatory. Your health is our upmost concern. Now, please,” she says again, “open your mouth.”
Day 014.
They work in shifts to clear out the old mine tunnels that run underneath Hawkins, that El and Hop have been using to join their big ‘secret society’ group meet-ups without getting clocked. Now that downtown has been fully zoned off and swarms of helicopters have started doing daily patrols, things feel more restricted than ever.
Steve’s got blisters forming on his palms from all the shoveling, sweat dripping off his forehead, a wet ring of it at his collar. He had to take off his jacket hours ago, has it tied around his waist now. Is down to just a t-shirt that keeps clinging to the skin on his back as he works to scoop away dirt and decades of debris.
He winces as he twists and dumps a fresh pile; the bite wound on his ribs stings like a bitch, hurting worse the longer he shovels, especially with the sweat making it constantly burn. Every breath now is starting to feel like a sharp, searing poke.
“Steve?” Nancy notices that he’s stopped.
Down the mine a bit, he can hear the sounds of Dustin still going at it, the thuds of displaced soil, but Nancy sticks her shovel upright in the ground and comes toward him.
They’ve only got a couple lanterns to see by. Even though her face is shadowed because of it, he can still make out the worry that draws her eyebrows inward.
“What’s wrong?” she asks him, up close now.
Annoyed at himself for hurting, he tells her, “It’s fine,” with an involuntary flinch as he lifts his arm to run his hand through his hair.
“Right, you always look like you’re about to pass out.” With her own look of quick calculation, Nancy reaches for the hem of his shirt.
He stops her just as fast, his hand wrapping around her wrist.
At the touch, she looks up at him from beneath her eyelashes. And then she raises her eyebrows.
Swallowing, he let’s go, reflexively flexing his fist. “Nance, it’s okay.”
After a beat that goes on long enough he thinks he’s won, she looks even more determined, lifting up his shirt, methodical and matter-of-fact about it. The second her eyes land on the bruise that covers his whole left side, from his waist up to just below his armpit, her face goes slack with concern.
“Steve,” she murmurs, “what…”
“Dick with the—” He half-heartedly mimes the rifle-to-the-chest hit from the other day.
The memory of it ruins that sweetly worried softness of her expression. Her jaw tightens, her eyes sharply roaming over his injuries.
“You’re still hurt from the bats,” she realizes, almost scolding him about it. Her hand hovers over the biggest wound, the one that’s been reopened and is raw, sporting the most tender part of the bruise.
“Freaks got me good.”
“Why didn’t you say something, do something—” Eyes full of fury, she grabs the shovel out of his hand and tosses it aside. “You need to see a doctor. Now.”
“And get sent to MAC-Z as patient zero? No way. Look, all I need is some aspirin, a bandage—”
But Nancy’s grabbed the closest walkie talkie. “Jonathan? We need a change-out,” she says into it with urgent authority, while Steve tries and fails to fold his arms across his chest, the sting of it too much.
Nancy catches this and does one of those see? I’m always right faces that he’s always found adorable. Even now, annoyingly, but it’s nice to feel cared for, for once.
Or, who knows, he might just be lightheaded and suffering from interdimensional rabies.
“Everything okay?” Jonathan’s voice squawks back with some white noise. “Nancy?”
“We’re fine, we just—need a doctor. Again,” she makes it clear, “we’re fine. Can you come swap out, please?”
The walkie talkie makes more static sounds and then Jonathan says, “Be right down.”
“Great,” Steve complains as Nancy sets the walkie talkie back in its designated spot. “Feels like I’m about to get Old Yeller’ed.”
Distantly they hear the sound of a shovel being tossed aside, and then the footfall of Dustin coming closer.
With a slowly creeping smile, Nancy tells Steve, “Don’t be so dramatic,” in this quiet but affectionate rumble that makes him momentarily forget about his impending doom as the shine of Dustin’s maglite starts bouncing off the dirt walls around them.
When Dustin sees Nancy and Steve standing close together, Nancy with her hand comfortingly on Steve’s arm, he aims his flashlight directly on the two. “I hear that right? Doctor?” he asks before coming to a stop. “Steve bonk his precious head of hair?”
“Your concern is touching,” Steve murmurs sarcastically, his patience with Dustin already teetering close to empty. The kid’s been going through it since they got back from the Upside Down, he gets it, but he’s also tired of being the designated punching bag.
“Wait, an actual injury?” Dustin realizes, clocking the tension. “Steve, you giant dipshit son-of-a—”
Steve scoffs. “Me? A giant dip—yeah, like I did this on purpose, like I walked into the end of a rifle—”
“Can we not—” Nancy cuts in loudly, and then lowers her voice to normal when it shuts Steve up, “fight right now? He’s going to be okay,” Nancy tells Dustin, but her gaze finds Steve’s right after, locking on him, silently communicating he’s just scared. Don’t make things worse.
After a beat, Dustin says, “Rifle, huh?”
Steve huffs out, “Yeah,” keeping quiet about the other part of it, the demobat part of it, so he doesn’t have to see Dustin’s face fall the way it does when he’s reminded of Eddie in the UD.
“One of those asshole military guys,” Nancy says, clearly pissed. “It’s like ‘power-tripping, emotionally insecure’ is a requirement.”
Just then, they hear the sound of Jonathan coming down the ladder, jumping a few feet from the ground and landing with a thump that echoes toward them. “Nancy?”
“Down here,” she calls back.
Her eyes flit toward Steve, passing something apologetic between them before she backs off, just as Jonathan comes into view.
“What’s wrong?”
Nancy reaches around Steve and grabs his shovel, which gets handed over to Jonathan. “Steve needs a doctor.”
“I really don’t,” he tries again, finding the whole thing humiliating now that Jonathan’s here, with his narrowed eyes wandering over Steve like he’s wondering if he’s just trying to get out of manual labor.
“You do, before things get any worse. We can’t lose you.”
Steve’s heart kicks around in his chest. He tilts his head at her, hope stupidly picking itself off the floor like its dumb enough to think he’s got a shot here.
“I just mean—“ Nancy quickly adds, glancing at Jonathan, “that we need all the help we can get. We don’t have time for ‘sick days.’”
“Makes sense,” Dustin says in that gleeful drawl of his, enjoying the tension.
There’s an awkward beat, and then Nancy charges forward. “Lets go!” she calls over shoulder, back to composed.
Day 051.
“Everybody got it?” Hop asks with his eyes locking from one person to the next, his meaning clear: don’t fuck this up.
It's Nancy’s plan; once she realized what the military was doing in the MAC-Z, they figured out they could hitchhike into the Upside Down with the right amount of prep, positioning, and sheer luck.
Kinda like a spy movie.
Steve’s got one of the easier parts—all he’s gotta do is drive, let Dustin man the walkie talkie so they can stay in range of the two-way radio Hop’ll be armed with.
No pressure at all.
On their way out, game time on, Nancy passes Steve a walkie talkie, masking her concern with a tightly clenched jaw, but he knows her well enough to see through it.
“Be careful,” she tells him, making his nod back a promise of it.
Day 065
“You’re being incredibly obvious, you know this, right?” Dustin says to him, distracting Steve as he works to turn the WSQK van into a useable set-up for their next burn attempt.
Turns out, sending someone into the UD with only a walkie talkie as a location device was like sending them in with a stick for a weapon. They’d lost connection pretty early on and were damn lucky Hop got back on his own, in one piece no less.
So, now they’re using a transmitter system, which requires some heavy duty modification of the radio van, and since Steve’s the guy with a garage full of tools his dad hasn’t touched since Steve was in diapers, that makes him their resident mechanic.
Biting down on the handle of a screwdriver so he can manually tighten one of the eight million tiny bolts he’s had to screw in, he says around it, “Yeah, about?”
Dustin’s supposed to be helping, big ol’ brain of his coming up with the idea, but he’s sitting in the passenger seat with his feet kicked up on the dash. If this was Steve’s car, he’d have slapped 'em off, but this clunker? Steve lets the disrespect slide.
Outside the open back door of the van, Steve’s got a perfect view of Nancy and Jonathan; they’re sitting on the station steps, shoulders pressed together while they talk, obviously having some private conversation.
“You can’t be this dense,” Dustin tells him. Steve looks up and catches Dustin’s eyes watching him in the rearview mirror. “Or, frankly, can I be frank here? Kinda gettin' pathetic.”
Steve lets the screwdriver fall from his teeth, wiping his mouth right after. “You know, thank god they keep sticking me with you. Because if I can’t count on you to mope, or be mean—”
“Mope?” Dustin interrupts, his voice rising, “I’m the one moping—?!"
“Yeah! You’re like a walking mope machine! Bring something new to the table.”
“At least I’m not obsessed with my ex,” gets thrown at Steve, making his gut dive swiftly in immediate, face-flushing embarrassment. “Who,” Dustin digs, counting off on his fingers, “is with another guy, broke up with you, doesn’t care—”
“I’m not—“ he starts, and then gets self-conscious about being heard beyond present company, calming himself down to more quietly say, “Don’t start that bullshit up again.”
“Don’t have to,” Dustin slings back easily. “Not when you’re basically doing it yourself. She’s got a boyfriend. Let it go.”
Steve falls back to rest on his haunches. Dustin’s stopped staring at him to gaze moodily out the passenger window instead.
Steve keeps telling himself that Dustin’s going through something. That he’s lashing out because his friend died, that they’re all just stressed because, hey! The world sucks right now—yeah, except he’s getting real goddamn sick of always being the one getting yelled at or talked down to.
“You know what, Henderson? You can put your little wheelie-thing on yourself. Have fun with that.”
Steve slips out the back of the van without a backwards glance, ignoring the weight of Nancy’s stare on him as he strides past the happy couple, yanking open the station door. He barely waits for it to close behind him before he screws his eyes shut, biting back a frustrated curse.
Day 100
“Murray’s making a supply run, want anything?”
Steve looks up from the overhead projector where he’s been going over the map of the town, their next crawl zone highlighted by blue marker.
Nancy’s in the doorway, pointing with her thumb behind her.
“No, I’m—no,” he tells her, distracted. “Thanks.”
The last run, they almost lost the transmitter signal when Steve blew through a stop sign and nearly got pulled over by some cops just looking for something to do. The close call of it, the mistake being so stupid, has been eating away at him since, making him extra focused.
Nancy walks toward him, asking, “You sure? Because, last time, Murray forgot the Lucky Charms and you went a little—” When he doesn’t do more than offer up a curt smile at her impression of him lunging forward in snack-deprived distress, the humor disappears from her face. Perceptive as ever, she asks, “Everything… okay?”
He taps the projector screen with a couple of anxious fingers, says, “Yeah, yeah, of course,” in an attempt to brush her off. But his voice goes up, doesn’t convince her at all.
Because she’s smart as hell and leaps ahead of him emotionally, Nancy searches his face, looks at the map, and then puts two and two together so quickly, he doesn’t have time to avert.
“Steve,” she starts, wearing that pinched expression.
He swipes his hand over his mouth. Considers bullshitting. What comes blurting out is, “Just—one mistake, you know? One stupid screw-up, this whole thing comes toppling down—someone gets hurt, people die—somehow it’s our job to save the goddamn world? It’s just—it’s a lot.”
“It is,” Nancy agrees softly.
He’s reluctant to look at her, to find out she’s disappointed in him for coming apart a little, but what he sees instead is her face so full of tenderness, so open and unguarded from it, he could almost convince himself it meant something.
“Sorry,” he tells her, guilt coming back with the abruptness of his outburst fading.
“No, you’re… right,” she admits. “It’s a lot of pressure. Which,” she says more slowly, more coy about it, “makes me wonder if I’ve ever mentioned how much I appreciate how you’ve… you know, stepped up, help out—”
“Babysit Dustin,” he jokes, “babysit Robin.”
She rolls her eyes at him but is biting back a smile. “I’m serious. Years ago, when this whole… bullshit started,” and there’s a pointedness in the way eye contact is suddenly hard for her that sends him right back to their breakup, back to before he had his shit figured out and it cost him their relationship, “I don’t think we could’ve handled the scale of what it’s turned into. Any of us. But you… I mean, you’ve never had any obligation to be here, you could’ve left town and never looked back and no one would’ve blamed you for it, but you stayed and—and now you’re, you know, actually a leader. It’s... definitely been… noticed.”
The look they share is so loaded, Steve feels light for the first time in weeks, months. All the loneliness, the pressure, the uncertainty, the revolving door of unending shittiness—it’s like it’s all been dimmed, leaving him filled with this climbing sense of hope.
“You’re wrong, you know,” he tells her, barely above a murmur. When she tilts her head at him, forehead starting to furrow, he says, “I was always gonna end up here.” And then, more meaningfully, “You’re here.”
It’s so reminiscent of their conversation in the UD, he can tell by the change in her expression that she’s recalling his confession too.
And, just like back then, she seems torn, reluctant to address the unanswered question of it all.
He’s not an asshole. He’s not going to force a decision on her.
So he lets her off the hook.
“Anyway,” and it’s a more upbeat tone, changing the mood, “you said something about a supply run?”
Eyes still roaming across his face like she’s trying to figure something out, she eventually tells him, “Yeah!” in that overcompensating chirp. “Yeah. Change your mind?”
He just grins. Not where it counts.