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“Steve.” His ears are ringing even before he really comes back to himself. His fingers are numb. “Steve.”
A hand grips him by the shoulder, jostling him hard, sending pain dancing up his arm, a feeling not at all dissimilar to when he took a nasty hit in peewee football and broke his arm. His stomach flops over with it, and Steve jerks away from the hand with a broken groan hidden under a roll of thunder. He peels one eye open, all he can find the energy for, and sees Dustin’s face in his peripheral, bruised and unconcerned.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty,” Dustin snarks. He rolls his eyes and heaves himself out of the passenger side of the bimmer, slamming the door behind him. He sticks his head through the passenger window, offering Steve a sarcastic sneer. “Have a good nap?”
Steve smacks his lips and swallows hard, but the odd metallic taste doesn’t leave his mouth. Dustin huffs at his lack of response and smacks the flat of his palm against the side of the car. Usually, Steve would reprimand him for that, tell the kid something about the paint job, or dents, but Dustin storms out of Steve’s sight before he can catch up to the situation. His arm is broken; he thinks he’d thrown it out to protect Dustin when he’d realized they were going to crash. And now, Steve’s slumped over the steering wheel, letting it press into the side of his face and his ribs, a radiating ache, but he knows the moment he moves, the pain will flare into something sharp and unbearable.
He has to bear it. Steve bites back a sob as he pulls himself up and out of the car, stumbling as he tries to get his feet under him. He keeps his throbbing arm tucked in close to his body. The front of his car, crumpled against the towering wall made of…God knows what, creaks and groans in pain alongside him.
Outside the car, Nancy and Jonathan crowd around Dustin as he talks into his walkie. Steve reaches up to brush his fingers along his hairline, expecting to find a damp patch of blood, but he finds nothing. Still, his head feels like a bruised, split-open apple.
“Does any of this make sense?” Dustin is saying, the rest of his fast explanations lost on Steve. He thinks they’re talking to Hopper, maybe. Hopefully. Steve’s sight doubles around him, and he stumbles again. It feels like the world is moving around him, but Nancy, Jonathan, and Dustin seem steady on their feet. “Do you need additional details? Questions? Concerns? Over.”
The walkie crackles in Dustin’s hand.
“You hit a wall?” Hopper responds. “What kind of wall, exactly?” Steve glances over his shoulder at his car. The tail lights reflect a flash of the red lightning of the Upside Down.
“Uh, it’s a bit…hard to describe. It’s sort of,” Dustin trails off. Speechless for the first time in his life, Steve thinks, and he would laugh at the thought if not for the way his entire body pulses in time with his racing heart. His head pounds, made worse by the thunder booming every few seconds.
“Huge,” Nancy offers.
“Disgusting,” Jonathan adds.
“Smells like Henderson’s armpit,” Steve murmurs. Tastes like it too, if the odd taste still sticking in his throat is anything to go by. He smacks his lips again and grimaces.
His stomach rolls, and he regrets thinking about licking Henderson’s armpit.
“We hit the same thing,” Hopper’s voice says over the walkie, “but not at Roane Cemetery. We hit it a quarter mile southeast of the old Hagen Bridge.”
“That’s the opposite side of town,” Nancy says. Steve nods along, but for some reason, he can’t place the name to a place in the map of Hawkins he has in his mind.
“Fascinating,” Dustin muses. Not the word Steve would use for the situation, but sure.
“We don’t know what it is, but we think Holly’s behind it,” Hopper tells them. Steve feels Nancy tense beside him, like she’s gearing up to charge in and tear the wall down with her own two hands. Hopper must sense that, too: “Don’t bother trying to break through. You can’t. We’re working on a solution.”
His words don’t seem to dissuade Nancy. She can’t take her eyes off the wall, and her hands are curled into tight fists. Steve’s bimmer didn’t make a dent in it going full speed, but he wouldn’t put it past her to take it on herself.
“Nancy,” Dustin says, eyeing her.
“Solution? What kind of solution?” she asks, still staring at the wall. Steve doesn’t blame her; he’s an only child, sure, but if Dustin or one of the other kids were kidnapped, and he knew the only thing between himself and the kid was a measly wall, there’s nothing on Hell or Earth or the Upside Down that could stop him from trying to get through.
The walkie crackles, but Hopper doesn’t say anything. Nancy steals the walkie from Dustin’s grip, desperate.
“Wait,” she insists, “what kind of solution?” The walkie stays silent still. She closes her eyes and grips the walkie tighter like Hop is here with them and she’s squeezing the truth out of him. “Hopper!” For a long moment, long enough that the thunder rumbles over them again, and Steve sways from the force of it shaking through him, the walkie keeps quiet.
“Listen,” Hopper says, finally, his voice somewhat hushed, “we gotta keep the airwaves clear, all right? We’ll come get you. Just stay put.”
The walkie goes dead, and Nancy shoves it into Dustin’s chest as she marches toward the wall, making him grunt and stumble backward. Steve reaches out to steady him with his good arm, but Dustin glares at him and steps just out of reach. Steve rubs his hand over the bottom half of his face with a sigh as Dustin stomps toward the church. Jonathan glances at him, scoffs, and stalks off to stand near Nancy by the wall.
Exhaustion washes over Steve, so he stumbles into the church to collapse into one of the pews. He hasn’t been to church since his parents started going on their trips without him, which is fine by him; he’s not sure he ever believed the stories they told him in catechism. Or, maybe more likely, he was too stupid to understand them the way he was supposed to. Dustin would agree. He makes sure to remind him as often as they see each other these days, which isn’t often.
He’s probably too stupid to get into Heaven one day, he thinks as he gazes up at the crucifix hung over the pulpit. One day soon, maybe.
He never thinks so much about dying as he does in a church. He used to sit next to his mother in their Sunday best and wonder what God thought of him, what He’d say to him when he made it to the pearly gates, always imagining himself as he was, never as an old man.
He wishes Dustin asked to meet Hopper and El somewhere in the middle, away from this place. Meeting in a cemetery is too on the nose, and being in this church is making him restless, agitated. Sitting still has each ache making itself known, but he doesn’t have the energy to pull himself out of the pew.
Dustin storms through the big doors at the end of the aisle, muttering to himself, and Nancy follows him in, Jonathan hot on her tail. None of them so much as glance at him on their way past to the front pews.
“Working on a solution?” Nancy spits, pacing at the front of the church, where the old women with the funny hats used to sit when Steve did go to church. Steve bites back a whimper as he pulls himself up to join them near the pulpit and the crucifix. “I mean, if Hopper has a solution to get through this and get to Holly, he should…he should share it with us!”
“I say we just ignore the old man. We keep moving. Look for a door or something,” Steve says. Nancy will go crazy sitting here, doing nothing—he thinks of the dinners with Barb’s parents, and how restless she was after she went missing.
He got good at hiding his own restlessness, and that’s why they didn’t work out. Sitting here, he feels like tearing off his skin, if only to get closer to the ache in his bones, to massage it better. He thinks he’s hiding it pretty well, or else no one cares to look for it.
“Yeah, and just curious,” Jonathan mutters, his arms crossed over his chest. “This door of yours, it’s soft like a Peanut Butter Bopper.” Steve goes hot and cold all over in embarrassment. Stupid, it was stupid of him to make that comparison, but it made sense to him back then, and it worked—it got them here.
It got them here, for nothing. They have nothing to show for it, except for his totaled car, and his arm tucked in close to his body to keep it from jostling too much, and none of them care about any of it except for how stupid he is.
“You got something to say, Byers, why don’t you just say it?” Steve hisses.
“I’m just saying maybe you shouldn’t be making the calls from now on,” Jonathan tells him. Steve wants to say you think I don’t know that? but Nancy beats him to it.
“It was not just his call,” she says, stopping her pacing to stare them down. “It was mine because it’s my sister. And…I agree with Steve.” Steve furrows his brow, and Jonathan’s lips part in surprise at that. “Okay, we can’t just sit here. I don’t know about a door, but this wall can’t go on forever. There has to be a way around it.”
Otherwise, how would Vecna get Holly to the other side? Steve wants to ask, but it seems like the sort of thing Dustin would make a jab at him for saying. Duh, Steve. That’s physics, or something.
“There isn’t,” Dustin says. “This wall is a circle. A circle completely surrounding the Upside Down.”
“Oh, yeah?” Steve asks. “How do you figure that?”
“Because unlike you, I didn’t sleep through Algebra 1,” Dustin tells him, flat and dry, and Steve turns his head away to hide the flash of shame that shoots through him again.
Thunder trembles through the church again. Steve screws his eyes closed and makes a wounded noise.
“My telemetry tracker picked up a weird frequency coming from the wall, and it took me a bit to place, but I’ve heard it before,” Dustin continues, brushing over the insult. “Rather, we have. Remember when we were out looking for Hop, and you heard that sound off of Irwin Road?”
Jonathan nods. “Yeah. You said it was interference.”
“It was. But this interference, it wasn’t coming from a military broadcast or an EMI. It was coming from this wall, which is important, because that gives us three known locations. So, I connected the dots, measured the midpoints, drew the perpendicular bisectors—” Steve’s head pounds harder as Dustin gets louder and waves his hands around his map in his excitement to be the smartest in the room, the little fucking genius. His voice keeps rising, grating on Steve’s frayed nerves.
“All right! Yeah, we’re not your teachers. We don’t need to see your work. We get it. You think it’s all a big circle,” Steve mutters. He clenches his jaw, but it makes something in the back of his neck, near the base of his skull, protest. His ears ring loud enough to drown Dustin most of the way out.
“I don’t think—I know. I triple checked, and my calculations are correct,” Dustin informs him. Steve expects him to continue, to say something about how Steve’s probably never gotten a math problem correct in his life, so Steve interrupts him before he can keep going.
“Jesus…whatever! I still don’t see how this gets us closer to finding Holly,” he says. Maybe it’s obvious, and Jonathan will laugh, and Dustin will ask how he’s made it this far in life.
“Because it’s not about the circle,” Dustin tells him, thankfully withholding any snark. “It’s about the center.” He pokes at his map, at the big dot at the middle of the circle.
“The DOE,” Jonathan says, “The Department of Energy.” Steve nods along, glad for Jonathan’s explanation because he thinks he’d lose his lunch for real if he tried squinting at all the little, squiggling lines on Dustin’s map.
“That’s…” Nancy trails off, all but glaring at the map.
“Hawkins Lab,” Dustin finishes. “What are the chances that the center of this wall happens to be in the place where all of this started, where the Upside Down was created?”
“So, the lab created the wall?” Jonathan asks. The sort of thing they’d make fun of Steve for asking, he thinks, before his eyes catch on the crucifix above them again. He’s being unfair, all because of a little headache. He should be used to it by now, the ache and hurt of the Upside Down.
He smacks his lips again. He doesn’t remember it tasting like this, even after he tore up a bat with his teeth. It’s weird, but he doesn’t have the time to complain.
“No idea,” Dustin admits. “But I think we should find out. Don’t you?” Steve tries to nod along, but his vision bobs and spins dangerously at the movement.
“My car’s not coming out of that wall to get us there,” he reminds them, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder.
“You wanted us to go out and look for a door in the wall,” Dustin points out, talking slower than he has to, like Steve is a little kid. “Did you plan on just walking the whole way around the Upside Down, Steve?”
“No,” Steve denies. He doesn’t have much else to say in his defense, feeling stupid and small and like he might throw up or tear apart at the seams.
“We’ll find a different car.” Steve shoots Nancy a thankful look for interrupting whatever snide comment Dustin was working up to next. “We’re going to the lab, and we’re finding a way to get to Holly.” Her jaw is set, and she looks determined as ever, so neither Jonathan nor Dustin argues with her. “Well? Let’s go.”
Nancy turns on her heel and stalks out of the church, toward the parking lot around the back, and Jonathan scrambles to follow close behind her. Dustin scoffs at Steve and trails behind them, leaving Steve to take up the back of the group.
Since the church is empty, he allows himself a pained sob as he leverages himself up out of the pew. No one’s around to hear it, even without the thunder to cover it up.
Then, he steels himself again, and he stumbles out of the church, and he must have taken longer than he thought to get himself moving because he finds Jonathan behind the wheel of a running car, Nancy in the passenger’s side staring out of the window, a muscle pulsing in her jaw, and Dustin in the back. Steve slides himself gingerly into the back seat.
On the way to the lab, Jonathan seems to make it a point to hit each crack and bump, sometimes swerving around unseen obstacles. Steve closes his eyes and tenses each muscle in his body to keep himself from keeling over. He’s sure he looks green around the gills, and he can’t bite back each groan or whimper, a few escaping from between his teeth, and he sees Jonathan glance at him in the rear view mirror more than once, rolling his eyes like he thinks Steve is playing it up for sympathy, even though there is no one here who would offer any, he’s sure.
Nancy stares out her window the entire drive to the lab, her elbow resting on the door and her fist pressed against her mouth.
The gates in front of the lab are open when they get there, and the lab looms over them. Here, the lightning seems to strike more often, and the thunder rolls almost constantly.
Either that, or the pain from the drive here is making nonexistent lights flash in his peripheral vision and his brain rumble in discontent. He’s starting to think that’s more likely.
The front doors open without protest, and Steve stumbles over the threshold after everyone else, so they don’t see the way one of his feet has been dragging since he got out of the car, heavy in a way he can’t control. He stares down at it, his toes somewhat numb and his knee weak underneath him. He’s never felt so uncoordinated in his life, and he’s trying to keep his breathing from turning panicked.
“Well this looks really promising,” he mumbles at the empty lab. The long hallways seem to stretch and sway in front of him like seaweed in a violent tide.
“We’re in the lobby,” Dustin points out. He glares at the side of Steve’s head before wandering off in another direction.
Panic seizes Steve, imagining a Demogorgon hiding in the depths of the lab, waiting for the kid to wander past, just to jump out from the shadows and steal him away to where Steve can’t save him. He tries to follow Dustin closer, but his feet don’t cooperate, and he stumbles over nothing. He catches himself on the wall before he can fall on his face.
“And…where are we going, exactly?” Nancy asks.
“Right. Like, what is it we’re looking for?” Jonathan clarifies.
“You’ve all seen Return of the Jedi?” Dustin asks. Something sparks in the back of Steve’s head—he knows that one, even if he can’t think of the main character’s name. He knows he knows it.
“The one with the teddy bears?” he guesses.
“Ewoks,” Dustin corrects.
“Yeah, it’s the best one,” Steve says, like he can remember what happens in the film at all. He’s seen that movie more than once, but he can’t think of what happens in it.
Dustin insists he’s stupid, and he might be right about that, but even this isn’t normal for Steve. He can remember things. Why can’t he remember this? He draws in a shaky breath. His foot drags on the tiled floor underneath him, and he swallows back a mouthful of panicked, bad-tasting saliva.
“Is it?” Nancy asks, eyeing him. She squints at him, analyzing, and he forces himself to stand up straighter. Steve tries to hold his arm normally, but he can’t hide the wince when he moves too much.
“No, but every child loves it, so tracks,” Dustin snarks, ignorant to Steve tripping over his own two feet. “In the film, if you recall, the rebels need to destroy a second Death Star, but it’s surrounded by a protective energy shield, which is created by a shield generator.”
Steve thinks he remembers that in the movie, maybe. “Yeah, cool,” he says anyway, trying to get Nancy to stop looking at him like she can see right through him. “Thanks for the summary of a movie we’ve all seen.”
“It’s an oddly relevant movie, Steve. Look, I think this circular flesh wall is Vecna’s version of an energy shield, except it’s not sci-fi. It’s supernatural, created by Vecna’s dark magic,” Dustin explains. “And this dark magic shield is what’s preventing us from reaching him and saving Holly. But if my math is correct, the generator for the shield has to be in this lab.”
“So if we find this dark magic shield generator,” Jonathan trails off.
“We destroy the wall,” Dustin promises.
Finally, Nancy looks away from Steve. He lets himself relax, every muscle in him aching from the effort to keep himself together.
“Find Vecna, save Holly,” she says.
“Medals for all,” Dustin remarks, sarcastic as he glances down another long, dark hallway branching off from the lobby. Steve isn’t sure what he’s looking for, how he knows which hallways are worth looking down and which ones aren’t.
“And it looks like what?” he asks. Dustin whirls around on the heel of his shoe and raises a brow, despite how much it must hurt with how beat-up he is.
“How would you expect me to know that?” Steve only offers him a half-hearted shrug and glances away. Dustin turns back around and clatters his way through a door marked ‘STAIRWELL’, and Nancy follows him without thought. Of course, Jonathan follows her, and Steve stumbles in behind them, unsteady. Dustin shines his flashlight up the stairs, then down.
“Up or down?” he asks, looking toward Nancy. Something in Steve crumbles at the thought of braving the stairs—after all he’s been through, it’s stairs he’s scared of. Pitiful, really, he thinks.
“I say both,” she answers, decisive. “Search in teams of two. Cover more ground.”
“Yeah, that’s cool with me,” Steve tells her, “but can we just switch the teams up? Nance, you and me to go up?” Usually, Steve would just go along with the plan, since he’s never been smart enough to add anything, but he thinks of the silent treatment he’d get from Jonathan, and how much Dustin is bursting to say to and about him.
There is only so much he can take, on top of how much everything hurts from taking the full brunt of the car wreck.
“Oh, I mean…” Nancy shrugs. He sends her a pleading look, needs her to save him from everyone he’s pissed off—of the three of them, he mistreated her, and she has every right to hate him, but she’s the quietest about it.
“Are you serious?” Jonathan spits.
“Me and Henderson need some space,” Steve tries. It’s a weak defense, but he doesn’t want to say the rest of it aloud—how he’s hurting all over, and how he couldn’t think of the plot of Return of the Jedi, and how he’s so fucking tired of people being mad at him.
“Please,” Dustin agrees, and that hurts, too, a pang in the middle of his chest, even though he deserves it.
“Please.” Steve’s voice is shaky and weak. He gives Jonathan the same pleading look he’d given Nancy, begging him to understand.
“Fine.” Steve lets out a breath, relaxes a little. “How about me and you?”
Fuck. He’s so tired.
“I think we need some space too,” Steve tries.
“So everyone but Nancy. That’s just—It’s convenient.” Steve doesn’t know what he’s trying to get at there, and he doesn’t ask, but Nancy seems to know.
“Hey, we don’t have time for this,” Nancy interrupts. “Let’s keep it simple, stick to the usual teams.” Steve slumps in on himself, glances at Dustin. He sees how much the kid seems to hate the idea of being with Steve.
He misses when the kid looked for him in a crowd before anyone else. Steve misses being the kid’s hero, but he’s just not strong enough for that anymore, and Dustin is old enough, now, to see through his thin act.
Steve debates telling them, about his arm and the ache in his ribs, about how he can barely see straight and can’t walk straight, and he’s starting to get a little bit scared from it all.
“Nance, I can’t…I can’t—” Steve starts.
I can’t go on like this much longer, he wants to tell her, but she’s right. They don’t have time for this. Her sister is out there somewhere, and Steve is being selfish, putting his own aches and pains above a little kid like this.
“End of discussion.” She gives him a hard look, and he nods, chastised. She starts up the stairs, and Jonathan shoulders past him, ignoring his pained grunt, to follow her.
“After you,” Steve sighs, but Dustin is already halfway to the next landing, leaving Steve to stumble after him. He grips the railing with his good hand to keep himself upright.
By the time they make it to the bottom of the stairs, a thin sheen of sweat is pooling in Steve’s temples and under his arms, and he’s breathing harder than he would be if he’d just played a full game of basketball.
“Okay, that was too many stairs,” he grumbles.
“Treasures are always hidden in the deepest depths of the dungeon,” Dustin mutters, obviously pissed off at having to wait for Steve to join him at the bottom of the stairs.
Steve only half understands what he’s trying to say. There’s treasure here? The place is sort of a dump, so Steve doubts it.
“What is it, a treasure or a magic shield generator? Keep your metaphors straight, dude.”
“Analogy,” Dustin corrects, barely paying attention to Steve as they wander down a hallway lined with doors. At the end of it, they find a room full of kids’ toys.
“Okay. Did not expect to find a daycare in this hellhole. That’s a perk.” He spots one of his favorite toys from when he was younger and stoops to pick it up with his good arm. He stumbles when he straightens up, dizzy from bending over, but he plays it off with a shaky laugh. “Holy shit, Henderson. You were right. Treasure.”
“Okay, you know what?” Dustin spits, and Steve stumbles backward at the hard anger in the kid’s voice.
“What?”
“This is the perfect spot for you, considering your arrested development,” Dustin says. He starts backing away like he can’t leave Steve fast enough. “While I search the rest of the basement, why don’t you stay here and play with your balls?”
“Perfect, yeah. Finally, a plan I can get behind.”
“I can imagine.” Dustin gives him the same sarcastic smile he gave him back in the car when he shook Steve awake.
“Yeah, good luck looking for your—” He’s suddenly grasping for the word, his jaw working and his tongue getting stuck behind his teeth like stale, saliva-soaked bread. “Treasure. I mean, shield generator. I mean, made-up bullshit.”
“Thank you.” Dustin disappears back down the door-lined hallway, leaving Steve to glance around at the rest of the toys. A lot of them, he remembers playing with as a kid, but he can’t think of the names. One of them, the cube with the colors, he can’t remember how to play. He knows he’s done it before, used to fiddle with them with Tommy and race him to finish it, and Steve held the record between them by the time they stopped speaking, but now, he just holds it up in front of him with his good arm and stares at it like it’ll all come back to him. He squints, and the colors all blur together in a nauseating swirl, until his fingers fumble with it, and he drops it at his feet.
“Come on, man. Piece of shit.” He stares down at his hands, unsure of why his fingers stopped working.
“Really? You’re actually playing in here?” Dustin scoffs from the door. Steve hadn’t heard him come in, and he jumps at his voice.
“I’m just following orders, dude. Judging by your pissy look, I assume you didn’t find the shield generator,” he says.
Dustin rolls his eyes. “It’s here somewhere.” He sweeps his flashlight around the room like Steve’s been sitting next to it and hadn’t noticed. Knowing the kid, he might really think that.
“But you didn’t find it.”
“Yeah, not on this floor.”
“So you were wrong.”
“You would just love that, wouldn’t you?” Steve shakes his head and regrets it immediately when his stomach rolls at the motion. The world blurs in the outside corners of his eyes.
“No, I’m just stating a fact.”
“No, you’re gloating,” Dustin accuses. He steps closer to Steve, and Steve stands up off the table he was leaning against to conserve his energy for the climb back up the stairs later. “Despite the fact that if I am wrong, we don’t reach past the wall, and don’t find Holly and the other kids. Do you understand how selfish you’re being?” Steve furrows his brows. He can’t follow what Dustin is saying, the kid talking too fast for how slowly Steve’s brain seems to be moving, but, he thinks, there’s nothing new there. And he’s sure the kid wouldn’t take well to Steve asking him to slow down a little.
“Me? Selfish? You wanna talk about selfish? How about when we finally reach Hop and El, we promptly ditch them to pursue this bullshit theory of yours? Not to mention, you’re the reason that we lost contact with them because of your no-show at the crawl. So this whole mess is actually your fault. And I haven’t heard so much as a sorry.”
“Shit. Again, it’s not like I just didn’t show up. I was attacked,” Dustin bites. The look in his eyes is the same one Steve used to see in himself, angry and self-loathing, looking only for the next fight and hoping to lose, thinking maybe this will be the last one.
He hates seeing that look on his little buddy.
“No, you wanted a fight, and that’s what you got. Just look at your face. You’ve done some stupid shit in the past, but this? Man, this takes the cake.” The bruises on his face look the same as the ones that marred Steve’s own back in high school, back when he pissed Jonathan off on purpose just to feel his knuckles breaking the skin on Steve’s face.
And Jonathan still hates him. And Steve doesn’t blame him.
“You wanna talk about dumb shit? How about chasing somebody else’s girlfriend while the world is ending?” Steve gives Dustin a disbelieving look.
“Nancy is a friend. She’s a friend, okay?” He can’t figure out why no one believes him when he says it. And then, because he misses the friend he used to have in Dustin and can’t help himself: “You remember what that’s like? Having friends?”
“Yeah, I do. I remember what it was like to have a good friend, a real friend who actually believed in me, and who was actually kind to me.” Steve swallows hard. He has always believed in Dustin, even when he was an awkward little kid, and he hates himself a little for not making that more known, apparently.
And everyone knows it: Steve has never been kind, even when he strives to be. He hates that he couldn’t be what Dustin needed, and he hates Eddie for leaving the kid behind with him when he obviously can’t take care of him the right way.
“Aha! Aha!” Steve snaps and points at Dustin, can’t help himself when it comes to a fight, especially one he doesn’t plan on winning. He doesn’t plan on fighting back, even, could never bring himself to hurt Dustin.
“What? What?”
“There we go. What this has all been about, really, is Eddie,” Steve tells him, glad to have a reason to say it all out loud. Glad to have something he can point at and say there, that right there is why Dustin hates me now. Steve can’t handle the guesswork the last few months has been. “All your bullshit, pushing everyone away, it’s because no one could ever be as perfect as he was.”
Least of all Steve, he thinks but doesn’t say.
“He wasn’t perfect, but at least he knew that, unlike you.” Steve bites back a laugh at that. Of course he knows he’s not perfect; he’s barely strong enough to keep himself upright at this point. “He was never fake. He didn’t care what other people thought about him. He was just himself. And you know what? He was the smartest, kindest person I’ve ever met.” Dustin picks up the toy Steve dropped and waves it in his face. “And he would’ve solved this in 30 seconds flat.”
Steve doesn’t think about it before he says it because he really must be fucking stupid: “If I’m such a goddamn idiot, how come I’m the one still standing here?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Dustin’s face grows darker than Steve’s ever seen it, but the words keep tumbling out now that he’s started.
“That night, I told you not to be heroes. I told both of you. What did Eddie do? He charged into a swarm of killer bats.”
“To save my life,” Dustin insists. Steve hates that the kid can’t see that he’s barely living anymore, just waiting for the next fight, can’t see that the Dustin who knew Eddie died alongside him, and now this stranger is left in his place. He’s not sure the kid can see past all this Upside Down bullshit.
Steve sure as hell can’t.
None of them are living anymore. They’re just fucking surviving, and Eddie dying didn’t change that.
“He saved no one,” Steve tells him.
“He saved everyone!” Dustin’s voice cracks down the middle.
“You can keep telling yourself that. But deep down, the reason you’re so goddamn pissed is because you know the truth. Eddie wanted to play hero, and he made a dumb call, and he got himself killed.”
“Shut up!” Dustin yells, and the kid throws the toy at him. Steve is too slow to block it, so it hits him square in the face, and in his surprise, Dustin rushes him. His head knocks into Steve’s collarbone, the pain of it rattling down his bad arm and into his teeth.
The kid bashes his flashlight into the side of Steve’s torso, where he already ached from the steering wheel. Again and again, and Steve grunts in pain, trying to get Dustin to stop, stop it. But the kid keeps coming at him, hitting him, hurting him worse than he was already hurt.
“No! What the hell, man? What are you doing, man? Stop it. Hey!”
Dustin tumbles away from Steve, dropping his flashlight and his walkie, but he gets right back up, fast enough to make Steve dizzy again. He swallows back the nausea from how fucking bad it all hurts, throbbing worse now than before.
“Stop! Stop it, man! Henderson! Hey! Hey!”
He tries to get his arms around the kid, to keep him down without hurting him, just long enough to calm him down, but Dustin doesn’t let him get close. He doesn’t notice until he brings it down on his hip, but the kid has picked up some sort of clipboard or—something solid that he uses against Steve. Steve throws up his broken arm to protect his head, and the impact of the board against it makes him gag.
“Henderson! Hey, what are you doing?”
The kid falls away from him again, this time toward a shelf full of games, and Dustin takes handfuls of jacks and chess pieces and checkers and throws them to rain down on Steve.
“Calm down! Calm—”
Dustin gets up again, and he charges, and Steve knows his back is against a wall, literally.
“Henderson, Henderson! Jesus! You’re gonna hurt yourself, man!”
He doesn’t think he could move out of the way if he wanted to, not with how fast Dustin is moving as he charges him again, faster than Steve’s ever seen him move, fueled by his anger and his hatred for Steve, and definitely not with how heavy his limbs feel, how uncoordinated he’s been since they made it to the lab.
Dustin throws himself at Steve, and the both of them tumble through the empty frame where there might have once been a window, or a one-way mirror, or something. Steve hits the ground hard, and Dustin falls directly on top of him, knocking the air from Steve’s lungs. His ears ring with pain.
Steve thinks they must be done, that Dustin has to have realized how wrong this all is.
But when he looks up, Dustin is still breathing hard, and he’s getting his feet under him again.
“All right, Dustin,” Steve breathes, trying to tap out as he, too, stumbles to his feet. He can’t let the kid hurt himself. He’s the babysitter here, he needs to take care of him.
As Steve stumbles to his feet, Dustin swings and punches him solidly in the face. The impact throbs across his entire head. He tries to recover, but the room spins.
They’re both barely vertical, but Dustin lets out a wordless shout and rushes at Steve again, keeping his shoulders low, but Steve somehow gets his arms around him, Dustin’s back to his chest. Dustin thrashes in his hold, but Steve holds on. His hands are trembling, slightly numb.
Dustin screams, a wounded noise, and Steve is scared he’s hurting the kid, until he lets out another angry noise and forces Steve to stumble back toward the empty frame in the wall.
“Enough, man! Enough! Enough! Stop!”
Dustin seems to realize the position he’s in, leading Steve around the room. He pushes off the ground, and his boots land squarely on the wall before pushing off, the way swimmers do in underwater turns, and between the force and how Steve’s balance is off, it sends them both careening toward the vine-covered wall behind them.
It leaves Steve sandwiched between Dustin and the solid force of the wall. He feels the back of his head connect with the brick, and the world goes entirely out of focus, and a noise he didn’t know he could make leaves him from somewhere deep in his chest.
His arms go numb, and he loses his grip on Dustin, who seems to realize his freedom immediately. He rolls away and sits up against the wall, breathing hard. Steve sits himself up, too, but everything goes staticky around him.
“I’m done,” he promises, but his words catch and slur between his teeth. “I’m done.”
“Go crawl back to Nance, you dumb, fake asshole,” Dustin spits. Steve stares at him, his jaw working like he’s chewing on a tough piece of steak.
Nausea stabs him in the gut, and he draws in a painful breath, his chest aching with it, but he can’t stop.
“I’m done,” he says again. He sounds drunk, even to himself. Liquid trickles from his nose, and he wipes a clumsy hand across the stream, smearing the clear liquid across his lip.
“You said that already, I get it,” Dustin mutters. The kid closes his eyes and rests his head back against the wall. A tear streaks down his bruised cheek. “You’re done with me, I get it, okay?”
Steve wants to say, I’m sorry. It’s okay. I’m sorry.
Instead, what comes out is, “I’m done. I—duh.”
The nausea becomes him, it’s all over his body, even in his arms and legs, his fingers and his numb toes and he jerks forward and vomits down his chest.
“Ew!” Dustin shouts, and he scrambles away. Steve chokes and coughs, drooling, and his nose is still running.
“Nnnnn—duh,” Steve slurs. He tilts to the side, his eyes rolling in his head. His bad arm jerks hard, and he falls the whole way over, groaning and trying to swallow around his tongue and failing. His shoulder jerks against the ground, and he flops almost onto his stomach, and he can’t stop jerking and shaking, and he’s so fucking scared.
He doesn’t know where he is.
His eyes clench shut without him wanting them to, and when they open, the room shudders around him like a piece of film stuck in a reel. His jaw keeps working, and his throat tenses up, and he hears himself making a terrible, wet choking noise, the only thing he can hear over what sounds like an oncoming train. His nose presses into the ground, and he can barely breathe like this, but he can’t roll himself back over, can’t control any part of himself. His leg jerks out and hits against the brick wall, his foot catching on a nearby vine, but something in the wall moves and gives away. His spit foams in his mouth, gathering in the corners of his vomit-specked lips.
Someone grabs him by the shoulder and rolls him off of his front. He keeps jerking and choking, and his noise is still running, and there is still an oncoming train, louder than anything he’s ever heard in his life. His body jerks again, and he strikes the wall again, knocking a groan loose from his chest. The same hands that turned him over grab the lapels of his jacket to tug him away from the wall.
It goes on like this for what feels like the rest of Steve’s life. Forever and ever, he shakes and trembles and jerks and groans.
But eventually, the loud blare of the train abates, leaving a disorienting ringing in its wake, and Steve’s limbs go lax all at once, leaving his head rolling on his shoulders. His fingers keep twitching, and he feels like he ran three marathons in a row, winded and sweaty and sore all over. His teeth hurt.
“Steve,” someone sobs above him, and his eyes roll in his head trying to find the source of the voice. “Steve, oh my god.”
“Duh—nnnnnn,” he slurs again. He smacks his lips, and swallows hard. “I’m done.”
He doesn’t know why he said that. He furrows his brow, tries to think of where he is, or how he got here.
He rolls himself onto his back, feeling two hands flutter around his head as he does so, and when he opens his eyes, he finds a curly-headed kid crying over him.
He looks vaguely familiar, Steve thinks. But he can’t place a name to the face hovering over him.
“Steve,” the kid says. There are tears on his bruised face.
“‘appened?” Steve slurs, reaching up to brush his fingers over the kid’s bruises, but he watches his hand miss the kid’s head by about a foot. It doesn't feel like any of his limbs are still attached, like they might just be floating around him, or they were never there to begin with. The room spins around them. He should know where he is, he thinks, and the thought embarrasses him. He shifts in the kid’s hold, trying to look around, to figure it out, to stop feeling hot all over with shame.
“No, buddy, come on,” the kid placates. “Stay still, okay?” Steve furrows his brow and sniffs hard, feeling congested and snotty. He smacks himself in the face trying to wipe his nose. “Listen, I’m gonna get the walkie, and I’m gonna get Nance to come help, okay?”
“Nance,” Steve repeats, his voice flat. He knows Nance.
“Yeah, just—okay.” The kid lifts Steve’s head off his lap, places it gently on the solid ground, and he scrambles away, out of sight. Steve tries to watch him go, but the boy moves too fast for Steve’s eyes to keep up. He finds himself making a wounded noise at the fact that he’s alone.
He doesn’t want to be alone. He doesn’t know where he is.
“I’m back, buddy, it’s okay,” the kid murmurs as he returns to Steve’s eyeline. “I’m here, and Nance is on her way.”
The boy picks Steve’s head up off the ground again and places it back on his lap. Steve stares up at him, blinking slowly.
Time passes slowly as they wait for—Nance, he thinks. But then time passes all at once; between one blink and the next, she’s there, kneeling over him, a concerned look on her face.
“Nancy,” he slurs. Her brows scrunch up over the bridge of her nose. Jonathan stands over her shoulder, his eyes wide and his lips pulled into a thin, frightened line.
“What happened?” she asks, but she looks at the kid above him, so he stays quiet.
“We were—I was,” the kid breaks off into a wet sob. “I pushed him, and he hit the wall.”
“Mad,” Steve murmurs. His eyes flutter closed, but Nancy’s dainty hand brushes over his cheek, so he opens them again.
“You’re mad?” she asks. Steve furrows his brows and grunts.
“Mad,” he says again, gesturing at the kid—Dustin, he thinks, and hates himself for forgetting, and then he’s scared because how could he forget Dustin? He gestures to himself, then. “At me.”
He gestures again at the rest of the room, at Nancy and Jonathan and maybe everyone beyond the room, too, wherever they are.
“Mad,” he insists.
“I’m not mad at you,” Dustin promises, his voice thick. Steve squints at him, an unimpressed look, and Dustin laughs. “I was mad, okay, but not at you. But I took it out on you, I’m—Steve, I’m so sorry.”
Steve reaches up again to wipe his face, but he’s uncoordinated still and only manages to smear more of the liquid across his hand. Nancy grabs his hand and redirects it away from his face. Steve glances at Jonathan, trying to pull his hand away from Nancy’s, suddenly panicked, so anxious he feels like he might die. He squirms, trying to get away from the feeling.
“Steve, hey, stop moving,” Dustin says.
“Everyone’s so mad at me,” Steve says, breathing hard. “I don’t know why everyone’s so mad at me all the time.”
Dustin leans over and presses his forehead into Steve’s collarbone, trembling all over. Steve reaches for him with the arm that isn’t throbbing, patting Dustin on the back of the head, his clumsy fingers tangling in his curls.
“Okay,” Steve tells him. His head aches like hell, and so does everything else. “It’s okay.”
“We need to get him to a hospital,” Nancy says, and Dustin sits up, sniffling and nodding. “His pupils are different sizes, and whatever’s on his face doesn’t look like snot.”
Steve’s face goes hot with humiliation.
“You’re not supposed to move people with head injuries,” Dustin tells her. He sounds terrified. “His neck could be broken. We could paralyze him, or kill him.”
“This is where they kept El,” Jonathan says. “It’s like a hospital on this level. We can find something here to help him. A neck brace, a backboard—or, something.” Nancy cranes her neck to look up at him, and she nods.
“Dustin, you stay here. We’ll go look for something so we can get him out of here. We just have to get back to the cemetery. Hopper will be there by now,” she says. “If he starts to,” she glances down at Steve, chewing on her lip. “If he starts to seize again, just yell. We won’t go far.”
Dustin nods, determined. “I’ve got him.”
Nancy disappears, her footsteps receding alongside Jonathan’s, leaving Steve alone with Dustin. The silence stretches like sticky taffy between them. Steve fidgets.
“Hey, Dustin?” he starts. His tongue still feels thick in his mouth.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, about, uh, some of the stuff that I said earlier. I just…” Steve squeezes his eyes closed, feeling sick with guilt.
“It’s fine. It’s okay,” Dustin insists, too fast. Steve grunts and frowns.
“No, just—It’s not okay. Eddie.” Steve heaves a breath. “He saved your life.” He keeps his eyes closed, and his temples pulse, but he needs to say it. “Our lives. And I know what he meant to you. I can’t even imagine how hard it’s been. But instead of—of just being there for you, I just. Well, I got angry about it. I guess—I got angry because things were different. Because—because I really missed you.” He swallows hard. “I missed my best friend.”
“Yeah, I missed my best friend too,” Dustin whispers. And he laughs to himself, so Steve cracks an eye open. “For the record, a Rubik’s Cube isn’t even a good measure of intelligence.”
They both laugh, quiet and rumbling. Steve trails off into a frail cough, but the serene smile stays on his face.
“I’ll hug you when I can sit up without feeling like my head might fall off,” Steve promises, and Dustin gives another snot-filled laugh, his eyes shining.
“I’m holding you to that,” he says. “We’re gonna get you out of here, get you home.”
“Maybe take me to a hospital before you take me home,” Steve snarks. “I think my arm’s broken. And my ribs.” He shifts, wincing. “And the whole…whatever just happened didn’t help.”
“I broke your bones?” Dustin warbles. “Your—your arm and your ribs? Steve.”
“What?” Steve scoffs. “No. No, pipsqueak, you’re not that big or strong yet. All that happened when I crashed the car into the wall. I’ve had a headache since then, too.”
“Steve,” Dustin agonizes. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I don’t know if you noticed,” Steve bitches, “but before this whole heart-to-heart thing we did, you were being kind of an asshole. Kind of made it hard to want to tell you anything.”
Dustin is quiet for a long moment.
“Yeah. I was being an asshole,” he admits. “But you’re always sort of an asshole, too.”
“Hey,” Steve protests. “The hell did I do?”
“You always try to get yourself killed,” Dustin tells him, his voice thickening again, “and I can’t let it happen again. I can’t do it again. You can’t die ‘cause I can’t deal with it again.”
Steve groans, but he forces himself to sit up so he can hold the kid. Dustin all but collapses into Steve’s arms, pressing his face into Steve’s shirt, despite the drying vomit and drool and whatever else is staining the fabric.
Gross. He’s going to have to burn this shirt.
Now, Dustin’s tears add themselves to the mix. “Don’t let it happen again. Please. Please don’t let it happen again. Not you.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Steve promises. Dustin nods into his chest, and Steve keeps holding him with his good arm. Steve thinks of the bruises Dustin’s hiding in his shirt, the need for a fight that kept Steve going for so long, and how he used to think of what he might do when there were no more fights to lose.
He can’t let that happen to his kid.
“Listen, kid. I die, you die, you told me that. And I am never gonna let anything happen to you,” Steve whispers into the side of Dustin’s head. “Never. Okay?”
Dustin pulls away to look Steve in the face. His face is set, determined. “Okay—okay. I get it, Steve,” he says, nodding. Steve knew the little genius would understand. “I die, you die.”
And then Dustin’s eyes flit over to where Steve kicked during his fit, where the wall has given away to another room. And the world keeps spinning, and there’s another fight to fight—but there is something beyond that, too, for the first time in a long fucking time.