Chapter Text
It’s the sight of Nancy’s car pulled haphazardly across three parking spots that flips the switch.
This is what Dustin tells himself later, when he tries to scrounge up a reason for what he does next. There is none. It’s an abdication of rationality, and he knows this, but he finds himself marching down the hallway to get to Steve, to grab Steve before Nancy issues another order, because in the end—
That’s why she’s here, isn’t it?
Hawkins has split into four and Steve’s to-do list grows ever longer. Set up the station, map out the tunnels, placate the g-men.
Rebuild.
But Dustin knows it’s about the crawl. They’re looking at a weekly schedule now that the telemetry tracker has been built, and everyone’s growing antsy. They’re talking about all the different jobs, all the moving parts, what’s considered safe and what’s considered dangerous.
(That last part is only voiced out loud by Joyce. Steve doesn’t really acknowledge that not all jobs are created equal, but he did admit to Robin that he wanted her in the lifeboat should push come to shove.
The implications of lifeboat, of course, are left unsaid.
Dustin has no doubt that he plans to go down with the ship.)
Dustin has never felt the electricity Steve used to talk about, but he feels it now.
And Steve, who once staked his love life on being observant, has thrown the last shreds of his self preservation instinct out the window.
He is obtuse.
“Hey,” he says to Nancy when she raps on the window (because she beat Dustin to the punch, as she always does). “Hopper sent you over to figure out the schedule?”
Dustin can only see his profile, but in that moment, he’s transported into Nancy’s shoes. He knows Steve’s fixing her with guileless brown eyes, already making space and time for whatever she asks next.
He knows what she’s going to ask.
He briefly pictures it—
Barreling through the door and straight into Steve. Taking Steve down in a tangle of flailing limbs, because Steve never plants his feet, even after all these years. Steve’s going to stay flexible. Steve’s going to break Dustin’s fall.
Second nature and all that. Dustin knows all of his impulses, good and bad.
But he sees Nancy soften herself before she opens her mouth to ask, once again, the impossible, and it comes to him.
He puts his hand on his abdomen—
Then changes his mind and makes himself small instead as he enters the room behind her. Steve will see him anyway. He feels the flush of victory when Steve’s eyes track him instead of whatever Nancy is saying and wills it away, because he wants himself pale for this.
He knows what a migraine looks like on Steve. And Steve knows all the symptoms—has run the gamut enough times himself. He’s not expecting to see them on Dustin, but Dustin already takes after him in so many ways (or so he tells Dustin, every time he works a comb through Dustin’s hair).
What’s another one?
“Sorry,” Steve mutters to Nancy. “Give me a minute.”
He slings an arm around Dustin’s shoulders, tugs him off into a corner.
“Hey, Dustin,” he says, voice pitched low, gentle enough that Dustin knows he’s bought the act. “You alright, man?”
Dustin stays silent as he chews on what to say. Then he shifts under Steve’s hand, listless, and says, “Yeah.”
Steve makes up his mind.
“I’m taking Henderson home,” he says to Nancy. “Call me later?”
No. No, no, no—
“I said I’m fine,” he snipes at Steve. “And you need me for what comes next.”
Steve doesn’t deny this. But he casts around, like he’s looking for someone. Probably Robin. Dustin already knows the drill; Steve, whose life is lousy with sidekicks, invariably looks to pawn them off before he leaps into heroics.
Nancy is already running out of patience. She doesn’t clear her throat, but her silence invites an answer.
Steve’s gaze travels between the two of them. Robin, kept away by some sort of sixth sense (or the vagaries of running a radio station), never comes to give him an out.
Dustin wills Nancy to make up his mind for him. To remember that once upon a time, she still had compunctions when it came to sending Steve into the bowels of hell.
“How about this,” Steve says when it appears that there will be no decision forthcoming. No solution handed to him from on high. “Do we really need two people going into the Upside Down? I mean, yeah, I know Hopper needs backup, but what if we just play it safe this time?”
Nancy fixes him with a steely stare. “We just got Hopper back, Steve. And you know it’s dangerous down there.”
“Can’t shoot a gun.” Steve mimes shooting one anyway. “Unless you’re gonna give me one of yours?”
She shakes her head mutely.
“So I’m just there to bear witness. In that case—”
Play it safe.
He looks down at Dustin, and whatever he sees shores up his resolve. Turns the unspoken into an order. “I’ll drive the van,” he says. “Topside. And Dustin can monitor the signal.”
“Isn’t he sick?” Nancy, too, has a sharp eye. “I should come—”
“No,” Dustin says. “No. He needs me. You should stay here with Jonathan.”
And Joyce and Will and Mike and Lucas and everyone else who shows up waiting for a job. There’s no point in idling away their time at the station, but no one knows where to go.
(He has very little charity left in him. They could, he thinks, finish mapping out the tunnels.)
“It’s settled,” Steve says, pulling Dustin in closer. “If things do go south, we’ll get El to lift a plate.”
“A plate?”
“The giant, metal bandaid thingy? I don’t know what you call it. Anyway, something happens to Hopper, we’ll get our asses down there, stat.”
Nancy has never loved compromises, but she’s not unreasonable.
“Okay,” she says. “It’s just—”
“Yeah?” But Steve sounds like he’s just prompting her by habit.
“Nothing. I just don’t think we need all of us at the station.”
They don’t. Inevitably, there will come a day that calls for all hands on deck, but today—
“It’s discipline,” Steve says with a shrug. “Best to get into the habit, yeah? For whatever’s coming next.”
--
Discipline.
It’s the bedrock of Steve’s approach to life. To hear him talk, one would start to believe that the war against Vecna would be won on the basketball courts of Hawkins High.
“And the basement of the Squawk,” he allows generously. “And the streets of Hawkins.”
In a nutshell: Hawkins.
It coaxes forth a sterner stuff. Moral nerve, as it were.
Dustin, imbued with self knowledge if not self respect, knows this to be true: he doesn’t have it.
--
Mind over matter.
Steve says that all the time.
Given what they know about El’s powers, it’s not impossible. But Steve, who is soft flesh and wet blood—
Willpower only goes so far. That the war will eventually be won in the tunnels of Hawkins is a nice concept, but it does so very little for his general state of health.
What his body has taken to heart: that these tunnels are where they cling to each other in a blind terror. That night two years ago when they were swarmed by demodogs, that night two months ago when the tunnels caved in.
It was a close call. They’d had so many of those by then that it seemed truly unremarkable. Steve picked himself up and dusted Dustin off and they climbed back into his Beamer.
All in a day’s work, really.
But Steve was shaking by the time they pulled up to the station. Drenched in a cold sweat that plastered his hair to his forehead and his sweater to his shoulder blades.
“Go grab Robin,” he said to Dustin. He was white-knuckling the steering wheel and he was far too pale. “Tell her I might need her to drive.”
Robin didn’t know how to drive, but it was a moot point, because Steve wasn’t getting out of the driver’s seat either. She opened the door and they looked at each other in silence, and then he said, “Get in.”
And he drove them back to his house.
--
So in the end—
It becomes a matter of staving off the train at the end of the tunnel.
It becomes a question of staying three steps ahead.
--
“You should learn how to drive,” Steve’s saying to Robin. He’s driving with one hand, holding the walkie with the other.
Dustin notes dully that Steve’s going to be a menace if he ever gets his hands on a mobile phone.
“You’re not getting tired of chauffeuring me around, are you?” Robin neatly sidesteps whatever Steve wanted to say.
“Nah, just tired of staying up all night. Misery’s best shared and all that.”
“I mean, you don’t want to teach me in the Beamer, do you? I know we have the van, but it’s the van.”
The little engine that couldn’t.
“I can teach you in the Beamer,” Steve says absently.
“You can—Steve. Steve. You love that car. You call it her.”
“It’s just a car, Robin. And didn’t we agree to use surnames? Henderson here’s gonna get pissy if—”
“Steve. Steve. I think I fell asleep and started hallucinating—”
And so it goes.
Shop, or whatever Steve planned in lieu of summer camp, falls by the wayside for now. It’s just Steve and Robin in the Beamer as Dustin sits sullen in the backseat. They don’t bicker, oddly somber for what should be a normal coming-of-age ritual; it just makes them seem half dead, drained of life.
Rocking Robin has run out of things to say.
“Don’t, like—look, your hands don’t need to be glued to two and ten.” Steve’s in the passenger seat and Dustin’s just realizing that he’s never seen Steve there before. “Just relax.”
Robin gives the gas pedal a timid tap.
The Beamer inches forward a bit.
“It’s good you don’t have a lead foot.” Steve, now reassured that they won’t die at the hands of Robin, who did play soccer and enjoys some level of hand-foot coordination, turns on the radio. “Let’s try to make a turn. You need the gas pedal for that—I mean, you need to accelerate if you want to make a turn. Ask Henderson if you want the details.”
She doesn’t ask.
Dustin leans his forehead against the window and watches the dreary landscape creep past.
Queen plays on in the background.
Second verse, same as the first.
They’re just waiting for the hammer to fall.
--
Sometimes—
Sometimes, Dustin wants to go back to that day when Steve stood in front of his storm cellar and banged on the door with his bat.
He sees that Steve, both a stranger in his memory and so, so familiar because of the years that follow, and he wants to say—
This is it, kid.
Dustin is fifteen going on a nebulous, undefined number. It’s old. That’s all he knows. Grief fucks up the timeline, along with everything else.
So even though that Steve is eighteen and still older than Dustin—
Dustin feels older. The two years between now and then confers upon him the authority to give that warning, even if the Steve of yore already knew the score.
He thinks about Steve in the aftermath of Nancy and Jonathan and Billy. At the time, all he knew was that Steve, King Steve, had emptied his afternoons for him. The why was irrelevant. Here Steve was, welcoming Dustin into his life with open arms, and so Dustin went.
Looking back, he was to Steve what Dart was to him.
Less murderous, of course, but then again—
Dart grew up. And now, so has he.
--
But he tries, nevertheless, to thread the needle.
He knows—he knows—that he’s far from the consummate actor. And even if he were—even if his body were to give out—to absent himself from the meetings is to remove himself from power. The hierarchy looks like this: Hopper and Joyce, then Nancy and Steve, then him.
Everyone else is just window dressing.
So to remove himself from the equation—
It would be the equivalent of giving up on Steve.
“It’s hard,” Steve says, threading a needle, because the universe likes its jokes on the nose. “You can’t keep everyone happy.”
He’s—
Dustin doesn’t know what he’s doing. He asks, and Steve looks even more peeved than usual.
“What does it look like I’m doing?” His scowl deepens. “I’m trying to mend this shirt, because I can’t drive up to the Nordstrom in Indy.”
“You could get Bauman to do it. He likes you.”
“I don’t want Bauman to shop for me, man. I like shopping.”
He misses Indy. He misses the mall in Indy, which he’s taken Dustin to a couple times before. Dustin would have thought that Steve had had his fill of malls after Starcourt, but it seems that Nordstrom is what delineates happy afternoons from the trauma of July 4th.
“Is it the cafe?” he asks, trying his hand at small talk.
“That too.”
So he really does like salads.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Steve adds. “I don’t mind the quarantine.”
“What are you talking about? You rant about the military, all the time—”
“Yeah, but it’s a good excuse. I mean, can you imagine explaining why we gotta stay to our parents?”
This is his main preoccupation. How to stay. For a man who talks such a big game about change, growth, flexibility, he sure is invested in the immutability of roots.
How deep, Dustin wonders, does his go?
--
Hawkins, with its tunnels and cracks and fissures, is no place to plant roots.
--
Robin keeps talking about leylines. There are none in Hawkins, but the tunnels, they think, are a good approximation.
Why they need an approximation, they never say. They simply do.
So down once more Steve goes.
He doesn’t take Dustin this time. He takes—
Dustin doesn’t dwell on what he takes. Whom he takes. Some version of himself who didn’t know how to be afraid yet, or another version who thought he’d triumphed over fear. Every version, since Steve has always been comfortable in his skin and doesn’t mind taking himself everywhere he goes.
They need the tunnels. They need to know where they lead. They need to live in them, if need be.
Dustin knows this. But not Steve, he thinks as he watches the Beamer’s taillights fade into the night. Not you. Not you too.
Steve comes back. He always comes back. He came back last time too, and in the grand scheme of things, last time was an aberration.
Steve actually said that.
It’s good he said that. It means he’s listening to Dustin. It means he knows. But it also means that he’s weighed everything and still decided to go into the tunnels, history be damned.
And Dustin tried to keep him back. He pulled out every trick in the book, short of another migraine. Every checkbox on Steve’s to-do list that didn’t have to do with the Upside Down. The shelter, the school, the hospital.
Hawkins isn’t a big town, but it’s cracked in four so someone, somewhere, is always in need of a hero.
And once every attempt proved itself futile, he started wishing himself sick.
(Better him than Steve.)
He doesn’t even have to fake it this time. It’s like whatever Steve had was contagious—he feels his throat closing up, his lungs freezing, his heart stopping.
He’s coughing up a storm by the time Steve gets back, dusty and worn to the bone.
“Hey! Hey, hey. Why is Henderson hacking up a lung?” Steve jogs up to him. Shoots an inscrutable look at Nancy. “I leave for a couple hours and someone gives the kid the flu?”
“It’s just allergies.” Nancy, veteran eldest daughter and sister, is supremely unconcerned. “It rained a lot, remember? It rains a lot.”
It’s pollen, ragweed, grass. She has a rational explanation for everything when she’s on a mission. Dustin thinks about pointing out the spores, but—
“It’s the ozone,” Jonathan offers. “Some people are allergic to it.”
“I’m taking him home,” Steve announces. He touches Dustin’s forehead, briefly, and then he’s shrugging off his Members Only jacket.
Dustin feels it settle on his shoulders, heavy.
Steve’s handing off the maps he drew. The film roll he used up to document the damage. (And where was Jonathan, resident photographer and aspiring director?)
“If we work fast,” he’s saying, “we can finish clearing the tunnels by the end of June.”
Before his twentieth birthday.
“Maybe we should prioritize the crawls,” Nancy says. “Finding Vecna is our first order of business.”
“We can do both.” But Steve’s already turning towards Dustin. “One thing at a time, Nance.”
One step at a time. One foot in front of the other, and then again.
It’s his motto, really, but Nancy probably hears—
Dustin doesn’t know what she hears, but he hopes it’s what he hears.
--
Steve drives him straight to the hospital.
It’s an overreaction. He refused to let Robin take him to Hawkins General when he was the one who couldn’t sit up. Dustin, who’s suffering from an itchy throat and maybe a narrowing of airways—
“They can give you an inhaler,” Steve says. “Vicki works there. We’ll ask her.”
It speaks to his opinion of doctors that he’d rather consult the girl who was a year below him.
“If you really trust the doctors,” Dustin says, “then why didn’t you go last time?”
Steve doesn’t miss a beat. “That was different.”
“How so?”
“It was from the bats. You really think a rabies shot was gonna fix anything?”
“How do you know?”
“Because I cured myself.”
Dustin thinks back to that long, awful stretch of days he and Robin spent at Steve’s bedside. There was no cure. There was no—
“It’s different,” Steve says again. “Don’t ask me how I know. I just do.”
So Dustin resigns himself to sitting in the waiting room. Lucas swings by once, careful to keep his distance when Dustin coughs his way.
“It’s probably just allergies,” he tells Steve. “Erica had the flu and it was awful. He looks fine.”
“Could be the spores,” Dustin says. “Could be heart failure. Just spitballing here, since I kinda wanna justify the bubble wrap.”
“Think positive thoughts,” Steve tells him, getting up to turn in the forms. “And maybe keep your distance from Sinclair. Don’t cough in his face, man.”
“It’s fine,” Lucas says. “My immune system is unassailable.”
It’s strange, Dustin thinks, how Lucas of all people is the one to take after Steve in the ways that matter. Maybe it’s the jock gene. Maybe Steve’s right—the war will be won on the basketball courts.
“You just jinxed it,” he says instead. “You know better than to say that out loud. Just ask Steve.”
“Ask me what?”
Dustin can tell—Steve’s only asking out of rote habit. He’s gone back to chatting with the nurse, trying to figure out how much longer before they usher Dustin in.
“Our immune systems,” Lucas says anyway. “And how they’re invincible.”
“It’s basketball,” Steve says automatically.
“You,” Dustin says with feeling, “are so full of shit.”
Steve chooses to ignore that.
“Still,” he says after a beat. “Can’t hurt to get checked out. Last thing we want is asthma screwing up your lungs.”
“Asthma?” Lucas echoes, bewildered. “Who has asthma?”
--
Dustin, the doctors decide, probably has a condition similar to asthma. They don’t think so, but they can’t be sure, because he did inhale several lungfuls of spores.
They are, once again, singularly useless. But—
“Great,” Dustin says, pocketing the prescription for an inhaler. “That means I’m at a higher risk for migraines too, right?”
--
After all, he thinks to himself as he climbs into the Beamer once more—
In for a penny, in for a pound.