Chapter Text
Each rung burned at his palms climbing the tower. This had been a lot different than climbing the tower back in Hawkins, the metal was more abrasive, more corroded like everything else in the forsaken land of the Upside Down. Still, his plan, that this group had listened to and followed, had worked, and Holly and the kids were at the front of the group making their way down the tower out with Ms. Byers, Will, Lucas, and Mike all helping them down, leaving Steve, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan, and Dustin who wasn’t leaving Steve’s side, bringing up the rear to ensure nothing followed.
The whole structure is shaking like it was hit by an earthquake and Steve can’t stop himself before he loses his balance and goes flying into the metal rail, toppling over it unceremoniously and just barely catching himself on the edge. He’s dangling, weighted down by heavy boots that are great for stomping out demobats, but even better it seems at anchoring him down towards certain death. The tower shakes again and he loses his grip before grabbing frantically at the edge again, slamming his head into the side in the process. Ouch. Fuck. He’s gripping the edge with all his strength, adrenaline thrumming in his head, pain exploding in his skull, and then something drips in his eyes– just fucking perfect– he angles his head awkwardly to rub his eyes on his shoulder, it’s blood. Of course, it’s blood, since when is he bleeding?
He feels dizzy and unsteady and desperate for someone, anyone to just take his hand and haul him back onto the platform before he does literally drop to his death. Blood drips down his head again. He hadn’t realized how hard he’d hit his head but the pain wasn’t dampening with each second that passed, if anything, it was getting worse. And the growing pain in his head was making focusing on not falling that much harder.
“STEVE!” Steve rubs the blood off his eyelashes and onto his sleeve so he can clearly see what he feared, Dustin, jumping into action, to save Steve’s life. But if Dustin did that, Dustin would die too.
You die, I die.
“DUSTIN, DON’T–” Steve tries to yell, but it comes out strangled, winded, and even harder to hear under the loud groaning of the collapsing structure.
Steve is losing his grip, fuck, this is it. He looks at Dustin, makes eye contact long enough to shake his head ‘no’, as in don’t do this Dustin, you’ll die, Dustin.
Nancy’s eyes lock on his next, and panic floods her eyes as soon as she sees what’s happening. She yells out his name and she’s coming to him too, but he’s losing his grip, and gravity is stronger than the two of them combined, especially when Steve is feeling a bit woozier from the apparent blow to the head by the second. He could literally kill them if they grab onto him and he goes deadweight, like trying to save an anvil. The best thing he could do to protect them both right now is just… let go.
That made sense to him, though that could’ve been the head injury talking.
You’re always trying to get yourself killed, and I can’t deal with it again, not you.
Shit.
“Steve, grab my hand!” That’s Nancy, right there, and beside her is Dustin and both of their hands are outstretched but he can’t take them, he can feel the weight of gravity on him. He can’t take them both down with him. Steve shakes his head, glancing over his shoulder at the platform below, way below. He’d just climbed the… maybe 10 feet to this platform, and dropping down with gravity pulling him down did not sound fun, but he’d be alive, probably, and he could at least catch himself there and then work his way back up without risking dragging Dustin and Nancy down with him.
Good enough.
Steve lets go. Nancy and Dustin scream. He does his best to tuck and roll but he misjudges it and slams into the railing below, rolling over onto the platform, with too much momentum. His vision goes dark for a second before blinking back into focus. His head feels like it’s on fire. He feels like throwing up, or passing out, or maybe both. He picks himself up off the platform, oh shit, he grabs onto the railing, he’s dizzy. But he musters up all the confidence he can and he looks up, mistake, at Dustin and Nancy and gives them a thumbs up.
“Steve?! Are you okay?”
Why does she sound so far away?
“Steve, you’re freaking me out here, buddy!”
Dustin, relax. It’s all fine. It’s all totally fine.
Steve opens his mouth to tell them to relax, but no words come out. Uh oh. As hard as it is to talk, it’s getting even harder to think. Shit, something was really wrong.
“Steve!” Nancy’s voice is getting closer, he thinks, and he hears the echo of hands on the metal rungs of the ladder. He can’t tell how long it is in between thoughts but suddenly she’s there in front of him, her hands on his shoulders and she’s looking right at him, and for some reason he can’t quite look back at her. She’s saying, “Steve!! Answer me!”
He wants to, he wants to do what she’s saying, but he doesn’t know how. He tries to say something again, and his knees are buckling and he’s going down.
“Jonathan, help me!”
The next thing he knows, he’s on his feet and he’s being half dragged across the ashen wasteland of the Upside Down. He is walking, but he had no idea how he even got here, and fuck, his head.
“...Nnce?”
Oh that didn’t sound right.
“I’m right here, Steve. Just keep walking, you’re gonna be okay.”
“M…kay, ‘m tire…d…”
“I know, but you just have to stay awake, okay? You’re gonna be fine, but we’ve gotta get you out of here right now.”
“He doesn’t sound fine,”
“Just keep moving.”
He tries to say something but his vision is doing that thing again and he can’t quite tell if he’s dreaming or if this is real. He should know on some level that this is real, but nothing feels tangible enough. Oof, and that feeling of passing out or being sick is back. Great.
“Annneedaminnit…”
“What?”
“I jus… I needa… minute.”
“We can’t stop, you need to keep moving, I promise you can rest when we get out of here but you need to keep moving.”
“NEEDA…fu-ck,” and now it’s happening, he’s on his knees and he can barely see but he’s acutely aware of the fact that he’s throwing up a wave of bile and whatever he had time to eat today, and he can’t focus, can’t talk, can’t think, it’s just that exploding pain in his head and now on top of that he’s yacking his guts out in the Upside Down.
“Jesus, Nancy, that isn’t normal!!”
“I KNOW, okay?! I KNOW. We need to get him out of here.”
Steve wants to have a say in this, tell them all that he’s fine, he’s here, but he doesn’t really feel like he is and before he can have another incoherent thought, he blanks out again.
He’s half sitting up in the grass, real grass, and if he was coherent of anything he’d know he was sitting out front of the Squawk, but he can barely tell that he’s sitting up, much less that he’s being held up by Jonathan while Nancy and Robin are frantically scanning the road, waiting for the ambulance they’d called from the station.
Slowly, the sound of a siren starts piercing Steve’s very sensitive brain and he thinks he throws up again but he’s not really sure and then he’s out, again.
The next few– Hours? Days? He’s not sure– but they’re a blur of color, noise, and pain. He has a lot of weird visions he’s pretty sure are mostly dreams, although some of them are brief images of what he’s pretty sure is Hawkins Memorial Hospital, so that bit is probably real. His head… it feels… hot? Like his skull is burning from the inside out, just so hot and relentless and explosive and then finally… he wakes up.
He blinks and for once, for the first time in however long, he has a coherent thought, and it’s: I have to piss like a fucking racehorse. He instinctively moves to get up, and he feels a very uncomfortable tug and he immediately lowers himself back down. He looks down and sees a series of tubes and shit attached to him, and he’s fairly certain one of them is a catheter.
“Mr. Harrington?”
Steve’s attention snaps to the door where a doctor is standing, holding a chart. The man grabs a penlight from his coat pocket and shines it quickly in Steve’s eyes and says, “Do you know where you are?”
Steve hesitates for a second and says, “Hawkins Memorial,”
“Good, and do you know what day it is?”
Steve hesitates again and says, “No,”
“It’s Monday. You were brought in Friday night with some swelling in your brain, there’s a drain in place, try not to touch it, things have been looking good so we should be able to remove it in the next day or so.”
Steve nods, not really sure what to say to that. The doctor then says,
“You’ve had some people waiting to see you. We can let one of them in for a few minutes if you’re feeling up to it,”
Steve feels a warm swell in his chest. Maybe it’s embarrassment, maybe it’s gratitude, maybe a little of both. As exhausted as he is, he’s sure that Henderson has been losing his shit. He almost hopes Dustin isn’t here right now, he’s not sure if he could put the kid through seeing him with what felt like a thick wad of bandages wrapped around his head and some kind of tube thing sticking out of his literal skull. He’s not sure he wanted anyone to see that. But that pang of loneliness, and a little bit of fear, makes him say,
“Yes—Yeah, I…uh, wanna see them.”
The doctor nods and says, “The nurse will bring them in shortly.”
The doctor closes the door behind him and Steve feels a nervousness twisting in his stomach– he’s afraid to let Dustin see him like this, hell, he’s even afraid to let Robin see him like this, he can’t imagine his parents are here, and–
There’s a sharp knock on the door and it opens slowly, a nurse holding it open as… Nancy walks in.
“Steve, Jesus,” she comes in, taking in the whole sight of him, head bandaged, eyes a little shadowed, skin a little pale, stubble a little thicker than normal, and of course the thin piece of tube sticking out from under the bandages. Nancy is clearly trying to hold strong but her eyes are a little wet when she says, “How are you feeling?”
Steve wants to reassure her, but his voice feels weak from lack of use and the pain in his head had lessened but wasn’t gone.
“Better.” Is all he manages to get out.
Nancy opens her mouth to say something and closes it. She looks so worried. And Steve wants to relieve her of all that fear but his head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton and even though this is the most conscious and coherent he’s felt in days, he still feels sort of hazy and not quite fully present in the way that he should. At this point it’s more frustrating and embarrassing than scary, why can’t he talk?
“How…” Steve starts saying, and he feels a cold drop in his heart and his stomach hearing himself sound like this, but he keeps going, he says, “How are you? And Dustin?”
Stupid, stupid, stupid, why do I sound like that?!
Nancy watches him softly, the worry not quite leaving her eyes, and she says,
“We’re fine— everyone’s fine, Holly is home safe, the kids are okay, Dustin is okay, and Mike and Lucas and Max and… Steve, are you—?”
Steve blinks, he wasn’t trying to zone out, and he wasn’t, he heard her, but he hadn’t realized his eyes had lost focus. It felt humiliating.
He swallows thickly and says,
“‘M sorry, I… I hear you I’m just… tired.”
It wasn’t totally a lie, despite having had pretty limited consciousness the last three days, but he was mostly just embarrassed that he couldn’t talk to her like he wanted to, like his mouth wouldn’t catch up with his brain, or his brain wouldn’t catch up with his mind, or whatever he just felt… disconnected.
Steve had hit his head a lot over the last few years, over his life even, but he’d never felt so disoriented.
Nancy says, “The doctors said you had some swelling in your brain, and it might take some time to heal.”
Right. Brain swelling. They had said that. That made sense. Still, it didn’t make this feel any easier.
Steve is so embarrassed to be this broken in front of Nancy. He wished he would’ve asked them to wait now, but he just felt so alone. And it’s not that he didn’t want her here, but he didn’t want to scare her either.
He didn’t want to scare anyone.
“Can you… tell Dustin… I’m okay?” Steve asks her, and he looks anything but okay.
Nancy stares at him, studying every inch of his face, the dressings on his head, the tubes and all this shit attached to him.
“Steve…”
“Please. Just… just tell him, I don’t want him to worry anymore. I don’t… want you to worry anymore.”
She opens her mouth and closes it again. His head feels hazier and hazier, he just wants to be able to think, to talk. To tell Nancy and Dustin that he’s okay, they don’t need to worry about him. But he can’t. And part of him, deep down, is not so sure they shouldn’t worry about him.