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It’s kind of nice that Eddie and Steve have moved in together. At least, Dustin thinks so. It means that when he’s tired of the silence of his empty house being broken only by the crying of Tews he only has to bike one place.
Because, of course, it isn’t enough that Dustin’s dad fucked off into the sunset when he was eight years old. That a portal opened up and swallowed one of his best friends when he was twelve. That since then he’s almost died a hundred times to monsters and Russians and people who used to be people but who aren’t anymore.
His mom has to get locked out of Hawkins, too.
She was in Indy the day everything went down with Vecna, visiting a college friend or something, and then the military guys put up the walls and Dustin hasn’t seen her since.
But it’s okay. Dustin is doing fine, he’s fine. Yeah he’s- he’s snapping at people more, or whatever, but that’s to be expected. He’s handling it.
He just needs somewhere to escape the quiet.
Steve’s house is a good place to escape the quiet. There’s always music playing, and he and Eddie are loud enough together that Dustin can sometimes trick even himself into believing everything is normal.
He goes almost every day. He helps Eddie paint some of the rooms, even though he can’t draw for shit. He picks through their music collections. On one memorable day, when Steve is out of the house, he gets to help Eddie clear out Steve’s parents’ bedroom and paint the whole thing maroon with navy blue and dark green polka dots.
One week later, he helps Steve turn it into a DnD room as a surprise for Eddie.
Dustin was right, of course, about them getting along. He generally is. He wastes no opportunity to hold it over their heads.
And then he goes home to the silent, empty house and prays his mom is okay.
They don’t know, is the thing. Steve and Eddie. He hasn’t told them. Hasn’t told anyone except Murray in case he sees his mom and even then Murray is sworn to secrecy and probably wouldn’t have told anyone anyway.
It’s better this way, is what he tells himself. Everyone’s preoccupied with Vecna anyway, it’s not like them knowing would help anything. They can’t bring his mom back. Not even Murray can do that.
The only thing is that he’s kind of running out of food. And money. He dipped into his mom’s emergency savings that she kept inside her mattress because he figured she’d rather him do that than not eat, but it’s been six months and he’s slowly but surely getting closer to the bottom of that pile of cash.
He’s not sure what he’s going to do after that.
So he goes to Steve and Eddie’s house and pretends it isn’t happening.
He’s pretty sure something’s going on between them. Steve and Eddie, that is. Because more than once he’s come in and found them asleep on the couch curled around each other like they’re never letting go. More than once he’s walked into the kitchen and found them disheveled and red. More than once he’s watched them sneak upstairs while the party’s over and come back down half an hour later wearing different clothes. Eddie lives in Steve’s sweatshirts, and Steve has started wearing Eddie’s Hellfire shirts. They orbit each other in a way that makes it painfully obvious to anyone who’s watching.
Dustin is watching.
It’s a little weird, admittedly. The way they look at each other like they’d rather die than let each other get hurt. Dustin hasn’t seen either of them like this before - not even Steve. Not even with Nancy.
It’s a little weird, and it’s a little nice, but mostly it just makes Dustin miss Suzie. Cerebro went missing after the government guys moved in and Dustin hasn’t been able to talk to her since.
She would know what to do. About the food, and the money. About Vecna.
He hopes she’s not mad at him.
He knows she probably is.
He doesn’t tell them on purpose. About his mom.
He runs out of money eight months after the lockdown starts, despite his care, despite his efforts to make it last longer. He hasn’t had a Three Musketeers bar in eight months, dammit, he was trying.
But he runs out of money, and then he runs out of food.
He starts losing weight, because he can only really get away with one meal a day at Steve and Eddie’s without them getting suspicious, and he has to sneak some home for Tews. He can’t kill another cat, not one his mom loves so much.
By week two, Dustin is pretty sure they’ve noticed. They give him bigger helpings, send him home with the leftovers, and it helps.
Some.
Not enough, it seems, because while Eddie is visiting his uncle on week three or four (he’s honestly starting to lose track) Steve sits him down at the kitchen table.
“So,” Steve begins, and then he just sort of stops for a second, not seeming to really know what to say.
“So,” Dustin agrees quietly, pretending not to hear his stomach growling.
Steve frowns at the noise. “You haven’t been eating.”
Dustin shrugs. His bottom lip is already trembling, he can feel it. His hands are, too, under the table.
“Dustin-” Steve sighs. “Eddie and I are worried about you. We want to help, but we can’t if you won’t tell us what’s going on.”
“I-” Dustin tries to get words out, but a sob comes out instead.
Steve is out of his chair in a second, coming around the table to pull Dustin into his arms. “It’s okay,” he says softly, holding Dustin tight. “You’re okay, Henderson, it’s all gonna be fine. Deep breaths, kid.”
Dustin buries his face in Steve’s shoulder and cries, and cries, and cries.
Eventually they move to the sofa, and Eddie gets home and brings Dustin a bag of trail mix, and he eats it while he cries because he is so hungry even though he knows he looks stupid when he does that.
It takes almost an hour for him to calm down, with Steve on one side of him and Eddie on the other and the bag of trail mix in his lap and when his breathing finally starts to even out he knows it’s time to tell them.
“My mom got stuck on the other side of the wall,” he says quietly, miserably. “I’ve been using her emergency money for food but it ran out a few weeks ago. And I figured- I figured that everyone was so preoccupied with Vecna that it wouldn’t matter, and I thought it wasn’t gonna last as long as it has anyway, and I haven’t been able to talk to Suzie either and I- I just really miss my mom.” His voice cracks, and he thinks he’s going to cry again but only a few tears fall before they dry again.
He’s cried himself out, it seems.
Steve and Eddie exchange some inscrutable look over Dustin’s head, and then Eddie ruffles his hair and stands. “I’m gonna go set up the guest room, yeah? You’re gonna stay here until this all blows over.”
“Okay,” Dustin says, because it’s not like he can do anything else. “Can Tews come?”
“Of course,” Steve promises.
Eddie slips upstairs, and Dustin lets Steve pull him into another hug.
“You can tell us about this stuff, Henderson.”
“I know. I just didn’t wanna bother anyone.”
Steve hugs him a little tighter. “You’re not bothering anyone. We were worried about you.”
They go over to Dustin’s later, to pick up his stuff and to pick up Tews, who screams the whole drive back to Steve and Eddie’s.
Dustin doesn’t even like cats that much.
Steve makes dinner, and Dustin sits with Eddie at the kitchen table and watches Eddie watch Steve and he finally feels marginally more okay so he snickers a little.
Eddie frowns at him playfully. “What?”
“It’s a miracle the whole party doesn’t know about you two,” Dustin tells him, matter-of-fact. “You look like you have hearts for eyes.”
Eddie scoffs and reaches over to smack the back of Dustin’s head, which Dustin dodges easily. “Shut up.”
Dustin balls up a napkin from the basket on the table and chucks it at Eddie’s head. Eddie doesn’t manage to dodge, and it hits him right between the eyes, and true to form, Eddie collapses dramatically into his chair as if he’s actually been killed.
“Betrayed!” he wails. “By my own brother in arms!”
Dustin can’t help but laugh when he sees Steve roll his eyes fondly from the kitchen. “Yeah, whatever, Eddie.”
He makes it into a game. Teasing them, that is. He switches out horror tapes for rom-coms, puts on mixtapes of cheesy music he makes them labeled things like Eddie and Steve’s Cheesy-ass Bullshit Mix and Mr. and Mr. Heart Eyes and PLEASE Go Get a Fucking Room and they laugh when they find them and listen to them anyway and slow-dance in the living room at one in the morning. It’s disgusting.
They tell the others. Not all at once, but slowly. Hopper first, in case he can convince the feds to look for Dustin’s mom (he can’t). Then Mike and Will and Lucas, because if Dustin tells Hop he has to tell them. (Even if he does get shit for breaking the Rule of Law which says that the party must be told about danger that anyone happens to be in whether it affects the whole party or not. He’s only a little sorry.)
Either Will or Hopper tells Joyce, who comes over and hugs Dustin tight and cries a little before leaving.
The whole Party knows by the end of the week. And somehow it’s… fine. After the first little freak out, everyone settles and doesn’t really bring it up which is good because Dustin doesn’t really want to talk about it anyway.
But the next time Murray comes through the gate Dustin watches every single party member go up to him. He meets each of them with a shake of a head, and then he glances at Dustin.
Every time.
Dustin can’t decide whether it makes him want to throw up or cry. Both, probably.
But they settle in for the long haul, and he’s damn grateful for all of them anyway.
They fall into a routine. Or Dustin gets inserted into Steve and Eddie’s routine. He’s not sure it matters which is true.
He usually wakes up last. Breakfast is already on the table, and Steve and Eddie are being gross sappy losers in the kitchen. Usually Dustin throws something at them or pulls a face. Usually one of them pulls a face right back.
Tews settles in faster than Dustin does, taking over the sofa and the coffee table and - somehow - the mantle. The living room belongs to him, really. Steve and Eddie help scoop his litterbox, which is really nice because Dustin is goddamn tired of being in so much contact with cat piss. He’s pretty sure he was getting asthma or something from the whole thing which would suck if he did have to actually fight Vecna.
Then they mostly do their own thing, unless they go to the Squawk for a Crawl in which case they all ride in the van with Dustin in the back so Eddie can have his hand on Steve’s knee while he drives. Dustin would make fun of this, except that Eddie’s music is so deafening that there’s no way to have a conversation ever at all.
He misses his mom, still. He misses Suzie. He misses most of all the version of him that existed before all this shit, but also that version of him didn’t know Steve or Eddie or Max or El or anyone, really, even himself, and he’d rather do it all again a hundred thousand times over before he loses them.
They eat dinner together. Always. Steve especially has become weirdly strict about Dustin getting three meals and a snack or two every day and so he sits them all down every single night and they eat dinner and then they watch TV or read or listen to music until one of them starts yawning and then it’s off to bed.
Tews has started curling up in Dustin’s arms at night. He never used to do that before, but Dustin’s mom was always who he went to before and that’s not an option right now.
It’s kind of nice.
Even though Dustin still doesn’t really like cats.
He just wants all this shit to end.
It does, eventually. End.
Vecna finally reappears two years into the shutdown, and it’s a whirlwind of fear and hate and absolute hell but they make it because they have to. They all make it.
Except El.
El does it again. The thing she did the first time this all happened, where she sacrificed herself to kill the Demogorgon, or whatever.
Dustin is numb for a little while. After everything. For a week after El disappears, after everything finally ends, he is completely and entirely numb because how else is he supposed to deal with this? To deal with any of this?
And then, on that eighth day after the end of the world, there’s a knock at Steve’s door. The whole party is there because they haven’t really left each others’ sides since everything.
Steve stands, kisses Eddie softly (they stopped hiding the day after everything, decided that the people they nearly died with could be trusted with the truth of them), and approaches the door.
“Who is it?” he calls through the wood, because they don’t open doors for strangers anymore.
“Steve? Is that you?”
And Dustin’s world narrows to a point and he’s up in half a second, shoving past Steve to throw the door open and launch himself into Claudia Henderson’s arms.
This is when Dustin breaks. He lets himself fall apart, finally, because it’s over now and his mom is home.
“Mom,” he manages in between gasping breaths, but he can’t quite pull more words together and so he just buries his face in her shoulder and cries.