Archive of Our Own ^beta

It starts with a walk in the woods.

Or maybe it starts before that. (Tunnels filled with silt and something that’s not quite snow, blood and shattered china on Jonathan Byers’ carpet. Christmas lights flickering in the hallway, Barbara Holland dying alone. Nancy Wheeler walking into high school with a smile that caught Steve’s attention and never let it go.)

It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that two weeks after a girl called Eleven closed the gate and retreated back to her cabin in the forest, Steve Harrington picked up a bat and walked into the woods because he couldn’t sleep.

It didn’t seem so stupid at the time.

Some of the kids did it too, occasionally, patrolled in secret until it became easier to convince themselves that there wasn’t anything waiting for them in the shadows.

Steve couldn’t sleep and it felt like the walls were coated in gunk and the shadows just kept growing, so he fixed the problem in the only way he knew how to. He picked up his bat, closed his door behind him, and walked into the woods, swinging it loosely in his hands, wondering half-heartedly if he should have been working on his English essay instead or if government men would come and carry him away if he wandered too close to Hawkins Lab.

*

That night, he has a new nightmare.

He’s lying in bed, and he can’t sleep, so he gets up and looks out of the window, only there isn’t any glass and he falls forward, down and down, into a black void that doesn’t ever end. All he can hear is a roaring, swooshing sound like wind from inside a car, only about ten hundred times louder and it feels wrong, it feels like something alive, and it feels like it’s trying to speak. He can’t breathe right—something is covering his mouth— in the distance, from far away, a girl’s voice calls out: Steve!

He wakes up when he hits the bottom of the blackness, which was wet and watery, and he doesn’t remember how he got home from the woods last night.

He doesn’t think too much about it, groaning as he swings his still-bruised body out of bed and into the shower, pours himself a cup of coffee and lets the dawn light illuminate his scabbed-over knuckles. That’s his second mistake. 

*

School is a blur, like it always is.

He finds Nancy and Jonathan, or rather they find him, and they walk to the lockers together. Tommy and some other boy—Reed? Steve thinks his name is Reed—walk past them, slamming into Steve’s shoulders as they pass. Candy two years younger than them is having a house party on Friday evening, her friends are handing out announcements, and Nancy and Jonathan roll their eyes and crumple up their invites without even looking at what it says.

“Are you going to go?” Nancy asks, looking at Steve where he’s still holding the invite, and he laughs, scoffs, says nah not this time. Folds it up and hides it in his jacket pocket and tries to mean it, probably does mean it.

He finds the invitation in his pocket again on Friday, two days later, thinks bullshit bullshit bullshit like it’s an anthem, and hops into his car before the silence in his house can sink its claws into his shoulders, drag him back into the darkness and set his aching skin on fire.

It’s not a good party. They usually aren’t. Steve doesn’t even know Candy—thinks she might be the girl with blonde hair piled too high on her head, eyes glassy and words loud because she’s way too drunk, but that’s most of them. It doesn’t matter, anyway, she only invited the whole high school because they’d have come anyway and she may as well have made it look deliberate.

Outside, Billy Hargrove is doing a keg stand, booze running in rivers down his chin. Steve turns around and goes back inside before Billy finishes because fuck that guy, really. The party is loud and the house is dim, and he drinks too much, but it doesn’t matter because everyone drinks too much, and what’s a little alcohol when real consequences look more like blood on shoes and tunnels full of bones?

“Here for a good time, not a long time, huh,” some girl yells into his ears, watching him throw back a full cup of something sharp like it’s a shot. Steve grins at her, waits for his vision to stop crossing over, and doesn’t fight her when she pulls him into the living room, where it smells like sweat and the music is playing way too loud to think, letting her twirl under his arms and steadying her when she stumbles, hand on her hip.

Eventually, Steve isn’t sure how much later, she reaches up and tries to kiss him. He lets it happen, then slips away and throws up in Candy’s toilet.

Steve groans, rests his head on his arms for a second and thinks bullshit bullshit bullshit. It’s all he can think these days, now that everything’s come to a grinding halt and Nancy’s prancing around school hand-in-hand with Jonathan fucking Byers, of all people—God, what an asshole, what a creep, Steve hates that he doesn’t hate him. Jonathan fuckin’ Byers.

Steve closes his eyes, retches, tries not to think about whatever the two of them were doing while he was fighting demodogs in a junkyard and trying not to die.

Someone bangs on the door and throws it open, aims a kick at his ribs to make him move. Steve bats the leg away, stumbles to his feet, and goes to grab another drink.

He isn’t sure how he got home, doesn’t think he should have been driving, but he knows he left before most at the party, probably just after midnight, yet when he finds himself at his front door it’s approaching dawn.

He shouldn’t drink as much as he has been, he knows that, he’s not—okay, he’s stupid, everyone knows he’s stupid, but he’s not suicidal. He’s nursing a concussion the size of Indiana and his bruises are still shining green-purple on his face, yuck, he knows he should be staying home and resting and remembering the name of the President to prove his coherency but none of that matters much when home is just silence, silence, silence.

Bullshit bullshit bullshit.

There’s nobody to tell the President’s name to, nobody to help him up the stairs and nobody to make him change out of his jeans before he falls into bed for a forty-five minute nap that ends when he starts to scream.

Steve wakes up, sits up, runs a hand over his face. Goes to the bathroom, showers, throws up bile, makes himself a cup of coffee and lets the dawn light illuminate his scabbed-over knuckles, just like it always does. He’s glad he developed alcohol tolerance early, or he’d be dealing with a proper hangover and not just vague nausea.

There’s a sticky note on the fridge that says call Stephanie if you need me, Mom and as he watches it unstick from the fridge and tumble down to the floor, floating, drifting, tracking its movement lazily. It’s lost its stickiness; it’s been up there so long. Stephanie is—Steve doesn’t remember who she is. His dad’s assistant, maybe? They’ve never met, he knows that. Steve looks away, and back out the window, but the sun has somehow risen already.

Dustin calls him, later, when he’s trying to write his stupid English essay but the words keep wobbling like he’s underwater. He wants a ride to the Byers, says his mom can’t take him and come on, Steve, please?

“Fine,” says Steve, like he has something better to do. “Be there in ten, dipshit.” It’s not even twelve yet, too early to be abandoning his homework already, but whatever— he can do it later.

Dustin talks and talks and talks, and Steve used to be the kind of person who’d have told him to shut his mouth but now Steve kind of likes it, kind of likes that he doesn’t have to say much and the whole car ride is just Dustin talking about whether his mom is going to get a new cat or whether his science teacher will accept a hypothetic discovery over a physical one since Joyce made them bury that stupid demodog out in the yard.

He makes the appropriate comments, smiles at Dustin out of the corner out of his mouth with affection that isn’t faked, and calls the kid rude names because Dustin calls him worse ones.

They pull up to the Byers, Dustin hops out. “Thanks,” he says brightly, and Steve rolls his eyes.

“You need a ride home, too?”

Dustin shakes his head. Before Steve goes, he says: “Wait, Steve—do you want to come in? Say hello to everyone?”

Steve laughs. Maybe he shouldn’t have, because it feels a bit mean but he doesn’t mean it like that. He’s never going in the Byers house again, never ever, not on his fucking life. “Nah, man, I got shit to do today. Have fun with the other nerds, though. Say hi for me.”

Dustin waves and Steve drives off.

He gets home, pulls into the driveway and shifts the gear into park, sees that his watch reads 2:20. Steve blinks. What? He rubs his eyes. Maybe he read the clock at home wrong earlier. He settles back in at his desk, spends three hours trying to write about The Tempest and trying not to think about the woods he can always see from his window—right about where Jonathan Byers once stood with a camera, and right about where the Demogorgon must have waited.

He reheats old pizza for dinner and drinks his mom’s vodka because she’ll never notice it was gone, watches TV with all the lights on and wakes up screaming like he does every night.

The moon is full, and Steve thinks gee that’s pretty. Then wait what the fuck because he’s never sleep-walked before but here he is, in the woods, far enough away from his house that he can only just see its lights.

He doesn’t break into a run on his way back but it’s a near thing, and he spends the rest of the night playing records and wondering who he can buy some cheap weed off of because this shit has gone on long enough, no thanks, he could probably cope with the weird nightmares he doesn’t remember but sleepwalking is where he draws the fucking line.

Monday comes and with it comes his teacher’s weary expression as she accepts Steve’s essay when he hands it in. He knows it’s shit, because every essay he’s ever written has been shit, but oh well there’s not much he can do about it now.

He eats lunch with Nancy and Jonathan, because Nancy is a force of nature and there’s not much he can do about that, either, save running away every time she approaches him with Byers at her heels.

She’s decided that they should still be friends, and Steve thinks kind of bitterly don’t even get a say in that, do I, and then regrets thinking it because it’s not like he can afford to pick and choose his friends, it’s not like he actually has friends anymore.

So Nancy and Jonathan—his ex and his replacement— come find him sometimes at lunch, and sometimes he finds them, and he feels so sick with guilt that he nearly pukes every time they avoid touching each other in front of him, because he’s not that much of asshole and he understands a no when he hears one, has only ever wanted Nancy to be happy even if it turns out she was never actually happy with him at all.

*

Week three post-Mind Flayer passes much like weeks one and two.

Steve drifts through school, sweats too much at basketball because running makes his adrenaline kick in with something that feels way too much like fear, and when he throws the ball at his teammates it’s always more aggressive than it needs to be, like maybe he’s hoping he’ll hit their faces and they’ll split apart and open up like the Demogorgon last year.

Max swears up and down that Billy is leaving her alone, when Steve sees her, which has only been like four times, but he believes her because those kids have some kind of chronic aversion to lying, so if Max says he’s leaving her alone and there aren’t any bruises on her arms then he’ll take that.

Steve, though, Billy does not leave alone.

At first he kind of did, at first it was just avoiding each other in the hallways and Steve trying not to turn around every time he felt Billy’s glare on the back of his neck. Then it became shoves, trips, most of which Steve can ignore—but Billy doesn’t need to avoid Steve, not really, and they both know it.

This is why: Billy beat Steve right the hell up, that day in the Byers house, beat him up so bad that Steve passed out and made the rest of that shitty night seem like a bad LSD trip. Max swung a bat, stuck a needle in her step brother’s face and screamed herself raw, (which Steve only knows about through the kids’ extremely awed retellings) but that had been Max, not Steve.

Also, if Steve hadn’t been there then Max wouldn’t have swung any bats or screamed any threats and Billy could still be beating on his little sister as much as he liked, only now he can’t and it stands to reason that’s Steve’s fault.

With weekend four comes five pages of math homework and Alex’s party which Steve blows off said homework for. He gets drunk, but not as drunk as he did at Candy’s because he’s not overly fond of being a sad drunk alone at home but he’s even less fond of being a confused drunk among crowds, which is somehow what he’s become.

Billy’s there, again, and this time Steve isn’t fast enough—Billy comes swaggering up, high off his ass, his cronies at his side, sliding right up into Steve’s space, chest to chest, spitting words at him so close that Steve can see the anger in his eyes and taste the beer on his breath.

“Go away,” Steve mutters, and Billy shoves at him once, twice, but Steve’s faster even with bruised ribs, heading off towards his car. Alex’s house has a long driveway, through the woods, but Steve is too drunk to be scared so he doesn’t much mind taking the long walk by himself—not until a body comes slamming into him, straddling him and pinning his biceps.

“What the fuck, what the fuck,” says Steve, writhing, trying to throw him off, and Billy grins at him, manic and crazed. “Get off of me, you fucking psycho,” and Billy laughs, leans in real close.

“You think you can just tell me what to do, huh Harrington? You think you can just tell my little bitch of a step-sister to drug me and I’ll just let that shit slide, huh? Huh?”

Steve jerks his knee up, hits Billy’s groin, and wrestles his wrists up so he can shove Billy’s torso away from him, scrambling up to his feet. Billy, grinning through the pain because he’s genuinely psychotic, jumps to his feet too, swings at Steve’s head, then slams his flat palm out so fast that Steve can’t duck away. Steve sees stars as he stumbles backwards and clutches his bleeding nose, white-hot pain shooting into his brain and out the back of his skull. Ow ow ow.

There are others, too, now—Steve can see them in his peripheral vision, clutching their drinks. He’s not that far from Alex’s house, or the party, and some of it spilling into the woods now. Tommy is probably one of the assholes watching and cheering for Billy, their faces doubling and tripling when Steve glances at them. Fucking perfect.

Billy cackles, and Steve realises belatedly that the woods are the worst fucking place to be right now because Billy just presses him back until he can yank Steve towards him, send a fist into his stomach to make him double over, then presses his arm against Steve’s throat and pushes, Steve’s back trapped against a tree, his hands scrabbling at Billy’s forearm.

Steve chokes, spits, kicks out, but Billy only presses harder, and Steve can’t breathe, can’t breathe, can’t breathe—his vision is going red, spotty and dark around the edges, and Steve wheezes, gasps. Billy laughs, low and sweet, presses harder, and something deep in Steve’s mind says no.

He isn’t quite sure how it happens. He’s dying one moment, can’t breathe, can’t move, and then his leg shoots up and out, catches Billy violently in the stomach and sends him a step backwards, then he grabs Billy’s one hand and slams down sharply on Billy’s elbow with his own, making the other boy howl. He kicks again, at the joint above Billy’s shin, and Billy drops roughly down onto one knee, panting and agonised.

Steve steps forward, spits blood, still can’t really see, punches Billy in the face once, twice, three times—grabs his collar in his fist and hauls him up, slams him against the tree he’d been using as an accessory to murder and knocks his head back, hard, against the bark. Billy, clearly dazed, struggles weakly, blood on his face and his hands, and Steve reels his fist back, punches him again.

 Kill him, he thinks. It’ll just be a few more hits and you’ll kill him and he’ll die and he deserves it, you could do it, do it, do it, it’d be easy, it’d be right—then he realises quite suddenly what he’s thinking and no. No, he’s not a murderer, he’s not even a fighter, he hates fights—so why are his fists still keeping Billy held up against a tree, his knuckles split open and weeping red all over his hands, some kind of fire burning through Steve’s veins?

“Do not,” says Steve, “touch me.” Billy stares, his eyes half-lidded and glazed over with pain and whatever drug he’s high off of. Steve doesn’t even sound like himself, too harsh and snarling and violent, and he has to actually force himself to step back and let go of Billy’s collar, letting him drop down onto the floor.

The world doesn’t feel quite right, too far away from Steve and too removed from his body. The woods are too silent. The crowd is too silent.

He leaves Billy where he left him, half on the ground, supported by the tree, and walks back to his car.

He doesn’t remember how he gets home, doesn’t even remember starting the car or turning the keys or how he drove. He blinks once and then finds himself sitting in his car outside his house, his fists still freshly raw but covered in darker, dried blood, watching the sun rise.

He comes back to himself kind of slowly, blinks once and then once again, stares at his fists in confusion because he just got into the car but the blood on his skin is sticky and clotted, not watery and wet like it had been, and the sun is already rising and turning the air gold even though it had been so dark in the woods that he hadn’t even been able to tell who’d been watching the fight.

The aches come next, the sudden realisation that he hurts, that he’s in pain and that his clothes feel stiff and too tight.

He steps out of the car, the soles of his shoes touching the asphalt of the street, and then he’s in the shower wondering when did I get here, how did I get here. His hands hurt like a motherfucker and he stares as soap bubbles swirl on his palms, washing away the red until they’re bruised blue and purple.

He clambers out of the shower and grabs a towel, hissing as his feet touch cold tire, and then stop short at his reflection in the mirror.

For a second, he feels like Billy is punching the air out of his body all over again. He doesn’t look like himself at all.

His hair is dripping and flat, and when he moves it behind his ears, he sees that his eyes are shadowed deeply, purple eyebags making him look like he hasn’t slept in days, and shit maybe he hasn’t, Steve can’t actually remember. There’s half a ring of bruises against his throat, from where Billy kept pushing and pushing and pushing, and his hands look so much worse in the light of his bathroom than he thought they did. His ribs are still green from three weeks ago, and now there are fresh marks overlaying them, like some kind of ugly watercolour painting where the colours all bleed into each other.

Steve looks away, towels off, and slides into sweatpants and a sweatshirt. He brushes his teeth, careful of his split lip, and then grips the countertop tightly and says, “Shit, shit, shit.”

*

Monday comes and he blows off school to go to the hospital, because that’s what people are supposed to do when they can’t explain what’s happening to them.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” says the hospital lady—secretary? What are hospital ladies called? “Busy night, huh?”

“Oh,” says Steve, self-conscious but too tired to care much about how bad he looks, “No, I’m not here about… that.”

The lady stops typing on her computer, moves her chair to see him better and lowers her glasses, runs her eyes over his body up and down, then looks back up at him. “You’d better take a seat, kiddo.”

Steve smiles awkwardly at her, goes to take a seat like she’s asked, and hides his hands by sitting on them.

He waits, and he’s called, and he waits some more, and then come the perfunctory questions and comments of you look like something hell spat out and what seems to be the problem, son?

“I’ve been losing time,” says Steve.

The doctor puts down his clipboard and looks at Steve, really looks at him for the first time. “What do you mean?”

Steve slides his fingers under his thighs to keep from twisting them together. “It’s like, I’ll get in the car and then two hours have passed and I haven’t gone anywhere. And I can’t remember where I go, sometimes, or what I do.”

The doctor frowns. “And how long has this been happening?”

Steve opens his mouth to answer, then closes it. He’s sweating, but he’s cold, so cold. “I don’t know,” he whispers, and the doctor looks at him carefully, like he can see straight through the bad stitching Steve’s been trying to keep himself together with.

“Do you have any idea, any idea at all? Work with me, kid.”

Steve pulls him out of his own head, looks back at the doctor who’s still watching him with something wary and concerned in his eyes. “Um.” The gate was closed four weeks ago, according to the calendar in Steve’s kitchen, which means four weeks since Billy Fuckin’ Hargrove smashed a plate and his fists against Steve’s face, and the two weeks after then kind of passed in a blur like last year, a blur of wait are we safe now wait is it really over god I want to sleep, but he doesn’t remember losing hours at a time. But that’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Not remembering. Not knowing.

“A few weeks, I guess. I only really noticed last night, but I think… I think it’s been happening for at least two weeks before then, maybe more, I don’t know.” He shrugs, helpless, because once you realise you can’t trust your perception of the world every one of your memories becomes painted with uncertainty.

“How much sleep do you get every night?”

Steve has to think about it. Not enough, he thinks. Never enough, and never for long.“I’m not really sure,” he admits after a moment. “Maybe four hours? Not—not always all at once, though.” He isn’t even sure if he’s lying or not.

The doctor shines his flashlight in Steve’s eyes, makes him answer questions, takes his blood pressure and his sugar levels and his measures his heartbeat, a dozen little tests which Steve passes with flying colours.

The doctor says it’s probably residual trauma from his head injury—aftershocks, he calls them. He tells Steve that they should go away, but if they don’t then he needs to come back to the hospital, get his head scanned and take more tests. He tells Steve that everything will be fine.

Steve wants to say, did you know there was a portal to another dimension, like, thirty minutes from here? Did you know a girl died in my pool last year except she didn’t drown she got eaten? Did you know that there are tunnels under Hawkins filled with the bones of rotting animals and missing persons?  

Steve says, okay, thank you, I understand.  

The doctor tells him he can’t drive, he shouldn’t read, he shouldn’t watch TV for more than thirty minutes at a time, he needs to get proper sleep every night for at least nine or ten hours—Steve nods and nods and then he climbs behind the wheel of his car and hits the road, shaking without understanding why, feeling more like he’s about to cry than he ever did in those stupid tunnels.

*

Tuesday arrives like every other day. Steve wakes up screaming, throws his legs over the bed, showers and makes himself a cup of coffee. He sits in his empty kitchen in his empty house, watches the dawn arrive and watches his fingers shine red in the golden glow of the sun. 

“What is happening,” Steve whispers, his hands over his face and fingers in his hair. He’s scared. He's—he’s scared.

Steve gives himself a moment, then another, and then taken in a shaky breath and makes himself eat a banana for breakfast. He doesn’t taste it at all. It tastes like the air in the tunnels had tasted, thick and cloying in the back of his throat. He throws it up five minutes later and then tosses his car keys from hand to hand, shoving it all down, down, down until his hands still and he can drive himself to school.

He didn’t do the math homework, he realises, half way to school. Of course he didn’t.

Nancy and Jonathan are waiting for him at his locker, which is—well. Nancy has that expression, that I’m-worried-so-I’ll-fix-it which used to be endearing but now just kind of… grates. Jonathan looks a lot less bullheadedly determined but pretty concerned anyway, which Steve doesn’t really know how to feel about.

“Steve,” Nancy breathes out as soon as they catch sight of him, “Oh my god we heard, the whole school is talking about—”

“Great,” says Steve, because wow, Nancy calls him tactless? He waits until she steps aside a bit and then opens his locker, pulls out his history books and slams it shut, turns to the detective duo with a smile that pulls at his aching lips.

“Oh my god,” Nancy says again, catching sight of his hands, “Your hands, Steve—Jesus.”

He pulls away before she can grab at them because personal space, Nancy, fuck’s sake. Jonathan looks just as worried at his girlfriend—his girlfriend who is Steve’s ex-girlfriend, how lovely—and Steve wishes that his only two kind-of friends in Hawkins weren’t also the nosiest people alive.

“I’m fine,” he placates, stepping away from the locker and down the hall. “It wasn’t anything. It was just a dumb party and a stupid fight, just got a little out of hand is all.”

Jonathan and Nancy hurry to catch up with him, trapping him by each walking beside him on a different side. It makes his skin crawl in a way it never did before, like he’s being examined, dissected, like they can just… biopsy his issues and diagnose them so they can go away, just like that.

“We heard Billy nearly killed you,” Jonathan says, careful, and Steve glances at him quickly out of the corner of his eye.

“Nah, man, it wasn’t that serious.” He laughs, and it hurts his throat. “He already did that, anyway, a month ago. Old news, y’know?”

“That’s not very funny,” Jonathan mutters quietly, like Steve can’t hear him if he lowers his voice. Steve winks, pulling at a scab on his eyebrow.

Speak of the fucking devil—Billy Hargrove and a couple other boys come around the corner just as Steve and the dynamic duo are doing the same. Billy makes eye contact with Steve for exactly one second, his jaw tightening, before he brushes past them, without a single word or a single push, almost going out of his way to get past as fast as he can while not running. Huh. Progress.

Nancy, her books held to her chest, watches Billy go. “We also heard you nearly killed him,” she says.

That’s—that’s fucking irritating, is what that is. Steve pushes down something angry and snarling in his chest, right beside the hurt that Nancy really thinks that lowly of him, when she knows he hates fighting—but he didn’t hate fighting when he had Billy shoved up against that tree and thought, really thought, about just punching until Billy stopped breathing, did he?

Uncomfortable with the direction of his thoughts and Nancy’s snoopiness, Steve’s words come out snappier than they should: “Gee, sorry—didn’t know I was just supposed to just fucking take it?”

“That’s not what I meant, Steve,” Nancy protests, because she’s always been like that, always too eager for a fight.

Steve rolls his eyes. “Didn’t you?” An uncomfortable silence, and the weight of Jonathan’s gaze. Steve sighs. “Look, it wasn’t that bad, okay? It’s just the stupid high school rumours. Billy jumped me, I fought him off.” I fought him back, is what I did, thinks Steve. “Okay? That’s all.”

Nancy looks like she could keep arguing, because she always can, but Jonathan speaks up: “Okay, well, at least he’ll leave you alone now, huh?”

Steve reaches his history class and turns to look at them, a smile on his face that he doesn’t feel. “Yeah, at least there’s that,” he agrees, and when he doesn’t say anything more they don’t have a choice but to head off, exchanging worried glances like they think Steve can’t see them. Ugh. Just because he and Nancy aren’t dating doesn’t mean he isn’t still privy to every single one of her expressions, like he doesn’t know every twitch of her face for its hidden meaning. Doesn't she know he loved her?

School is weird all day. He gets given a wide berth, wider than usual, except this one isn’t turns out King Steve is kind of a bitch after all, it’s weird and gross because it’s the kind of berth people like Billy Hargrove receive after beating someone else’s face in. But there’s also the sudden backslaps, the smiles in the hallways, the Hey, King Steve! Wild party, huh?

Billy isn’t the most likeable leader Hawkins High has ever had, and also winning a fist fight appears to be a pretty good way of showing the student body that you aren’t a friendless loser chasing after his ex-girlfriend anymore. Yikes, yuck.

He’d have been glad, before the party, before the missing time and the tunnels and the Byers house becoming his personal hell, but now it’s just uncomfortable. He doesn’t want people to like him just because he has power, not anymore. He—he kind of misses the kids, actually. They’re too much for him, they always are, with their noise and energy and wildness and willpower, but at least they’re fucking honest.

And, as if by fate, Dustin calls him that night and asks for a ride. “Sure,” says Steve, because why the hell not?

Dustin yammers on as usual when he gets into the car that evening, excited because El is visiting for the first time since that night and Mike promised them they could maybe play some D&D.

“Wait,” says Steve, interrupting. “If you haven’t been playing dragons and demons—” “Dungeons and dragons,” Dustin interjects— “Then what have you been doing at Will’s and Mike’s, like, every other night?”

Dustin flushes, then, and goes quiet. Steve glances at him. “Kid?”

Dustin huffs. “Okay, well, you can’t—laugh.”

Steve raises his eyebrows, surprised. “I won’t,” he promises.

“Okay, well, we’ve—normal stuff, you know, movies and shit, hanging with Will because possession is scary as all hell, but also, you know, sometimes we go over what we know about the Upside Down, make plans and stuff like that.”

“Oh,” says Steve. His voice is quieter than he’d meant it to be. Battle plans, that’s what Dustin is talking about. And the movies, the hanging out—that’s making sure they’re all safe, all together.

Jesus, they’re just kids. They’re supposed to be just kids.

“Yeah.”

Steve isn’t sure what compels him to say it, after the silence has grown, but he suddenly feels the need to blurt out: “Dustin, don’t go in the woods.”

Dustin turns to him, confused. “What?”

Steve doesn’t look at him. This is stupid, he’s stupid, he’s—“Just promise me you won’t go through the woods if you don’t have to, especially alone. Okay? I know you all—go on patrols, I’ve seen you, I do it too sometimes when I can’t sleep.” Which is, well, always. And Steve hasn’t actually remembered the last half dozen times he’s left the house to patrol. “Just… promise me you won’t go into the woods, alright?”

Dustin is watching him. “Okay,” he says slowly. “Do you… is there something there?”

Steve glances at him. No, he thinks, then: yes. “No, I don’t know,” he says instead, “It’s just—kids shouldn’t be in the woods alone at night, okay? And, you know, Hawkins is hardly the safest place to be but the woods are worse, alright?”

Dustin nods, says sure, then, “Wait what do you mean you’ve seen us—Steve! We’re not going on patrols, okay, we have definitely not done that, definitely not supposed to do that, and anyway if we had been we’re not anymore—” Steve rolls his eyes, brushes off the kid’s half-assed excuses, promises not to rat them out to any of their parents as long as they stay safe and don’t go in the woods or out at night, and thinks why didn’t I know if there was something in the woods.

The shitheads are all meeting at the Byers’ again tonight, and this time Dustin drags him out of the car. Steve still doesn’t go inside the house. The gremlins swarm him, like a little horde of pre-teens, chattering that they heard about the fight, the fight with Billy, — “How?” cries Steve, genuinely confused— and that’s awesome and what were you thinking he could have killed you! Steve bats away their hands and then ruffles their hair when they look put out about it.

He notices that Dustin’s got this worried little crinkle on his forehead, even if he seems weirdly proud, and Max is sticking pretty close to Steve’s side with a fierce light on her face, Will looking up at him with those big, concerned eyes. Lucas and Mike are better are hiding whatever it is that they’re thinking but concern is there if Steve wants to look for it.

They ask him to come inside. He says he places to be, things to do, and Mike says bullshit, sounding nothing and everything like his big sister.

They ask him to please come inside, just for a minute come on Steve. Steve laughs at them, pushes their heads together, and doesn’t go inside.

All he can think, as he’s driving home, is why didn’t I know why didn’t I know why couldn’t I answer. What’s in the woods what’s in the woods what’s in the woods why didn’t I know.  

He pulls up at a stop sign, even though Hawkins at night is empty as anything, and blinks—then he’s clutching his bat, in his backyard. The woods loom above him.

“Fuck,” Steve whispers. He grips the bat tighter. He steps inside.

*

The woods are cold and dark, even though there had been sunlight only a moment over. Fucking stupid, that’s what this is, that’s what he is—there’s nothing in the woods and there’s no reason to be swinging his bat.

The only monsters left are the ones in Steve’s head, the ones in his nightmares, and the one called Billy Hargrove.

He walks deeper, deeper, unsure as to what he’s looking for and unsure as to how he’ll find it.

Then he wakes up screaming.

“Shit,” says Steve, gasping, clenching his fists in his hair. He’s in bed. “Shit, shit, goddamn it.” It’s starting to scare him, the forgetting. It’s starting to scare him more than it was.

It’s too early to wake up and drink coffee, even for him, so he lies back down and tries hard to fall back asleep.

Steve dreams. He’s in the woods, only he’s not—they’re not quite right. The woods are too tall. The grass is too blue, and the moss is glowing. He hears something behind him, but he doesn’t turn around. Leaves, it’s only leaves. He bends down at a stream, and he doesn’t have a reflection—only a cloud of darkness, spinning and spinning like black sand.

Then he tips forward and into the water and he’s falling falling falling. I remember this, he thinks. “Steve!” He remembers that too. The girl had yelled for him last time, too.

He lands, but he doesn’t wake up this time, only pushes up to his feet and looks around himself. It’s dark and he’s scared. There is water up to his ankles. There’s a girl in the distance. She’s wearing pyjamas. Steve squints. “The hell?”

He turns to see if the blackness goes on forever or if it’s only in front of him, but when he faces what’s behind him, he sees the darkness from his reflection in the dream-river, a little cloud of the stuff that’s nearly as tall as he is.

He looks back at the girl, the girl with the pyjamas and curly hair. He feels like he knows her from somewhere. He thinks he needs to tell her something. Then the water is rising up and up and up, past his ankles, past his knees, past his thighs.

Steve yells, frantic, and the girl runs towards him, calling his name, but the water just rises and rises and rises, so fast that he can’t even think straight. He has a moment of perfect clarity when the water swallows him whole, his fingers clawing uselessly at empty air, breathless, and then he jerks awake in bed.

No screaming, this time. The sun is starting to rise. Steve rolls out of bed, lands with a thump, doesn’t take a shower, and doesn’t go to school.

He spends the whole day in his sweatpants, watching TV, staring at blank paper like he can hallucinate an essay between its lines. No essay materialises and Steve only gets a headache. He sleeps with the sunlight streaming onto him, sprawled on the couch, and if he dreams he doesn’t remember it.

He makes pasta for lunch and reheats it for dinner, debates calling his parents for longer than he has in weeks, even goes to his mom’s stupid unsticky sticky note and squints at call Stephanie if you need me until his mom’s handwriting is printed onto the back of his eyelids. She didn’t leave him Stephanie’s number. He tries not to think that was deliberate.

When he falls asleep for the night, it’s on the living room couch with the TV still playing and the lights left on.

He wakes up when he walks into an invisible wall, just a few steps into the woods.

Steve rubs his eyes, then tries again, taking another tentative step forward. His foot falls cleanly on wet grass and Steve stares at it, utterly confused. He could have sworn there had been something holding him back. Thoroughly spooked out but too tired to panic, Steve heads back into the house. He locks all the doors and then props up chairs under their handles.

Steve sighs, climbs back onto the couch, and presses his hands against his eyes. The TV is playing white noise, static in the air.

“Steve.”

Steve scrambles to a sitting position. “Steve,” says the voice, again, from the TV.

His pulse is racing a million miles per hour. He waits, heart in his throat, terrified, but the TV only flickers once and then it’s the credits of his movie, like nothing happened at all.

“This is a dream,” says Steve. No it’s not, he thinks. “This is a dream,” says Steve, louder. He can’t remember when he stopped being able to distinguish dreams from reality, but it’s not the kind of thing he wanted to discover about himself.

He turns the TV off, way too wary of what he knows is just an empty box, then crawls into his own bed upstairs. When he passed his mom’s favourite mirror on the way up, his eyes looked too dark, almost black.

He wakes at the crack of dawn, having not slept a minute since the TV spoke to him. He makes a cup of coffee. He makes a second cup of coffee. “Get it together, Harrington,” he tells himself sternly. Tries to imitate his father: “Pull your shit together, Steven. This has gone on long enough.”

He eats an apple and it tastes like the Upside Down but he doesn’t allow himself to throw it back up, chokes down every last bite and nearly gags every time he swallows.

Nancy and Jonathan are waiting for him again. They both look relieved when they see him, but Steve is too tired to be irritated with their weird “let’s breathe down Steve’s neck” schtick, only waves half-heartedly and prepares to let them interrogate him for the next ten minutes as he finds his math book and calculator.

His expectations are only somewhat subverted. Nancy tires, but Jonathan just clasps Steve’s shoulder with his hand, surprisingly secure, and there’s such naked concern in his eyes that Steve wants to look away, but he doesn’t. “You’d tell us if something was wrong, right?”

Steve smiles. Slips out from Jonathan’s hold. “Sure,” he says. Nancy looks like she might cry. She also looks like she might kick his shins. Or someone else’s. That’s Nancy—all action, all the time. That’s Steve too, or he thought it was. Lately he thinks his thing isn’t so much fighting as it is running.

Steve goes to class. He falls asleep at lunch at the table he’s sharing with Nancy and Jonathan. When he wakes up, his head is leaning on Nancy’s arm, and Jonathan is pressed up against his shoulder. “You shoulda woke me up,” he slurs.

Nancy shakes her head in tandem with Jonathan. Creepy. “You look like shit,” says Jonathan. “Get more sleep.”

“You can come over to mine,” Nancy says. “You always slept better at mine.”

Steve stares at her. Does she do this on purpose? “Yeah, no,” he says after a movement where it doesn’t seem to dawn on her how fucking crazy she’s being. Jonathan, when Steve sends a panicked glance his way, doesn’t seem to realise it either. The hell? “I’m good,” Steve says, trying to pick up his school bag slowly and not just gun it for the doors, “But thanks. I’ll, uh, catch you guys later. Bye.” He doesn’t run. He just walks quickly.

He drops Dustin off at the Wheeler’s, that night. Nancy’s window is open—she’s going to catch hypothermia. It’s so cold by now that snow isn’t far off. He can hear music— the type Jonathan likes. Steve closes his eyes, rubs his hands over his face even though it hurts because he’s still pretty bruised, and drives home.

He tells himself there won’t be a repeat of lunchtime.

The next day, he blinks his way through his classes, barely remembers anything of the morning and can’t recall who he’s spoken to all day, finds himself drifting off at lunchtime outside with Nancy and Jonathan and wakes up when the bell goes off. They’re leaning against a brick wall, this time, and Steve’s got his head leaned on Jonathan’s shoulder. Nancy is leaned against Steve, holding his hand and tracing the red on his knuckles.

They don’t talk about it, so Steve doesn’t either.

It happens every day for the rest of the week, and it’s the best sleep he has each day.

His English teacher pulls him aside one day, asks for him to stay after class. Steve knows it’s about his latest essay. When everyone else has filed out, Steve sighs. “Look, I know it wasn’t very good but I did my best—”

“Steve,” she says. She holds his essay out. He stares at her, confused, and she sounds worried when she says, “Steve, can you—what is this, exactly?”

Confused, he takes the paper from her and looks down.

There, in his handwriting, all along the margins of the paper, words tumble together and overtop each other, a thick scratch of pencil led, screaming the woods the woods the woods hide hide the woods the woods are calling the woods are calling where am I where am I hide hide hide it’s so dark it’s so dark get out get out I'm stuck I'm stuck the woods are calling they’re so dark where am I where am I

HIDE HELP ME HELP.

Steve opens his mouth, speechless, his heart still stuttering in his chest. “I—”

“Steve, are you alright?”

“I don’t… remember writing this,” Steve manages to say, his throat dry. The teacher looks concerned. “I’m sorry, I’ve just been—really tired, not sleeping well, and—”

“Steve, if something is going on—”

“I’m sorry,” repeats Steve, because he doesn’t know what the hell to say. “Can I—rewrite it?”

The teacher looks at him, carefully, at the scrapes and bruises and what might be desperation in his eyes. She sighs. “Fine, Steven. One week’s extension. And, Steven—get some sleep. Don’t let this happen again, okay? If you need to talk to someone—” His lips quirk. She’s not going to offer herself and if she does she won’t mean it, and his parents are MIA as always but even if they were here he wouldn’t talk to them, and that’s an empty fucking half-sentence. If you need to talk to someone. Right.

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks. Sorry about this.”

*

Friday evening, there’s a party at Jim’s place—a big one. A rager. A couple of guys from basketball say see you tonight like they already know he’s going to be there. They’re all idiots.

Steve’s not going to the party at Jim’s.

Friday afternoon, Steve gets home, pulls on a thicker jacket, and grabs his bag. He downs a cup of coffee. Says, “let’s try this again.” Steps outside into the cold and into the woods.

He makes it maybe a mile, moving fast, wary of every rustling leaf or creaking branch. The woods are dark and the trees are bare, leaves under his feet, cold air making his cheeks sting. He grips his bat tightly, feeling coarse wood under his fingers.

Steve opens his eyes and stares at his ceiling. “Ohhh my god,” he moans, then employs every different cuss word he knows. He closes his eyes.

He opens them in the woods. He’s dreaming. He knows it this time, and moves fucking fast—past the stream, past the tall trees, deeper and deeper into the darkness. The leaves are glowing. They’re leading him somewhere. Something moves behind him. Steve tries to turn around, to see it, and nothing happens. His feet don’t move. They’re stuck to the ground.

“Turn around,” he hisses, and his feet finally move—forward. The thing moves away. Steve snarls in frustration, and then he trips on a jutting root, too thick to be normal, almost like a vine—was he pushed?—he falls forward, arms windmilling, and falls straight into the darkness.

The void and the water are familiar by now. So is the girl’s voice: “Steve!”

It’s Eleven, he knows it is. He hasn’t seen her since that night, over a month ago now, but he knows it is.

Steve takes a deep breath. He can see her once he lands, in the distance, moving towards him with wary steps.

Steve turns around—straight into the writhing, airy cloud of darkness. Steve falls to his knees, choking, gasping, clutching and clawing at this throat—he can’t breathe, he can’t breathe, it’s everywhere, it’s all there is.

Eleven calls out for him again and his one of his hands goes out, to grab onto something, anything, but there’s nothing there.

He wakes up with a yell, jerking into a seated position, then picks up his alarm clock and throws it at the wall in frustration. He leans forward until his hands, covering his face, can touch his knees. He spends the rest of the night sobbing into his palms, and he misses his mom worse than he has since he was thirteen.

Eight AM, Steve’s on his second cup of coffee and someone knocks on the door. Steve lowers his mug. No one has knocked on his door in… Jesus, he doesn’t know. He almost hopes it’s not his parents—they don’t care much about him but they’d care about him getting into fights, he knows that. But then again—his Mom. He hasn’t seen her in so long. Christmas isn’t too far off, maybe they’ve come home early for that.

Wary, he heads over to the door—whoever it is, they’re still knocking. Not his parents, then. He picks up his bat, always close by, and debates for a moment whether to ask questions or swing first. Questions, he decides, and hides the bat behind his legs.

Whoever he expected, it wasn’t Chief Hopper.  Hopper raises his eyebrows. “Hi,” he says shortly, “Mind if I come in?” Then he comes in anyway.

“Uh,” says Steve, hoping the Chief didn’t notice the bat. “Can I… help you?” Then he realises who he’s talking to and says, “Oh shit, what happened? Who’s hurt?”

Hopper squints at him. “No one,” he says. “Actually, according to El, you are.”

Steve stares at him. Hopper stares back. “Well,” says Steve, “I’m… fine…” He holds up his arms like look how fine I am! Unfortunately, this a move which also demonstrates that he’s swinging round a spiked bat. Hopper’s expression doesn’t change. Steve tries not to visibly wince.

“I can see that,” Hopper says dryly. “Hey quick question—when’s the last time you slept?”

Steve scowls, confused. “Last night.”

“For more than a couple hours. Actually slept.”

“Chief,” Steve complains.

Hopper tilts his head, raises his eyebrows and huffs like Jesus, this kid. Steve flushes. He is right here. He’s not one of the kids, he can hold his own. “So can I help you?”

Hopper nods, short and sharp. “Yep. Get your shit, you’re coming with me.”

“Uh,” says Steve, wondering what qualifies as your shit. “Wait, why? Where?”

“You’ll see,” says Hopper, then turns around to look at Steve critically. “Actually, you don’t need to get anything—come on.”

Steve climbs into the car, so uncomfortable it’s insane, like his skin is crawling. “Is something wrong? Is it one of the kids?”

“Nope,” says Hopper. “I just… need your help with something.”

“Huh,” says Steve. What the fuck.

*

They’re driving in circles. “You’re driving in circles,” says Steve, side-eyeing Hopper. “If you’re going to kill me, could you not do it in my house, or what?”

“I know we’re driving in circles,” Hopper bites back, “Should I just, oh I don’t know, lead the government to my front door?”

“Right, okay,” says Steve, “Wait are we going to your cabin?”

Hopper sighs, very long-sufferingly. He doesn’t say anything. Steve thinks he’s kind of an asshole. He reminds Steve a little bit of his dad, in all the worst ways.

They make it to the cabin, eventually. It’s not quite snowing, but it’s going to. Steve shudders in the cold and Hopper glances at him, not quite concerned but not quite blasé either. Steve shoves his hands in his pockets and stamps his feet a few times as he waits for Hopper to knock the door—rat tat rat tat tat tat—and then it swings open and Steve glances at Hopper but the older man doesn’t look back at him, just steps inside.

Steve glares at him but follows. It’s not so cold inside, though the windows are boarded up, which is weird because Steve had thought Eleven being under house arrest was more of, like, a figure of speech but he guesses maybe not. “Come on,” Hopper calls, and Steve has no choice but to follow.

There’s a head of curls sitting on the couch, and Steve knows what she looks like even before she turns around, her big brown eyes looking at him like she can see right through him, right past every shitty lie and every half-assed excuse.

“Steve,” she says, too solemn.

“Uh,” says Steve, because he has no idea what the hell is happening but his skin is itching, crawling, burning.

Hopper’s hand comes down hard on Steve’s shoulder and he jumps. Hopper grimaces and draws his hand back. He nods his head towards the couch, steers Steve towards it. He sits down on the armchair, pulling off his coat, and Steve knows he should be a bit more freaked out but he’s so tired and his head feels weird, kind of fuzzy.

He shouldn’t be here. He can feel it down to his bones.

“El here,” says Hopper, “says she saw you in a dream.”

Steve squints at him.

Eleven nods. “You saw me,” she says.

Steve isn’t sure what they want from him here. “Is… is that a thing she does? Visit dreams?”

Hopper shrugs.

Eleven is still looking at him. “It got you,” she says. “The darkness.”

Steve draws back, a bit, and looks to Hopper for guidance, but the older man is staring back evenly. This is why he dragged Steve over to the cabin?

“Well,” says Steve. “That’s—it was just a dream, El.” He pauses. “Jane?”

She shrugs. Steve makes a choice. “El. It wasn’t real.”

El shakes her head. “It was. The darkness got you; I saw it.”

Steve laughs, running a hand through his hair. He shifts uncomfortably and wishes Hopper wasn’t here and watching Steve so closely. “Yeah, that’s… that happens sometimes, in nightmares. I’m fine in real life, see?” He smiles at her, but she just shakes her head slowly.

“No. You are not.”

Steve closes his mouth. Hopper says, “Come into the kitchen with me for a sec, Steve.” Steve gets up, feeling like he’s under investigation and upset about it without knowing why.

“Listen,” says Hopper, after a moment, surveying Steve with a too-even gaze. “I know this is strange. It is for me too. But El seemed sure, really sure, that you were in trouble. She says she’s seen your dreams before, but that they’re not really dreams.” Steve feels frozen, glued to the floor, too small for his skin and this room and Hopper’s shadow.

“They’re just dreams, man,” he protests weakly. His defence sounds wooden even to himself.

Hopper leans his palms on the counter. “Can you promise me there’s nothing wrong?”

Steve can’t stop his lips from quirking up into a bitter smile. “It’s Hawkins, something is always wrong.” The words don’t sound like they’re his.

Hopper is still just watching him. “You’re not really convincing me, kid.”

Steve opens his mouth. Almost says yes, Chief, I promise everything is fine.

Almost says no Chief, I can’t remember where I was last night and I’m pretty sure I don’t intend on half the things I do anymore.

He closes his mouth. Neither answer feels right, and neither makes sense. “I don’t know,” he says instead, fighting the instinct consuming his body, the instinct to lash out and run away and lie, make false promises and run run run. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, except Steve isn’t sure that’s what he wants to do at all and it scares him that he almost does it anyway.

“But I’m—I’m dealing with it, alright?” He pauses. “Nightmares are really the least of this town’s problems, Chief.”

“Hey.” Hopper steps closer, and Steve doesn’t mean to step back but he does. “If something is wrong—”

“It’s not,” says Steve quickly, the words almost pulled out of him.

Hopper leans back again. “Okay.” He sighs. He doesn’t believe Steve is telling the truth. Of course he doesn’t. Steve has shadows under his eyes and he’s jumpier than Joyce Byers two years ago, he’s lost weight and his face is still a rainbow from the two fights he’s been in in the last month; his hands are still painted in hues of bruises, red blue purple yellow green. Red red red.

“You can come to me, if something is going on,” Hopper continues. “Okay? I’ve been dealing with this Upside Down shit for the last two years same as you. If something is going on, you need to tell me, and we’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah, sure,” says Steve. He wonders how this is happening. Steve from two years ago—that guy feels light years away.

Before he leaves, El stands up and walks over to him. “Steve,” she says. “The woods aren’t what’s calling you. Something is calling you from inside them.”

Hopper is getting his jacket and he doesn’t hear it, but Steve’s blood goes cold.

“Are you—were you—” He pauses. “That night, with the TV…”

“Yes,” she says. “I stopped you from going too deep. You were not yourself.”

Steve runs a hand through his hair. “Thank you,” he says softly. “It’s, um, it’s sleep-walking. It’s normal.”

El sighs. She leans forward and before Steve realises what she’s doing, she’s winding her arms around his waist. She’s hugging him. Steve freezes, then ring his hands uncertainly down to rest lightly over her back. “Steve,” she says into his chest, blunt but still gentle. “Something is wrong inside you.”

Steve exhales shakily and smooths her pyjama shirt, puts one hand on her head of curls, soft against his bruised fingers. He wishes he could give her an answer that he understood, one they could both believe, but there are none.

“It’ll get better,” he says. It’s the best answer he can give, and he hopes it’s an honest one. El squeezes tighter, then draws back. She doesn’t seem like a kid, when she’s like this, all-knowing and with her still-stunted vocabulary. He’s reminded of her age by the smoothness of her face, the softness of her hair, and her big brown eyes.

She’s just a kid, just like Dustin and Mike and Max and Lucas and Will. They’re too young. He’s too young.

Hopper says he’ll drive him home, but he doesn’t. Instead, he pulls up to the Byers house.

He opens his door, hops outside, and then levels Steve with an unimpressed stare. “Are you just gonna sit there, or what?”

Steve flushes. He was hoping maybe Hopper had forgotten something, or he was just popping in to say to Joyce. Of course Steve’s luck isn’t that good. He doesn’t respond, just opens the car door and trudges up the front steps.

Hopper, who maybe isn’t as much of an asshole as Steve had thought, touches his shoulder. “Hey. It’s fine.”

Steve nods jerkily, bounces on his feet, and grumbles when the Chief swipes one clumsy hand through the back Steve’s hair. Joyce answers the door, smiles when she sees Hopper and falters when she sees Steve.

“Hi,” says Steve, waving a hand awkwardly and wondering how fast he can escape.

“Hi,” Joyce replies, and she steps forward—Steve doesn’t step back but something in him is telling him to get away—and pulls him into a hug he’s woefully unprepared for. He hasn’t been hugged in—oh, ages.

Joyce steps back and Hopper steps inside, Steve a couple seconds behind him, and it’s like he’s back to when the house was full of Christmas lights and painted letters, or when the walls were covered in a paper map, but he doesn’t have time to dwell because Joyce calls him into the kitchen.

Steve isn’t quite sure why Hopper didn’t just drive him home. Joyce is making two cups of coffee, one for her and one for the Chief, and there’s an open recipe book on the table—apple pie.

He can hear Will and Mike and Dustin laughing somewhere, Lucas and Max too, and it strikes him not for the first time that El deserves better than a cabin in the woods, even if it is for her own good.

“Hey, Steve, honey, could you give me a hand peeling the apples?”

Steve starts. “Oh, sure, Mrs Byers.”

Joyce rolls her eyes. “Joyce, please.” Steve smiles uncertainly, wondering where his charm went, and tries not to wonder how long he’d spaced out sitting at the table. Not long. It can’t have been long, he’d have known, right?

He peels the apples, helps mix the dough, rolls it out, stirs a bowl of apples and cinnamon and flour and sugar, even cuts up a lattice because Joyce gives up around halfway through the recipe and Steve ends up doing most of the work. But it’s… nice. Really nice.

The kids run through at some point, greeting Steve with too much noise and too much excitement, hugging him around the waist to avoid his sticky hands, peering around his arms at the pie coming together. Max calls him a housewife and Steve swats his dough-coated fingers at her to make her laugh.

Joyce and Hopper chat, their voices warm and comfortable, and both of them smoke a cigarette but neither lets Steve have one. It’s not even midday yet, and the sunshine is still golden and bright, shining on Steve as he dices apples.

“Huh,” he says quietly to himself, watching as the light illuminates the cuts and bruises on his fingers as he interlaces the lattice of the pie. A golden shimmer falls over his hands, familiar by now, yet new all at once. Life feels a bit different than it did this morning. Hopper and Joyce pause in their conversation, look over to him.

“What was that, honey?” Joyce.

Steve breathes out, sends her a smile. “Nothing, Mrs Byers.”

*

He goes back into the woods. Without his bat. It’s barely three in the afternoon, but then somewhere in between stepping over a root and stepping into a fern, the sky grows dark blue, indigo, lilac.

Steve blinks, rubs his eyes, hisses with pain when his knuckles catch a still-tender bruise on his cheekbone. He can’t see his house from where he’s standing, surrounded by trees and shrubbery, snow-laden and dark.

For a moment, he debates sitting down on a tree trunk and stopping, just sitting and waiting for whatever it is that he’s trying so hard to find. He can’t remember the last hour or so of walking. He can’t remember where he’s been. Hs feet are slow and sore.

Steve chews on the inside of his cheek. He glances at the purple sky and keeps going.

He knows it’s stupid. He’s probably lost, and if he isn’t already then he will be soon. He can’t see his home and he’s never gone this deep into the woods before and he doesn’t know the way, but he can’t turn around now and there’s something pulling his feet forward, something that kept him from taking his bat with him, something that keeps him from telling Nancy and Jonathan why he’s so tired every day and something that told Dustin to stay away from the forest without knowing why.

Somewhere along the way, birds stop singing. There’s a breeze blowing against the back of Steve’s neck, and he thinks he can almost hear something in the distance, some kind of a rustling. He shoves his hands into his pockets and doesn’t stop walking, but he’s so tired. He yawns, lifting his hands and rubbing his eyes again to try and grow more alert.

Steve opens his eyes and stares at his ceiling.

He rolls over and goes back to sleep.

(He dreams but it’s weird, it’s fuzzy and not in focus. He can’t see what’s behind him. There’s black smoke around his arms, billowing around his legs. He blinks and the light is gone and it’s dark, it’s so dark.

“What do you want from me?” Nothing answers him.

The smoke shifts and spins, covering his hands, covering his feet. He’s looking for something, he thinks. He needs to go home. He's lost and he can't find his way. The darkness is everywhere and all around him. He doesn’t remember his name. He doesn’t remember his face. He’s so alone and he needs to find the way back, needs to go back—)

*

It’s Sunday now and Dustin is asking him to drive him to the Byers. “Again?” says Steve, and then, “Fine.”

Dustin tugs him into the house, holding his jacket sleeve, and Steve grumbles but he’s not going to throw the kid off of him, so he comes inside, stamping the light snow off his feet and watching Dustin race down the hallway with a fond eye roll, tussling the kid’s hair before he goes.

Max comes around the corner as he does, and she grins when she sees him. “Hey, red,” he greets, and she punches his shoulder as if she’s his size and not just barely scraping five foot, then slips closer to give him a quick hug, races off before he can properly hug her back.

Jonathan waves at him from the kitchen table. “Hey,” he greets, and Steve waves back. It’s always a bit awkward between them, more than it had been when Steve had been dating Nancy, but it’s not so bad right now. Nancy appears from inside the kitchen and Steve works hard to keep his face smooth and inexpressive.

Nancy smiles when she sees him, walks over to wrap her arms around him and give him a quick hug. Steve goes stiff under her hands and detaches himself as quickly as he can without shoving her away. “Come sit?”

“I should go,” says Steve. Nancy frowns at him, scrunches up her nose.

“You can stay, you know,” says Jonathan, and that just feels like he’s giving Steve permission. “Stay. Just for a minute.”

Steve thinks about leaving. It would be easy and normal and fine. “Okay,” he says instead, and sits down beside Jonathan at the table.

*

That night, Steve wakes up in the woods.

He comes to shivering from the cold, shuddering from fear, and when he exhales shakily, white clouds form in front of him. It’s still pretty dark outside, but the sky is going blue-purple, the stars still blinking but not quite as bright as they are at midnight. He blinks up at the clouds and he wonders, quietly, what it all means. He isn’t quite sure when his dreams end anymore, or whether they are dreams at all, and he wonders what it’s all leading to.

His grandmother, his mother’s mother, had Alzheimer’s. Steve doesn’t really remember her, but he does remember hearing his mother saying to his dad that of all the fates, to forget oneself is the very worst. This feels a bit like that. Something is scooping inside of him and scraping out his soul, bit by bit, and by the time all this is over—if it ever will be—Steve isn’t sure there will be much of him left at all.

By the time Steve finds his way back home, it’s dawn, and the clouds above him are smears of pink and yellow, peach and orange and white.

He walks into his house, showers, makes himself a cup of coffee. He sits at the kitchen table and wraps his fingers around his mug, still shivering, and tries to remember what it feels like to be warm, what it feels like to be safe.

His brain tells him that warm and safe is the Byers house, like it was on Saturday, with the kids laughing and Hopper and Joyce holding hands when they thought nobody was looking.

(Experience, though, tells him that the Byers house is the reason he can’t remember warmth and safety.)

He wonders why El didn’t stop him, this time. Can’t she see him anymore? Can’t she see him?

He drifts through school, like he always does. When Tommy shoves him in basketball practice, Steve shoves back. It doesn’t escalate, and Tommy leaves him alone, but Steve can feel a burning right under his skin, one he’d only need to scratch to ignite, a desperate thirst for some kind of violence, any kind of fight. His body is a matchbox. He just needs to remember what it’s like, to be normal, to be alive.

He hides in his car for lunch and rewrites his English essay, checking his watch every few minutes to make sure time doesn’t slide past him. Nancy and Jonathan might be looking for him, but he doesn’t want to think about it for too long because then he feels guilty, when really of the three of them doesn’t he have the least reasons to feel guilt?

He turns the keys to the ignition before realising that he’s doing it, and then catches his actions and stares at his guilty fingers. Slowly, deliberately, he turns the car on. If he tells himself it’s a choice, will that make it true? He exits the parking lot and heads home, driving just under the speeding limit, feeling shaky and adrenaline-filled, all too aware that he isn’t entirely present.

It feels like—something else is driving his actions. Pulling his strings, like the puppets in the Pinocchio book that Steve’s mom keeps in her room to make it look lived in.

Steve pulls into his driveway. He hops out of the car, leaves the keys, and heads straight inside to grab an extra sweater and jacket. He’s so cold. Then he’s leaving the house, picking his way over ferns and shrubs, wondering faintly when he grew so familiar with the woods in his backyard.

He gets lost, really lost. It was bound to happen eventually. Whatever he’s looking for... he just has to find it. He has to find it, and then all of this will be over. He can go back to his ordinary life, all the bullshit bullshit bullshit, he just has to find whatever it is he’s looking for first.

The leaves are awash with gold, the sun sinking closer towards the ground— Steve isn’t sure how long he’s been in the woods, wandering, aimless. He feels distant from himself, not entirely in control of his actions but also not entirely removed from them. Like a shadow. Steve used to watch Peter Pan for hours, when he was little, watching the kid’s shadow flicker around Wendy’s room.

He trips over a root and stumbles forward, a sudden wave of helplessness crashing over him and destroying the sort of peace he’d fallen into. What is he doing? How is he every going to find his way back? He’s such an idiot.

He doesn’t have any choice but to keep walking. The minutes melt into each other. The tree trunks seem to grow before his eyes, every wrinkle of bark magnified and blending into the next. Steve retreats into his head, cocooned in the apathetic ease of numbness that he’s been trying for weeks to avoid. At some point, the sunset makes way for the rise of the moon.

He can hear his breath in his lungs, exhaling into the air. He can hear the leaves rustling, the creaking of the bark on scabbed-over trees, and underneath it all something dark and cold and hungry calls out. Where is he? What’s he doing? Where is he going? Where is he being led? It’s close, and it’s far away. Steve reaches up and rubs his eyes.

When he opens them, he can hear the rush of a river, somewhere close by. It’s windy, and Steve’s hair flies into his eyes. Something crunches behind him, a twig snapping underfoot. Steve wonders if he’s dreaming again. Turn around, he tells himself firmly, and for once, his feet obey. The leaves rustle, and the branches part, and— “Steve?” Nancy’s face is so pale that it looks skeletal, and beside her, Jonathan’s eyes are wide.

“Oh,” Steve tries to say, but the words don’t make it to his lips. The three of them stare at each other, and there’s something dawning on Nancy and Jonathan’s faces, visible only by moonlight filtered through the trees. Whatever they’re realizing makes Nancy horrified and Jonathan achingly sad, and Steve wants to ask what’s wrong, but he’s forgotten how to speak at all, and the concept of words is foreign to him.

Nancy jerks forward, and Steve jerks back. She raises her hands, instead, like he’s an animal that needs coaxing. Her gaze is fixed on his eyes and he wonders why. “Steve,” she says again, “Shit. What—what are you doing?”

Steve blinks at her. He doesn’t know what to say, and he doesn’t think he can anyways. His gaze slips over to Jonathan, whose head is tilted a bit to one side, like he’s thinking of the best angle to take a photo from, to capture this moment on film. 

“Hey, Steve,” Jonathan says quietly, not exactly timid but certainly gentler than Nancy, who’s nearly vibrating. Slowly, Jonathan takes a step closer. Steve watches him do it. Nancy lifts a curled hand to cover her mouth and press on her lips, like she’s keeping her words back by force alone. Jonathan takes another step, and another, until he’s close enough that Steve could hit him if he wanted—but he doesn’t, he doesn’t, does he?

Cautious, Jonathan reaches out. His hand slips into Steve’s own, and Jonathan smiles. It’s a crooked little thing, more a quirk of the lips than anything, but it’s sincere enough that Steve feels a bit dazed. He blinks, and all of a sudden, his mouth unsticks, his mind kicks back into gear, and he remembers the earth under his feet. “Oh,” he says. “Nancy. Jonathan. I don’t—what? What are you doing here?”

Jonathan’s smile grows at the edges. “Looking for you, as it turns out,” he says, lightly enough that it almost sounds like teasing. He's looking at Steve's eyes, too. 

“Oh my god, Steve,” says Nancy. She laughs a bit, but it’s the shaky, wet kind of laugh that she sometimes used to get after nightmares. She darts forward and winds her amrs around Steve’s chest, so quickly that he doesn’t realize she’s moving until she’s already there.

“Uh,” says Steve, floundering, with Nancy pressed up against his chest and squeezing his ribs tight enough to hurt, Jonathan’s hand still loosely held in his. “Is something wrong?”

Jonathan’s steady gaze meets his own, and Nancy squeezes tighter. There’s something heavy and weighted in Jonathan’s eyes, like he’s looking into Steve’s brain, and Steve turns away because he doesn’t want Jonathan to see all the emptiness in his chest where the thing in the darkness has been scraping him raw.

Nancy pulls away, just as brisk as she always is, and surveys him critically, drinking him all in. Steve fidgets uncertainly. “What are you doing here?” He asks again, though he doesn’t know where here even is.

“El had a dream,” says Nancy. “She’s asking for everyone to meet at the cabin. Come with us? Please?”

Steve hesitates. He looks over his shoulder, at the darkness and the trees and the river he can still hear. It’s calling him, tugging at him, like he’s being pulled along on a string that’s tied to his sternum. He needs to find it. He needs to go. 

“—Steve?” That’s Jonathan’s voice. “Hey, Steve?” Steve blinks, and turns his head back towards them. Nancy’s lips are thinned again and her hands are fisted in front of her in her jacket sleeves. “Come on,” says Jonathan, not delicate but nowhere near loud. “Come with us.”

“I—” says Steve. “I need—”

“Please?” Jonathan pulls on their hands, which Steve hadn’t realised were still connected. Steve thinks about El, and her flannel sleeves, and her curly hair. Nancy, beside Jonathan, looks like she wants to claw herself out of her skin, but when Steve finally takes a tiny step towards them, she inhales in what might be relief. Jonathan gives Steve a smile, and Steve takes another step.

They make their way through the woods to the car, and Jonathan slips into the driver’s seat while Nancy shoulders herself into the back next to Steve, where he tries not to notice her watching him the whole way home. Jonathan is doing it too, but he’s more casual about it. Steve thinks about the woods, and hopes that after they’ve made sure El’s okay, Jonathan will drive him back here. He needs… he doesn’t know what he needs but he was close to finding out, he’s sure of it.

There’s soft music playing on the radio. Nancy’s fingers are tangled in Steve’s sleeves. Steve’s head rests on the window, and whenever he looks towards the front of the car, he catches Jonathan’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Steve looks away and watches the stars streak past.

Nancy’s grip on his arm doesn’t loosen after they tumble out of the car upon arriving at the cabin, as though she’s worried he’ll dart away into the woods. Jonathan locks the car, looks around at the forest, and then presses his shoulder up against Steve’s other side.

El opens the door before they’ve knocked, and Steve can hear Hopper’s indignant exclamations, we’ve talked about this, why do you always do this, but his attention is drawn to El, who stares up at him in challenge. His skin prickles.

“Steve,” El says grimly.

“Hey,” says Steve. El reaches out and grabs his sleeves, dragging him into the threshold of the cabin, and unapologetically making Nancy splutter as she does so. 

El keeps tugging at Steve until Nancy and Jonathan let him go, pulling him by the hand and then down to the floor so they sit across from each other. Distantly, Steve can hear Hopper bustle over to Nancy and Jonathan, clearly confused, and absently he notices the hushed conversation they have, with a lot of gesturing from Nancy that makes Hopper look over sharply and run a hand over his scraggly beard.

“What’s going on, El?”

El tugs a blanket onto her lap. “The darkness wasn’t calling you from outside,” she says. “It's in you. I figured it out.”  

Steve blinks. “What? Is this about my dreams again?”

El levels him with an unimpressed look. “Not dreams,” she says firmly. “Like—Will.”

“Woah,” says Steve, genuinely thrown. “What? No. Will was possessed, El. I’ve just got bad dreams. They’re just dreams.”

“No,” El snaps. “No, Steve,” and she reaches out and taps his chest. “There’s something inside you and it doesn’t belong.” She pauses. “I told you. The darkness got you, and it’s trying to go back. Back to the Upside Down.”

Steve leans back and looks at her. He thinks about the nightmares, and the writing on his essay, and the hours and hours he can’t remember. He thinks about waking up walking in the woods, bare-footed and shivering. “It’s not,” he says meekly. “It’s different. It’s not like that.”

El reaches out and grabs his hand. “Let us help you,” she says fiercely. “Steve. Let us help.”

Steve thinks about driving himself to a doctor, and his mother’s note lying on the kitchen floor, and the hunger in his veins when he smashed his fists against Billy Hargrove’s face. The way that Dustin lights up when Steve pulls into his driveway, happier to see Steve than anyone ever has been, and Max and Lucas hugging him from behind with their faces pressed into his back. He thinks about Nancy and Jonathan letting him rest his head on their shoulders at lunch in school or on the couch at the Byers’, and Jonathan’s hand in his as Nancy links their arms.

“I don’t know how,” Steve whispers, like it’s a confession.

For the first time, Steve sees El smile. “That’s okay,” she answers, quiet strength and determination embodied by a twelve-year-old girl whose sleeves cover her knuckles. “I do.”

*

Hopper claps a hand onto Steve’s shoulder. It’s too heavy, and Steve shudders. “Thought you said you had it handled,” Hopper says wryly.

Steve jerks his shoulder and throws Hopper’s hand off, skin crawling. “Yeah, well,” he snaps. The room is so hot. All the heaters are on and it’s been almost an hour of sweating through all three layers he’s got on. Nancy is eying him warily, and Steve vaguely remembers hearing about a poker against Will’s skin, and tries to hide his reactionary twitching.

“Hey,” Hopper says gruffly. He bats at Steve’s chin until Steve meets his eyes. “You’re gonna be fine, okay?”

Steve resists the urge to bare his teeth. “Well you’re not listening,” he bites out. “I told you it’s not like Will. I don’t feel hot. I feel cold.”

“We know,” Jonathan replies calmly from the couch. He’s playing cards with El. Steve tries to focus on that instead of the way Hopper rolls his eyes.

“We just need to coax it out,” says Nancy, all analytical like always. She likes talking herself through a problem. Unfortunately, Steve doesn’t feel like being a problem.

“It is right here,” he complains. “Can’t we just try it my way?”

“I’m not going to let you wander into the woods until you fall into the upside down,” Hopper growls. “We’ve been over this. Your parents would wring my neck.”

“They would have to notice first, chief,” Steve snaps. He’s uncomfortable and he’s overheated and he feels like he’s a bug under a microscope. He’s been dealing with this—thing for weeks now. Shouldn’t that mean they ask him how he feels, not assume it’s just the same as Will? Hopper falters uncomfortably and Nancy frowns, but Steve doesn’t want to hear whatever they have to say to that. “Chief, I’m telling you, this isn’t going to work. Just let me out.”

El puts down a card. “I think we should listen to Steve,” she announces. “Go fish.”

Hopper glares at her. “El,” he says sharply. “Don’t encourage him—”

“No way,” adds Nancy, “This worked with Will, it’ll work again now—”

“Aw, El,” complains Jonathan quietly, picking up a card from the pile, “And I think they’re right—”

Steve puts his hands over his ears and closes his eyes. He tries to visualize the woods, the dark, the velvety path that calls and calls to him. By the time he opens his eyes again, the others have stopped talking and they’re all watching him.

“I think,” says El, “we let Steve go.” Hopper whirls to face her and El steamrolls over him. “I’ll come with him, and he’ll show us where he thinks he has to go, and then Jonathan and Hop will hold him down and Nancy will scare the darkness out and I'll close the gate once it's gone.”

Steve points at her, triumphant. Jonathan raises his eyebrows. “Fuck no,” barks Hopper. “Jesus Christ. No. We decided we’d do what we know works, and that’s final.”

Steve feels Nancy’s eyes on him, and when he looks over at her she’s tilted her head and is quietly taking him in. “Look,” she says after a moment. “We don’t know that what worked with Will will work with Steve. The… darkness… it wants to go back to the upside down, right? To reform? I'm still mad that you didn't tell us about this, but I trust you, Steve." To the others, "If he says he can take us there, to the gateway, then maybe we should listen.”

There’s a pause, in which Steve is reminded, forcefully, of the first thing he’d ever loved about Nancy, way back when he first met her. She says what she wants to say, and she doesn’t let anyone stop her. He used to think that was brave. He still thinks she’s brave, but it’s a different kind of bravery than he’d first assumed. It's the kind of bravery that means she doesn't just say what she wants, she does what she wants too, and fuck everyone else who disagrees or doesn't think she can. 

“Oh, yeah?” Hopper is scowling at them all. “And what about when the—darkness—leads him right off a cliff? What then, huh? You know who’s going to have to explain that? Me. No, it’s out of the question.”

“C’mon, Chief,” Jonathan says quietly. His voice wavers a little, but it does that sometimes. Steve doesn’t think it’s from indecision. It’s the same kind of bravery Nancy’s got, just distilled by trauma, probably, and a lifetime of worrying about his family. Jonathan is good at that, and Steve's seen how Will looks at him, like he's hung all the stars and the moon, even though Steve knows well how badly Jonathan used to get pushed around at school, and likely at home too before Lonnie left. “Listen, we’ll be right there. You can bring your gun. We’ll have El. We should at least try.”

Hopper’s arms are crossed over his chest. His eyebrows are lowered angrily. “No,” he says sharply.

Steve takes a breath. “Chief, you can keep me in this room as long as you want, and it won’t make a difference. Whatever’s in my head, clawing to get out—I know where it wants to go. It’s been giving me directions in my dreams every night, and all over my homework, and every time I get in the car. Let me go.”

Hopper sets his jaw and says nothing. Steve squares his shoulders. Nancy, in the corner of the room, inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales.

“If you die, Harrington,” Hopper threatens, and Steve shrugs.

“I won’t,” he says, trying to summon up whoever he used to be, that took a swing at a Demogorgon with a bat that somebody else pressed into his hands. Just to himself, Steve thinks: I will die as myself before I ever die as a shadow. I am not a puppet. My choices are my own. He hopes he convinces the others better than he convinces himself.

*

El’s holding his hand, and they’re stumbling through the forest like Steve has gotten so used to. “Can you feel it too?” He asks her, dazed, and she looks up at him solemnly.

“Yes,” she says. “I can feel it.”

“Oh,” Steve says like a sigh. “Is it—”

“It’s close,” El agrees. “The gate is somewhere close. It’s small—too small to enter.”

Steve doesn’t answer, too consumed by the tugging that’s guiding his feet over rocks and roots, pulling him closer and closer to a door in reality.

Eventually, El makes them stop. Steve stumbles over his feet, and Jonathan reaches out to steady him. Steve blinks, surprised to see Jonathan, surprised to see El. He isn’t sure why they’ve stopped. What are they doing here? It’s so close. He’s so close. He needs to go home. He needs to go back. He’s almost there, he just needs to find it, he just need to know.

They’re in a small clearing, and Steve shakes his head to orient himself, El watching as he looks around, because it’s so close, it’s unbearable, it’s right here and he just has to find it. He doesn’t understand the words El murmurs to the others, and lets their conversation slip away as he turns around, moonlight still shining through the evergreens as the night sky slowly, slowly begins to lighten.

He reaches out, and the others let him—Steve’s hands find bark and he looks up at the tree in front of him. It’s big and craggy and dead, with blackened branches writhing up towards the sky and gnarled roots spreading out all around them.

A distant sound reminds Steve of Hopper adjusting his rifle, but that doesn’t matter, none of it matters—“Here,” breathes Steve, and reaches—then hands grip his arms and hold him back.

“No,” Steve gasps, writhes, twists, because he’s so close, he needs to go home, don’t they understand?

“Hey, hey,” Jonathan murmers by his ear. His arms encircle Steve’s body, keeping him against Jonathan’s chest. “No, Steve, Steve. It’s okay. I got you.”

“Let me go,” Steve snarls, more piously than he's ever said anything before. Distantly, he hears that his voice is not his own.

Someone says, Nancy, now! and someone else says, Steve, Stevie, it’s okay, calm down, shhh, please. A child says, get out of him and go away! Steve twists and twists against the arms that confine him, and then heat flares against his face—he yells hoarsely at the sensation, white-hot terror racing through his veins.

“Let me go!” Begging. Movement, around him, and Steve leans forward with all his weight, aching. If he just stepped forward... it’s so close. He’s wanted this for so long. He’s been trapped, been lost for so long. The person restraining him presses their face against the back of his neck, and someone else holds his fisted hands in theirs, tearing his bleeding nails from his palms. Steve thinks maybe he knew them. Is he Steve? Was he Steve? He needs to go.

Fire near his arms, near his face, and Steve screams. Something screams with him. The fear in his veins turns to rage, and it races through him, up and out, and Steve opens his mouth to shout and something big and dark shoots up from his throat, out his eyes, it’s everywhere and everywhere and everywhere. Steve is going to die.

The darkness whirls around him and Steve is going to die, and then El shoots her hands out and snarls like a wild thing, one palm pointed towards the tree which creaks and groans as it is pried open from its centre to reveal vines and darkness and the murk of tunnels Steve still remembers.

The shadow in the air draws itself up as if to strike, to which El bares her teeth and screams, and then the shadow shoots forward and away, into the gap of the tree, out to the Upside Down. El claps her hands together and the gate in the tree closes as she shouts, binding itself back together. 

Steve slumps against the arms that hold him, into the chest that keeps him standing up as his knees buckle under him. “Woah,” Jonathan says, and Steve thinks oh, that's who. Oh, that's right. Before he can make himself jerk away, the hands on his wrists move up to his arms and then to his neck, interlacing as Nancy pulls them both forward.

The forest is silent but for the sounds of Hopper’s gentle words to El, the rustling of the grass, and the sound of Nancy and Jonathan’s hearts from where they press against Steve. He stares at the now-closed gate, wondering dizzily how one dead tree cost him weeks of restless sleep, and wondering almost despite himself where it leads. Then Nancy’s fingers twitch and Jonathan’s arms tighten and Steve’s breath catches in his throat all over again.

Above them, the purple sky begin to pinken, yellow clouds emerging out of the darkness as the sun slowly wakes and rises as though the horrors of the night were never there at all. Steve closes his eyes and lets his head fall forward to bury his face in Nancy’s hair, one of her hands cupping his neck and one touching Jonathan’s cheek, with Jonathan’s chin on his shoulder and arms still wound immovably over Steve’s stomach. For the first time in weeks Steve feels safe and loved and warm, even shaking on his feet and trembling from what may be fear or loss or exorcism.

“We’re okay,” Nancy is saying. “We’re okay. We’re okay.”

Steve laughs, and the sound scratches his throat and fills the clearing.

Jonathan chuckles wetly and moves to press his forehead against Steve’s neck. “Yeah,” he agrees. “We’re okay.”

*

When the morning arrives, it brings the kids with it. They tumble into the cabin in a tangle of arms and legs, shouting over each other, calling Steve, Steve, we heard you vomited a monster, are you okay, what happened, why didn't you come get us, are you okay?

El bounces over to pull Mike and Will into the kitchen so they can help her distribute over-decorated eggos, and Max and Lucas drag each other as close to Steve as they can get, sitting at his knees and prodding at his bandaged hands while Dustin makes horrified sounds and bats at them angrily. Joyce, who drove the kids here, clucks with worry and brushes her hands through Steve’s hair, lingering for longer than she has to and interrogating Hopper at the same time, who comes by every few minutes to put a hand on Steve’s shoulder.

Steve, sitting on the couch, watches it all through a haze of exhaustion and early-morning disorientation, but with his mind belonging, blissfully, solely to himself. His legs are under a blanket, his arms shoved through one of El’s ridiculous flannels. Beside him sit Nancy and Jonathan, with Nancy’s knees pulled up to her chest and her head resting on his shoulder, Jonathan with his legs thrown over Steve’s and his fingers tracing over Steve’s knuckles.

Dustin reaches out with a hand when Max and Lucas distract themselves by bickering, eyes a little shiny, and Steve uses his free hand to hold onto the kid’s and squeeze for a second. “Hey, dipshit, it's all good now,” he says. It’s not so hard to sound calm, bracketed on both sides, warmed by the sun, his thoughts entirely his own. “I’m okay.”

Dustin looks to Nancy and to Jonathan, back and forth. “Is he lying?”

Steve swats at Dustin’s head for the doubt, but he’s a bit curious as to what they’ll say. Nancy nestles her cheek against Steve’s shoulder and pats at his knee. “He’s good, Dustin,” she says warmly.

Jonathan smiles first at Steve, then at Dustin, all warm eyes and dimples. “We’ll keep him safe,” Jonathan promises, sincere as he always is. Nancy nods sleepily in agreement, her smile pressed against Steve’s arm.

Through the un-boarded windows, the sun enters the cabin and makes dust particles flicker and dance. Steve watches the light illuminate the room and all that it holds; Jonathan’s eyes, Nancy’s cheeks, his own bandaged palms, and the quilt that covers them all.

"We'll keep him safe," Nancy echoes, fingers on Jonathan's ankle. Steve looks at them and thinks they already have.