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Steve Harrington was going to die.
Everybody did, sure, but apparently the universe had decided to punch his ticket early. The sound of a clock had been ticking in his skull for days, a low, hollow tock that wouldn’t quit. It wasn’t exactly comforting.
He was scared as hell. He’d never say that out loud; hell, Steve didn’t really say what he felt. That was kind of the problem with him.
He huffed out a breath and stared through the windshield. The van rumbled along the shitty back road, trees blurring past. He silently thanked Dustin again for insisting Eddie drive. Steve wasn’t sure he trusted himself behind the wheel, and none of the kids were exactly the pinnacle of driving skills.
Eddie’s fingers were white-knuckled around the steering wheel, rings biting into skin. His jaw was clenched so hard a muscle kept twitching. Steve couldn’t blame him. If the guy riding shotgun was marked for death by a freaky tentacle-limbed wizard, he’d be a little tense too.
He had to admit, though, it was weird seeing Eddie drive like he actually cared about traffic laws and not scaring pedestrians. Steve had watched him fishtail out of the school parking lot enough times to know that “safe driving” wasn’t usually Eddie Munson’s thing. Kind of flattering, honestly. If Steve was going to die today, at least he probably wouldn’t do it in a car crash.
Music crackled from the van’s stereo, something loud and guitar-heavy, but the song blurred together. Steve only caught pieces — some drums, a rasp of vocals that was from some metal band he didn’t know — before they slipped away again. He could hear Max and Lucas bickering quietly in the back, something about whose turn it was to pick the next tape. Dustin’s foot tapped a restless rhythm against the floor.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Almost like —
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Steve frowned. That wasn’t Dustin’s shoe.
The clock again.
Except… no. This was louder. Sharper. Wrong.
His fingers dug into the fabric of his jeans as the ticking pushed at his ears like pressure underwater. He turned toward Eddie to say something — joke, deflect, anything — only to find the driver’s seat empty.
His stomach dropped.
Eddie was gone.
Steve jerked his head around. No Eddie. No Dustin. No Max, no Lucas. No crowded van, no kids, nothing.
He was alone.
“I… what—”
The ticking swelled, unbearable. Steve scrambled for the door handle and flung the passenger door open. Instead of asphalt and trees and overcast sky, he stepped down into gray.
Just gray.
The world around him had been washed with a single color — flat, lifeless, like a TV turned to static. Hanging in the sky ahead, massive and wrong, were spinning clock hands, suspended in midair. It looked like something from a book. Like one of those books Nancy had tried to get him to read.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
He couldn’t tell if the sound was in his head or in the air or both. His breath caught; every inhale felt too shallow, too thin. He took a stumbling step backward.
A wet, disgusting squelch sounded behind him.
Steve turned, heart lurching into his throat.
The Starcourt flesh monster loomed in front of him; well, what was left of it. There was no towering body, no teeth, no limbs. Just a heaving mass of raw, pulsing tissue spread across the ground like a huge, breathing wound. It writhed, veins throbbing, and as Steve watched, the van he’d just climbed out of began to sink into it.
The metal buckled as the fleshy mass swallowed it whole.
“What the fuck,” Steve whispered, voice shattered under his own fear. “What the fuck?”
Something seized around his ankle.
He looked down.
A hand — bloody, pale, fingers caked in gore — had pushed itself up from the meat. It squeezed hard enough to bruise. A face followed, forcing its way out of the mess. Skin stretched, tore, re-formed. Blonde hair, blood, blue eyes that had bore into him as they’d given him his second concussion, as a plate had been shattered over his head.
Billy.
Or something wearing his face.
His chest was torn open, ribs snapped and peeled back, heart gouged out. Blood bubbled at his lips as he choked on it, gurgling words Steve couldn’t understand. Then the grip on Steve’s ankle tightened and yanked.
He went flying.
His back slammed into metal, his head snapping against something solid. Pain flashed white-hot through his skull, the familiar feeling of his brain slamming against his skull. He smelled smoke (cigarettes) and metal (an elevator) and cheap aftershave (his own, but not him anymore). His ears rang with a familiar cadence — harsh, guttural, accented heavily.
“Who do you work for?!”
The voice clawed at his spine. Russian. Starcourt. The elevator, the base under the mall, the chair. Sudden, bright fear ripped through him, and for a second he thought he might puke. The memory of the third concussion slammed into him. Byers, Hargrove, Russian Asshole. The reason his brain felt like static. The reason he struggled to read, struggled to focus.
And then the third concussion happened.
Hands like iron grabbed his face and smashed his head back, once, twice, into a wall. His vision blurred. Then he was falling again, landing hard on concrete.
The scene shifted.
He wasn’t nineteen anymore. He was fourteen, standing in the middle of his father’s study with a turning stomach and scraped palms. He knew this place. The leather chair, the shelves of books nobody read, the bar cart in the corner. He knew the throbbing handprint blooming across his cheek. Knew the taste of copper on his tongue from where he’d bitten his cheek in pain. Knew his father’s footsteps pacing behind him.
The first time he’d snuck out. The first time his father hadn’t cared about keeping up appearances, and had smacked the shit out of him without care.
“You think I don’t know when you sneak out?” Bryan Harrington’s voice cut through him like a blade. “You think I’m blind, boy?”
Steve’s eyes stung. Back then he’d swallowed his tears, locked them down hard, but here they came hot and fast anyway. He felt small. Pathetic. Barefoot on cold hardwood.
“Fuckin’ disappointment. Too dumb for school, putting the only smarts you’ve got towards sneaking out.”
That one word hit harder than any slap ever had.
It reverberated through the room, through his bones, through time. Through everything.
Steve flinched, a tiny sound escaping him, high and broken and far too much like a child’s whine. It startled him. This was his memory, his body, his life — but it felt like he was just watching it from the outside. He squeezed his eyes shut, only to feel tears spilling over faster.
Except suddenly they weren’t tears at all.
Water slid down his face, over his hair, soaking his shirt, chilling him to the bone. Then the shirt was gone, and he was standing in a bathing suit, a beer can limply held in his hand.
He opened his eyes and was sixteen, standing at the edge of his backyard pool.
Crystal blue water. Too still. Too quiet. And at the bottom, crumpled like a discarded doll, was Barb.
His throat closed.
He could see her red hair floating around her face, her glasses knocked askew. The guilt that had followed him for years welled back up, raw and suffocating. Her parents thought she’d died from chemical exposure. They didn’t know it was his fault that their daughter was left alone.
It was his fault.
Because he’d wanted to hook up with Nancy Wheeler in his fancy rich boy house with his fancy rich boy pool. Because he was selfish and stupid and too obsessed with being King Steve to notice that his friend’s friend was terrified and alone.
What kind of king couldn’t protect people?
His chest hurt. The beer can fell, made a sound much louder than it should, and everything jerked sideways.
The world twisted, like somebody had grabbed reality and wrung it out. There was a flash — light, glass, the click of a camera, and then the sound of said camera cracking on the floor. The familiar sound of his own voice calling Jonathan Byers a ‘queer.’ Steve blinked and found himself standing in the living room again, but older this time.
Nineteen. Now. Present.
His face ached from a fresh bruise that he didn’t remember getting. Broken glass glittered on the floor like ice, the smell of whiskey burning his nose. His father stood two feet in front of him, tie loosened, eyes burning.
“Too stupid to even run the business, are you?” Bryan drawled, voice thick with disgust. “It’s those drugs you smoke, boy. Too busy getting high to even keep your grades up enough to get into a good damn college.”
Steve’s hands were shaking, exactly what his asshat of a father wanted. He forced his chin up, forced the words out past the lump in his throat. He was an inch taller than his father, but he still felt small.
“I graduated, didn’t I?” His voice came out rough, sharp. “I graduated, and I got friends, and I became a better person, and I did all of that without you.”
And there they were again. Tears. Goddammit.
He never cried in front of anyone else. But his dad? Bryan Harrington could shatter him with a phrase. Always had. Always would.
“You consider turning into a fuckin’ faggot ‘better’?” Bryan’s voice snarled through the room, slamming into that locked box deep in Steve’s head. A box where Steve shoved every thought that didn’t fit. Where he shoved the thoughts of pretty boys, of every guy he’d looked at for too long.
Steve flinched so hard his vision stuttered.
The word dug in like a hook, dragging him down. He felt it cling to him, sticky and venomous, trying to wrap itself around his throat. It yanked his soul, his being, his something, forward.
He was eighteen again, standing in the elevator at Starcourt, except the floor was slick, and the lights flickered, and there was a body in front of him.
Robin.
She lay in a heap, Scoops Ahoy uniform stained dark, hair matted with blood. There was a bullet wound centered perfectly between her eyes. One eye was just… gone, mashed against the wall, maggots wriggling in the mess. Her mouth was frozen open. Like she’d died screaming. For him. Because he couldn’t protect anybody, and she had been unfortunate enough to be his friend.
The stink of rot and gunpowder hit him. His stomach flipped. “Robin,” he choked, but his voice sounded quiet, like he was underwater. “Rob, please.”
Her lips moved.
Steve. No sound, but as clear as ever.
He stumbled backward, desperate to get away, to shut his eyes, to wake up, but he bumped into someone solid. Someone shorter, sturdy.
He turned.
“Dustin?” he breathed, another trickle of tears sliding down his face.
It looked like Dustin if someone had tried to draw him from memory and got all the proportions just slightly, horribly wrong. Teeth too straight, eyes too far apart, nose too small. His smile didn’t sit right on his face. It looked sunken in.
“Steve?”
Even his voice sounded off, like a record playing at the wrong speed.
“Why did you make me care about you?” the not-Dustin asked, and then the elevator floor vanished.
Steve dropped.
He screamed as he fell, arms flailing for anything to grab onto, but there was nothing. No walls, no cables, no light. Just an endless, roaring black.
He hit stone hard enough that the impact rattled his teeth. Everything in his body ached.
He lay there for a second, dazed, trying to suck in air around the ache in his chest. His face was wet — blood, sweat, maybe both. His body felt as if it wasn’t his own, like he had stolen it from someone more deserving. Slowly, he pushed himself up and looked around.
The sky was red. That was it. No sun, no clouds, no stars. Just a constant, searing red that made his eyes water. A shrill ringing drilled into his ears. It felt like a fire alarm, except it kept going, burrowing into his head like it wanted to make a home.
“Steve.”
The voice crawled up his spine. He knew that voice now. Had heard it in nightmares and in the back of his head, under the ticking.
“Welcome.”
He turned, and felt himself tense.
Pillars rose up from the ground, twisted stone reaching toward the bleeding sky. Bodies hung from them, caught in midair, twisted at wrong angles. Chrissy. Fred. People he didn’t know. People this thing had killed. Tentacles of flesh reached out and tugged the bodies against the pillars, curling around them wetly. A figure moved toward him across the broken ground.
Vecna.
Steve’s breath stuttered. He took a step back, then another. The pulsing vines on the ground recoiled and shifted with each step, like they were alive.
“Get the fuck away from me,” he snarled, voice hoarse. His hand reached behind him on instinct, like he was expecting a weapon, his bat, something, anything, to swing at the thing in front of him.
Vecna didn’t answer. He just kept walking, gaze steady and unblinking.
“You seem lost, Steve,” the creature said eventually, voice low, a horrible mimicry of sympathy. “I can give you direction. Purpose. Something no one ever gave you. Would it not feel nice? To belong?”
Steve wanted to laugh. Or cry. Or both.
Nobody had given him a map for anything. Not for school, not for girls, not for boys, not for this. He’d been stumbling blind since as far back as he could remember. Trying to be what everyone needed. A good son, a good boyfriend, a good babysitter, a good… whatever.
He thought of his empty house. The echo of his own footsteps. The way it had never really felt like home. The way his own house felt like an act.
Maybe he really was lost.
He swallowed, forced his shoulders back. “You’re not gonna give me anything I want,” he said, forcing the words through clenched teeth, forcing every thought of being lost away from his head. “You can’t. You’re just gonna take.”
His voice steadied on the last word. He grabbed it, clung to it like a lifeline. If he wanted to belong, this thing certainly wouldn’t help. Besides, belonging seemed to be far behind him at this point.
“You won’t give me anything I could ever want,” he repeated, sharper this time, and turned to run. He barely got three steps before something lashed out, snapped around his wrist, and yanked.
Pain exploded up his arm as the bone snapped. He went down hard, a scream ripping out of him. His ears filled with rushing sound, like static and whispers and distant screaming layered on top of each other. The disgusting, flesh-like vines curled around his arm, and he felt his body shiver at the wrongness of it all.
Vines wrapped around his ankle and yanked, taking his knees out from under him and slamming him into the ground properly. His nose crunched; warmth spilled over his lip.
Before he could inhale again, something coiled around his throat and jerked tight. He clawed at it with his good hand, fingers slipping on the slick, pulsing vine. It squeezed, cutting off air, and his lungs began to burn. His hand was slammed away in an instant.
Vecna loomed over him, eyes hollow, skin split and crawling with vines.
“You can’t escape,” Vecna said calmly. “There’s a reason I show you these things. They’re true. They are what you are.”
Steve’s vision blurred at the edges. His chest convulsed, desperate for air. Everything hurt. Somewhere in his head, he found a bit of humor in it.
Somewhere else, though, he heard music.
A guitar riff, sharp and bright, sliced through the air. Then a familiar gravelly voice cut through Vecna’s words, loud and urgent.
Bon Jovi.
Steve wanted to laugh. He managed a choked, mangled sound that came out more like a cough.
Of course.
He felt Vecna’s grip tighten around his neck, as if the creature could hear the song too and hated it.
“As long as your mind is mine, this will not save you,” Vecna hissed. “Let go, Steve. Join them. You know you want to.”
The vine around his throat constricted, spots dancing in his vision. God, that hurt.
Over the roaring in his ears, the lyrics pushed through:
On the street where you live, girls talk about their social lives—
The opening lines of “Runaway.” His favorite. The one he’d played on repeat when he was too pissed or too sad to think straight. The one he’d mentioned offhand in the van while discussing music with Eddie while trying to argue that, no, actually, his music taste was great, thank you.
He turned his head as far as the vine would allow.
The air split open.
A jagged hole tore itself in the fleshy wall of Vecna’s mindscape, like someone ripping a sheet of paper. Through it, Steve could see the real world — the dark stretch of an unpaved road, the beat-up van pulled over on the shoulder. His own body lay on the ground beside it, floating a few inches off the dirt, limbs rigid and eyes white.
Eddie was there, hands fisted in the front of Steve’s jacket, shaking him like he could rattle Steve’s soul back where it belonged. His mouth was moving, screaming something Steve couldn’t hear. He could see Eddie’s arms flexing, trying to yank him back down to the ground.
Dustin knelt beside them both, clutching a Walkman so hard his fingers had gone pale. Tears streamed down his face, his thumb smashing the buttons to blast the tape at full volume into Steve’s ears. Max and Lucas hovered nearby, both of them yelling Steve’s name, faces white with fear. Lucas was squeezing Max’s hand.
The sight twisted something in Steve’s chest.
He wanted to go back. God, he wanted to go back. The kids needed him. Well, maybe not needed, but he’d be damned if he let them throw themselves into danger without him there to take the brunt of it.
Vecna’s clawed hand covered his face, forcing him to look up again, away from the hole. Away from his friends. He let out a cry of pain as his head was forced to snap toward the creature above him.
“Join them, Steve,” Vecna murmured. “Just let go.”
Steve’s lungs seized. His vision dimmed. He squeezed his eyes shut.
Robin’s laugh floated up from somewhere deep in his memory. Robin in her stupid sailor uniform, complaining about customers. Robin in the movie theater, throwing popcorn at his face. Robin on his floor, admitting she liked girls, not him, and the way something in his mind had slid into place. Like he’d found the other half of himself, but not like that.
Robin in his car, listening to him ramble about his parent’s bullshit, about feeling so damn alone, nudging him to actually say what he needed while keeping him sane the whole time.
“Deep breaths, dingus,” she’d said once, demonstrating. “In for four. Hold for four. Out for four. It’s not that hard.”
He tried. In for four—
The vine strangled the inhale halfway.
Okay, that wasn’t working. Different tactic.
He thought of Robin anyway, because how could he not. Of her messy handwriting on the whiteboard at Scoops, adding a tally-mark under the ‘You Suck’ column. Of the way she drew him out of his own head when he was spiraling. About how she’d taken to his weird children friends in an instant.
He thought of Dustin, barreling into his life like a hurricane. Dustin putting a Farrah Fawcett spray can in his hands and insisting Steve teach him how the hell to use it. Dustin going on and on about D&D, about how he’d met new people, about Eddie.
He thought of Eddie. The guy he’d written off as a freak for years. A metalhead with wild hair and tattoos and a loud mouth, who turned out to care more about the kids than half the adults in this town. Who’d poked fun at Steve in a way that made him not hate himself. Who made that ‘Do Not Touch’ box in his head seem so much less scary.
Eddie was terrified right now. Steve could see it. Even in the quick flashes through the hole, Eddie’s fear was stark and ugly and painfully real. Hell, the other man was a self-proclaimed coward.
Steve was terrified, too. But he was so fucking tired of being scared.
He snapped his eyes open. Vecna’s ruined face loomed overhead. With adrenaline he hadn’t felt in years, Steve yanked his hands upwards with everything he had and jammed his thumbs into Vecna’s eye sockets.
The flesh gave way with a wet, sickening squelch. Vecna shrieked, the sound shrill and furious. The vines around Steve’s throat spasmed and loosened. He sucked in a ragged breath as the world shuddered.
His body moved before his brain caught up. He rolled, tore himself free of the remaining vines, and ran.
He ran like his life depended on it, because it did. His broken wrist hung useless at his side, every step jolting pain through his bones, but his legs kept going.
He’d been running for three years. From monsters, from Russians, from guilt, from his parents’ disappointment, from his own bullshit. He knew how to do this. If there was one thing Steve Harrington could do, it was run like hell to make sure he could live to protect someone else.
Bon Jovi’s voice chased him, the chorus of “Runaway” looping in his head, in the air, in the way his heart hammered in time with the drums.
He heard something crash behind him and flinched instinctively, ducking sideways. A boulder slammed into the ground where he’d been a second ago, spraying chunks of stone. He felt it scrap across his sides, felt shards rip at his shirt.
“Come back here,” Vecna’s voice roared.
Steve ran faster.
“Go fuck yourself,” he rasped, though he wasn’t sure if the words came out or just stayed in his head.
The tear in the wall — his glimpse of the road, the van, his friends, his kids, — flickered ahead. He aimed for it, legs burning, lungs on fire. His vision was tunneling, but he kept his gaze locked on that jagged opening.
He reached for it like it was a rope, like it was a lifeline, like it was the only thing standing between him and an early grave, because it was.
As he dove, pain sliced through his wrist again — sharp, blinding. The bone snapped back into place with a crack that made him black out for a heartbeat, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered was getting out.
When his eyes flew open, he was staring at the sky.
Only this sky was normal. Regular old Indiana gray.
“Steve! Steve, Jesus—”
Everything was loud. Too loud. Voices piled on top of each other, Eddie’s frantic shouts mixed with Dustin’s sobbing and Max and Lucas stumbling over each other in relief.
His ears rang, a high shriek drowning everything out. He tried to push himself up and felt cold metal behind his shoulders.
The van. The road. Dirt under his hands.
Here. Not there.
He sucked in a breath, chest hitching, and blinked until the blur in his eyes cleared.
Eddie’s face swam into focus.
He was pale, eyes wide, pupils blown. Tears clung stubbornly to his lashes, not quite falling. He grabbed Steve like he was afraid Steve might float away again if he let go.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Harrington!” Eddie yelled, voice breaking on Steve’s name. He hauled Steve upright and yanked him into a crushing hug, and oh. Oh, he hadn’t had one of those in a while.
Steve’s breath punched out of him. For a second he just sagged there, face pressed into Eddie’s jacket. Eddie smelled like weed and cheap detergent and something sharp, like metal and sweat mixing.
“Steve!” Dustin’s voice cracked as he crashed into them, arms wrestling their way into the hug. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god—”
Steve forced an arm up and wrapped it around Dustin’s shoulders, pulling the kid close. He was shaking so hard his teeth wanted to chatter. Bon Jovi was still screaming in his ears through the Walkman, the tape warbling a little from overuse.
Somewhere to his left, Max let out a wet-sounding laugh. “Holy shit,” she breathed. “Holy shit, holy shit.”
Lucas was saying something too, voice hoarse, but Steve couldn’t quite make the words out over the ringing.
He just held on.
Eventually Dustin pulled back, sniffling and wiping snot on his sleeve. Steve let his hand drop. His arm felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
He looked up at Eddie.
He’d never seen Eddie look like this. Eddie was supposed to be loud and ridiculous and grinning even when they were in mortal danger. He was supposed to fill every silence with a joke or a dramatic complaint.
The smile on his face now was… different. Small. Fragile. Relieved. The kind of smile you gave someone you thought you’d lost.
“Steve, you’re badass, you know that?” Eddie said, voice thick. He sniffed and swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand like that might erase the evidence.
Steve huffed out a laugh that hurt his ribs. “I don’t think almost getting murdered by a demon and being saved by Bon Jovi counts as badass, man.”
“That is extremely badass,” Eddie insisted, eyes going wide like this was the most obvious thing in the world. He leaned in and pressed a quick, fierce kiss to Steve’s cheek before he could move.
Steve froze. Heat rushed to his face, clashing with the cold sweat still clinging to his skin. Tears started up again anyway, blurring his vision. He wasn’t sure which part of that combination pissed him off more.
“How’d you—” He had to stop and swallow, throat dry and raw. “How’d you guys know? What song to play?”
Dustin blew his nose on his sleeve and pointed at Eddie. “Thank Eddie,” he sniffled. “He’s the one that picked it.”
Eddie’s ears went pink. He shrugged, gaze darting away for a second. “You, uh… you mentioned Bon Jovi in the car. Earlier. The whole, y’know, ‘Runaway’ thing. I pay attention sometimes.” He gave a weak smile. “Surprise.”
Steve barked out a laugh that came out more like a sob. He buried his face in Eddie’s shoulder again, fingers curling into the worn denim and leather.
Eddie hugged him back like he’d never let go.
The van creaked as Max and Lucas shifted closer. Steve could hear them murmuring, feel the warmth of their presence at his periphery. Dustin leaned against his side, still clutching the Walkman like it was a holy relic.
Steve’s wrist throbbed. His head pounded. His throat ached. He was exhausted, wrecked, and so wrung out he wasn’t sure there was anything left inside him to squeeze.
But he could feel Eddie’s arms around him. Dustin’s weight against his ribs. The faint smell of fast food from the wrappers on the van floor, the scratch of Lucas’s jacket sleeve when it brushed his leg, Max’s relieved exhale.
For the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel like he was standing alone in some giant empty house with nobody to notice if he disappeared.
He felt… here.
He felt held.
He felt, in a small, shaky way, like he might finally have something close to home.