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Steve Harrington sank into unconsciousness like deep, dark water, like he was ten years old again and had slipped while playing beside his pool late at night, when the only monsters he’d known were the creaking in the empty halls and the parents who returned for a week every few months. Noises rushed through his ears, water or gunshots or air moving too quickly past his face. It came on, harsh and swift, that pain that bridged past the point of sharp or dull or burning and plummeted straight into nausea. Just as swiftly, it was gone, and he found himself alone in the silence, standing on the edge of a familiar cliff, the one that was all shallow water and frothing rapids in the middle of the woods. Secluded, due East of Skull Rock, the make out point right next to a jumping spot. Steve was intimately familiar with the ragged outline of the trees in the darkness, that steep drop of jagged rock curving to form an outcropping jutting over the roiling rapids in an inelegant arch.
Every time Steve took a moment to think, to enjoy himself, to set down the burden of always fitting into the predetermined borders of expectations he’d only just conquered, he found himself in the same place. Just standing at the edge of that cliff face, staring down the jagged teeth of stone waiting below. The fence that once bordered it had long since fallen into disrepair, beams rotted and soft with years of neglect and brutal water ever surging up the sides. He didn’t dare venture out too far like he had as a child with a big house, no curfew, and no parents, didn’t risk dangling his feet over the edge. He just stood on the side, sand and soil just damp enough to kiss at the soles of his sneakers as he stared into the depths. He kept one hand on a nearby fence post, iron ball at the top rusted and corroded— just rough enough against his palm to make Steve feel real as he leaned, just a beat away from plunging down forty feet into the shallow water.
The rocks were sharp, lining the white froth at the water’s edge like the mouth of a Demogorgon, row after row of razor-sharp spires eager to swallow him down and unmake him. Sometimes, Steve wondered if the stones on the cliff side had held him back that day, splintered pieces of that same maw that they were, if they had seen that he was just as rough and jagged on the outside as they had been, once. He wondered if that was why he’d stopped himself from reaching for Eddie’s hand. For any hand. Maybe, he thought, it would have been better to let the water keep him for a while, let it smooth out all his harsh edges and hollow bones. Maybe, if he’d let the water hold him, it could have tempered the fire that smoldered in his chest even now.
He hadn’t, though.
He’d refused every hand that reached out to help him but the ones with poison under their fingernails. No, no one was allowed to hold on to Steve Harrington. Who would want to? His parents had never tried, and his lackeys had never bothered. It was better that he kept his jagged, broken pieces to himself. No one could hold a river still, not when it had work yet to do. That was half the reason it always slipped through grasping fingers, half the reason you could never touch the same river twice. The river was free in its constraint, bracketed by shore on either side, and it used that freedom to flee from thirsty tongues and grasping hands. If the river never stopped flowing, no one could ever capture it. If Steve never stopped fleeing, fucking, fighting, he couldn’t be kept prisoner, either… except, that wasn’t how things had turned out. Steve kept sprinting up the hill to get to the top, outrunning supportive hands and cheering waves, but he hadn’t been able to run fast enough to escape the voice of a dead girl, still calling him down to the bottom of his pool.
He hadn’t been able to outrun that vicious, vivid red of the Demogorgon’s open mouths.
He hadn’t been able to escape fists to the skull, ceramic plates shattering against his frontal lobe, the demanding “Who do you work for?” that drifted into his mind every time he passed the now-abandoned shell of Starcourt.
He certainly hadn’t managed to run fast enough to get out of the way of those screaming bats that had taken chunks out of his stomach, nor the beating of his own heart.
Here, sitting on the edge of a cliff, watching the water swirl between stone and those few, battered reeds with equal ease, Steve couldn’t help but think that it was his own fault. Maybe, if he’d let himself be bracketed by the shoreline, had more of a lake’s spirit than a roiling river’s, his heart would have been soft enough that it could grow instead of bursting. If it could have embraced that cookie-cutter destiny he’d been chasing for so long, rather than making him pay for wanting something that defied it with flesh and bone. Every time Steve fell in love, the universe demanded payment, and every time that debt was paid with blood.
***
No one could hold back a lake once it decided to move, but it could be supported by the banks. It could be lifted by the little, jagged stones that crept into its waters. It could help things grow, if it wanted, with waters that moved but hadn’t yet forgotten stillness. Steve had known, deep down, that he was always a little too fragile to grow much in those few tender places he had left. No, Steve Harrington had never let himself be soft enough to carry water lilies and shelter tadpoles, apart from those few still pockets tucked out of even his own reach. He’d spent too much time running to learn that sort of stillness. The only water that had ever seen fit to hold Steve was this river, with its gnashing waves and harsh froth. It only made sense that his mind would carry him here now, in this space between death and dreams. He’d only had a little calm in that hardened heart of his, little pools tucked behind boulders and surrounding the reeds near the shore, enough protection to learn to have kinder hands, to guard his kids, and to try to love again.
Eddie stumbled into Steve’s life with all the grace of river rocks and silty banks, and for the first time since Starcourt, Steve wanted. Longing was loud and percussive in his brain, had wiped all his senses clear in a moment and reset everything to the blinding, ringing shriek of an electric guitar. Loving Eddie was like slow dancing in the kitchen to Jo Stafford, making hot chocolate the way his grandma used to do, with a spoonful of cinnamon sugar swirling into simmering milk and making that huge, empty house smell like safety. It was like sitting in his car on a rainy day and watching the droplets hit the puddles as the parking lot turned into a shallow sea, bubbles forming and popping in an endless parade of performative flow. It was only in that process of falling and flowing and popping that the water began to sparkle, and loving Eddie had always skewed closer to a fireworks show than some bargain bin sparklers, anyway.
Eddie took pieces of all the people he’d loved and put them together, soothed the heavy ache of grief in Steve’s chest by pulling them through the filter of his being. Curly brown hair, loud metal music, the thirst for something real fueled by the need to be better, ease and laughter and comfort… Eddie chased the bitterness from love turned sour and gave Steve permission to love those things again. He could twine his hand through his hair, half-ignoring yet another rewatch of The Labyrinth, and not be jeered at by a mocking chorus of “Bullshit.” He could pull those tapes out of the shoebox in his closet, immerse himself in mix after mix without watching blood pool on white laminate, without thinking of change and promised apologies and how they were finally gonna get out of Hawkins. He pulled Steve back to an easier time, hazy summer days spent playing truth or dare in the basement of a church while some kid had a birthday party upstairs, a time before he’d had to wrestle through a tangle of trauma, thoughts, and NDA-bound speech before a sentence even left his mind. Eddie had polished away all the jagged edges of his memories, made Steve feel safe enough to pick them up again. Eddie had made him want to learn to be still, had slowed those rushing waters, if only for a moment.
Then, Vecna had happened.
Eddie had come racing to his house in the middle of the night, rain dripping off of his curls and terror in his eyes. They’d fought, God, they'd fought so hard to see it through, to bring an end to the torment, to return to the peace they had been building together, but the bats had swooped in and torn any hope of that asunder. Now all Steve had left of stillness was a set of matching scars with his lover’s corpse and another set of memories to heap onto the mountain of grief in his chest. He’d still tried to see it through, to see the bastard dead, but he wasn’t strong enough. His body still remembered the weight of Eddie’s corpse in his arms, the rigidity that had taken over by the time Steve finally found him. It was hard to dodge bullets, to swim to shore, to stop oneself from falling when his entire being behaved like it was still carrying the weight of his world— a hundred and forty pounds soaking wet, but lighter when he’d lost a few pounds and all the blood in his body— home. Steve’s river had finally learned stillness, but it wasn't because he’d flowed into a lake. It wasn’t because he’d grown old and settled down, six kids and a husband and a life spent building something better.
Steve’s river stopped flowing because pain built dams around his heart, too high for any living creature to jump over, and the water dried up. You couldn’t have a lily lake or rapids if there was no water in the first place. Without anywhere for the water to flow, without any water to flow anywhere in the first place, a river died…
So, the next time Vecna reared his mottled flesh and pulled Steve deep into his own mind, Steve died with it. He died alone beside his pool, clear water swirling between his toes. Still.
Though the riverbed was dry, there were still a few drops of water clinging around the sticks and stones that kept it bare in the first place. It was enough for what was needed. Steve refused to let his kids find him like that, twisted up and screaming with broken bones and empty eyes, so he hid. He ran deep into his head, ran as only a river knows how, and found a tranquil place. He stood, staring down into the frothing waters near Skull Rock, leaning out over the water. Steve may have run from Vecna, but he wasn’t running from death. He wasn’t trying to escape it. He was too weary, too tired, too weighed down for that. He thought somewhere, something in the universe was smiling at him, because he wasn’t found. His death came slowly, peacefully, his vision tunneling until all he could see was the water below, glowing and luminous in the gray-blue twilight. It was still, the gentle warmth of an end-of-summer day, with only the faintest breeze disturbing his mourning as everything faded to black. He could have almost convinced himself it was just the sun setting behind him, were it not for the stars already twinkling in the reflection beneath his feet. In tandem, Rightside-Up and Upside-Down Steve’s hearts stopped, bodies toppling over into the pool and the lake. The water rushed around their ears, bubbles drifting out from their still-open mouths before they were buoyed up to the surface, floating, the perfect picture of serenity.
Steve let the water hold him, neither too hot nor too cold. He floated on his back, finally relishing the weightlessness that came when he no longer had to run toward some undefined finish line. There were birds twittering in the trees overhead, the low hum of dragonfly wings as they danced between the reeds growing along the banks. The air was sweet, heavy with waterlilies and clover and other growing things, but the water was clean. It didn’t cling to his skin, gritty and slimy like when he’d fallen into the pool as a child, when his parents had already been gone for three months and had forgotten to hire a cleaner. It was just there, clear and cool as it flowed over and around his legs, his hands. There was a gentle splashing from behind his head, steps coming closer and closer until two hands, fingers all bearing at least one ring, curled gently beneath his shoulders. Steve let his eyes flutter open, lips already parting with a grin.
“Hey there, Stevie.” Eddie Munson murmured, smiling down at him with something soft in his eyes.
“Hey, Eds. It’s really good to see your face.”