Steve’s foot slips on one of the ladder rungs. His reflexes save him just in time, his hands clenched tight around cold metal. He locks eyes with Jonathan going up the opposite ladder.
“You okay?” Jonathan asks.
“Yeah,” Steve says. His stomach churns, an awful, false sensation of falling.
“Good,” Jonathan says. “I don’t wanna win the race by default, that’s embarrassing.” He pauses in his climb, only moving again once Steve’s regained his footing.
Steve can’t get rid of that drop in the pit of his stomach, like he’s secretly been falling all along, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It stays with him as he reaches the top of the tower, as the Abyss drifts perilously close. He thinks of Holly tearing back up here—which must’ve happened to Dustin, too. The distance is unfathomable. It had to have hurt.
The Abyss collides with the tower; the tremor travels up from Steve’s feet, into his chest, threatens to shake him off the edge. He holds on tight, pressing Robin close with an arm locked around her. Failing now is not an option.
He spots movement above their heads, a strange mass clinging to the rift, like a spider’s nest except gelatinous instead of silk. Hears piercing shrieks coming from inside.
He can’t remember what he’d said to Dustin when he saw him hunched, so small, over Eddie’s body. He remembers the blood, remembers freezing, paralysed with guilt. His last clear thought was that everything he could have told Dustin—that it would have been so quick, that Eddie wouldn’t have felt it, he wouldn’t have known—was all comfort he couldn’t possibly give.
“Nance,” Steve says.
She looks at him. He jerks his head up. Very calmly, she reaches for a Molotov. He wonders if she feels like him: separate somehow, like the danger is still there, but it can’t really reach them. That nothing can touch them, not until…
Nancy’s aim is true. Steve ducks, warns everyone with a sharp, “Look out!” The nest falls with one last dying shriek, a ball of fire.
For Eddie, Steve says in his head. He does it twice because Dustin isn’t here.
—
Will falls to his knees in the stark, arid landscape of the Abyss.
“Woah,” Jonathan says quickly, a wave of dread, “hey, hey, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Will gasps. His hand touches the back of his neck. “It’s gone,” he says, almost wondrous. “The connection.”
Jonathan nearly sinks down beside him in relief. “El?” he says, watching in awe as she leaps up to the Mind Flayer—bigger than Starcourt, arachnid.
“I don’t know,” Will says again.
—
Steve doesn’t feel a thing when the Mind Flayer crashes to the ground, a husk. He couldn’t care less. He turns to Nancy, grazes on her cheek from when the thing had chased them into a chasm—where, just for a moment, the illusion of safety had broken, rocks digging into Steve’s ribs.
They should probably be dead, he thinks, detached. He doesn’t waste time feeling concerned about it. Their determination carried them here; they only have one place to be.
“Come on,” Nancy says, like she’s read his mind. “Steve, let’s go!”
They run. The terrible drop in Steve’s stomach is back, stronger than ever. He ignores it. It’s just adrenaline, it doesn’t mean—
In the cavernous rib cage of a monster, Nancy bursts into tears. Steve, thank God, can hear her smiling.
“Oh,” she cries. “Oh, Holly.”
It doesn’t hit him yet. As if from another room, he hears an axe being swung again and again. One by one, he helps the kids down from their prisons, viscous, womb-like. Holds them as they throw up twisting black particles.
It still hasn’t hit him. He just—he just isn’t looking properly, he just has to—
His resolve breaks when Derek Turnbow hugs him. The kid is trembling, and Steve feels like he’s been punched. He pulls back to grip his shoulders, all he can get out is, “Have you seen him? Kid, please, have you—?”
“Seen who?” Derek looks awful, pale and blinking slowly behind the glasses Steve just feverishly cleaned, and yet he’s the one who seems concerned. “Are you—?”
“Nance,” Steve says.
She looks up from where she’s huddled with Mike and Holly. A fresh wave of guilt as Steve stands over them, a shadow cast on their reunion. Holly is fast asleep on Nancy’s shoulder, her skin the same sickly shade as Derek’s.
“Nance,” Steve says again. “He’s not here.”
She doesn’t believe him, not yet. It’s Mike who rises, looks at Steve with a frown.
“Steve,” he says, suddenly grown-up, “sit down.”
Steve shakes his head, mouth dry. He watches as Lucas and Mike search, how they glance back at him like they can’t help it; for a second they’re years younger in the tunnels, terrified. But Steve can no longer help them.
“Mike,” Nancy says, a thread of panic hiding in the firm tone. She doesn’t want me to hear it, Steve thinks. “Mike, we have to be sure.”
Steve could delay the whole thing. He could turn and spit poison at El, lying exhausted between Will and Jonathan, What is the point of you if you can’t… Could rage at Joyce, Why did you kill him already, why didn’t you just—
But nothing can stop it, what Steve’s body already knows. He’s not going to find Dustin.
The kids. Before they wrenched them free, they looked like flies trapped in a spider’s web. It would have been only a matter of time before they were consumed.
You’re gonna die, you’re all gonna die.
Steve doubles over and vomits.
—
The walkie starts to work again as they reach the bottom of the radio tower. Jonathan watches Steve tear it out of his mom’s hands.
“Just set it,” Steve says.
“Kid,” Hopper says haltingly.
Steve’s voice breaks only once. “Don’t make me say it again.”
—
In the truck, Steve senses Robin winding down the window in his periphery. He can hear what she’s trying to cover up: her crying.
“Steve—”
“Don’t talk to me.”
He needs to drive. He just needs to drive.
“O-okay,” Robin sobs.
There’s demogorgons waiting for them at the Gate. Steve is so focused on swerving around them that by the time he sees the spikes, it’s too late.
The tires burst. Gunfire: the demos have followed them through.
Steve watches impassively through the window as several of the military are killed. Two grenades go off in quick succession, felling what looks like a pair of speakers. He only realises when the noise stops in the back that El had been screaming this whole time.
He opens the door, hearing in far off fragments what he’s leaving behind: Mike yelling something about Radio Shack, Robin calling his name.
“Son of a—” Murray, urgent. “Jim. Jim, that kid is—”
Steve gets halfway to the Gate when he feels a hand clamp around his elbow. The grip is fierce; he can’t shake it off.
Jonathan, tears in his eyes.
“No,” Steve says. “No, don’t—don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me.”
“What good’s it gonna do?” Jonathan whispers.
“I can’t just leave him!” Steve screams. “I can’t, Jonathan, he’s alone, he’s—”
A blinding flash; the pressure wave throws them to the ground. Steve’s ears ring.
Jonathan’s face is suddenly above him. He looks like he’s yelling, but Steve can’t hear anything. Jonathan tries to pull him up by the collar of his t-shirt. Sound returns, sudden, overwhelming.
“Steve,” Jonathan says. “Steve, get up. Get up now.”
Steve just blinks at him. It’s like the bomb is still detonating, tearing through him.
“Steve,” Jonathan repeats. “It’s your car.”
He pulls Steve forward. It feels strange, Steve thinks, that he can move, like it’s happening to someone else.
It comes to him in pieces. He can see where The Upside Down used to be, Hawkins Library reduced to rubble. His car has crashed right through where the front steps would have been. There’s a body in the driver’s seat. Hunched, so small.
Steve feels the blows to his shoulder before he registers what he’s doing, slamming into the car door again and again. He pries it open, and he’s trying to speak, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, please God, please, but someone’s making this terrible wailing sound.
“Hey.” Jonathan. He’s got his hand on Steve’s shoulder, shaking him. Steve’s throat hurts. “Steve, listen. Listen.”
“I have him,” Steve says wildly. “I have him.”
“Steve, he’s breathing.”
He finally looks down. Dustin’s eyes are closed. There’s blood dripping down from his hair. Steve could try and find a pulse, feel a breath, however slight. He doesn’t trust himself.
“Do you swear?” he gets out.
“I swear,” Jonathan says instantly.
Steve looks up. The corpses of demogorgons amongst the rubble. A woman with short silver hair lying dead. Just a few military survivors are left. They’re not pointing their weapons, they’re just—they’re just standing there.
“Help him!” Steve’s voice is hoarse. “Haven’t you killed enough kids?”
—
“Let him through,” Jonathan says, pulling Steve forward again. “Let him through! That’s his brother.”
—
Jonathan finds Steve in the hospital. He’s near the reception, walking around aimlessly, like he doesn’t know what to do.
He blinks slowly at Jonathan, eyebrows furrowed. “I think… I think I called his mom. He needs his mom.” He blinks hard. “Jonathan, I don’t—” A shaky breath. “I don’t know how I got here.”
“That’s okay,” Jonathan says. “Come on, we’ll find him together.”
When they reach the room, it’s quiet. Jonathan can barely see Dustin through the window, just the smallest glimpse of him lying in the bed. There’s a doctor talking to a woman, right by the edge of the blinds. She looks to the side, noticing movement at the window, maybe.
Claudia Henderson catches Steve’s eye. She smiles through tears. Nods. Jonathan thinks of his mom, how she’d looked at him four years ago. Oh, honey. He’s gonna be okay.
Steve makes a strangled noise beside him. “I—I can’t—”
Jonathan works on instinct. Nods back at Claudia, mouths Five minutes. He guides Steve past the room. “Let’s take a walk.”
They burst through the doors to an empty stairwell. Steve grips onto the railing, breathing in ragged bursts.
Someone needs to tell him, Jonathan thinks. Someone needs to tell him that it’s over.
“It’s gonna be really boring now, you know that, right?”
Steve laughs—an approximation of it, at least. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. He’s just gonna sleep, like, all the time.” A sudden pang in Jonathan’s chest, an old scar. “It’ll feel like he’s never gonna wake up, but he will, okay? He will.”
“Okay.” Steve sinks down to sit on the stairs. “Okay.”
“He’s gonna be all right. He’s home now.”
“Yeah,” Steve says. Jonathan can already sense what’s about to happen. “He’s home, he’s…” One last pained inhale. “Oh,” Steve says. “Oh, God.”
“I’ve got you.”
It turns out that seeing Steve cry is not the end of the world.
Steve’s foot slips on one of the ladder rungs. His reflexes save him just in time, his hands clenched tight around cold metal. He locks eyes with Jonathan going up the opposite ladder.
“You okay?” Jonathan asks.
“Yeah,” Steve says. His stomach churns, an awful, false sensation of falling.
“Good,” Jonathan says. “I don’t wanna win the race by default, that’s embarrassing.” He pauses in his climb, only moving again once Steve’s regained his footing.
Steve can’t get rid of that drop in the pit of his stomach, like he’s secretly been falling all along, just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
It stays with him as he reaches the top of the tower, as the Abyss drifts perilously close. He thinks of Holly tearing back up here—which must’ve happened to Dustin, too. The distance is unfathomable. It had to have hurt.
The Abyss collides with the tower; the tremor travels up from Steve’s feet, into his chest, threatens to shake him off the edge. He holds on tight, pressing Robin close with an arm locked around her. Failing now is not an option.
He spots movement above their heads, a strange mass clinging to the rift, like a spider’s nest except gelatinous instead of silk. Hears piercing shrieks coming from inside.
He can’t remember what he’d said to Dustin when he saw him hunched, so small, over Eddie’s body. He remembers the blood, remembers freezing, paralysed with guilt. His last clear thought was that everything he could have told Dustin—that it would have been so quick, that Eddie wouldn’t have felt it, he wouldn’t have known—was all comfort he couldn’t possibly give.
“Nance,” Steve says.
She looks at him. He jerks his head up. Very calmly, she reaches for a Molotov. He wonders if she feels like him: separate somehow, like the danger is still there, but it can’t really reach them. That nothing can touch them, not until…
Nancy’s aim is true. Steve ducks, warns everyone with a sharp, “Look out!” The nest falls with one last dying shriek, a ball of fire.
For Eddie, Steve says in his head. He does it twice because Dustin isn’t here.
—
Will falls to his knees in the stark, arid landscape of the Abyss.
“Woah,” Jonathan says quickly, a wave of dread, “hey, hey, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Will gasps. His hand touches the back of his neck. “It’s gone,” he says, almost wondrous. “The connection.”
Jonathan nearly sinks down beside him in relief. “El?” he says, watching in awe as she leaps up to the Mind Flayer—bigger than Starcourt, arachnid.
“I don’t know,” Will says again.
—
Steve doesn’t feel a thing when the Mind Flayer crashes to the ground, a husk. He couldn’t care less. He turns to Nancy, grazes on her cheek from when the thing had chased them into a chasm—where, just for a moment, the illusion of safety had broken, rocks digging into Steve’s ribs.
They should probably be dead, he thinks, detached. He doesn’t waste time feeling concerned about it. Their determination carried them here; they only have one place to be.
“Come on,” Nancy says, like she’s read his mind. “Steve, let’s go!”
They run. The terrible drop in Steve’s stomach is back, stronger than ever. He ignores it. It’s just adrenaline, it doesn’t mean—
In the cavernous rib cage of a monster, Nancy bursts into tears. Steve, thank God, can hear her smiling.
“Oh,” she cries. “Oh, Holly.”
It doesn’t hit him yet. As if from another room, he hears an axe being swung again and again. One by one, he helps the kids down from their prisons, viscous, womb-like. Holds them as they throw up twisting black particles.
It still hasn’t hit him. He just—he just isn’t looking properly, he just has to—
His resolve breaks when Derek Turnbow hugs him. The kid is trembling, and Steve feels like he’s been punched. He pulls back to grip his shoulders, all he can get out is, “Have you seen him? Kid, please, have you—?”
“Seen who?” Derek looks awful, pale and blinking slowly behind the glasses Steve just feverishly cleaned, and yet he’s the one who seems concerned. “Are you—?”
“Nance,” Steve says.
She looks up from where she’s huddled with Mike and Holly. A fresh wave of guilt as Steve stands over them, a shadow cast on their reunion. Holly is fast asleep on Nancy’s shoulder, her skin the same sickly shade as Derek’s.
“Nance,” Steve says again. “He’s not here.”
She doesn’t believe him, not yet. It’s Mike who rises, looks at Steve with a frown.
“Steve,” he says, suddenly grown-up, “sit down.”
Steve shakes his head, mouth dry. He watches as Lucas and Mike search, how they glance back at him like they can’t help it; for a second they’re years younger in the tunnels, terrified. But Steve can no longer help them.
“Mike,” Nancy says, a thread of panic hiding in the firm tone. She doesn’t want me to hear it, Steve thinks. “Mike, we have to be sure.”
Steve could delay the whole thing. He could turn and spit poison at El, lying exhausted between Will and Jonathan, What is the point of you if you can’t… Could rage at Joyce, Why did you kill him already, why didn’t you just—
But nothing can stop it, what Steve’s body already knows. He’s not going to find Dustin.
The kids. Before they wrenched them free, they looked like flies trapped in a spider’s web. It would have been only a matter of time before they were consumed.
You’re gonna die, you’re all gonna die.
Steve doubles over and vomits.
—
The walkie starts to work again as they reach the bottom of the radio tower. Jonathan watches Steve tear it out of his mom’s hands.
“Just set it,” Steve says.
“Kid,” Hopper says haltingly.
Steve’s voice breaks only once. “Don’t make me say it again.”
—
In the truck, Steve senses Robin winding down the window in his periphery. He can hear what she’s trying to cover up: her crying.
“Steve—”
“Don’t talk to me.”
He needs to drive. He just needs to drive.
“O-okay,” Robin sobs.
There’s demogorgons waiting for them at the Gate. Steve is so focused on swerving around them that by the time he sees the spikes, it’s too late.
The tires burst. Gunfire: the demos have followed them through.
Steve watches impassively through the window as several of the military are killed. Two grenades go off in quick succession, felling what looks like a pair of speakers. He only realises when the noise stops in the back that El had been screaming this whole time.
He opens the door, hearing in far off fragments what he’s leaving behind: Mike yelling something about Radio Shack, Robin calling his name.
“Son of a—” Murray, urgent. “Jim. Jim, that kid is—”
Steve gets halfway to the Gate when he feels a hand clamp around his elbow. The grip is fierce; he can’t shake it off.
Jonathan, tears in his eyes.
“No,” Steve says. “No, don’t—don’t do this to me, don’t do this to me.”
“What good’s it gonna do?” Jonathan whispers.
“I can’t just leave him!” Steve screams. “I can’t, Jonathan, he’s alone, he’s—”
A blinding flash; the pressure wave throws them to the ground. Steve’s ears ring.
Jonathan’s face is suddenly above him. He looks like he’s yelling, but Steve can’t hear anything. Jonathan tries to pull him up by the collar of his t-shirt. Sound returns, sudden, overwhelming.
“Steve,” Jonathan says. “Steve, get up. Get up now.”
Steve just blinks at him. It’s like the bomb is still detonating, tearing through him.
“Steve,” Jonathan repeats. “It’s your car.”
He pulls Steve forward. It feels strange, Steve thinks, that he can move, like it’s happening to someone else.
It comes to him in pieces. He can see where The Upside Down used to be, Hawkins Library reduced to rubble. His car has crashed right through where the front steps would have been. There’s a body in the driver’s seat. Hunched, so small.
Steve feels the blows to his shoulder before he registers what he’s doing, slamming into the car door again and again. He pries it open, and he’s trying to speak, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, please God, please, but someone’s making this terrible wailing sound.
“Hey.” Jonathan. He’s got his hand on Steve’s shoulder, shaking him. Steve’s throat hurts. “Steve, listen. Listen.”
“I have him,” Steve says wildly. “I have him.”
“Steve, he’s breathing.”
He finally looks down. Dustin’s eyes are closed. There’s blood dripping down from his hair. Steve could try and find a pulse, feel a breath, however slight. He doesn’t trust himself.
“Do you swear?” he gets out.
“I swear,” Jonathan says instantly.
Steve looks up. The corpses of demogorgons amongst the rubble. A woman with short silver hair lying dead. Just a few military survivors are left. They’re not pointing their weapons, they’re just—they’re just standing there.
“Help him!” Steve’s voice is hoarse. “Haven’t you killed enough kids?”
—
“Let him through,” Jonathan says, pulling Steve forward again. “Let him through! That’s his brother.”
—
Jonathan finds Steve in the hospital. He’s near the reception, walking around aimlessly, like he doesn’t know what to do.
He blinks slowly at Jonathan, eyebrows furrowed. “I think… I think I called his mom. He needs his mom.” He blinks hard. “Jonathan, I don’t—” A shaky breath. “I don’t know how I got here.”
“That’s okay,” Jonathan says. “Come on, we’ll find him together.”
When they reach the room, it’s quiet. Jonathan can barely see Dustin through the window, just the smallest glimpse of him lying in the bed. There’s a doctor talking to a woman, right by the edge of the blinds. She looks to the side, noticing movement at the window, maybe.
Claudia Henderson catches Steve’s eye. She smiles through tears. Nods. Jonathan thinks of his mom, how she’d looked at him four years ago. Oh, honey. He’s gonna be okay.
Steve makes a strangled noise beside him. “I—I can’t—”
Jonathan works on instinct. Nods back at Claudia, mouths Five minutes. He guides Steve past the room. “Let’s take a walk.”
They burst through the doors to an empty stairwell. Steve grips onto the railing, breathing in ragged bursts.
Someone needs to tell him, Jonathan thinks. Someone needs to tell him that it’s over.
“It’s gonna be really boring now, you know that, right?”
Steve laughs—an approximation of it, at least. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. He’s just gonna sleep, like, all the time.” A sudden pang in Jonathan’s chest, an old scar. “It’ll feel like he’s never gonna wake up, but he will, okay? He will.”
“Okay.” Steve sinks down to sit on the stairs. “Okay.”
“He’s gonna be all right. He’s home now.”
“Yeah,” Steve says. Jonathan can already sense what’s about to happen. “He’s home, he’s…” One last pained inhale. “Oh,” Steve says. “Oh, God.”
“I’ve got you.”
It turns out that seeing Steve cry is not the end of the world.
The soup is burning hot in some places, cold in others. Steve doesn’t bother putting it back in the microwave; he’s only eating because he has to. The soup comes with a grilled cheese too, so tasteless that it was hardly worth the trouble of Murray smuggling it in.
At least the act of eating, however mechanical, forces him to slow down just a little. He’s still not absorbed everything, not even close.
Remembers walking back to the Squawk in a daze, clinging to the journal like it was a life raft, only setting it down when he saw Max, inexplicably awake. Kneeling down in front of her, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing—thinking that if this can happen, then surely everything else is nothing, it should be—
“I never saw Dustin,” Max told him, frowning hard as if to keep her face from doing anything else. “Holly didn’t mention him.”
Steve drops his spoon into the now empty bowl. He can’t stomach the rest of the grilled cheese, catches Erica’s eye as she comes in. “Want some?”
She gives him a look of such disgust that he laughs, the sound slightly raw. She sits next to him, and he starts flicking through the journal again, placing it between them.
“Hey, Erica, can you make any sense of this?” She jokes about whether he’s forgotten she’s in middle school to which he says, deliberately light, “Yeah, so? Most of the time it’s you kids explaining all this shit to everyone else.”
They don’t mention what’s so obviously missing. He’d give anything, Steve thinks, to hear one of Dustin’s smart-ass comments again.
“Slow down,” Erica says. Steve stops at a page, but after a moment she shakes her head, urging him on. “It’s hard, his writing’s not usually so…”
“I know,” Steve says. He tries not to think of Dustin’s hands shaking.
“Wait, go back. There.” Eric’s points at the page, full of cramped words from a stranger. There’s a diagram, almost in the shape of an hourglass. “In class, we just…” She looks up. “I know who can help.”
—
When Steve takes Erica out to the van, Murray’s already in the driver’s seat, still managing to wave obnoxiously despite his whiplash.
“Thought I’d tag along in case teacher dearest doesn’t cooperate.”
“What’re you gonna do, threaten him?” Erica asks, like she highly doubts Murray is capable of such a thing.
“I have a way with words.”
“Sure, Bald Eagle,” Steve says flatly.
Murray laughs, gives him a quick side-glance before starting the engine. Steve has the feeling that he’s being supervised, and he’s on the way to being offended by it before he starts wondering whether it’s justified. He recalls Jonathan leading him out of The Upside Down. If I was alone in there, Steve thinks, would I have stayed? Would that have even helped?
“So,” Murray says conversationally, “you’re Steve Harrington, huh?”
Steve shakes his head in disbelief. “We’ve met before.”
“Yup,” Murray concedes. “Though these are slightly different circumstances than being your Gatorade supplier.”
“Jesus, did Nancy put you up to this? Great talk, but I don’t need a distraction.”
“Aren’t you just a charmer?”
The rebuff works, for a little while: the only time Murray talks is when he’s asking Erica for directions.
They pull up to the house and let Erica out first, give her time to knock and ease into her planned speech.
“She’s giving the signal already,” Steve says, watching as Erica clenches and unclenches her hand behind her back, Help.
“I guess what I’ve been trying to say,” Murray starts up again, seemingly undeterred by Steve slamming the van door on his way out, “is that I get it.”
Steve scoffs. “Oh, yeah? Get what?”
Murray gives him a look, eyes sharp, and Steve’s reminded that however weird this guy is, there’s a reason he’s not been caught smuggling contraband into Hawkins.
“Well, I figured if I could’ve saved my sister from cancer,” he says, still upbeat, like he’s just saying that the sky is blue, “I would’ve done anything. Anything,” he repeats, journalistic intensity, like he already knows what Steve could have done; what he still might do.
—
“—Dustin is missing,” Erica stresses. It’s clearly not the first time she’s said it.
“Erica, I’m—” Mr Clarke falls silent. He looks dubiously at Murray, but when his eyes land on Steve, there’s a flicker of recognition. He turns back to Erica, sighs, and opens the door wider. “Come in.”
Steve stands uselessly in the hall. There’s something about seeing Mr Clarke like this, in person, that makes everything hit him all over again: Dustin is gone.
Mr Clarke looks him directly in the eye, a teacher’s authority. “Does his mother know?” he asks.
A pause. Murray steps forward with his hands up, conciliatory. “Why don’t we—”
Mr Clarke reaches for the phone.
“No,” Steve manages. “Please.”
Mr Clarke’s hand stills.
—
“There you are,” Eddie says from somewhere deep in the dark. He sounds relieved. Dustin doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t want to see him; it’s not real. “You’ve gotta think about this, man. Why would a dragon just let you into its lair?”
An old echo: Dustin’s own words, when Mike was about to make a disastrous move during Hellfire.
“I know,” Dustin whispers. “I figured it out already. I don’t need—” His voice breaks. “Please. Please just go away.”
Silence. Dustin eventually opens his eyes, finds nothing but the attic. He hugs his knees to his chest.
A sudden flash of something, like lightning. He looks up. Holly Wheeler. Just a glimpse of her, terrified, looking like she’s just been crying—fading in and out as if she’s on a TV screen filled with static. Her eyes land on Dustin, widening in shock.
“Make a door,” she begs, and she’s gone.
—
Steve thunders back up from the basement. He’s got the diagrams Erica and Mr Clarke made in his head, Nancy and Jonathan debating whether Murray could risk a last-ditch run for more supplies. He checks outside: Max is there, talking with Vickie and Lucas.
One last scan of the place. He turns, spots the ‘On Air’ sign, illuminated.
“Shit. Robin, did we leave the—?”
The sign flickers. And he hears it, barely there, like it’s drifting in from some far-off storm. Someone is crying.
Steve runs into the booth. He lunges for the microphone, heart in his throat. “Dustin? Dustin, can you hear me? Dustin!”
The sound comes through the speakers now—louder, if occasionally muffled by bouts of static.
“I’m here,” Steve says helplessly; he isn’t, he isn’t.
“I messed up,” Dustin’s saying, “S-Steve, I—I was wrong, I was—”
“Hey, no, it’s—it’s gonna be okay,” Steve says, momentarily flooded with relief. He can hear me. “We’ve got a plan, we’re gonna get you—”
“No! No, don’t, please—”
“Dustin, hey! Dustin, it’s okay, I’m gonna come and—”
“Stop! I-if you do this,” Dustin sobs, “you’re gonna die, you’re all gonna die.”
“No-one’s gonna—”
“Just listen! He wanted—he wanted you to find everything, so you’d—Steve, he’s going to kill you.”
“No, he won’t,” Steve says. A sudden wave of calm; there is nothing, he thinks, that can happen to him that could possibly be worse than—
“No?” Dustin parrots, mocking, still so afraid. “You’re just gonna—Why would you do—”
“There’s not another option here, Dustin. There’s no way I’m just gonna—”
“Even when you know it’s a trap?” Dustin says, voice shaking but now laden with condescension. “That’s—that’s so fucking stupid.”
A distant, rational part of Steve knows that Dustin is terrified, but it’s suddenly too easy to snap back, months of muscle memory; too easy to let this win over fear.
“Yeah, so stupid,” he says bitterly; it’s already too late to take back what will follow. “Only Eddie can do that, right?”
“Shut up!” Dustin screams. The lights blink rapidly. “Shut up!”
Everything turns off at once, leaving Steve in darkness.
“No,” he says again. The return of that chill, rising panic. “No, wait—shit, shit. I’m sorry,” he says, clutching the microphone. “Dustin, please, I’m—We’ll come and get you, just—just hide, okay? Hide right in here. I’ll find you, you hear me? I’ll—”
He can’t hear anything. His vision goes white. He comes back to the sound of Robin’s voice, wavering. “Steve.”
His hands sting. A gouge in the wall. The tower of tapes has been knocked over. Smashed records litter the floor.
Robin is standing in the doorway. The bruise on her cheekbone somehow looks worse with the lights off. She grabs hold of him, rubs her hands up and down his arms. He’s shaking. Steve suddenly wants to apologise to her, but the words get stuck in his throat. He worries that if he does manage to make a sound, he might never stop.
“We’ll find him,” Robin says.
It’s not her fault, Steve thinks, how it comes out. Like a platitude rather than something certain.
—
Steve is the first one to leap out the back of the truck. Jonathan anticipates it and follows just a few steps behind.
The vine-tangled radio station looms before them. Steve gets inside first; Jonathan hears him calling Dustin’s name over and over. When he enters, he doesn’t even need to look to know Dustin isn’t there. He can read it in the way Steve’s standing by the booth, back to him, a line of tension.
“We’re close,” Jonathan says. “Just a short climb. I’ll race you.”
Steve sniffs. He turns, his face obscured in the dark. “Just say you wanna lose again, Byers,” he says, sudden bravado; Jonathan gets the feeling it’s the last piece he has left.
The soup is burning hot in some places, cold in others. Steve doesn’t bother putting it back in the microwave; he’s only eating because he has to. The soup comes with a grilled cheese too, so tasteless that it was hardly worth the trouble of Murray smuggling it in.
At least the act of eating, however mechanical, forces him to slow down just a little. He’s still not absorbed everything, not even close.
Remembers walking back to the Squawk in a daze, clinging to the journal like it was a life raft, only setting it down when he saw Max, inexplicably awake. Kneeling down in front of her, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing—thinking that if this can happen, then surely everything else is nothing, it should be—
“I never saw Dustin,” Max told him, frowning hard as if to keep her face from doing anything else. “Holly didn’t mention him.”
Steve drops his spoon into the now empty bowl. He can’t stomach the rest of the grilled cheese, catches Erica’s eye as she comes in. “Want some?”
She gives him a look of such disgust that he laughs, the sound slightly raw. She sits next to him, and he starts flicking through the journal again, placing it between them.
“Hey, Erica, can you make any sense of this?” She jokes about whether he’s forgotten she’s in middle school to which he says, deliberately light, “Yeah, so? Most of the time it’s you kids explaining all this shit to everyone else.”
They don’t mention what’s so obviously missing. He’d give anything, Steve thinks, to hear one of Dustin’s smart-ass comments again.
“Slow down,” Erica says. Steve stops at a page, but after a moment she shakes her head, urging him on. “It’s hard, his writing’s not usually so…”
“I know,” Steve says. He tries not to think of Dustin’s hands shaking.
“Wait, go back. There.” Eric’s points at the page, full of cramped words from a stranger. There’s a diagram, almost in the shape of an hourglass. “In class, we just…” She looks up. “I know who can help.”
—
When Steve takes Erica out to the van, Murray’s already in the driver’s seat, still managing to wave obnoxiously despite his whiplash.
“Thought I’d tag along in case teacher dearest doesn’t cooperate.”
“What’re you gonna do, threaten him?” Erica asks, like she highly doubts Murray is capable of such a thing.
“I have a way with words.”
“Sure, Bald Eagle,” Steve says flatly.
Murray laughs, gives him a quick side-glance before starting the engine. Steve has the feeling that he’s being supervised, and he’s on the way to being offended by it before he starts wondering whether it’s justified. He recalls Jonathan leading him out of The Upside Down. If I was alone in there, Steve thinks, would I have stayed? Would that have even helped?
“So,” Murray says conversationally, “you’re Steve Harrington, huh?”
Steve shakes his head in disbelief. “We’ve met before.”
“Yup,” Murray concedes. “Though these are slightly different circumstances than being your Gatorade supplier.”
“Jesus, did Nancy put you up to this? Great talk, but I don’t need a distraction.”
“Aren’t you just a charmer?”
The rebuff works, for a little while: the only time Murray talks is when he’s asking Erica for directions.
They pull up to the house and let Erica out first, give her time to knock and ease into her planned speech.
“She’s giving the signal already,” Steve says, watching as Erica clenches and unclenches her hand behind her back, Help.
“I guess what I’ve been trying to say,” Murray starts up again, seemingly undeterred by Steve slamming the van door on his way out, “is that I get it.”
Steve scoffs. “Oh, yeah? Get what?”
Murray gives him a look, eyes sharp, and Steve’s reminded that however weird this guy is, there’s a reason he’s not been caught smuggling contraband into Hawkins.
“Well, I figured if I could’ve saved my sister from cancer,” he says, still upbeat, like he’s just saying that the sky is blue, “I would’ve done anything. Anything,” he repeats, journalistic intensity, like he already knows what Steve could have done; what he still might do.
—
“—Dustin is missing,” Erica stresses. It’s clearly not the first time she’s said it.
“Erica, I’m—” Mr Clarke falls silent. He looks dubiously at Murray, but when his eyes land on Steve, there’s a flicker of recognition. He turns back to Erica, sighs, and opens the door wider. “Come in.”
Steve stands uselessly in the hall. There’s something about seeing Mr Clarke like this, in person, that makes everything hit him all over again: Dustin is gone.
Mr Clarke looks him directly in the eye, a teacher’s authority. “Does his mother know?” he asks.
A pause. Murray steps forward with his hands up, conciliatory. “Why don’t we—”
Mr Clarke reaches for the phone.
“No,” Steve manages. “Please.”
Mr Clarke’s hand stills.
—
“There you are,” Eddie says from somewhere deep in the dark. He sounds relieved. Dustin doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t want to see him; it’s not real. “You’ve gotta think about this, man. Why would a dragon just let you into its lair?”
An old echo: Dustin’s own words, when Mike was about to make a disastrous move during Hellfire.
“I know,” Dustin whispers. “I figured it out already. I don’t need—” His voice breaks. “Please. Please just go away.”
Silence. Dustin eventually opens his eyes, finds nothing but the attic. He hugs his knees to his chest.
A sudden flash of something, like lightning. He looks up. Holly Wheeler. Just a glimpse of her, terrified, looking like she’s just been crying—fading in and out as if she’s on a TV screen filled with static. Her eyes land on Dustin, widening in shock.
“Make a door,” she begs, and she’s gone.
—
Steve thunders back up from the basement. He’s got the diagrams Erica and Mr Clarke made in his head, Nancy and Jonathan debating whether Murray could risk a last-ditch run for more supplies. He checks outside: Max is there, talking with Vickie and Lucas.
One last scan of the place. He turns, spots the ‘On Air’ sign, illuminated.
“Shit. Robin, did we leave the—?”
The sign flickers. And he hears it, barely there, like it’s drifting in from some far-off storm. Someone is crying.
Steve runs into the booth. He lunges for the microphone, heart in his throat. “Dustin? Dustin, can you hear me? Dustin!”
The sound comes through the speakers now—louder, if occasionally muffled by bouts of static.
“I’m here,” Steve says helplessly; he isn’t, he isn’t.
“I messed up,” Dustin’s saying, “S-Steve, I—I was wrong, I was—”
“Hey, no, it’s—it’s gonna be okay,” Steve says, momentarily flooded with relief. He can hear me. “We’ve got a plan, we’re gonna get you—”
“No! No, don’t, please—”
“Dustin, hey! Dustin, it’s okay, I’m gonna come and—”
“Stop! I-if you do this,” Dustin sobs, “you’re gonna die, you’re all gonna die.”
“No-one’s gonna—”
“Just listen! He wanted—he wanted you to find everything, so you’d—Steve, he’s going to kill you.”
“No, he won’t,” Steve says. A sudden wave of calm; there is nothing, he thinks, that can happen to him that could possibly be worse than—
“No?” Dustin parrots, mocking, still so afraid. “You’re just gonna—Why would you do—”
“There’s not another option here, Dustin. There’s no way I’m just gonna—”
“Even when you know it’s a trap?” Dustin says, voice shaking but now laden with condescension. “That’s—that’s so fucking stupid.”
A distant, rational part of Steve knows that Dustin is terrified, but it’s suddenly too easy to snap back, months of muscle memory; too easy to let this win over fear.
“Yeah, so stupid,” he says bitterly; it’s already too late to take back what will follow. “Only Eddie can do that, right?”
“Shut up!” Dustin screams. The lights blink rapidly. “Shut up!”
Everything turns off at once, leaving Steve in darkness.
“No,” he says again. The return of that chill, rising panic. “No, wait—shit, shit. I’m sorry,” he says, clutching the microphone. “Dustin, please, I’m—We’ll come and get you, just—just hide, okay? Hide right in here. I’ll find you, you hear me? I’ll—”
He can’t hear anything. His vision goes white. He comes back to the sound of Robin’s voice, wavering. “Steve.”
His hands sting. A gouge in the wall. The tower of tapes has been knocked over. Smashed records litter the floor.
Robin is standing in the doorway. The bruise on her cheekbone somehow looks worse with the lights off. She grabs hold of him, rubs her hands up and down his arms. He’s shaking. Steve suddenly wants to apologise to her, but the words get stuck in his throat. He worries that if he does manage to make a sound, he might never stop.
“We’ll find him,” Robin says.
It’s not her fault, Steve thinks, how it comes out. Like a platitude rather than something certain.
—
Steve is the first one to leap out the back of the truck. Jonathan anticipates it and follows just a few steps behind.
The vine-tangled radio station looms before them. Steve gets inside first; Jonathan hears him calling Dustin’s name over and over. When he enters, he doesn’t even need to look to know Dustin isn’t there. He can read it in the way Steve’s standing by the booth, back to him, a line of tension.
“We’re close,” Jonathan says. “Just a short climb. I’ll race you.”
Steve sniffs. He turns, his face obscured in the dark. “Just say you wanna lose again, Byers,” he says, sudden bravado; Jonathan gets the feeling it’s the last piece he has left.
ao3
Written for @steddiemicrofic March 2026 prompt, “short,” 321 words. Rated G, Missing Scene, season 5, epilogue, after Dustin’s speech, canonical character death
The memory hits him sometime during the confetti-laden joy after Dustin’s graduation speech, like maybe the cheers, the background hum of the speakers have knocked it loose; Steve’s back in the school office, and he can’t remember the specifics of why he’s there, a sick note, a rare instruction from his parents, he wishes he could pin it down. He turns, and Eddie Munson’s being chewed out by Principal Higgins in the hallway. His face is a parody of seriousness, nodding gravely at every word Higgins says, and Steve finds himself having to hide a smile, ducking behind the open door.
“Are you finding this amusing, Munson?”
“No, sir,” Eddie says, and maybe Steve’s kidding himself, but he thinks he can hear the trace of something in the words, another hidden smile. That maybe Eddie’s seen him.
He doesn’t ask; he never gets to ask.
Dustin’s blinking like it’s just the sun in his eyes. Steve knows better.
“You think he would’ve liked it?” Dustin asks. He smiles like it’s the only thing keeping him from crying.
(“You better have a speech planned,” Steve tells Eddie. He’s in The Upside Down, mid-walk through the woods. “You’ve had plenty of time to write one.” It already feels easy to joke together, like he’s learning a rhythm he’s secretly known all along.
“Oh, absolutely,” Eddie says, theatrical tap at the side of his head. “Got it all up here.”
“Yeah,” Steve says instantly. He ruffles Dustin’s hair, holds him tight. “Yeah, bud, he’d—”
A welling emotion cuts short all he might’ve said. He figures from the way Dustin hugs him back that the kid might get it, just a little. Maybe Steve will explain it to him. He’ll find the words.
When Dustin lets go he allows Steve the illusion of pretending that there’s a stray piece of confetti in his eyes.
They turn into Roane Hill Cemetery at breakneck speed. “Jesus, where the hell is this thing going?” Steve mutters under his breath. Then, louder, he says, “Jonathan, I should keep going this way, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan says, but there’s the slightest hesitation before he answers, a fraction of a second too long.
“Talk to me, Byers,” Steve says urgently. They can’t afford to mess up, not now.
“I can’t—I can’t hear.”
“What d’you mean, you can’t—”
“What I said! I can’t hear the signal, there’s—”
“Give me the headphones,” Steve says immediately.
“You’re driving!”
“Then listen harder! We can’t let it get away, this is—”
“Steve,” Nancy says, frantic, but Steve barely hears her.
“Byers, please, which way am I going?”
“I don’t know!”
“Great, that’s just—”
“Steve,” Nancy repeats, and Steve suddenly hears the warning in it, his gut screams stop, “watch out!”
The squeal of brakes, burning rubber. Steve throws his arm across the passenger seat without thinking and hits empty air. His seatbelt cuts into his shoulder; he blinks, not understanding yet what he’s seeing, all he knows is: “That was close. Shit.” He looks over his shoulder, assessing. Nancy and Jonathan don’t seem hurt, just catching their breath. “You guys okay?”
“We’re okay,” Jonathan says. He stares at the view. “What the hell…?”
They get out of the car as one. Right in front of them, a giant wall, a black mass of… Steve’s got no idea. It’s like nothing he’s seen before, which is saying something.
“Jesus.” He pats the hood of the car, a silent thank you. If he hadn’t braked at the exact moment he did…
“I’m sorry.” Jonathan’s reaching into the back seat of the car, headphones on. He shakes his head and takes the headphones off again. “I can’t hear the tag, it’s just…” He sighs in frustration. “It’s kinda like back at the Squawk, just a bunch of static or—”
“Interference,” Steve finishes, resigned. “It’s okay, man. Not your fault.” He cranes his neck up to try and take in the wall in its entirety—does it even end? “God, how far does this—? You think this could be, like, blocking the signal?”
Jonathan shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know.”
“So we drive away from it,” Nancy says.
But what if the kids are behind it? Steve doesn’t voice the thought; it’s too awful to consider. They’re here, just within reach. They have to be.
“We drive,” Nancy repeats, like she’s convincing herself. “The demo has to slow down eventually. We’ll find the signal again and…”
If Dustin was here, he’d say something like, That method isn’t scientifically sound. The loss threatens to strike Steve all over again; he turns sharply, like he can outrun it so long as he keeps moving.
“We should check the church before we go, right?” He grabs a flashlight from the car without waiting for an answer. “Just in case.”
The flashlight’s beam cuts through the dark of the church. Steve sweeps across the pews, methodical. “Dustin? Holly?” His voice just echoes back. Really, he’d known before taking one step inside that the church would be empty, but he just—
He sighs at the altar. A joke on his tongue as he turns, forcing a smile, You think we should pray? But the words die at the sight of Nancy on the floor, mid-crawl between pews. With a sickening jolt, Steve understands what she’s doing: trying to see the church through her sister’s eyes. Places where she’d be small enough to hide.
Another beam of light from the door, holding steady. “They’re not here,” Jonathan says, firm. A kindness.
Steve wonders what would happen if it hadn’t been said, if Jonathan wasn’t here. Maybe he’d never leave the church; he pictures him and Nancy stuck searching for the rest of their lives, convinced that every shadow could be…
“God, I wanted them to be there,” Nancy says in the car, a brittle laugh, like she’s being ridiculous. The same dead hope sits heavy in Steve’s chest.
He drives slowly. It reminds him of the careful pace he adopts when reaching the school parking lot, in case kids walk out right in front of the car without looking. It’s been well over a year since Dustin last accepted a ride to school.
“Wait,” Jonathan says eventually.
Steve stalls. “The tag?” he says, a clash of renewed hope and anxiety.
“No, I don’t—Look.”
The decibel screen is going haywire. Numbers leaping then falling, then jumping back up, up, up, well past ninety—
Steve kills the engine right as Jonathan turns everything else off. But there’s nothing. No snarl of a demogorgon, just the rumble of thunder and lightning.
Frowning, Jonathan gets out of the car. He returns almost immediately. Steve watches him share a look with Nancy, a shadow passing between them.
“We’re near Hawkins Lab,” Jonathan says.
Steve leaves the key in the ignition. They could need a quick getaway.
—
Jonathan’s hand slips on the railing. He’s only on the first step, but his stomach drops suddenly, as if he’s somehow fallen down a whole flight instead. It takes him a second to register what’s happening: not just the Lab shaking, but the entire Upside Down. He clings to the railing, finds Nancy doing the same, Steve bracing against the wall.
“It’s like before,” Steve says, looking at Nancy. “Last year.”
“What would you call that, a mini shake and quake?” Jonathan asks.
Steve’s laugh seems overly loud as the building stills.
“That felt worse than last time,” Nancy says. She’s still gripping the railing with one hand. “It’s like the place is breaking apart.”
Steve moves his flashlight so it illuminates the stairs then the floor behind them, back and forth. “You wanna split up, cover more ground?”
“No,” Jonathan says simultaneously with Nancy.
Steve laughs again. “Yeah, me neither. Okay, we’ll start from the bottom and work our way up. That makes sense, right?”
“Right,” Jonathan echoes, but it’s instantly clear that Steve’s not waiting for an answer; he forges ahead like he can’t help himself, propelled by an urgency he can’t shake.
“Steve, be careful,” Nancy calls. “Check before you go round corners!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll scream if a demo comes, give you some warning.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Jonathan calls back before Nancy can reply. “Just let him,” he tells her in an undertone.
An old, hazy memory, a childhood fear of the dark: checking rooms in the house, always in front of Will even though his heart was pounding, he had to go first, that was his job.
Nancy stays close but calls Steve’s name every so often, relaxing minutely when he answers. Her eyebrows are drawn, face sharp and tired. It’s like they’re rediscovering how to be around each other, what fear looks like on them all. Jonathan’s half convinced that the next turn he takes will find him back in the living room, the three of them staring at his mom’s flashing Christmas lights.
Steve’s voice grows fainter. Jonathan takes on the mantle of calling his name, chest tight when he’s met with silence. So much can happen in the space of one second.
Beside him, Nancy swears. They move together, faster—no more caution, no checking around corners. The movement of Jonathan’s flashlight becomes erratic as he runs, seeing briefly lit up fragments as if from the bulb of an old camera, constant, disorientating. The floor, the wall, the ceiling, and then another turn, a rainbow.
Jonathan steadies his flashlight as Steve emerges from somewhere deep inside the room. He trips in his rush over to them. A Rubik’s cube goes scattering across the floor.
There’s a journal in Steve’s hands. His knuckles are white.
“He was here,” Steve says. A desperate smile—he looks torn, Jonathan thinks, between laughing or crying. “Dustin was here.”
—
They’re almost at the roof when they hear a scream. It travels slowly, like the ripples of a wave, before the whole realisation comes crashing over them. It hits Nancy first; Steve sees it happen. She goes so still, so pale. Eyes wide with a horror he wishes he didn’t recognise.
“Holly,” she whispers, and she’s flying up the stairs, Steve and Jonathan only a breath behind her.
Rushing past strange melted floors, out into the air, the scream now piercing. Holly is falling through the sky. Steve drops the journal, his arms outstretched on instinct, but he already knows it’s no good, he’s too slow; there’s nothing they can do, nothing to stop the deadly impact of her skull cracking on the roof.
She’s still falling, still screaming, and he’s hit with an image of a little girl hiding from him at the top of stairs. “She’s shy,” Nancy says, smiling, and then it’s Christmas Eve and Holly’s showing him a picture she made, a hand drawn snowy scene. “You drew this? No way,” Steve tells her like he’s found some rare piece at an art auction, and she giggles.
Her scream, so close.
“Nance, don’t look,” he wants to say, but he knows she will—knows that if it was him, he couldn’t possibly turn away, he’d have to know.
He keeps looking; someone else has to carry this, he thinks, it can’t just be—
But the final terrible sight doesn’t come. Abruptly, Holly is frozen mid-air. Painful sobs.
“Nancy,” she cries, “Nancy, please! Please help me, h-help, Nancy!”
“I’ve got you,” Nancy says, and Steve knows that it’s not even a lie, no matter how impossible it seems; her sister needs her, so she’ll come. Of course she will. “I’m coming, I’m coming, Holly, just hold on!”
“Jesus,” Jonathan says. It’s only then that Steve notices Nancy’s right at the edge of the roof, reaching desperately. “Nancy, don’t, you’re gonna—”
In a blink, Holly is gone: tearing back up to the heavens, pulled by some unseen force.
Nancy makes a noise Steve never wants to hear again. Her hand swipes the air, fingers curling around nothing.
Several things happen at once. Steve has an instant of wondering why Nancy is swaying when he feels it too: the world shaking again, much worse than before. He doesn’t brace in time—as he crashes to the floor, sees a blur of Nancy teetering over the edge, hears Jonathan scream.
She’s dead, Steve thinks. It’s not taken hold yet, the thought just cold, heavy, sinking.
The tremors don’t stop. He feels his body start to slip, like even the roof is tilting. Scrabbles for something to grab onto and hears—
“Don’t do that,” Jonathan’s saying, face white. He’s got an arm across Nancy’s chest, rigid; he must’ve pulled her back from the edge just in time.
Another violent shake sends Steve further away from them, but his fear at being flung off the roof is quickly replaced with another one. His hands. His hands are empty. The journal. Dustin’s—
He looks around wildly, catches a glimpse of paper and crawls toward it as fast as he can. Holds the journal close with overwhelming relief. Notes that he can barely comprehend the enormity of, but scrawled across them, unmistakeable: Dustin’s handwriting. Proof that he had been here, that he was breathing.
The worst tremor yet. Steve pins the journal down with his whole body.
And then, a sense of something, something vast, looming over him. He dares a glance up: flashes of electric blue, like forked lightning. Thinks of the page he’d turned to halfway up the stairs, a drawing of some kind of circle, Dustin’s words over the top, messy, urgent: DON’T TOUCH.
“Steve! Steve, come on!”
Jonathan. Steve turns his head. A red tear right at the roof’s exit—thin, fragile, barely a Gate at all. Steve doesn’t see an image of the Lab through it, but grass, a tower. The Squawk.
Jonathan is half dragging Nancy through. And then he hovers in between, one foot in each place. He’s staring at Steve. He’s scared, Steve realises. He doesn’t have time to work out why.
“Steve,” Jonathan repeats. He holds out his hand. “Come on.”
Steve doesn’t move.
“He’s not here,” Jonathan says. “He was, and now he’s not, okay?” He sounds like he’s pleading. “We’l’ll figure it out but we need to go, we need to go now.”
Steve stands. Presses the journal fiercely to his chest. He takes Jonathan’s hand.
—
Dustin’s head swims. Dark. Dust, floorboards. Cold. The attic. But no, that doesn’t… He was in the middle of… Why can’t he—?
Vision blurred. Henry Creel’s face twisting into an ugly smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You did everything perfectly.”
They turn into Roane Hill Cemetery at breakneck speed. “Jesus, where the hell is this thing going?” Steve mutters under his breath. Then, louder, he says, “Jonathan, I should keep going this way, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan says, but there’s the slightest hesitation before he answers, a fraction of a second too long.
“Talk to me, Byers,” Steve says urgently. They can’t afford to mess up, not now.
“I can’t—I can’t hear.”
“What d’you mean, you can’t—”
“What I said! I can’t hear the signal, there’s—”
“Give me the headphones,” Steve says immediately.
“You’re driving!”
“Then listen harder! We can’t let it get away, this is—”
“Steve,” Nancy says, frantic, but Steve barely hears her.
“Byers, please, which way am I going?”
“I don’t know!”
“Great, that’s just—”
“Steve,” Nancy repeats, and Steve suddenly hears the warning in it, his gut screams stop, “watch out!”
The squeal of brakes, burning rubber. Steve throws his arm across the passenger seat without thinking and hits empty air. His seatbelt cuts into his shoulder; he blinks, not understanding yet what he’s seeing, all he knows is: “That was close. Shit.” He looks over his shoulder, assessing. Nancy and Jonathan don’t seem hurt, just catching their breath. “You guys okay?”
“We’re okay,” Jonathan says. He stares at the view. “What the hell…?”
They get out of the car as one. Right in front of them, a giant wall, a black mass of… Steve’s got no idea. It’s like nothing he’s seen before, which is saying something.
“Jesus.” He pats the hood of the car, a silent thank you. If he hadn’t braked at the exact moment he did…
“I’m sorry.” Jonathan’s reaching into the back seat of the car, headphones on. He shakes his head and takes the headphones off again. “I can’t hear the tag, it’s just…” He sighs in frustration. “It’s kinda like back at the Squawk, just a bunch of static or—”
“Interference,” Steve finishes, resigned. “It’s okay, man. Not your fault.” He cranes his neck up to try and take in the wall in its entirety—does it even end? “God, how far does this—? You think this could be, like, blocking the signal?”
Jonathan shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know.”
“So we drive away from it,” Nancy says.
But what if the kids are behind it? Steve doesn’t voice the thought; it’s too awful to consider. They’re here, just within reach. They have to be.
“We drive,” Nancy repeats, like she’s convincing herself. “The demo has to slow down eventually. We’ll find the signal again and…”
If Dustin was here, he’d say something like, That method isn’t scientifically sound. The loss threatens to strike Steve all over again; he turns sharply, like he can outrun it so long as he keeps moving.
“We should check the church before we go, right?” He grabs a flashlight from the car without waiting for an answer. “Just in case.”
The flashlight’s beam cuts through the dark of the church. Steve sweeps across the pews, methodical. “Dustin? Holly?” His voice just echoes back. Really, he’d known before taking one step inside that the church would be empty, but he just—
He sighs at the altar. A joke on his tongue as he turns, forcing a smile, You think we should pray? But the words die at the sight of Nancy on the floor, mid-crawl between pews. With a sickening jolt, Steve understands what she’s doing: trying to see the church through her sister’s eyes. Places where she’d be small enough to hide.
Another beam of light from the door, holding steady. “They’re not here,” Jonathan says, firm. A kindness.
Steve wonders what would happen if it hadn’t been said, if Jonathan wasn’t here. Maybe he’d never leave the church; he pictures himself and Nancy stuck searching for the rest of their lives, convinced that every shadow could be…
“God, I wanted them to be there,” Nancy says in the car, a brittle laugh, like she’s being ridiculous. The same dead hope sits heavy in Steve’s chest.
He drives slowly. It reminds him of the careful pace he adopts when reaching the school parking lot, in case kids walk out right in front of the car without looking. It’s been well over a year since Dustin last accepted a ride to school.
“Wait,” Jonathan says eventually.
Steve stalls. “The tag?” he says, a clash of renewed hope and anxiety.
“No, I don’t—Look.”
The decibel screen is going haywire. Numbers leaping then falling, then jumping back up, up, up, well past ninety—
Steve kills the engine right as Jonathan turns everything else off. But there’s nothing. No snarl of a demogorgon, just the rumble of thunder and lightning.
Frowning, Jonathan gets out of the car. He returns almost immediately. Steve watches him share a look with Nancy, a shadow passing between them.
“We’re near Hawkins Lab,” Jonathan says.
Steve leaves the key in the ignition. They could need a quick getaway.
—
Jonathan’s hand slips on the railing. He’s only on the first step, but his stomach drops suddenly, as if he’s somehow fallen down a whole flight instead. It takes him a second to register what’s happening: not just the Lab shaking, but the entire Upside Down. He clings to the railing, finds Nancy doing the same, Steve bracing against the wall.
“It’s like before,” Steve says, looking at Nancy. “Last year.”
“What would you call that, a mini shake and quake?” Jonathan asks.
Steve’s laugh seems overly loud as the building stills.
“That felt worse than last time,” Nancy says. She’s still gripping the railing with one hand. “It’s like the place is breaking apart.”
Steve moves his flashlight so it illuminates the stairs then the floor behind them, back and forth. “You wanna split up, cover more ground?”
“No,” Jonathan says simultaneously with Nancy.
Steve laughs again. “Yeah, me neither. Okay, we’ll start from the bottom and work our way up. That makes sense, right?”
“Right,” Jonathan echoes, but it’s instantly clear that Steve’s not waiting for an answer; he forges ahead like he can’t help himself, propelled by an urgency he can’t shake.
“Steve, be careful,” Nancy calls. “Check before you go round corners!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll scream if a demo comes, give you some warning.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Jonathan calls back before Nancy can reply. “Just let him,” he tells her in an undertone.
An old, hazy memory, a childhood fear of the dark: checking rooms in the house, always in front of Will even though his heart was pounding, he had to go first, that was his job.
Nancy stays close but calls Steve’s name every so often, relaxing minutely when he answers. Her eyebrows are drawn, face sharp and tired. It’s like they’re rediscovering how to be around each other, what fear looks like on them all. Jonathan’s half convinced that the next turn he takes will find him back in the living room, the three of them staring at his mom’s flashing Christmas lights.
Steve’s voice grows fainter. Jonathan takes on the mantle of calling his name, chest tight when he’s met with silence. So much can happen in the space of one second.
Beside him, Nancy swears. They move together, faster—no more caution, no checking around corners. The movement of Jonathan’s flashlight becomes erratic as he runs, seeing briefly lit up fragments as if from the bulb of an old camera, constant, disorientating. The floor, the wall, the ceiling, and then another turn, a rainbow.
Jonathan steadies his flashlight as Steve emerges from somewhere deep inside the room. He trips in his rush over to them. A Rubik’s cube goes scattering across the floor.
There’s a journal in Steve’s hands. His knuckles are white.
“He was here,” Steve says. A desperate smile—he looks torn, Jonathan thinks, between laughing or crying. “Dustin was here.”
—
They’re almost at the roof when they hear a scream. It travels slowly, like the ripples of a wave, before the whole realisation comes crashing over them. It hits Nancy first; Steve sees it happen. She goes so still, so pale. Eyes wide with a horror he wishes he didn’t recognise.
“Holly,” she whispers, and she’s flying up the stairs, Steve and Jonathan only a breath behind her.
Rushing past strange melted floors, out into the air, the scream now piercing. Holly is falling through the sky. Steve drops the journal, his arms outstretched on instinct, but he already knows it’s no good, he’s too slow; there’s nothing they can do, nothing to stop the deadly impact of her skull cracking on the roof.
She’s still falling, still screaming, and he’s hit with an image of a little girl hiding from him at the top of the stairs. “She’s shy,” Nancy says, smiling, and then it’s Christmas Eve and Holly’s showing him a picture she made, a hand drawn snowy scene. “You drew this? No way,” Steve tells her like he’s found some rare piece at an art auction, and she giggles.
Her scream, so close.
“Nance, don’t look,” he wants to say, but he knows she will—knows that if it was him, he couldn’t possibly turn away, he’d have to know.
He keeps looking; someone else has to carry this, he thinks, it can’t just be—
But the final terrible sight doesn’t come. Abruptly, Holly is frozen mid-air. Painful sobs.
“Nancy,” she cries, “Nancy, please! Please help me, h-help, Nancy!”
“I’ve got you,” Nancy says, and Steve knows that it’s not even a lie, no matter how impossible it seems; her sister needs her, so she’ll come. Of course she will. “I’m coming, I’m coming, Holly, just hold on!”
“Jesus,” Jonathan says. It’s only then that Steve notices Nancy’s right at the edge of the roof, reaching desperately. “Nancy, don’t, you’re gonna—”
In a blink, Holly is gone: tearing back up to the heavens, pulled by some unseen force.
Nancy makes a noise Steve never wants to hear again. Her hand swipes the air, fingers curling around nothing.
Several things happen at once. Steve has an instant of wondering why Nancy is swaying when he feels it too: the world shaking again, much worse than before. He doesn’t brace in time—as he crashes to the floor, sees a blur of Nancy teetering over the edge, hears Jonathan scream.
She’s dead, Steve thinks. It’s not taken hold yet, the thought just cold, heavy, sinking.
The tremors don’t stop. He feels his body start to slip, like even the roof is tilting. Scrabbles for something to grab onto and hears—
“Don’t do that,” Jonathan’s saying, face white. He’s got an arm across Nancy’s chest, rigid; he must’ve pulled her back from the edge just in time.
Another violent shake sends Steve further away from them, but his fear at being flung off the roof is quickly replaced with another one. His hands. His hands are empty. The journal. Dustin’s—
He looks around wildly, catches a glimpse of paper and crawls toward it as fast as he can. Holds the journal close with overwhelming relief. Notes that he can barely comprehend the enormity of, but scrawled across them, unmistakeable: Dustin’s handwriting. Proof that he had been here, that he was breathing.
The worst tremor yet. Steve pins the journal down with his whole body.
And then, a sense of something, something vast, looming over him. He dares a glance up: flashes of electric blue, like forked lightning. Thinks of the page he’d turned to halfway up the stairs, a drawing of some kind of circle, Dustin’s words over the top, messy, urgent: DON’T TOUCH.
“Steve! Steve, come on!”
Jonathan. Steve turns his head. A red tear right at the roof’s exit—thin, fragile, barely a Gate at all. Steve doesn’t see an image of the Lab through it, but grass, a tower. The Squawk.
Jonathan is half dragging Nancy through. And then he hovers in between, one foot in each place. He’s staring at Steve. He’s scared, Steve realises. He doesn’t have time to work out why.
“Steve,” Jonathan repeats. He holds out his hand. “Come on.”
Steve doesn’t move.
“He’s not here,” Jonathan says. “He was, and now he’s not, okay?” He sounds like he’s pleading. “We’l’ll figure it out but we need to go, we need to go now.”
Steve stands. Presses the journal fiercely to his chest. He takes Jonathan’s hand.
—
Dustin’s head swims. Dark. Dust, floorboards. Cold. The attic. But no, that doesn’t… He was in the middle of… Why can’t he—?
Vision blurred. Henry Creel’s face twisting into an ugly smile. “Don’t worry,” he says. “You did everything perfectly.”
Tags:
POV Dustin Henderson, Pre-Steve Harrington/Eddie Munson, Found Family, Protective Dustin Henderson, Protective Eddie Munson, Protective Steve Harrington, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Steve Harrington Has PTSD, Panic Attacks, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hopeful Ending, Trauma, Healing, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Post-Season/Series 04, Post-Canon, Recovery, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Future Fic
Summary:
He thinks about the relief in Eddie’s voice when he said he had a hunch about Steve’s whereabouts, like Dustin is the chosen one for understanding what makes Steve tick. Eddie’s joked about it before; he’d called it “sibling telepathy” when Dustin had silently communicated his popcorn order at the movies, and he’d nudged Steve in the ribs when Steve’s nose wrinkled meaning Gross, dude. Then Steve had huffed a laugh, nudging Dustin back. Okay, okay. I’ll pay for it, you little shit.
But Eddie gets Steve, too, Dustin thinks; that’s why he called him. And yeah, it’s different than the way Dustin understands Steve, but it’s significant enough for Eddie to make the cut of Steve Harrington Interpreters in Dustin’s mind.
Thanks for the rec!
Know a fic that deserves extra love? Submit through our asks! Suggest challenges, nominate an author for the writer's spotlight, and vote on our next theme here.
In the Squawk’s basement, Steve sits next to Jonathan on the couch.
“When your mom, um…” He stops, picking a thread at the knee of his jeans. A clean pair, faded and worn.
“Yeah?” Jonathan prompts.
“When she knew Will was missing,” Steve continues, looking determinedly at a random spot on the wall, “she’d never stop looking, right?”
It’s not really a question. Jonathan answers anyway. “Never.”
Steve gives a half nod and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Okay,” he mutters, then goes back upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. The entrance to the basement is left slightly open, and Jonathan tries not to overhear as Steve uses the phone. Occasional words drift down: “Hi, Claudia… Sorry I haven’t… Yeah, he’s with us… Just needed some…”
He’s good at it, knowing exactly what tone to strike—reassuring, warm. If Jonathan didn’t know any better, he’d never suspect that it was a front.
He hears Steve head back down. When he glances over, Steve’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking like he might be sick.
“Have you slept yet?”
Steve shakes his head. “Could you?” It comes out accusatory, and he gives an apologetic wince like a reflex.
“Fair point,” Jonathan concedes quietly and pushes down a flood of memories: November ‘83, crying himself to sleep. “But you need to be good to drive later.”
That gets Steve moving back over to the couch, at least. “Finally admitting that I’m the better driver, Byers?”
“Will inflating your ego help you sleep?”
“Oh, yeah,” Steve says with a weak smile. “Works every time.”
Jonathan stands and tosses him the blanket from the foot of the couch. Steve pauses, his hand clenching around the fabric for a moment; he sighs roughly and lies down.
Jonathan lingers for ten minutes or so, acting like he’s double checking the inventory notes, the amount of barbed wire. He waits until Steve’s breathing goes deep: actual sleep, no longer faking it.
—
Dustin wakes all at once; he’s not even groggy, just sharp, unnatural awareness. His clothes have changed, cleaner, brighter. And the style of his shirt is different: more formal, older somehow, as if Hellfire Club belongs to another time.
A tightness just beneath his chest. He lifts his shirt and finds a line of stitches, clean and precise. For some reason it’s the neatness that makes his stomach turn.
He sits up. Dark floorboards, dust. An attic.
The door’s been left ajar. Dustin creeps over to it on tiptoe. One step down, another, another. Eventually he sees a glow on the wall, shadows cast from flickering candlelight. He thinks inexplicably of Drama Club. Exit stage left.
—
When Steve emerges from the basement, still looking half caught in sleep, Jonathan says, as lightly as he can, “You’re not gonna believe this.” He knows it’s a risk even trying to make a joke.
But Steve just rubs his eyes and says, “What?” through a yawn.
Jonathan unfolds the sheets of paper he’s found. They must’ve been tucked into the back of the manual, slipped out in their rush to fix the tower. “He does have a handbook.”
Looking wide awake now, Steve glances at the papers. For a second, Jonathan wonders whether he’s done the right thing, but when Steve spots Dustin’s handwriting, he actually smiles.
“That little shit,” he says. He points at one corner of a page. “Look at this, he’s got diagrams.” He takes the papers and drifts over to the window. It’s like reality is settling back in with every step, his shoulders tightening. He squints into the distance. “What’s Nancy doing?”
“Seeing if the telemetry tag will survive getting fired out of a gun.”
She’d crashed earlier than Steve, back when they took turns to use the shower at the radio station. Steve had insisted she go first, and maybe a few years ago Jonathan would’ve cynically put it down to some misplaced chivalry. Now he could only see how they were all barely clinging on to something normal. So Nancy had showered, and when she came out, the bathroom smelled freshly clean. Once Steve had finished showering, the smell was even stronger. Jonathan pictured them spraying cleaner, scrubbing—trying to shield each other from something they’d already seen.
When Nancy woke it was with a glint in her eye. As she explained her plan to Jonathan, she’d added mildly, “And if Murray says no, I’m gonna kill him.”
“I kinda wish you hadn’t told me that,” Jonathan said. “I want an alibi.”
A sudden crack: the gun being fired. Both Steve and Jonathan jump.
Steve sighs, restless. “I can’t just sit here, man.”
“Okay.” Jonathan opens the door. “C’mon.”
They head outside, start emptying the van in preparation for tonight. Jonathan’s in the middle of using the drill to unscrew some shelves when he catches Steve shaking his head, saying something.
Jonathan turns the drill off. “Huh?”
“I said it’s not gonna be fast enough. No matter how much crap we get rid of.” Steve’s frowning, looking down at Dustin’s notes. “You know this van once stalled on Pickett Road? Dustin gave me so much shit for it, like it was my—” He breaks off, points at one paragraph, keeps tapping, a-ha. “And it says here that tracker thingy can be put on any…” He looks up to the sky for a second, sighs. “Gimme that.”
Jonathan hands him the drill with increasing bewilderment. “Um, what exactly are you—?”
Steve’s already jumped out the back of the van, crossing the grass with purpose. “We’ve gotta be fast, right?” he calls over his shoulder.
Jonathan watches in utter silence as Steve leaps onto the Beamer and, without so much as a flinch, drills a hole into the roof.
—
The table is set like there’s about to be some fancy dinner. Dustin sits down, looks at the gleaming silverware, and is hit suddenly with the memory of setting the table at Christmas, the thought that he won’t get to do that ever again. He’s never gonna see his mom—
“You made this much more difficult than it needed to be,” comes a voice from the head of the table. It’s a man in a brown three-piece suit. Dustin tries not to look at him. “But you’ll listen now,” Henry Creel continues. “You’ll go back up to the attic and stay there.”
Dustin thinks of Steve staring down Billy. He sets his jaw. “Oh, yeah? Why?”
Henry is smiling. “If you don’t,” he says, adjusting a knife by one increment, “I will kill Holly Wheeler, and so many stupid little children.”
Dustin stares at him. If this were one of Eddie’s campaigns, he’d be able to look for a tell. Anything to know whether it’s a bluff. Except this isn’t a game, and he already knows how this can end.
Henry tilts his head like he’s found something mildly interesting. “I killed my sister,” he says conversationally. “I wonder what you’ll do.”
A shift in the air. Dustin turns before he can stop himself. Steve’s sat right next to him, slumped like a rag doll, head lying on the table. His eyes are gaping, bloody sockets.
Dustin jumps so violently that he knocks over his chair. Those eyes are all he can see as he runs back to the attic.
—
“Ground Control to Major Tom?”
Steve huffs with quiet amusement. He pushes the walkie button. “Yeah, Rob?”
“Nothing,” Robin says breezily. “Just saying hi.”
Steve smiles, as much as he can. “Hi.”
He’s parked outside the Turnbow’s house, waiting. Jonathan had promised he was confident in tracking now, had read Dustin’s notes over and over. Steve trusts him. But it doesn’t stop that sick, shaky feeling trapped under his skin; it’s been there ever since he saw Dustin’s bike from the corner of his eye.
“Steve?”
“Sorry. Still here.”
“You’re quiet,” Robin says. He can feel her nerves through the walkie, knows they’re both just barely hanging on. “You know, I can cope with silence that’s like, five seconds, maybe six? Anything longer and I’m just gonna assume a demo got you, so…”
“Sorry,” Steve says again. “I just…” He tries to come up with something, their usual back and forth on mundane crawls, but it’s lost to a jagged sigh. “I just—I just have this horrible feeling.”
Sudden pressure behind his eyes; he pushes his fingers hard into the corners, pushes everything back. He wishes Robin was here—wishes, like a helpless kid, that she could hold his hand.
“Hey,” Robin says quickly, the word cut off at the start like she’d slipped when pressing the button. “It’s gonna work, okay, Steve? It’s gonna work.”
Steve tries to reply and abruptly can’t. Robin must hear it because she’s there again as soon as he lets go of the button, instantly, like she’s right beside him. “It’s gonna work because I’ve not finished showing him the greatest movies of all time.”
Steve laughs—sudden, choked. “He always falls asleep when it’s a double VHS.”
“Yes,” Robin sighs. “Because unfortunately he’s inherited your uncultured ways.”
“I liked Doctor Zhivago.”
“See, my curriculum works!”
Robin rattles off a list of every great movie Dustin hasn’t yet seen. Steve makes a shaky crack about that being a gruelling schedule—realising it’s been so long since he’s heard Dustin on a rant, something teasing, joyful. It’s almost a relief when the streetlights start to flicker.
—
Dustin wrenches open the door, his chest heaving, and the attic changes. He steps into his bedroom. The bed is messy, like he only just woke up, and for a second he thinks maybe he did. He wants to believe it.
When he opens the door, there’s a trail of blood. Tews’s corpse is on the kitchen counter, neck broken. His mom’s lying on her stomach, stretched out on the tiles. Blood is seeping from underneath her, endless.
Dustin shuts his eyes. “Stop, stop.”
Another shift. The attic is back. But it’s dark, cold snaking into his lungs. The Upside Down.
The memory is a physical force, stealing his breath like a punch to the stomach. Eddie choking on his own blood. Seeing the change, like all the lights going out, from Eddie to a body.
“Let me out,” Dustin screams. His hands claw, hit vines, floorboards. “Let me out!”
All sense of time leaves him. He screams for so long that he loses his voice. Eventually he slips into a darkness too brutal to be sleep.
And then, a change. A hush; a voice.
It’s Eddie narrating during Hellfire Club. Dustin blinks heavily. He can see Eddie as if through a fog, at the head of the table. He can make out where his own seat would’ve been, where Mike and Lucas would’ve sat, but it’s all in shadows. It’s like him and Eddie are the only people here.
“The mist is never ending,” Eddie says. His eyes linger on his invisible audience around the table, in his element. “But you wait. Look closer.”
Dustin closes his eyes. He doesn’t think he could bear it, if this changed.
“There, right in the depths. D’you see it? It’s just a glimmer. Are you listening?”
Dustin’s eyes open. Eddie is looking out. Right at him.
He looks down at the table, a pen poised in Eddie’s hand. His left.
“I’m saying,” Eddie says urgently, “that all is not lost, Henderson, d’you hear me?”
—
Steve swings the car around at McCorkle farm. He’s gripping the steering wheel so tightly his fingers hurt.
The freshly torn Gate is already beginning to close. He only has seconds.
He glances at the rear view mirror. “Gates are kinda like Boppers, right?”
“You’re insane,” Jonathan says which is not, Steve thinks, a no.
“It’s moving fast,” Nancy says, eyes on the rapidly changing decibels. “We need to go now.”
Steve flicks his eyes up again, a silent question.
Two nods.
Steve breathes in. “Better hang on to something,” he says, and floors it.
the little point Steve does when he says, He charged into a swarm of killer bats, like he’s subconsciously saying, Look. Look at this thing that’s haunting you, Dustin, it’s haunting me too, look over there it’s happening now, it’s still happening, it’s always happening, but even while he’s doing it, Steve knows that he didn’t see, that this is a horror he can only imagine, but Dustin saw and it’s too late, he can’t undo any of it. Look.
In the Squawk’s basement, Steve sits next to Jonathan on the couch.
“When your mom, um…” He stops, picking a thread at the knee of his jeans. A clean pair, faded and worn.
“Yeah?” Jonathan prompts.
“When she knew Will was missing,” Steve continues, looking determinedly at a random spot on the wall, “she’d never stop looking, right?”
It’s not really a question. Jonathan answers anyway. “Never.”
Steve gives a half nod and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Okay,” he mutters, then goes back upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. The entrance to the basement is left slightly open, and Jonathan tries not to overhear as Steve uses the phone. Occasional words drift down: “Hi, Claudia… Sorry I haven’t… Yeah, he’s with us… Just needed some…”
He’s good at it, knowing exactly what tone to strike—reassuring, warm. If Jonathan didn’t know any better, he’d never suspect that it was a front.
He hears Steve head back down. When he glances over, Steve’s standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking like he might be sick.
“Have you slept yet?”
Steve shakes his head. “Could you?” It comes out accusatory, and he gives an apologetic wince like a reflex.
“Fair point,” Jonathan concedes quietly and pushes down a flood of memories: November ‘83, crying himself to sleep. “But you need to be good to drive later.”
That gets Steve moving back over to the couch, at least. “Finally admitting that I’m the better driver, Byers?”
“Will inflating your ego help you sleep?”
“Oh, yeah,” Steve says with a weak smile. “Works every time.”
Jonathan stands and tosses him the blanket from the foot of the couch. Steve pauses, his hand clenching around the fabric for a moment; he sighs roughly and lies down.
Jonathan lingers for ten minutes or so, acting like he’s double checking the inventory notes, the amount of barbed wire. He waits until Steve’s breathing goes deep: actual sleep, no longer faking it.
—
Dustin wakes all at once; he’s not even groggy, just sharp, unnatural awareness. His clothes have changed, cleaner, brighter. And the style of his shirt is different: more formal, older somehow, as if Hellfire Club belongs to another time.
A tightness just beneath his chest. He lifts his shirt and finds a line of stitches, clean and precise. For some reason it’s the neatness that makes his stomach turn.
He sits up. Dark floorboards, dust. An attic.
The door’s been left ajar. Dustin creeps over to it on tiptoe. One step down, another, another. Eventually he sees a glow on the wall, shadows cast from flickering candlelight. He thinks inexplicably of Drama Club. Exit stage left.
—
When Steve emerges from the basement, still looking half caught in sleep, Jonathan says, as lightly as he can, “You’re not gonna believe this.” He knows it’s a risk even trying to make a joke.
But Steve just rubs his eyes and says, “What?” through a yawn.
Jonathan unfolds the sheets of paper he’s found. They must’ve been tucked into the back of the manual, slipped out in their rush to fix the tower. “He does have a handbook.”
Looking wide awake now, Steve glances at the papers. For a second, Jonathan wonders whether he’s done the right thing, but when Steve spots Dustin’s handwriting, he actually smiles.
“That little shit,” he says. He points at one corner of a page. “Look at this, he’s got diagrams.” He takes the papers and drifts over to the window. It’s like reality is settling back in with every step, his shoulders tightening. He squints into the distance. “What’s Nancy doing?”
“Seeing if the telemetry tag will survive getting fired out of a gun.”
She’d crashed earlier than Steve, back when they took turns to use the shower at the radio station. Steve had insisted she go first, and maybe a few years ago Jonathan would’ve cynically put it down to some misplaced chivalry. Now he could only see how they were all barely clinging on to something normal. So Nancy had showered, and when she came out, the bathroom smelled freshly clean. Once Steve had finished showering, the smell was even stronger. Jonathan pictured them spraying cleaner, scrubbing—trying to shield each other from something they’d already seen.
When Nancy woke it was with a glint in her eye. As she explained her plan to Jonathan, she’d added mildly, “And if Murray says no, I’m gonna kill him.”
“I kinda wish you hadn’t told me that,” Jonathan said. “I want an alibi.”
A sudden crack: the gun being fired. Both Steve and Jonathan jump.
Steve sighs, restless. “I can’t just sit here, man.”
“Okay.” Jonathan opens the door. “C’mon.”
They head outside, start emptying the van in preparation for tonight. Jonathan’s in the middle of using the drill to unscrew some shelves when he catches Steve shaking his head, saying something.
Jonathan turns the drill off. “Huh?”
“I said it’s not gonna be fast enough. No matter how much crap we get rid of.” Steve’s frowning, looking down at Dustin’s notes. “You know this van once stalled on Pickett Road? Dustin gave me so much shit for it, like it was my—” He breaks off, points at one paragraph, keeps tapping, a-ha. “And it says here that tracker thingy can be put on any…” He looks up to the sky for a second, sighs. “Gimme that.”
Jonathan hands him the drill with increasing bewilderment. “Um, what exactly are you—?”
Steve’s already jumped out the back of the van, crossing the grass with purpose. “We’ve gotta be fast, right?” he calls over his shoulder.
Jonathan watches in utter silence as Steve leaps onto the Beamer and, without so much as a flinch, drills a hole into the roof.
—
The table is set like there’s about to be some fancy dinner. Dustin sits down, looks at the gleaming silverware, and is hit suddenly with the memory of setting the table at Christmas, the thought that he won’t get to do that ever again. He’s never gonna see his mom—
“You made this much more difficult than it needed to be,” comes a voice from the head of the table. It’s a man in a brown three-piece suit. Dustin tries not to look at him. “But you’ll listen now,” Henry Creel continues. “You’ll go back up to the attic and stay there.”
Dustin thinks of Steve staring down Billy. He sets his jaw. “Oh, yeah? Why?”
Henry is smiling. “If you don’t,” he says, adjusting a knife by one increment, “I will kill Holly Wheeler, and so many stupid little children.”
Dustin stares at him. If this were one of Eddie’s campaigns, he’d be able to look for a tell. Anything to know whether it’s a bluff. Except this isn’t a game, and he already knows how this can end.
Henry tilts his head like he’s found something mildly interesting. “I killed my sister,” he says conversationally. “I wonder what you’ll do.”
A shift in the air. Dustin turns before he can stop himself. Steve’s sat right next to him, slumped like a rag doll, head lying on the table. His eyes are gaping, bloody sockets.
Dustin jumps so violently that he knocks over his chair. Those eyes are all he can see as he runs back to the attic.
—
“Ground Control to Major Tom?”
Steve huffs with quiet amusement. He pushes the walkie button. “Yeah, Rob?”
“Nothing,” Robin says breezily. “Just saying hi.”
Steve smiles, as much as he can. “Hi.”
He’s parked outside the Turnbow’s house, waiting. Jonathan had promised he was confident in tracking now, had read Dustin’s notes over and over. Steve trusts him. But it doesn’t stop that sick, shaky feeling trapped under his skin; it’s been there ever since he saw Dustin’s bike from the corner of his eye.
“Steve?”
“Sorry. Still here.”
“You’re quiet,” Robin says. He can feel her nerves through the walkie, knows they’re both just barely hanging on. “You know, I can cope with silence that’s like, five seconds, maybe six? Anything longer and I’m just gonna assume a demo got you, so…”
“Sorry,” Steve says again. “I just…” He tries to come up with something, their usual back and forth on mundane crawls, but it’s lost to a jagged sigh. “I just—I just have this horrible feeling.”
Sudden pressure behind his eyes; he pushes his fingers hard into the corners, pushes everything back. He wishes Robin was here—wishes, like a helpless kid, that she could hold his hand.
“Hey,” Robin says quickly, the word cut off at the start like she’d slipped when pressing the button. “It’s gonna work, okay, Steve? It’s gonna work.”
Steve tries to reply and abruptly can’t. Robin must hear it because she’s there again as soon as he lets go of the button, instantly, like she’s right beside him. “It’s gonna work because I’ve not finished showing him the greatest movies of all time.”
Steve laughs—sudden, choked. “He always falls asleep when it’s a double VHS.”
“Yes,” Robin sighs. “Because unfortunately he’s inherited your uncultured ways.”
“I liked Doctor Zhivago.”
“See, my curriculum works!”
Robin rattles off a list of every great movie Dustin hasn’t yet seen. Steve makes a shaky crack about that being a gruelling schedule—realising it’s been so long since he’s heard Dustin on a rant, something teasing, joyful. It’s almost a relief when the streetlights start to flicker.
—
Dustin wrenches open the door, his chest heaving, and the attic changes. He steps into his bedroom. The bed is messy, like he only just woke up, and for a second he thinks maybe he did. He wants to believe it.
When he opens the door, there’s a trail of blood. Tews’s corpse is on the kitchen counter, neck broken. His mom’s lying on her stomach, stretched out on the tiles. Blood is seeping from underneath her, endless.
Dustin shuts his eyes. “Stop, stop.”
Another shift. The attic is back. But it’s dark, cold snaking into his lungs. The Upside Down.
The memory is a physical force, stealing his breath like a punch to the stomach. Eddie choking on his own blood. Seeing the change, like all the lights going out, from Eddie to a body.
“Let me out,” Dustin screams. His hands claw, hit vines, floorboards. “Let me out!”
All sense of time leaves him. He screams for so long that he loses his voice. Eventually he slips into a darkness too brutal to be sleep.
And then, a change. A hush; a voice.
It’s Eddie narrating during Hellfire Club. Dustin blinks heavily. He can see Eddie as if through a fog, at the head of the table. He can make out where his own seat would’ve been, where Mike and Lucas would’ve sat, but it’s all in shadows. It’s like him and Eddie are the only people here.
“The mist is never ending,” Eddie says. His eyes linger on his invisible audience around the table, in his element. “But you wait. Look closer.”
Dustin closes his eyes. He doesn’t think he could bear it, if this changed.
“There, right in the depths. D’you see it? It’s just a glimmer. Are you listening?”
Dustin’s eyes open. Eddie is looking out. Right at him.
He looks down at the table, a pen poised in Eddie’s hand. His left.
“I’m saying,” Eddie says urgently, “that all is not lost, Henderson, d’you hear me?”
—
Steve swings the car around at McCorkle farm. He’s gripping the steering wheel so tightly his fingers hurt.
The freshly torn Gate is already beginning to close. He only has seconds.
He glances at the rear view mirror. “Gates are kinda like Boppers, right?”
“You’re insane,” Jonathan says which is not, Steve thinks, a no.
“It’s moving fast,” Nancy says, eyes on the rapidly changing decibels. “We need to go now.”
Steve flicks his eyes up again, a silent question.
Two nods.
Steve breathes in. “Better hang on to something,” he says, and floors it.
It starts in the library. Dustin hides there sometimes when facing the cafeteria is too much. He’s found a quiet corner of his own, a table angled so the bookshelves are hiding it from view. Eddie used to sit here. He knows this because there’s an E.M carved into the underside of the table.
He’s following the writing with his finger absentmindedly, the way the letters tilt; he looks across the table and sees Eddie sitting next to him.
Too sharp, too clear. Hellfire shirt pristine. It’s not like those foggy mornings, running on too little sleep, when Dustin heads to his locker and there, just out the corner of his eye, he can almost make himself believe that—
Eddie is scrawling in a notebook, humming. He stops writing every so often to fiddle with his rings in thought. He always…
It’d be so easy to accept this. So easy. To just sink into the memory because surely, now that Dustin thinks about it, that’s all it is. There’s no harm in… Maybe he just needs to…
He stops. Looks closer. Then, very carefully, checks the gaps left in between the books on the shelves. He’s alone.
He leans over the table, gets right in Eddie’s face.
“He was left-handed, you stupid piece of shit.”
The change is instant. The thing wearing Eddie’s face sits up straight, eyes cold. A slow, calculating smile.
“You,” he says, both Eddie’s voice and not, something else lurking underneath it, an old, refined cadence, “Dustin Henderson, are too clever for your own good.”
This Eddie comes and goes. Whenever he leaves, the absence is just long enough for Dustin to be convinced that it’s over before he’s back again. He’s there on the bike run to school; he’s there when Dustin comes home late again and his mom’s voice is breaking as she reheats his dinner, “Honey, I can’t keep—I have to know where you—”
He’s there at the Squawk, a different kind of spectre this time: Eddie as he looked in the boathouse, shaking hands, haunted eyes. Dustin hasn’t slept, and Robin’s asking some inane question about the radio signal, and he’s so—
“I literally don’t know how I can be any clearer,” he tells her. “It’s—this shit is, like, self-explanatory, I—”
“Hey,” Steve says sharply. “Don’t talk to Robin like that.”
“What?” Dustin snaps. “What did I even—”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Robin babbles, pleading.
“You know exactly what,” Steve says. Then, under his breath, “Your tone, Jesus Christ.”
I can fucking hear you, Dustin almost says. He doesn’t have the energy. There’s a crawl tonight, and while he’s managed it on no sleep before, his head is already aching.
When he gets in the back of the van, Eddie is waiting. He’s lying on the floor right next to Dustin’s tracking equipment. His clothes are ripped, drenched with blood.
“Signal strong?” Steve says from the front, a little muffled.
Dustin makes a vague noise of agreement. Yeah, the signal’s fine. But other things are competing with it.
Wet, clicking sounds from Eddie’s throat. His hand reaches up briefly, the slow drip of blood from his fingers.
Dustin makes it through the night. He tracks Hopper until he’s back into the MAC-Z, then throws the headphones off.
“Careful,” Steve says. “If those break, we’re—”
“Well, it’s a good thing they’re not broken.”
Dustin barely hears Steve scoff in reply. Eddie seems closer now, eyes fixed and glassy. There’s blood all over the floor, on Dustin’s shoes; it’s not real, he thinks as saliva collects in his mouth, and he quickly moves forward, climbing into the front, “Can I sit here now?”
“Um, sure,” Steve says slowly in a tone that sounds like, You’ve never once asked for permission, why are you starting now? He glances over, askance. “Not like you to get motion sick.”
“You know, shockingly, maybe you don’t know everything about me.”
Steve laughs without humour. “Yeah, shockingly,” he echoes, bitter.
They drive in silence, their new routine. Dustin chances a look in the rear view mirror. Eddie is still there.
“—goddamn waste of time,” Steve’s saying.
Dustin blinks hard, fills in the blanks of what he’s missed. “Don’t let Nance catch you saying that.”
“I’m serious, dude.” And in Steve’s frustration, it almost sounds normal, like they’re fine, they’re— “This is crawl—Jesus, I’ve lost count. And we’ve not seen one sign of literally anything close to Vecna so, hell, maybe—”
Dustin looks down at his shoes. The blood’s gonna dry all crusted; he’s never gonna get it off.
“—we’re, I dunno, chasing shadows for no good—”
“I’m just gonna,” Dustin mumbles without really meaning to, and closes his eyes.
Swirls of red and black, and then for a blissful while nothing; Eddie doesn’t follow him.
Sounds drift in. The van door opening, Robin asking something he can’t quite catch. Steve sighing. The door being shut, the noise softened, careful, only registering every few words, “I don’t know, he just… yeah, I think… exhausted… Mm-hmm, I’m gonna—”
When Dustin opens his eyes, he’s met abruptly with daylight. His seatbelt’s been unfastened and he’s been covered with a thick blanket; when he moves he finds a pillow has also been placed beneath his head. He throws the blanket off, lets the pillow fall. A brief look back before he scrambles out of the van. There’s nothing there, but he doesn’t even have time to feel relieved, shit, he’s gonna be—
“Woah, wait a minute.”
It’s Steve; he’s getting out of his car. He’s carrying three small packages wrapped in foil—bagels, Dustin realises, not that it matters because—
“I’m late for school.”
Steve shakes his head. “No, you’re—”
“Steve, I am, I need to—”
“Would you just listen? Your mom called in sick for you.”
“How do you know that?” Dustin asks, thrown.
He suspects that if Steve wasn’t currently holding bagels, he’d be crossing his arms. Steve raises an eyebrow instead.
“Because I called her,” he says curtly.
“Why?” Dustin presses.
He doesn’t miss the fact that Steve rolls his eyes.
“Dude, are you seriously telling me you want to go to school straight after a crawl? Just take the day off, it’s—”
“Stop avoiding the question, Steve.”
Steve shakes his head, looking for a moment like a disappointed teacher who can’t believe what he’s hearing. Dustin sees red.
“I’m not avoiding—God, it’s not a big deal—”
“It is! It’s—” Dustin flounders. “You shouldn’t have called, it’s none of your business.”
Steve exhales in disbelief. “None of my business, right. Yeah.” He shakes his head again. “You ever tried listening to your mom, huh, Henderson?”
There’s a lurch of guilt in Dustin’s stomach. He turns away, looking for his bike—there it is, up against the wall—and tries not to think about how he suddenly feels exposed, like a little kid unprepared for show-and-tell, tries not to think about his mom and Steve talking, talking about him; he can’t control it, whatever Steve’s said, whatever his mom has shared.
“Again,” Dustin says, heading over to his bike, grabbing the handlebars, “that’s got nothing to do with you, what do you care?”
“What do I care?” Steve blocks his path. “Your mom’s worried sick about you.”
“Okay, fine! She doesn’t need to worry ‘cause I’m going to school.”
He puts his leg over the bike, ready to push off. Steve hesitates then steps out of his way, looking exhausted all of a sudden.
“God, Dustin. Just… Look, you’re late anyway, yeah? You don’t have to leave right away, just—”
“Jesus! Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe I just don’t want to be around you?”
Silence.
“No,” Steve says quietly. A smile that’s more of a flinch. “I guess not.”
Dustin pedals away. “See you at the next crawl,” he throws over his shoulder. Steve doesn’t say anything.
He keeps going, all the way to school, no matter how much he just wants to stop, to turn back the clock. His eyes sting. He wants to be in the Squawk eating bagels, teasing Robin over her corny introductions to songs, an oldie but a goodie, and she won’t have that hurt look on her face, and then he wants Steve to drive him home, and he’ll sleep in the car, and when he wakes up he’ll find out that everything’s okay, and Eddie—
Eddie stops appearing. Dustin is numb to any relief he might’ve once felt. He keeps listening for word on the next crawl, never calling Steve, never directly hearing from him until the radio signal goes wonky, and his walkie crackles barely a minute later. He answers like he couldn’t care less, Yeah, I copy.
Later, aching from the ambush at the cemetery, Dustin starts a slow, wincing walk, bike in tow. It’s dark. Fighting against his pounding head, he manages to produce Nancy’s map in his mind. He takes a rough guess at the road Steve will have ended up on, a sudden spark of his old confidence; his guesses are usually right on the money.
A sense of something just outside of his periphery, like a stray hair that’s fallen over his eyes. He doesn’t look. He knows it’s Eddie.
And then, just up ahead, lying in the road, Dustin sees the demobat before he can even think to avoid it.
It’s not real. He gets closer. It’s not real.
He’ll be in the van soon. He’ll call a party meeting later; he knows that he has to tell them. What he’s seeing. And it’ll suck, it’ll be almost the hardest thing he’s ever done. But then they’ll know, and he imagines what Steve will say—his exasperation, grounding in its own way. Dustin, he’s just trying to scare you.
He steps over the bat. In less than a breath, it leaps up, digs its teeth into his ankle.
Dustin cries out, and he has a split second of panic—Oh God, oh God, why can I feel that?—before he’s hit with overwhelming vertigo.
He drops his bike. Sways but remains on his feet, he has to—has to—
A glow of red. The world starts to slide away. He sees the demogorgon too late. No time to run, no time to do anything but—
“Come on,” Dustin says. It’s meant to be a scream, but he doesn’t have the strength. “Come on!”
It doesn’t matter. Steve will be here soon.
The demogorgon lunges. But Steve will—Steve will—
Searing pain. A horrible thought: that maybe this is what Eddie felt.
Mom. Steve, Dustin thinks suddenly, just as the darkness swallows him. I’m sorry.
It starts in the library. Dustin hides there sometimes when facing the cafeteria is too much. He’s found a quiet corner of his own, a table angled so the bookshelves are hiding it from view. Eddie used to sit here. He knows this because there’s an E.M carved into the underside of the table.
He’s following the writing with his finger absentmindedly, the way the letters tilt; he looks across the table and sees Eddie sitting next to him.
Too sharp, too clear. Hellfire shirt pristine. It’s not like those foggy mornings, running on too little sleep, when Dustin heads to his locker and there, just out the corner of his eye, he can almost make himself believe that—
Eddie is scrawling in a notebook, humming. He stops writing every so often to fiddle with his rings in thought. He always…
It’d be so easy to accept this. So easy. To just sink into the memory because surely, now that Dustin thinks about it, that’s all it is. There’s no harm in… Maybe he just needs to…
He stops. Looks closer. Then, very carefully, checks the gaps left in between the books on the shelves. He’s alone.
He leans over the table, gets right in Eddie’s face.
“He was left-handed, you stupid piece of shit.”
The change is instant. The thing wearing Eddie’s face sits up straight, eyes cold. A slow, calculating smile.
“You,” he says, both Eddie’s voice and not, something else lurking underneath it, an old, refined cadence, “Dustin Henderson, are too clever for your own good.”
This Eddie comes and goes. Whenever he leaves, the absence is just long enough for Dustin to be convinced that it’s over before he’s back again. He’s there on the bike run to school; he’s there when Dustin comes home late again and his mom’s voice is breaking as she reheats his dinner, “Honey, I can’t keep—I have to know where you—”
He’s there at the Squawk, a different kind of spectre this time: Eddie as he looked in the boathouse, shaking hands, haunted eyes. Dustin hasn’t slept, and Robin’s asking some inane question about the radio signal, and he’s so—
“I literally don’t know how I can be any clearer,” he tells her. “It’s—this shit is, like, self-explanatory, I—”
“Hey,” Steve says sharply. “Don’t talk to Robin like that.”
“What?” Dustin snaps. “What did I even—”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Robin babbles, pleading.
“You know exactly what,” Steve says. Then, under his breath, “Your tone, Jesus Christ.”
I can fucking hear you, Dustin almost says. He doesn’t have the energy. There’s a crawl tonight, and while he’s managed it on no sleep before, his head is already aching.
When he gets in the back of the van, Eddie is waiting. He’s lying on the floor right next to Dustin’s tracking equipment. His clothes are ripped, drenched with blood.
“Signal strong?” Steve says from the front, a little muffled.
Dustin makes a vague noise of agreement. Yeah, the signal’s fine. But other things are competing with it.
Wet, clicking sounds from Eddie’s throat. His hand reaches up briefly, the slow drip of blood from his fingers.
Dustin makes it through the night. He tracks Hopper until he’s back into the MAC-Z, then throws the headphones off.
“Careful,” Steve says. “If those break, we’re—”
“Well, it’s a good thing they’re not broken.”
Dustin barely hears Steve scoff in reply. Eddie seems closer now, eyes fixed and glassy. There’s blood all over the floor, on Dustin’s shoes; it’s not real, he thinks as saliva collects in his mouth, and he quickly moves forward, climbing into the front, “Can I sit here now?”
“Um, sure,” Steve says slowly in a tone that sounds like, You’ve never once asked for permission, why are you starting now? He glances over, askance. “Not like you to get motion sick.”
“You know, shockingly, maybe you don’t know everything about me.”
Steve laughs without humour. “Yeah, shockingly,” he echoes, bitter.
They drive in silence, their new routine. Dustin chances a look in the rear view mirror. Eddie is still there.
“—goddamn waste of time,” Steve’s saying.
Dustin blinks hard, fills in the blanks of what he’s missed. “Don’t let Nance catch you saying that.”
“I’m serious, dude.” And in Steve’s frustration, it almost sounds normal, like they’re fine, they’re— “This is crawl—Jesus, I’ve lost count. And we’ve not seen one sign of literally anything close to Vecna so, hell, maybe—”
Dustin looks down at his shoes. The blood’s gonna dry all crusted; he’s never gonna get it off.
“—we’re, I dunno, chasing shadows for no good—”
“I’m just gonna,” Dustin mumbles without really meaning to, and closes his eyes.
Swirls of red and black, and then for a blissful while nothing; Eddie doesn’t follow him.
Sounds drift in. The van door opening, Robin asking something he can’t quite catch. Steve sighing. The door being shut, the noise softened, careful, only registering every few words, “I don’t know, he just… yeah, I think… exhausted… Mm-hmm, I’m gonna—”
When Dustin opens his eyes, he’s met abruptly with daylight. His seatbelt’s been unfastened and he’s been covered with a thick blanket; when he moves he finds a pillow has also been placed beneath his head. He throws the blanket off, lets the pillow fall. A brief look back before he scrambles out of the van. There’s nothing there, but he doesn’t even have time to feel relieved, shit, he’s gonna be—
“Woah, wait a minute.”
It’s Steve; he’s getting out of his car. He’s carrying three small packages wrapped in foil—bagels, Dustin realises, not that it matters because—
“I’m late for school.”
Steve shakes his head. “No, you’re—”
“Steve, I am, I need to—”
“Would you just listen? Your mom called in sick for you.”
“How do you know that?” Dustin asks, thrown.
He suspects that if Steve wasn’t currently holding bagels, he’d be crossing his arms. Steve raises an eyebrow instead.
“Because I called her,” he says curtly.
“Why?” Dustin presses.
He doesn’t miss the fact that Steve rolls his eyes.
“Dude, are you seriously telling me you want to go to school straight after a crawl? Just take the day off, it’s—”
“Stop avoiding the question, Steve.”
Steve shakes his head, looking for a moment like a disappointed teacher who can’t believe what he’s hearing. Dustin sees red.
“I’m not avoiding—God, it’s not a big deal—”
“It is! It’s—” Dustin flounders. “You shouldn’t have called, it’s none of your business.”
Steve exhales in disbelief. “None of my business, right. Yeah.” He shakes his head again. “You ever tried listening to your mom, huh, Henderson?”
There’s a lurch of guilt in Dustin’s stomach. He turns away, looking for his bike—there it is, up against the wall—and tries not to think about how he suddenly feels exposed, like a little kid unprepared for show-and-tell, tries not to think about his mom and Steve talking, talking about him; he can’t control it, whatever Steve’s said, whatever his mom has shared.
“Again,” Dustin says, heading over to his bike, grabbing the handlebars, “that’s got nothing to do with you, what do you care?”
“What do I care?” Steve blocks his path. “Your mom’s worried sick about you.”
“Okay, fine! She doesn’t need to worry ‘cause I’m going to school.”
He puts his leg over the bike, ready to push off. Steve hesitates then steps out of his way, looking exhausted all of a sudden.
“God, Dustin. Just… Look, you’re late anyway, yeah? You don’t have to leave right away, just—”
“Jesus! Has it ever crossed your mind that maybe I just don’t want to be around you?”
Silence.
“No,” Steve says quietly. A smile that’s more of a flinch. “I guess not.”
Dustin pedals away. “See you at the next crawl,” he throws over his shoulder. Steve doesn’t say anything.
He keeps going, all the way to school, no matter how much he just wants to stop, to turn back the clock. His eyes sting. He wants to be in the Squawk eating bagels, teasing Robin over her corny introductions to songs, an oldie but a goodie, and she won’t have that hurt look on her face, and then he wants Steve to drive him home, and he’ll sleep in the car, and when he wakes up he’ll find out that everything’s okay, and Eddie—
Eddie stops appearing. Dustin is numb to any relief he might’ve once felt. He keeps listening for word on the next crawl, never calling Steve, never directly hearing from him until the radio signal goes wonky, and his walkie crackles barely a minute later. He answers like he couldn’t care less, Yeah, I copy.
Later, aching from the ambush at the cemetery, Dustin starts a slow, wincing walk, bike in tow. It’s dark. Fighting against his pounding head, he manages to produce Nancy’s map in his mind. He takes a rough guess at the road Steve will have ended up on, a sudden spark of his old confidence; his guesses are usually right on the money.
A sense of something just outside of his periphery, like a stray hair that’s fallen over his eyes. He doesn’t look. He knows it’s Eddie.
And then, just up ahead, lying in the road, Dustin sees the demobat before he can even think to avoid it.
It’s not real. He gets closer. It’s not real.
He’ll be in the van soon. He’ll call a party meeting later; he knows that he has to tell them. What he’s seeing. And it’ll suck, it’ll be almost the hardest thing he’s ever done. But then they’ll know, and he imagines what Steve will say—his exasperation, grounding in its own way. Dustin, he’s just trying to scare you.
He steps over the bat. In less than a breath, it leaps up, digs its teeth into his ankle.
Dustin cries out, and he has a split second of panic—Oh God, oh God, why can I feel that?—before he’s hit with overwhelming vertigo.
He drops his bike. Sways but remains on his feet, he has to—has to—
A glow of red. The world starts to slide away. He sees the demogorgon too late. No time to run, no time to do anything but—
“Come on,” Dustin says. It’s meant to be a scream, but he doesn’t have the strength. “Come on!”
It doesn’t matter. Steve will be here soon.
The demogorgon lunges. But Steve will—Steve will—
Searing pain. A horrible thought: that maybe this is what Eddie felt.
Mom. Steve, Dustin thinks suddenly, just as the darkness swallows him. I’m sorry.
Nancy looks on as Steve washes the blood off his hands. She doesn’t tell him that the water will scald if he lets it run for too long, that later he’ll still be picking out a crust of blood from underneath his fingernails, no matter how long he scrubs. He can figure that out for himself. A flicker of something close to resentment deep in her stomach—that he doesn’t have to do this part alone.
But worry overshadows it all. She thinks of how Jonathan caught her by the wrist urgently, right as Steve slipped away from the hospital reception. How he shook his head slightly. A low whisper so Mike and Lucas wouldn’t overhear.
“Nancy, he shouldn’t be left—I don’t know what’ll happen if—”
Steve catches her eye in the bathroom mirror, the glass pockmarked with damp. A cruel set to his jaw.
“Okay, but—” He blows out a harsh breath. Wipes his hands roughly down the front of his jeans, skirting the bloodstains. His lip twists, almost a sneer. “Mr. Whatsit? Really? Dustin’s not a little kid, he wouldn’t be taken in by—”
“What are you saying, exactly? That Holly deserved it?”
“No, Jesus! No.”
Don’t lie to me, Nancy thinks, as Steve eyes flash with more than just anger. You want a fight. You want a fight so you can put it somewhere.
“There was. There was a lot of blood,” Steve says suddenly—clipped, almost as if it’s Nancy’s fault, like she doesn’t already know. As if they don’t have matching bloodstains on their knees.
“You can’t think like that,” Nancy says. Digs deep to smother the panic rising in her chest. “You have to—this has happened before, and Will—he survived it, he—”
Steve lets out a horrible laugh. “Barb didn’t.”
The air leaves the room.
“Sorry,” Steve chokes out. His face is white. “I’m sorry.”
For a long moment, Nancy can’t speak. She just watches as Steve sinks down to the floor, like he suddenly doesn’t have the energy to remain standing. He puts his head in his hands.
There’s a version of this, Nancy thinks, where she just walks out. Where she’s forever grieving in a bathroom, where the black hole of ‘83 engulfs her. No, you. You’re bullshit.
She doesn’t leave. She sits down on the tiles, right in front of Steve. The cold condensation seeps through her pants. She doesn’t care.
Steve lifts his head and looks at her. “But Dustin wouldn’t just—he’d figure it out, he’d…”
He doesn’t sound mean now. Just desperate.
“We know how Henry works,” Nancy says quietly. “He can see… Mike and I, we never…” She shakes her head, a rueful smile. “We never talked to Holly about what was going on. Not really. We’d try sometimes, but we couldn’t actually…” She sighs. “I think Holly could sense it. That we were lying. She—she must’ve been so scared.” She swallows, quickly wipes away a stray tear. “And I think Henry knew that. So he—he gave her a friend.”
Steve’s face crumples. He turns away, a hand covering his eyes. A wet inhale, that awful shudder of breath. And he’s crying.
“I let him—I let him push me away,” he’s saying, like he’s monstrous. “N-Nance, I just—I just let him.”
“No. Steve, hey, hey. No.”
Nancy fights against her hesitation. Moves forward. Neither of them are good, she thinks, at showing their pain. At letting someone see.
But they’re here now. They’re here.
“Steve, there was nothing—you couldn’t reach him. None of us could.” She gets a hand on the back of his neck, and he falls against her, shaking. Silent, devastating sobs. “You didn’t—you didn’t know, it’s not your—you didn’t know.”
She knows intimately the loss he’s grieving. Muddy footprints in his car; the joy of childhood Dustin had almost never cast aside. She thinks of that Snow Ball, Dustin’s wide-eyed, innocent grin. Of Holly at New Year’s, fast asleep against her shoulder.
No, she vows in her head as she hushes Steve, whispering, “Hey, you’re okay. Shh, shh, shh, it’s—”
Nancy looks on as Steve washes the blood off his hands. She doesn’t tell him that the water will scald if he lets it run for too long, that later he’ll still be picking out a crust of blood from underneath his fingernails, no matter how long he scrubs. He can figure that out for himself. A flicker of something close to resentment deep in her stomach—that he doesn’t have to do this part alone.
But worry overshadows it all. She thinks of how Jonathan caught her by the wrist urgently, right as Steve slipped away from the hospital reception. How he shook his head slightly. A low whisper so Mike and Lucas wouldn’t overhear.
“Nancy, he shouldn’t be left—I don’t know what’ll happen if—”
Steve catches her eye in the bathroom mirror, the glass pockmarked with damp. A cruel set to his jaw.
“Okay, but—” He blows out a harsh breath. Wipes his hands roughly down the front of his jeans, skirting the bloodstains. His lip twists, almost a sneer. “Mr. Whatsit? Really? Dustin’s not a little kid, he wouldn’t be taken in by—”
“What are you saying, exactly? That Holly deserved it?”
“No, Jesus! No.”
Don’t lie to me, Nancy thinks, as Steve eyes flash with more than just anger. You want a fight. You want a fight so you can put it somewhere.
“There was. There was a lot of blood,” Steve says suddenly—clipped, almost as if it’s Nancy’s fault, like she doesn’t already know. As if they don’t have matching bloodstains on their knees.
“You can’t think like that,” Nancy says. Digs deep to smother the panic rising in her chest. “You have to—this has happened before, and Will—he survived it, he—”
Steve lets out a horrible laugh. “Barb didn’t.”
The air leaves the room.
“Sorry,” Steve chokes out. His face is white. “I’m sorry.”
For a long moment, Nancy can’t speak. She just watches as Steve sinks down to the floor, like he suddenly doesn’t have the energy to remain standing. He puts his head in his hands.
There’s a version of this, Nancy thinks, where she just walks out. Where she’s forever grieving in a bathroom, where the black hole of ‘83 engulfs her. No, you. You’re bullshit.
She doesn’t leave. She sits down on the tiles, right in front of Steve. The cold condensation seeps through her pants. She doesn’t care.
Steve lifts his head and looks at her. “But Dustin wouldn’t just—he’d figure it out, he’d…”
He doesn’t sound mean now. Just desperate.
“We know how Henry works,” Nancy says quietly. “He can see… Mike and I, we never…” She shakes her head, a rueful smile. “We never talked to Holly about what was going on. Not really. We’d try sometimes, but we couldn’t actually…” She sighs. “I think Holly could sense it. That we were lying. She—she must’ve been so scared.” She swallows, quickly wipes away a stray tear. “And I think Henry knew that. So he—he gave her a friend.”
Steve’s face crumples. He turns away, a hand covering his eyes. A wet inhale, that awful shudder of breath. And he’s crying.
“I let him—I let him push me away,” he’s saying, like he’s monstrous. “N-Nance, I just—I just let him.”
“No. Steve, hey, hey. No.”
Nancy fights against her hesitation. Moves forward. Neither of them are good, she thinks, at showing their pain. At letting someone see.
But they’re here now. They’re here.
“Steve, there was nothing—you couldn’t reach him. None of us could.” She gets a hand on the back of his neck, and he falls against her, shaking. Silent, devastating sobs. “You didn’t—you didn’t know, it’s not your—you didn’t know.”
She knows intimately the loss he’s grieving. Muddy footprints in his car; the joy of childhood Dustin had almost never cast aside. She thinks of that Snow Ball, Dustin’s wide-eyed, innocent grin. Of Holly at New Year’s, fast asleep against her shoulder.
No, she vows in her head as she hushes Steve, whispering, “Hey, you’re okay. Shh, shh, shh, it’s—”
very excited to report that i managed a portion of season 5 rewatch before january ended & that this season 5 canon divergence is also now on ao3, to be continued! ❤️
I know a place where we can go @loveinhawkins - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
