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Oh, So We Do Love Steve.

🖤 An Ongoing Series, from Misha’s Masterlist Library. ☾⋆ OSWDLS Full Series Masterlist here.

THE BAUMAN FILES • Folder 1 -> 1967 Series Prologue [OC Origins]

Steve Harrington x Bauman!fem!reader enemies to lovers, heavy angst, hurt/comfort, upside down mayhem, S2-S4, post S4 into S5 universe hot-take, end-of-the-world / dystopian setting turned happy ending (no more upside down!), ugly fights turned smut (...but with hella plot). 18+

🖤 AUTHOR’S NOTE / PRE-READ BLURB: Okay, listen. I wasn’t planning on dropping this yet (like… at all) but Babe Bauman has basically turned into her own economy at this point, and every single time I write her, she steals yet another piece of my heart, the scene, your man, your wallet, and probably your lighter.

So here we are: a little detour, a bonus chapter, a peek behind the 1967 velvet curtain at who she was before she strutted her way into Steve Harrington’s life in ’84 and ruined him for every other woman on Earth.

This is the part of her story no one’s seen. The part she never talks about. The part she only survived because two very deeply messy Bauman adults somehow managed to love harder than they lived. Also, if something in here feels a little too real, a little too specific, don’t squint too hard. Some things belong between the lines.

Anyway. Buckle up. This is where Babe Bauman begins.

OVERALL WARNINGS: (t.w.'s in advance that applies throughout the series) graphic descriptions of dr*g abuse, medical aftercare and abandonment, dark backstory and plot arc, strong language, heavy topics, sensitive mental health matters. mega comfort to balance the mega hurt/comfort trope. 🖤

“Just Bauman.”

You don’t remember the first four months of your life, but sometimes your body does.

It remembers in flashes, in phantom aches you can’t name. The nurses said you shook, “like a leaf caught in a storm drain, all instinct and no strength, a little feral thing fighting through chemical ghosts left in your blood.” You were born premature. Small enough to be mistaken for something breakable, but stubborn enough not to break.

The doctor who delivered you didn’t know whether to file you away as a miracle, or write you off as a lost cause.

They kept you in the far corner of the NICU under a plastic dome, like some sort of exhibit. Sometimes the lights hummed overhead so loudly that you’d twitch at the sound. Sometimes your chest forgot the rhythm of breathing and a nurse would press two fingers to your sternum to remind you.

“Steady now, baby girl,” the overnight shift nurse would murmur to you softly, devoted to seeing you through it.

You were never named.

Just “Bauman” had been stamped onto charts in hard, hurried handwriting.

A placeholder for a life someone had already bowed out of.

Julie never came back. The med staff said she was gone before the ink on your admission papers dried, slipping out the back entrance of the hospital with a track-marked arm and an empty womb. She left the way she lived: quick, quiet, and chasing the next high.

Not seventy-two hours out of her damn womb, you were already motherless, nameless and bound for the foster care system.

Four months later, the hospital rang a number they weren’t sure still worked.

And in a smoke-thick apartment over a casino over in Reno, Marjorie Bauman picked up the phone with red lacquered nails and a cigarette parked between two fingers. She listened. She didn’t gasp, didn’t curse, didn’t even sit down.

She simply drew in a slow drag, let the Marlboro smoke curl from her mouth like punctuation, and asked bluntly, “Where is she?”

She wasn’t even bothering asking about her drug addict daughter.

She was only asking about you.

It wasn’t until after she’d booked her flight to Hawkins that she swore up and down like a sailor, fuming and furious and fucking determined to get the hell over there to meet a grandchild she never either of her kids would give her. It wasn’t in her nature to blubber in bewilderment, no matter how jaw-dropping a situation was. That wasn’t her style.

Then again, neither was being a grandma.

But that’s what she was now.

As of New Year’s Eve, 1967, Marjorie Bauman was a grandmother.

She walked into the stuffy Hawkins hospital like she owned the building. Fur coat draped over her shoulders in the middle of April. Hair curled into a helmet that didn’t dare move. Half a face of makeup because she’d done the other half in the car’s rearview mirror at a red light. People parted for her without knowing why. Just something about her posture, or the way a person carries themselves when they’ve survived more than they ever talk about.

“You all better have a damn good reason for not calling me ‘til now,” Marjorie told the receptionist, never even raising her voice but somehow still bouncing off sterile walls.

To her disappointment, they did.

Their reason was valid enough to make her jaw clench.

No one had any way of knowing who the hell any of Julie Bauman’s emergency contacts were, because she hadn’t given them any. She barely gave them anything to work with.

Turns out? Julie had walked into the ER in the middle of the night, already in labor, already high. No purse. No ID. No wallet. No address. No family listed. She gave them a fake last name, then switched it two minutes later. The nurse charted, “Bauman?” with a question mark because Julie had slurred something about her “old man’s name,” and then passed out before anyone could ask again. There were no driver’s licenses to cross-reference in ‘66, no digital records, no social workers with databases. Just whatever a patient said out loud.

And Marjorie’s 20-year-old daughter had barely said anything at all — before bringing you into the world, then vanishing without a trace. No desire to be a mother. No desire to keep a baby that was the result of a late-night bender in the sheets of a motel room with a boyfriend who likely ran a gang and sold hard stuff to folks with cash and street cred.

New Year’s weekend turned to January.

January turned to February.

Babies born under those grim circumstances didn’t always last, and hospitals didn’t go hunting down family for heartbreak unless a caseworker told them to. And they had nothing.

“No address, no relatives, no fingerprints,” the staff told Marjorie now, having all gathered at the desk. “Nothing but the maybe-true last name ‘Bauman,’ and the city Julie claimed to be ‘from,’ which could’ve been a lie too.”

All of that tracked so well, it made Marjorie sharply inhale, deep and slow… and she only exhaled when she knew that she’d not flip a damn lid, or shout, or spew the foulest language known to mankind at this medical staff who had all kept you in their care, and not handed you off to someone in foster care that specialized in this sort of ordeal.

It wasn’t until a new caseworker was assigned in March (a woman who’d just transferred from Detroit and who’d seen Julie’s name before) that anything cracked open. She recognized it. Not because Julie had ever filed any real paperwork, but because the caseworker had once worked night shifts at a motel Julie used to frequent, the kind of place where people stayed under aliases and paid in crumpled cash. She remembered the attitude. The track marks. The loud, slanted handwriting Julie used when she scrawled a name on the motel ledger.

Bauman.

That had been the surname Julie jotted down when she’d checked in once with a man twice her age and left three days later with everything stolen from his wallet.

It wasn’t much, but it was something.

And because it was the 60’s, the caseworker had to do it the hard way — she pulled out a phone book. Not a slim one either. A brick. Reno-North Valley listings weighed more than the baby did. She dragged her finger down pages of Baumans, calling every number she could. Most were dead ends: wrong family, wrong spelling, disconnected, or people who didn’t want to admit they knew the name at all.

But on the third day of calling, after forty-seven numbers and more than a few people slamming the phone down, someone finally said, “Try Marjorie. She’s the only Bauman I know who’d have kin wild enough to pull something like that.”

Marjorie’s listing wasn’t even under her own name. It was under the name of her then-boyfriend who worked nights dealing blackjack at the casino downstairs. His number was a leftover in the directory because nobody had bothered getting it removed after the breakup.

It shouldn’t have reached her.

In any other universe, it wouldn’t have.

But it did. By sheer dumb chance — or luck, or fate, or whatever force has a sick sense of timing — the phone rang on a night she happened to be home instead of at the blackjack tables or out drinking with the wrong man.

That was the miracle.

Not that they’d found her.

But that she’d answered.

And once she did, once she heard the words “your granddaughter,” and “four months old,” and “premature, in state custody, alive but small,” there was no stopping her. She had shoved clothes into a suitcase with shaking hands, cursing Julie’s name under her breath and promising the universe that if this baby was still breathing by the time she got to Hawkins, she’d take her in. No questions asked, no hesitation.

“Lemme see her.”

When the nurse finally led her to you, Marjorie stood there for a full minute without speaking. Her eyes were lined in black kohl, but the rest of her face was a fortress. She didn’t cry. She didn’t soften, or melt, or coo. She just stared at the four-pound bundle under the warming lamp… This strange and quiet granddaughter she hadn’t known existed until some odd hours ago.

Then she reached in and touched your cheek with the gentlest fingertip she had. “So you’re Bauman,” she murmured. “Well. That makes two of us.”

Murray showed up hours later, hungover and unshaven, wearing the same shirt he’d fallen asleep in after a night spent ranting about Watergate to a bartender who’d stopped listening at midnight. But the moment he’d gotten home to three missed calls, and one helluva voicemail from his mother? He’d sobered up in a flash.

The blood in his veins boiled hotter than ever. He drove over — teeth gritted, smoke coming out of his ears, seething as he glared out the windshield while the godforsaken Indiana city became a bokeh blur around him.

He’d never liked Julie.

Didn’t matter if they were blood, Murray Bauman didn’t trust anyone who lied to themselves as easily as they lied to others. And that’s something his sister did like it was her life’s calling. He’d learned over the years, time and time again, to know better. To not expect anything but profuse disappointment and mind boggling strife when it came to his estranged sister, who’d snuck out of the house at thirteen years old to go get high and drunk with older boys who knew better but didn’t give a shit about consequences. Neither did Julie. Hell, it didn’t matter what consequences came her way. No punishment ever got through to her. She was self-sabotage in human form: “defiant, reckless and cursed to the core.” That’s how Murray described her.

Which is why he’d stopped taking her calls from a jail cell when she needed bailing out, and stopped signing her up for rehab that she only pretended to want until she got her way and dipped.

As a self-proclaimed cynic, nothing surprised Murray.

But this news hit him sideways.

He wasn’t a father; he wasn’t even the idea of one. He’d spent a lifetime avoiding responsibility with the same precision other men avoided landmines and commitment.

…and then he saw you.

Marjorie eyed him from the other side of the glass in the NICU. And as soon as her son entered, she stepped back to give him the floor.

“About time,” she mumbled as she lit up another cigarette right in front of the No Smoking sign, just outside the doorway.

The nurse opened her mouth to object, then closed it again.

Murray didn’t even quip back at his mother, even though that’s what they did best. He couldn’t look at anything but you.

You were hooked up to monitors that all beeped like anxious birds, wrapped in a blanket too big for your body. Your tiny fists were clenched. Your eyelids fluttered like moth wings.

The chart at the foot of the crib still said Baby Girl Bauman.

“…you look like something from a sci-fi experiment,” he muttered, his voice gravelly, but something in it cracked at the edges. “Christ, kid. What the hell were you born into…?”

He stared at you for a long while, and Marjorie let him. Quietly, she watched. Right there in the doorframe, trimmed brows subtly furrowing at the sight. A nurse eventually walked in when you began to fuss. The sound was dreadful. High pitched and pained, like irritation set on fire. Murray looked on in horror as the nurse began to swaddle you, catching his mother’s pensive stare over her shoulder. Because even she hadn’t gotten used to the sound, no matter how many times she’s heard you make it over the last stretch of hours.

“I wanna know everything,” Murray demanded, his voice uncharacteristically raw, despite its bass. He stared hard at the nurse swaddling you. “What all’s in her system. What my sister was on. How it’s affecting this child—all of it. Right now.”

The nurse didn’t hesitate.

She and the doctor went on to tell your uncle how Julie was on crack cocaine before and during birth. How you were born too early, already shaking with the kind of bone rattling tremors that didn’t belong in a human — let alone a fetus. How the entire staff knew before the results even came back, because babies exposed to crack don’t cry the way other newborns cry. They shriek, high and thin, inconsolable even underneath layers of blankets and given the most tender loving care.

Marjorie recounted what she’d learned, too. How your withdrawals hit within mere hours. How no drugs of any kind could simply ease you off the cliff, because stimulant babies don’t get that.

“They just endure it,” she said flatly, eyes cold, heart blue.

The nurses kept you swaddled in the softest of cotton, the lights dimmer as warmly low as they could go, every sound muffled and every staff member accurately aware of themselves.

“Feeding’s been a battle,” the nurse told Murray, who watched you with what almost appeared to be awestruck wonder, despite the icicle lodged inside his chest. She swaddled you close, offering him a sad smile. “But… she likes touch. As long as it’s gentle.”

He blinked at her, then at you. Then her again.

“…and Child Protective Services already filed the paperwork.”

She nodded. “Correct. But—”

“Tell ‘em to burn it.”

Murray didn’t catch his mother’s stare from across the room, or even the soft look in the nurse’s eyes. He was too busy looking at you now. How your eyes were finally beginning to open a bit, locking with his own. For some reason, it didn’t look like his sister’s daughter. Regardless of how your piercing, dark irises resembled hers, and even his… they didn’t look the same. They just look like your own.

You are your own miracle.

Eventually, it was just the three of you. Because while you needed constant supervision, this was clearly a crucial moment to just be a family. Whatever that even looked like, given the circumstances.

“S’good look on you,” Marjorie deadpanned, gesturing at her son’s swaddling efforts. “Shoulda signed you up for Christmas pageants.”

Murray fixed her with a look. “Virgin Mary would sooner pick Cher to play her before I got the call.”

It wasn’t even heated between them. Not now, inside this dimly lit NICU. How on earth could it be? How could they bicker and argue about petty nonsense, like how her son “never calls” and his mother “dials room service” more than she ever calls him, when they’ve just discovered there’s been a new member of this family for four entire months of them not knowing…?

“She didn’t even name her,” Marjorie said quietly.

“Of course she didn’t,” Murray muttered bitterly, but careful not to disturb you. “Julie never stuck around long enough to name anything.”

There was a lot of subtext behind that statement.

But neither of them pushed or expanded on it.

They went silent then — mother and son, two people who’d failed each other in small, sharp ways for decades. But something shifted in that room where they stood there together now: a line in the sand, a wordless vow.

You didn’t need a mother.

You were getting them.

They took you home three weeks later. Marjorie held you like a woman who never learned softness but would break anyone who threatened the little life in her arms. Murray sat in the back seat with you, because he insisted it was “scientifically irresponsible” to leave a newborn alone, and also because he didn’t trust the car seat.

You only cried once on the drive, a thin sound like someone testing the edge of their own voice. Murray reached down, awkward and unsure… and your hand — tiny enough to disappear in his palm — curled around his finger with a strength that startled him.

“Well, shit,” he whispered, staring down at you like you’d just rearranged the entire contents of his brain and instilled something permanent inside of him. “Guess I’m in this, huh?”

Marjorie didn’t look back, but Murray could hear the devilish grin in her voice.

“You’re a Bauman,” she stated. “Of course you are.”

And just like that, born into the worst kind of beginning, you were claimed.

Not rescued, not redeemed.

Claimed, but two broken people who had enough fight left in them to make sure you’d never go unseen again.

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