Discombobulated by The Disembodied
Rating: Teen and Up (May Change)CW: Graphic Depictions of Violence/Canon Typical Violence, Canon Typical Blood & GoreCharacters: Steve Harrington, Robin Buckley, Vecna, Other Characters to Be AddedTags: Canon Re-write, Canon Divergence, Season 4, Vecna's Curse, Steve Harrington Gets Vecna'd, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington's Friendship, Steve Harrington Has Nightmares, Traumatized Steve Harrington, Mild Humor, Steve Harrington Has Head Trauma, Steve Harrington Has Migraines, Worried Robin Buckley, Mentions of Steve's Bad Parents, Other Tags To Be Added WC: 4,177
Season four rewrite where Steve gets targeted instead of Max. More to be added eventually, but here's chapter one! Enjoy! <3
Or, read it on AO3 Over Here!
🪦—————🪦 A bloody nose isn’t good for business. Not when it drips down onto the case he’s holding. Staining the pristine white edge with a rich pool of his warm blood. He’s never done well at the sight of it. And knows damn well she won’t allow him to just walk around Family Video with a wad of toilet paper up his nostril. “Robin,” he calls out towards the back room.
“What d’ya want Steve? I’m on break!” She shouts. Her mouth is full of something. Probably fries, if the smell of grease in the air says anything.
“Um—I—Don’t freak out!”
“You know that as soon as you say something like that, I’m going to do it regardless. Now, what’s wrong?! Use your big boy words!”
Steve scoffs and rolls his eyes. Finger laying flat against his nostrils, head tilted towards the ceiling. The flow won’t stop. He pinches. Voice high pitched and embarrassingly similar to Kermit the Frog, “I’ve got a bloody nose! I’ll go to the bathroom and clean it up, already half way there. Just need somebody to watch the counter.” And since he’s honest, he’s in the men’s restroom before she has the chance to even open the break room door.
It’s a mess. His hand is coated in his own blood, already drying between his fingers, caught in the life lines. A faint ring of red on the edge of his right nostril. Damp spot above his lip, caught in the little bit of mustache hair he’s got, tacky. It’s on the tip of his tongue when he catches a little bead between his lips. He wets a paper towel and dabs at the stains on his face. The white paper turning hideously pink. Almost salmon. Wrings it out under the steady stream of warm water from the tap, watching as the blood washes away in little swirls. This has to be the most inconvenient time to get a nose bleed. But every single time has been inconvenient. Is there convenience in blood on his face?
He sighs when he’s finally clean. And takes a good look at himself in the mirror. Dark circles and oily skin. Shaking hands. Dark pink lips—stained. “Get it together,” he mutters, “rent’s due in a few days. Need all the money you can get.” He runs his hand over his face, grimacing at the flakes of blood that come away from his sweaty palm. “Fuck.”
When he’s back on the sales floor, he has to force the annoyed sigh back down his throat. Robin’s already looking at him. Wide eyed and reaching out. “I’m fine,” he automatically says. She’s got questions, he knows this. Will he answer? Most likely not.
“There’s no way you’re fine, Steve!” She says in return, exasperated. It’s her signature catchphrase. “That’s the fifth nose bleed in the last like…four days? You should really—“
“Get it checked out. I know, Robbie. I can’t do that and you know that.”
She grumbles some sort of profanity under her breath, missed by Steve’s slow shuffling towards the counter. “Steve, I’ll literally…give you my paycheck for the rest of your rent if it means you’ll get checked out by a doctor,” she attempts to bargain.
“I’m not taking your money, you need that, too,” he rebuttals. “And I’m not going to a doctor. I don’t have insurance. It’ll get better, I’m sure. We have nothing to worry about.” Though when he looks down at the cases on the counter, stretching to take one, his hands are shaking. Of course he’s worried. He’s had concussions and enough doctor visits in the last three years, it’s enough to finally make his parents tut and coo over him. He’s heard all about brain damage and risks and all the other garbage. What’s nose bleeds on top of that? Just a minor setback. But also, maybe it does mean something. Maybe he’ll die in his sleep, too much blood on his pillow. He’s not sure. The doctor would prescribe him something, probably. Though, doctors aren’t his forte. Not after last summer.
“What if it’s cancer?” Robin oh-so helpfully supplies.
“It’s not cancer,” Steve drones.
“What about a brain bleed?”
“Think I’d know if that was happening.”
“What about—“
“Robin,” Steve interrupts firmly. “Your little diagnostics are not helping. And I wish you’d stop for the sake of my own sanity. I’ll get it figured out eventually. Now’s just not the time.”
He grabs the tape he had before, wiping at its edges with a sanitary wipe. The cloth is pink in his hand. Just like it’d been in the bathroom. He knows that she’s right. She always is, or at least mostly to some degree. But he can’t miss work. Not when he’s got groceries to buy and bills to pay and rent to cover. Not when he’s on his own, no longer covered by his parents.
“When will be the right time? Because at this rate, Steve, it’ll be when you’re covered in your own blood and dead on the floor.” She moves behind him. Standing all too close to his back. He moves away. Her hand falling back down to hit the side of her thigh. “Why won’t you just let me worry? Let me in, y’know. I’m your best friend, you can trust me.” He hates how wounded she sounds. A strain in the back of his throat. The lurching in the pit of his stomach.
“I do,” he weakly murmurs. “I’m just fine with handling this kind of stuff. Not like I haven’t done it before.”
“But you have your own place. You have independence. You’ve got your friends,” Robin lists. Voice rising in urgency and volume. “They want to help you. They want to give you what your parents couldn’t, Steve! That’s part of my purpose! To just be there!”
He sighs. Bends himself in half over the counter, forehead resting on his open palm. The aching tinge of a migraine settling uneasily behind his eyebrows. They’re getting more frequent, too. He’s already out of his prescription medication for this bullshit. Now reliant on Tylenol, and ibuprofen, and weed from Eddie Munson. It’s been weeks since he’s been able to just go about his day, normally and at peace. Haunting nightmares. Whispered voices in cold silences. Getting high just to cover up the pain that doesn’t even recede when he’s finally out of his mind. It’s bad that he’s got Robin yelling at him. Bad that he wants to cave, give in. Knows that he can’t, though. It’s all such bullshit. “I’d ask for your help,” he grits, “But it wouldn’t do much good.”
She exhales sharply over his shoulder. “What’s that supposed to fucking mean?” Her voice bites.
“It means,” he drags on, voice going weaker and weaker by the second, “means that I’ve tried everything. And nothing you could do is going to help me right now. That’s all I meant. I’m not—You know I’m not that guy anymore.” A part of him wants to cry. Grovel at her feet. Chomp down on the side of the counter and sob into the surface, sounds muffled by the formica. But he stays bent over his own hands. Knees forward and ready to crouch down. His hair flops into his eyes. It’s almost laughable how he keeps forgoing his normal hair care routine, but knows that it’s cause for concern, too. What the hell happened to me, a small part of him wonders. The rest of him is just caught up in Robin. What she thinks of him. Why she sticks around for somebody like him.
Steve stands from his stupor. To look back. Her eyes are forlorn towards the doors. Body tight and still. “I don’t know how you can help,” he mutters. “I’d ask if—“
“I know,” she quickly interrupts. “Doesn’t mean you have to be alone, though. I—I’m gonna head back to the break room. Have the rest of my lunch. Take yours in fifteen minutes, alright?” Her eyes find him. And for once, her eyes that are normally excited and curious and welcoming, are dull and closed off. “I want you to eat today. Bounce back. Be yourself.”
He nods once. A finality to it. “Right. Yeah, I’ll take my lunch soon. I can’t guarantee that I’ll be normal.”
“Then don’t be normal. Just be Steve. Be the guy I’m friends with. Not some…Some self conscious jerk who won’t let his best friend worry. Because she does. Do that. A lot. But only because she loves you and doesn’t like the idea of you being dead. So don’t do that. Don’t die because you’re being an ignorant moron.” He laughs, loud and belly forward. Something in him sparkles, glinting gold and honey-like when she smiles at him. Even as she tries to hide it from his sight. She chuckles herself and walks by him, but not without throwing a fake-out punch to his arm. “Fries are calling my name, Steve-O. Practically screeching for me to eat them.”
“Go eat, you dork,” he chokes out through his fit of giggles. Stomach clenching with the words. “I’ll still be here, you know that.”
“You better be, Steve Harrington. Or I’ll find you and kill you myself.”
“Not unless somebody gets to me first,” he fires at her back, already half way through the break room door.
She flips him off. Good natured. Chipped nail polish gleaming in the Family Video light. Her voice is muffled by the swinging door. “Don’t be a stranger! Maybe close up! Come chow down! I’ve got your stupid burger with yellow mustard, you freak!” Before he can dignify that with a response, the bell above the front doors chimes. He schools himself.
His headache festers. And he swears, for a moment, that somebody whispers his name.
——— Before he sleeps, he pops three Tylenol. Technically, he’s not supposed to. But he’s also out of weed. And what he’d normally take for migraines. This goddamned headache won’t leave him. It went from a dull ache within the last four days to a throbbing, pulsing mass at the back of his head. And, sure, maybe he should go to a doctor. Not now. Not with what his brain will surely create for him tonight.
He’s tried just not sleeping. But then he’s too groggy in the morning. Running off of tepid cups of coffee and whatever candy he grabs from the rack in Family Video. While it’s not ideal, the suffering in his sleep, he knows that he’ll have to shut his eyes. Sweat through his clothes. Get caught in the blankets like a mouse in a trap.
It takes a while. The all encompassing brownish-black behind his eyelids to swallow him whole. But it does. Sucking him in, tying him down to the mattress, shoving him further and further into the indent his body makes.
———— He can hear them screaming through the large metal door. The separation growing farther and farther as he sits. Strapped to the chair. Eyes pointed and unblinking at the door. Nauseous and off-kilter, but so damn afraid. Terrified as another screech breaks through the underside of the door.
They shouldn’t have come down here. No matter how enticing this secret code was. No matter if he knew where the music was coming from. He knew that it was stupid. That all of this was a bad and awful idea. And now he’s got two basically brand new people roped into his and Dustin’s bullshit.
The screams fade. Walls crumbling around him. He’s stuck to the chair.
Trapped. His labored and panicked breathing echoing between the floor and the endless abyss that cages him in on all four sides. Beyond where the door was, he sees them.
He tries. Tries really hard to look away. To find a corner or a stain by his shoe or a stray ice cream cone crumb on his uniform, but to no avail. His eyes remain glued to where the door should still be. Where it should be shielding him from this gnarly, unsightly, gruesome view.
Robin Buckley is a tangle of broken limbs and matted blonde hair, smeared lipstick and plucked black fingernails. Her sneakers are soaked in red, covering the doodles he’s seen before, smearing whatever ink was previously there. The white on her uniform is unmistakably pink. Her face…Steve doesn’t recognize it. Features smashed in, bloodied, or missing. Eyes no longer blue. Just two black holes. Suggestions for where eyeballs should go. And he veers his line of sight just to the left of her slumped body, all crooked and messy on the bench they’ve thrown her on. There, on the ground by her rolled over left foot, is her eyeballs. Piercing blue and retina tailed.
Dustin Henderson is also more broken bones than put together human. His curls are frizzy, stained with red, sticking tacky to his forehead. A bloodied pile of teeth lay rotting next to his corpse. His hat is too far away for him to reach. Hands tied behind his back and strained, rubbed red raw on his wrists. T-shirt worn from camp instead ripped and jumbled, stained with crimson, and sticky to his body.
Erica Sinclair. She’s only twelve years old. He can’t look any longer. At what he couldn’t prevent. What he should’ve been able to save. They’re all kids, a part of him realizes. He’s the only one there who’s an adult, who’s had the chance to graduate high school, who’s alive.
A presence lingers behind him. He dares not turn his head.
But a disembodied voice accompanies the lingering shadow towering over his soon-to-be corpse.
“Steve Harrington…Your time is up.” ————
He startles awake in his bedroom. It’s dark. The black inkiness undefinable in the space around him. Filled with the white noise of silence. His clothes are wet with sweat. Limbs locked straight and stiff at his sides. Eyes centered to the foot of his bed.
There’s nobody there, which he wants to believe. But Steve swears, in this torturous moment, a figure stands over him. Tangled in its own flesh. A singular white eye. Dangling claw-like hand brushing the comforter tucked insecurely at his feet. It’s mouth remains still and closed and absent of lips. He swears it. He hears it. “Steve Harrington,” the figure seems to whisper. Voice deep and rumbling. Disembodied from all sides.
He swears it comes from the figure. He knows it does. It has to. But the next time he blinks.
Eyelids squelching with the tears he couldn’t sense.
The figure is gone. Dissipated. He knows he won’t sleep again. Searching the room, eyes going right towards his night stand, the alarm clock reads 3am. It was worth a try. Managed a good five hours somehow. It’s something.
It’s enough as he peels himself from bed and stumbles to the bathroom. It’s enough when he reemerges in a towel with sopping wet hair. It’s enough when he idles in his car outside of the shitty apartment complex he’s managed for himself.
It’s enough to wonder if what he foresaw was just a figment of his imagination.
For now, however, he pulls out of the parking lot. Riding slow and careful to Robin’s house. Today’s the day of the championship game. And he’ll be damned if he misses it.
——— “You’re awfully quiet this morning,” Robin drawls. She doesn’t have to look at him to know that it’s the truth. Her eyeball is practically pressed against the passenger’s visor mirror. Applying her mascara with fingers prying the eye open, tongue squished between her teeth, nostrils flared in concentration.
Steve scoffs. “It’s just early, man. Not that weird.” He rolls his shoulders as much as he can with his hands extended to his steering wheel. Sometimes he wishes she weren’t so perceptive. Or that she only noticed him when he was down on his luck about his dating pool, not his existence. He blinks sluggishly, the road blurring for a brief moment. He should’ve had more coffee or something this morning. Being alert is important. Being aware. Being ready, especially after what he saw last night.
“It is a little,” she mutters, still hyper-focused on her makeup. “I mean—Usually, you’d be melting my ears off with some discussion about your dating life. How much it sucks. What you’re looking for. Your success in bed the night before.” Finally, she pulls herself away from the visor, open mascara tube in hand, and stares long at his profile. “Did you even go on your date yesterday? That girl…What was her name…From the other day? Thought you scored a movie with her or something.”
He shakes his head. Eyes vigilant to the road. “Heidi. Her name is Heidi, first of all.”
“Okay, Heidi. Her name is Heidi. Did you go on a date with her? Or are you going to tell me how she isn’t the right person? Because you aren’t eager to. Which means one of many things: she’s going out of state for school, she’s more interested in your douchebag dad, she thought that you could get her a word in with Tommy the Horrid, or she almost bit your dick off while giving you a blow-ie and now you’re too afraid of a girl with a little bite to her bark.”
“Hey! The girl that almost bit my dick off had serious teeth to her, dude! I have every right to be afraid of somebody making a snack outta my dick,” he objects. “Besides, I wouldn’t know about Heidi because I didn’t even call her!”
Robin sucks in between her teeth. “Low blow, Steve-O.”
“I forgot!”
She groans. “That’s even worse, Steve,” she bemoans. “It’s like objectively terrible to forget to call the girl that you asked out. If anything, I should’a called her and taken her up on the movie.”
“Oh, come off it,” Steve shoots. “God forbid a guy forgets every once in a while.”
“God forbid a girl accidentally bites your dick,” Robin mumbles under her breath. She leans forward before Steve can refute and turns up the music on the radio. Her nose crinkles immediately. “Tears For Fears…Again? It’s the exact same tape as yesterday!”
Steve just shrugs in response. Sure, it is the same tape. But also, it’s keeping that lingering whisper at bay. He’s made almost a science out of it. Whenever he prickles with a floundering sense that he’s being watched, he plays the first few seconds of their song, “Watch Me Bleed”. It works, though. Brain zeroing in on just the voices emanating from the tape’s delicate nature. He plays it in his Walkman at work. During his break. From the stereo in his car. The sound system he stole from his parents. Wherever he can fit the music like caulk between tiles, that’s where the whispers don’t reach him.
She sighs at his non response. “Alright, what’s going on with you?” She finally asks. “We’ve been in this car for like fifteen minutes. You won’t talk to me about girls. You won’t ask me why I’m getting all dolled up or whatever. And now you’re listening to, admittedly, the most heart wrenching Tears For Fears album I have ever heard. At least so far.”
“Does there have to be something wrong with me to listen to Tears For Fears?”
“Yes. When it’s depressing, there absolutely needs to be something going on with you. Talk to me,” she eggs, slapping the back of her left hand on his bicep. He winces at the sound. “Let me in Steve or I’m gonna ban you from picking movies at work.”
He gasps, offended. “You wouldn’t!”
“I’ll turn on The Apartment everyday I work with you this week. Swear on it, I will. Let me in or there will be dire consequences.”
He shifts in his seat. And for the first time in the whole drive, he pulls his line of sight over to Robin. She stares back. But he can’t actually bring himself to look. Not at her eyes or where her lipstick might be smudged. Or at her fingernails, no matter the color they’re painted right now. He finds a freckle between her eyebrows instead. “Okay, fine,” he mutters. “I’ve been having nightmares, that’s all.” And then he’s back at the road. The long and stretching road. An uneasy silence around all aspects of his car. It’s not usually this vacant. But something is changing, shifting. Lurking, he can sense it.
“Just nightmares? Or does this have to do with the bloody noses and chronic headaches you’ve been getting, too?” Of course she knows what to ask. The exact questions he doesn’t like answering.
He shrugs once more. “I don’t know, Robbie. Maybe. Probably doesn’t help my headaches when I get less sleep than needed. The nose bleeds are their own issue, I think.”
“See, this is why you should be going to a doctor. They’d actually know, y’know? Instead of speculating all this garbage.”
“Robin—“
“I’ll drop it. For your sanity. But, come on, it’s not weird to you? Not at all. All these things suddenly happening in your life. Practically mingling and making out in the corners. There has to be—“
He can’t listen to this any longer. To her paranoid ramblings. The what ifs and possibilities. At the next red light, he slams harder than necessary on the breaks. Hands squeezing the steering wheel tightly. Pointedly looking at his white knuckle grip. Tears simmer in his eyes. But he can’t. Can’t do this. The next swallow of spit he takes is harsh and agitating on his throat. “Why are you putting on so much makeup? Nobody has ever cared that much about a pep rally. Why do you suddenly care about this pep rally?” He interrogates.
Except, while he’d been expecting a long and agitated ramble that turned all too sappy, there’s silence. An odd and tense type of silence. Drawn with charcoal and engulfed in flames. His chest drops inwards, stomach swooping towards his throat, and his breath grows choked and distant from himself. He doesn’t move his eyes. For fear that the tangled flesh of that unidentifiable late night visitor will be wearing Robin’s scent. Doused in her perfume, but wickedly tall and bent. He doesn’t look. Not even when the recognizable drag of claws grows sharp and mean on the back of his right hand. Even as they curl into the cuff of his jacket. Even as the fabric bunches with the movement. Crinkling like plastic. And for a moment, it’s like he’s ground beef stowed behind plastic wrap on a grocery store shelf. Awaiting some fate. A fate somehow like death. Death after death.
“Steve,” it whispers. Definitely not Robin. Deep and masculine and vibrating. He swears the voice echoes in his chest. In his head. But he favors the steering wheel. Doesn’t want to confirm something he made up. He’s making this up. He has to be.
“Steve,” it tries again. The claws on his hand press firmer. He winces. But doesn’t move. Doesn’t pull away. Even if it could take him at any moment. Even if it could diffuse his suffering. Even if it would rid him of the crawling under his skin that he’s tried to lock away for the last three years.
The next time, “Steve,” is said again, it’s Robin. Shaking his hand. Firmly pushing into his skin. Panicked and sharp and loud by his ear. He blinks, shifting, whipping his head to see her. Her piercing blue eyes perfectly placed in their sockets, fitted by black mascara and her lips a shiny pink, freckles, shaking voice, meticulously styled bob. “Steve, hello? What the hell—Where’d you just go?”
He flits over his surroundings. Pulled to the side of the road. Idling with the engine on. The tape done and over. How long have I been out of it, he has to wonder, and how did I get over here from the road? “I—I don’t know what that was,” he musters. “Lost in thought, I guess.”
“Is your head up your own ass or something? Made me have to pull over and emergency brake, you asshole.”
“Sorry,” Steve murmurs, “must be more tired than I thought.” His hands go back to the steering wheel. The leather squeaks under his sweaty grip. It’s solid where he touches. The only thing he can hear are his hands and her breath. He sighs with exhausted relief. “So,” he chirps, “getting ready for Vickie, right?” He deflects. “She definitely likes boobies. And you like boobies. Match made in heaven.”
For a moment, Robin’s eyes flash with something like grievance. A worry. But she schools her expression and scoffs. A tight, tight laugh. “Don’t call them that!” She squawks.
If he continues to egg her on, he can pretend like there isn’t something breathing down his neck. Can pretend, too, that he doesn’t feel the need to be ready. For danger. For imminent peril. For his death.
🪦—————🪦 More to come later, but take this for now. Basically throwing you a bone. Whoops. Chew on this for a bit while I think about how to keep the narrative going.
