ST x TBP
Not like, super big or anything but there's a good number of people who like to write Steve Harrington as Finney Blake? I love horror movies and The Black Phone is genuinely one of my favorites. That being said, I feel like there's so much freedom in writing some sort of crossover between the two, so I just wanted to give a bit of how I would write one.
Alright, so we know that Brenner somehow has his fingers in places not just around the country (lab in Indiana and to a lesser extent, Nevada with Project Nina and everything) but also the world cause of Kali, right? Kali, for some reason that I've yet to understand, is from London.
Point is, Brenner is curious, has power, the drive and the money/government backing to do what he wants. He's in/was in the CIA, right? So let's say that he was in charge of MK Ultra and Nina but that's not all. He has, like, spies or whatever. People on his payroll who keep an eye out for things that are interesting. You know what someone finds interesting?
How in 1978 in Denver, Colorado, the police write up reports of a little girl who says that she has dreams about boys getting kidnapped. Even better, her brother ends up getting kidnapped. And even better than that? The dad's a drunk so taking her should be easy.
Before Brenner gets there, already writing off the older brother, it's revealed that Finney Blake not just survived but killed his kidnapper and all it takes is a wire watch/listen in the house that they already bugged to overhear the siblings talking. The girl can see things, that they already know. But the boy too?
The dad's a drunk and the town knows it- knows how the wife offed herself not even that long ago. Taking both the kids is, quite literally, super easy for them to do.
This is the thing tho.
Gwendolyn Blake's questionable powers are easier to gauge and test. As far as Brenner knows, the boy will never see anything other than the tragic boys who were killed in a basement. So while Brenner takes Gwen back to Hawkins with him (the massacre doesn't take place until 79), Finney gets sent to the shell of an old bomb shelter in Nevada (or somewhere else, it really don't matter).
Que Season One of ST. Gwen is there -knows that something is definitely off about Henry Creel but can't really do anything about it- when El gets out. Gwen's tattooed a number but she's way too difficult to play the game, that being said, she's also smart and knows how to pick her battles.
They get out. Somehow, I dunno. Point is that Gwen's there. She's canonically born in 67 so she's the same age of Nancy, Jon, Robin, etc. When she gets out, she obviously wants to help El and with the weird monsters and everything. If nothing else, she definitely wants to kill the guy who kidnapped her.
She wants to find her brother.
So season one happens and there's calm and Gwen thinks that this, this is it. How she's gonna find Finney, she doesn't know yet but she gets some money from the government; knows how and what to threaten to get exactly what she wants. Owens either lies or genuinely doesn't know -at that point- if MK Ultra/Brenner had any other labs. So even if he actively tries to help, he's likely blocked by the higher government.
Finney, on the other hand, is officially traumatized beyond belief. I dunno about how his abilities would work quite yet but the point is that he still hears the damn phone ringing. He ignores it when he can- answers and talks when he's forced to by his captors. Eventually, he gets the call about Alpine Lake. This is in the TBP2 canon time of 1982 so Finney?
Finney get's out of his own lab before Gwen does. He can go a bit crazy or somehow sneaks out or maybe, idk, he ends up getting transferred to a different lab entirely or something because his powers get elevated somehow through a serum or some bs and that's how he escapes. How whimsey.
Crazy/pissed/hurt enough to probably deal with the ghost of Shaw/The Grabber himself. And just... doesn't know what to do after. Goes back to Colorado and just- his dad's dead. Gwen was taken too but he has no idea where she is. If she's even still alive. So he just wanders? Get's out of CO because he's still legally missing.
Finney and Gwen find each other eventually and it's because of El. Because Eleven is difficult, yes. Taken in by Hopper, yes. But so is Gwen and Gwen hates cops and thinks that they're pretty damn useless so Hopper is having to deal with them both and honestly, poor Joyce.
Joyce Byers who isn't so much as meek as she is anxious; especially since her son was taken and monsters ended up being real. She tries to connect and help and Joyce, at some point, realizes that telling the girl that her brother was likely dead wasn't exactly helpful.
Joyce and Hopper get back into investigating like they did with Terry Ives. They call some people. End up getting a newspaper of Finney Blakes kidnapping shipped out and that- it's the picture. El can find him.
Finney doesn't ever answer the phone.
I dunno how it happens or where, when or how but they meet up. Maybe Gwen goes or maybe she doesn't know how to deal with what El's explaining. Maybe Finney is, like, hitchhiking across the country or maybe he's stealing or maybe he's getting by somehow and paying for a cheap as hell apartment or something. But Finney, eventually, gets to Hawkins and is there for the fallout.
(Not sure about the timing -if I haven't said that enough yet- but I think it'd end up being Eddie x Finney cause they're the same age. (I hc Munson born in 65, which Finney was, too. Steve was born in 66 and the rest of the teens in 67) Just picture Robin and Gwen teaming up together to make fun of people or something, idk.)
(For all that I love Steve Harrington and Finney Blake, I don't understand how people can write them to be the same person. That being said! There's some real good stories out there for the trope. This is just how I'd do it.)















