Chapter Text
Steve starts spending more nights at the radio station. At first it’s just a night or two, usually pre and post crawls, but then he just settles into the new habit and makes it semi-official by renovating an office into a bedroom.
“—I mean, at first it was like, do I really want to live at my place of work, but then Robin said, hey, it’s like you’re Batman, and—”
That’s what Dustin gets as an explanation. It’s all he’s getting as an explanation, even though he knows it’s because Robin doesn’t want Steve rattling around in his house. It’s too close to the lab, she said, ticking this off as Reason #1 on her fingers, and his parents never made it back before the quarantine, and yes, they were always gone, but not like this, and most of Loch Nora’s residents hotfooted it right before the tanks rolled in, so now he really is all alone up there in the hills.
With a murder pool in his backyard.
Steve’s bedroom window looks out over the murder pool. This, to Dustin’s knowledge, has never bothered Steve, and he doubts it’s going to become an issue now.
But maybe he’s tired of Robin always haranguing him, so he relents. Because he’s Batman with a squad of Robins—and Batgirl, he supplies when Robin shoots him a look—and because he spent so much time cleaning out Jimmy Fast Hands’ bathroom that he needs to make all that effort worth it.
“That’s just sunk cost fallacy, man,” Dustin says to him. “And if you’re worried about a gate opening in your pool, may I remind you that the sidewalk right outside of the station split in half, revealing the fiery and somewhat dead depths of the Upside Down, which was why Jimmy Fast Hands beat it—”
Steve just flaps a hand at him. It could mean anything from quit your yapping (except then he’d press his fingers together, and he didn’t) to come give me a hand, and it’s usually the latter, but Dustin doesn’t want to give in.
He doesn’t want to enable Steve’s bad decisions.
And it’s a pretty shitty decision, even if Robin was the one to put the idea in Steve’s brain, because it’s stupid and unnecessary.
It’s just window dressing, Steve says, and Dustin doesn’t even think he knows what the phrase means. It’s background décor. That sort of shit.
It’s irrelevant.
But Steve is the only one around who actually gives a shit about window dressing, and maybe it really is that.
It looks good—that’s the thing. It’s comforting to think that someone like Steve is manning the comms, because he looks responsible. He dresses the part and everything. He’s respectable.
Solid. Steady. Dependable.
These are all terms Dustin has heard bandied around by parents and the community at large.
(Steve is everything Eddie wasn’t and would never have been.)
Maybe Steve’s so used to playing the part of the solid, steady hero that he doesn’t even think to say no when they move him into the radio station like they’re doing him a favor. Sure, he’s not living there all the time, because he has fantastic water pressure at home and he’s not a masochist, alright, Dustin, and yet—
His hair products start taking up space on the counters. He turns one storage room, and then another, into a walk-in closet.
“It’s an armory,” he mutters to a judgmental Jonathan Byers, who also cleaned out the bathrooms in a hazmat suit but wasn’t rewarded a room for his troubles. “Okay? It’s for stowing the stuff we wear into the Upside Down. Do you want to track all that crap floating down there into Nance’s house? Do you?”
They all know better. That oatmeal wool sweater Steve just hung up has no place in an armory.
Jonathan never does point out that whatever floating crap indigenous to the Upside Down has already done multiple cycles in everyone’s washing machine, so Steve’s newfound fastidiousness does absolutely jackshit. Instead, he just mumbles something about how crashing on a couch for longer than a month is stupid if Steve is only doing it to impress Nancy.
“I’m not doing it to impress Nance!” Steve says, all worked up like he gets whenever the topic of his love life comes up. “It’s just practical, alright, Jonathan? It makes sense. And Robin was the one to suggest it.”
But Dustin thinks it is for Nancy. It’s a way of saying, see? Steve’s always on call, always ready for another round.
(Always ready to play hero, and it’s so fucking stupid—
Look at what happened to Eddie, and who’s mourning him? No one. Steve’s so eager to die for a girl who chose Jonathan over him, and it doesn’t matter that the girl is Nancy Wheeler.
No one is worth Steve’s life. No one should be.)
“It’s just,” Jonathan says, bafflingly still part of this conversation even though Dustin can see that he doesn’t really want to be talking to Steve any longer than he has to. “Don’t you want to live in a house? Your own house? It has to be better than—” He shrugs. “It’s not like there’s anything left in the lab. If that’s what Robin is worried about.”
The point that he’s trying to make is this: Loch Nora, for better or for worse, is familiar ground. It’s home turf. It’s comfortable. There is immeasurable comfort in sleeping in one’s own bed and watching one’s own television, and Steve has always been a creature of habit, no matter how well he rolls with the punches.
“Again,” Steve says pissily, “I’m not moving out of the house.” He says this like his house is the house, the center of Hawkins, the origin of the axes that span their fucked up little world.
Jonathan, who has never set foot inside the Harrington residence, just blinks.
“But yeah,” Steve says. “Your concern is touching. Duly noted.”
It would be a bitchy way to end the conversation, if he didn’t sound so goddamn sincere.
He means every word of it, and he proves it by enlisting Dustin to help him move a mattress and bed frame into the station.
Dustin tries to say no. He does say no. But Steve is so horribly insistent about it. He picks Dustin up in that godawful van as soon as the bell rings, and Dustin just knows he’s turning this exercise into a Thing.
More babysitting for Steve, he thinks dully to himself. It’s almost sad, because does Steve really want to be ransacking an abandoned furniture shop for a mattress with one of his kids in tow?
Does he really want Dustin to be the one trying out a box spring instead of Robin or Nancy?
“Of course I want your eyes on it, man,” Steve says, clapping his shoulders when he accidentally says that last part out loud. Steve’s great at ignoring the parts he doesn’t want to hear. “You spend the most time in my room, dude.”
“Because you have Duck Hunt. Which you won’t have at the Squawk.”
“There’s a whole radio tower and other cool shit,” Steve says. “C’mon, you gotta admit—this place is great compared to Scoops. Or Family Videos. You like Batman, don’t you? Where else can you get your own Batcave?”
“So am I Batman?” Dustin asks, testy. “Or am I your sidekick? Am I Dick Grayson or Jason Todd?”
Both names go over Steve’s head.
“Uh,” he says. “Whoever you want to be? Does it really matter? No, don’t answer that.”
Dustin watches him wander off to examine a lamp.
“Christ.” Steve’s voice bounces off the walls. “There’s so much stuff here. Can’t believe we didn’t take down the boards and donate everything back in April.”
“That would probably qualify as grand larceny,” Dustin says.
(“But now,” Eddie said shakily, “I’m wanted for murder, and soon, grand theft auto. So, uh, yeah, I’m really living up to that Munson name.”)
“What happens under quarantine stays under quarantine,” Steve says absently. “Besides, it’s not like they’re gonna get sold anywhere else.”
And here’s the kicker—
He knows Steve’s trying to make everything lighthearted and fun. And maybe it’s just years of habit ingrained in Dustin—all those afternoons spent at Family Video, doing his homework, scaring off Steve’s customers—but it’s easy, far too easy, to let Steve get his way.
He thinks it’s his brain. The part wired for survival, the part that’s selfish and doesn’t want to spend the rest of its life in mourning. It keeps telling him to enjoy every moment spent with Steve, because who knows?
He was so miserable back in the fall of ‘85. The winter of ‘86. He would have sworn those eight months were hell, because everyone was drifting apart and it seemed like bonds forged in trauma weren’t that strong after all.
And now—
Well, shit.
Looking back, that period of his life seems almost idyllic.
--
But it’s not the good old days. There are no good old days, because that would mean—
Stand By Me is a shitty movie. Christ, that last line—
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
That’s the saddest shit Dustin’s ever heard in his life.
What the fuck was Steve even thinking, buying them tickets to that shitshow?
--
But then again, Steve’s never been afraid of change.
To change.
--
The latest change is also the final nail in the coffin.
(Of what, Mike says, nonplussed, and then he just shrugs when Dustin says of youth.
He really means Steve’s.)
Steve just turned twenty. He’s officially out of his teens now, and he’s putting on a good show of commitment. To the cause, to killing Vecna, to saving the world, yes, but also to his new job.
It’s the first job Steve takes seriously, and he makes Dustin take it seriously too. He puts Dustin to work. In between building whatever they need and helping Steve set up everything (and why was Steve put in charge? Oh, right, he volunteered because Nancy looked his way), Dustin tells him—maybe too sharply—that he should get a life outside of chasing after Nancy.
Steve aims a flat look at him.
“What does this have to do with Nance,” Steve says, sounding even flatter, and Dustin has to concede that maybe, just maybe, Steve is just bad at saying no sometimes. It’s always what would Hopper think or would so-and-so like flowers and a casserole and another stream of social niceties that only he gives a fuck about.
Dustin will be the first to admit that it’s these qualities that make Steve so endearing, but they’re so—
They’re so trite in the face of everything else.
This is why Nancy broke up with you, he thinks about saying to Steve. This is why she treats you like a child.
She does. She treats Steve like Mr. Rabbit or whatever stuffed animal she once loved and then gave away after she got her guns.
(She was ready to shoot him in the leg if that meant keeping him away from the demogorgons.)
It’s a private observation, one never meant to see the light of day, but somehow he lets his bitterness (on Steve’s behalf—he spent so long being bitter about Jonathan on Steve’s behalf, and now look at the two of them) leak to Robin, who dismisses everything he says out of hand.
“Steve listens to Nancy, sure,” she allows, “but, like, we all do. She has big guns and plans and she’s a force of nature. We just get out of her way. But Steve was co-captain of the swim team and the basketball team. He likes to take charge.”
He likes to take point.
“Exactly,” Robin says, “and Nancy knows this too. They dated on and off for six months before getting together officially, and then they made it another year after that, you know?”
Dustin was still just Nancy’s little brother’s toothless friend at the time, but yes, he does know.
He also knows that Nancy thinks Steve’s soft. It doesn’t matter whether he really is—
She likes him that way. Like he’s a remnant of a past she’d like to protect. Barb’s gone. She doesn’t want Steve to disappear too.
(Uncharitably, Dustin thinks she wants Steve exactly as she left him—
Single, wounded, pining.)
Pretend you don’t care.
Steve said that to Dustin and then spent the next three years proving that he was full of shit.
So why pretend in the first place? Better to be honest. But if they’re being honest now—
Why not just rip off the band-aid completely? Why trade niceties and pretend that this whole sordid business he had—has—with Nancy and Jonathan is something worth dying for?
He doesn’t mean to say all of this to Steve, but then they spend hours trying to fit that mattress through the Squawk’s doors (because Steve went for a king), and even longer setting up the bed.
It’s a fucking thankless task, back-breaking and tedious, and Steve’s mutterings about pizza are nothing but a pipe dream, because almost everything’s closed.
He has no idea how Enzo’s is still open, but they’re scraping by the skin of their teeth as things stand.
So it’s just Steve and a hot plate and a saucepan, which means it’s probably spinach and eggs, again. And mushrooms, because Steve’s on another health kick and he’s feeling adventurous, whatever that means. Dustin doesn’t usually have an opinion on Steve’s cooking, other than not bad, and he’s usually not a picky eater, but he hates it when Steve talks like a 1950s housewife.
He’s pretty sure Nancy hates that too.
He doesn’t mean to say it, but it just slips out of him: “Nancy hates eggs.”
Steve looks at him like he’s grown another head.
“Are you Nancy?”
“Uh, obviously, no?”
“Do you like eggs?”
“I don’t hate them.”
“Then I don’t see the problem here,” Steve says. He even manages to make it seem like he’s not gritting his teeth. “And Nancy doesn’t hate eggs. I’ve seen her eat Karen’s breakfast casseroles, okay?”
Nancy also hates those. Mike said so. And—
“I mean. Do you want to be on par with her mother?”
“Please,” Steve says, rolling his eyes. “Like she’d ever listen to me.”
“Yeah,” Dustin says. “So it’s stupid when you do things like move out of your perfectly nice house just because she said you should.”
“Henderson, I know you’ve been out of it, but you have ears that work, so you should know Robin—”
“It should have been Jonathan! I know he doesn’t want to live in the Wheelers’ basement. But you just had to—”
“Jonathan doesn’t want to squat in squalor—”
“And you do? God, Steve, stop martyring yourself. It’s not worth it.”
Steve’s surveying him with narrowed eyes. That’s a new thing too, another habit he’s picked up from Nancy. He takes a deep breath, like he’s about to launch into another rambling lecture, but then he just shakes his head (and his hair still flounces, but if he keeps showering here, he’s going to lose that shine) and says primly, “I don’t have his hangups.”
This, from a man who counts the puffs of Farrah Fawcett hairspray he gives himself. Who once spent a week hunting down a thin white belt to go with his sailor uniform. Who consults the color wheel when it comes to assembling outfits.
“You’re going to lose sleep because you’re crashing here,” Dustin informs him. “I know you think you’re in the clear because you have a brand new mattress, but it’s always cold here and blankets can only do so much. And inevitably, you’re going to find yourself saddled with a migraine when a demogorgon attacks because you’re so sleep deprived, and then what? Boom. You’re out of luck.”
Steve’s gaping at him.
“And it wouldn’t have been worth it,” Dustin says. “Look at Eddie. Even you’re not mourning him.”
Steve’s expression closes off instantly. It’s not that he’s stone-faced—his eyes are too expressive for that—but for a split second, a mask slams into place.
He—
Dustin wants to think—again, uncharitably—that he looks like King Steve, surveying this piss-ant of a sophomore he should be shoving into lockers or the toilet, but there’s no violence in the way he holds himself.
It’s just disappointment, which seems to be the theme of his year.
Dustin can tell he’s holding back.
But whatever he’s biting back just fades away. He shrugs.
“Are we talking about the elephant in the room now?” he asks mildly.
It’s practically an admission.
“That you’re not mourning him?”
“I did mourn him,” Steve says. “Dustin—it’s not like I’m happy he died, alright? But we can sit here and torture ourselves over everything we did wrong, or we can try to move on.”
(He shouldn’t move on. Dustin hasn’t moved on, and he doesn’t think he ever will.)
Steve’s still talking: “Nance tried the first thing after Barb died, and it tore her to pieces. And Max did the same after her brother bit the dust, even though it wasn’t her fault, like, at all, and it was just pointless. It was pointless.”
“Do you count your mistakes?” Dustin asks anyway.
Steve goes still. Then he says pointedly, “Yeah. Should have turned him in to the cops.”
It’s—
It’s such an ugly thing to say. Dustin wants to knock the tatters of his past right out of him.
But then Steve sighs, and it’s a big, gusty thing. “It’s not like it would have been forever,” he says, more gently. “Because Patrick would have died, and then—”
(And then Max.)
Steve doesn’t finish his sentence. He doesn’t need to, because his meaning is clear.
He wanted to turn Eddie in at first. And maybe he didn’t believe in Eddie’s innocence at the time, but it’s a moot point now. If Dustin had listened to him, Eddie’s name would have been cleared in days.
He got Eddie killed, because he was careless, sloppy, arrogant—
(He’d gotten used to Steve being near invincible. Steve always bounced back. Always landed on his feet.
Eddie tried, just once, and he died.)
It’s too terrible a thought to contemplate, even if he knows—has known for months—in his bones that it’s the truth.
His grief is a vast, incomprehensible thing.
He doesn’t mean to start crying again. It’s pointless. He knows it’s pointless. Steve must know it too, but he’s always been the one to see the point in pointless things, so he scoots his chair around the table and wraps his arms around Dustin.
“Hey, hey, no, it’s okay,” he’s saying. “I mean, no, it’s not okay, but it’s not your fault, Dustin. Man, it’s this Upside Down shit, okay? It’s bullshit. It’s bullshit all the time, and Eddie just drew the short stick.”
It is bullshit. Everything coming out of Steve’s mouth is bullshit, but what’s new?
He sees Steve flinch out of the corner of his eye, and he admits readily to himself that he, too, is bullshit.
Again—
What’s new?
--
Eventually, he eats his eggs.
They’re cold and rubbery, but he finishes them anyway.
When he looks up, Steve is a thousand miles away.
“Steve,” he says. “Steve.”
Steve heaves himself upright.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Yeah, I’m listening.”