Chapter Text
It’ll get better.
That’s what Steve tells himself for days, then weeks, and eventually years on end.
But it never does.
Nothing can undo what’s been done or unlose those left to disappear and decay under the endlessly drifting soot of the upside down.
The mantra keeps him moving forward, though; at least in some ways.
Vecna’s not going to just lay down and die after all. There are war efforts to coordinate. Kids to drive to the hospital and school and each others’ homes. Robin to... be Robin? Mundane routines hold them all in place as they wait for the other shoe to drop. For Max to wake up. For the vandals at the cemetery to grow bored and run out of obscenities to paint over limestone. But there’s a point where moving forward just isn’t possible and there are pieces of Steve frozen in time, encapsulated and untouched since the disaster that was ’86.
A packet of cigarettes he never finished sits in the kitchen after traveling from his coat to his car to his bag and back for just shy of nine months because every one of the six missing smokes had been shared and he doesn’t know how to just light up the next one by himself. He also couldn’t bring himself to buy a new pack so he’s effectively quit smoking unless someone offers. No one really does, though, since outside of the usual suspects he doesn’t see anyone.
Parties and socializing in general have lost their appeal. He’d found it was hard to maintain an interest in his casual connections or in forming new ones while making near weekly trips to the store with Henderson for cold packs and paint thinner. He’s lost his faith in humanity, or at least in most of the humans of Hawkins.
There’s a mix tape in his glove box he’ll never listen to again marked “Ozzy: educational” in magic marker with a couple bats in flight doodled off to one side. He touches the corner of it every couple weeks but won’t take it out of the car. There’s a different mix shoved to the back of his sock drawer that he’ll never label or finish. He hears it scrape against the wood of the drawer every morning as he gets dressed but this one, he won’t touch.
A denim vest stays tucked between his bed and the wall and he reaches for in the night, most nights. There’s blood on it, still, old and dark, sunk deep into the fiber but he can never bring himself to wash it. Not when the collar still smells vaguely of cigarettes. The faint tang of spilled beer and sweat had been the first to fade. He misses when he could still smell weed, and motor oil, and the pine-forward scent of cheap aftershave, too.
Eau du Metalhead.
The smell makes him think of fidgeting hands with ink-stained fingers that spin silver rings around and around; a face with eyes probably too large for it, hovering too close to Steve’s own; a soft mouth that only ever really stopped running the once.
Wild curls. Loud music. A louder laugh.
But this will pass, he tells himself.
It will.
Eventually.
He’s not even sure why this is the loss he’s hung up on.
He’d known Barb since pre-K and she’d died in his back yard for chrissake. He hadn’t exactly been friends with Billy Hargrove but they’d played ball together and before things got violent, they’d shared the odd spat of small talk at parties.
He and Eddie hadn’t even run in the same circles or shared classes in school and he’d probably spent more time listening to Henderson wax poetic about the guy than he had spent in his actual presence. They weren’t friends, not really. Not yet. They’d been at most two amiable morons dragged into a shared catastrophe who wound up spilling blood in the same spot.
Maybe that’s the thing that sticks in Steve’s craw, though. The sense that it wasn’t just ‘not really’ and had very much ended feeling more like a ‘not yet’. That they’d shared something, or been on the edge of something that never came to be.
There was something in the way Eddie looked at him after that time he’d used his teeth to rip into a demobat. Something he’d recognized. Something that only continued to grow, steadily, after their heart to heart in the woods through every shared cigarette, bad joke, and casual touch. It was in the growing frequency of small unnecessary interactions between them, building to an easy familiarity.
Or maybe something started long before that, with a broken bottle to his throat – the moment stretching, Eddie’s face so close to Steve’s own, eyes huge and luminous.
The head trauma Steve collects like baseball cards has been consuming his memories indiscriminately for years and yet he’s certain the image of Eddie’s eyes pinning him to that boathouse wall in ’86 just as surely as the bottle to his neck will remain burned into his mind until the day he dies.
He’d seen himself in Eddie’s eyes that day.
Not the reflection, though the experience did feel a bit like looking into a mirror. No, it was something quiet. Something shared. Something Steve recognized as they stared into one another and though he’d never actually asked, it was something Steve suspected Eddie recognized too. There was a moment where Steve had just known Eddie wouldn’t, maybe even couldn’t hurt him, and in that moment, he would have sworn that Eddie understood the same thing about Steve.
Every moment from there to the end had only convinced him he’d been right.
They were from completely different worlds, “the King” and “the Freak”, but somehow they came out of it all as two sides of the same coin.
Childhood neglect made them a little too willing to care for others before themselves and too much independence too young made them reckless or at least a mite chaotic with a casual disdain for authority. Quick wits but cluttered minds made school a battlefield. The only real divergence between them was privilege and the social acceptability of their respective special interests. Steve’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have graduated either if he’d grown up a nerd in a trailer park instead of a jock from Loch Nora. And maybe if Eddie had caught even one of the breaks Steve had been so carelessly handed every day of his life since birth, he’d have lived.
Steve says as much to Robin, once, lying day drunk on the floor between the coffee table and the TV.
When she immediately tells him he “can’t think like that” and presses her hands to her eyes and tries again to convince him to maybe come see the therapist her parents have set up for her, he opts to keep the last bit to himself.
The bit where Steve thinks maybe it should have been him.
That if either of them deserved to live it was Eddie.
But he can’t think like that, apparently. And it’s supposed get better, eventually.
Except it doesn’t and suddenly it’s been two years and Robin has a girlfriend and Henderson’s getting in fights he doesn’t know how to talk him out of and Lucas is missing school to talk to a statue of his girlfriend in a hospital bed and Eddie’s headstone is turning pink because how many times can blood and paint, and hatred soak into stone and still be scrubbed away completely? And Steve is just so tired of shouldering the weight of all the emotions he’s not equipped to process but there are monsters in the dark coming to devour them all so he shuts everything else down and continues to push forward.
It’s different now, though.
He wants everyone safe and sound on the other side of this. He does. But somewhere along the way he’s stopped counting himself among ‘everyone’.
He doesn’t see a future after these things and thinks maybe he’s not meant to survive this either. He reaches out to the kids less and less. He drinks when he’s alone more often than not. Finally, in a particularly low moment he tries to finally push Dustin away.
He uses Eddie’s memory to do it.
He doesn’t mean what he says, not really. There are pieces missing. Because Steve can verbalize anger but hasn’t quite learned to unpack things like grief or how loss can feel like abandonment when you grow up a stranger in your own home. He doesn’t even actually know all the details of what happened between Eddie and Dustin that night because he hasn’t been able to talk about it.
He can’t even remember much of what he saw after running from the Creel house to be honest; just a mass of dead bats and how Henderson had cried so hard he burst capillaries around his eyes that wouldn’t heal for weeks.
So, Steve deliberately misunderstands what the kid’s trying to tell him, twisting the words around until he can unload the angriest part of his own pain on the only person who’s probably suffering worse than he is. The one who actually knew Eddie the way he won’t allow himself to wish he had. He baits a kid, his kid, and it works.
Dustin hits him.
He wasn’t really expecting a physical fight, and certainly not such visceral rage so he sort of just takes the first couple blows, shoving Henderson off, redirecting him, and trying to downplay what he’s done. The shame and regret are immediate but the situation only continues to escalate, and Steve finally calls it, taking both of them to the ground and losing his temper again in the process.
“I’m done,” he says as he walks away and pretends not to hear the words Dustin yells after him, or the way he can tell the kid’s crying behind the vitriol.
“Go crawl back to Nance, you dumb, fake, asshole!”
But he can’t crawl back to Nancy, of fall back behind the easy façade of “King” Steve so instead he pretends the familiar words don’t cut proper wounds for what feels like the first time coming out of Henderson’s mouth and sinks deeper into himself and walks away.
It’ll get better, he tells himself.
It’ll get better, or it won’t.