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‟Nance! Nancy.”
Shit, Steve thinks. He knew he’d forgotten something.
He steels himself before turning. Nancy’s come to a stop halfway up the stairs, and he can see an expression of what might just be guilt flash across her face – turns out maybe Steve’s not the only forgetful one – before she schools it into something more neutral. She turns to look down toward the foyer, and Steve peers over the railing of the second-floor landing to see Barb standing by the base of the stairs, gazing up at her friend.
‟Where are you going?” Barb asks, and the sense of betrayal is heavy in both her voice and her expression.
‟Nowhere!” Nancy blurts out. ‟Just… upstairs. To change. I… fell in the pool.”
She gives a small laugh, and Steve can’t help but grin as he watches her awkwardly twist her fingers into the fabric of the towel draped over her shoulders. She’s beautiful, he thinks, and soft and soaked to the bone and she might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
‟Why don't you go ahead and go home,” she tells Barb, and Steve perks up at that – thinking of all the possibilities a Barb-less night might offer. ‟I'll just... I'll get a ride or something.”
Barb looks crestfallen. ‟Nance…”
‟Barb,” Nancy replies, and then she gives a soft smile, and there seems to be some kind of silent communication going on – the kind girlfriends sometimes share – before she adds, ‟I’m fine.”
Barb doesn’t seem to agree. ‟This isn’t you,” she murmurs, almost too low for Steve to hear, before glancing down at her hand.
She’s wrapped her palm with paper towels, and even though the cut hadn’t been that deep – from what Steve had been able to tell, at least – it appears to still be bleeding. Barb looks downtrodden and rejected as she silently fiddles with the bloodstained wrapping, and there’s a sinking feeling in Steve’s stomach as he glances over at Nancy, who’s no longer smiling.
He watches her worry her bottom lip as she turns to look back at him, clearly torn about what to do, because she’s good like that – kind and gentle and unwilling to disappoint, all the qualities that drew him to her in the first place – yet he still thinks that with a little bit of encouragement, he could probably get her to make Barb leave them on their own.
The fact that the odds might just be in his favor even now, when he’s going up against Nancy’s very best friend, makes Steve feel pretty fucking awesome; had it been any other girl he might’ve taken advantage of it, but Nancy’s not just anyone – she’s someone worth waiting for – and somehow even deciding to let her go feels like a win.
‟It’s okay,” he says, and Nancy seems to visibly deflate in relief. She looks thankful to not have to decide either way, and it sets off a warm feeling somewhere in Steve’s chest. He adds, ‟I’ll get you some dry clothes,” as she reaches out to touch the banister and begins to step back down the stairs, but she just shakes her head.
‟No, that’s alright. I have a sweater in the car. Here—” She goes to unwrap the towel from her shoulders.
‟Keep it,” Steve tells her, because it’s cold and she’s still wet, and Nancy shoots him a shy, grateful smile.
Next time, Steve thinks, and he lets the thought continue to warm him as he follows Nancy down the stairs to where Barb’s appeared with her jacket, clearly eager for them both to leave.
He sees them to the door, giving Nancy a soft, lingering kiss goodbye, and then he watches them walk across the driveway, the gravel crunching beneath their feet as they disappear into the night. It’s grown colder now, a few hours after the sun has set, but he still lingers in the doorway, shivering in his wet clothes until he hears the sound of a car engine sputtering to life somewhere down the street – apparently Barb hadn’t wanted to park anywhere near his house – and then he turns and closes the door and heads upstairs to change into a set of dry clothes.
Tommy and Carol have thankfully not followed through on their threat to occupy Steve’s mom’s room; they’ve shut themselves into one of the guest rooms instead, and Steve quickly changes before escaping the second floor altogether, because they’re being obnoxiously loud and he’s not about to spend the next ten minutes listening to Tommy grunt like a rhino in heat.
He trudges down the stairs and finds himself back out on the patio, staring at the steam rising off the pool as the heat of the water meets the crisp November air. There’s almost no breeze tonight; the woods bordering the backyard appear still and silent, apart from the chirping of the crickets hiding in the brush.
Steve’s eyes linger on the tree line as he listens to them sing. His hair is still slightly wet with pool water, just enough to drip down the back of his neck and dampen the collar of his new sweater, and standing there, feeling the cold of the tiles seep into the soles of his bare feet, he can almost feel the last of the pleasant buzz he had going on fade away, leaving him feeling strangely tired.
There’s an empty beer can lying discarded by the edge of the pool, close enough that it’s in danger of falling into the water, and Steve heads over to pick it up. He tosses it onto one of the loungers before doing the same to the next can he spots, and the next, picking his way along the patio until he eventually comes across the blood.
It’s just a few drops, but they’re spattered across the tiles in a dark, foot-long arch, slightly smeared at one end, and something primordial in the back of Steve’s mind feels instantly uneasy at the sight. Then he realizes that the blood’s started to seep into the grout between the stone as well, staining it a dark red, and the moment is gone; he groans and rubs at his eyes before heading inside to get something to try and clean the mess up.
He jams his feet into a dry pair of sneakers as he passes through the foyer on his way to the kitchen, where he wets a handful of paper towels beneath the tap before slipping back outside. The crickets have all fallen silent by the time he steps out of the house, but that’s nothing new; they do that sometimes, easily spooked if something dares to disturb them. Usually, it’s a deer or some other kind of large animal making its way through the forest, but at the moment it’s too dark for Steve to make out any movement among the trees, and when he holds his breath and listens he can’t hear much of anything either.
He shrugs, returning his attention to the blood instead as he stoops to rub the wet paper along the grout, and feels some satisfaction when it seems to be working; cold water is the key when dealing with blood – half a lifetime of playing sports and doing his own laundry has taught him that, if nothing else – and he folds the paper over and wipes it over the larger smear, going for a second pass when the first one doesn’t get it all.
The pool lights flicker. Once, twice, three times, and the patio and house lights do the same, as if the whole neighborhood is experiencing a sudden power surge. A few seconds later they all die as one, plunging the backyard into darkness, and Steve blinks as his eyes try to adjust to the sudden lack of light.
That’s when it happens.
The attack comes from behind. He doesn’t hear the thing approaching, but at the very last moment he must have still sensed it, because he finds himself looking over his shoulder just in time to gaze straight into the maw of it.
It lunges for him, claws extended, and it’s fast, but so is Steve – he’s got years of dodging opposing players on the court, after all – and he throws himself to the side, nearly tumbling into the pool, and the thing’s claws catch on the back of his sweater instead of the soft of his belly as it yanks him backward and they both go tumbling into the patio furniture.
Steve hits his head on something – the edge of the table, maybe – and his vision goes black for a split second as pain lances through his right temple, and then he’s scrambling to escape the wreck of the furniture pile, pushing himself onto his feet as he struggles to catch his bearings. Behind him he can hear the thing trash as it tries to follow, too large and frantic to be as agile as Steve is, but Steve doesn’t look back at it over his shoulder even though his morbid curiosity half wants him to. The drive to escape is stronger, and he stumbles toward the house as the thing roars in frustration, wood snapping as it finally escapes the prison of its own making.
Steve barrels into the house, through the open sliding glass doors and into the foyer to get to the stairs, because he needs to find Tommy and Carol – needs to warn them, or ask for help, or something, he doesn’t know – only the air inside is thick and moist and the lights are still off.
Nothing looks right. Even in the dark he can tell that much. It’s like the whole place has turned into a giant Petri dish of mold – like it’s diseased – and Steve’s sneakers and hands slip on the stairs as he finds himself dropping down on all fours to climb it, the carpet slippery-slimy with something wet. There’s a shut-in smell permeating seemingly everything, like the dampness of a root cellar left undisturbed for too long, and plants vine their way across the floor and up the walls, appearing half-dead as they stretch across the wallpaper.
It feels like maybe – impossibly – Steve’s the first person to climb these stairs in a long while, even though he knows – he fucking knows – that he came this way not ten minutes ago. Small flakes of ash or spores or something like it dance in the air as he finally claws his way onto the landing and hurries down the hallway to the guest room, and they swirl in his wake as he reaches out to wrench the door to the room open.
And then he stands there for a moment, panting, because there’s no one inside. The bed’s unmade, as if perhaps whoever last used it left not too long ago, but when Steve steps inside and closes the door behind him and moves forward to touch his fingers to the sheets at the foot of the bed, they feel wet and strangely crusty, like they’ve been there for years.
“What the fuck,” he whispers, and then he clicks his jaw shut because behind him, from somewhere beyond the closed door, he can hear the stairs groan beneath the weight of something large and heavy.
His eyes immediately go to the window. The guest rooms all face out onto the driveway, and it’s maybe a fifteen-foot drop down onto the gravel, but Steve thinks it’s probably doable. He doesn’t know, because he’s never had cause to sneak out before. He’s been on his own for so long that it’s never been an issue, even though he sometimes fantasized about it when he was younger; about having present parents, with all that might have entailed – getting his report cards checked, and being grounded, and having to slip out windows to go to parties he probably shouldn’t have been going to – instead of how, in reality, he’s always simply used the front door to come and go as he pleases because there’s been no one around to care.
He pulls the window open, having to use far more force than he thinks should be necessary; it’s as if the wood is swollen with the humidity, and the window frame groans as he finally manages to create a gap large enough to climb through.
There’s a scratching sound coming from the hallway, followed by the splintering of wood as the thing stalking him claws its way through the door of a neighboring room, and Steve swings his legs over the window sill and lowers himself down until he’s hanging by his fingers from the frame, and then, before he can think better of it, he lets himself drop.
He hits the ground feet first, knees bending as he tucks and rolls on impact, and the gravel bites at his back and arms where he’s got them tucked over his head. He’s back up on his feet almost immediately, conditioned by years of tackles and play wrestling, and then, almost before he’s able to regain his balance, he takes off running down the driveway and toward the street.
//
Steve’s lived in Hawkins his entire life.
Most of that time, he’s been on his own – or, early on, under the not-so-watchful eyes of one nanny or the other – and the result is a childhood spent roaming. Maybe being left to one’s own devices lends itself to that – to give in to the urge to search for excitement – but as a young Steve had quickly discovered, Hawkins had been the epitome of a boring, small town; if he wanted excitement, he would need to create it himself.
The point is, Steve knows most of Hawkins like the back of his hand by now. The town is slow to change; you could blindfold him and drop him off anywhere, and he’d immediately be able to tell you exactly where he was.
Logically, Steve knows that, at the moment, he’s following Cornwallis, headed toward downtown. He just crossed the intersection with Denfield, with the Motel 6 coming up on his right, but this isn’t Hawkins.
This is someplace else. Someplace murky and cold and wet, with familiar buildings that have been gutted by age and overcome with rot, covered in vining roots that seem to be the only thing still holding the structures together. The motel is a dark shell and Steve can’t help but edge away from it, crossing the road as he passes, because its windows gape open, black like empty eyes, and somewhere in the back of his mind he’s fully expecting another thing to come crawling out of one of them.
He might have managed to evade the creature that had tried to get him, but the uneasiness seems to grow stronger the closer to downtown Steve gets. The punching of his sneakers against the pavement feels too loud, and with the adrenaline fading, his head is starting to ache, pain radiating from the spot where he hit it. He wipes at his face as the blood drips down the side of it, trying to focus his attention on the burn in his legs instead, and his hands feel gapingly empty because he’s beginning to realize that he needs a weapon – a gun, a knife, he’ll take a fucking stick if that’s all there is to be had – but even so, a feeling of terror washes over him every time he considers leaving the road to venture into a building to try and find something.
He’s vulnerable out in the open, but he tries to tell himself that it’s for the best – there’s space to run here, in case anything comes for him – only then the hulking body of the hospital starts to appear out of the creeping mist, a looming behemoth cutting against the eerie blue glow of the sky, and suddenly Steve feels sick with the need to find shelter – to hole himself up somewhere and come up with a plan of action – because there’s a creeping realization starting to scratch uncomfortably at the back of his mind; the suspicion that he might not be able to find a way out of here as easily as he’d like.
His original plan had been to find someone to help him, but that seems to be easier said than done; the streets are empty and the buildings clearly abandoned to time, like everyone simply disappeared into thin air without even trying to fight the blight that’s somehow overtaken Hawkins. Steve had been expecting boarded-up windows and burned-out cars and trash lining the streets – signs that people had at least tried to save the place – but there’s none of that. Just a ghost town left behind like no one even cared.
He gets as far as the library before the desire to hide becomes overwhelming to the point of being debilitating, legs trembling beneath him, and he cuts across the lawn – or what used to be the lawn, with its withered, dead grass crunching beneath his feet – and stumbles up the stairs to the doors, praying that they’ll open for him. They do, thankfully; they groan and grate but swing open relatively easily beneath his touch, and Steve quickly slips inside and slowly lets the doors close behind him with a low creaking sound.
Inside it’s dark and quiet. The air is clammy, and he holds his breath as he blinks against the shadows, his whole body on alert in case something comes lunging at him from out of the murk, but nothing does. A few moments later, as his eyes start to adjust to the dark, he begins to be able to make out the outlines of the library furniture; the u-shaped main counter, the reference desks, and the rows of bookshelves disappearing into the shadows at the back of the building.
Every surface inside seems to be covered in a thick layer of grime, and Steve makes a face as he takes a step forward, and then another, eyes fixed on the main counter, because it suddenly occurs to him that there’s a fire axe hidden away behind it. Tommy claims to have seen it once, at least. They’d been horsing around over by the non-fiction section when the librarian had stepped away for a moment and Tommy had jumped at the opportunity to snoop around behind the counter. He’d joked about trying to steal the axe so that he and Steve could go axe throwing in the woods, only nothing had ever come of it. Steve’s never swung an axe before, but he figures it can’t be that much different from handling a very sharp bat – and bats, at least, are something he knows how to wield.
He slowly makes his way around the counter, reaching out to steady himself against its side and feeling his fingers smear lines in the filth layered there. The vines have crept their way into this building too, crisscrossing the hardwood floor to the point of nearly covering it in a thick root mat, and he imagines it would be easy to trip and sprain something in the dark if he doesn’t watch where he’s going.
He carefully steps behind the counter and peers down at the empty shelves, half-wondering if maybe Tommy’s been lying about the existence of the axe all along, and then he jerks back in startled surprise, because there’s a kid sitting on the floor less than four feet away.
He’s curled up with his back against the inner corner of the counter, dirty and disheveled and with a face so pale that even through a layer of grime it still stands out among the shadows. He sits frozen in place, eyes wide as he stares back at Steve, like he’s as surprised to see Steve as Steve is to see him, and he’s so still that for a moment Steve’s entirely convinced that the kid’s dead.
Then he notices the rapid movement of the boy’s chest, like he’s trying very hard not to hyperventilate. He looks scared, arms drawn up against himself like he’s fully prepared to fend Steve off, and he’s effectively trapped in his corner, wedged between several stacks of books; Steve can’t help but wonder what the kid had been planning to do if something other than Steve had rounded the counter and found him instead.
The kid blinks, and it suddenly occurs to Steve exactly who he’s looking at. He’s seen that face before – it’s basically impossible not to have, because there are posters plastered all over town with the kid’s grinning mug on them. There was a search party the other night, and on Monday, as school let out, his mom had been hanging around the parking lot handing out posters and asking everyone to keep an eye out for her baby. Steve had let her push one at him and had taken it without comment, just to make her shut up, and he’d ended up throwing it into the back of his car as he climbed in. It’s probably still lying there, crumbled up in one of the backseat footwells.
Like most people, he’d figured the kid had simply run away – no dad in the picture, and his mom is apparently prone to hysterics, so who wouldn’t want a break from that? – only the kid’s mom had insisted to anyone who would listen that her baby would never.
Steve doesn’t know the kid, so who’s he to say. What he does know is that most kids probably dream of running away at some point. Hell, Steve even got as far as trying it himself once or twice when he was younger – five or six years old, with no concept of how far away Milan or New York or London really were, and filled to the brim with the utmost belief that if he really set his heart on it, he’d be able to find his parents and bring them back home. None of his attempts had seen him get much farther than the bottom of the driveway before whatever nanny his parents had employed at the moment had caught him and made him go back to the house.
“Easy,” he tells the kid, who flinches like Steve just slapped him across the head. “It’s alright. Are you—” Shit. Steve can’t even remember the kid’s name. “What’s your name?”
The kid wets his lips, peering up at Steve all suspicious-like, as if he’s still not sure if he should trust him. Hell, if this is where the kid’s been holed up since he disappeared all those days ago, then Steve can’t really find it in himself to blame him.
He tries to put on his most sincere expression as he crouches, bringing them basically eye to eye, and at first, the kid just stares, maybe taking in the drying blood that must be caking the side of Steve’s face, but eventually, it seems to work – or maybe the kid just gives in to the relief of seeing another human being – because he shifts and lowers his arms from his defensive position.
“Dustin,” he whispers.
“Right. Dustin. My name’s Steve.”
Steve carefully lowers himself down onto the floor until he’s also sitting, mindful of the way the vines are digging into the back of his thighs. They have the texture of dead bark, but when Steve touches them he swears he can feel them pulse like they’re alive.
He clears his throat, trying to think of an icebreaker. “Everyone’s looking for you, man,” is what he settles on.
The kid – Dustin – looks relieved to hear it. Steve would be too, probably.
“Yeah?”
“For sure. Your mom thinks someone took you.”
Dustin makes a face at that, like he’s both sad and happy to hear that she’s worried. Steve knows, through Nancy, that she’s not the only one.
“Your friends are freaking out too,” he adds, because the kid just looks so alone, cold and dirty and hiding from literal monsters, and Steve kind of knows that feeling – remembers being eleven, twelve, thirteen, and standing in the middle of his empty house, wondering if anyone would even miss him if he simply disappeared. “They’re, uh— I’m dating Nancy. She’s Mike’s sister. She told me they’re sneaking out to search the woods for you.”
“I know,” Dustin murmurs. He sneaks a glance up at Steve. “I’ve seen you dropping Nancy off after school.” Then he tucks his legs up against his chest with a shiver, and Steve frowns.
“You cold?”
It’s a stupid question. Steve can’t imagine that the kid isn’t, because this place – wherever it is – is freezing. The kid’s wearing a jacket at least, which is more than Steve has on, but after two or three days in this dump, Steve figures it’s probably soaked through with whatever else is infecting the place.
“C’mon, scoot,” he says, making an executive decision as he shoves one of the book piles to the side so that he can crawl over and take a seat beside Dustin.
He can feel the kid stiffen as Steve swings an arm across his shoulders and gently pulls him closer, tucking him up against Steve’s side, but after a moment or two Dustin seems to relax, and another breath or two later he even goes as far as to subtly shift so that his body is turned against Steve’s. Steve had been right about the jacket; the fabric feels cold wherever it presses up against his side, but it’s not as damp as he’d feared, which means there’s probably no point in making the kid remove it.
“What’s all this stuff?” he asks, hoping to take Dustin’s mind off the cold as he motions to the books stacked in small piles around them, and Dustin sniffs.
“Research,” he sighs. He drops his head down against Steve’s shoulder, dirty curls brushing against Steve’s neck, and Steve wonders when the kid last had an opportunity to sleep.
“Yeah?” He rubs his hand over Dustin’s arm, trying to work up some heat from the friction. “What are you reading about?”
“Wilderness survival,” Dustin murmurs, all sleepy-like, and Steve swears he can feel him grow heavier against his side. The kid kind of reeks, smelling of dirt and something sour, but Steve bets that he’ll be in the same boat after a few more hours spent in this place.
“Didn’t realize there were this many books about it,” he says, stretching his legs out as he makes himself as comfortable as he can – which isn’t much. “Hey, how about I keep watch? And you can rest a bit?”
Dustin doesn’t answer; he’s already fast asleep.
//
There’s something downright spine-chilling about sitting in the dark with nothing but your own heartbeat to keep you company. Even with a sleeping kid draped across his lap, Steve finds it startlingly lonely, and he’s growing more impressed with Dustin by the minute, because he must be a stubborn little shit to have made it this long on his own.
The kid keeps shivering in his sleep, and Steve finds himself worrying that maybe it’s been too long already, so he ends up carefully lowering Dustin down onto the floor and pressing himself up against his back in an attempt to keep him warm; he tucks Dustin’s hands against the kid’s chest before covering them with his own, feeling the cold of Dustin’s fingers seep into his palms, and he stays like that, holding the kid close as he listens for anything that might want to harm them.
There’s nothing, thankfully; just the occasional groan of the building settling around them, like it can’t bear the weight of what’s happened for much longer, but Steve makes sure to keep an ear out even as he lets himself relax, hugging Dustin to him like a stuffed animal. It’s a comfort, in a way, to have another warm body next to him, even if Dustin probably wouldn’t be much help if the thing that tried to grab Steve should stumble upon them.
He makes a mental note to ask if this is where the kid’s been hiding since he went missing, and what he’s been eating for the past few days, and if he knows anything about what this place might be, and also maybe how they got here. He doubts the kid has a clue about the last one, but it doesn’t hurt to ask, and once that’s decided he lets himself rest, careful not to close his eyes because he thinks he might just be in danger of falling asleep if he does.
It’s late – or rather, it had been late back in the real world – when Steve had gotten himself pulled into this one. He’s starting to think that maybe time doesn’t work the same way here, because the shadows haven’t moved since he took watch, and he must have been staring at them for at least a couple of hours by now. Only maybe that’s wrong too – maybe it’s simply easier to lose track of time in this place. If time even exists anymore. Maybe it’s all never-ending, a timeless twilight and rot. Dustin might know – another thing to ask the kid – but Steve’s not about to wake him.
More time seems to pass – hours? minutes? – and Steve feels himself in danger of drifting off just as Dustin finally stirs in his arms. The kid shudders and then freezes before trying to frantically jerk away, and Steve pulls him back against his chest and shushes him.
“It’s just me, remember?” he says, and while Dustin doesn’t immediately respond, like he either can’t hear Steve or doesn’t remember him, he does eventually sag back against Steve’s chest once Steve repeats himself a few more times and reality seems to sink in.
“Sorry,” Dustin mutters, sounding embarrassed by his reaction – or maybe it’s about finding himself tucked up against Steve like this, even though it obviously worked, seeing as he stopped shivering a while ago – and Steve snorts.
“Don’t make it weird,” he says, going for levity. “It’s like, uh, the war. When my granddad fought the Germans—”
“The Nazis,” Dustin says, and Steve blinks.
“What?”
“Not all Germans were Nazis,” Dustin explains, ‟and not all Nazis were Germans.”
Steve frowns. “Look, do you want to hear the story or not?” he asks, and feels Dustin squirm a bit as he untangles his fingers from beneath Steve’s.
‟I guess,” he says.
“Right. So when my granddad fought the Nazis—”
Dustin makes a satisfied noise, and Steve’s beginning to realize that apart from being a stubborn little shit, the kid also appears to be a complete smartass once he realizes you’re not about to eat him.
“—it used to get real cold at night. And sometimes when they were out scouting or whatever and they didn’t have tents or tanks to sleep in, they’d all huddle together to keep warm. Like we’re doing, only there’d be, like, five or six of them.”
Dustin is quiet as he seems to digest this information. “Yeah?”
“For sure,” Steve promises.
His granddad had already been pretty old by the time Steve had been born, and his parents never seemed to have the time to take Steve to visit him. On the few occasions that they had, Steve remembers the way his granddad would cup the back of Steve’s head with his large, heavy hand, and how he’d tell him stories – war tales that Steve had probably been too young to hear at the time – and how he’d never grown annoyed when Steve had interrupted to pose a question or ask him to repeat a really exciting part.
“I can keep watch too,” Dustin says. Steve can feel the kid’s fingers touch the top of his hand, a lot warmer now. “If you want to sleep, I mean.”
Steve gives Dustin’s chest a tired pat. “You know what?” he says as he closes his eyes. “That sounds great.”
//
The shadows still haven’t moved when Steve wakes up, even though he must have slept for at least a couple of hours. He feels better now, more alert if not well rested, and he rubs at his right eye and looks down his body to where Dustin’s sitting crosslegged by Steve’s hip, one of his knees poking up against Steve’s left thigh like he can’t bear to lose the physical connection.
He’s got a book lying across his lap and an opened bag of potato chips resting on the floor beside him, and his full attention seems to be on whatever he’s reading as he shovels handfuls of chips into his mouth, lips smacking loudly as he chews.
Steve groans. “Were you raised in a barn?” he mutters, and Dustin looks up at him, chips-laden hand halfway to his mouth.
“You want some?” he offers, and Steve barely has time to heave himself up into a sitting position before Dustin’s pushing an unopened bag at his chest.
“I got them from the vending machine by the arcade,” he explains.
“You went outside?” Steve feels a thrill of unease run through him at the thought of Dustin sneaking out on his own, but the kid simply shakes his head, his eyes widening at the accusation.
“No, I kept watch,” he insists. “I got them earlier.”
He turns around to indicate in the direction of a small stash of junk food hidden away on one of the shelves, and Steve’s honestly too hungry to argue. He hums in acceptance as he pulls his bag open and leans down to give the contents a sniff, and the chips seem alright – a bit stale when he tries them, perhaps, but they still taste okay, as if the seal on their bag has somehow managed to protect them from whatever is affecting the rest of this place.
Steve goes for a second handful, and Dustin grins, looking pleased with himself. He’s missing teeth – had been on the posters too, still in the baby-tooth phase of his life – and it really drives the point home of how much of a kid he really is.
“I know who you are,” Dustin blurts out, and Steve arches an eyebrow as he chews because yeah, duh, but Dustin shakes his head. “No,” he continues, “I mean, I knew before you told me your name. You’re Steve Harrington.”
“Right,” Steve says, not really sure how to respond to that; he’s used to people knowing his name – due to his father or mother, or his reputation as King of Hawkins High – but he didn’t think it had made it as far as the middle school.
Dustin blinks at him guilelessly. “You’re supposed to be a douchebag,” he tells Steve, because apparently a couple of hours of sharing body heat is all it takes for him to feel comfortable enough to insult Steve to his face.
Steve can’t help his snort of surprise. “Shit, kid,” he says. “Maybe not the smartest thing to say to the only other guy stuck in this hellhole with you.”
“Well, it’s not true, obviously,” Dustin declares, like he already has Steve pegged, and Steve can’t even remember the last time he found himself trusting that quickly.
“No, it’s not,” Steve agrees, because he’s never considered himself a douchebag; he can lash out at times, but usually it only happens when he’s feeling cornered or someone’s caught him off guard. He doesn’t go looking for fights – not like Tommy sometimes does – though that’s mostly because Steve knows that he’s not much of a fighter, a lesson well learned from his few attempts at keeping Tommy from getting his ass beat.
“How’d you get here?” Dustin asks, having seemingly decided that the douchebag topic is settled, and Steve tells him what little he can as Dustin listens, face scrunched up in concentration.
Steve hadn’t gotten a good look at the monster, just brief glimpses of claws and a mouth that looked like something off an autopsy table, but when he gets to that part, Dustin happily fills him in because apparently, the kid had found himself face to face with it.
Or not-face, because according to Dustin the monster doesn’t have one.
“Fuck,” Steve mutters, shoving some more chips into his mouth to keep himself from blurting out something that might scare the kid as Dustin happily launches into his own story of how he ended up in this place.
He’d been on his way home from the Wheelers’ house on Sunday night when the thing had come out of the woods and grabbed him, and the only reason he’d managed to get away from it was that the monster became disoriented after they both passed through the veil.
“The what now?” Steve says, and Dustin rolls his eyes like he’s disappointed that Steve can’t read his mind.
He launches into some kind of gibberish rant about alternate dimensions or parallel planes, and Steve’s pretty sure he’s making things up as he goes – has probably spent far too much time in here, alone, thinking about it – but after everything’s Steve’s seen so far today – yesterday? – he figures it’s about as good a theory as any.
Dustin describes how he managed to give the monster the slip, stumbling over his words in his excitement to tell Steve all about it, and it’s a familiar tale; he’d sprinted toward downtown to get help but had found it abandoned, and that’s when he’d hidden in the library, only venturing outside to grab food from where he knew for sure he’d find some.
“I broke the glass on the vending machines outside the arcade with a rock!” he says, chest puffing out in pride at his ingenuity.
Steve’s feeling pretty generous right now, seeing as he’s eating the spoils of Dustin’s labor, so he makes impressed noises as he chews, and they have Dustin lighting up in pleasure. The kid seems starved for attention, and Steve wonders if it’s only because he’s been on his own for the past few days or if it’s just a... thing. Steve figures he knows the feeling; no dad in the picture isn’t too far removed from a dad who doesn’t give a fuck. He doubts either of his parents will be out pushing missing person pictures at strangers once they realize Steve’s gone.
He doesn’t want to think about that right now, though, so he shakes his head and refocuses his attention on the kid in front of him.
“So how do we get out of here?” he asks, because while Dustin doesn’t seem to know much, it’s proven to be far more than Steve does.
Dustin hesitates before looking down, shrugging as he begins to fiddle with the zipper of his jacket. “If we could find another tear, we could probably escape through it...” he says, trailing off, and it’s both less and more of an answer than Steve expected.
“A tear in the universe,” he clarifies, and Dustin finally looks back up at him. He seems to study Steve’s expression for a moment before he nods, suddenly a bit more animated now that he appears to realize that Steve’s genuinely considering the idea. “Okay, great,” Steve continues. ‟So how do we find one?”
Dustin hesitates again, which probably means it’s bad news. “I think the monster makes them,” he says. “At first I figured that maybe they were random anomalies and that the monster just used them to travel between dimensions. But it’s a pretty big coincidence that both of us and the monster would end up going through the veil at the same time, at two separate occasions, so...”
Steve’s starting to feel a bit sick to his stomach. Maybe the chips actually had gone bad. “You think it brought us here on purpose? So it could, what? Eat us in peace?”
Dustin makes a face of disgust, but he doesn’t deny it.
Steve groans. “So we need to find the monster, and make it want to create another hole in reality.”
“Basically,” Dustin says, ‟yes.”
“Awesome.” Steve crumples up the empty chips bag and throws it to the side. “So how do we do that? Just follow the thing around?”
Dustin shrugs, and Steve tries to imagine having to trail after the monster, without being seen, and wait for it to get hungry enough to crawl into their own universe so that they can crawl right on after it.
“Yeah, that’s not gonna work,” he decides.
Dustin doesn’t seem to be in the mood to argue. “Can I ask you something?” he says instead.
Steve sighs and rubs at the bridge of his nose. ‟Hit me.”
“Do you hear that?”
Dustin points up at the ceiling, and Steve swallows hard, steeling himself as he raises his eyes to look up at the cracking plaster where the vines are anchoring themselves into the structure. He holds his breath, expecting to hear the scrape of claws on wood, but there’s nothing – just his own heartbeat rushing in his ears due to the scare the kid just gave him – and he’s about to tell Dustin as much when he actually does hear it.
It’s voices. There are several of them, but they’re distorted, like a group of people who are trying to make themselves heard while underwater. Steve closes his eyes and tilts his head to the side and tries to make the words out, but he can’t.
“What is that?” he asks, blinking his eyes open again, and he finds Dustin looking strangely relieved.
“I think it’s the other side,” the kid says. “People in the library, I mean. In the real Hawkins. I thought I was imagining it, but if you can hear it too...”
“You think we can talk to them?” Steve asks, and Dustin throws him a wide, toothless grin, like he’s proud that Steve got it right.
It probably shouldn’t make Steve feel as good as it does, and he smothers the impulse to straighten his back in pride, though he does allow himself an answering smile.
“I think so, yeah,” Dustin says. “If we can find a spot that’s a bit more quiet, maybe we can let someone know where we are.”
Steve racks his brain for a suitable location – for someone to contact – but he comes up blank.
“I don’t know,” he says, because even though he trusts Tommy to have his back in most things, this goes beyond what he thinks he can expect from him. “Even if we did find someone to talk to, do you think they’d believe us?”
“My friends will!” Dustin insists, and Steve hasn’t spent much time around Nancy’s brother, but if he and the rest of his tiny cohorts are anything like Dustin, chances are the kid’s correct.
“So where—?”
“Mike’s basement,” Dustin says, like he doesn’t even need to think about it.
Steve can’t help but frown. He makes the drive to the Wheelers’ house pretty regularly when he drops Nancy off, or when he stops by to sneak into her bedroom, and it’s a comfortable distance – a couple of easy miles from his own house, perhaps – but on foot, accompanied by an exhausted middle schooler and with a monster on their trail? Even setting out from downtown, Steve’s got his doubts.
“I could go, but you should probably stay here,” he suggests, and Dustin’s expression immediately turns outraged.
“They’re my friends!” he insists, face starting to color like he’s gearing up for an argument. “They won’t believe you if I’m not there too!”
Steve shakes his head. “I know,” he soothes, “but you’d be safer here.”
“Nowhere is safe,” Dustin counters, practically vibrating with indignation. “And I’m not letting you go alone! What if you die?!”
He looks fiercely insistent, and Steve’s kind of surprised that the kid’s still capable of conjuring up the energy to argue after spending half a week in this hellhole, jumping at shadows and eating vending machine junk food. Dustin’s fists are clenched against his thighs, knuckles white, and Steve knows that he should tell him no. If he were a better person, he wouldn’t cave, but he’s not, though.
It’s a cold kind of realization that’s begun to creep up on him during the past few months. He might not be a douchebag, but he is the company he keeps, and maybe that’s what initially drew him to Nancy, who’s gentle and kind and brilliant; for whatever reason, Steve’s suddenly finding himself wanting to be better, and he’s working on it, but at the moment he’ll readily admit that he’s not quite there yet.
That’s why he already knows that he’s going to let Dustin tag along, because the thought of leaving the kid behind and unsuccessfully trying to contact his friends and then returning to find Dustin gone – or worse, torn apart by the monster – is… It’s perhaps worse than bringing Dustin with him and risking the chance of slowing them down to the point of having the monster find them anyway. Steve doesn’t want to be alone – never has – and it’s selfish to put Dustin in danger, but he’s always been the selfish one, hasn’t he?
“Okay,” he says, and Dustin’s eyes widen, like he’s surprised that Steve’s agreed.
“Yeah?” he breathes, and then, without giving Steve a chance to reply, he turns to stuff as many bags of chips into the pockets of his jacket as will fit.
Steve watches him, feeling an unfamiliar sense of responsibility settle heavily over his shoulders. It chafes, but it also feels kind of good to have a purpose – to know which direction to go in.
“We need a weapon,” he tells Dustin. “There should be an axe somewhere around here. Have you seen it?”
Dustin peers over at him, lips pursed like he’s debating on whether to answer or not – like he thinks Steve might go straight for the axe and leave him behind, promise be damned, if Dustin told him where to find it.
But then he nods to himself and turns and crawls over to the other corner of the desk, shoving a pile of books aside before reaching behind them to pull the axe out from where it’s lain hidden all along. The blade scrapes against the floor, nicking the vines as Dustin angles the handle toward Steve, and Steve takes it from him and lifts the axe with both hands, feeling the weight of the steel head at one end.
“You think you can kill it?” Dustin asks. ‟If it finds us?”
Steve looks away from the blade. Dustin’s worrying his bottom lip, once again suddenly looking all of his twelve or so years; small and frightened and trusting in Steve to keep him safe and alive, and Steve tightens his grip along the handle of the axe and feels a spike of determination run up his spine, because fuck that thing, whatever it is.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I’m sure as hell gonna try.”
If the monster comes for Dustin, it’ll have to go through Steve first.