Chapter Text
“We cannot build the future by avenging the past.”
The Once and Future King, T.H. White, 1958
March 31, 1986
Their plan failed spectacularly. Eddie was dead. Max is in a coma. They failed.
Steve knows they might all die anyway, this time around. He thinks of how horrifyingly right Robin was when she said things might not work out in their favor this time. They’ve definitely bitten off more than they could chew with Vecna. They could throw endless firework bombs at the Mind Flayer. He had smashed the face of a Demogorgon and watched Jonathan Byers burn it to a crisp in the hallway of the Byers household. He had crashed his car against a possessed Billy Hargrove's Camaro, preventing him from killing Nancy, Jonathan, and the kids.
All of them were easy predators—fleshy, tangible, real.
And Vecna... well, he was real too. Perhaps realer than all the other threats have been. They had seen the vines that wrapped around his body like they were his own skin. Had seen his handiwork—the snapped bones and the gaping jaws and the horrid pallor of death and decay. But this was a guy—a thing, a being who could infiltrate people’s minds and feed them their worst memories and fears before breaking their limbs and sucking their eyeballs into their skulls. A barrage of bullets and Molotov cocktails could not undo any of the damage that has already happened. Could not bring Chrissy, Fred, and Patrick back to life.
Apparently, it couldn’t help Eddie or Max either. And now Eddie is dead. Max is in a coma. The plan has failed and Vecna is poised to come back, because of course he will. Because of course they’re never getting a break.
Hawkins is a ghost town; the people who stayed being branded as fools by those who had packed immediately and left. Because what else would they be if not idiots? Main street has almost completely disappeared. The trailer park in its entirety has been swallowed by the rifts. The remaining population—those who were either too poor to leave or still holding out hope for those who are missing to reappear—has been staying at the Hawkins school compound, with classrooms in the middle and high schools being shared by families who are terrified out of their lives. Those who are lucky to still have their homes don’t even go outside anymore because of the strange animal sightings and the spores from the upside down that appeared ever since the dimension started leaking into Hawkins.
The news is calling them the portal to hell. If Steve hadn’t signed about a hundred NDAs he would have snatched off the first reporter’s microphone he could see and then tell everyone how correct they all were. Point to a rift and say yes, hell is underneath all of us. We're all doomed. The end is here.
In the aftermath of the world splitting into two, all Steve wants to do is crawl into bed and sleep forever. He couldn’t, realistically, but the idea of it is nice. His bones ache, his bruises are far from healing, and the grief in his chest for everything they have sacrificed and lost is insurmountable. He could sleep forever. Never wake up. Never have to face another morning where his life has gone to absolute shit.
Dustin is distant. Steve couldn’t blame the kid. There’s only so much sadness and anger you could hold in before you start falling apart at the seams, and with all the shit the kid and his friends have been through over the past couple of years he’s sure that having Eddie die in his arms was the last straw for him. The kid barely speaks, moving forward with his life like some robot operating on simple pre-programmed commands. Eat, sleep, visit Max, and then repeat. Steve has tried his best, offering a shoulder to cry on and even bribing him with free food and the privilege to raid his closet for his old clothes. But apart from the conversation he had with Eddie’s uncle two days after their what is now failed stint with Vecna, Dustin hasn’t really talked or done much.
Still, Steve gives him space, because he’s not the only one that he’s worrying about.
He should think it’s funny, how differently they’re all coping now that the world has officially ended. He remembers 1984 and how they had all ended up piled on the Byers’ living room floor, laying on top of blankets and carpets and at least one person touching another person, a silent indication of the need to assure themselves that they were all real. That they were alive. He thinks of the aftermath of Starcourt—how Robin, Dustin, Lucas, Erica, Max, Nancy, and Jonathan had ended up having breakfast at his house the morning after because they were worried about him being alone with his concussion and also because they had difficulty sleeping after everything that happened the night before.
The point is that for their previous encounters, there was this need to stick together. To remind each other that they were okay.
Now, well. It’s shit is what it is.
Steve pats down his blanket and fixes his sheets as he thinks of how everyone has been doing. Badly seems like an awful understatement. Nancy has been going to who knows where with Jonathan. He only ever sees glimpses of them in the hospital when he visits Max. He assumes they’ve been communicating with important people over the gaping tears in reality that appeared throughout their town in the span of two days. They’re tight-lipped and tense and they don’t really tell him anything whenever he gets the chance to ask. He doesn’t fault them at all. He doesn’t think he could help them anyways.
And Max, well, Lucas hasn’t truly left her bedside in days, only ever going home when he needs to shower and then heading straight back to his vigil. Hovering over Max’s still figure as if he was the ghost. Erica, still shaken by the events that transpired in the Creel house, has taken to trailing after her brother. The two are rarely ever separated, and if Steve could kill Jason Carver all over again he would for what he has done to the Sinclair siblings.
He takes threatening the remaining members of Carver’s mob with his nail-studded bat as a compromise, warning them not to step foot within the vicinity of the hospital and Lucas’ family and friends if they don’t want their skulls bashed in by him. They seem to have taken his threat seriously so far, but it helps to be prepared (this is his motto now: it helps to be prepared, and much better if you prepare for the worst) so he leaves his bat in the care of Lucas, propped behind Max’s hospital bed and in easy reach just in case someone rudely disturbs the peace they've created in their bubble.
The recently-brought-back-from-the-dead Hopper, Joyce, Mike, El, and Will have stuck together, not really wanting to be separated after everything that transpired on their end. El and Will especially have been isolating themselves, electing on being the group’s warning signal for when Vecna eventually returns. The last Will felt Vecna’s presence was when the rifts opened, and while he hasn’t felt him since they’ve all been told anyway by El that he was in fact alive; hiding and licking his wounds and waiting for the right moment to strike.
Robin has mostly been with Steve whenever she wasn’t with her parents, sleeping beside him on his bed with one of her hands tightly enclosed in his to try and keep the nightmares at bay.
It doesn’t work. She always wakes up screaming.
Steve’s not really been coping. He’s tired, sure. He feels like a walking corpse. But aside from the growing urge to lay and rot in his bed, the exhaustion for the most part has rendered him hyper, in a way. Like he has all this restless energy that’s just itching to be unleashed, buzzing from underneath his skin. He can’t exactly put a name to the feeling, mostly because he’s never really felt it before, but it’s like an odd sort of adrenaline that makes him want to go out and hunt something down. Destroy a few things. He thinks it’s probably that the reality of the world’s end hasn’t sunk in yet (he’s always been a bit slow on the uptake), but it’s been days and surely his mind has acknowledged by now that there really isn’t much that he or anyone could do anymore. Mostly, he tries not to think.
He does, anyway.
Max has always been a spitfire. A ball of restless snark and energy that Steve often admired from her back when he first started helping the party sneak into the cinema through Scoops at Starcourt. He remembers how she was never afraid to speak her mind. How she never hesitated to tell the boys what she truly felt. She said what needed to be said. Did what needed to be done. Even towards the end, when she volunteered to offer herself to Vecna as bait so they could proceed with their crazy half-baked plan, she never backed down. She stood her ground. Stayed true to all the things that made up Maxine Mayfield.
It hurts a lot, sitting by her bedside and watching her chest move only through a breathing tube. Brain dead, the doctors would whisper. Poor girl, the nurses would say whenever he walked to her room. No chances of survival, he would overhear from the occasional gossip whenever he walked by her neighbors at the high school’s temporary shelters. He believed none of them, of course, because if Max was anything she was a fighter. He didn’t need El to tell him that Max wanted to live and was clawing her way out of the clutches of death. He was already sure that she would. There’s a reason why he hasn’t read her letter to him yet. Her failsafe in the event that Vecna does succeed in killing her.
Still, though, there is a distinct pain in his chest every time he holds Max’s still hand between his. Every time he whispers wake up on her forehead when he kisses her goodbye. Every time he hears the hitch in Lucas’ breath as he reads to her every night.
And Max is only one in the list of Steve’s many, many regrets. There’s Eddie there, too. Name written in bold and all capitals and then underlined many times over.
God. Thinking about Eddie hurts more than it should.
It frustrates Steve to no end, because he didn’t even really know the guy. Or, well, he knew Eddie Munson in the way that everybody knew Eddie Munson. He allows himself to remember what he said to Dustin over the phone when he called to ask if he could substitute for Lucas in their campaign. Eddie ‘The Freak’ Munson , he had said. Not even with vitriol, because he likes to think he’d gotten past that phase in his life, but with a certain degree of rightness. As if the moniker was just sitting on his tongue and slipping through his teeth easily like water would. Like it’s a nickname , and in some fucked up way it actually is. Freak was something Eddie wore with pride. Something he uses—used to protect himself from the outside world and those who tried to pry into his life as though he was some specimen they could gawk at and not a real person.
“If people were going to assume things about me, might as well give them what they want to see right, Harrington?”
“You really believe that?” Steve had asked, like his King Steve days weren’t a costume on their own. Like he doesn’t still spend an hour maintaining his hair and setting aside part of his paycheck for Fabergé Organics and fucking Farrah Fawcett sprays because if his hair still means something to people then maybe he wouldn’t cease to exist. Maybe he could feel like a real person sometimes.
Eddie scoffed in response. “’Course I do, Steve.” He says as he shrugs on his vest—not the denim one he had given Steve in the upside down, but the military green they had bought from War Zone. A haphazard attempt at armor for what could be the war of their lives. “Like a poisonous animal in the wild. All this,” he says, gesturing to his get-up, his rings, his hair, the bandana tied to his head “is my equivalent of having a defense mechanism. Fuck around with bright colors and find out just how hard it could sting.”
Still, though. Eddie wasn’t even a freak at all. In the short time he’s spent with the guy he had come to find out that he was actually just so enthusiastic about things. Sure, his interests don’t align with the cookie-cutter world of small town suburbia and picket-fence America, but he was—well. He was sweet. Kind. Definitely had more depth to him than what people, including him, had assumed and accepted. He was loud and annoying but not even in the bad way, Steve had realized belatedly, because it’s not like anything he ever said was a lie.
And Eddie was brave, too. All his claims about always running away and turning from danger the moment he senses it are absolute bullshit. He walked through hell beside Steve. Had taken a broken oar to a demobat’s face and stabbed it to the ground until it stopped squirming. He had dedicated his part of the plan to Chrissy Cunningham, whose death lingers around Eddie’s head like an itch he couldn’t scratch. A regret he couldn’t quite get over.
And then, in the end, he had given his life to save their lives. Bought time and paid the ultimate price. And no one would even know the gravity of what he’s done.
It pisses Steve off because ultimately his sacrifice (their sacrifices) amounted to nothing. In the end, Nancy’s vision of Vecna’s plan to open the gates and split Hawkins in half had come to fruition. In the end, Eddie’s death led to nothing.
So he’s dead, Max is in a coma, and their plan failed, and Steve is really, really tired of pretending like he doesn’t want to jump off the nearest balcony and end it all.
All the grieving aside, he’s mostly angry at Eddie for the scars he left on his wake. Like he didn’t even care about what he was going to leave behind with his little play. As if his life didn’t matter to anyone. He’s mad at Eddie over the fact that despite knowing his nephew was dead, Wayne Munson still volunteered for the search operations being conducted by the rifts in the hopes that maybe he could bring his nephew’s body back home. That he could have something of Eddie to bury because obviously that guitar pick is not enough for the man who practically raised the boy his whole life and is now being confronted with the fact that he would never see him again. He’s mad because he knows Wayne’s search would amount to nothing, because they couldn’t even tell him his nephew’s body has been left behind the rotten dimension that’s hiding beneath those rifts. He’s even more mad at Eddie for dying in Dustin’s arms. For being the hero. For being Eddie the Brave and cutting off the rope and for bleeding out on the cold of the upside down and whispering his last words to a kid who looked up to him so much he stopped at absolutely nothing to prove that he was innocent.
If I could just... change things. He thinks as he lays down and waits for sleep to claim him. If I didn’t tell Eddie not to be a hero maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to act like one. Or if I used my brain and realized that of course Jason Carver and his idiot lackeys would have followed them and attacked Max, Lucas, and Erica at the Creel house then maybe Max would have been safe. If I just prepared back-ups. Or hit harder. Or if we just waited for El and found a way to contact everyone else instead of rushing into the stupid plan.
Hindsight is a fucking bitch. There’s a billion what-ifs. Even more maybes and could-have-beens. And Steve knows that there’s no point in dwelling over them, because the war is far from over and there’s still the morning after and then another morning after that and then another morning after that, all days bleeding together and leading up to the day where Vecna decides to rear his head again and finish his destruction of Hawkins for good.
But Steve is tired. Steve is just so, so tired, and there’s no use wishing for a do-over because not a single higher power in existence—if there were even any—would hand out one to just anyone. Least of all him, Steve Harrington, just some boy with a complex from a small town in the Midwest. Doesn’t matter that they deserve a do-over. Doesn’t matter that innocent people are dead and dying.
And if there was a God , Steve thinks, he would not have let all this happen. Would not have given this heavy burden to a couple of teenagers who haven’t even gotten the chance to truly live yet.
What’s done is done is done. It’s almost 12 AM and he still has to drive by Robin's early tomorrow to pick her up for their shift at the emergency hotline stations they’ve set up in the middle school.
Their plan failed spectacularly. Eddie was dead. Max is in a coma. They failed.
Steve closes his eyes.
March 26, 1986—the first loop.
Steve jolts awake, staring up into the dull beige of the camper’s ceiling. There’s a distinct brown stain, likely from a leak. The cushion of the back seat is hard against his back, and if he strains he could hear yelling and laughing from the outside.
He wonders if he’s finally lost his fucking mind.
“Hey, Steve.” Robin says, walking up to him and holding a canister of gasoline. “Nancy says we should start making Molotov cocktails.”
Steve closes his eyes again.