Chapter Text
“Mr. H! Can we watch a movie today?”
The class breaks into giggles as he turns with his hands on his hips, leveling the room with a flat stare.
“You mean after I already let you little jerks wheedle me into one on Friday?”
Emily squeals, “Mr. H, you can’t call us jerks! You said you wanted to!”
It’s true, he had. Friday had been a bad headache day so putting his head down and letting the kids be enraptured by this science guy everyone was raving about had seemed great. It had been surprisingly difficult to get a VHS of it though. Worth it for 30 minutes of peace.
He sighs, the class giggles again which makes his mouth quirk up against his will. “Besides the point, if I don’t see all of you doing silent reading for at least twenty minutes today then I’ll be in trouble. And if I’m in trouble we definitely won’t be able to go on our field trip, so. Zip it, the lot of you.”
There’s sixteen pairs of eyes widening at him for that, but only quieter giggles before everyone makes a mad dash to pull their books out from their desks. Win-win all around.
Steve settles into his desk chair with only a slight wince– he’d never really gotten his back right after everything. Made him feel a lot older than his 27 years most of the time. Between the old aches and pains–and the fact he’d been unceremoniously told-not-told to pick up a prescription and a pair of lenses a few years back or he would be unable to read his own blackboard writing– and the hellions that made up his Grade 5 class, he felt near ancient half the time.
It’s not exactly what he would have thought he’d be doing, to be perfectly honest, but. It’s nice. Steve spends more time with paint in his hair and stickers plastered on his arms (which hurts like hell to pull off, thanks) than he does chasing down monsters these days, which is to say he doesn’t do much of the latter at all. Well, different kinds of monsters maybe. He’d thought it was sort of an insane idea, freshly twenty one and just out of an apocalypse that had very nearly ripped Hawkins clean out of the earth, sprawled across Robin’s lap on their shitty hand me down couch.
‘What if I just like, became a teacher,’ he’d said, apropos of nothing and all in one breath. He hadn’t even been thinking about it, really. (He’d been thinking about it a lot in the way he normally did, which was thinking around it and pretending the space behind that was the same thing as acknowledgement)
Robin’s nails scratching against his skull paused, ‘Are we talking hypotheticals again?’
Steve squeezed his eyes shut, embarrassed for reasons he didn’t even understand himself. ‘No, I mean– nevermind, it’s stupid.’
Robin had huffed, shoved him upright and grabbed him by the shoulders, the face, until he looked at her. ‘Did I say stupid? I don’t think I said stupid, stupid.’
Steve laughed, frowning playfully and shoving at her. ‘Hey.’ She let him go, hands sliding down to hold his.
‘Say it again, ask me.’
Steve sighed. ‘I just. I heard some people talking? Nobody wants to teach in Hawkins anymore, right? Kind of desperate. I think I could get into the community college, maybe be a substitute to start?’
Her big eyes tracked back and forth between his, flaking eyeliner haloing them. She had just graduated and was talking about taking a year off, or being really wild and doing something like moving in with Nancy and going to an Ivy League because she’d gotten some crazy scholarship apparently. (Of course she had, she was such a big nerd, he was so stupid proud of her). She was leaving, and it was good, it was so good but maybe also really terrifying.
‘What’s the question, Stevie.’
He took a second, swallowing. ‘Do you think I’d be good at it?’
The craziest part of all of it, was that he wasn’t actually half bad. He’d scraped his way into a few courses, getting a full diploma certificate and everything– Robin and Nancy had been there for the dinky little ceremony. (It was quiet, Steve hadn’t really wanted to make a thing out of it when three people he knew were getting bachelors and then some and his accomplishments felt kind of small and silly in comparison. They wouldn’t stand for that of course– his favorite people liked to make a lot of noise, Dustin and Lucas had found out and organized a party somehow without him noticing. It hadn’t been quiet when he’d gotten back to his house at all .) He’d sort of just walked up to the school the week after and handed in his resume, kind of dorky and far too simple in hindsight.
Kind of perfect, when he got the call that they were really desperately looking for a substitute for their art classes.
Steve knew jack shit about art, was the thing. But the teacher who usually taught it and also the Grade 5 class down the hall had a rough situation going on, and would be away for a few months (he didn’t ask, didn’t really want to know if he was indirectly-directly responsible for whatever personal crisis had pulled her away without notice). He showed up that first day expecting to do something like paper mache, make abstract paint splatters and call it a day.
The way the group of kids had just stared at him, eager and bouncing in place like they’d been waiting for this, how empty the room had been, the way they’d just been so silent and happy before fading a little, had just scooped out everything else in him. He’d gone home that afternoon and immediately pulled together all of his shitty savings into buying like, real actual art supplies. Called up Will from wherever he was in New York (out being a big shot comic artist slash playwright or whatever new artistic thing he’d picked up since they last talked), and got him to give Steve the world’s fastest crash course in tempera paints and canvases.
He’d spent a wild amount of time in the library after that trying to find anything he could on art history and different styles, what kinds of art they could do, what kinds of projects might make sense, his own high school teachers would have eaten their hats if they’d seen him. Practically a regular.
The first morning back, when he’d rolled up to class with his armload of materials, he’d gotten the chance to watch the kids trickle in and see everything laid out– the way they all looked like Christmas had come early, big grins and bright eyes. That was the feeling, Steve remembered thinking. The moment that sealed for him that he was in this for the long haul, whatever that looked like.
After that, there’d been the old gym teacher’s retirement party, Steve’s new coworkers raising an eyebrow and asking after his famed basketball days, and suddenly he was also subbing in for their PE classes too. When he volunteered to coach after that, they’d brought him a cake as thank you. It was terrible, but he sort of at least expected it when the principal asked if he’d be willing to take it all on as a full time position.
The long and short of it, the whole mess, was that Steve Harrington had helped save the world, and now he was. Living in it, maybe. Trying to.
“Mr. H?”
Steve looked up, “hey, kiddo, you finished?”
Taylor shuffles a little, nodding. “Can I read the big one now?”
The big one being the beat up copy of the Hobbit he’d rescued from– well, that he’d rescued. Steve arched his brow. “You’re one stubborn cookie, you know that?”
Taylor just widened his eyes in a way Steve knew meant ‘you promised’ and ‘I’ll just keep asking’ all in one. He stood up with a sigh, ruffling the kids' hair. “Alright, alright. Let’s get your nerd book, huh?”
It wasn’t easy, every day. Living in Hawkins was a bit like a chalk hopscotch game where everyone was one bad jump away from finally giving in and leaving. If you conveniently ignored the broken up roads on Center Street, it was like the earthquakes never happened. If you pretended that the string of unknown murders a few years back were just really wild animal attacks, you could sleep easier. Steve thought it was kind of hilarious, in a morbid way, the mental loops people went to in order to justify not moving away from their childhood family home.
Steve spent a lot of time pretending himself, though.
(At first he’d said he didn’t want to leave because the kids were still here, and they might need him when Vecna came back. Then when the bastard was nothing but a smear under El’s shoe, he told himself it was because they weren’t really lucky enough to have won and also survived.
Then, three years later, when most of the kids were high tailing it to the nearest Big Brain school and doing crazy things like getting married, he told himself it was for Erica. To keep an eye on things, because he didn’t have any big future plans anyways.
‘I need them to have someone they can tell,’ he’d said to Robin. ‘You know? Dustin said the reason he went to me with the, the demon dog bullshit was just because no one else was around, isn’t that messed up? He didn’t even like me, I was just the only adult who knew about this shit and was available.’
‘If there’s anything, if anything happens, I need to be the one those kids know they can call.’ )
He had something of a routine these days. Like the old man Robin always made fun of him for being.
He usually called Robin in the evenings– doing her PhD now like the absolute rockstar dweeb she’d always been, out in Berkley of all places– she liked hearing about all the nonsense ‘his kids’ got up to, cooing over them like Steve was an adorable mother hen. This year her favorite was Emily, just because the kid had a stubborn anti-authority streak a mile wide and liked to make sure Steve knew anytime he was wrong about anything.
On Fridays he hung out with Hopper and Joyce– Jonathan and Will had moved out, Jane following Mike and Will to New York, so it was quieter than either of them really cared for. Steve typically just put up (fondly) with Joyce trying to stuff him full of her cooking and fussing over him (he loved it), and Hopper gruffily asking him about how the basketball team was doing (badly).
Saturdays were for supplies, groceries, any left over planning and grading– sometimes brought over food for Ms Henderson, too, who always seemed too small for her house alone with Mews II– and Sundays he puttered around in his tiny living room and tried to learn something new he could bring to school.
This week it was Picasso. He really wasn’t sure he understood the guy like, at all, but. It was all about trying to look at something different, right? He could make that a fun thing.
(Will thought it was so funny, Steve being an art teacher. Steve had absolutely no artistic talent in his own opinion, and had to get Will to teach him things about shading and color theory to regurgitate dutifully, but he was good at making messes. Will said that was really all art was, trying new things and making a lot of mistakes. Mike made fun of him loudly in the background of all of their calls, the brat.)
Living in Hawkins post-Vecna meant it was a little harder to find things, a little more difficult to order in specialty non essentials– he’d had to drive up to Indianapolis more times than he’d want ever to admit just to find a new tool one of his kids had mentioned wanting to try out. It also meant a lot less kids, a lot less laughter outside in the parks.
It had been years but… old habits.
Steve did his best to make his classroom bright anyways, hanging up frames of comics that Dustin sent his way, making hand made signs for different events and sayings he picked up. His kids thought he was a push over, probably (he was), but he thought it made learning stuff easier for him. If it was fun, if it wasn’t so doom and gloom. Kinda wished he’d had someone to show him it didn’t have to be so hard when he was younger– didn’t think he’d had anyone to even explain what he was missing until Nancy.
(She thought it was incredibly sweet, what he was doing. Robin said she’d gotten choked up about it when Steve first got offered the full time role, actually. Part of him wondered if it was because she was surprised a meat head like him would ever want to step back into a classroom.
The less self-depreciating parts who actually knew Nancy thought she was proud.)
All in all, it worked pretty okay. It wasn’t exactly what he’d thought of when he was younger and sketching out the big unknowns after high school, but he’d very nearly not had an ‘after’ to worry about, so.
The stupidest part for him, the thing that wormed into his heart, was the way his parents seemed to still be hung up on it after so many years.
“Stephen, there’s an opening at the firm I would like for you to take a look at,” his dad would say on their brief phone calls, or god forbid visits back to Hawkins. Not that he ever stepped foot in Steve’s place, or even asked where it was. Not that he even wanted to give Steve his new address either. Or, “now that you’ve proven capable of getting a degree, you will be signing up for alternate courses, correct?” As if he wasn’t a fully grown up person on his own. As if his career choices were still some stupid high school fad he was working through.
(He’d always been a bit like that to him, a portrait on a shelf he could collect dust with. Brush off and pretend to remember when it was convenient. Meant to be nodded sternly towards and kept.)
He didn’t live near them anymore, pooled his first paycheck into a damage deposit on a lower level bungalow just up the road from the school. They’d never visited either. His mother had barely said more than two words to him in the past four years. The stupid part wasn’t any of that, though.
Steve liked his job, he liked the kids that hung off his classroom doors like ungrateful little goblins, liked making them feel comfortable enough to sass him back. He liked that despite everything, despite what anyone thought of him, he was good at it. He missed his best friend but he called her all the time, missed the kids but they sent him wordy emails about their shenanigans. He was fine, he was good.
The funniest thing about Steve, in his opinion, was that he was always the last one in on the joke.
Back in High School, the peak throes of seemingly untouchable popularity cushioning him, the easiest way to resolve it had been to be the one with the punchline. Big fragile ego shoved up behind mean words, a cliched jock through and through, right? The problem was he hadn’t even really been good at that much, either– Tommy and Carol were the ones usually biting out the quick acidic words anyways, he just got all the credit for standing there sneering.
Later, it just became more obvious. Clock makers and vampires and whatever.
He’d never really stopped to think about it or anything, the way he was always wrong, or missing something. Didn’t matter, Henderson was just a snarky little shit anyways. If they got the answer, well, who cared if Steve said something stupid first.
It was more that he’d always sort of thought it had more to do with how smart the people around him were, how he’d found himself around nerds, and before that mean empty people that thrived off insults in a way he never could make himself. He hadn’t maybe thought it was just him.
When he’d made the choice to apply for school, nervously and with Robin and Nancy reading over his application letter at least twenty times each, Joyce and Ms Henderson for an additional two, there’d been this big empty thing in him the entire time. He hadn’t really known what it was, only that it had made the words seem like they were sinking right down into the paper as he wrote them, big black lines that bled right into the universe, this impossible pocket of ‘not enough’.
His parents hadn’t been back in Hawkins for a full year by that point, hadn’t even visited Steve’s place at all. All he’d thought about as he’d penned out shakily his reasons for valuing education was that they’d find out somehow, make him go up to New York, all upstate in the woods with them to their summer home slash permanent home, rip his shitty thoughts to strips of logic and reason right in front of him. They’d wanted him to take over his dad’s firm one day, that had always been the plan, and he’d already gone so far off script with his terrible grades and his choice in friends.
He’d broken down right after mailing out his application, writing up a follow up letter to his parents place coming clean. Even giving them a call, even though the line had just stayed busy the entire time. Maybe he hadn’t always been a good son, maybe he’d never really measured up to what they wanted, but he still cared. Figured they’d still want to know, wouldn’t they?
Maybe he’d been a little disappointed in some unknowable way when nothing had happened, just a quiet acceptance letter in the mail. Just Robin and Eddie and Nance and the kids to celebrate.
He hadn’t gotten it, the inside joke, for a few months. Not until his first classes were starting and a stack of mail fell through their front mail slot. Bright red return to senders stamped on all of them dating back for months.
“You need to get a hobby,” Hopper groused at him. The fall air was thick and dry around them, the old wood of Hopper’s porch digging rough lines into Steve’s palm as he leaned back. Crickets and cicadas humming out in the depth of the woods around them.
“My hobby is bothering you, I think,” Steve shrugged back, taking a long sip of his beer. He’s a big fan of late October as a season– the kids are always excited, he gets to pull out the fun projects, and there’s a lot of study time for quizzes that let him pretend he isn’t two months late on his migraine specialist appointments. The leaves crunching underfoot during recess adds a fun level of enthusiasm, enough to stave off the worst of his nightmares usually.
Hopper side eyes him. “Like a real one, smartass. The only thing you’ve talked to me about today was work.”
Well, yeah, Steve thinks. “So you don’t want to hear about what Daniel said in the middle of silent reading time, then?”
Hopper takes a drink with a grunt. “Come on, your only downtime thing can’t be hassling me. What happened to all those dates you were going on?”
“Didn’t work out,” he shrugs. He’d gone on one, but– it was weird, trying to date someone who didn’t have chronic nightmares and stress over flickering electric wiring. A lot he couldn’t explain. “I’m not just hassling you,” he points out. “I’m also bothering Joyce.”
“You know that’s not true,” Hopper says, which is fair. Joyce gets regularly frowny at him for implying that he’s anything but unconditionally welcome. Steve figures it’s the empty nest part of it all, Ms Henderson is the same way. Hopper sighs, “I saw your old man ripping out of town the other day. He talk to you?”
“Jeeze, Hop. Can’t we just like, enjoy the ambience?”
“That’s a yes, then.”
Steve looks down at his beer. “You know, the usual. Waste of the Harrington name, had a career all set out for me, making my mother cry. Blah blah blah.”
“Rough.” Hopper looks out at the woods. Hopper liked to push and push and then just sit in the silence around the words, it was infuriating for how it worked.
“Doesn’t matter though,” Steve means it, he thinks. It doesn’t even sting as much anymore that they hadn’t bothered to tell him where they moved. “Hey, did I tell you I’m trying to get the kids out to a field trip? There’s a big art museum opening up in Indy, thought it could be fun. Just need a couple of chaperones to get it going, I think.”
“The principal went for that?” They’d had a rough time convincing parents or the school boards to let the kids even go outside for recess for the first few years, it’s a fair question honestly.
Steve hums, “Well, not exactly. Think she’s close to warming up to me on it though.”
“Heard from the rest of them? Wheeler Senior and the Sinclair’s I mean?”
Steve shakes his head. “I talk to Robin every day but she can’t come down to supervise with her yanno, defense or whatever. Nancy’s supervisor won’t approve time off right now either.” Or however that went for them, academia seemed like a frightening mess of independence with simultaneous specific checked boxes. At least the school board only cared about whether the kids did well on their year end tests. “Max and Lucas are good, haven’t gotten any sarcastic postcards recently at least. Lucas’ team is kicking ass.”
H“What about Munson?”
Steve blinks, scowls. “What do you mean what about Munson.”
Hopper’s gaze slides towards him from the treeline. “Haven’t heard from him, still?”
As if any of them heard from him other than Dustin, Mike and Lucas, once, on their graduation. Eddie definitely didn’t talk to Steve. Would be nice, honestly, if Steve knew at all what he was up to but– post world saving there’d been a firm rule about talking too loudly and witness signatures, so. He assumed Eddie was fine, just like Steve was fine. He didn’t let himself think too much more about it.
His collarbone itches vaguely, and he hides a grimace.
“No, have you?”
“Nah. Mike said something last week about him, thought maybe he was in the area.”
Steve tries aggressively to ignore the way his heart kicks around in his chest at the thought.
“Who in their right mind would stick around a place like Hawkins?” He tilts his bottle towards Hopper.
The older man laughs, grins big and fond. “Just us screwballs, I guess,” clinking their glasses together.
Twenty year old Steve had fought for the world with his bare hands. He’d torn apart monsters with his teeth and not stopped to think for even a second. He’d dove right in, head first into danger and half thought he wouldn’t be around to see the next sunrise for three ongoing years of his life. Twenty year old Steve had saved the world.
In that final battle, the big one that had made the city more a memory than anything, he’d nearly died for it too.
He didn’t remember much about it, blood loss will do that supposedly, but he remembers El screaming, hand outstretched as Steve rounded up behind that Victor bastard with his old well worn nail bat. He remembers thinking not that he’d get the guy, but that El was losing and everyone else was knocked down, and if he had to go at least it would be to give Supergirl her badass final blow moment, right?
The funniest part is probably that he barely helped.
He knows he spent two weeks in the hospital and was only conscious for the last four days of them. And that Eddie had stayed in the cramped, shitty, one person chair in the corner alongside Robin.
When he woke up for real, Robin had been sleeping on his arm. She had her chipped nail polish coated fingers tangled up in his, her hair mussed like she’d been ignoring it for days. Steve had sort of blinked awake, looked up, and seen Eddie hanging upside down off that shitty chair humming to himself. Eddie locked eyes with him and said ‘Shit. Hi. Can you wake up again so I can pretend I was doing something else’. They’d woken Robin up because Steve had tried to laugh with a tube down his stupid throat.
Just barely twenty one year old Steve had spent the craziest summer-fall-into-winter of his life half living in Robin and Eddie’s back pockets.
Hiding Eddie in Steve’s stupid empty house had been the only logical choice (‘No one would believe you even know me anyways’, Eddie had laughed in a way that had kind of made Steve want to do something dramatic like throw himself off a bridge or like, apologize), and Eddie was wanted by every concerned mother and their shitty teenage son. So, Steve’d woken up every day and cooked his best friend and his weird pseudo roommate breakfast, and spent every night talking to Eddie out on the rooftop overlooking his backyard while they smoked and pretended they didn’t because Robin hated it. He’d maybe half thought he was in love, go figure.
Then the world stopped trying to actively fall apart, and Steve made stupid choices, and reality had kind of plummeted right through it all.
Twenty seven year old Steve taught ten year olds in a beat up old school that struggled to get enough funding to fill desks with pencils half the time, that was so desperate for help they’d let anyone, Steve Harrington included teach art and have his own homeroom. Twenty seven year old Steve had a bad back and random flare ups of pain in his shoulder, and on and off migraines that made him blind in one eye for indeterminate amounts of hours. Twenty seven year old Steve went home to an empty house and had to leave every light on in case he woke up screaming again, because his neighbors had threatened to get the building management involved four separate times already.
All twenty seven year old Steve had to show for the last seven odd years of his life was a stack of NDA’s and vague threats about ever mentioning anything beyond ‘earthquakes’.
Twenty seven year old Steve was also tired. He mostly pretended that it was because of the reading, though.
It starts like any normal Monday, rolling up in his parking space thinking about the math tournament coming up. How at least two of the kids in his class had for some reason thought he’d be their go to tutor, and how that invariably meant he was going to have to do something awful like rent out books about polynomials and other words he’d hoped he’d buried back in high school. He doesn’t think he was even doing polynomials in grade five, he thinks he was probably picking up worms behind his house to gross out Carol.
There’s the usual rigamarole of getting his class wrangled, running through attendance and basic homeroom stuff. Questions about his shirt – it’s lime green, he should have known that’d be a sticking point for a bunch of ten year olds who wear striped shirts and overly patterned shorts their mothers picked out– and the typical pestering about the field trip. ‘No, I don’t know if it’s happening yet’, and ‘hey, ask your parents if they wanna chaperone, then maybe.’
All in all, uneventful except for the way Emily gets gum stuck in her hair and cries the entire way to the nurse’s office to get it cut out. He tries to suggest the peanut butter method at least, which makes her laugh a little. Her mother scowls at Steve when she picks her daughter up like he’d personally told her to chew gum while talking– he hadn’t maybe been watching closely enough to tell her to spit it out but hey. She’d probably learn the lesson now, right?
During lunch, he heads to the Teacher’s Lounge to grab the last sad sandwich he’d had left in his pantry and listens to the other teacher’s gossip about who’s marrying who and what they’ll do at the Christmas party, and pretends very intently he doesn’t have a headache. Or the way Margaret keeps looking over at him as she talks about plus one’s. He winces into a bite and pretends it’s because the bread is stale (it is).
He doesn’t really make friends with his coworkers– not because they aren’t fine people or because he’s stuck up, but it’s just easier not to. To only be the surface level kind of pals that don’t know too much about family life, so Steve doesn’t have to explain why he lives alone, or why he needs to call up his kickass nerd best friend across the country every other night like he’s feeling phantom pains on a severed limb.
He eats his damn sandwich with its shitty wilted lettuce and goes back to class. Pretends he’s working on grading homeroom assignments when really he tries his best to take a powernap with his head still upright.
Afterwards, for once homework free and with a decent plan for art projects with Halloween ramping up, he manages to convince his sorry self to get groceries instead of waiting until his mac and cheese is entirely ravaged. He’s really living the prime bachelor life most days, nearly in his thirties.
The grocery store is at least quiet, enough room for him to think about whether Robin will get to take Christmas season to come back for her parents this year, or if he’ll manage to find a way to drive out. Kind of mull over the ever looming problem of the field trip, too. He has a meeting with the Vice Principal tomorrow at least, and a whole speech prepared on the value of seeing the world outside of Hawkins and the optimism of escapism (Robin and Nancy wrote the whole thing, it’s probably incredibly obvious).
He’s in the middle of debating whether he can afford to splurge for a coffee creamer this week, and thinking distractedly about the way the overhead lights bounce green off the shitty supermarket tiles, when it’s like– a flash in the dark maybe. A warped reflection in the glass in front of him.
A mass of dark curls and a bandana.
Steve turns around before he can really be cognizant of whats happening in front of him or put together the spiraling lines his mind is screaming at him and– it’s like seven years folded up over themselves. A flat page between then and now.
Eddie Munson back in Hawkins, in the grocery aisle picking out eggs like it’s a regular Monday. What the fuck.