Chapter Text
Steve almost made it to adulthood without thinking about it again.
If he was good at words, he could have sat down next to Will at some point after he came back from the Upside Down, put a hand on his very thin shoulder, and explained that Steve knew what it was like, to come back when no one expected it of you. But he couldn’t manage it, because then he would have had to explain what he meant. And that would have meant thinking about it, really thinking about it, and that seemed like more than he was capable of. So he didn’t say anything to Will Byers about the challenges of being a living dead boy.
Steve had gone for years without thinking about it. He hadn’t spoken a word about any of it since before they moved to Hawkins, burying his childhood history behind the vapid experience of being King Steve. King Steve was normal, and popular, and he didn’t talk about things that were upsetting to him or to other people. No one wanted to hear about trauma. That was actually pretty a easy rule to follow, no one wanted to hear about the time he got kidnapped by a child murderer slash maybe pedophile and the only reason Steve was this creep’s only survivor was because of the ghosts that called the creepy black phone in the murder basement he’d been kept in. He had been doing alright. The nightmares were tolerable, the ghosts had gone quiet again.
Until that damned walkie that Dustin was carrying around.
The Upside Down wasn’t Steve’s first experience with the paranormal. He had spoken with ghosts before, he had known from way too young an age that there was more out there than he could explain. Even if he had been a scientist who was good at explaining things and not someone who was only going to pass physics with the help of his girlfriend. If Nancy was still his girlfriend, and didn’t, you know, still think their love was bullshit.
That wasn’t the point. The point was that Steve had dealt with the ghosts before and he had managed to live a fairly normal life, even with the knowledge that he was basically haunted.
The thing that had helped Steve bury that so deep and not think about it was that the ghosts needed a phone to speak to him. They needed to call him. And if he was never home, never in reach of a phone, then they could never reach him, and that was it. He didn’t have to listen to their whispers, didn’t have to think about the five days he spent locked in a basement waiting to die. The phone thing was a rule, and they had to follow the rules.
Until he was walking along the railroad tracks with Dustin, slinging meat from a bucket to lure out a cat-eating tadpole dog and the walkie burst into a hiss of static that sent him reeling.
“The gate is open” the walkie said and Steve felt his knees buckle. He didn’t recognize the voice coming from the walkie, but that didn’t mean anything. People sounded different when they were dead, sometimes.
“Did you hear that?” He asked Dustin, even though he already knew the answer.
“Hear what?” Dustin asked, and Steve did his best to play it off like it must have been the wind.
He had, mostly on purpose, tried not to learn too much about what had happened the last time with the Upside Down. He knew the general shape of it, knew that the thing that he had fought at the Byers’ house had killed a lot of people, had killed Barb, and Will had survived and come back and the thing was gone because a tiny girl with magic powers had killed it, and also maybe herself.
So he had gone to dinner at the Holland’s with Nancy and woken up in a cold sweat and not thought about what these things were or where they came from. The tiny superhero that Mike would not shut up about had taken care of it. But not before it had - Steve didn’t know - laid eggs or something and now there were tadpole dog things with razor mouths?
The point was, he didn’t know what “the gate” was, but he did know that there was someone who cared enough about it to pull themself from the fog that the afterlife seemed to be entirely made up of, to warn him. So it was important, and not too much of a stretch to imagine that it was tied, somehow, to this whole tadpole dog situation.
When he was scrambling for the fortified bus, concerned about these idiot kids and whether or not he was going to get home alive, he spared a single thought to wish that whoever had cared about the gate had cared enough to warn him that there was apparently an entire pack of tadpole dogs. Demodogs. Whatever, Dustin.
He shoved his feet against the reinforced bus door and swore under his breath. The demodogs were bigger than he was expecting and as they threw themselves against the door he knew that he couldn’t hold it forever. He also couldn’t think of a way to get the kids out of here without moving from the door and then they’d all be dead, and even if he was the kind of person who was good at coming up with plans, he could barely hear himself think over all the background screaming from the frightened kids.
“We’re at the old junkyard, and we are going to die!” Dustin was shouting into the walkie. He didn’t get a response. Steve did.
“Not yet,” the walkie promised, the words almost lost under the screaming of the kids. These fucking kids. Steve didn’t even have time to think of what he was meant to do with that information before he’s hustling the redhead (Mads? Maria?) behind him and waving the bat at the tadpole dog on the roof of the bus. The roof of the bus that they did not close. Great. He was going to die here.
“Max,” the walkie said, and Steve wanted to throw it out the fucking window. “Her name is Max.” This was a new voice, not the one that had been talking to him all day, but he didn’t really have time to ponder what that meant.
“Fuck. Off.” Steve grit out from between his teeth. The demodog hadn’t moved yet, and he could have been talking to it, if the kids asked.
And then it left. They all left and the bus fell mercifully silent for an entire two seconds.
“The gate!” The walkie insisted, and Steve wanted to scream at it that he didn’t know what that meant and he didn’t know what they wanted.
He didn’t, because he was the mature adult in this situation and he had to get these kids back to safety. But he wanted to.
And then there was more yelling, and planning, and little Will Byers looked like he was half a step from death’s door. And the superhero girl was back, which was neat, but also confusing. And then it was just him alone at the Byers’ house with his squad of kids from the bus, plus Mike Wheeler, and the fucking walkie would not stop whispering to him.
Steve wanted to go home and go to bed. He wanted to scream that it wasn’t fair, that this wasn’t his responsibility, that he had enough fucking truama, thank you. But the walkie just whispered, the chorus of voices coming too fast and thick for him to pick a single word or phrase out of the noise.
And then fucking Billy Hargrove.
From the moment that Billy had rolled into town, he had some sort of vendetta against Steve. And it had been fine, it had been stupid highschool bullshit that didn’t matter because there was an alternate Hawkins sitting under their feet, because there were ghosts that could speak to Steve if he had felt like listening, because Steve had killed a man - a real, human man - when he was twelve years old. If Billy Hargrove wanted to shove Steve around and claim to be king of Hawkins high because he could do a longer keg stand, then clearly his life was pathetic and he needed every bit of validation he could find. He could have Steve’s old friends. He could have Steve’s popularity. He could even have Steve’s spot on the basketball team.
He was not getting in that fucking house.
Max had been terrified when he had driven up, almost more so than she had been of the demodogs and that was more than enough for Steve. It had been almost six years, but he remembered how to fight human monsters.
“Am I dreaming or is that you, Harrington?” And then Billy Hargrove took his fucking jacket off, like there was anyone in a ten mile radius that wanted to see his nipples right now. The walkie hissed again, and one voice came out of it this time.
This was a voice that Steve recognized.
When he had been in that basement, Vance had been the only voice that had scared him. Steve had seen him once in real life, a kid interrupted Vance’s pinball game and Vance had carved his name into the kid’s arm with a pocketknife, so the poor kid would remember him or something. Vance had been taken less than a week later. And that rage, it crackled down the phone line like it was a physical thing, like if he just hated enough he could pull himself back to life.
“Are you going to let this bitch push you around?”
It was a bit funny, because when Billy had first blown into town, Steve had thought that Vance was back, somehow. They shared the same mop of blond curls, the same thick arms and boiling rage. Maybe that similarity was what had called Vance back from the fog of death - Stevie was Vance’s last tie to the world, and Vance didn’t want to lose a fight to a cheap imitation.
So when Billy went to shove him, because the idiot kids couldn’t keep their idiot faces out of the window, Steve didn’t go down. Instead, he wrapped a hand in the collar of Billy’s shirt and used it as a lever to slam Hargrove’s face down at the same time Steve brought his knee up, connecting with Billy’s nose with a sickening crack. When he pulled the knee back, he used the grip he still had on Billy’s collar to shove him backwards.
“Plant your fucking feet, Hargrove,” Steve spat, which, in hindsight, may have been a mistake.