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“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Steve muttered to himself as he saw something move in the trees.
“Is that-“
“A demodog, yeah,” Steve cut Jonathan off. He watched the creature for a moment, then its head turned to face them. It stilled.
“And it’s seen us,” Steve said. He pulled out his bat with the nails in it from under his seat and stepped out the van. “I’ll go kill it. You deal with Jessica.”
“Wait.” Steve turned back to see Jonathan scrambling out the van. “You can’t go kill a demo by yourself.”
“Sure I can,” Steve shrugged. He refused to let fear creep into his voice. It was just a dog, right? An inter-dimensional dog, yeah, but still just a dog.
He walked into the trees confidently, bat raised. The demo was still completely still, watching him get closer. Steve slowed his pace, and raised the bat higher.
“That’s it,” he said softly, “Just stay still and-“
He was cut off by a loud growl. The demodog’s head opened up to reveal rows of sharp teeth. Steve stumbled back, caught off guard, and the demo charged.
Steve hit it as soon as it was close enough, but it didn’t slow the creature. It pounced straight onto Steve, knocking him over. It stayed on his chest, pinning him to the ground. It growled again.
Steve managed to hit the thing again, pushing it back enough for him to sit up. He tried to kick it fully off him, but the demodog pounced again, sinking its teeth into Steve’s left leg.
The pain was instant and excruciating. Steve was unable to stop a pained cry from escaping him, but he didn’t stop fighting.
He kicked the demodog away with his other leg, and it released its hold on him. Steve pulled himself to his feet, ignoring the agony in his leg as approached the creature.
He raised his bat and hit it, over and over, not giving it a chance to recover between each hit. It shrieked loudly, then Steve felt it grab hold of the bat in its teeth and pull it out of his grip.
The bat was thrown to the side, and Steve began to back away, defenceless. The demo approached him slowly, seeming to enjoy its new power.
Steve’s mind raced, trying to think of something to do, but he was out of ideas.
Then, suddenly, a gunshot cut through the quiet. The demo turned his head to find the source of the noise, and Steve didn’t waste a second.
He darted to the side and grabbed the bat. By the time the demo looked back, he was already hitting it, aiming only for his head. This time, the already weakened demodog could do nothing but shriek as it was attacked.
Steve kept hitting it even after it fell to the ground and went silent. Eventually, he pulled his bat away, satisfied that the thing was dead.
He breathed heavily, then stepped away from the body.
Waves of agony crashed through him, and he suddenly remembered the demo biting his leg. He looked down. It was hard to tell in the dark, but he could see where his trousers had ripped. And the dark red patch spreading downwards.
The bat fell from his grip as he swayed suddenly, and then he fell, his leg unable to hold his weight any longer. He fell backwards into a tree, and slid down it, leaning against it with his injured leg stretched out before him.
Suddenly Jonathan was standing above him. Steve had almost forgotten he was there, although it must have been him who fired the gun.
“Jesus Christ, man,” Jonathan said as he knelt down. His hands hovered over the wound for a moment, then he looked at Steve. His face was twisted in anger. “I told you not to go on your own!”
“Well, what was I meant to do?” Steve shot back, “We needed to get rid of Jessica!”
“Yeah, and if you had just waited one moment, then I could have come with you!”
“We didn’t have a moment! The thing had already seen us!”
Jonathan was pulling off his jacket as Steve spoke, and he began to wrap it around Steve’s leg. Steve let out a cry of pain, his hands clenched uselessly. Jonathan tied the jacket tightly, and the agony caused black spots to blossom over Steve’s vision.
By the time he could see clearly again, Jonathan was staring straight at him, his expression unreadable.
“Can you stand?” he asked. He was no longer shouting, but his voice was still tight. Steve nodded without really thinking about it. He honestly had no idea if he could, but what other option did he have?
He began to pull himself upwards, gripping onto the tree for support. He couldn’t stop himself from groaning, though. The pain was white hot and only seemed to be getting worse.
The van was only a few feet away, but to Steve it may as well have been a thousand miles. He was starting to feel slightly dizzy.
Wordlessly, Jonathan pulled Steve’s arm around his shoulders and tugged him away from the tree. Steve tried hard to not fall completely into Jonathan, but he couldn’t stop himself from leaning heavily on him.
Each step was agony, and by the time they reached the van Steve was breathing heavily and sweating. Jonathan pulled open the door at the back of it, and Steve sat down heavily, pulling up his injured leg to lie flat on the floor of the van. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, trying to focus on anything other than the pain.
“What the hell.”
Jonathan’s words forced Steve to open his eyes again. Jonathan was staring out at the road. He leaned forwards to look around Jonathan and see what he was looking at.
Dustin was walking towards them. Even in the darkness it was easy to make out the blood covering his face.
Dustin approached them, his eyes landing on Steve’s blood-soaked leg. Alarm flickered over his face and he turned to Jonathan.
“What happened?” he asked him, but Steve responded.
“Demodog.” he said shortly. “What happened to you?”
Dustin paused for a moment, before looking at Steve.
“I fell off my bike,” he said.
“You fell off your bike,” he repeated slowly. Dustin nodded. “What did you fall into? A knuckle sandwich?”
Dustin sighed and looked back at Jonathan.
“Why was there a demodog here?” he pressed, but again Steve cut in before Jonathan could speak.
“Maybe you would know that if you had actually been here like you were supposed to be. Instead of getting into fights. Because you know what, Henderson? Out of all the crawls this one was like the one to miss.”
Steve couldn’t stop the anger building up in him. Dustin had been different since Eddie died. He was getting into fights, isolating himself, pushing Steve away every time he tried to talk to him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dustin asked, “That this was ‘the one’ to miss?”
The question was directed to Steve, but he was glad when Jonathan answered instead. The dizziness was starting to get worse. He leaned his head back against the van and tried to control his breathing as Jonathan spoke, explaining what had happened with Holly and the rest of the Wheelers, and then them losing contact with the upside down.
Dustin was silent for a long moment.
“For future reference,” he said eventually, “When the lights go really bright and then dim, it means there’s a power surge, and you need to turn everything off.”
Steve couldn’t believe that, after everything he had just been told, that was what Dustin had to say.
“Or,” he muttered, raising his head to look up at Dustin, “You could just be where you’re supposed to be.”
“I was en route to the Squark when-“
“When you fell off your bike,” Steve finished, “Yeah.”
Dustin scoffed. He looked back at Jonathan.
“What do we do now? Should we keep searching for a signal, or do we need to get him back to the Squark?”
“I’m fine,” Steve said, but Jonathan spoke over him.
“We should keep searching. He should he fine until we get back.”
Dustin walked into the back of the van, stepping over Steve’s outstretched legs to reach the decoder. Jonathan slammed the doors of the van shut.
“Who was it?” Steve asked. He got no response. “Andy and his cronies? You poked the bear one too many times.”
“You know, your concern for me is overwhelming,” Dustin said. Steve felt anger shoot through him as white-hot as the pain in his leg.
“I have shown nothing but concern for you since forever,” he snapped, “But you have kept pushing me away. And because of that we are now completely screwed.”
The engine powered on. Steve hadn’t even noticed Jonathan get in the van.
“Correction,” Dustin said angrily, “We are screwed because you can’t even do the most basic thing and prevent a power surge. My mother can stop a power surge. I think even your mother-“
“Just admit it!” Steve yelled, suddenly furious, “Just admit it, Henderson! Admit that you were wrong!”
“Are you going to try and find the signal, or not?” Jonathan snapped from the front. Dustin glared at Steve, before pulling on the headphones and turning away.
The van jolted slightly as one of the tires hit a bump in the road, and the movement sent a sharp stab of pain through Steve’s leg. He winced, glad that Dustin was still determinedly looking the other way.
The pain was agonising, and the part of his leg below the wound was starting to go slightly numb. But he could feel sticky warmth spreading under him from the injury. How much blood was he losing?
Time stretched on in silence, and he was starting to feel really lightheaded. He focused on a spot on the wall of the van in front of him, but it kept slipping out of focus.
His leg was throbbing painfully, and it was getting harder to ignore. Waves of agony crashed through him with every breath he took, and each one seemed to make the van tilt out of focus even more.
He closed his eyes to try and block out how much everything was spinning, and the blackness behind his eyelids helped a little. He was suddenly very cold.
Someone slapped his cheek, and he gasped as his eyes flew open. It took him a second to make out Dustin, with his hand raised as though he was going to slap Steve again. He lowed his arm as he saw Steve was awake.
“Steve. Stay awake,” he said firmly. Steve nodded, but he didn’t know how he was supposed to obey when nothing would stay in focus and blackness was creeping around the edge of his vision.
He realised Dustin was looking at his face closely, and he blinked hard to try and clear his vision enough to make out Dustin’s expression.
Before he could, Dustin had lowered his gaze to Steve’s leg, and he suddenly swore loudly.
“Language,” Steve murmured automatically, but Dustin didn’t seem to hear him. He was shouting, but not at Steve. The words seemed distant, but Steve focused hard on them.
“…hospital now!”
“What happened?” That was Jonathan’s voice, also loud.
“There’s too much blood. Oh God, it’s everywhere.” His voice caught on the last word.
Steve was still trying to wrap his head around what was going on when he felt Dustin grab his shoulders hard.
“Don’t pass out,” he was saying. His voice sounded panicked, the words running together, “Do you hear me, Steve? You need to stay awake.”
“Okay,” Steve mumbled. He was so tired, though. He felt his eyelids droop. The voices continued, but the words got lost somewhere, and he stopped trying to focus on them.
Pain exploded in his leg, and a scream ripped its way out of Steve’s throat. He could just make out Dustin holding something down on his leg, pressing hard into the wound.
The van tilted alarmingly, and the blackness closed in over his vision.
He wasn’t supposed to go to sleep, but he couldn’t remember why.
And he couldn’t stop himself.
———
Dustin had had a pretty shit day.
First, he had been beaten up in a graveyard. Then, he had been late to the crawl. And now he was in the back of the van, trying to find the signal, with a pissed off Steve Harrington.
And Dustin was pretty pissed off too.
He looked back at Steve briefly, and froze. His eyes were closed. Dustin tried to push down the slight fear blossoming in him and he pulled off the headphones and moved over to Steve.
He hesitated, then slapped him. There was probably a better way of waking him up, but he was still pretty angry at the guy.
Steve’s eyes opened with a gasp, and Dustin told him to stay awake. Surely Steve should know that? Surely it was common knowledge that you should stay awake if you’ve been injured?
Then Dustin realised how dazed his eyes were. He looked closer, noticing the paleness of his skin. It took Steve a long time to drag his eyes up to meet Dustin’s. And that’s when Dustin felt it.
Warm, red blood, seeping steadily over the floor of the van.
“Fuck,” he shouted, pure terror fuelling the word. “Jonathan! Forget the crawl. We need to get to the hospital now!”
“What happened?” Jonathan called back. Dustin felt the van speed up.
“There’s too much blood.” Steve’s leg was drenched. Dustin felt sick at the sight of all of it. “Oh God, it’s everywhere.”
How had he not realised how bad the wound was? Steve had seemed fine a moment ago. How had this happened so quickly?
Dustin looked back up at Steve’s face. He looked completely out of it. Dustin grabbed hold of his shoulders to try and make sure he would hear what he was about to say.
“Don’t pass out,” he said, panic spilling out with the words. “Do you hear me, Steve? You need to stay awake.”
Steve muttered some incoherent, but Dustin ignored him in favour of listening to Jonathan telling him to put pressure on the wound.
Pressure. Right. Dustin knew that, but the cold fear in his chest was making it hard to think logically.
He tugged off his jacket and bundled it up in his hands. He steeled himself, and then pressed it down over the soaked jacket already tied around Steve’s leg.
Steve screamed, and the sound broke something in Dustin. He kept his attention on his shaking hands, trying and failing to keep them steady.
He glanced back at Steve, and saw that his eyes were closed again.
“No no no. Steve, Steve! Wake up, please,” he begged. No response. “Jonathan,” Dustin shouted, “He passed out!”
“Just keep putting pressure on it!” Jonathan ordered, sounding frantic.
Dustin pressed down harder. His hands were covered in red.
“I’m sorry,” he said, voice shaking, “I’m sorry, Steve. I shouldn’t have pushed you away so much. I should have been here for the crawl. Oh God, please don’t die.”
He was rambling. The panic was starting to set into his bones, so strong he could almost taste it. Steve could die. He could die right next to Dustin, just like Eddie had.
And Dustin hadn’t even noticed. He had been watching the decoder, deliberately facing away from Steve. He hadn’t noticed that the guy was bleeding out slowly. Hadn’t even bothered to check how bad the injury was. If Steve died it would be all Dustin’s fault.
He didn’t know how long he knelt there, pressing down on Steve’s leg, hands slipping in the blood, before the van came to an abrupt stop.
Jonathan threw open the back door, and Dustin looked up to see him take it all in: Steve’s pale skin, the blood pooling on the floor, Dustin’s trembling hands clenched around the jacket.
Jonathan didn’t speak, just bent down to lift Steve up in his arms. Dustin’s hands fell away from his leg, the saturated jacket falling to the ground. He scrambled out of the van and slammed the door closed, leaving a red handprint behind.
The moment the two entered into the hospital, doctors had surrounded them, pulling Steve out of Jonathan’s arms and putting him on a stretcher. Then they were gone, disappearing behind a door at the end of the hallway.
Dustin and Jonathan were left to stare at the closing door.
“What happened?”
The voice came from behind them. Dustin turned to see Nancy and Mike, eyes wide and horrified. In the commotion, Dustin had forgotten about what had happened to the Wheelers. Forgotten that Nancy and Mike would be here.
Mike’s eyes were glued to Dustin’s hands. He looked down and saw how awful they looked: dark red and shaking.
He looked back up at Mike and opened his mouth to explain what had happened.
But all that came out was a sob.
———
The first thing Steve was aware of was pain. A dull, constant pain in his left leg. It took him a long moment to remember the demodog, and the teeth sinking into his leg.
The pain felt wrong. Shouldn’t it be sharp?
He pushed the thought away and tried to remember what had happened. His brain felt like it was moving through fog. He began to piece together a timeline.
Jonathan helping him walk to the van. Dustin with his beat up face. Arguing.
He must have lost consciousness at some point.
And where was he now? He tried to make sense of his surroundings. He was laying down on something soft, he realised. And he felt slightly floaty, although he couldn’t really figure out what that feeling was.
His left hand felt warm, and he realised someone was holding it. That was strange.
He could make out a rhythmic beeping. Also strange.
It was time to open his eyes. He slowly did so, squinting against bright lights. He raised his head slightly to look down at himself, and saw he was lying in a bed in what seemed to be a hospital room.
Maybe the leg injury had been worse than he had thought.
Holding his head up was surprisingly difficult, so he let it fall back down onto the pillow. He turned it slightly to the side to see someone next to him, asleep in a chair.
“Dustin?”
Dustin stirred, then his eyes shot open and he leaned forwards.
“Hey Steve. How are you feeling?”
“Okay,” Steve mumbled, even though confusion was building up in his brain. The last thing he remembered was him and Dustin arguing. That didn’t add up with Dustin sleeping at his bedside and holding his hand.
“Why…” Steve’s voice trailed off. He didn’t quite know what he was asking.
Dustin’s face flickered with worry, although he tried to cover it.
“You’re at the hospital. You’ve been out for about 12 hours,” he told Steve. He already knew the first bit, but the second was new. 12 hours? He must have been worse off than he thought.
He pulled his hand free of Dustin’s grip and pushed away the blanket covering him in order to get a look at his leg. It was heavily bandaged, but fully intact.
“Your leg’s fine,” Dustin told him, “The wound was deep, and you lost a lot of blood, but the doctors patched it up. You’re not gonna be able to walk on it for a while though.”
“Right,” Steve said slowly, absorbing this information as Dustin pulled the blanket back into place.
“You’re on a lot of drugs right now,” Dustin continued, his voice a shade softer, “So you’re probably feeling pretty out of it. You’re gonna be fine, though.”
“Yeah,” Steve said. Drugs. That would explain the floaty feeling, and the dull ache in his leg as opposed to the sharp agony. But the thought of being on drugs made him feel slightly anxious. The last time he was on drugs he had been kidnapped by Russians. He had never found out exactly what they had injected him and Robin with.
Dustin was looking at him intently. The bruises on his face looked much worse in the bright hospital lighting. Steve was reminded horribly of that argument they had had in the van. He had completely snapped at Dustin.
“Hey, about what I said earlier-“
“Don’t worry about that,” Dustin said quickly, cutting him off.
“No,” Steve said, “I got angry. I snapped. I shouldn’t have said…”
His voice trailed off again. It was difficult to hold onto his thoughts. They kept slipping away from him. Dustin’s face was creased in concern.
“We can talk when you’re feeling better, okay?” He said, patting Steve’s hand comfortingly.
“Yeah,” Steve agreed, “I just… I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Dustin said, “These past 18 months… I’ve been pushing everyone away. Especially you. I’ve been an asshole.”
“No,” Steve said, “No, I should have been there for you. I just…things were different. I guess I just missed my best friend.”
Dustin’s eyes were glistening.
“I missed my best friend too.”
There was a soft knock on the door, making them both jump. Steve looked up to see Jonathan walking into the room.
“Dustin, I-“
He broke off as his gaze fell onto Steve.
“You’re awake.”
“You’re observant,” Steve responded. Jonathan stepped closer.
“How, um, how do you feel?” he asked.
Steve shrugged. “I’ve been better.”
“Yeah, well maybe in the future you shouldn’t go chasing after a demodog by yourself.”
“I killed it, didn’t I, Byers?” Steve replied.
Jonathan just scoffed. The room was starting to slip out of focus a little, and Steve closed his eyes. He opened them a second later, remembering something.
“How’s… how’s Nance?” he asked.
“She’s okay. Her parents are both stable, and we’re working on finding Holly.”
Steve absorbed this slowly, thankful that Jonathan hadn’t made some comment about him asking about Nancy. He didn’t think he had the energy to deal with it. He was suddenly aware of how exhausted he was.
“That’s why I came,” Jonathan said, speaking to Dustin, “We have a plan, to find Holly, and we need you.”
“I…” Dustin looked back at Steve, clearly torn.
“Hey, don’t worry about me,” Steve said, “You need to go.”
“Are you sure you’ll be okay?” Dustin asked anxiously.
“Yeah,” Steve said, “I’m gonna go back to sleep now anyway.”
“You do that,” Dustin responded, “You look awful.”
“Thanks,” Steve muttered. Dustin smiled.
“I’ll come back later,” he promised, “And I’ll bring Robin. I bet she’s really worried about you.”
Dustin squeezed his hand, then stood up to leave.
“Get better, man,” Jonathan said softly, looking down at him.
“Mhm,” Steve mumbled, his eyes already closing.
He was asleep again before Dustin and Jonathan had even left the room.