Chapter Text
After the end of the world, Steve Harrington is missing quite a few things.
First and foremost he misses people. Robin, Nancy, hell, even Jonathan since they all went to college last summer. He misses Eleven. He misses the kids, who have mostly returned to their normal lives since the military left (thank god for Dustin, who still calls him and hangs out with him regularly, but he knows that blessing has an expiration date as soon as the kid takes off to become even more of a genius somewhere bigger than this forgotten town).
The second thing he misses the most (and this one makes him feel a little guilty) is feeling part of something important. It’s selfish and self centered and it’s not like he preferred it when the world was actively ending… but he used to have a purpose, a group of people he belonged to, a calling to help and protect. This one thing he had made up for with the coaching and the teaching and even if it’s in a smaller scale, he does feel like he’s making a difference. Doesn’t mean he misses the party and the crawls and the whole thing any less.
Third and most confusingly, however, he’s missing things. Weird random things: two or three pairs of socks he could swear he’d washed not long ago, an old hoodie he’d worn to exhaustion and that he isn’t sure if he’d forgotten in his Beamer’s (RIP) trunk, his old school backpack, a baseball cap, the water bottle they’d been gifted as part of their Welcome To Scoops Troops package. Every so often, he notices something else he can’t quite place in between his house, the station or the Upside Down.
He doesn’t think much about it.
Until the kids graduate.
Or, to be more precise, the day after.
He’d already expected their graduation to be emotional. Steve had felt his chest swell with pride for all them, but perhaps most of all Dustin. It wasn’t just the fact that he was graduating, or valedictorian, or ALIVE to see this day for that matter… it was the fact he looked happy. The way he smiled, the way he celebrated, the way he allowed himself that moment of joy had seemed impossible a year and a half ago.
Steve knew, though, that as much as he wanted to celebrate with the kid, that day didn’t belong to him. Not really. That day was for the Party, the same way him and Robin and Nancy and Jonathan had needed that space to reconnect, the kids needed it to say goodbye.
But Dustin is a loyal friend and so, the next day he’s there to have their own little celebration with Steve: they have cake, the last of the Scoops Troops hush hush ice cream and a beer (because Steve isn’t stupid enough to think Dustin won’t be drinking in college and he’s appointed himself responsible to teaching him how to do it responsibly at least, like he would a little brother if he had one).
It’s a happy day, even if they are both a little emotionally hungover. Eventually, they get lulled into a bit of melancholic reminiscing and Eleven comes up.
“I wish she’d been there yesterday,” Dustin sighs, watching his ice cream melt.
“Me too,” Steve says, thinking of the ice cream party that never was. “If anyone deserved to celebrate the world not ending, it was her.”
“You know, Mike said something yesterday. He has a theory… I guess it’s more of a story that we can believe or not.”
Dustin talks about Kali, about mind tricks and the tunnels and three waterfalls.
“I guess it’s nice idea,” he finishes, “I wish it was possible.”
“Sounds very possible to me,” Steve says, pretending he isn’t cleaning a stray tear off his cheek.
Dustin gives him a look. It’s one Steve knows. The kind that says How do you not get it? The kind that is usually humorous, except for the time they don’t talk about when it was mean spirited. Except for today when it’s a bit sad.
“I kept thinking about it, after. Trying to picture it, but…” Dustin shakes his head. “There’s no way, Steve. Even if she’d made it out of the tunnels, where would she have gone? How’d she get out? The whole town was filled with cameras back then. They would have searched like crazy after she disappeared. If Kay had found any indication that she’s alive, she wouldn’t have left.”
“Maybe she did,” Steve insists, feeling his stubborn heart double down on hope.
“How?”
And Dustin looks like he actually wants to believe it, like he’ll give anything for Steve to find an answer. He’s never been the one with the answers, except once, one plan, one time they trusted him.
He doesn’t find the answer so much as he stumbles on it.
“A blind spot.”
“What? Where?”
“Here!” Steve stands up so abruptly his chair topples over. “From the tunnels, to my house!”
He’s running before Dustin gets up. The kid follows as Steve explains hurriedly: Eleven’s additional secret training, the way she’d snuck into his house behind his back to train extra, the fight they had about it.
“I knew it! Wait. Is that how you got hurt?”
“Yes, keep up, Henderson, that’s not the point. The point is she moved the cameras so she could get from the tunnels to the house without my help.”
They are on the street now and Steve is looking up. The military had taken the trouble to disconnect their “security system” but they hadn’t bothered taking the cameras down.
Steve walks sideways trying to figure out one blind spot, then connects it to the next.
“Wait, Steve, you’re saying she used them?” Dustin looks at the cameras too. “But there’s no way. They closed everything off. She wouldn’t have time.”
“She was fast. I trained her. She could’ve made it.”
“To your house. Okay, and then?”
Steve pauses. He’s looking for the wrong path.
He turns to Dustin.
“I’m missing a backpack, a hoodie, clean socks, a water bottle.
Dustin looks at him like he’s gone mad. “Okay, so…”
“I’ve been trying to pinpoint where I lost them all. I thought maybe they were in the Beamer when it got wooshed into space or whatever, but if you put them together what do they sound like?”
He can see the moment it hits. “A getaway bag.”
Steve claps once, loudly. “Yes!”
“But that would mean… wait.”
Dustin changes direction, heads back to Steve’s house, makes it to the backyard, by the pool. He’s looking up at the cameras in the woods. Fuckers had been throughout but…
“Blind spots,” Dustin whispers.
They spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out the path. When the sun sets, Dustin produces two flashlights from his backpack. Steve is touched he carries two.
They finally reach the end by the fence that once circumvented the town. It’s been taken out since, but the poles that once held it remain.
“She could’ve jumped the fence,” Steve says firmly. “Easy. Easier than the bus, or the mindflayer.”
“She would’ve been tapped out after all that,” Dustin says.
But Steve knows. He knows. And he can see in his friend’s eyes, so does he.
It changes nothing. They still don’t know where she went or if she’s okay, but some of the searing pain that’s taken permanent residence in Steve’s chest eases. Just a little. Just enough. He trusts her.
They don’t know it back then, at least not definitively, not by name, but the Cold War ends in 1991.
Mike gets a postcard from Iceland on February 1995. It took a while to get to him. It’s dated November 6th. It has three waterfalls.
It takes a while for everyone to get passports. It’s a miracle none of them get flagged or denied. April 1995, Steve rents a camper at the airport, packs the kids inside and they hit the road.
Everyone is here. The whole Party. They barely fit in. Mike’s so nervous, so anxious, so impatient that he’s been downright insufferable. Steve’s gonna kill him. It’s nice to see that spark of life back in him.
The roads are tricky, even now that spring has melted the snow. The air is still chilly but the fields are beginning to green, which is gorgeous but also means mud banks and unsteady terrain. They park the camper and start making their way on foot.
They don’t make it to the village.
Twenty minutes in, Mike screams and takes off running to their right.
No one knows what he heard or what he saw, but they take off after him.
Steve is in great shape, even if he isn’t twenty anymore. Lucas is faster than him now. Max is close behind Steve. Dustin and Will are wheezing and falling behind.
Mike, though —tall and lanky and skinny Mike Wheeler—, is running like he’s possessed. Impossibly fast. God, they should’ve drafted him for the track team.
A shape appears. Small, tiny, so far away in the distance that it’s barely a spot in the horizon. Mike screams. The figure stops for a second and then it’s running in their direction.
Mike and Eleven crash the way the worlds didn’t. They fall on the grass, tumble down the hill, rolling, laughing, holding on to each other.
By the time they reach them, they have melted into a tearful hug on the floor. They start to get up when Lucas crashes onto them.
Steve pauses a few feet away, frozen, eyes glued to the girl who isn’t a little girl anymore, who hasn’t been for a long time.
Max joins the hug, with Lucas opening an arm so she can get all the way in to El. They are all laughing now.
Will and Dustin finally stumble towards the rest, breathing so heavily that Steve finally approaches, arms outstretched in case one of them collapses. But their wheezy breathings turn into tearful laughter as they join the ball of arm and legs on the floor.
Steve fights back tears. God, he needs to call Robin. He needs to tell the others. Jesus, Hop’s gonna lose it.
Then several sets of hands are dragging him by the jacket and pulling him into the hug and he’s holding the kids, all of his kids, for the first time in almost a decade.
Holding Mike’s hand, Eleven shows them the way to her cabin. It’s a little far from the village, she likes her privacy, but close enough to go in every day for work (she’s an English teacher) and to hang out (she’s made some friends).
She talks about the whole fight against Russia ending, about the project that made her finally being shut down for good, about her tracking down and dealing with anyone left who could hunt her or her loved ones down. She’s straight forward with it, unapologetic, and Steve finds be might have a more flexible moral than he imagined because he can’t find it in himself to care if she’s been long distance sniping these assholes.
Everyone has questions, clarifications, wanting to know more about where she’s been and what’s she’d done and how de ended up here.
Steve is happy to let everyone else fill the silence while he looks at her. It’s like looking at a ghost but she’s the furthest thing from death. Eleven is dressed in sportswear, with worn out sneakers, her hair pulled back in a single long braid. Her cheeks are flushed. She was going for a run (it has nothing to do with Steve, but it still makes him proud and happy to an almost stupid degree). She looks healthier too, there’s no trace of the dark circles under her eyes nor the hollowness in her cheeks from back when they last saw her.
Her cabin tells a story, too. While Eleven takes Mike upstairs to her bedroom for a long properly private conversation, the rest of them give them space by exploring it.
There’s all three of Mike’s books (which is impressive because being self published they’d been hard to find even in the States). There’s print versions of what Steve recalls being Will’s very first art exhibit in a shitty small studio in New York. There’s tapes of all four of Jonathan’s independent films, half of them done with a nonexistent budget in Robin’s uncle’s basement (which should’ve been even harder to find than Mike’s fantasy novels). And there’s a wall covered in news paper articles penned by Nancy Wheeler. And next to them, right there, it’s a whole section for Hawkins’ Little League baseball team.
Hawkins Little League Baseball Team Makes It To The Finals For The First Time In Five Years.
Amazing Season For The Hawkins LLB Cubs.
Meet The Coach: Steve Harrington Talks Training Kids, Team Building and Rebuilding a Community.
Meet This Year’s Cubs.
Cubs Win The League For The First Time Ever.
Puff pieces, not even from a real newspaper or anything but from the Hawkins High School student newspaper.
Steve’s eyes water to the point where he can’t read the headlines anymore.
A blurry shape walks silently next to him.
“You like my story wall?”
“Where did you even get these?” He breathes.
“The library, first. Then, they opened a cybercafe.”
It’s not lost on him that the collection in these walls and shelves has something in common. It’s not just people she knows, it’s her family. And he’s there. His name is there with theirs. She went out of her way to fucking find and print it and hang it up.
“You’re such a sap,” he says, voice cracking a little as he fights back the tears.
“I had a good teacher,” she sounds just as shaky.
Steve finally looks at her and she is smiling, even if her face betrays she’s been crying for a while now. He puts an arm around her shoulders, presses her against his chest and rests his chin on the top of her head. Eleven wraps her arms around his waist and hides her face against his chest.
It’s the first time ever that they’ve hugged.
“I’m so happy to see you, kid. I missed you.”
“Missed you too, coach.”
Fuck it. He’s crying now. Who gives a damn.
“Can I have my hoodie back, though?”
Eleven laughs and the sound reverberates against his chest and Steve feels how part of him stops aching for the first time in almost seven years.
“You owe me an ice cream party, Mister Miyagi.”
It’s Steve’s turn to laugh, as he pulls back and smiles at her. She’s all smiles too. Just a kid, still. Just a girl who gets to live. Finally.
“I’ll get you all the ice cream you want when we get home.”