Chapter Text
Steve felt Hawkins wake up wrong on Tuesday.
He didn't know that's what it was yet, not exactly. He was elbow-deep in the returns bin at Family Video, sorting One Crazy Summer from a stack of tapes that definitely weren't One Crazy Summer, when the morning went from ordinary grey to something with teeth in it.
He should’ve seen it coming, really. Weather always changed this way on him. This slow building feeling just barely strong enough to be noticeable. Anticipatable. But sometimes, when Steve wasn’t paying attention, he would catch himself in the middle of it, with the slow build being replaced with something closer to the feeling of being hit by a truck.
Now, the weather hit him like a truck.
The feeling of the air getting thicker, the sensation of a storm front rolling in over the quarry; a wall of green-black cloud eating up the blue one inch at a time. Except this wasn't green-black. This was something closer to rust. Old-penny orange, tinged with a sick yellow underneath, spreading out from somewhere across town and seeping into every person who walked through the door.
"You look like you're about to throw up," Robin said, not looking up from the register.
"I'm fine."
"You've got a face, Steve."
"I always have a face, Rob."
"Yeah, but you've got a face, Steve, and it's doing a thing, and the thing is lying." She finally glanced over, chewing on the end of a pen. "What's up?"
He didn't have a good answer for everyone feels like they’re having a bad day and it’s yucky, so he didn't give one. He just said, "Dunno. Didn't sleep great," which wasn't a lie, exactly, and went back to the returns bin.
This was the thing about…. it, about all of it, the sensing, the reading, whatever you wanted to call it. He'd personally never had a good word for it.
This… reading people. Feeling them. Sensing them. Whatever. They all sounded too deliberate, like it was something he sat down and chose to do, like there was a method to it. Does one sit down and choose to have their heart beat? Or breathe? For Steve, this… whatever was the same. He just knew people. The same way he knew where his own hands were without having to look at them. It was simply another piece of background information his brain insisted on collecting.
For years, he'd just assumed everybody else worked the same way.
Because of course they did.
How else were you supposed to know when someone wanted you closer and when they wanted another step of distance? How else were you supposed to know when your history teacher was one badly timed joke away from completely losing her shit? How else were you supposed to spot the kid who insisted they were "fine" when, in about ten minutes, they were going to be sobbing on the floor because the cafeteria had run out of curly fries?
He didn’t think too hard about it, didn’t sit down to examine it because, well, it just... felt obvious. Intuition, or something.
His mom used to tell him he was observant. Tommy claimed Steve could flirt with a brick wall if you gave him long enough.
It wasn't until much later (embarrassingly, painfully later) that it occurred to him that most people did not, in fact, walk around registering the emotional temperature of a room the way you'd register whether it was hot or cold.
However, he was very quick to accept it and frankly, try as hard as possible to never think about it again.
The bell over the door jingled and a customer came in trailing worry like cheap perfume. It was, thankfully, the good kind of worry. Mundane. The did I return this on time worry. And Steve nudged it, without really meaning to, into something calmer. It wasn't hard. It was barely even a conscious thing anymore, eased by dozens of uses in much more stressful situations. Smooth the frown lines. Take the edge off. He'd been doing it his whole life without realizing. Pretty hard to suck at something you’ve been practicing at ever since you can remember.
By lunch, the rust-colored dread had a name attached to it, and the name was Chrissy Cunningham.
Steve heard it three different ways in the space of twenty minutes. First, from Robin, who'd heard it from a girl at the salon, then, from a customer who said did you hear like it was the start of a party trick, and last, from the shape of it in the air itself, ugly and spreading, grief curdling fast into something meaner. Fear liked to do that. Give it long enough and it always went looking for someone to blame. Something to help turn it into anger.
By the time he picked Dustin up that afternoon, the kid was practically vibrating.
"It's Eddie," Dustin said, before Steve had even pulled fully into the driveway. "People are saying it's Eddie, Steve, they're saying he did something to her, like, murder or something, and that's- that's insane, that's not- he wouldn't-"
"Hey. Breathe." Steve reached over and put a hand briefly on the kid's shoulder, not doing anything with it, just letting it be there: warm and solid. Dustin's fear had a jagged, staticky quality to it, all sharp little peaks. It was nothing like the slow rust-fog blanketing the rest of town. This wasn't background dread. This was personal. "Who's Eddie?"
"Eddie Munson. Hellfire Club. You've literally never met him, why would you, but he's- Steve, he's not like that, I know people are gonna say it's because he's weird, but weird doesn't mean-"
"Hey, hey! I believe you, okay? I do” And Steve meant it. Mostly because Dustin meant it so hard that it was impossible to sit next to him and not believe him. That was the other thing nobody warned you about: feelings had a way of leaking. I know, sucks. Maybe not for normal people, but for Steve, sitting shotgun next to a kid radiating this much conviction was a little bit like standing too close to a bonfire. Pretty hard to not burn a little, too.
He didn't reach for the fear and push it down, not all the way. Fear like this was doing its job. Fear like this has kept them alive. Sure, he soothed the anxiety of it all a little bit, but mostly he just started driving.
He kept catching himself flinching. Every time someone said freak about Eddie Munson, someone Steve had genuinely never spoken more than four words to in his life. Flinching at the the accusation more than the person it was aimed at. He's different, so it must be him. He's got something wrong with him, you can just tell, can't you?
He didn't examine that too closely. That wasn't a door he opened.
There were doors he didn't open. He knew that about himself. Knew it in a kind of unimportant, distant, filed-away way similar to how he knew he was left-handed or that he was allergic to shellfish. There, sure, but not particularly interesting enough to ever think about.
He knew the outline: that he wasn't supposed to be able to do what he could do. That somewhere in the years before he had any memory worth trusting, someone had made him this way on purpose, in a building he'd never been able to picture without his skin trying to physically rip itself off his body. He knew, even if he never let himself accept it, that he must have been from the lab. Had it crystallize in his mind as soon as he saw El. As soon as he laid eyes on a face he’d seen in his nightmares, although much younger, surrounded by the blood and corpses of what he knows was his family.
But El was everywhere, and she was their friend, and he grew to love her. And so the part of her that confirmed his fears, the part of her that reminded him that, whatever she could do, when it slipped its leash, looked like a room full of people who used to be alive and now weren't, was packed away and ignored as hard as he possibly could. He would simply not think about it.
And he would try his best to not look, not think, when she used her powers. Never let himself try to reconcile the version of her he loved, and the version of her that was a monster.
Because that's what we are.
Underneath it all.
That's what's waiting at the bottom of both of us, if you dig deep enough.
As soon as they got to Rick’s Steve knew Eddie was there. He could feel the jagged, jumpy spikes of anxiety and fear practically emanating from the place. And it honestly didn’t really help. He could trust that Eddie wasn’t a murderer, sure, but he also knew what scared and desperate could do, so excuse him if he wasn’t exactly in the greatest mood.
He was still turning that over, still half a step behind himself, even as they were searching the place – which was, in hindsight, probably the reason Eddie got the drop on him so easy. Before he even registered any kind of real change, there was a broken bottle at his throat and a wild-eyed stranger breathing hard about four inches from his face.
"What are you doing here?" Eddie's voice cracked on it, more scared than menacing, but the glass at Steve's neck sure didn't care about that difference.
"We're looking for you," Dustin said, hands already up, looking like he was about to try moving between them like his skinny arms were going to do anything.
"We're here to help," Robin added, and oh God Steve loved her.
Steve didn't say anything. Didn’t think he would really help. Didn't trust his voice not to shake, and more than that, he didn't trust himself not to reach out and shove the fear down hard and fast the way he could. The way that would've been easy, would've made this whole thing stop in about two seconds flat.
He didn't do it. Some old, stubborn part of him had never liked the idea of fully reaching into someone's head uninvited, not even to save his own skin. Soothing? Sure. A little nudge in any direction he could do. But these kinds of strong emotions were like a full speed train: a little nudge wasn’t going to do jack shit. And it was this stubborn part that won out over the part of him that screamed about the jagged glass actively pressing against his pulse.
It was, as always, his friends that did it in the end. Enough familiar people saying enough true-sounding things, and the bottle slowly came down.
"We want to know what happened," Robin said, once Eddie had backed off enough for everyone to settle down and those spikes of anxiety stop trying to dig themselves into Steve’s skull.
“You wont believe me” Eddie said, slinking down the wall, fear growing somewhat smaller.
But the thing is, Eddie Munson's fear didn't read like guilt. Guilt had its own signature, its own ugly greasy weight, and Steve had felt it plenty of times to know it on sight. No, what was coming off Eddie Munson was something closer to cornered animal — desperate and defensive and shot through, underneath all of it, with something that made Steve's chest go tight and strange.
"Try us," Max said.
So he told them.
Somewhere in the middle of it — the monster, the floating, the planning — Steve caught himself doing the thing he always did when the world tipped over into too much: shutting the door, fast and total, like slamming a fist over a burn.
It wasn't even really a choice. Closer to a reflex, probably, the same way you flinch from a hot stove before you'd consciously registered pain. Part of it, he knew, was fear of himself, plain and unglamorous — if he let it all the way in, all of it, Eddie's terror and Max's grief and the low, sick wrongness bleeding off every damned inch of the Upside Down, he wasn't sure what would come out the other side of him. Part of it was pure animal instinct; self-preservation. And part of it (the part he liked least, would’ve denied even under oath) was that everything about this, all of it, felt just simply wrong. It felt bad in a way so violently unhuman that it made him sick. But, at the same time, it felt wrong and bad and disgusting and terrifying in a way that was sickeningly familiar. And every instinct he had screamed at him to slam every door in the house and pretend none of them existed.
So he did. He clamped down so hard and so fast that for a second the whole world went flat and grey around the edges. It was easier that way. It was also, he was distantly aware, something that could not last.
It got worse before it got better.
They had a plan. It was a Nancy plan, so it was obviously good. And Steve was following the plan. Being there, face to face with the most foul, horrible aura he had ever felt, ready to give it all throwing fire at his worst fucking nightmare.
It started as a itch behind his ribs, low and insistent, easy enough to dismiss as nerves. Then it sharpened. Dustin. And under Dustin, tangled up with him so tight it took Steve a second to pull the two threads apart, there was Eddie.
Fear. Wholly, totally consuming fear. Fear and panic and grief.
"Steve?" Robin's voice, from somewhere behind him, a million miles away. "Steve, where are you — Steve!"
He didn’t remember choosing to run. He didn't remember grabbing the bike leaning against Wheeler's garage, didn’t remember cycling so forcefully he couldn’t breathe, didn’t remember the exact actions involved in doing anything at all. He just remembered the pull, growing stronger the closer he got, and beneath it, tightening and tightening like a noose, the clear feel of Eddie Munson’s determination turning into something far scarier to Steve than any monster.
He knew what deciding you were expendable looked like.
Don't you dare, Steve thought, pedaling hard enough that his vision blurred at the edges, the wrongness of the air around him screaming louder with every second, every color too bright, every emotion too sharp, like someone had reached into his chest and turned every dial up past where it was supposed to go. You said you wouldn’t be a hero, don't you dare, don't you—
He didn't have a plan. He didn't have anything, really, except the growing, sick, certain knowledge that every tool he'd ever taught himself to use wasn’t going to be enough.