Chapter Text
I
Population Hawkins: dropping by a few thousand a day.
How many thousands are there to go? Steve isn’t the kind of guy to have statistics floating around in his head, unless they have to do with sports. And even then, he’s never been the sharpest tool in the shed. Was mostly just a tool, actually.
Was, past tense, but that’s cold comfort, especially when life as we know it has basically become ancient and unchangeable history at this point. Steve’s heroism, present tense or not, hasn’t done jack-shit to fix it.
To save anyone.
It’s like this: the apocalypse is here to stay. The town has opened up like one of those paper fortune-tellers the girls used to make in middle school. People died, Eddie among them. And Max?
But Steve can’t think about Max. He can navigate the painstaking roundabouts required to keep his tires clear of burning interspace goo, and he can and did drag his ass and everyone he’s responsible for (everyone left living) back through a gate that’s hot to the touch. Yeah. Sure. That’s just Hawkins-is-Hell stuff. But he’s been to the hospital only a couple times in the last forty-eight—the initial visit, fast as they could get there when the ground was still groaning under their feet, and then a second time, alone, passing through the corridors like an unworthy ghost—and it was a couple times too many.
He was on his way to get patched up himself (and that’s all it was, getting patched up; he’d survive—a little uglier, a little older, but he’d survive until the fucking end of time—). He was woozy, light-headed, all the adrenaline drained away. It didn’t make the sight any easier. He couldn’t—detach, seeing what there was to see.
Seeing what was left of her.
He puked for ten minutes at the nurses’ station, even with nothing in his stomach, and they all thought it was from the first round of rabies shots.
Dear Steve...
(Yeah. Dustin gave him the letter.)
Steve…
(And Nancy gave him hope, right there in the dark pit of hell, then snatched it back from him under the sunshine.)
It’s a whole new day, reunions and reshufflings, heroes returning to empty battlefields, discovering how little the common soldiers could do in their absence. It’s happiness and heartache, forehead kisses and promises, the kind of bullshit that makes the world go round. Steve’s sorting shirts in the Hawkins High gym, stacking the deck in favor of happiness because he got off easy, he really did, and he can’t complain on his own behalf.
Since morning dawned with no new disasters—just the all-consuming ones of the foregoing days—there have been scraps of news transmitted over the working phone lines, over the airwaves. The Sinclairs have managed to make it to the hospital—Erica radioed that in. Max’s mom still hasn’t resurfaced, but nobody knows quite how to reach her; they need to give it time. Robin’s parents are both A-OK and volunteering at the hospital. Claudia Henderson stayed up all night with Dustin, trying to understand what he couldn’t say. When Steve picked him up this morning, she tried to get an explanation from him, too—but Steve couldn’t give one. Couldn’t help but see how much, in the course of two days, Dustin had changed.
Happiness, he tells himself, watching Robin and Vickie babble back and forth. Catching Carol Perkins’ eye across the scuffed expanse of the floor, and returning the cautious half-smile she gives him. Happiness—it’s not too late for happiness—
Because Max is still breathing, and they are still standing, and—
When the first flakes of living ash begin to fall, Steve isn’t ready.
He’s never ready.
That’s not what counts.
II
“Like the blizzard of ’78,” murmurs Mr. Henry, who works at the bank on North Main—well, when there was a North Main, which there isn’t anymore.
Robin automatically bites back the urge to say, No, sorry, this isn’t an opportunity to satisfy the masculine need to dredge up old weather events, this is Apocalypse Part Two, and finds that it isn’t actually much of a hardship to keep her mouth shut. Her tongue feels like it’s made of cotton balls.
Maybe because it’s Apocalypse Part Two.
Vickie has vanished into the crowd, and the momentary high of brushing hands and joking about peanut butter has faded with her. Robin turns her head, searching for Steve—and finds him, hair and height instantly recognizable even in a high ratio of people-to-windows.
She needs Steve right now. Needed him when she was being choked to death by otherworldly vines, needed him when they found Dustin curled over Eddie’s body, needed him when they were standing in Max’s hospital room, even though Steve’s hand, then, was very cold in hers.
Needs him when it’s snowing-but-not-snowing.
Her heart’s pounding high in her chest, low in her ears, by the time she reaches him. She wraps a hand around his wrist before he even sees her, which is a bit stupid, because Steve has frayed nerves just as much as she does (maybe more) and he jerks like she’s poked him with a cattle-prod.
“Jes…Rob. Hey.”
“Hey,” she says, slipping her hand in his. It doesn’t matter, right now, if Vickie’s watching and gets the wrong impression. If Carol Goddamn Perkins is curling her lip in curious disdain a few yards to their right. All that matters is that it isn’t over. Whatever the fuck Vecna has planned is moving into Phase Two.
“This is bad,” Steve murmurs, which is vaguely comforting. Steve’s not being Steve if he isn’t softly pointing out the obvious.
“It’s—” Robin can’t quite bring herself to say it. It’s fucking weird, is what it is, standing here with half of her high-school class milling about, her sixth-grade math teacher bobbling a tray of coffee cups, the postman on her street looking a little out of it thanks to the bandage wrapped around his head. And all of them are just—frozen in place, trying to make sense of their own reckoning.
Weakly, Robin resorts to saying,
“Nancy’s vision.”
Steve gnaws his lip. He knows exactly what she’s talking about, even setting aside the fact that he’s thinking of Nancy pretty much non-stop. It used to be a half-funny, half-sad feature of working alongside Steve Harrington: watching him drift into vacant melancholy over the prospect of Nancy Wheeler, unreachable.
Now, in almost too many ways, it’s so much more than that.
“She said it was our Hawkins,” Robin says, low, like Steve needs reminding that the town is currently fissured by the Gates of Hell. “And that—the Upside Down took over. Guess that’s…that’s this.”
Steve’s quiet. He squeezes her hand, once, and lets it go. Turns, purposeful. “We need to get back to the others,” he says. “Nance. El. We need to—shit, we need to find Dustin.”
III
Talking to Mr. Munson is exhausting. Dustin wouldn’t trade the chance to do it for the world.
It’s his duty, to honor Eddie’s memory, even if that memory’s so recent that saying his name is like someone’s taken a rusty knife to Dustin’s heart and twisting hard.
Hell, three days ago, Eddie was alive.
There’s a lot he can’t say to Mr. Munson, of course. Not because it’s classified—Dustin doesn’t give a shit anymore about that—but because he doesn’t want Mr. Munson to think he’s being mocked. Belittled. Lied to.
Not everyone’s seen what Dustin’s seen.
He clutches his too-thin paper cup of black coffee—which he doesn’t even drink—and tries to explain Hellfire instead. How Eddie made him and Mike and Lucas feel included, gave them something to look forward to when life crashed down too hard.
But wasn’t Eddie supposed to have something to look forward to?
Mr. Munson wipes his eyes and blows his nose in a disreputable handkerchief he keeps in his breast pocket, and after a while he starts asking the kind of questions that Dustin wants him to ask (even though they’re the kind that twist the knife just a little more).
“He ever show you his guitar?”
“Yeah.” Dustin can’t see a damn thing, the tears running like grief’s flicked on the faucet again. He sniffs. Waves away an offer to share the handkerchief. “Yeah, he played it for me—once.”
“Loved that damn thing like it was his own child.” Mr. Munson shakes his head. “Loved it better than some people love their own children.”
“Eddie loved a lot of things,” Dustin says. “A lot of people.”
Mr. Munson nods. “He didn’t get that from nobody. Just—just pulled it out of himself. Must have been born with it.”
It makes Dustin think of El.
“Some people,” he says, “Are just—good. Really good. No matter how badly the world treats them. I’m not that way, Mr. Munson. I don’t know what I’d have done if I didn’t have a—a family, and friends, and—but Eddie...” He has to stop short again, clear his throat. Then—“I think Eddie was one of those people, who can be good without a lot of help. But you helped him, too. I just know it.”
Mr. Munson looks ready to shrink away from the praise, to start arguing. He doesn’t get a chance. Something’s changed in the room around them—everyone’s abandoning their stations, whether for sandwich-making or toy-sorting or trash-collecting. Everyone’s flocking to the windows, jostling across the squeaky wax floor.
Dustin knows more than he should.
Dustin knows there are no good changes in Hawkins.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Munson,” he says, because he really, truly is, and because where he’s going, no Munson should ever have to follow again. “I have to go.”
He doesn’t even make it to the windows before Steve and Robin crash into him.
“Dustin!” they say in unison, like they’re his goddamn parents.
Dustin’s in no mood for being babied, even if his leg does hurt like a bitch from the exertion of trying to jog across the gym. “What’s going on?”
“Phase Two,” Steve says grimly. Robin flicks a look at him, nose scrunching slightly, but she picks up the thread.
“Of Nancy’s vision,” she says. “The Upside Down—it’s—”
Outside, the light looks…wrong. Worse than it did under plumes of rising smoke. Now there’s—there’s a blur, like snowflakes are swirling between earth and sky.
Snowflakes that aren't snowflakes.
“It’s here,” Dustin finishes, a little breathless. “Hawkins is…becoming one.”
“Pretty much,” Steve says. “We need to meet up with the others. Come up with…” If he says a plan, Dustin still might sock him.
(He needs to get a handle on all this fucked-up, misplaced anger he seems to have to aim at Steve.)
“…with the next step,” Steve says, like he sensed that Dustin was on the very edge of sanity.
It seems like there is nothing on earth that could distract everyone else from the toxic blizzard drifting down, but when the gym door swings open and a bullhorn blares, there’s not a head in the room left unturned.
“Attention, Hawkins.” A voice Dustin would know anywhere, at least since the fateful fall of ’83. “This is your Chief of Police.”
Turns out there is one good change—one last roll of Hawkins’ twenty-sided die:
Jim Hopper, back from the dead.