Chapter Text
Steve wakes up ahead of his alarm. He’s not screaming, but he feels like he should be.
The dream is foggy, still taking shape. The bones of it are simple: monsters, hell on Earth, fighting for his life. He remembers bodies, not faces. Bodies, and parts of bodies.
Crawling from beneath the covers is usually a chore. He’s sixteen years old and it feels like the mornings keep getting earlier.
Today, he jumps out of bed. It’s 5:30 and he flicks his lamp on with determination, walking immediately downstairs, throwing open every curtain. The pool is uncovered; the water is flat and still.
Looking at it, something like bile, the taste of blood, rises, acrid in his mouth. He shakes off a prickle at the base of his scalp.
He’s still breathing quickly, his heart hammering.
The details are assembling themselves in his head, but if someone asked about his dream, he wouldn’t know what to tell them. He’s had nightmares before, bad ones. This one feels like a different beast entirely, like it’s telling him something. He closes his eyes and imagines someone, his mother, maybe, painted nails cradling her coffee cup, asking What’s wrong?.
No one asks. No one is there to ask, and he doesn’t have anyone to tell.
It’s fall, and Steve is running cross country to stay in shape for swim season. He gets his shorts from the laundry and gets his things in order so mechanically, he’s at school half an hour early.
The school is important. Part of him knows. He walks the halls, taking in the quiet, the teachers sitting in their classrooms before the day really begins, wondering how they can stand it, the weight he’s obviously carrying everywhere. How can they not know what will happen here?
He moves through his classes, and he forgets where he sits, so he just sits wherever and it seems like no one really minds. People say hi to him and he says hi back, but some of them, he doesn’t even know their names. Or he did, but he’s forgotten. It feels as if he’s lived years between yesterday and today.
In the hall Tommy slaps his back and greets him and something tells Steve what to say, how to behave so as not to let on about these things he knows: what’s coming, what it looks like.
But then Tommy steps out, just a bit, just so his shoulder catches someone who walks by. Tommy snickers with a foul, freckled grin and Steve can’t help the grimace that crosses his features.
“Who was that?” He asks, like maybe it’s someone they like, like maybe Tommy was being a dick because that was a friend.
“Who… what? Oh I don’t know,” Tommy says with a shrug, his smile becoming like camaraderie, and Steve looks away, pretending to sort through the belongings in his locker.
Nothing is making sense. He knows, rationally, that this is normal. This is something Tommy would usually do. It’s something Steve would usually do. It feels terrible.
Steve sits with the lingering disgust and carries it with him through his last classes. The way Tommy had looked at him for approval, it makes him feel embarrassed and a little slimy; it’s like when you realize your socks are wet and you don’t know why.
At lunch, he takes his tray and walks into the courtyard, at first feeling grateful just to be outdoors, but the voices of other students start to grate on him.
People keep meeting his eye like they’re supposed to be friendly with him and he’s supposed to talk to them.
He doesn’t want to talk to them, knowing they’ll expect something he isn’t capable of producing. He leaves the tray, carrying his wrapped sandwich to the side of the building and sitting against the brick.
Hawkins Middle stands just a few hundred feet away. He tastes blood, feels a prickle of sensation creep across his scalp—the back, where the curve of his skull meets his neck.
There’s something important there. Something important will happen. He closes his eyes and allows the sun to warm his lids, sees nothing but the brown and pink of skin and blood.
The dream isn’t any clearer after school, when he’s changing for cross country. It’s just lingering sensations: the brightness of a red sky, the grip of something foreign and terrible around his neck. Screams, and they’re from people he loves but doesn’t know.
People are greeting him; he’s trying his best to pretend they’re important, like Steve is really here and not still in Hell on Earth, looking for clues to a mystery he knows he has to solve.
He notices that the locker room has grown quiet.
Turning, he looks to the bold black and white clock.
In the way is Felix, a tall Junior with close cropped hair and skin the color of coffee with a heavy hand of milk. Felix is really hot. He has a broad, muscular back. He looks like he could throw Steve over one shoulder without breaking a sweat, hold him there without thinking about it.
Steve watches Felix strip his shirt off and the lines of his back are searing, but familiar, the same as they’ve been all semester, since just after summer break. That first week, Steve had noticed the definition beneath his smooth skin and turned abruptly, jerking from the sight like he’d been burned. Steve takes his time looking now, feeling the pulse of blood to the center of his body in a way he hasn’t ever felt before. He’s not afraid. He doesn’t pull away from the sensation; he studies the feeling like it belongs to someone else. He likes boys. He likes the way they look, and smell, and if he thinks about it for too long it makes him feel really, really good. He was scared before, even yesterday. Terrified, he wouldn’t let himself touch it.
He looks down to tie his shoes. The fact that he likes boys is there, now, but it sits comfortably in his brain, like there’s a place where the fact is allowed to be; there’s room for it there. He was scared; he used to be scared. Now he can’t bring himself to worry it out of existence. It’s fine. He’s fine. He doesn’t have to look away.
When he looks up, Felix and the rest of his team have left. Steve puts his shirt on and closes his locker.
At home, he’s chewing salisbury steak from a tv dinner and taking note of a few facts that have settled in his brain.
After practice, he’d showered slowly, reflecting. Thinking that maybe he needed a run to clear his head, he’d made sure to catalog his thoughts and stack the evidence carefully. He’s not intellectual in any sense but he can see a few basic facts. They’d taken a bit to make discernible shapes, like sand settling into place, but now they feel real, obvious, like undeniable truth.
The first: Something–capital S, Something–exists, maybe not here, not now—not human, barely animal—and it exists to hurt people.
Second: Steve doesn’t want to hurt people. He’s been hurting people, and for too long.
Last: However long he’d been asleep, he’d been gone far longer than that.
Steve’s parents are home when he’s back from school the next day, and after a few pleasantries he tells them he’s a bit too tired to go out to dinner with them. Retreating to his room, he comes up with a sort of game plan for the weekend, which will involve:
Step one: avoid Tommy and actually, any of the guys. Steve’s feeling shifty and uncomfortable around all of them, like he can’t remember (or maybe never knew) where they stand with each other. Would they swing a punch for him? A bat? Would they shoot a gun? And at what? A man? A cop? A monster? Lots of them?
Step two: hit the books, spend some time researching what this imminent threat could possibly be.
The monsters have become clearer since that first terrified morning, slowly emerging from his foggy brain. There’s a mouth, teeth, scales, but that’s not everything—there’s flight, tails, vines: details that could belong to one monster or many.
Steve hasn't been to the public library since he was little, and as he breaches the doors and smells the stale sweetness of dust and paper, he remembers being small enough to think the place was huge, the librarians imposing.
Now it’s intimidating in a different way. He’s been trying to think of how to start since last night, what questions to ask so he comes across as a sweet and curious young man instead of an absolute freak who’s on either way too many or way too few drugs.
“Good morning,” Steve begins, and at least that part is easy.
There are two librarians behind the desk and it takes too many moments of Steve breathing maybe too loudly for their attention to kick in.
“Good morning. May I help you?” The older one asks; her skin is just as thin and dusty as the pages in front of her.
“Yes, hi,” Steve says and notices his voice is too gargly and cracked; he hasn’t spoken since Friday afternoon, “I was hoping for some help finding something, uh…”
She looks at him expectantly. It seems like her eyes are going to paper over and flake off, like snake skin.
“I was looking for some books about monsters,” he says, and she looks down just as the other librarian, a younger woman, maybe his mother’s age, looks up. She’s wearing a gold plated name pin that says “LINDA”.
“Fiction?” She asks.
For how tuned up Steve is he’s somehow caught off guard. “Sorry?”
“Are you thinking about, hmm.. Frankenstein? Or more, uh, mythology?”
“Like Greeks and stuff?” Steve asks, and shakes his head. “Uh, I guess I’m more interested if it’s something that um, something that could maybe be real?”
“A legend,” she says, and she's standing, brushing off the lap of her skirt. For some reason, Steve expected her to be taller. “Do you know where the card catalog is?”
“Is that…? Okay.”
She’s already walking and Steve follows her, thinks maybe he’s going about this entirely the wrong way. She thinks he wants something for a school project or whatever and he’s thinking real, goddamn, man eating, face ripping monsters.
Librarian Linda approaches the card catalog and starts rifling through the late 300’s, asking, “So, what led you to this particular topic?”
Steve’s mouth moves noiselessly and he’s thinking of an excuse but she keeps going.
“And are you thinking of legends that are recent, or more historical…?”
“Uh, actually, maybe it’s not a legend,” and Steve doesn’t really decide to unhinge but that’s what happening as he describes the things he’s seen, what he’s looking for, as if it’s not real, as if it’s just something he heard about from a friend who’s into this sort of thing and not exactly what’s coming for all of them, and god knows when.
“You want Lovecraft,” she says, and Steve is a teenage boy so for a moment he thinks she means something sexual.
Librarian Linda tells him about the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, how that’s the place for what he’s looking for and heads off in the direction of FICTION. All the books she hands him have little stickers on the spines that say SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY with a little dancing unicorn and Steve worries for a split second about being seen carrying books with fucking unicorns on them, before he remembers this weird new version of himself that doesn’t give a fuck about what anyone thinks.
Looking at the row of three unicorn stickers on his way out of the library, he wonders, thinking about the dozens of people he’d have listed two days ago, if someone asked him to name his friends. Now they’re just people who’d give him shit about a unicorn on his books and he realizes: they don’t care about him. What’s more, he doesn’t actually care about them either.
Steve’s parents leave for their next trip Tuesday morning. His mother kisses his cheek and her skirt suit is pressed, smells of her perfume, just like her styled hair. They tell him someone is coming tomorrow to cover the pool for the season and Steve huffs a sigh of relief.
He's not any closer to discerning the very real threat to the livelihood of all of Hawkins, Indiana, but he is closer to some sort of mental balance, a method of approach to the whole matter of daily life.
He’s come close to questioning, a few times, whether he’s just losing his mind—no monster, just a dream, all clear. Because of that, he knows now he can’t question it—there’s no solution other than to trust his gut, which tells him that whatever happened during that night last week was much more than a dream. Sometimes he catches sight of himself in a mirror and literally startles backward; his jaw is too soft, his shoulders too narrow. He’s too young; there’s a part of him that’s sixteen but there’s a part of him that really fucking isn’t, that’s seen and heard things that keep coming back to him piecemeal, arriving slowly through the dense fog in his skull that hides just enough to keep him sane.
He might not be smart enough to comprehend the whole thing, but… what he knows now, he knows for a reason.
He has time. There’s a part of himself that feels older, knows more than he used to. The part of him that’s older than sixteen knows he has time to work this out.
So, he arrives at school every day. Steve devotes a certain amount of attention to keeping things copacetic—he knows he has eyes on him and he doesn’t want anyone—parent, teacher, peer— asking him questions. He stays on the team; he does his classwork; he even smiles sometimes, when he feels it’s warranted. Still, anyone who’s paying attention probably realizes he’s pulling away from the usual, bit by bit. For the first time in his life, he’s making a concerted effort to blend into the background.
It starts with his clothes.
Steve is standing in front of his closet wondering why he ever owned this many pairs of khaki pants. Why are all of his shirts collared? He has more clothing than he could ever need and all of it screams “douchebag”. He sorts the best options from his closet and drawers: anything a little more subdued, a little less ostentatious, and for fuck’s sake anything without a collar.
Shopping isn’t a priority, but when he’s out restocking frozen meals, he picks up a package of plain t-shirts, hoping to pad out a meager selection of normal clothes.
In the following weeks, he’s not the best student. Math is especially hard; it’s never been easy and something says he isn’t going to care about his damn degree and his Lovecraft books are right there, so easily read behind the back of the student in front of him. It’s difficult to tell whether his reading is helping, but it massages the center of the deep anxiety he has, feeling like he’s doing something to prepare.
Normally, he’s had someone next to him who’s always been as middling as he is. It was difficult to throw Tommy off; the boy was persistent, eager to spend time with Steve. Still, they’d never really been close, and Tommy didn’t really know anything about Steve that ten other people didn’t know—really, Steve didn’t know much about Tommy either. Tommy stopped at Steve’s locker every day until he didn’t, and the last Steve had heard from him was a phone call asking if he wanted to hang out and drink beers. Steve said no, the last “no” in a long line.
At school, his math tests keep coming back with the kind of grades you’d expect of someone who’s not all that booksmart to begin with, when you add a hefty dose of academic negligence.
This day isn’t any different; a shocking 34% slides onto his desk.
At some point, Steve knows this is going to bite him in the ass. His parents don’t exactly invest themselves in his scholarly progress, but his report cards are sent straight to his father’s secretary and a glaring F in Trigonometry isn’t going to do him any favors.
Panicked, he starts to look around, trying to reassure himself that other people have the same shit combination of luck and lack of ability. He doesn’t actually meet anyone’s eyes and he’s been trying not to even look at them lately.
Steve feels like if he looks too closely at anyone it’s going to make it harder to tell what really stands out, what matters and what’s going to matter. So, he’s been ignoring just about everyone.
That's difficult when he frantically meets the large, probing eyes of Nancy Wheeler.
She isn’t someone he would have expected to know, before. She isn’t usually in any of his classes, being a year below him and taking all honors courses to boot. Trig is different. She’s gotta be the youngest person in here, her and a couple kids from her year placed for the advanced cohort. She’s got braces to treat an underbite she had throughout elementary and middle school, is best friends with Barbara Holland, and the pair of them both dress like his old babysitter Mrs. DeShield, a neighbor woman who used to watch Steve after school and was old enough that she actually spent most of her time knitting in a rocking chair.
He looks at Nancy, her huge blue eyes like windows on daylight, and the familiar taste of blood prickles into his awareness with the tingle at the back of his scalp. It’s over in the space of a second.
Steve flicks up his paper so the dismal grade is on display. He grimaces. She grins, drawing in on herself a little. The braces are actually gone.
Part of him feels a little guilty when he turns it on.
“You, uh, wouldn’t happen to need a study partner, would you Wheeler?”
The weeks pass in a gently turning wheel, the same classes over and over, but Nancy is helping him and mostly it’s just her and Barbara’s individual attention that gets him through the fall semester.
They study at a wooden table in the school library, and mostly that means the pair of them helping Steve through practice problems that look like gibberish until the girls explain the individual letters. Barb draws a unit circle and Nancy points to it as he counts individual lines. After a few sessions Barb is openly mocking Steve’s inability to focus for more than two problems in a row and Nancy is gentler, more shy, but they’re both friendly; he can tell they actually want him to understand.
Nancy, he realizes, under her awkwardly skinny posture and polyester sweaters is actually one of the most striking girls he’s ever met, and part of him thinks maybe that’s the only reason he thought she was important to the mission—but the blood he tasted when he formally met Barbara Holland wasn’t his imagination. While Barb herself isn’t ugly, especially if you like tall women, he knows the feeling he gets is connected to the future, so he makes a point to spend time with both of them.
The pair are inseparable, and it seems like they have all of their classes together. Their lockers are decorated with matching stickers; it seems like they even shop at the same stores. When Steve starts driving them home after school, he notices that they finish each other’s sentences; they know what the other is thinking without words. He wonders if he’s ever been that close to anyone.
Nancy’s house is on the way to Barb’s, and he drops her off first.
“Thanks for the ride, Steve!” she shouts to him.
“Least I can do, professor,” Steve says, and asks Barb if she’d like to move up front.
“No thanks,” she says, like always, “I’ll take the chauffeur experience.”
“Gotcha.”
“How’d you get this thing anyways? Was it like, super expensive?”
“The Beemer?” he asks, knowing what she means, but not wanting to act like he knows how impressive it is. “It was a birthday present. My dad, he’s an asshole, but he’s loaded, so.”
“Some asshole,” she says, and Steve laughs.
“Yeah, I mean, it wasn’t all for me,” he says, “I mean, they didn’t have to give me something so nice, but they need me to be able to drive myself around.”
“Oh. For like, sports and stuff?”
“Uh, well, kinda, they’re just not around a lot. My dad spends a lot of time abroad, and my mom goes with. She doesn’t trust him.”
“Oh,” Barb says, and she takes a minute to process, “so are you just like, alone? You don’t have any brothers or sisters?”
“Nope, one and done for these Harringtons,” he says. “So like, they used to have people drop stuff off. Like food or whatever. But as soon as I could drive they wanted me to be able to do all of that. It’s nice because I get to pick my food and I can go where I want.”
“But like…” she says, “you’re alone. Aren’t you ever…uh, creeped out?”
“What, like scared?” he asks, and she nods. “I don’t know. I guess not. I don’t really think about it.”
It’s a lie, but he doesn’t even really know he’s lying until afterward. The lie just comes out, and he doesn’t think about the fact he’s always scared, has always been scared, until much later.
December arrives and basketball has started in earnest, so he leaves a message with his father’s secretary that he’s going to need a deposit for team fees. He doesn’t wait for a response, knowing it’ll just be in the form of a few numbers in his bank account. He doesn’t think about Christmas until he’s at the grocery store and the displays are out with the nutmeg and sprinkles and everything else moms need for the season.
So it’s a shock when his dad arrives out of the blue, his mother just behind, the two of them pressed and polished despite a long haul flight from God knows where.
“Did you forget?” His dad asks, and it’s like Steve is a grown man whose parents are arriving after a long drive, expecting holiday music and a cocktail pressed into their hands instead of whatever this is, Steve still wet from a shower and eating manicotti from an aluminum tray in front of the TV.
“No, no,” Steve says, lying, looking around desperately at the cups on the coffee table and thinking of the absolute wreck that is the kitchen. “I just uh… I didn’t realize it was…” What fucking day is it? “Thursday. Sorry about the mess. I’d have picked up.”
“Oh, honey,” his mom says, at the same time his dad agrees that it’s a wreck and he’d have preferred to see his house in the state he left it.
“How uh, how long until…?”
“Taipei?” his dad says, “We have a little over a week. Enough time for a proper Christmas dinner, at least.”
There was a time in Steve’s life where he’d have felt relief, or even joy, to think about having his parents at home this close to Christmas: his mom making dinner in an apron, mashed potatoes and gravy, eating reindeer shaped sugar cookies and watching It's a Wonderful Life while his dad drank beer with some beloved uncle. However, none of that is actually how Christmas has ever happened for him; it’s just scenes he knows from TV, wished for privately between lavish, but ultimately disappointing, December packages from far away places.
Now he can’t help his disappointment, thinking of the tiring lines he’ll have to summon, of sitting at the table while they ask How was school today?
“Your shirt is untucked,” his father says, and Steve’s mother gathers his dinner from the coffee table, carrying it to the dining room where she settles in. Steve’s father pours her wine.
“Listen, Steven, honey,” she says, and explains a long itinerary, scheduled around his meets and practices. There’s an office party they want him for, and there’s a suit and he has a fitting, and his head starts to swim a little before they really drop the other foot.
“Mrs. Hagan called us,” she says, and she looks at Steve’s father, not using words but begging him to intercede.
“Steven, we’re concerned,” he says, and he knows what’s coming before they say it—your friends, you’re not talking to anyone, you look different, your coach says, your grades, and shockingly–have you been into anything? Any drugs?
Steve summons the energy, the effort to really try, here. It’s mostly platitudes—how he’s working on it, how he doesn’t mean to alarm anybody, makes up a story how he was seeing a girl and she dumped him and he was not feeling like himself, plus he’s really had to work on his grades recently so he’s been a little out of it, but he’s fine and here’s what he’s doing to fix everything and how about he gives Tommy a call this weekend and they can actually study together, since y'know Tommy could probably use some help too and he wants to look after his friends, of course he does and really he never meant to worry anybody.
He’s more disappointed than he expects when the two of them nod, and agree, and change the subject. It’s exactly what they wanted to hear.