Chapter Text
At the end of it all, when the world is cracked open, with a red glow spilling out onto the streets, Steve wants to cry. He’s reassured Dustin that, yes, this was the end. That, yes, they defeated Vecna. But his mind keeps supplying him with the empty space where his body should be, how hard it was to kill even a Demogorgon the first time.
Some things are good. Hopper is alive, which Steve is so fucking happy about because El deserves to have her dad back. The Byers-Hopper family have meshed in such a way that it’s impossible to tell them apart. As he helps them move boxes back into their old house and Hop’s cabin, he feels the reassurance of warm hands on his shoulders, and Steve pretends that it’s not the first time someone’s hugged him in years.
Dustin was…distant. Steve knew two days wasn’t enough to accept it, the death. He doesn’t know how he’s meant to help. There’s not exactly a pamphlet detailing how to help your friend/child deal with the death of their friend, who they maybe might have saw getting torn to bits.
(Steve tries not to think about Metallica or Master of Puppets, or the bat bites on his abdomen. He doesn’t deserve to feel this sorrow because he didn’t even know him, pull yourself together, Harrington).
Robin stays over at Vickie’s house. And he’s happy for her, honest, but if his empty halls feel that much more daunting as he wakes up in the morning, he tries not to think about it too much.
It’s the end of the second day after the battle. He volunteered, he watched Nancy go with Jonathan, he watched Dustin cry. Steve tries not to think about Max in the hospital bed, Lucas by her side, but he fails. Sometimes, in the mornings, he thinks that it’s his fault. If he hadn’t fallen onto the vine, if he hadn’t told Eddie to be the distraction, if he hadn’t done this and that.
It’s worthless to think about, anyway. People like him didn’t get do-overs (he knows it in the way he and Nancy faded to not talking, or how he’s sitting alone, now, at the edge of the pool).
The water stares up at him, inviting and cold, whispering. He slips in, feels his jeans stick to his skin, as he sinks to sit on the bottom of the pool. Steve looks up, feels the water rush up his nose, and watches the stars twinkling and messy overhead.
He breathes.
It hurts, at first, scratches down his throat, smooth and thin, cold. It feels sharp in a way that he never thought water could feel, until it turns thick and dark, something else being breathed in with the water. Steve tries to open his eyes, because what the fuck just went into my lungs but his vision is hazy at the edges, and he sinks.
— — —
His hands are by his feet, laces to his sneakers untied, and when the fuck did he get this headache? Steve looks up, sees Robin and Nance and Eddie looking down into the water of Lover’s Lake. He unties his shoes, shucks off his shirt, says some spiel about being swim captain that feels odd on his tongue.
As a tentacle wraps around his leg and pulls him through the gate, bat-like creatures with tails dragging him across the way, he can’t help thinking that he has the worst case of déjà vu.
— — —
As he sits by the pool again, slips in with his jeans on, does Steve feel like something was meant to change. If he started having prophetic dreams about the biggest battle they had ever faced, what was it worth if he couldn’t change anything? Maybe he can try again.
Max is in a coma. El was too late. Eddie is dead.
Steve breathes deep, and closes his eyes.
— — —
He realises that it always starts in the same place. One shoe untied, looking for the gate at the bottom of Lover’s Lake. It’s the third time he’s been here, and he feels like, maybe, he can change something this time. Save someone.
Steve dives into the water, goes just deep enough that he sees the pulsating red, doesn’t drop his flashlight and swims back up. He freaks them out when he breaks through the water and, hey, if that makes him smile a bit, no one has to know. Yes, there is a gate down there, now please shuffle aside so I can get the fuck up this boat, he wants to say.
As a tentacle grabs him down and his mind feels like mush inside his head, he feels like this is a bit much for karmic justice.
— — —
Nothing changes. And, yeah, maybe Steve was a little foolish for thinking that he could just fix everything with a swoop of his hand, and going up a little early, but he had to try, right? He tries not to think about Dustin crying, or the days he has to spend waiting and waiting.
The loop always ends two days after the battle, as he slips into the pool.
— — —
Steve can feel the stumble before it happens. They’re hiding underneath Skull Rock and he gets up too fast, way too fucking fast, and the world is spinning and his shoulder is digging uncomfortably into the rock.
There’s the hurried, hushed whispers of his name under the blue, sometimes red, sky, as he slides down on his back. He can feel something oozing out of his stomach, and he doesn’t want to look, but he has to know, has to see it for himself.
“Okay,” he breathes, because at least he is alive, he had help to deal with these wounds and this fight. He decidedly doesn’t look at Eddie as he realises how deep the teeth sunk, tries not to think of Master of Puppets and self sacrificing metalheads.
When they’re walking through the woods, Steve decides that he can bend the rules. Eddie is complimenting him (and he knows now that’s what it was, a proper, not sarcastic, compliment), and Steve uses his future knowledge to sail the conversation smoothly.
“That was a real Ozzy move you pulled back there,” Eddie says, and Steve preens under the praise. He knows this one, he knows what to do, how to make sure the conversation doesn’t end in stilted silence.
“Ozzy Osbourne?” Steve asks, but he knows the answer already.
“You know Black Sabbath? You know Black Sabbath?” There’s an incredulous look, sparkling behind his eyes as he says it.
“Yeah, of course, man. Bit a bat’s head off onstage, right? Where d’you think I got the idea?”
There’s a barely contained glee in the way that Eddie walks besides him, knocking his shoulder every few seconds. Pre-loop-Steve pushed him away, he remembers, hurting and wanting, but Steve decides that he’s allowed to indulge, allowed to break the mould.
The conversation lands back to Henderson, it always does, how Eddie was on the receiving end of the hero-worship placed on him by the kid. When he leans forwards to the side of his face, Steve just catches his eye.
“You know he won’t shut up about you either, right?”
“What?” Eddie pauses, steps back.
“Dustin. Every time we’re hanging out, he somehow manages to talk about Eddie Munson, best DM in history, or Eddie Munson, theatrics extraordinaire.”
Steve glances to Eddie with a smile on his face, thinks back to the words that he says every loop, that Steve never returns even though he knows them to be true.
“I was jealous too. It’s not everyday your almost-child is swept away by someone else.”
Eddie has pulled a piece of hair to cover his mouth, his other arms crossed around his chest. There’s a faint smile on his face and a hint of something else in his eyes, before his shoulder is bumping Steve’s again. He could get used to this, Steve thinks.
“Well, we could co-parent, you know? I’ve heard a little about your reputation as the kids’ mum, so I guess I’ll take the mantle as their dad.” He smiles as he says it, joking in a way that Steve craves.
“Oh yeah? Well you better be paying child support, cause those fuckers are running me dry.”
“Pay you child support? Did you forget which one of us lives in a trailer?”
There’s an ease to the unknown, to talking with Eddie. Steve hopes that he never gets tired of this one conversation, no matter how many loops it takes.
The ‘earthquake’ hits earlier this time (or maybe it just feels like it does because Eddie hasn’t gotten to the part where he starts talking about Nance and him). And when Steve is the first one to crumble to the ground, blood seeping through the bandage, Eddie keeps him stable.
Steve tries to remember everything, this loop. He knows the conversations he was a part of, he knew the vague events. But he had to know everything: what went wrong? Why didn’t they win? Eddie’s hand on his shoulder guiding him up makes Steve want to hurl because he knows, he knows, that Eddie is going to die, this time.
— — —
Steve could almost laugh at the idiocy of it all. After crawling their way through the gate and the Upside Down (no changes, it seemed that small conversations didn’t do anything), he gets to watch Eddie Munson (for the third time) pull on a Mike Myers mask and hotwire a house/van.
“Harrington’s got her, don’t ya big boy?”
There’s something so calm and warm and alive in his smile as Eddie turns to look back at him, a pooling of something appearing in his chest. His breath is caught, and he zones out for a second as that smile is turned on him, and for a moment, Steve idly wonders if looping time has affected his health.
Or maybe it’s just the bat bites. Again.
When he vaults into the driver’s seat, steering in such a careless way because he knows that no one will be on the road, Steve listens to the conversations between everyone. He doesn’t strike up the talk with Nancy about his future (doesn’t think that he’ll be allowed to make it there), and he watches as Lucas and Max have their moment. Eddie has been demoted to please for the love of god stay in the back AWAY from the windows, so Steve doesn’t get a chance to talk to him.
It hurts a little more than he would’ve thought, to know that pre-loop-Steve didn’t get to know him.
Nancy still meets Jason in the gun shop. Eddie stays in the van. Robin sees Vickie kissing her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, and Steve places a hand on her shoulder, holds her tight, tells her the same thing that he always did.
When they’re back on the road, making their way to a secluded nowhere that Eddie directed him to, Robin catches Steve’s eye in the rearview mirror so he winks at her. Overly exaggerated and not subtle at all, she cracks a half exasperated smile as she turns her head away. If nothing else, Steve’s calling that one a win.
— — —
After the battle is done, after Eddie is dead and El didn’t arrive on time and Max is in hospital, Steve finds himself at the back of the Harrington Household. Because this was not a fucked up sense of déjà vu, no, he was going through the battle again and again and—
He couldn’t save them. (He had to save them, he had to try and save them, they deserved that at least). What was he supposed to do? He wasn’t— he was the worst person to get this power, this chance, to fix things. Steve wasn’t stubborn and smart like Nancy, or powerful like El. He hadn’t been through this horror forever like Will, or equally new to it like Robin and Eddie.
He was just Steve Harrington: a shitty boyfriend who peaked in high school with a mediocre career as a babysitter.
This loop feels wasted. He knows that it’s not, there’s no such thing, and if there was, who was policing those ideas? As far as he knew, he was the only person to be stuck in a time loop, like, ever. He burns conversations and faults into his brain, wills it to remember.
Jason and his gang attack at the Creel house. That’s the reason Max doesn’t have her music. El gets ambushed by the government (and, god, can someone give this girl a break?), and the boys are a little late in getting to her. Hopper and Joyce and Murray had things sorted, he thought, and he wasn’t going to strain himself thinking how he would even contact Russia in the first place. Eddie buys them time, but it’s not enough.
Okay. He can do this. Buy more time, figure out how to contact El, make sure Lucas is alert and armed, and plead that Eddie decides not to be a hero.
The cool blue of his pool tauntingly stares up at him, wind sloshing the water over his toes, as he sits by the edge. The sound of guitar and screeching bats, of the world splitting open, of bones cracking is enough to send him deeper, and deeper, breathing in.