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Chapter Text

1981

Steve first meets his father on the eve of his fourteenth birthday. Crystal Mahoney has just given him a pretty stellar gift in the guest bedroom of Tommy H’s house and though he feels glum in the ways that teenage drunkenness can often trigger, there is a strange soaring sense that accompanies the aching splotches that purple his neck. 

Badges of honour, Tommy calls them. Jewels for his crown, Carol prefers. King Steve, she purrs. King Steve! they all chant, as the world turns rightside up and the football team releases their hold on his legs. 

He may have graduated middle school with nothing to show for it beyond a string of detentions and a scraping grade in math, but none of that matters because this means far more. He means something more. 

Nobody at this party cares about his grades or his posture or the ketchup stain on the living room carpet that won’t scrub out. Their yells are celebratory, their claps on his back come in congratulations, their smiles are given with abandon. 

It’s electric, it’s promising. Steve feels this joy rise so rapidly within him that it takes him a moment to realise he’s throwing up. It splashes against the siding of the house, his palms pricking with thorns from Mrs Hagan’s rose bush. 

Absently, he notes the sound of Tommy’s older brother shouting something. The music cuts out. Steve wipes his mouth with the collar of his shirt and winces at his lack of forethought. He gags once more and feels his stomach roll at the sheer amount of beer sloshing within, and still, he cannot contain his grin. It was worth it. It was totally worth it. 

“Wipe that smile off your face, Your Majesty.”

Steve turns on his heel and stumbles in the soil. When he catches himself, it’s on another thorn, but the blood running a river down the line of his palm is suddenly the least of his concerns. 

The Chief of Police stands before him, backlit by the Hagan’s fancy porch lights. He takes a step forward, then another, and Steve knows that he should be worried about getting in trouble – or worse, getting arrested – but he really, truly, could not stop smiling if he tried. 

Because the Chief of Police is tall, with broad shoulders and a thick moustache. He’s got a gun on his belt and a hat on his head with such a wide brim he could be mistaken for a cowboy. 

Steve knows his face from the pictures. Knows his eyes from the mirror. 

You have your daddy’s eyes, his mother always says. Though Richard Harrington’s are a steely slate grey; the kind that fissure down the middle at any sudden snap of anger. 

The Chief’s eyes are the brown of freshly tilled earth, the tree bark Steve had carved his name into in the woods behind his house. Steve wonders what they’d look like lit by a smirk, by pride, by the warmth he rarely ever bore witness to in his short life. 

“It’s my birthday,” he tells the man. 

He tells his dad. 

“Well, shit,” the Chief smiles, and Steve beams right back. That his real father doesn’t know his birthday is forgivable. In fact, it’s no surprise at all – Steve’s other father has forgotten his birthday the last three years running. 

The Chief continues. “I don’t have cake, but how about a ride in a real-life police cruiser?”

And he may be a proper teenager now, but Steve is still a kid at heart. So, his heart takes to the skies at this suggestion, until the amused and vaguely irritated look on the Chief’s face drags it back down to earth. 

“Wait… what?”

“Hands behind your back, kid.”

Shocked into submission, Steve puts his hands behind his back. He then ralphs all over his dad’s shoes. 

As far as first meetings go, it sure is memorable. 

1973

“And there, button – there’s your daddy.” 

Mom’s holding him in her lap, the pair of them curled up on the sofa. Steve loves the smell of her clothes, how soft they are. Sometimes, his mom will want to hold him like this – carries him around like he’s a baby, kisses his face all over. Sometimes, Mom takes Steve from his bed in the middle of the night and puts him between his parents – even when his father has work before the sun comes up and gets cross with Steve for his cold feet. 

Other times, it’s like Mom forgets Steve was ever there at all. There’s nothing for breakfast when he wakes, no clean clothes to change into. He gets himself ready for school as best he can and never remembers to pack a lunch. On the weekends, he runs through the house and garden in his underwear, creeping around like a secret agent or roaring bloody battle cries like a soldier gone to war. He eats cereal from the box, dry noodles and softening fruit. He draws pictures on his bare bedroom walls and does cannonballs in the pool. It stays like that until his father finally gets home and dumps Steve into the bath to scrub the mud from his ears and brush the leaves from his hair.

His father doesn’t use bubbles or let him play with his toys, but he always wraps Steve in a towel and gets him dressed for bed after, so he never gets too cranky about it.

But today, Mom wants to hold him, so Steve lets her. She’s showing him a big book – a yearbook, she said – full of faces from when she was at high school. The same high school he will go to when he’s big enough. 

Steve is not the best reader – his teacher said so – but he can read enough to know that the name on the paper doesn’t spell out Richard Harrington. 

“Really?” he asks his mom, just to make sure. 

She hums. “You look just the same as him at your age.” 

Steve’s father is from Texas. His parents didn’t meet until college. 

He traces the letter ‘J’ with his finger, and later, when his mom has gone for her long bath, he tears his daddy’s page from the book. He folds it as neatly as possible and tucks it between the seams he’d plucked from his favourite teddy’s back. Toots was an expensive toy and his father is very angry with him about it, and demands that the housekeeper stitch Toots up again. But it’s okay, because Steve knows his secret will be safe forever.

1983

“Don’t you dare walk away from me– ”

Steve, heart beating violently in his chest, does exactly that. 

A tumbler shatters against the wall. He brushes the crystal from his hair. 

“If you were going to throw a party,” his father continues. Richard, that’s what Steve calls him in his head. In times like these, it’s nice to put as much distance between them as possible; it’s nice to remember that he’s not actually Steve’s blood. 

“... you should have invited more than Tommy and that redheaded bitch.”

“Do you mean Carol?” Steve asks, as droll as he can be in his rapid ascent of the stairs. “Or Barb? The girl who literally went missing.”

“Watch it!”

Richard is tailing him because, short of sprinting for the front door or climbing out his bedroom window, there is no way for Steve to escape this lecture. 

His mother has discarded her heels at the top of the stairs. Steve scoops them up, leaves them beneath one of many decorative chairs. The sound of running water comes from the master bath. She’s singing. 

“I am watching it, but I don’t get why you’re so mad about all that when we ought to be out there, I don’t know– ”

“Doing the pigs’ job for them? Let Hopper do some real work for once in his pathetic life.”

Steve would whip around in his bedroom door, to face this like he’s supposed to – defend Chief Hopper and the work he does – but Richard does it for him, bashing Steve’s head against the frame and squeezing his shoulders to keep him there. 

“Cut the shit, boy.” Spittle flies from his mouth and lands on Steve’s. “We both know that you only orchestrated the whole thing to get into the Wheeler girl’s panties.”

Steve pitches forward, pushes against his father’s hold. “It wasn’t like tha– ”

“Don’t go telling me what it was like. I know you.” 

Steve shakes his head. 

“I do, Steve.”  

It should feel warm, to be known. But there’s a coldness that bleeds from his father’s eyes; as if knowing Steve is some curse he has borne for the last sixteen years. 

“I could give a shit about the beers.” Steve had asked Nancy not to tell, and look at where it got him. He burned that bridge for nothing. “Christ – next time aim a little higher and get some hair on your chest!”

When his father laughs, it’s never funny. Steve can’t look at him, so he looks somewhere far off and blurry. He tries not to think about it. 

“But did you have to fuck her?”

Steve’s cheeks burn. “I didn’t!” 

“Don’t bullshit me, boy.” 

It’s less of a warning, more of a threat. Steve’s crossed the line so many times with Richard, he knows that well enough. This tug of war between them never gives any slack and he’s always scrambling in the dirt, doing his best to dig his feet in. 

This truth is an ugly thing between them. Steve wishes he’d just say it. 

“You’re a whore, just like your mother.” 

But Steve never gets what he wants. 

1974

Steve unpicks the stitches in Toots’ back a year later, when Mrs O’Donnell announces this semester’s class project. 

It’s about Heroes. 

Steve’s hero is his daddy, of course. The school secretary won’t copy the yearbook photo and Steve is afraid that Tommy H will get his sticky peanut butter jelly hands all over it, so he does a drawing instead. 

Steve is actually very good at art, so he does a lot more than copy what’s in front of him. No, instead he gives his daddy a moustache like Mike from All in the Family, sunglasses, and a big gun because Steve sounded the letters out and he knows what the M-I-L-I-T-A-R-Y is. 

He copies his daddy’s name as best he can, but Steve’s got funny letters that mix up in his head and ends up with ‘Hobber’ written in dark green ink that he can’t rub out. 

Oh, well. He doesn’t know much else about his daddy, really, so he makes a lot up. He stands in front of the class and talks about how his daddy jumped from a plane and shoots bad guys all the time, how he once fought an alligator and kissed a lady all over her mouth. 

His project is pretty good. He even swiped stickers from the supply cubby, so Steve and his daddy are surrounded by trucks and gold stars and tigers – which his daddy probably sees lots of in the places he visits as a soldier. 

Everyone in class claps when Steve is finished presenting, and he does a little bow because he feels so nice inside. 

But later when Mrs O’Donnell hands out the grades, a great big ‘F’ stares back at him, and when he asks her why, Mrs O’Donnell only says:

“You get points for creativity, Steven, but you certainly won’t get any for lying.”

1984

When everyone finally returns, Steve is curled up in the Byers’ bathtub, doing his best not to get any more blood on the floor. 

Mostly, it’s cool against his flaming skin. Mostly, it’s closer to the toilet than the couch or any of the beds the kids tried to urge him into, so it’s where he waits. 

Dustin waits with him, uselessly patting his face with a damp cloth. If anything, it keeps him awake, but that’s the height of it. Steve is so tired. He wishes the kids would all stay in the bathroom with him, so at least he could keep an eye on them. But they’re fretting and fussing and making so much noise from the other room that his head pounds even harder than he thought possible. He wants to throw up again, but there’s nothing left to come up, so he gags a little and accepts a sip of water from his dutiful, if mouthy, nurse, and keeps waiting.

Jonathan darts in for the first aid kit under the sink, Mike comes in to pee. Mrs Byers scrubs her hands raw in the sink and frowns at them in the mirror, and when she leaves there is even more noise outside. Dustin bounces on his perch at the edge of the bath, and Steve is about to tell him to just go, when they finally have another visitor. 

It’s Chief Hopper. 

“Jesus, kid.” 

Every bit of worry melts from his bones. Steve feels like he’s floating, as if he’s entered some other existence where he is not a boy who can be hurt. As if he is instead a boy with a dad who loves him and who’s always been there. 

Not someone who sees him as nothing but an afterthought. An inconvenience to deal with once every other duck is in a row. 

He waited. Even as Billy’s hits rose into the double digits, Steve waited and hoped foolishly that it was only a matter of time before his dad would show up again and save him – like Hopper didn’t have other priorities, namely his apparent superpowered daughter and the end of the world. 

There’s a hand in his hair, and Steve relishes in the feeling before he realises that Hop’s fingers are seeking the split in his skull. 

He must find it, because there is a sharp pain that burns so terribly it whites his vision at its edges. His brain is on fire. 

“Dad, please.”

The words don’t sound like his own. His hand clamps around Hopper’s wrist; Steve feels the life in him. The steady yet quickening thrum to remind him that this is a person who, without obligation, has come back to him. 

Steve sinks further into the bath, knees and spine curling tight around a hand that isn’t holding him back. 

“Joyce!” Dad barks, and it hurts. The noise hurts so bad. “Start the car.”

1981-1983

Steve gets pulled over a lot, but it’s a safe kind of trouble to get into. His father never minds, because speeding is what a fast car is for, and when Steve gets pulled over for worse, well, for some reason his father never hears about it.

It’s another reason to like Hopper, to take pleasure in the sight of flashing blue lights rolling up the hill to the cliff over the quarry or the alley behind the Hawk. Steve’s not breaking the law – he rarely takes anything too far beyond the drinking and the smoking – but he’s bothersome enough that the residents of Hawkins often call the station just to report him for loitering. 

Sometimes it’s not Hopper who comes to berate him, and Steve feels like all his effort has gone to waste. Other times, he’d rather not get caught at all – because who wants their secret biological father to catch them with their hand up a girl’s skirt? – but Hopper taps on the backseat window anyway. 

Again, he never tells, but Steve knows the man’s patience must be dwindling. 

He wishes it were easier. That it could be like Carol and her dad, who is divorced from her mother and lives two towns over, but takes Carol for pancakes every other Sunday just so they can talk. 

Steve can’t invent a valid reason to talk to Hopper, so he makes trouble instead. 

For a time there, he even toyed with the idea of volunteering at the station, showing an interest in the police academy for after graduation, but he blew that option the moment he puked his guts up on the police chief’s shoes. 

Whatever, he thinks, as Hopper steps out of his blazer and shoots Steve a look of utter exasperation. Beggars can’t be choosers. 

“Chief,” Steve says, joint lit between forefinger and thumb, extended to the hand of his maker. “We have got to stop meeting like this.”

1985

“I’m going with you.”

There’s a plan, and it’s one that Steve can’t agree with. El must have had similar qualms, for how she pulled Hopper aside and spoke with him in urgent whispers. But he turned her away, clearly. Fed her the same shit he’s feeding Steve. 

“Not happening.”

Ridiculous. Steve was down there. He knows what to expect – hell, he can still feel it on his face. 

“What? But I– ”

“I need you here,” Hopper interrupts. “The kids need you here.”

“But I’m good. I can fight.” Better than Mrs Byers, certainly. “And I’m fast – you know I’m fast.”

“Oh, I know that.” The ghost of a smirk brushes Hopper’s expression before it settles into something more sombre. “But you’re not a soldier, kid. I was.” 

I am, he means. Hop’s more of a soldier than any of them; thrown into war by his own eager hands, barely older then than Steve is now. A father, unknowingly, in the year that followed. He was a man and he fought. He chose it. Steve chooses the same. 

“Mrs Byers isn’t a soldier,” Steve tries. “Neither is that random guy.” 

“No, but I need them there like I need you here.” What about what I need? Steve longs to ask. “Besides, they’re adults.” 

“I’m an adult! I turned eighteen last month,” Steve says, like it matters at all. Like the man isn’t a brick wall, immoveable and far higher than Steve could ever reach. “June eleventh.”

“I remember.”

He remembers. 

“But my answer’s not changing. We’ve both got our jobs, okay? You keep those kids safe and I’ll get some revenge for those shiners of yours.”

Steve’s laugh rattles pitifully in his chest. He will always look back on this moment and wonder why he never tried harder. 

But then again, it barely matters in the end.

“Okay.” 

Later, when it’s all over and the smoke has yet to clear, Steve passes a crying Max into Robin’s trustworthy arms and bolts for the loading dock. The elevator won’t work without a keycard, but there’s not long to wait. When the doors finally open, he rushes forward, still rather unsteady on his feet, and is not met with his father in need of assistance.

He’s not even met with his father’s body. There is simply an absence.

Mrs Byers is there, and she’s crying. The other guy is careful with her – a guiding hand to her elbow, his own eyes welling with sorrow. 

“Where is he?” Steve grabs Mrs Byers, all but shakes her. “Is he still down there?”

“Steve, I– ”

“He’s coming up, right?”

“No, Steve,” the man says. “He’s not.” 

And there’s no choice, really, not when it’s Hopper. Not when it’s his dad. 

Steve never gets chosen, never gets considered. But it’s enough that Hopper came to every call, that he unknowingly cut his own kid too much slack and kept him safe from his own misguided actions. 

It’s enough that Hopper remembered his birthday. 

So, he takes the keycard and every objection from the pair falls on deaf ears. It’s no use – Steve was never going to go anywhere else. 

The doors of the elevator close behind him. He plummets into hell once more.

Chapter Text

Jim hasn’t heard much beyond his own rattled breathing, the sound of fists smacking against his flesh, the inane questions of his captors that he will never answer. 

When the screaming starts, his heart stops. 

The General before him leers, hands tucked behind his back as he bounces on the balls of his feet. 

Gleefully, he says, “Your boy is very loud.” 

Jim stills, spits. There is no boy. It’s all a game. El’s hair is longer now, it’s all grown out. She can’t be mistaken for a little boy anymore. It’s not her, they just want him to think it is. And there are those brats she hangs out with, but Wheeler never would have left her side and the nosy one was on the radio – Jim heard him. And none of them sound like that. 

Shredded and raw. A voice too deep to be that of a child. There’s nothing distinctly American to it – who’s to say it isn’t just another Soviet prisoner? Some fool caught smuggling or rioting or stealing a loaf of bread. 

“Little sailor,” says the General. Jim feels his dead heart sink somewhere down by his ass. “We like him very much. We call him Butterscotch, because he is so very sweet. You Americans like that, yes? Butterscotch?”

Without considering the consequences, Jim lifts one leg and aims a brutal kick at the man’s crotch. It’s effective and satisfying. It will do nothing to stave off the inevitable, but Christ, it feels good. 

Then a mask is forced over his face. 

Things get decidedly worse after that. 

–

He is dragged down an alley, through snow, and shoved into the back of a truck. When they shave his head, it’s almost a relief, until he’s hosed down in an outdoor courtyard like a filthy dog and made to wear clothes that smell as if someone died in them.

The corner of the cell they eventually shove him into contains a tight curl of limbs, a bloodied face. 

Without his telltale locks, Jim only knows him by his teeth: a straight and blinding row of pearls paid for by Richard Harrington’s dental insurance. 

Steve is smiling, despite it all. His eyes are swollen to tight lines – one nearing the size of a baseball – his bottom lip is split almost to the chin. His neck is roped in red, with wrists to match. He’s shaking with the cold and seemingly unable to move from his spot against the wall and still, he is smiling. 

“Found ya.”

Of all the things to say, of all the feelings to feel, Jim can’t reconcile this look of absolute triumph with a teenage boy who has essentially been sentenced to death. Because that’s what this is. There is no way out, no going home. 

It was fine before, for the brief moment where it was just Jim. But now there are two of them– now there’s this kid who’s barely old enough to buy cigarettes, who’s had his head shorn and his face beaten a few times over. How are his ribs? Why is the white of his left eye filled with blood? Did they put the mask over his face too? Did they steal the breath from his lungs? 

It’s then that it occurs to Jim – the kid’s eagerness to accompany him, his absence in the bunker when Joyce had to flip both switches. 

Why? Just when Jim thought this kid was finally realising that his actions have consequences, he has to go and fail at being a hero. 

“What exactly was the plan here, dipshit?” Jim spits, marching across the small space with the chains clinking between his ankles. “Did you think you were gonna swoop in and save the day? Well, all you’ve achieved is getting two of us stuck here instead of one.” God, Jim would just love to shake some sense into him, but neither of them are currently up to that. “Don’t you ever think?”

Steve’s smile shutters down into nothing. 

“Thanks, Steve,” he snarks. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, Steve.” 

The nasally quality of his voice only irritates Jim more – the kid’s nose definitely needs setting. What a joy. More work. 

“C’mere.” Jim slumps down, smacks the cot next to him; which is rusted and has a mattress that seems to consist entirely of rotting burlap and straw. 

“No.”

“Harrington.” Jim struggles to stand again, hand reaching out. 

Steve flinches back. “Don’t touch me. Pig.” 

Ah, the apple never falls far. 

“Alright, Butterscotch. You want that proud Harrington nose to heal crooked, be my guest.” 

“Fuck you.” Steve traps a growl behind his row of perfect teeth. “Don’t call me that.” 

“Does it matter what I call you? Butterscotch? The fuck did you do under Starcourt before I arrived? What did you tell them?”

It’s not lost on Jim that things were made infinitely worse by his absence, but to get stuck under a mall and interrogated by a foreign power feels like real overkill. 

“I didn’t tell them anything!” But Steve’s not looking at him anymore. There is a distinct flush to the tip of his ears that ought to be lost in the seas of purple and red that paint his skin, but beam bright like beacons.

“Whatever. It’s too late. They already know about the kids, and it seems you’ve made quite the name for yourself.” 

Steve says nothing. Continues sulking. 

“At least they tossed the sailor uniform. That’s not the kind of attention we need right now.” 

“Alright, Miami Vice – it’s not like I had a choice of wardrobe.” 

“Do you know what happens to people like you in places like this, Harrington? Did you notice any women around?”

“They put a bag over my head – I wasn’t exactly searching for talent.”

“I’m telling you that there are no women around, Harrington, and you are probably the youngest person here.”

Steve's bottom lip drops down – though that could be due to the swelling – and he gapes for all of a moment before he finally clocks it; the light in his eyes dimming to a dull brown. Jim knows that colour well, because he saw it in the mirror every day before El entered his life.

“Gross.”

“But true.” Jim won’t sugarcoat or try to make things seem better than they are. Not right now. The kid has to know, so he can stick by Jim’s side and out of harm’s way. “I know you had some grand delusion about how this was going to go, but we’re not in Hawkins anymore. Fuck, we’re not even in America anymore. You do as your told and don’t give ‘em anything worth looking at– ”

“Hey!” 

“I mean don’t go drawing attention to yourself. Keep your head down. Stick with me, and well, I can’t promise you anything, but– ”

“Whatever.”

“Harrington.”

“Don’t call me that!” 

Jim feels the ache of his beaten eyes rolling. “Enough with the temper tantrum.”

“My name is Steve.”

“I know.”

“So, use it. I’m not Ri– my father and I’m not whatever pervy fantasy these dipshits made up.” A jerk of his shaven head, followed by a wince. “My mom calls me Steve.” 

His mom. Right. Wherever the hell she may be. Kitty Harrington has not graced Hawkins since the prior winter, according to Flo’s fairly reliable gossip. No wonder Steve’s been scooping ice cream in that godforsaken outfit – if anyone were to forget about her own son, it’d be Kitty. She’d forget her own head, only Rich has screwed it back on enough times to stick. 

It’s a little easy to forget that Steve is a kid. With parents. Sure, he’s just enough like Rich in his mannerisms to take notice, but the rest? That has to be all her. It doesn’t bode well, but Jim is inclined to reserve judgement, what with how many times the kid has thrown himself between others and danger; another fact that Jim can’t tell how he feels about just yet. 

He backs down, because they can’t afford to bicker. Because the kid is making a pretty simple request. He’d ask Steve to call him Jim, only that feels like a step too far. It’s less about the closeness and more about how much more capable Hop feels in such a dire situation. He’s not sure he’ll be able to get them both through this if he’s just Jim. 

Sighing, he stands on shaky legs to crouch by the kid. He’s soft and placating and every bit the good cop he was trained to be. 

“So, Steve, you gonna let me take a look at that nose?”

–

Some time later, they meet in the middle over what must be dinner. A cold metal tray carrying cold slop and colder water. It’s brackish and sharp. Bread is broken, a brittle snap, a piece each for them to gnaw on. 

Silence is no longer an issue – there is nothing more pressing than the hunger. By Jim’s count, it’s been almost a week since the mall and the monster and the 4th of July.

He does his best to think of anything but Joyce. Anything but El and the cut on her leg and how it’s healing. Instead, he takes all of that placeless devotion and stretches it out into the dank space. He reframes it – allows the presence of another to start a fire within him that will inevitably be stoked by the immediate violence surrounding them.

Jim watches Steve bite the bread with his molars, his injured jaw only stretching so wide. He thinks of another child with a buzzed head, gnawing on the corpse of a squirrel. 

By the end, Steve is gagging back the urge to chuck it all up again. 

“Easy,” Jim says, one hand on the boy’s back. “Just breathe through it.”

Steve’s eyes water, breath hitching with every stroke of Jim’s hand along his rigid spine. When he calms down enough to take a small sip of water from their shared tin cup, he says:

“Think the last thing I ate was popcorn.”

“Oh.”

“From the trash.”

“What?”

Steve waves a hand. “Threw it back up, don’t worry.” 

This has been the nature of the majority of their interactions. Steve is much like a baby who can’t keep milk down, but instead of milk, it’s alcohol. Or Russian slop. Or, that one time in Joyce’s house: every organ in his body. 

“They got you good, huh?” Jim asks after a time. “Before, I mean.” 

“It’s whatever.” The colour’s returned to his cheeks, all of this talk of vomit somehow a welcome distraction from actually vomiting. “They could stand to take a few pointers from Hargrove.” 

“How’d that go down?”

Steve shrugs, but it’s not very convincing. “Died.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not that I know of.” Except them, of course. Everyone will assume Jim’s died and, well, whatever they want to think of Steve will no doubt be heroic. “El’s okay. Mrs. Byers too.”

“You saw her?”

“El? Well, duh– Oh, Mrs. B? Yeah, she and that sweaty guy came up in the elevator.”

Came up. The realisation dawns on a long delay, like a malfunction or some faulty wiring in the synapses of his brain. Jim could blame the beatings, the starvation, the dehydration, the stress – he could blame any number of things – but he still feels stupid as all hell for not grasping it sooner:

Harrington had risked his life to save a dead man. 

“You gonna finish that?” Steve asks, bouncing back from his nausea like kids tend to, and pointing to Jim’s own hunk of bread. 

He shakes his head, no longer hungry. “Knock yourself out.” 

–

They are put to work the following morning. For a brief period, Jim had worried that torture followed by a painful death would be the extent of their stay, but there is plenty to be done, it seems. 

Hauled from their cell and down a bleak corridor, which opens wider into barred doorways that line each side, the other prisoners bark as the pair pass. The noise accumulates into a cacophony of howling that echoes in their wake long beyond the leering faces. Jim wants to stand right by the kid and shield him from the worst of it, but he worries that it would only make things worse. 

The room they are led to is not particularly wide, but stretches long into an indiscernible dark. There are showerheads attached to rusty pipes, and dark green tiles blackened by flecks of mould. Mercifully, it’s empty. But Jim’s not about to start thanking anybody (let alone God) for this fact, when there are still four guards in the room, who think nothing of manhandling him and Harrington towards the wall. 

He has a flash of being hosed down only days before and wonders – worries – whether the kid got the same treatment. But the kid’s not really a kid, certainly not to these people. He’s young, sure, but were he a little less conventionally attractive, the fact of his youth would be of little concern; as callous as that feels to think within the safety of his own mind, Jim’s not going to worry over kindnesses when their very lives are at stake. 

After unchaining their ankles, the guards scowl. One shouts into the cavernous space:

“Wash.” 

They get shoved at the wall. Harrington’s hands smack against the tile, thankfully sparing his face from further bruising. Jim starts stripping, but the kid is frozen, so Jim eyes him imploringly, knowing – Jesus, he knows – what he’s asking of him. They have no choice. It’s better than wearing wet clothes in this cold. It’s better than letting the guards do the stripping for him. 

“American!”

Steve doesn’t need telling twice. He drops the dusty grey pants – they’d neglected to give him underwear, but Hop seems to be in the same boat on that one if the bare ass in Steve’s periphery is anything to go by – and stands for a moment feeling quite like a battered and bloody Winnie the Pooh, before delicately shedding his shirt. 

There is no soap, and when Steve’s assigned guard slams his fist against the shower’s knob, it spurts cold water over Steve’s newly bare head. Knives slice his flesh, he can’t help but shiver. He’d rather live in his own filth than be subjected to this, but the guard grabs him by the shoulder and forces him to open his stance. He spins Steve like a rotisserie chicken and makes sure every part of his skin is sodden. Hop does this part himself, though he receives some shoves mostly for show, and when the whole process is over, they’re both given new, thicker clothes, with underwear and socks to boot. 

It’s like his birthday and Christmas all rolled into one. 

Steve dons his scratchy sweater like it’s one-hundred percent cashmere. He curls the sleeves around his palms and hopes to regain some feeling in his fingers. The pants are a little tight on him, but he’ll survive, because they’re thick with some mockery of wool – stiff and cold and stinking, but proper pants nonetheless.

Without further ceremony, they’re chained back up and herded towards a room with long tables that can’t be called a cafeteria, but is about as good as it’s going to get. Steve stays half a step behind Hop, because there’s safety in that. Because even if it makes him feel like a big wuss – he knows those prisoners were barking at him, alright? – it’s what Hop would want him to do. 

So, Steve does what Hop wants every step of the way, and sits close to him after they retrieve their respective trays of grey, sloppy food. 

The tables fill around them, and there must be more than that one corridor they’re on, because the place is teeming with bodies. Steve slides closer again to Hop on the bench, makes the most of the warmth he naturally emanates – is that a man thing? Richard is like ice, so maybe it’s just a Hop thing. 

He’s so busy lingering on further comparisons between both men, that he doesn’t notice another prisoner step up behind him until a heavy hand lands on his shoulder and Steve feels a hot, rough breath in his ear.

“You are very sweet, they tell me.” 

Without thinking, Steve does as he always does and shrugs – hoping to dislodge this stranger’s hand – he cocks his head with the kind of smug indifference that would have roused some laughter from his classmates back in Hawkins. Hop kicks him at the ankles. Steve gets laughter, alright – howling guffaws from the men sharing their table, who likely have very little English, but can read body language better than most – but it’s not even remotely the same. The satisfaction shrivels into nothing but ash. Hop grabs him by the elbow, drags him closer, practically tucked in his armpit. 

Hop doesn’t stand to match the other man. He hardly rises to the bait, other than to say with such severity that even Steve feels scolded:

“You wanna hold onto your teeth? Leave my boy alone.” 

My boy. 

“The boy does not belong to you, American.” 

The man is big and wearing clothes that match their own. His shark smile shines golden and rotten. Around him, there are men of all kinds, but Steve can’t see or hear a single one of them, because, God, he’s finally getting what he’s always wanted, he only had to jump into literal hell to get it. 

“You blind as well as stupid?” Hop grabs Steve by the chin. He winces with the pain. “Look at him.”

Yes, Steve thinks. Look at me! 

But Hop’s putting every ounce of his energy into establishing whatever kind of dominance is the currency in a place like this. It’s the Hawkins High cafeteria, and they can’t afford to be the band geeks or the bookworms. But if Hopper’s the king, what does that make Steve?

Left with no time to ponder it, the altercation is halted by the buzz of an intercom. Steve lets Hopper manhandle him off the bench and toward the guards who are calling them for work. 

–

It’s a single cot they’re expected to share. Were this Hawkins, where necessity did not demand it, Steve might have felt a sliver of shame or embarrassment at sharing a measly three feet wide mattress with the Chief of Police. 

Or, far deeper than that, a gnawing guilt at the sheer length of time he’s dreamed of just this. 

But this is a wild and fantastical place. A neverending winter; trees and mountains and tundra and darkness to the very ends of the earth. Terror-inducing, the stuff of nightmares. 

In all his years, Steve’s never been held through such things. Through the pain in his joints from a long day’s work; through dreams plagued by horrors both mundane and supernatural. Warmed through the cold – the rotting blanket’s thickest parts pulled tight to his chin, a heavy arm thrown over his back. 

They have gone from struggling altercations next to police cruisers, to standing shoulder to shoulder in preparation for battle. This is no natural progression, no normal thing, but Hop takes to it like it’s easy. Like he’s been doing it all along. 

It’s the stuff of his wildest dreams: the heart of his father beating steady and slow against his back, the rough timbre coaxing him back to sleep. Steve tries to match his breathing. 

–

Hop cut his leg hauling sleepers a few days ago and refused to let Steve look at it. Which was mostly annoying at first, because he bitched all night long as he dug splinters from the wound, but grew far more worrying once it started to weep and smell. 

The wound is infected. Badly. 

It’s not like Steve’s an expert or anything – his general measure for wellness falls into the categories of good and bad and very bad – but he’d put money on it: Hop’s got a fever. He was like a furnace the night before but his teeth kept chattering while he slept. Nevermind the sweating.

In the morning, Hop can’t get out of bed. Steve tries to tell someone, to get help, but the guards refuse to listen – pretend they can’t understand him or simply sneer in his face – and haul his ass to finish both of their work instead. 

All the while, one guard watches him, gaze never lifting, even when Steve matches it. It must be him that Hop’s been talking to – when he dips out at dinner time and spends too long in the work shed; when he speaks quietly over Steve’s head to a shape in the cell door, thinking him asleep. But why? And at what cost? Is there some way he can help? If there is, Steve’s the only one who can ask for it. Hop needs him. 

Steve’s been smuggling food from dinner – bread in his pocket, dry crackers and beans – but he can hardly smuggle water (he collects what little drips in through the bars of their cell, and none of it's enough to fix something this far gone. So, during his next work shift, Steve’s axe mysteriously breaks, and he must request a trip to the work shed to retrieve another. Of course, Hop’s guard, observant as he is, is the one to take  him, but the hardest part still lies ahead.  

Once in the safe and unseen confines of the shed, Steve turns to face the fair-haired man, hands up in his best attempt at looking utterly pathetic and harmless. 

“My– My dad’s leg is getting worse.” He stammers this out to the man’s flat stare. “I know you talk to him. Could you– I mean, is there anything that can help?”

The guard’s cold eyes flicker with something familiar, but Steve can’t name it for what it is. There is an ache in him, a longing that’s become swept up in that light and panicky feeling that used to come when he couldn’t find his parents in a crowd; when he was crouched at the starting line, ready to sprint. 

“I’ll do anything.” Something cold and vile flops around in his stomach as he lowers his hands, and reaches one forward to rest against the man’s belt. Richard’s voice screams inside his head, but he does his best to put as much emphasis as possible on his broken words. “Anything you want. Please?”

Because he’s no idiot: without medicine, Hop will die. This isn’t like the movies, where things come on slowly and build to suit the story. This has happened all at once, because that’s how life works. Tommy’s uncle lost a finger to a deep-rooted splinter back when they were in middle school, and this is a heck of a lot bigger than that. 

And Hop never needed to tell him how this might work – again, Steve’s seen the movies – because he’s no stranger to lingering looks. He understands better than anyone the transactional nature of affection. In fact, it’s the only kind of affection he’s experienced. This, well, this would be decidedly worse than any of that, but Hop is his dad. And, above all that, Hopper is a good man. One of the best. He doesn’t deserve an end like this. 

He’s about to speak again, to well and truly seal his fate, when the man’s hand comes down against his cheek in a brutal smack. 

“You will never say that again.”

The heat of Steve’s cheek is stark against the sharp cold. Every plea he’d been planning in his head has fallen out of his ear on impact. He simply gapes at the guard, who looks off toward the wall as if deep in thought.

“I will see what I can do,” he eventually says. “Tell your father this will be added to his fee.” 

Steve, utterly dumbfounded, nods. “Yeah, sure. Of course. Thank you.” 

“Do not look so happy. You just got hit in the face.” 

Steve, robotically, says, “I just got hit in the face.” 

Get with the program, Steve. 

“I am going to push you now.”

And he does. The guard shoves Steve back out the door and into the merciless wind, new axe swinging in his hand. His comrades guffaw, as if what might have transpired between them in the shed was a topic of popular conversation. 

Steve feels his other cheek flush with embarrassment. Oh well, he thinks, at least it’s keeping his face warm. 

–

That night, some white linen and a bottle of what is apparently – after a cursory sniff that singed the hairs from his nostrils – vodka, is shoved through the slot of their cell door. Which… whatever. Hop’s on death’s door and his guard is, what? Giving them one final toast?

Then Steve remembers what Mr Clarke told his class in middle school, with a petri dish and a microscope, eyes wide in excitement: alcohol kills bacteria! 

He clambers onto the bed, careful of Hop’s leg, and hangs over him to feel his breath against his face. 

“Hopper?” Steve whispers. Nothing. The man is still and cold, yet sweating through his clothes. The only real signs of life are the little groans that escape his open mouth every few minutes, by Steve’s count, which is endearing, if not mostly concerning.

“Hop?” Steve tries again, hand to his forehead – which is still far too hot in the freezing cold of their cell. “I’m gonna need you to wake up now.” 

Then, he gives it one more whisper: “Dad?”

No luck. Well, there’s nothing else for it. 

Steve whips the threadbare blanket back and eyes the wound for all of a second before he tips the bottle slightly and soaks it in vodka. 

Hop’s eyes shoot open, bloodshot and dilated. 

“Jesus fucking Christ!” 

His chest is heaving with frantic breaths. Steve feels awful. He would have washed Hop’s leg with soapy water if he had any, but needs must. 

“Here.” He passes the bottle to Hop. “Take a swig of this.”

Hop downs all but half before Steve can stop him. 

“A swig, I said!”

“Harrington?” Bleary-eyed and waxy, Hop’s sweaty brow is pinched in concentration. 

“Try again.”

There’s indignance on Hop’s face before it settles into something more… exasperated. Fond, even. 

“Steve.”

“Ding, ding, ding!” 

Steve takes the white sheet and shreds it into strips. Hopefully it’s clean, even if it looks rather dusty in the dim light. Hop’s leg is dead weight like the lumber they carry through thick snow, but Steve is far more careful as he hoists it onto his lap. 

“I’m gonna wrap this now,” he says. “It’ll hurt, but we have to keep it clean.”

“Kid… what’s going on?”

He looks soft, a little pathetic – like Dustin that one time Miss Henderson called and asked Steve to babysit him during a particularly vicious bout of flu that she couldn’t get time off work for. Only Dustin was wearing Wolverine pajamas, and Hop is wearing pants and a shirt that he hasn’t changed in two months. 

“You’re sick,” says Steve. 

“No, I know that.” Hop leans up on his elbows to observe Steve as he works. “But where did you get this?”

“Bed sheets,” Steve answers quickly, though their bed has never had them.

“And the vodka?”

Again, Steve tries for the smirk, the shrug. He tries to keep his gaze focused on the task at hand, because it’s hard to lie to Hop when their matching eyes meet. 

“Don’t worry about it. Get some rest.”

And Hop, who’s exhausted and weak, who’s growing paler with every strip of gauze Steve layers over his leg, can do nothing but comply.

The following morning, just inside their cell, there are two buckets of water and a single cup of murky, steaming liquid. It smells salty, with an overpowering whiff of garlic. Hop is roused by it, but can’t sit up on his own. Steve slots in behind him like he used to do for his mother – only his mother is slight and fits snugly in the cradle of his arms – and pulls at his chin. 

“Little sips,” Steve says, coaxing and ever so close to begging; for how tired he is, for how worry hangs over him like a guillotine at the prospect of the day ahead. “That’s it.” 

Hop manages half of it before he begins to splutter. “You’re okay.” He uses the sleeve of his shirt to wipe away broth that has spilled across Hop’s chin. “I’ll try and get some more today. See if your guy has anything else.” 

After he lovingly tucks Hopper back in to the best of his ability – he’s not sure how it’s supposed to go, as his mother tucked him in with the energy of someone trying to mummify their son – Steve heads to the canteen following the knock of an impatient guard. 

His heart thrums at the thought that this is something illicit, that he will get in trouble if he’s caught helping Hop, when he’s on his way to where he’s supposed to be and will work hard enough for two people today, even if it makes his hands bleed and his bones ache.

He’s almost in the clear, can hear the quiet clinking and chatter of the breakfast line from the bottom of the steps and is about to be the last to enter when he is grabbed at his collar by a large hand. 

His heart drops to his stomach, the breath leaves his chest. Before him is the guard from yesterday, looking displeased as ever, his blue eyes searching Steve. 

“Fancy meeting you here.” Steve croaks as the grip on his collar tightens. “Thanks for the– ”

“Silence.” 

“Sorry.” 

His bright eyes dart back and forth, always keeping Steve in his periphery. This close, the man’s features aren’t so harsh as Steve thought. In fact, they're rather soft. Scared, even, just hidden under his mossy green uniform and stern moustache.  

“I cannot give you anything now,” he says, sounding convincing enough in his regret. “You will be caught with it in your pockets during work.”

Steve’s heart picks up its pace to an impossible extent. But there is something light brimming in his chest. It’s the lightest he’s felt in weeks. 

“There’s more?”

The guard nods, loosening his grip. “At dinner I will slip you the rest. Give it to your American, get him well, and our deal will still stand.” 

With that, he drags Steve toward the canteen, surely kicking up some fuss about how late the prisoner is. But Steve hardly minds – it’s a lot easier to get through the day with some light at the end of the tunnel. 

At dinner, Steve lines up for his food and does not dare slip some extra with so much at risk. No, whatever the guard has will be enough. It has to be. Only later, when he’s safely tucked into he and Hop’s shared cell, does he dare to check that the guard had been successful. As he stands with his back to the door, Steve’s fist closes around something plastic and round that he’s felt in his pocket from somewhere around the halfway mark of his meal. Its rattling is music to his ears. 

–

In the months that follow, Steve’s left eye grows increasingly fuzzy. This is no big deal, really – Steve’s always wondered if he might need glasses – but lately it’s been worse. In fact, there are times when he misses things entirely; has to be steered bodily by Hop’s heavy hand, misses gestures and looks and the approach of people he’d best avoid at all costs. 

But Steve is doing pretty well on the railroad crew despite this. It’s only when he begins missing nails, cutting pieces of timber crooked, and almost decapitates a fellow prisoner as he miscalculates the distance between a two-by-four and his head, that things grow pretty dire.  

That last one in particular gets him a swift tackle to the snowy bank and a punch to said eye before Hop intervenes. It also earns him a makeshift eyepatch tied in a knot around his head. 

“Depth perception’s all fucked,” says Hop, leaning over him before bed one night. He’s using the quick light from one of their precious matches to get a good look at Steve’s bad eye – which has apparently grown milky and bisected at the pupil. Steve’s not really sure what that means, but if the shadows on Hop’s face are anything to go by, it’s bad.

“You in pain?” Hop asks, carefully laying the patch back over his bad eye. 

“No more than usual,” Steve says, groaning as he sits up. 

“And what the hell does that mean?”

“Means my bones hurt from the cold and I’ve got splinters up my asscrack and I have a headache from all your snoring.” 

“So long as it’s not a migraine…” says Hop, grinning growing wider by the second. Then: “My snoring? Are you sure it’s not yours? Never could set that nose right.” 

Steve huffs, curling his legs into a criss cross to retain some warmth. “Thought we were being attacked by bears the first time I heard it.”

Hop yanks their blanket back, having already made sure it’s tucked at its edges. “Oh, my apologies – must have been me. Yours sound a little more like– ”

The noise he proceeds to make can only be described as bubbly, light, the honk-shoo, honk-shoo of kittens and farm animals and newborn babies. 

Steve pushes him off the cot. 

–

Most days aren’t so good. 

It’s hard when he’s alone and there are hands that linger too long or too rough. He frets when he can’t see Hop – which is almost always, now that he’s been switched to munitions – when they don’t go over the plan he’s made with Dmitri (Joyce will help them. Joyce has never known how to leave anything well enough alone, according to Hop) every morning before breakfast. 

Steve knows he’s an adult now, and he’s played sports all his life so he ought to be used to being buck naked in front of others, but it’s not so easy when you’re the youngest. Certainly not the shortest, but maybe the skinniest. He’s never been the skinniest in his life. He worries about his teeth, his bad eye; he worries that he’ll be stuck feeling and looking like this until he dies. He worries that dying isn’t as far off as he originally thought. 

There are times when the work is rote and easy and mundane, and there are times when it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done, and the words and the hits cut so deep that he’d much rather the tower of Richard Harrington looming over him – spit flying from his mouth, signet ring glinting in the dim light – for the familiarity in that particular pain. 

He begins forgetting what home feels like. He wonders if he ever had a home in the first place. 

“Chin up.”

Hop says this each morning when they part. It’s hard to remember and even easier to forget. 

But Steve holds tight to the feeling, letting it warm him like the light of a buttercup. That scarred spot Hop tips without thought, a tether to the world when he feels his mind float far up and out and away from his body.

It’s more of an anchor than a tether, really, and it’s the only thing to hold onto in the weeks following the incident in the munitions chamber. 

–

Jim isn’t one bit happy about the change to Steve’s work shift.

The distance between them, no eyes on the kid from dawn to dusk, the increasing leers and taunting across the canteen. The barks have turned to howls. Steve flushes to his ears, showers quicker than anyone (on the rare occasion they’re allowed one). Each time Jim asks, he brushes it off, rubs at his eye when he knows he’s not supposed to, chews on the healing skin around his fingernails. 

Dmitri is none the wiser, but the look on his face doesn’t bode well. And, believe it or not, Jim has asked the kid. Outright. The little voice in his head that sounds exactly like Joyce – his guiding light, as it were – demanded as much, but the conversation went like this:

“How’s the factory?” Jim had been careful to ask this while they were in the middle of eating, because Steve is always more inclined to reveal something when he’s distracted by another task. 

“It’s fine.”

No dice. 

“Well…” Jim had decided not to come on too strong, but has very little experience in doing so. Sara was always easier to talk to, but Sara was younger than Steve and El. Sara thought her dad was without fault, and died before she could ever realise the truth. “Is anyone bothering you?”

Here, Steve had snorted; his nose whistling where it didn’t set right. 

“Everything here bothers me.” 

Which had been enough of a red flag in and of itself. While the Russian tundra they have been doomed to freeze in is nothing short of doom and gloom, Steve’s always had a relatively sunny disposition; the kind of bliss that accompanies ignorance. Jim’s known it from the moment he first laid eyes on the kid, who seemed so happy to be spending his birthday with someone that he didn’t even care about being arrested. 

In fact, Jim recalled, he seemed to want it. 

“You know, you could always– ” Jim coughed. “Talk to me about it.”

“Dad,” Steve had whined, tacking a disgusted little sneer on the end. “The other boys are bullying me!”

It was as if someone had plucked Richard Harrington from Chicago or New York or Topanga or wherever the fuck, put him on a plane, and flown him to a prison camp in the Russian wilderness. Not cause for concern necessarily – why wouldn’t the boy take after his father? – but jarring all the same. 

Even now, as he sits and waits for the kid at their usual spot for dinner, two bowls before him, he feels the ache of that emotional whiplash. The sense that Steve is pulling away and retreating into that spiky shell of his, which cuts and maims if you get too close. 

Jim only knows what it’s like, because he’s got one too. 

So absorbed in his anxiety, so fixated on devising a plan of action with Joyce’s voice in his head, Jim only notices that his cellmate has arrived because of the sheer noise that accompanies his entrance. 

The jeering is a wall of sound that erupts only when Steve’s fuzzy head breaches the doorway of the canteen. Even the guards who stand sentry at its sides laugh at the sheer volume of it. Along the tables to the right, where many of the current munitions crew sit, sounds the slamming of fists and the rattling of utensils. 

They’re all, everyone single one of them, looking at Steve. 

Jim can’t help himself: he rises immediately and crosses the room, pushing past men on the way back to their tables with dinner in hand, to grab the boy. Jim’s mind, void of Joyce’s influence, is chanting a gruff protect, protect, protect, as if they’re in the midst of a battle and his world has sharpened itself to such pointed focus that he can only manage the most simple directions. 

Steve pulls back on his approach, brushing Jim’s hand off his arm like an annoying fly that keeps trying to land on his clothes. He moves past and makes for their usual table. When he sits and lifts his fork to begin eating, Jim sees that his hands are shaking. 

Jim’s heart is beating so loud that it drowns out all the jeering. The men are in hysterics, smacking each other on their backs in a twisted mimicry of a high school cafeteria. But Steve’s not the butt of the joke, no: Jim is. He’s who they’re laughing at, and Steve is the one who had to suffer for it. 

‘It’ being something so far beyond Jim’s comprehension, yet the very thing he had warned Steve about. The very thing he himself had spent so much time worrying over instead of sleeping. Surely not. It can’t be, but… what else? Calls of Butterscotch across the room, and the guards’ seeming involvement in the joke. Steve’s complete and utter shut down, his inability to meet Jim’s eye. 

But Jim doesn’t have time to think on it any further, because his body has decided for him. His battered, calloused hands have wrapped themselves around the throat of the main perpetrator – a tall and tattooed worker from the munitions chamber, the very one who had approached Steve on their first day in gen pop. 

“What did you do?” Jim growls between clenched teeth. If he opens his mouth too wide, he fears he might go for the jugular. 

The prisoner grins, two gold teeth glinting like a vampire in the low light. 

“Your boy,” he starts, slow and taunting. Around them, the canteen has quietened in curiosity. Steve is no longer in his field of vision. “He is very hard worker, yes? Who does he belong to now, Amer– ” 

Jim doesn’t need to hear anymore. His forehead slams right into the man’s nose, cartilage crunching, spilling blood over both their faces. 

The canteen explodes with sound. Vaguely, Jim is aware that Steve is calling him, that guards are approaching with dogs barking and snapping their jaws, but it’s hard to care very much about any of it when he’s got the cause of his– his kid’s pain clutched between his fists, crumbling under his boots. He throws the man, who goes flying across two benches and a table, tin trays clattering to the floor, prisoners darting out of harm’s way; others darting into the fray. 

He should have known, he should have asked sooner, clearer. Held tighter and protected Steve from it all the way he couldn’t protect Sara, or even El. 

As if he even falls into that same category when Steve is an adult, and not Jim’s ward. El was– is a child. Steve may have shit parents, but at least he has them. He was born and raised and given a clean and warm roof over his head and Jim took him on when the kid never needed that. He only came along to help, and look what that’s got him. 

Other prisoners pile on. Jim feels a shock to his back, his hip. Through a sea of warring bodies, his eyes meet their mirror – the only one Steve has left. He’s crying, Jim thinks, as something slams against the back of his head. 

The black hole keeps getting bigger. It has swallowed Steve up. 

–

Solitary is dark and empty. It is unbearably cold, especially without another body next to him. Jim thinks of Steve and what will inevitably happen to him without any protection, and can’t keep a single meal down. Which is unfortunate, because his meals have reduced to one a day and have worsened considerably in quality. 

Dmitri hasn’t come to visit, hasn’t brought any news about Joyce and the message he supposedly sent. 

There are no cold feet pressing against his shins, no elbows nudging him during meals, no chains tangling with his own. No fidgeting and no fuzzy crown grazing his chin. Jim marks the days by what little he can see of the winter sun and bashes his head against the wall when he loses count. 

He sings songs he recalls from childhood, stretches and works out as best he can in such a confined, poorly lit space. Yelling is inevitable, with the desperation he feels. Jim curses his captors, Owens, the US government. He curses himself most of all, but it does nothing to make him feel better. 

Eventually, a general comes to visit. The one that called Steve ‘Butterscotch’ on that first day of torture; who caught the kid and his girlfriend under the mall in the first place. 

“You miss him?” Ozerov taunts, his hot breath fanning over Jim’s face. “You going to cry like your boy did when he saw his papa under the shopping mall?” Here, the man does a poor imitation of Steve’s accent. “Oh, Daddy, please, please, please! You got to wake up! I need you!”

And if he hadn’t all the time in the world to think about it, obsess over the details, Jim might never have made the connection. Because calling the Chief of Police “dad” once while drunk can be forgiven, calling him that a second time while severely concussed and exhausted is yet another blunder, but nothing worth lingering on. 

Because Jim knows Richard Harrington, and he can imagine well enough that he is lacking in the paternal affection department. He knows that Steve was a child who undoubtedly, in his professional opinion, was neglected. In the atypical sense – when the parents are rich and revered, when they have the mayor in their back pockets, Tom Holloway wrapped around their little fingers; when Steve was athletic and popular and never came to school with bruises that weren’t from fights with his peers, never came to school hungry, because his parents wrote cheques that far surpassed the cost of cafeteria lunches. 

In the sense that there are other ways to starve a child. 

But in Russia, Steve is truly starving. Jim feels the poke of his ribs, sees the hollow in his cheeks and beneath his jaw. Gone are the muscles and what little baby fat he retained from his teens. And despite all this, he smiles. He smiles almost every day, trapped in this hell with Jim. This hell he chose for Jim. 

And why? Why would he choose such a thing? Why did he come back when it meant certain death? Jim’s never been able to figure it out. 

But the pieces are beginning to slot together, and he doesn’t like the picture they create. 

–

They let him out of the hole during dinner. 

Even the dim lights hurt his sensitive eyes, but Jim faces them head on for the sake of one thing:

Above the filthy masses, the wary glances and threatening glares, he searches for a glimpse of Steve, and for a moment he sees nothing. Panic seizes his chest, playing out every awful scenario that plagued him in the hole. 

“Christ…” Jim is breathless until he spots him. Ears with nothing to hide behind, the band of his eyepatch sitting twisted on the crown of his head. He walks toward Steve from the left, so the kid doesn’t see him at first, not until Jim’s fingers tap twice against the table so as to not frighten him. 

“Hop?” 

At that one exhalation, that delighted grin painting the kid’s face, Jim feels something within him lighten. Steve looks as unscathed as a teenager in a prison camp could, with nothing other than a dark bag weighing his only visible eye. He perks up in his seat and grabs Jim’s arm, tugging him down so they’re shoulder to shoulder. Jim doesn’t have a tray and he’s too late to get one – this feels like a conscious choice from their captors – but he doesn’t care one bit. He’s content to share with the kid at his side, so long as his side is where he’ll stay. 

“How you been?” Jim asks quietly, giving him another sideways glance from head to toe. “Anybody hurt you?” 

Steve snaps their stale loaf of bread in half and shoves it between his teeth. “It’s fine. Dmitri won’t let ‘em.”

“What?”

Steve looks at him with thinly veiled exasperation. “Enzo? He’s been taking the night shifts.” 

The night shifts. The implication makes Jim feel weak. They can’t trust a single person in this place, bar Dmitri. And even that feels like a flimsy thing at the best of times. “What about the day shifts?”

“No need.” Steve tries and fails to hide his grin, but it all comes tumbling out. “I won a fight.”

“Excuse me?”

“Look, it wasn’t out of sheer strength or anything,” Steve explains. “Henderson said I’m resourceful and surprisingly spatially aware." Ironic now, given his eye. "So I tried playing to my strengths for once.” 

“And…?”

“And I hit Dracula there over the head with a tyre iron.” His bouncing head nods toward the gold-toothed prisoner from munitions, whose eyes are red and swollen and incredibly bloodshot. “Which only knocked him down, but once he was on my level I jabbed my thumbs in his eyes. Because everyone’s eyes are soft, right? Don’t matter how much muscle you’ve got.” 

“Huh.”

“It was kind of gross, honestly. But I think he’ll be fine. It’s looking nothing like this, anyway,” he says, pointing at his own mangled socket. 

Jim takes his hand, guides it back down to the table. With a scruff to the kid’s head, he assures: 

“Still handsome as ever.”

“Well…” Steve stabs at the mystery meat they have been given, smiling bashfully. “Take after my dad, I guess.”

There it is. 

The doubt has a way of creeping back in. If it were a danger or a threat, he’d know to ask – he’s not making that mistake again – but this is something else entirely. This has the potential to be far more frightening than creatures from another dimension, torture, or children with supernatural powers. Jim has no idea what to do with it. 

–

Hop said that Dmitri said that Joyce is coming. They’re going to meet her at a church. 

Steve imagines his own mother in her winter furs, getting on a plane to Alaska and on another, decidedly less legal plane, to the Soviet Union, and chuckles into the pillow. 

“What?” Hopper grumbles, stuffing his feet into his boots. He didn’t sleep very well last night. 

“Nothing.” 

“Hm.” He takes his coat from where it’s draped over Steve – it’s been particularly cold these days – and nudges him with his knee. “Time to get up.” 

“I know, I know.” Steve winces, swings his feet and stops before they can touch the floor. Hop slides his boots over. “I’m going to miss this bed, is all.” 

“Oh, I’m sure.” 

It’s meant to be funny, and Steve is smiling, but there is a hollow feeling inside his chest; like he could push through with his fist and there would be nothing to touch. He won’t miss the bed, not with its rusted springs and scratchy straw filling, but he will miss having an excuse to be so close to Hop. 

He’s had sleep problems since childhood – the kind that had his mother fretting and Richard so frustrated that he began sleeping at his apartment in the city – and it’s only worsened with age. What will he do when they get home? He won’t get to sleep in the same house as Hopper, let alone the same bed. 

God, he berates himself. Grow the hell up. 

Today is the day, he has to be ready. Hop will be working on the railroad crew, but Dmitri reckons he can get Steve out in enough time. Dmitri's been on the ammo shift ever since Hop got back from the hole – some weird deal they struck that had Steve seething, because he’s got it handled now and doesn’t need a babysitter – and is going to cause some kind of distraction so that Steve can slip out a service entrance and into the forest on the western side of the camp. 

This means that, unlike Hopper, Steve doesn’t need to slip his ankle cuffs. Or that’s what they’ve been assuming, at least. Working in munitions means Steve has access to bolt cutters, though it’s rare that he’s ever allowed to use them with his bum eye. Mostly, his work involves sorting scrap metal and helping one of the older prisoners – who was a Ukrainian chemist and anarchist, and taught Steve how to cuss in both languages – fill bullet casings with gunpowder. 

“How’s the ankle?” he asks Hop, who’s been huffing and puffing and wincing about the injuries he’s sustained by trying to get his cuffs off. 

“Don’t remind me,” says Hop. But Steve has to remind him, when the last time his legs were injured almost resulted in literal death. He must catch the furrow in Steve’s brow, because he continues with: “I’ll clean it at the church, don’t worry. Enzo said they’ve got booze. And cigarettes.”

“Cigarettes?” Steve's heartbeat increases tenfold. He thinks his mouth might be watering. 

What he wouldn’t give…

Jim hates that he has to bring it back to reality and make sure Steve knows how this has to go, but despite the excitement that the potential of cigarettes brings, he runs through the plan once more. It’s almost time for them to head out for breakfast when he tries for one more thing. 

“Kid, I…” 

Steve looks up at him with those wide and shining eyes, and there are so many things he could say, if every single one of them didn’t get lost somewhere between his heart and his mouth. 

“I’ll get us out of here,” is what he settles with, knowing it’s as false a promise as he could ever utter. Saying what he really feels? Well, that would have been the truth at least. 

“I know.” Steve’s faith is unwavering; his smile crooked and utterly charming. 

This is where they should hug, but it’s no goodbye. So instead, he tips the kid’s chin like always, thumb pressing against the pinkish scar that rests just beneath his lip. 

“Chin up, huh?”

It hasn’t been easy in the last few months. Sometimes, this is the only touch Steve will tolerate. Their sleeping situation has made this difficult – Jim’s slept on the floor more times than he can count on two hands, which only makes the kid feel worse. 

“Chin up,” Steve repeats, and it’s a temporary balm to these worries; a comfort Jim will allow himself for the few remaining moments they will share. 

“Alright,” Jim says, after what feels like a small eternity but must have only been two minutes. “Stick with Dmitri and I’ll see you at the church.”

Steve nods. “See you at the church.”

Jim turns just as a guard opens the locks on their door. “Hey, Hop?” he hears from behind him. 

“Yeah?”

The door opens and the guard grunts at them, gesturing with his gun for them to head for the walkway. 

“Nothing,” Steve says against his back. “See you later.”

–

When the alarm sounds, he knows Hop must have made it. 

For the most part, Steve tries not to be caught alone while working. And if he has to be – when Artem tells him to sort through the copper wiring in the storage closet, or when he goes to the dank bathroom so he can lean his aching skull against the cold concrete walls – Dmitri comes with; a scowling shadow with a few inches on him, who hasn’t left him alone since he got cornered by that guy with the gold teeth and all his buddies, and Hop got sent to the hole. 

What a time that was. 

Steve is alone this time. Really, truly alone. Dmitri’s running interference on the other side of the chamber, roughing up some unsuspecting prisoner – probably the aforementioned gold-toothed creep – to cause a distraction while Steve, who made sure the bins were empty from the day before, had gone straight to storage to snap the chains on his cuffs. It’s slow going, and he ends up having to lean his full body weight against the handles to create enough pressure that the chain will snap. But one down, one to go. 

“Jesus,” he curses, wiping sweat from his brow. 

He missed the link the first few times, with his hand-eye coordination still sorely lacking on occasion. It’s only a matter of time before they’re all herded back to their cells, so he has to be quick. Outside, Dmitri is yelling something. Not normally one to escalate, Steve worries that it’s overkill for the prison guard. But if he tells everyone to go back to work, they’re all going to notice how long Steve has been missing. 

He snaps the final link. 

He’s wired after that; smiling into the poorly lit room for his success, for knowing Hop made it out and they’ll be back together soon. 

There is just enough room for him to slip down into the vent that will lead to the service entrance unnoticed, and he’s about to make it – about to slot the grate back above his head to make it seem like he escaped by some other means – when a hand reaches down and grabs him by the collar. 

Steve dangles there like a cat, choking, scratching at his own neck, as more footsteps gather behind and above him. As a voice he’s dreaded since that very first day under the mall lets out a delighted laugh, and the barrel of a gun kisses the crown of his head. 

“Hello, Butterscotch,” says Ozerov. “Leaving us without a goodbye?”

–

When Jim is shoved in a cell with Dmitri and some other prisoners, no Steve in sight, he feels the meagre amounts of peanut butter he’d managed to swallow from Yuri’s cache at the church threaten to make a reappearance.

“Where’s Steve?” He slams Dmitri against the wall. “Where the hell is he?!”

Dmitri’s crisp blue eyes are now dull and tired. “I am sorry.”

“What?”

With how he slouches, how he doesn’t fight Jim’s grip, the man slips from his hold. “I thought he would be here.” 

“Why?” Jim shoves him once more for good measure, before letting go and stepping back. “What happened?”

“I could not get the boy out on time.” Dmitri slumps back onto the frozen bench. “We were separated when they captured me. I thought he might have made it to the church alone.” 

Ice cold dread sinks Jim’s gut. He slumps down next to his former captor. 

“He wasn’t there.”

Dmitri argues, “It would have taken him longer.” 

Jim wants to believe it, but he’s never been that naive. Part of him wants Dmitri to know that –  so he tells him that this is well and truly over. He’s not cursed, he is the curse. Sara, El… now Steve. And with all that Ozerov said to him, all the pieces that have started to click seamlessly into place, Jim’s beginning to wonder if he might have cursed Steve worst of all. 

Through the noise in his head, Dmitri asks “What about your boy? Is he sick too?”

“He’s not…”

But even as he’s about to say it, he knows that’s not true. Steve’s not what? With those eyes and that jaw, nose similarly straight despite all the breaks between them. With a single night spent hanging off Kitty Harrington that swims before Jim in darkness. God, he didn’t… did he? And worst of all: why did Steve know? It explained so much about Kitty and Rich and all the shit Steve had ever said to him while he looked up at someone teenagers normally hated and kept insisting that Jim ought to know his birthday. 

Jesus Christ. 

“He’s not what?” Dmitri asks. “Your son? Ha,” he laughs. “I would not bet against those odds, American.” 

–

Steve wakes to a chittering in his ear. He is alone. There is a needle shoved into the crook of his elbow and it burns. 

Where is Dmitri? Is he alright? Was Ozerov really there or did Steve’s worst nightmares conjure him like a bad trip? 

His stomach rolls and he thinks of Robin and her toothy smile, and the vomit that stained their uniforms. 

He thinks of Robin and tries so hard to hold that moment, even an image of her in his mind. Nancy. Max. Lucas. Dustin. There are only glimpses that are swiftly soaked in an inky black. 

He can’t even picture his Mom. 

“Dad?” he gasps, voice hoarse and broken. Because maybe Hop is still here. A small part of Steve hopes that’s true; a far larger part hopes that Hopper made it to the church and is riding on a smuggler’s plane with Joyce by now, back to El and Hawkins and home. 

The needle stings. Hurts so bad. Everything does. If he could, Steve would pull it out, but he’s too afraid to look when he knows exactly what he will see. 

Instead, his eyes drift upward. 

Snow flakes come in flurries through the barred window above. All the while, Steve is on fire. 

–

Having shrugged the drunken prisoner act that bought them some time with the guards, Jim makes a plan with the other prisoners to fight the demogorgon. 

A flask of vodka, a shred of fabric from the lining of his jacket, a stolen lighter. 

It’s a bloodbath, but he can’t linger too long on the guilt. He has a kid to find. Joyce, too. It’s not just him that’s fighting this monster, because Dmitri has a son to get home to and they’re doing this thing side by side. As a team. 

Until it’s not just them anymore. 

The cage that they’ve found safety in – that once contained the demogorgon – slides open at its interior doors. On the other side is Joyce. 

It’s Joyce. 

He all but melts into her embrace and would give her every bit of weight he’s carried over the last eight months if she wasn’t half his size. Her smell, the way she fits against him. He can let himself forget for a moment that things are as bad as they are. For these few seconds, he’s safe. He’s home. 

“You’re bleeding,” she says, shattering the illusion. “Let me see.”

They sit and she wraps his arm with her scarf; the scratches aren’t so bad, not in comparison to what he’s usually seen from a demogorgon. 

“Did you see him?” Jim asks, while Dmitri and Murray bicker in the background.

“See who?” Joyce frowns, tying the knot of his makeshift bandage. 

“Steve.” 

“Oh, Jim…” her voice catches. “You mean he’s– ”

“Alive? Last I checked.”

“Well, is he here?” Joyce stands and makes for the screens against the wall, squinting to find Steve’s shape in their fuzzy pictures. “We have to go get him.”

He knows. He knows. How can they leave when he might be here? 

“We are hoping he is at the church,” says Dmitri. 

Before Jim has to think of what to say – how does he explain months of this proximity? Of feeling, yet again, that his heart is running around outside of his body? – gunfire rattles outside. The creature screeches. Followed by another, far weaker sound. 

There are more. 

In the Soviet’s lab – which is more like a slaughterhouse with all the blood – Jim sees that the smoky shape the kids have dubbed Mindflayer, demodogs in pods, a demogorgon writhing on the table, and some part of him knows. Whatever he had feared, this is much, much worse. He pulls the trigger. 

There is no silence in the echo that follows, though. Instead: a whimper from somewhere in the dark. Jim moves toward the sound, heart thundering in hope that this is not what he’s thinking.

Please God let it not be that. 

“No, no, no, no, no…” 

When he pulls back the plastic curtain, somebody else is in the driver’s seat. He can only look on as the action reveals a boy, his boy, curled up on the filthy floor in a sick mirror image to that first night in Kamchatka. He’s fallen from an examination table and he’s wearing nothing but their standard navy pants and a pair of mismatched socks. Needles with tubes attached sprout from his arms. When Jim tries to speak, Steve spits. 

“You killed him.”

Joyce’s gasp is jagged and broken. Hand over her mouth, she moves as if to approach Steve, before seeming to think better of it. Only Jim is frozen and can’t take that step towards the boy, who’s not cowering out of fear, no, but shaking with some other emotion. 

“You killed him!”

Rage. 

“Steve…” 

“Why would you do that?!”

It’s Dmitri who acts first, crouching down to be at level with the kid. 

“Stepushka…” His voice is calm and level, even managing a smile. “You did not make it to the church.” 

Realising that it’s not just he and Jim in the room seems to reset something in Steve. He blinks hard. 

“Wh-What?”

“You remember the plan?” Dmitri asks. 

Steve nods. “They took you.”

“Ruined the plan,” Dmitri says with a smile. “But we have made a new one.”  

Slowly, he takes another step forward, but Steve doesn’t seem to care all that much. It’s Jim he’s glaring at – one eye molten brown in the flickering lights, his other one without its patch and far more red than it was when he and Jim parted ways a few days ago. 

“Steve, honey,” Joyce eventually says, joining Dmitri on the floor. “We’ve come to take you home.” 

“Oh, hi, Mrs. Byers.” Once more, Steve blinks to awareness. For Joyce, he grants a smile. “Hop said you were comin’.” 

Joyce looks back at Jim, hamming up a smile for the kid to diffuse some of the tension. But Jim can’t pretend again, can’t not ask and hope that Steve comes to him. Not after last time. 

“Killed who?” he asks the kid point blank. 

Steve’s head tilts, eye clearer. “The demogorgon. Just there. I fel– I heard you do it.” 

Murray’s stare burns the back of Jim’s skull. The unspoken sits so heavy in the space they all share. Jim can’t let this one go, no, but they don’t have time. 

Together, he and Joyce remove the needles, ignoring the blackened state of Steve’s surrounding veins. Dmitri calls to them, having found an escape beneath the table that carries the dead demogorgon. 

Steve flinches at the sight. 

They make it through the tunnels. All the while, Steve is muttering the kids’ names in that halfhearted berating manner of his. Jim would tease him, if not for how dire their situation is. When they reach a ladder, he insists on going first, leaving Steve to be passed up by Dmitri once the coast is confirmed clear. 

Hop carries him all the way to the van that Murray leads them to, because he’s got no shoes, and Murray’s hat and Hop’s jacket aren’t enough to keep him warm. 

They blast through the guarded gate, bullets shattering the rear windows. 

As Jim throws his body over Joyce, Steve inexplicably says, “Max can’t drive.” 

And if Jim’s laughter is closer to tears, it hardly matters, because Steve starts laughing too; near smothered as he is beneath both he and Joyce’s protective holds. 

In fact, the further away they get, the more Steve’s eye focuses. He’s still pale, but his cheeks are flush with the cold; with red blood rushing and undeniable signs of life. 

“You back with us?” Jim asks him. 

Joyce scooches across to Dmitri, leaving no space between Jim and the kid. Steve doesn’t say anything just yet, but his chin juts out for Jim to touch, so Jim does; tipping it up to get a proper look at him. 

He’s fine, really. No worse for wear beyond the pallour of his skin and the track marks along his arms. Murray howls as he steers them through a sharp turn in the snow, and Jim grabs Steve by the back of his neck; pulls him close, keeps him there. 

It’s a while before they get back to the church, but not long enough. He lets go and Steve stumbles out after Dmitri, wet feet hopping across the snow. It’s woken him, certainly, if the spring in his step is anything to go by. 

Even when Yuri shows them his lousy excuse for transport, Steve is grinning. When he sees the peanut butter, the cigarettes; when he stumbles upon Jim kissing Joyce only to announce delightedly that their garish jackets and bright yellow shirts all match. 

Steve is relieved, brimming with energy. 

Until Jim announces that they have to go back; to help El and the kids by fighting the parts of the Upside Down hive mind that exist in the prison. Until Joyce asks about Yuri’s flamethrower. 

Then that look comes back. 

“You can’t go!” Steve is yanking Jim by his coat, his new shoes digging into the ground with the strength of his hold. “Katinka’s almost ready!” 

“El needs our help,” Jim states, blank as he can be despite the dread that threatens to choke him. 

“Fine. Then I’m coming with.”

“Absolutely not!” It’s spilling over. 

“Steve,” Joyce tries. “You need to stay here with Dmitri. Eat something, let him clean those wounds.” 

“Whatever,” Steve dismisses, heading back for the church. Jim shares a look with Joyce and Murray. “You’re always pulling this shit. Look what happened last time.” 

Jim rears back as if slapped.

Dmitri’s eyes dart between them in confusion, because of course he can’t see this for what it might be and thinks it’s about the incident in the munitions chamber. Murray coughs pointedly – they shouldn’t be telling Steve any of this, not if their collective suspicions are correct. 

“Now, malchik…” Dmitri starts. 

“Dima,” Steve says with a scowl. “What about Mikhail, huh? How’re you gonna get home to him if those bastards follow us here?”

“Those bastards are dead by now,” Jim cuts in. “I know you know that.” 

Steve scowls at the implication and marches back into the church; the picture of his delinquent youth. 

“Watch him,” Jim says to Dmitri. “And make sure Yuri fixes that piece of shit, will you?”

“Aye aye, captain,” Dmitri mocks. 

Jim salutes him in return, heading back to the van with Joyce and Murray. 

He can’t just stay and do nothing. 

–

“Joyce is not your mother?”

Dmitri asks this while he cleans the holes along Steve’s arm with a bottle of vodka. By now, the smell invokes a feeling of fondness, of being cared for. It’s a funny thing, made decidedly less funny by the state of him. 

Steve feels sick. 

Like really, really sick. 

Earlier, while Dmitri yelled at Yuri about fixing the plane (he could only assume, seeing as Yuri proceeded to do just that) Steve thought his brain was going to melt from his ears. Now things are better – though his heart is beating fast like he’s running a race – and not so dire, but the guilt from his fight with Hopper feels far more rotten than any of it. 

He has no idea what came over him, but he’ll apologise when they’re back together again. 

“Nah,” Steve says. “She’s my, uh, friends’ mom. I guess?”

Dmitri hums. “And your father’s lady?”

Steve looks away. 

“You are a terrible liar, Stepushka.”

He whips his head back around. “I never lied!”

“But you keep many secrets.”

Dmitri’s not asking, so Steve’s not going to answer. Yet the silence between them remains comfortable as his arms are taped and his bad eye is checked. 

It’s all fine until Yuri calls and Steve is about to board the back of the chopper. 

Then it just burns.

We rain fire from above. 

Steve is running, kicking off walls and slumped bodies and he’s just running so, so fast. Arms scoop him up and a door slams shut. He’s held tight and still, somewhere else, he is running. All fours, thrilled by the chase. 

He knows that frame, that voice. Those clothes.

Shit, we’re matching!

His bones are ablaze. The whir of an engine, veering left. He can’t see. He can’t see anything. He’s crying and it won’t stop. 

It never stops.

–

They are somewhere above the Bering Strait when Steve blinks back to himself. 

“Dad?” he asks into the silence. “Dad, I feel sick.” 

They don’t talk about it.