Chapter Text
ACT I — STEVE
If there’s one thing Steve’s learned about the Upside Down it’s that this shit is contagious.
Point one: Will got stuck there for a week and came back possessed and vomiting slugs.
Point two: Somehow every time Upside Down shit happens all the same people get involved again, even if they’re all doing completely different things.
Point three: Ever since Steve fought the demogorgon he’s been having prophetic dreams.
It starts the night after they find Will, though he won’t realize until almost a year later.
They’re all piled into the hospital waiting room, a motley collection of kids and teens and adults, all connected in the weirdest ways. Steve is the least connected of them all, only there because he was a huge jackass to his girlfriend — and, god, he can’t even feel relieved that she wasn’t cheating, because it means he did all that shit to her and Jonathan while they were out fighting monsters and trying to rescue his kid brother.
Everyone’s waiting for Will to wake up and Steve is stuck in a shitty plastic chair, watching them celebrate and feeling like the worst person in the world.
Steve sticks around until it’s too awkward not to leave. He was hoping to talk to Nancy — maybe iron out their relationship, figure out if there’s still a relationship to iron out in the first place — but her parents show up sometime after the Sinclairs to pick up her and her little brother, so Steve flounders for another fifteen minutes before just going home.
The drive home is… stressful. He’s almost positive the monster is dead, though no one bothered to explain where it came from or if there were more of them, so he’s not sure how worried he needs to be. He keeps Jonathan’s bat in his car, just in case.
It doesn’t hit him until he’s walking through his front door that his whole life has changed. One shitty week and suddenly he has no friends, a girlfriend he doesn’t really deserve to keep, and the deep, intimate knowledge that monsters are real. He feels a strange emotion bubbling up as he looks around his plain, empty house. Everything looks so normal, like nothing’s changed at all, like he hasn’t changed. Like a girl didn’t disappear and probably die somewhere right outside.
He mistakes the emotion for relief. It’s that, more than anything, that marks the downfall of his and Nancy’s relationship.
Steve climbs into bed, stealing an extra comforter from the guest room to make the blankets just a little heavier. The pressure is nice, and it makes keeping the lights off just a little bit easier.
That night, he dreams.
Nancy’s already waiting at his locker when he gets there. She’s clutching her books in that cute way she does, with both arms holding them close to her chest like they’re important. She’s always been more dedicated to school than him, even in the little things.
She bites her lip, looking up at him with wide eyes, and smiles.
“How’s the most beautiful person in the world doing this fine morning?” he asks, leaning against the locker beside her with a charming smile.
“You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington,” she says, and it sounds like ‘I love you’.
“Ah, but you didn’t answer my question.”
Her smile turns fond, “I’m doing alright.”
He means to say something about making sure she’s doing better than just ‘alright’, maybe ask her on a date to take her mind off things, but she cuts him off before he can start.
“Jonathan and I were planning on going to his place after school to help with the repairs, and then maybe do some studying. We were wondering if you wanted to join?”
It takes him by surprise for a moment, something sour curling in his chest, before he shakes it off with a grin. They’re friends now, and if he wants to be better then he should support his girlfriend and her friendships, no matter how weird they might be to him.
“Sure, sounds like a blast,” is all he says. Nancy smiles at him again, and he presses a kiss to her forehead to keep all his bubbling emotions from overflowing.
He lays his head back against the locker as he watches her walk to class, wondering why one of them feels like loneliness.
Great, Steve thinks when he wakes up the next morning, I miss her so much I’m even seeing her in my dreams now.
He doesn’t see Nancy again until Monday at lunch. She and Jonathan are sitting together in a corner, their heads ducked in quiet conversation. He slides onto the bench across from them, smiling when they both look up.
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you, both of you. My apology got a little… interrupted.”
Jonathan snorts, and surprisingly it feels almost friendly.
“I shouldn’t have said all the shit that I did, to either of you,” Steve says. Nancy looks at him with her big, serious eyes, and he knows he wants to do this right. “You wouldn’t have deserved it anyway, but I jumped to conclusions like an asshole. I’m sorry.”
Nancy smiles, and it feels like the sun breaking through the clouds.
“To be fair, it’s not like you could’ve guessed what we were actually up to,” Jonathan offers, then bites into an apple.
It should be awkward after that, but instead Steve just feels kind of warm. It’s different from how it was with Carol and Tommy, but maybe that’s a good thing.
Steve and Nancy fall back into dating like they never stopped. There are a lot of differences — mostly in the company they keep, which has dwindled down to just Jonathan — but a lot of it is the same, too.
He’s sweet with her, trying to be funny and charming and cool, the way he was when she first agreed to go out with him. He tries to bring her a sense of normalcy after everything, to be someone who can take her mind off things and make life fun again.
They go on dates and she helps him study, he always has her home before dark. Jonathan is there a lot, and he’s surprisingly easy to get along with. Or maybe Tommy and Carol were just really fucking difficult.
Two days before winter break, Steve shows up to school a little later than usual. It rained the night before and he had to break the sheet of ice over his windshield before he could leave.
Nancy’s already waiting at his locker when he gets there. She’s clutching her books in that cute way she does, with both arms holding them close to her chest like they’re important. She’s always been more dedicated to school than him, even in the little things.
She bites her lip, looking up at him with wide eyes, and smiles.
“How’s the most beautiful person in the world doing this fine morning?” he asks, leaning against the locker beside her with a charming smile. Someone snorts, a little ways down the hall.
“You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington,” Nancy says, and Steve feels an odd sense of déjà vu.
“Ah, but you didn’t answer my question,” he says, trying to shake it. Somehow it just gets stronger.
Her smile turns fond, “I’m doing alright.”
He means to say something else, something sweet, but the oddness of the conversation’s thrown him off enough that by the time he thinks of something Nancy’s already talking again.
“Jonathan and I were planning on going to his place after school to help with the repairs, and then maybe do some studying. We were wondering if you wanted to join?”
They do this a lot — make plans without him. It feels like Nancy’s in contact with everyone who was at the hospital that night, always trying to help as best she can. They — and by extension Steve, partly because he’s dating Nancy and partly because he has nothing else to do — have been spending a lot of time trying to fix up the Byers house after they set it on fire, among other things. He likes to think it’s made the three of them into something like friends.
“Sure, sounds like a blast,” Steve says, almost tripping over his words with how familiar they sound. Nancy gives him an odd look but leans forward obligingly when he drops a kiss on her forehead.
Her first class is on the other side of the building so she leaves first, peeking back over her shoulder to give him a little wave before she disappears around the corner. Steve leans back against his locker, trying to figure out why he feels so unbalanced all of a sudden. He’s had bits of déjà vu before, but it was always small, a single moment in an otherwise unfamiliar experience.
He shakes it off — it’s probably nothing, anyway — and turns to get his books out. Out of the corner of his eye he catches a glimpse of curly hair and denim. Munson, he thinks, though he can’t remember the guy’s first name; Tommy always just called him ‘the freak’. He must’ve been the one who laughed, though honestly Steve can’t blame him. He knows he can be cheesy sometimes; he thinks a little bit of cheesiness now and then can be endearing.
Munson must sense him looking because he turns his head suddenly and locks eyes with Steve. He has a moment to think that Munson’s eyes are big, like Nancy’s, before he’s turning away. He can feel Munson’s gaze on him but ignores it — he’s trying to be better, and being better means not antagonizing anyone by getting caught staring.
Besides, he has a house to repair later. Nancy will kill him if he gets caught up in something that makes him late.
Things continue like that for a while. He takes Nancy on dates, hangs out with Jonathan, makes polite conversation with Ms Byers, avoids looking Munson in the eye.
The weird dreams continue too, mostly filled with little insignificant moments — conversations with Nancy, lectures in class, a few tests. It’s like he goes to class every day only to go back in his dreams. He’s never dreamed this much about school before, and when he did they were never this boring either.
The worst bit, though, is the déjà vu. It feels almost constant, at least twice a month something happens where he feels like he’s seen it all play out before. He knows it’s irritating Nancy, but he’s not sure what to do about it.
He doesn’t connect the déjà vu with the dreams until Tina’s party.
He wakes up crying from a nightmare where Nancy said she blamed them for her best friend’s death, that he was bullshit, and that she never loved him. It’s such a miserable dream that he breaks out the extra comforter again so he can pull the blankets up over his ears and hide. He stays that way, curled up and trying not to cry, until his alarm goes off.
It’s easier to deal with in the light of day. As he goes through his morning routine — spending just a little extra time on his hair — it all seems to fade away. It’s just a nightmare. He’ll see Nancy at school later, give her a kiss, see her smile, and everything will be alright. Besides, they have a party to go to.
Some of the stress seems to linger though, no matter how hard he tries to put it out of his mind. Nancy’s on edge too, has been ever since their dinner with the Hollands. It’s eating at her, not being able to tell them what happened to Barb, and he doesn’t know how to help.
It’s unfair to give them hope, and the idea of them selling their house just to chase after a ghost makes him sick to his stomach, but he doesn’t know what else to do. Nancy wants to tell them the truth, but Steve knows that’s not the right answer either — and not because of the NDA. He doesn’t care about the NDA, not really. Steve might have trouble with the more academic side of things, but he knows people, and people do not take well to being told their daughter was eaten by a monster. Best case scenario the Hollands think they’re being made fun of and he and Nancy are instantly on the shit list of every mom in Hawkins.
But Nancy doesn’t want to hear it, and Steve doesn’t know how to phrase it in a way that will actually help, so they’re going to a party. Nancy needs normalcy, something to take her mind off things the way he’s been trying to do all year, and a Halloween party is the perfect excuse to let loose and have fun.
He picks her up half an hour after the party’s set to start — the term ‘fashionably late’ exists for a reason — and feels a little thrill run through him at the sight of her matching costume. He’s never gotten to do a couple’s costume before, it’s cheesy in a way that makes him want to never stop grinning.
“Ready to go?”
She nods, shooting him a small smile, “Yep, Mike’s out trick-or-treating with his friends already, so I’m all yours.”
“Oh yeah? Are their costumes as cool as ours?”
Nancy laughs.
“They’re going as the Ghostbusters. Our mom spent like a week helping him glue that backpack together, it was a nightmare.”
“God, I can imagine,” he says. He doesn’t know a lot about the middlest Wheeler and his friends, but they definitely seem like the kind of nerdy kids that would insist on accuracy in their costumes.
Tina’s house is already packed when they get there, and it’s easy to slip into the crowd. He watches Nancy’s face carefully as he gets her to dance, spinning her around like they’re the only ones there. The music isn’t really made for dancing, but that’s not the point. All that matters is that Nancy’s having fun.
She’s not having fun though, and it makes something sour curl in his gut. He can see it in her face well before Hargrove shows up to be a dick, getting in Steve’s face like it’ll make everyone see how much cooler he is if he just yells louder. It only really hits Steve how bad it is when Nancy starts drinking.
Nancy doesn’t drink — not a lot anyway, and definitely not this much — but she’s knocking back cup after cup on what’s definitely an empty stomach.
“Nancy, Nance,” he pleads, “you’re going to make yourself sick.”
He places his hands over hers, trying to get her to give up the cup but she’s holding fast. She gives him a dirty look and jerks the cup away.
“You said we need to have fun,” she pouts, “I’m having fun. We’re partying.”
That sour feeling grows larger. He doesn’t know what to do, doesn’t know how to help. Clearly she’s upset about more than just Barb’s parents, but she doesn’t talk to him. She never talks to him.
“Okay, I get it, you don’t want to be here.” Steve holds his hands up in a placating gesture, gently trying to take the cup again. “Just, give me your cup and I’ll drive you home.”
“No!” Nancy shouts, and now they’re drawing attention. “We’re partying! Let me party!”
“Nancy, please,” he makes a grab for the cup again and she lurches backwards, spilling the punch all over her shirt. The room goes silent for a moment while Nancy stares at him, then she turns around and heads for the bathroom. He follows after her, and something like dread follows after him.
“You’re just pressing it into your shirt, Nance,” he says softly, but doesn’t try to take the cloth from her. She shoots him another glare through the mirror and keeps scrubbing.
“Bullshit,” she mutters. Steve sighs.
“Yeah, I get it. I’m sure your mom has some hydrogen peroxide lying around though, so it shouldn’t stain too bad.”
“No,” she looks up at him, dropping the cloth. “You. You’re bullshit.”
And suddenly everything clicks. It wasn’t a nightmare.
Nancy’s still talking, saying that they killed Barb, that they’re pretending to be in love, but he can’t hear it — doesn’t want to hear it again. He doesn’t waste time asking her questions, doesn’t want to listen to her tell him his love is bullshit. Steve looks his girlfriend in the eye, presses the cloth back into her hand, and walks right out the door.
He grabs Jonathan when he sees him in the crowd.
“Nancy’s drunk, I need you to drive her home.”
Jonathan gives him a weird look, “What about you?”
Steve smiles, and it feels like when he told Tommy and Carol to fuck off.
“Trust me, she doesn’t want me there.”
He’s holding it together better than he thought he would. He’s not sure if the night air is helping or making it worse. Somehow it feels less real than the dream did, like this is the real nightmare he’s going to wake up from, and the one from last night was just… a dream within a dream. He knows it’s not, though. He doesn’t get to be that lucky.
He sits down heavily on the porch, leaning back against the siding so he can look out over the front yard. Most of the party is still inside the house, with a couple people spilling onto the lawn, but Steve’s section of the porch is mostly empty — which is good, because he doesn’t feel up to driving yet and the idea of having to go back inside to find someplace to sit makes him nauseous.
He feels a hand on his shoulder and looks up to see the wide blue eyes of Chrissy Cunningham.
“Hey,” she says softly. “Sorry if I’m intruding, but… I heard a bit of what happened, back in there. Are you okay?”
The smile he gives her feels less brittle than the one he gave Jonathan.
“Not really,” he says, matching her volume. He can just barely hear her over the thumping of the bass, but it’s nice instead of grating. It makes it seem like she actually cares.
She sits down beside him, drawing her knees up to her chest. She’s wearing a yellow polka-dotted dress, white and green striped tights, and bright yellow shoes. He has no idea what her costume’s supposed to be.
“Want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” he says again, and his smile feels more real this time. He bumps his shoulder against hers. “But thank you.”
“No problem,” she smiles back. They’re silent for a moment before she looks back over at him. “So, Risky Business?”
“Huh?” He looks down at his own costume. “Oh, right. Yeah, kind of a shitty couples costume now that I think of it.”
“I don’t know, I think they’re cute. You could definitely do worse.”
“Yeah, I think I saw a Luke and Leia in there earlier.”
Chrissy’s eyes go wide.
“Oh my god,” she breathes, “do they know?”
“Know what?”
“The last movie,” Chrissy leans forward to whisper, “they’re twins.”
Steve’s mouth drops open, “No!”
Chrissy nods frantically, “It’s true, I swear. One of my friends’ little brothers loves those movies and he made us take him.”
“But they kissed?”
“I know!”
Steve lets his head thunk back against the side of the house.
“Wow. I guess my costume really isn’t that bad, huh?”
Chrissy laughs. It’s nice, hearing her laugh. It’s almost like they’re friends.
Nancy and Jonathan come stumbling out the front door. Steve watches them go quietly, with Chrissy equally silent beside him. As Jonathan helps Nancy into the passenger seat of his car he hears Chrissy let out a quiet sigh.
“So,” he says before she can bring it up again, “who are you supposed to be tonight?”
She blushes, tugging on the hem of her dress.
“It’s embarrassing but, um, Lemon Meringue?” she says. Steve gives her a blank look. “Like the doll. My little sister’s going as Strawberry Shortcake and she wanted us to match. I managed to get away without the hat, though, so. Yay.”
She does a halfhearted little fist pump and Steve snorts.
“I don’t know what the hat’s supposed to look like, but I’m assuming you dodged a bullet.”
She nods, “Definitely. It’s like—”
She makes a gesture with her hands that reminds him more of an upside down bag than a hat, or maybe a pillowcase. He winces.
“Jeez, that with the polka dots and the stripes?”
“Yep.”
“Those poor dolls.”
Chrissy laughs again, “Tell me about it.”
They lapse into a comfortable silence. The party is still going strong but Steve’s just drained.
“I should get going,” he says quietly. “Do you need a ride?”
Chrissy shakes her head.
“No, Jason” — she gestures to inside the house — “my boyfriend, I’m his designated driver.” She tilts her head with a small smile. “I’m not allowed to drink, so.”
“Alright, then.” He stands up, offering her his hand. “Thank you, I think I really needed that.”
“Anytime,” she says, and it sounds like she means it.
“You too,” he replies, and walks down to find his car. With one last look at Chrissy — polka dot dress and big chunky shoes and all — he climbs in and drives away.
The drive home is short and it isn’t long before he’s back under his covers again. He feels like crying but his eyes stay oddly dry. The revelation that he’s having prophetic dreams feels like one for another day, one where he doesn’t feel like shit. So, of course, when Steve falls asleep that night he dreams.
He starts writing them down after that.