Work Text:
Steve wakes up and lays in bed and for a minute it’s still the summer from before and he can picture Dustin at camp miles away. He thinks of the post cards lined up on the wall above his desk. Hand drawn pictures of science projects Dustin made while gone. Steve lays in the sun from the window and tries to stay in the spot of time where Dustin was alive and it’s still the warm summer sun shining through on him. The sun doesn’t cooperate though. It’s the drab half light of winter, the cold of snow leaking through trying to chill him to the bone where he’s already frozen. Steve rolls to his side and the bat leans against the desk within arms reach, two bandannas tied around the grip. Blood stained and ugly. Nancy had told him to soak them in cold water, had told him what to use to get the stains out but he didn’t. He didn’t wash them until the smell was so strong he couldn't hold them anymore; he waited until they were so stiff they wouldn’t crumple into his fist. Then he washed them in hot water, alone. First with no soap just to be safe then he dried them on the hottest setting of his dryer. Then with soap once the stains were set.
There’s a green and yellow hat covered in red in his car, there’s blood stains in his car that match the bandannas. He has a huge spot in him missing that he never thought he’d have and now he understands, just a little, what it was like for Nancy when Barb was gone. Steve lays in bed and thinks about getting up but he doesn’t. He doesn’t get up. He just sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Every time he wakes up the bandannas are there. Every time he sleeps Dustin is there. He lives in that inbetween of what was and what is for as long as possible.
It’s never long enough.
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It’s winter so his hours at Scops Ahoy are cut but he still has to work or go to school according to his parents so for twenty hours a week he wears the uniform that he wore when Dustin died and goes to scoop ice cream for the kids and parents that shuffle through the mall like nothing has ever changed. He wants to yell at them how he’s missing something but he doesn’t. He gives out ice cream and makes change and watches, hollow eyed and empty, as the kids still alive roam the mall and laugh. He know he needs to fix something. He knows there’s something broken in him that he doesn’t know what to do with but he was never the guy who fixed things. He just picked up the pieces afterwards and held them close.
The hat sits on his passenger seat and rides with him no matter where he goes. Mostly he goes to work and home but sometimes he rides to the gates of the cemetery. Sometimes he rides to the pumpkin patch. He never rides to the bluff. He never goes to the outskirts of town. He never goes anywhere Dustin’s blood spilled. Except the mall, but really then it was mostly Steve’s blood. The mall is where Dustin held him together. Steve’s guilt and horror of not being able to hold Dustin together eats him up so much it’s all he is.
He passes the arcade on his way to work, on his way home. Sometimes he sees the other kids hanging out there. They put their hands up in waves as he passes. He never stops. Mostly when he looks at them he sees them screaming; he sees them bleeding and he sees Dustin’s eyes blinking out blood in the night while El screams in the woods behind them. He thinks about Hopper and how he had stood there while Steve cried holding Dustin’s body to his chest while it grew cold. It was Joyce that took Steve away while Hopper called for an ambulance. Joyce who drove him to her house and held him on the steps of her porch while he cried and got blood all over her. It was Joyce who told his parents how he had a friend die when she finally took him home.
His parents left the next day. Left him in the empty house holding a blood soaked bandanna crumpled in his fist. His mom apologized as they went out the door, while he stood there in his white undershirt and boxers with Dustin’s blood still on his face and hands and arms and all over him inside. She never looked at him; only around him and at the air above him. After they’ve left Steve thinks about how she never looks at his face. So he went back to bed. He left the door unlocked, he left the windows open. He felt the warm air of summer creep into the house from his bed and thinks about how Dustin will never feel that again. He knows the monsters are gone, again, but he hopes maybe one got left behind. Maybe one will find its way back to him by the smell of blood. By the smell of the woods he ran through, the sweat he wiped off on the bandanna before it was bloody. Maybe it’ll remember him from before and come back to finish what was started. Steve lays in bed and hopes.
Steve listens to the housekeeper as she cleans and thinks about how unfair it would be for her to have to clean up after his mess when he finally kills himself. He thinks about the blood of the bandanna and how he could mix his with Dustin’s and they could finally be the blood brothers the younger boy had wanted to be before he left for camp. Steve had said no, mostly because he was scared of that first cut of pain from a knife slice against his finger. He wishes now that he had done it. Now he realizes that some pain is nothing compared to others. He wonders what it’ll feel like when he cuts the knife deep into his arm.
He goes to sleep and dreams about teaching Dustin the perfect way to style his hair.
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One day, five minutes before his shift ends, Max walks into the shop with Billy. Steve is wiping down the counters while his boss counts the register down before he can go. When he looks up her hair looks like fire haloed around her and he flashes back to the night before Dustin died. When they had gone to the bluff and shot off fireworks that Mike had brought back from his trip out of state with his parents and Nancy. He remembers El and Will standing towards the back holding hands watching the explosions in the sky and laughing. El, who had never seen fireworks like this and Will who always seemed so sad to Steve. It was the last good night of Steve’s life now that he thinks back on it. When he looks at Max now it’s with the knowledge that they both have a place inside cold and empty. He thinks his might be the bigger one though. She has the gang still. Steve has a blood soaked bandanna and nightmares. When he meets her eyes there’s a sadness reflected back at him. He’s not sure where it’s aimed though, her face when she looks at him is pained and scared. The smile he gives her is small and forced, something his job requires of him and nothing more. Billy though, Billy’s face when he looks at him is shocked more than anything. The last time they’d spoken was when the blond had apologized for the fight they’d had. Steve reaches up to his hairline and touches the scar left by the plate and Billy’s eyes watch the movement. Steve has seen Billy around the mall now that the pool is closed. They pass each other with nods and silent acknowledgments. Steve has nothing to say. The grief of Dustin is only months old and most days Steve feels like it will never fade.
Steve can still see the sun on Billy’s skin even though it’s the dark of winter for everyone else. Steve knows he doesn’t look good, that he’s lost weight and his hair is dirty because he doesn’t see the point of a shower now. He feels like there’s still some of Dustin left on him, in him, and he doesn’t want to wash that away. Max doesn’t order ice cream though. She just stands in front of him and stares. When she opens her mouth all she does is scream.
Steve wakes up in his own bed, sweat stained and shivering from the open windows of his house.
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Steve drives past the arcade on his way to work the next day and all of the kids are outside standing there staring at his car as he goes by. He raises his hand in a lack luster wave and Max starts screaming.
Then Will.
Then Lucas.
Then Mike.
When he sees El’s mouth start to open he floors it. As his car speeds away he can hear the howls of demodogs in the background. He can hear the screams of the kids mixing in like the melody of a song he never wanted to hear the first time, let alone again. He runs all the red lights on his way to the mall. When he gets to the parking lot he sits in his car and cries. Great big gulping sobs that keep his breath from catching and then he screams. He screams for Dustin and the future he’ll never have but the more he screams the more it turns into screams for himself. He sits in his car and cries with how his life ended up. He sits in the car for hours, he doesn’t care about his job or anything. He just wants to sleep again. He just wants to dream about the before of all this terribleness.
He wants to dream about summer again.
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Steve lays in bed and thinks about the housekeeper and how she’s been there more than his parents. He thinks about the huge standing flower arrangement his parents had sent for Dustin’s funeral. He thinks about how it was just signed ‘The Harrington’s’, like they even knew who Dustin was. He wonders if that’s what it’ll say when they miss his funeral.
‘The Harrington’s’, cold and unfeeling like they are. He thinks that maybe they won’t even notice when it happens. Maybe they’ll give the housekeeper a bonus for the trauma of finding him. He hopes so. He knows death isn’t anything pretty to see.
When he finally goes downstairs the curtains are open to let in the little bit of winter light there is and when he looks outside he sees El standing at the bottom of his driveway. She’s so still he thinks that maybe he’s imagining her.
Then she starts screaming at him.
Then the howls start behind her and he runs.
He runs out the backdoor in his boxers and no shoes. His feet crunch down into the snow and he slips and slides his way down around the front of the house but she’s gone. The screams just an echo in his ears. The howls just memories of terrible times. He sits down in the snow of his front yard and stares at the spot where she had been. There’s nothing there. No indent in the snow, no footsteps leading up to his driveway from the sidewalk. No tire marks left like she had been dropped off. Was she even there? Steve wonders if this is just another dream.
He goes back to bed.
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Steve has just finished making a cone for a little boy when Billy walks into the store. The younger boy looks tired now, still slightly tanned from the summer but his eyes are shadowed and look like the same eyes Steve sees when he looks in the mirror now. Steve wonders who he’s lost in the last few weeks, months, days since he’s seen him.
Billy opens his mouth and screams.
Steve doesn’t know what to do. Then the little boy drops his ice cream and screams. Only he sounds like Dustin. He sounds like Dustin and then as Steve turns to run he finally makes out what they’re screaming at him.
“Wake up Steve! Wake up Steve! Wake up Steve! WAKE UP STEVE!”
Then the howls start and the lights go out and Steve wakes up.
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Steve wakes up in the woods and Dustin is there.
He screams and screams and screams.
(end)