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There was no linear series of events, hadn’t been for hours (days?), since the silly radio transmission project became a mission, and Dustin’s insistence pushed Steve into letting children get involved in what became a nightmare of steel, guns and screaming.
Steve knew the steps they’d followed, but the full sequence was muddied in his memory. It was drowned out in parts by fists and drugs and blood. It was scrambled by intervals of spiking terror that seemed to draw events out like taffy, impossible to escape and sticking in time, refusing to end, while other entire blocks of time were wiped out in seconds.
There were ambulance lights now, Steve thought numbly. Blue and red and bright white, or maybe some of that was the headache threatening to topple him over with every dragging step, or the cacophony of fireworks explosions still echoing inside his skull. The pain had become sharper, deeper, but it felt far off, happening to some other body than the one he was stuck inside of, the awareness of it barely penetrating the fog of adrenaline keeping him upright.
Robin’s arm around his helped. Sometimes he thought she was talking, but her voice kept tuning out into static, so he wasn’t sure if he wasn’t imagining the ongoing commentary. He knew she was there, because she was keeping him up and sort of anxiously trying to soothe him, it seemed, with her shaky petting motions against some part of him. His back. His chest. His face, when he’d blinked out of focus for too long.
Every touch hurt, there wasn’t an inch of Steve left that didn’t, but he didn’t tell her to stop. He wasn’t sure what would happen to him if she stopped reminding him that she was there.
Starcourt was on fire, half crumbling ruin spreading out on the tarmac. More and more emergency and military vehicles descended on the parking lot, trucks and vans, shouting, guns and noise everywhere, lit up in flames and flashing lights. The stench of rotten, burnt, dead flesh would have made Steve hurl if he and Robin hadn’t already expelled anything they’d had for days back in the bathroom.
God, it’d been days, hadn’t it? Since water, since sleep, since safety, since before those hands had-–
“Steve?” He heard, and this time he was sure he heard it. Robin was shouting it into his right ear for some reason. He couldn’t muster much more than a slight nod to show he’d heard it. “C’mon, cavalry’s here now. Drop the gun.”
Steve blinked down at her dumbly, the words senseless to him as he tried to guess what she meant. She was blinking tears off her eyes, and her lips were shaking. That was bad. Robin didn’t cry. Did she? Had she?
“Give it to me, okay?” Robin insisted, and Steve nodded in agreement because of course he agreed. She usually had good plans. Much better than his were. He didn’t fight her off when her icy hand went around his clenched fist, when it loosened his hold on the metal he held, when it pulled it away. With it gone, Steve’s hand was left free and spasming in the air, unsure, broken fingers aching with the release of tension.
When he saw the gun now in Robin’s hand, he remembered it. The guard he’d taken it from, the one who’d laughed in his ear when he’d been unable to stifle the cry of pain, the one whose breath smelled of dense tobacco and who’d then put the barrel of it —
“Hey,” Robin said, sharp, too loud. Steve blinked her back into half-focus, one of his eyes already swollen shut and useless. “This way.”
Steve sat. He didn’t know where at first, but the crinkly blanket that he noticed wrapped around him clued him in that it was probably an ambulance. The flashing colored lights were still everywhere, and he could still see the ruin in the distance, if he squinted his eyes against the smoke and the pain. Steve didn’t.
He stared down at his blood-stained shoes and stupid sailor socks and tried not to remember the things the Russians had called him. He idly wondered where Robin was, how come he was alone again, if she had gone home already while he’d been zoned out.
But her voice came again, faint, indiscernible in the throb of shouted orders and wailing sirens around them. Still somewhere close enough that Steve recognized the sound and clung to it. He tried to blink the tears from his working eye so she wouldn’t see them when he finally managed to look back up despite how heavy his head felt.
When he did, he caught sight of Eleven wailing near another ambulance, wrapped in Joyce’s tiny frame, clinging and sobbing in a heart wrenching way that pulled at Steve, making him half attempt to stand before a firm hand gently pulled him back down to a sit.
Steve blinked down at the hand, registered it was big and strong and male and the next second he was down, blanket lost, half dragging himself through the parking lot gravel on his ass trying to scramble away.
But then Robin was back and wrapped around him like a shield, pulling him to her like it was okay that Steve kind of wanted to crawl into her skin to hide there, where it was safe, like she wished Steve could do that too.
“I’ve got you,” She was saying, loud, next to his ringing ear. Steve believed her, could feel her hands tightening and making his broken ribs send liquid agony through his ribcage. But Steve clung to it, to her, tried harder to disappear under her fierce hug.
Time went liquid again, dripped away and then Steve wasn’t sitting on the asphalt anymore. He was crying before he was aware of why, just knew he had to, that he could now, where he hadn’t been allowed before. Then Robin had his face in her bruised hands, and she was crying right along with him even as she tried to shush him, told him he was safe, he was safe, it was over, she was there.
And she was, but that was almost worse, Steve thought fuzzily, because he was drugged again, he could feel it, and he couldn’t move his arms, there were straps on him again, he couldn’t move and they were surrounded by metal and chemical smells and people, and she was still wearing that uniform, but Steve wasn’t- they’d taken it, he’d been stripped, he’d been–
“It’s over,” Robin swore, sobbed, pledged. “Stevie, it’s over. They’re gone. They’re dead. They’re ash, you hear me? We smoked them all, they’re dead. You’re safe. You’re safe, now.”
“It hurts,” He told her hoarsely, choking it out through a too tight throat. She was dripping tears and snot on him as she leaned down to kiss his forehead. “Robin, they hurt me.”
“I know,” She whispered, right into his ear, and he heard it this time when she told him. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry Steve, I know they did. They paid for it. They all paid for it, I saw it, I saw them die.”
“ETA 2 minutes,” Another voice said, unknown and stern and male and Steve made some sort of noise that Robin shushed as she gripped his face harder, squeezing right against the bruising and the undoubtedly broken bones. Steve didn’t shy away from the pain of her relentless hold. It was pain he welcomed, easier to deal with than the rest of his throbbing body, somewhere past the panic in his head.
“Close your eyes,” Robin told him, and he listened, because she knew the way out of things. She’d gotten him off of that table, out of that room, both of them out of that steel tomb. “I’ll stay with you, Steve. I swear we’re safe.”
“It’s never safe,” He told her urgently, because it was important that she knew that. She had seen it now, the shadow, the death under their feet roaring its horror and there was no escaping it, it would always come back. “It comes back. It’ll come back. They’ll come back.”
“I’ll kill it,” Robin said, and Steve’s working eye snapped back open to watch her ghost-white face, shadowed with soot and blood and dirt, hair matted with it, mouth grim. Her eyes were steel. It registered in Steve’s awareness slowly that she was covering other people nearby with her hovering presence, that she was distracting him from whatever moving vehicle they were on, and Steve loved her so much for it. For every fierce word from her. “It burnt. They- they burnt too. It’s dead. We can burn it all again. We will. I will.”
“You can’t,” Steve wanted to tell her, but she was pushed away and doors were slamming and people were shouting numbers and stats, and Steve couldn’t see her anymore.
He couldn’t see Robin, but he felt cold, thin fingers grasp his and he clung back, terror and pain blurring out the motions as metal clanging noises came as he was swiftly moved, rushed into a building with people in medical coats and gloves and Steve thought he might have blacked out again before he was sure if he had screamed or not.
The aftermath is a horror reel.
It shouldn’t be, Steve thinks. That’s when the credits roll in the movie, when the books skip to the happy part, when the screen fades to black to reemerge in the bright, hopeful morning after months or years.
His brain tries to do it for him, the shock or the pain or the concussion flaring up, but even the hazy bouts aren’t enough to numb every dragging second. The pulses of pain, the burning, sickening shame, the marks on his body when they cut his clothes off in the gurney, the mind numbing terror of more hands on him that aren’t Robin’s safe ones.
It doesn’t stop and it cannot be stopped, and Steve’s brain skips over chunks like a scratched record left to endlessly spin. But he’s still there, it’s still his body, and he doesn’t get to run away from his skin, no matter how he longs to.
There’s an exam. They have to do it, Robin explains. She struggled to let them, had to be talked down as well, had to be taken from the room and only let back in when Steve’s frenzied screams of her name couldn’t be sedated to silence with the unknown drug cocktail still in his system.
Steve didn’t say what had happened. He didn’t say anything to anyone that wasn’t Robin’s private, hushed whispers near his good ear, and Robin already knows all of it. She doesn’t tell either, Steve knows she doesn’t, but Steve’s bruises and blood stains and marks tell the story they won’t admit aloud to, and there has to be an examination.
Steve says no, but Robin goes white when the doctor talks of the epidemic, of the risks, of the extent of the possible damage. Steve’s bruised insides do their best to expel bile, food, anything from him in response to what he knows will need to happen, but there’s nothing left in him. Not even struggle.
It’s endless. It’s painful and humiliating and traumatizing and Steve wants to be numb to it, but he knows he isn’t. Knows he cried, knows he might have hurt Robin with his hold on her arm, but she never lets go. She wipes his tears for him when he can’t disengage his grip on the gurney beneath him, on her hand, to manage it. She wipes her own with the same hand.
The nurse is exceedingly kind throughout it, and it’s almost worse. The contrast between her mindful, gentle attempts to get him through the worst of it, to the last stranger’s hands to touch him. Robin answers her questions more than he does and Steve lets her. He would spare her the recounting if he could, but then he’d also save himself from the ghost touch of it all replaying in front of his wide open eyes as he lays there and tries not to scream.
The silence when it’s over, when Steve’s allowed to wipe down and change into a clean gown is almost more terrible than the clinical recounting of events, the statement, the pitying grimaces. Robin’s words seem to have also dried right out of her, and she looks like a ghost of herself, still in her bloodied uniform, the scrubs she was given to change into discarded somewhere behind her. Steve wants to tell her to go change, to go home, to get some sleep, but the thought of her walking away now keeps him mute.
Steve knows how this goes. Expects it when the suits sweep in with their legalese and documents, with blank official faces and unsympathetic lies to memorize, with the unveiled threats of consequences and exposed gun holsters at their waists. Expects it to come, and yet his reaction at their intrusion is gut-instinctual panic, and he’s got the agent under his arm wheezing for air with the plastic tubing of his IV before he’s been dragged off and forcibly immobilized on the bed, half in a chokehold that doesn’t muffle his painful attempts to beg for help.
There’s more commotion, more shouting, more slamming of doors and it takes three orderlies to settle Steve down and get everyone out of the room. It takes an eternity before Steve realizes they weren’t Russian, that he wasn’t back there, that they weren’t taking him, that Robin is safe, that nobody is touching him anymore. It’s the same nurse that did the terrible exam that stays, the one that lets him crawl away from the gurney to put his back to the wall, that lets Robin come hold him back together again.
Eventually, Steve knows he and Robin are alone again, because she relaxes her hold on him enough to check she didn’t aggravate his ribs with her hug (she didn’t), that sitting on the hard floor isn’t hurting his stitches (it is). She half drags him back into the bed and climbs in with him without asking, clumsily maneuvering around reinserted IVs and monitors. She’s shaking too, Steve notices.
“I’ve got you,” He tells her, because she had him too, and that means everything to him. She squeezed him around his bruised middle wordlessly for it and Steve didn’t wince, squeezing back.
The silence drags on endlessly. Eventually, Robin falls asleep . The suits don’t come back in, but the papers are brought in to be signed anyway, and Steve doesn’t even care about what chunk of his life he’s signing away on this run. The monster and horror of it, the deaths he saw happen, the decomposing flesh monstrosity, all of it is barely a blip in his thoughts as he lays there in the barely dimmed room.
His monsters had hands and faces this time. They’d been laughing.
“Oh sweetheart,” He heard. The door was facing his good ear, the one that wasn’t full of static and ringing. Robin didn’t stir from her slumber. Steve almost didn’t want to turn his head. But he did. He did, because of that voice. That voice had been the one he wanted down there, for hours, for days, for every dripping second of noise and of silence –
“I’m sorry,” Steve blubbered, and there was no other way to phrase it, because he could barely understand the words himself as they left his lips, shaky and breathless and stupid. “Eddie, I’m so sorry, I couldn’t get out. I didn’t– I didn’t want to– ”
It was a blink, a second, then Eddie wasn’t in the doorway any longer. He had no regards for physics or Steve’s swimming vision as he darted inside and to Steve’s side, to hover his large, ring-clad, masculine hands within reach but hesitating, asking.
Steve was already collapsing, Robin and all. He collapsed onto him, to feel those tattooed arms cradle them both close like he’d ever had more than a passing acquaintance with Robin before, like he didn’t care about why or how or with whom Steve chose to clutch him close with, as long as Steve wanted him there, and god. God, Steve wished he didn’t want him there. Steve wished he could spare Eddie this horror, could lie away his absence, his bruises, his disappearance, the monsters that chased after him, could keep him safe from all of it. But Steve was weak, and tired, he was so tired, and he’d never had this many arms around him, this much protection and offered comfort in the aftermath before.
“I thought you were gone,” Eddie told him. It was a confession, kissed into Steve’s smoke-saturated hair, into his forehead, it was a desperate tightening of his arms. It hurt in the best possible way because it meant Eddie really was there, and not an imagined solace. “The mall is- it’s a wreck? And you hadn’t come home and your car was still there. It didn’t move for days, Steve, you weren’t anywhere, you weren’t answering and Wayne and I were going crazy. They said there’d been a bunch of people– I thought I’d lost you. Jesus Christ, baby, I thought you were gone.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve tried to say, but Robin had awoken, because of course she had, jostled around as she’d been, squished into Steve and Eddie both, privy to their every private word. She should be awkward and hesitant and a million other things, put in the middle of this secret scene with a virtual stranger, Steve knew. But instead she went,
“Shut the fuck up dingus, it wasn’t your fault,” And just hugged him and Eddie both tighter. That was the shove Steve needed to break open in two, coddled in between two people who weren’t letting him go, who only held him together tighter, tighter, broken bones and blood be damned.
It was a testament to the state of general chaos Hawkins was thrown into that Eddie didn’t get thrown into jail for how he drove his van through town at twice any rational speed limit. He was sure he took out at least one mailbox and was afraid he might have even taken out someone’s weird pet on the way, but he had no time to worry or double check or even breathe before he pulled up to the hospital on the fumes of sheer fucking panic.
The TV and radio reports were saying there’d been survivors despite the final toll of ‘casualties’ still being kept under wraps. It was Eddie’s only remaining hope after having gotten as close to the disaster zone as the corded-off police tapes had let him get and run the rest of the way past the barriers to see the pillars of capitalism crumbling on themselves with raging fire.
Now, Starcourt had been a blight and Eddie would have normally been happy to see it go. Hell, he might have lit the match himself, danced in the flames and all, if he didn’t know how many people had been inside. If he didn’t know one person in particular HAVE to have been inside, because where else would he have been?
Where else that Eddie hadn’t already scoured over, frantically calling and driving around town like a jilted wife, haunted by the unmoving maroon car his boyfriend drove parked immaculately in its usual spot, unmoved for three entire days and gathering dust and now ash and probably debris from the fire.
Where could Steve have been other than inside that steel and concrete mammoth collapsing on itself, from which all those grimly covered gurneys had been rolled away from?
The hospital was another warzone altogether. Eddie fought through the mayhem of it for what had to be hours, arguing with every official uniformed figure and uncooperative medical and administrative personnel. He was dodging one particularly vicious-looking security guard, on the verge of being dragged off the premises for the second time, before someone finally took pity enough to seek out the list of admittance for the name Eddie kept throwing around to whoever would listen. He dreaded being led down to a cold slab or back into the fiery pit of Starcourt with a mournful shrug. He dreaded her face twisting with clinical pity, her voice hushing in practiced sympathy.
But no. No, there was a room. Visiting hours were long over, but the harried nurse cared enough to point the way when she saw whatever soul-wrecking relief was doing to Eddie’s face. He ran in, because of course he did, blundering and too blind with the shaky realization that Steve was alive to worry about appearances or decency, and–
Steve. Steve was–
Alive. Alive and hurt. Brutalized, it seemed to Eddie, everywhere black and blue and painfully swollen, lying oh so still and holding onto someone on the bed. A girl. Holding someone close with desperate hands. Eddie would pause, would dread, Eddie would reel back in any other world, but then Steve turned his head, and his other eye was swollen completely shut, and his face still had dried blood smeared in parts where someone had done a poor job of wiping it off, and Steve’s eye–
“Oh sweetheart,” was all Eddie could say. It felt like the first time he could breathe in hours, in days. Steve was holding a girl tightly, but still reaching out to Eddie. Trying to apologize, like Eddie wouldn’t forgive anything, any possibility that would end with this; Steve breathing and warm and clutching at Eddie with splintered, damaged fingers, and god, what had happened, but it didn’t matter, it couldn’t matter, nothing could matter more than–
“I thought I’d lost you,” it’s all Eddie could say and Steve was sobbing, crying, wailing, choking on sobs and wavering, irrational apologies, and the girl – that’s when the bloodied uniform sank into Eddie’s consciousness, when her fierceness and her stubborn, defensive glare clicked for him. Eddie realized this was Robin, this was Steve’s coworker who Steve swore hated his guts, and she was cuddling closer to Steve and to Eddie like it was natural, like it was necessary, and Eddie didn’t question that it was. It must be. He could see it in her eyes.
Eddie just closed his own and held them both close and tight and dear, and tried not to shake apart imagining all the questions he had to ask. He already dreaded all the terrible truths that would need to explain what made Steve sound like this, desolate and terrified and pleading, when Eddie knew him as nothing but strong and dependable and stubbornly, pathologically incapable of asking for help. He dreading knowing what would make his boy sway into him like Eddie and Robin were all that were holding the pieces of him together.
Eddie knew Steve kept secrets. Had held him after nightmares, had walked and driven around with him in strange nightly patrols around town when insomnia would rattle him, had gotten evasive shrugs and hesitant half-truths to more pointed questions about his darker moods, his anxiety attacks, his uncanny attachment to kids that had no direct relation to him and yet seemed to expect Steve to look after them constantly.
Yet none of those secrets before now had stolen Steve away for days on end or brought him back like this, shaking apart in terror and painted in blood and finger-shaped bruises all over his arms, down his neck, peeking around the gown that was wrapped around him in horrible blooming technicolor.
Eddie didn’t want to ask. Didn’t really want to know. Didn’t want it to be real, and yet Robin was crying too and holding on to Steve too tight for the injuries he bore, and she had once hated Steve like Eddie had once dismissed him. Steve had told him how she had mocked him and bullied him for whatever image of him she had in her head the same as Eddie had sneered at him before he saw beneath the image to the boy he loved, to the boy worth loving that had been there all along. Robin saw him now, Eddie knew. She knew him now, and that meant she wasn’t leaving.
To Eddie, nobody that was privy to who Steve really was should ever want to leave him.
“We’ve got you,” Robin was telling Steve over his hoarse, terrible cries. She whispered it over and over, a mantra straight into Steve’s upturned ear against Eddie’s chest, a well-worn one it seemed, for the way her gaze went far off and somewhere terrible. “We’ve got you now, Steve. You’re safe. You’re safe, they’re gone, you’re safe.”
They, she said. Eddie’s already straining heart felt like molten lead in his chest, weighted down with dread and hatred.
“I’ll kill them,” Eddie swore, dark and heavy, voice gone hoarse under a strain that was all internal. He meant it. He had never meant such a thing before more than he did at that moment. “You tell me who it was, baby, and I’ll kill them all.”
“They’re dead,” Robin told him and Steve both, reassurance and steely, hardened hatred meeting Eddie’s own. Her hand was cold when it touched Eddie’s on the back of Steve’s head. “They’re all dead. It’s done. You hear me, Steve? It’s done. We made it out.”
“You made it out,” Eddie echoed, grateful all over again for the weight on his arms, the feverish warmth of Steve’s sweat-drenched forehead burrowed under his chin, the tickle of his greasy hair. “I’ve got you now, Stevie. I’ve got you. You don’t gotta say a thing if you don’t want to, okay? No more apologies. Shh, it’s alright. I’ll make damn sure you’re alright.”
“But I’m not,” Steve sobbed, heart-wrenchingly honest. Eddie felt his own despair threaten to choke him silent in the face of it. All the times he’d wanted Steve to open up, to say he wasn’t alright, to let Eddie in, and now he had, and what did Eddie have to offer him? “Eddie, I’m not. I’m not, I’m sorry, I’m not–”
“And that’s okay,” Eddie bit out, half choked and stupid and not enough, but Robin’s eyes had opened to give him strength to say it. “That’s okay, Steve. You can– you can. I’ve got you anyway, huh? I’m staying right here with you. We’ll be freaks together, and Robin can sell tickets.”
Steve laughed. It was weak and wet, and the joke was weaker, but Steve’s torn, swollen lip moved up in a ghost of a smile and Eddie. Eddie would take it. Anything. Any wisp of happiness he could whip up. He kissed Steve’s hair again, breathed in the smoke and the blood and the smell of medicine and sweat, and swore he’d treasure it. Nurture it. Make it grow back inside Steve, where it deserved to live.
“It’s a three man show, Munson,” Robin said, hoarse voice low but determined and Eddie met her knowing gaze with a nod. Nobody who saw who Steve really was should ever want to leave, Eddie knew. That’s how it should be. “Four, if you count Dorothy.”
“Ah.” Eddie said, ‘cause he got it now. A small, stupid part of him, hidden away inside him where Eddie didn’t often care to look, relaxed. “We’ll make a killing,” Eddie told Steve and Robin both, and meant it more seriously than the stupid joke deserved.
Eddie was a lot of things, a freak, an asshole and a showboat but he didn’t make promises lightly. The one he made to himself, clutching Steve’s battered body close and Steve’s new best friend to boot in that hospital room wasn’t an exception.
“Who the fuck is Dorothy?” Steve groaned from under Eddie’s chin and the laugh it wrung out of him and Robin both, the way Steve relaxed and smiled small and private against Eddie’s skin to hear it, well. It was a start.