Chapter Text
POV: Steve
The thing about parties was they always ended the same way: someone crying in a bathroom, someone puking, someone saying something they couldn't take back. Steve Harrington had been to enough of them to know the pattern. What he hadn't expected—what knocked the air clean out of his lungs—was for Nancy Wheeler to be the someone, and for the thing she couldn't take back to be about him.
"It's bullshit!"
Her voice cut through the bass-heavy thrum of whatever song was shaking the walls of Tina's house. Steve found her in the hallway, red Solo cup dangling from her fingers, eyes bright with alcohol and something harder to name. Grief, maybe. Or rage. He'd learned they looked similar on her face—had spent months now trying to decode her expressions, to understand why touching her felt like reaching through glass.
"Nance, hey, let's get you some water—"
"We're bullshit, Steve." She said it like an accusation. Like he was the one who killed Barb Holland, who opened the gate to the Upside Down, who ruined everything good they might have had. "This whole thing. You pretending you care, me pretending I'm not just… going through the motions because that's what I'm supposed to do, right? Find a partner, settle down, have the white picket fence—"
"That's not—Nancy, that's not what this is." But even as he said it, Steve felt the wrongness of them like a stone in his throat.
Because she was right, wasn't she? They'd been hollow for months. Going through motions. He kissed her and it was plain to see she felt nothing but the mechanical press of lips. She touched him but failed to perform interest in what his biology asked to generate. They had sex—once, safely outside of his rut, after he worked up the courage because it felt important—and both of them acted out a script neither of them wrote. For Steve it meant everything. For Nancy, clearly, it meant nothing at all.
He thought maybe he was broken then too. Thought maybe this was what alternate sexuality felt like, this constant gear-grinding between what his soul craved and what his designation said he should want. But the way Nancy was looking at him now—like he was a stranger, like she was seeing him clearly for the first time in a year—told him she knew the truth he'd been avoiding.
"I don't love you," he heard when she slurred "bullshit" again and again, said it quietly, almost gently, and somehow that was worse than shouting.
He walked away after that. Somehow standing in the hallway with the party churning around him, anonymous and loud, while something fundamental cracked open in his chest—not his heart breaking, but the foundation of who he thought he was supposed to be crumbling into dust.
Steve didn't move for a long time. Just stood there with his back against the wall, breathing through his mouth because his scent glands had gone hot and prickly with shame. Around him the party continued: someone had been laughing too loud, glass shattered in the kitchen, a couple stumbled past him toward the stairs. Normal. Everything was normal except Steve, who couldn't figure out why his Alpha instincts—the ones his father had sworn would kick in with the right girl, would make him possessive and territorial and desperate to keep her—never showed up.
Nancy Wheeler was smart and brave and beautiful. On paper she should have been perfect. His heart wanted only her but his body didn't cooperate. She didn't respond to his scent—barely seemed to notice it at all—and try as he might, he couldn't muster the territorial prowess his father always said was the hallmark of a proper bond. Again, Steve felt like an actor reading lines phonetically in a language he didn't speak.
He drove home that night with his windows down, Halloween air cold enough to sting, and thought: I'm broken. I must be broken. Because if Nancy Wheeler couldn't love him, if she didn't even want him, then what did that say about him as an Alpha?
The gossip started immediately, because of course it did. Hawkins was too small for secrets and too bored not to make entertainment out of other people's pain. He heard it everywhere—locker rooms, gas stations, the grocery store produce aisle where mothers whispered just loud enough. Nancy Wheeler dumped the Harrington boy. For Jonathan Byers, for a male Omega.
At the gas station, Tommy H. smirked: "Freak Byers' an Omega. That's a much more natural match for a Beta bitch anyway. Wheeler probably got tired of dealing with Alpha ego."
That one almost made Steve laugh, bitter and sharp. Alpha ego. Steve Harrington, who'd spent his entire presentation trying to smooth down every rough edge, who outside of sports tried to shy from conflict, who felt physically ill at the thought of using his Alpha voice on anyone who mattered.
Billy Hargrove was what Alphas were supposed to be: dominant, powerful, sexually magnetic, terrifying. Steve had played basketball against him, watched the way he moved like violence contained in skin, watched girls and boys both track him with hungry eyes. That was an Alpha. That was what Steve's father meant when he talked about "proper presentation."
Steve was... not that. Had never been that. He was the Alpha who got his ass kicked by Jonathan Byers in an alley. The Alpha who couldn't keep a Beta girlfriend interested. The Alpha who felt more comfortable babysitting middle schoolers than asserting dominance in any meaningful social hierarchy.
And Nancy—Beta Nancy, middle-of-the-hierarchy Nancy—had chosen an Omega over him.
The math was simple, brutal: even the lowest designation was preferable to a failed Alpha.
What cut deeper than the gossip was Nancy's silence. She didn't correct anyone when they called Steve a Zero, a Latent who'd never presented. She just held Jonathan Byers's hand in the hallways and laughed at his jokes with an ease she'd never shown with Steve, and said nothing at all.
Maybe it was easier than admitting their lack of chemistry had nothing to do with designation and everything to do with the fact that she'd stayed with him out of grief, out of obligation, out of the desperate need to feel normal after Barb.
Or maybe—and this was the thought that cut deepest—she knew exactly what he was, and her silence was the cruelest gift she could give him.
Permission to disappear.
Steve made the decision on a Tuesday in late November 1984, sitting in Dr. Morrison's office ostensibly for a follow-up about the tunnels and the demo-dogs incident. Morrison was one of Owens's people—cleared for Upside Down business, which meant Steve didn't have to lie much about why his face was still healing too slowly from another Alpha’s attack.
"Your white blood cell count is elevated. Any other symptoms? Fatigue, rut delay? Mood changes?"
"I can't stop smelling them." The words came out before Steve could stop them. "The demo-dogs. Or—not them, exactly, but... rotting meat and blood. Every time I walk past the woods. Every time another Alpha gets too close. It triggers something and I can't control it."
Dr. Morrison's expression shifted into something clinical, assessing. "PTSD with scent-trigger components isn't uncommon in Alpha-designation trauma survivors. Your instincts are trying to protect you, but they're overcompensating. There are medications that can help regulate—"
"Can you make it stop?" Steve interrupted. His voice came out too raw, too desperate. "Not just the triggers. All of it. The Alpha thing. The instincts, the ruts, all of it." He swallowed hard, made himself look Morrison in the eye. "My dad always said good Alphas control themselves. That if you can't control yourself, you're dangerous. And I don't want to be dangerous. I don't want to hurt anyone."
There was a pause. The doctor set down his pen. "There are suppressants. They're typically prescribed for Alphas whose ruts cause medical complications, or for those with violent territorial responses they can't control. But Mr. Harrington—Steve," he amended when Steve flinched, not wanting to think of his father, "what you're describing is a trauma response, not a designation dysfunction. Suppressants aren't meant for—"
"I'm not asking what they're meant for. I'm asking if they work, Doc."
Morrison studied him for a long moment. Then, carefully: "It's a significant decision. Suppressants aren't meant for long-term use. They can have side effects—hormonal imbalance, delayed healing, emotional regulation issues. And they don't erase your designation, Steve. They just... muffle it. You'll still be an Alpha. Just a quiet one."
"I understand," he nodded, because he didn’t care. Because the alternative was continuing to be this broken thing, this failed Alpha who couldn't even keep a Beta interested and worse, couldn't protect a litter of almost-grown pups. Even if he had tried his very best. "Please. I need to be normal."
The suppressants did work.
The first prescription was legal, monitored, meant to be temporary. Steve took the pill religiously—a white one with breakfast, synthetic and bitter on his tongue. Within days the constant hum of designation-awareness went quiet. No more reflexive cataloging—Alpha, Beta, Omega—running in the back of his mind since fourteen. When Billy Hargrove walked past in the hallway, Steve felt nothing. No bristling. No hierarchy calculation. Just blessed, hollow silence.
By the end of the first week, Steve stood in front of his bathroom mirror and ran his fingers over his scent glands. The ones at his neck felt different—less pronounced, the skin less sensitive. He pressed his wrist to his nose and inhaled: cedar and rain, but muted. Not gone—Alphas couldn't lose their scent entirely, no matter what the black-market dealers promised—more like... nothing. Like a Beta, better even, like a Zero.
He liked it. Not feeling like the thing that made Nancy flinch when he tried to kiss her after Barb died. No possibility of the supposed rut-madness that made his father sneer and say, "You're a Harrington. Act like it.".
By early December his scent had faded to something forgettable. When classmates asked his designation—casually, the way you'd ask someone's favorite color—Steve shrugged and said, "Null. Never presented." Nobody questioned it. He smelled like nothing, acted like nothing. Even Billy stopped targeting him. No Alpha-posturing, no locker-room dominance games. Just mutual, blessed indifference.
Then he drove Dustin Henderson to the Snow Ball.
The kid walked out of his house more Farrah Fawcett than Steve’s ever had been—Jesus Christ—and talked a mile a minute the entire drive. Steve couldn't scent Dustin's nervous excitement anymore—the suppressants muted pup scents too, flattened them into vague impressions—but he could see it.
"You look great," Steve said in his softest voice, and meant it.
Still, Steve sat in the Beemer with the heater running, glancing at Nancy, watching middle schoolers filter in and out of the gym, and felt something settle in his chest he couldn't name.
Not instinct. Not designation. Just... the need to make sure Henderson was okay.
When the pup finally came out two hours later, he was still grinning. Practically vibrating with joy. Something had gone right—Steve didn't ask for details, didn't need to—but when Dustin threw his arms around Steve's waist in an unselfconscious hug right there in the school parking lot, Steve felt something crack open.
Responsibility. Care. The bone-deep certainty that this kid mattered, and Steve was going to make damn sure he stayed this happy, no matter what.
Pack, he thought, after a second, longer and tighter hug. Even if he couldn't scent or claim anymore. Even if he was hollowing himself out one pill at a time. Henderson was pack, and that meant something. Everything.
Over the next few days, the rest of the Party inevitably followed. Lucas Sinclair, Mike Wheeler, Eleven Hopper, Will Byers, Max Mayfield—a pack of six pups who somehow decided Steve Harrington was worth keeping around. They didn't notice his lack of designation markers, though Dustin sometimes tilted his head when Steve got close—confused puppy trying to place what was different—but no one asked. Steve was just Steve: the guy with the car, the one who showed up and stayed.
Sinclair was the first to present in early January, right after winter break—came into his Alpha designation with the kind of confusion most kids experienced. He'd been seeking Steve out more after that, asking questions that started about basketball but always curved back toward the same thing: How do I do this? How do I be an Alpha without being a dominant asshole?
They were at the outdoor court behind the high school on a Saturday in late May, working on Lucas's three-point shot for high-school tryouts, when the teen said it:
"You're a good Alpha too, you know. Even if you're..." He trailed off. Steve's ears buzzed. "You don't smell like an Alpha. I thought maybe you were on suppressants for medical reasons or something. But you still act like one, with us. You're still our Alpha, even if your designation got messed up."
The words landed like Hargrove's fists once did. Our Alpha. Even if your designation got messed up. Lucas meant it as a compliment—Steve could see that in his earnest expression—but all Steve heard was confirmation: Even a fourteen-year-old can tell something's wrong.
"I'm no Alpha, Sinclair," Steve said, voice flat. "I'm just a guy with a car."
They didn't talk about it again. But Steve went home that night and took two pills instead of one.
Steve graduated in June. His parents didn't attend—his father was in Indianapolis on business, his mother at some charity luncheon she deemed more important than watching her only son walk across a stage. Steve sat among classmates whose names he was already forgetting, listened to Principal Higgins drone about bright futures and limitless potential, and felt nothing.
Two days later, his father called.
Not to congratulate him. To inform him he had until October to get into any college or prove he had a "real career path." Otherwise, the money stopped. The house got sold. Steve could find his own way.
"You're eighteen and an Alpha," Daniel Harrington said again, no preamble, no second chance. "Time to act like it."
Steve stood in the kitchen—his kitchen, the house he'd grown up in—and barely felt cornered. He was already on his own, already a failure in his father’s eyes.
So Steve shrugged, looking at the smiley photo Jonathan took of him and the pups for his birthday. Then he called Dustin's mom, because Claudia Henderson had told him once—after she'd watched him drive Dustin to the Snow Ball, after she'd seen the way he cared for her son like like a pack mate—that if Steve ever needed anything, anything at all, he could call.
"Mrs. Henderson?" His voice cracking nonetheless. "I need help finding an apartment."
By early July, Steve was working at Scoops Ahoy in the newly opened Starcourt Mall, wearing a ridiculous sailor uniform and trying to ignore Robin Buckley's increasingly pointed questions about why he never took ruts or heats days, why he flinched every time someone asked his designation.
"I'm fine," Steve said. "Better than fine. Normal."
Robin didn't look convinced.
The Party showed up almost daily that summer, dragging Steve into their schemes or arguments with the kind of easy chaos he'd come to crave. As usual, Dustin was the worst—best—about it. Always pulling Steve into conversations about girls, movies, radio towers and secret Russian codes, always assuming Steve would help, would care, because of course he would.
One late afternoon, the kids minus Eleven but plus Erica Sinclair piled into a booth after pestering Steve for free samples. Dustin had claimed the seat closest to the counter, close enough that Steve could see the kid tracking his movements even while he argued with Mike about some campaign detail. Like Dustin was making sure Steve didn't disappear.
Steve delivered their order—three sundaes, two shakes, one banana split that the Sinclair pup ordered with the imperious air of someone who knew exactly how much free ice cream she could extort—and tried to ignore the way they were all staring at him.
"So,"Mike said, dragging out the word. "You really never presented?"
Steve's hand tightened fractionally on the empty tray. He hoped young Beta Wheeler didn’t recall the family dinner his parents hosted, when Nancy showed him off as her Alpha boyfriend. "Nope."
"That's gotta be weird," Max added. "I mean, you're ancient… Most Latents present by sixteen."
"Some people just don't." Steve kept his voice light, easy. "No big deal."
"I think it's cool," Dustin said loyally, fiercely, the way he'd been since the day they searched for the demo-dog together. "Designation doesn't define you. You're still the best—"
"The best babysitter," Mike, Lucas and Will interrupted in unison. "Yeah, we know."
Dustin flipped them off. Max snorted into her sundae, Erica only rolled her eyes, blessedly focused on her ice cream.
Steve should have gone back to work before Robin materialized to give him shit about lingering. But he stayed, just for a second, watching them bicker and laugh. Dustin caught his eye and grinned—wide, genuine, the kind of smile that made Steve's chest warm in a way that had nothing to do with designation and pills.
"At least you're not a bossy Alpha," Mike said casually, going back to his shake.
He managed to keep his expression neutral—had learned that much from his socialite parents—but his grip on the tray went white-knuckled.
Yeah. At least.
Robin caught his eye from behind the counter, one eyebrow raised in question. Steve forced a smile, shook his head. I'm fine.
He'd gotten so good at lying.
By the time the Mind Flayer came back, by the time he and Robin were drugged and captured in a secret Russian base under Starcourt Mall, Steve had been on suppressants for eight months. His scent was a ghost. The Russian soldiers didn't even bother checking his designation—assumed he was a Beta as well, unremarkable, not worth the trouble of special containment protocols they'd use for an Alpha.
When Billy Hargrove died heroically on the mall floor, Steve watched from twenty feet away.
El was screaming. Max was sobbing. The Mind Flayer collapsed into smoke and rot. And Billy—broken, bleeding, finally human—looked at Max and said something Steve couldn't hear.
Then he was gone.
Steve stood there—bruised, battered, covered in blood that might be his or Robin's—and felt little grief, almost no relief. No grim satisfaction that the monster who tormented his pack was dead. Just the distant, hollow thought: At least he got to be a real Alpha before the end.
The kids and Robin became pack properly after that. Not consciously, maybe, but the pattern solidified: Steve drove them everywhere, hosted movie nights at the crappy apartment he could barely afford, mediated their arguments, made sure they ate and slept and processed their trauma in something approaching healthy ways. It was enough.
When Will and El moved to California, Steve called them twice a week to make sure everything was okay. When Max ended up in the hospital after Vecna, Steve went to appointments with her mother, making sure Lucas was functional. When Dustin kept pushing him away after Eddie Munson's death, Steve kept reaching out anyway.
Because after everything, Dustin—still Latent, still un-presented, still the kid who tilted his head when Steve got close—had no idea how precious he was.
When the kid missed a Crawl and came back bloody and bitter and hurtful, Steve added a third pill to his daily dose.
Years of suppressants had sanded Steve down to nothing—no scent, no rut, no edge. Just a hollowed-out Alpha passing as a Null, while the kids he'd failed to protect once kept showing up at his door expecting him to be whole.
Since the Wheeler house got destroyed, Steve's apartment had become base camp for the Party—a rotating circus of teenagers who treated his fridge like a public resource and his couch like communal property. Tonight it was movie night because Will picked The Princess Bride and nobody argued with Will anymore.
Steve was in the kitchen making popcorn when Robin appeared in the doorway.
She was considering her first semester at Indianapolis Community College, but at a leisurely pace. She didn’t want to be too far from the person who became her platonic soulmate somewhere between Russian torture and the world crashing down. She used Steve's spare key almost as often as Dustin did.
"Hey, dingus, you got any—" She stopped. Stared at the kitchen drawer Steve left open. The one where he kept the silverware and, unfortunately, his black-market pill bottles badly hidden under a stack of takeout menus.
Steve's stomach dropped.
Robin crossed the kitchen in three strides, pulled out the unlabeled bottle. Shook it. The rattle of pills was obscenely loud in the small space.
"These aren't prescribed anymore." Her voice was flat. Dangerous. "What are you doing?"
"Rob—"
"Don't." She set the bottle on the counter with deliberate care. "Don't lie to me. Not about this. How long have you been taking black-market suppressants?"
Steve's hands were shaking, but he gripped the edge of the counter to hide it. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine." Robin's voice cracked. "You're disappearing, Steve. Your hands shake. You have constant headaches. Those scrapes from Vecna months ago still haven't healed. You think I don't notice?"
Steve opened his mouth. Closed it. What could he say? That she was right? That he knew his body was shutting down but the alternative—being an Alpha again, feeling everything again, risking becoming his father or Billy Hargrove or Henry Creel—was worse than dying slowly?
"I need to be normal," he said finally.
"Normal?" Robin's laugh was bitter. "You think poisoning yourself is normal?"
"I'm broken, without Alpha ruts, it’s manageable, safer."
"Safer?" Her eyes were wet now. "Steve, you're the least dangerous person I know. And you're not—" She stopped. Some revelation dawned on her and she took the breath Steve held in his own lungs. Started again, softer. "You're demisexual, dingus. You need an emotional connection before feeling sexual attraction. That's not broken. That's not wrong. That's just how some people are wired."
The words landed like stones in water, rippling outward. Demi…sexual? There was a word for it, this queerness. For the way he felt—or didn't feel. For the hollow disconnect between his body and everyone else's expectations.
"Nancy wasn't right for you," Robin continued. "That doesn't mean you're defective. It means that, like me, you need something different. Someone who—"
"It doesn't matter." Steve's voice came out flat. "This is better."
"Better than what? Being alive?" Robin picked up the pill bottle again. "I'm keeping these."
"Robin, please—"
"No, Harrington! You want more? Get them from a real doctor, Owens, at least, with a real prescription and real medical supervision. Otherwise you’ll likely OD on black-market shit because apparently you hate yourself too much to exist properly. I'm not watching you kill yourself."
"They're not killing me—"
"They are!" The words came out strangled, too loud. In the living room the movie paused. Someone—probably Eleven—said something, but Steve couldn't hear it over his throbbing panic. "And I'm done pretending I don't see it."
She walked out, bailed on movie night under false pretence and took the pills with her. Steve stood there, gripping the counter, trying to remember how to breathe through the charred popcorn and the open drawer and the sick knowledge that his pack-mate was right.
After Robin left in a huff, Steve found himself on the couch, the Party sprawled around him like they still were a litter of half-grown pups. He managed to salvage movie night through sheer force of performed normalcy. Mike and Lucas shared the couch's far end. Will had claimed the comfiest armchair closest to Mike. Max and El sat cross-legged on the floor near the coffee table, El's hand guiding Max's to her soda from time to time. Dustin sprawled next to Steve, taking up more than his fair share of cushion.
At one point, when Inigo Montoya had explained his backstory, Dustin had curled up against his side, warm and solid and real. Steve hadn't been able to help quietly inhaling Dustin's scent, found it calmed him. It was the only thing he had really been able to scent lately: still undefined, like most Latents, but warm, comforting. His best friend there, safe, content to breathe against his ribcage, centimeters away from his dead heart.
Besides them, the girls and Will giggled the most. The fiery redhead was still adjusting to blindness, still relearning how to navigate the world without sight, but as always, she was adapting. Alive, always fighting. A zoomer. She'd just started using a cane and still had a significant limp Owens had said might improve with physical therapy. Of course, she absolutely refused to be treated like she was fragile.
Suddenly Mike said something stupid—made a crack about Prince Humperdinck having hair like Steve's, but "at least not an entitled prick, leagues away from knotheads"—and the temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
"Thanks for the reminder, Wheeler," Steve volunteered in an overly cheerful voice that physically made him cringe. Steve could feel Dustin watching him, those too-clever eyes cataloging everything. Demisexual, Robin had said, not broken. It didn't feel true, the label probably as fake as the colorful fantasy on the screen.
After it ended, everyone scattered toward their respective rides home. Lucas helping Max to her mom's car, their hands linked with casual intimacy that made Steve's chest ache with envy.
Dustin stayed.
He always stayed longer—helped Steve clean up, put away the leftover popcorn, rinse the bowls. They worked in comfortable silence, the way they had a hundred times before. But tonight the silence felt heavier. Charged. Steve was drying the last bowl when Dustin finally spoke.
"What if I don't present?"
Steve's hands stilled. He set the bowl down carefully. "You will."
"But what if I don't?" Dustin's voice was small, uncertain in a way Steve almost never heard from him. "I'm almost seventeen. Most people present between thirteen and sixteen. What if I'm just... stuck like this? Latent forever? A Null?"
Steve turned to face him. Dustin was standing by the fridge, arms wrapped around himself, looking younger than he had in years. Not the brilliant mind who helped save the world mere months ago. Just a scared teenager worried about being more different than he already was.
"Henderson." Steve kept his voice soft, almost rumbling. "You're not stuck. You're just—"
"Late," Dustin finished. "Yeah. That's what my mom said. But what if it's not late? What if it's never?" He looked up, met Steve's eyes. "What if I'm broken?"
The familiar word hit like an uppercut, robbing him of a few heartbeats.
Steve crossed the kitchen without thinking. Stopped just short of touching Dustin, hands hovering uselessly between them. "Then, we're broken together."
Dustin's breath hitched.
"You're not broken," Steve continued, forcing the words out past the tightness in his throat. "You're Dustin Henderson. You're brilliant and loyal and brave and—" And you're the best thing in my life. "—and designation doesn't change any of that."
Steve wanted to say all the right things… about how pack was more than biology, how companionship mattered more than pheromones, how Dustin would always be his favorite person regardless of what their body did or didn't do.
But the words stuck in his throat, because he was a hypocrite. Because he'd spent three years erasing himself, convinced his own designation made him dangerous. Unworthy. Wrong.
Dustin's eyes were absurdly bright. "You mean that?"
"Yeah, bud. I mean that."
Something shifted in Dustin's expression—relief and hope and desperate need all tangled together. He took a step forward. Reached out, fingers brushing Steve's forearm, looking for a hug.
Steve flinched back.
He didn't mean to. Didn't want to. But his body reacted before his brain caught up—pulled away from the touch like it burned, like Dustin's gentleness was somehow more than Steve deserved, more than his poisoned system could handle without breaking completely.
The hurt on Dustin's face was immediate and devastating. His hand dropped. Somehow that odd not-quite-anything scent that marked Latents still went noticiably acrid with distress. Steve almost choked on it. Every instinct he'd spent three years suppressing roared to life: he immediately wanted to pull Dustin close and rub and purr until that wounded smell disappeared. The impulse was so strong it physically hurt to resist.
Unlike that time in the Upside Down lab, when everything was melting around them, Steve couldn't move. He stayed put.
"I'm sorry," Dustin mumbled, backing toward the door. "I didn't mean to—"
"You didn't do anything wrong." Steve couldn't look at him. Stared at the floor instead, at his own hands trembling at his sides. "I just—I need some space. Okay?"
"Okay." Dustin's voice was small again. "I'll see you tomorrow? After school?"
Steve nodded, so Dustin left. Steve heard the front door close, heard Dustin's bike disappearing down the street.
Then he was alone.
Steve walked to the bathroom on autopilot. Opened the medicine cabinet. Three pill bottles stared back at him—Robin took the unlabeled one, but she didn't know about the prescription bottle Steve refilled last week, or the second black-market source he'd been using.
He took one from each bottle. Studied them in his palm: periwinkle blue, sage green, light yellow. A dull rainbow of erasure.
Better a Zero than a monster.
He swallowed them dry. All three at once. Chased them with water from the tap, metallic and cold.
His reflection in the mirror was a stranger: too thin, too pale, bruises under his eyes that never quite faded. His scent glands had gone almost invisible now—pale scars where they used to be pronounced, sensitive. When he pressed his fingers to his neck he barely felt the glands at all. He was succeeding at becoming exactly what he wanted: nothing.
Demisexual, Robin had said. Not broken.
But Steve Harrington had built his entire identity on being broken. Broken Steve Harrington had survived demo-creatures and Russians and Vecna and the Mind Flayer. He'd survived his parents' disappointment and Nancy's rejection and Billy Hargrove's fists. He could survive this too.
Steve told himself it was better this way. Told himself he was protecting his pack by erasing the thing that made him dangerous, unpredictable. Being nothing was a gift he was giving them, his pack-mates, a sacrifice they'd never have to know he made.
He told himself a lot of things.
In the other room, Dustin's distressed scent still lingered in the air—sour and wrong and entirely Steve's fault.
We're broken together, he'd said.
He'd meant it.
He just didn't know how to stop breaking.
Steve turned off the bathroom light and went to bed fully clothed. Stared at the ceiling. Counted his breaths until they slowed, until the pills kicked in and the numbness returned.
The last thing he thought before sleep dragged him under was Dustin's face—pale and hurt in the kitchen light, hand still half-extended, asking wordlessly why Steve couldn't let himself be touched.
Steve didn't have an answer.
Only the pills and the lies he kept telling himself: This is better. This is safer. This is enough.
None of it was true.