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longlivefanfic-net · 2 years

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Banished&Bloody: King Steve

Fic Summary: Post-Volume II. Eddie Munson wasn't dead when he was left in the Upside Down; well, he wasn't dead anymore. Steve Harrington has spent the days since they came back to Hawkins haunted by the idea that he could have saved Eddie--or at least died in his place. It quickly becomes clear that the Hawkin's group has to go back to the Upside Down and, when they do, they find an unfamiliar face. Vampire!Eddie Munson, Grieving Steve Harrington.

Chapter Summary/Content: Chapter 2 of 8. Steve is dealing with the constant ache of Eddie's death, the feeling that he should have been the one who died. Very heavy on the angst, grieving Steve Harrington, some mentions of Nancy/Steve.

Word Count: 3.8k

A/N: I really, really needed more info about what happened after Eddie died. Basically I just needed to know that it actually affected...anyone?? other than Dustin and Uncle Wayne?? so this is v angsty and sad bc IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THAT WAY ON THE SHOW. anyway duffer brothers I'm outside anytime u want to talk

Chapter Two: King Steve

Always the babysitter. He was always the fucking babysitter, Mr. Mom as far as everyone else was concerned. Steve rolled his eyes, grabbing another package of Doritos off the shelf to pitch into the grocery cart he was pushing, thinking about how Jonathan had so casually suggested Steve run to the store for provisions when Dustin had complained that he was too hungry to think. The actual adults–a term Steve still didn’t feel like applied to him–were all at work, trying to make life look as normal as possible to keep the rest of them safe. Frankly, Steve, Robin, Nancy, Jonathan, and Argyle had more or less decided to keep their plans secret from Murray, Hopper, and Joyce: the “adults” needed to focus on things like keeping the cops off their backs, and it wasn’t like anyone was going to suggest that Joyce Byers go into the Upside Down. And, as Jonathan had pointed out, there was no reason for the adults to fret about what the rest of them knew had to be done. The adults knew the bare minimum of what was going on: they seemed to gratefully swallow the lie that the group of kids were all spending eight or more hours a day together just to sit and watch TV, or occasionally going in groups to visit Max at the hospital. Part of keeping their plans under the radar meant avoiding telling Hopper or Joyce too much about what they were doing or how often they were together; that left Steve in the grocery store, playing the role of grown-up despite the fact that a part of him still felt like the high school kid who had kissed Nancy in his bedroom after throwing her in his pool. But, he did have to admit, he wasn’t the same person he had been back then. He still kept his baseball bat full of nails in his trunk, and, even in the grocery store, he was aware of the closest exit to him at all times (at this moment, it was through the storeroom which would bring him out to the loading dock where he could either go back to the parking lot for his car or go straight out from). Picking up groceries felt useless, though. It felt like something anyone could have done, and by asking him to do it, Steve felt like the rest of them viewed him as useless. Was this why he had survived? He had beaten a demogorgon, had been tortured by Russians, had lit Molotov cocktails and thrown them at Vecna and still he felt like he was just…a necessary evil to the rest of them. A combination of bodyguard and babysitter.

A sharp slice of pain cut through his heart as he turned the corner into the next aisle. A combination of bodyguard and babysitter was what he had thought of Eddie Munson when he left him with Dustin to distract the demobats. He had known Eddie would keep Dustin safe, had seen the way Eddie looked at Dustin like he was a little brother, had heard Eddie’s admission to being jealous of Steve ringing in his ears. Steve had known in his heart that Dustin would keep Eddie from being stupid, and Eddie would do whatever it took to keep Dustin in one piece. He hadn’t counted on Eddie doing that same thing for him, for Nancy, for Robin. Dustin had told them, sobbing when they came back to the gate in the Munson’s trailer, how Eddie had tried to make Dustin go back to Hawkins, had gone back outside on his own to draw the demobat’s attention. Steve shuddered at the memory, his breath speeding up as he remembered Dustin soaked in Eddie’s blood, tear tracks clearing dirt over the round, youthful face that had suddenly lost some aspect of childlike innocence. Steve had looked at Dustin, and he had known that a part of Dustin had died when Eddie Munson did. They had worked together to pass Dustin through the gate with his injured leg, and Steve suddenly felt a phantom of the tickle against his chin as Dustin had buried his curls into Steve’s neck, sobbing as he was passed to Nancy and Robin in the trailer. But that’s not where he was right now–he was not in the trailer, he was not holding a crying Dustin, he was not wiping Eddie’s blood off his hands. No, Steve was in the grocery store, about to hyperventilate in front of the bread options. Eddie was dead. Dustin wasn’t. Steve wasn’t. Just because Eddie had broken his promise to Steve, had decided to be a hero, didn’t mean Steve had to– Had to what, he thought, suddenly angry. Had to feel guilty? Yeah, he did. If he hadn’t been so pissed about being the babysitter he probably would have been the one with Dustin. He, Steve, would have died instead of Eddie. And that was something he was going to have to get used to, because Steve knew it was going to burden him for the rest of his life.

Shaking his head, the brown locks flopping in front of his eyes as he cleared his mind forcefully, Steve grabbed the first loaf of bread his hands touched, threw it in the half-full cart, and walked to the front. He checked out quickly, barely making polite conversation with the cashier–a shame, too, because he was highly aware of the way she was flirting with him, but he couldn’t shake the itchy feeling in the back of his skull that told him he needed to be back with the kids, making sure that they were all safe. He loaded the food into his car, sliding behind the wheel with the intention of driving directly back to Hopper’s cabin. Most of their company, as Mike insisted on calling them, were living in the cabin together, so as soon as Joyce and Hopper were gone for the day it was the perfect place for everyone to convene and work on their battleplan. They had spent the last week talking through plan after plan, shooting them down one by one. They couldn’t be sure where Vecna would be; they couldn’t be sure that El’s recently returned powers would be strong enough to fight him again; they couldn’t be sure they knew how to kill him after their last plan had failed. Nancy had been angry, at first, when they had realized Vecna had lived. When they realized Vecna had taken Max–or taken her and given her back, Steve wasn’t completely sure–Steve had had to hold Nancy, rubbing circles in her back while she sobbed. Robin had held her hand, the three of them suddenly aware of the price they had paid for not being ready to face him. But, Robin had reasoned later, Vecna was going to take Max anyway–maybe it was because they had weakened him that Max was still alive, albeit asleep in a hospital bed. That’s what they all told themselves, anyway. That still didn’t make Steve feel better about Eddie, though. No one really talked about Eddie like they did Max. Every time they saw Lucas, someone would ask immediately if there had been any change in the young girl, if she had suddenly opened her eyes and started snarking at nurses. Steve had only heard Dustin talking about Eddie once after they left the Munson’s trailer–telling Mike that their Dungeon Master hadn’t survived. The two had clapped each other on the shoulders, quiet tears slipping down their faces. Steve had watched them, thinking how grown up they seemed; it was like they were more mature than him, closer to being adults than he was, because they could put their grief aside so easily.

Steve’s car suddenly slammed to a stop. He had spotted one of the many flyers lining the streets of Hawkins these last few days, and his foot had slipped onto the break. He maneuvered his car to the side of the road, putting it in park as he got out. There, fluttering in the wind, was a picture of Eddie. It was one of the signs his uncle had put up, covered with the word “Missing” instead of “Wanted,” and someone had drawn pentagrams over it. Steve knew Eddie wouldn’t mind the pentagrams–probably would have laughed–but the red ink that scrawled “MURDERER” across his face was too much for Steve to bear. He ripped the poster down, balling it up and tossing it in the open top of the trash can he passed on his way back to his car, that same slicing pain in his chest. He had made it a habit to scan the posters he passed, telling himself that he was looking for faces he recognized, keeping a mental scorecard of how many people Vecna had taken from him, but he really was watching for Eddie’s posters. Anytime he saw a “Wanted” poster, he would stop to examine it, making it look like he was only looking at the picture closer before he slipped it into a jacket pocket. The police force had enough going on as they dealt with the recovery from the “earthquake” that Steve felt certain they would forget about their missing “cult leader” within weeks. The ones Wayne Munson put up were different though. Wayne had used a better picture of Eddie, one that looked much more casual than the yearbook picture the police had pulled from Hawkin High’s files. Eddie’s lips were half crooked in the “Missing” photo, a begrudging smile playing at the edge of his mouth as he probably said something that would have confused Steve–something about Dungeons and Dragons, or the Mordor shit those kids were always going on about. In the photo, Eddie had his arms crossed in a defiant pose that, to Steve, spoke to his need to be different, separate himself from everyone around him. Steve tried to take most of the “Missing” flyers down too–there was no need to leave Eddie’s face to fade in the sun for weeks when they knew exactly where he was, where he would always be. But when Steve found the posters that had been vandalized, cartoon devil horns and cruel words scrawled over them, he couldn’t stop himself from letting just the tiniest bit of his anger out.

Eddie had fucking died for this town. No one knew it but them, but that didn’t make it fair for these people–hell, these assholes–to make a mockery of him. Eddie had told Steve that he wasn’t a hero; he had told him about how he ran, how he ran when Chrissy was dragged onto his ceiling, how he ran when the cops showed up, how he ran when Jason and his friends found him, how he was always, always running. Steve had clapped him on the shoulder, leaning in to remind Eddie that running is a survival instinct. You’re supposed to run from this kind of shit, he had said. Eddie had bristled at his response; “I know there’s no shame in running,” he had said, his voice low as they walked through the woods in the Upside Down. “But you don’t run, do you, Harrington?” Steve had half-shrugged at this, avoiding Eddie’s eyes. No, he wanted to say, but I want to and that’s just as bad. And that was just another reason Steve would feel guilty for Eddie’s death. If he had turned around, had put his hands on Munson’s shoulders, maybe even given him a little shake to force him to look in his eyes, and said “I want to run, I would always run if I wasn’t the only thing standing between these creatures and those kids; you should run and maybe I’ll run too,” maybe Eddie would be alive now.

Steve pulled up to the cabin, putting his car in park before turning the keys in the ignition. He had been so distracted with his thoughts about Eddie that he hadn’t even paid attention to where he was going, sheer muscle memory bringing him back to the poorly-repaired cabin. The slam of his car door summoned the younger kids to the door, and they fell on his car, pulling out the grocery bags, like a pack of starving wolves. “Yeah, yeah, slow down ya little–” Steve cut himself off when he saw Nancy standing on the porch, smiling. He smiled back at her, raising a single hand to wave. His chest twisted again. Part of him felt like it wasn’t fair. He had been so close to telling Nancy how he felt before they went after Vecna; if he had been able to stomach the idea of her living without him, he would have told her in no uncertain terms how he felt about her before they had gone to the Upside Down. Instead, he had waited, convinced he would be able to tell her when they got back, but there was always something keeping the two of them from having a quiet moment to talk. There had been one moment in her mom’s kitchen, while she grabbed trash bags and he waited to take them to the basement, that he had started to tell her. “Nance,” he had said, and his voice had broken. She had turned to look at him, eyes wide, and looked at him with a hint of panic in her face. “Are you…okay, Steve?” She had asked. He had been about to answer–about to say no, he wasn’t okay, he was pretty sure he was the reason Eddie Munson was dead and he was in love with her, and both of those things were going to be permanently weighing on his mind but he needed someone to know and he wanted that someone to be her–when Robin had bounced into the kitchen, pulling the box of trash bags out of Nancy’s hands and teasing Steve for standing around like an idiot.

Now, the only time Steve ever got to see Nancy alone was in his dreams. That sounded dirty, he thought to himself as he unpacked grocery bags in the small kitchen of the cabin, but it wasn’t like that. He dreamed about her almost every night, but he also dreamed about Dustin, about Robin, about Eddie most nights. He’d wake up almost every night, screaming, his sheets twisting around his sweat-soaked body. It almost made him grateful that his parents were never home; no one was around to burst into his room, to ask why he woke himself screaming until his throat was raw and sore, why this happened to him every night. Steve couldn’t help it: he would lay in bed every night, staring at his ceiling, and keep his eyes open as long as possible. He would think about good things–red lipstick on pretty girls, ice cream in the summer, the smell of his pool at midnight in the Fall–and he would still eventually close his eyes and wake up howling, a sound that didn’t even sound like it should come out of a human body breaking through his chest. Steve’s dreams were full of death. It wasn’t always bloody. Sometimes, he dreamed about Nancy in Vecna’s grip again, no music to pull her back to him as her bones snapped under his too-weak fingers. Sometimes it was Robin, coughing up bloody spittle as demobats pinned her down like they had done to him, and she’d reach her fingers out to Steve but he could never reach her. The ones that hurt him the worst, the ones that he would wake up from and spend the rest of the night sitting locked in his bathroom, the fluorescent lights on, a knife or his bat in hand as he crouched against smooth tile until the sun came up, were the ones about Dustin. Dustin being pulled into the air as his jaw cracked, Dustin pinned under one of those stupid demodogs like he had fed candy bars to, and–the really, really bad ones–Dustin being held down by Eddie, the demobats circling the two of them as Eddie dripped blood onto Dustin’s body and Steve stood there helplessly as Dustin’s eyes darkened, went glassy. Steve’s imagination had taken over, but only when he was asleep: during his waking hours he was still in control. As a result, he had basically stopped sleeping. What was the point, anyway? All he did during the day was work the occasional shift at the Family Video, essential to keeping Keith from getting too suspicious about where Steve and Robin were, and run errands for the people in the group who actually got things done.

Since coming back from the Upside Down, Steve had spent a lot of time thinking about one of the many assigned readings he had struggled through in high school. Reading wasn’t exactly Steve’s strongest subject, so Nancy had helped him make sense of the damn thing. Even though she was a year younger than him, she could read through the nonsense words and explain each scene to Steve, make the weird sentences and spellings into understandable moments that Steve could see when he closed his eyes and listened to her talk; he had spent the entire day fuming when she explained the ending, telling him that the hero had come back to get his revenge after being rescued by pirates because, really, who got rescued by pirates? But what he really thought about, more than anything else, was the ghost in that story. The guy had been haunted by his dad; his ghost-dad told him to get revenge for his murder, to kill his uncle because his uncle had killed him. Steve felt like he was being haunted by Eddie, every flier on the street with his eyes ordering Steve to get revenge for his death. Steve also worried about what that meant for Nancy because, if he was Hamlet, that meant she would be that pretty girl who drowns, singing about flowers. He shook his head suddenly–that’s why it was best to let Nancy and Jonathan stay together. Let him be her Romeo–well, that one didn’t end any better either, so maybe they could be…just someone else, someone happy.

A small hand patted him on the back, pulling him out of his reverie as he considered how few of his English class stories had happy endings, and Steve jumped. “Hey, calm down,” Dustin said over his shoulder. He reached out, grabbing the bag of Doritos Steve had just unpacked and ripping the top open. Dustin turned to Steve, smiling, and Steve tried to plaster a similar one on his face. If Dustin noticed the artificial smile or the dark bruises under Steve’s eyes, he didn’t say anything. “New plan,” Dustin said around a mouthful of taco flavored corn chips. “We’re briefing in the living room.” Steve followed behind him, taking a spot on the floor near Robin, still wearing her Family Video uniform from her shift that day, as the younger kids crowded onto the couch. “We go in, we get to Vecna, El holds him, right, and then–” Mike turned to El, his words bubbling over his lips, “we grab Max and we run, and you guys–” Mike pointed to the older kids as he said this, “go in and you hit him with fire and burn him, and then El will just like,” he clapped his hands together, “squash him.” They all sat, looking at Mike. “Okay, dude,” Argyle said from where he was sprawled on the floor. “How is this different from the last plan?” “It’s not,” Nancy said, voice sharp as she shot a biting look at her brother. “No, it is actually,” Mike said, “Because Will is going to be with El and he’s going to let Vecna take him like with Max,” Jonathan gasped, “but we’re all going to be together this time.” All of the eyes in the room slid to Will. He was looking at the floor, lip between his teeth. “You want Vecna to grab you?” Steve couldn’t stop himself from asking. “No,” Will said, sharply. “But I want to stop him.” He looked at Jonathan, and the two brothers shared a watery-eyed nod. “Do you…do you think this will work?” Steve turned to look at El. He had never truly gotten used to the young girl, with her odd speaking patterns and word choices, but he trusted her completely. She locked eyes with him, far too intense for a kid, and nodded. Steve bit his lips, looking back at Nancy. She nodded as well. “What do you think, Buckley?” He asked, trying to force his tone to be light. “We’ve made it out twice,” she said. “Might as well tempt fate again.” The two looked at each other, half smiling, and Robin’s eyes narrowed as they slid over his face. She searched Steve’s eyes, tilting her head to the side.

Once everyone else had agreed to the plan, Nancy immediately taking control of fine-tuning the instructions with Dustin, Robin pulled Steve outside. “What, what?” He yelped, her nails clawing into the soft skin of the back of his neck. “What’s your deal, Harrington?” Robin half-growled at him, getting too close as she poked him in the chest. “What do you mean?” Steve asked, brows slipping over his eyes in confusion. “You want me to make a move with Vickie, you tell me that it’s now or never, you immediately back off,” she whispered, “Nancy,” and then resumed her usual too-loud volume, “and then you start showing up here looking like…well, you look like shit, Harrington.” He shook his head at Robin. “Cool it, okay, with the…romance stuff, Buckley.” “No!” Robin said, throwing her arms out to the side. “Why should I have to carpe diem and all that if you don’t?” “Because you and Vickie actually have a chance,” Steve said, putting his hands on his hips as he leaned towards her. “Okay, despite the fact that you and I have equal chances,” Robin said, raising her eyebrows to add silent emphasis, “That still doesn’t explain why you look like you were dragged through a lake again.” “Don’t worry about me,” Steve said. “I couldn’t sleep last night.” He turned away from her, looking out over the woods. Robin’s voice was uncharacteristically soft behind him as she asked, “Why not?” Steve chewed his bottom lip. He didn’t want her–or anyone else–to worry about him, but he just doesn’t lie to Robin. “Nightmares,” he whispers, sliding his eyes to hers as his voice fades into the oncoming night. He turned, looking out over the oncoming night sky as the sun faded below the treeline. “What kind of nightmares?” Robin asked from behind him, her voice rasping. He half inclined his head towards her. “The bad kind, Robin.” She snorted then, realizing he was serious, put a calming hand on his shoulder. “What kind of nightmares, Steve?” “Nightmares about you,” he admitted, quietly, and her fingers tightened around his shoulder. “And Nancy. And Dustin, and–” Steve’s voice broke. “And Eddie,” Robin said. Steve just nodded, his throat tight. “He’s gone, Steve,” she whispered. “It’s my fault, I think.” “It’s not.” With that, Steve turned to look at Robin fully, smiling a half smile that likely only emphasized the bags under his eyes. “Agree to disagree, Buckley.”

Chapter Three here!

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