#Anyway thinking thoughts. something something steve as eurydice and eddie as orpheus

[desiccatedwithering]

just saw hadestown again and oh boy the brain worms

[withacapitalp]

Countdown Pt 4

Part One Part Two Part Three

Seventy Three Years. 

Seventy Three Years. Eleven Months. Twenty Nine Days. Five Hours exactly. 

All prime numbers. They added up to one hundred and eighteen, which only had four factors, which was another prime number. Prime numbers were important, since they were the building blocks of all number theory. Every natural number could be broken down into a product of primes, and Dustin’s timer was the ultimate prime lineup. 

Well it used to be. 

His timer wasn’t all primes now. It wouldn’t be for at least another year. He wouldn’t know exactly unless he looked down at his wrist, but if he did, then he would see a number that started with Seventy Two Years. 

He had already missed his one year anniversary with Suzie. 

“Dustin, are you listening?” Nancy whispered impatiently, giving him a no nonsense look. She was holding up a box of bandaids, clearly fed up with his daydreaming. 

“Sorry,” He whispered back, hustling to take them out of her hands and stuffing the box into his nearly full backpack. 

Footsteps crept up slowly behind him, and Dustin turned around just in time to see Robin approaching. She gave him a silent little smile and ruffled his curls, dropping a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in. 

“I think that’s all we can fit in his backpack,” Robin said above Dustin’s head, keeping her voice pitched low, “We don’t want to tip the small child over,” 

If things were different, Dustin would have shouted at her for the ‘small child’ comment. Now he just made a face, pushing up against her hand that was still on top of his head. 

Dustin had never been very good at regulating his volume. He was built to be loud and bright and in people’s faces. If only his teachers could see him now. Calm as a silent sea and patient as Orpheus waiting to hear Hades’s decision. 

Orpheus. Dustin’s first love was Suzie, and his second was science, but there would always be a special place in his heart for mythology, and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice had always confused him. 

It was the devotion to the nonsensical that perplexed him. Their timers had been set, and Orpheus had known his time with her was up, but he had gone to the Underworld anyway. He had done everything he could just to get more time, only to fail, because that was fate.

Dustin couldn’t really understand it. There was no changing a timer, and once the countdown began, you could only surrender. 

Didn’t people understand that? Couldn’t they accept it? 

He knew better now. He had watched Steve pound against Eddie’s chest till his ribs cracked, despite the zeroes on his wrist already telling him that his soulmate was gone. He had seen Robin have to drag Steve away, and listened as she held him while he openly wept and begged her to make it stop. 

Dustin had never seen Steve cry before that, and he hadn’t seen him cry since. If he had it his way, nothing would ever happen to make Steve ever cry ever again.  

“Dustin,” 

This time when he looked up, Nancy wasn’t irritated. Her eyebrows were drawn together, and her eyes were darting around his face, trying to find the problem. 

“Just lost in thought,” He said, zipping up his bag and putting it on his back, “Let’s get back? Rule number one and all,” 

Nancy looked like she wanted to call him out, but Hopper’s rules weighed on them all, keeping her from digging the way she wanted. 

Rules. Rules that ran all their lives now. Anytime they left whatever safehouse they were in, they had to recite them just to be allowed to go. 

Get back as quickly as possible. Don’t radio unless you have to. Stay in your group. Only talk when absolutely necessary. If you see something, let everyone know. Only draw blood as a last resort. 

Ultimately it all boiled down to one thing- Don’t be Stupid. That, and Dustin’s secret rule- Don’t do anything that would make Steve cry. 

The rest of the kids were annoyed by the rules, frustrated by the rigidity of their lives. Dustin was fine with it. The rules kept them alive, and being alive was all that mattered. 

He couldn’t really blame them for not having the same discipline he did though. None of them had seen Eddie’s dead body. None of them had watched Steve fall apart. They had only seen the aftermath- a quieter, more withdrawn Steve, who kept his wrist covered every moment of every day and was religious about making sure they were safe. 

Dustin didn’t like to admit it, but there were times he missed the slightly reckless Steve that used to speed down the back roads of Hawkins and let them hang their heads out his windows. He missed the Steve that would happily argue with him till the cows came home. 

He missed Eddie, there was no doubt about that, but losing Steve too…Dustin had never expected that. 

“Kiddo,” Robin’s voice called, putting Dustin back in his body. They were standing by the door of the pharmacy, and her hand was across his chest, holding him back from walking straight out into the open. 

“I’m fine,” Dustin immediately replied, a spike of anxiety shooting through his chest. The weird spacing out was only getting worse. They had started as just blink and you’d miss it moments where his mind and his body disconnected, and now he was losing whole minutes of time. It was scary, sometimes even scarier than the literal apocalypse they were living through. 

“Breathe,” Nancy murmured, putting her hand on Dustin’s shoulder, “Look down at your timer,” 

Dustin did as instructed, exhaling a long slow breath before looking down at his wrist

Seventy Two years. Ten Months. Fourteen Days. Nine hours. Eight minutes. 

He was still alive. Suzie was still alive. They were all still alive. 

Everyone but Eddie. 

“Better?” Nancy asked after a moment and Dustin silently nodded. It wasn’t really better, nothing would make this better, but he was okay enough to get back home without freaking out again. 

They crept out of the pharmacy as a single unit, all three covering each other’s backs as they looked around for any signs of danger. The sky was still grey with streaks of red, but the town was deserted. No people, no demogorgons, no bats. Nothing but the three of them. 

But then in the corner of his eye Dustin spotted something. He turned, just in time to see someone standing in the alley off of the movie theater. Someone he knew couldn’t be there….

No. 

No way. 

This was just another one of his problems. He had upgraded from dissociation to plain old hallucinations, and here was the undeniable fact that Dustin was absolutely losing his mind. 

Unless it wasn’t. Unless this was some kind of miracle. 

They had never gone back for his body after all. 

And El had brought Max back from the dead. 

“Dustin!” Robin harshly whispered as he broke away from the two of them, wandering towards the alley like a man possessed. Her voice tore him out of his trance and Dustin stopped short, remembering the two things he always repeated to himself. 

Don’t be Stupid. 

Don’t do anything that would make Steve cry. 

But…

But Dustin had seen him. And not just in the hopeful dreaming kind of way that he always wanted to. Dustin saw something that he knew couldn’t be real, and he needed to make sense of it, or he might actually go insane. 

So, for the first time since all of this started, Dustin broke the rules.