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carolperkinsexgirlfriend · 9 months ago

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Steddie Upside-Down AU Part 83

Part 1 Part 82

“He doesn’t want me to see,” Steve says. Will’s getting tired all the answers Steve gives that are really just questions. “There’s a spot that I can’t see.”

He’s staring at Dr Owens, has only looked at the man since he’d walked into Steve’s hospital room, and corralled them all out like ducks in a line into an unfamiliar conference room to discuss how a seventeen-year-old boy could possibly know how to stop a monster from a different dimension.

Chief Hopper had trailed in after them, still attached to an oxygen machine pumping up into his nose by little wires Will remembers the feel of from his own stint in the hospital. He looks tired, but upright and alive. He’d patted Will and Eddie’s backs on his way past – a hard smack that made Will cough out a little laugh, relieved to see him strong and broad backed and alive.

Steve doesn’t look his way at all. He’s too busy staring at Dr. Owens, blinking that same metronome blink. Will wishes he had a watch so he could confirm that it’s every ten seconds. He’d tried to count in his head, but it’s hard to say it at the right tempo, even with the mississippi’s.

“See what, buddy?” Dr. Owens asks. Buddy now instead of friend. Still, no Harrington, or Steve. Will wonders if there’s something he knows that Will doesn’t. If they’d taken a DNA test with all those scans and found there was nothing of Steve left at all.

Steve blinks, pauses, blinks. He’s one of those dolls like Holly has, where you lean them back and they blink in a pantomime of life that never quite reaches anywhere else. Blink if you’re alive. Blink Blink. Blink.

“I don’t know,” he says, finally. Dispassionately. “But it must be important. Right?”

Uncle Wayne and Mom trade looks Will can’t read. Dr. Owens just keeps smiling. “Of course, young man.” Smile. Blink. Smile. Prove you're alive. “Can you point to the spot on the map?” Like he’s a general in a war movie, Dr. Owens gestures to the map spread across the entirety of the wide-conference table magnanimously.

Steve blinks down at the map as everyone looks at him with bated breath and bitten off words. He looks and looks, eyes roving, before he raises his hand and points, finger raised and straight. It’s not at the map, but toward the corner of the room. As one, everyone turns to look that way.

Like everywhere else in the lab, the walls are white plaster. The tile of the floor is white and clean. There’s nothing there; no shadows or smoke, or hidden clues. There’s not even a cobweb or a smudge of dirt.

“Kid,” Chief Hopper sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose and shaking his head. It pinches into the wires trailing into his nostrils, and the machine makes a whirring complaint until he drops the hand.

“It’s that way,” Steve says. “The spot I can’t see.”

The scientists are all clamoring, room crescendoing into pandemonium except for Dr. Owens who is still smiling, and Steve who is still blinking. Will reaches out to latch his hand onto Eddie’s wrist. In turn, Eddie takes a step closer to him. Will shivers as the body heat hits him.

The lab’s always so cold.

“How do you know?” He says it in his usual even tone, but Dr. Owens' question cuts through the clamor like a sword through its gut.

“It’s that way,” Steve repeats. “I can feel it, like with…” he gestures to Chief Hopper, eyes blank as he finally turns away from Dr. Owens to look at the Chief’s face, squinting like he’s trying to pull the name from his mind.

Dr. Owens is still smiling when he kicks Eddie, Will, and Steve out of the room to wait in the hallway like recalcitrant students outside the principal’s office. Steve went without complaint, but Eddie had started to kick up a fuss. But Wayne had muttered out a tired, “boy,” just threatening enough to make Eddie stop his griping and meet his eyes. Something had passed between them, and then Eddie had huffed out of the room, pulling Will along by the grip he’d yet to drop from Eddie’s wrist.

Now, they stand, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, facing the closed door, listening to the raised voices drifting from the room. They come in and out of legibility, little snippets of a conversation about them that they’re no longer allowed to be a part of.

“–not going!” his Mom’s voice cuts through, before petering back out. “–my son!” Will wonders if they’re arguing about him or Steve. With his Mom, it could go either way.

Dr. Owens’ response can’t be heard at all, but Wayne’s cuts through, gruff and commanding and loud. “–go with them.” His voice raises slightly on the end, cutting off the clamor of unnamed scientists trying to cut him off. Will jumps at the unexpected volume. He’s never even heard Wayne raise his voice. It's a shock to the system. “They’re my boys.”

Eddie laughs, and when Will turns to look up at him, his eyes are twinkling, even here, at the end of things.” Old man’s always been a secret softie.”

Something warm and filling sinks into Will’s stomach, like the chicken noodle soup his Mom always makes when he’s sick. Like family. Will smiles.

It’s too quiet in the room to hear much more than the gentle murmur of voices intermingling. Will isn’t concerned; whatever happens, Uncle Wayne will be there. It’ll be okay.

The grim faces when the door opens, and everyone comes pouring out shakes that resolve. His Mom crouches down in front of him, taking his shoulders, and looking up into his face.

“You don’t have to go,” she says quietly, talking louder when the closest scientist scoffs. “No matter what anyone says!” She pauses to glare at the man until he huffily looks away.

“Go where?” Will asks when she meets his eyes again.

She’s biting her lip the way she always does when she’s trying to find the best words to use, but Uncle Wayne cuts in before she finds them.

“Going to where he wants us to,” he says, tipping his head toward where Steve’s still standing by Eddie’s side. “You’re going to get the lay o’ the land if he gets sucked back inta his noggin again.”

“If you want to!” his Mom bites out, eyes wide, hands squeezing.

Will looks past both adults to Eddie. He’s looking down at Will with the same resolve Will can feel burning in his own eyes. They’d both follow Steve everywhere. They always have.

“I’m going,” Will says, turning back to catch the way his Mom closes her eyes, pained. Resigned. “He needs me, Mom.”

She grimaces, but still says, “I know, sweetie,” and stands up to join the procession making their way down the hall.

They’re corralled by soldiers, armed and armored in a way no one bothers with any of the civilians in the group. Steve’s still in his basketball shorts. Will and Eddie are in jeans, with his Mom in her house sweatpants. The contrast would be comical if it didn’t leave him itching with vulnerability.

The vans they slide into don’t help matters. They’re reminiscent of the types of vans he’s seen on TV shows, where the army is bunkered in and off to war. Will’s not sure the metaphor holds true, though because the enemy is inside the van with them, looking out the windshield with that same blank expression.

And the enemy has his friend’s eyes, and face, and voice, and hair. It has all of him.

They’re going to get him back.

Even if the driver is currently following Steve’s pointing finger down the road. Toward certain doom.

It makes for a bumpy ride, when the finger turns on a dime, no words used to prompt a left or a right, only to end up right back where they started.

The grass is still flattened on the ground where Steve had writhed. The holes still dug and abandoned.

“Is this some sort of joke?” one of the soldier’s demands, spinning on Steve with his gun half-raised from its former parade rest.

Wayne shoves the gun down, hard until it’s pointing at the floor of the van. It’s this moment that Will notices that Chief Hopper didn’t come with them. There’s no man with a badge and a gun to buffer the situation. No strong and solid back to stand in front.

Steve just keeps pointing until Eddie asks, “we need to go in there?”

He nods, getting up and leading the way. Everyone follows him down into the earth.

Sound moves weirdly underground. Will hadn’t known that before, but he does now because the quiet voices pad against the dirt, get diluted like they’re getting sucked up and out. Their shuffling footsteps are similarly muffled, barely audible as the dirt sucks them dry.

Steve’s voice is loud and clear when he finally speaks. “Straight ahead.” He’s still pointing like he’s forgotten how to stop. The soldiers shuffle past him, guns out, firepower ready.

But Steve’s just stopped, stalled out there in the dirt, bringing all the other members of the party into a standstill with him.

“Stevie?” Eddie asks. The men with their guns continue on, uncaring of the small dramas they leave behind. Will’s glad to watch them go. “Are we not going?”

He lowers his finger, jerky like he’s straining against something Will can’t see. Still, he just looks straight ahead, voice echoing into the caverns of the underground as he says, “I’m sorry.” Will stares at the back of Steve’s head, hair somehow still perfectly coiffed after his time on the ground, in the hospital, outside of himself. “He made me do it.”

Ice sinks into him. It sinks and sinks until it feels like Will’s floating, barely there as his Mom asks, “what, sweetie?”

She doesn’t get it, somehow. Even as Wayne says, “you didn’t,” voice ragged. Even as Eddie sobs, looking past Steve and toward the distant sounds of boots stomping, the even more distant sound of dissonant growls.

“I told you, they upset him,” Steve says. Still quiet. Still echoing.

“Steve, no,” Eddie says, voice breaking as he reaches out, fingers brushing a line of heat against Steve’s forearm.

That gets him to turn around. Eyes dull, gaze distant. Blink. Blink. Blink. “It’s too late. We have to go.”

He starts walking away as the growls grow louder. Eddie stands, staring at the empty mouth of the cave, clutching his hair hard enough to rip a clump out as he pulls. “What did you do?” he whispers. “Shit, shit!”

But he turns and runs, Wayne and his Mom, and Will catching up to Steve, then overpassing him, all heading up and out.

Will trips when Eddie stops, turns. He looks back. Like Orpheus looking for Eurydice, Eddie was always going to look back. Will turns with him.

Steve’s just standing, staring out at them, something almost alive within him. Almost.

“You should go.” He’s scratching at his arms, like he’ll be able to peel away all the bits that aren’t him and reemerge, just Steve. But even as he tries to get them to go, to leave him to die, his eyes are vacant and blinking. Blink. Blink. Blink. Prove you’re alive in there, Steve.

“They’re almost here.”

The growls are reverberating off the dirt walls now, made strange and echoing under all that grave dirt. He wants to run until his legs give out, leave this place behind for good. But Eddie’s still down there. And Steve’s not coming.

Steve. What would Steve do? He’d make the sacrifice play. He’d stand firm and tall in front of any monster and the ones he loved. He always had. But Steve’s slipping away.

So, he’ll have to do it. He can learn to make his shoulders broad and strong, be the action hero, make the sacrifice play.

Will takes a step forward, ready to be sword and shield. For Steve.

Eddie’s begging, pleas for Steve to come, for Steve to stay with them, on ears that can no longer hear him. “Angel, please,” he begs, reaching out to cup Steve’s cheek, even as it reddens and blisters.

Steve doesn’t answer. Death’s knocking at the door in the sounds of bullets plowing into bodies and a mud. Of growls and snarling unlike anything Will’s ever heard before.

It’s not a Demogorgon coming for them, but it sounds just as wrong, and just as hungry.

Mom and Uncle Wayne come back because of course they do. Mom looks frantic, hands flickering with the need to help. Wayne looks steady. Resolved.

“We don’t got time for this,” he says. The betrayal hits quick and hard as Will realizes they’re going to leave Steve down there. Wayne’s going to restrain Eddie, and his Mom’s going to scoop Will up, and they’re going to leave Steve to the wolves.

It's cut short when Wayne scoops Steve up like a stack of potatoes. He struggles, kicking and scratching and screaming until Wayne holds his legs down to stop the kicking.

“Get with it, Eddie,” Wayne growls, pushing his face down into Steve’s hip to hide it from his seeking claws.

Eddie, still weeping, steps up to clutch his wrists together, hard enough that it’d hurt if Steve could feel anything at all.

They hobble up and out, a make-shift rag-tag group of adventurers, not okay, but alive. Will hangs onto that conviction even as the screams kick up a pitch. Even as Wayne and his Mom hogtie Steve with all the seatbelts that can reach, ignoring the red the blisters everywhere they touch. Ignoring their wailing requests to make him stay.

Eddie sobs, loud and openly from the front seat, twisting wires together until they spark, and the engine ignites. Eddie peels out of the parking lot with a whistle that almost drowns out the last dying screams of the soldier’s the thing inside Steve had led to their doom.

They’ll all make it out of this. They have to.

Part 84

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#steddie #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie upsidedown au #my fic #will byers #also i am SO excited for the next part :):):):):)#we'll see if i can actually hold out posting it til what. sunday?

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