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hitlikehammers · 8 days ago

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This Is Your Life (¿ǝɟı˥ ɹno⅄ sıɥ⊥ sI)

Steve Harrington never thought he’d end up like his parents. He never thought he’d allow his life end up like this.

…but did it really?

He wants to grab for his wallet: he knows there’s gotta be pictures there, he always knew if he did become a dad he’d be that dad and maybe he can’t fucking grasp how he’s here, how it all went wrong, but he, it’s… He can’t have gotten it this wrong; he might have fucked up the love of his life, somehow—and he knows that’s what it was, the one, came out of nowhere and made him feel more than anything he’d ever known his chest could hold: he might have failed the soft brown curls he can feel against his cheek with his eyes closed, but he’s shaky on the smell of them, the scent of this person he knows that he loved, fuck, no, he knows that he still loves—but he can believe that part. He doesn’t want to believe it, really thought this was different, feels it in his chest that this was so different, and this time was forever—but Steve’s history speaks for itself. Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want to think it fell apart—again. But. That said: he swore he’d never be his own parents. He can’t have gone and failed this bad, with his own kids—

rating: t ♥️ tags: post S4, established relationship (?), drama, introspection, angst (?) with a happy ending (!), steve harrington and the inescapable reality of becoming your parents no matter how hard you try, (it IS inseparable, right?), creeper hitting on a sad divorcé at the bar, SINCERE APOLOGIES TO PEOPLE NAMED A NAME MALIGNED HEREIN SOLELY FOR PLOT PURPOSES

for @steddielovemonth Day Twelve—“Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up.”―The Sandman —

“You look like you shouldn’t be alone.”

Steve, actually, feels like he should definitely be alone. Certainly isn’t looking for company from this random, hair-slicked-back, not-even-being-subtle-about-the-sleaze stranger.

Who sees fit to put his hand on the back of the empty chair across from where Steve sits.

Alone.

“I meant,” and his voice is…soft, but like he wants something. Soft like he means to pull you in. Steve doesn’t fucking need this, not tonight. “Are you waiting for someone?”

Steve wants to laugh. Steve wants to throw his glass and watch it shatter, watch the other patrons of this fairly high-end restaurant gasp and clutch their pearls for it.

He wants to know how he ended up here. How his story unfolded to this. He knows there was a time when they were happy. When he was happy. Lots of memories of being unhappy, especially when he was a kid, but Steve knows in his bones there was happiness, there was lov—

“Hmm,” the stranger hasn’t figured out he’s unwelcome yet, apparently; Steve tries sipping his drink as a hint.

It has the opposite effect.

“Ah,” the man watches Steve’s hand, then points: “it’s been a while, but you still remember the weight, no?”

Steve makes the mistake of taking his eye off this nuisance of a human to follow the pointing: he grabbed for his drink from the left.

Yeah, he does still keep his presently-empty ring finger the slightest bit off the glass. Like a habit.

Motherfucker.

“Children?” the stranger who absolutely cannot take the goddamn hint presses on, too curious, too poised at innocence to be wholly genuine.

Steve doesn’t know what could have possibly given him away—he knows he looks run through the wringer, but kids, there wouldn’t be a tell for the kids in his wrinkled suit, his mussed-up hair from running his fingers through it, greasier than he ever allowed before, tie rumpled and half-undone, what—

His right thumb catches his eye, just out the corner: nail polish. He didn’t have the heart to take it off, and, well. There’s a little corner of Barbie pink on the inside of the tip, hanging on months later. Taunting him.

Must be pretty quality stuff.

“How old?”

And Steve’s lips part, he intends to answer actually because the drive in him to tell this asshole it’s none of his business and that he needs to fuck off was strangled in a second at the thought of the girls, his three girls, the six little nuggets he always dreamed of, plus one more besides as a bonus, a fucking gift, and maybe it’ll hurt less in the long run to say anything about them to a faceless person he’ll never see again, so he intends to answer, but…

Suddenly he can barely form a coherent thought about his kids, it all hurts too much—like the burning, the wetness caught on his lashes; like that’s flooding full-on in his own mind’s eye as much as his lungs all at once.

He can’t have gotten it this wrong; he might have fucked up the love of his life, somehow—and he knows that’s what it was, the one, came out of nowhere and made him feel more than anything he’d ever known his chest could hold: he might have failed the soft brown curls he can feel against his cheek with his eyes closed, but he’s shaky on the smell of them, the scent of this person he knows that he loved, fuck, no, he knows that he still loves—but he can believe that part. He doesn’t want to believe it, really thought this was different, feels it in his chest that this was so different, and this time was forever—but Steve’s history speaks for itself. Doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want to think it fell apart—again. But.

That said: he swore he’d never be his own parents. He can’t have gone and failed this bad, with his own kids—

“She took them?”

Steve turns—he hadn’t been looking at the pestering asshole, had kind of forgotten he was there. Steve stares at him a little open-mouthed; blinks. The fuck is he talking about—

But it makes sense. Steve got his picket fence and his gaggle of Harringtons, maybe only got a handful of their trips across the country under their belts before it went to shit, before Steve fucked it up like it was always in his blood to do: lost his marriage. Lost his kids.

“For Henry?”

Finally, the man turns away, automatic: so that’s his name. That’s the only reason anyone looks so quick.

Steve…doesn’t know any Henry, but he bristles to hear it anyway. Like a…a back-of-the-mind instinct that it’s a bad name for bad people.

Maybe it’s just the fact that he’s obviously had too much to drink, for now fuzzy him mind is proving; for how quick his eyes are to sting in public—for how much of a mess he is.

How much of a mess it all is—

“Let me grab that, but,” and the man, this Henry, he gestures to Steve’s glass of mostly-melted-ice; “what were you drinking?”

“Old Fashioned.”

Steve’s voice is metal on gravel. He licks his lips.

“I’ll bring you back another,” this Henry, he thinks he can touch Steve’s shoulder as he walks away.

Once he’s reached the bar and shoots Steve a…deeply discomforting smile as he waits on the second drink and—

Steve doesn’t remember what he had been drinking.

But he knows in his core, somehow, that it wasn’t an Old Fashioned.

“Shame they can’t just turn the music off,” Henry slides the drink Steve’s way before sliding back into the seat he was never invited to sit in in the first place; “not loud enough to really hear is it,” and where he’s started the out-of-fucking-left-field comment with more annoyance than Steve thinks it warranted, he hadn’t even noticed there was music playing until now; “but not strong enough to make an impression.”

Henry ends with more…satisfaction, and weirdly, kinda like self-satisfaction, and fuck but this guy’s weird as shit.

“Oh, unlike the drink,” Henry laughs, shifts the mood—or tries to—after a sip of whatever he’s got for himself and he laughs…too forced. Too much like a game, and unsettling for it when Steve doesn’t know the rules, let alone the playbook.

And honestly, Steve is more interested in the music, now, than his unsavory tablemate.

“You were talking about your children,” Henry leans close his arm extended like it wants to grab for Steve’s in something comforting, too presumptuous—Steve moves that closest arm to grab his glass, but not to lift it.

“I’d rather not,” he says as flippant as he can because he doesn’t want to go back to the hurting, to the lack of anything to hold to in remembering that’s still closer to the surface than the actual face of his kids, his kids—

“Don’t see them much,” Henry says, kinda…tuts, like he’s regretful on Steve’s account, and it’s less a question than an observation, but Steve’s face must do something without his permission at those words because to en Henry’s got this too-bright, too eager sympathy painted all over him before he starts damn-near cooing:

“Oh,” he says, breathy, sour at the back of Steve’s mouth somehow; “oh you poor thing, you’re not even in their lives? Barely remember them sometimes, no?” And the weird thing is…he sounds too invested, yeah, but not just like a creepy fucker looking to maybe take a sad sap to bed. It’s…

It’s different.

“Like they never existed.”

Steve doesn’t understand why of all the things this asshole says, it’s that that shakes him, that trips in his pulse in a way he can feel, and hard.

He stares, jaw clenched, at the unsampled drink still in his hand: whiskey.

Like your eyes, sweetheart, just like whiskey in the morning sun, magic and full of their own perpetual light—

“She took the house, I bet,” Henry sighs, shaking his head, while Steve shakes his own from the voice that had floated at the back of his mind through to the front, close, so close and so fucking clear; “your white picket fence. Your Winnebago.”

And he looks over Steve’s shoulder like he’s really aiming at sympathizing, but…

Something about those exact words seems too precise. Lights something up in Steve’s wobbly memories—but the light feels old. Like it’s a thing he did know, once; followed and looked to, but…changed course.

And how the fuck does this jackass know that Steve maybe wanted, ever, or thought he could have wanted but knew it was a past want, a no-longer-want—in the marrow of his bones he knows the way he’s remembers it, if he is remembering it, he knows the last time it left if lips he didn’t mean it anymore, he’d turned toward wanting something else, something somehow more—

His chest feels stretched for thinking all of it through and…something equally uncertain and shimmering, just out of reach: that part knows this.

And is very fucking suspicious of how this fucker sitting across from him knew about a fucking Winnebago he doesn’t even want anymore?

“Love,” Henry, fucking, yes, Steve is now 100% convinced that that’s a bad name, it’s a bad name that means a bad person, his brain might be fuzzy right now but he knows that part: “even if it werereal,” and he says is almost dreamily but more mocking, kinda, but he’s…he’s not sincere in it. At least not the hints at empathy.

Steve knows he’s being played, even without having the rule book. Even without knowing the game.

“It’s never quite enough, is it.”

It’s not a question. But still. Nonetheless.

Love isn’t enough?

Wrong.

That he knows deeper than any narrow. Closer to the soul of him than of the other things his brain has thought it’s known so far, he’s—

Wait.

Wait, why did Steve think that? Whose voice was that, in his head? A deep voice, smooth and sweet and beloved, Steve feels that undeniable in his chest—thinks it might have been the same voice as the one that talked about his eyes, and, he, it’s…

Is that what he lost, the ring not on his finger, the kids he’s apparently walked out on in every way that matters—if the voice is right, if love were enough then why is Steve, why is Steve here, now, and he’s—

It’s always enough..

It’s a man’s voice. Steve tried to think of any man in his life who would say such a thing in the first place—no family, and friends? He—

Maybe not enough to fix everything alone, but it’s the foundation, Stevie. If it really is love, then it’s more than enough to build anything out of, or back up from.

That’s a man’s voice. And it rolls through Steve’s veins like embers, like the light catching precious stones and sparkling prismatic.

Steve may not be able to place the where or the who just yet. But he knows that it’s there.

There was no ‘she’ to take anything from him, not anything that mattered, when it mattered.

It’s the weight of the memory between his lungs and his steady-pounding heart, gaining pace and punch with every breath—the first inklings of some knowing. It’s the face of kids he’d die for. It’s the knowledge in his bones they’re not the only people he’d die for, and that he’d feel his life more than well-served in doing it. More than.

Steve swirls his glass, watching the smoke from the bar haze through real crystal—thick where the cloud in his head is dissipating more every second. It’s a meta…metafort? It’s a thing that’s making a point about another thing. Illustrating it poetically, or whatever.

The smoke left in his head. The clearest thing shining through it is that voice. That voice telling him not just about love, but something crucial embedded inside: this man seated across from him.

That man is wrong.

“What did you say your name was?” Steve asks, because there’s power in redirecting someone’s attention. And Steve feels…electricity building in his body. Lightning in his limbs; familiar.

He’s on the brink of something, and if all of the losses this man is underscoring are the reflection of who Steve’s grown into, after all that he’d sworn not to become what he knew, what nearly ruined him growing up, fucked him up so bad it took another fucking dimension and its literal monsters to yank him back from the path to becoming like the monsters at his mother’s cocktail parties, his father’s business dinners—

If this man, sitting here, is still somehow who he’s become anyway?

If Steve feels on the brink of something, so fucking close—and maybe the thing he’s close to is total oblivion, to whole-on forgetting and decimating any chance of recovering the losses this fuckface across from him with his martini glass has lifted up to the light—if he’s this close?

Last time Steve can remember breaking through the disaster of his present self was swinging a bat, and swinging to crack fucking skulls.

He’s not sure what that means but he feels weirdly inclined to trust it. So…he figures: what’s the harm?

He’d very much like to break this sonofabitch’s skull in, so.

“Could have sworn you did,” Steve finally takes a sip of his refreshed drink—the single sip alone is sharp assault on his tongue, and he bites at his bottom as the taste shoot through the nerves in his limbs and the pathways in his ways and lights them all up at once, and he hears the music in the background make a bigger impact than the way his heartbeat starts picking up in his ears as he set the drink back down, and leans in on autopilot to meet the guys eyes and make sure the way every cell in his body’s waking up is real, is telling him the truth:

“Henry, right?”

The man barely blinks, just hides less a smirk now and more a grimace in the curve of his martini glass.

Fucking bingo.

The clouds are gone. The haze has fully lifted, or at least is on its way. Steve couldn’t have said how much his body felt like a wrong-sized suit before this very moment until this very moment, when it starts to feel like his own again, like this body and every scar it’s marked with belongs to him alone.

“I’m also in the mood for forgetting this evening,” Steve lowers his tone a bit, bats his lashes as subtly as he knows and then tips his chin down the look up through them, a move that’s never failed him once when he really tries:

“Could I persuade you to accompany me?”

Henry tries to play his wordless agreement cool, almost aloof, but now that Steve knows the truth of it all, now that his own mind is clear, it’s so obvious.

Motherfucker’s champing at the bit.

They make it just out the door into the half-packed parking lot before Steve pauses, looks up at the sky—notices the eerie starlessness, the shadowy-faltering veil over the ominous red of the clouds.

“It’s funny,” Steve tells the sky as his eye catches the impression of a bolt of lightning behind the shade; “what you said earlier.”

Henry hums, but it’s…it’s an impatient, or maybe unsettled, at the very least annoyed sort of sound. He wants to leave. He wants to take Steve farther from a neutral setting.

Or at least: neutral by comparison.

“About the music,” Steve tosses his head back toward the bar beyond the doorway. “Too low to really set the ambiance,” Steve agrees, because he knows the why; “but there enough to be,” Steve sucks his teeth, pretends to look for the right word: “distracting.”

Distraction.

Henry stills. Steve isn’t feel patient enough to drag this out any further, really, now that his gaze is clear.

“We knew it wouldn’t work this time, the music,” Steve taunts, feeling the adrenaline suddenly rise in his veins like an untamable force; “you’re not strong enough for it to matter, can’t even lift the tool you need for half your dirty work.”

Literally. Because Steve’s still cognizant. Steve can feel the bleed of the real world—even if he’s floating he’s not down for the count yet. And by rights, he damn well should be—based on all previous encounters.

And yet here, on top of everything, all the memory and clarity rushing back in one heartbeat, one breath—the choice of the cocktail, the song in the background wasn’t a song anyone would know, it was written for Steve and it was in the voice of its composer, probably sang at his side without any instrument to smooth it out to anything less than raw and real—

The last nail in the coffin were the eyes.

“Can barely hear at all, the state you’re in,” Steve kicks at the ankles of the man unraveling before him as the parking lot around them starts to fade into dead trees and shot-red skies; “the bats could have, if they’d made it.”

And there it is, even diminished, even rotting: Vecna’s eyes were always the same; unmistakable. Dead giveaway.

Still full of the same fucking unhinged, megalomaniacal hate.

“She took everything, didn’t she?”

Because Steve knew it didn’t sound right for him, when it was thrown at him beyond all of it being twisted and wrong—that part had felt different, and now he knows why: no woman was taking his house, was dismantling the life he was building with someone his heart belonged to, full stop.

But this sorry excuse for crawling corpse had a young woman whose buzz cut was growing back to her curls again; and she sure as shit took everything, and was poised now to come back for the stragglers and make it final. Make it done.

All this pathetic scrap of not even a man, not even a monster—this pathetic scrap of nothing really was?

Was lingering in the dead space, half-a-ghost on borrowed time.

So Steve thinks, given his role in this was always to be the bait, and to keep him preoccupied until that ill-borrowed time needed returning to its rightful owner, and what was left of Vecna had run out of it entirely—Steve thinks he’s more than entitled to kick this fucker when he’s down.

He doesn’t even feel bad when he trips the bastard up again, too uneven on his disintegrating legs to even try to fight; honesty feels kinda giddy, like he wants to laugh when the fucker let’s loose a fittingly inhuman scream when Steve jumps with both feet on what’s left of his knees, one by one.

“Never tell me my kids don’t exist,” Steve growls, enraged, half-feral at what this creature tried to sell him; “do not even suggest I don’t remember my fucking kids.”

Because Steve could never. Steve would never. He had the nuggets he used to dream of. Almost missed the gift of those shitheads, for too long, in clinging to a different version of it he’d just absorbed from what he thought was the way the world worked; hadn’t yet readjusted to knowing the world worked wholly fucking differently, and the things he heart really wanted of course would shift accordingly.

Had shifted. Goddamn perfectly.

“And it’s wild,” Steve takes a second, considers the writhing vermin on what’s given way entirely from the mirage of anything else than soggy ground, littered with dead leaves, blackened bark.

“I’m really not a whisky drinker,” Steve muses, circling the pathetic heap of this self-style god: some fucking god.

“Not yet, anyway. I’ve been told it’s a drink you have to grow into,” Steve hums consideringly, even as he catches a hand try to reach, try to grab, try to bring Steve down again and sap his energy, the lifeblood in him to steal a few more minutes, a few more gasps before the end.

Steve crushes the hand that darts out from what’s left of the wrist, unforgiving under his heel.

“But you ordered me that cocktail with bourbon,” Steve says, almost blasé, as the figure on the ground writhes and howls.

“I drank a lot, after our first round with you,” he had. Figuring out you might very well be falling in love with someone when that someone’s not guaranteed to make it through the night for too many nights in a row takes a goddamn fucking toll. “Only time I’ve ever touched bourbon,” and it’d been top-shelf shit, his dad didn’t keep anything less on hand:

“Only time I ever will.”

Maybe Steve could grow into enjoying another kind of whiskey in the future but…that taste was always going to be tied to the heart-pounding nightmares, the bitter fear of unmitigated loss.

“Really throws me out of the moment here and now, though, y’know?” Steve makes a point of crushing every individual finger on the hand he’s still got under one shoe with the other. For insurance. “Takes me back somewhere else.”

When the cretin slowly quiets his yelping to heavy panting—and Steve is not above admiring to himself that he does weight crushing his windpipe next because Steve’s not a vicious person, he’s not violent like that but this animal nearly cost them everything, nearly cost him everything.

Might still, if Steve can’t get back out of this half-mindfuck, half-hellscape.

He really, really thinks about it.

“You fucker,” he desires to hiss, to lean down little and catch those wrathful eyes; “you really thought you had me, didn’t you.”

And the second hand tried to shout up to take Steve by the neck, but Steve’s faster, not least because he’s not coming apart at whatever stands in for the cells of a reconstituted corpse multiple times over. He knocks that arm away hard enough to snap something clean enough to echo, and then takes his time repeating the through crushing of wrist, finger, finger, finger, finger, thumb.

And then, because the screaming isn’t load enough for Steve’s liking just now, not for this monster, he decides to see if there’s anything in the crotch area left of this wrinkled ballsack of a man. It never really looked like it, the few times Steve had seen him in full, in better days for his…already-rotting body…thing.

But the pitch of the agony that rings out when Steve grinds his heel down in that general anatomical…area must mean there’s still something.

It’s something like the middle of that scream that Steve catches under his shoe at what’s left of the neck he wanted to crush before but now…now it’s just pressure. Painful. Inconvenience, dialed up to Eleven.

“What’s wrong, Henry?” Steve taunts, meets those eyes with what he knows, means to be a crazed fucking grin:

“Never heard of a Piggyback?”

And those hate-filled go wide, go fearful.

Fucking excellent.

“El, take him!” Steve cries out and feels a seismic wave knock him far from where he was standing, but he’s still grinning wide when he lands far in a heap, knocked hard but…this was the plan.

Everything goes dark very fast after he crumples in the ground, hears mostly yelling—rage and pain, triumph and total decimation—and it’s the last thing he does hear, might be the e last thing he hears ever, save for a desperate cry of one word before it all fucking fades:

“Steve!”

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

…..tbc??😬🫠

SERIOUSLY: I have nothing against people named Henry! I promise! 🫠

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