deadonstage
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Summary
Steve Harrington learned how to survive. He never learned how to be loved.
After everything Hawkins put him through, Steve settles into a quieter life teaching middle school, coaching baseball, and pretends the past stayed buried when the gates finally closed for good. The town knows about the earthquakes and blackouts but they don't know what it cost him.
Claire Bennett always noticed the things other people missed. The kid who never talked, the one who flinched at sudden noises, and the ones who learned how to disappear in plain sight. Which is why she noticed Steve. She remembers the boy Steve used to be. Or at least, the boy everyone thought he was. Popular. Untouchable. Safe. What she finds instead is a man who startles too easily, avoids silence, and carries a loneliness that feels familiar.
They went to school together their whole lives but they may as well have been in completely different worlds. Now they share hallways, late afternoons, and a growing awareness that some parts of him never made it out of the darkness that still haunts him.
This is a story about how sometimes healing begins with someone simply choosing to stay.
Bookmarked by deadonstage
26 Mar 2026
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Two weeks before she is meant to leave Hawkins, Brie Henderson loses her mother in a car accident and becomes the only parent her little brother has left.
That same night, she makes two decisions.
She will raise Dustin.
And she will not let Steve Harrington sacrifice his future for her.
Four months after a careful, practical breakup, she tells herself she can carry it all alone; the house, the paperwork, the grief. Even the nausea. Even the exhaustion. Even the truth growing quietly beneath her ribs.
Steve notices more than she thinks he does. He always has.
The truth does not arrive through confession.
It arrives in crisis.Bookmarked by deadonstage
28 Feb 2026
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“She’s not cool. She’s condescending.”
“Mmhmm.”
“She looks at me like I’m an idiot.”
“Wow. New experience for you.”
“And she talks like she’s already five steps ahead of everyone else.”
Robin hummed thoughtfully. “You know, that’s exactly how I felt about you when we first met.”Julia, the new art teacher at Hawkins Middle, is sharp, unreadable, and clearly hiding something. When a student starts acting strangely, Steve finds himself forced into a reluctant investigation with the one person he can’t stand—and can’t quite look away from.
OR: a post-canon, post-epilogue fic where Steve Harrington stays in Hawkins as a middle school coach and reluctantly teams up with the new art teacher to untangle a mystery.
Slow burn. Enemies to allies. And a love story about confronting the parts of yourself you’d rather keep buried.Bookmarked by deadonstage
28 Feb 2026
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Hawkins is a town built on routine—quiet streets, familiar faces, and the comforting lie that nothing truly bad ever happens there.
Lena Harris has survived long enough to know better.
When a local boy vanishes and the town begins to unravel, Lena is pulled into the edges of something strange and unsettling, where reality bends, secrets surface, and the past refuses to stay buried. As Hawkins cracks open, she finds herself standing closer to the dark than she ever meant to be.
Some doors don’t stay closed.
Some truths won’t stay quiet.
And once the world turns upside down, there’s no going back.Series
- Part 1 of Upside Down Sisters
Bookmarked by deadonstage
08 Jan 2026
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Rosemary Clarke never planned on finishing high school in Hawkins, Indiana. She definitely didn’t plan on living with her nerdy science-teacher uncle, getting adopted by a bunch of overexcited middle schoolers, or forming an uneasy co-babysitter alliance with Steve Harrington of all people.
But Hawkins is stranger than it looks, and normal keeps slipping through Rose’s fingers. Between Dungeons & Dragons nights, suspicious happenings no one can explain, and one ex–golden boy trying very hard to be better than he was, Rose finds herself building a new life out of grief, bad jokes, and late-night car rides.
There is too much hairspray, cryptic small-town mysteries no one quite wants to name out loud, and two reluctant babysitters who keep ending up on the same side of things. Rose and Steve are determined not to talk about the way they fit together in a crisis… or the quiet, inconvenient feelings that start growing in between monsters, math homework, and middle school dances.
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Bookmarked by deadonstage
06 Jan 2026