Chapter Text
Averno. Ancient name, Avernus. A small crater lake, ten miles west of Naples, Italy; regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld.
You die when your spirit dies.
Otherwise, you live.
You may not do a good job of it, but you go on—
something you have no choice about.
...
It is terrible to be alone.
I don’t mean to live alone—
to be alone, when no one hears you.
- Louise Glück
Black and silver, black and blue. Silt churning, clouding your eyes. Silver was moonlight, already faded. Blue-black, the water.
Red, the open mouth. Part lips, turn tongue, you’ve found the answer.
Steve has nightmares.
This is not newsworthy, not by any metric of Hawkins batshittery (painful pun only half-intended). There is no way you put your brain (and yeah, OK, occasionally your face) through a meat-grinder every six months and escape unscathed. There is also no off-switch when the worst is over, except for maybe some particularly illegal substance that Steve isn’t willing to try.
That would be the coward’s way out, anyway, and if Steve can claim anything to his credit, it’s that he’s spent the last two-and-a-half years trying to be less of a coward.
Less of a coward, less of a whiner. When he was the basketball star and the swim-team champ and all that shit, people let him get away with so much whining. The kind of thing you have to look back at, like the secrets of darkness through daylight’s skewed lens, and think, what the fuck was I doing?
So. Less cowardice, less bellyaching. The kids have it way worse than he does, which is part of the reason he doesn’t talk about his two o’clock wakings. Who cares if he’s sweating through his sheets in an empty bed three or four nights a week? He’s nineteen, which means he has a hefty five years on every last one of the little squirts. Also, he’s rarely been in the supernatural’s sights directly. Not like Will—Max—Eleven.
Not like Chrissy or Fred or Patrick, who became the nightmares they wouldn’t live to dream.
So I want you to think of the worst place you’ve ever been. Cold and slimy. Fucking slimy, yeah, I’m not messing with you. I want you to think of the worst place you can even imagine, and I want you to find a way to be happy there.
I’m not joking. It’s so much easier than you think. You’re bleeding out, and you might die here, but all you need is—
Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!
There’s the fact, too, that Steve’s nightmares are selfish. They’re always about his pain, his death, as if the worst thing that could possibly happen is that Steven Grant Harrington’s life gets snuffed out before he reaches legal drinking age.
See, when I’m in my subconscious or whatever, turns out I don’t care about any of you. That’s what he’d have to confess to the kids, if he talked about it, which again—he won’t.
Wild demon-bats couldn’t drag it out of him.
So. Steve has nightmares: flesh tearing wetly from his bones, pain screaming in his snapping joints, vision going dark under the flapping, razoring jaws of a demagorgon. Steve has been scared out of his fucking mind. Has begged for mercy. Has been ashamed of himself for waking with a hoarse throat; has been sickly relieved that there’s rarely anyone to hear him.
Steve has nightmares, but he’s never dreamed of this.
The whites of Nancy’s eyes, tilted back like lifeless marbles—the chill of Nancy’s skin, going cold beneath his touch as if she’s already—
The thing about happiness is that it depends on other people. The thing about death is that your own doesn’t matter. You could be snuffed out, and the world would not be worse off. The Party would hold a funeral. Nancy might shed a tear or two, watering the stirred-up soil of your grave. Real romantic.
Your parents would finish the distant kind of grieving they started a while ago, for the son they didn’t want, particularly.
Maybe if they’d had a daughter—their own Nancy Wheeler—maybe they’d get it. How goddamn precious life is, how each one of these kids has to live until they’re fucking a hundred and five, or you won’t be satisfied.
How Nancy has to live, or else the world ends.
He’s already wasted precious seconds, shouting and shaking her. If what Max said is true—and of course it’s true, Steve has no reason not to believe her—Vecna’s cruel fingers are already tightening their grip on Nancy’s skull, ready to plunge viciously into her eye-sockets. If what Eddie said is true—and Steve wishes like hell he didn’t have to believe him—bones are about to start twisting, snapping.
Nancy’s stiff as a board, and about to be light as a feather. Once she rockets upwards, there’s nothing he can do.
Steve has daydreams. This is so much more embarrassing than the terrors he wanders into in sleep. Steve has full-on looney daydreams, which Robin calls his head-trauma episodes, but which are actually just him trying to picture a future so hard it kind of overtakes him in the moment.
It usually goes like this: Nancy Wheeler, walking back into his life, giving it purpose.
Giving him purpose.
He is fully aware that this is all bullshit, or at least, he was, until this current string of Freddy Kreuger kills gave them what seemed like a second chance.
You’re so fucking selfish, Harrington.
(Things you tell yourself to stay sane.)
He shouldn’t have seen a series of murders as an opportunity, for one thing, and for another, he should have been looking out for her. Not just when it came to demon-bats and sentient vines, but when it came to—to the real threat, the one that came for people with enough heart to be haunted.
For people like Nancy.
He should have remembered that it’s all about give-and-take: courage, loyalty, friendship. Whatever it is they have, it’s be careful running in both directions, it’s her standing over him and keeping the monsters at bay, it’s his arms around her when the world shakes hard enough to split open.
He should have remembered that they never get to have enough time.
“What’s her favorite song?” Dustin is bellowing from up above—from down below? Who the hell knows, or cares at this point—and Steve hears his own voice howling back,
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” for all the world to hear.
Because he doesn’t.
He’s not her boyfriend. Jonathan would know. Or Mike. But Nancy’s been a figment of Steve’s lonely imagination for a long time, now. Even when they were together, he could never be sure how much truth she was telling him, how much of her professed taste was designed to shield her from his desire to know who she really was.
“I don’t know,” he rasps out one more time, like that can help them, and then Nancy starts rising.
She saved his life. More than once, in the past few hours. No other way around it, not that he’d look for one. He owes her everything.
She plunged into the lake on blind faith, and that kept him from being torn (completely) to shreds.
She bandaged him with her own hands, never flinching, confirming his ongoing theory that he was more squeamish than she was.
They’ve made it this far. They’ve made it through wars the world didn’t even know anybody was fighting.
Steve will be damned if this is the end.
Steve is damned already if he has to watch Nancy die in front of him.
She’s taller than he is now, the tips of her toes not even brushing the ground, her hands pulling against his with unnatural strength as he tries to drag her downwards. Her face is still the same. Her body doesn’t know what her mind is letting in.
Not yet.
Steve doesn’t know what he’s doing. A fool, a failure, you’re an idiot, Steve Harrington, and he’s never been the same since her smile was for him, since her touch made him whole.
He died in her arms, in a way, because she wouldn’t let such a pathetic little shithead as he used to be survive.
He died and came back again, so now it’s his turn to make things right.
Steve doesn’t know what song can save her. He has to try something else.
He leaps before she’s out of reach. Arms around her; hand on the back of her neck, where her spine is ramrod straight.
Steve does what he never thought he’d do again: kisses her dead mouth, in the hope that it will keep her alive.
You’ve found an answer.