Chapter Text
Steve’s having a really bad night. It might be morning now, actually. He hasn’t looked out a window in awhile.
There hasn’t been any time for that between getting his two bites stitched up and then criss-crossing one specific hallway on the third floor of Hawkins Memorial while his nurses clicked their tongues and reminded him that excessive movement would pull at his stitches. As if his stitches matter at all in comparison to Max and Eddie coming out of surgery and Lucas getting his possible concussion looked at and Dustin in a state of near catatonia.
At least Robin is okay. Somehow she’s currently calmer than she would be during a busy day at work. Nancy left with a list of addresses to drive by after first checking on her own parents, promising to report back to all the kids about the state of their families post…earthquake? Steve thinks that’s what they’re gonna call it. He isn’t entirely sure how that one will sell.
He told Robin to go with Nancy, to check on her parents and her cat with her own two eyes, but he’d been admittedly, selfishly relieved when she squeezed his hand and insisted on staying. It gives him another person to gather information with. Right now she’s with Lucas and Erica in an exam room, though she promised to intermittently pop her head out into the waiting room to check on Dustin. Steve wishes he could do the same, gravely concerned to not have heard more than twenty words from the kid since they got back through the gate with Eddie’s head lolling forward onto Steve’s shoulder, but he’s occupied with listening to Max’s doctor explain a torrent of information.
Steve remembers when his nonna’s heart started failing two years ago. It was a bleak winter, full of hospital visits and late-night emergency room trips right as things seemed to be calming down, and Steve was struck by how his parents apparently could work together and communicate when they needed to. They’d take turns at hospital visits, listening to doctors and then relaying everything they’d learned over dinner. Questions about pacemakers, double-checking how much sodium could go in every meal, complaining about one particular nurse and insisting something should be done about that little know-it-all. Steve was amazed, partially by how much effort went into the health of someone they only saw every Thanksgiving and Christmas, and partially by the fact that his parents apparently just chose not to work together on anything else their entire lives.
It feels awful to think this about his poor sweet nonna, but Steve is kind of grateful for her heart failure in the current moment. He knows, from watching his parents, that you have to ask doctors questions and make sure you understand everything so that you can explain it to someone else later. Someone else in this case being Max’s mother, wherever she is–has anyone even told her?
Steve listens to a ten minute spiel about everything wrong with Max. Broken bones, some of which needed corrective surgery, a severe concussion which may or may not be affecting her vision, and a ruptured lung that’s apparently being fixed by a little tube that snakes out from the bandages around her chest. Steve doesn’t know how the hell that little plastic tube is going to fix her goddamn lung being ruptured, but the doctor doesn’t give him time to ask. When it is time for questions, Steve gets the most important one out first.
“She’s gonna wake up, right?”
“Well, yes.” The doctor guy says it in a tone that suggests maybe it should’ve been obvious, but in Steve’s defense it all sounded really fucking bad. And Max looks like someone whose body might just stay asleep at this point, with her bulky white casts and oxygen tubes and brace around her neck that apparently doesn’t mean her neck is broken, just that they’re taking pressure off the back of her head…or something.
Steve heaves a sigh and reaches down to squeeze Max’s hand. He wishes he could tell her sleeping form that he’ll be there when she wakes up, but it seems impossible to promise. So instead he just tells her, “Good job, Red.”
Two nurses come in while the doctor explains the timeframe for Max to wake up and what they’ll do afterwards and when she’ll be out of ICU and into a regular room. Steve asks about contacting her mother and there’s a stir of confusion between the doctor and nurses when they realize that Steve isn’t her older brother.
“No, I’m just a friend.” He realizes how insane it sounds, but until that Owens guy inevitably arrives, he doesn’t have a good enough cover-story to explain away the bizarreness of it all. “I’m the one who filled out her forms, also, uh I put all the allergies that I know about but you should really double check with her mom. I can call her if you guys haven’t, I know their home number.”
“Okay.” The doctor seems utterly bewildered, maybe a little out of his depth. Steve can’t blame him. He probably stayed at Hawkins General for his entire professional career because it was calm and uneventful until recently. He has absolutely no experience in dealing with a dimensional rift opening up. “And just to clarify, you are…?”
“Steve Harrington. I’m her friend.”
“Steve Harrington?” One of the nurses looks away from where she’s fiddling with the ruptured lung tube. “We have another patient asking for you.”
One more squeeze of Max’s hand and a quick walk five doors down later, Steve has Eddie’s face squished into his shoulder as they both cry a little. Everything that’s happened tonight feels insane, so really in the grand scheme of things he shouldn’t be so tripped out by weeping and hugging Eddie Munson, but it really is up there on the list of things Steve could’ve never predicted in a million years. You’d think he would stop being so surprised by now.
“You’re okay, you’re okay.” Steve tells Eddie, and himself, before finally releasing his grip and letting him lay back in bed. He looks better than he had the last time Steve saw him approximately three hours ago when he was being rolled away on a stretcher with blood caked onto his chin and little bits of Upside Down pollen stuck in his tangled hair. Now his face is clean, his hair pulled back, and he’s pale but no longer taking on a sickly-gray tint like he had when they were still down there. Eddie is technically older than Steve, by four months, but he still has the strong desire to hold his face in both his hands just like he sometimes wants to do to the kids.
“I should’a taken your advice.” Eddie has the gall to smirk at a time like this, though the heavy drugs he’s on are probably exacerbating the issue. “Being a hero is overrated. I was seeing the light for a second.”
“You’re religious now?” Steve jokes weakly, trying to match Eddie’s tone in stride.
“Mm, no.” He’s apparently too tired to carry the bit much further. His eyes slide shut and Steve instinctively grabs his shoulder again, ready to jostle, until the doctor gently interjects that he’s fine, just still feeling the drugs.
This doctor is different than Max’s and a hell of a lot nicer. She’s also much more on top of things because she somehow contacted Eddie’s uncle who should be here any minute. Until then, Steve hears a brief version of what went down in the operating room and what Eddie’s recovery will look like. The more thorough version must be reserved for once Eddie’s uncle shows up, because Steve hears a lot less technical jargon this time. Some of it he already knows, because his two bites got stitched up the same way Eddie’s whopping twelve did.
“Dog bites.” Eddie suddenly revives to interject in the exact middle of the doctor’s sentence.
“Dog bites, that’s right.” She talks to him like he’s three years old, which Steve supposes the drugs might be reverting him to. Her expression is nothing but sympathetic when she turns back to Steve, shaking her head mournfully as she tuts, “Awful luck to be working with skittish animals when an earthquake hits.”
It’s so ridiculous that Steve wants to laugh. He probably will, later, a few days from now. Right now he can’t muster up more than a noncommittal shrug, a sort of what-can-ya-do gesture that probably doesn’t rightfully convey how he’s supposed to be feeling.
“I just can’t believe the whole thing.” Eddie’s doctor continues, glancing at the wall their backs are turned to. Steve follows her gaze, alarmed to find that the television has been on this entire time and he was apparently just tuning it out. It seems weird that Eddie’s television is on at all, considering he just woke up from surgery, but there probably isn’t a TV in Hawkins that isn’t currently tuned to channel three news.
“It’s crazy.” Steve agrees. “Uh, so you said he’s on antibiotics to help with infection? Does he have to take those by mouth, or…?”
“Some he will, yes. Some will be administered through his IV while he’s staying here with us.”
“And how long do you think that’ll be?”
“It depends on how much progress we see with those fluid levels that we talked about–”
“Steve?” Eddie interrupts again. Steve casts a glance in his direction, but Eddie is looking past him at the television with hazy eyes.
“Yeah, I’m here.” Steve jostles his foot gently and gestures for the doctor to continue talking about fluid levels. By fluid, he’s pretty sure she just means blood. The blood that Eddie was coughing up, he figures. It had to go somewhere, so they must’ve drained it the same way they drained all the leaking air from Max’s lung. Maybe. He hopes Eddie’s uncle gets this stuff better than he does.
“Don’t you live in Loch Nora?” Eddie asks just as the doctor is opening her mouth to speak again. Steve builds up to a sigh, unsure how exactly to tell Eddie to shut up when it’s not even his fault that he can’t, before he realizes Eddie’s gaze is still glued to the TV.
Steve turns around. The footage is all shaky. A reporter lady in a red dress is talking in a box in the upper corner of the screen about…the airforce? Or something. Maybe the airforce are the ones flying all the helicopters that are taking aerial footage of the gradually lightening sky. It is morning, Steve notices, and then he notices the pink flamingos on screen.
Little plastic eyesores, that’s what his mother calls them. Mrs. Abernathy next door insists on having them all in a little line at the edge of her lawn, no matter the season. There’s usually six. Three on one side of the cement pathway up to her door, three on the other. Steve used to reach out and bop their little plastic heads on the walk back from the mailbox.
Now there’s only five. Where the sixth one used to be, there’s a red gaping slash in the Earth, swallowing up what was once trimmed green grass and sidewalk and little snails when it rained. The camera pans out, and Steve has to grip the edge of Eddie’s bed to stay upright because it isn’t just the pink flamingo that was eaten up by the Earth.
All that’s left of Steve’s house is the chimney. It’s not even jutting up into the sky anymore. It’s laying horizontal on the ground, the brick exposed and dangling over the crevice like the plank on a pirate ship. Everything else is gone. His bedroom window, his driveway, the wreath on their front door.
“Steve?” Eddie all but whispers, sounding suddenly sober.
“I, uh, I have to go.” Steve manages to say around his heart in his throat. “Eddie, uh, I’m gonna get Robin and she’ll–she’ll come sit with you until your uncle gets here. And um, Max, my friend Max Mayfield, she’s in room–fuck, I can’t remember the number but she’s five doors down, she’s a redhead and she’s in casts and she’s really small so someone should stay with her too, I’ll be–”
Steve has to blink to sharpen his vision again, clearing his eyes of gathered tears so he can see the doctor’s face, make sure she understands everything he needs from her. She’s no longer gaping at the TV, although her mouth is still open slightly, and Steve has to just take the eye contact to mean she heard all that. Eddie must have, at least.
“I’ll be right back.”