Chapter Text
Steve saw Eddie again on the worst day of his life.
It had been two years since Hopper and Joyce got married, and the morning after the night before that he never told anyone, not even Robin, about. They’d seen each other, him and Eddie, in passing since then of course: it was hard not to, running in concentric circles around each other — but by virtue of his job, Steve had been able to keep himself scarce in the aftermath. There were parties and events and get-togethers when they were stateside in the off season and summer break; there were the American and Canadian grands prix, because they always had tickets for everyone and made big dinner plans for after, no matter the podium Steve landed on. Eddie had integrated so seamlessly into their lives after Will had first brought him around; it would’ve been glaringly obvious if he didn’t invite him, so he’d worked hard to be normal, kept it superficial, glossy and picture perfect. He put on his public persona even in private, and no one noticed, not really, because Steve had always been good at masking. After the first year of being as aggressively normal as possible, he’d begun to suspect Robin might know something was up, and Max, and later Erica, and him lived out of each other’s pockets enough that they’d sometimes look at him askance, but no one called him on it and that was good enough for him.
Anyway, it took two to tango, and for two years, Eddie was as normal as him. Maybe he had as good a front as Steve, or maybe it just meant less, to him: he was as he always had been before with him, if less handsy, but no one said a thing about it — not even Dustin, who was known to put anyone and everyone on the news if they acted the slightest bit different than usual. Two years, and he would’ve thought the whole thing was a drunken dream if not for the evidence he woke to in the cold, sober light of morning that day, the fingerprints on his hip bones and the hickey that didn’t fade for a week and the body he left behind in the bed because Steve had never loved anything the way he loved racing and he didn’t know how to be anything else other than what he was and he’d ran because it was the easiest, safest thing he could do .
So it had been two years since that morning, and it had been six months since Steve had cornered Eddie in the hallway at Robin and Nancy’s engagement party and tried, haltingly, to apologize. It had been six months since Eddie had said, “Sure, man, I get it, I’m sorry too,” and had walked away from him without a backwards look. It had been six months since he’d locked himself in Robin and Nancy’s bathroom for ten minutes while he sat on the edge of the tub and cried into a hand towel, and it had been six months since he’d lied to Robin’s face when he said he had food poisoning.
And now here he was: on the worst day of his life, Hopper and El on one side of his hospital bed and Eddie on the other, and Steve was probably never going to race again because Hopper looked like he hadn’t slept in days and El’s face was tear-stained and nurses and doctors were poking at him, the machines, the lines in his arms, and Eddie was right there and —
“I can’t feel my legs.”
But maybe he was getting ahead of himself.
The first time he got behind the wheel of a go-kart, Steve was ten.
They’d always moved around a lot for his dad’s job, and at first it had just taken them all across the States: he was born in Chicago, but he’d lived in Miami, Boston, LA, Toronto, and Houston by the time the first European posting was offered. Steve had been seven, back then, and good at making friends but not at keeping them, and his mom had frowned at the idea of Prague, somewhere so totally foreign, but they went nonetheless. That only lasted six months, and then it was Paris for eight, London for fifteen, and then Milan.
That was the city his mom had liked the most, and Steve figured either his dad did too or the business was best there because they bought a house and everything after the second month, had the furniture shipped from storage in Houston, and he actually got enrolled in an international school this time instead of getting foisted off on some perky au pair that his dad probably wanted to bang and his mom turned a blind eye and rictus grin to.
The school was one populated mostly by the kids of American diplomats and other expats, and it had enough connections that Steve practically gave presentations during Sunday dinners so his dad could examine these potential friends and let him know who to continue associating with, and who to drop like a hot potato.
Connections were how he got sat in that go-kart in 2001. Some business rival, or potential partner or something that Steve barely remembered these days, had a kid who raced and his dad figured it would be a good way for him to get introductions made. He’d gotten Steve a handful of private lessons, signed him up for a race, and dropped him into his first cockpit with an admonishment not to embarrass him in front of his potential new business partners.
It turned out his dad didn’t need to worry, because he was fucking good at racing.
“He is,” someone said to his dad while vigorously shaking his hand and Steve stood at his side, silently holding the tiny gold statue that had been thrust at him after he’d crossed the checkered flag first, “an utter marvel behind the wheel! A prodigy!”
He’d beaten kids who were bigger and older than him, who’d been at it for years longer, who’d had better equipment and actual trainers and one kid had an honest to god sponsorship. He’d left each one in the dust, including the son of the business rival-partner-whatever too.
His dad wrapped an arm around his shoulders, said, “Yes, we’re very proud,” and proceeded to parlay Steve’s new found prowess into several successful deals for his firm.
Most of the time, when Steve got roped into doing things like this for his dad, it was one and done. He’d done basketball in Houston, learned hockey in Boston and Toronto as the only notable repeat, took up swimming in London, and sure he’d liked swimming the best out of everything but they were never things for him . They were never anything he got to keep.
“Everyone has a role to play,” his mom had told him once, right before they first moved to Prague. He’d caught her drinking sherry in front of the vanity at three p.m. as she got ready for some office party later that night, staring dead-eyed into the mirror at her glossy, picture perfect face, the company face Steve sometimes saw reflected back at himself even now. She’d met his eye over her glass, smiled tightly, and said, “We all have our parts. Even you, baby.”
It was a feeling he’d had for a long time, finally put to words, and he was a little kid but he got it, okay, he understood. He knew what his role in the family was in Houston, in London, in Milan, and it was as a prop. He was the kid who was seen but not heard, trotted out for a Christmas card so they could get their perfect Sears portrait in matching sweaters and his dad could send them out to everyone and no one and say, Look at how perfect my family is. Steve got brought round to make friends and strategic connections and then he was shuffled away to wait in the wings until he was needed again.
Something shifted, though, with the go-karts, with racing. Danny Harrington was nothing if not an opportunist, and he took one look at Steve’s prowess and the looks it garnered their family — he took one look at the older kids who were transitioning to F4 and F3 across Europe, at the way the European sport’s world looked at Michael Schumacher as he took home his fourth Championship that year — he weighed the pluses and the minuses, and he saw how the Harrington name could come out on top.
His dad was always a businessman before he was a father, and Steve had no illusions, even at ten, what it meant when he got to keep racing. A trainer was retained and the best equipment was bought, meal plans and workout regimens designed for a ten year old boy, and Steve raced and raced and raced, and he won and won and won. His dad shook hands, signed deals, and took his son’s success all as his own.
But for Steve —
It may have started at something his father gave him, as just another role, but the minute he dropped into that seat for the first time — go-karts, driving, racing — when he was alone in the cockpit, he was free.
He’d never known it before. He spent so long as someone following behind, constricted by the rules and expectations of his parents, of everyone around him, and suddenly he wasn’t anymore, when he was inside that go-kart. It was just him and the track in front of him, the decisions his and his alone back then, and Steve had never been alone like that — he’d never had a chance to be who he was: to be himself. He was ten and he was someone who only had to exist in that moment, behind the wheel, and he was so free.
And if there was some small part of him that clung to the idea that this could be the thing that would make his parents finally, finally proud of him? At the end of the day, he was only just ever a boy, alone in a country that wasn’t his own, in a huge house that his mother haunted like a ghost and that his father inhabited only when it was convenient for him — at the end of the day, he was just a boy, and their love was for sale and he thought maybe this was the price he needed to pay and he would do it gladly.
So Steve raced, and they stayed in Italy, though his father still traveled constantly for work. As much as his mom had liked Milan, liked Italy, when they first got there, she began to resent it alongside her husband’s absenteeism, even when she was at his side. She didn’t speak the language and didn’t have the same role in the family that Steve did that kept him immersed with the people around them. She started to resent him too, he knew, when he started speaking Italian more than English and carried on conversations with their cook, Nìcolo, and their maid, Isabella, around the house more than her.
Looking back, he wondered if it would have made a difference, if he’d made more of an effort, but at the time he just thought that he was playing his part and she was playing hers. He focused on racing, on winning, on taking home trophy and title after trophy and title, and his mom stayed a picture perfect wife, a trophy herself, brittle only if you knew where to look.
When he was thirteen, he caught the eye of Ferrari — his dad had moved them right after his birthday that summer to Modena for that express purpose, in fact — and, specifically, Steve caught the eye of an Italian-American engineer there who was trying to get his little girl into racing.
He’d noticed them around the track, of course. It was hard not to, considering the girl in question was an uncoordinated mess on her own two legs let alone behind the wheel of a go-kart. Steve was sort of abstractly jealous of the girl, because she was never yelled at or chastised when she took a turn too sharp or didn’t accelerate at the right moment. He celebrated every single one of the girl’s last places — if she even managed to cross the line — like she took the first podium, swinging her around and laughing.
Steve, with his shelves of trophies and awards and a father who only came to races when he caught wind that someone important would be there, would bite his lip and look away from Signor Buckley and his daughter, their laughter and chatter burning his ears, and tell himself his love of racing was what mattered.
Because of this, he didn’t notice Signor Buckley watching him right back, sticking around for Steve’s age and gender bracket with his little girl perched on his shoulders, whispering her own commentary in her father’s ear as she watched him too. He had potential, Signor Buckley would tell his bosses at Ferrari, this American boy who spoke almost perfect Italian, this American boy with the freckles and moles and the non-existent parents.
Signor Buckley sent his daughter, quite literally, crashing into Steve one afternoon so he could formally make his acquaintance. He’d fallen down and backwards in an attempt to not crush the twelve year-old whirlwind that had practically body checked him, and Signor Buckley had come running over to scoop them both up and dust them off.
He didn’t remember the particulars of the conversation, but Steve knew how it ended up: with Signor and Signora Buckley taking him under their wing and into their lives, befriending their chaotic, uncoordinated Robin, and Steve signing with Prema despite his young age shortly after that, the path to the junior seat at Ferrari already begun.
When he was fifteen, he was less than a year out from a Formula 2 seat with Prema and he hadn’t seen his parents in person in six months. He spent most of his time with the Buckleys, more a part of their family than his own, but that ended too when Signor Buckley got the call that his mother had been hospitalized back in Rhode Island and that it wasn’t looking good. He saw the family off, dry-eyed, at the airport, and promised that they would all stay in touch. Signor Buckley was only taking a leave of absence, after all, to care for his mother, and would return when that came to its sad conclusion, and Steve had practically been an adult since they first met anyway, at least in his own eyes.
He was lonely, after the Buckleys left, his parents flitting into his life when he made that race debut with Prema during Formula Renault 2.0 Italia, only to leave again as soon as Steve won the first race of the circuit at Mugello. He made do, as he always did, attended the classes he needed to with his tutors and spent all his free time at the tracks. He joked with Nìcolo and Isabella around the house, and texted with Robin constantly, really testing the limits of his trusty Nokia 3100 as it struggled along on its last legs.
But then, just after his sixteenth birthday, right after the race at Misano, a man and a woman from the American Embassy showed up at Steve’s door to tell him that his parents were dead. A boating accident, off the coast of Sardinia, and Steve stared, said, “I thought they were in Rome?”
The man and the woman exchanged a short but loaded look, and the man said, “I’m sorry, son.”
And despite the fact that the house was left to Steve in trust in his father’s will — despite the fact that Steve was racing for Prema under the guardianship of an engineer there — despite the fact that he’d been living in Italy since he was nine, hadn’t been back in the United States since he was seven — despite it all, he was an American citizen at the end of the day, and, suddenly, an orphan.
He was sixteen, and he was ripped from the only life he’d ever known, sat on a plane with a one-way ticket next to a real battle ax of a CPS officer who’d flown all the way to Italy to collect him on the Embassy’s behalf, and sent to live with the only blood relative he had left: a great-aunt he’d never met, in Hawkins, Indiana.
What Steve remembered of the crash was this:
It was overcast at Silverstone, that afternoon. It was cooler than last year, the wind from Friday had died down significantly, and the likelihood of seeing rain was slim to none. Conditions were favorable, and Steve had had good runs in practice and snagged P2 to start. Max had officially made her test debut for the team Saturday too, and Erica, despite her age, had gotten to be her race engineer; Max was going to get elevated out of testing and dev within the next two years and make motorsport history, and Erica was going to be the youngest race engineer in F1 history shortly there after, mark his words.
So the girls were running on a high at breakfast that had kept a smile on his face as he’d made his way to the track with them. It was going to be a good day and a great race, and he and the team were feeling confident as the flag went up.
Only Hopper and Joyce had been able to make it to the British Grand Prix weekend this year: the Party had been filming what Dustin referred to as a “long-anticipated one-shot for the mail bag,” which made zero sense to Steve even after all these years, and El had finally acquiesced to a guest appearance after being promised a “totally bitchin’ character” by Mike. His group chat with them was subsequently all apologetic well wishes but also filled with Lightning McQueen gifs and one Dukes of Hazzard one, because every single last one of them was an asshole; it also included a picture of El in her Mercedes cap giving him a thumbs up, the boys blurry shapes in the background, taken by an unknown hand. Robin, Nancy, and Jonathan had all sent him good luck texts as they got closer to the flag. Argyle would text him after, because he never woke up early enough to catch the beginning of the race when it wasn’t in North America (and even then Jonathan and their girlfriend Naomi had their work cut out getting all three of them to the race on time).
Hopper, who came to as many races as his and Joyce’s schedules allowed, had never liked spending the morning with Steve — he was vaguely aware of it as some superstition around Steve crashing, though he probably would’ve had to waterboard Hop to get him to admit to it — but there was always a customarily gruff “don’t die out there” voicemail from the night before instead for Steve to wake up to. He’d saved every one of them.
(Even before, Eddie had never got in the habit of wishing him good luck; Steve hadn’t even been sure the guy knew what he did for the first couple of years after they got introduced, though Mike had once implied he did go regularly to Robin’s crack of dawn viewing parties. He usually texted him the day after to tell him congrats if he won, but not always; Steve tried real hard not to let that bother him, and quietly told himself it wasn’t like they were friends, not like the rest of them were.)
He dropped Max and Erica off at the paddock, shot Hop a text to tell him and Joyce to come down there after the race, and greeted the crush of engineers and mechanics in the garage as he cut his way through.
Steve remembered getting in his gear — he’d finally gotten the helmet Will had been designing for him right before they left for England, and he was excited to debut it — and he remembered Max and Erica tapping the hard shell of the helmet as he climbed into the cockpit. Dmitri, as always, was the last person he saw, checking his straps one last time and giving him a stoic nod, and then Yuri was in his ear, telling him to give them hell.
There was nothing like the start of a race: the anticipation building from the practices and qualifying to the moment he was dropping into the cockpit — the roar of the engines, vibrating the cage of Steve’s ribs, his heart beating a similar tattoo — the smell of it, gasoline and exhaust and burning rubber, so thick it was a taste coating the back of his throat — the crowd, the noise, the heat. Every start was the same and every start was different, and he never felt more at home then when he was cradled within his car, secure within its embrace, ready to meet a new challenge, ready to reach a new height.
All the drivers had taken their cars through the formation lap, and then there they were, staring down the start of Abbey, breaths bated, blood pumping. Five lights lit up one by one and then —
Steve released one clutch paddle, then the next, and he was hurtling down Abbey and into Farm Curve, eyes on the prize. He tore through Turn Three and then Four, and was in front of the Red Bull that had started in pole ahead of him. Yuri congratulated him on his overtake, and Steve thanked him, watching the track, his hands, the gauges.
It was like breathing for Steve, racing, not even second nature but first, as natural as if he’d been born with the steering column beneath his hands. Most people assumed he’d gotten behind the wheel of a go-kart much younger than he had, a natural born talent, and yeah it took a hell of a lot of practice for him to be at the top of his game, this game —
But when you stripped it away, stripped the sound and the heat and the smell back, stripped away the other drivers — when you took it down to just Steve and his car and the road turning before him —
Sometimes, he thought he could do it with his eyes closed, if he really wanted to. He’d wonder, later, if that was his downfall.
He kept his lead for twenty laps, had clocked the fastest thus far on the seventeenth, had two seconds and a half lead out in front now, and Yuri was asking him about the tires, how the mediums were holding up, and telling him that they’d like him to box the next lap or the one after that, if you would be so kind, my sweet baby bird.
He rolled his eyes — Yuri liked to keep up a stream of increasingly bizarre nicknames for him on race day; “baby bird” was actually pretty tame, considering he’d once called him “a slice of farmstyle thick cut American cheddar” and Steve got turned into a Twitter meme for a month — and acquiesced to the pit, said he’d swing by during lap twenty-two, maybe twenty-three, was thinking about the mediums again, what did everyone think of that?
This was where things started to get blurry around the edges for him, grainy and insubstantial, before they cut out entirely. He had the memory of Yuri in his ear, baby bird and the mediums, and talking shit about Red Bull, four seconds behind him now and then five. But trying to remember the accident itself? It was like a worn down VHS, imperfect and skipping over the well-loved parts, whole scenes disappearing because the film had gotten stuck in the player, chewed to pieces.
Steve remembered the race, until it blurred and turned to black. Steve remembered the race, until he didn’t anymore.
The doctors would say it was a gift, not to remember, the pain he would’ve been in, the fear. But he feared more the unknown, the lack of control, always had, and so later, much later, he would watch back the footage of the crash. Dmitri would try to keep it out of his hands, and Max and Erica would both be steadfastly against him seeing it too. But Steve was a grown man, and anyway what were they going to do — steal his phone and cut the internet to his place? His memory cut out between one turn and the next and then he was in a hospital bed in a c-collar and — and he just had to know, okay: he had to see it, the moment his life spun quite literally out of control.
So he watched it back eight weeks after that fact from a guest room in Los Angeles. It was like something that happened to another person: watching as he pitted, and his lead had meant he came out just in front of Anttila from Red Bull, so close; watching as his Mercedes swooped through Turns Three, Four, and Five; watching his Mercedes thunder down Brooklands with Anttila on his heels but got through Turns Six, Seven, and Eight without incident.
He was flying down the straight to Nine, to Copse. He knew Silverstone like the back of his hand, his first ever P1 Podium back when he debuted with Ferrari in 2008, and he knew his Mercedes was on the approach at 300 km/h, that he was shifting down to sixth for the blind entry, barely breaking, Anttila at his back wing, in his rearview, Yuri in his ear, cautioning —
Their wheels touched —
Yuri’s voice on the team radio, a timestamp of horror broadcasting live on ESPN2 —
The Mercedes on the screen, airborne —
The Mercedes on the screen, flipping: once, twice, a third, then a half —
The Mercedes on the screen, crashing upside down along the barrier, halfway between Copse and Maggots now —
The red flag went up. The medical car peeled out onto the circuit.
Yuri, over the radio: “Steve, Steve, Steve, can you hear me, Stepan —”
The Mercedes on the screen, catching fire —
The Mercedes on the screen, and then the garage off the pit lane, where Dmitri had Max by the shoulders to stop her from running to Steve.
“Can you hear me? Steve, are you hearing me?”
The English hospital room he woke up in was small and had a window that overlooked a pretty courtyard. They’d taken him, he’d learn shortly, first to a hospital in Milton Keynes, before he’d gotten transferred to a private hospital in London because it boasted one of the finest spinal specialists in England on its staff.
At first, he hadn’t realized what was happening, what had happened. He’d blinked himself into consciousness to see Hopper and El to his left and then Eddie to his right, all three of them various degrees of haggard and tear-stained, and El had burst into sobs when she’d seen him staring back at her, and he’d been so confused he couldn’t process anything in particular until a small coterie of doctors and nurses appeared in his doorway, asking him how he was. Why was El crying? Why was Eddie there?
Steve had taken stock then, and he’d been floating pleasantly on painkillers and couldn’t feel much of anything until he realized he really couldn’t feel much of anything, and he’d told them, maybe even sort of asked, confused, “I can’t feel my legs?”
The room had descended into controlled chaos at that. Hopper had shot Eddie a look across the bed, and he’d risen, wrapped an arm around a silently crying El, whispered, “Hey, let’s go find Joyce for Steve, huh? She’ll want to know he’s awake. The others will want to know too.”
He’d reached out over his body and squeezed Steve’s hand before he left — he only had the one free, the other one in an air-cast and braced across his stomach — and El had pressed a damp kiss to Steve’s hairline, and they were both gone. A few of the doctors had filed out too, and the nurses. Someone said they were going to find his surgeon.
Steve blinked, and then blinked again. His mouth was dry. He couldn’t turn his head, he realized.
Hopper’s warm, big hand replaced Eddie’s cooler one on Steve’s and he said, “Hey, bud.”
“What happened?” he asked. Hopper took a deep but uneven breath.
“There was an accident,” he told him. “You were in an accident.”
“Yeah. I mean, I figured,” said Steve. He wanted to laugh, but he also thought he might start crying if he did. Hopper had been crying, he thought; his eyes were red, glassy. He’d never seen him crying before, not ever. His mouth was so dry; his head hurt. His legs —
“Mr Harrington,” said a handsome man from the doorway then. He smiled and sat down in the chair that Eddie had vacated. “I’m Doctor Deshpande. I’m a spinal specialist here at the Holly, and I’ve been overseeing your care since you arrived. It’s very good to see you awake.”
He stared. “Have I — have I been out long?”
“A little less than three days,” said Doctor Deshpande. “Not uncommon, and you were in surgery or recovery from anesthesia for a not insubstantial chunk of it.”
“He doesn’t remember what happened.” Hopper squeezed his hand again. “And he said — he said he can’t feel his legs.”
“Hmm.” The doctor leaned forward in his chair, his face giving nothing away. “Mr Harrington, your father here has been approving all the measures that have been taken thus far, but before we continue, I just want to be certain that having this conversation in front of him is okay.”
Steve swallowed. “It’s — I want Hop to stay. What happened?”
“Very well. Stop me when you have any questions, either of you. Now. You crashed your car,” began Doctor Deshpande. He swallowed again, and Deshpande continued, “When you were removed from the car, you were in and out of consciousness, but I imagine you don’t remember that — the EMTs said you weren’t responding fully, which, again, is not uncommon. In the ambulance, they realized you had a punctured lung from a broken rib, and so taking care of that was the first order of business. That happened in Milton Keynes. Once the tear was repaired and you were stabilized, you underwent an MRI, where the Heads of Trauma and Radiology there diagnosed you not only with a broken collarbone, a broken wrist, and a dislocated shoulder, but also several fracture-dislocated vertebrae, an incomplete spinal cord injury. To be specific: the T10, T11, and T12 vertebrae.”
“I broke my back?” he asked quietly.
“To put it plainly,” said Deshpande with a kind smile. “You were brought into my care, here, where I repaired the damage to the best of my ability. We wrapped that surgery up about twenty hours ago, and you regained consciousness again briefly in the recovery room, answered several questions, and slipped back under, which, again, is perfectly normal.”
“But I broke my back,” he said again.
“Yes.” He put a hand on Steve’s bent and braced elbow. “Yes, Mr Harrington — Steve — you did. But there is a reason you were brought to this hospital, and to me, and it is that I am very good at what I do. I understand that this is very scary, and waking up, unable to feel your legs, is — I can’t imagine I can put it into words, what you feel. But while you may not be able to feel your legs right now, you do have active reflex responses — your nerves, I mean to say, were not severed beyond repair.”
“If the nerves weren’t severed,” began Hopper, slow and low, “why can’t he feel his legs?”
“Steve experienced an incredible amount of trauma,” Deshpande said, “and it’s not uncommon in cases like this, with severe spinal trauma, to have a — pause, shall we say, in regular motor function. In fact, I would go so far as to say it’s expected. Again, let me be clear, the fracture-dislocated vertebrae were not what we call complete spinal cord injuries; and in that there was damage to less than thirty percent of the spine, which is always a cause for optimism, and I did not need to fuse the dislocated vertebrae, just realign and repair the musculature and ligaments that had ruptured around them. But that of course is still damage that was sustained, and every body will react differently to it. Unfortunately, while this isn’t the worst case scenario upon waking, it’s still less than ideal — however, that being said, I’m confident that, with time, with intensive physical therapy, you will most likely walk again.”
“Walk,” said Steve. Everything was washing over him, too slow and too fast all at the same time, but that he could dig his fingers into, hold. His back was broken, he couldn’t feel his legs, and the doctor was telling him most likely walk again. Did that —? He said again, “Walk?”
“Yes,” said Deshpande.
“But,” he said. “Most likely? I’m — I’m a racer. I. Will I?”
Hopper’s thumb, running slow and reassuring along the back of Steve’s knuckles, stuttered almost imperceptibly, and Steve’s eyes burned and he bit the inside of his mouth. Deshpande watched him carefully, his dark eyes flicking across his face; he said, slowly, softly, so kindly even though he was breaking Steve’s heart, “I don’t know.”
His mouth twisted.
“Can you give us a minute?” asked Hopper.
“Of course,” Deshpande said. “I’ll be at the nurse’s station, just hit the button when you’d like me to come back in.”
He left as silently as he came, and the other doctor and nurse who’d lingered in the room when the others went to find Deshpande filed out too.
Softly, Hopper said, “It’s okay, bud.”
Steve burst into tears.
Instantly, Hopper moved to comfort him, tucking one arm so, so carefully around the — shit — braced curve of Steve’s neck and head and leaning in to press their foreheads together. He whispered a litany of nonsense to him as Steve blindly wept. He couldn’t hope to hear or understand him over the rush of blood in his ears, over the breath hiccoughing around his strained sobs, all of it overloud in the quiet of his hospital room. What the fuck was he supposed to do? What the fuck was he supposed to do? This was his life, this was his whole fucking life — Steve’s back was broken, he couldn’t feel his legs, oh god, oh god — he was never getting in the cockpit again —
Who the fuck was he if he wasn’t racing? He didn’t know, he didn’t know, he didn’t know —
He’d spent one whole year not racing, back when his parents had died and he’d gotten unceremoniously shipped back to America to a life he couldn’t understand, to a life he didn’t fucking want, to a great-aunt who didn’t know what to do with this strange, gasoline stained child who spoke in Italian more than he did English. It had been absolute hell, and he’d only been sixteen then, he hadn’t been racing that long, in the grand scheme of things —
And now? What the fuck — now? Now that Steve was twenty-eight, and he had a broken back and he couldn’t think straight and his mouth was dry and he couldn’t feel his legs and he was crying so hard he could barely breathe, and he’d spent more than half his life in the cockpit of a Formula 1 car, it was his whole life, his whole life, everything he’d done, everything he sacrificed, everything he didn’t do — everything he wanted but didn’t have because — because — who was he supposed to be? Who was he without — without —
Who was he supposed to be?
“My kid,” Hopper whispered fiercely in his ear, and it was only then that Steve realized he was gasping the question aloud, around his awful, ugly sobs, again and again and again. “You’re the same person you always were, and that’s one of my fucking kids, that’s my son.”
It was mid-February, 2007, Steve had been in Hawkins, Indiana for seven months, and he was in the middle of running away when a police truck slowed to a crawl next to him as he trudged along in the snow and Jim Hopper rolled down his window to gruffly say, “Been looking for you for like three hours now, kid, you headed anywhere in particular?”
“Non parlo inglese,” said Steve, shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and kept walking, ignoring the cop watching him out his truck window.
He was going to Providence, where Robin had a plan to sneak him in through her bedroom window and a sleeping bag on her bedroom floor ready for him until he could figure out how to get himself back to Italy. His Nokia 3100 had finally bit it during month two of his American exile and he had no way of getting his hands on something new, so they’d been planning via email when Steve could get to the local library; Robin thought they could smuggle him on a fishing boat somehow, and she was so much smarter than him with anything that wasn’t racing, so he figured she was probably onto something. Either way, he was getting back home, hell or high water.
Steve fucking hated America, and he hated Hawkins even more. His English came out with an accent, these days, even if it was faint, and he sometimes forgot English words for simple stuff and all of these backwards midwest shitheads made fun of him for it. He was behind in almost all the classes he’d been enrolled in as a junior or whatever they called it, his teachers kept frowning at him about it, like it was his fault somehow, and it wasn’t his goddamn fault! He’d been homeschooled by tutors since he was twelve, and that had been in Italy, thanks, of course he knew jackshit about US History and English fucking grammar. Like, he hadn’t had a formal English class since the international school! Only thing he had going for him was Spanish class, because he was European, okay, and his partner at Prema was from Spain and the Romance languages shared a lot of similarities anyway, and he was pretty okay at math too, because you didn’t drive a race car without knowing how to calculate shit on the fly.
Sure, there was a cute girl in the year below him that had been trying to help him out, but she looked at him like an experiment or a test or, like, a fucking dumb puppy rather than an actual human boy who was actually kind of famous in Italy, did these people not get that? Robin always joked the American side of her family was uncultured, but Jesus.
He was also pretty sure Nancy Wheeler had taken him in as her wannabe civics project or whatever partly because he was the closest Hawkins was going to get to a hot exchange student but mostly he thought it was because her weird brother and all his little nerd friends had imprinted on Steve first when they’d seen him in the public library his first week in town. He’d been arguing with a baffled but increasingly annoyed librarian in broken Italian because the computer wasn’t working and Steve didn’t know what to do and he couldn’t remember half the words in English he needed, like usual when he got upset; but, either way, the boys bailed him out and got him set up on the computer and he taught them a bunch of Italian curse words in exchange, and now he had a bunch of eleven and twelve year olds who wouldn’t leave him the fuck alone.
Steve was lonely, was what he was, an alien in the American Midwest, and all he wanted to do was get back to racing, get back in the cockpit of his car and be free. He wanted to goof around with his Italian friends and all the other drivers and he wanted to talk to Robin on the phone for hours at a time. He wanted to get back to the life he was supposed to be leading and he didn’t want all these fucking looks from people, okay, about his dead parents who were never really his parents, not the way he’d realized they should’ve been —
He couldn’t even watch an actual F1 race because his great-aunt didn’t even have a fucking TV — Christ, she didn’t even had a car for him to steal either so he could at least maybe feel normal that way —
So he’d set out just before dawn to hitchhike his way to Providence, to Robin and Signor and Signora Buckley, and he hadn’t counted on the snow, which had started something like two hours ago, but he was doing okay, he was sure he’d find a motel or something for the night soon. But it was just his stupid luck that the one car on this lonely stretch of road out of Bumfuck Nowhere, Indiana, ended up being the truck of the local police chief.
“Would you get in the truck, kid,” the man was saying. Steve could pretty much hear him rolling his eyes. “You’re gonna freeze to death in that jacket.”
“Non parlo inglese,” he repeated, waving a hand.
“Yeah, I was kind of warned you’d say that,” said Chief Hopper, “and I was told the reply is: you do. So get in the truck, I’ll drive you where you need to go, and maybe I’ll even get you a better damn jacket on the way.”
Still walking, Steve said, “Rhode Island. Providence.”
“Huh.” Hopper drove a little ahead and then turned the car slightly, blocking his path forward. He opened the passenger door and Steve glared as he said, “So, I won’t take you that far, but my cabin is two hours back, and if you stay the night with me and my kid, eat something, maybe explain your grand plan — in English — I’ll take you to the bus depot in Indy in the morning. How’s that sound?”
Steve got in the truck. He didn’t really see any other option and his hands were pretty cold; plus, he only had on his Air Force 1s and they started soaking pretty much as soon as the snow started.
“Seatbelt,” said Hopper before reversing the truck and heading back towards Hawkins.
On the way to the cabin Hopper kept on the outskirts of town, he talked — at Steve, rather than with him, since Steve was stubbornly committing himself to Italian only. He thought maybe if he didn’t talk back he’d get sick of him and kick him out, let him go, but Hopper was quick to inform him that he was used to carrying on one-sided conversations. Steve knew this, kinda, because the Chief’s adopted daughter often hung out with Steve’s entourage of American toddlers, and the girl had something called “selective mutism” from whatever shitty upbringing she’d had before she’d ended up in Hopper’s care.
So the man talked. He kept up a running commentary on the weather, on local Hawkins gossip, answered a few calls on his radio before signing off for the evening. He let slip that it wasn’t even Steve’s great-aunt who’d reported him missing before Hopper came looking for him, or even the school since he’d cut Thursday afternoon to pack, and all of Friday, obviously, as he began his journey: it was one of the toddlers, the loud one without teeth who Steve sometimes thought was his favorite of them all. He was demoting him now for sure; the Byers kid was sweet, made him a mixed CD for Christmas with his brother’s help when he learned Steve hadn’t gotten any presents from his aunt, had hand-drawn a surprisingly accurate little race car on the disc. That one could be his new favorite.
At the cabin, the Chief had some sort of elaborate knock that alerted his daughter that it was him and introduced the two of them with a “Steve’s gonna eat dinner with us, that okay?” before receiving an enthusiastic nod from the girl and giving her instructions to set the table for three.
Steve watched with his back against the front door as they moved around each other comfortably, until the girl, El, finished her task and gently took Steve’s hand to sit him next to her on the sofa. They watched silently as Hopper burnt whatever he was making to a crisp. Steve winced at the rise of smoke from the stove and the man caught it out of the corner of his eye.
“Oh, like you could do better,” he grumbled, rolling his eyes — Steve figured he did it a lot, and it was a miracle his eyes weren’t stuck that way — already reaching for the freezer and beginning to root around for some frozen dinners for all three of them.
Despite the fact that it would go unnoticed, he rolled his own eyes in return. “Sì.”
“What?”
He rose, pushed his way past the Chief, and began opening and closing cabinets while the Hoppers watched him with varying degrees of amusement. Steve found an ancient looking box of Barilla spaghetti, which was better than nothing, and some desiccated nightmare masquerading as parmigiano-reggiano in the fridge that had him throwing up a prayer. Beggars — or would-be runaways — couldn’t be choosers, he figured, and he set about recreating Nìcolo’s cacio e pepe as best he could with his limited materials. There was half a loaf of almost dried out white bread on the counter that he did his best to turn into a bastardized garlic bread too.
When he was finished, he dished up three plates, and said, pointing to the blackened remains of Hopper’s attempt, “Meglio di questo, sì?”
“I have no idea what you said, but I get enough sass from this one,” he said, “so can it, or I change our deal, yeah?”
Dinner was conducted in near silence after, given Steve’s refusal to speak English and little El’s own condition. Hopper apparently didn’t feel the need to carry on a one-sided conversation now as he had in the car, simply watching the two strange children at his table. Steve watched him watch them, and raised his own eyebrow as both of Hopper’s shot into his hairline when El went into the kitchen for a second helping of pasta.
After, the Chief did the washing up and El dragged Steve back to the sofa, where she pulled out a relatively new looking Dell Inspiron laptop and expertly Googled Steve’s own name. She glanced at him, assessing, as she did it and pulled up a YouTube video of Steve’s second to last race back in Italy that had very briefly made the rounds as an ESPN2 clip. It had clearly been watched before, and Steve wondered if she and the boys talked about him when he wasn’t around.
They watched the clip once, twice, and then a third time before El said, “Fun?”
“Sì.” He figured, for her, he’d give the game up, and said, “Very fun.”
She smiled, delighted. He smiled back. Haltingly, she asked, “Still race?”
He felt his face freeze and fall. “I didn’t even get to finish the season.”
“Shit,” said Hopper, loudly, from the kitchen.
El, whose smile had fallen too when Steve spoke, grinned suddenly again and pointed at him.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the Chief said, turning so he could dig a soapy hand into his jacket and produce his wallet. He tossed it at them, El catching it easily, and she pulled out a dollar bill before heading over to a Mason jar on a windowsill — labeled Eleanor Jane’s College Fund, Paid For By James Hopper’s Big Mouth — and stuffing the bill inside it.
“Ellie Jay,” the Chief said, wiping his hands on a dish towel now. “Could you help Steve make up the sofa? He’s gonna stay the weekend, and I gotta run and make a few calls real quick. And maybe he’ll watch that Wendy Wu movie you rented with you.”
Weekend? Before Steve could protest that that wasn’t their deal, El was shooting another huge grin at him and tugging him up from the sofa, asking quietly, “Will you?”
He felt like a monster saying no to the girl — felt like a monster when he said no to any of the kids that followed him around like ducklings in this town — so he nodded and allowed himself to be dragged to a linen closet, his arms piled with blankets. He watched the Wendy Wu movie with El, and then the next morning found himself helping her make Eggo waffles. Before he really knew what was happening, he was watching another movie with the girl and helping her with her math homework and giving Hopper a grocery list so he could make dinner again on Saturday.
Deal or no deal, Steve did spend the whole weekend with the Hoppers in their little secluded cabin. He found himself talking to El about what it was like to race and to Hopper about just why he was trying to get to Rhode Island, to Providence and the Buckleys, opening up about how he hoped Signor Buckley would help him figure out how to get back to Italy and Prema, back to his life and his passion, his dream. He told them both what he loved about racing, what it meant to him, how proud he was to race and be a part of his team, to bring home those accolades to his engineers.
Hopper disappeared now and again to answer his walkie and smoke on the porch, and Steve would hang out with El but watch him through the window as he passed, cell phone to his ear. Because as comfortable as he was becoming with the Hoppers, he still wondered what was going to happen to him, if Chief Hopper would hold up his end of the bargain and take him to that bus depot in Indy or if he was going to get dragged back to his great-aunt. Guy was a cop; as much as he hoped, Steve figured he was getting sent back to that house.
On Monday morning, Chief Hopper loaded El and Steve into his truck and began to head towards the middle school — and the high school, of course, right next to it. Steve dug his nails into his palms and fought the urge to scream.
But a few miles away, Hopper turned the truck suddenly and El started bouncing in her seat. Brow furrowed, Steve watched as they took a few more turns and pulled into the parking lot of the local diner, Benny’s. Wordlessly, Hopper shepherded them each out of the truck and into the restaurant, flagging down Benny himself to get them one of the booths tucked far into the back.
No one spoke as they sat down, Steve and El on one bench and Hopper alone on the other. He ordered all three of them massive plates of waffles, with sides of bacon for him and El and fruit for Steve. He got all three of them milk too, and when their waitress took their menus and bustled away, Hopper let out a deep sigh.
“I got a question for you, Steve,” he began. “Got a question for both of you, actually. After you told me about the Buckleys, I did a little digging and I spoke to Gio on the phone. I know you want to get back to Italy and start racing, but he says it won’t happen this year: Prema already filled your seat for when the season starts, and honestly I don’t think your caseworker is gonna be wild about you not finishing out the school year. I know, I know — you’ve got a tutor over there, you’re on track in the Italian school system, trust me, me and Gio have gone over all of this and, yeah, I even talked to your caseworker. The three of us did, actually, and we came up with an idea, and I want you to hear me out. I know you’re on track with F2 to get to F1 as soon as you’re old enough — Gio says it’s pretty much a done deal with Ferrari once you turn eighteen in a year and a half — but you’re still an American minor, with no guardian, and no one is really wild about the way you’d be living before so we’re not about to send you back to do it again. But we got a proposal, and that’s this: I become your legal guardian. The Buckleys are going back to Italy in the summer, and you can go with them — do your training, race while Gio and Lucia keep an eye on you, me and El come visit for a couple weeks, and in the fall you come back here, go back to school. We get you your GED before next January, so that you can race with Prema again — with me there with you, as your guardian, and you come back to the States in between races as needed, okay? After you turn eighteen — then you can go back to Italy full time, sign with Ferrari, and race F1.”
Steve stared at him. He was pretty sure he’d stopped breathing and his heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to burst from his chest. Hopper wanted to — Chief Hopper was going to —
Next to him, El was looking between the two of them with her big eyes. She asked in her soft voice, “Steve would be — brother?”
“Of a sorts,” Hopper told her. “And only if he wants. But the condition is one year without racing, and no more attempts to hitchhike to goddamn Providence, Rhode Island. One year, Steve. Think you can do it?”
“One year,” said Steve. “I can do one year.”
And he did: one year without racing, and then the rest of his life, it turned out, with Jim and El Hopper.
Eventually, Steve cried himself out, harbored within Hopper’s arms like that alone would shield him from harm. Sometimes, he used to think it might, same as his car, but now, in this hospital bed, he felt betrayed by almost everything he held dear and he wanted to disappear, forget. He wanted this day to have never happened; he wished he’d never woken up.
Joyce joined them as Steve was winding down, getting his breath back under control, and while she hadn’t quite parented him the way Hopper had when he was a teenager — they hadn’t gotten their shit together until he turned twenty — she’d always mothered him from a distance like she’d done El, and all the rest of the kids who weren’t her own. She brushed his hair back from his face, told him she loved him and the others couldn’t wait to see him once he was feeling up to it, and that she brought him some ice chips, if he wanted them.
He did, and so she fed them to him slowly as Hopper pressed the button for Deshpande and his team to return.
“The others?” Steve asked as they waited.
“Eddie flew in with El,” she told him. Hopper grunted. “We didn’t want her flying alone, and Will and Mike both had a meeting we knew you wouldn’t want them to cancel. Robin, Nancy, Dustin, and Lucas all flew on Monday, and the boys got here yesterday. Jon, Argyle, and Naomi will be here this weekend. I know you don’t like us to fuss —”
She cut herself off with a sharp shake of her head and a frown. Steve, his nose stuffed and eyes tacky with tears and sensation cutting out somewhere below his hips, didn’t need to be told how different this accident was from the others he’d been in before.
“Well. We all wanted to be here with you,” she concluded. “Have another ice chip, sweetie.”
The doctors returned and Steve gave his permission for them to discuss him medically while Joyce was in the room too; and with both of them there, he felt comfortable enough to retreat into the fog of his own mind, wondering if he passed out and woke up again this would all prove to be a bad dream. He wished —
Voices washed over him.
No one wanted him flying for a while, and anyway the back brace needed to stay on for six weeks at the absolute earliest. Staying in England would be easy enough: Steve had a townhouse over in Brackley that he stayed in whenever he needed to be at the offices during the off-season or breaks, and it had two guest rooms since Max and Erica had only just started traveling themselves in the last few years and it didn’t make sense for them to pay rent when they were never there and Steve owned something outright. Once he was out of the hospital, Hopper and Joyce could keep him company there until he was cleared to travel.
It was after the back brace came off and Steve began rehab and physical therapy that the questions of where and how started cropping up. Most everyone lived in California these days, the majority of them keeping places in Los Angeles after the kids had all ended up there for college and stayed, pursuing grad programs and careers and getting drafted by the Clippers, in Lucas’s case. Hopper and Joyce had been the final ones to relocate, having bought an old vineyard up in NorCal the year prior that would only become functional through Joyce’s iron will; Hopper, Steve knew, was more than content to let it go to seed, kick back and eat the grapes straight off the vine while he chased them with PBR. Steve himself had an apartment there too, and everyone felt more comfortable having him there than in England by himself or letting him loose at the house he also kept in Genoa, the one he bought after he sold his parents' place when he turned eighteen.
Deshpande recommended UCLA if they were insistent on Steve going to Los Angeles, or Cedars-Sinai, both had excellent programs for physical therapy. No one could say how long it would take him to begin walking again when the brace came off: recovery was unpredictable and based on the individual; he could be in a wheelchair anywhere from six weeks to six months. There was no telling.
Blearily, Steve said, “But I don’t have an elevator.”
El, who’d drifted in shortly after Joyce, holding a red-eyed Max’s hand, giggled. Max said, “Dude, you’re loaded, why do you still have a walk-up in Koreatown?”
“Mrs Pak makes the best kimchi,” he offered, which was true. His LA apartment was above a place called Pak’s Korean, and the woman who ran it always gave him free kimchi when he was in town, was trying to marry him off to every single one of her nieces, and called him her favorite white boy. He was never leaving.
“You could stay with me and Lucas,” said Max.
“No, neither of you are ever home,” said El.
“Then what about you?”
“Steve would kill Mike within a week.”
“Hop and I can get an AirBNB in the valley, maybe,” suggested Joyce.
“Or what about Robin and Nancy?” asked El.
“One bedroom,” said Max. “Plus they have those stairs out front, and if Steve needs help getting in and out of the shower, those two’s noodle arms aren’t doing anything. Will’s got a one bedroom too and Dustin’s place is an actual death trap, so they’re no-go's as well.”
“Me and Joyce in an AirBNB sounds like the best option —”
“He can stay with me,” said Eddie. He was in the doorway, hands in his pockets; he had a small smile on his face that didn’t look so much nervous as it was tired. Eddie repeated, “He can stay with me. My house is up in Laurel Canyon, and it’s not, like, a bad drive for LA to get down to Cedars, and I’m not working right now — at least, not on anything that I can't do from my office. So I can, you know, take him to appointments, and stuff.”
He couldn’t turn his head to look but he knew Hopper’s eyes were on him, could feel their heavy weight. He always knew more than he let on, especially when it came to him and El; Steve wasn’t sure if it was a dad thing or a cop thing. Still, he kept quiet, just stared at Steve, and in turn he stared at the door frame just over Eddie’s shoulder.
Joyce said, “Oh, sweetie, that’s so kind of you to offer.”
“I’m happy to,” said Eddie, and the bitch of it was: it seemed like he even meant it, that small, tired smile, his eyes flitting between Joyce and Steve, and he wanted to pull his good hand from Hopper’s grip, dig the heel of his palm into his eyes and start crying again. He was on too many drugs. He wasn’t on enough drugs.
The doctors and nurses started talking over Steve again, coordinating, making plans, jotting down notes on the chart at the foot of Steve’s bed. He needed to stay in the hospital for a bit longer still, and it was fine, Hopper, Joyce, and El would stick around England, and the boys and Robin and Nancy could stick around for a while too. Some of them would get hotel rooms, the rest would stay with Steve in his townhouse, and Hopper and Joyce would fly back to LA with Steve once the brace was off, help get him settled with Eddie up in the canyon, if that was okay?
He closed his eyes and tried not to picture Eddie, from that night two years ago, and let the warmth of Hopper’s hand in his and the sound of everyone’s voices carry him back under.