Archive of Our Own

Steve

Steve’s daemon is a dog for most of her life before she settles. Delmira changes shape to fit the occasion, of course; a bird when she needs to be fast, or something with teeth when she tries to be intimidating. She’s hardly ever something small enough to hold, even when he wishes she was, because when they were children his father told them that real men didn’t have small daemons. Delmira will curl up in his lap as something soft, something with weight, and Steve will comfort himself with knowing that at least he’ll never have to deal with what his father might say about a son whose daemon settled as a rabbit.

But no amount of snide remarks about obedience or lack of initiative can sway Delmira from dog forms. She mixes up the breeds, going from lanky and fast to small and loud to anything in between. But Steve likes the way people respond to dogs and so does Delmira–always with friendly smiles and comments about how pretty she is. They try to ignore the way the other boys on the basketball team call them ‘bitch’.

Nancy Wheeler’s daemon is fairly changeable, but more often than not he’s a lithe little house cat or a small flitting bird, sitting neatly on her shoulder. Steve once sees them in the library, Sera a grey bird with a vibrant yellow breast, and Nancy too focused to wave off Sera as he preens her, tousling her curls as he goes. The light through the window paints them both gold, and Steve feels frozen to the spot just watching them. They look like a painting, and Steve is so full of wanting at the sight of it that he feels it reverberating in his chest, like struck metal.

Delmira nudges his leg. Her snout is long today, chocolate brown to match the speckles on her white coat. “I don’t care what Tommy says about her, and neither do you,” she tells him, “If you don’t ask her out, I will.”

Steve bats at her nose playfully, “Shut up.” But he goes and sits in the seat across from Nancy anyway, Delmira trotting in behind him. Sera notices them first, looking up to watch them with his beady little eyes, and not too long after that Nancy looks up from her book, startled.

“Oh, hi,” she says, surprised, “Uh, can I help you with something?”

Steve smiles, hoping that his charm won’t fail him here, not when he needs it most. Delmira is a warm weight at his side, peeking her nose above the table and doing her best to look adorable, “Yeah, actually. I was wondering what your favorite movie is?”

Nancy’s brows draw together, her eyes round and confused and stormy blue, “Why do you need to know what my favorite movie is?”

Steve leans forward, “Well, I wouldn’t want to take you out to a movie you didn’t like, now would I?”

Nancy blushes, pretty and pink, as a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. On her shoulder, Sera fluffs up, looking flustered. “Maybe I should make you guess, then,” Nancy says and Steve can’t help the feeling that wells up in him, charmed and smitten in equal measure. 

…

Delmira is not a dog when Jonathan throws the first punch. She’s the smallest thing she’s been in years, because right now Steve feels small, like Nancy has somehow pulled the rug out from under him entirely. So Delmira is a house cat when Nancy comes into that alley with Jonathan behind her, because even as he’s hurting some part of Steve wonders if Nancy would like him better if he were more like her. Delmira hisses the whole time Steve is insulting Jonathan, lashing out from that well of pain and meanness that’s always so close to the surface, and she yowls like nothing he’s ever heard as Jonathan pummels him into the pavement.

She’s fast, too, as Tommy hauls Steve up by his jacket and urges him down the alley and away from the cops. And when Tommy slams him up against the car, snarling in Steve’s face, he knows that she would claw Tommy’s boar’s eyes out if she needed to. 

Steve peels out from in front of the Fair Mart and Delmira curls up in the footwell of the passenger seat, big enough to fill it again, her coat lustrous and golden. The sight of her is almost enough to make Steve laugh, if his face didn’t hurt so much.

“She’s not gonna like us more just because you’re a golden retriever, ‘Mira,” Steve says, gripping the steering wheel tight.

“You don’t know that,” Delmira pouts, “I’m adorable, even if you’re all beat up.”

Steve does laugh at that, tight and breathless, more scared of apologizing to Nancy than he was when Jonathan was beating the shit out of him. 

Then he arrives at the Byers’ house and everything changes. It turns out there’s more to be scared of than just an apology, and against all odds it’s Jonathan that pulls Steve out of the path of the demogorgon, his jackal Anje dragging Delmira by the scruff. Standing in one of the Byers’ bedrooms, staring at the door and waiting for a monster to come through, Delmira is deadly silent, pressing herself against Steve’s leg and shaking as he babbles in terror. But Delmira’s hot on Nancy’s heels as the six of them slip back out, looking around warrily for the monster that had fallen from the ceiling. 

And when Steve scrambles out the house, fumbling for his car keys, it’s Delmira who stands between the house and the car, looking at him with pleading eyes.

“We have to go,” Steve hisses, yanking the car door open.

“We have to stay,” Delmira insists. She sounds as scared as he feels, but she also sounds determined, planting her paws in the gravel.

They stare each other down, and behind Delmira’s shoulder the lights inside the house flicker. 

When Steve grabs Jonathan’s discarded bat and aims it at the demogorgon, grimacing at the noise of nails ripping through wet flesh and cartilage, Delmira is right beside him, tearing at the monster with her teeth. It feels awful to touch–empty, hollow, bitingly cold. Like they could get frostbite on their soul just by being near it. 

Together they drive the monster into the waiting bear trap, and they hold steady as Jonathan throws the lighter, wincing when the fire flares around them. They step together as they approach the bear trap, united in their conviction to keep the other four behind them and out of danger. It’s Steve who swears when they find the monster missing after the smoke from the fire extinguisher dissipates, but he feels the sentiment of it echoed in the set of Delmira’s shoulders. 

They back up in tandem as the Christmas lights begin to light up again, prepared for the worst. Then Jonathan says, softly, “Mom?”, his guard dropping, and Steve and Delmira fall out of sync a little, the terror slowly but surely ebbing the longer the monster fails to show itself. The trail after Jonathan and Anje, out onto the front porch with the dark hedging them in on all sides, hiding untold terrors. Or maybe not hiding anything at all. 

“Mike,” Nancy says in sudden realization, “The kids, we left them at the school. You don’t think it could have gone back there, do you?”

Steve looks at her, and for the first time he really processes that the massive bird perched on her shoulder is Sera.

“Holy shit, Nance,” he breathes, unsure what else to say in the face of the golden eagle staring him down, its yellow eyes reflecting the light of the streetlamp.

“Holy shit, me? Holy shit you, Steve,” Nancy says incredulously, gesturing at Delmira.

Jonathan snorts, “Will she even fit in your car?”

Steve glances at his side and finds Delmira already staring back. She’s…big. Massive, actually, her shoulder even with his hip, thick fur and round amber eyes and triangular ears. She’s a wolf, and at the sight of her Steve knows, somehow, that it’s the right form for her.

“This is us, huh?” he asks her, reaching out to lay a hand between her ears. His face aches, and she has a bit of blood matted in the fur around her left eye; matching wounds. There’s black ichor and gore coated up her muzzle and down her ruff, and when she opens her mouth her teeth are large and wicked looking.

“Do you even have to ask?” she mutters, leaning her full weight against him.

They do manage to fit her in the car, though she takes up a full seat. Jonathan sits in the back, Anje wedged between him and Delmira so he doesn’t accidentally touch her. Sera settles down into the passenger foot well, bracketed by Nancy’s legs. 

Nancy almost has a heart attack at the sight of the ambulances at the school, but she finds Mike already bundled in Karen’s arms, Karen’s red deer prancing anxiously in front of them, pointing his antlers at anyone who gets too close. He lets Nancy through, though, and his head only rocks a little when Sera lands on his antlers. Steve glances at Jonathan, who is looking around frantically, searching desperately for any sign of Joyce or his brother.

It’s apparently pretty easy to get someone’s attention when your daemon is roughly the size of a motorized scooter, and Steve manages to snag one of the paramedics long enough to ask if he’s heard anything about Joyce Byers. 

“Byers?” The paramedic says, clearly preoccupied with other things but doing his best to focus, “Oh, yeah, we got a call about a Byers. Should be at the hospital by now.”

Steve thanks the man, tells Nancy where they’re going, and then all but shoves Jonathan back into the car, Delmira doing her best to herd him, if the canine equivalent of closing a wall in on someone can be called herding. “Come on, Byers,” Steve says impatiently, “Your mom is waiting.”

Jonathan is a lot more cooperative after that. 

At the hospital, Delmira curls herself under the hospital chairs, settling her nose on top of her paws and doing her best to stay out of the way, Steve’s legs on either side of her shoulders. A nurse took one look at them and immediately cleaned them up, putting antiseptic and butterfly bandages on Steve’s face, her monkey daemon using his hands to examine Delmira for wounds. So now they’re mostly presentable, even if a black eye is already well on its way to blooming on Steve’s face.

Hopper’s daemon, a Belgian Malinois who somehow manages to look long-suffering and sleep deprived despite not having any eyebrows, is doing something similar to keep out of people’s way. She watches Delmira with a bored sort of confusion, which Steve would be a little more offended by if Hopper didn’t appear to be about five seconds from passing out. Steve doesn’t know how to respond to it or how to explain why he’s here, so Delmira only gives a little wuff of air and closes her eyes.

Then Jonathan opens the door, exhausted relief spilling off of him, gesturing for the kids to follow him back to Will’s room, and Steve feels a knot he didn’t even know existed begin to loosen. For a moment, he and Delmira are united with these strangers in a hospital waiting room, all the others who went through something insane tonight. He watches the kids rush out of the waiting room and feels something inside himself settle. 

…

Hopper

“She’s just a girl,” Venatici growls, pacing the length of the dim interrogation room they’ve been put in, “She’s just a little girl, Jim. Like Sarah.”

Hopper grimaces, breathing in nicotine and smoke. Venatici doesn’t like bringing up Sarah any more than Hopper himself does, but he’s always been the kind of person who picks at scabs. Sarah, though. Sarah is an open wound that never got the chance to close, still bleeding sluggishly even after years. Festering. 

“Her daemon is here somewhere, Jim,” Venatici presses, because neither of them has ever known how to quit something, “Alone. Abandoned.”

Hopper exhales, clouding the already murky room. 

“It’s a child,” Venatici growls.

“We have to pick our battles,” Hopper mutters. He’s traded her whereabouts for the chance to save Will Byers. It’s not something he’s proud of, and he’s doing his best not to think about that nameless little girl, with the shaved head and the borrowed pink dress. He’s trying not to think about the way she’d cried, delving into a darkness where none of them could follow. 

“Bullshit,” Venatici spits. He can’t fault her for her anger. She’s only mirroring what he himself feels–a barely leashed rage. At these people. At himself. At whoever allowed this to happen. “You fight every battle you can see and then add on some extras that you can’t just for fun.”

“You gonna fight all of them by yourself?” Hopper asks idly, “An army of one?”

“An army of two,” Venatici corrects, “You can have the gun. I’ll rip out their throats with my teeth.”

…

He hasn’t settled yet. Of course he hasn’t, not when El herself is barely capable of speaking. He never stays in any one form for long, often imitating whatever animals they see outside, or else one of the forms El has seen someone else’s daemon take. He doesn’t even have a name, since the lab hadn’t deigned to give him one any more than they’d given El one.

Hopper gets used to their silence just like he gets used to El’s bare hands on Venatici’s fur. If El and her daemon are silent out loud they are a clamor of emotion and thoughts and pain through this connection. The first time Hopper has to sit down and press a hand over his eyes so that El doesn’t see his tears. But this is something he can give her, this comfort, so he focuses on his affection for her, his steadfast desire to protect her, and hopes that she feels it.

It takes a bit of acclimating, and El is a little too old for the behavior, but Hopper was once familiar with Sarah’s small hands on Venatici’s back and he finds himself growing familiar with this too. El is lonely, and sad, and often struggles with asking for things, or finding the words to express herself. But she learns quickly that reaching out will have equal chances of Hopper or Venatici coming to comfort her, and she asks for it often. 

She’s a child, one he’s sworn himself to protect, and Hopper will never begrudge her the desperate way that she asks for support. 

Nearly four months into living with each other, Hopper wakes up to find El’s daemon walking around the living room as a juvenile Belgian Malinois, and the sight of it brings him close to tears. 

He sits them both down that night, “El, have you thought about what you’re going to name him?”

El glances at her daemon, who is resting his head on her knee and staring at Hopper with big, soulful eyes. He still hasn’t spoken a word to either Hopper or Venatici. Hopper doesn’t know if he’s even talked to El.

“What…should I name him?” El asks slowly, carefully, like she wants to be sure of the words.

Hopper bites his lip, “Usually your parent’s daemon names yours. But I think, in this case, it would be right for you to choose.” He thinks of Terry Ives, daemon-less and blank, staring into nothing and muttering to herself. Her soul was gone, and there’s no one left to name El’s daemon in her stead.

El sits with this information for a moment, contemplating it seriously. She looks at her daemon again, and Hopper wonders if they’re somehow communicating telepathically. He’s yet to see her daemon move anything with his mind, but Hopper hasn’t entirely ruled out the possibility. 

Then El turns purposefully and looks at Venatici, “What should I name him?”

Hopper sucks in a breath, stunned and touched in equal measure, and Venatici speaks before he can say anything.

“Amias,” Venatici says, like she had only been waiting to be asked. 

“Amias,” El repeats, feeling out the word, “What does it mean?”

Venatici steps forward to nudge her nose against El’s hand, urging El to rub at the fur between her ears, and then she says, “It means ‘loved’.”

Amias stands, spinning in a happy little circle, and when he stops his tail is wagging. He looks between the three of them and says, “Loved.”

Hopper is crying now, and he reaches out to pull El into a hug, doing his best to sound steady when he says, “Yeah, kid. You are.”

…

After they close the gate, Hopper carries El back to the car, Venatici shouldering Amias’s weight. Hopper and Venatici pile El and Amias into the passenger seat, leaning the seat back far enough that they’re at least a little reclined, Amias draped across El’s lap. He’s a dog again, this time a medium sized dog with a mottled blue coat and black patches on his eyes. Hopper snorts at the thought that he almost seems to be wearing El’s thick eyeliner. 

“Where are we going, Jim?” Venatici asks, hopping into the back seat and setting her nose on the armrest, pressed against his elbow. Hopper pulls away from the wrecked remains of the lab. He’s already called an ambulance for Owens, and he has more important things to do than wait with the man. 

Hopper sighs, “The hospital. The Byers’ will be there, hopefully.”

Venatici snorts, “I wonder where they went.”

Hopper knows she isn’t talking about the Byers family. “We’ll have time for that later.”

He gets a wet nose nudged against his forearm for that, “They were gone for days , Jim. How did we not notice?”

“We thought they were home,” Hopper corrects, “We thought they were safe. That’s not the same as not knowing.”

“We yelled at them and then we left,” Venatici insists stubbornly. 

Hopper hisses through his teeth, frustrated. He glances at the passenger seat, at Amias curled protectively around El, even in unconsciousness. His paws are still disproportionate, puppy-big against his lanky form, and Hopper aches with how small the two of them look. They’re just children. 

“They’re teenagers, Jim,” Venatici says softly, “They yell. They throw fits. They want to go outside with their friends. It was unfair of us to expect otherwise.”

“It was. But we apologized,” Hopper says, “And we’ll do better next time.”

The Byers’ are waiting for them when they get to the hospital. Hopper leaves Venatici in the car with El and Amias, exercising the long tether they developed during the war. His heart breaks all over again at the sight of Joyce, looking wrecked, sitting at Will’s bedside once again. Fornax is curled around her shoulders, his narrow vulpine nose pressed under her chin, an imitation of the way Will’s ferret Gwin has taken to settling around his neck like a collar.

Right now Gwin is curled in a ball on Will’s chest, rising and falling with the rhythm of Will’s breathing. Neither Will nor Gwin stir when Hopper enters, although Nancy and Jonathan’s daemon’s perk up. They’re both leaned against each other in exhaustion. Hopper can’t blame them–he feels like passing out himself.

“Joyce,” Hopper says quietly, crouching down next to her chair so that they’re about eye-level when she blinks awake.

“Hop,” she says, and her voice is hoarse. She reaches for him, and Hopper catches her hand, folding her small fingers against his palm, “You’re okay. Is she–?”

“She’s fine,” Hopper assures her, “They’re in the car with Venatici. How’s Will?”

Joyce pulls herself upright, Fornax moving with her, and she reaches a hand up to steady him, looking over at Will. 

“He’ll be okay,” she says quietly, “The doctors think he just had a really bad flu or something. I don’t know if antiviral medication works in this situation, but. He’ll be okay.”

“Good,” Hopper sags with relief, resting more firmly against his heels. “I should have listened to you, Joyce.”

“What?” Joyce looks back to him, “Hop, you couldn’t have known–”

“But I know you,” Hopper gives her a wan smile, “And you haven’t been wrong about this stuff once. I should have listened.”

Fornax snorts in amusement, cracking one amber eye open, “It’s only happened twice.”

Hopper groans, rubbing at the bridge of his nose, “And let’s hope it stays that way. Listen, I have to go take care of my kids, but you let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” He glances at Nancy and Jonathan. Nancy appears to be fully asleep, but Sera is watching him with his piercing eagle eyes, and Jonathan seems mostly alert, “Any of you.”

“We will,” Nancy murmurs. Not so asleep, then. Jonathan nods in agreement.

Hopper pushes himself to his feet, feeling his exhaustion deep in his bones. He catches sight of the rest of the kids as he leaves the hospital, gathered around the emergency room. Hopper slows his steps, trying to catch sight of who is injured and where, fear crawling up the back of his neck at the thought that maybe the demodogs came back to the house.

It’s Steve they’re crowded around. His big wolf daemon is pacing around them, watching passing nurses and doctors with wary eyes, her muzzle and coat matted with blood and grime and something black and thick, like what Hopper had to wash off when they pulled him out of those tunnels in the middle of the fields. Steve himself looks beat to hell, both his eyes blackened and busted skin all over his face. Dustin and Lucas are berating him about something, Lucas’s Sagitta fluttering around them anxiously as a small red bird, Dustin’s Pyxis talking almost as fast as Dustin himself, her tail curled down around Dustin’s neck as she perches on his hat.

Hopper can feel Venatici’s pull, but she’s fine, she would let him know if their pups were in danger. 

“What happened here?” Hopper asks, crossing his arms as he approaches them. Delmira gives him a cursory glance before looping him into the perimeter of their group. 

Despite his daemon acting as hypervigilant guardian of a bunch of middle schoolers, Steve looks more exasperated by Dustin and Lucas’ pestering than anything else. He has a good poker face, this kid. 

Will’s friends erupt into overlapping chatter at Hopper’s question, but Hopper manages to glean that they didn’t actually stay in the house like he told them to, but apparently went back to the tunnels under the fields instead. 

Hopper eyes Steve critically, “Is that what happened to you?” Hopper consciously does not look around to see who might be paying attention to them, “The dogs got you?”

Steve grimaces, “Not exactly.”

“Billy did it,” Max says, looking him dead in the eyes, the set of her jaw firm and mulish. At her side, her daemon Nova glares up at him as a Karelian Bear Dog, just as stubborn. There’s blood on his muzzle too, though significantly less than the blood coating Delmira. 

“Hargrove?” Hopper asks, “Your brother?”

Max doesn’t hesitate for a second, “He attacked Lucas. And when Steve tried to stop him, he attacked Steve too.”

Hopper hisses through his teeth, “And where is he now?”

“Holy shit,” Pyxis whispers while Dustin says with dawning horror, “We just, like, left him passed out at Will’s house.”

“We left a demodog in their fridge,” Steve mutters, “Billy Hargrove is only one of the monsters in that house.”

Still pacing, Delmira huffs in agreement.

“Okay, I’ll, uh,” Hopper glances back down the hallway, “Warn Joyce, I guess.”

“Ugh, my car is still at their house,” Steve groans.

“You’re in no state to drive anyway, Steve,” Lucas insists. 

Hopper frowns, “Wait, how did you guys get here, then?”

The kids all share blatantly guilty looks. Marieke, Mike’s daemon, cracks first, “Max drove us.”

“Max drove you? ” Hopper demands at the same time that Pyxis shouts, “Come on, Marieke!”

“Way to be a snitch, you guys,” Max says, scowling.

“Okay, you know what?” Hopper says, desperate to just go home and get some fucking sleep, “I’m not dealing with this. Call your parents.”

“Oh shit, our parents,” Lucas says in despair, “How are we supposed to explain this to them?”

Hopper leaves them to it, finally heading back to the car. Neither El nor Amias stir when Hopper gets in, Venatici only lifting her head to say, “Took you long enough. Everyone alright?”

“As alright as they’re going to be,” Hopper agrees, “Let’s go home.”

He carries El and Amias to bed when they reach the cabin, silently grumbling at the state of his back as he arranges them on their bed, pulling the covers up over both of them. Venatici gives Amias a lick on the nose, helping Hopper nudge them into place, and when they’re done she gives a huff of approval. 

Hopper doesn’t even look at the collection of heaters sitting cool and dormant around the couch in the living room, bypassing that as a task for tomorrow so that he can collapse into bed.

The next morning El is up, groggily asking for waffles as she leans heavily on Amias, who hasn’t changed out of his Blue Heeler shape. El’s fingers are woven deep into his blue salt and pepper coat, his ears large and pointed, just like Venatici’s.

“I think this is us,” El tells Hopper quietly over breakfast.

“It is,” Amias agrees. 

Hopper can’t quite keep the emotion from his voice as he pulls her into a hug, Venatici and Amias leaning up against both of them, when he says, “That’s great, kid. That’s really great. I’m happy for you.”

“I’m happy too,” El says. It’s a fucking miracle that she is, after all the pain and the heartbreak and the lingering uncertainty. But he finds that here, holding El close, safe even if only for now, he is too.

…

Karen

It was her mother’s daemon who named him–Valentijn, which means ‘strong’. Sometimes Karen wonders if her mother’s soul was trying to say something that her mouth never managed: that she wanted better for Karen than a cage. Karen grew up watching her mother shrink herself in all possible ways, until she barely took up any space at all, and when her frail hands would brush Karen’s hair aside Karen would think of how it was her mother that gave her a name that meant ‘healthy’, that meant ‘vigorous’. 

In the end, Valentijn settles as a red hart. A prize, to be chased, to be hunted. Noble and proud and not meant to be mounted on a wall, despite what the men in her life might think. In medieval times, the red hart was considered the most prestigious quarry. The irony is not lost on them. 

Karen walks the halls of her high school, of her college, Valentijn tall and eye-catching beside her, and she can feel the hounds snapping at her heels. 

She does her fair share of fooling around, of course. She’s pretty and smart and she might not come from what ivy boys consider wealth but it’s nothing to sneeze at either. Small town Indiana isn’t a very big pool and it’s easy to feel like a big fish, even if you’re only moderately sized. She flirts with college boys, idealistic and progressive when they’re not slapping the ass of the waitress at their local, and she flirts with soldiers on leave, only looking for someone to keep them company before they’re back off to Vietnam. 

But none of them are substantial enough to build a life on, and small town Indiana starts to feel more and more like a fishbowl after a while, magnifying anyone in its sphere for all to see. 

Sometimes Karen wonders if she might have made it out. If things had gone a little differently, if she’d been more careful, if she’d been less scared. 

It’s the same old story she’s heard a thousand times. Suburban girl resents her father and pities her mother, watches their sham of a marriage and swears she won’t be like them, swears she’ll be better. Suburban girl goes to bed with a dashing boy from out of town who doesn’t leave his number and is gone before she wakes up. Suburban girl winds up pregnant, and is suddenly more alone than she’s ever been before. 

To her, nineteen and pregnant and terrified, Ted Wheeler is a miracle. Ted’s daemon is a tired looking basset hound, with droopy eyes and a sleepy countenance, and when Ted tries to flirt with her, awkward and unsure despite the years he has on her, Karen sees in him an opportunity. A potential for safety, when everything seems so dangerous. 

Ted takes her on a few dates first, because he might not be the kind of gentleman that she’s always secretly dreamed of but he was raised with manners and money. Ted is respectful to Valentijn, and he never tries to grope her when he places an unsteady hand on her back to guide her, and he’s about as interesting as a brick wall but he’s nice, and she’s running out of time. 

Ted Wheeler takes her to bed and the sex is utterly uninspiring and inoffensive. When she tells him she’s pregnant he has a ring for her the next day, offered with a shy smile and broad, soft hands. 

Nancy is–

Nancy is a joy, pure and simple, the most beautiful thing to come out of all her mistakes. Valentijn names her daemon Sera, and Karen can’t help but agree that the miracle of her daughter is something to be honored. 

Motherhood is exhausting, and hard, and all the same Nancy and her small soft bundle of potential is a wonder to Karen. Maybe she’s lost the chance for the life her mother wanted for her, but holding Nancy makes Karen sure that she will never detach herself from her life the way her mother did. She will be present, and she will be proud, and Nancy will always be loved so long as Karen is around to see it done. 

Mike is–

Mike’s birth is carefully planned in the way that Nancy’s very much wasn’t. She and Ted stop having regular sex several months into their marriage, though occasionally when Karen is feeling particularly wound up or lonely she’ll submit to Ted’s inelegant ministrations. She’s always the one to initiate the event, and Karen would wonder if Ted were having an affair if he weren’t so plainly boring. As it is, he seems to prefer lounging in front of the TV to touching her, and Karen has long accepted the banality of this aspect of their relationship. 

But when Nancy is three Karen starts getting that itch, that fishbowl feeling coming back, as though she hasn’t given enough to this town already. So she tells Ted she wants another baby, and she lies back and thinks about other things until it sticks. 

She thought that having one baby under her belt would make the second one easier, but somehow Mike is the most difficult of all her children as an infant. He’s fussy and demanding and he doesn’t latch well, and his daemon squalls at all hours, constantly cranky if Karen isn’t holding him. Valentijn names his daemon Marieke–bitter, but beloved. Karen finds, sleepless in a rocking chair next to her son’s cradle, rocking her baby to sleep, the one who always wants to be close to her, that the sentiment seems accurate. 

Even still, she doesn’t love him any less. Nancy and Mike, her two gifts. 

Holly is–

Holly is a surprise. Karen stopped taking her birth control a while ago because she and Ted haven’t had sex in nearly three years and at this point the habit seems wasteful. So it's a surprise all around when Karen gets a little tipsy one night and finds herself thinking that there isn’t anyone stopping her from sleeping with her husband. Well, Valentijn gives her that judgy look that means he thinks this is a bad idea–he never really gets anything out of her having sex since Ted’s basset hound usually just falls asleep near the end of the bed. 

It’s not very good, but it’s the most anyone has touched her in years. Karen’s almost forgotten about the event by the time she misses her period. 

Holly is an angel baby. She sleeps well, she breastfeeds well, she hardly ever screams the way Mike did. Her poops are still ungodly and she comes with the usual childhood problems, but after the stress filled whirlwind that was Mike’s infancy Karen finds herself immeasurably grateful. Valentijn names her daemon Heddwyn, and Karen basks in the peace of it all. She has a new baby to focus her energy on, and for the most part she’s free to do as she wants, even under the watchful eye of her neighbors. 

Then Will Byers goes missing and all of Hawkins gets turned upside down. 

Years later, staring at her sleeping husband and standing on the precipice of a decision–maybe a bad one, but at least one that feels like hers, for the first time in almost twenty years–she finds herself wishing that she had been a better friend to Joyce Byers.

…

Mike

When Mike is little, Marieke likes to be something with hands. Monkeys and lemurs and a raccoon for a little while, though the bullying they received for that one guaranteed that it didn’t stick around long. They liked the versatility of an extra pair of hands, and when they met Dustin and Pyxis for the first time they liked being able to match someone. Daemons with hands usually belong to people who’ll go into a scientific field–people who become doctors or scientists or engineers. Mike and Marieke like AV club and science plenty, and the idea of this works for them. In the meantime they use their hands to build scale models and reach things off of tall shelves and play arcade games.

There’s also a secret use to having hands that’s pretty nice, and that’s getting to hold people. Marieke might not be able to hold Mike’s friends, but she can hold their daemons, and when she needs to she can even hold Mike, giving him something soft and comforting to wrap his arms around.

Once, Will goes through a period where his daemon is constantly shifting between insects, and Marieke spends months cradling Gwin in her palms whenever she can. Joyce thinks it’s funny, and Mike relishes the closeness until the day that Gwin abruptly decides that he wants to be a badger for a while.

Then Will disappears and there’s a girl in the woods with no daemon, a girl who reaches out to Marieke unthinkingly, with the same shameless naivete that had led to her almost undressing in front of Mike, Dustin, and Lucas.

Marieke goes skittering back when El reaches for her, and for a second El looks genuinely and deeply hurt, like Mike has betrayed her. 

“Sorry, uh,” Mike crouches in front of her, unsure how to explain something that’s always been understood by everyone else, “It’s not polite to touch other people’s daemons.”

El furrows her brows at him in confusion, “What is…a daemon?”

Mike topples out of his crouch and onto his butt at that, startled into stunned silence for nearly a full minute before saying, probably too loud and entirely too shocked, “It’s your soul!”

El does eventually get the hang of daemons, aided by Marieke and her immediate desire to give El anything she asks for. Mike is still sick with worry at the thought of what might be happening to Will right now, but El is someone he can help here , even if he can’t help Will. So he teaches her daemon etiquette and Marieke takes to flicking between forms that will make El smile.

In the cafeteria after El uses her powers to reach across an unknowable void and find Will and Gwin, Marieke lets El bury a hand in her ruff, El sending a shock of fear and confusion and bone-deep tiredness through the connection.

“Touching daemons isn’t allowed,” El mutters, stroking a hand through Marieke’s fur. She’s currently a German Shepherd, because they felt the need for something mean and scary to be around to protect them now that Hopper, Venatici, Jonathan, and Anje have left.

“It’s allowed if they tell you it’s okay,” Mike tells her, staring at the place where El’s hand is buried in Marieke’s fur, “Or if they’re family.”

“We’re family?” El asks, looking up at him with wide eyes.

Mike feels himself flush, “Yeah. I mean, we can be. If you want.”

El’s hand in Marieke’s fur tightens, “I do want.” She looks down again and says, like it’s a new discovery, “I like dogs.”

It’s that sentiment that keeps Marieke as a dog. Even when El disappears, maybe never to be seen again. Even when Will comes back, though maybe quieter and stranger than before. In the wake of this disaster, Nancy’s Sera settles as a bird of prey and suddenly Steve Harrington’s massive wolf is around all the time, and Will’s Gwin comes out of the Upside Down as a small white and brown ferret and stays that way. 

And Marieke switches between dog forms but is almost always a hunting dog. Always on the lookout. Always searching for clues.

“It’s just kind of embarrassing,” Mike admits to Will one night, hushed and curled up under blankets at a sleepover, “Everyone was waiting for me to do something smart and important with my life but it turns out I’m just…this.”

“Hey,” Will chastises, “Don’t talk about my best friend like that.”

Mike turns big, mopey eyes on Will and almost vocalizes the blow that came biggest with Marieke’s newest decision: he can’t hold anyone anymore.

Will crumples at the presence of Mike’s puppy dog eyes, just like he always has, “Plenty of smart and important people have dog daemons, Mike. Hopper’s daemon is a dog. And Steve’s daemon is a big wolf, which is pretty cool. That’s kind of like a dog.”

“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Mike groans, “I don’t want to be like Steve. He’s so lame.”

“You’re not lame,” Will assures him fondly, “And besides. I like dogs.”

So that settles it. Marieke turns into an Irish Setter on the day after Will’s breakdown at school, the day he admits to Mike about being the spy, and it isn’t until they’re in the hospital and it’s all over that Mike notices she’s stayed that way.

Mike buries his hands in her ruff and reminds himself that two of his favorite people like him, regardless of the shape his soul takes.

…

Mike watches Will and Gwin disappear into the rain, Marieke at his side, her slender nose pointed after them. 

“Go,” Marieke insists, seconds away from taking off after them, her whole body tense, “Mike. We have to go.”

“And do what?” Mike asks, bitter and sad and angry all at once, all of it tangled up inside of him, choking him, “He doesn’t want to talk to us.”

“We hurt them, Mike,” Marieke insists, still staring into the grey sheets of rain where Will and Gwin have long since disappeared, “That was cruel.”

“It’s not cruel, it’s the truth!” Mike exclaims, raking a hand through his hair, “He’s not– just because– I like El, she’s not stupid! And Will is– he’s being so unfair about this whole thing!”

“We’ve been ignoring them,” Marieke reminds him, “They're our best friends.”

Mike leans back against the car, crossing his arms, “They’re all our best friends. Will was right, we should check in on Dustin.”

“Mike, we have to apologize,” Marieke says, finally pulling her eyes away from the rain to pin Mike with her stare, “And don’t try to lie to me. We’re friends with the whole Party, but Will is special.”

“Not more special than El,” Mike argues, “Marieke, you’re a dog because of her.”

Marieke gives him a disbelieving look, “You know that’s not true. And Will likes dogs too.”

Mike doesn’t have a response to that, biting his lip and staring down at his feet. 

“Fine,” he agrees eventually, “Let’s go get Lucas and Sagitta. We'll apologize.”

…

Jonathan

Jonathan has never really been interested in fantasy. That was always Will’s thing–the escapism and the adventures and the imagination. Jonathan is down to earth because he always had to be. That’s part of why he got into photography–looking at something real, but finding a story in it. His own kind of escapism.

So he’s never really been interested in mythology, but it’s hard to avoid certain things when your daemon is a jackal. 

Jackals are usually depicted as clever and wily. Magicians or sorcerers or wise people. Which doesn’t stop his classmates from making mocking roadrunner noises at him, even though the cartoon is about a coyote. It’s in the name.

In some myths they’re used to illustrate desolation, loneliness, and abandonment. Jonathan doesn’t put much stock in mythology, but he can’t help but absorb the truth of that one. He and Anje have their family, but even within it Jonathan feels a bit like an outcast. A son and a brother and a father all at once. Filling the gaps that Lonnie left in their lives even as he struggles desperately against all the things that Hawkins has always piled on top of him. It wasn’t enough to be a weird and awkward teenager on top of being poor. Now he gets to be the son of the man who left, the son of the woman who broke, the brother of the boy who died and came back.

Nancy is the first person who makes him feel seen. Like she looked right through the camera lens back at him, with her eagle eyes and her pointed questions.

But even that starts to lose a little of its potency as she moves on to bigger, better things. She has dreams to pursue, and after a while Jonathan starts to feel like more of an obligation than someone she enjoys spending time with. 

Jonathan goes home after Nancy gets them fired and lets himself collapse onto the couch, Anje jumping up to lay her bulk on his chest.

“Was I wrong?” he asks, burying his nose in her fur.

“I guess we just don’t understand each other anymore,” Nancy had said. Like he was the one who betrayed her. 

Anje huffs, “Wrong about her being a spoiled rich girl who can’t see past her own ambitions? No.”

Jonathan bumps her reproachfully with his forehead, “We don’t think that.”

“Don’t we?” Anje asks, blinking one of her round brown eyes at him, “She didn’t even consider what repercussions there could be before dragging us into that house.”

“We didn’t put up much of a fight,” Jonathan points out.

“We make bad decisions when she bats her eyes at us,” Anje replies, with a pointed emphasis on ‘we’ and ‘us’ like she’d prefer to be excluded from this accusation.

Jonathan sighs, letting his head thump back against the arm of the couch so he can stare up at the ceiling, “They didn’t treat her well, there.”

“They didn’t treat us well there,” Anje spits, “Nancy and Sera were the breakfast runners and the coffee makers but did they ever notice how those assholes talked to us? Did she stand up for you when Bruce asked if mom had done something crazy lately so they could publish a story about it? When he asked how Lonnie was doing? When Tom told us he couldn’t pay us as much as a regular intern?”

“She–” Jonathan stops himself, makes a noise of frustration, “It’s not her job to stand up for me. And they were being sexist to her. Belittling her and diminishing her contributions. Making all those fucking comments.”

“Of course they were,” Anje agrees, “They suck. She deserves better. But so do we, and none of those assholes ever told her daemon to fetch a stick.”

“No,” Jonathan agrees quietly, “They just told Nancy to do it instead.”

Anje nudges him with her nose, drawing his eyes back to her, “Nancy was never going to keep her head down. We knew that. And it’s not a competition about who was treated worse. I just don’t know if she knows that.”

Jonathan snorts, “Yeah. I don’t think she does. She talks a big game but I don’t think Nancy has ever thought about, like. Class consciousness.”

He goes back to staring at the ceiling, letting the anger simmer out of him. He’ll apologize, and Nancy probably won’t, and then he’ll have to decide if he loves her enough for that not to matter. In his more frivolous moments, Jonathan dreams about having a life with her. He just doesn’t know if her dreams line up with his.

“It was weird that Tom was so sweaty, though, right?” Jonathan mutters, “He did seem kind of off.”

“You just want to find a conspiracy in everything,” Anje nudges him more pointedly, “You and Nancy deserve each other.”

“Hey,” Jonathan protests, “We deserve each other.”

…

Nancy drives him to his physical therapy appointments in the time before they leave for California. It feels like a bit of an apology, one that Jonathan is happy to accept, if only because he really does need the help and his mom is busy with moving prep, so Nancy offering to drive is the kind of support they could really use right now. 

It doesn’t make Jonathan feel like any less of a burden, but the guilty tilt of Sera’s head every time they come to pick him up makes the whole thing a little more bearable. It’s easier to think that he’s doing them a favor in accepting the help, rather than the other way around.

They don’t ask him about his progress, which Jonathan is grateful for. It turns out that being thrown into shelves and then taking a metal stool to the back can cause some lasting damage, not helped by the fact that Jonathan spent the next twelve hours or so running for his life. Not that he can really mention that last part to the doctor. At the very least, the government is covering the price of his medical bills with their hush money. But the pain–

Jonathan didn’t know pain could be like this. He’s been hurt before–scraped knees and split lips and bruised knuckles, not to mention that time he and Nancy cut their palms open. But this pain is different. Excruciating and ever-present, affecting everything he does like a specter over his shoulder, at once fading into the background and so prominent it almost prevents him from functioning. Jonathan talks, and he smiles, and he goes through the motions of life, but all the while he feels distant from it. Like the pain is the real him, and everything else is just a mask he puts on.

Nancy doesn’t understand. He tried to explain it once, back when he was still half waiting for her to break up with him in the wake of everything they lost at Starcourt. But she just didn’t get it. How he now spends hours lying on his bed with his feet up on the wall, Anje pressed against the back of his thighs, desperate for even the smallest bit of relief from the pain, even as his mind spins with boredom.

He’s tired of it. Tired of thinking about it, of bargaining with it, of living with it, of talking about it. The doctors say this might be something he’ll live with for the rest of his life, that the damage may be permanent, but that the effects can be lessened with exercise and maintenance. And if he keeps coming to his physical therapy sessions.

The truth is, he’s fucking exhausted.

But he doesn’t have time to be tired. They’re moving soon, and they’re all learning to live with El and Amias now, and to live with the hole that Hopper and Venatici left in their lives, and Will and Gwin have been weirdly quiet lately, more withdrawn. So Jonathan gets up every day, and he does what is expected of him, even if he has to physically lean on Anje to do it. And when people ask him how he’s doing he says ‘fine’, even as the truth sits unspoken on his tongue, because nobody wants to hear that he’s tired, or that he’s in pain, or that he might just be this way forever, now. 

Nancy doesn’t break up with him. They talk about it, eventually, sitting on the front steps of his house, Anje curled up behind his back, Sera perched at a distance, his keen eyes scanning the front yard and the ‘for sale’ sign, now covered with a bar that says ‘sold’. 

“Long distance is hard,” Nancy says, because she’s never come at a problem sideways when she can come at it head-on instead.

“It is,” Jonathan agrees.

Nancy looks at him, those eyes of hers really seeing him, just like they had back when his world was falling apart for the first time, “It’s going to take a lot of work. But I–,” she hesitates for a moment, biting her lip, “I’m willing to do it, if that’s what it takes. I think we’re worth it. Do you?”

Anje nudges his hip lightly with her nose. Jonathan thinks about his dreams, the ones where he and Nancy get to grow old together. He thinks about how she doesn’t understand his pain, but how she drives him to his physical therapy appointments anyway. 

“I do,” Jonathan agrees. It’ll be difficult, but he’s nothing if not stubborn, and he’s willing to try. 

…

Robin

It’s been years since Liene poked someone on purpose, let alone by accident, but during Steve and Robin’s first shift together at Scoops, Liene gets Delmira right in the nose. 

It’s not that Robin is unaware that Steve Harrington’s daemon is a massive wolf. She’s hard to miss: lean but striking, with dark charcoal coloring over her head and shoulders and down to the tip of her tail, light grey and white on her chest and legs. She has amber eyes and a square black nose and she’s gorgeous, utterly, like some mythical beast. Robin has seen her from a distance, walking beside Steve in the halls of their high school, and in comparison she’s always found Steve to be unimpressive. He gets bagel crumbs on his shirt–who cares if his soul is somehow otherworldly, sleekly dangerous?

The first day at Scoops, Steve shows up ten minutes early, hands in the pockets of his jeans, and she spots him before he’s even over the threshold. It’s hard not to, with people giving his intimidating daemon a wide berth. Robin is preemptively dismissive as she watches Steve approach, scanning his surroundings as he walks to the store.

And then, for a moment, it’s like he and his wolf fall into sync with each other. Just before he crosses the threshold Robin finds herself thinking that she’s not looking at a douchebag and his guard dog, but at a wolf in human form, stepping lightly across polished linoleum. 

Then Steve is standing in front of the counter and going into the employee bathroom to change and she finds, to her astonishment, that he’s awkward and nervous and his jokes are bad and his hair is probably too long. He’s still arrogant, and he still flirts with any girl who smiles at him for more than half a second, but he’s human here. The stupid hats they wear flatten his hair, and his knees are knobby, and he strikes out as often as girls flirt back. 

Delmira goes into the back room and curls up under the dividing window, keeping herself safely out of the way. Robin thinks she’s asleep, but every once in a while she snorts a wolfish laugh at one of Robin’s jokes, even when Steve is protesting that Robin is being mean to him. 

King Steve thinks she’s funny. Will wonders never cease. 

Robin usually keeps Liene in a little fanny pack at her waist. It’s not the most fashion-forward she’s ever been, but it’s hard to find things hedgehog sized that are also relatively unbothered by hedgehog quills, so Robin has long since ditched anything fancy for good old fashioned nylon. But fanny packs are not Scoops Ahoy uniform approved, so Liene has been given free reign of the table in the back because Robin occasionally worries about her getting stepped on and Steve doesn’t seem accustomed to small animals underfoot. 

She doesn’t know much about Steve’s friend group nowadays but Nancy Wheeler has that big-ass eagle and Billy Hargrove is out terrorizing the town with his puma. He’s probably not used to daemons who fit in the palm of your hand, like Robin’s. 

This all culminates about half an hour from closing, when Robin is in the back sorting inventory and Steve slams open the window and says, “Hey, Buckley–“ startling Liene right off the table. 

The thing about hedgehogs is that there are many ways to touch them without hurting yourself. Robin tries to not view it too closely as a metaphor–that she isn’t dangerous if handled correctly, that she has a soft underbelly she curls into herself to protect. 

Liene falls, curled into a ball, spikes out, and Robin is too slow to catch her. 

Delmira makes a pained noise, and Steve rubs at his nose, hissing in pain. Robin makes it around the table to find Liene already uncurling, and blood welling from several small punctures on Delmira’s nose. 

Robin is already opening her mouth to snap something at Steve, but she’s cut off by Delmira leaning down until her nose is even with Liene and saying, “I’m sorry, I tried to catch you.”

Liene blinks her small beady eyes, nose in the air, “You shouldn’t have. I’m covered in spikes.”

Delmira huffs, “But you’re small. I didn’t want you to get hurt when you hit the ground.”

“Don’t worry,” Liene says proudly, “I hit back.”

Robin looks at Steve and finds him stifling a smile, watching the interaction with fondness in his eyes. He’s still arrogant and his hair is stupid, but. His daemon tried to catch her’s when she fell, and then apologized for not being able to, even with blood still trickling down the side of her muzzle. Maybe he’s not all bad. 

…

Robin is pretty sure they’re the least qualified people for a stealth mission. Delmira is quiet on her feet and so is Steve, but it doesn’t change the fact that Delmira is, conservatively, the size of a small horse. Delmira and Steve combined had only barely managed to get her onto the roof of the elevator in time to go unnoticed. Pyxis is loud and startles easily, chatting rapidly with Dustin as he tries to work out theories on the secret underground Russian base they find themselves in. And Erica and her daemon Tyr–who keeps flitting between a cockatoo and a bearded dragon, both of them equally judgy looking–have been anything but subtle. Robin supposes she can give Erica and Tyr a pass since they’re ten-year-olds, but she makes no excuses for the other two.

Speaking of the other two, they seem determined to keep her and Erica out of the loop. Steve and Dustin drop back to have some kind of private conversation, Delmira walking easily in the gap between the boys and Robin and Erica. Robin looks over at them disapprovingly. They’re all in this shitty situation together, the least they can do is share whatever dumb plan they’re coming up with. 

“I’m sorry, is there something you’d like to share with the class?” Robin calls, her voice bouncing off the flat plastic and metal hallway they find themselves in.

The boys glance at each other again. They better be glad the walkie interrupts them and saves them from Robin’s annoyance. She might not be very big, but she is prickly.

They make it down the endless hallway and to their destination: an actual, honest-to-god Russian operation under Starcourt. Watching Steve take down a Russian guard, Delmira tackling the man’s daemon to the ground with a low reverberating growl, is pretty impressive and surprising. But whatever the hell is beyond that door is something else .

“What the hell is that?” Liene hisses, and Robin can feel her spikes starting to poke out from the fanny pack. Robin feels suitably unsettled and inclined to agree.

Delmira growls again, that same low, resonant sound that buzzes in Robin’s chest.

“The gate,” Steve and Dustin say in unison.

…

Intentionally or not, Robin is not what anyone would call ‘popular’. She’s gangly and freckly, she’s a little accident prone, and when given the chance she can ramble for truly impressive lengths of time. She doesn’t get invited to the cool parties, and she’s usually too anxious to break the rules in any truly significant way. Because of this, Robin has only ever been in the general proximity of drugs–trombone players always seem to have illegal substances on hand–and never actually done any. 

Well, that’s not true anymore, she supposes. 

Everything is a kaleidoscope of color. She knows, in some screaming part of the back of her brain, that something is very wrong. She’s nauseated and her arms and shoulders ache and she has a pretty significant bruise forming on her thigh where Steve accidentally kneed her when they were getting jostled in the back of the Russian golf cart thing.

But she’s also feeling a little unreal, a little like everything around her is a heat wave mirage, so she points one wobbly finger in Erica’s direction and says, “Is that real or am I hallucinating?”

Dustin–there are two Dustins, but they appear to be moving in sync with each other, very impressive actually–looks over at Erica, who is standing next to what Robin could swear is a pastel orange pony with a bright yellow mane and tail and what look like apples printed onto the fur of its flank.

“Oh, that’s real,” Dustin confirms, “Do you know anything about My Little Pony?”

Robin doesn’t really have a way to answer that, so instead she dissolves into slightly hysterical laughter, Steve not far behind her, and the two of them sprawl on the floor of the elevator as it brings them closer to their escape.

It’s when they stumble out of the elevator, Robin swaying as she opens her mouth to taste the air, that she nearly falls face-first onto the pavement. She trips on an uneven part of the concrete and only has enough wherewithal to giggle nervously as she falls. Something catches her. 

Or someone, rather, since she finds that her fingers and face are buried in fur, one of Delmira’s amber eyes watching her solemnly. 

“Whoops,” Robin says, caught between genuine horror and the fuzzy blanket that the world is currently wrapped in. She feels second-hand confusion and dizziness and surprise all in a bright flash. She slips off of Delmira’s shoulder and onto her back on the floor, laughing breathlessly up at the night sky. 

“Woah, Rob,” Steve slurs, bending over her and blocking her view of what sparse stars she can see past the bright lights of Starcourt. 

Robin thrusts a finger in his face, “That was an accident! I didn’t mean to like,” she coughs, or laughs, air leaving her in a hysterical wheeze, “Defile you or whatever.”

Steve scoffs, holding out a hand to help her up, “Whatever, come on.” He lowers his voice to a stage whisper, “Or Dustin will yell at us again.”

“I heard that!” Dustin shouts back at them. 

The guards with guns quickly escalate the situation and that, coupled with the hazy feeling of the drugs, whisks the incident from her mind. It doesn’t come back to her until she’s sitting slumped on the floor of the movie theater bathroom, cool tile under her feverish skin, the sour taste of bile still acidic in the back of her throat. Delmira had tried to catch her, just like she tried to catch Liene. No thought, only action. 

And here Delmira is again, nudging her cold nose against Robin’s fingers as Robin says, uncertainly, “Steve, did you OD over there?”

“No, I just, uh,” Steve says quietly, “Just thinking.”

“Okay,” Robin looks down and away. But then she feels it, feels comfort and confusion and something more steadfast than all of it, a camaraderie built out of ice cream scoops and white boards and horrible customers, solidified in a secret underground Russian torture chamber. Robin blinks down at Steve’s daemon, who has once again stuck her nose where it doesn’t belong, the short soft fur of her muzzle beneath Robin’s fingertips.

There isn’t a hint of disgust in anything that Steve is feeling. Through his soul Robin finds, first and foremost, affection and fondness and loyalty, projected straight at her. 

“Steve, you can’t–” And, oh, she really is going to cry if this keeps going, “You don’t even know me.”

Steve leans his head back against the bathroom stall, the side of his mouth quirked up, “Sure I do. You’re funny, and you like bullying me, and you hate mint chocolate chip.”

“It’s the worst ice cream flavor,” Robin agrees softly.

“You’re a little prickly,” Steve says, half laughing because he thinks he’s so fucking funny, doesn’t he, except she feels a watery laugh building in her throat, unbidden, “And you like to doodle on your shoes, and you stayed with me so the kids could get away, and when I was half passed out from pain you wouldn’t stop talking to me.” Steve’s eyes are so earnest, and beneath her hand Delmira is warm and comforting, “You shouted at that guard for me.”

“I spit in his face,” Robin offers, because she’s proud of that one.

Steve’s smile widens, “And you’re a fucking badass, apparently. And,” Steve adds in a slightly bitchy tone, the one she’s started thinking of as his ‘mean girl’ voice, “You have shit taste in women.”

“Excuse me?” Robin demands, too offended to be worried, “You of all people–”

“I mean, yeah,” Steve continues, like he doesn’t even hear her, “Tammy Thompson, she’s cute and all, but. I mean, she’s a total dud.”

“She is not!” Robin protests, but she’s relaxing back against the wall as she says it, relieved beyond words that she hasn’t lost this, the friendship she didn’t even know to ask for.

They might still be a little high because when Dustin slams through the door to yell at them Robin’s face hurts from laughing and for a second she almost forgets about the life and death situation they find themselves in.

…

Lucas

The week that Max breaks up with him–not one of their on again off again things, but the final time, after Starcourt–Lucas goes to Castle Byers. Sagitta flies ahead, her wings glinting blue in the dappled sunlight, while Lucas traipses through the woods on a familiar path. Winter has well and truly set in, leaving the trees barren and covering the forest floor with a layer of snow, and Lucas is grateful for the exercise keeping him warm in his winter coat.

It’s peaceful out here. For all the horrors that these woods have visited on Hawkins, Lucas can’t help but enjoy the tranquility of winter. He watches as Sagitta circles back to land on his shoulder, her talons digging into the fabric of his coat.

“Something’s in there,” Sagitta tells him just as Castle Byers comes into view.

The first thing he notices is that it looks wrecked. Lucas frowns and picks up the pace at the sight of it–not just regular weather wear and tear, more like someone took a bat to it on purpose. There’s noise coming from inside, and for a moment Lucas wonders if a raccoon or some other animal could have done this, but then he hears the familiar sound of Marieke’s voice.

He pushes the curtain aside and ducks through to find Mike and Marieke curled up inside. Mike looks up at the disturbance and quickly wipes at his face, furiously rubbing at his eyes, but not before Lucas sees that he’s clearly been crying.

“Hey, man,” Lucas says cautiously, stepping in and sitting carefully cross legged on the floor when Marieke shifts over to make space for him.

“Hey,” Mike replies, his voice thick with emotion. He’s clutching some kind of ripped paper in his hands. Marieke rests her head on his knee, looking up at Mike with big, soulful eyes.

Lucas lets them sit in silence, letting the sounds of the forest in winter filter through the hideout, the cold of the ground slowly leaching through his pants. He’s surprised that Will didn’t clear this place out before they left–there are comics that are curling with water damage, old D&D modules, figurines and knick-knacks. Childhood relics that Lucas hasn’t thought about in a while. 

He picks up a crumpled piece of paper sitting on the floor and smooths it out. It’s one of Will’s drawings–Will the Wise, with his crystal ball. Sagitta flutters down from his shoulder, fussily straightening the corners with her beak. 

“It’s smaller in here that I remember,” Lucas says, breaking the silence. He laughs quietly, “Or, I guess we’re just bigger.”

Mike snorts, still looking down at the paper in his hands. “We were always too big for this place. Will was just tiny.”

Marieke huffs, “That didn’t stop us.”

“No,” Mike agrees quietly, “It didn’t.”

They fall into silence once more, and then Lucas speaks up again, “You want to talk about it?”

“What is there to talk about?” Mike asks, dull and sullen.

Lucas sighs, “Look, Mike, he’s probably just busy–”

“Two months, Lucas,” Mike interrupts, his lip curling with bitterness, “He hasn’t called in two months.”

“Have you tried calling him?” Lucas prompts.

“Of course I have!” Mike snaps, “I stopped after three whole weeks of Mrs. Byers saying he was ‘busy’. I can take a hint.”

“Maybe he is busy,” Lucas insists, even though he’s also been receiving the radio silent treatment from the Byers’ house.

“So, then what?” Mike demands, gesturing sharply in his frustration, “He has new friends and he doesn’t have time for us any more? Like that’s better? ”

Marieke catches Mike’s wrist with her mouth, pressing down gently with her teeth in warning. Mike freezes, staring down at her, and all at once the anger drains out of him, leaving him helpless and heartbroken. 

“He’s our friend,” Marieke reminds him, “He just needs some time.”

“You’re wrong,” Mike laughs mirthlessly, tears gathering in his eyes and spilling down his cheeks, “He hates me. I messed it up. I ruined– I ruined everything .”

“Hey,” Lucas says, drawing Mike’s attention, “You didn’t ruin anything. We apologized.”

“You apologized,” Mike corrects, frowning.

Lucas’s brows draw together in confusion, Sagitta bouncing around on his knee uncertainly, “I– what?”

“After we went over to the Byers’ house and Will wasn’t there,” Mike clarifies, “I was so caught up in the Mind Flayer thing that I never apologized. I mean, I only really managed to apologize to El after like three tries, and even that got interrupted by Dustin. And then she told me she loved me and,” Mike shrugs, “I don’t know, I guess I figured that was it.”

“Will didn’t really let me apologize either,” Lucas says, “When I tried to apologize. He just said he didn’t care about the campaign anymore and brushed it off.”

Mike looks back at the paper in his hands, what Lucas can now see is a photograph that looks like it’s been torn in half.

"I just…” Mike’s face scrunches up like he’s going to start crying again, “I miss him.”

“I know, man,” Lucas says, reaching out to rest a hand on Mike’s knee, “I miss him too.”

…

Hellfire meets every other Friday in the drama room. Lucas is always the first one there, since he doesn’t really have anyone to drive him. Sometimes he’ll hitch rides with Nancy or Steve, and sometimes one of his parents will take him, but Lucas always feels a little bad about asking them to wait around while he’s in club, so usually he just stays late at school and gets driven home afterwards. He and Sagitta will hang out in the library or practice in the gym, and it’s a good time to get his homework done without too many distractions. 

After a few months of this, he comes in one day to find Eddie and Mordred already there, setting up chairs and laying out Eddie’s DM stuff.

“Oh, hey, Sinclair,” Eddie says, looking up and waving when Mordred gives a little trill of greeting at Lucas’s presence. 

“Hey,” Lucas returns the wave. He didn’t know that Eddie was the one who set all the chairs up ahead of time. “Uh, do you want some help?”

Eddie, standing on the stage and in the process of shifting the heavy throne he sits in during sessions closer to the edge, gestures in a broad sweep at the chair, “If you’d be so kind, Sir Lucas.”

Lucas bypasses the stairs and pulls himself up on the stage, grabbing the front of the chair under the seat and lifting while Eddie tilts it back and lifts from behind. They manage to maneuver it down in front of the table, and then Lucas settles himself in his usual chair while Eddie crouches on the throne like a gargoyle, laying out his notes behind his cobbled together DM screen.

“So, Sinclair, what brings you to my domain so early?” Eddie asks, glancing at the clock, “You scared the shit out of me, man, I thought I lost track of time. But we don’t start for another thirty minutes.”

“Oh, uh, I’ve just been hanging around since school ended,” Lucas shrugs, “I figured here was as good a place as any to do my homework.”

Eddie raises an eyebrow, resting his chin on one ringed hand, “You usually do that?”

“Most of the time,” Lucas agrees, “It just seems easier.”

Eddie hums thoughtfully, studying him. Mordred jumps up on the table next to Eddie, stalking forward and crouching in front of Sagitta, watching her with his round, green eyes. After a moment he bats lazily at her, sending Sagitta up in the air. She flies in a circle and lands on Mordred’s head, turning to preen one of her feathers, unfazed. Mordred looks up at her but doesn’t shake her off, his tail flicking behind him in interest.

“You’re pretty observant, yeah?” Eddie asks, pursing his lips. 

“I think so,” Lucas agrees. Sagitta has always preferred bird forms, usually a sign that a person has a keen eye for details. Dustin laughed at him when she settled as a magpie, citing Lucas’s proclivity for shiny things and bright explosions as reasons why this was predictable. But Lucas prefers Eddie’s word: observant.

“What’s up with Wheeler? If you don’t mind me asking.” Eddie reaches out and flicks Mordred’s tail. Mordred flicks him back, making Eddie grin. “Lately he’s been all,” Eddie makes exaggerated sad eyes, “You know, mopey.”

“Oh, uh,” Lucas tilts his head back and forth, “Do you know Will Byers?”

Eddie’s eyebrows shoot up, “Zombie boy?”

Lucas cringes, but Sagitta beats him to the punch, snapping, “It’s rude to call people names.”

Eddie holds up his hands in surrender, “Deepest apologies, my lady, I meant no offense. I never had the pleasure of meeting baby Byers in person, I’ve only heard,” Eddie gestures around them, “General town gossip.”

“He’s one of our best friends,” Lucas says, picking up his pencil to have something to do with his hands, “For years it was just Mike, Dustin, Will, and me. We were really close, but then some stuff happened, and this summer the Byers moved to California.”

Lucas shrugs, unwilling to get into the complexity of it, “He and Mike are…going through a rough patch. That’s why Mike is being mopey.”

Eddie steeples his fingers, “I see. And you’re left in the middle of it.”

“What?” Lucas looks up sharply, “No. I mean, I was also– we were kind of shitty to him last summer.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t say that you and Will were going through a rough patch,” Eddie points out, “So you’re caught in the crossfire.”

Lucas bites his lip, “Maybe this is just what happens. One day you’re close and the next you just drift apart or whatever.”

“Sure,” Eddie agrees, leaning back in his throne, “Sometimes. But if you really don’t want that to happen–and it sounds like you don’t–you gotta fight for that shit, man.”

“Fight for it?” Lucas asks.

Eddie waves his hand at the sky, “Listen, I’ve been here before. Not gonna lie, it’s rough. But you do what you gotta do to keep in touch. Call your friend again, write him a letter, talk to his mom. Whatever it takes. Let him know that you’re still there. That you’re still reaching out. And see if he reaches back.”

Eddie slants a smile at him, “Trust me. I’ve been the one slipping away more times than I’d care to admit. Just knowing that someone is there really helps.”

“Right,” Lucas taps his pencil against the table, thinking, “Does, uh, does that advice work with girlfriends too?”

Mordred makes a noise of amusement, but Eddie’s expression doesn’t waver, “Girlfriends are friends too, aren’t they? It works on anyone. Just be careful not to push too hard. Be available, but don’t invade their space or privacy.”

“I’ve been trying,” Lucas laments, letting his head fall into his hands, “She doesn’t want to talk to me. She’s made that pretty clear.”

Eddie makes a sympathetic face, “That’s rough, buddy. Just don’t give up, okay?”

“Yeah,” Lucas nods, “I won’t.”

…

Dustin

Dustin loves Hellfire, he really does, but sometimes Eddie can be…intimidating. It’s not the ripped jeans or the heavy metal that do it–though those work to intimidate plenty of other people–and not even the loudness or the wild, slightly manic energy–Dustin has been friends with Erica and Robin too long to be scared off by something like that. It’s more that Eddie has this energy around him, this charisma, that makes Dustin act kind of crazy. He wants so desperately for Eddie to like him, to be impressed by him, that sometimes hanging out with Eddie is a little exhausting. 

The rest of the club are cool, though. Jeff always has new modules, passing around his copy of Dragon for them all to read, and Wes always has weird character ideas and snacks to share, and Gareth is surprisingly quiet for a group like this but his comebacks are always hilarious. 

Gareth’s daemon is a border collie named Lovelace, and despite the fact that Mordred is nearly as tall as she is, he’ll still try to ride on Lovelace’s shoulders. Pyxis, on the other hand, is definitely small enough to climb on her shoulders, and Lovelace is often happy to let her. 

The thing about Pyxis is that she’s more than capable of walking, but often prefers to ride on another daemon if Dustin isn’t available. None of their friends’ daemons are really big enough for that, though, other than Delmira and Amais. But Amais is all the way in California and Delmira is at work with Steve, so in the meantime Pyxis is more than happy to hitch a ride on Lovelace. 

“She’s a capuchin, right?” Gareth asks him one day on their way out of the cafeteria, Pyxis laid out on Lovelace’s back with her arms around Lovelace’s neck. 

“Yeah,” Dustin shrugs, “She only settled a few months ago but she’s basically always been some kind of monkey.”

“It’s cool that she has hands,” Gareth says, and Dustin prepares himself for some kind of comment on if he’s planning on becoming a surgeon some day, or an engineer, but instead Gareth continues with, “Means she can roll dice, if she wanted to.”

Dustin smiles, “Yeah, I guess she could.”

They tried playing D&D just the two of them, once, but the split focus was a little disorienting. So instead Pyxis just hangs off his shoulders or leans on the top of his head, her tail curled around his neck or the strap of his backpack, and makes comments while he plays with his friends.

On the days that Dustin can convince Steve to accompany them to the arcade, or the quarry, or wherever, (which is often) or on the days when Steve comes over for dinner (slightly less often, because he’s stubborn about it for some reason), Pyxis gets to hang all over Delmira. 

Steve is intimidating in a different way. They’ve been through hell together, and Steve has saved his life too many times for Dustin to worry about potentially losing Steve’s attention or affection. They’re brothers. If you die, I die. 

But it’s exactly because they’re brothers that Steve is intimidating. It’s not his massive, fuck-off big daemon–although Dustin has heard tales of woe about Delmira’s size and scariness factor chasing off potential dates, which is ridiculous because she’s a total softie–and it’s not about Steve’s reputation as fallen king of Hawkins High–Dustin has never cared about popularity, and honestly Steve is probably better off without a fiefdom. 

Instead, Dustin finds himself intimidated by the possibility of letting Steve down somehow, of disappointing him. Being brothers is a two way street, and Dustin is supposed to support Steve just as much as Steve supports him. Even if he’s not always good at it.

Sometimes, when school gets out and there’s no band practice or Hellfire and Steve has work, Robin takes him out for hot dogs. Neither of them has a car, so they bike to the diner, and Robin buys them fries and hot dogs with all the toppings with her Family Video money. Dustin likes Robin–he would probably have a crush on her, honestly, if he weren’t already devoted to Suzie. But then again, he likes her better without the tinge of ‘smart pretty girl is talking to me’ that colored his earliest interactions with Suzie. 

“Okay, Dusty-bun,” Robin says, wiping mustard off her face, “What are we reading this week?”

He and Robin have started an informal book club as part of their after school hangouts. Robin likes to bemoan the trials of hanging out with a middle schooler– freshman Pyxis corrects her primly–but the truth is that Lucas is too busy with basketball and neither Mike or Steve are big fans of reading things that aren’t comic books or magazines, which leaves the two of them to discuss the finer points of whatever book one of them has picked up recently.

Dustin finishes his bite and takes a big sip of water before speaking, “So, I’ve been rereading The Silmarillion because the book we’re reading is so boring I just needed something that I knew would be interesting.”

“Heart of Darkness?” Robin asks sympathetically.

Pyxis shakes her head, “My Antonia.”

Robin’s face scrunches up in disgust, “My deepest sympathies.” She takes a big bite of her food and makes a go on gesture.

Dustin doesn’t waste a second, launching into a ramble about one of his favorite books. Robin listens attentively and engages with thoughtful feedback, because she’s also a Tolkien nerd. Liene steals his fries when he isn’t looking, too wrapped up in ranting about Turin and Beleg’s relationship to notice. 

At some point they find a lull in the conversation, Dustin busy thinking about the tragic death of Beleg, when something else occurs to him.

“Hey, has Steve been weird lately?” Dustin asks.

Robin, in the process of bunching up her straw wrapper before making it expand like a snake with a drop of water, glances up, “How so?”

Dustin bites his lip, unsure how to say ‘Delmira didn’t respond to any of Pyxis’s teasing last time we saw them’ without seeming childish, so instead he says, “He canceled dinner with me and my mom.”

Robin grimaces, “Oh, yeah. His parents are in town. You know his mom makes them do family dinners or whatever whenever they’re in.”

Dustin does know. Dustin, in fact, would like to personally scream at both Howard and Celia Harrington, and every time they make Steve do this whole song and dance he gets a little bit closer.

“I’ll show them a family dinner,” Pyxis grumbles nonsensically, Dustin’s anger leaking out through her.

“I’ll spike them right in the nose,” Liene adds, just as incensed.

Robin’s lips quirk in a bitter smile, “I’d love to see you try.”

“I won’t try,” Liene protests stubbornly, “I’ll succeed.”

Dustin sighs, “We can’t go over there. We’d just make it worse.”

They all go quiet, weighed down with the truth of it.

And then, three days later, when the Harrington’s silver Mercedes pulls out of the front drive and onto the road towards the airport, Robin and Dustin show up at the house, weighed down with VHS tapes and junk food and diner take out.

Steve answers the door in his pajamas, looking exhausted, but he brightens considerably at the sight of them, his smile soft with fondness. 

“Hey guys,” Steve says, and then he backs up quickly as Pyxis strides over the threshold, a pie tin grasped carefully in her hands.

“We brought food and entertainment,” Dustin informs Steve, following his daemon into the house.

“Entertainment?” Steve asks, swiping one of the tapes out of Robin’s arms as she passes. His face softens even farther, “Aw, did you guys rent Rocky for me?”

“All four of them,” Robin confirms, dumping her haul on the coffee table and rapidly cluttering it up. Steve’s house is always strangely clean right after his parents have been home. Sterile. 

Steve picks up another tape and sounds genuinely close to tears when he says, “Dustin, Rob, is this Karate Kid? You guys hate action movies.”

“Don’t worry, we also grabbed the Dark Crystal,” Dustin assures him, “And maybe in exchange you can stop trying to get us to go see Top Gun with you when it comes out.”

Steve tries to wipe discreetly at his eyes while Delmira says solemnly, “Never.”

“Steve ,” Robin whines while Dustin goes to put in the first tape. It’s Grease, because Dustin doesn’t actually hate musicals. The dance scenes are fun. “You know I don’t care about Tom Cruise.”

“But I care about Tom Cruise,” Steve insists earnestly, which sends both Robin and Liene into a giggle fit.

Dustin smiles, satisfied with the way that they’ve brought a little bit of life and color back into this dull house. Pyxis climbs onto Delmira’s shoulders and begins grooming her, and Delmira only huffs in amusement, her eyes crinkling in a smile, rather than trying to shake her off. Dustin and Robin will be the support that Steve needs, when he needs it.

…

Robin

Unlike porcupines, hedgehogs aren’t rodents. They belong to the order Eulipotyphla, which includes hedgehogs, shrews, moles, and a few other mammals. They’re primarily nocturnal and, also unlike porcupines, their spines are not poisonous or barbed and do not easily detach from their bodies. Since the average adult hedgehog weighs about one to two pounds, they have many predators, including but not limited to: owls, ferrets, foxes, wolves, mongooses, and badgers. 

Nancy Wheeler looks like a fucking predator.

Of course, Liene isn’t actually a hedgehog. She doesn’t have the same instincts that a normal hedgehog does, because she has Robin’s instincts–it just so happens that Robin’s instincts also involve curling into a small ball and trying to stab people. Though, Liene did try to weaponize their defense mechanism after Robin read that some desert hedgehogs will curl themselves up at a run to ram their spines into things. It was pretty successful at scoring lines into the Buckley’s dining room table, but has so far been unutilized as a defensive attack.

The point is that Nancy Wheeler can’t actually do anything to her, and Sera isn’t actually going to eat Liene, even if he watches her like a hawk every time they're near each other. Or, an eagle, rather. 

Robin does her best to ignore it because, despite everything, she and Nancy are part of this weird little monster-hunting trauma family. And Steve doesn’t seem liable to drop either of them anytime soon, and sometimes Robin thinks that the little gremlins actually like her, so. She’s in it for the long haul. And if Sera does try to eat Liene he’ll have a very stabby digestive experience and a very pissed off Robin to contend with.

But this stilted, passive aggressive, ‘I need to speak with your manager’ attitude that Nancy has going on is really testing Robin’s limits.

“Did I come off mean or condescending or something?” she demands, facing Nancy but watching Sera out of the corner of her eye. He’s sitting on the little perch provided by the library for visiting bird daemons and he’s also staring at Liene like he’s about to wring her neck and string her up in a tree somewhere. Or– is that a thing eagles do? He’d probably just try to swallow her in one bite.

“No,” Nancy says with a little frown, giving the worst possible performance as ‘person who is not annoyed’.

“Sorry, it’s just you seem annoyed,” Robin insists, because she’s never seen a button she didn’t want to push, “You don’t know me very well. I don’t really have a filter or a strong grasp of social cues.”

“Okay,” Nancy gives her a squinty eyed little look that Robin knows from pissed off customers and teachers who think she’s being obnoxious on purpose.

“So if I say something that upsets you, just know that I know it’s a flaw.” Robin continues, on a roll now, “Believe me, my mother reminds me daily.”

“Got it,” Nancy agrees, not like she really gets anything.

The librarian returns and hands them the keys to the newspaper archives, saying brightly, “Here you go ladies. Have fun!”

“Yup,” Nancy gives the librarian a closed-mouth, tense little smile, Sera fluttering down from his perch to land heavily on her shoulder. “We’ll try.”

The librarian gives Robin a sympathetic look, to which Robin can only shrug. “They definitely hate us,” Liene reports from her pouch.

“I know we can be a little annoying,” Robin mutters, trailing after Nancy, “But this seems like overkill. Right? Steve said she isn’t a priss.”

Liene snorts, “Steve can’t be trusted here. He thinks she’s hot.”

“I mean,” Robin makes a so-so motion with her hand, “She’s not not hot.”

“Say that five times fast,” Liene mutters.

The COM Catalog is always kind of a bitch to use, and the process of scrolling through thousands of words is quickly mentally exhausting. Robin sets Liene on the shelf so she can sniff around and folds herself into what Steve calls one of her gargoyle poses. It doesn’t help that Nancy and Sera are entirely silent from their end of the machine, leaving Robin and Liene’s quiet banter to echo in the nearly empty room.

Robin tries to be sociable, she really does. Or at least as sociable as she ever gets, awkwardly flinging herself from one topic to the other. But Nancy is entirely resistant to any kind of interaction and Sera hasn’t said a word in Robin’s presence basically ever. 

Then Nancy starts in on her tirade, ending it with a waspish, “And you’re obviously bored, so. Why don’t you just call Steve? I’m sure he’ll come pick you up. And, I mean, I’m not really in any danger here, so.”

She gives Robin a curt nod and disappears down into the microfilm storage, Sera fluttering after her. 

“Oh,” Liene says in sudden realization. Robin is already scrambling after them.

Against all odds, or maybe just against all perceptions, Robin really does love Steve. She’s jokingly told him on multiple occasions that he’s like a sister to her, if maybe a little more understanding of her as a person than her actual sisters. And okay, maybe it’s the latent Russian truth serum, but she connects with him in a way that she’s never connected with anyone before. So if Nancy’s whole hissy fit is all because of Steve–

“I wanted to make sure that you knew that Steve and I are just friends,” Robin can tell she’s babbling, “Like, Platonic with a capital P.”

Nancy gives her another of those disbelieving little closed mouth smiles. Robin sighs, turning away from her and going to fiddle with one of the drawers. She could really do with a less fraught working relationship here.

“Just in case that’s adding any tension between us,” Robin tries again.

“It wasn’t,” Nancy says, so wide-eyed and strained Robin is surprised her face doesn’t pop. This is getting ridiculous.

Robin is just opening her mouth to protest that particular bullshit when her eye catches on something and she says instead, “Holy shit. The Weekly Watcher . I can’t believe they have this.”

There’s a huff from the railing and then Sera says derisively, “Don’t they write about, like, Bigfoot and UFOs?”

Liene, who Robin has deposited on top of the filing cabinets, pitter-patters her way closer to Nancy, saying matter of factly, “First, UFOs are absolutely real. Bigfoot we’re still on the fence about.”

“And may I remind you,” Robin adds, staring at Sera rather than Nancy, “We are looking for information on dark wizards? If someone’s gonna write about that, it’s gonna be these weirdos.”

Nancy tilts her head thoughtfully, an intrigued light in her eye. Robin grins back nervously and follows as Nancy marches purposefully back up the stairs. It’s not full acceptance, but it feels like progress. The ice thawing a little, at the very least. Nancy continues to roll her eyes and make snide comments while Robin scrolls through the film, but Sera perches on the lid of the COM Catalog, bent over so he can peer upside down at the screen. Liene stares up at him warily from her seat on the shelf below, but Sera doesn’t pay her any mind, too busy watching the words speeding by as Robin scrolls.

The Victor Creel article feels like some kind of win, at least, and when Robin offers Nancy a celebratory high-five as they get in the car on the way to the school she rolls her eyes, but completes it.

…

Robin has mostly gotten over her fear of Sera spontaneously eating her daemon by the time they arrive in the Upside Down, soaking wet and splattered in demobat gore. Liene had fallen out of Robin’s pouch at some point during the fight and she’s just looking around frantically for her when Sera shakes the last of the water from his feathers and scoops Liene off the ground with his talons, starting off towards the barren woods at the edge of the lake. Nancy grabs Robin’s hand at the same time, dragging her into a frantic run, and out of the corner of her eye Robin spots Delmira and Mordred nimbly leaping over the vines as the rest of them try not to step on anything.

Sera deposits Liene into Robin’s hands after they’re done huddling under Skull Rock, fluttering up to one of the branches and swiveling his head around like he’s keeping watch.

“Thanks!” Robin calls softly after him, wary of drawing the attention of any creatures that might be hiding out around here. 

Mordred prances around anxiously as Nancy patches up Steve, Eddie standing at an awkward distance and watching them with something complicated on his face. Delmira hovers around Steve and Nancy, finally darting in so that Steve can lean his weight against her. Robin understands the urge, kneeling next to Steve and babbling something about rabies, but she does stand and turn away when Nancy gets to the actual bandaging part, walking back to stand next to Eddie as chills run their way down her spine in sympathetic pain. 

She manages to gather herself enough to nudge Eddie into doing the kind of perimeter check that Steve and Delmira would ordinarily be conducting, if they weren’t currently otherwise occupied. Robin glances over her shoulder at them occasionally but mostly she tries to focus on not totally freaking the fuck out. Examining the surrounding area for potentially deadly creatures is something to do, at the very least.

“So, is that, uh,” Eddie runs a hand through his hair and grimaces at the texture, wiping his hand off on his pants. Robin is feeling pretty grimy herself. “Is that normal? For him?”

Robin crosses her arms, sticking her hands under her armpits as she peers around rocks and into the places where low brush would ordinarily be, “Who?”

“Steve,” Eddie gestures over his shoulder with a thumb, “His whole ‘diving in head-first’ tragic hero thing.”

“Oh,” Robin looks back at Steve and Nancy again, “Yeah, it is, actually.”

Eddie side-eyes her, “And you’re…into that?”

Robin snorts, “No. Are you?”

“Uh,” Eddie takes half a beat too long to respond, obviously thrown, before he gathers himself enough to shoot her a coy smile, “I’m not really into the jock type, Buckley, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Sure,” Robin agrees, unconvinced. She opens her mouth to say something a little snarky when something takes off suddenly from one of the branches and she jumps about a mile in the air, just stifling her yell of surprise. In her pouch, Liene gives a squeak of alarm, curling up as best she can, her spines poking out of the nylon.

“Hey,” Eddie says soothingly, reaching a hand out towards her but not touching her, like he’s unsure if he’s allowed, “Why don’t we go back? At this rate I figure we’ll hear anything coming. These things aren’t subtle.”

Robin laughs nervously, “Yeah, uh. Probably.”

She allows herself to be herded back towards Skull Rock. Once they’re close enough, Eddie says, with the awkwardness of a boy trying to cheer you up when they’re not quite sure what would work, “Wanna see if I can climb this rock?”

“If you want,” Robin agrees, charmed despite herself.

“Bet I can beat you!” Mordred announces, immediately scampering up the rock, Eddie not far behind.

Robin focuses on the task at hand to distract from all the wild shit happening when Nancy and Steve start explaining things for their Upside Down rookies. 

“Well, we don’t have to go all the way downtown for guns,” Nancy says, “I have guns in my bedroom.”

Liene makes another squeaking noise, but not one of fear this time. Robin knows exactly what she means. Not not hot indeed.

A few seconds later, when Eddie throws his vest at Steve’s face, Robin meets his eyes and raises her eyebrows. Eddie sticks his tongue out at her and turns away, but Robin catches the pinkness in his cheeks, even in the darkness. Looks like they’re in this together in more ways than one.

…

Will

Will can’t help but feel like he came back smaller. Gwin was never fond of being anything too big in the first place, preferring a form that could ride on Will’s shoulders or be cupped in Marieke’s hands, aside from their brief stint as a badger, back when Lonnie first left and Will felt a little bit like biting anyone who came too close.

In the Upside Down, everything had been cold and frightening, and all Will had wanted to do once he gave up on trying to get home was to curl up in a little ball and disappear. Gwin had cycled through a few different forms–first the rabbit that they’d been as a child before Lonnie had bullied them out of it, and then a mouse, and finally a brown and white ferret. And he’d stayed like that, settled as something small and soft and quick, something that can run and hide in tight spaces. 

Will tries not to make a big deal about it, since Gwin probably would have settled as something similar even without the Upside Down. On some level, Will has always wanted to hide. He tried telling his demons to go away, and all that did was get him possessed.

But he’s self-conscious about it anyway. Even though he’s the same height as Jonathan, now, so much taller than his mom that she fits comfortably under his chin, he still feels small, like he could disappear if he really wanted to. He knows that his family would come after him–if nothing else, they’ve proven time and again that they won’t let him stay lost–but that doesn’t quiet the voice in his head. 

“In 17th century England, weasels were believed to be the familiars of witches,” El says, reclined on his bed and reading her book out loud. Ever since Max’s daemon settled last summer as a bird that none of them could identify, El has been really interested in animal symbology. Amais is curled up next to her, shedding his coat all over Will’s sheets in the heat of California winter, Gwin napping on his shoulders. 

El lowers her book, frowning at the ceiling. She turns to look at Will, “What is a familiar?”

“It’s like a helper,” Will explains, “Like a pet that helps you do magic.”

El scrunches up her nose, “Like a daemon?”

“I mean,” Will lowers his paintbrush, “Wait, does Amais help you use your powers?”

El’s continued lack of powers is kind of a sore subject, but she’s more comfortable with it now than she was back in July, at least. She looks back at the ceiling, considering, and finally nods, “Yes. I am stronger when I have him than when I don’t.”

Amais gives a huff of agreement. 

“Okay, yeah,” Will agrees, “Then, like a daemon. But a daemon who is also a pet.”

“I’m not a pet,” Gwin protests.

Will smiles at him, “You’re not my familiar.”

El reads from her book again, “In Ireland, seeing a stoat at the beginning of a journey was considered bad luck, unless you greeted the animal as a neighbor.” She looks at Will again, “What’s a stoat?”

“It’s like a ferret, but different,” Will tells her.

“Undomesticated,” Gwin adds.

“You are not domesticated,” El tells Gwin seriously.

“Of course not,” he agrees.

…

In the back of Argyle’s van, bumping into things as Argyle swerves wildly through the desert, Secret Hero Agent Man bleeding all over the blanket Argyle has laid over the seats, Will’s a little bit grateful that Gwin can curl up around his neck, out of the way. Marieke and Anje are left to tumble around with the rest of them, and Will pulls his feet close to himself so that he doesn’t bump into them. Argyle’s ring-tailed cat, Eudora, is clinging to Argyle’s shoulder for dear life as Argyle wails incoherent terror at them. 

It’s better once they leave the corpse of Secret Hero Agent Man behind in the Lenora dirt, Anje curled up behind him and Mike in the back and Marieke between Mike’s knees, Argyle slightly calmer now and Jonathan in the driver’s seat. At least they have a destination now, some sense of purpose.

“You okay, Will?” Mike asks, leaning closer to him, as though there’s any kind of privacy in this van.

“Yeah?” Will says, nonplussed.

“Gwin is doing that thing,” Mike gestures to Will’s neck, “Where he tucks his nose under your collar when you’re nervous.”

Will reaches up involuntarily, his fingers brushing the top of Gwin’s head, which is indeed partially buried under his collar. 

“I’m just,” Will shakes his head, “Anxious. I mean, a guy died here less than twenty-four hours ago.”

Mike huffs a laugh, too dry to have any humor, “Yeah. I’m still freaked out about it, honestly.”

Will very purposefully does not look at the blood stains on the blanket, the ones that Anje is doing her best to cover with her body. “Me too. I’ve never seen anyone die before. Other than, you know, Billy.”

Mike looks down, running his hand through the fur at Marieke’s ruff, “I have.”

Will looks at him, “When?”

Mike grimaces, “I mean, the first time I ever saw a dead body it was…yours. We were at the quarry that night, when they fished you out of the water. El was helping us look for you.”

He clenches his hand in Marieke’s fur and she turns to rest her head on his knee, her snout pointed at Will. “I know it wasn’t really your body but we didn’t know that, not back then. I’m still not even sure what it was, actually.”

“Hop said it was a fake,” Will tells him quietly, “Just a dummy stuffed with cotton.”

Mike wrinkles his nose, “I guess that’s better than if it had been, like, some other kid’s body. But, other than that, there was also Bob.”

“Bob?” Will parrots, “You saw–?”

Mike nods, “Through the glass. You were unconscious and possessed at the time, but I saw him through the doors. The demodogs tore him apart. Your mom wouldn’t stop trying to get to him. Hopper had to keep her from going back in for him.”

“That’s,” Will hesitates. It’s horrifying. He didn’t know Mike had been close enough to see that.

Mike shrugs, “It sucked. At least this time it wasn’t someone I knew. But still. Freaky.”

“Freaky,” Will echoes. 

“I can hide in your collar, too,” Marieke says, and it makes Mike laugh, breaking the tension. He leans forward to press his nose against the top of her head, wrapping his arms around her neck. It makes Will’s heart ache, wishing he could be the one to give that comfort, to wrap Mike up in his arms with Marieke pressed against him. Gwin is too small to offer any kind of substantial warmth, but Will wishes he could try anyway, that he could be the one to offer affection and strength this time.

He tucks his hands under his legs and looks forward instead, catching Jonathan’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Jonathan raises his eyebrows in question, but Will doesn’t have any answers for him, doesn’t have anything to offer other than how he feels raw and exposed, like if anyone were to look too close they could see his heart on full display.

Gwin presses himself more firmly against Will’s neck, his warm fur pressed to the underside of Will’s chin.

…

Joyce

Joyce is accustomed to grief. She’s lived with it her whole life, learned to breathe through it, to keep moving. She grieved Lonnie in a strange, off-kilter way, glad of his absence but sometimes still nostalgic for his presence, for a partner, for someone to lean on. She grieved Will with a rage that felt like it would eat her from the inside, slamming her fists against the unfairness of it all until she broke through to the other side and found him again. She grieved Bob with a helpless desperation, feeling his loss like a gaping hole, a carved out emptiness, when she was just starting to find her feet again after her first brush with the Upside Down.

Grieving Hopper is quiet. Losing him feels at once impossible and also inevitable. She stares at the place on the scaffolding where he disappeared, searching for him, for Venatici. Disbelieving even as some part of her is already resigned to the reality of his loss. 

Hopper was so sturdy, and yet it feels inescapable, like it was fate she’d end up here: reaching for him as he disappears in pursuit of some new, horrifying danger. He died saving them, and maybe she always knew he would.

In a unanimous decision, when Joyce pulls El into a hug in front of all the emergency personnel called to deal with the Starcourt situation, Fornax presses the top of his head under El’s chin, his nose against her collarbone. Joyce has learned to live with grief, and she’s willing to shoulder some of El’s if it means lifting a little of the weight off of this child who has suffered too much. Amais whines and leans his weight against the both of them, warm and present.

Grief follows them to California. All of her children miss their friends, but Joyce can’t live in that house anymore, that town, and she hopes that taking them away from it will keep them safe, even a little bit.

It doesn’t.

Fornax means ‘furnace’. Her father’s daemon named hers, and he would sometimes joke that Fornax’s vibrantly orange coat was a warning, like stripes on a snake. Joyce burned her way through a town and a government agency to get to her son, twice . She’ll burn through all of Russia if she has to.

Seeing Hopper and Venatici again is–

Joyce is accustomed to grief. Seeing them again feels like something close to it, a relief so acute it feels like sadness. She’d love him in any form but Hopper looks horrible, scarred and dirty, his ribs standing out against his skin. When she hugged him again for the first time, in the prison, she’d been able to wrap her arms all the way around his torso, a feat she never would have been able to accomplish before all of this. 

Hopper has never before been small. But he is now. As she slings her arms around his neck, pulling him close and kissing him like she never thought she’d get the chance to, he’s small. Fragile in a way she never thought he could be. 

For a moment, amongst all the bullshit, and another fucking apocalypse, even as she feels the stark knobs of his spine under her fingers, Joyce thinks about the future. She wants to have a life with this man. She wants to keep him.

She’s so tired of losing things.

…

Hopper comes out of surgery with a cast, strict instructions not to walk on his ankle, and a bad attitude.

“You broke your ankle and then ran on it for a few days, Hop,” Joyce tells him, bullying him into the car, “There were always going to be consequences.”

Venatici leaps into the backseat easily, laying down with her head on top of Fornax. She’s been relatively cooperative today–likely because she’s not the one on medically mandated bedrest. 

“I’m telling you, I’m fine,” Hopper grumbles, letting Joyce arrange him in the back seat so that his leg is propped up. 

“Dad,” El says reproachfully from the passenger side, Amais curled up in the footwell, “Listen to Joyce.”

‘Dad’ is the magic word, settling Hopper down considerably. Joyce is so used to El using it to refer to Hopper over the last nine months that she forgets that it’s a relatively new development for him. He has yet to build any defenses against it. 

Hopper tries one last time, turning his disgruntled expression on her, “Joyce.”

Joyce raises her eyebrows, “Jim.”

This is also a new development, and also something that Hopper has no defenses against. He caves almost immediately. Joyce kisses him on the temple and closes the door on him carefully, walking around to her own side so that they can get going.

They’ve only been back in Hawkins for a few days, but Dr. Owens’ people have been putting them up in Hawkins’ nice hotel, rather than the little motel just outside of town that would be the best Joyce’s Encyclopedia Britannica money could afford. It’s a nice place to stay, but none of them have spent much time in it. The kids have been out at all hours, spending time with their friends at the hospital or helping with the relief effort. 

The ‘earthquake’ that wracked Hawkins, the cap on the week of of serial murders committed by apparently not dead escaped mental ward patient Henry Creel, was luckily not enough to put anyone out of their homes. But the structural damage to some of the buildings down main street was substantial, and more than a few people were injured. 

Despite the whole story being entirely fabricated, Dustin has used the opportunity to go on no less than three rants about environmental consciousness. El has started picking it up and can now be prompted to ramble about several exciting new and incendiary topics, Will and Jonathan doing nothing but encouraging her. 

Joyce, El, and Venatici help Hopper out of the car and through the lobby to the elevator, since he refused a wheelchair and insists on using crutches to get anywhere. Amais trots in front of them, clearing the way, his tail up and wagging like it hasn’t stopped doing since Hopper got back. 

Hopper settles on the couch once they reach the room, Venatici jumping up so that Hopper can prop his leg on her back, leaning his shoulders against the pillows that Joyce stacks behind him. He obediently takes his medication, and only complains a little bit that he’s not allowed to drink while he’s on it. El gives them both hugs, and Amais happily licks both Venatici and Fornax’s noses, and then she and Amais depart to go spend time with the Party.

Joyce drags the armchair a little closer to the couch, until the arms are pressed up against each other, and grabs one of the books that Jonathan picked up for her from the second hand bookstore downtown. She puts on the TV for Hopper and settles in with her dime store mystery novel, Fornax curled up in her lap.

After a few minutes, Hopper catches her free hand, lacing their fingers together. He brings their joined hands up so that he can brush a kiss against her knuckles, and then lets their hands rest against his shoulder.

Joy has never felt so present, so pervading. Joyce smiles, full of love for this stubborn man, and settles in for a quiet afternoon.

…

Max

The wheelchair probably isn’t permanent, they say, with enough work and physical therapy and luck. The partial blindness is, though. 

She’s in the hospital long enough that she starts becoming familiar with the hallways, once she becomes mobile enough to traverse them, rubbing new blisters into her hands from the repetitive motion on the wheels. Ever since waking up in the hospital she hasn’t been able to see more than shapes and colors, but with enough trial and error she memorizes the twists and turns of the halls on her floor, especially the pathways to the vending machine and to Eddie’s hospital room.

Eddie’s good for conversation and he’s stuck here just like she is, which makes him an ideal captive audience. Plus, Max likes the camaraderie they’ve found–their black bad-luck daemons, their injuries, their trailer park solidarity. Eddie reads to her sometimes, and he always does the voices. When nurses or Lucas get upset that she left her room without permission again, Eddie always covers for her. 

And he’s the first person who doesn’t make a big deal about Nova’s new appearance. Nova is nestled in her lap when she wheels her way into his room for the first time, Lucas pushing her because she can’t read the room numbers, and Max is preemptively defensive about how he looks right now. But Eddie just says, bluntly, “Holy shit, bud. Kicking the ass of a dark wizard really took it out of you, huh?”

Lucas and Sagitta start to puff up defensively but Max is too busy laughing to let them say anything.

Max, Lucas, and El are the only ones who know what actually happened that day at the Creel house. How Nova had gone with her into Vecna’s mindspace, her not-raven, big and black with his too-long tail. How Vecna had tried to crush the life out of him along with Max. How Nova had burst into flames while Max hovered in the air, an explosion so bright even Max’s damaged sight picked it up, the room turning pure white and staticy, like an overloaded microphone. 

Nova settled after Billy died, a big black bird that most people assumed was a raven. Max didn’t argue with them, even though they both knew he wasn’t–ravens are guardians of cemeteries, omens of death, carrion feeders. And Max felt more and more like an omen of death herself, a cemetery dweller, as the year wore on. It seemed a fitting misunderstanding.

Max dies and Nova bursts into flames, his wings and breast vibrantly red and yellow and blue. Not a raven, Max realizes, when her heart restarts and she’s left cradling Nova’s baby bird body. A phoenix. 

“I’m not actually a baby,” Nova grumbles, flexing one of his downy, featherless wings. He’d been entirely featherless in the aftermath of Max’s death and resurrection, but he’s starting to grow back into them now, looking more like a baby chick and less like a bug-eyed skinless chicken breast. 

“I know,” Max assures him, “I’m not a baby either, no matter what the nurses think.”

She’s released from the hospital before Eddie is, but she’s there for physical therapy on the day he finally achieves freedom. They high five each other as they’re wheeled out the door and sent to their respective homes. Steve loads Lucas and Dustin into the BMW and follows them all the way to the trailer park, Steve and Wayne getting Eddie situated in the Munsons’ new trailer while Dustin and Lucas lift Max and her wheelchair up the stairs.

“We need to build you a ramp,” Dustin huffs, hands on his knees and breathing hard once they get Max inside. Pyxis is busy running around as a gopher for anything Max needs but she stops long enough to hand Dustin a glass of water.

“Already on it,” Lucas agrees, only a little less out of breath, Sagitta perched on his shoulder, “Steve and I are going to the hardware store today.”

Max snorts, “As if you and Steve know how to build a ramp.”

“Hopper and Wayne agreed to help us,” Lucas admits, “And Eddie said he’d supervise.”

“Right,” Max agrees, because they all know that means Eddie will be heckling them the whole time and badly pretending to not be ogling Steve. Nova has been recounting the excruciating details of their encounters to her, so she feels like she’s seen it, even if she’s only heard it. Although, maybe Dustin and Lucas haven’t picked up on that last part. They haven’t witnessed how much time Steve and Eddie spend awkwardly flirting with each other. It’s getting a little painful.

At Max’s request, she’s wheeled out onto the front porch so she can heckle along with Eddie, who’s settled in a lawn chair next to her. She can’t do the ogling she’d like to be doing, but she takes cues from Eddie’s shouts, happy to encourage through insult.

“Put your back into it, Henderson!” Eddie calls, not yelling with his whole chest in respect of his stitches.

“Lift with your knees, Dusty-bun!” Max adds, staring in the vague direction of the activity.

“You don’t even know what I’m doing!” Dustin shouts back, incensed, and Max can hear Lucas’s laughter, bright and clear.

“I know you’re trying to get Steve to do all the work,” Max says wisely. She holds her hand up for a high-five that Eddie eagerly completes.

…

Sagitta has been some form of bird for as long as Max has known her. It used to be something Max found funny, back when she was sure that Nova would settle as a bear dog, or a tiger, or maybe even a maned wolf, like her dad. Sagitta would perch on Nova’s head or shoulder, riding him like he was a bird delivery service.

It had been less funny after Billy’s death, when Max had wished desperately that Lucas would be either more or less perceptive. He was always watching, looking for her in crowds, checking up with her in class. It’s one of the reasons that she broke up with him–he was just always so attentive , when all Max wanted was to disappear.

In her hospital room when she wakes up for the first time after Vecna, when she can’t see more than blobs moving across her sight, only able to identify Lucas and Erica’s presence by sound, it’s a comfort. The doctor’s report on her vision says that she may be able to improve her sight with glasses, but that there’s nothing more that they can do beyond that. 

“Lucas,” she whispers when the doctors leave, “I can’t see.”

“Don’t worry,” Lucas assures her, one of his hands warm and familiar on her shoulder, “I’ll be eagle-eyed enough for the both of us.”

Max laughs, mirthless, “You can’t always be around.”

“Then we’ll get you glasses,” Lucas says easily, logical and matter-of-fact, “And when one of us can’t be around, Nova will be your eyes.”

Nova nips her sharply on the hand in reminder.

She puts off the glasses thing for a while. It’s not that she doesn’t want to see–she very much does. But there’s something about having to acknowledge that she’ll need them, that she’ll always need them, and asking for that help, having someone drive her to the store and help her pick them out, that stops her. Plus, it’s easy to ignore the glasses problem when most of the people she hangs out with can’t drive and therefore can’t take her anyway. She could probably ask Joyce, or Steve, or Hopper, or even Nancy, but they’re already doing so much for her, and they’re all recovering in their own ways.

Then one day Steve comes by the house around midday on a Saturday and says, “Hey, want to go on a trip with me?”

“What kind of trip?” Max asks skeptically, feeling Nova perk up in her lap. He’s a little more grown out now, nearly fledgling sized. Both Max and Nova are eagerly awaiting the day when he can fly again.

There’s a movement that Max can’t really discern but when Steve’s next words come out sheepish she assumes it’s him running a hand through his hair, “So, Robin has been bullying me to go get my eyes checked because she thinks I need glasses. Something about all the, uh, concussions damaging my eyes.”

Max furrows her brows because the idea hadn’t occurred to her before but actually yeah, Steve has gotten beat up a little too much to come out the other side unscathed. At least his face survived the most recent apocalypse.

“Anyway,” Steve continues, “I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind going with me to the optometrist?” 

“Why?” Max asks suspiciously.

Steve sighs, “Honestly? Because Robin has work and other than her you seemed like the person least likely to make fun of me about it.”

“Eddie wouldn’t make fun of you,” Max points out, but she knows what he means. She loves their little makeshift family, but they’re not the best at meeting vulnerability without teasing first and foremost.

“Eddie isn’t really mobile right now,” Steve says, sounding wry, “So…is that a yes?”

“Sure,” Max agrees, “But I require a slushy as a bribe.”

“Of course,” Steve says, amused. He helps her maneuver out of the trailer and into his car without running over Delmira’s tail (it happened one time), and then they’re on the road. Steve even lets her take control of the stereo, an honor usually reserved for Robin or Eddie, Steve’s permanent shotgun riders.

The optometrist is in a town a little ways out of Hawkins, and they pass the drive having a spirited discussion of the book Lucas is currently reading Max–a new Stephen King novel that Max finds boring and Steve finds too scary. 

“It’s a horror story, Steve,” Max insists as he wheels her into the store.

“Our lives are a horror story,” Steve mutters, and then he gets swept into the process of his eye appointment. Steve manages to get her into the exam room with him, likely through a combination of casually referring to her as his sister and the protective way he hovers, since the person who helps them sounds like a man and is therefore probably (probably) immune to his charms. It’s pretty boring to sit through, but Max has been sitting through a lot of boring things since Vecna. At least this thing doesn’t have weird and extremely sexist descriptions of women that Lucas awkwardly tries to skip over with a deeply embarrassed tone.

She’s also mostly useless when it comes to helping Steve pick out frames, though when he leans close enough that she can kind of see the color and says, “Red or blue?” she’s able to confidently say, “Blue.”

Max isn’t stupid. She knows that there was probably a secondary motivation for Steve bringing her here other than the pleasure of her company. But he hasn’t so much as said a word about Max getting glasses, apparently content for this to be a visit exclusively about his vision problems, and because of that Max has the time to convince herself that maybe admitting this–to Steve, to the glasses guy, to everyone who sees her with glasses after this moment–wouldn’t be entirely terrible.

It still takes her until Steve is wrapping up his purchase, being informed that his glasses will be ready for him in about a week, to work up the nerve.

Nova nips her sharply on the knuckle and Max blurts out, “Actually, do you have time for another appointment today?”

Steve doesn’t say anything while the optometrist tells her that they do, but she can feel Delmira bump her weight against Max’s wheelchair, her warmth radiating through the gaps in the metal.

Sitting in the optometrist’s chair, her chin settled against the hard plastic rest, looking through small lenses, she can see for the first time in weeks. Max furiously blinks through tears that turn her vision blurry because there’s finally something to blur , and tells the doctor that the second option is a little clearer. 

Nova presses himself up against Max’s palm, and as she strokes a finger down his feathers, Max tries to tamp down on the urge to be a pessimist. Sure, she won’t have peripheral vision, and if she loses her glasses or they get damaged she’ll be right back where she started. But this is a good thing. It’s so much more than she had before. She refuses to let her stupid brain ruin it for her. 

Steve helps her pick out frames.

“Any requests?” Steve asks.

Max purses her lips, “You know those sunglasses I have? The red ones.”

Surprisingly, Steve says, “Yeah, the ones you wore all summer?”

“Exactly,” Max confirms, “Something like that.”

Steve hands her a few different ones to try on, Nova occasionally giving him advice on what to choose, and eventually finds one that he, Nova, and Delmira all agree on. Max is told that because they’ll have to special order her lenses it’ll take a little longer to come in, and Steve assures the clerk that they’ll be back in a few weeks to pick them up.

“How are you feeling?” Steve asks as he wheels her back out to the car.

Max huffs a breath, “It’s stupid.”

Delmira bumps into the wheelchair, just enough that Max can feel the bulk of her, “How so?”

“I spent all this time telling myself that I didn’t want glasses,” Max says, “And now that I have to wait for them, I’m impatient. I want them now.”

Steve laughs quietly, “Yeah, I know the feeling. Ready for your bribery slushy?”

“Always,” Max says immediately.

And, three weeks later when Steve drives her back to the optometrist to pick up her glasses, Max finds that she doesn’t mind admitting that she needs them when it means that she can see Steve smiling back at her for the first time in months. He’s wearing the glasses she helped him pick out and she was right, blue was the better color for him. And when she gets to look at herself in the mirror she finds that he didn’t do such a shabby job picking hers out, either. 

“How do they look?” Steve asks, leaning on the back of her wheelchair and looking into the mirror over her shoulder. 

Max grins, “Perfect.”

…

Eddie

Even before he settled, Mordred’s favorite thing to do was bother Wayne’s daemon Jurriaan. Mordred would hide in his fur, or curl up between his paws, seeking the comfort that Eddie had never had access to before Wayne took him in. When he was a young teenager, Eddie had been embarrassed by it, this outward display of his own vulnerability. But Hawkins wasn’t nicer than his parent’s old neighborhood, just smaller, and as time went on Eddie and Mordred stopped feeling quite so self-conscious about asking to be held, to be loved.

It helps that Wayne has always loved him openly, transparently, even before Eddie moved in with him. Jurriaan, too, weathers Mordred’s more playful moods with endless patience, occasionally scruffing him in a way that makes Mordred squirm indignantly, despite him and Eddie being secretly pleased about it.

So it’s no surprise to Eddie when Mordred settles as a long, lanky cat, still small enough to ride on Jurriaan’s back or curl into his side. He settles as a serval cat–a wild cat with large pointed ears, like a bat, and a narrow head, his fur pure black. It’s unusual for serval cats to be melanistic, but Eddie has never been usual. 

It seems fitting, too, that people often make the same assumptions about Mordred that they do about Eddie: that he’s bad luck, and that he’s domesticated.

Eddie can’t do much about the bad luck–encourages it, with his devil horns and his piercings and his tattoos. And he does his best to show that he isn’t domesticated either–standing on tables and sticking his tongue out, being loud and obnoxious and fierce, right in the faces of anyone who assumes otherwise. Eddie defies anyone to look at him, to look at his soul, and call him docile. 

When the world comes down around his ears, Chrissy crumpled and bleeding above him, her pretty nightingale daemon exploding in a shower of gold Dust, Eddie wonders if this is all the bad luck finally catching up with him.

“Maybe we’re cursed,” Mordred mutters, huddled in the musty old boathouse with the least likely group of people Eddie has ever seen.

The wolf daemon, the one Eddie has managed to glean belongs to Steve fucking Harrington, of all people, snorts. “No more than the rest of this town,” she says, her voice devoid of any real humor. 

Dustin delves into his explanation of what’s going on, Pyxis adding quips and commentary at key points, and Eddie does his best to pay attention, but his concentration is well and truly shattered at this point. He keeps seeing Chrissy’s horrifying brutalization of a face when he closes his eyes, keeps hearing her daemon screaming in agony when it gets a little too quiet. So he does his best to focus on the moment instead, the wood of the boathouse beneath his feet and the creak of the wind, the lapping of the water. 

Max’s daemon Nova, a large raven-like bird with a long tail that flutters over her shoulder from its perch, won’t sit still. It’s a restless kind of movement, his head swiveling at any kind of noise. Eddie can relate, and Mordred has long given up the pretense of listening, choosing instead to pace in the free space available to him. He approaches Robin warily, skirting Delmira, and stares up at Liene with interest. Robin’s daemon is tucked into a little pouch on her waist, her long nose poking out enough to signal her presence. 

Done with that investigation, Mordred slinks back towards Eddie, this time eyeing Delmira more closely. Delmira looks right back, her piercing amber eyes alert and guarded, but her posture remains casual and non-threatening. She’s clearly mastered the art of staying out of walkways, the way most large daemons do. Steve has his arms crossed, leaned against the wall, his feet crossed left over right, just like Delmira’s paws. And just like Delmira, he’s watching Mordred rather than Eddie. 

Mordred chances a step closer, his tail flicking behind him. Pushing the limits, clearly ready to bound back if Delmira shows any signs of snapping at him. When she doesn’t move Mordred takes another step, then another, until he’s nearly nose to nose with her. Delmira only tilts her head, one of her ears twitching. Then she opens her mouth and licks a stripe up the side of Mordred’s face, sending him skittering back with a yowl that thoroughly derails whatever Dustin was trying to say about evil wizards.

“What the hell, guys?” Dustin demands.

Eddie and Steve make eye contact, and then they both erupt into loud, semi-hysterical laughter.

…

Eddie doesn’t remember much about the trip from the Upside Down to the hospital, but he remembers this: Mordred screaming and then falling silent, his cries turning to whimpers while Eddie wheezed, his breath whistling as he struggled to draw breath. Dustin’s hands on his face, against the back of his neck, wetness on his cheeks that could have been tears or blood. A taste in his mouth that was definitely blood. Pain, and then numbness, which he remembers thinking was probably worse, but was a welcome relief from the screaming agony of it all.

Thick fur beneath his fingers. The lurching, tilting gait of something four legged, as though he were face down on the back of a horse. Voices saying his name, pleading with him, demanding that he stay awake. And through that, like a beacon, the steady thrum of a desperate cry. Stay alive, stay alive, stay alive, like a drum beat. The fear in it is enough to keep him clinging to consciousness with unsteady fingers. 

Things get hazy for a while. He feels a fleeting moment of something else that isn’t his–fear, worry, a sharp-edged grasp at control–and thinks vaguely that it tastes like Nancy. Registers that she must have touched Mordred. 

Eddie’s nose is pressed against something large and warm, fur tickling his nose, and for a moment he thinks it smells like Steve’s cologne.

Then he wakes up in the hospital, groggy and hurting and with a tube down his throat that he really doesn’t appreciate. It takes him a moment to get his eyes to cooperate, and he spends that time staring up at the ceiling, thinking vaguely that it’s strange how far away from his pain he feels. Like there’s a fuzzy layer between his brain and his body.

When he finally achieves control of his eyes, he finds that Wayne is slouched in the chair next to his bed, one of his large weathered hands wrapped around Eddie’s thin fingers. There’s a weight on his legs that turns out to be Jurriaan, watching him with his big soulful eyes.

“Welcome back, son,” Jurriaan says quietly, and Eddie feels tears streaming down his face before he’s gently pulled back under.

…

He gets lots of visitors during the time he spends in the hospital–each of the Hellfire kids, Erica, Nancy, Robin, even Max wheels in with her chair, defiantly alive with her vibrantly orange casts and her wrist brace, Nova riding in her lap. Wayne hardly leaves his side for the first few days, though he does eventually have to go back to work. But none are more determined and attentive than Steve, who seems to almost move into Eddie’s hospital room. At first Eddie is alternately too exhausted and too bewildered to protest, and then it’s just…nice. It’s nice to have someone to talk to, someone to give him regular updates on what’s going on, to help him reach the thing that’s just a little too far away, even someone to help him laboriously make it to the bathroom when they take the catheter out. 

In any other circumstance, Eddie thinks it would probably be deeply humiliating, how much help he needs for even basic things. But Steve handles all of it with a steady, endless well of patience and good humor. The only thing Eddie can’t really figure out is why Steve seems so determined to just be present, to be helpful, but he’s willing to leave the mouth of that particular gift horse unexamined. 

He is eventually discharged and sent home with a mountain of pain meds and some strict physical therapy guidelines, Mordred riding home curled across his shoulders like he hasn’t done since they were kids. Eddie is half expecting Steve to stop hanging around all the time now that Eddie is mostly capable of shuffling around on his own. But Steve keeps coming by, keeps showing up at the trailer (brand new and Upside Down hole free, courtesy of the shady government organization who had apparently cleared Eddie’s name while he was trying not to bleed out in the hospital), keeps watching Eddie with a soft fondness that Eddie isn’t quite sure he’s earned.

Delmira and Steve hover in equal measure, which Eddie tries not to find too funny (laughing pulls at his stitches). Steve, at least, mostly lets Eddie wander around the trailer as his whims dictate, but Delmira hovers at his side like she’s bracing to catch him if he falls. Eddie finds this a staggering demonstration of trust, how close she sticks to his side, her willingness to touch him if he needed it. Although he can’t deny that Mordred has been prowling closer and closer to Steve, circling him like he’s considering an angle of attack.

Eddie would be inclined to call Steve paranoid, up to the point that Delmira’s hovering actually pays off. He’s wandering into the kitchen for something, dressed in his best recovery clothes–a threadbare pair of flannel pajama pants he shamelessly pilfered from Wayne years ago and a t-shirt that’s at least a size too big for him that he cropped in a fit of pique last summer, exposing the stark white gauze that’s still wrapped around his abdomen. He doesn’t know what he slips on–water or crumbs or maybe just his own fucking pants–but one second he’s upright and the next second he’s bracing for the pain of impact.

Something else hits him first, though, something large and furry and soft, with a wet nose that presses against the bare line of his hip. Delmira stops his fall, bracing his lower back with her shoulder, his hand buried in the soft fur on the top of her head. Something electric and breathtaking shocks through him at the contact, fondness and warmth and worry.

Eddie gasps, wincing at the way any sudden torso movement makes his wounds ache, and lets Delmira push him back onto his feet, grabbing the counter to steady himself.

“Thanks,” he tells her, and then he chances a look at the living room, where Steve is frozen halfway off of the couch, like he was planning to run over and catch Eddie himself. Mordred is perched on the back of the couch, the hairs all down his spine standing straight up.

“Uh, sorry about that,” Eddie says awkwardly, a nervous laugh bubbling out of his throat, “I didn’t mean to–”

“No, it’s fine, I don’t. It’s fine.” Steve hurries to assure him.

Then Eddie trips over a memory and blurts out, “Wait, did Delmira carry me out of the Upside Down?”

Steve flushes scarlet and presses his lips together, looking torn. Delmira, on the other hand, meets his eyes with her own steady gaze, amber and serious.

“We thought you were going to die,” she tells him, unflinching, “It was easier for me to carry you than him.”

Eddie’s eyes dart to the living room again, “And Mordred?”

“I wrapped him in my jacket,” Steve says softly, “Nancy steadied him at one point, but no one touched him other than that.” Steve offers Mordred a lopsided smile, “You’re lanky as shit.”

Mordred sniffs, tilting his nose up imperiously, “I’m lithe.”

“You,” Eddie blows out a breath, unable to shake the disbelief, “Your daemon carried me. Out of the Upside Down.”

Steve grimaces, “You were dying, Eddie.”

“And the only option was to bare your soul to me?” Eddie says incredulously, “You’d known me for less than a week. That’s– that’s insane. Is that why you’ve been helping me so much? Because you’re just some kind of super altruist?”

“No,” Steve protests immediately, “That’s not–”

Eddie is aware that he’s pushing too hard. Steve has been nothing but kind for weeks now, never once making Eddie feel ashamed by the limitations of his body. Eddie said he wouldn’t bother the gift horse. But he’s never been very good at leaving things alone. 

“Why are you here, Steve?” Eddie braces his hands on the counter, leaning forward, something complex and desperate warring in his chest, itching for an answer, an explanation. 

“Mordred, please,” Delmira says in a fondly exasperated voice. Mordred ignores her, crouching for a moment before launching himself onto her back in one graceful leap. He turns in one narrow circle and begins kneading the fur on her shoulders.

“We want to know,” Mordred tells her, his tone deceptively mild, “Is it because you pity us?”

“No!” Steve runs a hand through his hair, hissing through his teeth. When he meets Eddie’s eyes he looks so fucking earnest, “Look, can’t I just say it’s because you’re a good person who didn’t deserve to die down there? You sacrificed yourself for us, and it would be pretty shitty to repay that by abandoning you in the worst place imaginable. I could do something, so I did.”

“You could say that,” Eddie agrees.

“You could also say that you spent the night on our couch the last few days because Dustin likes us and you’re just a really good babysitter,” Mordred muses, an edge of sarcasm to his voice.

Steve laughs, quiet and breathy, “You know that’s not why.”

Eddie pushes off from the counter and Delmira steps aside easily as he shuffles his way into the living room, moving slowly and carefully so he doesn’t accidentally end up on his ass again. He can still feel that electricity that had shot through him when he touched Delmira, and with it the memory of the heartbeat that had kept him alive, steady like a drum beat.

“I don’t really know anything,” Eddie says, moving towards where Steve is still frozen, socked feet set against the dingy shag carpeting of the trailer, “Mind reading is not in my repertoire of demonic powers.”

“I–” Steve’s eyes dart back to Delmira and then to Eddie, “I just want to take care of you.”

“Yeah?” Eddie raises his eyebrows, “I’ll be honest, Stevie, thus far there’s only been one person in my whole life who wanted to take care of me just because they thought I was worth it. No ulterior motives, or alimony checks, or the flimsy excuse of parenthood needed. Just me.”

There’s pressure against his legs and Eddie knows that it’s Mordred, weaving between his feet and offering the comfort of something warm and soft and alive. “So sue me for wanting to know what the reason is this time,” Eddie finishes, more vulnerable than he really meant it to be. But that’s him all the way through, isn’t it? All raw nerves and bite.  

Steve’s whole demeanor changes, going from unsure to solid and firm in a matter of seconds, squaring his jaw as he sets it at a stubborn angle. “Well, now you have at least twelve people who will take care of you, no questions asked. We don’t leave people behind. Those kids would fight a god for you, and the rest of us won’t be that far behind them.”

Emotion swells in him so suddenly that Eddie chokes on it, inhaling sharply, one hand reaching out to steady himself. He’s aiming for the couch but his hand touches thick fur instead, and he looks down to find Delmira’s coat beneath his fingers, her broad, noble head tilted up at him. There’s uncertainty in Steve, for sure, an undercurrent of fear that Eddie is all too familiar with. But beyond that is a wave of love and affection so strong it nearly knocks Eddie to his knees.

“And what about you?” Eddie asks softly, tearing his eyes away from Delmira to find that Steve has stepped closer, his hands hovering like he doesn’t know what to do with them.

Steve quirks a wry smile at him, “You’re touching my soul, Eddie. I think you can tell that I’m kind of hopelessly into you.”

Eddie isn’t sure if he wants to scream or cry, so what he does instead is frame Steve’s face with his hands, drawing him closer, and say, “Not hopeless. Not hopeless at all.”

Delmira crowds up against him at the same time that Steve kisses him, the two of them bracketing him on either side, warm and present. Eddie isn’t really up for anything enthusiastic–spirit willing but flesh recovering from recent near death experiences–but he winds his fingers in the hair at the back of Steve’s head and pulls him as close as they can be without aggravating Eddie’s wounds, the bridge of Steve’s new glasses pressed against his nose. Mordred winds himself between Steve’s legs and Steve gasps against Eddie’s mouth.

Steve leans back, not far enough to dislodge Eddie’s fingers, his own hand brushing against the line of Eddie’s neck up to his jaw. “Just to be clear,” Steve murmurs, “I’d fight a god for you too.”

Eddie tilts his chin to brush his lips against Steve’s again, “I think you made that pretty clear when you dragged my almost-corpse out of hell, babe.”

“I’d say ‘anytime’ but, uh, please don’t do that again,” Steve says, pressing their foreheads together.

“Haven’t you heard?” Mordred says, purring so hard that the buzz disrupts his words, “We’re bad luck.”

Delmira huffs, “Says who?”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees, rubbing a thumb against Eddie’s cheek, his eyes molten brown and gold, like honey, like chocolate. Everything sweet in the universe, holding Eddie in his hands like something precious, “This is the best luck I’ve had in years.”

…

Nancy

“So,” Jonathan says, in the wake of the latest apocalypse, “We should probably talk.”

Of the two of them, Anje has the better poker face. Jonathan has always been startlingly easy to read. It’s one of her favorite things about him–the honesty that runs straight through him, like a vein of gold. Jonathan has never been able to hide his emotions very well from anyone, and right now he looks about as quietly, hesitantly sad as she’s ever seen him.

Nancy’s always been a liar. It’s how she was raised–to put a bright, shiny gloss on anything and everything happening in her life. She can’t blame it entirely on nurture, though; the nature was there from the beginning. But she tries to be honest with Jonathan, because he wears his heart so openly all the time, and she can’t bear to be another thing that hurts him.

So she says, dread for the conversation to come already building in her chest, “We should.”

It’s not surprising, and not something she couldn’t have seen coming. Jonathan will always put his family before himself, and Nancy has always been ambitious. Steve’s speech in the RV had been misdirected for a number of reasons, most notably because she could see in his eyes that he didn’t really believe in it, even as he was laying out his grand dream for her, but also because the thought of being a stay at home mother of six terrifies her. Nancy isn’t even sure that she wants children, let alone to be their primary caregiver. 

Jonathan can’t go to Emerson with her. It was never his dream to begin with.

“I understand,” Nancy says quietly, Sera grooming her hair in comfort, rearranging her curls the way he likes them, “But, Jonathan.” She meets his eyes, because she needs him to know that she’s serious about this, “Take a gap year, do whatever you need to do, but I really think you should apply to NYU. At least give it a shot.”

Jonathan is quiet for a long moment, and then he says, “Yeah. I’ll think about it.”

Nancy holds out her hand, and when Jonathan takes it Nancy is hit suddenly with the thought that she’ll never get to hold these hands again, not like this. When he kissed her just a few hours ago–quick and chaste, just a greeting–he was kissing her for the last time. She’ll never get to touch Anje again, and Jonathan will never again run a careful finger over Sera’s crest. Jonathan has been her best friend for almost four years. And now she’s going to lose him.

“We can still be friends, right?” Nancy asks, gripping his hand tighter, “I’d like it if we could still be friends.”

Jonathan’s smile is sad, but genuine. “Yeah,” he says, “I’d like to still be friends, too.”

They sit like that for a little while, holding hands in silence, and then Jonathan lets go, pulling her forward to kiss her softly on the forehead. And then he’s gone.

…

Robin takes her out for consolation milkshakes.

“I’ve never been broken up with,” Robin tells her, leaning forward across one of the tables at the diner, fiddling with a ketchup packet. Liene is on the table, snuffling her way through a plate of fries. “But this is what my sisters always do when they go through a breakup. You go out and get the biggest milkshake you can find.”

“Oh?” Nancy asks, laughter in her voice. Robin’s energy is infectious.

Robin nods sagely, “Then you go home and cry and watch Sixteen Candles or something.”

“Big Molly Ringwald fans?” Nancy asks.

Robin wrinkles her nose. “Big Michael Schoeffling fans.”

Nancy gets a chocolate milkshake with extra sprinkles and Robin gets strawberry with a drizzle of chocolate sauce on top. Sera finally breaks and hops down onto the table so that he can steal some of Liene’s fries. Nancy pilfers a few as well, dragging them through her whipped cream before sticking them in her mouth.

“I’m kind of an ice cream snob now,” Robin confides conspiratorially, talking around the maraschino cherry in her mouth, the stem bouncing against her lip, “After the whole Scoops thing.”

“How so?” Nancy prompts, and Robin predictably launches into a long ramble about ice cream flavors and toppings. Nancy settles back with her milkshake and listens, watching Robin’s animated hands and expressive face as much as she is listening to the words. Even just a few weeks ago, Nancy found Robin’s endless chatter to be a little grating. But ever since Pennhurst, and Vecna, and almost dying together, Nancy finds that Robin’s rambling fills the silence in a way that Nancy is grateful for. She finds herself thinking of Jonathan, who’s so quiet, and how his pensive silence was at first soothing and later aggravating. Sometimes, when Nancy’s thoughts are running and she can’t help flinching at shadows, the noise helps settle her.

In the months after the Byers moved to California, Nancy would sit on her bed and miss Barb in a way that was so sharp and visceral it was crippling. And then, when she tried to soothe that hurt, she would miss Steve. Not their relationship, but some of the things that came with it; the way he would sit next to her and hold her hand, running his thumb over her knuckles, and how he would talk about anything and everything if she asked him to.

Robin is a good compromise between those two holes in her life. Someone who is new, someone she hasn’t hurt yet, with her spiny soul and her endless waves of meandering noise. Robin is comforting. Lately, Nancy doesn’t often let herself have comforting things.

“Sorry, I’m talking too much again,” Robin says self consciously, drawing back into herself.

“Not at all,” Nancy shakes her head, and she finds that she really means it when she says, “I like listening to you talk.”

Robin opens up slowly, like a flower unfurling, and then she smiles.

…

“We have a problem,” Sera reports one day. They’ve just dropped Mike and the Sinclairs off at the arcade, and Nancy is thinking of popping into the music store next door, where Robin and Steve have taken up work after they were unceremoniously fired from Family Video. Robin had done her best to convince Kieth with the fact that there had been a massive ‘natural disaster’, but he had been unmoved, especially since Robin and Steve had bounced out of work early and gone missing for nearly a week before the ‘earthquake’. So now they’re on to their next retail adventure–administering music and fending off rabid Madonna fans, if Robin is to be believed.

“What problem?” Nancy asks, glancing around. Sera would have said something more urgent if it was anything that required a gun, but she hasn’t quite come down from the level of paranoid vigilance that the most recent near-apocalypse has inspired.

“Steve and Delmira like us,” Sera says confidently.

“They don’t like us,” Nancy scoffs, “I’m pretty sure we broke their hearts. If anything, they hate us.”

“They don’t hate us,” Sera objects, rolling his eyes, “Steve was flirting with us like the whole time the Vecna thing was happening.”

“You have an inflated sense of your own ego,” Nancy says, pushing into the brightly lit music store, the bells above the door jingling. Robin isn’t anywhere in sight, but Steve is behind the counter reading a magazine. He looks up when they come in and smiles. Nancy can’t see Delmira, but she assumes that she’s under the counter, out of the way and free from getting stepped on or accidentally bumped into. 

“We have an inflated sense of our own ego,” Sera corrects primly.

“Hey guys,” Steve says, “What’s up?”

“Steve!” Robin shouts from somewhere among the racks of music. After a moment the top of her head pops over a shelf, “You have to say the thing!”

Steve closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, sighing before he says, in the deadest tone imaginable, “Welcome to Music Magic, where we bring the magical listening experience to you. How can I enchant you with sound today?”

Nancy cringes as she approaches the counter, “That can’t be what you’re supposed to say.”

Steve rolls his eyes, “It’s not. I lost a bet and now I have to say whatever stupid slogan Robin makes up every time a customer comes in.”

“And how is that going for you?” Sera asks, turning his head to peer around the empty store.

“You’re our first customer in like an hour, so pretty good for me, actually,” Steve says, grinning. Robin boos from among the stacks, emerging with an empty crate in her arms. She sticks her tongue out at Steve, who flips her off, before she disappears into the back room.

“Anyway,” Steve rolls his eyes exaggeratedly, before turning a version of his customer service smile on Nancy, “How can I help you?”

“I’m not actually a customer,” Nancy admits, “I just finished dropping the kids off at the arcade and I thought I’d just stop in and say hello. I can go, though, if–,” she gestures around the store.

“Yeah, you’re really holding up the line here,” Steve jokes, lifting his magazine slightly so that she can see that it’s an old copy of Rolling Stone. 

The store is quiet, only the faint sounds of music playing through the overhead speakers and Robin clattering around in the back room. It seems like as good a time as any to bring up the conversation she and Sera were having, to clarify all the tense moments and long looks that had happened while they were fighting Vecna. Nancy hesitates, though, because Steve never said anything, not after–

Well, he said some things, certainly. Things Nancy is maybe supposed to address. Sera pecks the side of her head, urging her to get this over with.

The bell above the door jingles and Steve straightens, plastering on a customer service face, before abruptly dropping it, his face breaking into a wide, genuine smile.

It’s Eddie, walking stiffly and carefully the way he has since he was released from the hospital, though he’s recently regained some of his buzzing, frenetic energy from before. Mordred trots in beside him, his tail up and waving lazily. 

“Hey, Wheeler,” Eddie wiggles his fingers at her in a wave, Mordred weaving between his legs and taking a running leap at the counter, landing dangerously close to Steve’s elbow and peeking over the edge to look down at Delmira. 

Eddie himself leans on the counter and into Steve’s personal space, making grabby hands, “Come, on, Harrington, gimme the goods.”

“Are you even supposed to be driving?” Steve grumbles, but he obligingly reaches below the counter, retrieving a tape and holding it out to Eddie. Eddie takes it like the tape is made of gold, looking down at it with a huge smile, his leg bouncing with excess energy.

“You’re a prince among men,” Eddie says earnestly, “Meeting you was the best thing to ever happen to me. And I was cleared to drive two days ago, doctor’s orders.”

“I’m the best thing that ever happened to you because I special ordered a Judas Priest album?” Steve laughs, but there’s an edge to it, one that Nancy can identify easily. She was there when Steve carried Eddie out of the Upside Down on Delmira’s shoulders. Steve himself had been cradling Mordred, carefully wrapped up in his jacket, and Nancy had had to catch Mordred before he could slip, her bare hand brushing his fur for just a moment.

The pain she felt through the connection had been excruciating. She can’t imagine how it had felt for Steve, the length of Eddie’s body slumped over Delmira’s back and shoulders.

“No one else has ever ordered a Judas Priest album for me,” Eddie says, grinning, leaning further into Steve’s space. Steve doesn’t lean away from it, and whatever tension had entered him at the reminder of Eddie’s near-death experience seems to drain out again. Abruptly, Nancy feels like she’s witnessing something intimate, something not for her, so she turns away from them and pretends to peruse one of the boxes of records, flipping through them but not processing the words.

“That can’t be true,” Steve objects, and Nancy knows the tone he’s using–not quite the amused, indulgent voice he uses for Robin or the kids, but something a little different. 

“Regardless of what Elliot from High Street Records has done for me as a person,” Eddie says dismissively, “This one is more meaningful.”

“Oh?” Steve asks, and there, that tone. It’s a tone he used to use with her. “Does that mean I’m special?”

Sera leans down to catch her eye, clicking his beak twice. Nancy nods, reeling with this new revelation. Flirting. Steve is flirting with Eddie Munson.

“I’d say it does, yeah,” Eddie says, and Nancy doesn’t know him all that well, but he’s definitely flirting back.

“Inflated ego,” Nancy sing-songs quietly. Sera pecks her again in retaliation. Apparently all Steve’s wishful thinking had been just that, a fleeting memory of a wish he’d once had. Nancy peeks over her shoulder to find Steve and Eddie talking quietly, their heads bent towards each other. From this angle she can see Delmira behind the counter, and Mordred curled up on top of her, grooming the top of her head.

The back door opens and Robin steps back out, armed with a new crate of records to shelve. She nods at Eddie in greeting before coming to stand next to Nancy, propping the box against her hip and one of the crates of records. 

“Hey,” Robin says, a tiny bit breathless, grinning wide and pleased at Nancy. Not for the first time, Nancy notices that Robin has freckles, and that her smile is a little crooked, and that each and every one of these details has become incredibly dear to Nancy over the last few months. 

“Hey,” Nancy smiles back, instantly cheered simply by Robin’s presence, “Mind if I hang out for a bit?”

“Please,” Robin agrees eagerly, “Save me from dying of boredom. Oh! I almost forgot.”

Robin fishes a tape out of her pocket and hands it over–the Pat Benatar album that came out a few months ago. “I remember you saying you didn’t have it yet,” Robin says in a rush, “So I saved one for you.”

Nancy feels herself go scarlet, pleased and a little bit flustered. “Thanks,” she says, and she doesn’t need Sera’s tug on her hair to tell her that she’s making some kind of hopelessly smitten face. Robin, at least, has the grace not to mention it, launching into the tale of the bet Steve lost, calming Nancy down with a wave of words.

…

El

It takes a while for hair to grow out. El knows this, and yet sometimes in the mornings she finds herself reaching for a hairbrush that she doesn’t need, or running a hand through the buzzed-short strands, wishing it was coming in faster. She didn’t really notice the first time because she’d never had long hair before. But lately she’s grown accustomed to the way it falls around her shoulders, the way Joyce had been earnestly teaching her how to style it.

“It is not pretty,” El mutters one night, petulant and hurt about this thing that was taken from her because she can’t quite look at all the other things that were taken as well. Not yet.

Amais nudges her with his nose until she pets him, running a hand over the soft fur of his head and ears. “It will be,” Amais tells her encouragingly. El is at least comforted by that. Someday it will be, even though right now the loss is present and real.

They’ve lost so much. But they have Hopper and Venatici back. And soon, they’ll be going back to Hawkins.

…

The process of moving back to Hawkins is long and complicated. They have to go back to Lenora for a little bit, at the very least to finish out the school year. Well, Jonathan and Will have to finish the school year. El stays home with Joyce and lays low, since the police are technically still looking for her, and neither El nor Amais is particularly sad about not having to see Angela or her stupid cockatoo again. And when Will gets home he and Gwin share their very detailed notes with her, Amais pressed against her hip or reading over her shoulder. She does homework along with Will, and does her best not to fall behind any more than she already is.

At the very least, Joyce sneaks her into the graduation ceremony, giving her a hoodie and some fake glasses, even though it’s sweltering in the May Lenora heat. El keeps her head down but when first Argyle and then Jonathan cross the stage she cheers loudly alongside Joyce, Hopper, and Will.

Hopper had to stay in Hawkins for a while because of his recovery, the shady government shit, and also to find and set up a house for them to live in since the cabin is, in Jonathan’s words, “condemned as hell”. But he’s in Lenora now to help them with the last of the packing, since they’re leaving for their cross country road trip tomorrow, this time hopefully with significantly less secret government bases and home shootouts. 

El wakes up bright and early the next day, eager to get out of Lenora once and for all. She and Amais pad into the kitchen, intent on making some quiet early morning eggos, to find Hopper and Venatici already at the table with what appears to be their second cup of coffee, based on how alert they are.

Hopper smiles at them, “Hey, kiddo. How’d you sleep?”

“Fine,” El says, going to give Hopper a long hug. It’s only been a month since she saw him last but she’s always a little worried whenever he and Venatici are out of her sight for too long. His hair is about the same length as hers, barely grown out from its buzz cut. The fact that they match makes her feel a little better about the situation.

Venatici makes room for her in the kitchen as El goes to make herself breakfast. That’s another thing that’s new about this whole situation–Venatici and Amais have both been very careful not to brush up against anyone, even more than usual. Both Hopper and El are feeling a little raw after the events of the last few months, or even just the last year . El and Amais don’t feel quite up to baring their soul to anyone, and neither do Hopper and Venatici.

El sits down with her plate of eggos, and for a moment it feels just like it had more than a year ago, back when it was just them. And then Joyce comes into the kitchen, kissing both of them on the head as she goes to serve herself coffee, Fornax trotting in behind her, and soon Will and Jonathan are up too, chatting about the plans for the day, and then before long Argyle and Eudora are knocking at the door. El basks in all of it, in the feeling of having family, and between her feet, tucked under the chair and out of the way, Amais’s tail begins to wag.

…

She broke up with Mike–officially, for real this time–before they left Hawkins.

Marieke’s tail is between her legs before the conversation really starts, so El is pretty sure they all saw it coming, but Mike still looks devastated when she tells him. He hastily dashes tears from his eyes before asking, “Was there anything I could have done?”

El reaches out to take his hand softly in hers, sad about having to do this, but also certain. She loves him, and is pretty sure she’ll always love him, but she doesn’t think they’re meant for each other. Not like this.

“I do not think so,” she tells him gently, “I think we are better off as just friends.”

Mike’s hand in hers tightens, and he corrects, “Family.”

El smiles, small and full of emotion, as she agrees, “Family.”

So it’s not exactly a surprise, but she’s still pleased when Mike is waiting at their new house when they pull up. Everyone is there, actually, Max and Lucas and Dustin and Nancy and Steve and Robin and Eddie and even three boys she doesn’t know, but whose style of dress indicate that they’re probably Eddie’s friends.

“This seems like overkill,” Jonathan says, gripping the steering wheel tighter as he leans forward to scan the crowd all sitting on their cars and chatting. 

Argyle rolls down the window and leans out, almost losing his hat as he shouts, “Yo! Amigos! How’s it hangin’?”

Lucas laughs, loud and clear through the open window, and El can see Eddie waving back, doing some kind of hand signal she doesn’t know. She turns inquisitively to Will, making the sign with her hand, and Will smiles and says, “It means ‘rock on’.”

“Rock on,” El repeats dutifully, bobbing her hand like Eddie had.

“It’s like saying ‘hell yeah’,” Jonathan tells her.

El rolls down her window and sticks her head out like Argyle, lifting her hand in the same symbol and shouting, “Hell yeah!”

Eddie beams, throwing both arms into the air enthusiastically, and his group of friends whoop encouragingly back at her, all of them making the devil horn sign.

El throws herself at Max first, coming around the back of her wheelchair to wrap her arms around Max from behind. Max laughs, full throated and genuine, reaching up to grab onto El’s arms. In her lap, Nova looks like a juvenile raven, his tail not quite as long as it once was but still a far cry from how long it was when he first woke up after bringing Max back to life.

“Hey, El,” Max says warmly, squeezing El’s arms.

“Hey,” El says back, so happy she feels like she could burst. Amais is spinning in happy circles around the group, too excited to contain himself.

Mike offers her a hug next, a shy smile on his face, and El is so grateful for his friendship, the unshattered bond between them, that she falls into the hug immediately, Amais and Marieke sniffing each other behind them. 

Everyone gets hugs after that, including Eddie, even though she doesn’t know him that well. She’s careful with his midsection because she saw how bad his injuries were, in the hospital. Then she greets each of his friends, who are instantly enthusiastic about her, entirely based on her participating in their hand symbol.

“Very metal,” one of them–Jeff, with his snake daemon, Aeryn–tells her.

“Metal,” El agrees, filing this word away for later use.

Apparently Eddie’s friends are here because he is still not allowed to lift heavy objects. Instead he sits with Max and heckles the boys, Mordred nimbly weaving between people’s feet and shouting unhelpful suggestions. They get both the moving van and Jonathan’s car unloaded before the sun sets, and then they all transition inside to begin unpacking boxes. 

Max and Lucas follow her into her new room, El shutting the door before she carefully maneuvers all her furniture into place with her powers. Max high fives her when she’s done, and then they dig into the boxes, pulling out all the knick-knacks and clothes that El has accumulated during her time in Lenora. Sagitta lines up all her shiniest objects on her new bookshelf, along with a sparkly rock that El’s never seen before and an aluminum gum wrapper that’s been carefully folded into an origami dog.

El picks up the little dog, cradling it in her hands, and looks at Lucas in question. He smiles sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck, “I don’t have a job or anything so it couldn’t be too extravagant but, uh. Welcome home.”

El presses her lips into a thin line, trying to stave off the tears suddenly crowding her eyes, and then she gives up and tackles Lucas in another hug, her tears soaking into the fabric of his shirt.

Joyce and Hopper order pizza for everyone, even getting a pineapple one at Argyle’s request, which El and Eddie happily partake in, to the outraged disgust of Mike, Steve, and Eddie’s friend Wes.

“Byers, back me up on this,” Steve insists, gesturing from Eddie’s smirking face to the pizza. 

Jonathan blithely grabs a piece of the pineapple pizza, saying nonchalantly, “Try before you deny,” and taking a huge bite. 

Mike gags performatively. Will laughs at him, and then Dustin and Max both try to shove pineapple into Mike’s face, making him shout in protest, only Marieke’s presence at his back keeping him from falling out of his chair entirely.

Eddie’s friends leave when the sun starts to set, but the rest of them bundle in, dragging Joyce and Hopper’s new mattress onto the floor and unfolding the couch bed so that they can all pile in on top of each other, their daemons in a big heap at the foot of the beds. Delmira in particular gets ambushed, Liene sitting on the top of her head while Mordred curls up on her shoulders, Pyxis snuggling herself between Delmira’s paws. Gwin wraps around Anje’s neck and Eudora sprawls across her back, Amais and Anje pressing themselves against Delmira’s bulk. Even Marieke settles her nose on Delmira’s flank, the side of her against Amais. Sagitta and Nova flutter around between all of them, Sagitta eventually settling on the top of Marieke’s head, Nova burrowing himself under Amais’s chin. 

Sera settles himself on the perch by the TV, keeping watch over all of them with his sharp eyes. Close enough to be in reach but not quiet in the pile, Venatici and Fornax curl up nearby. 

“Okay!” Dustin exclaims, snuggled into the dogpile of humans on the beds, his leg carefully elevated so he doesn’t strain it, “Let the movie all-nighter begin!”

The kids, Robin, and Eddie all cheer while Steve and Hopper groan in unison. 

Hopper presses play on Ghostbusters, and the boys cheer again, but quieter this time.

“Ready to stay up all night?” Max asks softly, smiling. Her hand is intertwined with El’s, the two of them mostly horizontal in deference to Max’s back, Lucas sitting up next to Max, his legs and knees pressed against her. Will is on El’s other side, and he keeps silently passing the popcorn between her and Mike. 

“Ready,” El agrees.

El only makes it halfway through the movie before sleep pulls her under, but she doesn’t mind so much. She’s seen this movie before. And besides, everyone will still be here in the morning. 

…

Quiet voices wake her, the sound of them falling and rising filtering through her dreams before she becomes fully aware of the waking world. The credits of a movie are scrolling up the screen, casting the living room in a soft blue light. It’s a different movie than the one that was playing when she fell asleep.

It’s Jonathan’s voice she’s hearing, low and soft so as not to wake anyone up. It takes her a second to parse what he’s saying, and by then Jonathan is laughing, subdued and raspy, and someone else is talking.

“I’m just checking!” Robin protests, whispering furtively.

“You’re good, Buckley,” Jonathan says, amusement clear in his voice.

There’s a pause and then Robin says, “You’re being remarkably cool about this.”

“Yeah, well,” there’s the sound of cloth on cloth, like one of them is shifting positions. Jonathan sounds a little hesitant when he speaks next, “Let’s just say I know where you’re coming from.”

There’s a pause.

“I cannot believe you, Jonathan Byers,” Robin hisses, “This whole time. This whole time.”

“What, did you think you got to be the only one?” Jonathan asks, his tone completely dry.

“I just didn’t think I’d find four of us in one friend group!” Robin replies.

“Five,” someone else corrects sleepily, and it takes a moment for El to identify the speaker as Argyle.

“Um,” Will says quietly, and El can feel the vibrations of his voice from where his arm is pressed against hers, “Six?”

“Six ,” Robin whispers furiously.

“Make that seven,” someone else mumbles, ruefully, and this time El has no problem recognizing Nancy’s voice, “Now come on, Robin, go to bed.”

Robin makes an incoherent spluttering noise.

“Bed, Robbie,” Eddie sing-songs, “Come on, sleepy time now.”

“How!” Robin protests, but there’s more shuffling that El interprets as Robin being pulled down to lie horizontally. “How!” she demands again, this time more muffled.

“Good night kids,” Hopper says pointedly. Robin makes another muffled flustered noise.

“Will,” El asks quietly, “Seven of what?”

Will rolls towards her, something bright and vulnerable in his eyes, and takes her hand in his.

“It’s complicated,” he tells her, “I’ll tell you in the morning.”

“Promise?” El insists.

“Promise,” Will agrees. He tightens his hand on hers, and between one breath and the next, El is asleep again.

…

The next morning, El helps Steve and Joyce make homemade waffles for everyone while Hopper fries eggs and bacon. Steve shows El how to pour the batter into the waffle press, and how to set the egg timer so that the waffles don’t cook too long. El proudly carries plates of waffles to the table, Gwin and Mordred weaving between her socked feet as she walks, Sagitta fluttering overhead and calling out people’s waffle orders. Everyone enthusiastically tells her how good the food is, and Dustin mocks Mike for the amount of positive adjectives he uses but it makes El smile. 

Eventually they all sit down, digging into the huge plates of food that have been prepared. The house is full of noise, laughter and shouting and at one point some kind of chanting song started by Eddie and Dustin that Robin, Lucas, and Mike semi-reluctantly pick up, Mordred’s voice ringing loud and clear over all of them. El doesn’t know what a green dragon is, but she assumes it’s something from that game that all the boys play.

During a lull in the conversation, El leans over to Will, “Will, seven of what?”

Will glances around the table furtively, assessing, and his eyes catch on Eddie and Steve, who are arguing good naturedly about something. Steve must feel Will’s eyes on them because he breaks off the argument to raise his eyebrows at Will, before smiling and giving an encouraging thumbs up. From this angle, El can see Delmira’s nose peeking over the top of the table, a piece of bacon caught in her teeth, her tail wagging behind her. 

“You know how, most of the time, boys like girls?” Will tells her quietly. El nods in understanding and Will continues, “Well, sometimes, boys like other boys. Or girls like other girls. Or they like everyone, or neither.”

El keeps nodding, following along so far.

Will pauses expectantly, as though waiting for her to have some kind of reaction, so El confidently adds, “I understand. What else?”

“Oh,” Will says, wide-eyed. Gwin, who had previously been tearing away at a single waffle, perks up and scampers up Will’s arm to stand on his shoulder, the side of his head pressed against Will’s jaw.

“That’s not weird for you?” Will asks, just to check.

El furrows her brow, “Is it weird? Hopper says that the only important thing is to be safe and to treat people with respect.” She says the last part with the tone of someone repeating a phrase they memorized, because Hopper had asked her to repeat it back to him, back when he first explained all of this.

Will turns around and finds Hopper already watching them. Hopper also gives them a thumbs up, though his is far more deadpan than Steve’s had been.

“Well, I guess, what I’m trying to say,” Will continues, a pleased flush rising to his cheeks. He ducks his head for a moment and then looks up to meet El’s eyes earnestly, “Is that I’m like that. A boy who likes…who likes other boys. And some of the other people in the Party are too.”

El nods decisively and holds out her hand for a shake. Will takes it, looking bewildered.

“I am also a member of this group,” El tells him, shaking his hand firmly.

Will blinks a few times, stunned. “You are?”

El nods again, and then she smiles, “I’m glad we have each other.”

Will grins back, slowly at first, and then he breaks into a bright, sun-shiney smile, “Me too. You’re my favorite sister, El.”

“You are one of my favorite brothers, Will,” El tells him warmly.

“Hey! Baby Byers!” Robin calls, drawing Will’s attention. Liene is trotting towards them, an entire blueberry between her teeth. Robin gestures between herself and Dustin, “We need you to be a tie breaker!”

“El, you have to try this,” Max says, pushing a plate across the table towards her. There appears to be a waffle with a whole fried egg on it, drizzled in hot sauce.

“Max,” El says reproachfully, because the last time she tried hot sauce it made snot come out her nose.

“Come on,” Max grins at her, shark-like, “I dare you.”

El laughs. She’s lost so many things over the years, some of them things she didn’t even know she was losing when they were taken from her. But here, in the dining room of their new home, surrounded by these people who have become her family, she feels like she’s been given more than she knows what to do with.

Amais nudges her palm, his nose wet against her skin, and she reaches out to press her hand between his ears. His name means ‘loved’. And she is. She really, truly is.