Yeah It’s Me, Don’t Cream Your Pants

Hopper smiles.

A small one.

The kind that looks almost friendly if you’ve never had someone considering murder while wearing it.

“Happy to hear it,” is what he replies. But what he thinks is: you say ‘enthralled’ like they’re not one wrong step away from disembowelment.

The man with the cane leans in slightly, already treating Hopper like a source instead of a person. “Do you think the boy suspects the girl is with the Career pack?”

There it is.

The buzz.

The angle.

Already moving through the Capitol air like perfume.

Hopper glances down at the tablet in his hand as if checking something instead of reminding himself not to slam it against the man’s temple. 

“What I think,” he says evenly, “is that underestimating either of them would be pretty stupid.”

The woman laughs like he’s flirted.

He nearly blacks out from annoyance.

“I adore that,” she gushes. “So mysterious.”

No, you don’t, he thinks. You adore having something to project onto.

Hopper just gives a tight nod and moves on before either of them can ask anything else. That’s the rhythm of it for a while. Roaming. Listening. Seeing. Collecting.

District 1’s mentor is exactly the sort of slimy talent-agent bastard Hopper expected him to be. Thin suit. Oily smile. Hair too perfect. One hand always touching somebody’s elbow like he thinks the whole world is a casting couch. He talks about Marvel and Glimmer like he’s discussing an ad campaign.

“They understand visual command,” he proudly tells a nearby circle of uppity Capitol women that are clustered around him, and Hopper physically has to stop himself from muttering fuck off out loud.

District 2’s mentor is somehow worse.

He’s bulky in that steroid-swollen, overcompensating way that makes him look less tough and more inflatable. He’s in some sleeveless athletic thing under a fitted jacket like he wants everybody to know he has biceps and no inner life. He’s laughing too hard at his own jokes while using words like dominance and bloodline and natural killers with the kind of pride that makes Hopper wonder if the man’s mother ever considered putting him back.

Hopper catches his eye once from across a bank of screens and gives him a straight-faced nod so dry it borders on offensive.

The man mistakes it for respect.

Which is maybe the funniest thing that’s happened all day.

Effie finds him between one corridor and the next in a blur of magenta, gold, and weaponized posture. “Where have you been?”

Hopper doesn’t look up right away from the tablet. He’s still tapping through a sponsor ledger with the sleek stylus like he’s trying to dig a tunnel through the screen.

“Walking.”

Effie stares at him. “Well, yes, clearly, but where?”

“Among the wolves.”

“You smell like cigarette smoke and contempt.”

He finally glances over. “Good. Means I’m blending.”

Effie rolls her eyes so hard they nearly click. “That is not what blending is.”

What Hopper thinks is: lady, you seriously look like a Fabergé egg having a nervous breakdown and somehow you are still the most competent person in the room.

What he merely asks is, “you having any luck?”

That sobers her a little.

She straightens, smoothing one hand over the front of her absurdly elegant outfit. “The press is eating out of my hand.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, Jim—yes.” Her voice drops a notch, still theatrical but more grounded underneath it as she takes a conspicuous glance around the room, leaning in closer. “The star-crossed lovers angle is everywhere now. They’re absolutely obsessed with it.”

Hopper grunts.

Effie watches him carefully. “Don’t make that face.”

“This is my face.”

“The other face.”

He gives her a look, like I have another face?

She narrows her sparkly eyes right back. “The one where you act as though romance itself insulted your ancestors.”

He snorts despite himself.

It’s brief, but it counts.

“There’s nothing wrong with the angle,” he sighs. “Long as nobody’s stupid enough to think that’s all it is.”

Effie’s expression shifts… and there it is. That weird, accidental rapport that they’ve developed by sheer necessity. She’s all vivacious polish, spectacle and brand awareness. He’s blunt force and pessimism in a borrowed jacket. They should hate each other more than they do.

Instead they work.

Because they both know what’s actually at stake.

“Well,” Effie chirps, lowering her voice as elite people drift around them, “the lovely thing about the angle is that it needn’t be all it is in order to be useful.”

Hopper glances at her.

She holds his gaze for a second, then lifts one manicured shoulder.

“…I’m not saying I enjoy turning children’s feelings into media strategy,” she adds earnestly. “I’m saying if the Capitol insists on making monsters of itself, I see no reason we shouldn’t use the beast’s appetite against it.”

That gets a real look from him.

Not because she surprised him. Because she didn’t, really. He knows by now what she’s made of underneath all the lacquer and etiquette and bright little performance smiles. Effie Trinket is made of steel wrapped in satin. She just happens to be excellent at accessorizing the steel.

What he thinks: Christ, I forgot how much I’ve come to like this strange little woman.

What he says: “That almost sounded smart.”

Effie’s mouth drops open. “Almost?”

Hopper allows himself the smallest grunt that maybe, in another life, might have become a laugh. Then he taps the edge of the screen with the stylus.

“Got a few possibles for later,” he says. “Not touching ‘em yet.”

Effie nods immediately. 

She gets it. Of course she does. Because sponsorship isn’t cheap. And this is the part that nobody back home truly understands, not in full. Hawkins scraped together money. Real money, by Hawkins standards. More than Hopper expected, honestly. Enough that when he saw the total transferred to the district fund this morning, his throat had gone tight in a way he’d rather die than describe in front of witnesses.

Those little shits.

Those stubborn, loyal, beautiful little bastards back home.

They did it.

Not enough to buy high-tech, progressive medical miracles. Not enough to make the Capitol applaud. But enough to matter. Enough to make it fucking count. Enough to prove (yet again) that Hawkins, even after two and a half years of supernatural apocalypse and rationing and grief and roofs caving in and people rebuilding from soot and teeth, still found a way to gather something for Steve and you.

Hopper had stared at the number on the screen and thought, fuck yeah.

Then immediately thought of Robin Buckley.

Because the kids always bleed into each other in his head eventually. Steve and Robin and Dustin and Will and all the rest of them, tangled together into one impossible net of people he cares about too much and never soon enough.

Maybe Robin’s workin’ some miracles from the other side, he’d thought then, and the thought had been so dangerously tender that he shut it down almost instantly.

He doesn’t mentally stay on Robin long.

Can’t.

Still can’t.

The fact that she died before eighteen sits in him like a rusted blade stabbed into his gut. Not because he doesn’t know death. He knows death. Knows it too well. It’s because of the timing. The waste of it. The fury of it. Another kid gone before she had any real shot at being anything except brave for too long. Another kid he did not get to in time.

That’s the shape of Hopper’s guilt most days.

A curse with broad shoulders.

A disappointment with a badge.

A man arriving after the worst has already happened and then getting stuck living in the crater it leaves.

And yet here he is anyway, in the Capitol, trying to make up for everything he didn’t stop by manipulating a market of bored elites into keeping two more children alive.

It’s a stupid plan.

It’s also the only one he’s got.

He and Effie fall into step together as the day drags on and the Capitol grows more feverish with every update from the arena. Sometimes she peels off to work the press. Sometimes he does another slow lap through the citizen clusters, catching scraps of gossip and appetite.

Somebody thinks you’re seducing the Careers.

Somebody else thinks Steve is smarter than he looks and likes that because it makes him “dangerous in a rustic way,” which is a sentence that makes Hopper want to body-check a stranger through a window.

One older woman with silver hair and a red velvet collar says, “I don’t believe the girl is false. I think she’s simply clever enough to know when honesty serves her.” Hopper nearly stops walking at that because it’s the first read all day that sounds even remotely close to accurate.

Another man says, “The boy seems loyal to a fault,” and Hopper thinks, if only you knew how much.

By the time early evening starts pulling its dark skirt over the city, the Capitol is fully drunk on itself. Screens glow brighter. Music filters in from distant hallways. Caterers begin moving like schools of expensive fish towards the banquet wing, all silver trays and white gloves and dead eyes.

Hopper’s stomach turns at the sight of food.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

The idea of eating while Steve and you are out there in the arena rationing crackers and water and God knows what else makes bile rise at the back of his throat hard enough to burn.

Still, he goes.

Because mentors are expected at dinner.

Expected to be visible. Social. Available. Expected to keep the theater alive.

He follows the current of bodies toward the banquet hall, tablet in one hand, stylus tucked between his fingers. Effie finds him again just before the doors and slips into stride beside him, still jabbering to some press lizard over her shoulder while somehow also clocking Hopper’s screen.

“You still have him up in the tree?”

“Yeah.”

“And her?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

He glances at her. “You say that like they’re houseplants.”

Effie gives him a sharp little side-eye. “I say that like they’re alive.”

Fair enough.

They enter the banquet hall.

And it is, in a word, obscene.

The high ceiling alone looks like a cathedral had a nervous breakdown and decided to become a palace instead. Gold molding. Crystal chandeliers. Silk banners in jewel tones draped between columns so polished they reflect the candlelight in buttery vertical slashes. The long central mahogany table is already groaning under the weight of the feast… and half the dishes haven’t even been brought out yet. Roasted birds lacquered in glaze. Platters of fruit so perfect it looks painted. Seafood arranged like sculptures. Breads. Meats. Cream sauces. Delicate towers of pastry and spun sugar and shining little desserts no one needs and everyone here will treat like a birthright.

Hopper feels ill on sight.

The room is lined with Peacekeepers, white and still and heavily armed even here among flowers and crystal, because of course it is. Nothing in this damn city exists without violence standing just off-frame.

He barely notices the food after that.

His tablet is in his hand again before he’s even fully seated.

Because Steve’s square is still there.

It’s night in the arena now. Moonlight washed thin and blue through the trees. The feed locked on him high in the branches, where he’s rigged the rope and sleeping bag exactly the way that Hopper hoped a kid like Steve would — practical, unsentimental, efficient. Curled up in that cocoon of fabric and tied safety, hidden enough that you’d miss him if you didn’t know which patch of tree to look for while scanning the canopy.

He’s actually sleeping.

Or close enough.

The sight of it eases something in Hopper’s chest… and tightens something else. Because the kid looks smaller asleep. Not literally. In the way sleeping people always look younger, no matter how old they are or what all they’ve survived.

Hopper taps to the next feed.

You.

And this one is not easing a goddamn thing.

You’re in the dark forest under moonlight, moving with the Career pack like you were born in the middle of them even though you stick out so beautifully it’s almost absurd. Tommy. Carol. Marvel. Glimmer. All savagery and vanity and ugly confidence. And then there’s you among them… in your braid and your quiet face and that wave-soft, angelic sort of composure that makes the whole image look wrong in the best possible way.

Hopper watches you like a damn hawk.

Because this is the reveal.

The real one.

Not the public version where you look like a possible turncoat and a possible heartbreaker and maybe a girl playing the long angle against a boy who wants to believe she’s soft.

Hopper knows better.

He knew before you went in.

The two of you talked in private.

Not even Effie got the whole thing.

That was deliberate.

Less she knew, the better she could sell the visible version of it. The cleaner her performance would be. And it has worked. God help him, it has worked.

The Capitol thinks you’re circling Steve.

Hopper knows you’re circling the Careers.

And there’s a difference.

A giant one.

On the feed, Tommy is talking.

Of course he is.

The bastard carries himself like somebody cast him as the lead in his own war movie, all broad shoulders and thick muscle and savage little flashes in his eyes every time he looks back at you. Marvel keeps trying to lean closer than necessary, smug in that blond district-one way of his, while Glimmer glides beside him with Steve’s bow slung over one shoulder like the weapon belongs to her.

Hopper’s lip curls.

He really would like five uninterrupted minutes alone with that stupid girl and a sturdy railing.

Carol’s the interesting one.

She doesn’t flirt.

Doesn’t posture.

Doesn’t chatter.

She just keeps cutting those little green knife-eyes toward you — measuring, measuring, measuring, while still somehow falling a step back when Tommy talks, like all her venom goes slack on a leash around him.

You, meanwhile, are playing this so cleanly that it actually makes Hopper grudgingly proud even while it scares the shit out of him.

You’re not overdoing it.

That’s the key.

No simpering innocence. No fake bravado either. You’re keeping pace with them like this is just some weird fucking high school hallway and you’re the only girl smart enough not to apologize for being there. Your tone stays even. Gentle without being meek. Witty without drifting into smartass. Easy enough that Marvel keeps leaning into it and stupid enough that Tommy keeps underestimating exactly what kind of nerve it takes to stay that steady under his stare.

At one point Tommy says something Hopper can’t hear over the banquet hall noise, but he sees the shape of it in your body — some challenge, some dig, some rough little test, directed at you... and your backpack?

Ah, shit, Hopper realizes.

Because he knows that Tommy H. is still sussed out about the missing pack. The extra supply bag you snatched from that fallen tribute and took off running with... and then secretly handed off to Jack and Hannah, when tucking them in the nearest best hiding spot. Thankfully, you'd kept that little pouch to pretend you'd merely consolidated the items into one bag. But even so, Tommy's still not sold on it.

You don’t rush your answer.

Don’t cower.

Just lift one shoulder and say something back that makes Marvel bark a laugh and Glimmer smirk and Carol go even stiller.

Hopper taps for volume and catches the tail end of it.

“…you’re that pressed about it,” you’re saying calmly, “you’re welcome to play TSA and look through the bag yourself.”

He actually snorts.

Out loud.

A couple mentors nearby look over.

He doesn’t give a shit.

Because that is funny.

That’s the thing about you—Hopper is learning it more every day—you’re not sunshine and lace and soft-focus saintliness. You’re just composed. You’re just real. There’s bite there. Cleverness. Timing. You aren’t trying to be adorable, which is exactly why you are in the moments you least mean to be.

Effie drops into the seat on one side of him with a rustle of tulle fabric and strategic brightness. Cinna takes the other side a lot more quietly, all cool, composed grace and gold eyes that seem to notice absolutely everything in the room without ever needing to prove it.

The seating chart says mentor between PR and stylist.

The reality is… Hopper feels like he’s been wedged between a diplomat and a blade. He doesn’t mind it, though. Strangely? It’s comforting.

Across the table, a few other stylists are glancing over.

Not at Hopper.

At Cinna.

Of course they are.

This whole week, he has been the anomaly in the room. The one stylist assigned across two tributes from the same district while everybody else got one apiece. And in the Capitol, anomalies breed gossip faster than blood in water.

Hopper had learned the details in pieces.

Cinna bent the rules to make it happen.

Not just bent them—broke somebody else’s appointment clean enough that another stylist got sacked over it. Cost him most of his pay too, because the Capitol doesn’t let men act on principle without charging them interest.

Hopper doesn’t know why that fact pisses him off as much as it does.

Maybe because it confirms what he already knew: Cinna is one of the only people here who’d actually pay something real to do the right thing.

Effie is already into her first line before the server has even poured the wine she won’t drink. “You both look dreadful,” she says crisply.

Hopper doesn’t take his steely eyes off the tablet. “Feel free to put it in a press release.”

Cinna’s mouth twitches with an amused hum.

Effie ignores the bait with practiced elegance. “I, on the other hand — look incredible.”

“That’s because you’re insane,” Hopper deadpans.

“Thank you.”

“I wasn’t complimenting you.”

“Your loss.”

Cinna finally speaks, voice low and smooth as worn velvet. “I think in some cultures, this would qualify as affection.”

Hopper looks up at him.

What he thinks is: Christ, you’re sneaky when you want to be.

What he says is, “Don’t encourage her.”

Effie gasps theatrically. “Encourage me? I’m holding this district together with ribbon and sheer force of personality.”

“That tracks,” Hopper mutters.

A server appears with some sort of carved roast thing and asks if he’d like a slice. Hopper looks at the knife, then at the meat, then at the tablet in his lap where Steve is asleep in a tree and you are walking through the dark beside four killers, and he has to physically stop himself from saying, are you out of your goddamn mind?

Instead?

“No.”

The server blinks, startled by how flat it comes out — but then she nods and moves along.

Effie does accept a plate, though she barely touches it. Cinna simply allows them to place something artfully arranged in front of him, thanks them kindly, and then forgets it almost immediately. Meanwhile, Hopper keeps his trusty tablet propped against the edge of his plate like it’s the only thing at the table worth consuming.

Cinna glances down at the screen, watching your feed for a moment. 

“They’re letting her closer than I expected.”

Hopper grunts. “They think she’s useful.”

“And is she?”

Hopper flicks him a look.

Cinna meets it serenely.

Neither one says what they’re actually thinking, because they’re in public and neither one is a complete moron. But the meaning still passes between them cleanly enough.

Yes.

She’s more than useful.

And yes, that also makes her in danger of being slaughtered the second that one of them gets bored.

Effie dabs once at the corner of her mouth with a napkin she hasn’t needed and says, quietly now, “The room is very taken with her.”

“She’s easy to root for,” Cinna murmurs warmly.

“She’s easy to project onto,” Hopper corrects, though it’s secretly fond.

Effie gives a little hum. “Both can be true.”

Hopper arches his brow at her, his eyes flicking between the sparkly PR fairy godmother and tranquil stylist. What he thinks is: you two’re both disgustingly perceptive and I hate that I need you.

What he says is, “Long as it buys time.”

Cinna glances down at Steve’s feed now. The sleeping bag. The branches. The rough makeshift spear laid securely overhead with the knife.

“He made himself a nest,” he says.

Hopper snorts into his own chest. “Yeah, well. Boy always did know how to hole up.”

That puts the smallest grin at the edge of Cinna’s mouth.

Effie glances between them. “You both sound revoltingly fond.”

Hopper immediately says, “No.”

At the exact same time Cinna says, “Quite.”

Effie sits back, triumphant. “Mhmm.”

What Hopper thinks is: I’m surrounded by assholes.

What he says is, “Eat your dinner, Trinket.”

She points a fork at him. “You first.”

Not happening.

He eyes the food again and nearly feels his stomach turn over.

No.

Absolutely not.

The banquet hall keeps swelling around them in noise and silverware and laughter that doesn’t belong in the same universe as the arena. The mentors for One and Two are talking too loudly down the table, full of swagger and bad predictions and ego. One of the stylists near the opposite end is clearly fishing for Cinna to somehow engage in some Panem gossip about his dual appointment.

Cinna does not bite.

The man never shows all his cards.

He fields one question with a gracious little nod and some answer so mild it gives away nothing. Another with a hum that could mean anything. Hopper, watching it from the side, has to stop himself from smiling because the man is elegant as hell when he’s stonewalling idiots.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Effie leans in and whispers under her breath, “Do you know… they are calling us Team Hawkins in the outer press rooms now?”

Hopper keeps his eyes on the screen. “Sounds stupid.”

“It sounds marketable.”

“It sounds like a high school softball team.”

Effie puts one hand to her chest. “I adore that.”

“It is oddly effective,” Cinna agrees, without looking up from his water glass.

Hopper flicks a glance between them. “You’re both the same font in different colors. It’s bizarre.”

Effie smiles brightly. “And yet you need us.”

Damn it.

She’s right.

The only response he’s got is a grunt and a hard tap of the stylus against the tablet screen.

That’s when the hall changes.

Not because the noise dies.

Because it spikes.

A ripple of excitement shudders through the room, moving fast from one end of the banquet table to the other as people begin to rise or clap or turn their chairs toward the entrance.

“Hell of an evening!”

Seneca Crane.

Of course.

He makes an entrance like a man convinced that history gives a shit about his cheekbones — gold Rolex flashing, hair arranged just so, silk suit tailored within an inch of its life. That little smile on his face that says he thinks all this applause belongs to him because in his mind, it probably does.

“And hell of a kickoff, right?!” Seneca eggs them on, seeking validation for all his game-making sorcery.

The room bursts into it.

Cheers. Clapping. Bright delighted laughter.

Hopper slow-claps.

Dead-eyed.

Smirking like he’d rather be applauding a public execution.

What he thinks is: if hubris were flammable, this prick would light up the city himself.

What he says, to absolutely no one, is, “Look who learned to walk upright.”

Effie claps too, theatrical and gleaming and smiling the exact practiced smile she knows to wear in public. Cinna offers his own measured, civil applause that somehow manages to be both polite and completely inscrutable.

Seneca eats it all up.

Naturally.

He raises his hands just enough to invite more noise before graciously pretending to quiet it.

“In all seriousness,” he goes on, voice carrying with the slick confidence of a man born to podiums and cruelty, “I do hope… that everyone is enjoying the first evening of what promises to be a very exciting week.”

Hopper’s smile gets meaner.

“Hell, maybe even two weeks,” Seneca adds with a coy little lilt, like they are merely discussing a summertime sailing trip and not the uncertain duration of child slaughter.

The Capitol room titters.

Hopper wants to put his head through the table.

“Please,” Seneca continues, “enjoy the meal. Enjoy each other. You’ll all be very busy in the coming days.”

He means sponsorships.

He means making deals with blood.

He means make me proud of the machine I’ve built.

Hopper nods once to himself like he’s hearing useful information instead of a threat in a Versace tie.

Then Seneca is moving on — drifting back toward the game-making levels or wherever the hell men like him nest when they’re not being applauded for thinking up fresh ways to break children in high definition.

The banquet begins in earnest after that.

Silver domes are lifted. Wine is poured. Food is served in waves.

But Hopper doesn’t eat. He doesn't even pretend to. He rolls one shoulder,  then the other, a tired little crack working through the stiff muscles there, and lowers his gaze back to the tablet.

Steve’s screen hasn’t changed.

Still in the tree.

Still asleep, or close enough that it counts.

Curled into that miracle of a sleeping bag, with the rope holding him secure against the trunk, his body tucked in and hidden, the makeshift spear and knife wedged in the branches overhead within reach. The moonlight through the dark leaves paints him in cool silver. He looks younger. Smaller. Not safe, exactly. Just temporarily untouched.

Hopper exhales once through his nose.

Then he taps to your feed…

…and immediately sits up straighter.

Because yours just got interesting.

The Careers are no longer wandering.

They’re hunting.

They’ve got a scent.

All five of you are moving through the dark forest in a tighter formation now, slinking instead of walking, expressions gone sharper and uglier under the moonlight, Tommy at the front with that bodybuilder bulk moving more lightly than it ought to. Carol’s one step back with a knife already in hand and that little murderous grin threatening to show, with Marvel and Glimmer flanking. You’re with them, keeping pace, face pale and steady… and just a touch too still, if someone knows what to look for.

“I seeee fiiiiiirrrrre,” Glimmer sing-songs in a stage whisper. 

Sure enough, up ahead, somewhere off-screen… there’s fire.

Not a huge one.

A stupid one.

A bonfire or campfire or whatever the hell some doomed tribute thought was worth the risk.

The orange flicker pulses faintly through the trees.

And all five Careers can see it… can smell it…

Hopper feels his entire body go cold. Because now he knows exactly what this is. He knows what’s about to happen, and he knows you know too.

Onscreen, Tommy's glancing back at you and says something too low for the banquet room noise to carry through clearly — but your answer comes sharp enough for Hopper to catch part of it.

“Then let’s not waste the opportunity by gloating before it’s done.”

Goddamn.

That’s my girl, some traitorous fathery part of him thinks before the phrasing even has time to embarrass him.

Not his girl.

Not even his kid.

But the innate protective feeling punches through anyway, girl-dad grief and admiration and terror all braided together into one ugly stubborn thing that he will never be able to shake. Because he had a daughter once. Brief. Bright. Sarah... Tiny hands and soft blonde hair that ended up falling out in clumps, one day at a time, because chemotherapy wasn’t enough to spare her life as she sat in a hospital bed. Her mommy and daddy were right there the whole time, with doctors and sterilized corridors and antiseptic and helplessness… until the world took her too.

Maybe that’s why watching you do this hits in the same old damaged spot.

Not because you’re her.

Because you’re a girl with your chin up in a world built to eat girls first… and because you’re doing something that’s brave enough to look suicidal from an outsider’s point of view.

You keep walking with them.

Playing the role.

Not overselling. Not cracking. Just enough menace in your pace to pass.

Hopper watches your face on the screen and thinks, if this goes wrong, I will never recover from it.

He doesn’t say that, obviously. But what he does say, very quietly, to no one and everyone, is, “Don’t you fucking blink, kid.”

Cinna glances down at the screen.

Effie follows.

And just like that, all three of them go solemnly still, banquet forgotten, plates untouched, the great decadent Capitol hall receding around them as the feed shows the five of you… now gliding through moonlit trees, towards a stupid little fire and the terrified tribute who lit it.

And before the cannon, before the scream, before the bloodshed… 

Hopper knows that tonight, you are about to witness your first murder.

“...what the fuck?”

It comes out of Steve in a whisper so groggy and low it almost still belongs to sleep. For a second he doesn’t even know where the hell he is. Just knows it’s cold. Too cold. The kind of cold that sneaks in through bad dreams and unsteady sleep and makes your entire body lock up around itself before your brain catches up. He’s cocooned deep in the sleeping bag, face half buried, one arm trapped awkwardly beneath him, the rope still secured tight enough around him and the trunk that if he rolls wrong in the night he won’t plummet out of the tree like the world’s most embarrassing corpse…

Then the smell hits him.

Smoke.

Faint, but real.

Steve’s whole body goes still as his senses kick in. All the sleep leaves him at once. His eyes crack open inside the dark of the sleeping bag and for one weird second he just stares into black fabric, heart beginning to pick up hard and fast for no reason he can yet name except that his body already knows that smoke inside an arena at night means somebody, somewhere, is being catastrophically fucking stupid.

He moves very, very carefully.

That’s the first instinct.

Don’t panic. Don’t bolt upright. Just be careful.

He eases one hand out of the sleeping bag, then the other, then inches the fabric down enough to poke his face free into the night air without rustling more than necessary. Moonlight filters through layers of leaves above and around him in broken silver strips. The branch beneath him groans softly but holds. The rope at his waist, around the bag, is still tight. The tree bark at his shoulder is rough and cool and real.

Steve lifts his head…

…looks out…

…and there it is.

A little orange glow in the distance.

Not huge. Not roaring.

Just enough to make his mouth flatten.

“Wow,” he breathes, blinking at it through the trees. “Just… wow.”

Because seriously?

A fire?

At night?

Inside the fucking Hunger Games?

He stays half-raised in the sleeping bag, peering out from his branch with the kind of offended disbelief that only Steve Harrington — in all his jaded glory — could bring to an imminent murder situation. The glow is far enough away that it doesn’t immediately threaten him, but not far enough to feel irrelevant. It flickers low between trunks and brush, small and stubborn and idiotically obvious.

And his first thought…his honest to God first thought…is that whoever lit it is a moron.

Not elegantly.

Not philosophically.

Just flat-out, pure, instinctive judgment.

That is so fucking stupid.

His eyes narrow toward the glow.

What tribute in their right mind would risk that?

What dumb son of a bitch hears their mentor’s voice in their head going don’t be stupid, don’t make yourself obvious, don’t hand your enemies a goddamn map straight to your location — and then goes, actually?…I think what I need right now is a campfire?

He almost rolls his eyes.

Then immediately feels like an asshole for it.

Because fuck.

It’s cold.

That’s the thing.

It’s colder than the arena looked like it would be in daylight. The forest turned mean the second the sun dropped. He can feel it now in the exposed tip of his nose, in the knuckles of his hand resting outside the sleeping bag, in the damp chill hanging in the air between branches. Not everyone got a sleeping bag. Not everyone got a backpack. Not everyone got lucky enough to find a tree they could rig and hide in and enough brain cells to actually do it right.

So now he feels guilty too.

Judgmental, then guilty.

Cool. Great.

Once again, I’m an asshole.  Even in my own head.

Steve slinks back down into the sleeping bag again with self-disdain, tugging it up around himself… eyes wide open now in the dark fabric as his thoughts start going in ugly circles. It’s stupid. But also desperate.

And desperation makes people do all kinds of dumb shit.

He swallows.

Then the worse thought hits.

What if it’s one of the kids?

His pulse kicks hard.

What if it’s Hannah and Jack? They’d been practicing how to build fires, back in the training center. Did they successfully start one together?

What if it’s Ro? Would his age get the better of him in an instance like this?

And then comes the ugliest one of all…

What if it’s you?

“Oh, shit,” he whispers into the sleeping bag, and his own voice sounds too loud.

Now he’s fully awake.

Now he’s lying there in the dark, breath shallow, body tense, thoughts going from irritated to guilty to genuinely sick with fear in under thirty seconds — which feels just about right for his life lately. The arena has a real talent for making every thought worse than the one before it.

He’s just starting to push himself back up again, unable to help it, needing to check one more time—

…when the scream tears through the woods.

Steve goes rigid.

Not metaphorically.

Physically rigid.

Every muscle in him locks at once so hard it almost hurts.

The scream is blood-curdling. Real. Not quick either. Not one startled burst. It goes on and on and on in this awful ragged peel that seems to shred itself against the night until it doesn’t even sound like a person anymore so much as pain with lungs.

Steve sits upright so fast the branch shudders under him.

He yanks the sleeping bag down and stares toward the glow.

His own blood feels ice-cold.

The screaming keeps going.

And because of course his brain is the world’s least helpful roommate, it now instantly starts trying to identify it.

Not Ren.

Maybe?

No.

He doesn’t know.

He’s never heard you scream in his life.

The thought of hearing you scream at all lands in him like something blunt and rusted.

No. No, no, no.

…but it sounds older than Hannah would. Too mature. Too full-throated. Not little. Not young in that particular way that terror sounds when it tears out of a kid. That should make him feel better.

It doesn’t.

Because all that means is that somebody else is being butchered in the dark while he’s up in a fucking tree, safe and sound, listening to it happen… and doing absolutely nothing to help.

The scream finally breaks.

Not gradually.

Abruptly.

Like somebody just reached in and turned it off.

…then comes laughter.

Roaring. Gloating. Overlapping. Cheers.

Steve’s face twists.

That does it.

That’s the part that really gets him.

Not the scream. God knows the scream is bad enough. It’s the laughter after. The delight. The way human beings can witness another person dying and immediately turn that into some kind of locker-room celebration. It reaches him muffled through trees and distance, but not enough to lose its meaning. Not enough to ward off his worst thoughts, his triggers, his traumas. Steve knows that laughter. He knows what it means when fear turns social, when violence becomes group sport, when cruelty gets treated like wit.

He hates it.

He fucking hates it.

And worse than that, some darker, more exhausted part of him…is reminded just how much he doesn’t want to be here in this world anymore. Not just in the arena. In the world. In this place where there are always people like that. People who hear pain and get off on it. People who think breaking someone open is the same thing as winning.

The thought comes and goes in one nasty flash.

He doesn’t linger on it.

Can’t.

Because now the voices are getting closer.

Way closer.

Steve freezes again.

Then very slowly, very carefully — he tucks himself even further down into the sleeping bag and pulls the opening up around his face, leaving only the barest gap to breathe through and hear. Every part of him goes stock-still, not even by choice really, just survival. His whole body knows what to do before his head catches up.

Below him, branches crack.

Leaves crunch.

Multiple footfalls.

The voices get clearer.

Not clear enough to map every word right away, but enough.

The Careers.

Of course.

Who else would be laughing like the devil himself just bought them drinks?

Their voices overlap in ugly little bursts the closer they get. Different tones, different rhythms, all carrying the same shit under it — adrenaline, triumph, savagery.

Tommy’s the loudest.

Motherfucker.

Shamelessly boasting. Half his volume seems generated by his own need to hear himself. Glimmer’s voice cuts through next, stupid and airy and sharp in that way popular girls get when they’re talking about ruining somebody’s life in a school hallway instead of participating in murder. Marvel sounds almost normal if you don’t listen to what he’s actually saying — some brainwashed jock laugh, too boyish for the violence underneath it. Carol barely talks, but when she does? It comes out thin and viperous and mean enough to curdle milk.

They all stop somewhere nearby.

Not right under him.

A few trees off, maybe?

Still, they’re close enough now that Steve feels every single little sound like it’s happening on his own skin.

“She basically cooked herself,” Glimmer’s saying, and there’s a breathless little laugh in it that makes Steve’s stomach turn. “I mean, seriously. A fire?”

Tommy scoffs. “Stupidest shit I ever saw.”

Marvel laughs, “Dude, she had enough tarp to burrito herself and still did that instead.”

Carol’s voice cuts in next, all nasal and low and nasty. “Desperation makes people stupid as hell.”

“Yeah! But that bitch was like—built for the Olympics,” Marvel’s now reveling aloud, making Steve’s ears perk up. “She could bench like a dude, and that’s how she goes out in the end??”

Tommy snorts. “Kinda bummed. Thought she was gonna make it more fun.”

“Real shame,” Glimmer snickers. “There goes her Olympian future.”

“Poor thing,” Carol sighs.

Steve stays perfectly still in the sleeping bag.

His jaw tightens.

So it was a girl. Not you, though. Based on the way they’re describing her, it doesn’t match your physical description at all. You aren’t built like an Olympic medalist. You aren’t built to bench. You’re slender, waify and lithe.

Which also means it’s not Hannah, unless his instincts are way off.

Not Ro either, or Jack.

He feels relief bloom and rot at the same time.

Because it isn’t you, but it’s still somebody.

Steve wracks his brain, thinking…

“Seriously,” Tommy’s still snarking. “District ten’s already outta the race, and we ain’t even at twenty-four hours yet.”

The district helps narrow it down for Steve.

Mara, he thinks suddenly.

The District 10 girl. Built like an athlete. Strong. Fast. Olympian frame. He’d clocked her at training. So had everybody else. The way that the Careers are talking about her… too big to be smart enough, too physical to need strategy, too stupid to survive a cold night without a fire. It all tracks in the grossest, most cruel possible way. It has to be Mara.

Steve’s relief turns guilty so fast it makes him want to throw up. Bevause he just heard someone die and his body’s first instinct was, thank God it wasn’t Ren.

Which is true.

And ugly.

But true anyway.

The voices keep drifting closer and farther in weird little pockets as they shift positions below. Steve can practically map them all by sound now... Tommy, pacing some short, brash route between trees. Glimmer, right next to him as she laughs. Marvel, hanging slightly back, amused by his own existence… and then Carol — quieter than the rest, closer to the edges, like she’s always scanning while the others talk.

Then comes the sound of another set of footsteps.

Different.

Lighter.

Steve’s whole face tightens inside of the dark of the sleeping bag, his brows pinching with confusion.

Tommy calls out, loud and mocking and too close now for comfort. “Yo, lover girl—where the fuck you at?”

Steve’s eyes fly open wider.

Wait.

Wait, what?

Leaves crunch.

And then your voice comes through the dark.

“I’m here,” you holler back, calm as anything. Gentler than any of them are… softer by nature even when you’re trying not to be. “Just wanted to scope out the perimeter.”

Steve goes completely still.

Again.

What?

What the actual fuck?

Inside the sleeping bag, his mouth actually falls open.

You’re with them?

Not just with them in the broad bloodbath sense, not in some fleeting camera angle or temporary overlap while chaos happened around all of you.

You’re here.

In the dark.

With the fucking Career pack.

…and Tommy’s calling you lovergirl.

Steve’s brain nearly short circuits. And for one absolutely surreal, miserable second? He genuinely wonders if he’s still asleep up in this tree, and having some kind of psychotic little nightmare because there is just no way.

But there is.

Below, Tommy snorts. “Perimeter, huh?”

“I said I was here, didn’t I?” you answer.

Steve can hear the steadiness in your voice, even from up here. The care in it. You’re choosing every word before it leaves your mouth. Not too fast. Not defensive. Not playful either. Controlled in a way that makes it obvious you know exactly what line you’re walking and how thin it is.

Tommy’s boots scrape the ground. Closer now to you than the others, Steve can tell.

“You really missed the fun,” he smugly drawls. “Couldn’t even stick around for the show?”

Steve closes his eyes for one second, face twisted in disgust. Of course he’d say it like that. Show. Like a girl screaming herself to death by a campfire is halftime entertainment.

You answer without rushing.

“You had it handled.”

Simple.

Flat enough to count as practical. 

Not warm, not meek. But also not matching his energy.

Steve can’t see your face from here, not properly — only slices of the group through leaves and moonlight when he dares shift the sleeping bag opening enough to peek. He does, of course. Slowly… cautiously...

And there you are.

Down there between tree trunks and shadows, with your braid gone a little messier now and your whole body carrying itself with that quiet certainty he’s quickly learning is somehow far more unnerving than if you were all swagger and bluster. You don’t match them. That’s the thing. Even now. Even among knives and bloodshed and moonlight… you don’t belong with them. You look like somebody who took a wrong turn into another species.

Tommy’s now towering over you.

Carol’s standing a little behind him, expression unreadably foul in the dim of nightfall. Glimmer’s hanging near his shoulder, while Marvel’s slightly to the left, looking between the two of you like he’s watching a tennis match he may or may not want to fuck.

Tommy says, “Yeah? Then what was so goddamn important?”

“I was seeing if anyone else was close enough to be useful,” you reply — still no tremor, no overplay. Just that answer, laid down clean.

Carol immediately cuts in. “Useful how?”

“To all of us,” you clarify, and Steve’s stomach turns over because you sound so believable it pisses him off. “See if there’s any more signs of life.”

Tommy laughs once through his nose. “And?”

“No sign of anyone.”

Steve feels heat flare up the back of his neck.

No sign of anyone?

Seriously?

That’s what you’re doing?

Helping them look for him?

He almost moves before he remembers where he is, almost rips the sleeping bag open and gets himself killed out of sheer offended bewilderment. He has to literally bite down his lip to keep from cursing at himself out loud, thankful as hell for the damn rope keeping him strapped the fuck in.

No sign of anyone, he repeats silently, horrified.

You mean him.

You mean him.

“Then why’d you bother?” Carol speaks again, suspicious and sharp. 

A beat falls.

And in that beat, Steve’s mind races so hard it almost trips itself.

Because what the fuck is happening?

You are down there with killers in the middle of the night talking strategy, and they are all clearly asking you about him — and every instinct in him is going there!—see? I knew it, I fucking knew it, she was playing me the whole time, you stupid asshole.

Then you respond, perfectly calm, “Because the more of them we thin out, the easier it is to get to the real threat.”

Everything below goes quiet for a handful of seconds.

Tommy especially.

Steve can practically hear the way that lands with him.

Eventually Tommy scoffs, because of course his big fat fucking ego won’t let anything else happen. “I’m the threat here.”

You let just enough silence sit to make it mean something.

Then merely say, “sure.”

Not sarcastically. Not disrespectfully. And yet worse than either one of those because it sounds thoughtful, bordering on nonchalance.

Steve’s eyes narrow as he watches this all play out.

What the hell kind of game are you playing?

Tommy shifts on his feet. Glimmer says nothing at all now, staring at you and glancing up at Tommy through her lashes with morbid curiosity. Marvel’s now gone quiet. Carol’s face is still impossible to read, especially from this angle, but even she looks like she’s listening harder.

You have their attention.

So you keep going.

“It doesn’t change the fact that everyone in the arena is thinking about him.”

There it is.

There he is.

The room — or rather, the patch of dark forest under his tree — goes strange and eerily still around the words you’ve spoken, and Steve feels every one of them. Because you’re right. And all of them know you’re right.

Tommy feels threatened by him. That much is obvious in the way his volume keeps jumping whenever his name gets too close to the conversation. Carol feels threatened by him because Steve Harrington is unpredictable and she’s smart enough to hate that in other people. Glimmer had wanted him, couldn’t get him…and is very still much bitter enough about it to carry his fucking bow like a trophy. Marvel feels it too, though he’d never name it — because Steve is the version of a marketable boy that Marvel can’t quite manage to become no matter how well his jaw photographs.

And you… somehow know that too.

Below, Tommy’s voice gets lower. “Then tell me where the hell he is.”

You answer immediately. “He wouldn’t stay near the nearest water source.”

Steve’s entire body goes cold.

What?

“Why not,” Tommy demands, curt but low.

“Because that’d be too obvious.”

Steve stares into the dark gap of the sleeping bag opening like maybe that’ll help it all start making sense if he glares hard enough.

He wouldn’t stay near the nearest water source…

That’s literally where the hell he’s camped out right now. Yet here you are — talking about him with the sort of certainty that says you know how he thinks. And you’re giving them a read on it.

Helping them hunt him down.

Holy shit.

That’s what you’re doing?

…or—

No.

No, because something’s wrong with that too. 

Because if you were really trying to help them find him…? Why say “wouldn’t stay there” unless you were steering them somewhere else?

But then why mention water at all?

Why not say nothing?

Why not—

Fucking hell.

His thoughts are a whole rabid knot now, too tangled up and too fast to sort cleanly.

Below, Tommy’s still on you. “You seem real sure about that.”

You take a slow, deep breath through your nose. Steve can actually see it in the slim line of your shoulders.

“I spent a week with him,” you say. “You asked what I learned. I’m telling you. He works alone, and he’s not stupid enough to camp somewhere obvious.”

Steve feels outrage and confusion fighting in him so hard it’s almost funny.

Oh, okay.

Cool.

So all those rooftop confessions, and soft looks, and whatever-the-fuck-else apparently came with a side of psychological profiling for the enemy.

Awesome. Great.

He fucking knew it. He fucking knew it.

You don’t love him. You were playing him the whole time.

He’s an idiot. A complete moron. An absolute clown in combat boots.

…and yet?

…even inside that fury, there’s something that won’t sit right.

Because your voice doesn’t sound vicious. Doesn’t sound pleased, or sound like Carol’s does when she sniffs out blood. It sounds… careful. Too careful. Like you’re setting plates down on a table full of explosives while pretending it’s not delicate work.

Tommy steps closer to you now.

He’s making his title as alpha in this group alliance clear with the mere step. Steve can tell by the shift in the Careers. By the way Marvel hangs back and even Glimmer goes quiet. Carol too. They all let Tommy do his thing.

Because he’s the ring leader.

Tommy’s voice comes lower now. Meaner. Not loud, but intimidating, intimate in the ugliest way… like pressure test.

“I know you got a soft spot for those little ones too, sweetheart.”

Steve’s eyes narrow.

There it is.

That’s what he means!

That’s what he’s fucking saying!

Jack. Hannah. Ro.

You’ve been looking after the littles inside the training center all week. Mostly Hannah and Jack, but you also clocked Ro in the corner — watching Steve, quietly admiring him afar, looking at him like he hung the moon and the stars.

Tommy doesn’t even say their names. He doesn’t need to. The implication is all over it and that’s when Steve realizes with a weird, sick sort of clarity that Tommy doesn’t entirely believe in whatever role you're feeding to them. He’s probing. Looking for weakness. Looking for the point where your poker face changes or where your breath catches or where he can smell sentiment and crack you wide open with it. Bust you for it with an aha!

So you don’t blink.

At least not noticeably.

Not from up here.

Whatever you’re saying back, you say it after exactly the right pause — long enough to sound thoughtful, short enough not to be suspicious — and Steve can’t even fully hear the beginning of it because blood is rushing too hard in his ears, but he catches the end of it.

“…if they stay out of our way, they stay out of it. If they don’t, they don’t.”

That makes the whole group go still again.

Steve blinks.

Because that’s… not an outright lie.

It’s also not the truth.

And from where he’s hidden up here, mouth slightly hung open like the most agitated owl in all of North America, he suddenly realizes there is way more happening here than he understands.

Because if you were truly with them, that answer wouldn’t be necessary.

If you were against them, you’d already be dead.

…which means you’re doing something in between.

Something dangerous.

Something he cannot yet map.

Tommy studies you for a long moment. Then he steps back at long last, lifts his chin, and smirks. “Alright, then,” he says. “Lead the way, lonesome dove.”

The nickname lands uncomfortably in Steve’s chest.

You give all of them one last cool look, nod once, and start moving again. No hesitation, no stuttered step. Just onward into the trees like you belong at the front of the pack.

Carol falls in right behind you.

Right on your heels, basically.

Marvel catches up on your other side after a beat, saying something low that Steve can’t make out. But it makes his nose scrunch anyway with immediate sourness anyway because he does not need to hear the words to know the vibe. Marvel’s into you. That much is obvious even from here. He’s been into you since you all were back at the Capitol and all that smug little district-one face of his ever does around you is remind him of that.

Steve hates that.

He doesn’t want to hate it.

But he does.

Below, Tommy and Glimmer hang back a few extra seconds — and Steve, still peeking through the narrow slit in the sleeping bag, catches the shift in Glimmer’s snobby face when she looks up at Tommy. She doesn’t appear to be jealous exactly. Just suspicious. Annoyed. Predatory in that soft blonde way that disguises itself as flirtation until you look too long.

“Do you really trust her?” she asks him in a whisper.

Tommy shrugs one shoulder. Not a real shrug. A performance of casualness.

“Trust?” he repeats. “Nah.”

Glimmer’s mouth curls. “Then why are we following her?”

“Because she’s the closest thing we got to a map.”

Steve’s jaw tightens.

Oh, so I’ve got my own map now?

Tommy smirks down at Glimmer then, and the whole dynamic between them shifts into something slimier.

“She gets us to him, we use her. She doesn’t, we don’t.”

She hums pleasantly.

Flirtily.

“Think maybe,” Glimmer purrs, crowding Tommy’s space, batting her lashes, “you could use me a little bit too?”

Steve frowns. 

Ew?

“Mm,” Tommy purrs right back, husky and throaty as he smirks down at her with male hunger and diabolical ideas. “Thinkin’ I can get lots more use outta you.”

Gross.

Just instantly gross.

Glimmer giggles. “Oh yeah?” 

“Oh yeah.” Tommy traces one meaty finger along her waist, down to the divet where her crotch-line begins. “They don’t call you glimmer for nothing, right?”

Alright. 

Steve’s ready to barf up a lung. Guess we move on fast, he thinks to himself with the utmost disdain. Not heartbroken for long, are you chick?

The two savages keep their little dance going for another minute. Glimmer leans in a little too much, her fingers brushing Tommy’s brawny chest under his shirt like she’s petting a feral dog that bites for sport. He says something back that Steve thankfully can’t fully hear now, because if he heard the whole thing he might actually throw up in the sleeping bag.

It’s verbal sex.

That’s what it is.

Nasty. Transactional. Obvious. Glimmer plays her own angle because this is how she survives — through being wanted, through being lustfully desired. Being decorative enough to disarm and useful enough not to discard. Tommy plays right into it because power turns him on almost as much as flesh does.

And all the while. Steve, from thirty feet up a tree, is forced to witness all of it like the universe specifically enjoys humiliating him.

“God,” he mouths silently, curling his upper lip in disgust. “Fucking nasty.”

But even under that revulsion, another thought needles in.

Everyone in here has a tactic.

Glimmer has hers. Tommy has his. Carol has knives and venom. Marvel has charm and idiocy and brute alliance.

And you…

What the hell is yours?

He can’t really figure you out.

Not even now.

Not with you literally standing in the middle of the Career pack, feeding them just enough truth and just enough bullshit to stay alive.

And that’s what really keeps needling Steve, more than the anger, more than the betrayal he keeps trying on and can’t quite make fit right.

Because he can’t buy you as vicious.

He just can’t.

Not fully.

Not even with every cynical cell in his body begging him to.

You don’t belong with those savages. That much feels obvious… even when you’re walking in the middle of them. Nothing in your posture matches theirs. Nothing in your voice. Nothing in your face. You’re too measured. Too gentle. Too fucking human in ways they aren’t.

Too real.

And worse, he has evidence.

Too much of it.

Back at the training center. The way you took care of Hannah and Jack when neither one of them was doing a great job pretending not to be terrified. The way you quietly made space for Ro to orbit Steve without ever embarrassing him for it. He wouldn’t have even clocked the kid shadowing him, not really, if you hadn’t leaned in that one day with that soft little smile and told him… “I think you have a shadow.”

Ro had gone pink to the ears then vanished behind the pillar.

You hadn’t laughed.

You’d just let Steve turn and notice that for himself.

And before the Capitol — before all this — even back in Hawkins, he knows what he knows. You loved your grandfather. You loved working at the bakery. You gave away what you, or your family’s business, couldn’t afford to give in the middle of the apocalypse because there were people hungrier than you. He’d seen it. Not up close. Not all the time. But enough.

Enough to know there’s good in you.

Enough to make this feel impossible.

Which means either he’s a complete sucker.

Or there’s still more to this.

Below, Tommy and Glimmer finally start moving again, their silhouettes now sliding after you and the other two through the dark until all five of you are slipping farther and farther away through the trees.

Steve keeps watching until he can’t.

Until the sound of all your footsteps gets fainter.

Until the darkness swallows your shapes whole.

Only then does he let himself sink back down into the stiff sleeping bag fully, pulling it up over his head…and staring into the blackness of it with eyes that feel way too open.

He is not sleeping again.

That much is clear.

No shot.

Not after that.

Not after hearing somebody die.

Not after hearing the Careers laugh about it.

Not after hearing you among them.

His mind keeps twitching back toward the practical side of things, because if he doesn’t force it there? Then it’ll stay with you and that’s apparently where all roads in his head want to go tonight.

Fine.

Practical.

Tomorrow.

He needs food.

Needs a real weapon.

The knife is good, sure. Thanks, Carol, you psychotic bitch. But one knife is not enough to work with. He needs range. Needs something with reach, with more options than stabbing something (or someone) in self defense. He can sharpen more branches into spears, maybe. Try fishing in the stream… well, if there’re even fish to fish in the damn thing. No telling. Could be just a decorative, useful stream for all he knows, designed solely for hydration. Or it could be full of mutant eels designed by some asshole with a bow tie and a cruelty kink.

Steve exhales through his nose.

Keep trying to think like that, he orders himself.

Fish. Spears. Traps. Morning. Sunlight. Water. Movement.

But every single practical thought still bleeds back into you.

If you’re with Hannah and Jack— No. He doesn’t know that.

If you’re with the Careers— You are. He just heard it.

If you’re playing them— To what end?

If you’re not— Then what the fuck is wrong with him that he still can’t hate you for it?

He pulls the sleeping bag up over more of himself and shuts his eyes. Tries to will his body back into sleep. Below, the arena forest keeps breathing and creaking and existing like nothing happened. Farther off, the pack of Careers and you keep moving deeper into the night.

And all the while, Steve lies awake up in the tree, thinking about you so hard that it feels like a disease, trying to plan for fish and sharpened branches and tomorrow’s daylight… because all of that is easier than admitting the much worse truth: he still has no fucking clue what game you’re playing.

And he hates that it doesn’t make him stop caring whether or not you survive it.

By the time the clock above the old Hawkins High gym rolls over towards midnight, the whole place smells like stale coffee, sweat, damp blankets, and fear. Not cinematic box office fear. Not screaming, panicked, everybody-run fear.

This is the slower kind.

The kind that settles into a room and stays there for ten straight hours until it starts feeling like another body among the living. Another presence breathing down everyone’s neck while the giant projector screen keeps shifting through angles of the arena, through moonlit trees and hidden cameras and children sleeping in places no child should ever have to learn how to survive inside of.

The Games have been live for ten hours.

Ten fucking hours.

And the gymnasium is still packed.

That alone says everything there is to say about Hawkins, Indiana. No one’s gone home. Not really. A few people have drifted out and back in — maybe changed shifts, maybe gone to fetch blankets, coffee, pain pills, cigarettes, casseroles, whatever the hell people in Hawkins bring one another when the world is ending again and nobody’s sure how to stop it. But the room is still full. The bleachers are still crowded, the folding chairs are still taken and the gym floor is still shoulder-to-shoulder with the bodies of citizens that should have gone home to sleep… and simply have not.

And right up front, exactly where they’d planted themselves when this whole thing began, the kids are still there.

Dustin, Mike, Lucas, Erica, and Will haven’t budged from their post once. Not to stretch. Not to eat properly. Not to do anything but survive on a ridiculous combination of adrenaline, junk food, and sheer stubbornness.

At this point, it’s honestly a little impressive… but also? It’s kinda ridiculous. Dustin is trying to say something about the latest camera angle as he yawns straight through the middle of the sentence so hard his jaw nearly unhinges. He blinks furiously afterward like he can guilt and shame his own body into cooperation, his curls flattened on one side from where he definitely dozed off while sitting up at some point and then denied it.

“I’m just saying,” he starts again, young voice rough and sleepy, “if they keep cutting away from Steve every five seconds, then whoever’s controlling the feeds is a literal fascist.”

Mike, planted beside him in his own purple sleeping bag like a kid stubbornly refusing to admit he’s freezing, doesn’t even turn his head when he answers.

“I don’t think that’s what fascist means.”

His eyes are technically open.

But only technically.

He’s staring at the projector with the glassy, dissociative focus of somebody who’s been awake too long and is now seeing through objects instead of the objects themselves. He looks dead asleep, his eyes wide open — somehow still participating in the argument anyway, which honestly feels very on brand for Mike Wheeler.

Dustin points accusingly. “That’s exactly what a fascist would say.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m right.”

“You’re drooling.”

Dustin immediately wipes at his mouth in horror.

Will smiles into the edge of his quilt blanket without looking away from the screen, tucked between them with his rumpled up sleeping bag zipped high and the walkie-talkie cradled in one hand.

That’s the thing about Will.

At this point, he’s probably the most awake out of all of them. Not because he isn’t tired. He’s exhausted. All of them are. It’s in little the blue half-moons under his sweet eyes, the way his voice has gone softer within the hour and the fact that every now and then, when he thinks that no one’s looking, he presses the heel of his hand lightly against his chest — like he’s steadying something there. But he’s still the sharpest one in the bunch right now, and a lot of that has to do with the walkie-talkie clipped between his fingers.

Because Joyce and Jonathan are still awake too.

Still over at their place with your grandfather.

Still communicating quietly with Will every so often in that strange, tender way that families in Hawkins have all learned to do since the apocalypse made radios and codes and checking in second nature.

On the other side of Lucas, Erica is basically gone.

Not metaphorically.

She’s dead asleep — fully curled up on her side with her blanket cocooned around her and her three My Little Pony figurines tucked against her chest like trusty bodyguards on overnight duty. They've seen some shit over the last couple years, and yet they’ve survived it all… right alongside her. Erica’s face is all scrunched up and solemn in slumber, lashes resting against her cheeks, one little hand still clamped around the edge of the blanket like if she loosens her grip, she’ll fall right out of the world.

Lucas groggily glances at her, then back at the screen, then at her again.

He’s trying so hard to stay awake that his eyes have gone nearly feral in the effort. They keep drooping shut for a second or two at a time, and then jerking open again like he’s personally offended by his own exhaustion.

“I’m awake,” he mutters, unprompted.

No one had accused him of anything.

Dustin snorts.

Mike peers over at him, eyes still half dead. “You literally look embalmed.”

“Still awake.”

“Sure.”

Will reaches across and nudges Lucas’s arm lightly with the back of his fingers. “You can blink, y’know.”

Lucas blinks exactly once. Slow… rabid… too deliberate. Then he squints back at the projector screen like he’s proving a point to God.

The live feed tonight has been doing that particularly “Capitol thing” where it behaves like the audience’s curiosity is the same thing as narrative importance. It doesn’t split-screen. It doesn’t show everything all at once. It cuts where the producers want it to cut, lingers where the game makers think there’s drama to milk, and right now that means Steve’s been almost comically absent from the coverage.

Every now and then they’ll get a glimpse of him.

Just enough to prove he’s still there.

Still alive, high up in that tree, bundled into his sleeping bag and tied off to the branch like some weirdly handsome survival burrito with a sharpened stick and a knife and all the bad luck in the world.

But the focus tonight… has heavily been on you.

You and the Careers.

The screen flickers now to another wide shot of the cornucopia — silvered by moonlight and ugly in its stillness. The giant golden mouth of it looks almost holy from a distance, which is exactly the sort of sick joke the Capitol loves best. And right there on top of it, perched like a lone little star somebody set too high to reach, is you.

Wrapped in tarp.

Curled against the metal.

Looking up at the sky.

Even from this distance, even through a glitchy projector that keeps blurring ever so slightly whenever somebody walks in front of it, you look unreal in the moonlight. The braid in your hair has loosened in all the right ways, wispy and coppered and soft around your face. Your eyes reflect what little light there is, which makes you look almost otherworldly. Not weak. Never weak. Just… impossibly serene compared to where you are and who’s sleeping below you.

The Careers are all down at the base of the cornucopia, tucked in around the dead remains of a small campfire they were smart enough to put out fast. Glimmer and Tommy are too close together, even while pretending they aren’t. Carol is all sharp little angles and quiet resentment. Marvel’s wrapped in part of their own tarp situation, looking like a boy who has somehow convinced himself he’s camping at a music festival instead of inside a state-sponsored death match.

And then there’s you up there alone… because apparently, even among killers that have included you in their alliance, you had enough sense to realize that sleeping within arm’s reach of any of them… was a stupid way to get your throat cut before sunrise.

Dustin points at the screen with a tired sort of reverence. “See? See? She knows what she’s doing.”

Mike rubs at one eye. “Yeah, because she’s not an idiot.”

“Exactly.”

“That’s not exactly—”

“It is exactly.”

Will doesn’t look away from you. “She’s making it hard for them.”

Lucas yawns into his own fist and nods sleepily. “Yeah.”

Dustin turns toward him. “Thank you.”

“I’m not agreeing with you, Dustin—I’m agreeing with Will.”

“That’s still agreeing with me.”

Lucas makes a face, mocking him in that adorably mocking childlike tone. “Yer-still-agreeing-wif-meeeehh...”

Erica makes a tiny grumbling sound in her sleep and curls tighter around her ponies.

Lucas immediately softens. The whole fighting-sleep, snarky older-brother thing drops right off his face. He leans over and tugs her blanket up a little higher around her shoulders with the most careful hands in the world… then gently scoops one of the ponies that’s nearly fallen free and tucks it back against her chest.

Dustin watches that happen, blinks once, then says in a yawn-whisper, “You’re such a sap.”

Lucas doesn’t even look at him. “Shut up.”

Will’s walkie crackles softly.

He straightens a little, tearing his eyes away from the screen while he clicks it on, his voice automatically dropping to that quiet nighttime register everybody back home seems to know now without discussing.

Joyce’s voice comes through, gentle and low and tired enough to ache. “Hey, honey.”

Will smiles instantly.

No matter what’s happening, that’s what his mother’s voice does to him.

“Hey, Mom.”

“You doing alright?”

“Yeah.”

There’s a pause in which every single one of his friends very pointedly does not listen while absolutely listening.

Then Joyce clicks in again, “Burdock finally fell asleep. Jonathan’s with him now. I’ve got a roast going in the crockpot. Should last us the week.” There’s a soft pause before she adds, “gotta make sure we keep him fed, given the meds.”

Will’s eyes flick toward the screen again where you’re still lying awake, eyes to the stars. “Is he gonna be okay?”

“Yeah, baby. We’re keeping an eye on him. Don’t you worry.”

Will swallows, worrying anyway. “Okay.”

“I’m gonna come get you in a little bit.”

Her son opens his mouth to protest automatically, then closes it again because he knows it’s useless. It’s Joyce. She could be exhausted down to the marrow and still move heaven and earth to retrieve her cub if she decided he needed his own bed tonight.

“You don’t have to,” he tries anyway.

“I do.”

“I’m okay here.”

“I know you are.”

That’s the thing with Joyce. She never says I know you aren’t when he says he’s okay. She never makes him feel babied in it. She just tells the truth in her own direction and lets it rest there between them.

“I’m still gonna come get you,” she repeats softly. “We just… need to all be together. In case of anything. Make sure we keep Burdock going. No matter what happens.”

Will glances down at his sleeping bag, then over at Dustin and Mike and Lucas…even Erica, passed out beside them all. And his face does that little complicated thing that it always does when he’s trying to be brave and good and independent all at once.

“Okay, Mama.”

Joyce softens through the static. “See you in twenty, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Love you.”

“Love you too.”

The walkie clicks off.

Dustin turns his head at once. “Is she on the way?”

Will nods, hugging his knees to his chest as he stares down at his feet.

Mike’s brow furrows as he watches his best friend. Then he pats his shoulder. “You should go.”

Will looks at him, clocking the way his very best friend’s tone holds zero inflection. Mike’s eyes are still half asleep and red-rimmed — but he offers Will a crooked little smile and means it. He always does.

“Can’t hurt to be in our own bed,” he adds, quieter. “You need sleep.”

“We all need sleep,” Dustin mutters.

“Then why are you still talking?”

“Because I’m committed to the cause, Wheeler.”

Lucas snorts tiredly as they all look towards the projector again.

The screen cuts to another feed.

Foxface, deep in the woods, tucked into some little hidden pocket of the forest that makes her look less like prey and more like a ghost that learned how to burrow. She’s not asleep yet. Just still and awake, fox-eyed and listening, her pale face drawn tight with the kind of quiet intelligence that doesn’t get to rest even when the body does.

Then another cut.

Thresh in the tall grass on the opposite side of the arena, nearly impossible to see until the camera angle shifts and suddenly there he is — this huge dark shape gone nearly invisible in the field because he had the good sense to become part of the landscape instead of standing against it.

…then it cuts to Ro.

The kids sit up straighter all at once.

Because Ro, somehow, has made himself the coolest little survival nest in history.

He’s bundled high up in a tree branch cluster that really does look like a tiny makeshift bed — his oversized windbreaker pulled around himself like a cocoon, little knapsack tied up nearby, walking stick secured across a branch within reach. He’s curled into a ball so small and contained he almost doesn’t look real.

“He’s awesome,” Lucas whispers, no irony in it at all.

“He’s literally ten times cooler than any grown man I know,” Dustin agrees.

Mike nods solemnly, looking about three seconds away from passing away in his sleeping bag, watching Ro’s image with childlike admiration. “That’s true.”

Will smiles. “He kind of looks like a baby bird.”

“Yeah, a baby bird with survival instincts,” Dustin yawns obnoxiously. “I’d die for him.”

“Dustin,” Mike grumbles, exhaustedly grouchy.

“I said what I said.”

Eddie arrives just in time to hear that.

“Good,” he cuts in, clapping his hands once. “Now that we’re done assigning everyone in the arena bird classifications and discussing who all we’d die for, s’time you little goblins start hauling your asses back to bed.”

The collective groan that rises from the floor is immediate and heartfelt.

Eddie stands over them with his hands on his hips, expression caught somewhere between big-brother fondness and a man trying very hard not to laugh at how pathetic they all look. He’s been running on fumes for hours himself, but somehow he’s still all there. Still wired enough to wrangle them, still patient enough not to snap, still exactly the sort of secondary babysitter Steve would trust with his life and every single one of these kids.

“But we’ll lose our spots,” Dustin whines.

“Nah-ah!” Edie wags a finger like some substitute teacher. “No arguing. I’m the boss here.”

Dustin looks personally offended. “Excuse you?”

“You heard me, Henderson.”

“No.”

“That sounds like a you problem.”

“We’re watching.”

“You’ve been watching for ten straight hours.”

“No shit.”

“That is not helping your case.”

Dustin actually sits up straighter in indignation. “Steve needs me here. How else are we gonna land him more sponsorships?”

Eddie sighs softly as he slowly kneels down in front of him without a single ounce of irritation in his face, clearly considering his next words with care.

That’s what gets Dustin every time, really. Eddie never talks to him like he’s stupid. He never makes him feel dramatic for feeling too much. Never waves him off like some hyper little nuisance… even when he is objectively being a hyper little nuisance.

“I know he does,” Eddie says.

Dustin’s shoulders drop by one inch.

“I know,” Eddie repeats, gentler. “But you falling flat on your face, all ‘cause you didn’t sleep for a damn minute?… isn’t gonna help him tomorrow, is it?”

Dustin opens his mouth, closes it...

Then opens it again, defeatedly murmuring, “no...”

“There you go.”

“…but—”

“And,” Eddie cuts in, not harshly, just steadily, “everyone here’s already given what they can give for tonight, okay? More’ll happen tomorrow. More can always happen tomorrow. But you gotta survive till then first.”

That part hits.

Of course it does.

Because Dustin knows. He knows everyone back home is stretched to the bone. Knows people pooled together what little they had because they love Steve… and because they love the idea of defying the Capitol, even if they can’t say it that way out loud. He knows that. He hadn’t meant it like that. Hadn’t meant more money, right now, or else. He’d only meant action. Presence. Loyalty.

Even so, the reminder makes him go sheepish in the most Dustin way possible — chin tucking in, mouth doing that little guilty purse while he stares down at his own sleeping bag zipper.

Eddie just waves it off immediately.

“Hey.” He flicks two fingers lightly at Dustin’s knee. “I know what you meant.”

Dustin looks up timidly through his lashes.

“You’re not doing any less by going to sleep,” Eddie winks. “You’re just postponing the annoying part of yourself till morning.”

That gets a laugh out of all of them — even Mike, who sounds like he’s being euthanized by exhaustion.

“Come on,” Eddie grunts, standing again. “Up. Everybody up.”

He turns toward Lucas and Erica and his whole face changes.

Softens right down to something tender and fond.

Because Erica is fully passed out now… her little mouth parted, one pony halfway tucked beneath her cheek. Eddie crouches beside her like she’s made of glass and gently smooths a hand over her blanket first, like he’s giving her body a second to register safety before he touches her.

“Erica,” he whispers softly. “Hey, superstar.”

Her eyelids flutter.

He rubs her arm once, light and careful, all then patience in the world.

“C’mon, sweetheart.”

Erica makes the tiniest little noise, blinks awake with profound offense at the concept of consciousness, and then — without even pretending she’s gonna walk — just sleepily lifts both arms toward him.

Eddie grins.

There it is. The sweetest, softest grin imaginable on a man who looks like he should be fronting a metal band in the parking lot of hell.

“That’s what I thought,” he whispers as he gathers her up, blanket and ponies and all, and settles her against his chest with absurd ease. 

Erica barely even wakes fully, just tucks her face into his shoulder and keeps existing there like a sleepy little queen being relocated by staff. Meanwhile, Lucas is already picking up the My Little Pony figurines without being asked. Of course he is. He looks so far gone with tiredness that it almost hurts to watch… but he’s still making sure none of his sister’s things get left behind. One by one he scoops them up, eyes half-shut, his bandana still knotted around his head and somehow making the whole scene even more ridiculously dear.

Eddie reaches out and ruffles the top of th kid’s head.

Lucas squints up at him through the sleepiest grin alive.

“What?” he mumbles.

“Nothin’,” Eddie murmurs. “You’re just a good brother.”

Lucas rolls his eyes, which would be more effective if they weren’t threatening to close between blinks. “Don’t make it weird.”

“Too late.”

Mike, meanwhile, is gathering his stuff in what can only be described as slow motion. He moves like somebody underwater, collecting his shit. Blanket. Backpack. Walkie. Then he stares at the backpack for a solid three seconds like he’s forgotten what a backpack is.

Eddie watches for a second and physically bites back a laugh. Then just reaches down and helps zip the thing up for him without comment.

Mike looks up, dazed. “Thanks.”

“Anytime, Wheeler.”

Will stays put, eye still on the screen, knees drawn to his chest.

Eddie notices immediately. “Byers, your mom on the way?”

Will nods. “Yeah.”

“You want us to hang till she gets here?”

It’s asked so simply. No fuss, no obligated guilt. Just a real offer.

Will looks up at him, eyes warm and heavy-lidded and too old for how young he still is. “It’s okay,” he says softly. “Really.”

Eddie studies him for half a beat.

Then nods. “Alright. But if some Capitol psycho crawls through the vent, you scream loud enough for me to hear it from the driveway, alright?”

That gets Will smiling for real.

“I will.”

“Good.”

The others are nearly all standing now, still in various states of zombiehood — Dustin with his blanket dragged over one shoulder like a tragic cape, Mike blinking at the floor, Lucas holding the three ponies and one end of Erica’s blanket trailing down from Eddie’s arms.

And then, because of course it would happen now, because this story apparently feeds itself with perfect little emotional knives whenever it pleases… the feed cuts back to you.

Not the Careers, resting inside the golden cornucopia.

Just you — lying up there on top of it, basked in moonlight, wrapped in tarp and looking up at the stars like maybe if you hold still enough, the sky will tell you how to survive tomorrow.

Eddie goes still for a handful of somber seconds.

Will notices, peeking up at him before he looks back at the screen too, settling his chin into his hands, elbows on his knees, like a kid at the edge of a bedtime he doesn’t want but can’t outrun.

The moonlight really is doing something unfair to you.

That’s the thing.

It isn’t just that you’re beautiful… though you are, painfully. It’s that there’s something almost impossible about the image of you right then. How ethereal your face looks from that angle, how your braid has half loosened, how your eyes seem to catch every scrap of silver-blue light and turn it into something holy.

Eddie looks at you and feels a weird little hush open up in his chest.

Nothing romantic.

More like the feeling of looking at a stained-glass window after a funeral and thinking, against your better judgment, maybe there’s still some good left somewhere after all.

Then he glances down at Will — who’s watching you like a little brother does. Sad, proud and homesick all at once. And meanwhile, Eddie (because he is apparently not equipped to keep certain thoughts fully to himself after ten straight hours of this) says quietly… 

“She really does know how to play the long game, huh?”

Will nods without taking his eyes off the screen. “Yeah.”

There’s no hesitation in it.

Zero doubt.

There’s only the certainty that children get when they’ve already decided what kind of person somebody is and aren’t interested in being talked out of it.

Eddie studies him for a second, then the screen again. “And you really think she’s doing all this for him?”

Will finally looks up at him. There’s tiredness in his face, sure. Grief too… but still, no uncertainty.

“I know she is.”

Just like that.

Eddie exhales through his nose.

Because yeah. He knows it, too. That’s the stupid part. The irrational part. The part that goes against the rules, the math, everything this Capitol death machine is built to enforce. He knows you’re doing this for Steve. He knows you’re risking your own neck to keep the pressure off his own. He knows you walked yourself right into a den of wolves and somehow made them feel like it was all their idea — just so Steve Harrington could have one more clean shot at staying alive.

And maybe it’s insane.

Maybe it’s all projection.

Maybe Hawkins, Indiana, has collectively lost its goddamn mind and decided to believe in impossible things, simply because reality has been too ugly for too long.

…still, Eddie believes it.

And if he believes that, then the next thought comes easier than it should.

“Maybe they both come home.”

Will blinks at the screen, then at Eddie over his shoulder. Not because the idea hasn’t occurred to him, but because hearing it out loud lands differently. There can only be one victor. Everybody knows that. It’s the rule. The cruelty. The whole point of this harsh reality voted into law.

And yet Eddie says it anyway. More than that, he says it with that weird, casual confidence of his — like he’s testing the possibility by giving it air.

Will stares at him for a second, then smiles.

It’s so bright and sad it nearly does Eddie in on the spot.

“Maybe,” Will agrees timidly, as if afraid to dare wish it out loud.

He doesn’t argue it, though. Doesn’t say that’s not how this works or but the rules don’t allow it. He just takes the impossible thought in his tired little hands and lets it sit there like something fragile and real.

Eddie nods once at him, satisfied. “Alright,” he murmurs, clearing his throat. “You stay put till your mama gets here.”

Will nods.

“And don’t let any assholes sweet-talk you into a ride home. Got it?”

“I won’t.”

“Also?” Eddie points, smirk impish. “It you don’t lemme know when your mom gets here, and walkie us when you guys make it back to the crib? You’re fired.”

Will’s smile widens. “Okay.”

“Okay. Good talk.”

Eddie herds the others out in slow sleepy stages, not unlike a very tired sheepdog with excellent hair — shorter cut and all. Dustin is still muttering. Mike is barely vertical. Lucas is still carrying the ponies like sacred relics, while Erica is still asleep in Eddie’s arms, totally limp with trust. But before they make it all the way toward the gym doors, the feed changes again.

…but then all of them stop.

Even Eddie.

Even Mike, half-asleep and bumping into Lucas as he rubs his eyes.

Because now the projector screen is showing the cave.

A real cave.

Not huge. Not deep. But concealed so damn well under branches and leaves and the natural shape of the earth that it almost looks fake at first, like some game maker’s planted sanctuary for a story beat t land on when the plot calls for it… and inside of it, curled together in a bundle of sleeping bag and young limbs and absolute fucking heartbreak, are two little tributes.

Hannah and Jack.

CHAPTER CONTINUES IN NEXT POST... (fuck tumblr’s “blocks” limits, ffs…)

[check back in this weekend !!]

Footsteps sound behind you.

Faint, wary…

You don’t turn right away to confirm whether or not it’s him. But something in your chest seizes anyway. Because you know. You know who it is before he even says anything.

There’s a pause.

And then?

“…hey.”

It’s quiet. Almost too quiet. Like the word itself didn’t want to be spoken too loudly in case it scared you off.

You turn.

Your eyes go a little wide without meaning to.

Because there he is.

Standing a few feet back, half in shadow, half caught in the spill of rooftop light. Different now than he was earlier. Stripped down to something simpler. That white t-shirt. Lounge pants. Bare feet like he didn’t bother with anything unnecessary before coming up here.

Steve looks… younger.

And more tired.

But still the boy you’ve loved nearly all your life.

Your mouth opens just slightly before you find your voice.

“Hey.”

It comes out softer than you expected.

But it’s enough.

Something in Steve’s expression shifts — just barely — like the word hit him somewhere he wasn’t braced for.

He nods once.

Stiff.

Wary.

Careful.

Then he moves.

Slowly.

Like approaching a wild animal he doesn’t want to startle.

He comes over and settles across from you along the ledge, leaving a few stretches of space between you that feels much bigger than it actually is. He leans back against the wall, one knee drawn up, forearm resting over it, gaze turning outward toward the city like yours had been.

For a while, neither of you says anything.

And while the silence isn’t empty, it’s… loaded. Heavy in a way that presses against your ribs and makes your breathing feel louder than it is.

You’re aware of him.

Every second of it.

The way he shifts slightly beside you.

The way his puppy brown eyes flick once toward you… then away again, like he caught himself.

The way he exhales through his nose — slow, controlled, like he’s trying not to feel something too loudly.

You don’t know what to say.

You’re almost afraid to speak at all.

Because the last time you spoke freely, you changed everything.

And the last time he spoke, he—

You swallow.

Don’t go there, you tell yourself. Not yet.

Steve finally clears his throat. It’s quiet, but it breaks the tension just enough. “You should be asleep,” he says, snot looking at you.

It’s not sharp.

It’s not accusing.

It’s just… there.

You glance at him, then back out at the city.

“So should you.”

“Yeah,” he mutters.

Another beat.

The music below swells. Someone screams in delight. Fireworks — of all the fucking things — flare briefly in the distance, bright colors blooming against the dark like it’s a holiday instead of a countdown to slaughter.

You hate it.

You hug your knees tighter.

“Do you think any of them are?” he asks suddenly.

You blink. “Any of who?”

“The tributes,” he clarifies simply, eyes on the skyscrapers. “Sleeping.”

Your stomach twists.

You shake your head slightly. “No.”

“Yeah,” he says, like he already knew. His jaw tightens a little as he stares down at the city. “Kids definitely aren’t.”

You nod silently, heart bruising all over again as the names run through your head like lost boys and lost girls on the night…

Hannah.

Jack.

Ro.

Too small. Too young. Too terrified.

You can see their faces if you let yourself think about it too hard.

So you don’t.

“Careers probably aren’t either,” he adds after a moment, voice going a little flatter. “Doesn’t matter how cocky they are. No one sleeps the night before they might die.”

You hum faintly in agreement.

There’s nothing else to say to that.

The truth of it just sits there.

Between you.

Below you.

Everywhere.

Steve glances at you again.

You don’t notice.

You’re still looking out at all the chaos below, eyes distant, expression softer now… but more closed off than it used to be.

There’s a difference.

He sees it.

Feels it.

It makes something in his chest pull tight.

Distance.

There’s distance now.

Not just the few feet between you on the ledge.

Something else.

Something he put there.

Distance he’s instilled, even though you acted in it first thing morning.

Now he’s solidified it.

And he hates it.

Doesn’t know how to fix it.

Doesn’t know if he’s allowed to.

Doesn’t know why he wants to…

“Are they… in costume or something?” he asks, now nodding faintly toward the crowds below, eyes narrowed at the scene.

You follow his gaze.

Tilt your head slightly.

A sad little almost-smile touches your mouth.

“Who knows,” you say softly. “How can you tell?”

He huffs under his breath.

“Fair.”

You watch a group of Capitol citizens spinning in circles below, painted and jeweled and glowing under artificial light like they’re all part of some twisted parade.

“Everything here looks like a costume,” you add.

He nods slowly.

Yeah.

It does.

Everything except you, Steve thinks to himself absently.

He squints at it a second longer. Then looks away because he can’t stomach it anymore. Can’t stand the sight of glorified manslaughter below, like it’s The Purge Act all over again… just with rules still in place for those “fortunate” to stick around and live by them, here inside the elite walls of Panem.

Steve’s head tips back against the wall. Eyes closing briefly. Breathing in… breathing out… breathing in… out…

He knows what he has to do.

He knows it.

He just…

Doesn’t want to say it wrong.

Doesn’t want to make it worse.

Doesn’t want to look at you and see fear again.

He exhales slowly, then lifts his head and looks at you. 

“Ren?”

You turn again, your eyes still a little wide. A little cautious.

It guts him.

“I…” He scrubs a hand over the back of his neck. “About earlier—” He stops, starts again. “That—what I said. The way I said it.”

Your gaze softens.

You don’t dare interrupt.

You just listen.

Patient.

God, you’re so fucking patient.

“I shouldn’t have… snapped like that,” he says, voice tighter now. “I shouldn’t have yelled at you. That’s—” He shakes his head. “That’s not… me. Or least, it’s not—” His jaw flexes. “Who I used to be.”

There’s so much unspoken shame behind that sentence, it kills you softly.

You almost smile at him through the ache you feel in your soul.

“It’s alright—”

“No.” He cuts in immediately.

Not harsh.

Just… firm.

Your mouth closes.

Steve shakes his head again, more frustrated now — but this time, it’s not at you. It’s at himself.

“It’s not,” he repeats. “Don’t—don’t do that.”

You blink. “Do what?”

“Make it okay when it’s not.”

Your brows draw together just slightly. “I just—”

“I was an asshole,” he says flatly.

You inhale softly. “That doesn’t make it—”

“It does.”

A beat lands before Steve looks at you. Really looks, like he’s staring straight into your soul. Trying to read your mind, to make sure you’re hearing him.

“I don’t get to talk to you like that and then have you tell me it’s fine.”

Your lips part, hesitating before speaking again.

“I mean… you were blindsided.”

“I don’t care.”

“It’s still—”

“I don’t care,” he repeats, quieter now, but no less intense. “I don’t get a free pass for that. And no one should. Ever.”

Your chest tightens.

You study him for a long second.

Then you nod, subtle… almost small.

“Okay.”

That quiet response seems to throw him off more than if you’d argued.

Steve blinks. “Okay?”

“You’re right,” you say simply.

That… lands.

Different than he expected.

He looks at you like he’s trying to recalibrate something.

“…okay,” Steve finally echoes.

There’s a flicker of something like relief.

And something else.

Something softer.

Vulnerable.

You give him the faintest smile. It doesn’t reach your eyes completely, but it’s there. Gentle as ever. Warm, even though it's melancholy. Across from you, Steve notices that too. And it makes him feel like shit.

Silence settles between the two of you again.

It’s not as tense as before.

But still heavy.

Still loaded.

When Steve glances at you again, he finds that you’re watching him now… not looking away.

That’s new.

Or maybe it’s just unsettling.

Either way, it makes something in his chest twist.

He holds your gaze for a second longer than he means to. Then, words slip out before he can overthink them or shut himself up while he’s ahead.

“Your stepmom and your brother didn’t come to tell you goodbye.”

You go still, just a little, as he lets the statement hang before asking…

“…real or not real?”

Your angel eyes soften instantly. Something warm flickers there — surprise, maybe, or perhaps it’s just recognition. Because you remember… 

The kitchen.

The desserts.

The stupid game.

The hours spent together.

You nod. “Real.”

Steve watches you intensely, his cynical eyes searching… 

Searching for anything.

A crack.

A tell.

A lie.

He doesn’t find one.

His jaw tightens.

“…you told Caesar your brother isn’t heartless,” Steve says after a long beat. “That you forgive him.”

Your throat moves when you swallow.

He still asks. “Real or not real?”

Your kind eyes go a little glassy, but you don’t look away while answering.

“Real.”

Steve’s cynical gaze sharpens. “And your stepmother?”

That question…

You inhale slowly. Exhale just as slowly. You look down, then back out at the city. At the crowd, the noise, the bloodlust and exuberant joy of elites…

“Some days it feels real,” you confess quietly. “Some days it doesn’t.” A loud burst of fireworks pop off while you take a beat, eyes on the sky now. “Some days, I think that I truly forgive her.” The crowd roars. “Other days, I’m not… sure if she wants me to.”

That answer?

It hits him hard.

Because it’s not perfect. It’s not clean. It’s not what he expected. It’s honest. It’s brutally honest without overstating.

And for some reason that pisses him off a little.

Not at you.

At the fact that it keeps being real.

He stares at you for another long moment before speaking more carefully — the game still going, the search still on...

“You’ve been in love with me since grade school.”

A beat.

“…real or not real?”

You don’t hesitate. “Real.”

And you don’t even look at him when you say it. You just… know.

Steve watches you like he’s trying to break the word apart. As though maybe he can dismantle it if he stares hard enough.

He can’t.

“Why.”

The question comes out sharper than he means it to.

But not cruelly.

Just demanding.

Seeking.

Needing.

You blink at the city, then finally look at him. And for a second, you truly don’t know what to say. Because where do you even start? There are too many reasons. There always have been. It’s never just been one thing. It’s been a thousand small, quiet things that never stopped adding up.

Moments.

Looks.

Actions.

Ways he existed when he didn’t think anyone was paying attention.

You’ve never had to say them out loud before.

You’ve just always known, since the day he raised his hand in the classroom whenever the teacher asked everyone who knew the Star-Spangled Banner, and none other than Steve Harrington had proudly declared that they did — and then he’d stood up, hand over his heart as he sang it sweetly. In front of the entire classroom, while you watched with starry eyes that shone brighter than fireworks on Fourth of July. All for him.

Your gaze drops to your knees as the memory consumes you… 

You exhale softly. “I don’t even know where I’d start.”

“Start anywhere,” he says immediately.

Your brows pinch.

That didn’t help.

“Name one thing,” he adds.

It’s quick.

Too quick.

It puts you on the spot in a way that makes your chest tighten. But you don’t look away. You think. You search. You dive into every single crevice of your mind that drowns in every single core memory of him you’ve locked away — replaying them on a loop, scribbling them into the margins of your notebook while in class, daydreaming about while twirling in your room…

…and then you find something.

Small.

Specific.

But real.

You glance up at him through your lashes, your voice quiet.

“You always stayed.”

He blinks.

“…what?”

You shrug a little, almost imperceptibly. “With them,” you say. “With the kids. Even when things got bad. Or when everyone else was panicking or running or… too busy falling apart. Even when you did...” Your fingers tighten slightly around your knees. “You stayed.”

That’s it.

That’s the thing.

Not flashy.

Not grand.

Just… that.

That.

And it hits him. Not the way you expect, but it does all the same.

Steve’s expression shifts, something flickers behind his eyes. He looks away, shakes his head once. “You can’t love me.”

Your brows knit. “What?”

“I’m not—” He exhales sharply. “I’m not what you think I am.”

“I never said—”

“You didn’t have to.”

You stare at him, brows furrowing with gentle puzzlement.

“You don’t know me,” he goes on. “Not really. You know—pieces. Versions. Whatever the hell I was before all this.”

“That’s not true—”

“It is.”

“It’s not.”

He looks at you again, something more heated in his eyes now. “You don’t know what I am now. You love someone you think you know. Someone that’s capable of living up to your expectations.”

You stare, shaking your head. “That’s not real.”

“Your idea of me isn’t real.”

“I don’t love ideas of you.”

…that stops him.

Just for a second.

He blinks, actually caught off guard. Not only by your words, but your tone — which has sharpened, despite not raising your voice. And you hold his gaze, steady as ever, not cowering.

“I’m not in love with a fantasy,” you say quietly. “I’m in love with you.”

The real you.

You don’t have to say it.

It’s there anyway.

You’re in love with the real him.

He stares at you like he doesn’t know what to do with that, his jaw tightening. “You can’t be.”

You stare back. “Well I am.”

“You don’t—”

“I do.”

Steve’s frustration spikes now. Not loud, but sharp.

“You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” he fires back, a little harsher now. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Your expression doesn’t harden.

That almost makes it worse.

“You help people,” he says, gesturing vaguely. “You—you see the version of me that matches that. The version of me that—hunts, feeds people, keeps them alive. You see me with all those kids and think that makes me—what? Good?”

You don’t answer.

He laughs once, humorless. “That doesn’t make me a good person.”

You open your mouth.

But he cuts you off. “It doesn’t make me worth it.”

You close it again.

He keeps going.

Because now he can’t stop.

“Just because I let Dustin and his mom and Eddie all live at my place doesn’t make me a fucking saint. Just because I make sure my people don’t starve doesn’t mean I’m—” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means—”

“It doesn’t,” he repeats, sharper.

And then, he goes too far.

“I’m not someone who was made to be loved by one woman.”

The words land heavy.

Final.

You freeze.

He keeps going anyway. Because once it’s out, he can’t pull it back.

“I know I said that to the press, and they spun it like—” Steve mutters, halting the sentence to cut to the chase. “But not like that. Not—” Then he exhales harshly. “I’m not meant to be… that. For anyone.”

Your eyes are glossy now.

Wide.

Watching him.

“I’m not—someone you come home to,” he says. “I’m not someone you build something with. I’m not—” He gestures vaguely. “Dinner on the table. Good day, bad day, all that bullshit.”

His voice roughens.

“I can’t even get out of bed some days.”

That hits you square in the chest.

Hard, anguished, devastating…

You don’t move.

Don’t speak.

He keeps going.

Because now it’s spilling.

“I have Eddie dragging me out half the time,” he says. “Or I just… don’t talk. For days. I’m pissed off all the time, I’m grieving all the time, I’m—” He stops, jaw clenching. “There’s nothing light in my head anymore.”

Your chest aches.

God, it aches.

“I’m not letting anyone into that,” he finishes, quieter now. “I’m not doing that to anyone.” He holds your gaze with his own quiet agony. “Never will.”

Silence.

You’re still staring at him.

And your heart?

It’s breaking.

But it’s not breaking for you.

It’s breaking for him.

Because you can see it. All of it. You see the pain, the trauma, the unspoken horrors that plague his mind day into night, night into day. It’s all in his eyes. In the way he holds himself like he’s already bracing for impact, like he’s still backed into a corner with no other way to survive it then to lash out or cower in fear and beg for mercy.

You swallow carefully, keeping yourself together as best you can. Then softly tell him, or try to rather, “you don’t have to—”

“I do,” he interjects immediately.

Your lips press together.

You inhale slowly.

Exhale slowly.

And then something shifts as you look at him again, more carefully this time.

“There’s… Nancy,” you say.

It’s hesitant.

A little unsure.

His expression flickers, newly thrown. “What?”

You fumble slightly. “I mean—I know she helps you. At your house. And that she—she matters to you, and I just—” You shake your head. “I didn’t mean to—overstep. If there’s something there, I—”

“There’s nothing there.”

Steve cuts you off.

Instant.

Absolute.

You blink. “Oh.”

“She’s—” He exhales stiffly. “She’s my best friend.”

You nod slowly, still a little uncertain. “I just didn’t want to—”

“You didn’t.”

“I—”

“She loves me,” he admits bluntly. “Because she has to.”

You go painfully still.

That’s… not what you expected.

“She’s known me forever,” he goes on to say, just as blunt. “Yeah, we dated. Yeah, we—whatever. But that’s not—” He shakes his head hard. “That’s not something I can be anymore.”

You watch him quietly, still listening…

“Whatever part of me could’ve been that guy,” he mutters, “he’s gone.”

Your chest tightens.

“She knows that,” he adds. “She deals with it.” He stares at his hands now, at the callousness that never seems to go away. “I don’t ask her to stay, but she does. And I let her in the only way I know how.”

A beat falls.

Because he stops, realizing something dreadful…

He’s talking too much.

Saying too much.

Oversharing.

He exhales sharply. “Why the fuck am I telling you this?”

You don’t answer.

You just look at him… soft, open. 

Open.

And yet somewhere between maintaining this new distance between the two of you, while looking at him as though you’ve nothing to hide from him.

It makes him more frustrated.

“It doesn’t matter,” he mumbles, shaking his head. “None of this matters.” He looks at you, brown eyes burning. “You can’t love me.”

And then, as if things weren’t awful enough…

You smile.

Not brightly.

Not happily.

Something quieter.

Something that aches.

Something that yearns.

You hold his gaze. And then you tell him, soft enough it almost disappears into the wind, “You don’t get to decide that for me.”

Silence.

Heavy.

Absolute.

And all the while, Steve just… stares. Like your words knocked the air out of him. But all you do is turn your gaze back out to the city.

The countdown continues.

The music swells.

And somewhere between the noise and the quiet, everything changes again as the city below keeps celebrating like it isn’t counting down to a massacre. From up here, the Capitol looks almost… strangely beautiful, if you let your eyes blur long enough. Lights in long jeweled strings. Towers plated in gold and glass and untouchable monochrome. Streets pulsing with color. Massive projected numbers ticking down across the skyline in bright white digits, each second disappearing with a cruel kind of elegance:

09:13:42

09:13:41

09:13:40

It would almost be easy to pretend it’s a New Year’s Eve countdown. Some giant, drunken festival. A country making a large spectacle of itself the way that countries always do whenever they’ve convinced themselves that blood is tradition and cruelty is structure and children are acceptable collateral so long as the cameras stay polished.

Steve glares down at it all from beneath his lowered lashes and feels his stomach coil.

Music rises up in warped bursts from somewhere down in the streets. Horns. Drums. Laughter. The shriek of women dressed in sequins and feathers and body paint, hanging off balconies with drinks in their hands like tomorrow’s blood won’t be their entertainment. Men in expensive suits leaning against lit railings, gesturing up at the giant screens as though debating the odds at a horse track. Somewhere down there, inside the sealed and glittering walls of Panem, children are fast asleep in warm beds with full stomachs and parents who believe the world is still mostly safe.

And the sickest part?

Steve’s relieved for them.

Not for any of the adults. Fuck them. But the kids? Yeah. Those kids deserve soft sheets and locked doors and ignorance. They deserve to not know what demodogs look like when they tear through a town at dusk. They deserve to never hear the sound a demobat makes right before it dives. They deserve to never see what happens when people get cornered long enough that the monsters stop being supernatural and start being human.

Steve knows better than anyone… that walls don’t mean a goddamn thing in the end.

He was born behind them.

Born into gates and codes and private security and cameras set at every angle. Born into money that built fences so high, they looked like promises. His parents had made fortunes helping engineer systems like those: high- end private security, gated community defense networks, panic installations, reinforced estate perimeters. The whole pitch had always been simple: keep danger out. Keep the right people safe. Keep order where other people only had hope.

They were good at it, too.

Good enough to get rich. Good enough to get envied. Good enough to make sure that when the Purge Act hit and everyone with a brain and a wallet scrambled for some semblance of protection, the Harrington house became a fortress and a refuge. Families Steve had grown up around got welcomed inside those walls because his parents still had and exercised enough real decency to understand that survival without community was just expensive loneliness with surveillance.

And still, in the end, none of it mattered.

Because the things that got in that night didn’t come crawling through from another dimension with petals of teeth and claws and wet black skin.

They came in human form.

Human hands. Human mouths. Human rage.

Human resentment sharpened by class and humiliation and years of being told they’d never have what families like the Harringtons had. Human beings who looked at Steve’s parents and saw not people but symbols. Saw money. Saw power. Saw all the reasons their own lives had turned out hard and ugly and starved and praise-less. And they butchered them for it.

Not quickly enough to be merciful. Not sloppily enough to be random. It was deliberately. Viciously. Like they’d been imagining it for years.

And then they left Steve alive.

Which had always felt, in some ways, like the cruelest part.

Because if they had killed him, too? Maybe at least his story would’ve ended there. Maybe he would’ve gone with whatever dignity he still had left. Maybe he wouldn’t have had to spend the last year and some change carrying around a body that feels less like his than ever.

Instead they’d ruined him.

Ruined things no one could see at first glance. Things that lived under skin. Things that woke with him and slept with him and never, ever shut the fuck up. They’d taken his parents’ life and his house and his certainty and his manhood and left him with a pulse and a smile people still sometimes found charming, as if charm had anything to do with survival.

The memory doesn’t come at him all at once. It never does. It’s fragments. Heat. A hand. His father’s blood. A voice too close to his ear. Laughter in the wrong room. The sensation of being pinned by more than weight. Of being looked at like a prize, an object and a punishment all at once. Of someone saying sell him like it was a joke. Like a game. Like he wasn’t even there to hear it.

Sell.

That word still lives under his skin like rot.

It’s why Hopper’s voice downstairs earlier hit him the way it did. Why the sponsor talk always makes him want to peel his own skin off. Why the Capitol’s hunger felt so familiar when they chanted for him to take it off.

Sell.

He can still hear it. Still feel the burn of it in his wrists and pelvis and gut, like his body still keeps score even when his mind would rather jump off a bridge than remember the math.

He blinks hard and drags a hand down his face, palm rough over the line of his jaw. The wind touches the damp corners of his eyes and he hates himself for it immediately.

Next to him, you’re quiet.

Not distant in the cold sense. Just soft. Still. Wrapped around yourself at the edge of the rooftop in that pale sleep set that looks like something out of a painting no one in this city deserves to own. Your hair moves in the breeze, copper catching the moonlight. Your cheek is pressed lightly to your knees. The skyline glows in your eyes when you stare out at it, bare skin glowing like milky porcelain.

He shouldn’t be looking at you.

He looks anyway.

And because he’s a coward in all the ways that matter most, because it’s easier to talk while staring at the ugliness below than it is to look directly at the person breaking him open, the first thing out of his mouth comes half-flat and half-tight.

“Thought you said your grandfather ruined you for all other men.”

The second the words leave him, the air changes.

You don’t answer.

Steve frowns and glances down at you.

His stomach drops.

Your eyes are bright. Not full-on crying. Not openly. But shining in that awful way that means you’ve been fighting it for a while and you’re starting to lose. You thumb just beneath one eye when a tear catches there, blinking it back before it can fully fall, and then you curl tighter around yourself and keep staring out at the city.

After a beat, you nod.

Just once.

That’s somehow worse than if you’d snapped at him.

Because suddenly the meaning behind what he said… blooms in full. Your grandfather is sick as hell. Probably in a recliner somewhere right now with a blanket over his knees and the television too loud because everyone back home is losing their goddamn minds over what happened tonight, and he’s watching his favorite girl get dressed up and marched towards a slaughter he’s too powerless to stop.

Steve feels it then like something physical. A sharp, ugly stab right through the center of his chest.

“Shit,” he mutters, already shaking his head at himself. “No, I didn’t mean—”

But you cut him off before he can butcher the apology worse, lost in thought.

“I just…” Your voice is soft. Not shaky enough to break, but close to it. “I just keep praying he’s alright.”

That shuts him up instantly.

For a second all he can do is look at you. Really look. At the way you keep your face turned toward the city because maybe it’s easier than letting him see too much. At the wet shine still trapped in your lashes. At the way your fingers dig into your own sleeve to steady yourself.

He shouldn’t ask. He does anyway.

“Has he got someone with him?”

The question comes out stiffer than he means it to. A little too blunt. Like he doesn’t know how to ask gently anymore, only directly, as if kindness always has to be smuggled in under rougher language so no one sees him trying.

Thankfully, you don’t seem bothered by it.

You nod against your knees, a little sniffle escaping before you press a small, tired smile into the fabric. When you finally turn your face enough to look at him through your lashes, your eyes are still glossy.

“The Byers.”

Steve stiffly nods.

Right, he thinks to himself.

Jonathan Byers.

Which, for some reason, opens a whole other mess in his head.

Because yeah, obviously — of course the Byers are with him. Joyce would sooner fistfight God than let an elderly man sit alone and sick while his granddaughter waits for the arena. Jonathan’s your best friend. Has been forever. Steve knows that. Or knew it, anyway. It’s not new information, not really, but somehow it lands differently now.

He finds himself replaying middle school hallways. Elementary pickup lines. You and Jonathan perched on playground swings talking like the rest of the world didn’t exist. You by his side, at the Fall Festival one year, both of you carrying paper cups of steaming cider and laughing at something private. Not a romantic memory. Not remotely. Just… old. Established. Rooted.

Why the hell had he stopped thinking about that?

Maybe because Jonathan Byers, in Steve’s head, has spent so many years existing in relation to Nancy Wheeler. Quietly in love with her in that unflashy, puppy-eyed way that Steve has always hated recognizing because it makes him feel like an accidental villain no matter what he does. Maybe because Steve had gotten so used to clocking Jonathan’s feelings for Nancy that the rest of Jonathan blurred out around the edges.

But still...

A question presses forward before Steve can stop it. He doesn’t even know why he needs the answer. He just knows he does.

He clears his throat. “He, uh…”

You look over again.

Steve immediately regrets opening his mouth.

But he’s already in it, so he just keeps going, awkward and tight. “Jonathan. He—how’s he… holding up?”

It’s a stupid question. Too broad. Too personal… yet not personal enough. It makes him want to slam his own head against the wall because how in the fuck would you know? You’re stuck here, just as unaware as he is.

But you don’t laugh at him. Don’t look confused. You just blink once, then consider it for a second like you’re finding the answer in real time.

“Like Jonathan,” you say at last.

Steve almost huffs. “That clears everything up.”

That gets the faintest little smile out of you.

“He’s quiet when he’s worried,” you explain. “Quieter than usual, I mean... Which is saying something.” You tilt your head a fraction, eyes drifting back to the city. “He’ll make sure my grandfather’s got his medicine. He’ll keep the TV low if it gets to be too much. He’ll probably sit up all night, pretending he isn’t.”

Steve listens harder than he means to.

You shrug one shoulder. “He’s good in a crisis.”

“Yeah,” Steve murmurs before he can stop himself. “He is.”

Something about the answer settles weirdly in his chest. Not bad. Just… strange. Because it confirms exactly what he’d expect from Jonathan and somehow still makes him feel like he’s on the outside of a story everyone else already understood.

It also makes him wonder how in the hell Jonathan has never pursued you.

I thought suddenly searches through his mind, racking his brain, perplexing him even further. Because how in the hell is Jonathan Byers best friends with someone like you — someone angelic and ethereal and naturally beautiful in ways that puts the girl-next-door type to shame — and not head over heels in love with you?

…has that ever been the case?

…have the two of you ever talked about it?

…have you and Jonathan ever been more than friends?

Steve suddenly feels all these new uninvited questions pressing in. However, he doesn’t ask anything else. He forces himself not to.

Then you say, quietly, “Will worships you, y’know.”

That one does catch him off guard.

His head snaps toward you. “What?”

Your mouth softens at one corner. “He does.”

Steve ducks his gaze almost instantly, fondly embarrassed in a way that feels stupid and juvenile and painfully real all at once. His hand flexes where it rests over his knee. He can feel a little heat starting to work its way up his neck and hates that too.

“Kid’s got bad taste,” he mutters.

You smile properly this time. Small, but real. “No,” you murmur. “He doesn’t.”

Steve can’t help it. Something at the corner of his mouth twitches.

“Will’s probably the most well-behaved rascal out of the bunch,” he says.

Your nose scrunches fondly and it’s such an absurdly gentle expression that it almost physically hurts to look at.

“Yeah,” you whisper. “He is.”

Then the smile fades from both of you, because the city below swells again — horns blaring, voices rising, some new eruption of delight from whatever fresh coverage the giant screens have just started playing. The countdown clocks roll over to another hour marker and the whole Capitol seems to scream in approval.

Nine hours.

Nine fucking hours until the games begin.

Steve stares at you while you look away, and suddenly the reality of tomorrow settles over him with fresh teeth.

You’re going in there.

Into that arena.

With him.

With twenty-two other tributes and whatever horrors the Capitol’s engineered for spectacle and whatever human horrors get there first all on their own.

And he can’t protect you.

He shouldn’t want to.

But he does.

And the wanting of it — strong, instinctive, immediate — makes something vicious flare in him because Dustin is home. Dustin is his reason. Dustin is twelve and safe only because Steve stepped in. Steve gets one job: survive and get back to Hawkins. Back to the kids. Back to the house. Back to the world where grief is at least familiar.

…and yet all he can think right now is that you’re going in there too… and he doesn’t know how to live with the math of that.

You speak again before he can.

This time, you sound farther away. Like you’re following your own thoughts as they happen.

“When I go in there tomorrow…” You pause, eyes on the skyline. “I don’t… want it to change me.”

Steve goes very still at your words… …but then his eyes catch something.

You keep absently rubbing your right wrist with your other hand as you speak, thumb dragging up and down from wrist to forearm. He notices that before he notices the words. The faint discoloration there. Not a full bruise. Not yet. But a mark. A whisper of one. And for one sick second he can’t tell if it’s from earlier. From his hand on your arm in that hallway. From the way rage had made him careless.

The guilt hits so hard he blurts before he can think.

“Fuck, I’m sorry.”

You blink, startled out of your own thoughts. “What?”

“Your arm,” he says, staring at the place you’re touching. “Earlier. I grabbed you.” His voice roughens. “I shouldn’t have done that either.”

You follow his gaze down, as if only just now realizing what he means.

“It’s alright,” you say automatically.

Steve’s jaw tightens. “Stop saying that.”

He nearly begs you this time.

For once, you almost look like you might argue. But the feeling disappears as quickly as it came, and instead you turn back outward again and continue more softly, “I just don’t want to die unlike myself.”

That lands strangely enough that Steve actually has to blink.

“What do you mean?”

You take a slow breath. “I don’t want to disgrace myself.”

He stares at you. “By what. Not killing anyone?”

That makes your brow furrow pensively. “No.” You shake your head. “I mean—I’m not stupid. If it came down to defending myself, or protecting one of those kids…” You swallow. “I know what that means.”

The honesty in that answer makes something in him flinch.

“But I don’t want to come out of this as something I’m not,” you say. “Or die as something I never was.” Your hands tighten around your own wrist. “I don’t want them turning me into a monster and calling it survival.”

And there it is.

The thing he’s been choking on for months in one form or another, spoken back to him in your voice.

He should meet it with truth.

Instead he does what he does best.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says flatly. “That’s what we are to them. Pieces. All of us. Pieces in their games, paws they can maneuver whatever way they see fit.”

You turn and look at him fully now.

The challenge in your expression is quiet, but unmistakable.

“Maybe to them,” you say. “But I’m still me. And you’re still you.”

Steve gives a humorless little laugh. “Sure.”

“You are.”

“Why does it matter?”

Your eyes don’t leave his. “Because I care.”

He looks away first.

“Hate to break it to you,” he says flatly, voice grim. “You don’t get to care about that.”

And that, more than anything else tonight — seems to strike something raw in you.

You go so still he can almost hear it.

Then your voice comes out gentler than anger and sadder than pleading and somehow sharper than either.

“Aren’t I allowed to care about my own dignity?”

The word hits him like a body blow.

Dignity.

For a second the whole world narrows down to that one word and the sound of blood in his ears.

Dignity.

The thing stripped from him piece by piece under Purge Act laughter and masked faces and hands that treated his body like public property. Dignity torn loose with buttons and fabric and breath and every futile attempt he’d made to keep any part of himself untouched. Dignity left in tatters on a floor he still sees every time he closes his eyes too fast.

And here you are, saying it like it still belongs to you. Like it still could.

Steve’s stomach twists so violently he almost feels sick.

He wants to tell you yes. Wants to say yes, of course you are, yes, hold onto it with both hands, and yes, don’t let these bastards touch one inch of what makes you you.

Instead he says the ugliest thing available.

“I care about going home.”

The words come out cold. Blunt, deliberately stripped of feeling.

You blink.

“I care about getting the fuck back to Hawkins and getting this over with,” Steve adds, his tone clipped.

You don’t argue him further. Hell, you don’t even look offended.

That somehow makes it worse.

You just slowly pull back, leaning against the wall again, putting that distance between you one more time, and turn your face toward the city with a little nod that could mean anything.

Steve feels the flare in his chest immediately. That familiar helpless anger, sparked by the exact kind of quiet he never knows how to survive. So he goes on the attack again, but quieter this time. Meaner for how measured it sounds.

“Look,” he clips. “If this is how you wanna spend your last peaceful hours before tomorrow, fine. Who’m I to stop you. But I’m gonna spend whatever’s left of mine getting whatever sleep I can manage, so that I can lift my head another day back in my godforsaken hometown.”

He expects you to flinch.

You don’t.

You just… smile to yourself. Small, sad… real.

“I’m sure you will.”

It takes him half a second for that response to register. Then the meaning of it lands and something incandescent flashes under his skin.

He turns on you fully. “Don’t.”

You look over, startled by the force in his tone. “Don’t what?”

“Talk like that.” His voice drops lower, rougher. “Like you’re already dead.”

Your mouth parts, then closes again.

“I didn’t—”

“You did.”

He’s breathing harder now. He can hear it and hates that too.

“You keep doing that,” he goes on. “You keep talking like I’m the one going home and you’re—what? Not even in the running?”

You give the smallest laugh, almost self-conscious. “Steve—”

“No.” He leans forward off the wall, eyes hot. “No, answer me. Why the hell do you do that?”

There’s real confusion in your face now. “Do what?”

“Say it like it’s a given.” He gestures angrily out at the city, then back at you. “Like I’m supposed to just—accept that there can only be one winner and it sure as hell won’t be you.”

That startles you.

Steve can see it. The shift. The way your whole expression opens for one exposed second before you school it again. And because he’s too far in it now to stop — because the truth has started leaking out under all the anger and he can’t seem to seal it back up, he keeps going.

“I already know there can only be one fucking victor,” he states. “You don’t need to keep reminding me.”

Your eyes go wider.

Oh.

That’s what this is.

And the realization moves through you so quickly it almost feels like light.

Steve sees something change in your face and hates himself for wanting to know what it is. He’s still talking, too worked up to notice the damage he’s done — or the confession buried in it.

“I don’t wanna hear you talk like that,” he admits, quieter now, but no less fierce. “Like I’m supposed to just be fine with making it back into Hawkins alone.”

The second it’s out, the air goes electric.

You just look at him.

And for one impossible, aching moment, Steve realizes what he’s said.

Not fully. Not in a polished, pretty way. But enough.

Enough that you heard it.

Enough that he heard it.

Enough that there’s no taking it back.

The elitist city below keeps screaming and the countdown keeps ticking and somewhere music swells again, but up here everything goes still.

Your bruised heart feels so full it almost hurts.

Because there it is.

Not required love. 

But want.

Need.

The terrified, angry truth that Steve Harrington does not want to survive this without you.

You don’t smile right away. That would ruin it — break the fragile, blistered honesty of the moment. Instead you just keep looking at him, eyes bright and soft and astonished all at once, as if he’s placed something precious in your hands without understanding what he’s done.

Across from you, Steve looks like he wants to crawl out of his own skin.

Then, because the feeling inside you is too big to hold and too warm to hide, the smallest smile ghosts at your mouth.

You rise to your feet.

Slowly… carefully…

Steve stays seated and just watches you, blue-screening in real time. You in that pale silk sleep set with your robe hanging loose from your shoulders is the cause of it. You barefoot on the rooftop. You with the moonlight in your halo of hope and a look on your face he cannot decode for the life of him.

You look almost peaceful.

That makes no goddamn sense to him whatsoever.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” you say.

That’s it.

Just that.

And yet it leaves him staring like a complete fucking idiot, because how do you keep doing this? How do you keep taking the ugliest, sharpest things he gives you and somehow turning them all into something steadier, gentler, survivable? How do you keep walking away from all of these conversations looking more certain — while he’s left feeling like his own insides have been rearranged with a crowbar?

He doesn’t know.

What he does know — though he barely dares name it — is that you never make him feel small in it. Never stupid. Never condescended to. You leave him confused, yeah. Wrecked, absolutely. But not lesser. It’s almost worse, in a way. Because it means whatever this is, it isn’t power. It isn’t manipulation. It isn’t a game.

It’s just you.

You hold out your hand to him.

Simple as anything.

Like you’re offering help, not asking for it.

Steve swallows thickly. Then he reaches up with his left hand before he can think himself out of it. His calloused palm fits into yours and the contact is immediate and alive and a little too much in the secrecy of the dark. And like always, your hand is softer than his — warmer than the night air. The robin tattoo seems to twitch beneath his skin like it has its own pulse, as though the ghost of his best friend is getting a kick outta this. 

As if Robin Buckley herself is bugging him from the other side of the veil, the inside of his veins… calling him Dingus, telling him to say something.

Goddammit I’m working on it, he shouts at her in his mind.

You brace and help him up.

He could’ve stood on his own. Easily. You both know that.

Neither of you says it.

He rises and ends up standing too close for his own good, looking down at you while you look up at him… and for one charged second neither of you moves. The wind lifts a strand of your hair. The city glows below. Somewhere in the far back of his mind, Robin Buckley’s loud ghost is absolutely losing her goddamn mind.

Dingus, say something.

So he does.

“…see you in the morning.”

It comes out lower than he means it to. Almost shy.

Your angel eyes soften.

Then you give his hand the gentlest squeeze.

“Goodnight, Steve.”

The words hit him square in the chest.

Because of this morning. Because of the kitchen. Because he’d hated how much it bothered him when you didn’t say it the night before. Because it had become a thing between you before he even understood it had. A rhythm. A ritual. A stupid little thread of normalcy in a place designed to erase every trace of it.

And now you’re giving it back to him like you know.

Like you know exactly what it means.

He doesn’t scoff. Doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t even have enough pride left in him to pretend it doesn’t matter.

He just answers, quiet and sincere and wrecked by how much he means it.

“Goodnight, Ren.”

Your smile changes. Not bigger. Just deeper somehow. Then you let go of his hand and take a few steps backward, still looking at him, before turning toward the rooftop door.

Steve watches you go.

He watches the pale line of your silk robe disappear into the interior glow of the penthouse. He watches the door shut softly behind you.

And then he’s alone.

Again.

Only now it feels worse.

He stands there on the roof with his hand still half-curled from where it held yours and realizes with a sharp, sinking kind of horror that there is no chance in hell he’s sleeping tonight.

Because all at once he wants impossible things.

He wants another night in the kitchen with you stealing dessert off silver trays and talking about fake-sounding pastries until one of you laughs too loudly. He wants another old Disney movie with your shoulder near his on the couch… and the smell of something warm in the oven and no countdown clocks anywhere in sight. He wants to hear you say goodnight like it isn’t the night before the Hunger Games.

He wants you.

Not in the crude way the Capitol wanted him. Not in the way people take and strip and sell. Not ownership. Not spectacle.

Just you there.

Alive.

And the knowledge of that — the raw, helpless, completely unworkable need of it — makes the air leave his lungs.

Because it is not going to happen.

That’s what the rules say.

That’s what the odds say.

That’s what every giant bright number in this monstrous city says every hour, every minute, every second it keeps ticking down.

And yet every instinct in him is beginning to revolt against the math.

He doesn’t want to be the victor without you.

He doesn’t even know why that truth feels so old inside him. Like it’s been waiting there much longer than a week, longer than the train ride, longer than the Capitol, longer than the reaping itself. Like maybe some part of him knew before he ever did.

Below, the countdown rolls mercilessly onward.

08:57:03

08:57:02

08:57:01

Steve stares at it until his vision blurs.

And somewhere between one second and the next, between the noise below and the silence you left behind, between grief and dread and want and fury, he realizes the most devastating thing of all:

He is not afraid of dying nearly as much as he is afraid of surviving without you.

END OF CHAPTER