#russians

In the summer of 1985, Steve Harrington and Robin Buckley let themselves get captured beneath Starcourt Mall to buy you and the others time, but the plan unravels almost immediately when the Russians drug them with something that leaves both of them dazed, emotional, and saying entirely too much.

For Steve Harrington, apparently, that means becoming incapable of shutting up about you.

About how pretty you are. How much he likes touching you. How you make him feel calmer just by standing next to him. Every thought he normally buries beneath sarcasm and bad flirting suddenly dragged out into the open while the two of you are still trying to survive alarms, armed Russians, secret elevators, and the very real possibility of dying underground.

It should feel like everything you’ve wanted for years.

Instead, it feels dangerous.

Because you’ve been in love with your best friend since sophomore year, and once the drugs wear off, you have no idea if Steve is going to remember any of this — or if he’ll regret every second of it.

tags: henderson!reader, dustin henderson sister reader, steve harrington x reader, canon compliant-ish, canon dialogue, best friends to lovers, highschool best friends, pining reader, oblivious steve harrington, protective steve harrington, switch bathroom scene to love confession im so sorry, drugged steve harrington, robin buckley, dustin henderson, erica sinclair, stranger things season 3, elevator scene, forced proximity, post escape chaos, everyone is stressed and it shows, steve is not okay, robin is having the time of her life, dustin is losing his mind, reader is trying her best, accidental confession, did he mean that, emotional confusion

warnings: drugging/torture aftermath, canon-typical violence, panic/stress, injury mention, blood/injury, emotional distress, kissing, mild language, life-threatening situations, guns/weapons, claustrophobic spaces, emotional vulnerability, altered mental state

from jules: genuinely one of my favorite things i’ve written for steve because it’s somehow equal parts cute, fluffy, and completely ridiculous. i really wanted the drugged-steve scenes to still feel like him underneath all the chaos instead of turning him into a different character entirely. also reader, erica, and dustin deserve financial compensation for surviving that elevator ride. anyway this is basically my love letter to season 3 steve harrington. come home the kids miss you

unfortunately the entire fic is 30k words so i have to split it in three parts 😖 pt 2 will be 15k ish words and pt 3 will be 13k ish

dividers by: @uzmacchiato

wc: 4.5k

navigation

PART TWO

PART THREE

“Um… Steve?”

Erica’s voice cut through the room, sharp with confusion, but something laced underneath.

It wasn’t fear exactly. Erica Sinclair would probably rather chew glass than give any of you the satisfaction of hearing it. Still, something tighter had slipped underneath, alert enough to make the rest of you listen before you even understood why.

Her eyes stayed fixed on the corner of the room.

“Where’s your Russian friend?”

For a second, the question didn’t even land. It just hung there, strange and wrong, your brain taking half a beat too long to understand why it mattered.

Then Steve followed her gaze.

You saw the moment he realized before you did. His shoulders went still first, then his jaw tightened, his eyes dragging toward the corner of the room like some part of him already knew what he wasn’t going to find there.

The guard he’d knocked out less than a minute ago was gone, leaving behind nothing but an empty stretch of floor where his body should have been.

Which meant Steve Harrington’s first clean victory in a fight had apparently lasted about forty-five seconds.

You might’ve appreciated the irony if your brain hadn’t already moved on to the more pressing issue: the floor was empty, the door wasn’t locked, and somewhere outside the room, that guard was awake.

For a moment, no one moved.

The silence settled over the room before the fear did, strange and suspended, as if everything had shifted and none of you had caught up yet.

Your gaze darted around the room anyway, snagging on corners, shadows, the door—anywhere but the empty space where he should’ve been.

But you hadn’t.

“Well, shit,” you blurted out, which felt incredibly unhelpful for the circumstances.

Somewhere beside you, Dustin shifted like he was about to argue, but for once, nothing came out.

Then the alarm started.

The sound ripped through the room so violently you flinched before you even processed it, a sharp mechanical scream bouncing off the metal walls until it felt trapped inside your skull.

Your hands flew toward your ears before you could stop them.

“Shit,” Steve muttered, moving before anyone else did.

You barely had time to track him crossing the room in quick, urgent strides, his shoulders squaring as everything around you tipped into motion. He cracked the door open just enough to peek out, already braced for whatever might be waiting on the other side.

You saw it happen.

Steve froze for half a second, then yanked back.

They’d seen him. Granted, the bright blue sailor outfit kind of stood out in a hallway full of tan military uniforms.

“Shit.”

The door slammed shut, swallowed almost immediately by the alarm as he turned back to all of you, his expression sharper now, urgency cutting clean through the panic.

“Go. Go, go, go—”

His hand found yours without hesitation, fingers closing around your wrist as he pulled you toward the stairs. You didn’t argue. Steve moved with a kind of urgency that left no room for questions, his shoulder cutting ahead of yours as the alarm chased you both into the stairwell and bounced violently off the metal walls.

You didn’t think. You ran.

Thinking meant slowing down, and slowing down meant getting caught.

The stairs blurred beneath your feet, metal clanging violently under every step as you tore down them fast enough your body could barely keep up. Your breath came in sharp, uneven bursts, each inhale burning your lungs without ever feeling like enough.

Behind you, the others thundered after you—Dustin, Erica, Robin—their footsteps hammering against the metal stairs, their voices overlapping beneath the alarm until everything blurred together with the blood rushing loud in your ears.

“Move—come on, move!” Steve urged.

His voice had lost the “Steve Harrington charm” that usually clung to it. No teasing edge, no breathless little joke shoved in at the worst possible time. Just command, raw and stripped down, and that scared you more than the alarm did.

You stumbled on the landing, your foot catching the edge of the step hard enough to pitch you forward.

Steve caught you before you hit the railing.

For half a second, you were dragged back against the solid heat of him, close enough to smell sweat, ice cream, and the sharp chemical stink clinging to both of you from the rooms below. Then he hauled you upright without slowing, already moving again before your balance had fully returned.

His hand stayed locked around your wrist afterward, like he didn’t trust the stairs not to take you out a second time.

“Hey—hey, it’s okay,” he said quickly, breathless, glancing back at you as you kept running. “You’re doing great—just keep going—”

He sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as you.

That was the part that nearly tripped you worse than the stairs did.

Even now, with alarms screaming and guards chasing you through a secret Russian base beneath Starcourt Mall, Steve Harrington was still worried about you.

“Steve—” you started, breathless and sharper than you meant to be.

“Okay—yeah—yup, I’m running,” he shot back immediately, which effectively shut you up.

A door burst open in front of you, Steve shoving it hard enough that it slammed against the wall as all of you spilled through. Momentum carried you a step too far into the room before your body caught up.

And then all of you stopped.

Not by choice.

Whatever stood in front of you stole the movement right out of your body before your brain could catch up to what you were seeing.

The room was massive.

It opened up so suddenly the corridors behind you felt suffocating by comparison, the base narrowing in your memory the second you saw how far this place stretched.

Russian scientists and soldiers rushed behind a glass barrier, shouting over one another as control panels flashed in violent bursts of color that washed across the room in uneven pulses. Heat pressed heavy against your skin the second you stepped inside, thick with something metallic and chemical that settled bitter at the back of your throat every time you breathed in.

Your eyes went straight to the center of it, like everything else in the room had been built around that one point.

The machine loomed over everything, cables twisting upward into something too large to fully understand. It stretched across the room in every direction, metal groaning beneath the strain of its own power, the entire structure humming with a deep vibration you felt in your ribs before you fully heard it.

And at the center of it—

a beam.

Not just light. Something brighter. Denser. Violent.

It tore upward through the air, forcing reality apart at the seams while the space around it warped under the pressure.

Immense dread moved through you before thought did.

“Hey—hey,” Steve said beside you, too quick, too tight. “It’s okay.”

He reached for you without looking, his fingers finding yours with the awful ease of habit. He tried to offer you a reassuring smile, but it didn’t fit the room around you at all. Not with the machine roaring loud enough to shake through your ribs, not with violent light tearing through the gate while Russian voices shouted over one another behind the glass.

The expression faded almost as quickly as it appeared.

His thumb shifted once against your knuckles, small and unsteady, and somehow that was worse than if his hand had simply gone still.

It made him feel seventeen again for a second. Scared in a way Steve usually tried to cover with noise, with jokes, with that careless little lift of his chin that had gotten him through high school and probably half his life before that.

But he was still reaching for you.

So, without your better judgement, you held on.

It had been easier before, back when that look had belonged to someone else.

Back when you could stand off to the side and pretend not to notice the softness that came over him whenever Nancy walked into a room, or the way his entire face changed if she looked back.

That had hurt in a simpler way.

This was worse.

Because now you were the one standing beside him while he looked at you that way, as if you were the thing keeping him steady in the middle of all this chaos, and you had no idea what to do with the awful warmth it left behind.

You forced your attention back to the fracture in the air itself, to the impossible tear pulsing at the center of the structure.

The shape of it settled into place all at once, and cold panic spread instantly through your body.

For one horrible second, your brain refused to connect the pieces.

Then it did.

A fracture.

A gate.

The gate.

The same one Eleven had closed last year.

Somewhere behind you, Dustin said something you didn’t catch.

You knew you should turn. Knew you should find him, put yourself between him and whatever this was, because that was what you always did when the world started ending again.

But for one awful second, your body wouldn’t obey.

All you could do was stare.

The air around it warped, bending unnaturally, unable to hold its shape.

Something dark moved beyond the fracture, shifting in the space behind it as though it were pressing against the opening from the other side.

The room narrowed to the tear in the air, to the darkness moving behind it, to the impossible shape of something that should have stayed closed.

And then you weren’t here anymore.

November 12th, 1983.

The Byers’ house.

Steve gripping the nail bat so hard his knuckles split open around the handle.

Blood slick between your fingers where they clung to the knife in your hand, your palms slippery, your grip wrong, your body too scared to remember how to hold anything properly.

Nancy beside you, reloading with frantic, yet practiced precision, bullets snapping into place so quickly her hands blurred together in your memory.

Jonathan swinging the axe hard enough that every impact jolted through his entire body.

The Demogorgon crashing through the wall in a spray of splintered wood and rot while all of you swung and screamed and survived by inches.

It lunged for Nancy.

You don’t remember deciding to move. One second she was in front of it, frozen for half a breath too long, and the next your shoulder slammed into hers hard enough to send her stumbling sideways.

Then the claws caught you instead.

Heat tore across your side, bright and immediate, and the whole room flashed white around the edges.

The impact.

The screaming.

Cold air punched into your lungs afterward, carrying the smell of mildew, blood, and something rotting beneath the walls.

Black vines stretched through the tunnels, slick and wrong, turning familiar places into something Hawkins was never supposed to become.

The Upside Down had always felt less like another world than an infection, something spreading through cracks nobody else could see until it was already too late.

Will’s pale, lifeless body being pulled from the quarry.

The gate.

Oh god.

They were opening it again.

You still had nightmares that ended with claws tearing into your side while Steve screamed your name from somewhere too far away to reach.

And somebody had looked at all of it — the deaths, the monsters, the people Hawkins never got back — and decided it was worth risking again anyway.

Eleven screaming hard enough that the air itself seemed to crack around her.

The gate collapsing shut in one violent flash of light.

Then nothing.

Too fast.

The present crashed back into you all at once, heat and the roar of the machine swallowing everything else so completely you almost forgot how to breathe.

Steve was still beside you. Close enough that his shoulder brushed yours, close enough that the warmth of him cut strangely through the industrial heat rolling off the machine.

Understanding settled in cold and absolute.

They weren’t just building something.

They were reopening it.

“Holy shit,” Dustin breathed.

His voice sounded small against the roar of the machine. He stood a few steps ahead of you, staring at the gate with his face washed pale beneath the flashing lights, all that usual Dustin certainty stripped away in one awful second.

Robin hovered near him, eyes tracking the beam as it split against the gate.

“What the—” she started, then stopped, her mouth staying slightly open around the rest of a sentence her brain couldn’t finish.

Erica, for once, didn’t say anything. She just stared, her usual sharp expression replaced by something closer to disbelief.

Heat pressed thickly around you, turning every breath heavy as the machine roared loud enough to rattle through the floor.

“Go—shit—go,” Steve said suddenly beside you, his voice low and urgent as he pulled you out of the gate’s trance before it could drag you under again. “Come on—we can’t stay here. Move.”

Your body reacted a half-second slower than it should have, nausea twisting hard in your stomach, your shoes scraping against the metal platform as you forced yourself to follow.

You pushed through the door to the left and out onto the platform, but everything felt different now.

The knowledge of what you’d seen followed with every step, turning the platform sharper, brighter, more impossible beneath your feet.

Behind you, the machine roared loud enough to shake through the metal as heat rolled across the platform in suffocating waves.

They’re opening it.

The thought struck again and again, louder than the alarms, louder than the shouting, until it was the only thing your brain could hold onto.

Behind you, Russian shouting grew closer.

“Keep going!” Dustin yelled, his voice cracking as he pushed forward. “Don’t stop!”

“I’m not fucking stopping, Dustin—Jesus Christ!” you snapped, even though your legs felt like they were about to give out.

You kept moving anyway, the rest of you still caught somewhere back in that room.

The platform curved around the machine in two opposite directions, splitting sharply at the center like you were supposed to choose a path and pray it didn’t get you killed.

You didn’t think, you just moved, instinct pulling you one way before you could question it.

But Steve caught you before you got more than a step.

“No—no, this way,” he said, panic edging into his voice as he yanked you back hard enough that you stumbled into him. His grip tightened around your hand as he redirected you down the opposite path, firm and unyielding like he wasn’t about to let you go the wrong way.

Somewhere under the panic came the sudden, terrible certainty that if you lost him now, you wouldn’t find him again.

You barely had time to process that alone.

Which felt like a problem, considering Steve was apparently the only person here with any idea where you were going.

Behind you, a scuffle broke out. Dustin shoved one of the guards back with a panicked screech you would’ve laughed at under literally any other circumstances, while Erica darted around both of them, small and fast and horrifyingly calm for someone being chased by armed Russians.

“Go, go—!”

The corridor ahead opened up—

and the machine roared into view.

The sound slammed through the platform hard enough to rattle your bones as the structure twisted overhead, wet and uneven in a way no machine should have been, its surface shifting almost like flesh stretched over something alive.

“Holy shit—holy shit—holy shit—” Dustin’s voice broke somewhere beside you as he slowed to an abrupt stop.

You stopped with him before you meant to, your shoes scraping against the platform, every instinct in your body refusing to take you closer.

There was nowhere left to go.

It felt wrong standing this close, wrong in a way your body understood before your mind could dress it up into language.

Even El had never stood this close to the gate, much less something that was tearing it back open.

Robin hovered just behind Dustin, one hand lifting halfway before she caught herself, like even curiosity had its limits. “We really shouldn’t be here,” she muttered.

You couldn’t move.

You were completely paralyzed with fear.

“Steve—” Your voice came out higher as you turned toward him.

And then past him.

The Russians flooded into the corridor behind you, soldiers pouring into the space with weapons raised as shouts erupted sharp and overlapping. Boots hammered against the metal floor hard enough to send the platform trembling under your feet.

Heat at your back. The gate in front of you. The machine screaming through the air as if it were ripping the world open.

Your fingers tightened around Steve’s before you realized you’d even moved, some buried part of you deciding faster than thought that he was the one thing you weren’t letting go of.

They were actually opening the gate.

And you were standing right in front of it.

There was nowhere left to run.

Or at least that’s what you thought before Erica screamed—

“GUARDS—GO!”

Her voice cut through everything, sharp and commanding, snapping all of you out of it.

Movement exploded all at once, the stillness shattering instantly.

Her voice cut through everything, sharp and commanding, and the stillness shattered.

“This way!” Steve shouted, already moving as one of the Russians tried to cut you off.

Steve hit him shoulder-first, hard enough to send the man staggering sideways, and then you were moving again, swept into the chaos of bodies, noise, and heat before your mind could catch up.

The space felt tighter now, the walls seeming to close in as more guards poured through, the air thinning with every step.

“Oh shit—oh shit—” Dustin’s voice echoed somewhere behind you, high and panicked, barely cutting through the shouting and the pounding of boots.

You seriously regretted dropping out of Russian 2 in high school, because now all you could understand was probably “get them” or “kill them,” and that definitely hadn’t been in the chapter about ordering borscht.

Another guard appeared ahead, weapon raised, the barrel pointed straight at you.

Steve swore under his breath, his eyes darting down the corridor, searching, calculating, landing on something before the rest of you had time to catch up.

“Move—!”

He threw himself sideways into a stack of metal barrels lining the wall. They tipped, wobbled, then went down all at once, crashing across the corridor with a deafening clang.

One of them tipped straight toward you, the dark curve of metal filling your vision faster than your body knew how to move.

Steve caught you from behind and hauled you back hard enough that your shoulders hit his chest, the barrel crashing down where your feet had been a second earlier.

“What the fuck, Steve!” you yelped, the words coming out too sharp, too high, barely yours.

“No time—come on!” he shot back, already moving again. “Go, go, go—!”

He shoved through the nearest open doorway, taking you with him as all of you spilled into the room in a tangle of limbs and momentum. Then he spun back, slamming the door shut behind you.

“Push it!” he barked.

Robin was already there, throwing her weight against the door before anyone had to tell her twice, and you joined her without thinking. Your shoulder hit the cold metal hard enough to sting as Steve wedged himself beside you, all three of you shoving hard while the handle jerked under the force of the guards on the other side.

The room was small. Too small. Like whoever designed it had never planned for five people and a full panic spiral.

Your eyes flicked around the room, searching for anything that wasn’t a dead end, your chest heaving as you tried to catch your breath— bare walls, dim lighting, and—

A hatch.

On the floor.

“Here!” Erica’s voice rang out, sharp with urgency as she dropped to her knees beside the latch. “Come on, let’s go!”

Dustin was already moving toward her, skidding down hard enough that his knee cracked against the floor before he yanked the hatch open, revealing nothing but darkness below.

For one stupid, naive, second, relief sparked through you.

An exit.

Then the door slammed behind you hard enough to rattle the walls, the handle jerking under Robin’s hands as the guards threw their weight against the other side.

Your eyes snapped around the room, already searching for something heavy enough to shove in front of it. A shelf. A table. Anything you could wedge under the handle long enough for all of you to make it down.

But the room was almost bare.

The room shifted, and everyone else realized it too.

There wasn’t enough time.

Not for all of you.

Not with the guards breaking through.

Not with Steve still pressed against the door.

Not all of you were getting out of here.

Except you felt it before anyone said it.

You pressed harder against the door, the metal trembling under the force of the guards on the other side.

Steve’s arm brushed yours.

Solid. Steady.

He didn’t look at you when it happened, and somehow that made it worse. His attention stayed fixed on the door, jaw tight, body angled beside yours as if the decision had already settled into his bones.

“Y/N—come on!” Dustin shouted, scrambling back toward you. “We have to move—now!”

He grabbed your wrist with both hands, too hard, panic making him rougher than he meant to be as he tried to pull you toward the hatch.

“No!” you snapped, twisting against his grip as you tried to push past him. “I’m not leaving them—”

Some distant, rational part of you knew every second you spent fighting Dustin was a second Steve and Robin had to keep holding the door. A second less to run. A second less to survive.

But the thought of losing both of them at once hit too hard for logic to matter.

“Y/N, go!”

Steve’s voice cut through everything.

Louder than you’d ever heard it in the four years you’d known him.

It killed whatever hope you still had left.

And just like that, the argument died in your throat.

Or lack of.

For a second, everything else fell away: the shouting, the alarm, the violent pounding against the door.

Your eyes snapped to his.

There was no hesitation there. No room for the half-panicked joke he might’ve made to reassure you, no flicker of that reckless Steve Harrington confidence he always reached for when things got bad.

Just urgency.

Raw, desperate fear you had never seen on him before.

“Come on!” Erica yelled again from the hatch. “We don’t have time!”

“Go with them, Y/N!” Steve cut in again.

His voice cracked slightly under the strain as his body jerked against the door, but he didn’t take it back. He didn’t even look surprised by the words once they were out, and that was what made them worse.

He had already decided.

You shook your head, the thought landing all at once with such awful certainty that for a second, you couldn’t hear anything else.

If you left, they would die.

“No—let me do it instead!” you rushed out, the words tumbling over each other. “Steve, I’d rather you go with the kids—please—”

“Fuck no!”

The force of his voice temporarily stunned you.

“Y/N, stop fighting—just go!” he snapped, turning just enough to look at you fully now, his expression fierce, almost frantic.

He tried to soften his voice.

Couldn’t.

“Just trust me, okay? Just—go!”

The door slammed behind them again, the metal groaning under the force of the guards on the other side.

Closer now.

Louder.

They were getting through.

You hesitated.

For one impossible second, everything stretched long enough for you to really see him.

The panic he was trying to swallow.

The way his body jerked back against the force of the door.

The way he looked at you—

like this might be it.

like he knew it too.

Robin glanced at you, her face pale but set, then back at the door.

“GO!” she shouted.

“GO!” Steve echoed, louder, sharper, final.

Dustin didn’t wait for you to decide.

“I won’t forget you!” he yelled, his voice cracking on the last word as he grabbed you and hauled you toward the hatch before you could fight him off again.

“Dustin—no—” you whimpered, twisting hard against him, one hand reaching blindly back toward the door.

Some stupid, hysterical part of you couldn’t understand how your thirteen-year-old brother was strong enough to move you, but he was. He was dragging you back, and your mouth had started to tremble now because there was nothing left to do with the panic.

Nothing useful.

Nothing that would save them.

But it was too late.

Steve’s hand slipped from yours.

Dustin shoved you down.

And then you were falling before you could stop it.

The drop knocked the air out of your lungs, the impact jarring through your body hard enough to leave everything ringing.

You barely had time to drag yourself onto your hands before Erica and Dustin dropped down after you, landing hard in the dark.

“Robin! Steve—!” you shouted, your voice breaking.

Your hand flew to your mouth a second too late, clamping hard over it as if you could shove the sound back inside.

Above you, the door burst open.

The sound cracked down the shaft, followed by shouting, boots, the violent scrape of bodies hitting metal.

“Oh fuck—” you choked out behind your hand as the reality hit all at once.

Steve and Robin were alone up there with armed men, and all you had was a ladder you couldn’t climb fast enough.

“Dustin, I’m serious—we have to go back right now—”

“Hey—hey—no, we can’t!” Dustin grabbed your arm, pulling you back as you lurched toward the ladder. “He told you to go! So we go—okay? We go!”

You shook your head, your chest tight, panic clawing its way up your throat as the sounds from above grew louder, more distant.

“I—no, we can’t just—” Your voice faltered, the rest of the sentence breaking apart before you could force it into anything useful.

You had left them.

You had let go.

And the worst part was that Steve had made you.

“Okay, think, Henderson, think,” Dustin muttered, pacing in the narrow space, both hands gripping the edges of his denim vest.

“Can you not—” you snapped, your voice shaking, barely holding together, “—talk about yourself in the third person right now? You sound—God, Dustin, just stop.”

You knew it wouldn’t help to lash out at your little brother.

Nothing would.

Because all you could see was the last look Steve gave you.

The panic he’d tried to swallow.

The way he’d shouted at you to go.

The way it felt like a goodbye you hadn’t agreed to.