#seeder

It takes him another second to properly come back down into himself.

Then he looks at Hopper and sees, really sees, the offer sitting there in those two cups and that worn face.

Not strategy.

Not transaction.

Just a fellow human being — trying his luck at humanity in a place that has done everything it can to beat that out of people.

Seeder straightens a little and finally replies, “Well. That depends.”

Hopper’s mouth twitches. “On?”

Seeder looks at the cups again. “How bad that coffee is.”

That gets the faintest snort out of Hopper. “Fair,” he says. “I’ll level with you, I haven’t tasted it. Didn’t wanna risk poisoning myself before noon.”

That gets a fuller smile out of Seeder now, subtle but real.

Hopper lifts one steaming cup slightly. “Don’t think we’ve properly introduced ourselves yet. Should’ve done that before now. Didn’t. Figured I might try and make up for it.”

Seeder takes the cup from him slowly, still studying him a little like he is trying to make sense of where exactly this man fits in the architecture of the Capitol. Because Hopper sure as hell does not fit naturally. Nothing about him gleams. Nothing about him performs. He looks like somebody dragged a blunt instrument through a room full of polished diplomats and accidentally left one standing.

Seeder sticks out his free hand. “Don Seeder.”

“Jim Hopper.”

“I know who you are.”

“Yeah,” Hopper says dryly. “Same.”

They shake hands.

It’s a good handshake.

Not some limp Capitol nonsense. A real one. Firm, direct, both men looking each other in the eye because they were raised in places where that still means something.

Seeder glances down at the coffee in his hand, then back up at Hopper with a little sly curve starting at one corner of his mouth.

“So,” he begins, lifting the cup a fraction. “You figured I take it black because I’m black?”

Hopper does not miss a beat.

“No,” he says. “I figured you take it black because anybody who’s still upright after this morning has given up on joy and whimsy.”

Seeder stares at him for one beat.

Then a bark of laughter escapes him before he can stop it.

Real laughter, not pretty. Sharp and warm and a little disbelieving all at once.

A couple of Capitol idiots nearby glance over, startled by the sound of actual humanity interrupting their viewing experience — but neither mentor gives enough of a shit to notice.

Seeder shakes his head, still smiling into the rim of the cup. “A’ight. That was good.”

Hopper takes a sip of his own. Grimaces. “Coffee’s still bad.”

His company grits his teeth. “Really is.”

They stand in that for a second, shoulder to shoulder without quite being shoulder to shoulder, both of them turning their attention back up to the big screen...

Ro is done with Steve’s knee now. He moves to the sting on Steve’s forearm, gently pressing the leaf mash there, then glances up through the canopy with those huge alert eyes, still keeping watch while he works.

“Your boy’s somethin’ else,” Hopper says after a minute.

Seeder’s throat moves around a swallow. “Yeah.”

He says it casually. Though he fails at casual.

Because how the hell do you act normal while watching a child from home drag a six-foot disaster through the woods, build him a whole damn leaf bunker, and then turn field medic before nine in the morning?

Newsflash: ya don’t.

You just try not to let your whole chest split wide open in a public square full of glittering sociopaths.

On another screen, the feed changes.

Tommy, Carol and Marvel lie in a heap near the lake, all unconscious limbs and ugly swollen stings and the wreckage of arrogance. Tommy’s eye is still puffed up, mean as hell — and that scratch across his face from the robin’s beak looks even worse in daylight. Carol looks half-dead under one arm. Marvel’s chest rises and falls beneath his shirt, proving he is unfortunately still in possession of breath.

Hopper cuts his hardened eyes toward that image with an expression that could sour milk.

Seeder notices.

That’s the thing he notices first about Jim Hopper, actually… The man’s eyes never lie. Mouth maybe. Tone definitely. But the eyes? Not once.

Right now those eyes are fixed on the screens with the exact expression of a man picturing twelve different ways to break a teenager’s jaw and deciding all twelve are inadequate.

Then the screen changes again.

There you are.

Leaned up against a tree beside the stream, one hand braced rough against bark while the other hovers near the torn shin you’re clearly trying not to look at for too long. Your face has gone pale under the dirt. Your mouth tightens. For one second, you squeeze your eyes shut and breathe through it. In. Out. In. Out. Quiet, measured and furious.

Hopper’s face changes.

Not by much.

But Seeder sees it.

That dad-look.

That impossible adult thing that certain men get around hurt kids and girls in over their heads and boys trying not to cry and anybody too young to have that much blood on them. It’s not pity. It’s not softness, exactly. It’s more like the whole body stilling around the urge to fix something it cannot reach.

Seeder takes another sip of coffee, lets the silence sit for a beat, then says, without looking away from your image on the big screen, “That girl of yours is somethin’ serious.”

Hopper huffs once through his nose. “Yeah.”

“She got half that arena workin’ in her favor and three-quarters of them don’t even know it.”

That earns Seeder a glance.

Not suspicious.

Just considering.

Then Hopper shifts his weight, eyes going back to you on the screen where you are now forcing yourself off the tree and limping forward again.

“That’s kinda her thing,” he says. “She knows how to play a long game.”

Seeder nods slowly. “Mm.”

“Harrington?” Hopper goes on. “He knows how to survive. Knows how to fight when it comes time. But her?” A little grim little smile touches his mouth. “She’s the one who knows how to make people feel like… all this was their idea.”

Seeder lets out a soft amused breath. “S’that so.”

“Yeah.”

They watch you move between the trees.

Hopper continues, his tone quiet, matter-of-fact. “Capitol wants warmth, she gives ’em warmth. Wants mystery, she gives ’em mystery. Wants some story to fall in love with, she figures out exactly which one they’re already halfway inventing and walks straight into the frame.” He faintly shrugs one shoulder. “Doesn’t mean she likes any of it. Just means she’s smart enough to use it.”

Seeder turns that over in his mind.

He doesn’t ask too much. He doesn’t pry where he can already feel the line. But he is curious. More than curious, honestly... Because any fool with eyes can see by now that your angle has never only been about your own neck. There’s more moving beneath the surface there. More than one life threaded into your choices.

And Seeder is a man who respects strategy, especially the quiet kind.

“So all this—?” he asks after another moment, tipping his chin faintly toward the screens, toward the nation’s current obsession with you and Steve and your weird impossible orbit around one another. “That all improvised?”

Hopper actually laughs a little at that. Not loudly. Just one rough sound.

“Hell no,” he says. “Not all of it.”

That’s all he gives.

It’s enough.

Seeder nods once, taking the answer for what it is: not the full truth, not a lie either. Just the respectful amount of cards still held close to the chest.

That works for him.

Because he’s got his own cards, too. Thresh in the grass. Ro in the trees. A quiet little alliance that Hawkins does not fully know and the Capitol definitely does not fully grasp. All of it is still moving under the soil like roots.

One screen over, the feed lands on Thresh.

Just like that, the whole energy changes.

Thresh is out in the tall grass again, shoulders broad as a damn gate, body low and still and purposeful. He looks less like a boy and more like a land formation. Some old thing with a pulse. He moves through that high grass with the kind of quiet that belongs to predators and good men and very bad ideas.

Seeder’s mouth edges upward before he can stop it.

Hopper notices. “Built like a fuckin’ house,” he mutters.

That gets another short laugh out of Seeder. “A house?”

Hopper squints at the screen. “Nah, that ain’t right. House is underselling it.” He takes another sip of coffee. “Boy’s built like a courthouse.”

Seeder grins fully at that. “That’s better.”

“Guy could probably punch a tree and make furniture.”

“Wouldn’t even surprise me.”

They stand there watching Thresh for another few beats — and in that quiet, the easy shape of conversation starts to settle. Less cautious now. Less like two men standing on opposite sides of an invisible line. More like something practical. Circumstantial. Human.

Seeder studies Hopper out of the corner of his eye.

There’s wear there. The obvious kind and the less obvious kind. The obvious kind sits in the posture, the stubble, the face that looks like it came pre-tired and then got dealt a bad hand besides. The less obvious kind sits in the way he watches young people on those screens like every single one of them is both a mission and a memorial.

Seeder has known men like that.

Men who love children without ever once saying it in words as sweet as love.

“So,” Seeder says eventually, “my boy thinks that one hung the moon.”

Hopper glances over. “Thresh?”

Seeder gives him a look. “Ro.”

That softens something in Hopper’s face almost immediately.

“Yeah?”

Seeder nods toward the screen where Steve still lies unconscious under the leaves, one arm draped loose and helpless while Ro keeps moving around him with watchful care.

“Harrington’s a hero to him,” Seeder says, not joking now. “I mean that. That child worships him.”

Hopper looks back at the screen again. A tiny, helpless little smile shows up at one corner of his mouth.

Seeder takes that as an invitation enough to keep going.

“Whole week before the Games?” he says. “Wouldn’t shut up about that man.” His voice lowers, warm with the memory whether he intends it or not. “Photo shoots, video shoots, that—ridiculous gala…” He shakes his head. “Lord, after the gala especially. You’d’ve thought Steve hung the moon and personally polished every star around it.”

That gets a real laugh out of Hopper this time.

Seeder keeps talking — because now he’s remembering it all, and because remembering it is easier than looking at the screen for one second.

“He went out on that balcony with him,” he reflects. “Just stood out there and talked to him like he wasn’t some little afterthought in dress shoes. That was it. That’s all it took.”

Hopper rubs once at his mouth with his thumb, eyes still on the big screen. “Sounds like him.”

Seeder glances over. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

And again, there’s no boast in it. No false humility either. Just a quiet fact.

Seeder lets that sit between them.

Because he knows what Hopper knows. Even if they never say it straight.

A white boy from wealth, from gates, from all-American surfaces, talking to a little black boy from District 11 like he matters… that’s not some grand moral miracle. It should be normal. It should be ordinary. It should be too basic to even remark on.

But the world these two men come from is not a world that makes ordinary kindness equally available to everybody.

Hopper knows that.

Seeder knows Hopper knows it.

And maybe that’s a part of why this whole thing with the coffee matters just a little more than coffee ought to. Because Hopper didn’t waltz over here like some savior. He didn’t perform decency like it was a talent or gift to be given praise for, or any sort of noble recognition. He just came over. Unprompted. One man to another. One mentor to another. One worried bastard to another worried bastard.

Seeder respects the hell out of that.

He takes another drink, then says, tone lightening again because neither one of them can afford to live in solemnity every single second, “though I do gotta ask...”

Hopper looks over. “What.”

Seeder’s mouth tilts. “You wanna explain to me why your boy was calling mine Lucas?”

That stops Hopper dead for one beat.

Then he actually laughs, low and helpless and genuinely delighted.

“Oh, Jesus,” he mutters, covering part of his face with one hand.

Seeder waits, looking entirely too pleased with himself.

Hopper lowers his hand after a long second, still smiling. “Yeah, alright. That one’s easy.”

He shifts his coffee to the other hand and tips his head toward the screens like the answer might be tucked in there somewhere.

“There’s four boys back home,” he says, his voice warming. “All around Ro’s age or thereabouts. Henderson’s the kid he volunteered for.” His eyes slide toward Seeder. “Lucas Sinclair’s one of the others. Smart mouth. Good head on his shoulders. Steve’s had all of ’em under his wing for the last few years whether he’d admit that shit or not.”

Seeder nods, listening.

Hopper goes on, voice going quieter. “Ro looks like him a little. Mannerisms maybe. Big eyes. Sweet kid under all the caution.” A shrug. “Steve was high as hell on venom. Guess his brain went where it goes.” He ponders for a little beat. Then remarks aloud, “even I thought of the kid, after Ro brought up his slingshot. During the interviews?” He smiles to himself. “Kids got one’s those in his back pocket for monster fighting. It actually works.” He nods at the big screen. “Steve can attest to that. Not surprised he sees that kid in Ro.”

Seeder turns that over.

There is something in it that hurts and warms at the same time. The idea that Steve Harrington’s delirious mind, drowning in fear and poison, reached for a boy he loves enough to see him in another child. Seeder doesn’t know Lucas Sinclair. Doesn’t need to, though. Because he can already feel the shape of what Hopper means.

He lets the silence stretch for one moment.

Then, with all the gravitas of a preacher preparing to say something holy, he leans in a little and asks under his breath, “Because he’s black… right?”

Hopper blinks once.

And then he folds.

He lets out this startled wheezing sound that he clearly tries to kill off and absolutely fails to. He presses the heel of one hand to his face, shoulders shaking once, coffee barely saved from sloshing over the rim.

Seeder takes another perfectly dignified sip of coffee and grins into it like the devil in all his impish glory.

“Aw, hell,” Hopper mutters from behind his hand, still half-laughing. “You’re gonna make me like you.”

“That’d be tragic.”

“Real tragic.”

“Could damage your whole reputation.”

Hopper lowers his hand at last, still smirking despite himself. “Don’t spread it around.”

Seeder lifts his cup a little. “Scout’s honor.”

Neither of them were scouts.

That’s what makes it funny.

Around them, the elite Capitol square keeps buzzing, citizens theorizing and preening and pointing at screens and acting like any of them had anything to do with what bravery looks like.

The nearest screen cuts back to you.

You’ve now found a place to stop at last, leaning hard against a tree now, finally giving yourself one second to inspect the wound on your shin... The camera does not need to zoom for Hopper and Seeder to know it’s bad. You see enough and your face goes a little green around the edges before you shut your eyes and hold perfectly still for a moment — jaw flexing, forcing whatever nausea rises back down your own throat.

Seeder watches Hopper watch you.

That painfully protective look is back.

He doesn’t comment on it. Not directly.

Instead he says, “She’s got grit.”

Hopper nods solemnly. “She does.”

“More’n most.”

“Yeah.”

Seeder’s eyes stay on the screen. “Most people’d spend all their cleverness on themselves.”

That earns him a look.

“I notice things,” Seeder adds mildly.

“I can tell.”

“That girl of yours’been spreading her bets wide. Not just Harrington. Not just herself.”

Hopper doesn’t answer at first.

He studies Seeder instead, weighing how much this man is saying and how much he is merely noticing.

Then he looks back to the screen and says, “I ain’t saying she went in there to save the world.”

Seeder nods slowly.

“But I’m also not saying she’d ever know how to save just one person if she had the chance to save four.”

That lands all the way.

Seeder’s expression doesn’t change much. But inside? Something settles a little more solidly into place. Because that sounds right. Sounds exactly right.

And it makes him respect you even more than he already did.

One screen over, the image shifts again.

Foxface is crouched near a patch of low-growing plants beside the creek, collecting what looks edible and leaving what might kill her. Her hands move quick, clever, fox-fast. On another screen, Syl is curled miserably on higher ground, still trapped away from the Cornucopia by those coyote-like mutts that drove her back. On another, Hannah and Jack sit together inside the cave, sharing the little canteen and a couple of crackers, tiny hands around survival like they are trying not to squeeze too hard and lose it.

Then back to Ro and Steve.

Ro climbs again. Of course he does. Up a tree this time, light and nimble and soundless, looking out over the brush with the focus of a much older person.

Seeder’s whole face softens with pride. “That child’s gonna make me gray before I deserve it,” he murmurs.

Hopper glances at him. “How old is he?”

“Nine.”

Hopper whistles under his breath.

“Yeah.”

“Thought Harrington was gonna die in that clearing.”

“So did I.”

“Thought your boy was gonna get himself killed dragging him out.”

“So did I.”

They both sip their coffee.

Then Hopper says, “Your kid’s got ice water where most people got blood.”

Seeder smiles faintly. “No. He’s just scared and does it anyway.”

Hopper considers that.

Then nods once, like he recognizes the type.

They stand there in companionable silence for a little while longer.

Then Seeder asks, gentler now, “Your team at the penthouse. They good?”

That catches Hopper a little off guard.

He glances sideways. “Yeah.”

“Looks like it.”

Hopper huffs out a sound somewhere between agreement… and somewhat long-suffering.

“Effie’s a damn fairy godmother basket case,” he drawls. “Makes me wanna put my head through a brick dollhouse twice a day.” That gets a smirk out of Seeder before Hopper keeps going. “But she’s good at what she does.”

“…and Cinna?”

That one changes Hopper’s face.

Not dramatically. Just enough to go solemn.

“He’s a blessing,” he confirms quietly.

Seeder waits.

Hopper takes his time. When he speaks, he does it in the tone of somebody not used to explaining tenderness but willing to try because the truth matters more than his pride right now.

“I’m not built for…” He waves one hand vaguely, searching. “Sentimental shit. Soft landings. Reassurance.” He grimaces like the words themselves all taste a tad embarrassing. “I know how to survive. I know how to get people moving. That’s about the size of it.”

Seeder says nothing.

Hopper’s jaw works once. “Cinna’s the one who knew how to talk to Steve without making him wanna bite somebody’s head off.”

That earns a warm, light laugh out of Seeder.

But Hopper’s not joking. “He got through to him,” he says. “Early. Before any of this. Kept getting through to him.” His eyes flick to Steve on the screen. “There’s a fire in that kid. Cinna never tried to put it out. Just knew when to let it burn and when to make it bank low.”

Seeder absorbs that quietly. Because that’s… a very humble thing to admit. Maybe more humble than Hopper himself realizes. To say plainly: someone else reached this boy where I couldn’t.

It does not make him look smaller.

If anything, it does the opposite.

Seeder had already suspected there was more to Steve Harrington than the press package. More than the former golden boy surface. More than the volunteer glamour and the good looks and the “young man on fire” mythos the Capitol keeps polishing into a story.

This confirms it.

Confirms, too, that Hopper sees the fractures in him and does not look away from them.

Before Seeder can answer, the volume in the square shifts.

Not the screens.

The people.

A ripple goes through the gathered citizens. Heads turning. Bodies angling. Murmurs changing pitch. Because now… Caesar Flickerman fills the largest screen with all his lacquered enthusiasm and gleaming teeth, and his voice booms across the square with unmistakable breaking-news energy.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Caesar announces, visibly thrilled in that glossy way of his whenever something has finally become far too dramatic to keep to normal coverage, “we are interrupting our standard arena feed for a truly extraordinary development—live from Hawkins, Indiana.”

Hopper and Seeder both straighten at the same time.

Every screen in the square shifts.

The silver glow becomes rain.

The Capitol broadcast gives way to Hawkins.

And there she is: some drenched local news reporter in a huge rain slicker, standing in the middle of a grim, rainy street with wet hair plastered to her forehead and excitement practically vibrating through her whole frame.

Behind her, Hawkins is alive.

Alive.

In the rain.

People in coats and patched jackets and slickers, gathered in the streets like a crooked little army of support and enthusiasm.

The reporter’s talking fast and loud over the weather, her voice nearly getting eaten by the downpour.

“It doesn’t matter that the weather is miserable here this morning,” she says breathlessly into her mic. “Because the mood in Hawkins… is anything but! Residents are rallying in the streets in celebration—not only for their own tributes from District Twelve, Ren Everdeen and Steve Harrington—but in honor of the youngest, most unexpected hero of the Games so far: District Eleven’s very own, Ro Barnett!”

Seeder goes absolutely still.

Not fearfully frozen.

Stunned.

The kind of stunned that reaches in and presses fingers under the sternum.

Beside him, Hopper is no better. Mouth half open, coffee forgotten, staring at the screens like he’s not entirely convinced that he hasn’t slipped into some alternate reality himself.

Because there they are.

Dustin Henderson hits the screen first, of course.

He’s out front and leading like some tiny unhinged war general on a bicycle, soaking wet and fully committed: Mike and Lucas on either side of him, Will there too, smaller and earnest but no less determined. The four of them are cutting through the rain in a little chaotic pack while people on the sidewalks cheer and clap and holler encouragement.

And pasted to the side of Eddie’s old work van — trailing behind them, bold and impossible to miss:

LONG LIVE PAN’S SHADOW

WE BELIEVE

Seeder’s eyes burn so suddenly he has to blink hard.

Hopper lets out a soft, disbelieving little sound beside him.

On the big screen, Eddie’s van rolls slowly behind the kids while the reporter jogs alongside it, laughing breathlessly and trying to keep up. Eddie leans half out the driver-side window, one arm hanging easy, wet curls plastered down, talking to the cameras like he was born to sell revolution out the side of a goddamn van.

Nancy is in the passenger seat beside him, raincoat on, beautiful face bright and gracious and just as game as anybody else in the whole damn town.

The reporter shoves the microphone toward Eddie.

“What are you all doing out here this morning?!”

Eddie grins like the devil got into local organizing. “What’s it look like? We’re putting some damn respect on the kid’s name.”

The reporter laughs heartily. “District Eleven’s Ro Barnett?”

“You got ears, sweetheart?” Eddie shoots back, not missing a beat. “Little man dragged our six-foot problem through the woods and saved his life. That deserves fanfare.”

The camera cuts to Dustin on his bike, yelling hoarsely into the rain, “RO IS THE GOAT!” — while Mike immediately shouts, “DUSTIN, THAT DOESN’T EVEN MAKE SENSE FOR THE METAPHOR—”

Lucas yells over both of them, “RO’S THE MAN! GREATEST LOSTBOY OF ALL TIME—RO’S THE MAN!—”

Will is laughing so hard he nearly veers into Mike.

Hopper covers his mouth with one hand, not because he is upset. Because if he doesn’t, the smile is going to fully betray him.

Seeder, meanwhile, looks like somebody just reached into his tight chest and handed him proof that the world still has the capacity to stun him… in good ways.

The feed cuts again.

Chrissy Cunningham now, interviewed from the front steps of Mayor Kline’s house with the rain behind her and that little gold pendant at her throat. She is warm even in stillness, soft-spoken and clear-eyed and utterly sure.

“He’s coming home,” she says. Then, without hesitation, “and so is she.”

The reporter asks, “But what about the odds?”

Chrissy just holds up a Polaroid to the camera, a picture of her and you, both smiling, some ordinary stolen memory from a world that used to hold room for those. Her own smile deepens just a little.

“They’re all in favor of them both.”

The square around Hopper and Seeder actually audibly reacts to that.

Not with mockery.

Not even with skepticism.

But with a collective little catch of breath. A murmur. A rustle. The story of it landing all at once.

Then Larry Kline shows up on another split screen, sheltered under his front porch awning, smiling his oily politician smile while saying something about supporting the youth of Hawkins “wholeheartedly,” and Hopper mutters, “Oh, eat shit,” under his breath so fast Seeder almost misses it.

Keyword: almost.

Seeder snorts into his coffee.

Hopper cuts a glance at him, caught. “What?”

“That was from the soul.”

“Yeah, well.” Hopper disdainfully watches Larry gesture for the cameras like he personally invented hope. “Town’s still got one or two embarrassments.”

Seeder’s smile lingers.

Because what he is actually watching here is not just a small town rallying.

It is a small town expanding its circle.

Those boys on those bikes do not belong to District Eleven.

That man in the van does not have to care about Ro Barnett.

That girl on those steps did not have to speak his name in the same breath as yours and Steve’s and make it sound like all three lives carry equal weight inside these wicked games.

But they did.

And they do.

Pan’s shadow…

Seeder turns that over in his head. Pan and his shadow. Not “servant and master.” Not “hero and sidekick.” Not “one important, one incidental.”

Equals.

Bound together.

One impossible without the other.

That thought nearly undoes him.

Hopper, still staring at the screens, says out of the side of his mouth, “Stupid little shits.”

There is so much love in it Seeder has to look away for a second.

Then Hopper adds, with that dry fondness that only some men know how to weaponize, “damn town surprises me every damn time.”

Seeder looks at him then.

Really looks.

At the slick silver screens reflecting in Hopper’s cynical, tired eyes. At the rain-soaked chaos of Hawkins on those giant displays. At the kids on bikes and the old van and the signs and the sudden impossible feeling of one town saying, in full public view, that the little black boy from District Eleven counts as theirs too.

Hopper catches Don’s look and shrugs one shoulder. “They get weird when they care.”

“Weird?”

“You saw Henderson. Called your kid a goat—hell’s that even mean…?”

That does it.

Seeder laughs again, quieter this time but no less real.

Onscreen, the camera catches Lucas for half a second… chin lifted, raincoat on, grinning like crazy. Charles Sinclair somewhere behind him is now clearly yelling with pride while Sue stands beside him holding Erica, who looks like she would personally fight God if it meant better reception.

Seeder thinks of Ro looking at Steve Harrington like the moon.

He thinks of Steve hallucinating Lucas Sinclair under a rock.

He thinks of how strange and merciful it is, what children build when adults haven’t ruined all the architecture first.

He turns fully toward Hopper.

Hopper turns too.

And for one beat the whole Capitol seems to go quieter around them — not actually quieter, but smaller. Like the important thing has moved into this narrow little pocket between two men holding paper cups and wearing the faces of people who do not get thanked often enough.

Seeder sets his coffee down on the nearby ledge.

Hopper does the same.

Then Seeder sticks out his hand again.

This time there is no introduction in it.

No formality.

Just understanding.

Hopper takes it.

And the handshake is firmer now. Longer. Neither man squeezes too hard. Neither lets go too quickly. There’s a lot in it being wordlessly spoken…

Whatever happens now.

Whatever the arena does next.

Whatever the Capitol asks of them, strips from them, parades in front of them.

They are through the worst part of not knowing one another.

Now they know.

Now there is somebody else in this polished hellscape who can look at the screens and understand exactly why your throat tightens. Why your coffee goes cold in your hand. Why a little joke is the only thing standing between you and punching a hole through a silver display.

Seeder meets Hopper’s eyes and says, “Hell or high water.”

Hopper nods once.

“Yeah,” he says. “Together.”

And behind them, on the giant silver screens, Hawkins keeps rallying in the rain while Ro Barnett’s name echoes all the way to the Capitol.

The boy in the trees.

Pan’s shadow.

Long live.

10:48 AM

“Alright,” Eddie Munson drawls into his rain-dark windshield, voice bone-dry and vaguely offended by the weather itself, “whoever pissed off God this bad can go ahead and apologize whenever.”

That gets him exactly what it deserves.

Mike snorts. Dustin immediately says, “Probably you.” Lucas adds, “Definitely you.” Will laughs from somewhere beneath a towel in the back.

Erica, from the far corner of the van, says with complete confidence, “It was Nancy.”

Nancy, still riding shotgun like a princess with both arms crossed and one socked foot tucked up under her, doesn’t even blink. “Why would it be me?”

“Because,” Erica shrugs like it’s law, “you always look like you’re in a fight with somebody invisible.”

That one’s enough to make Nancy hum slyly, smirking.

It’s also one that nearly takes Eddie out. He bites down on the inside of his cheek hard enough to feel it and just barely keeps the van steady as the tires hiss through another ribbon of standing water.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters fondly, shaking his head. “Never have kids. They’ll smell weakness on you and then they’ll kill for sport.”

Nancy bats her lashes at him teasingly. “I thought you wanted triplets.”

Jonathan’s brow arches to the stratosphere. “Triplets…?”

Eddie puffs out his lips, flicking the blinker. “Listen, I was drunk and had just watched ‘Cheaper by the Dozen.’ It wasn’t my clearest thinking.”

Nancy turns to look over her shoulder impishly at Jonathan. “He’s saying that to save face. Don’t believe him. He’s a CareBear.”

Jonathan’s cheeks turn pink as he crookedly grins back. “Noted.”

“Uhm, wow?” Eddie side-eyes her, but it’s all in jest. “Way to make me sound like some beanie baby in denial.”

She feigns innocence. “I never said that.”

“You implied it.”

Nancy slyly glances back at Jonathan again, blue eyes gleaming. “See?”

Jonathan chuckles, the sound of it all light and warm. He glances down at his shoes, then back up at her… with those lovesick charcoal eyes of his.

She feels her playful smile flatter subtly, suddenly feeling caught.

Or rather, feeling like she’s caught him.

So before she can feel locked under his gaze any longer, she awkwardly lets herself give a tight-lipped kind smile before turning to face the dash again.

The rain is mean now.

It’s not cute rain, like in the movies. Not that soft, aesthetic little drizzle that makes people want to stare out windows and think about poetry and failed romances and whatever the hell else people with free time think about. No. This is hard rain. Dirty-bucket rain. The kind that pelts the windshield in wet handfuls and turns Hawkins into a gray smear of telephone poles, flooded gutters and exhausted little houses crouched under the weight of the sky.

It’s nearing eleven in the morning.

The cracked roads are all slick as hell. The storm forecast on the radio has gone from dreary to threatening. And inside Eddie’s van, everything smells like damp towels, wet denim, cheap soap, gasoline and the nervous energy of too many people trying too hard not to think about the same thing.

The kids are in the back, crammed together in a heap of knees and elbows and raincoats and still-not-dry hair. Eddie’s van, which usually looks like a raccoon got drunk in it and opened a music store, has actually been cleaned up for once. Relatively speaking. The floor’s still got cassette cases shoved under the seats and one singular boot that belongs to nobody, apparently — but there are clean towels stacked behind the passenger seat, a first aid kit, and an honest-to-God milk crate of snacks shoved up near the wheel well.

He came prepared.

Of course he came prepared.

Because now that the whole world’s become a rotating series of increasingly unhinged disasters, Eddie Munson’s van is no longer just “Eddie Munson’s van.” It’s a mobile command unit. A getaway car. A backup babysitter station. A rolling panic room with bad suspension.

And up front, the older kids are in their own little weather system.

Nancy’s in the passenger seat, spine straight, one hand resting near the radio dial, face turned half toward the glass where the rain keeps chasing itself sideways. Jonathan’s in a couched position just behind them, leaning forward between the two front seats, one forearm braced over the console while he talks. His hair’s still damp at the ends from the last dash through the rain. His jacket smells faintly like bakery warmth and outside cold. Every so often, when the van passes under one of the few working street lamps still hanging on in this apocalypse-fucked town, the light catches his face and makes him look even more tired than he probably feels.

And the thing is, they actually have been doing fine.

That’s what makes it annoying.

The three of them have been talking easily for the last twenty minutes or so. Not carefree. Nobody in this van is carefree. But easy enough. That strange, slapdash kind of camaraderie people build when everybody’s equally wrung out and no one has the energy left for pretense.

They’d been talking about the weather first. About how this storm was going to trap the whole town indoors… whether anybody liked it or not. About how maybe that was a good thing, because there were only so many ways a day could go wrong if half the surviving population of Hawkins stayed home and stopped trying to prove itself in public.

Then the conversation drifted, because of course it did, right back where all roads in Hawkins seem to lead these days.

The arena.

Glimmer's death.

The fucking tracker jackers.

The fact that no child should ever have to die on live television, and yet if one of those tributes had to go, then thank fuck it had been one of the ones who enjoyed the hurting.

Eddie had been the bluntest about it, obviously.

He’s still driving one-handed now — drumming the other on the wheel in a rhythm that sounds almost jaunty if you don’t know him. “I’m not saying the blonde psycho deserved it,” he sighs, eyes on the road, voice light in exactly the kind of way that means it isn’t, “I’m jussayin I’m not lighting any memorial candles either.”

Nancy cuts him a look. “That’s awful.”

“I know,” he admits solemnly.

Jonathan, leaning in from behind them, says quietly, “I get it.”

Eddie glances at him in the mirror.

Jonathan shrugs once, looking vaguely sick about the fact that he means this at all. “Nobody should die like that. But after what they did to Mara…”

He doesn’t finish that sentence.

He doesn’t have to, though.

They all remember.

The slaughter at the Cornucopia. The girl from Ten. The cruelty of it. The way Eddie and Nancy had killed the television before the worst of it could keep going on in front of the younger kids. The way Jonathan says, after a beat, “I turned it off. At our house. Wouldn’t let Will see it.”

Nancy goes a little still at that, then nods. “Us too.”

Eddie’s jaw ticks once. “Yeah.”

That’s the thing about them. All three. They’ve had to age like milk left on a radiator. Fast and mean and all wrong. They’re not supposed to be the ones deciding what twelve-year-olds can stomach. They’re not supposed to be the wall between children and bloodsport. They’re not supposed to know how to cut the feed at the exact second before a kid’s innocent brain gets branded by something it’ll never stop seeing.

…and yet here they are.

Nancy Wheeler, eighteen and carrying herself like some girl-next-door turned petite war correspondent in a town that hasn’t known peace in years.

Jonathan Byers, also eighteen — with that sad-eyed old-soul thing about him that makes him seem like he’s always just walked in from the edge of some terrible forest.

Eddie, older than both of them but not enough to feel like it counts, hands on the wheel, heart too big for his own damn good and humor sharpened into a defense mechanism sometime around the first apocalypse… especially after Uncle Wayne’s death.

And beneath all that talking… beneath the easy banter and the mutual horror and the sideways grief…there’s another truth pulsing under Eddie’s skin that he doesn’t say.

He watches Nancy sometimes when Steve’s face comes on the screen.

Everybody does, if they’re paying attention.

The way she goes painstakingly quiet. The way her whole body changes, not dramatically, just longingly. Like something inside her stands up and refuses to sit back down. Like she doesn’t have to say mine for it to be felt anyway.

And Eddie knows.

Knows in that ugly, helpless way you know when you’ve loved somebody too long and too closely not to see the shape of their pain.

Nancy loves Steve.

Always has.

Always will, probably until kingdom come.

…and Steve…

Steve is so broken now that sometimes…? Eddie genuinely does not know if that boy will ever let himself be fully held by anybody again. Not because he doesn’t deserve it. Not because he doesn’t need it. But because something irreversible happened to him that Purge night and Eddie knows it. Even if he does not know every single grisly detail of it. He knows enough. Enough to understand the flinch in Steve’s body now. Enough to understand why touch now turns pretty face to stone. Enough to understand the particular, haunted vacancy that lives behind his eyes now whenever intimacy, affection, hope — anything soft — gets too close too fast.

Nancy knows some of it too.

Not all of it.

But enough.

The kids know none of it, and if Eddie has his way, they never will.

And part of him — some bitter, guilty, deeply unromantic romantic part of him — has quietly spent the last year and a half praying that somebody else just might come along and pry Nancy Wheeler loose from the future she keeps offering a boy who may never be able to take it.

Which is where Jonathan comes in, in the most inconveniently decent way possible.

Because Jonathan Byers loves like a house fire too. Just quieter. He’s got that whole soft, hungry, loyal thing about him that makes Eddie want to both shake him and hug him. He’s been carrying a torch for Nancy since basically the beginning of recorded time, and everyone with eyes can see it. Nancy can too. She just doesn’t look directly at it because she doesn’t know what she’d do if she did.

Eddie knows all of that.

Says none of it.

Just keeps driving through the hard rain while his van hisses through Hawkins and the kids in the back argue about whether “Pan and his Shadow” is cooler than “the boys of the woods.”

Then Mike climbs up front.

Of course he does.

One second the back of the van is all loud kid-static and overlapping voices and Lucas telling Dustin he can’t legally nominate himself as “propaganda minister.” The next, Mike is crawling shamelessly over the seats like a determined little raccoon with a mission.

“You guys,” he starts, already halfway in the front space before anyone’s given him permission to be there. “Okay. So we were thinking.”

That phrase makes all three older kids react.

Nancy closes her eyes briefly, smirking. “Oh no.”

Eddie mutters, “That’s never led anywhere legal.”

Jonathan actually smiles.

Mike ignores all of them and keeps going. “We need more signs.”

Will appears a second later beside him, kneeling awkwardly on the seat with both hands gripping the top of it, nodding so hard he looks like he might shake loose. “Big ones,” he adds earnestly. “Like really big ones.”

“For Ren,” Mike adds eagerly. “She’s just as much a hero as Ro. We’ve gotta show support. Remind them she’s still in this, too.”

Jonathan smiles sadly. “Yeah, she is.”

That’s the exact second the air changes.

It happens so fast Eddie almost thinks he imagined it.

Because up until now? Nancy’s been talking just fine. Not cheerful, exactly, but present. Engaged. Going back and forth. Listening, answering, pushing back at Eddie when he gets too foulmouthed in front of the younger ones, or getting lightly playful with Jonathan. 

She’s been in it.

Now she goes very still.

Not frozen, just… stiff. Her whole body seems to draw in by half an inch. Her chin tips the tiniest bit higher. Her stare primly fixes on the windshield now, like she’s suddenly very interested in rainfall patterns… not the conversation happening around her.

Jonathan notices.

Eddie notices Jonathan noticing.

Neither says anything yet.

“Because Steve’s getting stuff,” Mike barrels on, unaware, “which he should, obviously—but she needs stuff too. She’s hurt.”

Will says, softer and more raw, “Her leg looked really bad.”

That lands in the van and sits there.

Jonathan answers first, too sad not to agree. “It does, but… it’ll be okay.”

Eddie nods. “We’ll work on it. Big time. But right now we gotta get everybody home alive first.”

Mike looks offended by practicality. “I know that.”

“Do you?” Eddie asks. “Because every time you say ‘we have a plan,’ I age about six months.”

Dustin and Lucas laugh in the back, while Erica smirks into her trading cards.

Will stays put beside Mike, still intent. “We can make posters! I’ll draw some. When we get back. Like—huge ones. Put them up all over town.”

Eddie keeps his eyes on the road, arching one brow. “And who’s this magical ‘we’ that’s apparently immune to hypothermia and lightning strikes?”

Mike points at himself and Will like a union rep. “Us.”

“Mmmm, nope,” Eddie says immediately.

Mike gasps. “Why not?”

“Because,” Eddie says, “contrary to popular belief, I actually enjoy all of you having skin and pulse.”

Will tries a different angle. “You could help.”

“I am helping, dearest.”

“No, I mean with the posters.”

Eddie gives them both a long look in the rearview mirror. “Sweetheart, I will personally become your little paper fairy if it gets you all to sit the hell indoors and not drown in a ditch.”

Jonathan chuckles under his breath.

Mike folds his arms. “That’s not the point.”

“The point,” Eddie says patiently, like he is explaining weather to a brick, “is that there is now a biblical amount of rain falling out of the sky and it’s only going to get uglier. So yes, posters, signs, messages, all that jazz, absolutely —but! You little goblins are not taking to the streets alone in a storm because you’ve suddenly decided you’re the revolution.”

From the back, Lucas hollers, “We’re already the revolution!”

“We’re the whole goddamn thing!” Dustin adds passionately.

“Language,” Eddie and Jonathan pathetically scold.

Erica makes a face. “Why do you even bother at this point?”

That gets a helpless laugh from everybody except Nancy.

She’s still staring at the windshield.

Jonathan clocks it again.

This time, when Mike and Will finally climb back into the rear and the chatter picks up behind them (Dustin immediately asking if spray paint counts as a household necessity) Jonathan keeps his eyes on Nancy for one second too long, unable to help it now.

She feels it.

Of course she does.

Still, she doesn’t turn around.

Eddie keeps on driving. The van fills with a brief, odd little silence in the front. Not total silence — the kids are still going in the back, now debating whether Mayor Kline’s fence would be easier to paint over than the side of the old pharmacy. But something quieter settles around the older three.

Jonathan’s the one who breaks it.

He does it gently, though... That’s what makes it interesting. He doesn’t go in swinging. He sounds almost hesitant. “Is… something wrong?”

Nancy blinks, then looks at him like the question itself is faintly inconvenient. “No.”

Jonathan watches her for a beat. “You sure?”

“Yeah.” She gives the tiniest shrug. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Eddie hears it.

That tone.

That clipped little Nancy Wheeler non-answer.

And dread immediately prickles in the back of his neck because, oh Christ — here we go… He doesn’t say that, obviously. He just readjusts his grip on the steering wheel and keeps listening to the weather report through the static, even though he’s no longer absorbing a damn word of it.

Jonathan doesn’t let it go.

“S’just you got weird when Mike said her name.”

It’s not aggressive, how he says it.

But it’s enough to make Nancy turn and look at him now, and there’s a flash there in her blue eyes. Not quite anger yet. More like surprise that he clocked it at all and dares to speak of it out loud.

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“I really didn’t.”

Jonathan’s brow furrows. “Okay.”

That okay is too flat.

Nancy hears it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Jonathan lifts one shoulder. “Nothing.”

“…Jonathan.”

Now Eddie is fully locked in, pretending he is absolutely not listening as the van hammers through the rain.

Jonathan glances down once. Then back at her. “It just means I know what I saw.”

“Which is what.”

“The way Ren’s name made you quiet.”

Nancy turns forward again. “I don’t have a problem with Ren.”

Right there. 

There it is.

Eddie actually has to press his lips together. Because that is not a sentence people say when they don’t, in fact, have a problem.

Jonathan knows that all too well.

He leans an inch farther forward between the seats. “Didn’t say you did.”

“You implied it.”

“No,” Jonathan says, more firmly now. “I said you got quiet when Mike said they wanted to put up signs for her.”

Nancy’s mouth tightens.

Outside, rain lashes sideways over the windshield. The wipers swat it away and lose before the next sheet covers it. The road disappears and reappears in muddy strips ahead of them.

“…I just don’t think,” Nancy says carefully, “that maybe turning her into some kind of martyr before we know what the hell she’s actually doing in there? Is the best idea.”

The van goes quieter.

In the back, the kids are still talking. But softer now. Slower. Will is absolutely listening with both ears while pretending to ask Lucas something about tape.

Jonathan goes eerily still now. And when he speaks again, his voice is calm enough to be dangerous. “You mean protecting Steve?”

Nancy laughs once without humor. “That’s exactly what I mean. If that’s what she’s doing—”  

“It is what she’s doing.”

“—then why the hell didn’t she tell him from the beginning?”

Jonathan stares at her for one beat.

Then two.

Then says, with a weird little edge Eddie has never heard from him before, “Because Steve would never have let her.”

Nancy blinks.

Jonathan keeps going. “He’d have blown the whole thing up before it all even got started.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh, please.”

“I know her,” Jonathan points out. “And I know him enough.”

Nancy’s eyes flash. “Do you?”

Jonathan doesn’t back down.

And that, more than anything, is what really throws Eddie. Because Jonathan Byers is not loud. He’s not somebody who picks a fight for the thrill of it. He’s thoughtful. Measured. Kind to a fault. But right now? He’s leaning in on this with a steadiness that makes Eddie glance over and think, well, shit.

Nancy hears it too. The steel in him.

“You’re acting like she’s some kind of mastermind,” she says icily.

Jonathan looks at her like he cannot believe he has to say the next sentence out loud. “She is.”

Nancy scoffs. “Oh come on—”

“No, seriously.” His voice rises a hair. Not shouting but no longer soft. “What do you think she’s been doing in there? Accidentally keeping four other people alive?”

That lands.

Nancy opens her mouth.

Shuts it.

Then settles for, “That’s not the same thing as having an actual plan.”

Jonathan lets out the tiniest breath through his nose — something halfway between disbelief and frustration. “It literally is.”

“No. It isn’t. A plan would’ve involved Steve knowing what the hell was going on.”

“And then what?” Jonathan shoots back. “He says yes, great—go ahead, Ren, throw yourself in front of Tommy Hagan and hope for the best?”

Nancy turns more fully in her seat. “At least he would’ve had a choice.”

“And then nobody would’ve made it!” Jonathan says, and that’s the first time his voice really cracks sharp through the front of the van. “Don’t you get that? He’d have tried to stop her, which means the Careers would’ve clocked it, which means Hannah and Jack and Ro would’ve been found too—and then what?”

Nancy just stares at him, dumbfounded.

The kids in the back have now gone silent, one by one…

Eddie doesn’t dare look in the mirror. He already knows what he’d see: five little wide-eyed eavesdroppers pretending not to be.

Nancy folds her arms tighter, pivoting in her seat to slightly face him now. “So your argument is that lying to him was somehow better.”

“My argument,” Jonathan counters, “is that she knows him.”

Nancy laughs again, but it sounds thin. “You think I don’t?”

The van gets even quieter.

Eddie’s fingers tighten on the wheel.

Jonathan goes still. It’s only for a second, but it’s enough. Enough for Nancy to realize what she’s said. Enough for Eddie to think, oh boy. But then… he answers with a levelness that actually makes Eddie’s stomach drop a little.

“I think,” he says carefully, “that you know him in a way that makes it hard to see anybody else clearly.”

Nancy’s face changes.

Not wildly.

Just enough to confirm that one hit.

She doesn’t yell. Doesn’t scoff this time. She just looks at Jonathan Byers in this new way. Like he has suddenly stepped out from behind the version of himself she’d always filed away as safe and sweet and quietly in love with everything around him… including her.

And maybe that’s part of it too.

Because Jonathan is also changing a little in his own eyes right now.

Nancy Wheeler has lived on a pedestal in his head for years. It’s not that she falls off it here. Not completely. He still loves her in that hopeless, stubborn, impossible way. But now… he’s seeing her in motion. Seeing the blind spot. Seeing the way devotion can harden into unfairness if you let it sit too long unchallenged.

Nancy’s voice, when it comes again, is newly clipped. “That’s not fair.”

Jonathan’s comeback is immediate. “Neither is acting like Ren hasn’t been bleeding herself dry for him in there.”

“Bleeding herself dry?” Nancy repeats, her tone patronizing, as if he just said the most audacious thing. “You don’t know what her endgame is.”

“She doesn’t have one,” Jonathan fires back. “That’s kind of the whole point.”

Nancy shakes her head. “That is not a point. That’s a problem.”

Jonathan stares at her in disbelief. “No, the problem is you think there was some world where she could’ve explained all this to Steve and he’d have just gone along with it.”

Nancy’s jaw jumps. “Maybe because I know him well enough to know that he deserves honesty.”

Jonathan’s eyes flash. “And I know her well enough to know she was never doing it to manipulate him.”

“I didn’t say she was.”

“You didn’t have to.”

That one sits there.

Nancy looks away first, jaw clenched. Then she looks back at him, mustering patience and pride in equal measure, before speaking quietly this time. “You really think that whole star-crossed lovers thing the Capitol’s been eating up is true?”

It’s meant to be a challenge.

But once again, Jonathan doesn’t hesitate. And for some reason, that’s what shifts the argument onto a different rail entirely. Because he doesn’t laugh or hedge. He doesn't blush or act embarrassed or pretend he hasn’t thought about it.

He just says, “Yeah. I do.”

Nancy actually blinks at that, totally thrown.

“You can’t be serious.”

Jonathan’s whole face changes a little then. Not because it becomes angry, more like he allows himself to look tired of pretending something obvious is difficult. 

“I’ve known her my whole life.”

Nancy says nothing.

So Jonathan goes on, because now that he’s started? Something in him has finally decided to stop apologizing for what he knows.

“She’s been in love with him since she was little. Since before either of them even knew what to call it. So yeah. I think that part’s very true.”

Nancy’s stare sharpens. “And what, exactly, makes you so sure that means she’s protecting him for the right reasons?”

Jonathan looks at her like the question itself offends him.

It doesn’t make him angry right away, not in any explosive obvious sense. That’s what makes the tension in the van go so weird and tight and hard to breathe around. Because he just… looks at her. Really looks at her. Like he’s trying to figure out whether she actually believes what she’s saying or if she’s just so deep in her own hurt and fear that she can’t hear herself anymore.

Which is why he answers with, very quietly, “Because she’s Ren.”

Nancy blinks.

Jonathan doesn’t stop there. “She’s my best friend and I know for a fact, she doesn’t do things halfway. She doesn’t ‘play’ people, she doesn’t set traps for people she loves and call it strategy.” He swallows once, jaw tightening. “If she threw herself between Steve and that pack, then it’s because she knew she had to. End of story.”

Nancy turns forward again, but it’s not surrender. It’s regrouping.

The rainfall thrashes the windshield so hard now for a second, the whole van feels submerged in it.

Eddie changes lanes carefully and keeps his eyes fixed on the road with the kind of concentration that only happens when he is trying very, very hard not to involve himself in something that is none of his business but also all of his business at once.

Nancy’s voice returns, and it comes out cool. Too cool.

“You really think love makes somebody automatically trustworthy.”

Jonathan’s laugh this time is short and humorless. “No. I think Ren does.”

That answer makes something raw flicker across Nancy’s face. Because that isn’t a romantic answer, not really. 

It’s worse. 

Or more than that, it’s personal. Unshakable. Something built over years and years and years until it became fact.

And Jonathan, now that he’s in this, now that he’s somehow found himself in a verbal knife fight with Nancy Wheeler and survived the first few cuts, is not backing down. Not because he wants to win. Not because he enjoys this. But because he is defending you. And some old, ancient, primal part of him has apparently decided that’s not negotiable.

Nancy feels heat rising inside her gut again, unwilling to drop this yet. “Then why didn’t she trust him enough to let him in on it?”

Jonathan answers so fast it’s like he was already holding it in his mouth.

“Because she trusted him too much.”

Nancy’s head turns, visibly shocked by that answer. Even Eddie’s fingers still for half a beat against the steering wheel before he forces them to awkwardly flick the blinker… even though there’s zero fucking traffic.

They reach a checkpoint, watching the officers wave then on.

As Eddie salutes them, Jonathan leans farther between the seats now, voice still controlled but no longer trying to be polite or offer soft landings.

“She knows exactly what kind of person he is. She knew if she told him, he’d ruin the whole thing trying to save everybody at once. You know that too.”

Nancy’s mouth opens, then shuts.

Then it opens again. “That doesn’t make it okay.”

“No,” Jonathan agrees flatly. “It makes it necessary.”

The kids in the back are fully silent now.

Not one whisper. Not one rustle. Not one stupid little comment from Mike Wheeler — which honestly? That’s how Eddie knows this conversation has officially become some serious shit.

He can feel them all listening. Will especially.

Poor kid’s probably sitting back there clutching a towel with his eyes huge as dinner plates while his older brother and Nancy Wheeler both have the most passive aggressive argument in American history.

Nancy’s voice goes lower. “It would’ve been nice if, just once, somebody had stopped deciding what Steve can and can’t handle for him.”

There.

There’s the real thing.

It drops into the van with a weight all its own.

Jonathan hears it. Eddie definitely hears it. Even the kids hear it, though they probably don’t understand all of it.

Nancy just keeps staring ahead as she says it, one hand curled too tightly around the edge of her seat. And now it’s not really about you anymore. Or well, not only you. It’s about Steve and all the ways everyone keeps trying to protect him, manage him, work around him, spare him, contain him — and maybe sometimes, that mercy starts to feel a little too much like being shut out instead of given considerate aid.

Jonathan clocks all of that.

And because he is who he is, because he isn’t cruel — because even now, in the middle of this — he can’t help but feel for her. Which is precisely why his own voice changes when he answers.

Softer. Not weaker. Just… humbly honest.

“I get that,” he says.

Nancy’s eyes flick toward him.

Jonathan nods once, now staring at the dash. “I do.” He rubs a hand over his mouth, then adds, “But he was never the only one in danger.”

That lands exactly where it’s meant to land.

And it’s maybe the most important thing he’s said yet.

Because for all Nancy’s fear, all her love, all her grief and protectiveness and old history with Steve Harrington… that’s the thing she keeps circling around without touching: the fact that you were in danger too. Hell, you are in danger . Right now. Bleeding and limping and still moving. Because stopping is not an option where you are.

Jonathan turns his head and looks right at her now. “She didn’t owe him the plan if the plan was the only thing keeping other people alive.”

Nancy goes completely still, lips parting slightly as she stares at her hands.

“She got Hannah and Jack hidden,” Jonathan goes on, quieter now but more relentless for it. “She kept Ro under the radar. She dragged the Careers off Steve. She got cut doing it. And she still kept moving.” His throat works once. “I don’t know what else you want from her.”

And there it is.

The question neither of them can answer.

Because Nancy doesn’t want anything from you. Not really. That’s the whole ugly, painful point. She wants something from the world. From the rules, from fate. From timing. From…

From Steve. 

From the fact that somebody else had the place in the story she never got to stand in after that horrific night they both barely survived on their own, before being reunited again… only for nothing to ever be the same.

She wants him safe.

And Jonathan wants you safe.

And right now? Both of those wants are trapped inside the same arena, with the same game, the same impossible rules, and neither one of them can do a damn thing about it except sit in a van and bleed their feelings all over the upholstery.

Nancy’s laugh this time is brittle. “You’re making me sound heartless.”

Jonathan’s answer is immediate. “I’m not.”

“Really.”

“No.” 

“Well you sure as hell think I am.”

He shakes his head. “I think you’re scared.”

That one knocks the breath out of the whole front seat.

Nancy turns to him so fast it’s almost a snap. Not furious. Just…startled. Like he just reached into her chest and touched a wire that she did not give him permission to even know was there.

Jonathan holds her gaze. “You’re scared,” he repeats, more quietly, empathy faintly lacing his tone now. “And you’re taking it out on the wrong person.”

Nobody says anything for a second.

But Eddie, still staring out at the road like it has personally appointed him as its witness, thinks: well, goddamn, Byers.

Because there he is.

The backbone. The bite. The refusal to just smile and nod and let something unfair stand because the girl doing it is pretty and wounded and somebody he’s wanted since he was basically in braces.

Nancy looks away first.

And that, more than anything else, is the thing that seems to shift the air.

Not because Jonathan won. This isn’t winning.

It’s just… exposure. They’ve both now said enough to where the thing that’s hanging between them is standing there fully dressed whether either of them likes it or not.

Nancy’s shoulders tug inward. Not defensive exactly. Smaller.

When she speaks again, her voice is flatter. More tired.

“I don’t think she’s evil.”

Jonathan exhales through his nose, almost a laugh. “I didn’t say you did.”

“No,” Nancy mutters. “But you definitely thought it.”

Jonathan’s mouth twitches despite himself. “For like five seconds, maybe.”

That gets the tiniest unwilling movement out of her mouth. Not a smile. Just the memory of where one could’ve been.

Until she says, more quietly, “I just think if he ever finds out she nearly got herself killed for him and he didn’t know… it’s going to infuriate him.”

Jonathan’s whole face softens.

And that’s the second moment of real understanding between them.

Because yeah. Yeah, it is.

He nods slowly. “Probably.”

Nancy looks down at her own hands. “So I’m not wrong.”

Jonathan takes a breath.

“You’re not wrong,” he says genuinely. And then, because nuance is where he lives, he adds, “You’re just not completely right either.”

Nancy glances over at him.

He lifts one shoulder. “I think both things can be true.”

And for some reason that’s what finally takes all the sharpness out of it.

Not gone. Not fixed. Just… lowered.

Like a knife set down on a table instead of held between teeth.

Eddie can feel it immediately. The exact second the van stops feeling like a pressure cooker and starts feeling merely awkward as hell again.

He nearly sighs with relief.

In the back, the kids are still dead silent.

Then Dustin, very carefully, asks Lucas, “are we supposed to like, clap when grown-ups finish a fight?”

Lucas fiercely shakes his head.

“I thought we were all going to die,” Mike mutters, dead serious, his eyes still ping-ponging between his sister and Jonathan up front.

Erica slowly flips another page of her trading card binder, still side-eyeing all the tension up front as she sighs with the gravitas of a tiny exhausted queen. 

Eddie makes unintentional eye contact with her while peeking to check on all of them, and that just about kills him as he sees them looking like a bundle of curious gerbils before hastily looking away — as if they’d never been looking at all.

He bites his lips together so hard they disappear.

Nancy hears the whispering too, of course, and her cheeks go the faintest bit pink. Jonathan definitely hears it and looks like he might actually crawl out of the window. And the radio crackles with some weather alert about rising wind and possible afternoon electrical activity.

Eddie eventually clears his throat. “Sooooo,” he begins, with the wary energy of somebody trying to casually step over a landmine without acknowledging it exists. “Good talk, everyone. Love communication. Huge fan. No notes.”

No one in the front answers.

No one in the back does either.

And after maybe the most awkward full minute of silence any human beings have ever had to survive in a moving vehicle — Eddie finally squints through the rain and says, “we’re uh—here.”

That shakes everybody loose.

The gas station rises out of the weather in dim, dripping pieces — one of the last still operating, lights flickering weakly over the soaked concrete and old rusted pumps. Jonathan’s 1971 Ford LTD sits where he left it, dark with rain.

He’s already pulling his hood up before the van fully stops.

Eddie parks beside the vehicle and shoves his van into park with more force than strictly necessary, almost apologizing to his clutch for doing so while the engine idles roughly under them. Rain pummels the roof. The lights inside of the gas station look like a dreary beacon of hope, barely illuminating moving signs of life inside.

Jonathan reaches for the side door, then pauses long enough to look back at Eddie, a little awkward but completely sincere… 

“Thanks,” he briefly glances back at Will. “For keeping him. For all of it.”

Eddie shrugs like it’s nothing, warmly smiling. “Yeah, man. ‘Course.”

Jonathan nods once. Then he turns towards the back and immediately gets mobbed with tiny emotional obligations.

Will’s the first one up, practically launching himself across the seat for a hug. Jonathan catches him automatically — one arm around his shoulders, hand cupping the back of his little brother’s damp head of hair.

“Be good,” Jonathan mutters into his hair.

Will makes a face against his shoulder. “I’m always good.”

“That is objectively false when you’re with these rascals.”

“I’m selectively good.”

Jonathan laughs fondly under his breath and squeezes him tighter. “Check in every few hours.”

“I will.”

“Actually will?”

Will pulls back enough to look offended. “I said I will.”

Jonathan smiles and knocks their foreheads together lightly. “I know.”

Then Mike leans over for a quick awkward hug too because Wheelers don’t do prolonged emotion without acting like they’ve been held at gunpoint. Then Dustin practically throws himself in next, followed by Lucas, who tries very hard to be cool about the goodbye and fails because he adores Jonathan too much. Even Erica offers him a rare, sweet little smile.

He gives her a little nod. “Don’t let them play in the rain, Miss America.”

Erica rolls her eyes. “You guys already let them do that.”

That gets the tiniest snuff of a laugh out of Nancy.

Jonathan hears it.

So does Eddie, whose smile fades completely as he eyes her disapprovingly.

But Jonathan just straightens turns to fully open the side door now.

Nancy is still facing the windshield.

And Eddie, bless him, has seriously had enough of that bullshit.

He doesn’t say a word but doesn't need to. He just slowly turns his head and stares at her side profile with the exact same visible disappointed, parental, telepathic energy Joyce Byers probably once used on Jonathan himself any time she was wordlessly demanding he be polite.

Nancy feels it almost instantly, almost grimacing.

She closes her eyes.

…then opens them…

…then side-eyes him.

Eddie nudges his chin toward the back seat. Well? Go on.

Nancy follows the motion… sees Jonathan crouching there in the open door with rain at his back and every kid in the van pretending not to watch her. So she sighs through her nose like the most put-upon girl in North America, and then turns around primly in her seat and finally says — with all the passive aggression of somebody trying very hard to look unbothered…

“Bye, Jonathan.”

It is not her best work.

Everybody knows it.

Jonathan looks at her for one beat.

And whatever she expected to see on his face — wounded longing, maybe, or embarrassment, or him matching her frost with some version of his own — it isn’t there.

What’s actually there is worse.

Kindness. …and subdued disappointment.

Warmth still intact. …just no pedestal left under it.

“Bye, Nance,” he says gently.

That’s all.

That’s what makes her heart drop.

Because he doesn’t punish her. Doesn’t snap. Doesn’t go cold. He just lets her hear the version of himself that sees her clearly now, maybe a little more clearly than she would like.

Then he’s gone.

He ducks into the rain, hurries around to his car, climbs in, and not a second later the old engine turns over.

Inside the van, no one speaks.

Not one person.

The kids are all sitting there in a stunned little row of silence. Eddie’s still got both hands on the wheel with that wordless disappointment all over his face. Nancy’s staring so hard at the windshield she might crack it.

Jonathan’s headlights flick on. His car eases out of the lot and disappears into the sheeted gray.

Only then does Eddie pull the van back into drive.

They roll out of the gas station in dead silence.

Nancy slumps deeper in her seat with her arms crossed tighter, glaring out at the rain.

Eddie looks at her once. Just once. And the disappointment on his face is so obvious he doesn’t even try to hide it. Hell, he’s not even ashamed of it.

Nancy catches it.

Scoffs. “What.”

Eddie just shakes his head and looks back at the road with a flat expression. 

That somehow makes it worse.

“Oh my God,” she mutters. “Are you serious right now?”

Still he says nothing.

Nancy shakes her head, then huffs, already way too defensive all over again. “Silent treatment,” she murmurs bitterly. “Real mature.”

That’s when all the boys in the backseat exchange the exact same awkward, bug-eyed look with one another.

Nobody knows what to say.

Nobody wants to be first.

And then, because the universe apparently loves timing more than mercy, Erica stares up at Nancy’s rigid back for a long thoughtful second, narrows her eyes, and says:

“Are you menstruating?”

The van explodes.

Mike chokes. Dustin chirps, “ope.” Lucas makes a sound like a dying goose. Will slaps both hands over his mouth.

Eddie fully loses the fight against laughter. It comes right on outta him in one ugly wheezing bark that he tries to swallow and only makes worse. Because his shoulders shake with snickers and he has to grab the wheel tighter.

Nancy whips around so fast she nearly dislocates something. “Excuuuse me, young lady?”

Erica blinks at her in total innocence. “Well, I’m just trying to figure out why you’re acting like the final boss of a Midol commercial.”

“…Erica—”

“That’s why my mom does it!”

That does it.

Eddie almost has to pull half onto the shoulder for one second because he’s laughing too hard to trust himself and the road at the same time.

Lucas is staring at Erica. “I’m telling mom you said that.”

“Nnnope—” Eddie wheezes. “Nope, don’t—Jesus Christ—”

“Nobody laugh,” Nancy snaps, cheeks now bright red.

Which obviously makes everyone laugh harder.

“I’m not laughing,” Mike lies through an unabashed grin.

“Yes you are!”

“It’s funny!—”

Dustin is literally smacking the back of Lucas’s shoulder while snickering like a gremlin, because he can’t breathe.

Lucas is no help whatsoever. “Women.”

Will, sweet angel boy that he is, is trying so hard to be diplomatic and failing miserably because his whole body keeps shaking with suppressed laughter.

Eddie wipes under one eye, finally drags a breath back into his lungs. “A’ight, alright, alright,” he says, voice still wrecked. “Settle down, savages.”

Erica, utterly unrepentant, leans back into her seat. “I asked a valid question —”

“Yes ma’am, ya did,” Eddie drawls like a smug asshole. “But it’s time to settle down now, ‘kay?”

Nancy turns back around in one furious little motion and glares out the weary windshield like she personally intends to curse the storm itself.

Eddie eases the van fully back onto the road, still grinning despite himself… but beneath the grin, beneath the much-needed laugh, beneath the release of it all, the disappointment is still there. Quiet now. Parked, waiting.

He’ll talk to her later.

Not now. Not with the kids. Not with this storm. Not with everybody still running on adrenaline and fear and not enough sleep and too much grief.

But later?

Yeah. Later.

For now, he just drives.

The rain gets harder.

And as Hawkins unspools in wet black ribbons ahead of them, the first blade of lightning finally cuts across the sky so white and sudden it turns every face in the van ghost-pale for one sharp second before the world falls back into gray again.

No thunder yet.

Just the warning.

And inside Eddie Munson’s van, with the kids now tumbling back into chatter and Nancy still steaming quietly in the front seat, and Jonathan somewhere behind them on the road headed home to Burdock and the television and all that waiting…

The storm finally arrives.

7:13 PM

The light is going blue when Ro starts making his way back.

Not sunset-gold anymore. That’s already gone. Burned off. Bled out. What’s left now is that eerie in-between hour where the arena itself seems to hold its breath and everything turns colder, darker, stranger. The sky overhead is one deep bruised shade of blue, fading by the second, and all the branches high above him look like black veins spread over it.

Ro moves through them like he belongs there.

Not loudly. Not showy. Not in any way that would make a person look twice if they were unlucky enough to glance up at the wrong moment. He just flies. Quiet as a little thief. Quiet as a prayer. Barely more than shadow hopping from tree to tree to tree — one hand gripping bark, one boot finding the next branch, nimble body bending and gathering and springing again without ever wasting motion.

The little water skin thumps softly against his side.

Full now.

He’d gone all the way down to the stream to fill it, crouched low under the cover of roots and ferns while the water slipped cold and silver over his fingers. It's not exactly close to the little hideaway anymore. Not close-close. Not when you have to move carefully and double back twice and stop every few minutes to listen for trouble. On foot, it’s a solid half-hour trip… maybe more if something out there decides it wants to grow teeth.

So Ro drank, then refilled it all the way.

Not just for himself.

For Steve too.

That thought settles warmly inside his tiny chest even while the air itself gets colder. Steve is still out. Has been out all damn day, knocked flat by tracker jacker venom and dragged back from the edge of disaster by a little kid who weighs about as much as one of his boots probably does. Ro does not mind that part. Not really. He minds the waiting a little. He minds the wondering. He minds not knowing when those eyes are finally gonna open up again and that grumpy, handsome face is gonna wake and say something either heroic or bitchy or both.

But he is patient.

Patient enough to keep watch. Patient enough to keep making trips. Patient enough to keep the whole little world going until another world wakes up inside it.

Every couple of branches, he stops and looks.

Over one shoulder. Then the other. Then down below.

He checks the forest floor for movement. Checks the underbrush for the wrong kind of rustle. Checks the bigger paths where somebody heavier might’ve pushed through and broken the ferns. He looks for tribute shapes. Career shapes. Animal shapes. Anything not meant to be there.

Nothing.

Just the woods.

Just the staged, fake-real woods of the arena doing their best impression of actual wilderness. Crickets beginning to wake. Breeze moving through the leaves with a hush-hush sound. Somewhere farther off, something splashes once in the stream and then goes still.

Ro keeps moving.

And because his little body is busy and his mind never really is, his thoughts keep running alongside him.

He wonders where you are now.

Not in a scared way. Or not just in a scared way.

More in that steady, loyal sort of way where he can’t help checking the shape of your plan over in his head and hoping that every piece of it is still landing where it’s supposed to. He wonders if you’re closer to the cave yet. If you’re injured. If you’ve stopped for water. If you’re staying to the shadows like you said you would if something went wrong. If Hannah and Jack are still staying put like they promised.

He knows they are.

Jack’s bold and courageous, but he listens. Hannah, for all her skittishness, does too. Both of them do when it counts. They know the cave means stay. Means wait. Means don’t go wandering just because the woods start getting lonely and you want to see a friendly face. 

Ro thinks about that morning before the interviews. About the way the whole thing had really started taking shape then, even though anybody looking in from the outside would probably think it was all chaos, luck and split-second bravery.

It wasn’t.

Not really.

You’d spoken to Hannah and Jack before the Caesar Flickerman show that morning, back when everybody was still pretending they were just children in pressed clothes and polished shoes instead of soon-to-be sacrifices. Hopper had helped, too. Hopper, with his big tired face and his don’t-fuck-with-me attitude, had found a pocket of time later and gone over it again with them. Discreet, firm and patient. Like he knew kids needed a plan handed to them plainly or it just turned to mush in their heads.

And then there’d been Ro’s turn.

Shortly after his own interview. Shortly after yours too, come to think of it…

Shortly after Steve had damn near blown a fuse and stormed out after your live confession had put the whole country into hysterics.

Ro had not understood all of that at first. At least, not the grown-up shape of it. Not the look on Steve’s face as he stormed out the back stage door, or the way everybody backstage had gone all lit up and panicked and fascinated at once, like they’d just watched somebody throw a match into a powder room.

He’d understood enough, though.

Understood that you were serious. Understood that the plan mattered more than feelings right then. Understood that Steve Harrington had to not know…because he was exactly the kind of person who would ruin a good survival plan by recklessly trying to save everybody all at once.

Ro loves that about him.

Also thinks it’s dumb as hell.

That thought makes him smile to himself a little as he drops down the last tall trunk, into his makeshift nest.

The hideaway is exactly where he left it.

It’s so tucked away it doesn’t even look like anything. Just more brush. More leaf litter. More bent branches and low-hanging greenery gone dark in the evening light. The little roof of it curves over in a hump that breaks up its own shape. Woodland igloo. Tiny thicket bunker. No tribute walking by would ever guess there are two heartbeats tucked up under there.

Ro slips down into it without a sound.

The first thing he sees is Steve.

Still asleep. Still face down.

Still in the same position Ro left him in — one cheek pushed into the emptied backpack he’d turned into a pillow, lashes dark against dirt-smudged skin… Beautiful even now, which is honestly rude. Ro feels that in the extremely objective way of a kid who knows when somebody looks like one of those storybook princes after they’ve been all but dragged through mud and bitten by insects and nearly died.

Steve’s windbreaker is still spread beneath him, thanks to Ro’s earlier efforts. It had been a whole production getting it off him too. A lot of grunting. A lot of inch-by-inch tugging. A lot of silently begging Steve’s unconscious giant body not to suddenly decide to deadweight itself worse than it already had. But Ro had managed it. Then managed to get him down onto it nice enough that his shirt wouldn’t be soaked through by the earth.

Now it’s just Steve in the black t-shirt and cargo pants and boots.

Still. Breathing. Alive.

Ro’s shoulders loosen.

He sets the water skin down first.

Then immediately leans in and checks Steve the way he always does now — one little hand hovering near his nose and mouth, then two fingers gently pressed at his pulse, careful and serious and so used to this by now that it almost looks practiced.

Breathing steady. Pulse steady.

“Okay,” Ro whispers to no one.

He checks the leaves next.

The mash pressed to the sting on Steve’s forearm is still there — damp and greenish-brown and ugly-looking, which means it’s doing its job. The one at his neck too. Ro lifts the edge of it very carefully, peeks, then settles it back down when seeing the poison working its way out.

Then he works on the knee.

That one takes a little more maneuvering because Steve is still face down, broad as a damn fallen tree… but Ro had rolled the cargo pants high enough before that he can still get a good look. The leaves there have stayed where they’re supposed to. The sting still looks nasty. Less like the end of the world than before, but nasty.

And just above it?

There’s the burn.

That awful hellfire rain burn that had once looked like charred meat. Now it’s smoother. Scar-ish pink. Strange-looking in its own way, like skin half-reborn. The fabric around that patch is still singed open around it, and Ro can see clear as day that it’s healing, but he also knows it needs more of the balm.

That part matters.

So he turns to where all of Steve’s things are lined up.

That’s the thing about Ro Barnett. He had unpacked Steve’s backpack for practical reasons, yes — but he’d done it carefully. Neatly. With respect. Like touching holy objects in a church that doesn’t belong to you. Everything is in a row now over near the little wall of branches.

Knife. Iodine. Jerky. Crackers. Cord of rope. Coil of wire. Box of matches. Sunglasses. Toothbrush. Tiny toothpaste. Water bottle.

The bow and arrow…

And the silver tin.

Ro reaches for it, opens it carefully, and dips two fingers into the ointment… then he comes back and spreads it across Steve’s healed-over burn with the gentlest touch he’s got.

Steve stirs.

Just barely.

A tiny sound in his throat hums. A faint shift. His face nuzzles deeper into the backpack like he’s trying to hide from consciousness itself.

Ro goes statue-still.

For one long second he does not breathe either.

But then Steve settles. Keeps sleeping. Keeps being dead to the world.

Ro lets his shoulders drop again and finishes applying the balm, rubbing it in soft and even… before closing the little tin and setting it back exactly where it belongs.

Then he gets the water bottle.

Unscrews it. Fills it from his water skin. Sets it full beside the rest of Steve’s supplies… so it’ll be there the second he wakes.

It is such a little thing and somehow heartbreakingly huge.

Because Ro never once acts like any of this is his now that Steve can’t stop him. Never once steals a cracker. Never once sneaks a dry jerky strip. Never once paws at the knife or the wire or the rope like a greedy little raccoon.

He could. But he doesn’t.

His own stomach grumbles anyway.

So he goes for his own stash instead: a few not-poisonous berries wrapped in a leaf, some bitter edible plant he’d stripped earlier, a softly shaved ribbon of tree bark he knows he can chew slow to trick his gut into calming down… and then a cluster of honeysuckle for dessert.

Not much.

Enough.

He snacks quietly while the light keeps dying.

At one point, there’s a rustle outside that makes him go perfectly still. Head tipped. Listening. Every little muscle in his body alert all over again.

But after a second he recognizes it for what it is.

Just the breeze. Just the leaves talking. Just the woods messing with him because the woods always do.

So he goes back to eating.

It isn’t until nightfall cloaks the arena fully in darkness that the anthem begins to play. And that’s when Ro carefully rises to stand in the shallow hideout… peeking out the nearest sliver that grants him visibility of the sky.

Glimmer’s image and name fills the hologram displayed up above.

Then the anthem concludes and the hologram vanishes.

No more deaths.

Ro sighs to himself… then kisses three fingers and raises them in respect.

Because regardless of alliance, the dead deserves at least that much.

By the time he’s finished his little supper, the chill has gotten mean enough to creep under his sleeves. So that’s when he finally lets himself use the one thing in Steve’s supplies.

The sleeping bag.

Ro unfolds it with both hands, trying not to make any noise. It’s big as hell on him, practically luxurious by arena standards... But even then, the first thing he does with it is not tuck himself in.

He drapes part of it over Steve.

Sideways, almost. Over his shoulders and upper back and part of one arm, just enough to give him extra warmth without disturbing the rest of the leaves and brush that cover his lower half. Then Ro quietly scurries into the opening himself, all the way down inside it with his little knapsack shoved under his head as a pillow.

Before that, though, he adds more leaves over Steve’s legs and around the base of the whole hideaway, covering every wrong shape, every little hint of human outline.

Then he wriggles in.

The sleeping bag swallows him whole.

His feet end up propped lightly against Steve’s back through the layers, and for one second he freezes, worried that might be too much, that maybe it’ll wake him, but Steve doesn’t move. Doesn’t protest. Just breathes, deep and slow and unconscious, while the trapped warmth starts building under the bag around both of them.

Ro goes very still.

He feels… warm.

He hadn’t even realized how cold he’d gotten until the warmth touched him. It steals the breath right out of him for a few seconds. Not because it hurts. Because it almost does. In that way comfort can hurt when you haven’t had any for a while.

Outside, the arena keeps being the arena.

The first few night sounds really get going now. Bugs. Breeze. Something calling far off and then going silent. No more cannons yet. No screaming. No footsteps. Just the dark settling down around them like yet another layer of camouflage.

Ro peeks out from the edge of the sleeping bag.

Looks at Steve one more time.

The handsome slack line of his sleeping face. The dirt in his chestnut waves of hair. The stupidly peaceful look of him despite everything.

Then Ro whispers, so hushed that the leaves almost swallow it before the air can…

“G’night, lost boy.”

And with his little feet still tucked against Steve’s back, warm for the first time since entering the arena, Ro lets the dark have him too.

END OF CHAPTER

<- previous part (PART II)

<- first part (PART I)

⚕️

TAGLIST: @silkholland @tangledluver @slutforpumpkins @katetimes @ratfrogs @moonlightdreamer111 @yikesmama3 @just-a-harmless-patato @ahoytherebean @sucker-4-angst @ninas-sayers @cherrys-muses @gredandforgeweatherby @shouldakissedyouanyway @fullofgutsndopamine @sambibomb @amethystxspace @ludachrissy @nicherthanu @mistylaneeee @cristy-l-blog @missmaggieb @snowtargaryen @raspberry-sunshinee @the-emma-bee @notahappystan @peachy-ve @glennspopeye @watermelon-online @impeterporker @doestxrs @1luvjo3 @theallisonkeery @readeronlove @wwylmlive @kitdjarin1 @headoverharrington @artismytherapy05 @breakingthefourtthwall @strangegirl26sff @iovedscenes @zuzixix @holawdw @lovetings