STEVE 

IF STEVE HARRINGTON HAD TO DESCRIBE HIMSELF IN ONE WORD, HE'D PROBABLY GIVE UP AND ASK KATHRYN WHEELER TO DO IT FOR HIM. And she'd probably think about it for at least a day before replying something cliche like 'an asshole'. 

Although that wouldn't be too bad. Steve could take anything in his current situation.

Dustin was yawning as he laid down. It seemed his healthy sleep schedule was the only thing that could tell time. Katie said whenever she checked her Tom and Jerry watch, it always went haywire and the needles wouldn't stop spinning. Robin had given it a slap and told her to never trust a cartoon show. Speaking of Katie, she currently was offering Erica one of her granola bars, and Steve felt foolish for making fun of her for bringing food to what he thought was just gonna be a mission.

They were all getting ready to hopefully get some sleep, all huddled around together to avoid the iciness of the air conditioning otherwise. Some of the cases inside the boxes had been lifted out, and the boxes themselves were squashed and broken into slabs of insulating paper, which were used as both mattresses and blankets, like they were all a part of some modern primitive science project.

A resentful puddle of guilt had curdled in his chest, eating away at his mind. They'd been stuck in the elevator for almost two hours now, and things were getting thinner. In all the sucessful missions him and anybody else had been in, they'd all somehow worked. Except now, as he watched Katie curl up in a fetal position to prevent herself from getting too cold in her thin bodysuit, Steve wondered if this time they'd be as lucky.

With a twitch of guilt, he realized that for days, Katie had been doubtful about the plan. He'd seen it on her face, but he'd always been focusing on something else. The plan. He felt stupid for doing so, but he knew there was no point in remorse. What mattered was that they were stuck in a Russian elevator, and what they'd do about it.

"I'm gonna sleep now," Robin murmured, and used the flap part of her Scoops uniform as a one-layer fabric pillow.

"Night," Katie said, as Erica crumbled up the granola bar wrapper and kicked it into a corner.

"Can you get the light switch?" Robin asked, to which Katie got up and pressed the square button once to make the lights in the elevator dim. Now, the only lighting were the open slits at the corners, to the elevator shaft.

Steve's eyes flickered, adjusting to the blackness of the room. He could make out vague square silhouettes of the boxes, and Katie's blurry figure siting up.

"Are you gonna sleep?" Steve asked Katie faintly, feeling the lone wolf in a deserted forest.

"I dunno. Are you?" 

"I dunno,"

"Can you nerds go up the hatch?" Erica asked, her face muffled as she slept face-down into her My Little Pony backpack.

"Uh, okay," Katie said into the darkness. "Steve, are you coming?"

"Yeah," Steve said, getting onto his feet and stepping onto the boxes and lifting his torso and his legs over the elevator hatch. The thick steel door was soundproof enough, so soundproof he couldn't even hear Dustin's snores.

Katie followed him, wearing her pink bodysuit and polka-dotted tights. She said it made her look like a clown, but Steve disagreed. The bodysuit was low-cut as per requirement from her creepy manager, Mr. Spinnet, but as Steve watched the way she moved in it, he was on board. The bodysuit skimmed over her hip dips like a wave over rocks, and though the tights looked a bit out of place, they still fit her like the glove on her left hands. Steve looked at the hand, so painfully erased from her, and he wondered what it would be like to have her glove removed, so he could hold both her hands fully.

"So, I've been thinking," Steve said, talking at his normal volume as he approached Katie, shaking himself out of his weird daze. "Tomorrow, once whatever Russian base we're at opens, people could come inside the elevator. We can tidy up before. And once they do, we can take the opportunity and sneak out. I mean, even if it's into the base, it's better than staying in here,"

Katie didn't respond straight away, only glanced around them for a bit. Then she opened her mouth. "Yeah," Katie mumbled, looking at her feet, before glancing back at him, with a new shard of ice in her stormy grey eyes. "If that even works,"

"What do you mean?" Steve said, aback at the bitterness in her tone as defensiveness sprang into his voice like an army ready to defend his city.

"Steve- when has a plan, any plan, ever worked? We lured a demogorgon into a junkyard, it didn't fall for the trap. We tried to keep the Party safe at a house, we both got beaten up. We set an Upside Down cave on fire, we almost die. And now, we think we're on a spy mission, and we're stuck in a Russian elevator," she begun to rant, listing off the experiences on her fingertips.

"Hey!" Steve felt a stab at his honor, his bravery, that sent heat waves of ash down his throat, clogging up his emotions. "We're not gonna die! I'm not gonna make that happen,"

"Look, Steve- I really, really hate to break it to you, but this is arguably way worse than all the last times! And I'm not blaming anybody here, but maybe you could've listened to a voice of reason!" she said pleadingly, but Steve didn't see her truth.

"What voice of reason?" Steve said blankly.

A small noise of ridicule escaped from Katie's lips, and Steve's eyes widened, the exclamation reminding him awfully of whenever his mother would scold him as a child. Katie turned a bit away from him, as if looking sarcastically into an imaginary camera before refocusing on him.

"Me! Well- okay, maybe I didn't handle my argument the best way, but neither did you! You could've listened to me! And not- I dunno, just jumped right into a dangerous Russian base! You've been so blinded by golden glory, Steve! 'Doing the right thing?'" Katie shook her head. "The five of us dying is definitely not the right thing to do. And- protecting us is great, and noble, and all that, but it's not gonna work against a Russian army!"

"Well- what do you think we should do right now? Repel a million feet up?" Steve said angrily, his hands on his hips.

"God- no! The problem is you, Steve, it's you! Every single time, you've gotten yourself, into messes like these, we've had some sort of guardian angel help us. But this time there might not be one! You're not seeing the truth, Steve!"

"What truth?!"

"THAT YOU COULD DIE!" Katie yelled, and if gods could scream, the whole world would have crumbled.

"Katie-" Steve began.

"No, no. I don't wanna hear it from your stupid-ass face. You always say that we'll make it out, but we've never saved ourselves! The tunnels. The demogorgon. Billy! We were saved, Steve!" Katie ranted, the pale white lights highlighting the tips of her curls, making her hair shine like moonlight. 

Except her words were as black as night. He had only let her touch his heart, and now, without realizing it, she was slowly crushing it, blackened blood oozing out of the sides in a sickening display of power. And as the words flew from her mouth, Steve first doubted whether or not she felt the same way he did about her.

"I've been saying this for days, and you haven't listened to me! None of you have been listening to me! Just- can you get it in your head, and stop being so thick, and just realize that maybe you're wrong about us?!" she exploded, and Steve was almost shocked at her anger, before his spiked alongside it. The American Hero inside him roared in fury, blazing with the ferocity of a sun, as its dreams of ice began to shiver in his arms.

"We've been through this before! And no, we haven't been saved, we've fought the monsters! All of them, together! If you're saying we're doomed-"

"-No, no, I'm not saying- fuck! No, that's not what I meant, I didn't mean to stab into your stupid heart or whatever, I meant you!" she said. Her eyes ran with enough water to bless a thousands worlds, and her skin glowed like moonshine among night.

The electric lights shimmered around them, but her eyes could light the way themselves. Katie was an angel, even if she was in a clown's outfit, even if she was wearing the white that she belonged in. Stormclouds shook with bolts of thunder, as streaks of blue lightning broke the images. The Hero was stifling, screaming words of his father into his ears. High school relationships never work, or whatever the fuck it was he said. Screw that.

"God, Steve, I meant you," Katie said. "You keep- doing this. Doing this whole suicide mission type thing, you drag me into it, and every time you do the thing. You pretend like it's okay, then we magically get saved, then through the whole thing, you're like: 'we'll be okay'. But we're not, okay, Steve? We're, fucking, a thousand feet under right now, and you're just reassuring? Dammit, you just need to take your head out of your skull for a second, right? And think about it, you're not seeing this! You're not seeing what's in front of you, and for what? Making some kids believe this is just a joyride?"

Steve wrung his hands through his hair, leaning back until all he heard was the Hero's screaming. End this! Steve pressed his hands onto the sides of his skull as he desperately tried to tune out her fury, and it hurt. It hurt so much, knowing that her anger was not directed to some supernatural monster, but to him. She had to know. He had to tell her.

"And I really, really hate myself right now- you don't get it, but I have to know, Steve! Why? Why do you keep doing this, to me? You're running circles around in every single direction! And you know what, Steve? The moment those doors open, you're gonna walk headfirst into the fire, and you're gonna leave us to just watch you crash and burn. Because that's all you do. That's all you make yourself to be, just-" Katie shook her hands in frustration. "-the first blood. The, freaking, sacrificial lamb, for fuck's sake! You do it over, and over, and over, why?"

Steve felt his pyre being to spark once more, the new flames dancing over his freshly-healed wounds, still tender. She was beautiful, she was so beautiful, and she had to know.

"And you have- no idea how much it gets me, Steve! I can't just watch you get hurt forever, I can't keep pretending to look out for you when you're straight-up diving into danger! God- why, Steve? Why do you keep doing this? Wh-"

"Because I love you!" 

The words left his mouth before he could properly grasp onto them before releasing. In fact, his mind only caught up with his lips a few seconds later, too distracted by her eyes. His own widened in both shock and horror, shock that he'd allowed himself to handle any type of romantic confession through an arguing match in an elevator shaft, horror out of potentially losing that match, and therefore losing the love that she had provided with him so unconditionally. 

"Steve-" Katie whispered breathlessly, as if she did not understand either, and Steve longed for her to. 

He loved her. As the words said in his voice ran through his head, Steve knew, wholeheartedly they were true. His father, his mother, everyone he had loved drilled miles-deep crevices into his fireproof stone with a single word. Yet as the ashes settled with his confession, etched into the marble was the deepest truth he could ever find. And he longed for her. For her to border his desert once more, for the glow of the moon to even have a sliver of a beam onto his withered, smoking core. 

And he told her. And so he kissed her.

Her cheek pressed against his, both of their faces rough, his with stubble of unkept days waiting, preparing for this moment, and hers with acne scars like dotted stars over the canvas that was her universe. Steve cupped the bottom of her chin, worried he would hold her too close, crush her too hard. He shut his eyes, finally allowing himself to drown in the moment. The colors of her icy rainbow were like paint splattered over his dark paper. She gasped softly as he deepened the kiss, the very tips of her eyelashes or eyebrows brushing against his own. She smelled like faint Farah Fawcett spray, again, but this time it was different. Her lips were dry and chapped, no matter the twenty-something tins of lip balm she kept everywhere, which he'd teased her about more than once. The reddish color that she'd swept over them was beginning to peel with its dryness and longwear. But Steve didn't care. What mattered was his body, every part of him was fully lost in her embrace, drowning in a pool of soothing ice water.

She kissed him this time, placing her hand on his shoulder as she gently tilted her head up. Steve's eyes were still closed, and it didn't matter whether hers were open, she just needed to be there. And Steve never wanted her to leave. True to her promise, she had pulled him up whenever he needed, an opened hand waiting for him whenever he turned his head. And he'd bitterly taken it for granted. How could he have done this so late? What world did he see, without her?

"It's you," she murmured against his lips, and with those words, the last of his ashes were swept away.

The stars might've realigned themselves before his gaze, but he was not looking amongst them. For the comet amongst them was in his arms already. There was gold inside her, amongst silver. Gold that he had written and rewritten among her bones, woven into her blood, thus he knew she felt the same. Katie took a breath from the kiss, the intake of air whisking over his lips like the ocean breeze. 

The elevator lights hummed steadily, as if they were the percussion in their song, but Steve and Katie were the harmony. Neither of them knew where they were, what they were doing there. But fuck that. Her lips tasted of heaven, and Steve knew all his sins were cleared with the touch of them. They kissed there, on top of a rollercoaster headed straight to hell.  And who was it, that flew alongside her? It couldn't have been King Steve. Perhaps it wasn't even Steve Harrington. But whomever it was, he knew that somehow, through all the smoke, Katie could reach in and hold his beautiful corpse.

And he saw. He saw everything. Every shared look over their lockers, every stolen glance over plastic playground equipment, he saw her. And oh, she was beautiful. A snowstorm that threatened to both bless and break him, a moon that both gave him light and threatened to pull him away from the sand. There was beauty in the way every wave of her storm would rise up in a mighty crest before crashing down in a constellation of seafoam. And he would gladly allow her waves to carry him down, to a place of peace, of frozen waters and no more suns. Part of him would always be guilty that she could even question her power for a second; that she could doubt them together. But if she wasn't in control, who was it that curved against his corpse like a cursed angel? It was him that danced at her fingertips, it was him that she could break with a flick of a wrist.

Kathryn Wheeler was no marionette.

━━author's note ━━

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