#<- it’s gonna be a steddie ghost story kinda deal with gothic horror and steampunky elements. or so i hope lmao

[flowercrowngods]

Spooky lighthouse story, pleeeaaase

(this is steviesummer btw)

alright, finally, have a little taste of what’s to come your way soon 👀🤍 (also pls i know who you are 😭🤍) @klausinamarink and @vampeddie you asked for this, too, but instead of three snippets i’m giving you the beginning of part 1 all in one 🫶

The fog rolls in like a heavy cloud that morning, leaving the city in eerie darkness as Steve Harrington hurries toward the heavy door to the steel manufactory, scarf wound tightly around his neck to keep out the cold so uncommon for late September.

“Thanks,” he mutters to the gruff man who holds open the door for him. He sees him every morning but has never had the chance to ask about his name. The question is on the tip of his tongue when, with a nod and a touch to his sturdy-looking hat, the man walks down a different corridor than Steve.

Where outside the fog was so thick that all noise seemed dulled, like cotton in his ears, the manufactory is a cacophony of banging and clanging, hissing and whirring, and Steve needs a moment to breathe the polluted, heavy air that’s always just a tad too hot for his lungs.

He doesn’t mind the work, is good with his hands and enjoys the single-minded focus it provides on a good day, the deafening noise loud enough to drown out most of the comments the other workers throw his way; comments about his father, his upbringing, and his rather sudden downfall when Richard D. Harrington decided to disown his eldest son three years ago.

Steelwork, engineering, intricate cogs that work massive machinery — they fascinate him, they keep him busy fourteen hours a day, and they leave him dead to the world when the shift is over and graciously let him sleep through the dreams that have been haunting him ever since he can remember being haunted.

It’s always the same dream, in the fall more than in the spring. A lighthouse trapped in the sea, waves rolling and crashing, water rising so high that it might as well swallow the lighthouse whole. And through it all, a beacon. And through it all, a voice he cannot make out. And through it all, a ticking that echoes through his skull even long after he gasped awake with a lungful of water that Robin says might mean Tuberculosis.

He blinks away the gloom that has laid over his mood like the fog over the city, shakes off the trancelike feeling that overtakes him every time he tries to think about the lighthouse when he is wide awake, and rubs away the headache. It’s fall again, which means he doesn’t get all that much sleep anymore, haunted by ghostly images of a lighthouse he’s not even sure exists, and it’s starting to manifest as a perpetual headache. It’s earlier this year. Everything is a little earlier this year.

A heavy hand lands on his shoulder as Emerson arrives behind him, snapping him out of his reverie and leading him to their station with idle chatter about the weather and the horrible, horrible fog that Steve has not the patience to partake in today — which is just as well for Emerson and his sunny disposition, he’ll talk enough for the both of them. Steve is fond enough of him to let him be as he falls into the routine of working steel.

more of this coming your way on the 25th 👻