#eddie calls robbie and moe and tells them to come home – not because they actually need to but because ed knows steve needs them home

[livwritesstuff]

uh so i was feeling like writing something angsty and ever since i wrote this a little bit ago i can’t stop thinking about the idea of what the upside down coming back decades later would look like, however it’s a bummer and not the vibe i want for my steddie!dads verse so consider this an au for an au or whatever idk

It’s a normal, average, mundane, regular Wednesday when Dustin calls.

They don’t talk as much as they used to, but that’s adult life, Steve supposes. 

They both have entire lives now, spouses and children and jobs that consume pretty much every waking hour. The near-1000 miles that separates Steve and Eddie in Massachusetts from Dustin in Indiana doesn’t help things either, and seeing as how Dustin had long-since inherited the Hawkins Lab research from Owens when he retired back in the mid-2000s, that won’t be changing any time soon.

Steve is home when Dustin calls, and between counseling clients, so when the phone rings and lights up with his name, Steve picks it up with a grin.

“Hey man, what’s goin’ on!”

Nothing but silence comes through Dustin’s end for a while – such a long time that Steve checks to make sure that the call didn’t drop or his phone didn’t die or something (and neither had happened, so it’s definitely a Dustin thing).

“Dustin?” he asks, “You there?”

Silence, still.

Then –

“Steve.”

Dustin sounds…not normal, and Steve feels the grin slide off his face.

“What?”

“Steve,” he chokes, “It’s…it’s back.”

Steve feels his heart stop for a second, feels it like all the blood in his veins came to an abrupt halt for just a moment.

“The Upside Down,” Dustin continues, “It…all of…it’s back.”

He sounds like he’s underwater, or maybe Steve’s the one sinking beneath the surface, just like he’d done forty years ago when he’d taken Dustin’s place on that boat and got dragged into hell through the depths of Lover’s Lake.

Steve hangs up the phone, his hands shaking.

His knees feel shaky too, like they can’t support his weight anymore despite doing so for nearly sixty years.

They’ve been giving him problems lately – his knees. Nothing too crazy; he can still go on his runs and putter around the yard and all that. It’s just a part of aging, he supposes, and he hadn’t minded aging before – liked it, even. Liked his greying hair and the crow’s feet around his eyes and his achy knees, because there’d been a period of time many years ago when he wasn’t sure he’d make it long enough to experience that inevitability of life.

Right this second though, he hates it, hates the way it makes him realize he’s not as nimble as he used to be, the way his reaction time isn’t the same anymore, because he knows that’s what had gotten him through those horrible years back in the mid-eighties.

He lowers himself down, and as his ass hits the tile floor of the bathroom – his daughters’ bathroom, the one they’ve shared practically their whole lives, the one Moe lost her first tooth in, the one Robbie pierced her own ears in, the one Hazel will be getting ready for prom in soon – Dustin calls him again.Steve doesn’t pick up, too busy kicking himself for not considering sooner the possibility of this sooner, for not having a plan ready to execute to keep their daughters safe the way no adult had done for him.

He can feel an old instinct – the urge to gather his loved ones close – starting to kick in, his mind starting to race as he catalogs the people who make up his small corner of the world. 

Hazel is easy – she’s at the high school just down the road. He can have her back home, back within arm’s reach, in a matter of minutes.

Robin and Nancy are next closest, still living in Boston after all these years. Steve would wager a guess that they’ll be hearing from Dustin soon if they haven’t already, and then they’ll probably head Steve and Eddie’s way, and then they’ll all regroup. 

They’ll figure out what their next moves are.

Moe and Robbie are trickier with both of them living in New York City and likely unwilling to leave their school and their jobs and their friends without any warning whatsoever. Moe is getting more and more reasonable the older she gets, so Steve may have to start with her and hope that Robbie follows.

Moe is twenty-two now. 

Moe is older than both of her dads had been when Eddie had nearly died, when Steve had carried him out of hell and made sure he didn’t. All three of their daughters – even seventeen-year-old Hazel – are older than Steve had been when he got sucked into that horrible mess, and they’re still so damn young. 

With two decades of parenting under his belt, he finds it kind of unbelievable that anybody had looked at his sixteen-year-old face and seen anything but a child, nevermind actually asked him to do the things that he’d done.

Dustin calls him two more times before he gives up. Only a moment later, Steve hears Eddie’s phone ring downstairs, and then he hears Eddie’s jovial tone as he answers the call. 

He goes quiet real quick after that.

Just as Steve is deciding who to call first – Hazel’s school or Moe – his phone vibrates, two quick buzzes that can only indicate a text from Robin.

He opens it.

did dustin call you?

Steve lets out a heavy breath because, fuck, it’s real.

Yeah, he texts back, then adds –

This fucking sucks

40 years

As Steve watches the bubbles of Robin’s incoming response, he can vaguely hear Eddie’s ascent of the stairs, still on the phone with Dustin. 

The bubbles disappear.

“Fuck you, Dustin,” he hears Eddie snarl, “This is on you.” There’s silence for a while, and Eddie seems to pause in the hallway just in front of their bedroom door. Then, “Yeah, I’ll talk to him…I know…later, man. Love you. Be safe.”

Steve looks down at his phone to see that Robin is still typing, only for the bubbles to disappear again a second later.

Finally –

nance is going back

i’m going with her

Steve could throw up.

He almost does, he’s pretty sure, although he’s not positive because he might be having an out of body experience, or maybe he’s dissociating, or maybe it’s a fucking PTSD flashback or something. He doesn’t know.

He should know, or so his handful of psych degrees would suggest, and he probably would know if it was happening to someone else, but then again, he’s always worn blinders when it comes to himself.

That was true about him when all this shit started in 1983, and it’s still true now, almost forty years later.

Forty fucking years.

He doesn’t look up when Eddie comes into the bathroom, joining him on the floor with his back against the bathtub.

“Dustin took offense to you hanging up on him,” he says, and Steve can hear the way he’s forcing humor into his tone.

As if any of this shit is funny.

“Erica and the kids left with Claudia,” Eddie continues, answering a question Steve probably would’ve gotten around to asking Dustin himself if it weren’t for the whole hanging up on him thing, “Erica went kicking and screaming, obviously. I offered up our house, but they’re still deciding where they want to camp out. And everyone has agreed not to say a word to Jim and Joyce.”

Yeah, that makes sense, seeing as they’re both in their eighties and perpetually acting like they’re thirty years younger – at a minimum.

Not that Steve would know anything about that.

Definitely not.

“He said he’s one-hundred percent positive that it’s all still contained to Hawkins, so…” Eddie pauses, “We don’t have to, like, track down the girls or anything. Just make sure they don’t go anywhere near Indiana.”

And that, at least, is an actual relief.

“Robin’s going back,” Steve tells him, because there’s no point waiting to address that particular issue in this whole fucking mess.

The so I’m going too is implied, because that has never needed to be said when it came to Steve and Robin.

The way Eddie’s face changes evades Steve’s ability to describe. It makes him regret saying anything – that’s for fucking sure. Makes him wish he’d just snuck away in the dead of night.

“C’mon man, we’ve picked up a whole fuckin’ litter over the years,” Eddie says, and he’s still forcing humor into his tone, “You can’t leave me to fend off the masses alone – the years have made me weak-willed, I’ll surrender immediately.”

Steve manages a snort, but he still looks down at the floor all the same.

Eddie doesn’t say anything else for a while, but his hand wraps around Steve’s ankle as if there was enough brute strength in the one appendage to keep him rooted to the bathroom floor.

(Strangely enough, it feels like there might be).

“Steve,” Eddie finally says, his voice stiff and hard in a way Steve doesn’t think he’s ever heard before, “We are way too old for this shit – Robin and Nance too.”

Eddie pauses.

“Steve,” he says again, “I know how important Robin is. I know, but our children would be fucking devastated if anything happened to you. Don’t think they wouldn’t – and something would most certainly happen to you.”

“Eddie.” 

He’s still avoiding his husband’s eyes.

“Steve,” he pleads, something desperate in his voice, “We talked about this. Remember? Last spring, when we watched that stupid zombie show with Hazel? And there was the episode with the old gay guys? We talked about this. You told me not to let you go if this shit came back.”

Steve makes no response. Ed lets out a heavy breath, looking to the ceiling.

They have this conversation every now and then – one of those conversations that always teeters on the edge of an argument – in which Eddie insists that Steve could be fine if their relationship ended in a way that Eddie himself would not. It’s a conversation that Steve hates, because he hates the idea that Eddie – his husband of twenty years and the love of his whole entire life – could still be thinking so low of himself, that there’s any part of him that doesn’t think Steve would be fucking wrecked by losing him.

Still, it had always been a hypothetical. It had never been real.

Suddenly, Steve feels claustrophobic sitting on the floor of his daughters’ bathroom. He gets to his feet and, as he heads for the door, Eddie scrambles up after him.

Halfway down the hall, Eddie lunges for him and catches his arm, wheeling him back around to face him.

“Steve,” Eddie says one more time. 

Then, because he apparently has no words ready to follow with, he stops.

“Steve,” Eddie starts again, “Please. You’re everything. I love the girls and I love our life, but Christ, Steve, you’re my entire world. You changed everything for me. You showed me how life could be worth living, and you keep showing me, and I’m not ready to let go of you yet – not even fucking close. Please don’t let this be the way we leave each other.”

Steve finally lets himself look at Eddie’s face, the face he’d fallen in love with decades ago, the face he’s still in love with decades later. He looks at his big eyes and the hint of grey at his hairline and his crows feet and the scarring that creeps up his neck from underneath the collar of his shirt (it’s a shirt he’s had for ages – since before even Moe was born by the looks of it, but so is the rest of his half of their closet).

And he finds himself nodding.

Eddie’s exhale is all desperate relief as he tugs Steve into his arms and wraps them around his shoulders. Steve immediately reciprocates the hug, pulling him in even closer, surprised to feel tears pin-pricking his eyes

“I love you so much, Steve,” Eddie tells him, gripping the back of his t-shirt so tight he feels the collar pulling taut against his throat, “I don’t say that to you enough.”

“You say it all the time,” Steve replies with a wet laugh.

“Not enough,” he shakes his head, and Steve decides there’s no point in arguing.

A minute goes by.

“Fuck,” Steve half-laughs, half-chokes as he lifts his head to meet Eddie’s eyes, “This fucking sucks.”

“I know,” he says. 

Again, he reels Steve in, and again, Steve lets him, holding onto his husband like a lifeline, like they’re standing somewhere far more perilous than the carpeted floor of their upstairs hallway.

“I know,” Eddie repeats, “And we’ll…we’ll talk about it but for now, just – can I just hold you for a bit, okay?”

Steve nods again.

“Okay.”

read the extended version on AO3 (i.e. feat. added “flashbacks” so it fits the formatting of the rest of the series)

[livwritesstuff]

Just in connection to my reply to one of your posts with little baby Moe (Okay she wasn't a baby but you get it.)

I really, really need some scenes with the girls (all of them or one by one) where they tell Steve (and Eddie too) how amazing he is as a dad. Not as teeny tiny children but rather as teenagers or even as young adults. Just genuine love between them, no ulterior motives.

Because I feel like Steve NEEDS that too. Every now and then. I know parents always have moments where they feel like they've fucked up or that their children don't really like them. And I feel like Steve could spiral about these things on a bad day. Eddie telling him that the girls love him to pieces doesn't help a lot on these days, I believe (You can correct me since it's definitely your universe and your Steve and Eddie).

So I'm just asking, very VERY politely :))), what you think those moments could look like and what the girls would say or why Steve even feels like he failed them. (Okay that's a LOT I'm asking of you, I'm sorry.) Just see where the flow takes you, if it does.

Thank you thank you thank you 🥰🥰🥰🥰

HAZEL

Steve was home alone with the kids because Eddie was away for a few days of work meetings in New York. The second day of Eddie’s absence, Steve was hit with a killer migraine – his first really bad one in a while – so he set the girls up with a movie (a long one) to give himself a couple hours to try sleeping it off.

A while later, he woke up to an alarm blaring – weird, he’d thought in the moment because he probably wouldn’t have set a loud alarm for a migraine nap (seems a little counter-intuitive), but everything about his brain was foggy so who's to say.

Then, outside the door, he heard this exchange between his two oldest daughters.

Moe: Papa can turn it off.

Robbie: But we’ll get in trouble.

Robbie: It’s on fire.

Half-convinced he was dreaming, he got up and followed the girls into the kitchen where, yep, the microwave was on fire. All Steve really remembers is unplugging it and leaving it to the elements outside.

Turns out Moe had wanted to make mac and cheese (which she knew how to do – they’d actually been about to graduate her to toaster privileges until this incident) and it had been a fluke timer-based accident.

Eddie had thought coming home to a melted microwave in their driveway was hilarious, but Steve was seriously rattled about it because it was the first time he'd felt like something had happened because of a failing on his part. He shouldn't have let himself succumb to the migraine, he should have pushed through it to be there for the girls, but he’d let himself slip and then they set the goddamn microwave on fire.

The same day he got back from his trip, Eddie went out and bought a new microwave (even though it’s one of those purchases Steve would normally handle because he doesn’t trust Eddie for a second to not buy the dumbest appliances he can find), and he took all three girls with him so Steve could have a bit of time alone. When they all returned an hour or two later, the sheer volume and amount of excitement they brought with them pretty much confirmed for Steve that whatever microwave Eddie bought had way more bells and whistles than any person on Earth could possibly need.

Steve didn’t go downstairs to greet them and not too long later, the door to his and Eddie’s room opened, and then three-year-old Hazel was climbing into bed and snuggling up close to him.

“There’s a new microwave,” she told him in her matter-of-fact way she reported on everything that happened in her world.

“I know,” he replied, running a hand through her tangled blonde curls (unlike Robbie, Hazel’s tolerance for “hair time”, as they call it, is pretty much rock-bottom – her hair is more frizz than curls these days and Steve is figuring out how to cope).

“Daddy wants to turn the old one into a diagram,” she continued.

Steve furrowed his eyebrows.

“A diagram?” he repeated.

“He wants to put all the melted spoons in and make them look cool and put it on a shelf.”

Oh – also, no fucking chance. Not in Steve’s kitchen.

“I think he said diorama, Haze.”

Hazel nodded.

Then she said, “You were like a firefighter.”

Steve refrains from pointing out that he shouldn’t have needed to be like a firefighter in the first place (because that would be putting his own issues onto his children and he doesn’t want to do that), even though he knows it’s true. He should have been there.

“You’re the best dad ever,” Hazel continued.

“Yeah?”

“Uh-huh,” she nods, and she’s just as matter-of-fact now as she was before, and she’s sitting on his chest in a way that has her little knees digging into his ribs, which should hurt but instead feels like a tether to the real world he can grasp onto and pull himself out of his head.

 “You think we should go check out this microwave?” he asks, starting to sit up.

Hazel nods.

“Alright, let’s go.”

MOE

When Moe was 21 – a junior in college in New York City – she and her best friend since kindergarten, Gray, started dating (finally, in Steve’s opinion, because he’d seen that coming for ages).

Steve and Eddie have known Gray for as long as Moe has, and they’ve watched Gray grow up nearly as much as their three daughters – as a kindergartener with freckles and dark brown pigtails, as a middle-schooler tearfully coming out as non-binary knowing they’d have to hide it from their family, as a high school senior, still with all those freckles, eager for the fresh start that college would bring.

It was nice to be for Gray (and for a handful of their daughters’ other friends over the years) something that Eddie and Steve had needed when they were their age – a place where they could be themselves without any consequences, a place where they didn’t have to hide, because sometimes, as was the case for Gray for many years, you have to hide. It’s nice to have a safe haven where you don’t.

During Moe and Gray’s senior year of college, the pair made plans to come home for their final spring break. When that first week of March finally rolled around, Moe called from the train to tell them that Gray was finally pulling the trigger – finally coming out to their parents, finally telling them about their relationship with Moe.

“Are they sure,” Steve had asked – not because he doubted Gray but because he hadn’t been too much older when he’d taken that leap for himself and he’d felt the subsequent loss of his parents like mourning a death.

“Positive,” he’d heard Gray reply.

Three hours after their train dropped Moe and Gray off at the Wellesley Farms station, Steve and Eddie heard the back door open. A moment later, Moe trailed in with something heavy in her eyes.

“How’d it…” Eddie started to ask from where he and Steve sat on the couch, but he stopped when Moe shook her head.

“Not over yet,” she told them, “Gray made me leave. It’s a fucking trainwreck.”

And even though he knew that was always going to be the outcome, Steve’s heart still sank.

“Damn,” Eddie commented while Steve shook his head, “They’ll always have a home with us, but…”

“Yeah,” Moe nodded, “Still sucks.” 

Steve recognizes something of his own experience in that – he feels so damn grateful that Jim and Joyce had slid into that parent role for him, especially after he’d become estranged from his actual parents in his mid-twenties. Still, they weren’t his parents, and Steve would’ve never not wanted his parents to pull through like they should have.

Moe sat down on the couch between her dads.

“Why did Gray make you leave?” Steve asked (even though he had a sneaking suspicion why).

“Uh…” Moe paused, pushing her blonde bangs back, “Well, I wouldn’t say I was yelling, exactly, but…I dunno. If you ask Gray they might tell you I was yelling.”

Yep, that seems about right.

“I just,” Moe continued, “I know Gray was prepared for this – for their parents, like, rejecting all of this – and I know they’ve always totally sucked so this was obviously how this was gonna go, but I think I had a hard time seeing it because I’d never really had to consider what it would be like for that to happen.”

Moe shook her head, her bangs falling right back into her eyes, and Steve had to resist the urge to ask if she wanted his help trimming them like he’d done when she was little.

“I just mean – it never made a difference to you who me and Haze and Robbie were or what we did. You just, like, love us regardless…and always, y’know? I never had to imagine anything happening to make that stop, and I never had to consider that it might not be like that for everyone.”

She paused again, this time for a while, her eyes trained on the carpet as she fiddled with cuffs on her jeans. 

And then Moe looked Steve dead in the eye.

“You’re the best dads,” she said, “and I’m really, really lucky.”

ROBBIE

There were eight hours between Steve and Eddie finding out their fifteen-year-old daughter had been in a car crash during a school trip to Disney World and when they finally made it down to the hospital in Orlando she’d been taken to. There were another agonizing two before Robbie woke up.

When she did, her eyes groggily blinked open, and she looked blankly around the hospital room for a moment, and then she saw them.

Then her pale face crumples and suddenly she’s crying.

And that had Steve’s heart plummeting even faster than the phone call from hell he’d gotten eight hours earlier, because Robbie doesn’t cry.

He can’t remember the last time he’d seen her cry – not since she was a baby, anyway. She’d cried constantly as a baby, but the second she had a firm enough grasp on the English language it had ceased entirely, replaced by an endless stream of words – demands and trains of thought and exclamations and everything in between.

Eddie had joked that she’d only ever been crying out of frustration over not being able to tell them what she needed, and as soon as she could tell them, she had no use for it anymore, so seeing Robbie sobbing – the kind of crying where no sound could come out, where she was barely breathing, where her tears were soaking her cheeks and staining the collar of the hospital gown someone had changed her into – it practically had Steve crying himself.

After a few minutes of we’re here and you’re okay and what do you need, Robbie had tearfully admitted, “I need a hug,” and then she’d broken down again.

She wasn’t exactly in any position to get up, obviously, so Steve had taken off his shoes (because even through tears she’d still side-eyed his sneakers) and slid onto the hospital bed so he could pull Robbie into his arms just like he used to do when bad dreams woke her up in the middle of the night.

Later, when Eddie was just outside the hospital room talking to the nurse and the chaperone for the trip about the accident and how the school was planning on moving forward in the aftermath, Robbie finally spoke.

“Papa,” she said, her face pressed into his shoulder.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’m sorry.”

Steve looked down at his daughter.

“Robbie, you don’t need to–”

“Not for this. For…just, like, in general. You–”

She paused, and Steve let her.

“I just mean…” she continued, “I haven’t been, like, good lately, and I’m sorry.”

Steve didn’t know what to say.

She’s not exactly wrong – it’s true that Robbie had been a total piece of work lately, especially since she started high school, especially since she got bumped up to the senior-level band class because she’s that good at the violin (which he and Eddie had been thrilled about initially until they realized it meant she was making friends with high school seniors) – but Steve didn’t exactly know how best to explain to her that up until this, up until she’d nearly died because of it and no matter how much Steve didn’t like it, it was normal.

It was normal for teenagers to do dumb shit, to hurt themselves, to hurt others, to drive their parents goddamn insane with worry. It wasn’t normal for them to nearly end up dead because of it, and this time it wasn’t really even her fault.

It sort of reminded him of Nancy in a way, of how Nancy had never been the same again after what happened to Barb, how Nancy had never let herself be a dumb teenager, never let herself relax, even though picking a boy over a friend was normal. Sneaking out and drinking during a badly-supervised school trip was normal. Sure, there were supposed to be consequences but there shouldn’t be a goddamn death toll.

“I know, Bean,” he finally said, something about the situation pulling out a nickname for her that he hadn’t used in a long time (because when she was born, Moe had turned Robin into Robbean and the rest was history).

“You’re really good to me,” Robbie whispered, “You and dad are so good to me, and I’m not always good back, and I’m sorry.”

“I don’t need you to be sorry,” Steve told her because, for right now at least, it was true, “Just…just stick around long enough to work with us, okay?”

Robbie nodded.

“Okay.”