Even Stranger Things

It was stupid, it shouldn't have been Steve's first thought when he woke up, but…

Harry said that Steve was pretty and then they never got a chance to talk about it because Chief Hopper almost died. Also it seemed like a bad time to talk about it anyway because Harry had been depressed and crying and Steve didn't know how to go from ‘we just buried a dead child' to ‘what do we do now that we said we're attracted to each other?'

It had been a horrible day though and when Steve woke up he just wanted to see if Harry and his family were okay. The whole night had been real messed up, Steve would like to see with his own eyes that the twins were alright, that El was okay, that Chief Hopper didn't die in his sleep.

Sirianna had been so upset when Steve arrived that he'd worried about what he would find inside the Hopper house. If Sirianna was throwing plates and crying, Steve expected some sort of chaos from Harry and El.

What he found was actually sort of sweet, actually.

Harry and El were sitting on the couch together, sharing a book. Harry was reading it out loud for El, pointing at every word he read and enunciating it carefully. El was hanging on Harry's every sound, she looked ready to jump inside of the book and live there if Harry asked her to.

Neither of them noticed Steve and he leaned in the doorway, quietly watching and only feeling a little bit guilty for intruding on their moment. Harry was great at reading, he even changed his voice for the characters in the book.

"The end," Harry finally read, closing the book.

"The end," El echoed. She took the book from Harry and clutched it to her chest. "Again?"

Harry looked up and saw Steve standing there and for a long moment they only looked at each other. It wasn't awkward, like Steve kind of expected it would be; Steve was checking for any sign that Harry was going to have his own meltdown and Harry was… well, Steve couldn't even pretend he knew what Harry was thinking.

"Maybe later," Harry told El, still looking at Steve. "We'll read it again before I have to return it."

Steve straightened up when Harry stood up and then he just felt awkward, standing in the doorway with nothing to say.

"Hi," Harry said.

"Hey."

God, why was Steve so painfully awkward?! It shouldn't have been weird, they were friends. So what if Steve told Harry he thought he was pretty and Harry said it to him? So what if Harry had cried in Steve's car and wore Steve's sweater?

That didn't have to change things, like not if Harry didn't want to change things. Steve wasn't even sure if he was ready to change things… it was all - it was new and awkward and Steve sort of wasn't fitting in the mold of who he was and that made everything a lot worse.

"Your sister's outside," Steve said, forcing himself to act like a normal freaking person. "Hopper seems good too, I couldn't even tell he'd been hurt."

Nearly dead. Chief Hopper had nearly died. And Harry saved his life.

Which kind of made him even more attractive in a - ‘holy shit, you're a superhero' sort of way. Which meant Steve was… like Mary-Jane, hanging on the sidelines, wishing the hero noticed him.

Lame. It made Steve super freaking lame.

"He's going back," Harry said. "To the other dimension. Siri's not happy."

Yeah, Steve picked up on that. Actually, Steve picked up that Sirianna was freaking terrified and that she didn't want to see Hopper die.

"Go back," El repeated. "Hop's going back."

"Does he… like, have a plan?" Steve asked. He didn't want to say it, but Hopper had been nearly dead when he pulled up the night before. If he got his ass kicked that hard and didn't get Will, Steve didn't like his odds of going back again.

"Plan." El put her book on the couch and stood behind Harry with her fingers pointing at each other, all of her concentration on them. It took a second, but then Steve saw a spark appear between her fingers, then another spark.

By the time El dropped her hands and smiled huge at Harry, she had created a small tornado of sparks. In the middle of the tornado, Steve swore he saw a tree or something, something that didn't exist in the middle of their living room.

"Does that open to the Upside Down?" Harry asked, turning away from Steve. "El, can that get Hop in and out?"

"In," El said. "Maybe out."

"Maybe out?" Steve repeated. "‘Maybe'?"

El blinked at Steve and he swore that she had never looked so much like Harry in the entire time that he had known her.

"Maybe," she said. "The end."

"No… I think this is the beginning of the end," Harry said.

Steve didn't know what Harry saw in the magic show El put on, but he liked that Harry immediately asked him for a ride to the local library.

The car ride wasn't awkward, even though Steve and Harry didn't talk. It made sense when they didn't talk; not talking was normal. Harry didn't usually ask Steve to talk to fill the silence and Steve didn't need him to do it either.

The Hawkins Public Library was pretty much abandoned when they pulled in. Steve wasn't sure what Harry was hoping to find, but he was pretty sure that there weren't any books on magic or monster dimensions.

"This is much better than the school library," Harry said when they walked in. Steve didn't laugh, because they were in a library, but Harry was looking around at the shelves full of books like a starving guy might look at a buffet.

"Yeah?" Steve grinned while he fished for his wallet, pulling out what he thought might actually impress Harry. "I've got a library card, so you can check out as many books as you want."

Harry didn't say Steve was a hero or anything, the way he looked at him sort of said it. Harry didn't though, Harry only looked at Steve with stars in his eyes for a moment before he literally took off and disappeared in the library.

It was probably the first and last time that Steve could use his library card as any sort of a pickup line.

Steve tried to follow him at first, but Harry was fast when he wanted to be. When Steve eventually lost him in the non-fiction section, he gave up and sat in one of the comfortable chairs meant to read in.

The library was the kind of quiet and peaceful place that Harry would like, Steve should have thought of it sooner. It was definitely a better… not ‘date', but kind of like a date? What was it called when two guys said they were attracted to each other and then they hung out? Was it like a half-date?

The library was a better half-date than the morgue had been, so Steve should have thought of it sooner, that was it.

Steve spotted Harry twice in the two hours he waited for him, both times Harry had an enormous stack of books in his arms. Steve really hoped there wasn't like a limit on how many books someone could check out, if there was he was pretty sure Harry was well past it.

"Steve?"

Steve had found a book to look at while he waited, something historic about all the wars fought in Indiana. He looked up from a picture of a battle and saw… a stack of books.

"Harry." Steve was grinning and it was fine because Harry couldn't see him. "You - uh… want me to carry some of those?"

"Please?"

Steve grabbed half of the stack, taking the books off the top, and huffed at the weight. "Are you hiding jacked muscles under your shirt?" he joked. "Jesus."

"I found more books on dimension magic in fiction than non-fiction," Harry said - which wasn't really an answer to Steve's joke of a question. "And monsters weren't in non-fiction either."

"I mean…" Steve looked around to make sure nobody was too close and then he lowered his voice to a whisper. "To normal people, like me? That stuff is fiction."

"But you know it's not?" Harry looked at Steve, never even tripping on their walk to the check out desk. "You know it's real?"

"Yeah, but like… the whole world doesn't," Steve reminded him. "Before you showed up I thought the X-Men and the comic books I used to collect were just fantasy."

"I don't know what that means."

When Steve was a kid, he really thought that anyone over the age of like thirteen was a real adult. Steve thought they knew all the right things to say and do and they were so cool and collected. Except Steve was an idiot and it was an idiot thing to say about X-Men when Harry was kidnapped and left in a cage for years.

"I'll be right back," Steve said, getting a good idea. He gave Harry his card and dashed off to the children's section of the library. It wasn't hard to find the comic book section, Steve took a couple of minutes to pick three of the best ones that would teach Harry the most about X-Men and superheroes.

Harry only stared when Steve added them to the pile of books they were checking out, the pile that they were warned to bring back by the due date.

"They've probably never seen anyone check out so many books," Steve said on their way to his car. They each had two bags of books, it had to be a record for the Hawkins Library.

"I used to spend all day in the library at my old school," Harry said. It was… like, just voluntary information that he was sharing. Which Harry didn't really do hardly ever.

"Magic classes would be more interesting to study than ours," Steve said, jumping on the opportunity to hear more about his life. "What was your favorite class?"

"Transfiguration," Harry said easily. "It's about changes, taking one thing and making it something else. It was hard, but I liked it."

That was kind of cool, taking something and making it something else. It might suck for the thing being changed, just getting twisted and turned into something new, but… but maybe it would kind of like what it turned out to be in the end…

Maybe it would realize that the world was kind of awful enough and there would be enough people who would hate it, it didn't have to hate itself so it could be whatever it wanted.

Or Steve needed to sleep and have a really long talk with the counselor at school.

Harry read the entire car ride back to his place and Steve kind of followed him inside, it wasn't like he was told to scram. Sirianna was waiting inside the house, pacing in the living room.

"Harry!" Sirianna stopped moving when she saw Harry. "We need to talk," she said seriously. "It's about the other dimension."

"Okay," Harry said. He lifted his bag of books. "Later."

"He found books about it," Steve explained when Harry went straight to his room. "I think he's probably going to read all of them tonight."

Steve had been kidding, sort of, nobody could really read that quickly.

"Probably," Sirianna agreed, dropping heavily on the couch. El and Hopper weren't there, but neither was Hopper's vehicle. Steve put the bag of books by the coat-rack and sat on the empty recliner, kind of unsure what to do.

He could go home, but he didn't want to do that. Steve wanted to know what Sirianna wanted to talk about and he wanted to see what all Harry found in his books.

"So…" Sirianna's voice turned sly and Steve looked over at her, suddenly not sure if he should just leave or not. "Harry doesn't talk much, but I was wondering what happened last night?"

"With the body?" Steve asked, pretty sure that wasn't what Sirianna meant. "Totally normal day, we - we stole a body and buried it. Totally normal."

Nothing about what Steve said was normal, but Sirianna's half-smirk was making Steve feel overly exposed and stupid. How did a girl so tiny who waved sparkly pom-poms and had a hickey on her neck make Steve feel stupid?

"Even Harry gave me more details," Sirianna said. "And I'll tell you what they were… once you spill."

Sirianna was the evil twin, that Steve knew for sure. Sirianna was the sneaky and evil one, Harry was the one who checked out twenty books and was quiet and nice.

"What exactly do you want to know?" Steve asked. It was like walking through a battlefield, Steve was pretty sure there were bombs planted somewhere, probably a lot of them, but he had no idea where they were or how deadly they would be.

"Everything from your side," Sirianna said. "And… go."

Everything? Everything??

Steve started slowly, trying to explain about the hospital and the car ride. Sirianna asked a few questions and that made it easier to remember it all, even if it was hard to get into words. When he reached the part about Harry restoring the boy's own looks, Sirianna sighed sadly.

"That's horrible," she said. "Harry - Harry cares so much sometimes. He doesn't always show it, he's never been great at talking about his feelings, even before, but he does care."

"He buried him with a light," Steve told her. "Because it was dark."

"That - that does sound like Harry," Sirianna said, her voice breaking just once. Steve politely looked away while she tilted her head up to the ceiling and blinked quickly.

Harry wasn't the only one who cared so much.

"Tell me about calling Harry pretty," Sirianna said, knocking Steve off-guard again. Jesus, she was sneaky though. One second she looked like she was going to cry and then the next she was smirking at Steve with evil little sparks of mischief filling her eyes.

Evil Twin, she was an evil twin.

Steve didn't really want to rehash kind of an embarrassing moment where he was blurting all of his thoughts because he thought Harry wasn't listening.

"Uh…"

In some of the best timing ever for Steve, Harry chose then to walk out of his room, immediately drawing Sirianna's attention.

"Is this real?" Harry asked Steve, holding up a comic book. Steve had to squint across the room to see it, but he remembered it when he saw the cover.

"I mean…" Steve scratched the back of his neck, not really sure why Harry thought he was the expert on the subject. "I didn't used to think so? But maybe?"

Maybe they were all real. Maybe somewhere there were mutant wars happening and people just woke up with superpowers. Sure, Harry and Sirianna and El called theirs ‘magic', but why couldn't it be a superpower too?

"Look." Harry moved around the couch to sit by his sister and started flipping through the pages. Steve leaned forward to see it and called himself an idiot mentally. The comic he grabbed was a good one, it was when Magik joined the team - but maybe a comic about a kid being taken as a slave who developed powers because of the isolation and pain wasn't really the best choice.

"Are you…? Harry," Sirianna's eyes grew three sizes when she looked at the page Harry pointed at. Steve wasn't sure what was so amazing about it, it was Magik traveling to the Limbo. "Can you do it?" she asked Harry.

Could he…? Oh! Maybe Steve wasn't an idiot! Maybe Harry could open a portal to the Upside Down where Will was. Steve wasn't sure if that would make it easier to rescue him or not, but it had to be worth something!

"El," Harry said, tapping Magik's face on the comic.

"You're brilliant!" Sirianna cried. She took the comic from him and started turning the pages slowly, her eyes scanning each page as she went. "If El can open a portal then we… oh." Sirianna paused, her eyes on the image of the dragons escaping through the portal.

"If we can get in, they can get out," Sirianna said. "Harry, they - they would kill every person in Hawkins. Hopper barely made it out. We can't open a portal if they can come here and hurt people."

Steve watched Harry while his jaw worked side to side silently. It looked like he was working himself up to say or do something painful, in Steve's probably wrong assessment anyway.

"They won't," Harry said. He turned the page back to the one where Magik opened the portal. "El," he said. He turned the pages again and pointed to where Wolverine fought against one of the dragons. "Me."

Sirianna blinked, but Steve understood immediately. Harry would have El open the portal, then he was willing to play defense to keep the home team from being destroyed by visitors.

It was sick and - and kind of rad.

"And I will go…" Sirianna turned to the page where Magik stepped through her portal and she traced the path from the real world to the Limbo world. "Through here."

"What?" Steve asked, picking up quickly on her meaning.

Harry frowned the second he saw Sirianna's finger move and spoke the same time Steve did. "No."

"Yes," Sirianna said calmly, looking only at her brother. "Hopper needs help getting to Will. I know I'm not as strong as you are, but I'm not useless. Jonathan is our friend, Will is a child. I'm going in with him."

They were both brave - brave and really impulsive.

Steve sat silently and watched Harry and Sirianna glare at each other, neither of them relenting for a moment. It was almost funny, if it were any other circumstance, seeing two people who looked so much alike have very different opinions on what they would be doing.

Steve didn't blame Harry for not wanting Sirianna to go through any portal, but Steve understood why Sirianna wanted to go. It was the same sort of reckless idiocy that led Steve to stealing a body from a morgue and burying it with Harry.

It was like half nobility and half stupidity.

When the staring contest between the twins ended, Steve could tell it was Sirianna who won. Harry clenched his jaw hard and glared darkly down at his lap while Sirianna raised her chin victoriously.

"Hopper's going back tomorrow," Sirianna said. "You'll stay here with El, keep her safe and keep any creatures from coming through. I'll go with Hopper, help find Will."

That - that wasn't really a great plan, though Steve could admit that he didn't know of any other plans even half as good. Anything that made Harry look pissed had to be bad though.

"Can El even open a portal?" Steve asked, hoping maybe that hiccup could give Harry time to find a plan he didn't hate.

"El's gifted, Harry's the strongest wizard I've ever known," Sirianna answered simply while Harry only glared. "Between the two of them, I'm sure that it will be fine."

El was gifted. Harry was a strong wizard. Which meant that Sirianna had to be the bravest of the three.

"Should we - we like find a place that isn't your living room to do it?" Steve asked, looking around the house carefully. It wasn't a huge house, any good sized monster could destroy it. Hopper already took in three kids that weren't his, it would really suck if his house was destroyed trying to save a fourth kid he didn't have to save.

"We can do it in the woods behind Jonathan's house," Sirianna said, thoughts and plans seemingly whirled in her eyes while she spoke. "Will must be inside his mum's house, why else would he have such a strong connection to everything there? Hopper said the place had been filled with giant spiders though, he never got a chance to search much."

"Acromantula," Harry said quietly, spitting the word quickly too.

"What?" Sirianna asked.

"Acromantula, Siri," he repeated. "Spiders."

"How do you fight giant acromantula spiders?" Steve wondered. The twins looked at him and Steve was so not asking a dumb question, most spiders could be squished under his foot so if those were big enough to mess with Chief Hopper, then they probably weren't squishable.

"Fire," Harry told him.

Yeah, okay, that made sense.

"So… we need weapons," Sirianna said. "Not just guns, but fire and - and weapons." She looked at Steve and blinked, "What other weapons do muggles use?"

"Uh… guns and fire and - grenades?" Steve said. "Except I think grenades would be hard to get, but we could make molotov cocktails, maybe? They're like bombs, but smaller?"

Maybe, Steve wasn't exactly the weapons expert. The best that Steve had was a baseball bat that he drove a bunch of nails in one night. Steve had been scared of like burglars or kidnappers or serial killers, he never thought of weapons to use against monsters.

"Can you get those?" Sirianna asked him. She sighed when Steve shook his head. "Fine. I'll have Billy help me find them. Do you have fire?"

Steve wasn't sure where Sirianna was going to find molotov cocktails, Steve had only heard the term in like a book or a movie or something, but he did have fire.

"I have hairspray and a lighter," he said.

"Alcohol," Harry nodded.

No, it was hairspray, but Harry was looking at Steve's hair and it made Steve a little self-conscious. Harry thought Steve was pretty. Nobody ever really called Steve pretty before - he heard cute and handsome, never pretty.

Harry was pretty, and handsome. Cute? Harry was cute. Steve liked his eyes and he liked the very few times that Harry smiled. Steve also liked that he was quiet, but like in a secretly brilliant kind of way?

"Steve." Sirianna snapped her fingers in Steve's face and he ripped his eyes off Harry and fought down a dumb blush when he saw Sirianna roll her eyes. Sirianna was pretty, but she was bossy, snappy.

Harry had a prettier personality, as really freaking gay as that thought was.

"Sorry," Steve said, "what?"

"Can you go get hairspray and lighters?" Sirianna asked. "And any other weapons you can think of? I can call Billy, see if he can get those cocktail bombs. Then Harry - Harry can help me practice before Hopper and I go back tomorrow."

Sirianna's stubborn look didn't change at all, but Steve thought he heard her voice shake just a little bit. It was the first sign Steve had that she was at least a little human, she was scared to go - she was just brave enough to do it anyway.

"Yeah, alright," Steve agreed, looking between the twins quickly. Harry's face was blank, but Steve got the impression that he was really pissed about the whole thing anyway. It was just the way that his fingers were tight on the comic book he held, the way Steve could see a muscle in the side of his neck.

"Great." Sirianna smiled tightly and she wasn't thrilled with her own plan, not that Steve thought it would stop her for a second. "Go team," she said brightly.

Yeah, go Team Monster-Killers and Child-Rescuers.