Chapter Text
TAGS: Found Family, Before the ‘Plot’, World Building, Steve is a Sophomore, Sixteen-Year-Old Steve, Eleven is nine, Steve Adopts, Eleven is a Stray Kitten, Steve is a Himbo™, Steve is Intuitive, Eleven is Feral, Father & Daughter Bound, Steve Harrington has Absent Parents,
RELATIONSHIPS: Eleven & Steve Harrington, Eggos/Eleven, Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson,
1981:
I
Steve Harrington is pretty sure there’s a kid with cancer watching a squirrel drink water out of the back of his pool filter.
He blinks.
He blinks again.
But the kid- Gender unknown due to their shaved head, is crouched, hunched over. They wearing the dirtiest medical gown he’s ever seen and watching the squirrel with utmost fascination. They're head is tilted, and they have big, wide brown eyes. A girl, maybe? Their face is soft, pretty even, despite the shaved head.
Steve blinks again.
“Um, hello?” he asks, baffled.
He drops his bowl of mac & cheese when the kid jolts and falls into the pool without a sound.
He gaps.
But when he realizes that the kid can't get out- only desperately reaching for the side before sinking-
They can't swim.
Steve is running. Ignoring the seer of Mac and cheese on his feet, broken bowl shards crunching underneath his socks. Steve is on varsity swimming, so he expertly dives after the kid.
Hooks an arm around them and brings them go trend water. The kid screams. High and desperately sucking in the air. And up, she’s a girl.
"Whoa, whoa!"
She clings. Steve blinks. She blinks. She tilts her head. Her eyes look up, at his dripping hair.
"P-pretty," her voice is hoarse, soft,
Steve swallows.
"Thank you?"
“Fraid,” she whispers, desperately.
“You’re safe, okay?”
“What safe?”
Something in Steve’s chest cracks. He stares helplessly at her big brown eyes.
“Safe means-” he swallows, “Safe means being with me.”
She blinks at him, eyes soft.
1981:
II
She clings like a monkey , Steve thinks, as he rubs the girl’s back. Her hands are curled around his soggy sweater sweater. His socks squish as he climbs up his pool steps. He had tried pushing her to shore, but she had held on and only made a small, devastating sort of noise when he tried. So Steve had simply gripped the edge of the pool until he was on the steps and climbed out.
She’s coughing. He wonders if she swallowed a lot of water. He rubs her back more. She drops her head against his arm. She shivers. It's December, and he's just glad his pool is heated. He stumbles into the house, slaming the glass door behind him.
The girl flinches.
"Shit," he mutters, "Shh, we're gonna get you warm."
He scrambles for the blanket he had left on the couch, careful to step around his broken bowl and squashed mac and cheese. Steve wraps the girl up.
"S-shit?"
Steve squawks.
"No- don't say that word."
She tilts her head.
"Why?"
"Wh- because it's bad."
The girl says nothing else.
Only stares at him with wide, dark eyes.
Steve suppresses a swear. He tries for a smile. She paws at his face. Smiles back, gently.
"Pretty."
He blinks.
“So are you, kiddo.”
She only shakes her head and pats his face again.
1981:
III
Running the bath had made her shake so hard he nearly dropped her.
So Steve simply drained the water and started the shower. The girl makes a startled but pleased noise as soon as the water hits her hand when he carefully extends it into the water. It was then that she let go, but not first without being startled by the rose soap his mom held. Or the shampoo, or the conditioner. She smiles as she sniffs. The girl acts like she has never smelled anything like it, never felt warm water before.
“For clean?” she asks, curiously, and Steve swallows.
“Yeah, this is for your body,” he points to the new bar soap he had found, “This is for your hair.”
The girl frowns and carefully touches at her nearly bald head. She tilts her head. She looks like a puppy.
“Still need?”
“Yeah. It’ll help to grow it,” he blurts.
She strips. Matter of fact, she does not care that someone else is in the room with her. Even though he’s a boy-
Then Steve sees the tattoo. On her arm. Small. A number. He nearly starts crying. He remembers Pops stories about War World Two, nearly vividly, but nothing had struck him more than his stories about the Concentration Camps.
The girl-
The girl is too young, to be apart of the generation of people from that, but he wonders if the US is doing something similar now. His vague plans to call the police fly out the window. Bile rises in his throat, and Steve’s hands are trembling.
His Pops always said that the worst evil was taking people’s humanity and freedom away, and he would make sure that the girls wouldn’t be.
AN:
Steve mentions his grandfather was in WWII, so I am going with it to explain why Steve realizes that talking to anyone about Eleven is a BAD idea the second he sees her tattoo. The show has gotten a LOT of flack about the numbered tattoos, and frankly, I understand why people are upset about them. I am NOT Jewish, and I have no personal say about how appropriate it is for non-Jewish people to take that horrendous shorthand for the sake of the narrative they are making. Personally, I don’t like it was used. However, it is baked into the narrative of the show and we cannot escape it when it comes to writing about it.
BUT for the love of decency, DO NOT get a number tattoo like the show, as some people have been getting. Get something else that represents the show if it means so much to you, but NOT that. That’s when it gets to be too far. It’s awful on a level that makes me shudder. I know people do it in ignorance, but it's still fucked up.
Since Steve is a kid in the 80s, I’m not surprised if his Grandfather told him inappropriate shit about the war. He’s a dude, and his sensibilities are not as strict as they are now. Also, this is the 80s, and the majority of the general American public DOESN’T know about the internment camps that the US government had that held Japanese-American, German-American citizens, and any other 'people of considerable risk'. So, Steve’s horror is not connected whatsoever with the historical context of what America itself did.
1981:
IV
A shower later, the girl is swimming in a pair of his mom’s softest cashmere sweater that she wears like a dress, and a pair of sweatpants he had outgrown, the drawstrings to keeping them around her thin hips. She wiggles her feet in his socks. She smiles. And when she does, she swings her legs like any other kid, sitting at the dining room table.
“My name is Steve,” he tells her softly, as she inhales some reheated mac and cheese, “What’s your’s?”
The girl stares at him, licking some cheese sauce off her lips. She only extends the empty bowl. Steve gives her more without another word. She hums, a smile quirking her lips. She eats as she has never tasted anything like mac and cheese, and Steve desperately wishes he hadn’t pigged out with the meal their personal chef had prepared for him before he had left. He was due back to deliver food tomorrow.
“I can’t keep calling you Girl if you could-”
She shoves in mac and cheese, and then, with the spoon in her mouth, she rolls up her sleeve.
She points to the horrible, ugly little number. Shoves another spoonful of mac and cheese into her mouth. Steve is so angry he feels his hands shake again. He hadn’t even known he could get that angry. It’s so much, he physically feel it like a weight on his chest.
“Eleven?”
The girl nods. He wonders if that’s all she knows. That a number can’t be a number.
“I’m gonna call you El, is that okay?”
The girl nods again. Pushes the once again empty bowl in front of him. He frowns, and looks at the empty sauce pan.
“We don’t have anymore Mac and Cheese… But, uh, I have eggos?”
She titles her head.
“What is?”
He blinks.
“Eggos. They’re- They’re sweet.”
“I do nothing,” she frowns.
He frowns.
“You don’t have to need anything to get-”
“Papa only gives sweet to good.”
Steve stops himself from clenching his fists.
“Well, I give sweet anytime, to anyone.”
El blinks wildly at him. She beams.
“Sweet? Pl-please?”
“Yeah, you’ll get sweet, El.”
The noise she makes when she eats the eggos nearly breaks him completely.
Steve makes the whole box.
1981:
V
He has exactly a week to come up with where El is going to live without his parents being the wiser. All the staff, cleaning crew, and the personal chef- they are easy enough to move around. He’s memorized the schedule by the time he was six. And Steve has never been happier that his mom and dad decided to go skiing the first week of Christmas vacation, and that he was technically grounded for not coming in first in his last swimming meet.
He swallowed.
Upstairs- they'll find her quickly. Even his parents aren’t that oblivious. They will clock a whole ass child in their house pretty quickly. And they would do their damn American duty and turn the girl in. The next place he can think of-
Is their basement.
His parents avoid it, even though it’s fully finished, kitchenette and full bath and everything. They've even talked about moving him permanently into the space because he needs the space as a near adult. Or something like that.
Steve wonders if it's just so they don't have to see him, as the basement is practically its own apartment, and even it's own damn door out the back with the pool.
"Safe?" She whispers, and El looks at the wide couch like it’s an animal.
“Safe,” he promises her.
Notes:
Fully Finished Basement: For those of you who lived in areas where basements really aren’t a thing, like MOI, a fully finished basement is for when it’s isolated and made to the same standards as the rest of the house.
1981:
VI
1981:
VII
1981:
VIII
1981:
XI
1981:
X
1981:
XI
1981:
XII
1981:
XIII
1981:
XIV
1981:
XV
1981:
XVI
1981:
XVII
1981:
XVIII
1981:
XIX
1981:
XX