Archive of Our Own

Steve applies for the au pair job because he’s desperate and vaguely qualified. He doesn’t really think he’ll get it but he’s hit that point in job hunting where you just fling your resume every which way with minor changes, and hope one of them somehow manages to land, a-thousand-monkeys-with-a-thousand-typewriters style. He doesn’t even remember how he found the posting, but he swaps some stuff around on his resume, slaps together a new cover letter that’s vaguely angled towards childcare, and sends it off into the void of the internet.

About a week later he gets a voicemail and an email from one Nancy Wheeler on behalf of Edward Munson, looking to set up a telephone interview.

“Are you sure you’re not gonna get murdered?” Tommy says, eyes narrowed as he pinches in on the map on his phone. “This place is like, so far off the grid. And you said there’s no cell reception?”

“He’s gotta get a job somewhere, Tommy,” Carol says, rolling her eyes. “Even if it is playing nanny for some creepy old man and his creepy kids in their creepy old mansion out in the middle of the creepy old countryside.”

“Oh my god,” Steve says, snapping his suitcase shut. “I’m gonna be fine. Edward Munson is a rich bastard who is looking for an ‘au pair’ for his seven kids. He’s just gonna be some rich old asshole who wants someone else to parent his kids for him.”

“You mean like daddy dearest, but with more children?” Carol snickers.

Steve flips her off even though he agrees. “Exactly like daddy dearest,” he says, “Which is why I’ll be great at this.”

“Maybe he’ll be a silver fox,” Heather offers when they get everyone together and all go out for one last group dinner before Steve leaves. “Maybe it’ll be a whole Sound of Music situation. Minus the Nazis. I hope.”

“Or maybe he’s one of those secret Nazis who’s rich off of a secret Nazi fortune,” Tommy drawls, and Heather swats him.

“That one does sound more likely,” Nicole agrees.

“Cool, guys,” Steve says. “Really feeling the love. Really basking in the concern. Tell me more about how you’ll miss me.”

“Maybe he’s some satanic cultist who’s gonna kill you so he can wear your fresh young skin,” Reed offers.

“Except he’d have to anticipate getting a male nanny then,” Nicole says. “Which, like, who would ever expect that?”

“Who said he only cares about wearing a guy’s skin?” Reed retorts. “He can be skinning his female nannies and parading around in their skinsuits.”

“You’re so gross,” Carol says.

Steve finishes his beer and decides to order something stronger.

Steve’s greeted at the airport by a young woman about his age holding a sign with his name.

“Uh, Ms. Wheeler?” he asks tentatively, but she just laughs.

“Oh my god, no. I’m Robin. Buckley. Nancy— Wheeler, to be clear— doesn’t leave the grounds.” She awkwardly tries to shove the sign under her arm so she can shake his hand, which he takes while he tries not to be weirded out by the fact that Edward Munson’s… personal assistant? (in hindsight, Nancy Wheeler had never actually specified her job when she’d called) also lives on the estate, and apparently never leaves it.

“Steve. Harrington,” he offers. “Nice to meet you.”

About halfway through the handshake the sign slips and hits the ground.

“Oops,” Robin mumbles, then she glances at him, back at the sign, and shrugs, and begins shuffle-kicking it along the polished concrete of the airport floor as she walks towards a trash can. It startles a laugh out of Steve, and she grins, only bothering to pick it up when she actually gets to the trash.

“Also,” she continues, “You know how to drive, right? I can’t remember if Nancy said, or if that was even a question in the interview or whatever, but we will be in trouble if you cannot drive.”

“I can drive, why?” Steve can’t hide his amusement, because Robin Buckley is weird in the most incredible way. She does not disappoint.

“Because I—“ she says with a dramatic flourish, “—cannot. And we have to get back to the estate somehow.”

Steve looks at her.

“How— how did you get here?” he asks, baffled. Because a cab would make sense, but then there’d be no need for him to drive.

“Well,” she says, as they continue to head out of the airport, and sure enough, based on the signs, they’re headed to the parking lot and not the public transportation section. “See, I can sort of drive, but not really. And Eddie insisted I come meet you, and it’s a pain to get a cab out to the estate, so I thought, ‘You know what? I can drive well enough to make it to the airport.’”

Steve grins. “Let me guess— you could not drive well enough to make it to the airport?”

“Ding, ding, ding!” she answers cheerily. “It’s a good thing I’m paranoid and planned on getting here an hour and a half early, and then that your flight was delayed, because it took me twenty minutes just to get down the stupid estate drive. It then took me another forty minutes to get to town, and by that point I just gave up and walked around asking if anyone needed a ride into the city, and would drive me in exchange for cab fare back.”

Steve laughs.

“And that is our ride,” she says, and tosses him a pair of keys. He surveys the cars in front of them, then looks down at the keys and a familiar insignia. There’s only one BMW in this row of the parking lot, and he whistles.

“Damn,” he says. “Mr. Munson really is a rich bastard, huh?” and then immediately winces because that’s absolutely not the right start when talking to a new coworker about your new boss, no matter how relaxed and fun she’s been.

But Robin only cackles, delighted. Steve hits the button to unlock the car, and she pops open the trunk, doing a very poor job at helping him lift in his suitcase.

“Oh, I have to tell him you said that.”

Steve winces again. “Please don’t? I really don’t want to fuck up this job before I even meet my new boss.”

“No, Eddie’ll get a kick out of it,” Robin says, waving him off as they get in.

Steve starts the car. “I hope so.” He pauses, adjusts the rearview mirror. “You call our boss Eddie?”

“Everyone calls him Eddie.” Robin says. “The ‘Mr. Munson’ is half of why that sentence was so funny.” Robin giggles. “‘Mr. Munson,’” she repeats to herself, under her breath. “Anyways, we all mostly just use first names, unless we’re, like, pissy or making fun of each other. It’s fine. It’s not that formal an environment.”

Steve tries to readjust his mental picture of Edward Munson accordingly. Not formal-stuffy. Probably younger than Steve previously thought. Or way older and going into friendly old-man territory. Probably not, given the ages of the kids. He taps his fingers against the wheel. Tommy’s dad is a “Mr. Hagan was my father, call me Dan” kind of guy, so Edward Munson might be similar— friendly smiles and firm handshakes and “How’re the kids? Wife still a nag? Ha, I know the feeling!” until someone fucks up and then the smile is just a shiny veneer over the coldest knife cutting someone’s career to shreds. Steve chews the inside of his cheek and hopes that Robin’s genuine, loud, open nature is a good sign.

They chat through the two and a half hour drive, briefly interrupted so Robin can give directions. It turns out she’s the tutor for the kids— “any and all subjects!” she informs him cheerily. “I speak five languages fluently and Will and I are working on Danish and Norwegian together.”

“Holy shit,” Steve mutters. “I’m feeling very under-qualified right now.”

“Oh my god, no, see, I have been feeling the exact same way, because the teaching? The studying? Easy-peasy, the kids are great, I can do that no problem.

“But when it comes to the other stuff, I’m a mess. I can’t bring myself to discipline any of them for shit. As soon as any of them start talking about hobbies I don’t share, I check out— not because I’m not trying, I swear! I really do. I just can not get into the fantasy stuff, or the HAM radio stuff, or Max’s skateboarding stuff and Lucas’s new thing with basketball.” (Steve perks up a little at that.)

“Trying to explain to the boys that they are almost teenagers now and need to start wearing some goddamn deodorant? Can’t do it! Weighing whether I should yell at Erica to stop spending 40 minutes in the bathroom every morning versus telling whoever needs to pee to just go find one of the other million bathrooms? Hell on earth. Trying to explain what happened in a fade-to-black scene in a romcom to Elle? Nope! Nope, nope, nope, just freeze right the hell up!”

It’s easy to laugh around Robin, Steve finds.

“And like, it helped that we sort of bounce them around between me and Nancy and Jonathan—the groundskeeper, by the way—“ Robin continues, “and Chrissy can help sometimes too. But like, I think Nancy finally yelled at Eddie that we all have our own jobs and whatnot, and the kids really need someone dedicated for all the, like, childcare stuff.”

“So here I am,” Steve says.

Robin beams. “Here you are!” she agrees, complete with silly little jazz hands.

“I’m pretty excited to have you around, to be honest,” Robin says. “It’s a weird job sometimes, and it’ll be cool to not be the only new kid on the block. In the estate. Whatever.”

“Happy to help,” Steve says, then pauses. “Weird how?”

“Eh,” Robin shrugs, “It’s a massive manor estate full of eccentrics, but you probably already guessed that,” and then she spirals through a crash-course of the kids and the other residents.

The house is exactly as huge and impressive and kind of eerie as Steve had expected. They drive through a small town, then out of it, and up a hill through sparse forest until they reach a massive stone and wrought iron gate, that both he and Robin get out and have to heave open, then shut behind the car. Then the drive is another several minutes through more trees and rolling fields before the house comes into sight.

And Steve’s no stranger to huge houses, sprawling estates, families with too much money, new and old— modern houses and looming stone behemoths, tech startup money and family inheritances— so he’s not unprepared for the manor, but it’s still pushing the upper boundaries of what he expected. It sits, massive and dense upon a hill, all gray stone and creeping ivy and ambiguously renaissance revival in style. It’s three stories and the kind of estate Steve expects to see on historical landmark lists and tourist attractions, not secretly tucked away and actually housing over a half dozen children.

“Absurd, isn’t it?” Robin says as they pull up. “Don’t worry, the inside is way less intense. There’s still way too many rooms but apparently Eddie stripped out any gaudy chandeliers and velvet drapes and ugly uncomfortable couches years ago.”

They get out of the car and unload Steve’s bags from the trunks, and when he looks up he’s startled to realize the massive front doors are flung open, and there’s a man standing there, hip propped against the doorframe, watching Steve with eyes that are way too intense, a few small faces peering out around him.

“Hey Eddie!” Robin says cheerfully, and Steve nearly trips and faceplants in the gravel drive.

Edward Munson is about as far from a stiff, besuited older man as can be. He’s wearing a band t-shirt with a logo so spidery and dense that Steve couldn’t begin to decipher what it says, his jeans are shredded all to hell, chunky silver rings dot his fingers and his wrists are wrapped in leather and chains. He can’t be much more than five years older than Steve, there’s smudges of tattoos across his arms and just visible at the neckline of his shirt, and his long hair is a mane of dark curls.

“I told you to just call for a cab, Robin,” Mr. Munson says, voice low and amused. “How long did you keep our newest resident waiting at the airport?”

“His flight was late,” Robin says dismissively, “and I ended up just stopping in town and having Jeff drive me the rest of the way.”

“And you made our guest drive you back?”

“Steve’s a better driver than you,” Robin says, sticking out her tongue playfully. The kids giggle. Mr. Munson puts a scandalized hand to his chest. Steve watches the whole exchange, wide-eyed and baffled.

“Hey!” Mr. Munson says, but he doesn’t actually sound upset. “Rude!”

“It’s just the truth,” Robin sing-songs, climbing the steps to the front door. She turns back to Steve. “You coming?”

“I— yeah, sorry, should I—” he gestures back at the car.

“Leave the keys in the ignition,” Mr. Munson says, “And don’t worry about it. I’ll move it to the carriage house later, unless Jonathan gets to it first.” He’s still watching Steve, eyes dark and disarming, smile just a little sharp. He doesn’t move out of the doorway, and it’s plenty wide so it’s not like Steve has to brush against him to enter, but it’s still strange and unnerving.

As Robin reported, the inside is unexpectedly practical and homey. The central foyer still has a dramatic two-pronged staircase that flanks either side, and the dark wood banisters match built-in bookshelves on every wall and the hardwood floors covered with thick rugs. Elaborate stained glass windows spill kaleidoscopes of color.

But—

There’s squashy square couches tucked against the walls. The bookshelves are filled mostly with well-worn paperbacks instead of pristine gilded leather hardcovers— titles mostly fantasy, from what Steve can recognize, but also some scifi, comics, and nonfiction ranging from electronics and radios to classic film to drawing guides to music to chemistry. Little figurines and stuffed animals and drawings are tucked in among the books, and one of the shelves by a couch is filled entirely with board games. There’s a few books and toys and pillows on the floor, pushed enough into corners not to be a tripping hazard, but hardly put away either.

“Alright brats!” Mr. Munson says cheerfully, “Let’s do some introductions!”

A few of the kids look excited, a few others roll their eyes. A couple shuffle over, curious, but others remain sprawled in their places.

“Alright,” Mr. Munson says, arms slung over the shoulders of two boys. “This here on my right is Dustin, and on my left is Will. Hiding behind Will is Elle. The grumpy one on the couch is Mike, the surly one against the wall is Max, and Lucas and Erica are the ones who look like they’re about to start brawling right here in the middle of the foyer even though they promised they’d be on their best behavior for you.”

The two children in question immediately look appropriately chastised, and Steve glances across the group of them, running curious calculations in his head. They’re obviously not all related by blood, at least not closely. There’s a few sets that could conceivably be direct siblings. Lucas and Erica, Will and Elle and Dustin, possibly a half-sibling situation with Mike. Max is an odd one out with her red hair and light eyes. Steve glances back at Mr. Munson for just a moment and thinks maybe she takes after her mother? He could see that, he thinks.

“Nice to meet you,” Steve says. “I’m Steve.” (Internally he winces, because introductions are always the most awkward part with kids, and he always has the vague sense they expect him to give them something more to work with, but Steve doesn’t really have all that much more to give.)

Will gives Steve a sweet little smile, and Elle gives a shy little wave from where she’s hiding behind him, so that’s promising, at least.

“Now,” Mr. Munson says, “Nancy was supposed to be here to help with some paperwork and ground rules and whatnot, but alas.”

He turns to the boy that’d been introduced as Mike. “Wheeler, would you kindly tell your sister that if she wants to be my personal assistant, she needs to stop fucking vanishing when there’s actually personal assistant-ing to be done?”

Mike scoffs and rolls his eyes. It startles Steve a little. He’s one of the few one Steve would peg as maybe actually Mr. Munson’s kid— the dark curly hair, the long line of their nose, an odd combo of soft and sharp edges on their features.

“I’m not the boss of her,” Mike snarks, “You are.”

“Good god,” Eddie says, but there’s something fond in his exasperation as he throws his hands up and stalks towards one of the halls. “Fine, I’ll see if I can find—”

He freezes next to a side table, stares at it, picks up a stack of papers, and sighs.

“You think you’re so damn clever, huh, Nancy?” he shouts, cupping his hands around his mouth and aiming it ambiguously up into the lofty upper halls of the house.

Robin and a couple of the children snicker.

“Well,” Mr. Munson says as he heads back over. “Nancy really should be the one going over these with you, but I believe she also emailed you a copy to look over before you came and—” he flips through the stack of paperwork, which has been neatly partitioned out via post-it note. (“Get these signed ASAP,” Steve catches on one. “Do not sign these without me,” on another.)

Mr. Munson snaps the papers back into a stack and lazily taps the pile in his hand.

“She really is irritatingly organized,” he says with a sigh. “Shall we?” and he waves a hand up the stairs, presumably to some sort of study or office. “Go ahead and leave your bags there, Jonathan’ll get them moved to your room. Robin, would you watch the kids for a few minutes while Steve and I get these last bits of paperwork squared away?”

“Yeah, ‘course,” she says brightly, and offers Steve a little wave as he sets his bag down. “Alright brats, what— wait, where the heck did Erica go?”

“Dunno,” one of the kids says, though Steve doesn’t quite catch which as he ascends the stairs with Mr. Munson.

“‘Dun—’ What do you mean you don’t know! She’s your sister and she was literally just here!”

Steve grins, and ahead Mr. Munson turns to look at him just in time to catch it. He looks amused.

“They’re really something, sir,” Steve says.

The man laughs. “That’s definitely a way to put it,” and he waves Steve into an… office?

Much like the foyer it has the bones of a beautifully crafted old house—the same bookshelves, window seats that look like they dual-purpose as either cabinets, or maybe are hiding radiators beneath them, leaded glass windows with delicate diamond grids. Much like the foyer it’s strewn with incongruous detritus. There’s more fantasy novels, little figurines, band posters slapped over satiny wallpaper, a wall dedicated solely to a dizzying array of guitars. Papers litter every table and desk surface, a good chunk of the couches and chairs as well, and crumpled up balls of them spill out of a cheap-looking wastebasket and across the floor.

“Right, so,” Mr. Munson says, sprawling into a chair. “Nancy did send you this paperwork before, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Munson snorts on a laugh. “Jesus, please don’t do that. You’re gonna make me feel stuffy and old. Just Eddie, really.”

“Um, alright,” Steve says, still feeling very off-kilter.

Eddie grins. Steve’s pulse ratchets.

“Great, so you’ve already had a chance to read over it then. Any questions?”

He gets up again, shoves a space on the desk clear for the paperwork, and begins rummaging around in the drawers. (Papers and tchotchkes cascade onto the floor.) 

“Uh, not that I can think of,” Steve says. (The legalese in the paperwork had turned his brain to scrambled egg, but Carol had rolled her eyes and put her law degree to work, highlighting the important parts and grimacing at the stipulations that she thought were “like, uber freaky.” Steve’s not really surprised by any of them, and he’s not sure why she was either. They’re both plenty aware that the ultra-rich tend to be eccentric and obsessively defensive of their privacy.)

“Cool, cool,” Eddie says. There’s a mug filled with lollipops on his desk, which Steve had assumed were for the kids, but Eddie grabs one, tosses the wrapper vaguely in the direction of the wastebasket, (misses,) and pops it in his mouth, continuing to talk around it. And of course Eddie catches Steve’s gaze, and he smirks around the lollipop stick.

“Ex-smoker,” he explains, “But obviously a no-go with the kids, so—” Steve nods.

“Anyways,” Eddie continues. “I’m trying to remember if there’s anything big I wanna bring up. We have no cell reception, obviously, and no wifi. A lot of the people in this household have the, uh, what do you call it.” His brow furrows, then he snaps, and grins. “Electromagnetic hypersensitivity!

“There’s ethernet in the living room for anything you might need, and the kids have pretty strict rules on how much time online they’re allowed. As the au pair or nanny or whatever you wanna call it, you’re welcome to adjust some of that at your discretion for rewards or discipline. Also, Dustin’s big on the HAM radio stuff, but he knows when he’s allowed to mess around with that, and you shouldn’t have to enforce that.”

Steve nods. “Robin mentioned the radio stuff in the car.”

“Already keeping track of the hobbies, good start,” Eddie says, with that disarming grin again, gone a little lopsided around the lollipop. He sounds genuinely impressed and appreciative, and something in Steve’s gut twists at the praise.

“What else?” Eddie muses. “I mean, the NDA is the big one. And I’m sure Nancy will imply that it’s super strict and super rigid and super serious, but like, whatever. I get it. Everyone talks about their job a little with their friends and family, especially when their job is a little weird. I’m not gonna yell at you if you tell your girlfriend that Dustin, Mike, and Lucas somehow dared each other to see who can stick more peanut butter up their nose.”

Steve chokes on a laugh. (Doesn’t correct Eddie on the ‘girlfriend’ part because some part of Steve hates the idea of admitting to him that he’s been alone for a while.) “Is that something they’ve done?”

Eddie finally finds a pen and waves it with a flourish. “Aha! And yup. Credit to Dustin for insisting that they only use one nostril so they didn’t suffocate, but still.”

Steve whistles a breath between his teeth.

“I’ve got my work cut out for me, huh?” he muses. Eddie only grins again, and offers up the pen, holding on for just a second too long after Steve takes it before letting go.

(Steve resolutely doesn’t think into it while he goes through the paperwork, filling out signatures. Eddie’s just a rich eccentric and it doesn’t mean anything. Steve also doesn’t stare when Eddie finishes the lollipop, and as he and Steve pass the pen back and forth, Eddie tucks the end of it between his teeth too so he can flip through the pages.)

When they emerge from the study, looking down over the banister at the cluster of children and an exasperated looking Robin, Steve’s once again struck with what an odd collection of kids they are. He’d kind of assumed there were multiple mothers involved when he first got the info from Nancy Wheeler, because the ages are way too close to be physically possible otherwise, and it would hardly be unexpected when dealing with the rich assholes who usually have this kind of money. But he’s not sure any of his assumptions really track anymore.

“Are any of them actually yours?” Steve asks, curious.

“They’re all mine,” Eddie snaps, suddenly sharp and vicious, and Steve throws his hands up in apology.

“Sorry,” Steve says, internally berating himself. Fuck. “I didn’t mean— sorry.”

Eddie’s eyes are still narrowed, and his arms are folded tight and defensive over his chest. Well, Steve thinks, At least I haven’t unpacked yet. No idea how I’ll make it back to the airport though, and having just signed that paperwork probably makes this messy.

“They’re all mine,” Eddie repeats firmly. “Even if none of them are mine. Capiche?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, nodding. He looks out at the array of them and chews his lip. He feels pretty shitty, and even though he’s pretty sure he’s just immediately lost the job, he wants to at least make this right.

“It’s a nice reversal of things.”

That seems to startle Eddie a little out of his prickly posture, and his head cocks to the side.

“What do you mean?”

“Just, you know, speaking from experience, most people with this kind of money, who are looking for an au pair or whatever, it’s usually the opposite. Their kids, but only technically. Must be nice to—“

Steve abruptly cuts himself off, embarrassed. Must be nice to be wanted, he nearly said.

The weight of Eddie’s stare bores into Steve’s core, and he tries not to squirm.

“You a trust fund baby, Steve?” Eddie drawls, and there’s something in his voice that Steve would almost call teasing if he didn’t know any better. He resists the urge to scuff his sneakers on the hardwood floors.

“If I had a trust fund, would I be taking a nanny job out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere?” Steve mutters.

And against all odds, all expectations, Eddie laughs, and Steve’s left staring, startled, at the line of his profile, the crinkle at the corner of his eyes, the curve of his adam’s apple.

“But you did have an au pair of your own?” Eddie says, amused, when his laughter subsides, and Steve abruptly tears his gaze away.

“I mean, not for long, but yeah, a couple. My parents realized pretty quickly that a pretty young thing in the house was gonna make one of them mad either way, and someone older could, god forbid, undermine their authority. So we ran through them pretty fast until I was old enough to shuffle off to boarding school or leave home alone during breaks. Incidentally, about the same age for both of those.”

(Steve mentally kicks himself for what feels like the millionth time in this interaction, because why can’t he just shut up? Why can’t he keep his mouth shut, or talk like a normal person instead of spewing all this baggage?)

“Well,” Eddie says mildly, “I hope you do undermine my authority.”

Steve’s pulled out of his spiral by the implication that he’s maybe still got the job.

“What?” he asks, dazed.

“I’m trying to raise the kids to be proper anarchists, see?” Eddie answers with a wild grin, and he starts descending the stairs. Steve follows obligingly.

“So,” Eddie continues, “by all means, undermine my authority all the time, with the understanding I’m gonna be trying to undermine yours too. I wanna foster some proper rebellion in these brats. There are no monarchs, there are no presidents, there are no bosses in this household.”

He pauses as they reach the bottom, and he looks at the kids. “Except when it comes to bedtime and eating healthy.”

Steve can’t help his disbelieving laughter, and he shakes his head.

“You know,” he says, testing the waters. “If you’re trying to foster rebellion, and you’re the anarchist, then wouldn’t their best way of defying you to be proper conformist cogs in the machine?”

Eddie gasps, throws a dramatic arm over his eyes. “No! Anything but that.”

Steve tries to smother his grin, relief and something else flooding his veins. Instead nods sagely, glancing out of the corner of his eye at Eddie’s indecipherable metal band t-shirt and ripped jeans and pentagram and skull rings.

“I see my task laid before me. I’m gonna play your kids music exclusively from the top 40s charts, and I’m gonna get them into football and reality tv, to really help them stick it to dear old dad.”

Eddie fakes a backwards stagger.

“Nancy’s invited a monster into his house,” he cries, stumbling and dropping (some) of his weight against one of the kids— Will, if Steve remembers correctly. The boy stifles a laugh.

“Kids!” Eddie shouts, “Flee! Save yourselves! Your new babysitter is going to unleash popular culture upon you!”

A couple of them shout, and sprint off into the house, laughing delightedly. A few look genuinely aghast before they disappear, and Steve tries to match the names to the faces: Dustin and Mike look horrified at the thought. Elle and Will are laughing but seem mostly caught up in the energy of it all, rather than any genuine disgust at the idea of popular culture. Three kids remain. 

Max and Erica roll their eyes in sync, and clearly have the teenage rebellion energy down pat already (though Erica is noticeably younger than the others) as they resolutely ignore Eddie, and size Steve up with shockingly critical expressions. Lucas stares at Steve, eyes narrowed.

“You mentioned football,” Lucas says suspiciously.

“I did,” Steve says. “Not my sport of choice to play, but I spectate and enjoy it like any traditional, conformist American does,” directing the last part at Eddie, still sprawled on the ground, who gives an exaggerated moan of despair. “I heard from Robin that you go for basketball.”

Lucas lights up.

“Do you play?”

Steve grins. “Varsity all through boarding school, college team all four years, captain for most of it all.”

Lucas’s grin splits his face, then briefly tightens. “You’re not fucking with me, right?”

“Language,” Steve admonishes, and Lucas startles. “No, I’m not messing with you. I’ll prove it, if you’ve got somewhere we can play.”

“You’re gonna ‘language’ us?” Erica says incredulously from where she’s watching the exchange.

“Eddie doesn’t give a shit,” Max adds.

“Hey!” Steve cuts in, “What did I just say?”

Max rolls her eyes, still leaning against the wall, looking disproportionately cool for a tween who should be going through her awkward years or something.

“Even Nancy’s given up,” Lucas adds, though there’s a buzzing energy to him that’s a clear sign he’d rather get back to the basketball talk.

“Yes, well,” Steve huffs, “Eddie’s already explicitly given me permission to disregard his rules, and I don’t give up so easily. Watch the language.”

Erica narrows her eyes.

“Or what?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know you all well enough yet to have figured out the appropriate disciplinary measures yet. I’ll get there though soon enough.”

(Steve ignores the way Eddie’s shoved himself up with one elbow to watch the exchange, but isn’t saying anything.)

“Now,” Steve says, turning back to Lucas. “You gonna show me where you practice?”

Lucas whoops.

“Mike and Dustin are gonna be pi—” Max starts, pauses, stares at Steve. He stares back at her. “Mike and Dustin are gonna be pissed ,” she repeats, putting extra weight on the word, “that you’re not, like, going to find them.”

“Well,” Steve says airily, “tough luck for them. Also, I’m gonna remember that, Max. Watch your back.”

Lucas guides Steve out to the back lawn, where a basketball hoop has been awkwardly affixed to the wall of some other structure (a garden shed? a chapel? a cottage for a servant? Steve has no idea). The grass has been removed and clay smoothed over the dirt, and Steve can see faint lines where someone— Lucas presumably— has attempted to scratch court lines into it and fill them with chalk.

“Huh,” Steve says absently as he stares at it. “That’ll be different. Okay. We can work with that.” Then he looks up at the basketball hoop. “We are gonna have to fix that to be regulation height, though.”

Lucas beams.

“Now,” Steve sighs, “as much as I would like to hang out with my current favorite kid so far—”

From the house, a door flings open.

“You can’t say that!” Erica shouts. (She hadn’t been subtle in following them, but anytime Steve glanced back at her, she’d faked boredom and like she just incidentally happened to be there.)

“I can and I will!” Steve shouts back. “If you want me to stop, you better work to beat him out!”

Erica gasps.

“Hah!” Lucas shouts, pointing at her. “Eat sh— dirt, Erica!”

“See?” Steve says, grinning. “Already cementing yourself in the leaderboards.

“But, as I was saying, unfortunately, I do suppose I have a responsibility to the other kids of this house, technically.”

Lucas laughs.

“So,” Steve continues. “Max said Dustin and Mike would be the most mad if we didn’t come find them. Where do you think they’re hiding, so we can go there last?”

With Lucas’s help, and then Erica’s (“because my idiot brother must be real dumb if he thinks Elle’s in the west hall linen closet. She hasn’t hid in there for like, three years now,”) and then Max’s, Steve tracks down a giggling Elle (behind the door to the kitchen). Elle then guides them to Will, reading a book behind the couch in one of four studies the house apparently has, who blinks at the assembled group.

“Where are Dustin and Mike?” he asks.

“Left them for last,” Steve says. “It’s Will, right?”

Will stares at the hand Steve extends, then delicately takes it and lets Steve help him up.

“You came to find me instead?” he says, and Steve mentally makes a note of that. So far, Will seems like the quietest, and most conventionally ‘well-behaved’ of the group, which is a fast recipe to ‘easily overlooked.’

“Yeah,” Steve says. “You wanna join us for a snack, or would you rather stick with your book? Or you could bring it with, and we can do both.”

Will’s eyes remain trained on Steve’s face.

“Okay,” he says, carefully tucking a bookmark into its pages and tucking it under his arm.

“Wait,” Erica says. “What about Dustin and Mike?”

“Like Max said,” Steve says mildly. “They’ll be the most mad if we don’t come find them.”

Elle gasps, adorably delighted at the scandal.

Steve grins at her.

“Now,” he says, “How do we get back to this kitchen in this maze of a house?”

The kids make bets about how long it’ll be before an indignant Dustin and/or Mike caves and seeks them out while Steve familiarizes himself with the kitchen, setting out some fruit and pretzels as a temporary holdover while he assesses his other options.

Sixteen minutes and forty seconds later a short figure with wild curls bursts into the kitchen. (Lucas whoops, his bet on Dustin at 15 minutes. Max, the next closest, had pinned Dustin at 20. Elle had said Mike at 10 minutes, Will had said Mike at 30, and Erica had shrugged and said “definitely Dustin first but it’ll either be, like, two minutes or an hour.”)

Dustin staggers to a stop, wide-eyed as he takes in the sight of everyone sitting at the kitchen island eating apple slices and the quick cheesy bread Steve had slapped together.

“What the fu—”

Erica abruptly cuts Dustin off with an aggressive buzzer noise.

Steve had done it twice earlier to Max, earning an aghast expression, and Erica had looked delighted, immediately pivoting and taking up the task herself, despite her previous disbelief at enforcing a ‘no cursing’ rule. Apparently getting to irritate and interrupt her siblings far outweighs any desire she has to protest the rule itself.

Dustin chokes on his words and stares at Erica.

“Sorry, what the f—”

“Bzz!” Erica shouts again.

“Did you just—”

Once again, the buzzer noise, and Dustin throws his hands in the air.

“I didn’t even cuss that time!”

“I’m just being proactive,” Erica says primly.

“Why are you even—”

“New rule,” Lucas says, “Courtesy of Steve. No cussing.”

Dustin narrows his eyes.

“One, who is he to make new rules?”

“The new nanny,” Steve says drily. “That’s literally my job.”

Dustin glares at him, sticks up his nose, and turns back to Lucas, ignoring Steve.

“Two , Lucas, why are you being a goody two shoes?”

Lucas shrugs, doing a bad job of looking detached.

“Steve plays basketball,” Max offers.

Dustin scowls. “Of course he does. God d—”

Lucas and Erica both cut him off with the buzzer noise.

Dustin scowls, and storms out of the room, shouting an “I’m gonna go find Mike!” over his shoulder.

“Hm,” Steve says. “Not a great start. Probably not my best work, huh?”

Will looks up from his book, cocks his head.

“No, you’ll be fine, I think,” he says.

Steve grins at him, and decides to risk running a hand through his hair. It pays off, because Will laughs as he shoves Steve’s hand away.

“Thanks,” Steve tells him.

Steve meets Nancy Wheeler in person a few hours later. She’s very pretty, and when Steve matches her face to the competent, efficient woman he’d talked to on the phone, he immediately knows he’s gonna be in trouble.

Elle and Lucas are giving Steve a tour of the house. Max and Erica both opted to do their own thing, whatever that may be, and Will had tagged along until they made it back to the foyer where he settled onto one of the couches with his book.

“And this—” Lucas says with a flourish, “Is the living room.”

Steve stares around it.

“What makes this different from the five hundred other rooms with bookshelves and couches?” Steve asks, amused.

“The TV, duh,” Lucas says. “And the internet.”

“Ah,” Steve says drily. “Of course. How could I miss it?” (It does have a huge TV, but so had the “sitting room.”)

Elle giggles.

And then a new figure is sweeping into the room, a laptop under her arm and a stack of papers in the other.

“Oh,” she says, blinking, and then smiles warmly. “You must be Steve. Sorry, give me just a second to—”

She sets her stuff down on a large, heavy desk tucked in the corner. It’s the kind of desk that Steve’s father and his colleagues pay obscene amounts of money for, used as a status symbol in their highrise offices, kept pristine and polished and tidy, with little except crystal awards and brass name plaques and Newton’s cradles to decorate the surface. Much like Eddie’s desk, this one clearly sees actual use, though the piles of folders are far tidier, labeled with color-coded post-its, and there’s a neat, empty square of space in the middle that she places her laptop precisely in the middle of.

With her hands now free, she offers one for a shake—strong, firm, warm— and smiles at Steve again. “Nancy Wheeler,” she says. “You can just call me Nancy now that you’re here. It’s great to finally meet you. Sorry I wasn’t around earlier. I tend to lose track of space and time in this damn house.”

Steve offers her his most charming smile, and feels gratified when her smile goes a little wider.

“Steve,” he says, “But you knew that already. Thank you again for the job.”

She looks at him up and down, nods. “Well, you were a gamble, and I had to talk Eddie into it, but I felt like it was time we tried something a little different around here.”

“Yeah?” Steve asks, adjusts his shoulders just a tiny bit in the way that he’s been informed makes them look extra broad.

“Oh my god ,” Lucas complains. “Do you actually need Steve for something or can Elle and I finish showing him around the house?”

Nancy sighs, but she doesn’t actually sound that exasperated.

“Yes, you can finish showing him around the house,” she says. “See you around, Steve.”

Steve grins, and offers her a wave as Elle tugs him out of the room. “See you around, Nancy.”

By the time Lucas and Elle finish their tour, periodically joined by Max and Erica, it’s late evening.

(Partway through the tour they’d entered a room where Mike and Dustin were sitting on the floor, heads bowed together. As soon as they’d come in, the two boys had looked up, scowled, and darted around the group and out the door.

“Really mature,” Erica had said, rolling her eyes.

“Ignore them,” Max had added, “Those two are like, the biggest turds.”

“Is ‘turds’ acceptable language?” Elle asked thoughtfully.

Steve had pondered. “‘Turds’ is fine, I think,” he says. “In moderation.”

“What does that even mean?” Max had asked, sounding exasperated. “‘Moderation’,” she mocks. “What, like once a day? Twice a day? Once a week?”

“Don’t be a smartass,” Steve had told her, and she’d lit up.

“You said ass!” she crows, and Elle had beamed, clearly a kid whose delight stems from everyone else’s excitement. It’s cute.

“‘Smartass’ is fine,” Steve says. “‘Asshole’ is not.”

“These are so arbitrary,” Max said, resettling into indignant again.

“Babysitter privileges,” Steve said with a grin, and she’d scowled.

“Jackass,” she muttered.

“You get one pass on that,” Steve says. “‘Jackass’ is also unacceptable.”

Erica had pulled a notebook out of her backpack, taking furious notes with a glittery pink gel pen. Steve suspects they’re less for herself, and more so she can hold it over the others’ heads.)

So they emerge back into the foyer as the light coming through the windows goes long and golden, and Eddie’s sprawled on the couch next to Will, a book of his own in his hands, but the two of them having clearly abandoned reading, talking intensely about something Steve knows he can’t possibly track.

Eddie looks up, grins. (Steve would swear Eddie looks at him just a beat too long, but he tells himself that’s just the anxiety talking. He’s still so caught off-guard by Eddie that he’s just overthinking everything, that’s all.)

“Tour done?” he asks.

“Yep!” Elle says cheerily.

“I don’t think I’m going to remember half of it,” Steve says, “But I’ll figure it out eventually.”

Eddie laughs, head thrown back, unrestrained and loud.

“Good to hear,” he hums, and then gets off the couch with a languid motion that Steve could only describe as catlike.

“All right,” Eddie says, clapping his hands. “Will, it’s your turn to help Jonathan with dinner.” (Steve nearly jumps as a large figure moves past them— broad shoulders and sandy brown hair, and Will brightens up as the guy that must be Jonathan ruffles his hair and disappears down the hall). “Erica, you’ve got an hour of internet time. Lucas and Max, an hour on the TV, and Elle, would you go find Dustin and Mike for me? They’re both on dinner duty too.”

There’s a chorus of agreement of varying degrees of enthusiasm, and then the children are all disappearing off to their tasks, leaving Steve alone in the foyer with Eddie.

Steve shifts nervously from foot to foot.

(‘Why are you so nervous around this guy?’ a mocking voice in his head asks, sounding suspiciously like Tommy. ‘He’s just some weirdo with a ton of kids.’

Because he’s my boss, Steve retorts back.

‘We both know that’s not why,’ imaginary Tommy scoffs. Steve ignores him.)

“You know,” Eddie starts, and it’s like every nerve of Steve’s body lights up in attention. “I would advise against all that flirting with Nancy,” he says, and there’s something almost amused in his tone.

It’s like a bucket of ice water, and Steve tries not to scowl, because fine, whatever, if your employees all live in your house, then technically it makes sense to have rules about them not getting in relationships. It still pisses him off.

“You’re the boss,” he mutters.

Eddie, the jackass, has the gall to throw his head back again and laugh.

“Sweetheart,” he purrs, (Steve’s face goes hot, because what the hell? ) “I don’t take issue with you having a relationship with whatever adults in this household you want. I’m just saying, Nancy as a choice might bite you in a way you don’t quite expect. Same goes for Jonathan, if you were considering that one.”

Steve had not been, because he hasn’t even exchanged words with Jonathan yet. But a tiny voice in his brain files the way Eddie said it easily and casually, like it would be no big deal if Steve was interested in a relationship with a guy.

“Those two are only slightly better choices than, say, Chrissy.” Eddie continues, “Really, the only person who I’d say is safe to have a normal relationship with is Robin, but—“

“I’m not exactly her taste,” Steve says drily, irritation dissipating despite his best efforts. (In the car ride Robin had slipped up about how pretty a girl down in the town below was, and had briefly gone pale and wide-eyes as she stared at Steve. “So redheads do it for you?” Steve had asked, and she’d let out a choked laugh and shoved him.)

Eddie laughs again.

“It is tough luck, and I’m sorry for it,” Eddie says mildly.

“Also,” he tacks on, “Nancy and Jonathan have a whole thing going on and if you want to go for a messy love triangle, then I suppose that’s your call, but that one will be messy .”

“With Jonathan?” Steve asks, a little surprised. Again, he hasn’t seen the groundskeeper much, but he didn’t strike Steve as Nancy’s type, looking stone-faced and surly, but then again, he’s probably not qualified to be making those assumptions since he hardly knows Nancy either.

“Oh boy, for sure,” Eddie says.

“Oh,” Steve says, and then feels a little shitty. Nancy was probably just being polite, and it’s his stupid ego getting in the way again, assuming people are flirting when they’re not. “Okay. Thanks for the heads up.”

(It doesn’t occur to Steve until days later that, unless Nancy—who doesn’t seem the type— or Lucas or Elle—unlikely they even noticed—had said something, there’s no way Eddie should’ve even known about the flirting.)

Steve pretty quickly learns that Eddie Munson isn’t at all what Steve expected, and he feels kind of shit about it. In hindsight, of course a single man would need some help wrangling seven children, and hiring someone to do that isn’t some effort to not be involved. He’s incredibly involved. (Which is good, because again, one man is not capable of wrangling seven children, and even with Robin’s help, and periodic assistance from the other adults in the house, Steve’s constantly running around.)

Eddie plays-wrestles with the kids on the lawn. He sets up game nights—sometimes D&D for the kids that play, sometimes board games, sometimes he breaks out some wildly outdated game consoles and plugs them into the large tv in a downstairs sitting room. He gives constant feedback to Robin about her lesson plans, and ropes Steve in, plus sometimes Nancy, so they can all sit and discuss where the kids are at in their studies, and how they can improve things. He spends seemingly all of his time with one kid or another, and even if he’s not actively doing something with them, he’ll be in the same room or the same space, reading or writing or sketching or playing music (typically one of several guitars, but occasionally he breaks out a violin, and at Steve’s surprised expression he grins, hefts it aloft, and offers a nonsensical, “Well, don’t you know the fiddle’s the classic pick?”)

Eddie insists on “family meals,” and that everyone participates in cooking, and there’s a truly incomprehensible chart in the kitchen that Steve can’t make heads or tails of, but all of the kids seem able to decipher in a moment’s glance. (Steve put his hands on his hips when Robin and Will and Elle had ‘helpfully’ added his name to the rotation, and just sighed. “You just tell me when I’m in charge of cooking, and when I’m helping out, because I’m never going to keep track of that on my own.”)

Steve meets Chrissy on his fourth day.

He’s making lunch with Will and Elle and Robin, and he turns to ask Robin to pass him the tomatoes, then nearly jumps out of his own skin because a pretty young woman with strawberry blonde hair is perched on the edge of the kitchen island.

“Hi,” she says sweetly. “We haven’t met yet, right?”

“Hi Chrissy!” Elle says cheerily.

“Uh, no,” Steve says. “Steve, nice to meet you.” He wipes his hand on his apron, and holds it out for a shake, but drops it when she makes no sign of taking it.

“Nice to meet you too,” she says, smiling warmly enough that Steve doesn’t worry too much that he’s offended her somehow.

“Steve’s the new nanny,” Robin offers. “Or ‘au pair,’ I believe was the official job listing.”

Chrissy’s brow furrows.

“Why?” she asks. “Barb didn’t leave, did she?”

“Barb can’t be the nanny very well anymore, remember?” Will says quietly.

Chrissy tips her head in confusion.

“Oh,” she says. “Okay. If you say so.” Then she looks at Robin and her expression creases again.

“Have we met?” she asks, which doesn’t make any sense, because Robin told Steve she’s been working here for almost three years now.

“Yup,” Robin says. “Robin, remember? The tutor?”

Chrissy blinks, looking bewildered. “Nancy’s not doing that anymore?”

“She’s helping Eddie!” Elle says brightly, and Chrissy’s expression smooths out.

“Oh, that’s right.” She looks over at Steve sheepishly. “Sorry, I’m a bit of a scatterbrain. You’ll probably have to keep introducing yourself and reminding me of stuff.”

“That’s okay,” Steve says. “I get it. I’ve had a couple concussions through— my sports career, so my brain doesn’t always hold onto things super great either.”

Chrissy beams softly.

“Do you like tomatoes on your sandwiches?” Steve asks, and Chrissy’s expression goes a little funny.

“Oh no, I’m fine, but thank you.”

“Oh,” Steve says, wincing, looking at his cutting board briefly. “Sor—” and when he looks up, Chrissy’s gone.

He stares for a moment, then turns to the other occupants in the kitchen.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asks, worried.

“Nah, you’re fine,” Robin says. “Pass me the lettuce?”

“That’s just Chrissy,” Will offers.

“I think she likes you,” Elle adds. “I like you.”

The process of “family meals” at the estate still leaves Steve feeling off-kilter. Eddie’s insistent that the kids and Robin and Steve and himself all sit down for at least dinner every night, but the other adults of the house seem exempt from this rule, sometimes there, sometimes not. Of them, Nancy is the most common presence, then Jonathan, who is almost always near-silent instead of contributing to conversation. Chrissy’s only there occasionally, and seems all over the place in how mentally present and on top of things she is, and Steve’s never actually seen her eat, which worries him, but when he brings it up to Eddie, Eddie just smiles.

“It’s very sweet of you to worry, Stevie,” he murmurs. (Steve’s chest goes tight at the nickname.) “Dinner’s hard for Chrissy, but I promise she’s doing okay.”

And maybe Steve’s just not used to the idea of family dinner, but it’s loud and chaotic and there’s always several conversations going at once, and if Steve’s not in one, inevitably he will be as someone drags him in, and then someone in another one will demand his attention for something else. He’s not sure he’ll ever fully get the rhythm of it, but he grasps the concept at least, and it’s a great opportunity to act on his mental notes:

Will tends to disappear into the noise of it all, so make sure to pull him into at least three conversations, and try and get almost everyone at the table covered by at least one of those. If Mike and Max are bickering, either make sure to set up an innocuous conversation with Elle that they can both jump in on. (Or, depending on the circumstances, absolutely do not let them both get in a conversation that also involves Elle, because it’ll turn into a fight over her.) If the other tweens are getting a little mean about Lucas’s new athleticism, side with Lucas, but gradually and increasingly exaggerate the jock persona so much so that by the end of whatever debate it is, even Lucas is rolling his eyes and making fun of Steve with the other kids and Robin and Eddie. Act a little extra dumb with Erica in areas where she excels so she can show off how smart she is, to help compensate for the gap caused by her age difference from the others. Rely on Robin, because the kids get a huge kick out of her and Steve’s playful bickering. Added bonus, it’s just really fun. (Try to pretend he doesn’t notice Eddie watching him.)

And Eddie is simultaneously an agent of chaos and a guiding paternal figure at mealtimes. One moment he’ll be shouting and throwing balled up napkins and half-clambering onto the table to reach over people for something, instead of just asking someone to pass it down. The next he’s scolding Mike for refusing to eat his greens, and spooning a second helping of mashed potatoes onto Will’s plate because “you keep getting taller and you can’t eat the same size meals as before or you’re going to waste right away and slip between the floorboards, you stringbean,” and getting up to grab Elle a new plate because Lucas jostled the table and it made her chicken and roasted squash slip from their carefully separated positions and touch each other, and now she can’t eat them.

And it’s not so much two sides of a coin, two separate personas, as it is a strange synergy. Dustin complains that Eddie’s got a double-standard for Elle, letting her be picky about her food while he forces the rest of them to eat vegetables they hate, and Eddie grins and sticks out his tongue at him. Or he’ll fully get a knee up on the table to dump some asparagus onto Max’s plate all the way four seats down. Or he’ll scold Lucas and Erica for shoving each other, but he does so by sliding halfway under the table so he can kick their chairs hard enough they nearly topple over.

The biggest issue of the meals though (and life at large), is that, even nearly two weeks in, Dustin still clearly hates having Steve around.

(Mike hasn’t fully warmed to Steve either, but Steve’s not too worried there. Observing Mike with the other kids has revealed that uninterested and mildly prickly isn’t entirely unusual for him. He has his moments of genuine sweetness and excitement sometimes with the others that Steve never gets, but he can accept that. He suspects Mike’s bickering and grumpiness is its own sort of relationship, and he’s fairly confident that if Mike really hated him, Steve would sure as hell know it.)

Dustin is the sticking point though.

If Steve enters a room he’ll huff and storm off. If Dustin comes tearing down the hall, brimming with excitement with something to share with one of the other kids, and he sees they’re spending time with Steve, his face scrunches up, and his face very visibly reveals complex mental math. Sometimes he’ll just scowl and say he’ll tell them later, or he’ll go for it but look irritable and frequently pause to glare at Steve. If conversation turns to Steve at mealtimes, he’ll mutter unflattering things under his breath, which often results in one of the other kids kicking him, and/or Eddie having to scold him.

The thing of it is, Steve’s seen enough now to know that Dustin’s default is loud and bright and enthusiastic. He occasionally gets bitchy, because they’re all tweens, that’s to be expected, but for the most part he’s open and earnest and generous with his attention and affection. Except when it comes to Steve.

It’s further complicated by the fact that Dustin clearly adores Eddie, even more than the other kids do. And so Dustin will mutter something nasty, and Steve never manages to finish the calculations in his head of how to handle it before Eddie sharply tells Dustin that it was inappropriate, and he needs to apologize, and Dustin’s face will crumple. And then if Dustin’s apology isn’t very convincing, Eddie will insist on trying again. Steve quickly learns that interjecting that it’s fine, really, just makes it worse, because Eddie will firmly state that no, it’s not, and Dustin will scowl at Steve and then start to tear up at the humiliation, and it’s all just a mess.

Steve nearly trips over Dustin one afternoon, facedown on the floor. It’s clearly a tantrum or crisis of some sort, but no one else is around to have instigated it.

“Uh, you okay there?” Steve asks tentatively.

Dustin doesn’t even turn his head to scowl, which is how Steve knows something’s really wrong.

He carefully folds himself to sit cross-legged on the floor next to him.

“Okay, what’s going on?”

Dustin doesn’t answer, but from this vantage point, Steve catches a baleful glare that he levies out of the corner of his eye.

“Either you tell me,” Steve says, “Or I have to go find someone else to wrangle it out of you,” and Dustin immediately lurches up.

“No, no, no, you can’t tell anyone!” Dustin cries.

Steve sighs. “I can’t promise that until I know what this is about, but I’ll try my best.”

Dustin’s face scrunches up. He folds his legs to mirror Steve’s pose, and his hands worry at the hem of his sweatpants.

“Dart’s gone,” Dustin says, voice very small.

“Dart?” Steve asks, puzzled, and then, with a sinking dread, he remembers the very large terrarium in the room Dustin and Will share, the contents of which Steve has resolutely not looked at the few times he’s had to go in.

“Your snake,” he says, desperately hoping Dustin will correct him.

Dustin only nods.

“You—” Steve swallows. “You said he’s gone? ”

Dustin nods again, expression miserable.

“I fed him earlier today, and I swear I made sure the lid was tight, but when I checked just now, it was loose, and he’s not anywhere in our room! I checked everywhere!”

Steve tries not to hyperventilate at the thought of a, as he recalls it, fairly large snake, loose in this massive house with all its weird nooks and crannies and shadows and hiding spots.

“Okay,” Steve says, grateful his voice sounds far more level than he feels. “First of all, we will find him much faster if we have help.”

“No!” Dustin says. “Eddie made me promise I’d take good care of him. We can’t!”

“We don’t have to tell Eddie,” Steve tries to reason. “We can start with Robin, or maybe Jonathan?”

Dustin shakes his head stubbornly. Steve breathes slowly out through his nose. Okay. Okay.

“Alright then, two, when did you last see Dart?”

“I fed him two hours ago,” Dustin says.

Steve pauses, then realizes that doesn’t actually help very well at all. He has no idea how fast snakes can move.

“How far do you think he could get in that time?”

“Not outside of this wing, I think,” Dustin says. “Unless he got into the vents?” (Steve tries not to throw up at the thought.)

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to close all the doors in this wing, and then search each room, one by one. If we still haven’t found him after that, then we go tell Jonathan, and then if he doesn’t have any ideas, we have to tell at least Nancy. Got it?”

Dustin opens his mouth as if to protest, then thinks better of it, and nods.

“Alright. Now tell me where a snake would like to hide.”

Of course Steve finds the snake. Of course when he bends down to look under a couch, he sees it curled up against the warmth of a vent. Of course when Steve skitters backwards in alarm, he realizes he has no idea where Dustin is, beyond ‘somewhere else in this wing’ which isn’t very helpful at all.

Steve tucks his knees to his chest and buries his face in his hands and hyperventilates, just a little.

The door creaks open.

“You good there, Stevie?”

Steve’s head jerks up, and he stares at an amused looking Eddie.

“Yeah,” Steve squeaks. “Yeah, totally good.”

“Anything I can help with?” Eddie asks, arching an eyebrow as he heads to a bookcase to grab a book.

And the thing is, Steve knows Eddie would definitely know how to retrieve the snake, because Eddie was the one who got it for Dustin in the first place. But also, Steve promised.

“Nope!” Steve says, scooting in front of the couch as if Eddie might somehow see Dart beneath it.

“Hm,” Eddie says, smirking, hefting his book. “Well, if you insist.”

“Close the door behind you?” Steve calls as Eddie leaves, which prompts another curious eyebrow raise, but Eddie complies.

Steve buries his face in his hands again, curses himself, and then suddenly remembers the snake is right behind him, and he lunges across the hardwood to put some distance between it and himself.

By the time Steve hears footsteps again, he has decided to abandon his morals, and beg whoever it is for help, promise be damned. He flings open the door (keeping an eye on the couch, because he doesn’t think snakes are fast enough it could slip past him, but he’s still paranoid), and Max nearly drops the bag of Doritos she’s holding.

“Max,” Steve says, “Max, if you help me with something and also keep a secret, I promise I will not tell Eddie or Nancy that you clearly stole a snack and are trying to circumvent the junk food quota.”

Max scowls.

“You don’t have to blackmail me,” she mutters. “I can keep a secret for you.”

“Not my secret,” Steve admits, and that causes Max to perk up as she follows him into the room. Steve waves in the vicinity of the couch, and Max ducks down to look.

“Ohh,” Max says, and snickers. “Yeah, you do have to blackmail me for this one, because otherwise I’d absolutely tell Eddie that Dustin screwed up and lost his snake.”

“Can you—” Steve starts, then stops.

Max sits up, pops another Dorito in her mouth, and blinks at Steve.

“Are you scared of Dart?” Max says, sounding a little delighted.

Steve can’t even be bothered to feel indignant.

“Yes,” he says, “So would you please get him out for me so I don’t have to touch him?”

“Yeah, I got it,” Max says, passing the half-empty Dorito bag to Steve, ducking down, shoving her arms beneath the couch, and retrieving the snake with ease.

Steve sags.

“You’re a godsend, thank you.”

Max then grins wickedly, stands up, and holds Dart out.

“No, no, no,” Steve chants, eyes going wide, stumbling backwards. “Max, don’t you dare!”

Which is how Dustin finds them— Max cackling as she very slowly follows Steve around the room, Dart held aloft.

“You found him!” Dustin says, delighted, and Max passes the snake over. Dustin coos, and nuzzles its face, and it’s almost cute. “I was sure you didn’t, because I just saw Eddie, and he didn’t say anything, so like—”

Max blinks. “Actually, yeah, he was carrying A Wizard of Earthsea when I saw him earlier, and I know he keeps that in here. You could’ve had him get Dart out for you.”

“I said I wouldn’t tell him,” Steve says absently, still nervously watching the snake as Dustin hefts it, and it coils around his arms.

Dustin blinks, turns to Steve, and cocks his head thoughtfully in what might be mimicry or just inherited habit from Eddie.

“Shouldn’t we get Dart back in his terrarium before Eddie really finds out?” Max says, and that draws Dustin’s attention away from Steve, and he nods. The three trek back to Dustin and Will’s shared room, and Steve watches warily as Dustin deposits it back in the terrarium.

“You’re sure that lid’s sealed tightly this time?”

Dustin rolls his eyes. “Yes, Steve, the lid is sealed tight.”

“Don’t be a brat,” Steve snaps. “I just spent the past two hours helping you find him, and hiding that from Eddie.”

Dustin ducks his head.

“Sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he really means it. Steve blinks. “Thanks.”

“It’s— it’s no problem,” Steve says, still feeling a little startled.

At dinner that night, Eddie spoons a serving of sweet corn onto Dustin’s plate, and then when he passes it back to Dustin, he doesn’t let go.

“You know,” Eddie says, holding the plate hostage, “Part of our agreement with Dart was that you’d take very good care of him, wasn’t it?”

Dustin blanches.

Steve’s sitting close enough he can just hear as Max leans over to whisper in his ear, “Come on, you really thought Eddie wouldn’t know?”

“I—” Dustin glances around frantically.

“And then,” Eddie says mildly, “You go ahead and rope your new babysitter into helping clean up your mess?”

Dustin opens his mouth and Steve has absolute confidence in his course of action.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steve says loudly, drowning out Dustin’s apology.

Eddie blinks, startled, and his hand goes just slack enough that a few corn kernels slip off the plate before Dustin grabs it, and sets it down in front of himself (spilling several more spoonfuls of corn as he too stares at Steve, eyes wide.)

“Darling,” Eddie says, pointing at Steve with the serving spoon. “I know everything that goes on in this house.”

“And I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Steve repeats firmly, lifting his chin defiantly, spearing a bite of pasta on his fork.

Eddie stares at him for a moment longer, then erupts into laughter. Dustin’s face splits into a delighted sunny smile.

“What the hell?” Eddie murmurs, half to himself, grin partially obscured by the hand he’s rested his chin in.

“Erica!” Steve snaps. “Don’t think I don’t see you sneaking your zucchini onto Will’s plate!”

Steve’s in the living room, checking his own email while Lucas and Dustin also have their designated internet time. Nancy comes in like a whirlwind, looking frazzled, grabbing papers off her desk in the corner that serves as her unofficial office.

“Hey,” Steve says, “You good?”

“Yeah,” Nancy says, “Yeah, yeah, I’m— I’m fine. Hey Lucas, Dustin.”

The two look up (Dustin a bit belated, distracted by whatever he was doing).

“What’s up?” Lucas asks her.

“You two haven’t seen Barb around lately, have you?” Nancy asks, and Steve startles at that. He knows Barb was the nanny/au pair before he was, but he’d assumed she left, and yet Nancy talks as if she’s still here somewhere. Maybe she lives down in the nearby town, he tells himself.

Lucas purses his lips. “Not in a week or two, why?”

“Did she seem okay?” Nancy asks, “I haven’t had the chance to talk to her for more than a minute since Steve came, and I’m not sure how she’s taking it, or if she even knows yet.”

“She did seem kind of mad last time I talked to her?” Dustin offers, “But that was like, last month before Steve came.”

Nancy scrubs a hand down her face.

“But after Eddie and I were talking about hiring him. Damn. Damn.”

She frowns and looks at Steve.

“You haven’t met her yet, right?”

“Uh, no,” Steve says. “Should I have?”

Nancy winces. “No, that’s probably for the best. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to try and defuse things before that happens.”

Of course Steve then meets Barb that night.

He’s headed down the hall, already weary from fighting Erica about her earlier bedtime than the others, knowing he’s then going to have to repeat the bedtime fight at least another few times. The lights are low, and he turns a corner and nearly trips because he has to immediately stop.

The young woman puts a hand on her hip and surveys Steve critically through her glasses. (Disproportionate number of redheads here , Steve thinks nonsensically.)

“Can I help you?” Steve asks, bewildered by the sight of a stranger, but she doesn’t seem dangerous, just irritable.

“So you’re my replacement?” she asks snidely.

“Oh,” Steve says. “You’re Barb? I’m, um, Steve, nice to meet you.”

Once again he offers his hand for a handshake and it’s ignored. She instead tucks her fingers into the collar of his shirt, though Steve swears he can’t feel it, and her lip curls.

“How’d Nancy and Eddie decide on a rich boy like you?” she asks. “It doesn’t matter, I suppose. You won’t last. You’ll go running back to the city soon enough, because you can .”

She sounds angry and bitter, and Steve’s left scrambling to figure out what’s going on. From what he’s heard from the kids she was sweet and a great caretaker, so he can’t imagine Eddie or Nancy would fire her, but she seems too angry to have quit on her own.

“I’m sorry?” he offers, and her face does something funny like she wasn’t expecting that.

Then a door flings open and Nancy spills out.

“Barb,” Nancy says, and then doesn’t seem to know how to finish.

There’s a long silence, and then Barb’s lip trembles a little.

“Nancy,” she says and her voice gets small. “Nancy, it’s not fair.”

The lights flicker a little.

“I know,” Nancy says softly.

“You and Mike are here because of me,” Barb says, voice shaky. “You followed me here, and now you can’t leave either, and— and now he and Robin can just come and go as they please? It’s not fair.”

Nancy wraps her in a hug.

“I’m sorry,” Steve repeats, feeling out of place and useless and lost. “I don’t— is there anything I can do? I swear I’m not trying to replace you or anything, everything the kids have said makes it clear they loved you.”

Barb lets out a wet laugh.

“This would be easier if you were an asshole, you know that?” she says.

“Sorry,” Steve says. “Uh, fuck you?”

Barb’s laugh is even brighter this time. Nancy shakes her head but there’s an amused curl at the edge of her mouth.

“Thanks, Steve,” Nancy says. “I’ve got this. Also, I think I heard Dustin and Mike saying something about a baking soda volcano down in the kitchen, so—”

“Oh shit,” Steve swears under his breath. “Okay, nice to meet you Barb, see you again sometime, maybe? I gotta go deal with that,” and he sprints down the hall.

(He thinks he passes Eddie in an open doorway, just a flicker of dark hair, but he doesn’t really have time to confirm, taking the stairs as fast as he can without falling, and he makes it just in time before Mike pours an entire bottle of vinegar into the volcano they made.)

Steve only sees Barb in bits and pieces after that, in brief moments, much like Chrissy. But it seems like she’s made peace with whatever it is about Steve that was so frustrating to her.

“Will and Mike had a fight,” she tells him one day as they pass in the hall.

“Ah,” Steve says, “That explains it. Thanks.” His brain’s already running a mile a minute trying to think of ways to help mediate that and smooth things over. Even Will’s been uncharacteristically testy all day, and Elle’s been upset too, which makes sense if Mike and Will aren’t getting along.

She looks at him thoughtfully. “Yeah, no problem.”

Or, “You can get Lucas to drink his milk if you pour strawberry syrup into it. There should be some on the left side of the pantry if there isn’t any left in the fridge.”

Or some days she doesn’t say anything at all. Some days he passes her in the hall and she doesn’t seem to register his presence, and some days she looks at him and there’s something strange and sad on her face.

“Do you want me to get Nancy?” Steve asks her on one of these occasions.

“Not really,” Barb says softly.

“Okay,” Steve says. “I was gonna watch some Scooby Doo with Elle and Will in the sitting room. You wanna join?”

Barb closes her eyes.

“Yeah, that sounds nice,” she says.

When they enter the sitting room, Elle lights up, and she cuddles into Barb’s side for the duration. Some of the fragile tension seems to seep out of Barb, and at some point she disappears, though Steve never sees her leave.

Steve frowns at a bag full of transistors and capacitors and whatever the hell else these little parts Dustin uses in his radios are, holding it awkwardly to keep them from spilling out of the lopsided hole Dustin had enthusiastically torn into it. He yanks open yet another drawer in the kitchen.

“How do you not have a junk drawer full of clothespins and chip clips?” he asks incredulously.

Dustin swings his legs where he’s perched on a tall stool. “Dunno!” he says cheerfully, then his face lights up in an epiphany. “Ooh, clothespins! I know where we could find some.”

“I already checked the laundry room,” Steve grumbles. “There’s lots of spare hangers, but no clips.”

“No, I know where Jonathan has some!” Dustin says, and he hops off his stool. “Come on.”

Steve follows him out of the kitchen, through the main foyer, up the stairs and down one of the wings.

“And he’ll be okay with us borrowing some?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Dustin says. Steve’s not fully confident in that, but he’s run out of alternatives, and he can always ask forgiveness later.

Dustin flings open a door, and Steve’s eyes go wide.

“Whoa.”

The room Dustin leads Steve into is covered in photos. They plaster the walls, pinned to corkboards, scattered across tables and counters, clipped to lines that crisscross the room.

“Is it okay for us to be in here?” Steve asks, because this seems like some sort of dedicated studio space, and it’s probably intrusive to go poking around, right?

“Yeah, it’s totally fine,” Dustin says dismissively, going over to a storage cart, and pulling out the trays to go rifling through them. “In here’s cool, we’re just supposed to stay out of the darkroom, because, like, it’s a makeshift setup so there’s no way of knowing if he’s in there or has stuff in progress, so if you open the door you could screw it up.” He waves at another door with heavy seals around the edges.

Dustin grumbles, shoves the drawer tray shut, and yanks open the next one. “I know he has clips in here somewhere,” he mumbles.

Steve doesn’t feel comfortable enough searching himself, so he occupies himself with looking at the more prominently displayed photos. There’s a ton of the kids, particularly Will, which makes him grin. There’s also a few of Robin, Barb, Chrissy, Eddie, but nothing compared to the volume of Nancy, which all have this quality to them that Steve isn’t sure how to define in objective visual description, but absolutely radiates affection. Absently Steve thinks Eddie really wasn’t kidding about there being something going on between the two of them.

There’s also a lot of stranger ones— artistic and abstract, with strange chunks of darkness, or bizarre focus, or weird lighting effects that Steve can’t imagine how you’d execute with film. Figures blur, or the world around them distorts while they remain perfectly in focus. Elle stands, perfectly lit, but centered in a completely black shot. There’s a lot of what must be double-exposures, where Chrissy or Barb fuzz into the background. Eddie’s hunched over his guitar, but his eyes are voids. The same shot of Nancy, leaning against a tree Steve vaguely recognizes from one of the side gardens, but done over and over and over— the tree flowering in spring, leafy and rich in summer, leaves dappled and crinkly in the fall as some pile on the ground, snow on the bare branches, and not just one year, but again and again, the tree growing from a sapling to what Steve knows of it as today. In each one, Nancy wears the same outfit, leans in the same pose, has the same expression— something Steve has seen plenty of people do before, but never quite to the same level of precision.

“Aha!” Dustin cries from behind him, and Steve turns to see him holding aloft a fistful of binder clips and clothespins, and Jonathan standing in the doorway.

Steve jumps.

“Sorry,” Jonathan says. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No, man, it’s totally cool,” Steve says, hand pressed to his chest like it’ll slow his racing heart. “I didn’t hear you come in, and we were the ones who were snooping. I should be the one apologizing.”

Jonathan stares at Steve. Every time they’ve met he has this strange, flat, unblinking look on his face. Steve can be honest and say that it makes him nervous, even though he knows it’s just a quirk in social expression.

“It’s fine,” Jonathan says. “You’re welcome in here whenever. And if you wanna see the darkroom, just let me know. Just don’t go in by yourself.”

“Yeah, of course.”

Steve glances over at the photos hanging near his ear. A slightly younger Will and Mike tussle in the grass, the glow of the sun warm even in black and white. Elle giggles as Barb brushes her hair, zoomed tight on their faces so their joy fills the frame. Dustin proudly holds up some sort of electronic component, all wires and circuitry, grinning widely and incidentally also showing off the gap of missing teeth, focus very carefully set to showcase the precision in the electronics that Dustin is trying to show off. Lucas and Erica are asleep on a thick rug in an uncharacteristic moment of physical affection, curled against each other in front of a roaring fire, every warm detail of their knit sweaters and the fibers of the rug visible.

“These are really good,” Steve tells Jonathan. “You’re really talented.”

Jonathan looks at Steve, and then there’s the tiniest smile, just a quirk at the edge of his mouth.

“Thanks,” he says.

“You’re really good with the kids, you know?” Eddie says, as Steve leaves Mike and Lucas’s room.

Mike had been particularly grumpy after a fight with Max about Elle earlier. Meanwhile, Lucas had been cheerful and excited because he and Steve had played basketball for two hours right before, and Lucas’s exuberance had only made Mike more irritable. Getting them to just go to bed had been hell, because Lucas kept piping up to ask Steve about how he’d done or how he could improve his basketball skills while Steve was trying to defuse Mike’s irritability. The night had only been saved because the basketball had worn Lucas out enough that he eventually passed out, letting Steve focus on Mike.

Steve stares blankly at Eddie, leaning against the hallway wall.

“Sorry, what?” he asks, feeling frazzled.

“You’re good with the kids,” Eddie says simply. “It’s impressive. In fact, I have to admit I’m a little jealous. You managed to turn Dustin from loathing you into your number one fan in the course of one afternoon, and now I can’t get him to stop gushing about you.”

Steve’s face feels warm.

“It’s nothing, really. The kid thinks you hung the moon and the stars. They all do. Not sure I’ve ever—” Steve bites his tongue, wondering if it’s too telling. “Not sure I’ve ever met someone who cares about their kids as much as you do. Not sure I really believed that existed outside of fiction, honestly.”

Eddie tips his head, still watching Steve. Steve can’t meet his eye.

“So, you know,” (Steve knows he’s rambling, and he’s not sure if it’s Eddie, or maybe he’s been spending too much time with Robin, because he never used to ramble like this before.) “It’s nothing, really. I’m just doing the babysitter thing, helping pick up the slack. You and the kids— and Robin and Nancy and Jonathan and Chrissy and Barb— are all great, so it’s made it pretty easy.”

“You’re not good at accepting praise, are you, Steve?” Eddie murmurs. Steve’s face probably can’t get any hotter, he thinks.

That turns out to be a lie, because Eddie steps in closer, and Steve’s face feels like the surface of the sun.

“Well,” Eddie says, mouth curling into a smile, “You can’t be perfect at everything, I suppose. We’ve found your first flaw— doesn’t know how to take a compliment.”

“That—” Steve chokes. “I’m not—”

“Not what?” Eddie purrs, leaning in. “You’re good with kids, you’re good at sports, you’re better in the kitchen then just about everyone else in this house, you’re very pretty, you’re probably Robin’s best friend, and I think even Barb likes you, despite her best efforts otherwise.”

Steve opens his mouth and no words come out.

“Do people not tell you things like that?” Eddie asks, voice low. “You deserve to hear it.”

Steve can feel himself trembling a little, heartbeat thundering so loud in his ears he almost misses the sound of a door creaking.

Eddie steps back.

“What are you two dinguses up to?” Robin asks.

“Complimenting Steve,” Eddie says with a grin, like that’s a normal thing to say.

Robin snickers, throws an arm around Steve’s shoulders as she comes up (though she has to push up onto her toes a little to do so).

“Yeah, he’s a pretty cool guy,” she says. “Even if his taste in movies is terrible.”

Steve stares at her now, chest feeling tight.

“Ahh,” Eddie says. “You’re right. I forgot that unbearably basic taste in culture and media is flaw number two.”

“What’s number one?” Robin asks, and with her arm over Steve’s shoulders, he has no choice but to join them as they walk towards the stairs and the sitting room.

“Can’t take a compliment,” Eddie says.

“Oh my god, tell me about it,” Robin complains.

“how creepy are the kids? 👯” Carol messages a few weeks in, popping up on Steve’s laptop when he plugs it into the ethernet. Steve assumes the dancing girls emoji is meant to reference the twins in The Shining , but he knows she hasn’t seen that film, and the tone of the emoji seems like it’s really missing the mark.

(He tries not to look at the message history, at how this is the only one on the left side of the screen, swamped by blue on the right. “how’s work?” “man, totally struck out by thinking one of my coworkers here was flirting back, but turns out she has a thing with the groundskeeper.” “have they finally promoted you to senior associate yet?” “everything good? haven’t heard from you or Tommy in a while.”)

“totally normal,” Steve sends back. “0/10 on the creepiness scale.”

Then he amends that.

“correction: lucas made a tuna melt the other day, but he buttered and toasted the bread first, on just one side, and then put the toasted sides on the inside of the sandwich, so 1.5/10 on the creepiness scale”

Read: 6:27pm.

Carol doesn’t reply. It’s the only message he’s gotten from anyone .

Steve means it though. The house can be creepy as hell. The way Barb and Chrissy (and occasionally Jonathan or Nancy) are sometimes just there when he turns around, when he could swear no one had been behind him never fails to make him jump. Eddie is unnerving in a way that makes Steve’s pulse thunder and his blood rush and the back of his neck and hands break out in a cold, clammy sweat. But the kids? Normal and incredible and sweet and a genuine delight to be around.

Yes, sure, sometimes at night they’ll scare him, hovering in doorways or making their way down creaky halls without a sound, but that’s more a function of the house’s creepy factor than it is the kids.

One night Steve wakes up and Elle’s standing, silhouetted by the light in the hall, and it makes his heart leap into his throat. But also, Steve does, in fact, know kids, and is, in fact, qualified for this job, so he just sits up and speaks softly.

“Bad dreams?”

Elle nods.

“Want me to come with you back to your room, or you wanna come here?”

“I don’t wanna wake Max,” Elle says quietly, so Steve scoots over and pats the bed, and Elle obligingly climbs up.

“Wanna talk about it?”

Elle shakes her head and leans against his side.

“Just— I just want to stop feeling so scared,” she whispers. “I want to stop feeling bad. I want to stop worrying that things that are gone will come back. I want to not feel like a monster at night.”

Steve hums, tugs her closer.

“You know what always works for me if I want to stop feeling scared or sad or guilty?” Steve asks. (In the back of his head he thinks about Heather joking about The Sound of Music , and kicks that train of thought back into the mental attic where it came from.)

“I know,” Elle says morosely. “I should think of happy things, but it is hard, and I don’t know what I am doing wrong because sometimes I cannot do it.”

“Nope,” Steve says. “Or, I suppose you can try doing that, but that’s not my method, ‘cause it doesn’t usually work too hot for me either.”

Elle makes a curious noise and blinks up at him.

Steve leans in close and whispers like he’s telling a secret.

“Get angry.”

Her eyes go wide and baffled.

“So,” Steve says, leaning back against the headboard again, “Tell me the stupidest thing Mike’s done this week.”

Elle frowns in thought, then nods.

“Chrissy was showing me how to put on makeup,” Elle says, “And we were having fun and then Mike came over and said it was stupid.”

“Mike is a stupid butthead sometimes,” Steve agrees. Elle giggles. “What did you like about the makeup?”

“I did not like the lipstick very much,” Elle says thoughtfully, “and the eyeliner was hard to do. But I liked when Chrissy made my eyelids green. And I liked that it was something we were doing together.” Then she scowls. “Mike said I looked like a clown. I think he looks like a clown. All the time, without makeup. So that means I am only a clown sometimes and he is a clown always.”

Steve grins, and Elle barrels on, and by the time the grandfather clock down the hall chimes to signal the hour, she is half-asleep, mumbling complaints about how Lucas won’t teach her how to dribble, and how Erica’s quips are sometimes too fast for Elle to catch up with and retort to, and how Dustin thinks he’s so smart because he knows the rules of his Dungeons and Dragons game, but he is the one who is stupid, because the rules do not make sense and Elle is following a more accurate logic.

Lucas and Steve manage to catch his basketball on something sharp, and discover it thoroughly deflated the next day. They order a new one, but it’ll be over a week before it arrives, and Lucas’s lip quivers before he sets his jaw. Steve knows it’s some bullshit about being ‘too old to cry,’ but also that if he says anything about it, Lucas is at that prickly tween age where it’ll only make it worse.

So Steve turns the basketball over in his hands and says, “I know there’s a few bikes in the carriage house. There has to be a pump and a tire repair kit here somewhere, right?”

Lucas perks right up.

Then they search through the carriage house, and all the storage closets, and the pantries, and they find nothing, and Lucas appropriately deflates as they continue to turn up empty. Steve scrubs a hand through his hair.

“I mean, there should be one somewhere,” he mumbles. “Where haven’t we looked?”

Lucas goes stiff.

“Lucas,” Steve says slowly. “Is there somewhere we haven’t looked?”

Lucas won’t meet his eyes.

“Lucas,” Steve repeats again, crouching just a little to look Lucas directly in the face. “If it’s somewhere you’re not supposed to go, I can go ask Eddie for you. Or if it’s somewhere you don’t want to go, I can go by myself, you just have to tell me, okay? I want to fix this for you.”

Lucas flinches when Steve mentions going by himself, and he reaches out and grabs Steve’s hand.

“No,” Lucas says, voice small, “I’ll go with you. It’s— it’s fine now, I just don’t like it.”

“Okay,” Steve says, squeezing his hand. “Where do we need to look?”

“The attic,” Lucas says quietly, and slowly tugs Steve along by their clasped hands. “Come on.”

It doesn’t surprise Steve that there’s doors he hasn’t noticed before, but it does surprise him that this one is covered with a tapestry, purposefully hidden. And the door’s locked moreover, but the key hangs on a hook right next to it that Lucas lifts off with hands that shake so bad Steve has to take it from him to unlock it.

“You sure?” Steve asks gently, as the door creaks open, and Lucas presses against Steve’s side.

“Yeah,” Lucas says, then repeats it, a little louder, like he’s convincing himself. “Yeah. It’s fine now. It’s fine now. Elle fixed it.”

So they ascend the stairs hand in hand, slowly, and when they reach the top, Steve stares.

It’s a massive attic, packed with all sorts of stuff, but what really stands out is that the far wall is gouged with what Steve can only describe as a massive scar. The ripples and ridges and contractions are clearly the same wood that the wall panels are made of, but in a thick branching sprawl that reaches all the way to the floor and the high ceilings, and spreads out across the floorboards and rafters.

“It’s fine,” Lucas repeats, resolutely not looking at it. “Elle fixed it. It’s over. Elle fixed it.”

Steve squeezes his hand.

“Let’s find that bike pump and tire kit, yeah?” he says softly, and Lucas nods.

It doesn’t take too long to find, and Steve hesitates a moment as Lucas gathers them up, looking relieved.

“Lucas,” Steve says, “If you want to leave right now, we can, but can I ask you to be tough for me for just a tiny bit longer?”

Lucas offers a jerky nod.

“Is there anything else here you think someone might want? It might be good to grab it all now so no one has to come back up anytime soon. We don’t have to, but—”

Lucas shakes his head, takes a deep breath.

“No. No, that’s a good idea,” he says firmly. “If doing it now means no one else has to— yeah. Yeah.”

So he and Steve spend another half hour hauling things out of the attic, and then Steve locks the door behind them, hangs the key back up, and drapes the tapestry back in place. He looks down at Lucas, who’s clutching a box of paints they thought Will might want like it’s a lifeline.

“You’re pretty incredible, you know that?” Steve says, wrapping an arm around Lucas’s shoulder and tugging him into a tight hug. Lucas sniffles a little into his shirt.

“How about we go make cookies, and we can fix the basketball while they bake?” Steve offers.

“Can I lick the bowl?” Lucas asks, still muffled by Steve’s shirt.

“Absolutely,” Steve says. “We won’t even tell anyone else about the cookies until they’re done so you can have the bowl and spatulas all to yourself.”

Lucas tips his head up, and his face has split into a shaky grin.

“Can we make them with white chocolate?” Lucas asks.

“You’re pushing it,” Steve fake grumbles, shoving Lucas’s forehead gently, before he drops the frown and smiles. “Yeah, we can even make them with white chocolate.”

Steve’s picking up after the older batch of kids while they have their lessons with Robin. Erica’s laying on the floor, scribbling in a glittery journal.

“Holidays are coming up,” Eddie says from behind him, and Steve’s gotten used to it enough that he doesn’t jump (much), doesn’t bother to look up.

“Mmhm,” Steve agrees, trying to remember what the agreement was on where Dustin’s little figurine things go. “You have any suggestions on gifts for the kids? It seems like anything they could need or want, you already get for them, and Erica’s being no help.”

Erica looks up enough to stick her tongue out, before returning to her work, carefully surveying an array of gel pens as she apparently ponders what color to use with the seriousness of a life-or-death situation.

Eddie doesn’t respond for long enough that it finally does attract Steve’s attention, and he looks over. Eddie’s staring at him, eyes dark and intense.

“That wasn’t really why I brought it up,” Eddie says.

“Okay?” Steve says. And it turns out looking at Eddie was the right idea because a little to the left of his head is the bin labeled “minis”. ( That’s what they’re called.) “Pass me that blue bin by your head?”

Eddie does, still watching Steve strangely as Steve carefully sets the figurines inside. (They’re little and fiddly and hand-painted by Dustin and Will, and Steve’s not going to risk scratching or scuffing them.) Steve passes it back, and Eddie slides it back on the shelf.

“I brought it up because I was wondering how long you wanted off,” Eddie says.

Steve frowns, furrows his brow. “‘Off’?”

“For the holidays?” Eddie asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh,” Steve says. “Nah, it’s fine. I can stick around and help out.” Then he pauses, thinks, winces. “Sorry, unless you want time with just the family, then obviously I can bounce.”

The lease on his apartment’s lapsed, and other than that single message from Carol he hasn’t gotten replies from anyone—nothing from Tommy, or Heather, or Nicole, or Reed—so he probably doesn’t have a guest room he can crash on. (He never could ask for that from them over the holidays anyways.) He doesn’t really spend on anything nowadays though, so he has more than enough saved that a hotel for a week or two is perfectly doable, if depressing to think about.

Steve doesn’t realize he’s worried his lip until it split until Eddie speaks again, and he realizes he can taste iron on his tongue.

“No, the help would be appreciated,” Eddie says, voice still sounding odd. “Just thought you might want to head home and spend the holidays with family.”

“Who would I spend it with?” Steve asks, puzzled.

The mention of his family does itch something in the back of Steve’s brain though.

He’s still working out gifts, and the holidays are a ways out, but he knows himself, and if he doesn’t get out in front of it, he’ll be scrambling last minute. He’s been looking online for art supplies for Will, and he’s searched through all of the D&D and other tabletop RPG guides on the shelves, and he thinks he’s found a few that Dustin and Mike might enjoy that they don’t have yet. Erica wears a backpack around the house half the time, stuffed to the brim with books and pens and fidget toys, but her favorite is wearing out, so he has a few bookmarked on his laptop. Max has four skateboards, but only one is really decked out with stickers, and there’s one that’s just plain gray on the bottom, so Steve’s hidden a whole collection of spray paint in the carriage house, and ordered some stencils.

The hardest one right now is Lucas. Steve’s already talked to Jonathan about potential upgrades they can make to the makeshift court, but Steve can admit he wants to give each of the kids something just from him. He could pick another tabletop RPG, but basketball is his and Lucas’s thing, and he’s kind of proud of that.

So he stands in the kitchen and dials a number he hasn’t called in a long time.

The phone rings one and a half times before it’s picked up. ("Never pick up on the first ring,” his father’s voice echoes in his head. “It lets people think they have a right to your time. But never let it go to the third, because it gives the impression you aren’t on top of things.” )

“This is Linda Dunleavy, personal assistant to Mrs. Harrington,” comes across the line.

“Hi Linda, it’s Steve—“ he stumbles and tacks on, “Harrington.”

“Oh, thank you for calling, Steven,” she says. “Your mother’s not in right now, but I can take a message.”

“Ah, no, that’s not necessary,” Steve says awkwardly. He glances up and there’s Eddie, standing in the kitchen doorway, watching him. (Always watching.) “I don’t need to talk to her. I was just, um, wondering if you could give me the number of the current housekeeper? There’s some of my old stuff that I was hoping to get a hold of.”

“I’m sorry, Steven,” Linda says “I’m afraid I’m not allowed to give the info of household staff to anyone but the other family, staff, and Mr. Harrington’s assistants. Can I pass on a request?”

Steve bites his lip, thinks of his old varsity jacket and his college jersey. It was a stupid idea anyway. Why would Lucas want those old things?

“No, that’s fine. Thank you.”

“Would you like me to let your mother know you called?” Linda asks.

“That’s fine,” Steve says. “You don’t need to bother her unless she asks.”

“Understood,” Linda says smoothly. They both know his mother won’t. “Thank you for calling. Have a nice day, Steven.”

She hangs up, and when Steve looks up again Eddie’s gone.

“Is it awful of me to wish you’d come here sooner?” Will asks quietly.

They’re in one of the ambiguous rooms somewhere between library, sitting room, study, and playroom. Will’s got a sketchbook in front of him at his low table. Mike and Elle are both reading— Mike sprawled on a couch, legs dangling over one of the arms, while Elle’s dragged a cushion off of another couch and is sitting on the floor, leaning against Steve. (Dustin and Max and Lucas have a history lesson with Robin, and Erica’s using her allotted internet time down in the sitting room downstairs where Nancy’s also doing some paperwork.)

Steve looks up from his own book.

“No?” he says, confused by the question. “I kinda wish I’d found this job sooner too. You’re pretty cool kids.”

Elle giggles, and Will smiles, but then it fades a little. His pencil scratches on the paper.

“You mean you wish he’d come here before?” Mike asks, looking up.

Will bites his lip.

“It is awful of me,” he says quietly.

“Hey,” Steve says, putting his book down, and untangling himself from Elle to go over. “I don’t know what this is about, but I can’t imagine that’s true at all.”

He frowns down at Will’s paper. It’s one of the stranger drawings— something strange and dark curling and twisting across the page. Steve hasn’t actually seen Will make one of these in his time here, but he’d found a stack of them shoved in Will’s desk, most of them a few years old by the dates. Steve pulls out a chair and sits next to Will.

“You okay?” he asks softly.

“I don’t want you to go,” Will says, staring at the paper and refusing to look at Steve. His pencil traces the silhouette of what might be a person, tangled in the dark.

“If you had come before,” Elle says, eyes large and deep as she watches the two of them from her seat on the floor. “Then you would be stuck here like the rest of us.”

“It’s good that Elle fixed everything,” Will says firmly. “It’s good that you can leave, if you want. I don’t want you to be trapped here.” Then his voice gets very small. “Except part of me does.”

“That— I’m not going anywhere,” Steve says, glancing between the children, feeling very lost. “What brought this on?”

Will just gives a little shrug.

“Everyone likes you lots,” he says.

“And these days the only thing left in this house that could keep you here is Eddie,” Mike says.

“And he would not do that,” Elle adds, then scoots over so she can take Steve’s hand. “Not after Chrissy. Eddie would not do that.”

Steve stares at them all.

“Remember the very first day I came here, I told you all that I don’t give up on things easy?” Steve says. “I meant it, and I still do. I don’t plan on going anywhere while you still need me. Circumstances willing, I’ll stick around until you’ve all grown out of having a nanny around and go off to live your own lives.”

“What if we always need you?” Elle asks.

“Kids grow up,” Steve tells her. “Someday you’re going to reach a point where you don’t even really need Eddie, let alone little old me.”

None of the three children reply to that.

Steve’s walking with Max to help her find a book that she ‘knows she literally just had in her room, but she can’t find it now,’ when they turn a corner and Chrissy is standing there in the middle of the hall.

“Hey Chrissy,” Steve says, then draws up short when she doesn’t respond, or make any indication to move. “Chrissy?”

She turns slowly, looks at Steve and then at Max.

Chrissy’s still not responding, and Max’s fingers have curled into the hem of Steve’s sweater.

“Chrissy?” Steve repeats again, nervous, because her expression is strange and blank, and he’s really not equipped to handle whatever medical emergency this might be.

“Chrissy,” Eddie’s voice carries down the hall, strong and rich and low. His hair seems to blur into the dark, the way he’s silhouetted by the hall makes him seem larger than life, and a shadow falls perfectly over his face so that Steve can’t see it. “Sweetheart, you’re scaring Steve and Max.”

You’re scaring me more, Steve doesn’t say.

“Am I?” Chrissy says finally, voice airy and vacant.

“You are, darling,” Eddie says, striding towards them.

Eddie reaches out and cups a hand against her cheek, and Chrissy blinks slowly, then leans into it.

(Absently, Steve remembers thinking way back when, that Max could maybe be Eddie’s, if she’d inherited the red hair and the blue eyes from her mother. He immediately brushes it aside, because Eddie had confirmed none of the kids are biologically his, and Chrissy’s hair is much blonder than Max’s, her eyes darker, but—)

“Chrissy, love,” Eddie says. (The endearments twist something weird in Steve’s chest.) “Why don’t we go rest a bit, okay? You’re having a bad day today, I think.”

“Yeah,” Chrissy says faintly, but a little more present than before. “Yeah, I think I am. That’s probably a good idea.”

“Good,” Eddie murmurs. And then he glances briefly at Steve and Max, eyes just barely visible in the shadows.

“Max’s book slid between her bed and the wall, by the way,” he says, and then he disappears down the hall with Chrissy.

Steve opens his mouth to ask Max what that was about, then looks down at her, and the tension in her shoulders, and thinks better of it.

“Let’s go dig out that book then, yeah?” Steve says instead.

Later that night, after the kids have gone to bed, Steve and Robin are sprawled across the couches in the living room talking about movies. Nancy and Jonathan had both briefly passed by the doorway earlier—Nancy with a sleepy wave and Jonathan with a soft, “G‘night. See you guys in the morning.”

“Look,” Robin complains, knees thrown over the back of her couch. “It’s a classic.”

“Is it though?” Steve asks. “Or do you just like it because it has lesbians?”

Robin picks up a small plush dog off a coffee table and chucks it at Steve’s head.

“Fuck you, Harrington,” she says grinning, as he bats it away. “I can like it because it’s a cinema classic, and a hallmark of incredible filmmaking, and because it has weird fucked up lesbians.”

“It doesn’t even make any sense,” Steve complains. “What even happens? ”

“It’s a David Lynch film!” Robin protests. “Of course it’s weird and surreal. That’s part of why it’s so good! You just don’t like it because you’re too dumb and uncultured.”

“Hey!” Steve says, laughing.

“Robin’s right on this one, Stevie,” Eddie says from the doorway, and Steve nearly tumbles off the couch. He’s leaning in that way that Steve’s started to associate as a trademark for him—hip propped against the doorframe, arms crossed, looking lazy and casual and unnervingly comfortable in his own skin, dark eyes piercing and smile wicked.

“It’s dreamy, sexy, confusing— what’s not to love?” Eddie purrs. (Steve’s face feels hot.)

“Hah!” Robin crows triumphantly, and she rolls off her couch to land face-first on the rug. “And now that I’m vindicated,” she continues, voice muffled at first before she pushes herself up, “I can finally go to bed. ‘Night, dinguses.”

“Yeah, yeah, sleep well, jerk,” Steve teases back, and she flips him off as she leaves the room.

Then it’s just Steve and Eddie, and like it always is, Steve’s suddenly hyperaware of himself.

And Steve’s not actually tired at all, but it’s a good excuse, so he gets up.

“I should probably get some sleep too,” he mumbles, and then draws short, because Eddie’s still half-blocking the doorway. (And sure, there’s enough space for Steve to get out, but the thought of being that close to Eddie—)

Eddie looks at Steve, and a smile twists across his mouth.

“Need something, Stevie?”

Steve shakes his head. (The nickname burns like a smoldering coal in his chest and he thinks about Eddie calling Chrissy ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ and ‘love.’)

“Are you wondering about Chrissy?” Eddie asks.

Steve chews the inside of his cheek.

“Are you two—“

And Eddie’s eyes go wide and his eyebrows go up and the lazy, cool air about him evaporates a little.

“That’s what you want to ask?” Eddie asks, sounding baffled and a little delighted.

Steve shrugs, trying to keep his shoulders from pulling up to his ears defensively. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer. Don’t mean to be invasive.”

Eddie throws his head back and laughs. As it dissipates, something quiet and thoughtful settles over his face as he looks into the distance.

“Once upon a time,” Eddie says mildly. “And she paid the price for it. It’s my fault she is the way she is today.”

And Steve’s blood goes cold and he steps back and his gut churns. He’d told Chrissy, back when they first met, that he got it—struggling to hold onto thoughts, losing threads, feeling spacey. He’d told Chrissy that he knew what it was like to have your brain scrambled like that, had his own share of concussions. But he didn’t think it was quite this similar. He didn’t think Eddie, who is soft and affectionate and loud and cheerful with the kids—

But he thinks about Eddie’s voice, low and dark, telling Chrissy she’s having a bad day, why don’t they go rest for a bit, and the way she’d easily fallen into it. He thinks about how Chrissy’s almost never at dinner, and when she is she doesn’t eat anything. He thinks about how everyone in the house is insistent that Eddie always knows what’s going on, and there’s no way to hide things from him so you shouldn't even bother, how none of them can leave , and—

“Steve?” Eddie asks, brow furrowing, and he reaches out, and Steve flinches.

“Oh, jesus,” Eddie murmurs. “Not— not like that. I swear. I’d never hurt Chrissy, not intentionally.”

“Right,” Steve says, digging his fingers into his palm to suppress the tremble in his voice. “Of course.”

Eddie squeezes his eyes shut.

“Which is exactly what someone who did would say,” he says softly. “Fuck. I don’t know— Steve, how can I prove—”

Steve takes a step back.

“Right,” Eddie says quietly, and he steps out of the doorway so that Steve can get out. “Okay.”

Steve stumbles a little as he flees the room.

Neither Eddie or Chrissy are at dinner the next night. That’s nothing out of the ordinary for Chrissy, but Eddie never skips it. Family dinner is a rule. Steve tries not to think about what that could mean. (Maybe it’s proof, or maybe Eddie’s just giving Steve space, and Chrissy’s just worn out. Steve doesn’t know how he’s supposed to tell the difference.)

“Something’s wrong,” Dustin says, startling Steve from where he’d been staring blankly into space.

Dustin’s got his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed, and with Steve sitting on the floor and Dustin standing, it gives him a good bit of height over Steve.

“Nothing’s wrong, butthead,” Steve says mildly.

“Bullshit,” Dustin snaps.

“Hey!”

“He’s right,” Max cuts in, and Steve realizes that all the kids scattered across the living room are watching him, with varying degrees of subtlety.

“Are you gonna tell us what’s going on?” Mike huffs.

Steve stares at him, then back at Dustin, and then around the others.

“Nope,” he says, because he could deny that something is going on more, but that’s probably useless anyways.

“Then there’s only one thing for it,” Dustin says.

“The Eddie method?” Will asks. (Steve’s stomach twists.)

“The Eddie method,” Dustin says with a firm nod.

“Cuddle puddle!” Elle shouts, and she tackles Steve.

It knocks the breath out of him as the force of it tumbles him backwards onto the rug, and then right as he catches it again, Dustin’s dropping his weight on top of the both of them, and Elle’s giggling.

And then there’s Max’s hair in his face and getting in his mouth, and Will and Mike laying across his legs, and Erica standing over them with her hands on her hips, looking unimpressed.

“You’re all so immature,” she says, rolling her eyes, and then Lucas tackles her from behind and their weight lands hard enough that Mike grunts and Dustin yelps before he dissolves into snickers.

“Oh my god,” Steve says, faking exasperation even as it feels like his heart will burst. “How are you all so bony? That— ow, whose elbow is trying to puncture my kidney?”

Eventually the chaos cools, but none of the kids leave Steve’s side. Mike and Will are back to back, reading, their sides pressed against Steve’s folded knees on the right, while on the left Lucas lays sprawled over them, Erica tucked under his arm in something between a headlock and a hug. Max’s head is on his shoulder, and Dustin’s is on his chest as they bicker. Elle’s draped across his stomach, still giggling softly into his shirt.

Steve ignores the uncomfortable twinge in his neck as he lifts his head to look down at all of them.

“So,” he asks, tongue feeling thick in his mouth, something weighing heavy in his lungs, “‘The Eddie method’?”

Somehow, he thinks he manages to sound casual and normal about it. Somehow. At the very least, nothing in his tone gives him away enough to distract Mike and Will from their books, or Lucas and Erica from their play-fighting, and Max and Dustin glance up at him, but don’t pause in whatever their current argument is.

Elle beams up at Steve from behind Dustin’s head of curls.

“If someone is feeling bad and does not want to talk about it,” she says, sounding rehearsed, like maybe she’s quoting someone (quoting Eddie), “Then you do not make them talk about it, but you must engage in appropriate cheer-up measures, such as the Cuddle Puddle.”

“Yeah?” Steve says. That lump in his throat hasn’t gone away, just changed shape. “It’s a pretty good one.”

“Of course it is,” Max cuts in.

“Duh,” Dustin says. “Eddie came up with it. Now tell Max she’s being stupid. There’s no way Doomguy would beat Samus in a fight.”

“Sorry for scaring you the other night,” Chrissy says the next morning, and Steve bangs his head on the inside of the dryer as he startles.

“Ow, fuck,” he mutters as he pulls himself out of it, depositing an armful of clothing onto the table he uses to fold it. (Theoretically , the kids are supposed to help do their own laundry, but Steve has learned that’s a good way to guarantee some of them just rewear dirty clothes, so sometimes when they have class with Robin he’ll just go in their rooms and take their hampers and get started on it without them.)

Chrissy laughs, bright and sweet, perched atop an ironing board, which shouldn’t be nearly sturdy enough to hold someone up. Her legs swing, and she beams at him, and she seems… good.

“And sorry for scaring you now, I guess,” she says, sounding soft and amused.

“It’s nothing, really,” Steve says, and then his brain finally catches up and the other night. His pulse ratchets, and he looks at her out of the corner of his eye while he shakes out a shirt and tries to figure out whose it is. She leans her cheek against a raised shoulder, hands flat on the ironing board by her thighs, and still, she really does seem relaxed and cheerful.

“You’re okay?” he asks her, searching her face for something. And maybe Eddie was telling the truth, or maybe she’s just good at hiding it.

“Yeah,” she says softly. “Eddie wouldn’t hurt a fly, you know?”

Steve freezes.

“And I’m not saying that because he put me up to it, or he’ll know,” she says, “But I get why it might be hard to trust that.”

Steve stares blankly at the shirt he has held aloft. (Lucas, probably, his brain idly notes. It’s got some horror movie monster across the front, so it could be Dustin’s too. Will and Mike like the genre just as much, but Will doesn’t wear many graphic tees at all, and Mike’s seem to skew more towards scifi.)

He finally lays the shirt down, folds it into a neat square, sets it on Lucas’s pile.

“I… want to believe that,” he tells Chrissy.

“Then do,” she says, like it’s that simple.

“There’s a lot of reasons you should run, if we’re being honest,” Chrissy says softly. “But Eddie raising a hand against someone isn’t one of them. He blames himself for what’s happened to everyone, for what happened to me, but it’s not his fault, not really. All he did was ask me to stay.”

And then she’s reaching out, and it’s like she already knows, like Steve doesn’t spend every morning carefully styling his hair so it falls just so. And he doesn’t feel the touch of her fingers, but he feels the shift of his hair as she brushes it aside, right where it falls across a scar right at his hairline.

“Our souls are made of the same stuff, I think,” Chrissy says. “A little too lonely, and so you’ll close your eyes and walk right into danger if it means you have someplace to call home.”

Steve squeezes his eyes shut (the irony not entirely lost on him), taking a long, trembling breath. Then he picks up the next shirt (definitely Mike’s), folds it, lays it on the pile.

“That other shirt was Dustin’s, by the way,” Chrissy says.

“Goddamnit,” Steve mutters, switching it over, and Chrissy laughs.

It takes time, but Steve wants to trust Eddie. He wants to trust Chrissy, and the children, and Robin. He wants to trust himself.

(“Then do,” Chrissy’s voice echoes in his head.)

And Eddie’s always watching Steve carefully, looking up every time Steve enters a room, glancing at him over the dinner table, but it’s also clear he’s trying to hover less, appear in the periphery, lurk in shadowy corners. And Steve thinks about the desperation in Eddie’s voice when he’d asked how he could prove he wasn’t like that, and the thing is, Steve doesn’t have an answer, not really.

But Steve finds himself watching back.

He finds himself standing in the doorway and watching as Eddie sits on the floor in front of the TV with Max and Dustin, cursing as they kick his ass at some fighting game.

He catches Erica and Eddie bickering because Erica’s sprawled on the floor and Eddie needs to get some dice from a shelf behind her and she refuses to ‘move for that nerd garbage.’ And Eddie finally just bodily picks Erica up and tosses her onto a couch, and she squeals with what’s clearly delight, even though she immediately and breathlessly launches into complaints right after. 

Steve watches out the kitchen window as Eddie attempts to play basketball with Lucas and Max. He’s terrible at it, and an exasperated Lucas tries to demonstrate a free throw for the fifth time while Max cackles.

Steve has his laptop out while Eddie and the boys have D&D night, and instead of cleaning out his inbox, Steve instead watches how Eddie bends over Mike, the two of them intensely discussing which feature makes the most sense mechanically versus narratively for Mike’s character to take with his latest level.

Steve finishes tucking in Elle and goes to fetch Max a cup of water, and he passes the open door of Dustin and Will’s room. Eddie’s laying awkwardly on the sliver of space on Will’s bed between Will and the edge. He has a massive illustrated copy of The Hobbit in his hands as he affects different voices for the characters, and a sleepy Will is tucked against his side while Dustin has his hands tucked beneath his own pillow, listening, rapt. And Eddie looks up as Steve pauses in the hall, and there’s a moment where Steve almost says something, but he doesn’t want to interrupt, so he steps back and continues on his task of getting Max water.

(And Steve watches Eddie with Robin and Nancy and Jonathan too. Eddie leaning over Nancy’s desk, hair falling in his face, expression uncharacteristically mature as they discuss finances. Robin and Eddie bickering playfully over the next movie for a movie night. Eddie chatting with Jonathan in the studio while Jonathan slides reels of developed film out of the plastic developing tanks, unspools them, and hangs them to dry.)

Steve wants to believe that’s all real, that’s genuine, despite the paranoid voice in the back of his head telling him there’s other things that still don’t quite make sense.

(“Then do,” Chrissy’s voice echoes.)

“Your music taste is so much better than Eddie’s,” Erica complains. The mention of Eddie still makes something in Steve’s chest lurch, but there’s no rush of panic, no real anxiety anymore, even if things are still strange and tentative between them now.

Steve grins at her.

“Finally,” he says, “Someone who gets it.”

(It’s a bit of an exaggeration. The kids have long since split into three camps on the music. Max and Lucas and Erica skew, not necessarily mainstream, but adjacent. Mike and Dustin are diehard loyalists to Eddie and his metal. Elle is amenable to anything and everything, delighted seemingly by music in general. And Will’s shockingly picky, throwing in with the dark horse pick of Jonathan and new wave and weird alternative rock.)

“I wanna listen to something fun when we play music for once,” Erica grumbles. “But I always get outvoted.”

And Steve pauses, and thinks. Eddie has an ancient iPod classic that he sometimes breaks out when everyone’s lounging around, and he’s actually pretty reasonable about his picks when in big groups—things that are a little slower, light on the screaming vocals. But it’s a far cry from pop.

Steve looks at Erica.

“Can you get ahold of Eddie’s iPod?” he asks.

Erica sits up.

“He’ll know,” she says.

“Are we gonna let that stop us?” Steve asks.

It’s four days before they see the results.

Most everyone is sprawled in the sitting room, and Eddie keeps glancing over at Steve, still gauging, still measuring, still feeling things out. And Steve feels a little guilty when he tucks his face into his book, because he can just see an unhappy twist to Eddie’s expression in response. But also, Eddie had plugged in his iPod (a guitar in his lap that he’s idly strumming along with), and if Steve doesn’t hide his face, he’s going to immediately give things away.

He chances one glance over at Erica, and she looks back, and he can see her trying to remember what song they snuck onto this playlist. (She’d initially advocated for swapping everything on the iPod entirely with contemporary pop, but Steve had convinced her this payoff would be better, and they’d spent hours poring over each playlist, trying to find the perfect moment to insert the perfect songs off of Steve’s own laptop.)

So Steve tries to bury himself in his reading, and Erica continues scribbling in her notebook, and Eddie strums along to his music. Will has his own book, and Dustin and Mike and Lucas are bickering about D&D, and Max and Elle are flipping through a magazine together. Nancy and Jonathan drift in and out. Robin arrives and throws herself onto the couch next to Steve, half sprawled on top of him.

And nearly an hour in, the last strains of a guitar fade out. (Even now, Steve’s miserable at identifying one band from another.) And Eddie plucks a chord, clearly expecting the next song.

“It’s Britney, bitch.”

Erica whoops, leaping to her feet on the couch. Will drops his book. And the look on Eddie’s face is so genuinely shocked and taken aback that Steve slides out of his seat onto the floor, burying his face in his hands, laughing so hard he cries.

It’s chaos, and it only sort of subsides with time. All the other kids and Robin are grilling Erica on how they did it. (When Steve had been asked, he’d shrugged through his laughter and said, “Erica’s the one who got the iPod.”)

Erica only grins and looks smug and says, “I’m not gonna reveal trade secrets and spycraft.”

“Trade—“ Mike sputters.

“You snuck into Eddie’s office and stole his iPod!” Dustin protests. “That’s not spycraft! ”

“Oh yeah?” Erica says. “Then tell me how I did it.”

“That was mean, you know?” Eddie says, elbows propped on the back of the couch Steve’s on, leaning over him just a little. Steve looks up at him, and there’s a brief pause, like Eddie’s wondering if he needs to step back.

“Come on,” Steve says lightly, heart thundering in his chest. “It’s Britney. You can’t tell me you hate an icon.”

“Of—“ Eddie glances over at the kids, lowers his voice, leans down more. “Of course I like Britney. That’s not—“

Steve grins, delighted.

“So you do like pop!”

He’s loud enough that several of the kids’ heads whip around, and Eddie lurches forward over the back of the couch and slaps a hand over Steve’s mouth.

“Britney Spears is an exception,” Eddie hisses, and Steve continues laughing beneath his palm. “Besides, what happened to your ‘no cussing’ rule?”

“‘Britney Spears is an exception’,” Steve echoes with a grin when Eddie removes his hand.

“Smartass,” Eddie mutters, but his eyes are crinkled in a smile.

Things don’t really go back to before, but that’s not a bad thing.

Sometimes Steve hates the manor.

He’s gotten pretty used to the strange quiet at night, the creaking and settling of the old house, the rushing of the wind, the groaning of the trees outside, the chiming of a grandfather clock all seemed unnaturally loud at first. The architecture of the house throws strange shadows, but for the most part, months in now, Steve’s settled in. (Part of him even thinks that if he were to move back to the city, he’d find it hard to sleep without the shapes and sounds he’s now accustomed to.)

But tonight there’s strange music coming from outside, and through the window there’s an eerie glow emerging from the center garden. From Steve’s room, he can’t see what it is, and his heart jackrabbits in his chest, and part of him wants to crawl under his blankets and hide. But he has a responsibility, and if something strange is going on, then he has to figure out what it is, and if the kids are safe.

None of the kids are in their rooms.

Steve’s tentative knock and gentle opening of Dustin and Will’s door to reveal empty beds and thrown back sheets turns into something a bit more frantic as he hurries to Erica’s room, knocks a little faster, a little louder, a little harder. No reply, and Steve starts hyperventilating when her bed is in much the same condition. There’s no light coming from underneath the bathroom doors, so he doesn’t bother checking.

And as Steve tears through Lucas and Mike’s room—also missing—he realizes none of the rooms in the house have a vantage point of that area of the yard where the music and lights are coming from. The closest you’d get is the door through the back kitchen pantry. He takes just enough time to check the last room—Max and Elle, gone, and no, no, no, no — before sprinting downstairs, socks skidding on the floors as he rounds the corner to the kitchen.

Robin’s seated at one of the tall island chairs, sipping at a steaming mug, looking entirely too calm for whatever’s happening.

“I’d suggest you don’t look outside,” she says as Steve nearly slips over the transition from hardwood to tile.

“Of course I’m gonna look outside,” Steve snaps, grabbing a counter to catch himself. “None of the children are in their rooms. What the fuck is going on?”

“They’re fine, Harrington,” Robin says. “Really. You should just go back to bed, throw a pillow over your ears, and forget about this come morning.”

“I’m not going back to bed!” Steve whisper-shouts.

There’s a pair of boots in the pantry just beside the door (surely Eddie’s), and Steve shoves them on and flings open the door. He distantly registers Robin sighing behind him.

Eddie and the children are in the center of the garden, barefooted and whirling in some strange dance. The moonlight soaks the mist, and it makes all their faces glow. Eddie’s got a fiddle on his shoulder, bow flying across the strings, a manic grin splitting his face—too many teeth, too sharp. The children's eyes all reflect the light like animals’, too bright in their shadowy faces, too unblinking. Their proportions seem wrong in ways Steve can’t pin, like their bodies are blurring and distorting as they dance. They’re all perfectly silent outside of the music, but with expressions of ecstatic delight.

And Eddie spins with a flourish of the fiddle, and his eyes catch Steve’s. They burn in their sockets, something strange and hollow about his visage. He’s not grinning at all— it’s the false smile of a skeletal jaw.

Steve stumbles backwards, and Eddie’s laughter follows him as he slams the door.

“I told you not to look outside,” Robin says gently, and she pushes a steaming mug of what smells like hot cider his way.

“What—” Steve can’t even finish his question as he shakily collapses onto one of the chairs. “What— what the fuck is going on?” he chokes out hysterically, wrapping his hands around the warm mug.

“Come on, Steve,” Robin says softly. “You had to have suspected before this, right? You knew this house and its residents weren’t normal. You had to have realized Chrissy and Barb are dead. That Nancy and Jonathan are— I don’t know if they’re dead, but they’re not not-dead.”

Steve opens his mouth, closes it, opens it just a little to take a sip of the cider. (Definitely spiked, bless Robin.)

“I thought the kids were normal, at least,” he whispers softly.

There’s a long silence.

“I don’t know what the kids are, honestly,” Robin finally answers. “They definitely were normal, once. Or at least Mike and Will must’ve been, before they came here with Nancy and Jonathan.”

Steve rotates his cup between his hands, staring into it.

“Is it Eddie? Or the house?” he asks. “Or… something else. Whatever it was that used to be here, and isn’t anymore because of Elle?”

“I don’t know,” Robin says. “Certainly no one else is gonna tell us newcomers, that’s for sure. You just kinda gotta roll with it.”

Steve muffles his hysterical laughter into his folded arms on the countertop.

“You’re human though, right?” he asks, desperate, turning his head to look at her. “Human and alive?”

Robin grins, bumps his knee with hers.

“Yeah dingus. I’m right here with you.”

When Steve shakily goes to wake the kids in the morning, they seem the same as normal. Elle yawns sweetly, rubbing at her eyes while Max grumpily covers her head with her pillow until Steve yanks off her covers. (He resolutely ignores the grass stains on the ankles of her pajama pants.) Will is already helpfully wrangling Dustin into his clothes, Dustin’s eyes closed and still half-asleep. Lucas and Mike are both thoroughly unconscious, and don’t stir until Steve smacks them with spare pillows. Erica’s already been in the bathroom for 20 minutes, and probably will be for another 20, so Steve heads off Mike and Dustin before they even reach that one, instructing them to use different ones down the hall.

Eddie’s not at breakfast, which isn’t all that unusual, and Steve’s not 100% sure the churning in his gut is relief. He makes the kids toast and bacon and sliced fruit, doesn’t pay too much mind to a silent Chrissy perched on a window seat, passes Jonathan a spoon when he comes in for a bowl of cereal.

Robin stumbles in late, as always, and offers Steve a quiet smile as he finishes dumping the last ingredients into a mug omelette for her before popping it in the microwave.

Erica has a half hour before her scheduled lessons with Robin, and the others have an hour and a half before their staggered start, overlapping with Erica’s window to study and do the work Robin gives her. The children scatter for their morning free time, and they’re usually still sleepy and waking up, enough so that Steve doesn’t have to bother with close supervision, so he stays in the kitchen with Robin, quietly drinking his coffee while she finishes eating.

“How you feeling in the light of day?” Robin asks him around a mouthful of egg and sausage and bell pepper.

“Better, I think,” Steve tells her, sipping his coffee. He doesn’t tell her about how he’d sat on the floor of his room last night, hyperventilating, suitcase pulled out from under his bed and trying to figure out what the fuck he was going to do.

“It’s a lot,” Robin agrees, and there’s an edge of a question in her voice. He supposes he didn’t really have to say those things aloud for her to know, since she’s been in his position before.

Steve turns his head and looks out the window. Jonathan’s pouring some mulch over a flowerbed while a sleepy looking Will clings to his arm. A little bit past them is the makeshift basketball court, and Steve thinks about the plans to get that turned into something better for Lucas. He can hear just barely the sound of one of the old gaming consoles booting up from the sitting room, which means he’s going to have to go scold Max and/or Dustin in a minute. There’s a little daisy drawn on his arm in gel pen where Erica had grabbed him at breakfast. And Elle trots into the room and presses a slightly lumpy origami something (her latest hobby) into his hand with a wordless smile before disappearing back down the hall.

“Yeah,” Steve says slowly. “But isn’t every family kind of complicated? Let alone one with seven kids, five adults, and two ghosts. Three adults and four ghosts? Two adults, four ghosts, and whatever Eddie is?”

Robin’s laughs so hard she chokes on her eggs.

Late morning finds Steve in his room, folding his laundry while the kids are busy with Robin. It’s a task he barely bothered with before this job, but now does religiously as an example, so the kids will fold at least some of their own clothing, and he doesn’t have to deal with five billion sets of clothes. He turns to grab his sock drawer, and jumps, because leaning against his door frame is Eddie, perfectly silent.

“What the fuck, Eddie?” Steve hisses.

Eddie just shrugs, staring at Steve, expression impossible to read, eyes deep and dark. Steve ignores the memory of them last night— alight with fire— and turns back to his laundry.

“Did you need something, or are you just here to stare like a creep?”

Eddie doesn’t immediately respond. Three shirts and two pairs of socks later, he finally speaks up, voice low and rough.

“You were packing your bags last night,” he says.

Steve shivers, and doesn’t ask how Eddie knows that.

“Yeah, well, then I unpacked them,” he snaps instead, slamming a drawer shut a little too violently. The dangling rings that serve as handles jingle.

“So you did,” Eddie says.

“I’m—“

For a moment Steve petulantly thinks I don’t have to explain myself, and then, fuck him, I’m going to anyway.

“I was understandably freaked out,” Steve spits. “But I’m not abandoning the kids like that. I said I don’t give up easy, and I mean it. I care about them, and I refuse to just walk out of their lives because of some unimportant spooky shit.”

Eddie just cocks his head.

“You know, Steve,” Eddie says, voice still that low rumble, and he steps into the room. Steve reflexively takes a step back, and Eddie just stalks closer, and closer, until Steve’s back bumps into his dresser and the rings rattle again.

“You know,” Eddie repeats, looming into Steve’s space. “I have a really hard time understanding how so many people in your life found it so easy to just let you go.”

Steve’s chest heaves, and he stares up at Eddie, whose own gaze is tracing Steve’s face intently. Eddie’s hand comes up slowly, like he’s giving Steve space to pull away, or push him, or say something. Steve doesn’t, and those long, ringed fingers curl around Steve’s jaw.

“When I felt you packing,” Eddie murmurs, “an ugly part of me didn’t want to let you go.”

Steve’s heart thuds in his chest, and he absently licks his dry lips, and gets to see Eddie’s pupils blow wide as they track the motion.

“Well,” Eddie says, voice a little thoughtful as he corrects himself. “ All of me didn’t want to let you go. But the ugly side of me didn’t want to let you.”

“You didn’t stop me though,” Steve breathes.

“If— if you really wanted to go,” Eddie says, and he squeezes his eyes shut like just the thought hurts. “If you really wanted to leave, it’s not my place to stop you.”

“But I didn’t,” Steve tells him. “I don’t. Want to leave, I mean. I’m still here. I’m not leaving.”

Eddie stares into Steve’s eyes.

“You’re still here,” he murmurs, and then slides his thumb up to dimple Steve’s lower lip, gently coaxes his mouth open, and then Eddie licks his way inside.