Chapter Text
Steve sees it happen for the first time when he is twelve years old.
His parents are fighting again. He sits at his desk and tries to focus on homework. The assigned reading for English is actually interesting, a novel about a fantasy world where magic never existed; the characters have to come up with solutions for problems without relying on artefacts.
He can hear a door slamming, then his mom stomping down the hallway. But there is nothing unusual about his parents’ loud arguments, so Steve keeps writing the first draft of his essay.
In the fictional setting, there are strict limits to how people can change the world around them. Their society progresses slowly, then rapidly upon the discovery of electricity. The pivotal moments in history come from human conflict rather than magical intervention.
Another door slams, causing him to jump. Steve hums a tune quietly to distract himself.
It’s a strange thing to contemplate, a world without powerful sorcerers who rent the planes apart, without demons intermingling with humans to establish the infernal bloodlines, without the rapid jumps forward that coincided with the birth of magical savants.
And most significantly, without the slow evolution of magical tolerance, generations of successively weaker sorcerers over the past millennia resulting in a modern era where most people cannot use magic at all.
His mom’s voice rises to a high pitch, audible even through the door.
The infernals have some natural advantages, of course. Mostly better eyesight and heat resistance. But ordinary humans like Steve Harrington have to use the artefacts handing down within their families, or those distributed by the government, to get by.
Steve can hear his dad responding in a calm, moderated tone.
He has long since learned that tone signals danger. He had better stay inside his room until-
His bedroom door swings open.
Steve stares at his mom, wide-eyed.
Her hair is unruly, although she has always been insistent on keeping up appearances. There is a suitcase at her side. She holds out an arm without saying a word, and Steve hesitantly pushes out from the desk and approaches.
His mom smooths down his hair several times and presses a kiss to the top of his head.
“I’m leaving, sweetheart,” she murmurs.
Steve can see the shadow that his dad is casting in the hallway, standing a short distance from them. He is suddenly so scared that he resists the urge to blink.
His mom has never left before. At least, not without his dad beside her. Not without arranging a nanny.
She sniffs, an ugly sound. To his horror, Steve realises that his mom is weeping. Her mascara runs in black streaks. She offers a watery smile that he has no idea how to reciprocate.
His mom pats his shoulder and turns away, pushing past his dad to reach the stairs. She drags the suitcase down without looking at either of them.
The front door shuts behind her. The sound is final.
Steve stands there for a moment, feeling numb.
His dad just laughs, with a grin so wide that it seems to split his face. Steve could count all of his teeth. The dim light in the hallway casts his dad’s features in shadow.
Steve thinks that he has never looked so terrifying.
“Come here,” his dad tells him.
It’s an order. Steve departs the relative safety of his bedroom and stands at his dad’s side.
“There is a gift, passed down in the Harrington bloodline,” his dad tells him, sounding gleeful. “Not even your mother knows about it. I haven’t had to use it in many years, not since you were born.”
Steve tries to hide that his hands are trembling. His dad hates to see signs of weakness.
“We have the power to Wish.”
The hallway light flickers when he says the last word. Reality seems to bend around them, just for a fraction of a second, almost too briefly to perceive.
“You must use it carefully, son. It takes a greater toll the more magic is needed to make it come true. But this?” His dad fixes his gaze on the front door. At his height, he must be able to see it from here. “This will take barely any effort.”
And then he opens his mouth, and the walls twist-
-and Steve wakes up in bed, with his alarm clock ringing out.
“Turn off that damn alarm, Steve!” his mom shouts from across the house.
His heart pounds. Even as he walks the short distance to his desk, Steve already knows what he will find. He understands instinctively what has happened.
His dad has returned them to the morning before his mom left. Everything is just as it was.
Steve opens his notebook and sees that the lined page is blank. He will need to start his essay over.
The day continues on without any surprises. The only difference is that Steve remembers having lived this day before, and his dad gives him a knowing smile across the dining table. His dad looks exhausted but pleased with himself. The magic has drained him, making him sluggish and clumsy.
That evening, his mom does not leave.
She remains in an unhappy marriage for the foreseeable future.
It feels like forbidden knowledge, the sort of terrible truth that can’t be shared with anyone. His dad forced his mom to stay. His dad altered reality to prevent their divorce. Nothing changes, because his dad will not allow anything to change. The version of his mom who chose to leave has ceased to exist.
Magic is almost seen as a gimmick, these days. His classmate can light a toothpick as if it was a match. It’s limited in its usefulness, but considered a neat party trick.
The government had once pulled her out of class for a mandated assessment. After they determined that she had no other magical aptitude, she was returned to class without any fanfare, and was thereafter considered one of the coolest kids in middle school.
Until they reached high school. The first opportunity for infernals to mix with humans their age. Lighting a tiny fire was old news. Now there were kids with slitted pupils or vestigial tails that they tried to keep secret until it was time for their physicals. Kids who could reach into flames to pull out marshmallows they had dropped while making s’mores.
Most could pass for human, and most tried when they enrolled at Hawkins High. They lied about being homeschooled or attending middle school in the neighbouring towns.
Some couldn’t, like Eddie Munson. His teeth were a little too sharp. His eyes were dark, but the slitted pupils were visible in the right lighting. He never bothered to hide his heritage. Even started a club and called it Hellfire, an homage to his demonic ancestors. He liked to freak out the bigots in their year, smiling wide enough to bare his teeth whenever he caught them staring.
He caught Steve staring more than once.
Steve Harrington knows about his reputation at school. Human. No magical aptitude, but with access to more artefacts than any other kid in Hawkins because his family has been wealthy for generations. A notable sorcerer with the surname Harrington back in the Middle Ages and none since—though Steve has to wonder if that was a deliberate decision, to keep their gift hidden.
His wealth and good looks attract attention. His dad is never prouder of Steve than when he comes home with another sports trophy and an offhanded mention that he will be attending another house party. He probably thinks that his legacy is secure.
Sometimes when Steve looks in the mirror, he wonders:
Did he Wish for me to be like this?
With his mom trapped and his dad all-powerful, it becomes impossible not to question how much freedom he really has. He has to keep his dad happy for his best chance at true freedom.
That means fighting the urge to flinch whenever his dad puts a hand on his shoulder, and listening for the slight tonal changes in his voice, and exaggerating stories that please him. Steve tells his dad about kissing a girl at a recent party and wants to throw up afterwards, his skin crawling, the face in the mirror suddenly cruel and unrecognisable.
He earns a nickname at school. King Steve. He wants to know who crowned him, angry that they would call even more attention to him and risk upheaving the fragile balance of his life.
He considers saying the words-
But Steve sits at his desk instead, listening to whatever pop music is playing on the radio, head in his hands and recalling the little details of the night that his mom tried to leave. Ruined mascara and a hand stroking over his hair. She has never shown much affection for him since.
“I don’t know why the icks bother showing up for auctions,” his dad is complaining.
It’s an old-fashioned slur. There’s not so much anti-infernal sentiment among the younger generations, who would sooner call them freaks or goatfuckers after their cloven-hoofed ancestors. The infernals haven’t had ichor running through their veins for at least three centuries.
His dad hates them, so Steve has to play along. Those fucking icks, trying to buy their way out of the trailer park where their kind has been relegated. How dare they want to change the laws so they can own properties closer to where they work and their children go to school? To rewrite textbooks which portray the devils that created their race in a better light? To insist that humans interfered with the planes and created the gates which brought devils into the mortal realm in the first place?
How much of the world would be reshaped, if Steve just-
He tries to avoid the infernals at school, any confrontations making him feel a pit in stomach that never really goes away. When Tommy talks shit about a freshman who has a warped spine, the angle distinctly inhuman to accommodate wings that will never grow, Steve has to keep his mouth shut. Hawkins is a small town, and Tommy’s parents are friends with his dad.
Munson does not keep his mouth shut.
He climbs onto a table right in the middle of lunch, when everyone will look at him. Walks a straight line across it, hands behind his back and voice raised confidently. One of his friends has to move their lunch tray to prevent Munson from stepping in mashed potato.
“-as long as you look just like the people in magazines,” he turns his attention towards the jocks’ table, cupping both hands around his mouth so that his words are even harder to ignore, “with the same cookie cutter all-American human features-”
Jason Carver interrupts him. “You want something, freak?”
Munson puts up devil horns and sticks out his tongue, goading. He soon turns around, saying something about conformity being the real monster, forcing kids into boxes that aren’t made for them.
But Steve can’t hear much over his friends strategising about where they could jump Munson without getting caught by the teachers. Not that the teachers would necessarily stop them, he thinks, seeing how one shies away from Munson with an expression of distaste.
It’s a small Wish. Nothing world-changing. Mumbled under his breath while grabbing textbooks from his locker.
I Wish for Munson to get home safe.
A not-insignificant part of Steve hopes that nothing will happen. Maybe the gift has skipped him, or finally vanished from their bloodline like the magical inheritances of other families.
When Steve feels the world ripple around him like calm water now disturbed by a single droplet, reforming itself into something fundamentally altered, he wants to claw at his own skin. He wants to cut his tongue out so that he can never speak again.
Even though the Wish was not wasted on something frivolous, he would have preferred that he was incapable of making it at all. That he could find solutions to problems that were wholly non-magical, and be brave just like Eddie Munson.
He welcomes the fatigue that comes afterwards, the bone-deep weariness. He makes sure to drink two cups of coffee right before heading home to prevent his dad from noticing. Not that his dad is likely to notice anything about what Steve truly feels.
The next morning, he feels fine. It was a droplet of water in an ocean. Munson shows up to school without any new bruises, flashing those sharp teeth at any jocks who pass him in the halls. Steve smiles and nods along to the same old bullshit and tries to pretend that nothing happened.
Nancy Wheeler is the best person Steve knows, by a long shot. There are good moments with her. If anyone could accept him, it would be her. She is so smart and sweet and kindhearted-
“I already said that I don’t want to go!” she tells him, a rare instance of raising her voice.
Steve reaches for her elbow. “Hey,” he tries to coax her. “I only wanted to-”
Nancy jerks her arm away and glares at him, throwing her hands up in frustration. “Sometimes I just wish that you would-”
His heart stops. He suddenly feels cold, like he was dunked with ice water.
“...Steve?”
Nancy sounds concerned now, anger forgotten. She touches his shoulder and he flinches away.
“Are you feeling okay?”
The words are distant, as though heard from underwater.
Steve attempts a smile. “I’m fine,” he replies, the words ringing false.
It would only take a few words to Wish that their relationship had never-
Arms settle around him. Nancy holds him gently. The scent of her hair is reassuring. The warmth of her body is something undeniably real.
His eyes are burning, he realises with a sense of detachment.
“You can always talk to me,” Nancy murmurs, rubbing circles on his back.
See? This is why Steve doesn’t deserve her. But she could be the only person capable of loving him.
“I’m really fine,” he insists, his voice wavering.
“Okay,” she replies softly.
They break up.
In his worst moments, Steve considers undoing the relationship. But that would mean Wishing away everything that was good about it. Her smile and his deeply-buried nervousness whenever they held hands. The scent of her hair and the rare times that she laughed at his jokes and so, so much more.
Steve can keep those memories with him, along with the clear reminder from the universe that he is not worthy of being loved. He is too flawed, too cowardly, too powerful.
It might have been for the best. Nancy will never have to know about what Steve can do. She will never have to struggle like he does, with the certain knowledge that the world manifests like this because he chooses not to intervene, with the eternal question of where the line should be drawn.
With bizarre things happening around Hawkins, a gate newly opened to a plane that should have remained separate from theirs, Steve has to keep asking the question over and over:
What should I Wish for?
His dad had explained that some Wishes were more costly than others. If they went without resting after making a Wish, then there was a serious risk of losing the ability altogether.
When magic had been commonplace, millennia ago, people believed that it came from the soul. That magic was a finite resource but could be replenished, similar to how a healthy body can recover from blood loss. They were certain that the soul determined the pool of magic available to the sorcerer—that a pure soul was capable of more than a tainted one. There are enduring folk tales about measuring the purity of a person’s soul.
Steve is really not interested in testing the limits of his power. He would rather exist within the world than shape it with his own hands.
But he is a coward at heart. Sometimes he would sooner make a Wish than get involved directly.
I Wish Hellfire had its own clubroom, Steve whispers after hearing about how the faculty keep turning down their application, no matter that the infernals have just as much right to use school facilities as anyone else. It’s easier than putting his name on the forms.
I Wish that water balloon would hit the ground instead, Steve whispers while watching someone throw it towards Dustin Henderson, who has been harassed ever since he started high school. The balloon explodes on the pavement a safe distance from Henderson’s sneakers.
In Chemistry, someone switches on a Bunsen burner when Munson is distracted talking to his friend. It could have been hissing gas for a while by the time that Steve notices the valve is open.
Munson tips his head back, laughing-
And a guy at a nearby desk leans over in his chair, arm extended with a cigarette lighter.
His heart is beating faster. His palms feel unpleasantly clammy.
I Wish, Steve whispers under his breath, barely audible-
Munson turns at that moment to look at him.
Steve stops mid-sentence, uncertain what to do. The Wish remains unspoken.
The lighter sparks, igniting the Bunsen burner and the air surrounding it in a swoosh of flame.
Munson does not move. The flames lick along the curls of his long, dark hair. They caress his skin and move in molten patterns along his jaw. The sight is both unsettling and peaceful. Steve is afraid of fire, but Munson clearly considers it an old friend. His mouth parts, and he exhales a burst of air, causing the fire to burn brighter and hotter. Right now he looks otherworldly, like the fire elementals that they read about in History class rather than the infernals that Steve sees every day.
One of their classmates shrieks and jumps out of their chair.
“Mr Munson!” the teacher says sternly.
Munson quirks a smile. His slitted pupils are visible, his irises a warmer brown.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says and moves away from the desk, holding his arms out, perfectly calm as the flames lick down his shoulders.
The teacher instructs him to close his eyes before covering him with a fire blanket. One of Munson’s friends sort of whacks him a few times. The fire is soon extinguished. Munson crinkles the fire blanket while pulling it away from him. When he sighs, smoke gusts from his lungs.
Some infernals come alive while smoking. Munson must be one of them, kicking his feet even more than he ordinarily would as the class continues on, his body thrumming with energy.
For the first time, Steve has to worry about what happens if a Wish is left unfinished. He might be imagining the haziness at his peripheral vision, reality no longer so certain of itself.
He takes a breath, forcing himself to calm down. The air tastes faintly bitter.
-that class would finish early, Steve whispers.
The fire alarm sounds.
No one is really worried, since Munson had just been on fire during class. The teacher resentfully directs them towards the door. The haziness resolves into detail. Life continues on.