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Steve Harrington was tired.

There wasn't a time in the past year and a half that he hadn't felt tired, actually.

Because for all that time, Briar Hargrove had lain in a coma. She had been unmoving, her face was getting paler and paler, and her beautiful blonde hair was matted. Steve brushed it out every day, and liked to braid it sometimes when the nurses let him.

But it didn't change the fact that the love of his life was motionless before him, her only signal of life being the pacemaker's beeping, beside her, and the small movements of her chest as she breathed.

Steve placed his hand over her chest sometimes, to feel the proof of her heart beating himself. Other times, he'd kiss her forehead and whisper things he only had the courage to say because he knew there would be no reply.

But most of the time, he sat back from her, and just held her hand. Their hands fit together like jigsaw pieces, and always had been. And sure, her hand was cold and not clammy, but he found comfort in it nonetheless.

Her bones had all healed now. There were no casts on her arms or the leg that had been broken. Her eyes were another issue; the doctor had no way of telling whether her vision would be permanently impaired until she woke up.

(If she woke up).

Despite the fact she'd inhabited it for well over a year, Briar's hospital room still looked the same. It was still way too white for her; didn't fit her electric personality. The only decoration was still the drawing she'd done of them that fateful night; the picture of them and the six little nuggets. That was the last time he'd seen her smile.

The only part of the room that actually felt truly like her was the radio in the corner, with a single cassette next to it. The only cassette Briar ever needed.

Everybody Wants To Rule The World.

Steve played it for her all the time. He cursed the moments when the sound would cut out and silence would fall over the room, because it meant the beeps were the only thing he could hear. And he didn't want that.

He still saw her bones snapping like toothpicks everytime he closed his eyes. Still heard her screams that she didn't want this, that she wanted to live. He still wasn't over what had happened.

But the town appeared to be moving on.

Well, sort of.

The four gates that had been formed by Briar's minute long death had all been covered up quickly and cleanly by the military, which Hawkins had a lot more of nowadays. They'd boarded up all the gates and sewn the town back together. The sane ones had still left, of course, but some people remained.

The centre of the military base was situated right in the centre of Hawkins, and it was called the MAC-Z (Military Access Control Zone). Steve hadn't been in there and didn't really have a clue what they were doing there, but some of the group did.

That was another thing.

The gang were still very locked in on their search for Vecna, including Steve. He wanted to hunt the son of a bitch down and torture him slowly for hurting Briar (and Eddie and Fred and Chrissy and Patrick) the way he did, and everyone shared his opinion.

However, the last time any of them had seen Vecna, he had been burning to death and falling from a three storey building. So they weren't sure if he was even alive.

Which was why for around a year now, they'd been completing these 'crawls' of the Upside Down. They were planned to the second; Hopper always went into the Upside Down, concealed in a military truck through the MAC-Z gate, and Steve and Dustin used a specially wrangled van with an antenna on top of it to keep in touch with him. The rest of the gang stay online to hear him as well at the new radio tower called The Squeak.