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badpancakelol · 5 months

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holy body

Steve does it, willingly, this time. He doesn’t enjoy it, no, but there were things worse than him. There were monsters that would wear human skin in a way that would make them almost invisible to the human eye, monsters who would speak and talk and move and walk as if they were anything but that — a monster. And Neil Hargrove is one of them. Was one of them.

He doesn’t make it quick. He knows what he has to do, but there are steps that he has to take, this time, to make sure that he is aware, that he is in control, that Neil knows what he did. Steve does not enjoy it, but it is something that has to be done. He drives home and he plans and he waits and he bides his time. Steve watches him — figures out the schedule of Neil Hargrove, what he does when he gets home (drink, watch TV, shout at Max and Billy), when he leaves work. It takes longer than Steve would have liked — planning on how to do this, spending days upon days, a couple weeks, planning. When the time comes, when he finally has everything he needs, when the hubbub of the previous dead body has died down, and his body has been lowered, Steve changes into his darkest clothes, stalks out Cherry Lane, and the Hargrove-Mayfield household.

Waits until Neil Hargrove leaves his house for a smoke.

And then, he lures him.

Steve feels his vocal chords constricting to take shape of those that are not his, that do not belong, but are part, of him. Mimics the sound of laughter, watches as it does nothing. He can hear his own breathing above all else, hot and heavy, and hopes that it can’t be seen in the cool air. Steve tries again — moves his mouth, shapes his lips so that the voice he occupies becomes other, nasally, insufferable, and wholly Billy’s. He’s heard it a hundred times at school. Some people just don’t know when to shut the fuck up. Steve didn’t like him. His father would say that hate is a strong word, do not use it lightly, but there’s just something about the makeup of his face that makes Steve angry. But it does not matter. He didn’t like him, but— this? He watches as Billy’s father steps out of the dull cast of the streetlamps. Nobody deserves this.

He lures him back, watches his steps to keep them, himself, quiet. Steve repeats phrases, what are you, a fucking pussy? Scared? Gonna punch me? Come at me! lures the man deeper into the woods. He watches the way that his mouth snarls, wishes that his hearing would die so that he would not have to bathe in the threats, the crack of his knuckles in glee, the limp in his step from a bad knee injury. He can hear the way that his bones creak against each other tiredly, and it spurs him on. As if they were calling out to him please! Put me out of my misery! Help me! Let me breathe!

It takes a while for Neil to even figure out that something bad is going to happen. It’s… pathetic. Really.

When the trees start to grow dense, and it’s more woods than town, Steve lets his bones shift and form. Does it slowly, lets his legs change, his skin tightening, bones breaking reforming under his skin, ribs shifting to touch each other in harmonious sigh. He lets Neil watch. And he lets his mouth lay closed, lips pressed together, eyes covering up, disappearing, where heat becomes sight and sight becomes nothing.

Steve doesn’t entertain his swears.

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

The man stays silent. He doesn’t even plead in the same way that other worm did. He just stays snotty, and he stays wide-eyed, as if he had been spat on. As if he had someone yank on his front teeth and tell him that they’re ready to be pulled out. Instead, Steve watches as he trips over himself, as he falls back and into the woods — in the wrong direction, in all his haste.

The sound of his shoes against the slippery-leaf floor is exhilarating. He lets his jaw fold and fall, lets his skull bore rot and bone, lowers himself to scratch nails and misshapen legs into a lunge, into a sprint.

He doesn’t make it quick. And he does not have fun. But some people deserved to be hunted.

Scared? Steve thrums, voice garbled and layered under the moonlight. He watches as Neil stops, as he turns to look around himself, to try and find the source. He clambers over, slowly, because he knows that Neil will not get far, and he walks. Steve Grabs Neil’s body by his neck, lifts him like he knows he has lifted others, brings him to where Steve thinks his eyes would be, where they would be if he had them.

Do you know what you’ve done? Steve lets it simmer in the air, lets Neil hear it vibrate through his soul.

He does not answer quick enough.

— — —

When Steve wakes, this time, as he goes to shower to do his hair, as he reaches tender fingers to silk, he feels something that is wholly, and not, him. It protrudes easily from his scalp — sharp shards of bone-wood where his horns would be if he were him. The hot water sprays freckles onto his skin, burns where it once brought comfort.

It shouldn’t be there.

It shouldn’t be bleeding into his everyday life, because it has already ruined enough. Steve had already had to deal with the fallout of what this thing and him, what he, himself, has chosen to do. He does not need it to appear on his skin in the way it does, appear through his scalp, through flesh and blood and bone, as bone.

The tap turns off. His breathing stills.

Don’t let anyone know. They would never understand. Can’t you see what’s happening?

Steam settles on the bathroom mirror. He watches as the silhouette of himself appears. Watches as what is and is not him makes itself scream.

The first thing he does is try and transform. He lets the skin recede, tries to close his eyes and image them to be gone like he had done so many times before. It had worked when he didn’t want to, in the woods that night, and it had worked when he had felt nothing but contempt for the man in front of him. Surely this combination, this prize-pool of information, still applies? He is met with nothing but a strained neck and veins that are all-too human.

And it’s… frustrating. It’s so fucking frustrating in a way that he doesn’t think that he’s ever felt before. Things have never truly gone his way. He didn’t want things to turn out like they have, like they have been. He didn’t want Nancy to leave him in the same way that he didn’t want her to stay. He didn’t want Eddie to hate him in the way that he leisurely conveys to Steve through his eyes and the curl of his lip, the unquestioning gaze that lands where a cut once was. He didn’t want the things in his childhood to end up two they did. With two parents who didn’t really love him, and dreams that make his eyes hazy-wet.

He has never wanted any of this. If he could have it his way, he would curl up into a ball in his room and never talk to anyone ever again. But, no. Nobody would want that, would they? They know woh he is, who he is meant to be, more than he could ever imagine himself.

“Why won’t you fucking help me?” Steve slams his fist down on the ceramic of the sink, watches it splinter. “I do all of this— all of this — and I’m still not allowed to—?”

The voice stays blessedly quiet. Figures.

He tries to smooth his hair over, dries it so that he knows what it will look like. Maybe it won’t show if he styles his hair just right, if he combs over his fringe, if he gels it up, mousses it down, pins it back. He pulls on tufts of hair in vain. Two small bumps continue to be there, glaring and obvious and whispering to him about what he’s done, about what he should do, about what he could do. But he doesn’t want this. He’s used the power that has been given to him, that has been placed on him, but he does not want this. He does not want people to know, or to continue. It was one slip up — a slip up that needed to be done, because nothing else was going to be done, so how was he to turn a blind eye — and it wouldn’t happen again.

It’s not easy — the decision.

He’s always been a little squeamish, trying to avoid situations where people might hurt him, where he might get hurt. Steven hadn’t learnt how to ride his bike until much later than his peers, in fear of scraped knees and burnt hands. The stove was not to be touched until he was left alone to the house, empty and unforgiving. Knives and scissors and sharp ends were tucked away, out of sight, until he could glance in their direction without panic. People would always praise him for it — parents and mothers and fathers — when he would babysit. He would scan the house as if puppeteered, sniffing out glimpses of glinting metal, under the guise of safety for the children!

It’s not that he’s afraid of the idea of pain, of pain itself. He’s been in fights. He’s scratched at his skin till bone would surely show. There are worse things in the world, things that can hurt more than kitchen utensils and a misplaced phrase. It’s just— the idea of what he has to do so that he can continue to keep living how he wants to, continue to live like a normal, ordinary teenager, with his normal, ordinary friends. He doesn’t like it. The idea of it— the image and the sound and the dust that has been kicked away to reveal itself in one horrible, terrible, idea.

Of course, he doesn’t have what he needs. He’s vain, yes, but not this much so.

He lets the light from the window flow into the hallway as he opens the bathroom door. He feels the temperature change between his toes from cold, slick, tile to carpet with— not crumbs, because they would never allow eating anywhere that wasn’t the kitchen— but the musty feeling of matted nothingness and age. The hairs on Steve’s skin pricks up, flows down his arms and chest in little bumps, unaccustomed to the cool air. One foot in front of the other, he lifts and walks down the hallway, passed the windows that look out onto the woods. In this way, it has been decided.

The door in front of him is fifty miles tall. It grows and it grows, and it feels as if he is only small, again, just tall enough to reach the handle. He is not allowed to knock. He is not allowed to bother them. He is not allowed to enter. It does not matter that he is tall enough, that there is hurt. He is not allowed.

But it needs to be done. He needs it like he’s never felt need before — as if what he thought was love was just lust and the want for companionship, the want to feel skin against skin, the want to feel love so much that he tricked himself into thinking that anything and everything was just so filled, that he had loved them. It is not the want that he thought was need. He can live without the want. He cannot live without this.

He lifts his hand, outstretched fingers delicately pressing themselves into the metal of the door handle. Steve enters the room, dust covered skirting boards and side tables turned to look at him, exaclty how they left it. Nothing has changed, no blanket untucked, or a pair of shoes missing. He can see from the doors the loose hairs from where his mother would brush hers, long strands stuck near the vanity. Her makeup will be long expired, now, perfumes gone foul and sharp. Steve does not look for his father’s memory.

It’s as if there’s something stopping him from entering. But what Steve needs is in here. He cannot stay on the outskirts forever. He needs to dive in.

(His heart beats against his ribs, once and once and once again. He shouldn’t be in here. He’s not allowed. Steven will get in trouble if he goes inside the room — more trouble than he will be in from just opening the door. And he does not want to be in trouble. He does not want the back of a cold palm. Bad Boys are those who get in trouble, and Steven is not a Bad Boy. His mother said that he was Good, so why does he do this?

He wants the warmth of fingers pressed into his scalp, uncurled appendages holding him close. He does not want what he will receive. But it has been decided. And he cannot change.

It beats again, reminds him that he, too, is alive.

It hurts).

The carpet does not feel any different from the hallway. Not softer, not cleaner, not warmer. The room itself is not alive in the same way that he is, in the same way that he will always be. It does not hold power over him. It is just a room. A dusty room that used to house terrible people that he will never have to see again. It is just a room that holds a dressing table, and a nail file.

It’s placed in the middle of the vanity set, placed delicately next to colours of reds and whites. Lipsticks still capped, gifted jewellery untouched, perfectly wrapped with small names printed on the edges. He wonders if she ever wanted any of it, if she was ever allowed to open her gifts. She would be forty-two, now. What presents would she have gotten if she stayed? Would she have been able to see them? To feel the pleasure of wrapping paper unwrapped from the seams? Or would it stay like this — a mass of unfeeling, unthinking gifts to be left to rot?

Steve takes what is now his, sees the way that the dust has left its mark.

The door stays closed, then. He leaves as quickly as he can, dust settling over the memories, again, and stamps his way back to the bathroom. Steve hauls in a barstool that has never been used, holds the tool up to his head, looks in the mirror, turns and turns until he can see the bone wood in all its horrible glory. It is too visible, and he does not like pain, but it needs to be done.

The nail file does the trick. He saws at it for hours, watches as the light disappears from the window, turns on the light, yellow cast his skin in sickness. Back and forth and back and forth he shaves down what is him, until his hair falls back into place, until the bone-dust has covered the tip of his nose and the rim of the sink.

Steve turns on the tap, washes it away, and it is gone.

— — —

The news comes faster, this time.

Steve isn’t surprised. He’d be a little bit more surprised, a little bit more worried about the police, if they hadn’t found Neil Hargrove’s body. It wasn’t as if he had just killed him in the woods, no, that man, for all his secrets and his parading and his lies, he deserved to be put on display. What was left of his flesh and bone, when it had been oh so conveniently placed on the place’s doorstep, was meant to be found. Monsters deserved to be culled, Steve thought bitterly, even if he is the one who has to do it.

“Sources say that the body of Neil Hargrove was found strung up to a lamp post outside of the Hawkins Police Department, with his chest split open.”

Steve watches as the woman on the TV screen is ushered away from the area, away from where Steve had been last night, by a police officer. There’s a glimpse of Hargrove’s body in the background, being lowered from the streetlamp. From this angle, with this quality, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. But, even underneath the moon, he knows what he did, what it looked like. He can make out the outlines of Hargrove’s hands, tied up with offal, strung like man in sin. He sees the loll of the man’s head, mouth open wider and wider in unhearing shout, and wimpish scream. Ribs pulled forward and out like a flowerbed in bloom. Steve wants to ask if he’s ever been this pretty.

He hears the man shout something, off screen, watches the swing of the cameraman’s body back behind the tape.

“You’re not allowed to be here!” A man shouts. “You’re not allowed to go past this tape, or say those things until we—”

“Do you think that there’s a pattern?” The woman barrels on. “Do you think that whatever killed this man was the same thing that killed Tom Holloway in the woods—”

Steve turns off the TV. He doesn’t need to know anymore. He knows the details so vividly, already.

— — —

(What is surprising, is the letter. Or, note. Letter is too formal, and this is only a few words in garish handwriting that he can barley make out. At least it’s recognisable. There is no name signed, and there does not need to be. Steve can smell the scent of him on it, and even without that, the handwriting is a dead giveaway.

Meet me at our spot.

Steve knows that he probably shouldn’t. Should probably run in the opposite direction, and yet he still goes. There’s something compelling about Eddie, something in the way that he talks, in the look in his eye that leaves Steve wanting more. More of what, is the question — one with many more answers than Steve is willing to admit).

“You did it.” He says. “Again. Even though you said that you didn’t want to, that first time, that you didn’t mean to.”

It’s not that simple, though. Because Steve knows that there are reasons behind his actions — reasons that stem further than that of petty pleasure or personal gain. He is not who he once was, who he has been coasting as. It doesn’t stop the warping of Eddie’s face, the snarl that he holds, upticked lips curled around the next word that he so desperately tries to grasp at, and, failing words, he just stares. It doesn’t make him feel good, no. But what part of any of this has been good?

Steve can’t bare it. He can’t keep looking at Eddie the way that he wants to, that he thinks of to himself, and see the way he looks back. He knows that it is his fault, something to do with who he is, and what he is, and what is fundamentally part oh itself, what has formed and forged who he is— shaping into something wonderful and disgusting to his own heart.

“He deserved it.” Steve says. Because how is he supposed to make Eddie understand any of it? He can see the way that Eddie’s lips curl, and the change in his demeanour; no longer angry at him, now just… exhausted. Steve tries to find the words to say what he truly means before Eddie can comment, because that minute sigh, exhalation in disappointment, is too much to hear. “Nothing would have happened if I left him. If that man were still alive he would inflict more hurt than he would be he dead.”

“That doesn’t mean that you get to decide that!”

“And what would you have me do?” Steve asks. “Leave him to live? Leave him to destroy more lives than just his? Is he worth so much more than those he hurts?”

“You don’t get to be judge, jury and executioner— there are fucking laws—”

“Oh!” Steve laughs, prickly back against the wall. “Eddie Munson talking to me about the law—”

“Tell me you won’t do it again.”

“I—” He stops himself. He can’t keep that promise. He doesn’t know if he wants to. Eddie crosses his arms over his front, eyebrows drawn in something that Steve can’t name. He wants to know what to call it — what to call him — in this moment. Hair unkempt, eyes glassy, stained. Like a prophet, or warning, outlined in thick oil. There’s a pit in his stomach that opens into a thin ravine, losing bits and pieces of himself to his body.

He does not want to hurt anyone. He never does, at the beginning. People are too soft— flesh and bone too easy to press fingers into. Sometimes he isn’t aware of what he does, the way that the things he does effects people. He has never wanted to hurt anyone, but aren’t there some people that deserve it? The people who slip through the cracks, the one that inflict hurt on others in ways that should not be spoken of, that are hushed away and swept under carpets and closed behind neighbourhoods of two-to-three story houses with the woods bracketing their secrets. Don’t they deserve it?

Steve smiles.

“You’re in over your head, Munson.”

“Well it’s my head on the fucking line, Harrington.” Eddie spits the name to the ground, to Steve’s chest. He does not flinch. It does not hurt. “My god, it’s like you never fucking learn. Do you even remember anything from when we last did this? Satanic killings, rumours, blame — any of that ring a bell in your empty fucking skull?”

Eddie pushes off from against the wall, crowds Steve to his. He presses a finger into Steve’s chest, teeth bared as he speaks.

“It’s like you’re trying to blame it on me. If a violent murder in the middle of the woods wasn’t ritualistic enough, you just has to, what, string him up like some holy sacrifice? Did you stop to think of who they’re going to question, or point fingers at, huh?”

No. He didn’t. He just wanted to help Max. He just wanted to help Billy. Neil had to die. He was hurting them. He had to leave.

“They won’t question you.”

“And how do you know?”

Pin it on someone. You can do it. You’ve been doing so well. Won’t it be so easy? It would be so easy.

(Steve doesn’t want to blame anyone. Nobody will be blamed. Nothing bad will happen. Maybe time will implode and everything will revert and he will only be left knowing what once was, and he will be able to fix these things, and he will feel what he is meant to feel. He fill go back to being boring and playing his part. The dolls will be put to sleep, and their houses tucked back into the basement to collect dust and lose memories.

He will go back to playing his part. Smile and kiss and drink and fuck. Fail his tests. Wear ugly collared shirts that his father bought him. Wear the sneakers that his mother likes. Pretend to like smoking by the pool and tucking cigarettes behind his ears. Chug beer till he passes out. Drive. Never cry — because crying is an emotion, and men do not show emotion. Shout. Get angry.

(“Aren’t they emotions, too?”

“No. Not for us.” He says, the memory of him repeating behind fogged glass and blurry eyes. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“‘Yes’ what?”

“Yes, sir.”).

He will become who they want him to be, and they will like it. And they will like him.

It will not be like this— not quite popular, not quite an outcast. An anomaly of a being that does not fit in where he is meant to fit in. Basketball player unfamiliar with team jokes. Classmate unwilling to participate. Neighbour that never introduces themselves. Boyfriend who can and can’t understand his girlfriend. Child who lives alone. Bad friend. Bad babysitter. Jobless. Floating. Unwilling. Willing. Taken. Hurt. Inflicting. Inflicted).

“I don’t.” Steve answers, quiet and unsure. “I don’t.”

Eddie nods, eyes justified. He leans his forehead against the brick wall next to Steve, shoulder brushing up against his shoulder. The shirt that he’s wearing clings to his back delicately, brushing up against the knobs of his spine. It’s weird to see Eddie without his jacket, without his vest, but it makes it easier to so the way he moves— the way he shifts out of the corner of his eye. Steve can see the way that he breathes, each intake of air exaggerated by his thin shirt.

A curtain has been made between them out of Eddie’s hair, and Steve turns to get a better look. The curls are uneven, no two the same. Thickly coiled hair shifts apart for a second to see his face, his eyes.

Oh.

“Are you—?”

“Just— gimme a second.” Eddie breathes. “Please.”

Steve nods, shifts back so that their shoulders touch. He lets his hands sit by his side, unsure of what to do with them, with what he’s allowed to do in this situation. Eddie is quiet. The only indication given that something is wrong is the laboured way his chest moves, exaggerated and emulating breathing slowly, and the droplets sinking into the soft sand and dirt beneath them.

“Did you—” Eddie sucks in a breath, wets his lips. “Did you talk to them?”

He doesn’t mean the police.

“I tried.”

“Not hard enough, I guess.” Eddie laughs, thunks his head against the brick wall. He’s quiet for only a beat too long that has Steve questioning if this is what does it— a petty conversation and not the revelation that he is not wholly human or himself, before— “There isn’t anything you can do to make them stop?”

“Eddie, you know how Hagan and Carver are—”

“Dicks?”

“Yeah,” Steve huffs. “Real fucking assholes. There’s some weird pissing contest going on between Billy and Jason right now— something to do with who’s gonna be team captain after I graduate.”

“I don’t think either of them are particularly good options,” says Eddie. “Too headstrong. Plus, they’re both—”

He spins around so that his back is now facing the wall, head directed towards Steve. There’s a shimmer in his eyes that wasn’t there before, as if something inside of him has been mended.

“Dicks?”

“Yeah.” Eddie says, smiles up at him. Then, smaller, he mutters something that Steve thinks he shouldn’t have heard, a thank you for trying that gets lost as they go their seperate ways to first period.

— — —

He doesn’t move. He knows that if he moves then they’ll look at him under the microscope again, draw more blood and squirm and test as he sits, strapped to the large folding table-chair. It’s like the ones that the mum’s used to put outside the school for bake-sales when he was younger (not as if he’s old, no, just… different. He can’t remember the last time he lost a tooth. The natural way, at least). So he doesn’t move, because he knows what is best for him — how to survive. It doesn’t stop it from hurting any less, though. The way that the people and their clinical stares stop and watch behind glass that they think he can’t see through: their demeanours are thick with anticipation and something that he would call lust if he knew what that word truly meant. Not in the way that he will learn it to mean, in the way that he will move and shift against others and kill it the l-word that isn’t the l-word that they want to hear, but, instead, something primal.

It is almost the same here. There is nothing comforting about the lust that they display, though. It is like they don’t even know it is there, as if they hide behind the medical masks and white rubber gloves covered in something sticky, behind pressed white shirts that crinkle at every movement. He is oh-so aware of how they move; every move they take, every breath they don’t.

It hurts. And there is no other way to put it. Not like getting a scraped knee, or sliding down the stairs in what he thought would be like sledding, or like a rough palm and warm rings, no. This is pain. This is what he had read about in the before, in the picture books that he could grapple onto before they were ripped from him, from the soft words of the teacher as she asked if he was alright. It’s not fair, and he knows this, deep down, he knows that it isn’t, but there is a part of him that wants to ask why. Why are they doing this? Is it because he had been too loud and too quiet and too hyper and too tired? Was he too much? Not enough?

No.

He knows why. But he latches onto excuses like rotten meat and stinking flies, like he is a decaying body and not here. Steven knows the reason. It is the same reason that leads them to do their little ‘medical tests’ for the sake of science, don’t you want to help humanity? and when that didn’t work, they asked don’t you want to help your country? They posed it — the thing within his blood that they so desperately try to taste — like they were doing good. Like they weren’t the bad guys in their black suits and guns and muscle just because they wore white shirts. Steven doesn’t know much about the world — not enough to know how to make a cocktail, or how to do long division, but he has read enough comics about Superman to know that this is not good.

They wait on the other side of the mirror, and Steven watches himself; the grooves of his hands turned in a way that they shouldn’t be. Like he is Stretch Armstrong, bent and re-shaped to be something that is not real.

They broke his hands.

That’s all there is to it.

There shouldn’t be any more to it.

They came in, and strapped him down, and the man with the white hair — old and ugly and too much like my father, Santa-coded horror — had shushed him with a kind smile and said that he knew Steven was capable of fixing things, you don’t want to hurt anymore, do you?

He tried not to scream as they did it. His father always said that showing emotions was a sign of weakness.

When he had, unintentionally, fixed them, his hands, because he had waited long enough, he thought, that they had all left and gone to sleep, because he had counted the painstaking seconds and mimicked a clock in his brain, trying to make a game out of it. How long can he go without blinking? His high score was three minutes and fifty-five seconds. He could see it now: flashing on the screen of the arcade that he had been in (once), before being dragged out and lectured about how to be a man.

He missed the arcade. Steven often wondered what new games they came up with while he was away. If, when he returned, his friends would welcome him with open arms, and ask about how his holiday in Europe was. He’d lie, of course. I saw the Eiffel Tower and drank a sip of red wine from my mum’s glass as she ate snails! And they’d all say ewww! because of the mention of the shelled-slug, and go looking for them in the garden, and then they’d forget about how Steven didn’t smile as much, how his arm looked like the man who lurked around the gas station that they bought cheap snacks from. He’d cover it with his mum’s makeup, he’d reckon. And they’d never know.

Don’t you see? Steven asked. They’ll all go away if we just wait. Everything will go back to normal.

He just needed to hold out until he was well enough, until they thought that he was nothing special. Steven just needed to be good enough to keep his arms limp in the chair, and hush the loud voice asking him, begging him to let it fix the hurt.

And we can be home again? It asks back. Small and quiet like it never has been before.

And so they wait. His hands lay limp at the wrists, because he knows that if he wiggles his fingers, they’ll move too much and start to rearrange in the way that they are supposed to bend. Not this deer-legged thing that he calls his wrists, but something more human.

Of course. Steven answers.

(It fixes itself. Not in the voice-inhuman way, but in the way that bodies do: with time. Bone fuses in a way that it isn’t supposed to, and Steven isn’t even worried about the pain anymore — how is he going to hide this from his friends? They’re not going to want to talk to someone whose hands look like his. This isn’t something that his mother’s makeup can conceal.

And so, they re-break it. The people with the gloves and the pressed shirts don’t appear this time. Instead, as he closes his eyes, he looks past the mirror and he sees a small head and a sloped nose, and he feels it in his wrists, slowly, shifting it back to how it once was.

It is then that he decides he doesn’t want to forget.

Because he knows, then, that there are others, with hands like his, with dreams like his).

— — —

He doesn’t want to be here, but he needs to keep appearances up. The basketball team has been positively up Steve’s ass recently— no, not about the murders (plural, now, which is wrong and horrible, and should have been stopped so soon, so quickly, but that one was needed), but about how many practices he’s skipped. As the pseudo-captain, they look to him for guidance, like little lost sheep, put it seems like they’re growing into themselves now: angry and hardheaded, stubborn and red.

The curfew hasn’t been lifted yet, and everyone here will leave before it is 11:30, time enough for them to be inside their houses, inside their rooms, by the time it strikes 12. Steve thinks that the curfew is a little useless, not because of why or who it was put in place for (he’s disregarding the fact that it is him that they are being protected from), but because people are normally dawdling their way home by 1. These parties (if you can even call them that) are just little get togethers that usually take place the day before important things. The night before the 4th of July, graduation, Christmas, exams. People in Hawkins, for being so fucking boring, have no idea how to plan around the minimal celebrations that happen, here.

It doesn’t help that, the place that everything takes place this time, looks so similar to that of the bathroom he and Nancy spoke in. It’s probably due to the fact that all of Hawkins is so single-minded in loving conformity that any and every house within the same tax bracket looks the same, but that is entirely besides the point. Steve can picture it all: shouting here, spilling the cup there, Jonathan racing through the room, heartbreak, heartache, nothing nothing, and, then, beginning.

So, he doesn’t want to be here, but he has to, because that is what normal people do, and that is what people who are on the basketball team do, because playing sport is all about the alcohol and the sex and looking away as people swap spit in the corner.

They’re a weird pair. That’s all he has in his mind as he watches Chrissy Cunningham and Eddie talk to each other, hushed as can be through the music. It’s hard trying to isolate their voices, and Steve is this close to asking someone to turn down the god-awful pop that he usually loves, grating on his brain. He needs to be able to hear them. He doesn’t know why — call it a gut feeling, a feeling of the voice.

Steve shuffles closer. As close as he feels he can get before his heart starts beating so fast that he has to recall the symptoms of a heart attack.

“…are you…”

It’s Eddie’s voice — bracketed by the booming music, but unmistakably his. Steve tries to read his lips, the way they move and push and bite, tries to sound them out with his own mouth, pictures what they might say. He can’t do it, really. He can try and fill in the blanks as best he can, but his mind is auto-supplying what the sentences could end in. Are you okay? Are you going to leave soon? Are you sure?

“Of course… he would never…”

He? There are too many people it could be. Steve tries to narrow it down, and it is surprisingly easy. Chrissy and Eddie are too weird of a pair to be able to communicate with each other so plainly if not for their linking ‘he’. To Steve’s knowledge, Chrissy would never take drugs. She’s like Nancy— generally pretty straight-laced, not wanting to ruin anything that isn’t already. So, it’s unlikely that Chrissy would be buying (and, Steve considers, if Chrissy did want to buy from Eddie, she probably wouldn’t do it out in the open, like this), so they have to be linked with who they know.

Steve almost throws his own name in the mix when he spots Jason cheering, beer almost slipping from his fingers as he raises his arms in cheer at— something. Steve isn’t interested. For someone who took Chrissy here — and he knows that he did, because, again, when has Chrissy Cunningham ever attended a Hawkins party like this? — he seems to be quick to ditch her. Especially when she looks, well. Concerned. Like she’s about to cry. Or throw up. Or both.

He’ll check in on her, later. Once this party is nothing but a stupid night to look back on, like every other stupid night.

“…if you’re sure…”

“I’m not… he’s always been like…”

Steve shifts closer, leans back against the countertop to try and make their voices clearer. He closes his eyes, tries to focus in on—

“Harrington!”

“Hargrove.” Steve acknowledges, opens his eyes enough to see his smarmy face.

“Enjoying the party?” He says something, but Steve tries to focus on both conversations, mind swimming.

“…find some way to help…”

“…been so long since you’ve shown your face, pretty boy…”

“…there’s nothing for you to do…”

“…been an asshole recently…”

“…are you sure? I can…”

“So, what do you think?” Hargrove says, closer, this time.

He doesn’t know what he asked. Steve doesn’t care. What matters is that he can hear the slight conversation of Eddie and Chrissy behind him, something that he needs to be able to hear, to be able to know and to make sure they’re okay, and Billy fucking Hargrove is standing in his way.

Tell him.

No! That’s not going to be productive, and will absolutely end in Steve getting his head slammed to the counter. He very much likes having his head attached to his body, thank you very much.

“Sounds interesting.” Steve answers. Passive. Safe.

Billy huffs. “‘Course you would say something like that. You weren’t even listening were you? I saw the way you just… stared off into the distance.”

Billy eyes him for a second. Steve doesn’t know how to answer that. How is he supposed to say I think something bad is going to happen tonight, and it is absolutely going to be my fault. And, also, I killed your father, even though I don’t like you, because nobody should have to live like that.

He doesn’t know how to answer, so he doesn’t. And Billy leaves. And Steve hears the words hurt me and I know someone who can help and nothing will change and then he gets the confirmation he needs— Jason’s name in high definition, past the music and the beer and the smell of sweat, and he closes his eyes, and he goes out the door, and everything is exactly the same as what once was.

— — —

Steve knows that he killed Jason.

He’s losing control.

He doesn’t even have the state of mind to bring himself back home. Because, when his body shifts back, when the feels bones folding in one themselves, fusing together like a sickly child who fell down a tree, he is met with the cold of the woods, the remains of Jason Carver, and a girl’s broken body, eyes unseeing, in the middle of the clearing.

Steve scrambles back— into Jason. He looks to his palms and the colour that they shouldn’t be. Oh god. It doesn’t get easier. Why? What happened? How did he get here? Why is there— who is— he doesn’t look anymore. Can’t make out the colour of her hair from the blood staining it. He doesn’t want to look any closer. He can’t.

He wipes his hands across his pants, tries not to let the metallic smell reach his brain, but when he has to side-step the girl and her almost-sleeping form, he almost vomits. Feels the saliva pile in the back of his throat, the feeling of his throat contracting. He presses hands towards his mouth, the smell too close too close too close, and swallows.

Steve just needs to get home.

— — —

There isn’t a school that he can hide in, this time. To wait and to bide his time, and to look at Eddie from a distance, feel his eyes on the back of his head— no. Eddie confronts him properly, this time, comes straight into his home, where Steve has been sitting since the confirmation that a Hawkins High student had been the latest victim of the serial killings. It is nothing, and exactly, like the first time it happened. The uncertainty is gone. He cannot just scare him, will him to leave him alone, and then pretend that nothing had happened when they enter school ground. No. Everything has changed, more than it had before, like nothing at all.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Eddie asks (shouts. He shouts it so loud that Steve thinks that the windows might break, that the neighbours might hear. It rings in his ears like a godforsaken choir, humming beneath his eyelids in static glee). “And don’t give me that oh I didn’t know what I was doing-schtick, Steve. It sure as hell didn’t work last time, and it’s not gonna work here.”

“I know.”

“I mean—” Eddie paces around the kitchen. There are no broken vase pieces, and yet he still side-steps around the carpet and the shame that Steve exudes into the house. “A kid. That’s what he was. Like, Jesus fucking Christ, Steve. Yeah, you had ‘reasons’,” and he twitches his fingers just so to be mocking, “for the last few ones, but, shit!”

Eddie paces a few more steps before using his hands to really show him what he means— waving and wild in a way that makes Steve think, if he were anyone else, hie might throw something.

“He was fucking seventeen, Steve. Seventeen. He didn’t even get to live long enough to graduate, or drink, or do any of the horrible wonderful stupid things that adults are allowed to do. Fuck—”

He sits down, then. And Steve watches. He doesn’t know how to comfort him. Because there is a part of him that knows what he did, is something that he shouldn’t. That he should have a code, a set of rules that said not to hurt those who have the possibility to change — but wouldn’t that stop him from inciting justice? Doesn’t everyone, theoretically, have the possibility for change? What makes a man a monster and a monster a man? Steve knows that he is both, and yet he does not have an answer.

There are those that do the monstrous things that would be considered immoral and hurtful, but when punishment is enacted upon them, people scream out and cry. Why are they afraid of it? Surely they must know that the unworthy must be punished? Nothing should stand in the way of justice. And so what if that justice has to be him? He will do what needs to be done.

Good. This is right.

If it were someone else, Steve knows that he would be dead. He wasn’t the best when he was Jason’s age, and if the thing in the woods was someone else, who acted exactly like him, he would no longer exist.

(Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe then none of this would have happened. Or maybe it would all happen exaclty the same, and Steve Harrington would no longer be able to breathe, just like Jason Carver no longer walks).

“—Steve.” Eddie takes a deep breath before approaching Steve like he did in the woods. Timid and afraid, like he was then, his footsteps are steely and planted deep. “You know that this is wrong, right?”

“I didn’t want to—” That doesn’t answer the question. It does not matter what Steve does or does not want. “Yes.”

Eddie lets out a breath, slow through his nostrils, flaring in something that Steve hopes is not distaste. “So you know that there needs to be an end to this.”

Steve tilts his head, tries to pick him apart at the seams. Of course there will be an end to this. Steve is not immortal. He will not live forever. He will not do this forever. There are just, sometimes, people who do not deserve to do what they want, at any given moment. He tries not to take offence at the way that Eddie speaks downs to him — like he is a child that has swiped icing off his mother’s birthday cake.

“Yes.”

Eddie backs away. Runs a finger through his curls. Steve wonders what they might feel like. He knows what it smells like: cheap shampoo and no conditioner (something that he endeavours to change), hints of smoke and nervousness. No fear, though. Which always makes him feel a little better about what he’s doing. See? Not everyone’s afraid of him. That must mean that what he’s doing is not wholly and fully ‘bad’.

“My offer still stands. I can— if you let me help you,” Eddie says as he wets his lips, “we can figure this out. I can help you figure this out, and control this.”

(It doesn’t sound like a bad offer.

But why would you want to do anything different? Nothing bad has come of your actions.

Yet. Nothing bad has come of his actions, yet. But why would Eddie even want to help him? He hasn’t been the nicest person to him— and the last few times that Eddie had even suggested helping — the woods, the meetups, the house — Steve had scared him away with threats and teeth and blood. There is no reason for help to be given.

He does not deserve it).

“Why?” Steve says, finally. “Why would you want to help me? There’s nothing in this for you— and how would that even work? There are moments that I don’t remember, when I feel like it isn’t truly me that is there, that it is me but not, but different, like I’m floating above myself, aware and not, of everything that’s going on.”

“I could—”

“You saw it— me— on that first night.” The horns, the not-vision, unmoving teeth and shifting veins, “is that really something that you want to work with?” Am I really worth it? Steve says, but he does not, because Steven is not allowed to say things out of turn.

“Yes.” Eddie repeats back at him, paces forward in an aborted movement to move his hands somewhere close— to his face? To his shoulder? Steve does not know, but he finds himself yearning for the touch that almost-was— and awkwardly rests them on an invisible cabinet bracketing Steve’s face. “You asked for my help that time in the woods. It doesn’t matter how— we’ll figure it out, okay? Because you— you’re distraught—”

“I’m not—”

“—I can hear it in your voice and how it shakes and, fuck, Steve. When you were there, when you weren’t you, you tried so goddamn hard to tell me what was going on. So don’t sit there and tell me that you’re not allowed to change, not allowed to be helped, because you need it, and that should be enough.”

He smells like… warmth. Something that Steve wishes could be closer. He does not know why it feels like all time has stopped, or why his heart is beating faster than it should, or why his neck is too-red-hot, or why he can feel each individual spine of his hair sticking into his scalp like a porcelain doll, or why he feels as if there is an open, flowing, river that cascades down his cheeks and into the ridges of his nose, the swell of his chin.

“I can help you. You just have to let me.” Eddie rests his hands down, warm and cold through the fabric of Steve’s sweater. His thumb rubs circles into his collar bones, and Steve wonders why his eyebrows have drawn, and the air tastes like salt.

“I don’t know—” Steve clears his throat, because no Man is allowed to look unbecoming (Why? Why aren’t I allowed to— no, sir. I’m not—). “I don’t know what to do.”

“We can work our way backwards. Start from the freshest one, okay?” Eddie sits down on the chair next to Steve, turns so that he faces him. “You said that you didn’t want to… kill him, right?”

“No!” Steve lets himself sit back, relax. “No. I didn’t like Jason, but he was never— he was an asshole, but isn’t everyone? I didn’t go after him because I didn’t like him. It’s like— every time there’s something there — I saw what Hargrove had to go through at home with his dad, I saw the way that Holloway treated everyone around him — it’s always something.”

“Then what was Jason’s? What was his reason?”

“I don’t know— I’m sorry. I remember the party, and how Jason was pushing her, but it was just— I think it was just— stereotypical teenage relationship shit. Nothing special. I think. Sometimes it’ll come back to me a bit later, but I just can’t— I really didn’t mean to. I knew that I set out to do what I did to Hargrove’s dad. But Jason? I didn’t want to. Not consciously.”

Eddie sighs. “You don’t think this is like a, what’s it called?”

“Split personality? No. That’s not what’s happening here. It’s like— a passenger that’s tagging along. Sometimes it tells me things, lets me know when I’m doing something right, but it’s not like that.”

“So maybe like a possession or something?”

“I don’t know. It sounds more right, but I don’t know much about possessions. I feel like you’re more of the expert there.” Steve laughs wetly, allows himself to wipe at his cheeks.

“Yeah,” Eddie smiles. “Maybe.”

Steve tries, then, to remember. What did he do? Where did he go?

He remembers some things: the party and the sweat. He knows that he came to the party wanting to do something, to get away, to pretend, again, for a moment. Steve knows this. This is true. Things get a little foggy after that. He imagines that he met up with— no one. Because he’s not necessarily friendly with anyone outside of his small, non-partying, circle, and there’s now ay he would have approached the basketball club of his own accord.

He went to the party. He does not know if he enjoyed it.

(He does not think he did).

“I don’t think I can.”

Steve knows that at one point, with his arms resting against the table, he overheard murmurs. Words and phrases that tickled the back of his brain — things that he had heard of before, but had never heard said. Things that should not be said aloud, should be left to be thought and pushed away once realised.

“Let’s just try again, okay? Who do you remember. That might be easier than trying to figure it all out at once.”

Jason.

Chrissy.

Eddie.

He saw them. All of them. He knows this.

They don’t belong together. Steve remembers the words flowing round his head. They don’t belong together.

Eddie and Chrissy and Jason.

“…it becomes foggy after that. I just remember you and them.”

“Right, yeah, I remember Chrissy saying something about Jason and how he was— were you drinking?”

“Sober.” Steve answers.

Eddie paces back, “Maybe it has something to do with emotion? I know that Chrissy wasn’t… having a great time, to say the least. And Jason wasn’t really helping with any of that. Maybe you overheard the things that he was saying — because, trust me, they weren’t good words — and got mad, and, unintentionally, decided that he needed to ‘leave’?”

That sounds right. That feels right.

“I know that I was close to wanting to throttle him, myself. Which it— I probably shouldn’t say considering that he’s, ya know, dead.” Eddie huffs, awkward and gangly in a way that Steve wants to feel.

Jason is dead. Steve killed him. Maybe the help that Eddie is offering— the one that Steve so desperately needs, is one that he should accept.

They don’t mutter much after that — small things that are lost to the awkwardness of their now not-so-friendship-not-so-enemy relationship. Eddie steps back when the streetlights turn on automatically, glaring in the face of his windows, into his eyes. He mutters something that sounds like I should get home, and Steve agrees and mutters something about curfew, and Eddie steps away, like he was the Earth and Steve the Sun, pulling him closer and closer in such a proximity that makes Steve want to taste the air, and then Eddie is wiping his hands on his jeans, and Steve is walking him to the door, and they say goodbye at the same time, stopping because they are just out of sync, thinking the other has more to say — a pause, as if written on a stage-play — before Eddie is twirling his keys around his fingers, and Steve is saying get home safe as if he is not the only monster in Hawkins, shutting the door between them and staring and staring, because what he really wanted to say, under no influence of nervousness or distress of that voice that he is somehow complying with, was do you want to stay the night?

— — —

“How have you been?” Jonathan asks.

It’s something that Steve feels like he’s sick of hearing, of asking, of answering. He doesn’t think that anyone actually likes being asked how they’ve been, especially if they’ve actually been real shit. How are they supposed to respond, then? Actually, yeah, my whole life has been turned upside down in the last couple of months, I feel like I can taste your thoughts, and I think I might have a crush on a man. Steve doesn’t know which one Jonathan would be more surprised by. Probably the last point.

“Not bad, not bad. You?”

“Good, yeah. Nance and I have—” Jonathan scratches the back of his head, as if to realise himself, who he is talking to. “We’ve been… good. Yeah.”

Steve sighs. Of course. “You don’t have to, like, hold back on me, man. It’s just— weird not being able to talk to everyone like we’re still friends. I mean— we are, right? Still friends?”

(He has to ask. Because he still feels like there’s something that’s dividing them. Like there is a wall between them despite both of them trying — because this time, Steve is, this time he really truly wants to try — there is still something dividing them. Like the woods and the class and the money. Like the flesh that bore them and the blood that loves them. Too different, too similar, not enough of either to fix them together neatly).

“Yeah!” He answers. “Of course, it’s just—”

“Still weird?”

“Yeah, but also, I haven’t really seen much of Nancy or Barb, recently. I thought maybe they were avoiding me, or something.”

Steve thinks back to the last time he saw either of them. It wasn’t that long ago and nothing was… weird. They were acting like they usually would, talking about how they were going to have a little girls night sometime.

Maybe they were just very secretive in their planning. They always have been whenever they wanted to do something big — surprise birthday parties were their forte and, ever since the one time that they accidentally let Steve know and he accidentally ruined it, they’ve been pretty close about what they plan. Closed books.

“Maybe they’re just doing their girls night? They were planning one, recently.”

“Yeah, I’m probably just paranoid about it. I guess it’s just weird not spending a weekend together. It’s freaking me out a little, not seeing everyone together. Especially with everything that’s happening.”

Steve clears his throat. “Yeah. Freaky stuff, man.”

“I just can’t believe that nothing’s being done about it. Like, you’d think that they would be trying to catch this guy, right?”

Yeah, right.

Lights pull up beside them, and Steve stops himself from answering.

“Chief.”

“Hopper.”

“Jonathan, Steve.” He acknowledges.

If Steve could never see the Chief again he’d be all too glad. What Jonathan had said before feels too close for comfort— the police should be looking for him. Was there some way that this could be linked back to him? Well, of course Eddie still exists in all his glory, and Steve keeps telling him things but— he trusts him. Which is honestly the weirdest feeling because Eddie could just… break that trust. He could do whatever the hell he wanted. He has no obligation to Steve.

No— this is. They’re friends. No matter what anyone says. Maybe-friends. Almost-friends. It doesn’t matter that Steve feels like he wants more.

“The kids late again?”

Jonathan sighs, “Yeah, you know how they are. You say one time and they push it by half an hour.”

“I don’t even know what they do in there for that extra half-hour,” Steve sighs. “It’s the movies. Not the arcade.”

Hopper huffs air out of his nose in a semblance of a chuckle. “It’s no harm done. At least we know they’ll get home safe.”

The kids bundle out the movie theatre, almost-empty container of popcorn being pulled this way and that as they race towards the awkward pickup trio.

“I thought we agreed on 10?”

“Yeah, well, we thought we agreed on 10:30. Right guys?”

Steve turns to look at the rest of the party, all nodding their little heads as if he can’t tell that they’re lying. Beside him, Jonathan sighs and nudges Steve in the shoulder are if to so what can you do? He relents. Drops his hands from where they were crossed across his chest, lets his shoulders relax. Hopper has his hands against his hips, in a proper Dad Stance as he watches Jane with the rest of the group.

Steve doesn’t know why he’s so anal about sticking to the times — the times that were only put in place because of Steve existing in the first place — but maybe it just has to do with how he wants to please. Steve mirrors Hopper, tries to see what he does, in this little group. He’d always wondered what it would be like to have children. Would he love them like this? Would he care for them like this? He thinks he’d like that.

Dustin says something that Steve can’t make out, that has Jane swatting at his cap. Steve tries to focus on the words they say, on his own beating heart, but all he can think about is what could have been marker against her wrist.

Do they know? Do any of them know?

Steve tracks Jane with his eyes, tries to place her, tries to imagine her in that place. What was she like? Was she always there? Did they know each other? Hopper places a hand on her head and ruffles her short, curly hair. Did he know?

It’s her. She’s the one.

She can’t be. That wouldn’t make— it would make sense. He just doesn’t want it to be. He doesn’t want it to be real. He doesn’t want to image what that would mean if what he saw wasn’t just some fucking mistake.

Time resumes. He pulls out from the driveway. Steve doesn’t mention it. He pretends that he isn’t wide-eyed as he looks back to his car, as Hopper and the girl whose-name-probably-isn’t-Jane drive away.

“Get in the car, shitheads. We gotta go double-time to get you home.”

There’s a picture in his mind; this is how it will play out: Steve will drop all the kids home, with Jonathan taking Will and Mike, and Hopper taking not-Jane, and Steve taking the rest, and when he goes to drop off the last kid, he won’t be talked down to by the parents. No, instead, they’ll just give him a tight smile, one that he thinks says do better next time and he’ll give them a goodnight and they’ll shut the door, and he will do better next time, and he’ll just blame it all on what he thinks he saw.

At least, he’ll try. He doesn’t think that he’s allowed to keep promises, right now.

The kids pile in. They chatter on— some argument or another that Steve pretends to have a stake in. Why, yes, he does think the Star Wars movie with the little cute dudes is the best one. No, he doesn’t think that Superman is the best superhero. He lets the car sit for a moment, warm up just a bit, enough so that he waves to Jonathan as he pulls out of the carpark with Will, and into the road.

Secretly, he checks in on Max. How she huddles in the backseat between El and Lucas, crowded by their bodies. He hopes that she’s okay. Steve should know— that feeling of I shouldn’t mourn for this person, they were horrible in all the ways that matter fighting with but I knew them, but things have changed now aren’t easy things to deal with. No matter what age it happens, now matter how much time passes, it will always be hard.

It’s only been a few weeks since Steve killed her step-father. Neil. Only a few days since Jason. He wonders how many people will miss him. Probably a lot, if Steve had to guess. There’s a part of him that feels like he should miss Jason. He was the one to see him in his last moments, even if he can’t remember it. But every time Steve thinks of his face, of his words, they just jumble together into a gag-reel of his worst moments.

“You are so wrong!”

“How am I wrong? Supergirl would one-hundred-percent beat Wonder Woman. No competition.” Lucas says. Steve hears in his tone how he doesn’t believe it himself — or, at least, he doesn’t really care. Is just saying things for the sake of saying things. He doesn’t want the night to end. He doesn’t want to leave Max.

“Okay, yeah, Supergirl has all her flashy little powers, but she’s just some dude. Wonder Woman is Wonder Woman! Like, c’mon!” Her voice is so exasperated that she’s started to gesture and roll her eyes.

The continue like that until they reach the first house.

Lucas gets dropped off first, wide smiles and too-loud goodbyes for this time of night, Steve watches as he makes it to his front door, as he’s welcomed in by warm hands.

The kids continue the conversation, away from Supergirl vs. Wonder Woman, and towards other menial things. Do you think Mike will be on-time to first period tomorrow? Doubt it. I think I can convince Will to trade some of that homemade cake for some of my nougat. Nobody likes that but you, Dustin. We should make more friendship bracelets, have some for every season. I’d like that. And then they hug and Dustin runs up to his front door, cat meowing so loudly that even Max can hear it from down the driveway and in the car, until he is inside.

“How’re you holding up?” Steve asks, as if nobody has asked her before today.

She huffs out air from her mouth, head lolling against the back seat. “Can we just… not?”

Steve winces. “Yeah, okay. That’s fair.”

They pause — Steve watches her from the front seat, feeling all too like a Parisian taxi driver in the middle of the night chauffeuring a person who he will never see again. It’s almost peaceful.

“Everyone thinks that the monster in the woods got him.”

“Who’s ‘everyone’?” Steve knows, but he wants to hear it.

“Dustin, Mike, Will, Lucas… Jane.”

“How do you know it’s a monster?” Steve doesn’t want to focus on Neil. He knows that Max doesn’t want to, either.

“We don’t.” She says. “But they think it is.”

“What about you?”

“Hmm?”

“Do you think it’s a monster out there?”

“Maybe.” She says, head leaned back. “It can’t be all that bad if it got Neil. But, then again…”

She grimaces. Steve tries not to think of if she should have seen the body. Did she know before the news hit — or is that how she was told? A news reporter trespassing to get some ‘good content’. Surely it had only been described to her. They wouldn’t have made her see him, he reassures himself. If he thought that she would have had to see, he would have made it clean. Kept it hidden. Tried to make it look like she had just… disappeared.

“Yeah.” He says.

Max hums in agreement, eyes focussed outside, to the vast darkness of the woods.

“Do you think there’s it was a monster?”

Steve pulls into the driveway, parks. Thinks.

Does he think that he’s a monster? The easy answer is, well, yes. He’s killed people. He’s not fully human. There are parts of himself that crave the hunt that happens in the before. None of that really spells out anything but monster.

But he doesn’t want to scare her. He doesn’t want to scare any of them. Steve wants to keep them all safe, he realises. Even if they continue to think that there is a monster in the woods, even if they think that he is a monster, he wants to keep them safe.

He knows what he has to do. That wasn’t marker on Jane’s wrist. They were too-neat, too blue-faded to be sharpie. They were numbers. Which means that she knows the man, and the man knows her.

“I don’t know, Max.”

She studies his face, searching. Her eyes dart from his ears to his nose to his eyes, and she must find what she is looking for, because she is out the door with a nod, and the jangle of her keys as she lets herself in.

#don't look at me as if i'll disappear #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie #steddie big bang 2023

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badpancakelol · 5 months

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STEVE HARRINGTON IS A BAD BOY ★ ( Wham! - Bad Boys edit ♫)

#steve harrington #stranger things #st art #st edit

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badpancakelol · 5 months

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the one where steve is the monster in the woods: chapter 2

The dull fluorescent lights cast their sickly glow across the clinical cabinets — bouncing across the matte surfaces in the same way they do unpolished granite tiles: consuming all that lays before them, and barely giving anything back. They stay still on the ceilings, but it is a fickle thing, the way that they almost-flicker, no two lights the same. Circular and small, rectangular and long, acting as the sun for a curled up child who holds themselves on unsure knees, toes sticking to the tiles that they believe to be ruined. There is no upcurling of uncut, awkwardly and cheaply positioned bedroom flooring, but the curtains sag against their wayward souls; a curled child against their curséd sun, horribly still.

He doesn’t want to be here.

The man holding his hand is the same as always — with white hair that reminded him of Santa, and a warm smile that felt anything but. There was some sort of fictionality to him, as if he were trying too hard to appear comforting. Like some kind of uncanny-kindness that branded itself across his eyes, that had embedded itself into the smell of his coat. The man wants to be called a name that Steven does not want to repeat. The hand clasped around his palm is meant to make him feel better, and he doesn’t understand why it makes him feel sick. The door opens with an impressive creak, and Steven is deposited into the room with no windows and a large mirror.

The sound of shuffling behind the mirror, fingernails scraping across a table, a click of a button: “Proceed to the checklist.”

The checklist has always been there. For as long as he can remember. In his hand, on the wall, slipped under his door. He’s never completed it. Steven doesn’t want to be here, he knows that, he knows that he doesn’t want this. Knows that if he gives them what they want, then he will never be able to leave. He saw the way the other kids in the room were slowly carted off one by one — just like he was — for their weekly checkups. And Steven was cognitive enough to realise that some of them never came back. The small child with large eyes, the boy with blonde hair, the girl with the sloped nose.

Sometimes, late at night, he’ll dream of where they were taken. If they were the lucky ones that had escaped the lights and the doctors and Papa.

But, Steven thinks, if he does this, if he makes them happy, if he makes them write down the green ticks on their clipboards, he will be able to see his mother and his father, and maybe then will they want him.

— — —

It feels like everyone is fucking staring at him.

Steve knows that that isn’t true — because nobody would be able to know that what happened last night, that the body found in woods was his doing, that he had changed under the moonlight, after and during and before the Halloween party. It doesn’t stop him for being paranoid, though. Not when every turn he takes to get to his locker, to go to his classes, is met with the peering eyes just out of his vision. But Steve Harrington is not a murderer, a monster, in these peoples eyes, so there is nothing for him to worry about. None at all.

Except—

“How long d’you think Munson’s has been staring at you, Steve?” Tommy asks. And, really, Tommy H. is quite literally the last person that he wants to talk to right now.

“What?”

Carol squeezes herself between them, as if they were still pals, as if they weren’t dickheads. “I think the little freak has a crush.”

She says it in such a sing-song way that makes him think of her as a child. Teasing and pulling hair, and running to Steve about how Tammy and I kissed each other so we could practice for when we get boyfriends! Sometimes he wishes that she never changed. Or, maybe, he wishes that she grew up more.

“Well, now that little Stevie’s on the market, the queer probably thinks that he has a chance!”

Right. Nancy. The breakup. How he’s bullshit. Maybe that’s the reason that it feels like the entire student body is staring at him — trying to gauge if he’s heartbroken and sullen, or if he’s already looking for another chance with another person. The reality is, he forgot about it. Or, he would have forgotten about it if nobody mentioned it to him, because he was more worried about the dead man in the woods, and the way his skin seemed to break and stretch, and the voice inside his head that has been eerily silent since he cursed it out. He still can’t remember who he killed.

Tommy and Carol cackle to each other beside Steve, beside his locker, and a hum in the back of his brain tells him to punch them. Slam their heads into the metal of the locker. Hold Tommy’s hand so hard that the bones start to creak, and he gets that scared, wide-eyed look on his face that will inevitably end in a crushed palm, a sickeningly sweet crunch, tears and snot and blood and—

Steve raises his hand to press against the crown of his brow, pushing and pushing as if trying to invert his own skin. He lifts his other palm — maybe to push Tommy and Carol and their incessant squawking and squabbling (give in give in give in), and places it to his other eye like a man blind. He rubs harshly against his face in a way that would be seen as uncouth by anyone willing to watch, trying to rid himself of the violent-hungry feeling at the forefront of his skull. Smooth fingers meets smooth skin and the raised edges of—

A cut.

From last night, in the woods.

A cut on his cheek, from last night in the woods, that Eddie had given him.

He snaps his head around, looks over the sea of heads to find where Eddie is still looking, where he hasn’t stopped looking, at Steve’s face— no — at the cut on Steve’s cheek. But, no, it can’t be because of that, can it? Steve knows, partially, possibly, what he looked like when he was not himself. He knew that he did not look human. He knew that he had horns and no jaw and horribly inhuman proportions — he looked nothing like himself. And the cut, if you can even call it that, is barely there at all! His other skin had taken the brunt of it. So there is no possible reason for Eddie to be staring at the cut. No, he has to be staring at him because of the breakup, because of something else, something else.

(But, if someone knew where to look, it was fresh, and pink, and obvious).

“Fuck off, Tommy.” Steve says, hands by his sides, eyes glued to where Munson was standing before he retreated around the corner.

“Aww, has wittle Harrington gone soft—”

“Tommy.” Steve says, eyes turning first, head following a second later. If Tommy didn’t shut his goddamned mouth soon, Steve was going to show him how. “Fuck. Off.”

The two sneer at him as if he just pissed on their fancy carpet, and Steve may as well have. He needs to fix this. Steve needs to see if Eddie really knows — if he had figured it out, if he had told anybody about what what he thinks he saw — or if he was just as much of a gossip as the average teenager. But he can’t— Steve can’t just go up to him and say were you staring at me because you know that I was the monster in the woods, because you know that I killed that man last night? without completely, and utterly, outing himself.

The warning bell rings, the students scatter, Steve locks himself in a bathroom stall, and watches as the chunks of his breakfast swirl down the toilet.

— — —

First period passes too quickly. Sure, Steve’s never really been what you would classify as a star student, but he’s always been attentive enough that teachers haven’t faulted him for his work, and he’s been smart enough to not really have to listen in classes and still get mostly B’s. He’s never really enjoyed school, but don’t all teenagers? Isn’t that what makes him so normal and mundane, just like them? He’s never wished for class to go longer, but today, as he stands under the spray of the shower in the locker rooms in second period, he wishes that they did.

Hargrove mentions it on the basketball court. The girl who sits next to him in first period mentions it as soon as he places his bag down. He hears whispers of it through the halls, feels his hairs stick on end when the words reach his ears. And then, of course, there was everything that was going on with Munson, but one thing at a time, right?

“Did you hear, Steve?”

In their little group, Barb is the first one to bring it up during their break. He’s the last one to arrive — skin pink-kissed from the scalding hot water, hair damp and cold against the slight breeze. Nancy and Jonathan have nearly finished eating, but Barb’s food remains mostly untouched. It was one of those little quirks that she had — she said that it was always awkward when she was little and would show up to lunch late, and everyone else had finished. She would end up being the only one eating, everyone with their eyes on her, telling her to chew softer or drink quieter. So, whenever something would happen and one of them was late, they knew they could always count on Barb to join them.

It doesn’t make Steve miss, however, the hand that Nancy has placed within Jonathan’s. Their fingers are clasped together underneath the metal table, as if the piece of shitty furniture will stop Steve from seeing how deeply infatuated they are with each other. As if they hadn’t been pining for months, as if Steve didn’t feel the way that everything was slipping away from him. Nancy looks up at him from her empty plate as he takes a seat next to Barb, eyebrows furrowed, but Steve just smiles and nods and swallows his stapled heart.

“Did I hear what?” Steve asks. He already knows the answer, because it can only be one of two things: the man in the woods, or he and Nancy’s breakup. Judging from the way that Barb is looking at him with soft eyes but not pitying eyes, the way that she places her hand on the back of his and presses her thumb to his pulse in a soothing motion, he can guess which one she wants to talk about.

“They found a body of a man in the woods! It was all over the radio this morning. My dad says that it was probably just a bear or something, but my mum thinks that it might be something supernatural.”

“What, like bigfoot?” Steve snorts.

“No!” Barb says, and stabs her apple slice with her fork. “Okay, yeah, maybe. But wouldn’t that be cool? Hawkins’ own cryptid?”

“A man died, Barb. You can’t just say that it would be cool to have a Hawkins-branded-monster.” Nancy says.

“Maybe cool isn’t the right word, but it would make this town less boring, wouldn’t it? I mean, when was the last time anything even remotely news-worthy happened here?”

Jonathan turns his head to the side, and Steve can just hear the sound of his breath stilling, or the hairs on his arms standing upright and paralysed, because the last time something news-worthy had happened, it was his little brother going missing. Steve nudges Barb with his foot under the table, draws a little arrow on her skin with his finger tips towards Jonathan. He sees the moment that understanding crosses her face: the furrowing of brows, the wide eyes, the hunched shoulders. She didn’t mean any harm by the comment. Just, sometimes, words came out wrong, for her.

“Mike thinks it’s a monster.” Nancy says, her hand tightly squeezing Jonathan’s. “He said that his friend’s dad is on the police force, that they got a quick look at the body when they were still in the car.”

(Does he look different? Can they tell? He spent most of his classes picking at his fingers, looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, trying to see if he left something out. If he has a smear of blood across his hands, imbedded under his skin, his bones. Can he have one moment where someone doesn’t mention the dead man in the woods?).

“Monsters aren’t real.” Steve says, definitive, reflective. “Barb’s dad is probably right. It was probably just a bear attack.”

“Since when did we have bear attacks in Indiana?”

“Since forever ago, Jonathan.”

Jonathan snorts, and despite the weird almost-love triangle that’s going on between the three of them, it makes Steve happy to see him smile.

“Stacy in chemistry said that he worked for the paper,” Nancy says. “It could be a rumour but.”

She stops, as if that is the end of her line of thinking. Steve can see the cogs turning in her brain, listing all of the people from her and Jonathan’s internship that it could be. The janitors, the paper-boys, her boss, the board, the other interns, the secretary, front desk.

“Hey,” Jonathan says, leg lightly kicking the bottom of Steve’s shoes. “What’s his deal?”

Don’t be Eddie, don’t be Eddie, don’t be Eddie, don’t be Eddie. Steve turns around, slowly, as if he can fight it off, as if he can turn forever until the bell rings and they cart themselves back to the rest of their classes. It’s only a quick look that he spares, but it is enough to know — enough to confirm — that it is still Eddie who is peering at him.

He knows, he knows, he knows. He was there in the woods that night, he had seen, he had given, the cut on his face. There’s no way that he hasn’t figured it out yet, there’s no way that he isn’t going to confront Steve about it. But what can he prove? There is nothing to prove. There is no way that he can say that Steve was in the woods, because everybody knows, everybody else had seen him leave the party, and the lights were on in his house, and he had collected his car before anyone saw that it was still at Tina’s. There is nothing to prove, there is nothing that can be proven, so why does he still feel breathless whenever he spots Eddie’s eyes piercing though him?

“I don’t know. He’s been doing that all day though. Just… staring at me.”

“You haven’t done anything to piss him off?” “Barb! You know Steve doesn’t do that anymore.” “It was a valid question!”

“It’s alright, Nance.” Steve sighs. “But, no. I barely even talk to the guy.”

Barb snorts. “Who knows, maybe he thinks you’re the one who killed that man in the woods.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Wouldn’t that be funny.”

— — —

“If you don’t tell me how the fuck to deal with Munson right now everything is going to be fucked!”

Steve’s tried a couple methods, already, but the voice inside his head hasn’t responded to any of them. Not when he threatened to turn himself in, not when he pressed his palms close to his fireplace, not when he held his breath under the pool for as long as he could before breathing in as much water as his lungs could hold. It didn’t seem like the voice even cared about being caught, or for the state that his fleshy vessel was in. No, the voice didn’t care about Steve, didn’t care about what happened to him.

The voice hadn’t made itself known, but, god, the noise that he didn’t realise that he could hear, now, did. The humming of his pool, the sound of the wind grating across his windows, the neighbours coughing into their handkerchiefs, the sound of the car starting up down the street. He had found that the only thing that made the sound go away, truly, was sleeping. It made listening something to be hated, and if there was one thing Steve was going to mourn, it was going to be listening to loud music. He couldn’t turn it up as loud as it could possibly get to drown out his own thoughts, his own very normal and mundane thoughts, and so, when he tried, when he played the radio station that his parents liked, the sounds of smooth trumpet turned strident, pushing against his brain as if he were a lemon to be grated into a too-fancy cocktail, Steve turned to his surroundings.

Around him, he can see the mess in its full glory. It’s going to be horrible to clean up, and if he were anyone else, if anyone cared enough to show up at his house, they would be horrified to learn that all of his mother’s fine china and pretty painted vases had been smashed into bits imbedded in the thick strands of carpet — blood stains across the wooden floors and the kitchen tiles in hopes of awakening a voice within him. But it is late enough that he expects no visitors. Nobody to knock on his door, or climb up to his window to save him from his own torment, ring his doorbell, ask for his love, his help, his body.

The shrill sound of his phone ringing is enough to cause him to jump — sidestep into the pile of shards that are scattered around him like some offering to an unholy being.

“Can you just shut the fuck up!”

He walks to the phone with purpose, not caring for the mess of himself that he leaves behind, and he grabs the phone hard enough for the plastic to creak underneath his grip, ready to slam it back down on the receiver before he hears the sound of a woman — the calming sound of Joyce.

“Hi! Hello, Joyce, how are you? Is everything okay?” He says, code-switching his voice, his face, as if she has eyes that can peer through the wires and the electricity. If she truly did, she’d probably be more concerned with the mess than Steve’s slightly pissed off tone of voice.

“Hi, hun. I know I’m calling late, and this is super late notice and you normally want to know a week in advance if you’re gonna babysit one of the kids, but the kids planned a last-minute thing at the Wheeler’s, and Will said he didn’t know how long they were staying until they went home, and I’m working late tonight, and only god knows where Jonathan went. And I just— you know, with everything that happened last time Will went home by himself late at night, I just,” Joyce pauses in her rambling. “I know you, Steve. I trust you with them.”

(You don’t know me. Because if you did, there would be no way that you would let me near them. No way that you would be okay with these hands that have hurt, this voice that has lied, this face that has been nothing but fake).

“Just tell Will to call me whenever they need to be picked up. He still remembers my number, right?”

“Off by heart since sixth grade,” Joyce laughs. “Really, thank you, Steve. I can pay you double because of the late notice—”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s barely any work, anyway. I may as well just drop them all off while I’m there, it’s not like Hawkins is exactly a big town.”

“Thank you, Steve, seriously. I owe you one — whatever you need, whenever you need it. I’m only a call away.” Joyce says, and Steve can feel the warmth of her through the phone.

Maybe he really is going crazy; hearing things within ranges that he shouldn’t be able to, hearing a voice within his head, thinking that everyone is staring at him, being able to picture exactly how Joyce looks, how she stands, how the warmth of her skin feels. Christ. At the rate he’s going, he’s gonna find out that he has a lust for blood, and can turn people into the same monster that plagues him. Or maybe he turns at every full moon or every Halloween. Maybe he’s unkillable — something disgusting and immortal in the way that he always wished he was.

Was this his fault? For not giving in? For pretending that everything was normal, that he was normal? No, focus. One at a time. Wait for Will to call. Pick up the kids. Drop them home. Figure everything out.

It doesn’t take long for Will to call, no. Barely even ten minutes after Joyce did, after Steve had ran his palms under the sink and tied his shoes, the phone shrieked from its place near the junction between the kitchen and the living room. His timid voice over the line is tired and happy and scared all at once — not exactly instilling a sense of hope within Steve. This is meant to be an easy pickup and drop-off. There is nothing to go wrong. There is nothing to worry about. He knows these kids like they know him, like Joyce knows him. He can do this.

When he goes to pick them up, when he is directed to the basement by Karen Wheeler, Steve decidedly does not look towards the stairs leading to Nancy’s room. He doesn’t try to listen in, really! But it’s just that— she’s talking so loud. Even without his new-founded hearing, he’s sure that you’d be able to hear her from downstairs: on the phone, with Barb, in person with Jonathan. Jonathan, who Joyce doesn’t know the location of, who was meant to be Will’s ride.

Well, Steve guesses, it makes sense with how he’s been acting recently — trying to give his brother space, trying not to smother him.

(He does not think of how it hurts him. He does not focus on how his three friends, the only people he would truly call friends, are all together without him. It does not matter that they are not physically there. Somehow, it hurts more, to think of how they aren’t. How they are using their time apart to spend it together, and how that time had never included him.

How long had they been doing this? Was this always how it was? When Nancy said she had to study, and Jonathan said he had a novel to finish, and Barb said she had a dinner with relatives, were they all just lying to him? Did they ever say anything truthful? Did they ever want him, like him, love him, the way that he did to them?

No. No, he will not think about it. He will think of Jonathan. He will think of Jonathan and how it answers the question of where he is, and he will not think of Barb or Nancy or what this means for any of them).

It’s not just Nancy that is loud, either. The kids — Mike and Lucas and Dustin and Will and Max and Jane — are whispering behind the closed door of the basement. With each step it feels as if his heartbeat is drawing in the sounds of their voices — too quiet for anyone else, too loud for him. He can hear the sound bounce off the small round table, muffled by their shoulders pressed together in a circle. They’re speaking in not-so-hushed tones, but the door of the basement is heavy, and Steve isn’t the best to judge the loudness of things, anymore. Was it a normal tone? Was it too quiet, secretive? Was it perfect and normal?

“That’s a horrible idea.”

“You don’t even believe that it’s a monster, so why would it be a horrible idea, huh?”

“Well, if it turns out to be a monster, I don’t want to be the one to get eaten, Mike!”

No.

“I do not think it would be good to go out there.”

“Why? You said that there was a monster! If Hawkins has something like that, we need to be the ones to find it and—”

“Dude, if it can do what El is saying, there’s no way we could capture it.”

“Dustin, Lucas is right. The police surrounded the place pretty quickly, and you know how incompetent the police force—” A shuffle, silence. “Most of the police force is. They’re trying to hide the body.”

“I don’t think any of this is a good idea.”

“We should listen to Will.”

“No! We should go to the scene of the body and figure this out before something else happens!”

They know.

“Why would you say that? You son of a bitch I’m just gonna be thinking of a monster eating me all night—”

“Monsters aren’t even real—”

“We don’t know that it was a monster—”

“It had to be a monster—”

“Couldn’t be human—”

“A real monster—“

How do they know a monster killed the man in the woods? How do they know where he was killed? He doesn’t want to be hunted. Steven doesn’t want to be a monster. He needs to— they can’t go on with this. Steven’ll tell Joyce. Or Mrs Wheeler. Or Dustin’s mum. Anyone, everyone. They can’t know, they can’t get involved. They can’t know about him. He’s not a monster. He’s not. He swears.

“Hey! Time to go, guys!”

Steve pretends not to see the way they jump, or how the two closest to the door — Max and Lucas — bolt up from their seats at the table to shield the rest of the party from Steve’s eyes as they shuffle papers into their respective bags. Instead, he leans against the doorframe, smiles at them as comfortingly as he can.

“Who else am I carting home with me?” Steve asks, head slightly turned away from the chaos of the table. “And don’t even try to dodge it this time, Max. You live the furthest away and it’s the middle of the night.”

“Can you drop me off at Dustin’s?” Lucas asks. “I’m staying over.”

“And your parents know that?”

He rolls his eyes. “Yes, mum.”

Steve reaches over to ruffle his hair in the way that they pretend to hate. “Hey, you know I’m responsible for you for the short time you’re in my care.”

Jane tilts her head up at Steve, and there is that feeling again, the feeling that he ignores when he looks back at her. She can’t know. There’s no way that she knows.

“If you are here, my dad should be outside.”

Steve nods, says something offhandedly about how he’ll be waiting there for them. Jane and Max are the newest additions to the group, but they’ve grown on his as quickly as mold. He still doesn’t know that much about them, just knows that Lucas has a wicked crush on Max, that Mike is so fond of Jane that he doesn’t see the way Will looks at him. He doesn’t like to meddle in their love lives, and so he doesn’t. But if he gives them a few pointers, tells them to listen, to let them speak, to not treat them as if they are porcelain, well. He’ll just deny it.

So when he goes outside to wait by his car, he feels his heart drop through his stomach at the sight of the police cruiser that’s stationed by the curb. I left the party early because I was upset. I drove away. I stayed in my house all night and cried and slept and then went to school. I heard of the death through the radio. I have never been that deep into the woods.

“Harrington!”

I left the party early because Nancy broke up with me. I didn’t drink so I drove home. I slept through the night and heard on the radio the announcement of the death. I have never been that deep into the woods.

“Officer.” Steve says, hands by his sides, head lowered.

“You’re Joyce’s babysitter, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

The officer grunts at the formal address. “Call me Hopper.”

The front door opens behind him. He can feel the light bleed warmth into his skin. Steve needs to leave. He needs the kids to hurry the fuck up and get to the goddamned car so he can get out of the fucking police officer’s presence.

“Better get those kids home safe, Harrington. What with everything’s that’s happening in the woods.” Hopper puts his hands on his hips, looks over Steve’s head to the children slowly saying their goodbyes. “First time someone’s been murdered in Hawkins since, well. Since before either of us were born.”

“Yes, sir.”

Hopper claps him on the shoulder, a too-toothy smile on his lips, before Jane has ran up to his vehicle, and the door is open, and they are gone.

— — —

He needs to clean up the mess that is in his living room and dining room, scattered across the hallway and kitchen. Dropping off the kids was easy enough, with the only downside being the bickering about who gets to decide the music (“It’s my car, so I get to decide. End of story.”). He didn’t miss the way that they spoke in hushed tones, or the way that Max rolled her eyes at the idea of a monster being real. Steve just… chose to ignore it. For now. There’s nothing that can connect the monster in the woods to himself. Nothing except— no. He won’t mention it.

Slamming the door of his car shut, he tries to catalogue how much damage he did to his house. He already cleaned up the blood before, just so that it wouldn’t stain so easily. But the whole shitshow of vases and the china? Yeah, that was gonna take a while.

Steve turns on the lights methodically — his father always told him to keep the ones outside on, to keep some of the living rooms lights lit so that people thought someone was home, so that they weren’t robbed. It didn’t matter that Hawkins was a small town, and that nobody would dare cross his father, his strong palm, his stronger team of lawyers. It only mattered that it was them versus us he would say. You need to make friends with the right people, foster beneficial connections. Sometimes, Steve wondered what his father would think about his smoke breaks with Eddie Munson, being almost-friends with Jonathan Byers and actual-friends Barbara Holland, or his babysitting job that really was just hanging out with some tweens.

He slides his shoes off, not caring to untie them. It’ll be a problem for him in the morning when he runs late for school. Steve throws his keys to the bowl at the kitchen counter. He makes to move to the living room, to assess the mess of his mother’s belongings, to grab a broom, to sweep it all away—

Oh.

Eddie.

“You were the thing in the woods.” He says. “I know you killed that man.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I picked the lock.” Eddie fiddles with something in his pocket. “Don’t dodge the question.”

Steve stands at the edges of the dining room. He breathes in deep and closes his eyes for just second, lets his shoulders drop from where they’ve been hunched to his ears. This situation — he needs to deescalate it. He needs to know if there’s anyone else here, if Eddie told anyone else what he saw in the woods, had accused Steve to anyone else within his circle. Eddie sits at the dining room table, the horribly plain and circular dark wood making his skin seem deathly pale. His feet are placed firmly on the ground, leg jumping and bumping the chain connected to his jeans. He must have only started fidgeting now. The sound is too loud for Steve to have missed it.

He places one foot in front of the other, his eyes swinging across the room to see if anything has changed — to see what has been moved. “Monster? Eddie, there’s no such thing as monsters—”

“No, don’t even fucking try that!” Eddie stands up from his seat, points a finger towards Steve. Nothing has been moved. The vase pieces stay shattered on the ground, beneath Eddie’s boots. “Don’t come any closer — I saw the cut on your cheek. It’s in the exact same spot as the monster’s.”

Steve raises his hands up, palms facing Eddie as if to say I have nothing that could possibly hurt you. “That’s ridiculous. This? This little thing? It was just a shaving accident, Eddie. Nothing more.”

“You’re one of the only people that left the party early.” Eddie says. “There’s no one else it could be.”

Steve smiles, takes another step forward. “Eddie, buddy. You must be misremembering — I didn’t leave the party early. I took Nancy home—”

“Nancy who was ushered out by Jonathan Byers? Don’t fucking deny it, Harrington. I saw you leave.”

He drops his hands.

This approach isn’t working. He’s just too stubborn. If only Eddie could just take him for his word, Steve wouldn’t have to do anything to him. Wouldn’t have to hurt him, or make him disappear. He never meant to hurt anyone, but if Eddie stays alive, if he knows everything that happened because of his stupid fucking stroll through the woods, then he needs to be gone. It’s a shame, really. Steve quite liked their shared smoke breaks. But some things just aren’t meant to be.

No.

No? Steve thinks. You do not get to decide what I do with my life. You do not get to come and leave whenever you please. You weren’t there when I needed you, so you don’t get to have a fucking say in this.

He is weak. He is scared.

The voice moves his head, like hands pressing softly against his cheeks, and points him towards Eddie’s hands. Eddie’s hands that are still in his jacket pockets, that he can hear shaking, that he can hear pinching at threads and pulling at the inner lining— destroying and tearing apart in his fear.

Make him terrified.

Steve tilts his head up, looks down at Eddie’s form down the curve of his nose. He knows that they’re the same height, but when Steve stands just so, and when Eddie is hunched in on himself, it is as if they aren’t even in the same atmosphere. Steve places his hands into his jacket pockets, he leans back on his legs, calm and comforting and at ease. And then, when Eddie’s legs have stopped moving, and his chain has stopped jangling, he smiles.

“What do you want, Eddie — to turn me in?” Steve laughs, flicks a stray hair out of his vision. “Because I don’t think that the police department will believe any of what you’re saying right now. You saw me leave the party early, and somehow that connects me to the murder in the woods?”

Eddie stands still, and Steve feels the voice revel in the smell of his anxiety. He takes a few steps forward, calculated and perfectly pressing his socked feet into the shards of broken china and useless flower vases.

“I’m flattered, really. Sure, I’m athletic, but do you really think that a freshly turned eighteen year old would be able to overpower an adult man?” Steve smiles, takes a breath as if to contemplate the answer. “No. They’re not going to believe that I can turn into a monster, they’re not going to believe a single word you say.”

He takes another step.

“Now, on the other hand.” Another. “You broke into my home, picked the lock so that you could get in.”

Steve sees the exact moment he becomes aware of what he’s implying. Sees the way that the words fail him in his throat, and how his left hand stills in its destruction of fabric. Eddie stands frozen as Steve leans into his space, places himself so close and intimate, before he continues.

“Maybe you wanted to steal something from one of these rich houses, and you saw through the trick of leaving the lights on, thought nobody’s home. Smashed a couple vases and expensive china trying to find where the cash was stored. And then, when I walked in, when you heard the car door opening, when you saw me come through the front door,” Steve arches blunt nails up towards the scabbing cut on his cheek, presses deep and harsh and scratches it away, leading to the corner of his eye. “You picked up your knife, the one that you have in your pocket, right now, and slashed me across the face.”

The blood from the opened wound rolls down in crimson beads. An unknown desire builds up in his gut to taste it, and, really, his instincts, the voice, haven’t fully lead him astray, yet. With dainty fingers, Steve presses the pad of his thumb into the warmth of the blood, brings it to his lips. He watches with fascination as Eddie tracks the movement, as his eyes, as his body stay still, and blessedly silent.

The voice within him hums — content. I’m doing the right thing, this is for the best, aren’t you proud?

Keep going. You’re doing so well. Keep going. Make him scared. Warp his actions. Warp his words. You’re doing so well.

“Who do you think they’ll believe?” Steve smiles, tilts his head. He leans away, turns towards the stairs, feels the blood pool to the surface of the thin cut, refilling what once was wiped away. “What was your plan, anyway? Since you knew what I was, already.”

Eddie stays still in his place, standing amongst the wreckage that is his dining room. Steve doesn’t hear him move.

“You said you needed help.”

And— well.

Steve doesn’t know what to make of that.

It doesn’t seem like the voice does, either, because it does not respond in the giddy glee that it did when Eddie was quiet and pliant and still. No, instead, it feels as if it has gone, again. As if it has decided that this interaction is done, and Steve does not need the guidance, that it has gotten off this ride, only to reappear when the voice decides that a change in the actions, in Steve’s actions, must be created.

He doesn’t understand. He thought he did good.

“You can let yourself out.” Steve says, instead. He makes his way up the stairs, the task of clearing the shards of his tantrum abandoned. “I’m sure you already know how.”

— — —

For a while, it felt like he was going to get away with it. Threatening Eddie, leaving the party early, the murder. A week had passed since the man in the woods’ untimely death, and nothing had, truly, changed. Sure, he and Eddie didn’t have their customary I-Don’t-Want-To-Go-To-Gym smoke breaks, and there was something weird going on within his friend group, and Nancy and Jonathan were more distant than usual, but, hey, the price one has to pay for not being found a murderer and-slash-or monster, right? There’s logical answers to all these changes, of course. Nancy and Jonathan are distant because of their new founded puppy-love. Barb is absent because of the sense of being a third wheel with them. Eddie refuses to speak to him because of… everything that happened.

(Or, that is what Steve thought before the current morning. But we can let him dream, for a bit, can’t we?).

He’s forgone the radio today, and every morning after Halloween. Steve can’t stand the sound of jazz or opera — that wonderful radio station of his parents’ sounding utterly horrific to his ears, reminding him of the man that he cannot properly remember. There is a part of him that wishes he could just picture his face — maybe where he killed the man, what he actually did. He had tried pleading with the voice again, to no avail. Really, what did he think he was doing? It didn’t respond to him when he first tried to ask for help, why would it indulge his desires now?

The tea is not new. One spoonful of sugar, a dash of milk, and a teabag that has been steeped for just the right amount to not be too strong. His father used to call him a sissy for liking tea — something about it being a girl’s drink, but Steven had been too young to truely understand, too much on his mind. The thermos is one that Nancy had gifted him, and Steve wonders if he should still be using it. Is there some unwritten taboo about what he can and cannot use now that they’re broken up? Is he meant to mourn every item that they shared, that he gifted to her, that she gifted to him? It is only a thermos. The item itself is nothing special — thick, double layered glass that kept the heat in or the cold out. It is not special, and there are hundreds and thousands of them that exist, so why does he feel like he should’t be using it? Like he’s crossing some line that nobody had articulated.

Maybe this is why he had been so startled, once he untied and slipped on his shoes, started up his car, by the voice of the reporter over his car radio.

“The man who was found dead in the woods has been confirmed to be Hawkins Post’s Tom Holloway. With his family left devastated, the police are urging people to come forward…”

Holloway. Hawkins Post. The man that he had killed — the man that had been murdered to the point of unrecognition — was Nancy and Jonathan’s boss. He’s never met the man. He doesn’t even know what he actually looks like. If Steve tried hard enough, he might be able to make out the vague features; greying hair, a square jaw, tired sunken eyes. He let the breeze come in through the open car door, and he tried to remember anything about him. Any mention of his name by his now-ex-girlfriend and her now-boyfriend. Tom Holloway. Tom Holloway. Hawkins Post. What did he do? Why was he so familiar?

It was like it was on the tip of his tongue. Something important that he wouldn’t forget normally. He knows that Nancy talked about him. No, that’s not right. He knows that Nancy bitched about him. Yes — this is how he knows him. Not by face, barely by name. He knows that he wasn’t a good person. He was an asshole.

And maybe that made him feel a little bit better about this— outcome. So to speak. The voice had not given him any indication of why Nancy’s boss was the one it targeted, but if Steve is remembering correctly, if the words that Nancy said were true, then there’s a part of Steve that says he deserved it. Or, no, maybe deserving to be hunted wasn’t the best way to put it, but there could have been worse people to die that night. Worse people for his anger, for him, to be directed to.

Hunted? Since when did he remember that the man was hunted?

(Pitiful. In their last moments, when they are fearing for their life, humans become so pitiful. Where is all the anger and vitriol that was held before? Was it ever real? Was it always just a façade? Did this strength even exist in its truest form, or was it always just playing pretend, as if this adult is a child that yearns for nurture?

“Please, please, don’t— I have— what the fuck do you— please—!”

The man shuffles backwards in the mud of the ground. Warm satisfaction curls its tail around the bony limbs of this body as tears track down the man’s face. Isn’t this what he wanted? Isn’t this how he treated everyone else? As if they were lesser than him. As if he was something to be afraid of. How many lives did he need to destroy, how many people did he disregard because of his own ego, before he realised that he was nothing but a pathetic worm? He’ll give the man something to be afraid of. Not the figurative monster that these humans refer to. Something real.

Steve’s body takes a hunkering step forwards, legs seemingly creaking at the movement. It has been so long since these bones have been out, since these bones have been full. A hand, a claw, reaches forwards to the withering form of the worm in front of him. It cries out pleas that are all for naught. The decision has been made. He has seen Steve’s body. He cannot live any longer. Bowing down, he leans in close — sees the vague outline in horrific non-colours of the body of the worm, the face of the worm and his snotty complexion — and breathes deep. He smells impeccable. The worm smells of fear.

He lifts his hand above the worm’s head, sees the way he looks at them reflecting the moonlight, hears his voice run hoarse in pleading and begging and crying and screaming and dying and dying and dying and dying and—)

“Shit!”

The glass thermos shatters in his palms, across the dash of his car. Steve watches in sick fascination as long claws recede from his fingertips, as the skin recollects its natural non-ashy colour, leaving a mess of red seeping into his cuffs. If the man was Tom Holloway, and he was Nancy’s boss, then the connection was there. And Eddie already knew about Steve.

— — —

The best thing he can do on such short notice is to feign interest. Sink the bloody cuffs into the cold water of his ensuite bathroom, shuck the jumper and pull another on. This was just a normal day. A normal day of high school, and not doing homework, and detesting the people he was meant to detest — jocks and nerds and people who he will not mention by name, right now. People do not look at him when he walks down the halls, and he would have thought that it would be a comfort: being invisible, today. Nobody looks his way. No teachers, no students. He stalks down the halls as if he is any other human student who likes their boring classes, who had heard the news on the radio about dead Tom Holloway of Hawkins Post.

They’re already waiting by his locker. Nancy, Jonathan, Barb. It makes his walk stop, shoes making that god-awful skidding noise against the tiles of the hall. But it doesn’t make them turn, too caught up in their conversation — pressed palms against shoulder blades, tight eyebrows, drawn grimaces and no teeth. He can smell their despair, the feeling of their outrage, and, distinctly, something sharper, or warmer, softer, something that does not belong in this conglomerate of downtrodden faces.

“Nance,” Steve starts, because he knows that if he said nothing, that if he tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, they would look at him as if he were an other. He needs to feign interest. Be interested in her turmoil, mourning a man that she had vehemently hated, had wished death upon before. Things change when words become real. When they gain power. “I heard what happened, with your boss. How’re you feeling?”

“How am I feeling? I feel as if someone I know just died! Like, yes, he was a horrible person, but I didn’t think that he’d just— that he would be the person— he didn’t deserve to die!”

Well, Steve thinks. To each their own.

“I just,” Nancy sighs, delicately places a thin hand atop her brow, barley touching her forehead. “I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel.”

Steve watches as Jonathan moves his hand up from where it lived inside his pocket, watches as it is placed against Nancy’s shoulder. He locks eyes with Barb for a moment, sees the way her eyes were following it, too. For a split second, he’s almost confronted with the idea that they were both kind of pining for their friends who were in relationships with each other. But Steve no longer felt towards Nancy what he did before, no longer felt how Jonathan did. At least, that’s what he tries to tell himself. If there’s one thing that he’s held on since the days where he would see his father, it’s to fake it till you make it.

The hand movement, though, is so much warmer than what he imagined it could be. Steve tries to pinpoint how he really, truly, feels about their relationship, about how fast she had moved on, how easy it was for her to move on. Was he blind in his human body, too? He saw the signs in the later stages, yes, when he was truly sure that they were crumbling into dust, but were they always there? The second that they had first kissed? How about when he first asked her out?

And then— there was Barb. He turns to watch her again, sees the way that her touch is only friendly, with no other motive there, and he wonders. Steve knows Barb. He’s known her for so long, now, would consider her a close friend. Had she always liked Nancy? Did she like Nancy before Steve did, before Jonathan did? There’s a sick part of him that hopes that she will find that happiness within Nancy, within someone else, leave all of them floundering. It seems like, out of all of them, she’d probably be the perfect match.

“Thanks,” Jonathan says, “For driving Will back home. I know it was super late notice, and I would have if I could, but—”

“Things got in the way.” Steve finishes. Tries not to spit the words. “It’s no big problem, really. What with all this happening, I can’t imagine how Will felt. Especially since it all happened close to where you live, near your part of the woods.”

Jonathan shifts a little at that, angles his body closer to Nancy, making their group even more tight-knit against the rest of the students. “It’s technically near your house, too.”

He didn’t really think of it like that. Steve tilts his head, tries to picture the woods separating them in his head, like a map. It’s weird to think that the only thing dividing them is the dense trees, thicket, and money bracket. What makes Steve’s house so attractive to buyers is exactly what makes Jonathan’s so poor. The woods so close by are so scary and off-putting. Oh I love how the woods give you privacy! I hate the sounds of the howling wind through the trees. The crickets chirping in the woods is so calming!

Steve thinks that he could have been good friends with Jonathan, if he had the chance. He doesn’t think that he will, now, with the way that Nancy looks at him, the way that Jonathan looks at her. It feels like there’s a hole within his chest — something that’s always been there, that he has only just noticed now. Something that had started off so small an unnoticeable, something that he had ignored until it festered and grew and devoured parts of himself that he was only just learning to love. He will never be able to be friends with them. Not in the ways that he wishes he could, not in the ways that he wants.

“The principal said that they were gonna hold a meeting in the gym,” Barb said. “Who’s gonna bet that it’s about this?”

“There’s nothing else that it could be.” Jonathan says. “Nothing as important.”

“Hopefully they don’t say anything about you guys.” Steve says. Tries to quell his beating heart. What will the principal say? Will they say anything about him? Will he see Eddie?

“I hope so, too.” Nancy says, as Jonathan removes his hand, shuffling around their group until they’re headed in the right direction. “I know I usually say we should go in early to get good seats, but…”

She doesn’t finish her sentence, but Steve doesn’t think she has to. He nods, watches above the heads of the students, catching the straggling eyes and fingers pointing in their direction. It’s no coincidence that their group has formed a semi-circle around Nancy — she was already part or the Hawkins high editorial newspaper committee, people already knew about her internship at the Hawkins Post. They didn’t know about Jonathan, too quiet, too reserved, or maybe they just didn’t care as much. All they heard was the words dead man and Hawkins Post and connected them to sweetheart Nancy Wheeler, trying to draw as many connections as they possibly could.

(He should’t feel happy about this. No. No, he should not. But these people are so preoccupied with trying to pin it on Nancy, trying to see how she feels, trying to gage how she’s responding, what she’s said about the dead man, what she feels about the dead man, where she was when he was killed, spiralling and tunnelling until they can only see her that, for once, for once in his miserable god-forsaken and humanely boring life, Steve Harrington is invisible to their eyes).

The warning bell rings, and their semi-circle stays strong. The students shuffle pass them, slowly surely, trying to glimpse and peer and leer and hear the little sniffles that Nancy does not make. Steve watches as she glares back at them through the cracks in their armour. Watches as she snarls in a way that makes her look even more deadly.

The announcement — the thing that starts the beginning of the end, the beginning of change, and revelations, and things that Steve would have never imagined — is made in the gym. Everyone is ordered to gather there, teachers ushering students who were left loitering in the halls, students who were even more late than their group was. When they had first arrived, the four of them, semi-circle disbanded and stood, back straight, faces denying anything that could be placed upon them, they had gotten stares. Or, Nancy had. It was just as Steve had noticed before: as if everyone and everything else was an afterthought, student body latching their hooks into the newest piece of flesh laid bare on the cutting table.

They quickly made their way to the only places they could see available, squishing themselves between the bodies of their peers, trying to blend into the background, not be spotted by the eyes of the principal, as he coughed and sputtered down by the microphone and the stand that held papers. He shuffled nervously, and Steve thought he had very right to be. If this announcement was about Tom Holloway, the dead man in the woods, accusations or warning and anything in-between, he would have to draft up a speech in the mere minutes before everyone got here, organised everyone to be here.

“I’m sure,” the principal says, and his voice hushes everyone, the noise and chatter a dull hum at the back of Steve’s head, “That you’ve all heard about Tom Holloway. I wish the Holloway family well for this tragedy that they are dealing with, and usher everyone to respond to their peers respectfully.”

He says the word as if it is rubber — rolling it around in his mouth, chewing it up in his tongue, before spitting it out. The faces of the people around Steve turn to look at their group, again, in the moment that the principal stops speaking, shuffling papers that held no meaning. He meets them head on, watches through the corner of his eye the way that Nancy faces forward, the way that she doesn’t want to face them, and does it for her. He tilts his head up, looks at them down his nose, eyes narrowed, teeth bared, and watches the way that they turn back to their measly, pathetic little groups, heartbeats racing, neck burning, hair sticking up on end. When Nancy taps her fingers against his thigh in thanks, he drops his gaze back to the front of the stage.

The front of the stage which held the principal, the secretaries, rows and rows of teachers in plastic chairs. And Chief of Police, Hopper.

“I was informed by the police that we will have a strict curfew in place, for those under the age of twenty-one.” The outrage is delectable and palpable, and Steve wishes that he could focus on it — their turmoil. But he can’t, he can’t, not over the way that Hopper seems to be scanning the faces of everyone there, not over the way that Hopper, the same man who saw him before, is here, is here, in a place where Steve had felt a semblance of safety, in a place where he was not meant to be.

“Before any of you ask,” the principal says, and Steve tracks the way that he looks to Hopper for confirmation, the beats of silence before Hopper looks away from the crowd to give him his blessing, “This is about Tom Holloway, and the circumstances around his death. They don’t know what—”

Hopper coughs, and the students murmur, and it is too loud, too hot, too much.

“Who did it, yet, and the police just want you all to be as safe as possible.”

He can feel eyes on him. Steve can feel one set of eyes, no more than one, and he knows who it is, because Hopper has not scanned across his section of the gym, yet, his section of the students, and there is only one person that would have any reason to look at him like that, would have any reason to look at him at all. Eddie. Steve doesn’t turn. He doesn’t want to see him. He wants to see him. He can almost picture how he would look — frizzed hair, wild eyes, hands clasped into the fabric of his dark-wash jeans. He wants to see him, he wants to turn around, but what will he be met with if he does? Steve knows where he is not wanted. He knows that Eddie does not truly want to look him in the face, not after everything, not after finding out what he knows.

When the assembly is over, announcement made, Hopper leaving as quickly as he can, Steve tries to hurry their group. Barb just looks at him with a question in her brows, but Nancy and Jonathan seem to have the same idea, and when they reach the double doors, teachers still sat, students milling about and trying to waste time before going to lunch, Steve catches a glimpse of Eddie. Catches a glimpse of how the basketball club is all huddled together like ants on a dead bird, staring at him. At Eddie.

“We’ll meet you there!” Barb says, hushed whisper, loud enough to be heard over the other students. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Nancy and Barb are ducking into the bathroom together — from Nancy’s hunched shoulders, to the uptick of her eyebrow. She just needed somewhere that she wouldn’t be stared at. Even if that had to be in a bathroom cubicle guarded by Barb.

It leaves Steve with Jonathan, walking to the cafeteria to secure their spots. The hole inside of Steve that has grown ten times in the time that he’s left it alone aches at the unsure, warm, smile that Jonathan gives him. As if he is unsure what they should do, as if there is no way for them to be friends. They wait by the doors as the students pass, as the herd is herded into the cafeteria, into their extra classes, or music practices that take up their precious de-stressing time, and just… don’t talk.

Steve would love to. He loves to talk, most of the time. If you got him talking about something that he liked, something that he legitimately liked, or tricked himself into liking, he found it hard to stop. Maybe that’s what people were talking about, that passion that he felt like he lacked. Though, he usually stayed quiet. Listened, rather than spoke. He liked to watch the way that people said things, the ways that their lips would curl around certain words, the way their eyes would flutter, or their noses would scrunch. The human body was such a fascinating thing, and he would often find himself imitating the things that he had learned in the mirror — a snarl here, a sparkle in the eye there, looking up through his eyelashes every now and then. It was good practice, and it was oh-so-fascinating seeing how his face muscles moved in response to his thoughts.

When the students have passed, and Steve makes his way to go to the cafeteria, to save them those precious seats, but before the girls have come back out of the bathroom, Jonathan places a tender palm on his shoulder, much like he did with Nancy. Only, this time, Steve can feel the shake in it. The tremor that runs from his ring finger to his heart, left elbow weedy and thin underneath his jacket.

“I’m…” He starts, eyes darting around as if there were someone watching. Steve knows that there isn’t. Would know if someone was. “I’m glad that he’s dead.”

He rushes out the words like they’re toxic, trying to get them away from him. They tumble and they shatter across the floor because— oh? Isn’t this an interesting revelation? Had what he done so carelessly, had the murder Steve committed in the woods create some type of good in the world? Did people benefit from a man dying?

“Yeah, I’d rather him just be,” Jonathan takes his hand back, pushes the shoulder back and away, hair swishing with the movement. “Away, rather than dead. But the way he treated people? The way he treated Nancy?”

Steve smiles. This is good news. He did something good. The net-good of the world has gone up because of that pitiful worm dying in the dirt. What he did was justified. What he did— what he did without meaning to— was the right choice. It wouldn’t happen again, no. The stress was enough to tear his pretty hair out, and he had worked so hard on it, so, no, it wouldn’t happen again. He would go back to being good little Steve Harrington, with his good little friend group, and the only person to know the fucked-up truth would be Eddie Munson, and, let’s face it, who in the fresh hell is going to believe him? Everything was going to be alright. Everything would be just, again. Because that man deserved to die.

“No, yeah, I totally get it, man.” Steve says, hides the glee in his veins. “Just, maybe hold off telling Nance about that? She seems a little torn up after everything.”

Jonathan nods, paces the space across the doors. Steve pretends not to see the way that he looks at Steve and then to the bathroom that Nancy and Barb are still in, revelling in their alone and girl time.

“What happened?” Jonathan asks. “Between us? I know, stupid question, with you and Nance and then me and Nance, but. One day I felt like we were making progress to being friends, and then it felt like it kinda just—”

“Imploded? Disappeared?”

“Yeah. Exactly that.”

Steve sighs, presses his shoulder into the wall and leans as hard as he can, tries to imbed the dirty tiles into his flesh. There is a part of him — the part of him that is not really him — that wants to make Jonathan hurt.

To tell him about how there could be a universe where they are friends, but that all bridges have been burned, and the hole in his body is only rotting from the inside out, that there is no way for them to be, ever be, something that even resembles friendly, despite the way that they like to talk to each other. The smiles are empty, the words are empty. Steve knows that Jonathan only directed his outburst about the dead man towards him because he has nobody to tell — because he is the first person he saw.

“I know you two are like… almost-official,” Steve says. Pretends that it doesn’t hurt, just a little bit. “You don’t need my permission to do anything, really. You’re your own people, and there’s nothing I can do to stop you, but just, please. Give me some time. Everything’s just, you know, a little weird, now. I don’t really think there’s any proper way to deal with what’s going on in our group.”

“Okay,” Jonathan says. Nods his head, rubs his cuff along the underside of his nose. “Okay.”

— — —

It turns out that the assembly is like a blessing in disguise. The I-Don’t-Want-To-Go-To-Gym smoke breaks that Steve had thought were destroyed — little bits of friendship floating through the air — by the revelation of… him, were not actually that. Destroyed. By the time that lunch finishes (an affair mostly steeped in silence, as Nancy and Jonathan huddled together on the side of the bench that she and Steve used to occupy, shielding each other from the eyes of the public. Barb had mostly been sympathetic — warm palm reaching over the cracks in the metal tables to warm Nancy’s fingertips, Jonathan’s elbow. And Steve had tried to give them that same comfort, tried to give them any of what she could, because a part of him, no matter how much he tried to fake it, or pretended to be normal and human, had always cared for them in some real way. He doesn’t think the kindness in his eyes was read as such, but if he believes it to be true, he can trick himself into thinking that he is good), and an English class goes by, it’s time for gym. Usually it’s the class that he enjoys the most, whether he be in the mood to actually participate in the sport, or to skip, with Eddie.

But— he had thought the smoke breaks would dissolve. Destroyed, despondent, and dead due to Steve, himself, and what he was.

He had decided to skip, this time. The moment that he walked even in the direction of the gymnasium, he had already garnered the attention of one Billy Hargrove, buzzing around his shoulders, asking questions that he knew Steve wouldn’t answer. How’s Nancy holding up? Does she need someone’s shoulder to cry on? Too bad that couldn’t be you. Do you know if she’s still single? I heard that she wanted that guy dead. What a bitch. When Steve had turned to give him nothing more than a blank eyed stare, Hargrove had just huffed and slammed his shoulder into Steve’s. The moment that he had started stalking off into the direction of the gym, Steve had turned for the little gap between the two buildings, a place which they would call theirs.

And, of course, he was there. Because this wasn’t just Steve’s spot anymore, this was a shared spot with shared history, between the two of them. Steve’s just glad that Eddie didn’t try to run away at the sight of him.

“Room for one more?”

Eddie sighs, and it is beautiful thing. The way that his shoulders dip, and he brings his knees up to his chest, how he blows air to try and move the heavy curtain of his fringe out of the way of his eyes. Steve’s been telling him to trim it for forever now, but Eddie said that there was nobody in Hawkins that could truly take care of curly hair. That the last time he went in for a routine trim, they had cut his hair so lopsided that Wayne had to take clippers to his scalp, in an attempt to salvage what was left.

(“At least you looked metal,” Steve laughs. “It suited you.”

“You don’t even know what that word means.” Eddie snorts, double-breathes his way through the cigarette. “And are you saying that you don’t like this look? My luscious curls? My mane?”

Steve smiles. It isn’t the first time that they’ve had this conversation. Circling back to things that they have branded as Safe. Things that they can bring up when Steve is too quiet to be human, when Eddie is too happy to be real. Things that they have branded as Theirs. Safe and Comforting and Just in ways that other pieces of conversation weren’t. Steve didn’t know what made it such, what made it so easy. He wished he did so that every conversation could be Safe.

He learnt what conversations, what topics were Wrong, with Eddie. Talking about Nancy, their fathers, classes. Things that existed outside of themselves in a capacity that was too true, and too much, and not enough all at once. They did not talk about their parents, and they did not talk about how their holidays were — they did not talk about all the things that Steve would talk about to Barb and Nancy (and sometimes even Jonathan).

This was different. There was something different between them. In their conversations that could circle between the same topics, with the same answers. Because they both knew, every time Eddie’s hair was brought up, or Steve’s old-new shoes were addressed, they would run in the same circles, play the same parts, as if it were a new conversation, as if it were a rehearsed part of a play that was just filler, that told them everything and nothing about themselves.

How was your day? Steve would say, and Eddie would reply with: good, I’m just tired, every time, no matter how he truly felt. And then Eddie would laugh about something, and regale Steve with a formulaic response that he wanted to test out on his group, and Steve would listen, because if there is one thing he is good at, it’s listening, and would laugh and cry and smile in the right places. This was Safe. This was Comforting.

“I think they’ve all suited you,” Steve says, “Made you look pretty.”

He deviates from the path, from what is Safe, and is rewarded with a shy smile, and calloused fingers knocking against his in the distance between them. What does this make them? Are they still Safe? Is this still Comfort?).

“Always, Harrington.” Eddie spits, shuffles closer to the wall.

There’s a part of him that doesn’t want to mention it. He knows that he will have to, if he wants to fall back into something Safe. But he doesn’t want to. It’s the first time that he’s actually felt, almost, afraid of doing something. Of the repercussion of his actions. It did not matter that the man was dead. He could not change that. He could not stop that. Steve could have stopped Eddie finding out — been more secretive, taken a different approach, done anything and everything differently. This— the distance— was his fault, and his alone.

“The basketball club has been pissy-er than usual.” Eddie says, turns to lean his head back and up against the brick wall. “I’m used to the comments about being a freak, about being queer, or whatever. I can deal with that. Embrace it, you know? But with this guy murdered in the woods, with a body in the woods, found in a way that is almost demonic?”

Eddie laughs again, and lets Steve fill in the gaps. He doesn’t even look at him, turn to acknowledge him more than giving him the space to be able to breathe. Steve knows what it means — what his carless murder has equated to: Eddie being targeted by thick-headed jocks who think that anything non-normative equal demon-summoning-demonic-murdering-virgin-sacrificing psycho. Steve knows that the location doesn’t help. Knows that the woods bracket the trailer park in the same way it does Steve and Jonathan’s houses.

“I never wanted that to happen, Eddie. I didn’t want to pin it on anyone — I never wanted to kill someone.”

“Well, you did. You turned into a fucking monster and then you killed a guy in the woods, and now people are starting to think that me your ex-girlfriend are the ones that fucking mauled him. So tough luck, Steve. Because while you live in your ivory tower, having all the fun in the world, not having to deal with any of the consequences that you made, everyone else does!”

“I didn’t want to kill him—”

“Tell that to the dead man!” Eddie says, and he turns to look at Steve in the eyes for a moment, and what he finds must be truly ugly, because he turns away the second they connect. “Or his family! Did you even notice that Heather isn’t here today? That she’s probably mourning the loss of her dad? Jesus Christ, Harrington, do you ever stop to think? Ever?”

He misses the closeness in which they used to sit, under the guise of lighting each other’s cigarettes. he wishes the things that were Safe and Comforting. He doesn’t want this. He never wanted this. Steve had only come to terms with the dead man — the man that he had no control over — and now all of that was being thrown back in his face, confronting and ugly and horrible.

“What can I do to fix it?” Steven can follow instructions. Steven has always been good at following instructions.

“Well,” Eddie huffs, flicks the butt of the cigarette to the ground. Steven watches as the ash durns to dirt to nothing. “I don’t suppose you know how to resurrect the dead, so maybe calling off your posse, your friends, would be a good start? Stop people from spreading rumours about people who you know have very much not killed someone?”

The basketball club. The rumours. It would be easy. It could be so easy. All he had to do, all he had to do was let it out, was let it sing, let it have one moment, just a small one, just so small that it wouldn’t even be a blip in the history of the universe, so small, Steven, it wouldn’t hurt, so small, so pitiful, it wouldn’t hurt, it wouldn’t hurt it wouldn’t hurt it wouldn’t hurt it wouldn’t hurt it wouldn’t hurt—

“They’re not my friends.”

Eddie snarls at that, kicks his legs out, and makes to stand — return back to a class that he hated, with people that are spreading rumours about him, because he doesn’t want to be here, he doesn’t want to be near Steven, he doesn’t want him.

“Could have fooled me.”

— — —

The curfew makes Joyce enlist Steve into the rotations of taking the kids home from their regular meetups. If he was properly paying attention and not replaying a certain conversation over and over again in his head, he would have heard something along the lines of we don’t want to compromise their growing social skills because of this! and something else of the nature of they feel safer together. But he was preoccupied, knowing only when, where, and who to pick up and drop off.

When he arrives at the Wheeler’s to pick them up, he doesn’t even try to eavesdrop this time — he does not want to hear it. He does not want to hear what they might be saying about him. And yet, it is as if nobody is listening, because he still makes it out, in the seconds before he’s opening the door, the way that they say next victim and let’s find out and solve this mystery and monster monster monster as if they were invincible, and this was just some fucked up version of Scooby-Doo!

Steve wishes it was. He really does. Maybe someone can come up to him and rip away his fleshy mask, reveal who he is meant to be. Would that be so horrible? Would all that remains be a monster?

No one. Steve thinks, as he opens his mouth to mention curfew to the kids. Nobody else is going to die.

“Curfew, kiddos! Chop-chop. We gotta go double-time on this if we all want to make it back before Hopper comes knocking at your door.” He watches the way that they scatter, that the mixed words of oh shit! and why didn’t you keep an eye on the time and hurry up! fill the room. This is their Safe. Their Comforting.

“Could you drive me home?” Max asks, quick and simple, like ripping out a tooth or a splinter. “I forgot to ask Billy, and I don’t know if he’ll be home to pick up the phone.”

Steve doesn’t ask where he would be at a time like this — when everyone their age has to be in their homes in less than hour. Knowing Billy, Mr. Bad Boy Extraordinaire, he’s probably at some girl’s house, ready to jump out her window and into his car, straight back home. Or maybe he’s just taken his car and driven straight the fuck out of Hawkins. No Hawkins equals no curfew.

“Sure, Red. You’ll just be the last one.”

She mutters something about not caring when she gets home, just as long as it’s before curfew, as the car starts. All the boys live close enough together on a strip that doesn’t have many turns or tribulations, and Steve locks the car, walks them to their front door and waits patiently for their parents to come round and say hello, welcome, thank you so much Steve! Waiting with the kids earns him a handshake from Dustin, a roll of the eyes from Lucas, and a small smile that said wonders from Will.

(And a hug from Joyce. But Steve thinks she would give him a hug no matter what he did— which in itself is a baffling thought. The act of giving without expecting something in return).

The drop-offs are routine. They are normal. They are how they should be, if not a little bit earlier, a little bit more frenzied than normal. The boys wave back three times as he starts the car, as Max toys with the radio, as she mumbles out directions and an address, as if Steve hadn’t had it memorised since the first time he had to drop her off.

The curfew, the assembly is not a blessing in disguise.

It already revealed itself with the conversation with Eddie— smoke break retained, friendship on thin ice.

It chooses to reveal itself, now.

To ruin everything. Set off a chain of events that cannot just be discarded and cast aside, misremembered and justified as an accident, this time. He does not know this, but, in the future, if he looked back on everything, he would be able to see where things started to go wrong.

When they arrive at Max’s home, at 4819 Cherry Lane, Steve turns off the car. Watches Max’s eyes. The way that they’re glued to the thin curtains. Honey warmth spills out of them, shadows of the people of the house being projected like some sick puppet show.

He hears the fighting. He hears the sound of a voice too loud, too sharp, too old to be Billy’s. Too masculine to be Mrs Hargrove. He hears the telltale noise of shouting, of screaming. Steve turns to Max, because sometimes he doesn’t know if the things he hears he is meant to be able to, as a normal perfect human being, as a non-monster, if this is something that she can clearly hear too—

And then, the sound, the shape, the silhouette of a body being flung into a window.

“You gonna be okay, going in there?” Steve asks, eyes mirroring Max’s, glued to the lights of the house. He shouldn’t let Max go in there. He should take her back to his house. He should tell Hopper. He needs to check on Billy tomorrow. And he knew it all too well — Steve knew all about fathers like that, fathers who would get too loud, who could never be wrong, do no wrong, even when they, even whey they would say things, even when they would do things—

“I have to, don’t I?” Max whispers. She is quiet in a way that she never is— that she should never be. “Curfew.”

This is my fault this is my fault this is my fault this is my fault this is my fault this is my fault—

“Please don’t tell Hopper. He won’t— he’s nearly 18. He doesn’t want to tell the cops because—”

“I know.” Steve says. And he does he does he does, in a way he wishes he didn’t. And he knows he knows he knows, that nothing will happen, that nobody will say anything, that nobody will feel Safe in that household, until that man is gone.

#steve harrinton #steddie big bang 2023 #steddie #eddie munson #stranger things #Don't Look at Me as if I'll Disappear

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badpancakelol · 6 months

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steve is a George Michael fan and u know it

#steve harrington #st art #stranger things

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badpancakelol · 6 months

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the one where steve harrington is the monster in the woods

Hawkins has never been one of those towns that you could point to on the map unless you were looking for it. Swaddled between the wide expanse of nothingness on either side, the town is less than a town, really. If anything, and Steve had figured this out when he was only young, only tall enough to slide the hard-covered dictionary from its place on the bookshelf into his little, grubby hands, the town was better suited to one of its other synonyms — a village, maybe. It was a little archaic, yes, young Steven had noticed this, but wasn’t their town always a little bit backwards?

It was a well known fact that nobody had tried to dispute for years, that Hawkins wasn’t interesting until you turned of age. A long time ago, before Steven’s parents were born, before Loch Nora had been a place for two-to-three story houses, deep pools, and house parties, that age had been eighteen. Steven had been regaled of stories, through thick books and musty paper, about how you were meant to drink, and fuck, and drive, smoke, party, undress, and press soft hands into softer flesh — feel the pleasures of a lesser man — destroy yourself from within.

Then, there was the accident. And the age had been heightened to twenty-one.

What if it happens again? They’re only children, really, why are we letting them do this? They shall be condemned. Young Steven had read the words on the paper, had squinted his eyes at the accounts of the courts in swirling text that had been ingrained into him from a young age. His script was loopy and small, quaint on the pieces of paper that his father had handed to him. Young men can write in its proper form, his father had said. And he had always said that, called Steve a young man — as if he was never truly anything but a being who was fully formed and grown, from before his first breath.

It had always rubbed him the wrong way. The way that they would leave him as if he were of age, days to weeks to months, alone and alone and alone. The walls of the house used to have this ugly wallpaper, patterned with golds and blues and whites. It was so terribly ugly, Steven had thought, with paintings of oranges and their yellowing leaves, and the stripes of sky-tones that reminded him of summer. His nanny would dust the walls as if he had dirtied them, tutting with that warmth within her skin, that made him want to be swallowed whole. She would dance around the house like a film, humming in that soft voice, skirts making dainty circles as she twirled and cooked.

When they had gone through house renovation number one, the wallpaper was the first thing to go. Ugly, unprofessional, childish, beach-y. Steven didn’t know why he missed it. Why he cried at the sight of the workers peeling and scraping the essence of summer from his house. But as soon as he had been spotted within the dust and the rot, he had been pulled from the construction site, ushered away to the small townhouse that they were staying in.

But, focus, we are not talking about young Steven, or his father, or his house. We are talking about Hawkins. We are talking about how boring, and mundane, and how utterly isolated, and normal, Hawkins is. The people there are ordinary, if not a little bit grating on the psyche if you asked Steve, but wasn’t that the magic of a small town in the middle of nowhere? Everyone knows everybody, every in and every out. Things that they didn’t even tell them in the first place. The best kept secrets are the ones that everyone knows but nobody acknowledges.

If Steve had to give an example of this, it would easily be Eddie Munson. Everybody knew what he dealt. Everybody knew, in a roundabout way, that he didn’t live with his parents, that he could be found in the trailer park, that he was not the most popular of bodies within the town, the village. He should have, could have, easily been busted so many times — dealing to his fellow peers in high school — but why wasn’t he? Everyone was aware. Deeply, intrinsically, as if it were one of the little pieces of knowledge that you were bestowed upon at birth — like how Steve had been branded a young man before he had even the chance to prove himself a boy — people had always just known.

And, the more he thinks about it, the more it seems a little bit silly. And then a little bit smart. And then a little more smart. Munson doesn’t deal anything harder than weed. Or, if he did, he was smart enough to not let it become knowledge in the public domain known as high school gossip. So, the cops know, and the parents know, and the students know, and those that are not buying from him turn a blind eye, because he has not been the cause of an accident, something like the accident, and, in turn, he has been branded as safe. By parents, by buyers, by the gods-damned law enforcement.

(This doesn’t mean that he is liked. Steve has seen, had used to almost-enjoy and participate, in the weird hierarchy pissing contest that came with being proclaimed a teenager, social, King. He had seen the way that people would purposefully shove their shoulders into Munson’s unknowing ones, or the way that people would yank on his long curls.

A small part of Steve thought that it was the same attitude that preteen boys would employ to get a girl’s attention. He had voiced these thoughts to his then-friend, Tommy H. and had been punched — a little too rough — between his shoulder blades in “friendly” warning).

Steve is no exception to the boringness of Hawkins. If he were to describe himself, he might find that he was a little odd, but not enough that he was a pariah, or an anomaly that needed to be taken away and put down. He played his part, just like Munson played his.

He lived in the upper-class part of town — something that used to be a point of pride, but has now turned into one of contention — had average grades, and an average sized friend group (if you didn’t count the kids, of course). He played basketball, no longer the captain after Hargrove had trampled into the village, and was on the swim team. Steve Harrington used to be a party boy, indulging himself on those pleasures that his age should not have allowed him to: alcohol, weed, sex. But these were normal teenaged things, and could be forgiven by parents by the bat of his eyelashes, or a disarmingly apologetic smile. He goes to school, picks up his girlfriend (who he is in love with, he thinks, but who maybe doesn’t love him), has alright attendance, and is loved by those that know him, and those that don’t. This is who he wants to be, and this is who he will continue to portray himself as.

Steve Harrington is normal, and Hawkins, Indiana, is boring, and it will stay that way, if Steve has any say in it.

And so, as any normal teenager does on a Wednesday morning, Steve listens to the radio on his counter as he finishes his piece of buttered toast, and he gets into his car. The maroon colour compliments his skin and his closet in a way that makes him a little more happy than he’d like to admit, but he’s allowed to have this little pleasure, isn’t he? Today, he’s chosen that one deep red-brown sweater that Nancy swears makes him look soft.

When she had first said it, it had made him happy. To believe that he had the opportunity to be soft again — because a man was all hard edges and empty words, and corporate collars, shoving people into lockers for the hell of it, and shotgunning beers because it seemed so easy, or, maybe, that was just his father. What his father had made a man to be.

(There’s a little part of him that wears the sweater because he’s afraid that Nancy is slipping away. He doesn’t know when it happened — nothing at all had happened over the Christmas break, no arguments, or disagreements, fights, spats, whatever they could be branded. But Steve had seen the way that she cast longing glances in the direction of Jonathan Byers, and the way that she was cancelling dates without telling him. He had tried to ask her what was wrong, to try and atone for some sin that he had not even been aware he was committing. And she had just smiled without teeth, and said he was seeing things, and for a moment it felt like he had never known her at all.

So, there is a little part of Steve that wears the sweater because he knows that Nancy likes how it looks on him, as a last ditch effort to try and, he doesn’t know— seduce her into loving him again. To peacock around as subtly as he can, to say please look at me like how you look at him, please look at me as if you love me. There is something there, Steve realises in a bout of self-awareness, about how time is cyclical, and he is stuck making the same mistakes that his mother had fallen victim to).

As he pulls into the Wheeler driveway, Steve picks at a loose thread near his sweater cuff. Nancy is already waiting by the steps of her house, adorned in that turtleneck-jumper combo that she loves to pull out as the weather starts to cool down. Steve reaches over the centre console to open the door before she gets to it — a wide smile on her face as she settles in, and Steve reverses back onto the road.

“Nice sweater,” she huffs, fingers dainty and sure as they hover over his shoulder.

For a while there, it was if they had created their own language together — a call and response type thing that he had learned to love. Certain phrases were meant to be met with other phrases and words in kind, and certain items, objects, events, could trigger the language to be spoken. It was like playing a little game, trying to figure out the intricacies of their maybe-love.

“Nice sweater,” he retorts, takes one hand off the wheel to hold the fraying edges of her own clothing, tugging at the threads that could so easily be weaved with his.

Steve replies in the language they have adorned and forged together, looking down to the warm colours that she wears, the way that their styles have assimilated to be similar to each others, and isn’t that meant to be what love is? To not know where one ends and the other begins? To be tangled in so deep that you are not yourself anymore, that the pieces you had given had been taken in and fostered until something completely foreign had been born? There is a part of him that wishes that he still had parts of himself left to call his own, that Steve hadn’t went all in on this one moment as a teenager, not of age. But what is he supposed to know? He is just young, and boring, and horribly mundane.

When they reach their destination, Nancy mumbles something about having to find her friend — Barbara. They had been close since the day they were born, she had said, and Steve longed for that kind of connection. To be able to call someone your other half. For a little while, he thought that he would be able to call Tommy H. and Carol that — his thirds, really. But then he had wisened up to the way that they were treating people, the way that they had looked to him for some fucked up kind of approval, as if he was the only thing in-between them and popularity.

(He knows that there is a version of those two that had actually been his friends. A part of them that he had loved and been loved, in turn. But it is so much easier, Steve thinks, if he only thought of them as the sum of things they did wrong).

As he watches Nancy walk towards the school building, Steve crumples up the college letter that he had asked her to look over. There’s no point in him trying, really. His future had been set out for him. Steve Harrington was set to work for his father’s company from the same time he was branded as a young man. There was no leaving Hawkins, or living in a share house, or studying late nights, in the cards for him.

Instead of wallowing in his grief (and, no, he would not admit to it if anyone had asked), Steve gets out of his car, tracing Nancy’s long-left steps to the front of the school. This is his last year of high school — then he will need to get a part-time job, as per his future plan, and then slave away in his corporate body of a corporate shell, until the day he dies in a corporate coffin. Wonderful, right? At least he’s eighteen, now.

The halls of the school are the same as always. A little too loud for Steve’s taste, filled with people trying to impress their peers in ways that they will see as embarrassing in a couple years. Steve nods at those that meet his eye, smile polite enough to still be considered a little bit of a heartthrob, despite his fall from kingship last year. He revels a little in the way that people seem to like him, even if it is just the idea of him that enthrals them. Steve reaches his locker, smells the heavy and crazed scent of one—

“Stevie!”

Eddie Munson.

“Munson.” Steve greets, not unkindly.

“Still on last names, I see. Oh, how you wound me!” Eddie says, puts his hands up to his heart as is he had been shot. “I missed you yesterday at gym.”

They are not friends. Not to Steve’s standards, no, and definitely not to Eddie’s. For all intents and purposes, they have nothing in common. Eddie is owned by the public domain of high school as much as Steve’s front of a King is — that is to say that Eddie is an open book, whereas Steve is closed shut. Munson isn’t afraid too blast his music as loud as he can as he screams through the parking lot, trying to drown out the similar tones coming from Hargrove’s car, just to piss him off. His shirt is branded with something that parents whisper as satanic, but really only alludes to the Dungeons and Dragons club he runs through the school.

They have a few of the same classes together, what with Eddie retrying his last year of high school after he majorly, and I mean, majorly, fucked up my exams, Harrington. They are not friends, but they know of each other. Steve is nice to him, cordial, really, and Eddie, despite the way that he acts in the cafeteria, is kind back. Occasionally, they’ll share a smoke when lunch gets too loud, or when Steve doesn’t want to deal with everything that happens in gym (no, he is not avoiding Tommy or Billy, he swears).

“Just felt a little sick, I guess.” Steve says, taking out his English text and absolutely not looking at where Nancy and Barbara and Jonathan have all huddled together at the end of the hallway lined with lockers. They are a unit that seems to flow together, and whenever all four of them go somewhere, Steve feels as if he is a broken fourth wheel — as if there is a final part of the puzzle that is decidedly not him.

“Ah,” Eddie says, a little smile on his face as he leans against the wall, “Trouble in paradise?”

Steve closes his locker with probably a little more force than necessary, because they are not friends, and Steve doesn’t really need other people to know about his love life, thank you every much.

“Something like that,” Steve says, smile tight, and eyes sharp in a way that says step back, think for a second.

And so Eddie does — hands raised and placating, because he knows that he has crossed their imaginary boundaries and imaginary lines that neither of them had fleshed out or set, themselves. The warning bell rings, and Steve mumbles a see you later, and Eddie hums in confirmation, before they are lost to the sea of students that look nothing, and exactly, like them.

— — —

One of the newer additions to the basketball club, Jason Carver, is a little bit annoying, if Steve was being complete honest. He knew that each of the students were meatheads in their own unique ways, what with their rallying members including the ranks of Billy Hargrove (AKA: Grade A Asshole) and Tommy Hagan (self explanatory), but there’s something about this guy that kinda rubs him the wrong way. Maybe it was his wannabe-Tom-Cruise style smile, or the fact that the girl he was dating — a sweet girl called Chrissy — looked so close to his own face. Steve knows that if he cared enough to actually look into it, he would recall something in the ways of Freud. For now, though, he relents that maybe they might be second cousins. And, well, it’s Hawkins. It wouldn’t be exactly out of the norm for their history.

“He’s just such a shithead, Nance,” Steve says, stretching his arms out over the lunchroom table, head pressed lightly against the metal to avoid imprints.

“More or less than Holloway?” She asks, hand rubbing almost-soothing circles into the textured patter of his knit sweater.

At this, he sits up. “Oh, god, did your boss do something again?”

“When has he ever not done something?” Jonathan huffs, chin resting on his palm.

See, unlike Steve, they had aspirations. In their spare time, Nancy and Jonathan would intern at the local newspaper. Sure, it was mostly running to get coffees, and saying yes, sir to everything that their superiors said, but it was still something right?

Barb speaks, her cheeks rosy in the way Steve knows they get when Nancy hasn’t told her something important. “Again? Nance, I really think you need to tell your mum about how he’s treating you, because it’s not—”

“—Okay, yes I know, Barb.” Nancy sighs. “But how would that look on me? I’m meant to be able to prove myself, not just run to my parents when one slight thing goes wrong!”

“But it’s not just one thing,” Steve says, as he mimics her previous movement, his thumb with the small scar catching in the frayed edges of her wool. “Just last week you were telling me about how you overheard him making those comments about— about people in our year, people in his daughter’s year. That’s not okay—”

“You think I don’t know that, Steve?” She hissed. “I am very much aware that his attitudes towards teenage girls is disgusting, but what the hell am I meant to do?”

Her pointed glare is directed at him, and it feels as if she isn’t even looking at Steve. It is as if she is looking through him, pointing her pointy edges in the way of the soft flesh that he has bore for her. It hurts, just a little bit, but isn’t love meant to?

“Nance—” Jonathan starts.

“No. I don’t want to talk about this.” She huffs, turns her gaze away from Steve’s eyes. He doesn’t miss the way that she melts, softens, under the concerned face of Jonathan. “No, we’re gonna talk about the upcoming Halloween party.”

Barb nods her head, just slightly, but with the way that she looks to Steve, as if to ask him please help, he knows that the two will stay up late on the phone, or meetup after Nancy and Jonathan have left, to try and figure out a way to help Nancy, to make sure that she’s actually alright. The piece of paper that Nancy slides across their humble cafeteria space is adorned in bright oranges and deep blacks — a crudely drawn ghost printed on the middle of the page, with a stupid pun being uttered from underneath its sheet-costume.

“I don’t know about this,” Barb says, eyes hesitant behind large glasses. “I’m not really a party gal.”

Jonathan scratches at the back of his neck, smile apologetic in the same way that Steve would use to wish away his past to doting parents. “Yeah, I’m not really one to get sheet-faced, Nance. Plus, I was gonna take my brother trick or treating tonight.”

“You have to, or you want to?” Nancy asks. And she has that twinkle in her eye that says I have set my mind to something, and now you are in my way. It used to be something that she would wholly and only direct to Steve, so seeing it pointed towards Jonathan of all people? Well. He’s gonna bottle up those feelings and maybe (never) go over how that makes him feel.

“Want to.” Jonathan says, a small smile on his face. “But I’m sure Steve’ll say yes, right?”

Steve finds that all the eyes of his friends are on him. And the answer should be easy, really, because is there even any other option for him? A good boyfriend would accompany his good girlfriend to her first party. He would do so willingly and lovingly. So why does he feel so hesitant? As if he had seen this film before, was aware of the things that saying yes would hold.

“Come on, Steve,” Nancy says. “Don’t you want to be stupid teenagers for one more night?”

“Of course.” He answers, places a kiss on her cheek.

“And if Jonathan is taking Will, then that means you’re not babysitting tonight, right? So you’ll come with me to the party?”

It doesn’t take much more convincing than that (externally, at least. Internally, Steve thinks of every possibly outcome and opportunity that he is creating. He was meant to babysit the kids with Jonathan tonight. After Will had been missing, and Steve had learnt about Jane, and the newcomer, Max, had joined, the parents all wanted their kids to be watched over. And who better to do that than Steve Harrington, Hawkins’ Golden Boy? But, no, if Jonathan was hinting at Steve being available, even though he knew that they were looking after the kids together, then surely he wanted Steve to go? Surely this was him hinting that he would be okay with the kids?).

This line of thinking, the questioning, the answering, within his own head, is what leads him to let Nancy choose the costumes, and kiss him on his head, and have him drive to the party. Costumes of characters from that movie that Nancy had liked — Risky Business — are adorned in true Hawkins fashion, ie: every person willing to have a social presence in the student body had raided their parents closets to find something so unlike their own clothes, that it could feasibly be recognised as “dressing up”.

The party is not unlike the ones that Steve was used to. The bodies in the house are all tightly packed together, and there is an indistinguishable scent of alcohol and sweat and sex. It lingers in the air as if it is its job, sticking to every surface it can. Steve is sure that as soon as he leaves this party, it will be imbedded in his hair, stuck to his flesh like a thin film to be washed away with copious amounts of soap and warm water. Slowly, surely, delicately.

The jacket that he is wearing is thick and dark against his shoulders — sweat building up near his shoulder blades with even the most minute amount of dancing that he’s been doing. There are shouts and chants outside about a new Keg King, but Steve couldn’t care less. That popularity contest and dick measuring bullshit was as beneath him as the dirt lacing his sneakers. The only thing that mattered right now was having fun. Trying to have fun.

“Nance,” Steve tries, “Nancy—”

“No!” She says, dips her cup into the punch. “I said that I wanted to be a stupid teenager, so I’m doing everything that a stupid teenager would do, okay? Aren’t I allowed to just have this?”

Steve places a hand between them on the counter, taps his fingers across it. Because he gets it, really, he does. He gets wanting to lash out and drink and party and do all the bad-child things that weren’t in line with their perfectly set out futures. Nancy Wheeler, straight A student and intern at the local newspaper would not drink. Nancy Wheeler, liked well enough to be seen as cute and quiet, not enough to be seen as popular or rowdy. Nancy Wheeler, who would go to university, and study hard, and get a well paying job, or maybe relent to the asks of Hawkins, and live in a little cul-de-sac, and have a nuclear fucking family.

Steve gets it. He gets wanting to lash out.

“Okay,” He relents. “Just— be careful, okay? Take it slow, and I’ll stay completely sober. I’ll try and look out for you.”

She just nods her head as she fills her cup (again? Had she not just went to go fill it?), bringing the white rim of the red plastic to her lips. Nancy tilts her head back in glee, an easy smile slipping over her mouth at the no doubt fruity taste of the punch attempting to mask the copious amounts of alcohol that were poured into the bowl. Steve’s had a bad feeling about this since before the day even started.

And that bad feeling doesn’t alleviate, not even a little, when he hears the door open, when he turns, when he catches a glimpse of the next person to walk through the open door.

Jonathan.

The bad feeling isn’t because of the weirdness that’s going on between his friend and his girlfriend, no. Not because he isn’t wearing a costume. Not because he’s showing up late. The bad feeling rises tenfold, and Steve finds himself taking quick and long strides across the floor, dodging people, using his height to shoulder passed others, because Jonathan was meant to be looking after the kids.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Steve asks, eyes a little too wide, breath a little too short. “I thought you were supervising them?”

“Will said he didn’t want me to,” Jonathan says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. He shrugs his shoulders as if to say what can you do? As if a single conversation can shirk the month of planning that went into tonight, for the kids. The planning that Steve had so readily skirted, himself, at the lone voice of Nancy, and the promising eyes of Jonathan.

“You know why we were meant to go—”

“—And I think my mum’s being a bit paranoid. Nothing has happened in a year, Steve. What happened with Will, him going missing, it was just,” Jonathan sighs, pushes his shoulders back in that way he always does, “An anomaly. Something weird. Nothing ever happens in Hawkins, right? So what’s one night? Can’t he just have that?”

Aren’t I allowed this? Can’t he have that? It’s as if they are the same conversations, asking for the same things, asking for different things, that he cannot give. As if the gift is something simple, and not something that might, that will, change everything. But, well. Steve doesn’t know that. Not yet.

“Shit, okay.” Steve huffs, mind rattling with endless possibilities of what could happen to the kids, what they could get up to, themselves, when left unattended and uncontactable in the middle of the night, in the middle of Hawkins.

“Steve, nothing is going to happen. Just enjoy tonight. With Nance.” Jonathan says, smile fading as the words exit his mouth.

Shit. Nancy.

“I’ll be right back!” Steve calls, turning as he says it, words being swallowed by the crowd. Nancy, Nancy, Nancy. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to spot her in the sea of costumes? What with how she’s wearing all white, and Halloween usually calls for, well, something a little more dark, a little more scary.

Steve pushes his way through, arms trying to break through pressed bodies. Were there this many people before? Was it always so hot? He pushes the sunglasses up to his hair, not caring for the look, anymore.

“Harrington!” Tommy calls, his freckles more prominent from his flushed face: drunk. “We’ve got a new Keg King!”

Steve turns away from the leers and the cheers of the basketball team, turns away from Hargrove who seems to be trying to make his way over. Steve really doesn’t have the time to be dealing with him right now — right now, all he wants to do is find Nancy. He told her that he’d take care of her, and then at the first sign of something happening, of another person appearing, of Jonathan, he had just abandoned her to the crowd, to these people that she didn’t really know, to these people that had more experience with parties than her, to these people that she—

“You okay there, Stevie?” Eddie asks, hand cold against Steve’s knuckles. “You look like you’re—”

“—Not now, Munson. Sorry, I’m just—” Steve tries to look over his hair, the frizz of the curls seemingly played up more than how they naturally are. “Have you seen Nancy?”

Eddie’s face seems to furrow in thought, and the cool hand that was so expertly pressed against Steve’s knuckles are removed to his own belt loops. “I think I passed her a couple minutes ago in the kitchen. Are you sure you’re okay—”

“Thank you!” Steve says, turning to his left, where he thinks he can see the counter, where he sees the dim yellow light that indicated change. Where hardwood floors and plush carpets stained with red punch turned to tile, and where he sees the back of Nancy’s figure.

“Jesus, Nance, I’m sorry that I left you like that. I just saw Jonathan and got worried about the kids— hey.”

“Mmmmrr?” Nancy mumbles, hand held tight against her cup, wrist limply flicking in and out of the punch bowl, uselessly trying to fill it up, again.

“You— how much have you had to drink?”

“Steve,” She slurs, a happy smile on her face as she dunks the cup under fully. “Not enough.”

“Hey, no, Nance, I said I’d take care of you, so,” Steve places his hand delicately on her wrist, uses his other one to try and pry the drink from her grasp. “I really think that you should wait a bit before you drink again, okay? Let’s get you some water, and sit down over—”

“I don’t want to drink some water—”

“Nancy, please,” Steve says. “Just, let go of the cup for me?”

“No.”

Steve tugs again, trying to slot his fingers under hers. He’d become all too accustomed to this — to doing this with Tommy. And it had worked with Tommy, with Carol, so why—

“Let go of the, the cup, Steve. I want you,” She enunciates, a little too much effort put into each word to be sober, “To let go, of the goddamned cup—!”

He lets go. The bad feeling presses into his skull, down his spine, like an old friend. Like punch staining white shirts. Like the hundred people who have turned, like the music that has been turned down, like Hargrove, making his way over, like Eddie, watching from the corner, like Jonathan, stuck by the door.

Shit.

“What the fuck, Steve?”

“Okay, Nance, let’s just—” She turns around before he can say anything more, and her figure flits in and out of the bodies of the people who had once hindered his trek to her. Now, they part like the ocean, as if she is some God to be reckoned with. Steve supposes that, right now, she is.

He follows the empty trail that she has left for him, nods politely and acutely to the woman who stands in Kiss makeup nodding her head towards the ajar door — the bathroom with golden yellow light and a large mirror by the sink. He pushes his way in, closing the door softly behind him. No more eyes. No more leering.

“Nancy, it’s not coming off. I think it’s,” Steve sighs, doesn’t try to reason with her as she runs the hand towel under the water again, bringing it up to the large red stain down her front. He’ll get the mess out tomorrow. He just needs to get her home, have her get into a change of clothes, and he’ll deal with the rest in the morning. “C’mon, Nance.”

“I know what I’m doing,” She slurs, leans agains the sink countertop with her left arm. “See? It’s— it’s coming off.”

Steve just sighs, goes to take the towel from her limp hand. “Let’s get you home, yeah Nance? How does sleeping sound?”

“I don’t want to!” She said, lurching forward from her standing position. “I wanted to be a dumb teenager and do all the things that— that I’m not supposed to, so why are you—”

“Nance,” Steve whispered, hand on her shoulder, holding up her weight as she presses onwards.

“—trying to take that away from me? You always just ruin everything. You’re— you’re bullshit! I just wanted one simple thing: to act like we were dumb, and young, and in love—”

“Like we’re in love? Nancy, what do you—”

“Bullshit.” She mumbles, then, louder, as if realising that Steve might not have heard it, she speaks. “You are complete bullshit, Steve Harrington. Bull-shit.”

No. Steve wants to say. Because, he realises, there is some truth to what she is saying. Has he ever been a person, has he ever been a subject that was once and truly owned by himself? Could Steve ever remember a moment where he wasn’t just an amalgamation of parts that he picked up over the years? Which parts had come naturally, and which parts had he so carefully chosen? He’s always felt as if he was slipping, from what he never knew, but maybe it was just normalcy. Maybe he was always a fake— a bullshit version of who used to wear his skin.

Steve Harrington has never been boring and normal in the same way that the people of Hawkins were — he had to be hand crafted to try and fit the moulds that were placed upon him. Carve off parts of himself that he realised were undesirable in the long run, because what was he, if not what people wanted? If not something that people had loved?

Nancy had been like a lifeline to him — someone who was trying so hard to break the role that was bestowed upon them. I don’t want to be the dutiful older sister who becomes the dutiful wife who doesn’t get to live for herself. I want to see the world, and travel, and learn, and study, and love. And I want to love you. Had it always been a lie? Was everything so predetermined down to a T, that for Nancy Wheeler to be breaking her mould, she first had to break him? Was there ever a future where they end up together — too similar and too different all at once?

She had been a lifeline. And maybe that is where it all started. That Steve had looked to her for the guidance that he was never given, trying so desperately to please her — to try and revel in that calm that exuded out of her body as if it were endless. It was that feeling that he was chasing, that feeling that made him ache for his own bones to be whole, that made him yearn to stay in his body, for his teeth to stay dull, and his height stay the same.

He feels like he’s losing it. Steve feels as if there are a hundred running words around his head. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. He knew that Nancy was falling out of love with him. He knew it in his bones. Knew it in his shifting form. Why does it hurt, still? Why does it still feel as though she has struck him across the face the way a father does to a child — or is this just another one of those scenarios, Steve asks himself, that are so very abnormal, that he has only known to be true?

Steve’s losing it. He knows he is. He pushes out of the bathroom, stumbles out, really, but the music has been turned back up, and he can feel it in his chest, thump thump thump-ing across the dance floor. He feels as if he is changing right there, in the middle of this stupid fucking house party, where everyone can see him. And if there is one thing that he is good at, if Steve Harrington is only allowed to, able to, be good at one fucking thing in his useless, short-lived life, it is knowing when he is not wanted. Knowing when he has to leave.

So he does. He leaves. Out of the back door — the crowd of people pressing in on his chest, his body, the front door — and into the woods. And it is there that he will change.

(The first thing to go is his sight.

Or, rather, his eyes.

Steve, in his fading consciousness, tries to lift his hands — hands that are too big for his body, that are sharp and grotesque, and so horribly his, with a scar near his left thumb where he nicked it as a child — towards where his eyes are. Where they should be. He turns his hands so that the long nails are pointing as outward as they can, so that they do not touch what he hopes is still his own face. The pads of his thumbs meet the space in which his eyes had occupied. It is textured and puckered, and when Steve tries to blink — because as a human, as a young man, he should be able to blink — he cannot. The expanse of what should be the woods in front of him are just shades of dark, with only the moon to bare witness to this, to him, to the monstrosity that he is becoming.

Where flesh meets bone, and love meets hurt, Steve morphs. Muscle and ligaments stretching and contorting till they are spread thin against a gangly body that tries — and succeeds — to tower above the height that he was gifted from creation. He feels as his vocal chords hum within his throat, a throat that has contracted and elongated to make space for the bones that sprout from his spine. Hind legs break and bend, making Steve fall over himself into the dirt of the woods, jutting out at odd directions, in a misguided attempt at growing into something new.

Where comfort and beauty used to be found in the form of golden-brown hair, something ugly starts to be birthed. Steve can feel as the thudding of something within his brain gets so insistent that he clutches at his ears to plead it to stop. He can feel as his skull starts to fracture. As his scalp is peeled back from his head, he raises his nails to stop it — pleading in the form of scratching at the warm wetness. Bone and blood make way for rotten wood; two spike-like structures ignoring the helpless cries of the boy that they occupy.

And, god, he can feel it. Steve, in the middle of this transformation, can feel as the bones within his body vibrate against his skin, whispering into his breath, let go, let me in, it won’t hurt, I can make it all okay. There is a part of him — the sensible, boring, part of him, that says he should not listen. That he should go back to the Halloween party, and pretend that he cannot taste his own bile mixing with thick blood, that it does not feel like he is being crushed between the worlds.

I don’t want to die, Steve thinks.

The voice within him answers, says: I am not going to kill you).

— — —

Eddie is not having a good night. Like, yeah, there are probably people having an even lesser good night (read: whatever the hell he saw happen with one Nancy Wheeler and one Steve Harrington), especially considering that he has to step over the passed out bodies of other high schooler’s as he traipses out of the back door of the house. His docs were slightly sticky in a way that indicated spilt alcohol, despite his stance on not drinking and dealing. The Halloween party that Tina hosted was meant to be small — only a couple close friends she had said — but it ended up being closer to the entire fucking year group (and then some). He had been bought out almost immediately — familiar faces in the forms of the basketball club, and the band nerds, unfamiliar faces in the forms of people who were usually too shy or too scared to approach him normally — and hadn’t been able to find an opportunity to leave until, well. Until whatever the hell happened with Steve and Wheeler.

See, Eddie was never planning to drink, what with his weirdly strict rules, especially considering his grades, but he still didn’t want to drive his van to the house. This was for a multitude of reasons, with the glaringly obvious one being so that it didn’t get alcohol, or barf, or other bodily fluids splashed across the front, as people drunkenly stumbled down the streets to their homes, or to their one designated driver. Ah, the woes of underage drinking.

That is how he finds himself, leaves sticking to his sticky soles, dirt caking themselves into the tread. It’s not the first time that Eddie has found himself huddled into his own jacket, trying to walk the non-existant path that he had set before him, on the way home. Sometimes it was just easier to walk than to have to pay for your van being keyed by some evangelical lunatics. That doesn’t mean that it makes the walk any easier, though.

The trees are all those horribly gangly and long, old-wood ones. His Uncle Wayne used to talk about how they were “there since the day Hawkins was erected”, but Eddie had been too young to properly take in the cautionary tale, instead snickering at the use of the old man’s use of the word erected. As they loom over him — shadows cast into the almost-mud of the ground — Eddie wishes that he had payed attention.

But he had made this walk all the time! In the daytime, in the afternoon, in the middle of the night. It had never felt comforting, sure, but it had never felt like— like something was watching him. That was absurd, though. It was well known that Hawkins was boring (no matter how hard Eddie had tried to liven it up a little), and most of all, it was safe. The accident was just that — an anomaly of an incident that was recorded in history, and swept away with teachings of how to be a good and proper man, and how to do your times tables. Will Byers was — well. Eddie didn’t know how to excuse that.

But, nobody was here.

Just him.

Eddie trudges forward. There is something within him that makes him clutch at the multitool that Wayne had gifted him, flicking the knife out. Not the dull letter opener section that had never been used, but the sharp, cerated blade that been bestowed upon him as protection.

(“Protection from what?” Young Eddie had asked. There was nothing to be afraid of, here. Because this is the town that Wayne was in, and this is the town that his mother had grown up in. Before everything had changed.

Wayne had shifted in his seat, the couch springs making that dog-whining noise that made Eddie’s noise scrunch.

“Nothing.” He said, hand warm and heavy on Eddie’s shoulders. “Just making sure, is all.”)

Step, step, breathe. Step, step, breathe. He would twirl the knife in his hands if he were not afraid of dropping it — a situation from a shitty horror slasher appearing forefront in his mind: he drops the blade to the ground as the monster runs up behind him, and as the camera pans to the sky, to his eyes, to its teeth, his fingernails encrusted with dirt, Eddie will grab it in the nick of time, brandishing it valiantly, before swinging his arm in a dull strike—

“Who’s there?”

The words leave his mouth before he can stop them. He no longer feels like the final girl who fumbles for the knife in the leaves, and suddenly feels like the expositional first victim. The sound that he had heard — something that he could only really describe as a gurgle has stopped.

“You’re just going crazy, Eddie,” He hums to himself, blows his curly fringe from in front of his eyes. “Nothing to worry about at all. No sir-ee.”

He keeps his back to the direction in which he needs to go; the invisible path that he has crafted towards his trailer. Eddie, horror movie connoisseur, knows that he should not stalk towards the noise — had shouted at his small television set too many times to know that it leads to finding the monster, the horror in itself.

(He finds that maybe there is some truth to the actions. His feet carry him backwards, towards safety, but it feels as if he is walking through sludge, moving ever so slowly, leaning forward, eyes wide, as if trying to gain a view of the thing that made the gurgle).

Back hitting a tree, Eddie turns, for a second, as small of a moment of time that he can spare, before facing forward, again. He cannot look away from the darkness of the woods. He wished that he brought his flashlight. Or drove his van to Tina’s. Or stayed at the fucking Halloween party.

Shifting so that his back is facing open woods, he places a tentative foot back. And then another. And another.

The sound lurches through the expanse of nothing. The wet death-rattle building and building, as if it is getting closer. As if it is running.

“Shit!” Eddie turns on his heel and bolts into the woods. Without a care for which direction his trailer is in — it doesn’t matter if it is behind him, or if it is in front of him, all that matters is that he gets away from the whatever the fuck is making that god awful noise—

He trips.

Eddie has enough self preservation to move his hand with the knife to the side so that he doesn’t stab himself in the eye, but it is a close thing. He feels all the fumbling heroine-final-girl-first-victim adrenaline rise through him as he feel the leaves shake beneath the weight of the thing that is racing towards him.

Get the fuck up, Eddie!

He scrambles and feels his nails catch against the roots of the tree as he pushes himself up — propelling until his palms meet rough bark, and he is pushing himself forward. His lungs feel as though they are on fire. As if they are constricting from inside his self, his body. In, out, in out. In, in, in, in.

Eddie pumps his legs as fast as he can, tries to think of what he is meant to do in these situations — was it better to go straight? Was he meant to zigzag? Does he make himself tall and raise his arms and snarl right back? Has he condemned himself just by running? Can it smell his fear?

He doesn’t want to die.

Eddie didn’t really think that he had much to live for, before this, and if you asked him yesterday he would have spouted some dogshit about dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. But now that he is at the brink of death, the thing (bear? Human? Monster?) almost breathing down his neck, he has a hundred — a million — different things that he wants to do, that he wants to say.

It roars. Not the pathetic sounding and out of place death-noise that it was making before. An absolutely pissed off I’m-Going-To-Fucking-Kill-You noise. A You-Are-Not-Final-Girl-Material noise. And the noise? It sounds as if it reverberates through the woods, impossible to tell how close, how far away it truly is.

(He does not want to turn around. Because if he turns around and it is there, Eddie knows that he will stop. He will pause in his tracks, because he is kidding himself into thinking that he is being chased by a fucking bear).

Eddie turns. He doesn’t know what made him do it.

It was like his body had told him you cannot keep running away and had decided for him — not letting his brain rest for even a moment to try and catch up to the thoughts of the heart. Eddie brandishes his knife tightly in front of him, slashing in wide arcs in hopes of— he doesn’t know. Scaring off the beast that is making the forest shake? Yeah. That’ll definitely work.

The air is cold against his clammy hands, and thin against the blade. He keeps his eyes shut, and slashes forwards and outwards, both hands clasped tightly against the handle. It’s obvious when it meets something that is not air. From the drag against what Eddie thinks might be flesh, to the stench of coppery blood that fills the air.

He opens his eyes.

The face that meets his own is not entirely a face. He watches as the blood slowly drips from where a cheek would be if this thing were human. Eddie raises the pocket knife again in his — and the monsters — moment of stupor, and tries to slash again—

Only for the knife to slapped out of his hand.

It lands with a dull thud against the wet woodland leaves. Too far away for Eddie to reach. He slides back, tries to back away as if he had not just tried to harm this monster that towers above him. He creeps back in the same way that the creature creeps forwards, until his shoulders are hitting the sharp outsides of the tree, and he is sliding to his knees, and closing in on himself.

“You’re not real.” Eddie mumbles. “You’re not— there’s no such thing as fucking monsters. None at all. You’re just— going fucking insane, Eddie. Must’ve just— passed out at Tina’s. Having a bad trip. Sleeping it off at home. Something like that. Right. Right?”

— — —

There’s something about the shape in front of him — the way in which it holds itself and begs — that makes Steve’s brain stall. Long enough for him to get back into the driver’s seat of his own body (was this his own body? This prison of flesh and bone that towered over this person? That had terrified them? Was he always a— a monster, in every possible way? Could he never escape it?), and start to back away. Steve tries to hunch in on himself. Tries to hold his hands — his claws — in front of him. Raised and open, trying to communicate without words, words that are stuck in his throat, I don’t mean any harm. I don’t want to hurt anyone.

“Okay, okay. Yeah, just— stay. Yeah, back away. That’s good— just keep— backing away.” The man mutters. Steve can see the frantic look in his eye, the way his hair falls just above his hunched shoulders, how he’s scrambling backwards and backwards, as if he is trying to crawl into the tree itself.

“Now you’ve really done it, Eddie. Real fucking monsters—”

Steve’s vocal chords gurgle at the word. Like a low humming in warning that sounds in the back of his throat without meaning to— without him wanting to. At first, it is at the way that he has been described — a terrible being of his own creation, of the hands of others, himself. But, then, it is at the name. Eddie. Eddie. Eddie. Steve knows Eddie. Maybe there’s a way that he could—

Eddie stops. Dirt encrusted in his fingernails, leaves in his hair, on the forest floor. He stops. And Steve realises that he is not himself. He is not Human Steve Harrington, with eyes and a kind smile, and moles and freckles and golden-brown hair. He is this towering creature that has chased his almost-friend through the fucking woods.

Steve goes to turn — to leave and never come back. Pretend that this was all a nightmare. And maybe it would be. Maybe he would wake up in the morning, and he would pick up Nancy, and he would place a kiss on her cheek, and she would help him with his college application. Maybe he’d wake up earlier — formative years come back to haunt him in the best ways possible — and his mother would card her fingers through his hair, and his father would tell him that he was proud.

(He’s fooling himself. Steve knows it’s not gonna happen).

“Can you… understand me?”

Steve tries to make a noise, then. Something more pleasant and soothing and desperate all at once, that says Yes! Please! Can you hear me? Do you see me? Please, I’m begging you, please, help me!

“Okay! Great. Amazing. You can understand me!” Eddie talks, in such a hushed tone that Steve feels as if he is not meant to hear it. “Fuck, okay? Um.”

Eddie tries to back away again, only to realise that there is nowhere to go. That he will have to shift to the side to get out of the woods. Steve tilts his head forwards, tries to motion towards the side, where Eddie will have to go to get to his home.

“Right! Yes!” He breathes. “I need to… to leave. Can you— will you let me?”

Steve nods. Readily, quickly. He does not want to force him to stay here. He does not want him to look at his figure. This grotesque concoction of things that he has become.

(He wants Eddie to stay. He wants him to help. He wants him to say that he is not a monster. Because if he leaves, if he goes through the woods and never comes back, what will Steve do with himself?).

“Okay— no leaving right now. Got it. Totally. Great.” Eddie says, hands still behind him, knife still cast away. “What do you want from me?”

Help. Steve wants to say. Reassurance. But his mouth does not seem to work like it normally does, like it is supposed to, and so he crouches down as best his bones will let him, and raises his clawed hands to the ground.

“H…e…l— Help! Okay, okay. You need help.”

Steve nods, neck strained and taught against extra bones in his frame. There is that noise at the back of his neck, and he feels the skin around his teeth attempt a smile.

“How do I help you?” Eddie asks. And Steve can sense the way that he moves closer, instinctually flinches away. “Right, no, that’s okay, yeah. No touching. Got it.”

He wishes that he didn’t flinch. He wants to say please, please, please hold me, please tell me I am human, I don’t want to be a monster, I just want to be held, I just want to be normal, I just want to be—

“Do you have somewhere you can go?” Eddie whispers, hushed tones so much more calming than when he was slashing forwards. And Steve does have somewhere to go — his empty house, with bouts of land big enough on either side that no neighbours would be peering out to see him. But he needs to get his car. He needs to get his car that he left at the party. Otherwise he will be found out. Otherwise people will connect the dots about Steve leaving early, and without his car, and the man in the woods—

The man in the woods? The man in the woods?

“Get the hell away from my boy!”

The shot would be accurate if not for the humming beneath his skin screaming at Steve to move. The pellets scatter into the tree-side, making little homes within the bark.

“Wayne, no, it doesn’t mean any—”

“Eddie, get the hell away from that thing—”

The man — Wayne — fumbles confidently with the gun in his hands. He makes a movement with it that has the sounds of mechanics ringing in Steve’s ears, but if there is one thing that he is not, monster or no fucking monster, is stupid. He knows where he is unwanted, an animal, he knows that he is the thing that instills fear into this man, and he knows, Steve knows that he doesn’t want to hurt someone — the he doesn’t want to hurt Eddie — but what is the use of this knowledge if nobody else is aware?

The voice that had once guided him is silent. But as Wayne aims towards his body, as Eddie moves to stop him, Steve feels the warmth and hum of appreciation and praise run through his veins, as he turns to flee.

— — —

As he lets himself down, Steve finds that he is still not himself. He sees in the way that a human is not meant to see: shapes and shades that morph and move as they shift across his vision. Inquisitive, and maybe a little bit afraid, he moves the claws across the features that make up his face. Of course, from the changing that he had experienced — like a second coming of man — he knows that he has no eyes. With long, sallow fingers, he traces his nose — the same — and feels his hairless skin atop his head. It is the same texturised feeling as that of his eyes, something that just screams monster.

When he pulls against the rotten wood that exudes itself from his soul, it offers the same sensation of his hair being pulled, but somehow deeper. As if the rot has attached itself to his spinal cord, his brain. There is a morbid part of him that thinks back to the books of animals that he read as he was a child: about cats and their tails, and how you shouldn’t hold them from it, lest you want their spine to be pulled out in a yelp, and a sopping pool of offal.

(Steve feels as though he should be more terrified. That he has been turned into the monster, like a gods-damned werewolf on the night of Halloween, and that he has chunks of time missing. That there is a voice within his own brain that had offered him some type of salvation from the hurt deep within his teeth, that Steve had so readily accepted without thinking of the consequences).

He stops himself from spiralling — catches it on the tail end of the fall, just like those cats — and pulls himself from the edge. He does not have eyes, yes, he knows this, and he has some type of bark that is growing and protruding from his skull like he is a daemon, and they are his horns. Steve’s hands trail across his features, again, more focussed. He presses as softly he can into the holes that held soft eyes, trails passed his father’s nose, and finds—

A lack of face. A lack of jaw.

Steve doubles over himself. Feels as his stretched stomach contracts within his fleshy vessel of a body, as it attempts to blow chunks of something onto the carpet. Hands clawing at his face again, he feels the absence, again and again. Because there is no way that he is— that there is— that there is not—

Oh god.

If Steve were to describe it to anyone, as he tries to describe it to himself from feel alone, it is as if someone had held a firm hand against his lower jaw, and pulled and pulled and pulled until— pop! There are wisps of his own skin and flesh near the hinges of his face. His upper teeth are bared for the woodland creatures to fear, top lip pulled taught into an impossible snarl that makes Steve keen into the silence. He did not want to be a creature — all he wanted to be was loved.

How do I return? Steve pleads into the silence. Pleads that the voice is still there to tell him what to do. Why do I remember a man in the woods?

You have to figure it out on your own.

The first thing that he thinks is well that’s not fucking helpful, but there is something within his own head that breathes out of him as he thinks the very words. Steve finds that it feels as if he’s just been admonished by his father — or that he’s heard a heavy sigh from his mother. Almost immediately, he tries to back peddle, but all other offers of rapture and guidance from the voice are lulled, and for the first time in the night, Steve is well and utterly alone.

His first idea comes in the forms of reassuring words that are not his own. He is reminded of the girl from the drama class he was mistakenly placed into for a half a term. Her short reddish-brown hair, the snark that nobody else would give him. Steve is reminded of the way that she had approached him when he was huddled up in the storage closet — with none of the remarks to be found, but instead, just soft eyes, and a similarly crouched form in front of him. What can you see? What can you hear? What can you feel? Taste? Smell?

He cannot see anything. And maybe that is the point of this exercise — not the one that the girl had taught him, but the one that the voice is teaching him. That these things, this small moments of calm were only meant for beings that were human. Now that he was stripped of any form of humanity left of him (or had he always been stripped of it? Had those moments with the girl calmed him down, or was he just putting on a front?), he was not allowed to be soothed.

But he can hear the neighbours. He must be home. He must be close. Steve had complained to his then-friends, Tommy, Carol, about how his house was eerily quiet, how he could not hear the people near him. So why could he now? Why could he hear the sounds of Ms Lowe down the street, teetering around the kitchen? Why could he hear the humming of the Sullivan’s pool?

Steve feels his bones re-breaking. Feels the juts of a body retract into his spine to make it whole again. He feels the sickly pleasing correction of his skull, the way that his jaw unfurls at the same time the bone-wood descends into his scalp. He tastes the slime of whatever was coating his skin to try and ease the sickly transformation — something that smells almost like a mixture of bile and something sweet. As his vision fogs, and Steve hears the sounds of what can only be described as moist peeling, the shades of dark turn to thick objects turn to outlines to lights to colours to vision. And as soon as he realises that he is not towering over the woods, over Eddie, that he is in his own home, that the doors are somehow locked shut, he languidly pulls himself to the bathroom, sits under the warm spray of the shower for as long as he goddamned wants.

It chimes then — and it had always chimed at every hour, scaring the ever living shit out of him as he was a child — the cuckoo clock. 12AM.

He has school tomorrow.

How does Steve have school tomorrow?

Doesn’t the world know to stop turning, to pause, for him? He’s a monster. And not in the way that the word was normally directed at him — not in the way that girls would say when he turned them down, or Tommy’s targets would say as he stood, impassive, disgusted, not at them, but at who he called his friend. When did it start to become real? Was he always a monster, always destined to be a monster, because everyone else thought him so? Maybe his skin was now just changing to catch up to what people truly saw.

But that wouldn’t make any sense. Because at the back of his mind — Steve knew. What the truth was, what the truth is, and how he is just trying to avoid coming to terms with it. What is inscribed on his skin, what has been inked into existence from the day that he had first changed. And yet, it is still different. Back then, it was never like this. Back then, it was as if he could hear and smell and react as he could now, regardless of what skin he bore. So why had this thing become him? Why had he become this thing?

It doesn’t fucking matter. What matters is that it doesn’t happen again. That nobody knows what he can become. He will go to school, and the world will continue to turn, and Steve will have to pick up his car in the morning. He’ll call Tina and say sorry! I was upset about what happened with Nance and walked home to clear my head. And she will believe him, because there would be no reason for him to lie.

And everything would be okay. And everything would be normal.

— — —

Breakfast, Steve thinks, is not the most important meal of the day.

It can be skipped so easily, with ready excuses. I woke up late! I don’t have any bread! Sorry, gotta go! It is the easiest to skip, but it is also the easiest to make. Sure, he’s not a fan of breakfast, but he’s a fan of cooking, and with the little amount of sleep that he got last night, he feels as though he has no excuse not to make himself eggs, and toast, and hash-browns, before school. Maybe he’ll even have time to swing by that fancy cafe that Nancy likes — get her favourite coffee as an apology, an olive branch. He’s already got the car, because, really? Did he really need to wait till morning wait to get it and excuse himself?

The radio is turned on to some station that his parents like. Normally, it’ll play jazz, a little bit of soul. Things that he couldn’t really imagine his parents liking, in the first place. He always imagined them to like something they would classify as regal — maybe some type of music they could ballroom dance to, or some orchestral string piece that his mother would cry to. Maybe opera, if they were feeling fancy.

Blues and soul were reserved for happy mornings. The radio was usually turned to the station that played all their favourite tunes — some rerun channel that was run through the school as a student project. The frequency was never changed, and on those mornings that were maybe-less-than-happy, the radio would never be turned on in the first place.

Steve flips the egg in the pan, taps a dash of pepper over the perfectly slightly-runny yolk, before turning up the volume of the radio. He juts his hips to the beat, terribly off-time with nobody to see his mistakes, and hums in perfect pitch against the lulling tones of the women. He deposits his egg onto his toast as the song ends, as he goes to sit at his picture-perfect breakfast, in his picture-perfect house, with his picture-perfect—

“A man has been found dead in the woods. Police are suspecting foul play, what with the condition that the body was left…”

Shit.

#Don't Look at Me as if I'll Disappear #steddie big bang 2023 #steve harrington #eddie munson #steddie

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