#Liquid Sky (1982) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

powderblueblood · 1 month

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Can we please talk about the Jonathan of it all? I love that lacy had the tiniest thing for him before nancy had him all spellbound (no hate to my girl nancy. She can't help it that her pussy pop's severely or however that meme goes) lacy likes herself a weirdo and I am right there with her. I want to ask, she mentions they went out on one date and you mention it a bit but was it really a date or something she, for lack of a better word, tricked him in to? because we both know he wouldn't have asked her out and I'm completely unsure if she'd even utter the word 'date' to him because it might have spooked him or had him thinking she was trying to pull something on him. Basically I want to know how you think lacy would have gotten him to agree to even meet in the park because as stated in a later chapter, he's pretty hard to get a hold of. sorry I'm fixating on this one part. it's just, idk i really liked that lacy saw something in him and went as far as she did to pursue him, you know?

never apologize for fixating in my inbox EVER, that's what this place is for. this dynamic is so secretly special to me. i honestly think if things were different and lacy didn't need a motormouth like munson to rev her engine up and bring her to life out of sheer annoyance, there would be a strong dair energy between her and jonathan. he appealed to something very real within her; he's sweet and thoughtful and sweet and thoughtful are in short supply. the following is how lacy and jonathan ended up standing elbow-to-elbow in main street vinyl that fateful summer. written in the third person because i thought, why not, fun. part of the hellfire & ice universe

HAWKINS, INDIANA. JULY 1982-ISH, SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

Dear reader,

Summer makes us pliable, I think. It makes us liquid and wanting. We've hit record temperatures this July, and even the best conditioned of places feel like they're warping. I find myself spilling over into things I usually wouldn't, looking over people's shoulders to peer into how they're handling the heat. Anything to break the monotony of Carol's/gas station/Lover's Lake/Skull Rock/substitute as appropriate.

I'm not finding anything interesting. Or didn't. Until today.

TRACK ONE - MARQUEE MOON by TELEVISION.

The weather that day was too heavy for the sky to hold, and Lacy's sour mood with everyone was too heavy to gloss out. She peeled her car out of the rocky bank at Lover's Lake and may have nipped Harrington's on the way, humidity fogging over her spatial awareness.

No one bothered to poke holes in Lacy's flimsy excuse for leaving, which she kind of resented--in fact, she was kind of resenting the grand dearth in attention she was getting. Cass on Mikey, Carol on Tommy, Tina chasing Steve, Derek pouring over Nicole, but no one quite zeroing in on her. The boys would shoot a stolen glance her way when her shirt and shorts came off, a momentary and forbidden distraction from whatever they were supposed to be locked into.

She's gorgeous, sure. And she knows it, of course. But not gorgeous enough to latch onto, it seems. Nothing of substance there. Lacy was bored to distraction herself.

Once she hit the throbbing, melting concrete of Hawkins' main drag again, she parked a couple of blocks away from the record store, figuring it would do no good to hitch her car right out front. Even if no one was looking for her. Lacy was a girl made of buffers and alibis, pushing the heavy glass door open just as the lightning cracks overhead. It announced her arrival in a way she could have done without.

The clerk, Jerry, a man made up of mostly Groucho Marx facial hair with bifocals perched on top, regarded her with a half-second glance. Lacy patted her perspiring brow as delicately as possible and wound her way towards the 'T's. She had a riff caught in her head that the darkening sky inspired, with all that threatening rain and achy rumbles of thunder, and she needed to exorcise it. It wasn't something she could do in the grand privacy of her own bedroom, because this was a purchase she hadn't smuggled home yet.

Plucking the record out and looking to the listening booths with a satisifed quirk of her lips, Lacy caught Jonathan Byers' dark, serious, brow-knit stare the very second before he thought to snap back around. His headphones skewed against his dull brown hair in a way she knew should have disgusted her. Pavlovian, Lacy waited for her learned reaction to kick in; a lurch, an ew, Byers, what a weirdo! squeeze of the abdominal muscles but... nothing. Nothing happened.

Like she'd left the part of herself that knew how to perform that back at the lake with the others.

Whatever.

The listening booth beside Jonathan Byers stood free. His spine visibly stiffened as she stepped up to his right, picking up the headphones and putting the needle down. The perspex between them was stained heavily, browned blotches of nicotine from decades past, but still transparent enough to see through. And Lacy could feel Jonathan's stare again, beady and judging and zeroing in on the vinyl cover as she flipped it over in her careful hands.

Confusion teemed off him in waves, prompting her to feel something-- a kind of smug indulgence in the notion that he might be thinking, What the fuck is Lacy Doevski doing listening to Television?

Smugger still that if he were to tell anyone, no one would ever believe him.

TRACK TWO - HERE SHE COMES NOW by THE VELVET UNDERGROUND.

Jonathan doesn't spend any time thinking about people like Lacy Doevski, and he means that. Not a flitting fantasy of oh, what would it be like to have the glaring sun of someone so popular shone upon him, nothing like that. Kid's a realist, okay? He knows that people like Lacy are not even worth entertaining the thought--plus, she's mean. As kindergarten as it sounds, he about as much mean in his life as he can handle, thank you very much.

But there's something about a person encroaching on your space, especially in summertime. Was it not for the perspex, they'd be elbow-to-elbow at the listening booths of Main Street Vinyl. And due to the Byers' shot air conditioning with no fix in budget and therefore in sight, he comes here every day to avail of those big box fans. So, unfortunately, does Lacy.

Doesn't she have a state of the art unit she could be sitting in front of, blasting cold air and listening to all these records that she can definitely afford but never ends up buying in the privacy of her own plush Loch Nora home? Why does she hang around here with a soft sheen of perspiration on her forehead that she has to keep shyly dabbing at? Irritably flipping her hair as she tries to subtly spy what he's listening to?

She's not as smooth as she thinks she is.

Why did she roll her eyes and smile a little when she spotted the copy of White Light/White Heat he was listening to? Why did she swap out what she was spinning for a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico?

Why did Jonathan kind of smile back?

TRACK THREE - FEAR IS A MAN'S BEST FRIEND by JOHN CALE.

Shutting up feels good in a place like this.

Not that Lacy doesn't thrive off the empty caloric intake of a good gossip, but a break in the buzz became more and more adored. And this wordless game of record chicken she'd taken to playing with Jonathan Byers...

Well, how does one explain that without coming across as cruel? Fact was, she was having fun with it and a huge portion of that pie was because Jonathan was so far out in the social hinterlands that it would never blow back on her. No one would ever accuse Lacy of having freak-loving tendencies because no one would ever care to notice Jonathan in the presence of someone like her. He was younger and he was quiet. He had a busted up family, of course, no one found that too interesting. He didn't parade himself around as a paragon of oddity like some people did, like that Munson kid did. He was just... nobody. And for a while, so was she, and it didn't feel entirely terrifying.

The two of them fell into this strange, silent rhythm, where it appeared to the naked eye that they were just two distant classmates standing next to one another in this stuffy record store.

But Jonathan's nose would wrinkle if she was listening to something he didn't recognize, and he'd tug at the hair behind his ear if he did. Jonathan's nose was always a little oily and a soft waft of body odor escaped under his deodorant as he passed her in the stacks-- yet, none of these imperfections triggered that habitual repulsion that they ought to. That they would have, if school was still in session. Instead, Lacy began to feel this animalic pull toward them.

It was as if she immediately started to try and sniff him out each time she entered the store.

And Lacy being Lacy, the pull made her want to push back. Threaten it. Break the unspoken covenant they had and see what Jonathan would do. Boredom with your life begets a thing like that, you see. So, she lifted her needle off John Cale, curved her fingers around the stained plastic that separated them and said, "I love Linda Thompson's voice, don't you?"

He'd never directly met her eyes before then.

"You wh-- sorry?"

TRACK FOUR - SUGAR ON MY TONGUE by THE TALKING HEADS.

Jonathan's a good judge of character. You have to be, with a father like Lonnie and a mother like Joyce. You have to know how to spot someone who's an asshole or someone on the verge of a breakdown from a few hundred miles away. You have to know the difference between good company and bad; Jonathan's skilled at that. Just, so far, seems that the only good company in Hawkins is his own.

Until. Well. Listen.

Lacy kind of made the lines blur.

He couldn figure out if she was fucking with him or not.

Instinct told him that she was; that this was some big elaborate plot to humiliate him somehow, because something like that always seems to be lurking around the corner for him. But the way she smoothed the arch out of her brow when she spoke to him--bitesized sentences, Bagel Bites of conversation--made Jonathan edge closer to that dangerous maybe not.

And they only ever talked about music.

Lacy did most of the heavy lifting, with Jonathan too struck to offer anything beyond a single-word affirmation or a strangled smile over the alarm bells that kept ringing in his head. She kept going, however, saying these incredibly clever, snipped, almost curated things that made Jonathan notice the shape of her mouth.

"...and I actually have that. I could make you a tape."

Jonathan's finger twisted into the wire of his headphones. "Oh, you don't-- I actually, I have this one too."

"Oh."

What was he talking about? That copy of Talking Heads: 77 that he's played to death but couldn't find for the life of him, not in the deepest recesses of his bedroom? The fact that it was missing brought about crazy feelings of self betrayal because that thing was one of Jonathan's prized possessions. Not least of all because it came out the same year he turned ten; same year Lonnie made him shoot a rabbit, same year he proved to Lonnie that he'd never be the man his father wanted him to be.

"Um, no, actually," Jonathan said, pinching the bridge of his nose, "I lost it, actually. My copy." Say actually one more time, buddy. "But you don't have to."

Lacy gave him a look that was solid and confident, one he almost recognized from the real-her, the one that existed in the spaces outside this record store. This looked more genuine, though. Like there was light behind her eyes.

"I want to," she said, "I wouldn't have offered if I didn't want to."

TRACK FIVE - PABLO PICASSO by THE MODERN LOVERS.

"Meet me in the park at off Maple at like... midday?" Lacy knew how it sounded, so she gave him a shrug, one so characteristic and comforting to her. Sliding responsibility right off the curve of one shoulder. "Or don't. It's up to you. But that's where I'll be."

And if she's confessional honest, she hadn't expected him to come. To breach containment of the bubble they'd created in the listening booths, hogging them away from the other patrons of the store. It was safe there, where they didn't have to exchange pleasantries like how are you or what's new, where things were abstracted yet so incredibly personal because this, this, music was one of her secret vestiges that she didn't share with anyone.

To bring it out in the light like this, in the pollen-filled field, to a pockmarked picnic table, meant Lacy was risking it.

Most of her knew that a thing like this couldn't survive being outside it's stuffy, soundtracked bell jar. But the little flicker that thought, dangerously, maybe burned bright in her. In some long neglected place.

"Hey."

"Oh, hi."

Summer makes you pliable. Makes you want to try anything.

It had that effect on Jonathan too, because he showed. But Jonathan shies away from the light; even sitting with Lacy in the shade, the farthest he could position himself from her, he squinted and hunched and looked all apologetic about it. Lacy couldn't hack through the awkwardness with a chainsaw, one she wanted so desperately to rev and scream,

DO YOU LIKE ME OR HAVE I BEEN WASTING MY TIME? I THINK YOU'RE NICE. NO ONE'S NICE. I SHOWED YOU SOMETHING NO ONE ELSE GETS TO SEE. SHOULD WE TRY SOMETHING? DO YOU READ ME?

Everything is that serious when you're sixteen.

The pirated tape of Talking Heads: 77 sat between them on the bench, and Nancy Wheeler crested the hill with a dog on a leash, and Lacy watched as Jonathan's eyes opened. His shoulders relaxed some and his face took on a faintness of a glow she had recognized, because Steve Harrington had looked at Nancy that very same way a couple of weeks back.

Not a look of distraction. Because they were in the real world now.

Spell broken, bubble popped. The shame that she would ever be so stupid to try something like this blew through her like a harsh gust, snuffing out the hope-- because no matter what she does, what she chances to reveal to boys like Jonathan who operate with a sweetness, who need coaxing, there'll always be kinder. There'll always be better. There'll always be Wheeler.

#powder room talk #Anonymous #this took me forever to write and i must apologize but i hope you enjoy my love #j. byers by powder #jonathan byers x oc #hai brainrot #lacy doevski #blurbs #published by powder #stranger things fic #l. doevski by powder

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