Chapter Text
At first, Jonathan thinks it’s just the flash.
He’s got the camera up to his face, and the instant light can be a bit disorienting sometimes. He’s used to it spotting his eyes and making him see fuzzy.
But he blinks away the light and the sudden color is still there, bright and vibrant and lighting up everything around him. The trampled carpet looks neon beneath his feet, even the sleeves of his shirt poking out underneath his jacket seem blinding.
“Did you get it?”
Nancy keeps holding her pose, one arm squeezing her brother and the other holding her sister to her hip. Mike’s already beginning to fidget beside her.
But Jonathan can’t feel his tongue anymore, and he’s not sure how to answer. He’s not sure he even took the picture.
“Jonathan?” Nancy asks again.
His finger slams down on the button hurriedly, and the second flash catches all of them off guard.
“Got it.” He mumbles it down to his hands, pretending to fiddle with the settings of the camera. He doesn’t want to look up and risk seeing them like that again, seeing her like that.
That satisfies Mike, who slips away from his sisters and rushes back to his friends waiting along the steps. They begin to talk among themselves, voices carrying across the open hallway.
Jonathan can nearly hear his heart beating, the thrumming getting louder inside his head. He needs to leave. He needs to go home and sleep and when he wakes up everything will be the same as it always was. This can’t happen now, not here, not with-
“Come on, Will.” He loops an arm around his brother and steers him towards the door, forgetting to spare the Wheelers another word.
He drives home on the same road he’s been down a hundred, thousand times. But it looks like something out of a fairytale. Everything is different now, everything seems closer and immersive and alive.
Will is talking about their game but Jonathan barely hears him. He can’t stop looking out the windows, watching this new world move past.
He wants to name it so badly but he can’t. What makes his hair a different color from his eyes? What makes the leather of the seats different from the dashboard?
What makes the pale of Nancy’s skin different from his?
Shit. Nancy. He shouldn’t even think about her. He has no right, he doesn’t even know her-
Lights fill his car and a beeping horn shakes him from his thoughts. Jonathan moves back into the lane, shaking hands gripping the wheel.
Focus, Byers.
Will glances over at him, his face burrowed in a frown.
“Are you okay?” He asks, and Jonathan forces himself to nod.
Will looks as if he doesn’t believe him.
“That was nice of you.” He says, in the same voice he uses when he tries to placate their father. “To take some pictures for Mrs. Wheeler.”
Jonathan wonders what would have happened if he hadn’t done that. If he never went over there and took the photo, his life would be exactly the same as it was yesterday.
But it wasn’t the photo, of course. Not really. It was Nancy. Nancy, and the way she smiled when she opened the door, how she asked after his mother, and how, he realized suddenly, she’d always been just there. Drifting on the perimeter of his life, making eye contact in the hallway or bumping into him on her home’s front porch.
Will clears his throat.
“Jonathan?”
Right. He's trying to have a conversation.
“I don’t feel well.” He mutters. It’s not an answer, but it quiets Will.
The rest of the drive passes in silence and a blur of things he doesn’t have the words to describe.
His mother has a book, tucked away in the corner of her bookshelf. He flocks to it once Will is in his room, pulls it out and runs his fingers along the glossy pages the way he used to as a child, finally putting names to the hues surrounding him.
Brown is the color of Will’s hair. Auburn is his mother’s, and he finds he lands somewhere between dark blonde and light brown. His bedspread is green and the walls of their kitchen are grey. Mom’s work uniform is blue, Will’s favorite shirt is red, and their dog is white.
Everything feels the same as it always did. His bed is the same, his clothes are the same, his car is the same.
And yet everything has been irrevocably changed, and he knows he can’t go back to the way things were.
Monday morning comes, and Jonathan awakes at 7:15 without any prompting from his mother.
He stares up at the ceiling (cream) and wonders if he can convincingly fake being sick.
Why now?
A part of him truly believe he’d never see it. Some people probably just weren’t meant to. It didn’t matter. He had Will and his mom, and photography, and he could live a perfectly happy life without a soulmate.
Besides, even if you did see it, that was no guarantee of anything. Look at Mom; she saw it ages ago and that didn’t stop Dad from leaving.
And if he ever did see it, he'S always assumed that would be years down the road. In college, or even after, once he gets the hell out of Hawkins and finds a place where he can really be himself. Then it would be okay to find a soulmate. Then all of this might make a little bit of sense
This has to be a mistake. Something inside of him has gotten messed up. Maybe he can go to a doctor and explain this is all wrong, he isn’t supposed to be seeing this yet, and he certainly isn’t supposed to be seeing it because of Nancy Wheeler.
He likes Nancy, he supposes. As much as he likes anyone outside of his family. She’s always been polite, always been kind. She’s not as obnoxious as the other kids at school. She’s smart, too; all the teachers love her. And he’s not blind, she’s more than pretty. If things were different, if he could have time for anything other than family and work, if he could be any better at making friends or talking to people, maybe he would have tried to-
No. That didn’t make this right.
His clock reads 7:30. The numbers (red) stare him down like a threat, forcing him to make a choice.
He wonders which is more cowardly; pretending to be sick to avoid school, or going to school because lying to his mother would make him feel too guilty.
As the bell rings for first period, and Nancy Wheeler steps into their English classroom, Jonathan wonders if the the best course of action may have been to just flee the state and change his name.
She doesn’t look at him as she sits down, taking her spot beside her friend and talking about last night’s assignment.
Jonathan stares down at the desk (light yellow) and tries to pretend his stomach doesn’t feel nauseous.
Nothing has changed for her, he reminds himself. Nothing is different.
Last night, when he couldn’t sleep because he didn’t want to stop seeing the blues of his bedroom wall, he briefly wondered if she had seen it too. Was it supposed to happen at the same time for two people? Was that how you knew?
But he had discarded that notion almost as quickly as it came. Of course she hadn’t. If Nancy saw it at all it was long before he did, when she was dating that baseball player or when she took classes at the college.
By all rules, there should be nothing that connects them together. And yet, when she’s called up to the board to write an answer, Jonathan watches her draw white across the dull green board and follows the loops of her name in vivid color.
He spends lunch and free period in the darkroom, finishing the next full week of homework just so he won’t chance running into her somewhere. He almost gets away with it; he’s used to living in the outskirts, it’s not hard to ramp it up a notch.
But somehow, just before 3:00 hits, someone comes walking up to his locker, clutching an Advanced Biology textbook and calling his name.
“Hey.” Nancy offers a smile, and Jonathan tries his best to mirror it without looking like a mental patient.
“Hi.” God, what a great conversation starter.
“I just wanted to say thanks, again.” Nancy holds her books tight to her chest, like she’s trying to hide something. “I’m sure my mom will love the photos.”
“Right. Sure. Of course.” He sounds like an idiot.
Nancy gives him another tight-lipped smile, and he finds himself wondering what shade of blue her eyes are.
“Have you developed them?” She asks politely.
“N-No. Not yet.”
She nods.
It’s almost like his mind has gone blank. He knows what the kids whisper about him, that he must be deaf or dumb because he doesn’t run his mouth constantly. He doesn’t always have something to say, but he’s always been perceptive. However, for the first time in his life, it seems as his brain has truly just given up on him.
Yet, somehow, his mouth seems to still be working. It betrays him and all his common sense, expelling some kind of secret hope in an instant.
“I’m going to do it now.” It comes out all in one breath, the words stringing together and slipping out of him before he has time to process them. “Do you want to come?”
Nancy looks as surprised by this offer as he is. She looks down at his camera bag, slung over his shoulder, and then back to his face, her eyebrows knitting close together.
“Now?”
“Yeah.” He sucks in another breath, attempting to cool the fire suddenly spreading through his body. “I- If you want.”
Nancy hugs her books closer, and he can’t read the expression on her face. She was just being nice because their brothers were friends, that didn’t mean she actually wanted to-
“Sure.” She tucks her hair (dark brown, chestnut, beautiful) behind her ear and nods.