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Mr. James Harrington, esteemed local businessman and platinum-level Hawkins High School booster club donor, is fairly well-known throughout the community. Everybody knows everybody in Hawkins, obviously, but the Harrington name carries a unique weight. Steve was nine years old when he realized why so many of the pretty young PTA moms liked to tell him to tell his father they said hello. He was fourteen when he finally understood why some kids would be really, really nice to him around the same time that his father started complaining about doing the yearly employee reviews and having to fire underperforming workers.
Steve is eighteen and tied up in an underground lab being tortured when he learns that his father’s complex and often vague business deals were mostly with the government, and involved mind-altering pharmaceuticals, international smuggling, and the abduction and torture of innocent children. As horrifying as it is, it’s like a final puzzle piece in the tapestry of his father’s assholery, and Steve finally feels comfortable letting go of any sense of obligation he once felt to love the man.
Which is pretty emotionally convenient, seeing as he watches James Harrington get his head torn from his shoulders by an interdimensional monster about fifteen minutes later.
He’s stumbling through the halls, sneakers squeaking on tile floor as Jonathan and Robin hold him up and Nancy keeps her shotgun at the ready. Dustin is on his radio, trying to reach everyone else. The sound of blood rushing in his ears melds with labored breathing and Robin’s urgent voice and Jonathan’s anxious mumbling to create the kind of white noise that Steve can easily lose himself in. A metallic tang fills his mouth and he wonders if his father was alive long enough to taste his own blood. Dustin told him last month that when people get beheaded, their heads can stay conscious for, like, an hour. Or maybe it was ten seconds. It doesn’t really matter anyway, because Dustin was talking about the rich people who got killed by the poor people in the French Revolution and they got their heads cut off nice and clean so it probably doesn’t apply to a monster tearing through your neck and flinging your head at the wall and spraying your teenage son with hot blood.
Nancy fires her shotgun at something Steve can’t see, and they keep running. Steve hopes that the blood filling his mouth is his own. The world is kind of melty. It feels like the mall has turned into a Tilt-a-Whirl, but Jonathan and Robin keep walking straight, so Steve closes his eyes and just keeps moving his feet. Eventually things straighten out and he can open his eyes and walk on his own.
Hawkins doesn’t burn to the ground. The government doesn’t kill them all and the news runs some bullshit story that Steve doesn’t bother reading. Within three days his mother throws together a tasteful memorial service with hors d’oeuvres and sings “Amazing Grace,” bowing when met with subdued applause. She skips town that night, leaving a note on the refrigerator full of excuses but lacking a phone number or address.
Steve can’t sleep. He tries to, slowly walking up the stairs with a death-grip on the railing, shuffling into his bedroom, slipping on his most comfortable pajama pants and long-sleeved shirt because for all that it’s summer in Hawkins, none of them can ever escape the cold. He crawls into bed. He stares at the wall and wonders if his mother knew when she was pregnant and first put up the matching plaid wallpaper and curtains. Maybe his ugly nursery was some kind of silent rebellion. Maybe she just didn't have anything better to do while she was pregnant and her husband was too busy hurting other children to spend time with her, so she scoured every store in Indiana until she found the perfect matching set. Patricia Harrington always liked for everything to match. They've got a series of family portraits in matching sweaters lying around somewhere. Steve thinks he was around seven or eight when his dad stopped showing up and his mom refused to be photographed as a mother without a husband, so then it was just him, alone in front of the camera in an itchy sweater and his mom coaching him on exactly how to tilt his head, fixing his hair and straightening everything that could be straightened. She taught him how to make even the fakest smile reach his eyes. Every portrait session was paid for with a custom check from his mother's monogrammed leather checkbook, the one that drew from his dad's account. Steve wonders which child paid for his ugly plaid curtains with their life.
The familiar taste of copper floods his mouth and all he smells is sweat and the kind of rot that’s too old and too foul to be of this world. He can’t look away from the wall. When he blinks, he swears it’s smeared with blood. Something cold and wet is on his face, starting from his forehead and trickling down, and he screws his eyes shut before the red can flood his vision. It drips into his ears. In the darkness, he sees his father. They’re back underground, Steve tied down and his father asking questions, except it’s wrong because his father has a mustache and his hair is thick again and thoroughly brown. Steve isn't tied down. Steve is still in bed, covers pulled up to his chin. Even though he can’t see it right now, he knows that there’s a nightlight in the hallway for if he gets scared, so he doesn’t need to wake anybody up. His dad is looking down at him but he doesn’t look angry. There's something gleaming and wicked and sharp in his hands, but then Steve focuses and it's a book, Dad is just holding a book, Steve's favorite, Hop on Pop . He’s wearing that dark red sweater that Steve helped Mommy pick out for Christmas. His skin is smooth and free of lines, and he looks tall, so tall, and Steve thinks he’s probably the tallest, strongest, smartest Daddy in the world. He leans down toward Steve.
Suddenly he’s choking on air that’s too cold and the rest of him is far too hot, and it’s dark so he tries to open his eyes but it doesn’t work, it’s just darkness and redness and the taste of blood, the sound of blood, rushing in his ears and over his head and flowing over him, so he screams until his throat gives out and then he gasps, gasps, heaves and chokes for air with his fingers twisting in the bedsheets and his body shaking until the taste of saltwater lands on his lips. His fingers abandon the sheets to dig themselves into his biceps and the pain reminds him that he’s alive and eighteen.
James Harrington is dead.
Patricia Harrington is gone.
There’s a night light in the hallway for if he gets scared.
Steve opens his eyes and breathes. He sits up too quickly and his head spins. Light is seeping through the crack under his door, and moonlight from the window lets him make out the familiar shapes of his bedroom. His fingers throb and he squints at them to see blood seeping through the shitty band-aids Robin had found in the Scoops Ahoy first-aid kit. The doctors had asked a lot of questions that he couldn’t answer before telling him that it’ll probably be at least six months before the nails grow back. Cracked ribs can take six months too, but Steve’s dealt with those and he thinks his chest should stop aching within the next few weeks. Nobody gave him a timeline for when he might be able to sleep again. He’d been getting the job done with pills and cough syrup for the past three days.
There’s a walkie talkie on the dresser for emergencies.
Everything hurts as he extracts himself from the twisted mess of sweaty bedsheets and walks over to the dresser. He leans on it and lets out an involuntary sound of pain when he presses down on the button.
“Um, hello?” he rasps, and swallows a couple of times to try and soothe his vocal cords. “Dustin? Are you up?”
He waits a few seconds.
“Uh, this is Steve. Over.”
It feels like there’s a knot in his throat as he tries to take a deep breath.
“There’s not- it’s not a code red, or anything, nothing big, I just… wanted to talk? If anybody else… wants to talk.”
“Over,” he adds belatedly. Steve shivers. The air conditioning is up too high, but the thermostat is right next to his dad’s office, and he doesn’t think he can look at it right now.
He practices deep breathing like his mom showed him once as he waits for someone to respond. It helps when you’re trying not to cry.
“It doesn't have to be Dustin,” he begs, “We can talk about whatever you want.”
He’s shaking. His head feels heavy and his chest burns like he’s sinking in the ocean, unable to figure out which way is up. He considers opening the window that looks out to the backyard and trying to jump into the pool from the roof. Maybe then some primal instinct would kick in and it would tell him what to do so he could breathe again.
“Hey, Steve,” a soft voice replies, and Steve’s head breaks above the water. “This is Jonathan. Will’s in bed. I can talk.”
Jonathan has a nice voice. It’s deep, but never booming. It’s just kind and gentle, sometimes teasing and cynical but very rarely cruel. Steve clings to it like a life preserver.
“Hey, man,” Steve says, and it sounds so far from casual that he has to laugh a little bit. “Sorry to bother you. It's not… I didn't mean to bother you. You don’t have to do anything.”
“Don’t do that,” Jonathan says. His gentle voice sounds tinny coming through the walkie’s speaker.
“Do what?”
“Pull away when you need help.”
Steve doesn’t know what to say. He clears his throat again before responding. “It’s just, you know, the… everything. Everything that happened. I don’t know, it’s probably the drugs, I’m just having a hard time.”
Jonathan sounds tired. “I can’t sleep, either.”
“My mom left,” Steve says. “I don’t think she’s coming back.”
“Come here.”
“What?”
“Come over, Steve. Mom won’t mind. I don’t… I think everyone would feel better if you weren’t alone.”
Steve doesn’t think about it. “Okay.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll… I’ll be there. Soon.”
“Okay. Drive careful, Steve.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Steve almost laughs. “Over.”
“See you soon, man. Over.”
As he sets down the radio, Steve realizes that his hands have stopped shaking. He throws a few things into an old duffle bag that he plans to hide in the car in case this invitation isn’t what he hopes it is. He clenches his jaw and adjusts the thermostat when he gets downstairs, flipping all of the lights off before he leaves and not bothering to lock the door behind him.
Steve buckles his seatbelt and uses his high beams, but speeds towards the Byers house and only drops below sixty when he reaches that one blind intersection about a half-mile outside of his neighborhood. Two out of three ain’t bad, and Steve feels like he’s outrunning something. He slows to a cool forty going down the Byers’ street and brakes hard just as the house comes into view, crawling forward to park in the road outside so that he won’t block Joyce in.
He puts the car in park. Hand still on the gear stick, he closes his eyes. Suddenly he doesn’t want to turn off the car. Its rumbling feels like a part of him now, like if he moves his hand and turns the key his heart will go still along with the car and Jonathan will come outside to find a handsome statue with bandaids on each finger and tear tracks down its face.
Steve jerks his hand up from the gear stick and twists the key in one fluid motion, exhaling as the car stills. The air is heavy and warm and oppressively quiet. Without air conditioning or a cracked window, the summer heat is getting to him, pricks of sweat making themselves known at his forehead and the nape of his neck. He still feels kind of frozen inside. Something about the sound of his own breathing is distracting, and he can’t really remember what he was about to do.
There’s a knock on the window. He looks up to see Jonathan, in a long-sleeved thermal shirt and flannel pants, awkwardly waving one hand as the other is tucked into his side.
Steve opens the door and the car is flooded with more hot air. He gets out and stands with a soft grunt.
“Cold?” Jonathan asks, looking Steve up and down. Steve is wearing knit socks under a pair of slippers, flannel pajama pants dragging a little on the ground.
“Are you?” Steve’s lips stretch, just a little bit, into something almost like a smile.
“Not anymore,” Jonathan says.
“Me neither.” Steve shuts the car door as gently as he can but it still sounds like a gunshot ringing out through the silent air.
Jonathan peers into the backseat and smiles a little bit, too. “It’s late. Let’s get inside, we can bring your stuff in in the morning.”
“Alright.” Steve follows Jonathan inside, wiping his slippers on the welcome mat before stepping over the threshold.
“Just, uh, try to be quiet, Will and Mom are still asleep. If you want some water or something the cups are- woah.”
Jonathan is looking at his hands.
“Steve, you’re bleeding.”
“Hm? Oh, yeah.”
Jonathan reaches out, hand hovering in the air for a moment before settling gently on Steve’s wrist. His hand is warm. “Come on,” he says, tugging Steve toward the hallway, “Let’s swap out those band-aids.”
“Okay,” Steve says, and it comes out so quietly that he isn’t sure Jonathan heard him at all. He lets Jonathan pull him into the bathroom and he sits obediently on the side of the bathtub as Jonathan rummages through a cabinet.
He emerges with a box of multicolored off-brand band-aids and a pair of small stainless steel scissors.
Steve watches as Jonathan gently cuts off each band-aid, hissing involuntarily when they fall away. He tries to focus on the feel of Jonathan’s hands cradling his own. It’s nice. Robin had been laser-focused on putting them on in the first place and she’d done so with clinical efficiency, shh-ing him whenever he gasped or groaned. Jonathan doesn’t shh him, but he does rub Steve’s palm with his thumb whenever Steve makes a noise. Looking up at Jonathan, Steve feels frayed and stripped, like he’s on display.
He closes his eyes. It’s okay, Jonathan touching him like this, as long as he doesn’t watch.
“Sorry, I know it has to hurt. Should- do we need to clean them, or should I just go ahead and put the new ones on?”
“I-” Steve starts, and it comes out so raw that he closes his mouth and swallows before trying again. “I think we can just switch them out.”
“Alright. Sit back then, it’s time for your manicure.”
Steve huffs air out of his nose in a near-laugh and swears that he hears Jonathan do the same.
Jonathan hums. “I’m thinking we alternate the pink and blue.”
“You’re the manicurist,” Steve says, “I trust your judgment.” He feels Jonathan gently manipulating his left pinky finger, slowly wrapping a band-aid around it until the cotton pad is snug against Steve’s exposed nail bed.
“Well, that’s on you,” Jonathan replies, “And is manicurist a word?”
“Are you questioning my vocabulary?” Steve keeps his eyes closed, listening carefully as Jonathan peels the paper off of another band-aid and crumples it up.
“Never.” Jonathan moves on to the next finger, turning it just as gently as he did the last and wrapping the band-aid around it perfectly.
“Didn’t think so.”
They lapse into silence as Jonathan works. Steve's world shrinks to the sound of Jonathan's breathing and the warmth of Jonathan's hands. Nothing exists beyond his senses, beyond the pressure on his fingertips and the hard molded plastic of the bathtub rim. He can hear the distant hum of an air conditioner working overtime. Steve drifts. It feels like he's being warmed up from the inside out. God, the last time he felt this warm was when Nancy fell asleep on his chest while they watched The Neverending Story. Something in the movie woke her up, though, just a few minutes after she dozed off, and she'd held her head up for the rest of the night.
"Alright, I'm all done."
Steve blinks his eyes open to find Jonathan's deep brown eyes closer than they've ever been before. It occurs to him that he should probably move back, but he stays still. The warmth has already started seeping out of his body. Steve tries to hold onto it as it flees.
Jonathan pulls away, holding eye contact as his fingers slip slowly away from Steve's hand.
"Let's go to bed," he says softly, looking down as he stands from where he knelt by Steve. The air goes cold.
"Oh," Steve rasps. "Yeah, I… Yeah." He stands, following Jonathan out of the bathroom and breaking off to head back into the living room.
"Steve, the bedroom's right here."
He pauses halfway to the couch. "Right."
He turns around. Jonathan's mouth is curved into a sad smile, and Steve smiles back.
"Thanks for reminding me."
Jonathan looks down again. He holds the door to his room open so that Steve has to shuffle by him to enter.
"Take whichever side you want. I just gotta-" Jonathan cuts himself off, leaning down to pick up a few things strewn across the floor and toss them into a corner. Steve looks at the bed. The sheets seem more mussed on the left side, so he picks the right, sliding out of his slippers and grunting softly as he sits. Jonathan glances up at the sound and Steve wishes that he'd been able to keep his mouth shut.
James Harrington always had a habit of making more noise than was strictly necessary. His shoes always echoed on hardwood floors and his normal speaking voice radiated throughout the house, travelling from the kitchen or the master bedroom or the patio into Steve's ears regardless of which doors were closed. Not a single movement was unaccompanied by something , by a grunt or a huff or the occasional growl.
Steve remembers the squelch. The sneakers on tile floor. Rushing in his ears. A grotesque, rumbling noise. Somebody had screamed. Steve doesn't think it was him, but he isn't sure.
"Do you want to leave the lamp on?"
Steve lays down facing the door. He's under the comforter but on top of the sheets.
"It's up to you," he says. Darkness shouldn't be an issue as long as Jonathan stays.
The lamp stays on. Steve has his eyes closed, and he doesn't really know when that happened, but it doesn't matter because the bed shakes and creaks a little and there's warmth at his back.
With the light from the lamp cutting through his eyelids, he can pretend that it's not three in the morning. It's daylight outside, actually, and he's taking a nap after basketball practice before he goes over to Nancy's place to study. If Holly or Mike start being too loud they'll go to the park, or the library if it's still open, and then when Nancy's through all of her flash cards they'll park somewhere secluded and fog up the windows. His parents are away on a harmless tropical vacation and his mom left lasagne in the fridge. Actually, Steve decides, his parents never existed at all. He's on Dustin's couch closing his eyes until the Excedrin kicks in, and then they're going to go to the arcade. Robin is going, too, and all of the kids, and Nancy, and Jonathan. They're all going to descend on the Dairy Queen like a horde of barbarians. Maybe they'll go to Sonic instead, so that El can experiment with all of the different soda flavors. After the arcade he'll drive them, everyone piled into his car, to that spot by the creek where there's a break in the tree cover and you can see the stars framed all prettily by shadowed leaves. Robin will sit on the roof of his car with Dustin and Erica and the frame won't dent. He'll lie down on the hood, Nancy holding his hand and Jonathan pressed against his side with an arm around his shoulders. The car doors will all be open, so everyone can hear the music Will picks from where he lounges in the drivers' seat, leaned all the way back with a blanket in his lap so that the night air can never make him shiver. Mike and El will find a big rock in the creek bed to rest their heads on as they lay in the dirt, side-by-side, and Mike will point at all of the constellations and tell their stories while El gazes in wide-eyed wonder. Lucas and Max will sit on the ground and lean their backs against the car, whispering just low enough that all Steve can understand is their laughter.
Nothing will emerge from the woods. There's a walkie talkie in the car for emergencies, but Chief Hopper and Joyce Byers are having a nice dinner so they shouldn't be interrupted. The worst that could happen is one of the kids scrapes their knee trying to jump from rock to rock in the slippery creek bed. He can handle anything that might go wrong. He's warm, and safe, and so is everybody he loves.
Steve drifts.
Some time later, he hears a door open. By the time the fog clears out from his head and his eyes force themselves open, he's forgotten about it. All he thinks about is how all of the browns and greens and other mixed-up neutrals in Jonathan's bedroom look incredibly inviting in the sunlight that streams from the window.
Jonathan's bedroom. He's in Jonathan's bed. His face is pressed into Jonathan's chest. Not completely, but he's pretty sure that his hair must be in Jonathan's face, and if he stretched his neck a little his lips would press into Jonathan's skin, just above where the collar of his shirt begins. The two of them are facing each other like a pair of parentheses and Steve can feel Jonathan's knees brushing against his own.
Steve slowly inches back until he's completely separated from Jonathan, who thankfully seems to still be asleep. He’s hungry and he kinda has to pee and he definitely has to go get his meds out of the car because everything aches, but he doesn’t want to get out of bed just yet. So he waits, eyes fluttering open and closed and open again, gazing first at Jonathan's face and then at the wall behind him when that begins to feel like too much. The side of his neck hurts just enough to keep him conscious. Jonathan's breathing is deep and even. Sometimes Jonathan will make little noises, when his breath catches in his throat or something happens in his dreams, and Steve waits for them. They make him feel real. The pain is making him feel real, too. It’s making him feel possibly a little too real. His hands are throbbing again and he’s reminded that he has a pharmacy out in the car.
Something clatters. It's coming from the general direction of the kitchen, and Steve tenses. Joyce must be home. Fuck, Steve's an idiot. Other people still have parents. Steve wants to wake up Jonathan and ask what he should do, but one look at his sleeping face shuts that down immediately. If anybody deserves some rest, it’s Jonathan. Still, Steve has a problem. As much as his instincts scream at him to stay put, he needs to get up. Things won’t be pretty if he goes too much longer without taking his meds.
Joyce is good, he tells himself, she’s kind, and most importantly, she’s got kind of a lot going on, and Steve is stealthy, like a ninja. Hopefully he’ll be able to sneak past her. Maybe she’ll be cool about it if she sees him. Hell, she might already know he’s here somehow, know that he was just having a rough night and that nothing wrong or weird happened. She’s a mother, though, a good one, and Steve hears that good mothers always know the truth.
He considers whether he’s likely to hurt himself climbing out of the window. It occurs to him that he might not be able to pry it open without fingernails, and trying would definitely wake up Jonathan.
So. Sneaking past Joyce. It shouldn’t be too difficult.
Steve eases himself out of bed and wiggles his feet into his slippers. The air feels sharp against his skin and he wishes he was at home and he could grab his cashmere throw, and then he remembers that his parents bought it for him like everything else that’s his. Owning cashmere was always pretentious anyways, as he's learned from people smarter than him.
He ducks out of Jonathan’s room and into the bathroom. Once he’s finished his business and carefully washed his hands, he waits, listening. Joyce is definitely still moving around in the kitchen. He spends a few minutes trying to style his hair with water from the sink, but his fingers shake and the mirror tells him that he’s just making it look worse. For the first time in his life, he feels truly disgusted by the person looking back at him. He sees scabbed-over cuts on his father’s sharp jaw. Dark shadows which look foreign under his mother’s eyes. All that he doesn't recognize from his parents is the haunted air that's settled over his entire face like costume makeup. It looks fake, like if he just scrubs a little, it'll rinse right off, but no amount of splashing and rubbing with the hottest water that'll run from the tap can make it go away. Steve isn’t the man in the mirror. The man in the mirror is a Frankenstein of borrowed genetics and memories that Steve would give anything to forget.
“Fuck,” he whispers to himself, and opens the bathroom door.
He walks lightly, toe-heel toe-heel, splitting his attention between the floor in front of him and the entry to the kitchen.
“Morning, sweetie,” he hears. Shit, she thinks he’s Jonathan. Steve inches closer to the kitchen, wincing as he realizes that she can definitely see him.
“I don’t usually get up early- well, stay up early- on my days off, but I wanted to make sure you had breakfast,” she says.
Steve feels like he’s studying with Nancy. He’s supposed to have a response, supposed to know what’s on the other side of the flash card, but Nancy made the study set herself and he’s never even taken this class.
Joyce is scrambling eggs, wearing a t-shirt about four sizes too big for her and a pair of pajama pants. There’s a plate of bacon with a paper towel on top of it spinning in the microwave.
“I don’t eat breakfast.”
That definitely wasn’t on the other side of the flashcard, but Joyce smiles anyway, flicking off the stovetop burner.
“More for me, then. Maybe if we have some leftovers you can heat them up around lunchtime. You do eat lunch, right?”
A small laugh bubbles up from his chest without permission. Joyce is still smiling at him.
"I… yeah. Sorry, I gotta… I gotta get something out of the car. I'm not… leaving. Unless-" Steve cuts himself off, not sure how to say it.
"Alright. I'll be here."
Steve goes and retrieves his bag. When he gets back, Joyce is still there. For some reason, he’s surprised. He approaches hesitantly, setting the bag down in a chair by the kitchen table and leaning down to dig for his pills. The first bottle, the antibiotics, are on top, but he can't find the oxycodone. It's probably for the best, since he's nearly out and he'll have to switch to Tylenol soon anyway. The throbbing in his fingers worsens as he digs. The pounding headache is coming back. He finds the bottle of Xanax that he stole from his mother's secret stash, buried beneath his underwear and t-shirts.
"Is something missing?" Joyce places a glass of water on the table next to the pill bottle. Steve starts and straightens to his full height.
"No, I just forgot my pain medicine," he says. For the first time he realizes that the top of Joyce’s head doesn’t even reach his chin. Steve zips up his bag and stashes it under the chair, sitting quickly. Looking up at Joyce feels much better than looking down.
"Oh, let me see what I've got," Joyce says, and she leaves the room. With the smell of bacon now permeating the air, the microwave beeps, over and over and over again. Steve waits it out and misses the sound when it finally stops. He swallows his antibiotic with a large gulp of water that almost makes him choke.
Joyce walks in with her head nearly buried in her purse. He can hear receipts crinkling and pills rattling. She draws out a large, rough-looking bottle of acetaminophen. He's never really paid much attention to the pills he's taken before, usually just judging by the color of the bottle and the list of uses on the side, but he's 80% sure that acetaminophen is Tylenol, which means he's been saved. The label is half rubbed-off and Steve knows that it must have been living in her purse for a while. She sets it down next to his antibiotic bottle with a triumphant smile, sitting in the chair right next to him.
“Found some!”
“Your, uh, bacon’s ready,” he says, hoping that she’ll look away long enough for him to take three or four pills at once.
“Eh, I’ll just reheat it when Jonathan and Will wake up anyway,” she says with a wave of her hand, “I’m not really hungry.”
Steve thinks that Joyce Byers might have the kindest eyes he’s ever seen, and he can’t bring himself to look into them. It reminds him of how the hellfire preachers on TV talk about God and angels and heaven. Like anything truly good would burn his eyes out of his skull if he dared to think himself worthy of sneaking a peek.
Joyce opens the bottle for him without a word.
He shakes three pills into his hand, eyes glued to his task. He doesn’t know if Joyce watches him as he lifts the glass of water to his lips with shaking fingers. His eyes are closed as he shovels the pills into his mouth and tilts his head back, neck shooting bolts of fire throughout his head and chest in protest. As he puts the glass down he feels a small hand on his arm, and he looks to his left.
“Can I get you anything else?”
Steve knows what’s on the other side of this flashcard.
“No, thank you, Ms. Byers.”
“Steve, you know that you’re welcome to stay here as long as you need. Right?”
Steve once looked at the sun for nearly a full minute on a dare. He can handle this.
He meets her eyes. “Thank you.” All he wants is to tell her that he’s leaving, that he’ll be out of her hair soon, but he can’t. He doesn’t know where else to go. “You won’t even know I’m here. And I can… do chores, and stuff, you know. Whatever you need.”
Joyce’s hand is still on his arm. Her thumb is moving slowly back and forth. Her gaze doesn’t waver.
“Oh, sweetie, don’t worry about that. Focus on getting better,” she says, patting his arm. “Is that everything you brought?” She nods down at the floor, where Steve’s duffle bag is still shoved underneath his chair.
“Uh, yeah, yes, ma’am,” he says, stumbling over his words, “I just kind of threw some things in, you know, I didn’t really have a plan.”
She smiles. “You can go get some more of your things from home, if you want. Jonathan’s got room.”
“I don’t want to,” he says, and blinks at himself.
Joyce frowns.
“Sorry. I don’t- I don’t mean that I’m just gonna, like, use all of your stuff. I’ll probably go back and get things later.”
“Steve,” she says. She isn’t pretending that things are normal anymore. “Stop it with the sorries.”
Steve raises his eyebrows. “Uh, okay?”
“I’m not making you go back there, alright? You don’t have to go back home if you don’t want to. I get it.”
Home is a weird word. Steve always thought of it as being where he lives. It was a synonym for house, just with a little more weight.
They’d talked about home in English one time, because whatever book they were reading had something to do with it, and his teacher had asked what home meant to each of them. Somebody said that home is where you feel safe. Someone else said that home is where you feel like you belong. Tommy said that it’s where the government can’t tell you to put clothes on.
Steve hadn’t raised his hand.
“No, it’s not that. I don’t… I don’t know.”
Joyce keeps looking at him. Her face isn't exactly neutral, but it's… open. Not judgemental.
Steve sighs. “It just sucks. You know? I can’t walk through my own house without remembering everything.”
“I know,” Joyce says. She looks at the refrigerator that Steve knows once held the body of a demodog.
“Oh, shit, sorry.”
She looks back at Steve admonishingly.
“Right. Yeah. No, it’s… It’s different. Here. I don’t mean to like, say that I’m special, it’s just… it’s different.”
“How is it different?” she asks, and it isn’t accusatory. It’s curious in a pleasant way, like she’s asking about his favorite subject in school or what sneakers he wears to play basketball.
He brings his right thumb to his mouth before remembering that he's got nothing there to chew on. The band-aid is pink, though, and he feels a little bit better as he puts his hand back down by his side.
“I don’t know. It’s not the bad things that I’m afraid of remembering, you know? When I’m here, I remember the monsters, and getting my ass kicked, and it was scary, obviously, but it was scary when it happened. It's not scary now.”
Steve struggles to figure out what he’s talking about. Joyce deserves a real answer.
“When I’m at home, I remember the bad shit, but I can handle that. It’s fine. Honestly, I can handle being at home, you know, it isn’t that bad. It’s just… stuff.”
Joyce shifts in her chair. She sits on it sideways, leaning against the chair’s back and facing Steve fully. “Stuff?”
He can handle direct sunlight, he tells himself. Steve Harrington doesn’t burn. He tans. Steve Harrington is used to being seen. This is extremely different from pretty much everything else he’s experienced in life, but it can’t be that hard. Nancy saw him before he really saw himself. Jonathan saw him last night. It’s different, but he tells himself it’s the same. Steve turns to face Joyce, mirroring her pose and meeting her gaze with a deep breath.
“It’s just… things. Like, my favorite shirt isn’t my favorite shirt anymore, you know? It’s just- it’s just another thing that my mom bought with my dad’s money that he got from being an evil asshole.”
Joyce looks at him like she’s expecting nothing and everything at once. “You don’t have anything that’s yours?”
Steve nods. “Yeah, exactly! It’s like… everything I have, I got from them. You know? I’m... I’m them.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Joyce says, so softly that Steve wants to cut and run while he still can.
She continues, and Steve sits still. “You are your own person, Steve. Your parents don’t define you.”
“But they do ,” he says, and he should probably stop talking but he really doesn’t want to, so he keeps going. “God, you know, I can’t even look in the mirror anymore. My face isn’t even my face. It’s just my dad’s stupid nose and my mom’s fucking hair.”
Joyce’s face is moving, twisting into something that Steve doesn’t have the energy to decipher. He can’t close his mouth. Breathing gets a little harder.
“And my car isn’t my car. My house isn’t my house. I don’t… I don’t have anything, anymore. They just… took it all. They left, they're gone, and they took it all.” Steve presses his lips together forcefully, swallowing and taking deep breaths to try and calm himself down.
Joyce regards him silently for a moment. “What about those guys?” she asks conversationally, tilting her head towards his face.
“What?” Steve’s eyebrows draw together.
“These,” she says, reaching out two fingers to gently poke Steve’s cheek where he knows that two freckles lie. “Who do these belong to?”
Steve swallows. He knows what she's trying to do, and it makes him want to crawl under the table. “Me, I guess.”
“They’re on your face, aren’t they?”
It’s nice of her to try, Steve thinks. He doesn’t say anything.
“Were you born with them?”
Steve thinks about it. “I don’t… think so? Maybe not?”
“Well, either way. Maybe you got them from your parents. Maybe they’re from the sun. They’re a part of you, Steve. Trust me.” Joyce laughs, a small huff of air that tells Steve she’s got a thousand stories he’ll probably never hear. “Once somebody’s gone, they don’t own shit , Steve. They definitely don’t own any part of you. Not unless you let them.”
Steve looks into her eyes and finds something that he doesn’t have a word for. Everyone else would have a word. Nancy might say strength and Jonathan might say love and Dustin might say experience. They wouldn’t be wrong, but they wouldn’t be right, either, because Steve sees something that he recognizes from the mirror. Something that he never saw in his mother or his father.
“You make it sound easy,” he says.
“It’s not,” Joyce replies plainly. “But you don’t have to do it alone.”
Steve’s lips twitch. The overhead light seems like it’s gotten brighter. Maybe the sun’s just gotten higher in the sky, fighting through leaves and curtains to illuminate his morning.
“You know,” he says, “I eat breakfast sometimes. I just don’t, usually. Unless I’m with other people.”
Joyce narrows her eyes, lips quirking up playfully. “Funny. I don’t usually have breakfast, either. Not unless I’m eating with my kids.”
Steve’s heart jumps in his chest and Joyce gets up. He notices that her pajama pants are cuffed at the bottom. Something about it makes Steve smile. He plays with the pill bottles, spinning them on the table and trying to minimize the rattle as Joyce scoops eggs onto two paper plates.
Will walks in slowly and silently. He takes the seat to Steve's right without a word, rubbing his eyes and sitting cross-legged in the chair. His pajama pants have spaceships on them.
"Morning," Will says softly.
Steve meets his eyes and finds exhaustion.
"Morning," Steve says, and Will offers a small smile. His eyes are still tired, but there's something else there. Whatever it is, it makes them shine. Steve smiles back.
Warmth is trickling through his body, Steve notices, starting from his chest and slowly seeping outwards. Joyce sets down two plates, first in front of Will and then in front of Steve, kissing the top of Will's head and placing her hand briefly on Steve's shoulder before she heads back to the stove. Warmth starts dripping down from that shoulder, too, bleeding onto his arm and into his side. He takes a bite of scrambled egg and then it's coming from his mouth, his throat, warming his entire head and then meeting up with the heat in his chest and continuing down until all that's cold is the tips of his fingers and toes.
"It's kind of hot in here," Jonathan's voice says, and Steve looks up just in time to catch him yawning with his arms stretched out, unguarded and taking up more space than Steve's ever seen. Jonathan doesn't shrink when he finishes stretching. He sits just as Joyce gets back with two more plates, and he takes the seat to Steve's left.
Will yawns. "It's alright to me."
"It's just the stove," Joyce says as she sits.
Jonathan knocks his shoulder into Steve's with the smallest upturn of his lips, sending shockwaves down from the point of impact.
"What do you think?"
Steve considers. "I don't know. I'm pretty warm. It's nice, though. Not too hot."
Jonathan holds eye contact as he takes a bite of his eggs. "I never said it was too hot."
Steve nudges Jonathan's foot under the table.
"Thanks."
Jonathan nods across the table at Joyce. "Mom's the one who cooked."
Sunlight streams in through the window, making the Byers' brown hair gleam gold. Steve eats his bacon with a grin.