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It wasn’t so much that Steve was pre-ordained as to accept something as trite as living in continuous misery, but at twelve years old (as he’s rotting inside invisible walls), he realizes that he’s never going to be happy.
It happens so casually, so quietly, like Steve breathing in and out, lungs filling with air and then quietly exhaling (yes, it was just that ordinary) that he never tries to fight it.
In between sips of lukewarm milk and soggy cereal with his vacant expression that is staring out the big picture window of a too empty house hidden in the backwoods of Hawkins, Indiana, he resigns to this particular fact. It is sometime past eleven am—the sun might have been out if it hadn’t been for the clouds—and if he listens hard enough, he can hear the rush of water from the river that runs behind his house, leading to the quiet hills of the now abandoned quarry. The Pit, as the locals call it. A body was found in it the day before yesterday—drunk, old Gary Whitaker’s—and Steve, like the rest of the town, tries to pretend that it was an accident and that he hadn’t killed himself after getting laid off down at the mill.
But beyond the fact that he is unmitigated fuck who doesn’t believe in things like this—like fate, or god, or whatever—he does think that some people might just be born unlucky. Like Gary for example, with his bloated cheeks and sagging skin, the perfect poster face for mid 1970s small-town economic depression. And it’s not like Steve has a hope in hell, but he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he’s one of them. The unlucky ones that is. In a way, he supposes he’s better off than most (he has a large house, with a large pool, and a large Technicolor television set—his model doesn’t even need rabbit ears), but when people ask him what’s wrong (why the long face, little Stevie?), he waves them off and projects his anger onto the nearest thing (or person) he can find.
Steve Harrington is, and has been for quite some time, a bully.
But if he really has to think about it, like really think, he knows his anger is because of the quietness. The emptiness. Of the too big house with the too big pool and the too big television set that he slips in front of each and every evening, always and endlessly alone. He doesn’t tell people this.
He doesn’t tell people because that’s not what angry little boys do. Angry little boys hide the fact that they are too sad and too fragile and that it’s probably been three weeks since he last felt the word ‘Mom’ touch the tip of his tongue. The word ‘Dad’ too feels clumsy and awkward when he tries it, forgotten from disuse, and a lot of the times he’s afraid that by mentioning their names (of mom and dad), that they will somehow break and he will lose all the pieces forever. That maybe one day they just won’t come back.
Their respective, separate ‘business’ trips seem to be getting longer.
Their names though, he reminds himself, had already been broken once before, the meaning behind the words synonymous with ‘family’ jagged and shattered, with Steve shoving them back into place post-haste. Pretending with wilfully blind stupidity that they fit, that this somehow wasn’t all his fault, because if he had known walking in on his father cheating with his secretary would have manifested this unending schism between them all—
He wishes he could go back in time.
He is selfish. He is a selfish little bastard who knows that he has it better than most. He has the newest model of the Technicolor television set after all! But the longing—for happiness, for family, for a house that didn’t radiate silence—it’s all undeserved and it doesn’t matter anyways, because it’s not like he can have it. It’s stupid to long for things he cannot have, like the warmth of a father’s smile or the gentleness of a would-be mother’s hand—wishing, desperately, for a home that wasn’t shrouded in the wealth of his parents failed relationship, entombing him in things that were meant to make up for their lack of affection.
He saw the Byers’ boys once—little Will, and his older brother, Jonathan—walking on the sidewalk next to their mom. She was smiling at them so warmly, so adoringly, so fucking lovingly that it didn’t even matter that Jonathan’s pants had a rip in the knee or that the car they hopped into was covered in rust.
Steve ran home and smashed the TV remote against the living room floor.
That night, he prayed to God—not god, but God. Begged him to stop the shadows that moved in the dark and stymie the fear and anxiety and anger that bubbled over the vents of his ribcage, spilling out in muffled sobs because the last time his father caught him crying, he hit him so hard that his ears rang for a week. He feels like he’s drowning, just drowning, but the more he screams, the more invisible he becomes.
It didn’t matter.
Praying couldn’t fix fuck all, because God was an asshole, and Steve didn’t have a mother anymore (not really) to hold him close and whisper in his ear: “Nothing will ever happen to you, Stevie. I promise. I promise I will keep you safe. Everything will always be okay.”
He supposed it didn’t matter. Even if he did, it’s not like she could fix this anyways.
-
He’s eighteen or maybe he’s nineteen and he’s in Jonathan’s room on a date that is candidly unremarkable and there is breathy silence and quiet words and the desperate grappling of bodies falling heavy onto the bed. There is Steve. Kissing Jonathan, or maybe being kissed—he’s not quite sure where one starts and the other begins, or even who started it, but the fact remains that they probably shouldn’t be doing this, they definitely shouldn’t be doing this, and—
His hand itches and so does his mouth. And in the back of his mind he thinks that maybe they’ve gone too far (he thinks to his father, of his mother, of all the harsh words and disgusted sighs and heaven forbid from he hanging out with that Byers boy—), but if he’s already settling for silver in the eyes of his parents, then he might as well go for dead fucking last.
Above them, the lights flicker, warm and bright, casting telltale shadows on the pale of his shoulders where red fingerprints are pressed deep into the flesh. A mouth slips to the bony fan of his ribcage, and fingers wander over the stretch of skin between his naval and the slip of fabric covering his hips. If one looked hard enough, they would even find faded bruises, small and mouth-sized, marking his clavicle.
Remember.
Remember regret and drowning. Longing and want. Of happiness that he is forever chasing with the most stupidly, cowardly tongue in the entirety of the whole wide world (we are missing six or seven years between then and this exact moment—but don’t worry, we’ll get to that).
Because little Stevie has a track record, like the notches in his bed post, like being born unlucky under the wrong sign of the stars—Steve has been fucking up and fucking up and fucking up for as long as he can remember, and he’d give anything (everything) to not have Jonathan hate him come morning.
His fingers slip—the button on Jonathan’s pants comes undone and with deft, practiced fingers that are far more used to undoing the clasps on girl’s bras, the zipper does too. He remembers the night in the car, half drunk and watching a meteor shower rain starlight onto Jonathan's skin.
He is in Jonathan Byers’ room on a date that doesn’t quite matter and it all comes down to this. Remembering. Remembering regret and drowning. Because if there was anything in the world that he can be better at than anyone else, it’s this.
-
He never really dated again after Nancy. Not really. He tried, and failed, and tried again, but in a way, he was okay with it—it never bothered him more than it usually did on the countless Friday night’s he spent watching movies with Robin. And if he liked to be poetic about it, their breakup truly marked the shift in his life that lead to his distancing from Tommy Hagan and Carol Perkins.
Tommy and Carol had handled with wonderful grace the rolls required to allow Steve to experience a phenomenally maladjusted teenage life. They seemed more than willing to pick up Steve from his house in the hills, drive to three corner stores testing out their fake I.Ds, buy bottles of cheap whiskey that tasted like poison, endless packs of cigarettes, and of course, snacks, in order to spend their evenings getting fucked up at the bowling alley or down near the Hawk. They would make rude jokes about the kids in their class and the people they hated and they would laugh and Steve would smile, and somehow after five or six shots, it just seemed easier to laugh along with them and it didn’t hurt to remember that he always thought Tommy was kind of a dick or that Carol had a nasty habit of ruining other girls lives.
By the eighth or ninth shot, Tommy was always telling him how lucky he was, because fuck, Steve, your parents are never home, and how he would kill his own brother to have parents like that and Carol would nod, like yeah, Steve—your parents are totally great. Steve’s parents. The best of the best. Really.
Of course, Tommy didn’t have a brother and Carol’s mom was on the school’s PTA, and when Steve went home, laughing and smiling and throat hoarse from too many cigarettes while blind drunk, he tried to tell himself that this wasn’t alright. That he shouldn’t have been laughing. He wasn’t supposed to enjoy this.
“Mom? Dad?” he would shout at the top of his lungs, like as if what Carol and Tommy had said where true. That he really did have the best parents in whole goddamn world.
But of course, nobody was home and Steve would pass out in his bed and wake to a stomach churning hangover.
But Nancy.
She was the first pretty girl that Steve laid eyes on that he didn’t want to ruin, not in the same way he had ruined all the girls he had dated. And she probably had never meant him any harm when she had shyly smiled at Steve that day in the halls, her teeth brilliant and blinding, and stealing his heart all in one go. And he should have known, right from the beginning, that something about her was terribly, terribly wrong because Tommy and Carol hated her, more than they normally hated anyone who existed beyond their sequestered little friend group of dysfunctional fuckery.
So he loved Nancy, and Nancy broke up with him at a Halloween party at Tina’s house, spitting in his face with the heavy help of alcohol that she never loved him back.
And he remembers drowning. Just drowning. And suddenly he was invisible again and nobody could see and King Steve was a joke, just a big fucking joke, and he threw his crown to the ground and stormed out of the party in a fit of unchecked rage.
Later, when he was drunk and Tommy was taunting him (what the fuck did you expect, Steve—you dated a princess, a fucking princess; was she at least a good lay?) he almost cried. He didn’t want to hear her name dragged through the mud, he just wanted her gone—he wanted to forget—forget her—but he didn’t think Tommy could understand something like this. Tommy had been fucking Carol since the seventh grade, but cheated on her regularly and Carol did the same.
He stopped talking to Tommy and Carol fully two weeks later, and the quarry was still swallowing bodies and obituaries for dead men kept popping up in the local paper. Tommy’s dad died, a shot to the head, and Steve didn’t go to the funeral because there wasn’t one, but he wore a suit and a tie and he went up to the graveyard where there was no tombstone, no nothing, and sat on the grass as if it meant something. It didn’t, but it gave him an excuse to drink a bottle of vodka and get wasted under the blinding whites of the hot Indiana summer sun.
He didn’t like Tommy anymore, never really had, but he thought it was sad something so awful had ever had to happen to him.
-
He supposes he should be bothered by his complacency—by his complete inability to not do anything about his life. About waking up every morning and staring dead-faced at the man who mocked him for not getting into any colleges, anywhere, the man he hates, and smiling, but only showing teeth and gums and eating his food and wearing his clothes and taking his handouts from his filthy fucking wallet, left right and center while he still screws around on his mom with that same fucking secretary from nearly ten years ago—but wait.
Let’s try this again.
What bothers him (what really, really bothers him) is this:
He has a choice. Every breath is a choice. Waking every morning, eating—those are choices. He is surrounded by them. There is a door in the front of his house made of old oak and metal hardware, and it is always there. He could walk away. He doesn’t. He stays silent and lets things happen (he drifts in and out of the murky waters pooling in the pit of the old quarry, where people dip below the surface and live forever). He stays.
-
This here is really where the story starts, because remember, we are trying to tell a story. He is all of eighteen years old and filled with a life-time of self-loathing. Ever since the breakup with Nancy, he doesn’t really have any friends left at school, but he doesn’t really care because he is okay with it if only for the fact that he doesn’t have to spend every other weekend getting wasted with that asshole, Tommy. He blinks and—
Oh, it’s Jonathan.
He thinks he should be mad at him. Like really mad. He should be mad that Jonathan slept with Nancy when things between them were still kind of weird and not really defined—like were they actually broken up? Was it really over?—but instead he feels nothing. Just nothing.
Jonathan at least, he thinks, makes Nancy happy.
And is that what love is? Like real love? Being happy for someone even if they don’t love you back? Maybe. But in all honesty, Steve doesn’t have a clue.
But Jonathan—well. His existence in Steve’s life had always sort of kind of just been classified as just there.
Like when he was six. He remembers meeting him for the first time—he was a skinny little fuck with hard eyes and a sad smile and Steve thought that he sort of might have liked him. He didn’t know his name, or who he was, but Steve didn’t really care, and three days later he was fighting tooth and nail with tiny fists that have no real reason to fight other than the fact that some kid called his kid a bad name.
“Jonathan,” is what the other boy tells him when they get dragged into the principal’s office. “My name is Jonathan.” Steve tries the name out on his tongue, tasting the word for the very first time. It’s nice, he thinks, a nice name.
Later, after his Dad has to leave work and come pick up Steve from the school, as soon as they enter the car, he smacks his son so swiftly upside the back of his head that it smashes into the dashboard.
He never talked to Jonathan after that.
Instead, he inherits a title—a Harrington—and no son of mine is going to be caught dead with the son of Lonnie fucking Byers!—with too much burden and wearing it sets Steve down a path that he doesn’t particularly want to take. He is six years old going on thirty, but it’s not like he can give the name back, so he acts tough and only spills his fears in secret when he thinks no one is listening. He doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time and ever since he caught his father fucking his secretary on their living room couch, his mother isn’t there to fix up his face anymore whenever he gets into a fight.
It doesn’t stop him from being reckless and stupid, and in this moment when he looks up to Jonathan standing over his table in the cafeteria with a fresh, black eye and a bleeding lip, Steve grabs the nearest object possible (a flimsy meal tray) and runs out of the school to where the smokers hangout, because he knows who did this and he’s tired of Tommy Hagan’s shit anyways.
All the frantic protesting in the world from Nancy can’t stop him from going, and no matter how many times Jonathan shouts at him to stop, Steve (a Harrington) runs.
-
He can’t really tell what he’s seeing at the moment, but he thinks it might be clouds. Thick, heavy clouds that go squish, squish as he steps on them, squish, squish. And there’s is a fairly large dog he thinks, or a demon, or maybe it’s a man, and it’s running behind him, howling in the dark, and Steve tries to face it, but he can’t, he just can’t, then another loud bang goes off—thunder, or a gun shot—and the walls open up and swallow the demon-dog-man alive. For a moment, he is alone again in the dark, eyes searching for something or someone as his hands grope blindly against strange, cool walls, and he thinks he might be crying. It’s the mall, he thinks. He’s definitely in the mall. He’s already puked once, but all that came out was acid, so when he goes to again, there’s nothing. The first time he thinks he might have gotten some on his socks, but it doesn’t matter—his feet are already wet anyways because the clouds he’s walking on are damp and his socks soak up everything. His moms going to be pissed, Steve thinks, because they don’t do laundry till next Tuesday.
Then, he looks down.
Three steps in and Steve falls as his knees give way. He thinks he’s dead this time for sure, but his body crumples as it lands on another thin layer of clouds, maybe one or two bodies thick. There’s faces amongst them that he recognizes. Just a bunch of stupid kids that he sort of kind of liked.
Someone is talking now—a shadow this time—but he can’t see the man’s face, only hears a disembodied voice floating around in the darkness, and oh—it’s his dad and Jesus, Steve, you’re such a fuck up that you couldn’t even keep those damn kids safe?
This isn’t happening, Steve thinks. This is only a dream, a really bad dream. He begs someone—anyone—for help, but his tongue won’t work and pinching himself doesn’t work and why the fuck can’t he wake up—
—“Steve?”
Steve’s eyes fly open and he gasps, sucking in the biggest breath of air and setting his lungs on fire.
His sits up and looks around wildly and oh right, Dustin and his friends had come over to watch movies only the boys aren’t there anymore, they're all gone, and it’s dark out and the only one left standing in his living room is Jonathan.
“Shit,” Steve says, and he vaguely recognizes that his cheeks are wet and that his chest is still aching and before he can even filter himself, he blurts out: “Where are they? The boys. Where’s Dustin and Will and—,”
“Steve,” Jonathan says again carefully and cautiously and he pushes him back down onto the couch and Steve tries to breathe, really tries, but he’s drowning again and fuck—
“I came by to get Will, but you had fallen asleep,” Jonathan tells him softly. “So I took the rest of the kids’ home.”
And Steve just nods, wide eyed and panicky, and Jonathan just sits down next to him, placing a quiet hand on the curve of his shoulder. The heaving in his chest stops and so does his brain.
“And Steve?” Jonathan says again, quieter than ever, and Steve is just listening, vaguely drifting, and he rubs the heels of his palms against the wetness of his own face. “It’s okay. The dreams. I get them too.”
And they just sit there, silently, in the vastness of Steve’s living room—in the grand emptiness of his house—and Steve breathes.
-
His last memory of Hopper was of his smile. It had been so rare, and so strange to see, that whenever Steve thinks of him, it’s of that wonderfully kind half smirk he got whenever El was around.
It does however, strike him as terribly ironic that this is how he chooses to remember the man, because for as long as Steve had known him, Jim Hopper had been a curmudgeonly, grumpy old man who sighed more than Jonathan did and was probably more scared than Joyce had been when she turned the key, closing the rift in the portal.
They never did find a body, and maybe it was for the best because in the back of his mind, Steve likes that he didn’t have to confront his mangled corpse at a funeral.
Instead, he likes to think that when Hopper died, a flash of all the happy memories he had ever experienced flooded his senses and instead of feeling pain, he was met with some sort of euphoric, long-lasting, final high. That maybe, he got to be happy just one last time. Because he deserved it. He really did.
He remembers sharing his theory with Jonathan once, two weeks after Nancy broke up with him. The Byers’ had come back to town for a quick holiday visit, just after Christmas, and Steve and Jonathan had driven his old car up to the quarry and between them, shared a shitty bottle of rum. They had been really drunk, but not in the same way he and Tommy and Carol used to get, and Jonathan had just nodded, like yeah, hopefully and being too drunk to drive, the pair fell asleep in the car with the heater on.
Later, he had been shoved awake in the dead of the night by Jonathan, and Steve nearly hit him for doing so, but only stopped once he realized that Jonathan only wanted to show him a meteor shower that was raining over the Indiana skies. His face in that moment was beautiful. Hollow and carved thin by the moonlight, Jonathan looked anxious, Steve remembered, almost as if he was waiting for something.
As if there was something brilliant for him out there, but just forever out of his reach.
Steve leaned over and kissed him, and for the first time in his life, someone saw it—
The drowning.
And Jonathan, rum drunk and sleepy, kissed him back.