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ana b’koach gedulat yemincha tatir ts’rurah. kabel rinat am’cha, sagvenu, taharenu, norah
‘please, with the powerful force of Your right hand, release the captive. accept Your people’s song; elevate and purify us, Awesome One’
Steve isn’t quite sure what to do, now that it’s all over. Mostly he’s trying not to bleed too much on the Byers’ upholstery as he slowly comes down from the adrenaline high he was on in the tunnels. When he was there, the need to protect the kids and get them all out of there alive covered up any other feeling. Now, the pain from the massive beating that Billy gave him earlier is coming in strong, and he tries not to show it too much and start freaking the kids out more than they already are.
The pain can’t surpass the relief that flows through him at the sight of Mrs. Byers walking through the door holding Will and followed closely by Nancy and Jonathan. Sure, in a little while the sting of Nancy calling their whole relationship bullshit and then dumping him for Byers will come back, probably. But for now, he’s just happy to see them alive and unharmed, even if they all look exhausted and sweaty.
Mrs. Byers starts to head for the couch where Steve is sitting, clearly meaning to lay Will down. She’s followed closely by the horde of preteens peppering her with a million questions about what happened. Steve stands to get out of her way and waves a hand at the kids. “Hey, shitheads, calm down a sec and let them breathe. Everything’s alright,” he says, which serves to calm them down for about thirty seconds before Nancy gasps from across the room.
“What happened to you?” And it’s Jonathan that’s asking, which should maybe be surprising but really isn’t. He and Nancy both step closer, peering at Steve’s face. He sees that Mrs. Byers is turning towards him now, too, though she doesn’t leave Will’s side.
“Oh, you know, the usual,” Steve says. “I got my ass handed to me.” He says it lightly, trying to make it a joke even as his head throbs and he’s finding it difficult to keep standing.
“That’s not true!” Dustin practically yells, and Steve appreciates the kid’s willingness to come to his defense but he’s not loving the volume at the moment. “You were totally kicking Billy’s ass before he pulled a dick move and smashed your head with the plate!” He goes quiet then, as Lucas and Max make frantic gestures for him to shut up. It’s a bit too late, though.
“What?” Nancy, Jonathan, and Mrs. Byers all say at the same time. Steve’s head is really, really not loving the volume right now.
“Um, yeah, that might’ve happened, also I’m gonna sit down now,” he says before practically collapsing into the rickety armchair that sits in the corner of the room. “It’s okay, though, like I passed out for a bit but we were still able to get to the tunnels and burn out all the little devil dogs or whatever they were.”
“Demodogs,” Dustin says cheerfully.
“Wait, what happened with the tunnels?” Nancy asks, turning to look at her brother. Mike gives Steve a pretty strong death glare before he starts to explain their whole plan to Nancy.
“Jesus, who cares?” Jonathan asks, exasperated. “Steve, we have to take you to the hospital.”
Steve groans, leaning further back into the chair. “Please, no hospitals,” he says, and both Jonathan and Mrs. Byers look at him closely. Mrs. Byers steps in front of him now, and he knows he must look pretty bad if she’s willing to leave Will’s side even for a second.
“Steve, a plate to your head is some pretty serious head trauma, sweetie,” she says softly. Her voice is soothing and familiar in a way that makes him want to close his eyes and curl into a little ball.
“No hospitals,” he repeats, though his conviction is a bit weaker this time. He glances around to make sure none of the kids are paying too close attention—they’ve mostly been distracted by the ongoing argument between Nancy and Mike. He still lowers his voice even more when he says, “they’ll call my dad.”
Mrs. Byers makes a face at that, and Steve can tell she’s holding in quite a few choice words about his father. Steve loves her all the more for it. “Are your parents home?” she asks instead.
Steve shakes his head. “Dad’s off somewhere with some secretary, and Mom’s visiting Aunt Becca in Boston.” It’s his cousin Noah’s bar mitzvah, and she had asked him to come with her, and Steve had refused because he didn’t want to miss the last Halloween parties of his high school career. He wants to laugh at his past self, to shake him so hard he sees sense. What a joke it all was—what a joke it all still is. To think that everything was just over, that he would never have to deal with monsters again. Yeah, right.
Part of him is glad his mom isn’t home, so she won’t see the blood and bruises on his face and he won’t have to think of some story to explain it away. He doesn’t want to think about what could have happened if he and the kids weren’t as lucky in the tunnels as they were. What kind of a phone call would his mother have gotten then? What sort of story would she have been told about what happened to him?
Mrs. Byers hums, then nods her head determinedly. “You’ll stay here with us until she comes back,” she says, and then she shakes her head at him when he tries to protest. “It’s that, or a hospital,” she says before turning to Jonathan. “Stay with him, I’m going to get the first aid kit.” She leaves then, and Jonathan stays hovering over him.
Steve doesn’t point out that they’re in a room full of people, and that Jonathan doesn’t need to keep watch over him. But if he’s really, truly honest with himself, he doesn’t mind Jonathan’s eyes on him. And if he’s even more honest, he can admit that he kind of likes it—but only because it reminds him of an earlier time, a time before high school and monsters and girls and everything else that came between them.
“So what happened?” Steve asks quietly, nodding his head to where Will still lies sleeping on the couch. The other kids have moved so that they’re mostly surrounding him, though they’re careful not to jostle him awake and are talking in soft whispers over his head. Steve is struck, for a moment, at how gentle they can be with each other, even when they’re usually yelling and running all over the place. He watches as Jonathan’s eyes move over to Will and stay there for a few long seconds, like he’s reminding himself that Will is okay.
“We—we burned it out of him,” Jonathan says after a moment, hushed. There’s a haunted look in his eyes that Steve hates to see, one that he recognizes easily. It’s the same look that Steve sees in the mirror when he wakes up from a bad nightmare, or when his eyes linger too long on the pool in his backyard.
Jonathan turns to him, then, his mouth open to say something else, but he’s interrupted by the front door opening. Everyone turns, tense—Steve thinks he sees Nancy reach for the pistol still tucked in her waistband—only to let out a collective sigh of relief when Hopper walks in the door, carrying a small body in his arms.
Steve decides that he’s seen enough of adults carrying unconscious children for tonight, and probably for forever.
“El!” Mike says, jumping up from his spot on the floor near Will’s head. “Is she okay?”
Of course, Steve thinks. El—the girl with the superpowers, the girl the kids were willing to risk everything to help. Steve’s still a little fuzzy on all the details; he thinks she had something to do with getting Will back the first time, and that Hopper’s been taking care of her in secret ever since. And it’s obvious that Wheeler has a crush on her big enough to see from space.
Hopper grunts in response to Mike’s question, stepping around the kids scattered on the floor to lay El on the opposite side of the couch from Will. It puts her head close to Steve, and Steve can’t help but notice the red staining her top lip. She’d been bleeding a little earlier, after she smashed the demodog through the window. He doesn’t want to think about how much she’d strained herself to cause that much blood to come out of her nose.
Her arm slips off the couch then, hanging down off the side, and it causes the bandana she’d tied around her wrist to fall off. Steve leans down to pick it up quickly before one of the kids steps on it. He goes to tie it back on her wrist, because he might not know her that well but it's clear she's got something going with this goth punk vibe and he doesn't want to mess with it. But when he leans in to tie it around her wrist, his eyes catch on something.
011. Tattooed on the center of her wrist, right where it would have been covered by the bandana.
Steve jolts back like he's been burned, and then suddenly he's out of the chair and making a beeline for the closest exit he sees. He thinks he hears someone call out his name, but he’s already heading out the front door. He needs to get out, to get away, he needs—he doesn’t know what, but he couldn’t sit there for another moment looking at that number on her skin.
He doesn’t make it far, stopping on the porch and gripping the railing tight, like it’ll stop his breath from coming out so fast, or stop the feeling that the world is spinning out from beneath his feet. Dimly, he realizes that this shouldn’t come as such a surprise. He’d heard the kids refer to her as Eleven a couple of times, though he thought it was something to do with their nerd magic game or whatever it was. He didn’t think her name was actually Eleven. He didn’t think she was named that because she was marked with the number.
He hears the front door open and shut behind him. “Hey,” Jonathan says, coming to rest on the porch railing next to where Steve is still gripping it tight. Steve’s not surprised that Jonathan is here—he’s one of three people in that house who could understand Steve’s reaction, and the other two are too busy to be checking up on him.
“She has a number on her arm,” Steve chokes out. He can feel tears pricking behind his eyes, and he shuts them tight to get rid of them.
“Yeah,” Jonathan says quietly, “she does.”
Steve turns slightly to look at him. Jonathan stares back at him steadily, with an understanding look in his eyes. Steve closes his eyes again.
“Her name is Eleven because of the number,” he says, “and they—they experimented on her. To give her the powers.”
“Yeah, Steve, they did,” Jonathan says, and then he rests a hand lightly on Steve’s shoulder. Steve opens his eyes again, leans back into Jonathan’s touch and raises his eyes to look at the night sky above them.
The thing is—well the thing is that Steve isn’t any stranger to people with numbers on their arms. Some of his earliest memories involve tracing the ones on his mother’s left forearm. The ones that were put there against her will, when she was hardly older than Eleven is now. His Aunt Becca has them, too, and there was a time in Steve’s young life when he thought all adults had them, that it was something everyone got when they reached a certain age. He was quickly corrected the one time he voiced that belief to his mother.
Stevie, bubbeleh, she had said, these numbers are a reminder of the worst thing you can do to another person—to stop seeing them as human, to only think of them as a number, a tool, or a beast. Always remember that, and remember that no one can take your identity away from you, no matter how hard they try.
Steve looks at Jonathan again, who hasn’t moved his hand, and who is still looking at him with sympathy. “Do you ever think about how we’ve almost died several times while fighting demons from another dimension, and this whole time the real monsters are human? And they’re just living their lives and working among us and we don’t even realize who they really are?”
Hawkins, Indiana was supposed to be his mother’s safe haven. As far away from Austria as I could get, she would joke whenever her sister would comment on them living out here “in the middle of nowhere.” She’d put in a lot of work to turn herself into the perfect, average Midwestern woman, too: losing her accent, dyeing her hair, trading her kugel recipes for casseroles. It was only with him, really, that she would let her guard down—she took him with her to synagogue, spoke Yiddish enough that Steve can recognize the words, even if he can’t respond well. She always wanted him to know where they came from, what she and her sister had to survive, and what her parents didn’t survive. Steve shakes when he thinks about how she would feel if she found out that the same kind of people she was trying to escape were living right under their noses.
“Yeah, Steve,” Jonathan answers him. “But, look, El’s safe now. She’s got Hopper, and all the kids, and she’ll never go back to the lab.”
“If she’s Eleven,” Steve says, feeling hollow, “where are the other ten? And who’s to say she’s the last one? Hawkins can’t be the only place they’re doing this shit.” He’s getting riled up, now. “I mean, Jesus, they’re constantly teaching us about how America was, like, the savior of everyone who was in a concentration camp, and that it could never happen here, and then, what? They use that to cover up that they’re experimenting on—on—on fucking kids, man!”
His voice cracks at the end, and he can feel himself start to break down. Jonathan uses the hand on his shoulder to pull him in. Jonathan hugs him tight as Steve finally lets himself go, crying out all of his anger and frustration and hurt into Jonathan’s shirt.
Jonathan just lets him cry, whispering soothing words and moving his hands in circles against Steve’s back. “I’m sorry,” Steve sobs out when he can finally form words again.
“It’s fine, Steve,” Jonathan says, not stopping the movement of his hands. He thinks Steve is apologizing for crying on him, Steve realizes. And, well, he sort of is sorry for it, but they’ve also been through a fairly traumatic event tonight so he thinks he can be cut some slack. But that’s not what Steve was apologizing for, anyway.
“No,” he says, pulling back from the hug slightly. Jonathan’s arms don’t go back to his sides, though. “I’m not sorry for this. Well, maybe a little, but—I’m sorry for everything else. All the shit I said about you last year, and the things I did. Everything since, like, we were thirteen, basically. You never deserved that.” Jonathan had been nothing but a good friend to Steve since they were children, as the only boys at temple their age and prone to getting into all kinds of mischief together. They’d been inseparable, best friends, until Steve’s dad had pulled him aside at his bar mitzvah and told him that if he was meant to be an adult he should start acting like one and get real, grown-up friends. And Steve, age 13 and stupid and desperate for his father’s approval, listened to him.
And all of that set him down the path that still ended up here: standing on Jonathan Byers’ porch, in his arms, shaking as he comes down from a mental breakdown. And Jonathan standing there, looking at him without a hint of judgment in his eyes.
“Steve,” he says, “none of that matters now, you know? We can forget about all of it, start over like new.”
“I don’t want to forget about any of it,” Steve says, and it’s only as it’s coming out of his mouth that he realizes it’s true. “I spent a year with Nancy trying to forget everything and look where it got us.” He throws a hand back to the Byers’ front door, trying to encompass everything going on inside. “And I know I couldn’t forget any of it if I tried, not after everything tonight, with the kids. I get it, now, why Nance couldn’t ever move on. I don’t know why I thought I could.”
“Well, we all had our own fucked up ways of coping, I guess,” Jonathan says. “And the worst part was that none of us ever talked about it, really. Like, not even me and Will, or me and my mom. We were just so happy that Will was back that we wanted to get back to normal right away, and we ignored the fact that nothing will ever be normal again. So, like, yeah. Let’s not forget it. We can just like, start a new page, or something.”
A new page. Steve likes the sound of that. A page where he’s no longer King Steve, and he doesn’t have to deal with the bullshit that comes with it. A page where he can hang out with the kids, and with Jonathan, and maybe even eventually with Nancy, and he doesn’t have to feel left out in the cold. A page where he can go to Temple with his mom every week and not have to lie to people about where he was on Friday night. It might even be a page where he finally tells his dad to fuck off. It could be anything, and for the first time in a long time Steve feels something other than dread when he thinks about the future. He thinks maybe he could feel happy about it, eventually, if he sticks around this strange little family being built in the Byers’ living room.
“Alright, yeah,” Steve says, and he smiles at Jonathan for the first time in a long time. “Yeah, let’s do that.”
*
They go back inside and Steve tries to ignore all the eyes on them. He guesses his exit was not exactly subtle.
“Did you puke?” Dustin asks. Lucas elbows him and Max shoots him a look, to which he only shrugs. “What? Billy hit him really hard, and my mom says sometimes people with concussions throw up.”
Steve laughs a little, reaching out to ruffle Dustin’s hair. “No, I didn’t throw up. I just, uh, needed some air.” He tries not to look at El, but he knows she’s still on the couch with Will. Hopper is sitting in the chair Steve had been in before, holding her hand. Steve glances at Mike and bites back a smile at the mutinous look on his face while he watches Hopper.
“You should go lie down,” Jonathan says quietly from behind him. Steve looks over his shoulder, and Jonathan smiles back at him softly. “Come on.”
He leads the way back to his bedroom, though Steve doesn’t need him to. He huffs a small laugh when he thinks about the last time he was in this room--back then, Jonathan had grabbed his hand and dragged him and Nancy inside while they ran for their lives. When Jonathan looks at him curiously, Steve just shrugs and gestures at the room, then shrugs again.
“Yeah,” Jonathan says, and there’s that hint of a smile at his mouth again, like he understands perfectly what Steve was trying to say. “Anyway, you can sleep here. My mom’s not gonna let anyone go home until morning, I think. And I know she said you have to stay until your mom comes home but, like, you could probably get out of that if you want. She’s just worried about everyone right now.” He’s moving his hands around a lot as he’s speaking, and this is the most Steve’s heard him talk in maybe four years.
“Jonathan,” Steve interrupts, “it’s cool. I’ll stay.”
“Cool,” Jonathan says. “Right. Um, well, I’ll, like, let you rest. I need to check on Will and the others, anyway.”
“Of course,” Steve says. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his jeans and watches as Jonathan moves to head back down the hall to the living room. Steve’s surprised that Jonathan has spent this long away from his family and Nancy, especially after a night like tonight. “Hey,” he says, just before Jonathan leaves the room, “thanks, you know, for everything.”
“Anytime, Steve,” Jonathan says, and then he shuts the door behind him as he leaves.
Steve kicks off his shoes and flops down on Jonathan’s bed, not bothering to remove his clothes even though he knows they’re disgusting. He’s both physically and mentally exhausted from everything that’s happened that night, but he doesn’t even know if he’ll be able to sleep without falling into nightmares. He can still hear the noise of the others, though, the sounds of the kids bickering and Hopper speaking with Joyce and Nancy asking Jonathan about something. He inhales deeply, surrounded by the comforting scent of laundry detergent coming off Jonathan’s sheets, and closes his eyes.
He falls into sleep slowly, actually feeling safe for the first time in over a year. In the morning, the feeling may be gone, but Steve won’t go back to how it was before. His new chapter starts tomorrow, and for the first time in a long time Steve feels like he has something to look forward to.