Chapter Text
"Dust collected on my pinned-up hair
I'm sure that you got a wife out there
Kids and Christmas, but I'm unaware
Cause I'm right where
I cause no harm, mind my business
If our love died young, I can't bear witness."
*
Taylor Swift, 'Right Where You Left Me'
Wisconsin, Stanley Correctional Institute. 1995.
“For what its worth, Jackie- I hope this time he makes you happy.”
That’s what he’d told her.
What had fucking possessed him to say that?
Steven Hyde lay on the flat slab the Board running the Stanley Correctional Institution had deemed a bed, his eyes fixed on his cell’s grey ceiling. Pieces of chewed up gum marked constellations; mounds of mint made the galaxy. They were as close as Hyde could get to the stars, as metal blinds came down over the bars of his single, skinny window each night. No moon, no familiar patterns.
He'd always liked the stars. They never really changed, no matter what he did. No matter where he ended up.
All those recreation periods with nothing to do but bide his time until the TV in the corner came on at six o’clock to give them the briefest snippet of the outside world through the news. He’d walked up and down the aisles of the Stanley Correctional Library, picking up and chucking back down books held together by tape.
Every spine worn.
Pages missing.
That hadn’t mattered when it came to the rare book on the stars. There was enough left of the constellation maps - enough for him to come up with something to do.
You needed to have something to do in prison. He’d learnt the hard way, during his first stint.
He’d poured over that shitty star textbook for as long as he could. The map spread out across one of the bolted, metal desks in the corner of the recreation room. Around him the other inmates rolled cigarettes whenever the guards fell asleep at their posts, some studied for the classes even the Board willed them to fail.
But Hyde didn’t care about doing any of that.
He could trade for a joint anytime. Recreation was for the stars.
One outshone them all, the little silver markings in his textbook where nothing when the TV in the corner flickered to life. A burst of static through the room, setting the hairs down the back of his neck on edge.
He always looked up. Up at her.
“Good evening Wisconsin, this is Jackie Burkhart with the news at six.”
When Jackie came on screen he forgot all about his stupid plan.
Some of the other prisoners would set down their books, drop their joints to whistle. She was something all right, every night in a different tailored suit with her curls perfect, all glossy like her smile. He wanted to punch every one of the other bastard’s in the recreation room square in the face for looking at her, even through the screen.
But then, maybe the guards would turn off the TV.
He couldn’t live like that.
Fuck them all.
Fuck the stars even.
She was everywhere. On the TV, in his head. When he stared for a little too long at the ceiling of his cell, his thoughts would fade back to 78’. Something stupid he had said, her smile, moonlit cruising round Point Place thinking about-
Her.
Her.
Her.
He couldn’t get his last conversation with Jackie Burkhart out of his head.
So Hyde thumped his head against the flat cement-like slab of his bed and repeated, under his breath over and over again. “Fuck, fuck, F-U-C-K.”
One wall of his cell was not the same grey bricks as all the rest. Metal bars looked out into the second floor of the prison, giving inmates a glimpse of each others suffering and guards the chance to look in as they made their nightly rounds after lights out.
If he kept it up, soon enough there would be a baton thrumming off the metal. “Hush right on up.” Was the guards typical response. “Or its confinement for a week.”
Confinement meant no recreation. No library. No TV.
What was wrong with him?
He should have been used to it by now.
The excruciating process of playing over and over again his every memory of Jackie Burkhart, their conversations, the way she would smile at him with more genuine warmth than she’d ever had on TV.
And he would remember kissing her.
Holding her.
Dancing with her.
Every night. Every single night. He would remember it all.
In those final moments before oblivion would take him, something in him would wish – something stupid, really stupid – that she would show up in his dreams, haunt him some more.
She didn’t.
At least, not as he had hoped.
Dreams, pleasant and warm and dripping with sunlight, where hard to come by. Nightmares, they were easy. The same ones, over and over again.
He didn’t have dreams about getting lifted. Screwing up. Four years for possession thanks to his record, who could have guessed? It hadn’t even been his stash, not that the Judge would hear him out.
No, the nightmares were mostly just memories.
Returning home from school to find his mom spilt across the beaten old carpet, liquor soaking into the foundations. Her eyes bruised, her chest unburdened by breath. She’d looked dead, maybe she had been – for a little while at least. And if she had died, he had thought as he held her and begged her to breathe again, where was he to go?
It wasn’t seeing his mom half-dead that made it a nightmare. It was remembering how it felt when he had first realised that he had no where else to go.
When it wasn’t his birth mother, it was Mrs Forman. A look of hurt, disappointment in her eyes.
And of course, Jackie.
‘I need to know that we have a future together.’ Her voice had broken, hands clawing at her heart through the yellow ribbing of her sweater. Eyes burning with tears. He hated to see Jackie cry, hated feeling like the walls of Eric Forman’s basement were closing in on him. ‘Can’t you just give me some kind of sign, a glimmer of hope that maybe some day, we’ll get married?’
‘Jackie, I don’t know.’
But that hadn’t been true. Not exactly.
How could he tell her that he could imagine her wedding so easily. She’d make a beautiful bride, curls tumbling down her back, brushing the ivory of her gown as she stepped over rose petals, made her way down the aisle.
He just couldn’t see himself waiting for her there. He wasn’t- he wasn’t there, when he tried to imagine her wedding. He just didn’t fit.
And he had known that she probably had some old dream journal detailing her wedding day. Her perfect church, her perfect dress, her perfect bouquet, and her perfect husband.
Her perfect husband couldn’t look anything like him.
‘‘That’s all you ever say. Please Steven, please. Say anything besides “I don’t know.” Anything else.’
They were kids, and he’d been afraid.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well then I can’t be with you anymore.’
‘Jackie, don’t threaten me, it’s not going to work.’
‘I’m not threatening you.’ Fuck, her eyes were like shining sheets of glass. ‘I can’t waste any more of my time on you if it’s not going to happen for us.’
‘Waste her time’, that’s all he’d heard at first.
Like she hadn’t always been.
Jackie Burkhart, with him? It had never made any sense.
‘Well.’ He could hear her fighting back tears. ‘At least now I know.’
She had left.
Big surprise.
They always left.
He told himself not to care. Deep down, he’d known it was coming. It wasn’t like he gave them any reason to stay. Not his mom, not his friends, certainly not Jackie.
He wasn’t husband-material.
He wasn’t a star.
Not like her.
What the fuck was he meant to do!
Say!
Fuck- just, shit man.
And he would have married her too. He knew damn well that a few more years with Jackie and it wouldn’t have mattered, his fears that he didn’t fit in with her perfect vision of the future. It wouldn’t have mattered. She would have wound her way so tightly around his heart, like ivy, that he’d be dead before he left her.
If they’d just stayed together.
If he hadn’t fucked it all up.
If.
He would have gotten down on one knee and meant it.
Not some big church wedding, not if he could help it. Something small, something with heart.
A motorcycle with tin cans rattling at its back as they sped off to their honeymoon. ‘Just married’, a scribbled sign.
But instead….
Instead…
He’d seen the plea in her eyes that morning. The very same. ‘Ask me to stay. Make me stay.’
He couldn’t.
Knew he shouldn’t.
‘Stay, Jackie, just- wait for me, okay. Don’t go back to him.’ His palms pressed against the glass between them, his eyes burning as her mouth formed a little ‘o’ of shock, of confusion, of happiness. Is that what he was supposed to have said? ‘Damn it, Jackie. You know its only ever been you.’
No, he could never have made himself say all of that. Even if he wanted to. Even if it was what she thought she wanted to hear, a reason to visit the prison on the morning of her wedding.
He had nothing to offer Jackie Burkhart.
And Kelso might have been Kelso, but he fit in with Jackie’s future. The big dream that had become her life. Famous, glossy news presenter with diamonds at her throat, a life outside of the prison’s grey cement walls. A life worth living. With friends, and kids, and- more than some shitty star map, that was for sure.
Hyde would be lucky to get a job bagging groceries when he was out. Put up in some rundown half-way house that she’d be fearful to set foot in.
Sooner than later, he’d just be back behind bars.
In and out for the last two decades.
Some charges justified – possession, drunken disorderly, theft – but others, not so much. Wrong time, wrong place, wrong sort of life he had lived.
‘Stay’ would have been desperate. ‘Stay’ would have been stupid. Soon enough Jackie would have realised what she had signed up for. Shit, imagine the headlines about Jackie Burkhart’s new, technically old, boyfriend – straight from Stanley Correctional! No, just no.
Besides, he hated to be left. Had to get out before the building burned down, soon as he started to smell the smoke.
And he knew for that he was a real fucking dumbass.
Hyde rolled over, facing the grey bricks of his cell wall. He hoped no guard would show up, telling him to stop stifling cold laughter into his pillow.
“A real dumbass.” He said to no one. “Red was right.”
The truly shitty thing was that he didn’t want Jackie to be happy with Kelso. Even though he’d said it, he hadn’t meant it. They’d been friends, but Kelso was also a piece of shit. Especially to Jackie. He might have looked the part of her perfect dream husband, he might have scraped together a career for himself, but still.
Perhaps Hyde was filled with barely disguised self-hatred, but he had plenty left over for Michael Kelso. She deserved better.
Better than Kelso.
Better than him.
Just better.
He’d said it not to hurt her. He’d said it because he’d seen her on the news with a brand new ring adorning her finger, a diamond bracelet to match. She’d touch it occasionally, blush creeping over her cheeks, as if reminding herself it was there. Big, glossy smile on her lips. ‘Now I’ll hand over to Buddy with the weather.’
She’d looked happy.
He just wanted her to be happy.
That might have made him a square, as he would have said back in the day, sure. He didn’t really care.
Hyde shut his eyes tight.
If she had asked him one more time that morning, ‘can’t you just give me some kind of sign’, asked him to marry her… he knew he would have crumbled. He wouldn’t have been good enough to send her off into the sunlight, to Point Place and Michael Kelso.
Screw better.
Screw Kelso.
He wanted her.
And once more, Hyde fell asleep knowing he would see her – dream or nightmare, it didn’t matter.
1977, Eric Forman’s Basement.
“Dude, you’re drooling on the couch!”
Steven Hyde opened his eyes to find Eric Forman staring down at him, line between his perpetually quirked brows. He had his hands on his skinny hips, thumbs looping in the pockets of his flared Levi’s. As if he thought any of that would make him – a cross between a string-bean and a teenage boy – intimidating.
He instead came off looking more like his mother. Though, Hyde supposed, Mrs Forman could be scary when she wanted to be.
Forman was right. He had been drooling into the smattering of moth-eaten, flower-power printed cushions that ran down the back of the basement’s couch. A wet patch brushed his face and Hyde tried to push himself up, only to find himself sliding down onto the floor.
After the initial thump, Hyde got out a confused, tired. “Uhh.”
And then.
“Fuck!”
He was in Eric Forman’s basement.
Scratch that.
Rewind.
More specifically, he was in Eric Forman’s basement, with teenage Eric Forman, and from the look of the room – the old, boxy TV, the white appliances off by the wall, the general mustard and brown of the décor and of course, a strong hint of weed in the air – it was the 1970s.
Was he asleep?
Was he dead?
Did he really care?
If he was asleep, Hyde certainly didn’t want to wake up back in his prison cell at Stanley.
If he was dead, well – it was too late to change that.
Shit-shit-shit-shit.
Hyde felt his face, the scratches of his old mutton chops and up, up to the crazed crop of curls and above them rested his sunglasses. He pulled the tinted frames down over his eyes, but it didn’t help. The world was still too-too much.
“That’s one word for it, mister. I mean, seriously, what’s come over you, man! Asking Jackie to the prom. You’re- you’re’- you’re darn rootin tootin.” Forman actually wagged his skinny finger at him. “That’s what you are.”
“Darn rootin tootin. Forman, you’re such a-”
His mind was completely split in two.
The realisation that young Forman stood before him, exactly as he had been, so real that the sight of him made Hyde feel sick.
And the other half of his brain frantically tried to catch up with what Forman had just said to him. It was a conversation they had had before, a very long time ago…
“I asked Jackie to prom?”
Forman threw up his hands, like Hyde was finely getting it. The insanity. “Yeah, man. Exactly!”
The words were spilling out of his mouth just as they had in the real 1977, the afternoon of the school prom. Forman had confronted him after he was caught sleeping on the couch about how he had agreed to take Jackie Burkhart – Jackie Burkhart, who he hated, Jackie Burkhart who he regularly compared to a tick on Michael Kelso’s back, Jackie Burkhart who he was not yet aware he would fall stupidly in love with – to prom.
All because she had no one else to go with.
No.
If he was being honest with himself, it was because she had asked him to ask her. It wasn’t a goodness of his heart thing. She’d just looked at him with those pleading, about-to-cry again eyes and suddenly he’d agreed to take her to prom, to fork out for renting a tux. Shit, he’d even went and got a corsage.
A corsage!
“She was all, and I was just, and we were- hey, who told you?”
“Oh.” Forman was smart enough to play dumb. He looked up sheepish, kicking the toe of his crappy sneakers into the side of the couch, his eyes shifting to the washing-machine, to the stairs, but not to Hyde, who had moved back up onto the couch. “You know, Donna.”
Hyde’s hands moved from his knees to a knit formation, one giant balled fist. He ran his tongue over his top lip, considering. He loved being able to look up at Forman through his shades again. “And who told Donna?”
Forman scratched the back of his neck. “Jackie, I guess.”
Something about that had never sat right. He doubted Jackie would have been eager to tell Donna that she was taking Steven Hyde, of all people, to prom instead of Kelso. Or some other, handsome, rich guy.
He’d had a feeling that Jackie had only boasted to Donna that she did now have a date to take her to prom. No name, no mention of Hyde.
But Forman… something in Forman must have just known.
“I’m serious, you’re crazy.” Forman sat beside him on the couch, his scrawny ass barely denting the nest of cushions. He leant forwards, elbows on his knees. His voice had that constantly rising infliction. “She’s going to eat you alive if you don’t get her the right type of, what are they called, those flowers? You know- well, I doubt you know, but you know, you know….”
Hyde cut him off. “Corsages.”
“Right. Who’s got corsage money!”
And for a moment they just sat there.
Together on the couch, not saying much of anything, too lazy to get up and go through the humdrum of turning on the TV. They’d have been stuck watching whatever Red had left on upstairs. The 70s had its downfalls.
The 70s…
Hyde poked his tongue around inside of his mouth, and swore under his breath just to see if he could break the mould of what he’d said – what he’d done – in the past. “Shit, man.”
At his side, Forman didn’t stir. He looked stressed, and all to focused on scratching a hole in the arm of the couch. With the benefit of retrospect, Hyde knew all about what Forman planned on getting up to with Donna that night at the motel he’d rented . He also knew that it wouldn’t go as planned, and that Forman had every damn right to look nervous.
That had been a blunder from years ago. A faded memory in 1995.
But not now.
Not when Forman was really there, and so was he.
It was 1977, the day of prom, and no matter if he was alive, dead, or dreaming, in some way, shape or form, Hyde had returned to his own past. And if he was back there, really back there, perhaps he could change things?
He’d seen enough movies to know how it worked.
Stuff changed in the past had a rippling effect. One slight shift, a little current in 1977 could reach 1995 as a full-on tsunami. More often than not, the people in those films were scared. They were dumbasses, really, never wanting to change anything and being all careful.
Hell, Hyde could think of nothing better than making waves. His future was a real shit show.
If he could change things, perhaps he could get it all right the second time around.
No losing Jackie.
No prison.
Darn rootin fucking tootin.
“Forman-”
“I’m not giving you corsage money, Hyde. There’s a perfectly good garden right upstairs. If you’re quick enough that Red can’t catch you- why are you looking at me like that? What’s on my face?”
But there was nothing on Eric Forman’s face.
It was more that he was really there.
At least, it felt like it.
Just as he was when they were kids.
And Hyde wanted to say. ‘I missed you.’
But he didn’t.
Couldn’t.
Forman would just think he was messing with him, anyway. He’d say that he’d clearly done too much weed for one day.
“Uh huh.” Hyde said instead, spitting into his left palm and grabbing Forman in a headlock that sent them both sinking down to the basement floor. “Can’t send you to Donna like that. Come here. I’ll get it for ya.”