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Steve’s not sure what it says about him, but he can’t help but feel a tug of bordering-on-comforting familiarity when he ends up at the empty Harrington house yet again, hell broken loose on all sides and a few days out from doomsday.
This part, at least, he knows. Regroup and reassess. Force the kids to put on bandages and bundle them off to bed. Then bundle Nancy and Robin off to bed, but probably don’t call it that, for the sake of your own safety. Take up the first shift as lookout, and have it stretch and stretch till it’s the next morning. Nod your head when Mrs. Byers asks you if you even got any sleep last night. Do what’s asked, do more than that, escape with everyone still in one piece. Steve has it all down to a science.
There’s hitches, of course. Always and invariably. Tonight, for example, Nancy wrangled a promise out of him to wake her up in two hours’ time to switch positions. She got all insistent about it, huge eyes flashing at him and that indignant scrunch of her nose. And, really, was Steve expected to even put up a fight at that point?
He’d lie without batting an eyelid if it was anybody else. He has lied without batting an eyelid to Dustin and to Max in the past – spread his hands and said you were knocked out, dude. He’s said the same thing to Robin, albeit with much more of a guilty weight in his stomach.
It’s not an option with Nancy, and he’s not going to set himself up for failure like that. Nancy would look into his eyes for no more than three seconds and have him completely figured out. She used to do that sophomore year of high school, doe eyes and meek smile, completely devoid of any kind of intensity, and her reflexes have only been battle-hardened in the time since. He stands no chance.
You’re an idiot, Steve Harrington.
For now, he’s won himself the initial shift, hunched in on himself on the couch and straining his senses, best he can, for a sign of the abnormal. Upstairs and in the first two of the inexplicable four bedrooms the house has, an ungodly number of fourteen-year-olds have been coerced into getting some rest. About twenty minutes into his shift, Steve took to sounding out their names in his head, if only to remind himself of all there is left to strive for.
Dustin, Lucas, Mike, and Will upstairs in his parents’ bedroom with the big bed. One door over, in his old room – Max, and Robin, and in a series of coincidences Steve has been kicking himself for, eleven-year-old Erica Sinclair.
Just down the hall from him, Nancy…and Jonathan. Nancy and Jonathan, because, of course. It’s been years, but Steve still has to remind himself sometimes that they’re a package deal now.
Mrs. Byers and Hopper are still with Dr. Owens, who, to Steve’s limited understanding, is attempting to “upgrade” Eleven’s powers. That’s never been his department, and he knows Hopper’s handling it, so he’s trying not to worry.
And Steve, is here: trying not to doze off, trying not to give in to the urge to turn on the television, trying to tamp down the horrible sense of satisfaction that comes with being needed – because as much as it is downright concerning that the only times Steve is ever useful is when there’s an interdimensional monster on the prowl, there’s a certain adrenaline rush that he still staunchly associates with being the man-in-charge. Blame it on too many years of captaining the basketball team being his greatest achievement.
The kids only just escaped with their lives, as is, unfortunately, at this point, tradition. Robin sprained her wrist. Hopper busted pretty much every bone in his body. He’d do well to remember all of that, next time the hero complex is up and raring.
The house has been quiet and uneventful for the now-almost-thirty-minutes of his shift – a minor miracle, but he’s grateful all the same. In times like these, there’s no dearth of things Steve is grateful for. The fact that they still have this safe house. The fact that they have at least two others if push comes to shove and the walls crumble like paper. The fact that he doesn’t have a concussion yet. The fact that they’re—
A noise, soft and one he would dismiss otherwise, registers itself in his head from somewhere out in the front of the house. Immediately, every muscle in his body tenses. His eyes dart, half-crazed, all over his immediate surroundings till they land on his bat. In a flash, his fingers close around the grip, and he’s up on his feet.
The hallway light is on, vaguely illuminating his path to the front door. He gulps and stalls for two seconds, the dread of having to venture into the unknown settling firmly on his shoulders. Then, there’s a louder bang followed by what sounds like a vocalization, and his instincts kick in on autopilot.
His fingers are frozen numb and incapable. He fumbles with the lock furiously, bites his tongue to stop from cursing out loud, and after entirely too long, manages to nudge the door open.
His parents’ pristine yard is unknowable pitch-black. The bat is heavy in his hands, heavy and well-worn from years of application and the only reason he even found it in himself to come out here. Steve Harrington – has a hell of a bat swing, if nothing else.
He takes a few stumbling steps forward. It’s freezing and he doesn’t have a jacket, he realises belatedly, as he strains to listen over the chattering of his own teeth. Within the minute, he’s rewarded with a scuffle coming from the direction of his parked car.
A Demo-something? They haven’t yet shown up this time around, but Steve’s pretty much taken for granted that it’s only a matter of time. The gate opens, and a Demo-something pops out. That’s his life. First, it was the flower-head, and then it was the dogs, and then it was the bats, and with his luck, now it’s going to be a leopard or something equally damning.
Calm down.
Best-case scenario – he keeps his shit together and he uses his bat for what it was made for. Worst-case scenario – he yells his head off and everyone wakes up and Nancy has to rescue him by shooting the thing square in the face. It’ll be embarrassing, but at least it won’t be Vecna. Steve has had more encounters with the supernatural than girlfriends at this point. This is nothing.
It's nothing, except it’s definitely something, because Steve is as close as he can get now, just on the other side of the car, lip bitten raw, and the noises, the little clinks and thwacks, an insistent beast nudging at alien machinery, have only gotten louder.
You got this, he tells himself, and in one motion, whips himself around to the other side, weapon poised for attack and—
“…Steve?”
It’s Jonathan Byers.
The worst part of this completely insane, beyond-worst-case scenario is that Steve freezes. He just stares, probably looking as dumb as Jonathan thinks he is, at the other guy, on his knees near the back tire of his BMW, a bunch of tools beside him.
Jonathan looks over his shoulder for a second, faux-concern all over his face, seemingly deduces that this whole thing is nothing out of the ordinary, and goes right back to what he was doing.
That’s what breaks Steve out of his stupor, grip loosening and shoulders dropping, an ember of frustration burning through him till all his confusion boils over into irritation.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Tire’s a little off from earlier,” he says, and that’s all he says, like it’s a completely formed thought, fully justified logically and contextually.
Steve entertains the possibility that Jonathan may actually be crazy. God knows he spent all four years of high school having no trouble believing that.
Unfortunately, he’s not in high school anymore. He can’t stand around and laugh at Tommy’s hallway taunts. He has to actually engage with his weirdo-no-eye-contact behaviour.
“Oh. Okay? Is there somewhere you have to go or…”
“No.”
Steve sighs. How did anyone have a conversation this way? How did Nancy—
Focus.
“Okay, so, uh…why—?”
Jonathan twists around, palms the ground till his hand closes around the wrench, and continues to fucking change the back tire of Steve’s car at one in the night. To his benefit, he does also answer.
“Just in case we have to leave in a rush.”
Steve blinks. The both of them seem to be operating off of entirely different information, disjointed by design, which invariably leads him to ask the only thing he can think of:
“Did you hear back from Hopper?”
“No,” Jonathan answers again. “Just like to be prepared.”
There’s something about the way he says it. Something dismissive, something weary. Jonathan needs to be prepared because no one else around here has their shit together. Maybe he’s just sleep-deprived right now, but he’s pretty sure he’s not dreaming up the judgement in his voice.
Still, losing his cool right now will probably not be for the best.
“You know what, this is crazy. And, like, not safe at all.”
Jonathan shrugs. “Look, I’m sorry I woke you. Just go back in, alright? I’ll be done in a bit.”
Which is stupid and unhelpful and—wait, what?
“Woke me?” Steve says. “No, I’m on first shift.”
“Oh,” Jonathan replies, near about looking right through him, expressionless. “Oh, okay, then.”
“Did you think you were on first shift?”
Mildly annoyingly, Jonathan seems to live in his head even during times of crises. God knows how much of the earlier discussion he heard and how much he discarded as not worth his time. You never knew with the artsy types.
Thankfully, Jonathan says, “No.”
But then:
“I didn’t know we were doing shifts.”
Not for the first time, Steve wonders why they even need Jonathan here. Nancy is smart and quick on her feet and has great aim, the kids have all the nerdy knowledge about their nerdy game, Robin is resourceful and more specifically, great for Steve’s morale, Eleven has superpowers – and Jonathan, evidently, can’t pay attention to save his life.
“You didn’t know—whatever, dude. Can’t we figure this out in the morning?”
“We may not have time in the morning,” Jonathan says, which Steve will admit is only partially insane. “Seriously, I got it. Go do your…uh, patrolling?”
And while it’s raised exponentially over the years, there still does exist a limit to Steve’s patience.
“Is this some big joke to you?”
“No, it’s not a joke to me. I’m just—”
“No, what?”
“Nothing, Steve.”
“I mean, you clearly have something to say so why don’t you just say it?”
Jonathan sighs, this deeply exasperated tone that only works Steve up further.
“Look, man, I don’t want to pick a fight.”
Apparently, the weird backhanded implications never stopped with this guy. Did he think Steve was dying to pick a fight out here in the cold with the house unmanned? Did he think Steve particularly enjoyed talking to Jonathan for more than ten seconds at a time?
Did he not realise the irony of—
“I’m picking a fight? I wasn’t gonna say anything, dude, but you’re the one messing around with my car.”
He picked his car out junior year of high school. His dad drove him down to the dealership, scoffed when Steve chose one in a shade he deemed “too close to pink”, and then barked out, she’s in your hands now, son.
This baby has seen so much. So many girls (before Nancy, Nancy, after Nancy). So many horrors, mock ones and real ones. She’s bailed him out so many times, in so many different ways (one or the other of the kids in his backseat, face drawn with terror, yelling drive drive DRIVE). Steve’s allowed to feel a little pride.
Jonathan pauses mid-action. “That’s my bad. I just figured…someone’s gotta do it. You or me, it hardly matters, right?”
Inexplicably, he’s once again reminded of his dad. Of him towering at the head of the dinner table, nearing the end of a ten-minute lecture about how unimportant high school basketball actually was, only to look straight at Steve and cap it off with – I’m sorry, I know you’re sensitive about this stuff.
(Nancy, riding shotgun, telling him, “That’s bullshit. It’s like, he’s trying to make you feel bad about being offended.”)
He opens and closes his fist around his bat, takes a deep breath.
“Well, I got it. Okay?”
Truth be told, Steve hadn’t really even noticed something off about the tires. Heck, he’d always gotten the guy at the repair shop to take a look for him. Jonathan doesn’t need to know that, though.
Jonathan stands, although he’s clearly a bit pissed off. He half-commits to this weird hands-held-up pose like okay, Jesus Christ, and then pushes past him.
Steve’s not sure whether to be relieved or concerned that he’s tapped into the non-verbal gestures of Jonathan Byers of all people.
He chooses relief. He can make peace with the other thing tomorrow morning when he tells Robin about this and she explains it all away with fancy science-y terms.
Except, as he finds out a minute later, walking back up to the house, he’s seemingly destined to never catch a break from the bullshit because Jonathan isn’t inside, much less in the nice guestroom Steve had to specially unlock for him and his girlfriend. He’s…sitting on one of the porch chairs?
Oh, how easy it would be to pretend not to notice him and just march right on inside. How nice it would be to just not bother with any of it. Live and let live – except the last time he did that, Max went and almost got herself killed.
So, he pauses and stares, doesn’t even try to hide the exasperation. Why should he when Jonathan was practically accentuating his own?
“What?” Jonathan says, gazing above and beyond Steve’s head.
“Nothing, nothing. If you want to go to sleep sitting in that uncomfortable thing, I mean, by all means—”
Jonathan chuckles. Just straight-up chuckles and Steve can’t even detect any irony in it. It’s probably not even his fault. Jonathan probably jokes in the exact same tone as he states.
“Why do you think I was playing car mechanic in the middle of the night, Steve?”
“Is that…like, rhetorical, or…”
“If you want it to be.”
Which—
What does that even mean?
“Uh…”
Jonathan waits.
“I really don’t have time for this, man.”
“I won’t bother you,” Jonathan says immediately. “You do your thing.”
“You know, the whole point of taking shifts is so that everyone else can get some rest.”
“Right, because, you were definitely gonna wake someone up after this.”
Steve blinks, takes a second to consider if he should just give up and go inside, and finds that the remnants of his golden boy persona will simply not allow for that.
“Yeah, I was.”
“Okay, so who’s usually on second shift?”
“Nancy,” Steve blurts, and instantly knows he’s fumbled.
“Nancy,” Jonathan repeats, leaning back in his uncomfortable chair. “Interesting.”
“Yeah.”
Steve ends up sitting in the other, equally-uncomfortable chair. Why not, he figures. As good a place as any to be on lookout. This way he can intercept Jonathan before he comes up with his next inane idea.
For now, though, Jonathan seems completely uninterested in him or anything else in his surroundings, for that matter. He sits, and taps his foot against the railing, and hums something, and he seems content to do that for the rest of the night.
The picture of nonchalance. Steve is almost envious, because for all his other quirks and talents, he’s never been able to bring himself to care less. He’s never been able to just shut down like that.
“So, like, what is this? You just don’t trust me enough to let me handle things?”
Jonathan looks at him out of the corner of his eye, but doesn’t say anything. It’s a full thirty seconds later (and yes, Steve counts because it helps him concentrate), the song playing in his head apparently drawing to a close and his leg taking a break from the bouncing, when he finally replies:
“You think everything’s about you, don’t you?”
It’s a split second of deja-vu, intense, Nancy and Max and Robin flashing in his head one after the other after the other, mouthing along to the echo of Jonathan’s words as they continue to ring in his head.
The difference is, they actually had a reason to say that and mean it. They were trying to make him the best version of himself, or something like that. Jonathan’s just trying to rile him up.
That’s all it is.
He feels his mean streak flair up. Thinks of all the leverage he has over the fucking Byers kid, and before he can even get to thinking about the high-school-pettiness of it all:
“Well, let’s recap: we made it out of that mess in my car, we ended up at my house, you’re sleeping in my guestroom and you’re wearing my clothes.”
Which, yeah. He’s wearing Steve’s clothes, his own beyond salvage. He didn’t even say thank you.
“Fair enough, King Steve.”
At that, something tips over and spills inside Steve.
“What are you playing at?”
“I’m not playing at anything.”
“Oh, please, first the car and then—”
“Jesus Christ, will you let that go already? I’m sorry, okay? There. Happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Steve mutters, and he really can’t be here anymore. No point in standing guard if you end up waking everyone else with a screaming match.
He’s just about to storm back inside when a thought strikes him, and he knows it’s probably the wrong choice to indulge himself, but he spins on his heel to face Jonathan again.
“How the fuck did you know?”
“What?” Jonathan says, suddenly looking so-very-tired.
“The thing you said. About me not waking up anyone.”
“Steve, it’s two in the morning, I don’t know what—”
“Wow, I totally forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me.”
And maybe this is why Jonathan has no friends, because spending too much time around him makes everyone, including Steve, prone to stopping mid-conversation and indulging in low-quality snarking.
“I seriously have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Steve stops himself from rolling his eyes.
“About the shifts. You said that I wouldn’t wake someone up to take second shift.”
Realisation seems to sink deep into Jonathan, then. He slumps back, covers his face with his hands and groans into them. When he speaks through his fingers, his words are muffled but Steve can understand him anyway.
“You’re not the only one who has trouble sleeping, Steve.”
Steve gapes, because oh. All this time, had they really been—
He stumbles back into his vacated chair. So all those little squeaks and grunts that had made him believe doing this was necessary in the first place, those had been, that had been—
“Every time?” he manages.
“Every fucking time,” Jonathan confirms bitterly. “You’re not as quiet as you think you are.”
“Well, neither are you.”
“You’re telling me I wasn’t completely silent while I was scrubbing your bathtub? Shit.”
And—three months ago, mishap down at the Gate, group sleepover at Steve’s place, spotless bathtub the next day. Three months before that, a couple stray zombies from the meat monster fiasco, setting up base at Steve’s place, the pile of dishes magically done overnight. A whole year ago, emergency escapade to Steve’s place in the middle of the night, and all the plants watered before they had to be.
“That was—”
“Mm-hmm.”
“But why?”
It feels like all the fight has left Jonathan. He stays with his hands covering his face. It kind of feels like all the fight has left him, too. Where did he even leave his bat?
“Why do you stand guard all night, Steve?”
Well, because—
“You can only peek into the kids’ bedroom so many times.”
And, god, if that isn’t the truest fucking thing.
Silence settles. It’s kind of peaceful, even, nothing tense pulling between them. Nothing unspoken to grasp at. Steve is sitting on the porch of his parents’ house, and he’s actually sharing a sentiment with Jonathan Byers.
Imagine that.
After what feels like forever, Jonathan sits up again. He ventures, “So, King Steve…”
It’s crazy how different his voice sounds, how much more soft and joking and friendly. Steve smiles despite himself.
“Might I interest you in some coffee?”
“And I suppose you already know where everything is?”
“Sure do,” says Jonathan, quick as ever, and Steve finds, to his surprise, that he doesn’t really mind.
“Okay, then,” he says. “But after that…”
Jonathan tilts his head in question.
“Weren’t you saying there was something off about the tires?”
Jonathan breaks into a smile at the same time as he does, and Steve thinks midway through that it’s something he could get used to.
Fifteen minutes later, he’s sitting on the kitchen counter with Jonathan and sipping some good fucking coffee and feeling settled for the first time in days.
Out of nowhere, a chord of worry strikes within him and he traces it to its source and finds Nancy there. Nancy and her big eyes, saying, wake me up, Steve, I’m not kidding.
He hasn’t even realised he’s staring in the general direction of the room she’s sleeping in when Jonathan clears his throat quietly. He looks back at him, sheepish, jumping to explain that it wasn’t about that but Jonathan is quicker.
“She’s a deep sleeper,” he says, all fond and soft. “I’ll tell her we tried.”