Chapter Text
Jonathan woke with a gasp, eyes flying open to the dark, inky expanse of his room. Sweat stuck his hair to his scalp, and he could feel himself physically trembling beneath the scratchy comforter thrown into his lap from him jolting awake. Breathy, panicked gasps filled the silence of the room, and he curled his fingers tight around his shirt, bunching the fabric above his chest with an iron-clad grip. Blood thundered in his ears, his heart beating so quick it felt like it would break out from its resting spot underneath the faux protection of his ribs.
He could taste the last semblance of an echoing, shrill scream that stood balanced on the edges of his lips, could feel his voice tangled up in his throat, the strings of his vocal chords wound round and round the cry that never had the chance to make itself known to the world.
His grief, verbalized, that never had the chance to fall upon ears that were long deaf from the paralyzing frost of death.
They were all dead. Nancy, Robin, his mom, Will-
In the empty silence of his room, Jonathan could only hear the wails and shrieks of his friends as their lifeless bodies dropped to the ground, one by one. He could only hear the thud of their limp forms falling heavy against the dry, stone floor, the frantic beating of his own heart echoing in his ears as he watched the scarlet ooze from their bodies and stain the rocks a terrible, abhorrent maroon.
The trembling gasp from Steve next to him, the skid of his shoe as he took a step back, the silence that encapsulated the air, so heavy it was nearly tangible. It crushed down on Jonathan’s chest, stealing the breath from his lungs, leaving him still and unmoving. Eyes wide as Vecna slowly turned to them, gaze unreadable from their distance, and then-
Then Jonathan woke up.
Seconds that might as well have been hours trickled by, and as Jonathan’s eyes adjusted more to the darkness surrounding him, something broke through the haze of panic and anguish smothering his mind. An odd sensation of sorts. Something Jonathan hadn’t felt in a while.
Nostalgia?
But how- why- would Jonathan be feeling such a thing at that moment? His friends had just died in front of his very eyes and- wait.
Where was he?
He pushed himself up further, casting a furrowed gaze at the walls surrounding him on all four sides.
He was in his room. His room. Back at his house.
How… what??
He shot out of bed, the blankets falling to the ground in a messy heap, and sprinted for the door. He fumbled with the knob, hands shaking too bad to get a good grip, but eventually he managed and flung the door open.
He stumbled out of the doorway and ran down the hallway, nearly falling into the bathroom but he caught himself on the vanity. He stared at his reflection in the smudged glass mirror hanging on the wall, heavy breaths permeating the thick silence.
He froze.
Something was wrong.
Something was so very wrong.
Jonathan didn’t look 20 years old anymore. Hell, he didn’t even look like an adult.
His hair was longer, like it had been his sophomore year.
Sophomore year?
Had he-
No.
No way.
Jonathan ran out of the bathroom, not bothering to turn off the light behind him, and stopped dead in front of the calendar hung on the wall in the kitchen.
October 1st, 1983.
1983???
No. That had to be wrong.
The shrill ringing of the phone sharply broke Jonathan from his disbelief, and he whipped around to stare at the noise. Fear stabbed clear through his heart, an icy cold water flooding his lungs, rendering him unable to intake oxygen.
Slowly, cautiously, he stepped towards the phone, and with trembling hands, picked it up from where it was braced against the wall. He held it up to his ear, muscles tense and taut, fingers curling around the cool plastic to attempt to tame the shaking.
“...Jonathan?”
A gasp escaped his lips, his eyes flying wide with astonishment, heart stuttering to a stop at the sound of his voice.
“Steve?” he asked shakily, hating how desperate his voice sounded. “Are you… there?”
“Yeah,” Steve replied, and Jonathan could hear a note of panic in his voice. “I- Do you-”
“Remember?”
A beat. “What do you mean remember?”
Jonathan’s heart sank.
“You don’t…” Jonathan took a shuddering breath, despair cutting his heart open with a sharp claw. “Vecna? Everyone… Everyone dying…?”
“What? No- of course I remember that. It just happened.”
“Steve, it’s 1983.”
Steve fell silent over the line, and again that terrible quiet consumed Jonathan.
“That’s not possible,” he finally said, but doubt was evident in his words. “That’s just- no. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Does any of this make sense?”
“Well, no, but going back in time makes no sense!”
“What does that even mean?”
“I’m gonna call Nance.”
Jonathan’s eyes widened. “What? No!”
“Why not??”
“Didn’t she…”
“...die?” Steve supplanted, voice wavering slightly at the word. Steve’s voice never wavered. It terrified Jonathan that even someone like King Steve was petrified by something like this.
Jonathan forced the words out from numb lips. It burned. “I saw her body. Her and- and Robin. They were dead.”
He heard Steve’s breath stutter on the other side of the phone, and a grief-tinged silence cloaked the two in a dark veil.
Jonathan turned, staring down the hallway that the stale light from the bathroom still shone down.
“I have to go, Steve. Call you back.”
“Byers what-”
Jonathan put the phone back on its stand, then turned around, apprehension tying him down with led weights wrapped around his ankles.
What if his mom and Will weren’t truly there?
What if this was all some horrific mindscape that Vecna created just to toy with him?
What if he opened that door just to see an empty bed and all his hopes crashing and burning around him.
He would never know if he didn’t try.
Slowly, unsteadily, he made his way down the hallway, and stopped dead in front of his mom’s room. He reached for the handle, hand shaking, and turned it, quietly creaking open the door an inch.
His knees nearly buckled in his relief. He suddenly felt weak, unable to support himself.
There she was, turned away from him, but from the sliver of light dully illuminating her still form, Jonathan could see bright as day that his mom was there.
She wasn’t dead.
She was right there. In front of him.
He shut the door quietly, standing there in the hallway for a few moments to regulate his breathing, before he turned to Will’s room.
He carefully opened his door too, and, just like his mom, Will was asleep in his own bed.
He shut the door, and staggered to the kitchen, a wave of exhaustion suddenly rolling over him. He collapsed heavily in a chair, eyes fixed on the unswept wooden ground.
It was nearly suffocating in its overwhelming reprieve. It pushed down on him, weighed heavy on his heart, guilt and relief alike eating him whole. His family had died. He had watched as the blood spilled from their bodies.
But they were alive now.
They were alive.
They were here now in 1983.
Four years earlier.
Oh, God.
Jonathan was 16, again. He was in school, his sophomore year, dealing with shit that he had barely made through once.
He didn’t know if he could do it a second time.
The phone rang, splitting the still air into two, and Jonathan jumped up to receive it.
“I tried calling Nance.” Steve’s voice warbled through the phone, and Jonathan’s heart stilled for a moment at his words.
“And?”
“Her mom picked up. She was super pissed.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. ‘Ah’.”
“What about Robin?”
“Same story.”
Jonathan fell silent, as did Steve.
“What do we do now?”
Jonathan shrugged despite knowing Steve couldn’t possibly see the gesture. “What time is it?”
A pause. “Four thirty seven.”
“Should we… go to sleep?”
Steve scoffed. “After that? I don’t know about you but I don’t trust that Vecna’s not gonna pop out of my closet when I turn off the light.”
“Should I come over?”
Steve paused for a second, and his apprehension caused something unnatural to curl inside of Jonathan’s chest.
“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be… fine.”
“Be there in ten?”
“Yeah.”
“‘K, bye.”
“Bye.”
And that was it.
Jonathan put the phone back up on the wall, hand not quite moving from the device yet. He stared at it, an almost uncomfortable feeling blossoming in his stomach. Something akin to adrenaline with a splash of guilt thrown in the mix.
It didn’t seem quite right, but Jonathan pushed it to the back of his mind and opted to force himself away from the phone and back to his room to change out of his pajamas.
When Jonathan pulled into Steve’s driveway, trepidation was moving his fingers in an off-beat rhythm on the steering wheel, and his breathing was a little quicker than he would have liked.
He didn’t know what was making him feel this way, didn’t know why he was so nervous (?) at the thought of seeing Steve for the first time since-
Since everybody had died.
He steeled his resolve, stuffing all of the uncertainties into the back of his mind with all the nervousness already ensnared there, and stepped out of the car.
He turned his gaze up towards Steve’s house, then, and suddenly somebody was standing there.
Steve, in all his glory, was watching Jonathan from the porch. His face was unreadable in the dark lighting of night, but he voiced a greeting, waving slightly as he did so.
Jonathan just stared.
He didn’t know why.
Didn’t know what compelled him to stop acting like a normal human being.
But all he could do was look at Steve, a quite unprecedented agitation seeping into his heart without his consent at the conflicting feelings creating a turmoil of confusion inside of him.
A part of him was happy to see Steve. To see somebody who was there, to see somebody familiar who knew the truth about the horrors of the world.
A part of him was angry with Steve.
Jonathan thought a part of him would always be angry with Steve.
No matter what he does, no matter how much he has managed to redeem himself since that fight in the alley all those years ago, a deep seated hatred still remained deep down for the boy standing in front of Jonathan.
Yet, something had changed in the past few days. It felt like a burden had been lifted from Jonathan’s shoulders when he caught Steve from falling off that tower, when he saved his life.
Maybe Jonathan was feeling responsible. Responsible for roping Steve into all the terrors of the Upside Down, responsible for that fight that he knew was really all his fault.
Responsible for stealing Nancy from him, despite knowing that it was completely her decision to leave him and that Steve was a pretty shit boyfriend.
But Jonathan would just be a hypocrite if he called Steve a shitty boyfriend, wouldn’t he? He hadn’t been boyfriend of the year either, no matter how much he tried to convince himself it wasn’t all his fault. Because deep down, where nobody else saw, something was telling him it was all his fault.
Will getting taken from right under his nose, his mom nearly going crazy because of the stress, Jonathan not believing a word she said despite it being the actual truth that the rest of them were too terrified to admit to.
It was all his fault.
Everything that happened could have been prevented if he had just stayed home instead of taking that extra shift at the diner, if he could have been there for Will before he was taken by the sick horrors of the Upside Down.
If he could have saved everyone when they were fighting Vecna. If he could have thrown himself in front of Will and told him to run so maybe, just maybe, he could have been the one to make it out of there alive and not Jonathan.
Because in Jonathan’s eyes, his brother had died that night.
His brother, who had an actual future in front of him.
His brother, who had been through so much in what short time he had lived his life, facing literal death in the face and saying ‘I am not afraid’.
His brother, who Jonathan would sacrifice anything for, even if it meant giving up his own life in the process.
Sweet Will, who Jonathan had seen fall limp onto the harsh stone ground, blood staining the floor beneath his body.
Now, his brother, his mom, his ex/best friend- they had all died. Every. Single. One of them.
Everyone except for Steve Harrington.
Now Jonathan was standing across from the boy he had resented all his life, unknown feelings bubbling inside of him.
A different part of him, something that was hidden beneath the rest, resented Steve for a completely different reason from anger or grudges.
Why was it that Steve Harrington stood here, while Jonathan’s brother was gone from the world?
Why was it that Steve Harrington survived when Jonathan’s mom hadn’t?
He knew it was terrible, knew that he would rather have Steve than nobody at all, but it was the truth.
It was ugly, it was repulsive, but it was the unwavering truth.
Yet, even more so than he hated Steve for it, he hated himself.
He wished he were the one to die there.
He had no future; he had no life ahead of him, and nowhere to go after this whole mess was over. Will had everything. He could have lived a beautiful, wonderful life, but instead he had met a terrible, premature end.
All because he was so brave, and Jonathan could never hope to match what Will had. After all he had been through, Jonathan wouldn’t have blamed his brother if he had closed in on himself, had become reclusive and unpleasant.
But he never did.
No, he was happy. He smiled and joked around, laughed and spent time with his friends.
Jonathan marveled in it. He marveled in the way that Will could be so goddamn carefree after all the shit he had been put through.
In a way, he was also jealous. Because Jonathan knew that there was no way he could go back to living a normal life like Will if he had been through something like that.
He wasn’t half the person Will was.
And if Jonathan could switch places with him, he would do so in a second.
But that wasn’t possible.
Neither was it possible to ignore Steve Harrington any more, so he raised his hand in a wave, and walked towards Steve.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” Steve said, eyebrows raised.
Jonathan scoffed. “Humble is certainly a way to put it.”
He stepped inside, Steve swinging the door shut behind him, and cast a look around Steve’s house.
It was nice. And huge, quite frankly.
A lot larger than Jonathan’s one story little ranch, that was for sure.
“Well,” Steve said, walking in front of Jonathan, then glancing back at him over his shoulder. “Make yourself at home. There’s soda and shit in the fridge, just get whatever you want.”
“Right…” Jonathan said, sending a look up at the ceiling above him. “Are your parents home?”
Steve waved a dismissive hand. “Nah, they’re not gonna be for a little bit. So don’t worry about it.”
Jonathan frowned. “When will they be back?”
Steve didn’t turn to look at him, but Jonathan could see the way his shoulders tensed for a split second before he shrugged. “Dunno. They’re usually gone for a couple weeks, or months, at a time.”
“But you’re still just a kid- still in high school. They’re not worried at all?”
Steve turned to look at him, something foreign flashing in his eyes, before an easy going smile overtook his lips. “It’s fine, man. Seriously. They know I can take care of myself.” He paused, his smile dropping into a grimace. “We should talk, though. I’m still trying to get used to being seventeen again.”
Jonathan nodded, and followed Steve as he walked through the large hallway into his living room. Steve dragged a chair away from the corner of the room and put it in front of the couch, the coffee table separating the two pieces of furniture. Steve sat down in the chair, and Jonathan took a seat on the couch.
“So,” Steve started, leaning forward, elbows braced against his thighs and hands clasped. “We’re back in 1983, and apparently we’re the only ones who remember what happened four years in the future.”
Jonathan rubbed a hand against his temple, fighting back against the growing headache building behind his eyes.
“That by itself is a lot to take in.”
Steve nodded his agreement, then quirked his lip to the side. “I’ll be right back.” He stood up, walking out of sight. When he returned, he had a white board in hand, and a dry erase marker in the other. He sat back down in the chair, and put the board down onto the table.
“Okay,” Steve said, uncapping the marker and sticking the cap to the back of it. “I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, so visual learning it is.”
On the right side of the dry erase board, Steve wrote the numbers ‘1987’ in his sloppy handwriting, and on the other, he wrote ‘1983’. He then drew two stick figures, labeling one with a S and one with a J.
Jonathan noticed he added hair to the one with the S above it.
“Okay. So, this is me and you in 1987. We went back in time-” Steve drew an arched arrow from 1987 to 1983, then drew the two stick figures under 1983. “-by four years.” He drew a ‘-4’ over the arrow, and apparently just for the fun of it added two frowny faces on the stick figures.
“Everybody else is dead.” Steve drew a quite morbid head under the 1987 with x’s through the eyes. “But here, they’re alive.” He drew the same head, but with dots for eyes and a big smile on its face. “What we don’t know is how the hell did this happen.”
“Do you think Vecna has anything to do with it?” Jonathan asked, frowning slightly at the crude representation at what had happened to the two of them in the past day.
Steve scoffed. “Who else would have the power to do this?”
“...Will?” Jonathan asked, his heart twisting into a painful knot at the mention of his brother.
“I don’t know if Will’s powers are that powerful yet,” Steve said, then added on very thoughtfully. “He almost got wrecked by Vecna before.”
“Watch it.”
“Anyway, what if this is just a game that Vecna’s playing with us or something? You know that bastard’s sadistic.”
“I was thinking that too,” Jonathan admitted, staring down at the translucent glass of the coffee table. “But I haven’t seen anything out of the norm for 1983, and I doubt that he would be able to recreate every little thing that we’ve ever seen.”
“He can see our memories, remember? I bet he could just about do anything trippy with our brains.”
“Okay, but why? I mean, what’s so important about us in particular that he, one, didn’t kill us, and two, that he sent us back in the past for some strange odd reason?”
Steve didn’t reply to this, instead running a hand though his hair, which was oddly very unkept and laying flat on his head.
Jonathan just now noticed the lack of grandeur that Steve usually wore like a mask.
He found he kind of liked it.
Huh.
“Okay, let's say it was Will. Why would he send us back in time?” Steve asked, eyes lifting to Jonathan’s, who stilled under his apprehensive gaze.
“To save us? So we could prevent everything from turning out the way it did?”
“Wasn’t Will dead?”
Jonathan stilled.
He slid his eyes back down to the coffee table, hands tightening into balls from where his arms were crossed over his chest, and suddenly he found it very hard to breathe.
Like very, very hard.
“Yeah.” It was discordant, broken. Emotionless.
“So it couldn’t have been him,” Steve reasoned, and despite Jonathan not looking back up to meet his eyes, he could hear a note of guilt echoing in Steve’s words. “But if it wasn’t him, then who was it?”
“He might not have been dead yet.”
“What?”
Jonathan forced himself to look up at Steve, no matter how much his eyes burned and retinas felt they were melting into molten lead. “I don’t know if he was dead for sure. He might have still been alive, just on the brink. Then he heard us or something and teleported us back. Here.”
Steve didn’t respond for a few moments, a contemplative look passing through his face.
“I dunno…”
Jonathan felt something in him snap.
“Jesus, Steve,” he exclaimed, but his voice would go no louder than a normal talking level for some strange, odd reason, so it sounded more exhausted than anything. “What other possibility is there? It’s either Will saved our lives with his powers, or Vecna’s playing with our minds, and I highly doubt the latter.”
Steve didn’t look hurt by Jonathan’s outburst. If anything, a small, barely discernible glint of worry reflected in his chocolate eyes.
Worry?
No.
Right?
Certainly not for Jonathan. He was probably just thinking about Nancy and Robin and Dustin.
Yeah. That was it.
“Okay, fine. Our working theory right now is that Will somehow transported us away to save our butts, and in doing so sent us four years into the past, before all of this happened. Am I right?” Steve said, brows furrowing in concentration.
Jonathan shrugged. “Maybe he knew what he was doing. Maybe he sent us back here to fix all of our mistakes and prevent any of that from ever happening?”
“But… Time travel? I mean, shit, man, I can’t even wrap my head around that.”
“You’re not able to wrap your head around anything.”
“Hey now, whose ingenious plan with the beanstalk was the one to get us all the way to Vecna? Hm, oh, that’s right! It was me!”
“Yeah and it also got everyone killed,” Jonathan shot back without considering the words before they burst out of his mouth.
Steve fell silent, the once humorous tilt of his lips flattening into a line. His eyes dimmed, and he looked away from Jonathan.
“Yep. Sure did.”
Jonathan opened his mouth to somehow reconcile his words, to miraculously undo the damage that had already been done the second the words left his lips.
Nothing came out.
Deep down, did Jonathan really blame Steve for all this?
It wasn’t Steve’s fault, Jonathan knew that. They all would have died if they didn’t do anything, and Steve’s plan was the best one at the moment to go with. It was successful in the sense that it got them to their destination, which was originally the goal for the beanstalk.
“It wasn’t your plan that killed everyone,” Jonathan finally said, words stiff and awkward. He had never really comforted anyone who wasn’t Will or his mom. Or Nancy, but he saw how that turned out.
“Your plan was just how to get up there. It was all of our faults.”
Even as he said it, that nagging voice from earlier spoke up again, and Jonathan had to shove it down before his brain was consumed by the crushing guilt.
Steve shrugged hopelessly, shoulders hunched and posture defeated. “I still got us up there. It it weren’t for me-”
“We would all be dead,” Jonathan cut him off, frowning slightly. “We wouldn’t get this chance to fix everything. We wouldn’t be here right now if we hadn’t gone up to the Abyss.”
“I guess you’re right,” Steve admitted, but guilt still clouded his usually bright, chestnut gaze, casting a dark shadow upon his face that didn’t seem quite right.
“Okay. So Will sent us back in the past to fix everything. The question is, how are we gonna accomplish this?” Jonathan asked, his earlier frustration creeping up his throat.
“Easy. Keep Will from getting taken to the Upside Down.”
Jonathan raised a brow. “What if the demigorgon goes after some other kid? What if it goes after Barb again?”
“Well, if everything goes like it did before, Barb got taken when she was at my house, right?” Steve asked, sending a glance out the large window to the steaming pool in the back. “I’ll be there to stop her from being taken, and you can stop Will from being taken by staying with him the night that he disappeared.”
Jonathan thought about that for a moment.
The plan wasn’t necessarily bad… but he sure could spot a couple gaping holes in it.
“What if the demigorgon decides to come early and catches us off guard? What if it just decides to take someone else instead of Will and Barb? Things aren’t gonna be the same as they were last time, so we can’t rely on things going exactly to plan.”
“So what, Byers? What do you propose we do, then?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Sure you are.”
Jonathan ignored Steve’s words in favor of delving deeper into his own mind.
In reality, despite the flaws outweighing the positives in Steve’s plan, Jonathan couldn’t imagine up any other ideas at the moment that beat it.
“Fine. We go with your plan, but when things change- and they will change- we make altercations.”
Steve shrugged. “Whatever floats your boat.”
Jonathan glanced away from Steve, casting a look out the window. He took a double take at how light it had become. Now, instead of darkness cloaking the trees guarding the back of Steve’s house, early sunlight filtered in through the leaves and branches, casting yellow rays down upon the pool and through the transparent windows.
Steve followed Jonathan’s gaze, and out of the corner of his eye, Jonathan could see Steve’s eyes widening.
“Shit, what time is it?”
Jonathan glanced down at his watch, staring at where the two hands were pointing on the miniature clock on his wrist.
“Around seven,” he responded, looking back up at Steve.
“What day is it?”
Jonathan thought back to when he saw the calendar hung up on his wall and realized he had gone back in time by four years. “Tuesday, I think…?”
“I’m guessing we’re gonna skip school today?” Steve asked, practically unbothered by the notion.
“Oh, yeah,” Jonathan responded, the answer falling easily off his lips. He couldn’t deal with Sophomore year again after everything that had just happened, especially not now. Maybe tomorrow, or the day after, or the day after he would go.
Just not now.
“I’m gonna make breakfast,” Steve said, pushing himself up from the chair with a groan. “Eggs okay? They’re probably gonna be burnt, but just pretend it’s a special feature in the Harrington household.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan answered distractedly, a different concern than breakfast making itself known in his mind.
He turned, bracing an arm on the back of the couch, facing Steve who was crouching down next to a cabinet, digging through it for something. His back was to Jonathan, and Jonathan could just barely hear the small curse that Steve bit out as something fell from its place.
“Do you think Vecna knows we’re here?”
Steve stilled. His shoulders hunched up, whole body tensing in a visceral reaction. After a couple tense seconds, Steve stood up, metal pan held in hand. He turned to Jonathan, a very not like Steve fear dancing in his dark eyes.
“Knowing that bastard, probably.”
“How long do you think we have until he finds us?”
Steve shook his head, turning away from Jonathan and placing the pan onto the stove. “At least until El opens the gate. After that, it’s fair game.”
“How will we fight back against him? I mean, the only people able to even injure him were El and Wil. We don’t have powers like them, so what chance in hell do we even have?”
Steve sighed. “Look, worrying about it now’s not gonna accomplish anything. Let’s just focus on not burning these eggs, and then we’ll deal with the scary Vecna stuff.” He paused, glancing back at Jonathan with his usual grin back on. “Are you gonna help or just stare?”
Jonathan blinked. “Ah, right. Yeah- okay.”
He stood up, swaying slightly at the stars that popped in front of his face, and walked into the kitchen. He stood there somewhat awkwardly, eyes glancing around the expanse of the room.
It felt nearly as big as half as Jonathan’s whole house. Maybe it was.
He glanced at Steve, who was staring at him with an unreadable look in his eyes. When Steve realized Jonathan was watching him, Steve quickly turned away, walking towards the fridge and pulling out a carton of eggs.
“Just like, set the table or something,” Steve said, an unnatural edge to his voice. Something like what a child’s tone would be if they were caught stealing from the cookie jar.
“Okay.”
Jonathan opened a couple cabinets, finding a multitude of dishes and cutlery and random shit that he didn’t even know belonged in a kitchen, before he finally found the plates.
As he set up the table, the distinct smell of eggs wafted into his nose.
Jonathan didn’t like eggs.
But it was fine.
Steve didn’t have to know that.
Eventually, though, the smell became ashy and tinged with something very unpleasant, to which Steve responded with a fun variety of curse words streaming from his mouth until he dumped the burnt eggs onto a plate.
“Oh, wow,” Jonathan said, staring at the eggs, which looked more akin to hashbrowns at this point. “You sure do know how to make some crispy eggs.”
“Shut up,” Steve replied, but Jonathan caught the glint of a smile at the end of his words. “They’re still edible. Probably.”
Jonathan raised a brow. “You sure?”
“One hundred percent."
“Right… okay, I’m gonna call my mom to make sure she doesn’t freak out that I disappeared over night. Where’s your phone?”
“Over there.” Steve pointed around the corner towards the main entrance, and Jonathan walked back that way, sending a glance down the hallway before making his way towards the phone on the wall.
He dialed the number to his house landline, and waited for a couple moments with the phone held to his ear.
“Hello?” the voice of his mom responded. “This is Joyce Byers.”
Jonathan’s breath caught in his throat. Hearing his mom’s voice for the first time since seeing her body fall to the rocky ground wrapped something around his lungs. Choking him, rendering him unable to force a single word out as she sat, probably very confused, on the other side of the line.
“Mom?” He finally managed, the word tasting stale and unnatural on his tongue. Why was that so?
“Jonathan?” his mom responded, sounding a little surprised. “I thought you had already left for school. Your car’s gone.”
“Yeah, I had to get an early start on a project for chem, sorry for not warning you yesterday,” Jonathan replied, fabricating the lie on the spot. The words felt tangled up in his throat, making it nearly impossible to get them all out.
“That’s fine, honey. Just make sure to tell me next time so I can make sure to get Will up.”
“I will. See you after school?”
“Yeah, have fun!”
Jonathan couldn’t find it in himself to put the phone back on the wall even long after the line had gone silent. Eventually, his hand moved mechanically, placing the phone in its spot, but not yet removing his palm from the plastic.
He didn’t turn around, despite feeling Steve’s eyes burning two holes through his back.
“Eggs are getting cold,” Steve finally said, but his voice was gentle, lacking the usual lilt of humor or bravado.
Jonathan finally turned around, coming face to face with Steve, who was a lot closer than he had initially thought.
“Right. Sorry.”
He walked past Steve, their shoulders barely brushing, and made his way back into the dining room. He stopped dead, setting his gaze upon the table.
He stared at the eggs, then turned to look at the freezer connected to the fridge. A sudden idea lit up in his mind. A stupid, reckless, idea, but the best they had come up with nonetheless.
“Eggos,” he said, the word being the first that sprung to his mind. He turned back to Steve, and confusion was the only emotion staring back at him.
“Those are eggs.”
“No, eggos! El likes eggos. El opened the portal to the Upside Down, and she hasn’t done it yet. That means…”
Steve’s eyes lit up with recognition. “That we can stop the portal from being created in the first place!”
Jonathan grinned. “Bingo. If we’re right, and El opened the portal in November, then all we have to do is stop her from doing so, then we won’t have to fix anything else! We won’t have to deal with getting attacked by demigorgons if there aren’t any to attack us.”
“Right. But how do we do that? That thing is like heavily guarded times ten,” Steve responded, eyebrows furrowing.
“We’ve been there before, haven’t we?” Jonathan answered, and suddenly everything seemed to be lining up just perfectly in his mind. “In the Upside Down. Hell, you were in the rainbow room, right?”
Steve’s eyes widened. “You’re right! We know the layout of the place! We can break in there easy!”
Jonathan shook his head, turning away from Steve and walking back into the living room to grab the dry erase board from where it was abandoned on the coffee table. “Not quite.”
He erased the writing on it, and uncapped the marker.
“There are a few things that we have to consider before actually breaking in. First, security cameras.” He wrote ‘security cameras’ next to a bullet point, then turned to Steve. “This is high level tech we’re talking about, and the literal government. If we get caught, we’re basically dead. We have no chance of saving anyone.”
Steve nodded along. “Why don’t we just shoot all of the cams?”
“They’ll realize that we have, and by the time they do it’ll be too late for us. Do you remember anything about the placement of them from when you were down there?”
Steve thought for a second, and a momentary flash of despair shot through his eyes. “No. I was too busy playing with a rubix cube.”
“Rubix cube…?”
Steve waved a hand. “Don’t worry about it.”
Jonathan frowned, but didn’t care enough about the whatever cube and let the subject drop.
“Okay, next, we have to worry about the actual kids in the lab. They all have powers, right? What if they’re not compliant with us because they’re scared, or they’re loyal to the lab?”
“El wasn’t loyal to the lab.”
“El was a special case, I think.”
“We just have to tell her that we’re rescuing her, and she’ll probably come with us.”
Jonathan raised a brow, and Steve threw his hands up helplessly.
“What do you want me to say, Byers? How I see it, it’s either drug and kidnap her, or tell her that we’re here to help. Because trust me, we both are not winning a fight against her. And as much as I hate to admit it, it would be a real ego blow if I got pieced up by a twelve year old.”
“I guess you’re right. Okay, what about the other kids?”
“What about them?”
“What will we do if one of them sees us?”
“Silence them.”
Jonathan stared at Steve for a second, trying to decipher if he was joking or not.
“I don’t mean kill them! Geez, conclusions much?”
“Not my fault when you go all serious on me and talk about silencing kids with a straight face!” Jonathan argued back, but there was no heat backed up behind his words.
When Steve rolled his eyes, it was in such a different manner from Jonathan was used to that it took him completely by surprise.
His gaze was fond.
His smile easygoing.
Not the fake kind, either. Jonathan could usually differentiate Steve’s ‘King Steve’ persona from his genuine emotion, and this definitely was the latter.
It made something strange curl up inside of Joanthan’s stomach. Something warm and fuzzy.
Something pleasant, and ever so unnatural. He did his best to ignore it in favor of turning his attention back to the dry erase board on the counter.
“Okay… a third concern is the guards. There has to be a shit ton of people swarming the place, including armed guards, government officials, and doctors. If any one of these people even sees us, it’s game over. How do we counter this? Go.”
Steve’s mouth fell open, but no sound came out. After a few moments of his eyes flitting around the room quickly, his gaze landed on a pair of clothes in a heap in the corner of the living room. What they were doing there, Jonathan had no clue.
“We dress up as guards and infiltrate the facility!”
Jonathan shrugged. “Okay, but aren’t they gonna be a little suspicious if two teenagers are guards at a high security federal facility?”
Steve waved off the worry. “I’m sure it’ll be fine. If you have any better ideas I’m all ears.”
His words were smug, but they carried no hint of animosity.
Jonathan found he vastly preferred that to the Steve he had known just days ago.
“Yeah, fine, I get it. Every once in a while you can have a good idea; I’m so proud of you.”
“That means so much to me,” Steve said, wiping an imaginary tear from underneath his eye. “I’ll carry this victory with me for the rest of my life. Jonathan Byers said I had good ideas. How will I ever repay you?”
Jonathan pretended to think real hard about the question for a second. “You could repay me a little by knocking out two guards and stealing their uniforms and keycards.”
Steve scoffed. “Oh yeah, that’ll be done in a pinch.”
“‘Course it will, cause you’ve never lost a fight, right Harrington?”
“Nope. Never. Seriously, though, do you think the both of us could take two guards?”
Jonathan shrugged, but doubt crept into his mind. “Probably not. I mean, maybe if we shot them like with tranquilizers from afar or something, but the cameras might see that.”
“So we have to draw them out from their post,” Steve deduced with a note of triumph in his tone.
“Easier said than done.”
Steve shrugged. “I can be bait. If we get the attention of one, then the other would most likely stay there, but if the first one doesn’t come back, then the other would follow. And we can jump them too.”
“Okay, but how do you expect us to knock out the first one?”
“I’m sure we’ll figure it out on the fly.”
“Wow. That’s really reassuring. Do guards even have clearance to go to the lower floors?”
“I’m sure we can find someone who does if the guards don’t and hold them at like gunpoint or something.”
Jonathan scoffed. “Without anyone noticing or them alerting someone? It’s way too risky.”
“Well what do you want to do then?”
“We should do recon before anything to figure out the schedules of the guards, then go from there.”
Steve ran a hand through his flat hair, shaking his head slightly. “Ok, fine. We can do recon and all that, but we need to do this sooner than later. We only have a little more than a month until Will is taken and we don’t even have the exact date when El opened the gate! We can’t just sit here twiddling our thumbs waiting for something unexpected to happen!”
“You think I don’t know that we’re limited on time? It’s either we do this, or my brother gets taken to that terrible place alone and gets connected to the hivemind that affects him the rest of his life. Trust me, Steve, if we could sneak in there right now I would be on my way to the lab. But that would only be a suicide run. We need to take time to plan and think this out in order to be an actual success.”
Steve didn’t reply, but turned away from Jonathan, hands on hips.
“How do you want to do this recon?” he relented, turning back to him with an unreadable look on his face. “With like… binoculars and shit?”
Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t really know any other methods of recon but if you do I’m all ears.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll go out there first and see what’s going on. I can relay info back to you with a radio.”
“Do you own a radio?”
Steve raised his eyebrows. “No, but Will does, doesn’t he?”
“I’m not gonna steal his only way of communication with his friends,” Jonathan said, frowning. “Besides, we need two to communicate. How would we get the other one?
“Easy. I’m still chummy with Nance right now I think, so I can just ask her to grab Mike’s.”
“You really think she’s gonna not question the fact that you, Steve Harrington, is calling her to ask for her brother’s radio? Who, one, you’re not supposed to even know, and two, is like five years younger than you?”
“Yeah.”
Jonathan huffed out an exasperated breath, pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger.
“I don’t see you exactly jumping at the chance to give any other ideas!” Steve shot back, annoyance clear in his voice.
“Can’t we just buy our own radios?” Jonathan asked, a weariness settling into his tone.
“And how much are those?”
“I don’t know, but it’ll be worth it if we can stop the world from ending! You’re rich anyway, I’m sure your bank account can handle a couple dollars.”
“That might be true, Byers, but I’m not made of money!”
“You know what, let’s just go together today to scout it out. Then we can figure out radios later, okay?”
“Okay, fine.” Steve blew out a long breath, eyes traveling from Jonathan to the forgotten breakfast laid out all nice and pretty on the table. “I guess breakfast’s off.”
“If you like cold, burnt eggs then they’re all yours, Harrington.”
“Yeah, no thanks.”
Jonathan turned away from Steve, and started walking towards the entrance to the house.
“Where’re you going?” Steve asked, something unnatural lilting his words.
“To go get decent, you probably should too, that hair looks sad.”
Steve sputtered indignantly behind Jonathan, but he didn’t bother to look back at Steve as he reached the door and opened it to the chilly October air.
“Hey, are you coming back?” Steve called after him, not moving from where he was still standing next to the kitchen table.
“Yeah, don’t miss me too much,” Jonathan replied, stepping out of the house, hand loosely holding the door knob. He shut the door before he could hear Steve’s response.
About an hour later, Jonathan found himself sitting in the passenger seat of Steve’s beamer, with Steve himself commandeering the wheel. They hadn’t exchanged too many pleasantries, if at all, but Jonathan found no tension in the air between the two.
It was strange. The last time Jonathan and Steve had been in a car just the two of them had been when they were in Robin’s van and had been following Hopper interdimensionally. They had been in a constant argument. Yelling at each other about petty and stupid things, taking every chance to ridicule the other- Jonathan had truly thought that the two of them would never get along.
Now, though, the two sat in silence as the car sped down the road at a steady fifty mph, no such previous negativity hidden in the static between them. Jonathan watched as the scenery flitted by, his eyes pausing on one thing before switching to another when it sped out of sight. Trees blurred as they passed them, the red and orange leaves turning into a vibrant mix of warm hues. The sun bobbed in and out of view, now a little higher than earlier, shining down upon the car in all its celestial glory.
They gradually began to slow down, then pulled off of the road entirely. Steve parked the car in a rough dirt patch semi hidden by trees, and pulled his keys from their placement next to the steering wheel.
Jonathan stepped out of the car, swinging the door shut behind him, surveying the area Steve had decided to park in.
It was at the very edge of the vast forest that swept through Hakwins, trees blotting out the sky if you looked the right way.
Jonathan glanced over at Steve, who he found looking at him right back.
Seriously, what was this guy’s deal? That was at least the second time Jonathan had caught him staring.
“You ready?” Jonathan asked, ignoring the other question that materialized in his mind.
Steve shrugged, turning away. “As ready as I’ll ever be to go spy on a top secret lab.” He began to walk away from the car and further into the forest, and Jonathan followed, the dead, curled up leaves crunching beneath the soles of his shoes.
Soon, the two stopped before the wrought iron fence surrounding Hawkins lab.
Jonathan cast his gaze to the top of the fence. It was at least ten feet high with barbed (probably electrical) wire tangled at the very top.
“Well, no way we’re climbing our way in, I guess,” Steve said, following Jonathan’s eyes to the barbed wire.
“Nice deduction skills, Sherlock.”
“If you’re so smart, Byers, then how are we gonna get in? Because how I see it, there’s only one way in and it’s through the front entrance. Which, by the way, is heavily guarded and has a giant gate!”
Jonathan opened his mouth to yell back, but stilled suddenly, eyes flitting to the side. The telltale crunch of brittle leaves, the snap of a twig, the whispering of a bush as it’s brushed past.
“Steve, shut up,” Jonathan snapped, forcing his voice to stay barely above a whisper.
“You know what, no! I’m so sick of you pretending you’re so high and mighty and so much smarter than me! I-”
“Steve! There’s someone here!”
Steve’s words abruptly cut off, and Jonathan could see his whole body tense as he whipped around, head swiveling back and forth to the surrounding woodland.
Jonathan kept his eyes glued on where he thought he had heard the noise stem from, and, tentatively, he took a step towards it.
Something burst from the cover of the shrubs, and Jonathan stumbled back, nearly falling into Steve. He stared, eyes widening, breath catching in his throat, as a doe fell heavily to the ground, blood seeping on the leaf litter surrounding the creature.
He couldn’t breathe. His lungs constricted on themselves, squeezing the oxygen from his chest, a fiery pain consuming him.
Scarlet shone brightly against her russet fur, staining the cold earth below, and clear as day, cutting through all other sound, Jonathan could hear the gasps and cries as she struggled against the multitude of wounds digging deep into her flesh.
Jonathan could only see his mom.
His mom, laying on the ground, hand outstretched towards Will’s lifeless (?) form curled up with his back to her. Blood dripped from her hand, her clothes, her hair, painting an obscene, grotesque picture of death.
It was almost as if Jonathan could hear her final breaths, could hear her desperately attempting to hold onto what connection to the land of the living she had left. Could hear the blood gurgling in her throat as it choked her, as the final haze of death finally clouded her eyes.
“-ers?”
Distantly, as if under water, Steve’s voice was calling to him. He felt someone shaking his shoulders, vaguely saw a hand waving in front of his face.
“Jonathan!”
Jonathan blinked, gaze focusing on Steve, who was staring at him, brows furrowed, a mixture of confusion and worry shining in his gaze.
“You good, man?”
Jonathan stared at Steve, and slowly, his gaze slid to the dead, broken form on the ground behind Steve.
He inhaled a deep, shuddering breath, and turned his back to Steve and the doe.
“I’m fine,” he lied, voice strained. “Let’s keep looking for a way in.”
Behind him, Jonathan could almost hear the frown creasing Steve’s usual flawless face, but after a moment, the crunch of leaves beneath Steve’s shoes echoed Jonathan’s own.
After a couple minutes of walking, they reached the edge of the tree line where the trees had been cut down in way of a road. Jonathan paused, staying hidden under the overcast shade of the large oak he was standing next to, and peered out from the leafy protection.
The gate stood in the way between the road and the facility, looming over the dark, lined cement. A bored looking guard sat in the station next to the street, elbow propped up and head leaning on hand.
There was no discernible way in besides from the gate from where Jonathan could see, and he glanced over at Steve, motioning for him to follow him away from the road.
After they were a safe distance from the street and out of the guard’s earshot, Steve turned to Jonathan, arms crossed and eyebrows raised.
“So, Einstein, what do you want to do now?”
“I’m thinking.”
Steve scoffed. “Sure you are.”
A palpable feeling of irritation suddenly swept through Jonathan, and he forced himself to face away from Steve in order to not blow up on him.
God, he was just so annoying.
Always thinking he was such hot shit, never doubting himself once despite the fact that he was almost always wrong.
Confidence practically radiated off the guy, and even staring into the face of all his flaws, he never once thought less of himself. He never once stopped shining.
Jonathan would rather die than admit that he was jealous of Steve Harrington.
So he didn’t.
“We could hitch a ride in the back of a car going into the lab,” Jonathan said suddenly, the idea formulating out of the blue in his mind. “We could sneak in that way, and then hide from the cameras and jump the guards or something.” He turned back to Steve, who wasn’t even looking at him at all.
Annoyance climbed his throat and he nearly actually did yell at Steve this time before-
“Or, we could cause a distraction, and open the gate ourselves.”
That made Jonathan pause.
A distraction. Hm.
“We would need to do one too mundane for the need to alert anybody else, but not too little for him not to even go out and check,” Jonathan said, looking up at Steve.
Steve nodded, glancing behind Jonathan’s shoulder at where the gate sat behind the thick wall of leaves and branches.
“Setting something on fire would be too much, right?”
Jonathan raised a brow. “Why’s that your first resort?”
“What if we fired a gun? The guard would probably go to investigate that- but he might tell someone,” Steve brainstormed, ignoring Jonathan’s question.
“What if we screamed for help?”
“He might not be a good person.”
“I feel like anybody with combat training would go towards somebody screaming for help.”
Steve squinted at him. “How good natured do you think most people are? Usually somebody would be running the other way!”
“Would you?”
Steve didn’t talk for a few moments, then shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”
“What if it wasn’t a hot babe?”
Steve put a hand to his chest in faux astonishment. “I would treat saving anybody’s life the same no matter their gender!”
“Uh huh.”
“Okay, fine. Would you?”
Jonathan… found he didn’t know how to answer that.
Would he, realistically, go towards somebody in the forest screaming for help? Idealistically he’d like to say he would. It’d be the right thing to do.
But, knowing himself, would he really put his life on the line for somebody he didn’t even know? Would he really risk himself, running off into the unknown, for somebody who might not even be in danger?
What if it was a trap? What if somebody was luring him out there and not actually in danger? Jonathan knew first hand that the most brave people are the ones to die first.
Which is why it was odd that Steve Harrington was still stood next to Jonathan, alive and well.
Because no matter how much Jonathan would hate to admit it, Steve was one of the bravest people he knew. He would put himself in danger for a complete stranger- has even done so in the past.
Jonathan didn’t get what Nancy saw better in himself than Steve. He really didn’t. But that had ended badly enough for the both of them, so maybe Nance just wasn’t compatible with either of the two.
“If it was a stranger, probably not,” Jonathan finally answered, not looking Steve in the eye. “Some of us don’t have a hero complex.”
“I do not- Well, okay, but running into the woods does not mean that I have a hero complex.”
Jonathan raised a brow. “You sure about that?”
“Yeah! I mean, what if somebody’s actually in trouble and they’re about to die? If I didn’t run out there, then they would have been long gone and I would have been responsible!”
“Responsible?” Jonathan asked, frowning. “Turning away doesn’t make you responsible. You would have had nothing to do with it, therefore having no part in it. It’s like, the opposite of responsible.”
“It’s like a hit and run, you know? Except you don’t hit them.”
“Yeah, but that’s like if you actually partake in their getting injured. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you had nothing to do with it!”
“So if you were driving your car at night and you saw somebody bleeding out on the side of the road you would just drive right past them? Why not run them over while you're at it?”
“That’s a completely different scenario!”
“So you would just leave them?”
Jonathan grasped for words, but found them slipping away like water through his fingers.
“Yeah, probably,” he finally relented, looking away from Steve.
“Would you leave me?”
Jonathan’s eyes shot back to Steve, brows furrowed. “What?”
“If, in this scenario, that was me on the side of the road, would you leave me?”
“No,” Jonathan said immediately, the answer coming easily. “Why would I leave you? I literally saved your life up on that tower.”
Steve frowned. “You don’t seem to like me very much.”
Jonathan actually bit out a laugh at that. “Yeah, no shit I don’t like you very much. Remember the past four years? Remember November of 1983? But, like I’ve said before, I don’t want you dead. You’re my friend.”
The last word was sour on his tongue.
Steve’s eyes widened, sparkled with something unfamiliar.
“Don’t start crying on me now, Harrington,” Jonathan said, an involuntary smile shaping his lips.
“In your dreams, Byers.”