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It had started with the nightmares.
No, it had started when a monster from another dimension had opened its jaws, revealing a row of fangs, like a flower of death. No, maybe before that, when a girl had been killed in his swimming pool and her ghost had remained to haunt him.
It didn't matter when it had started.
There was a spot in Family Video where Steve could sleep. The afternoons, when the light managed to find its way right into that corner where Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Sound of Music and Casablanca and Doctor Zhivago were kept... There... there, Steve could close his eyes. He could rest for a few hours. The nightmares stayed away, as if those characters printed on film worked as a shield.
It had started with Hargrove.
With his death, actually.
Every time Steve put his head on the pillow, he found himself at Starcourt Mall. Hargrove was facing the monster. He was the monster. He was protecting El. With his bare hands. Then the tentacles of that thing were piercing him from side to side, and his blood was so black and the smell of gunpowder and decomposing bodies so strong that Steve felt like vomiting.
It had started with the fireworks.
The memory of all those lights blazing in his eyelids was so dazzling that sometimes he couldn't see anything else. He'd talk to a customer and there he'd find those same flashes of colored light on the skin of the man—or woman—on the other side of the counter. He'd talk to Robin and—oh boy—that smell (of death, decay, and gunpowder) would spread through his nostrils like an invisible virus.
He wasn't sleeping.
Unless it was right there at Family Video. In that spot with Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain on the shelves…
It was there that he'd begun to reevaluate his relationship with Bil-Hargrove. Which, well, a relationship... it wasn't a relationship. It was nothing, really.
Steve had been so busy pining for Nancy, so distracted by Dart and the Demodogs and he was trying to survive another day and to forget what had happened the year before (there was a fucking ghost in his pool!) and to live like a normal person again, that he hadn't had the right mindset to relate to Hargrove. To understand why he resented him so much, even though he didn't know him at all. It was beyond dislike, beyond envy; he seemed to hate him.
If Steve had been a little more himself, if he hadn't been so heartbroken and tired—of everything—and had not been forced to pick up his spiked bat again (Jonathan's spiked bat, actually) and hadn't tried so naively to be Steve "the hair" Harrington again, maybe he could have changed things.
It had started when Hargrove had smashed a plate over his head and then punched him on the Byers' floor.
No, it had started when he had let him call him "pretty boy" and shove him on the basketball court and say things like "plenty of bitches in the sea" and "you were moving your feet. Plant ‘em next time. Draw a charge” and "looks like you've got some fire in you, after all! I've been waiting to meet this King Steve everyone's been telling me so much about!" and punch him while laughing like a maniac. It had started in the showers, at school, in the locker room, when he had patted him on his bare shoulder as if they were friends... acquaintances... something.
As if they could be more.
Steve didn't know when it had started. Or how. He only knew that when Hargrove had entered his orbit, he'd felt alive, even though deep down in his soul, there was almost nothing left to make him feel that way. Hargrove had made his skin itch with electricity, with the anticipation of something: a punch, a hateful comment, a drop of anger. Anything.
It had started after his death. After the fake funeral. When things went back to "normal".
Right there at Family Video.
In that spot where Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland were storaged…
One day, Steve had wondered why he remembered every single one of those interactions. Why he hadn't forgotten them. Why Hargrove had to die and the Mind Flayer had to rise and then... well, had to die too —but had he really died?
He'd wondered why he cared when he didn't. Why it hurt him to see Max suffer. And why, in a small way (very small), he suffered too.
It had started at the cemetery, when he'd gone to see Hargrove's grave and discovered that he was born in March and that on his headstone there was the promise that he would never be forgotten. The wind blew through the trees, and there was so much peace and warmth that Steve had felt the weight of those words and hoped the ground beneath his feet would open up and swallow him whole.
Gone but not forgotten.
It was there that Steve had chosen to honor that promise.
He didn't know why. He didn't really know shit.
Then he went back to Family Video and sat down in that spot, the one that belonged to Julie Christie and Gene Kelly and Julie Andrews, where there was the chair he managed to sleep in (he slept with it tilted back, and when gravity brought it back to the floor and Steve woke up with a start, there were fireworks again, the smell of gunpowder, and the menacing shadow of a monster at least 15 feet tall looming over him). And there, right there, he thought about talking to Robin about it. Test the waters. Throw the stone into the pond without hiding his hand.
He wanted to ask her what it meant. Ask her why he dreamed of Bil-Hargove all the time. Why he had gone to the cemetery. Why the burdens of that promise (gone but not forgotten) weighed on him. Why him? She was so smart. Not as smart as Nancy, smart with a different kind of intelligence. She was witty. She knew a lot. She spoke a lot of languages. She was clever. His person. His platonic soulmate. With the capital P.
She would have an answer.
She would know when it had started.
And how. And why. And why Steve wished Billy Hargrove were still alive. And why that monster that had opened its jaws like a flower of death from another dimension had arrived right here, in Hawkins. And why that girl—Barb—had been killed in his own pool and her ghost remained there to haunt him.
He was just a boy.
He didn't want monsters. He didn't want ghosts. He didn't want nightmares.
He just wanted to sleep in his own bed.
He just wanted to know when it had started.
And why.
And what could he do now that Billy was dead and there was nothing left to do.