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“When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?”
— On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
There is power in a name. That is why Papa— sorry, Brenner— stripped ours from us. Within the white walls of his lab, we were reduced to numbers, neat and bloodless. I was the first. 001. It is branded onto my skin, immutable as fact, and I am reminded every time I glimpse the ink on the inside of my wrist. Next, he took my clothes, my hair, my blood. And, when that was not enough, he took my life, too. The Hawkins Post had announced it dutifully:
Henry Creel, age 12, tragically murdered by father, Victor Creel, alongside mother and sister.
More “facts” in black ink.
Unfortunately for Brenner, I was no less difficult as 001 than I had been for him as Henry. Once he had procured enough test subjects, he wasted little time in rebranding me as “Peter Ballard.” A harmless name for his harmless Orderly. As Peter, I smiled politely, wiped the blood from children's noses, and did not move things with my mind. The chip that Brenner buried at the base of my neck ensured the performance held.
“I knew 001,” I had told Eleven in the Rainbow Room, “but he died long before you arrived.” I had grown so good at playing dead, it didn’t even feel like a lie at the time. I would die again, by her hand, not long after that conversation. She would catalyze my rebirth as a god. In the dimension she banished me to, where my flesh and bones were rearranged into something unrecognizable, I told myself I had transcended names entirely. Gods have no need for something so human.
Of course, the children who opposed me disagreed. They were Eleven’s— Jane’s— friends. While I had learned to outgrow humanity, she had learned to embrace it. They called me Vecna, after the villain in their pen and paper fantasy game— one that I, embarrassingly enough, have come to enjoy on occasion. When we were adversaries, I gave little thought to what the children called me, but I have since learned from them that removing a name is not the only way to gain power. A thing that is named can be opposed. Some nights, I suspect that is what saved them.
Now I call myself Henry again. My birth name. It feels smaller in my mouth than it used to, but that is a quality I have grown to appreciate. Henry is a human name— ordinary, and soft at the edges, as I am learning how to be. I think it sounds best when he says it.
My Steve.
Steven, as I had called him, when I first tested his name on my tongue. The first syllable stretches the mouth into an unwilling smile. The second hums at the lips, amused by the effort of formality. He was Steven Harrington when he signed into the ward for our visits. Mr. Harrington to the students who orbit him like moths. To his friends, he is Steve, and I joined them once I dared to name him in a single breath. I tested it cautiously at first. Steve is warmer, simpler. It rests differently against the teeth. It suits him; a name that is easy on the lips, for a man who is easy on the eyes, with a heart that is impossible not to love. He is still Steven sometimes, when I wish to remind him to put the toilet seat down, or when he slides his hand along my thigh beneath a restaurant table where he thinks no one will see. But tonight he is Steve, the way he always is when he folds himself around me in the dark.
We lie together, a tangle of limbs on a bed too small for us. Steve is propped against the headboard, and I against his chest, slotted comfortably between his legs as if I have always belonged there.
“Hey,” he whispers sleepily, glancing down at the notebook in my lap, “Whatcha writing?”
“An inventory,” I say.
“Of what?”
“Of my feelings.”
Steve hums against my shoulder. “This is for Owens, isn’t it.”
I nod. My rehabilitation plan requires that I keep a journal. Dr. Owens tried to frame it as a suggestion when we’d met in his office, easing me into compliance with that tone he favored when he wanted to appear collaborative rather than directive. “It may help you work through your trauma,” he had said, as if the decades of abuse I had endured and perpetuated were merely an arithmetic problem in need of solving. I resented the implication.
This week’s assignment is simple in theory and excruciating in practice: identify and describe what I feel. I took offense when Owens first prescribed the exercise. Did he imagine I misplaced my emotions the way one might misplace a sock? That my understanding of emotions was insufficient? I have never been lacking in this faculty. Fear, shame, guilt— that was the currency I had dealt in as Vecna, and, on my worst days, they are currents that move me still. Only a year ago I orbited those brutal suns called rage and grief, mistaking their gravity for purpose. They burned in me an emptiness so vast I was nearly lost to it.
I swallow my pride and put pen to page. My writing is fluid, scholarly. There is a rhythm to it that I have worked hard to reclaim; under my own directive, in the solitary hours of my early recovery, I would revisit Palmer’s elliptical motions, until my penmanship had regained the sweeping buttresses and looping cathedral arches drilled into my script back in primary school.
Absurdly, I wonder if Owens places any stock in graphology. Would he perceive ambition, or the pathology of a villain, even, in the high bars that strike through my T’s? Or would those crucifixes that litter my sentences be a flagrant confession of my own guilt? I huff a laugh. Owens would never employ such pseudoscience to assess me. And why should he? He had no use for unscrupulous methods, held no intransigent conjectures about my character which he was desperate to prove. No, Owens is nothing like Brenner. He understood Eleven’s sovereignty, and tried, to the best of his ability, to treat Will when he was colonized by the Mind Flayer. Owens understood. And that is why I would work with him.
Back to my journal. Owens, ever committed to the preservation of my autonomy, had not prescribed me a format for this exercise, so I invented my own. I organize my feelings like entries in a ledger, and I include the intensity of each emotion for good measure. My list, thus far, looks something like this:
Guilt (persistent): I've recurring thoughts about my past actions, despite the impossibility of reparative action towards many of my victims. The emotion therefore appears more commemorative than corrective. I don’t suppose it will ever go away.
Irritation (mild): triggered this week by institutional routines, bureaucracy, and this very journal assignment. I suspect the reaction stems partly from arrogance. I resent exercises that presume to instruct me on the nature of my own mind, and situations where I’m expected to capitulate to a higher authority.
Anxiety (moderate): from social interactions with people who knew me as Vecna. Their reactions towards me are understandable, but understanding doesn’t lessen the sting. I remain acutely aware of how undesirable my own company is to many of those around me. There remains a fear of relapse into old behaviors, an emergent fear that I will fail to meet Dr. Owens’ expectations of me, and, more unnervingly, a fear of disappointing Steve.
Contentment (acute): Steve Harrington has been one of the few individuals who knew me as Vecna yet welcomes, even actively seeks my company; this knowledge stirs warmth in the chest that defies categorization. The time I have spent with him this week is something that brings me great pleasure, and I’ve come to look forward to his visitations. My attachment to him continues to deepen, which produces both comfort and apprehension.
My pen stills; I have approached the limit of my candor. To disclose the details, to name the rest— that Steve will one day see the truth of me and recoil, that I will harm him, ruin him; that he should reject me as I deserve— would be invocation, not honesty. Such things are too raw to stain in ink and commit to paper. For now, I keep them inside, let them rattle like old bones in the box of my skull. Steve notices, of course.
”You’ve gone tense,” he tells me.
“This exercise requires precision.”
“I bet it does. And I’m also pretty sure Owens wants the journaling to relieve stress, not add to it. What’s he want you to do again?”
“Identify and describe my emotions.”
“Wait, that’s it? That’s what you’re all wound up about?” Steve laughs. “Just write ‘sad’ and call it a day. That’s what most people would do.”
“I am not most people.”
I feel him smile into my neck. “I know,” he says, and the fondness in it disarms me. Then, softer, conspiratorial, “But…I think if you tried my way…you’d really like it.”
The mattress shifts as Steve moves, extracting himself from behind me so we sit face to face. His eyes, resinous brown, glint with mischief in the lamplight.
“Here,” he says, adopting that affable cadence that has made him the favorite coach among his Little League ingénues, “I’ll even get you started. You could write… ‘I felt sad when Steve showed me how easy Owens’ homework is after I wasted ten minutes overthinking it.’”
“Steve.”
“‘I felt sad that wasted ten minutes on Owens’ homework when I could’ve spent ten minutes kissing Steve Harrington.’”
“Steven.”
“Don’t Steven me, you know it’s true—”
I set down my pen.
“Wait, wait, I got another one for you. ‘I felt sad when—’”
He doesn’t finish because I lean forward and kiss him.
It is meant to be brief. A tactical maneuver, something to silence him. This plan fails spectacularly once the first sound he makes breaks against my mouth— surprise, then laughter, bright and unguarded where it tickles my lips. It spills between us, warm as his breath, alive, before he gathers himself and answers me in earnest, with tongue and teeth and the faint scrape of stubble. My journal slips from my lap and off the bed, abandoned, as I pull him flush against me, until there is no space left between us, until even the air cannot pass through cleanly.
When we part, it is only to breathe.
“You were hoping for this outcome, weren’t you?” I say in a voice rougher than I expect.
“Mmm…” The sound vibrates low in his throat, weighted, a little dazed.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is when you kiss like that.”
I catch his mouth again and pull him under, into that slow, living rhythm we’ve built, each brush of our lips a tide that draws the shape from a shoreline.
We have not named this country between us. For months we have circled it, trespassed at its edges, pretended not to notice when our feet toed the line. As though silence might preserve it. As if men have ever been able to make anything safe by drawing borders in the sand.
But erosion does not recognize language. It wears at boundaries the same way it worries stone; patient, steadfast, certain of its own inevitability, until even what was once fixed forgets the shape it was first given.
And the body, ungovernable territory that it is, does not keep what we try to fence. It yields. It takes. It redraws. What we kept has given way, little by little: Steve’s fingers brushing mine without apology, a hand that lingered at my waist until it no longer needed an excuse, kisses that began as accidents and shed that fiction almost immediately. Now there is no accident left in it. Only want.
When we separate, his lips are slick and swollen, red as a sugared jewel, and softened at the seam by a crooked smile he can’t quite repress.
“Now you can write, ‘I felt happy when Steve kissed me senseless.’”
“Happy would be an understatement,” I reply, shameless. “Though, I’d prefer Owens remains ignorant of our methods of…stress relief.”
“I think we do way more than relieve stress.”
There is a small pause where he stares at me, face flushed and searching. My pulse stutters. I can feel that dreaded question gathering behind his teeth, looming in the dark, wet cavity of his mouth.
What are we?
It hangs there, blade-bright and dangerous. But, mercifully, he does not ask. Instead, he spares me; he bends to retrieve my journal from the floor, along with the pen that must’ve rolled away with it, and restores them both to the nightstand, so that order might still be salvaged. And I, coward that I am about the little love I have, am permitted my selfish ambiguity for one day more.
“This takes me back, actually,” he says.
“You used to journal?”
“No! No.” A laugh, self-correcting. “I mean, like, what we’re doing. You writing, me talking too much. Us goofing off. It reminds me of when Robin and I—”
He stops. I watch the blood flood his cheeks, hot and damning, before he hides his face from me. “Actually, never mind. It’s uh. It’s stupid,” he stammers, avoiding my eyes, “Yeah. Don’t worry about it.”
I don’t worry for more than two seconds, because Steve— my beloved, ingenuous Steve— who has seldom in his life been able to abandon a guilt-ridden thought once it has lodged itself in his consciousness, blurts:
“Me and Robin made this list.”
“A list of…?”
“Names. Descriptions.”
“For who?”
He doesn’t answer. I reach for him, and guide his face back to mine with a touch that is gentler than the question. “Steven,” I prompt, again, “For who?”
“…You.” Steve winces. “When you were Vecna,” he quickly adds, seeing consternation crease my brow. The words tumble from him, compelled onward by the garrulousness of embarrassment. “It was Robin’s idea. Mostly. We were stressed, scared, and stupid, trying not to freak out during a slow day at The Squawk. The end of the world was approaching, you know— very normal circumstances. And, uh, don’t worry, we didn’t broadcast it or anything. That list stayed between me, Robin, a piece of scrap paper, and a No. 2 pencil.”
I say nothing. I have always been very good at letting silence do the work.
“They were bad,” he says.
“Define bad.”
He sucks in a breath, “You have to promise you won’t be mad.”
“What was on the list?”
His mouth tightens before he obliges me.
“…Wet beef jerky.”
I blink, incredulous. My first instinct is neither anger nor hurt, but imagery: slimy, dessicated, alien. My body, before it had been restored. My flesh, altered, preserved not for memory, but for use, molded into a weapon for conquest. For a moment, I feel a flicker of grief for the creature I was.
And then, against all expectations, I laugh.
It startles me; the sound, once rare, now less so, still feels unfamiliar in my throat. It is no longer the old, brittle instrument I used to deploy manipulatively, nor does it cut its way out of me as it once would have. It rises from somewhere real, low and unsteady, then warmer, fuller as it leaves me, resonant in my chest; a song of delight rediscovering its own echo.
“Wet beef jerky,” I repeat. “Was that yours, or Robin’s?”
“Mine,” he admits, sheepish. “Robin started with ‘Swamp Thing,’ but I told her she could do better, so then we got ‘Rehydrated Mummy,’ and—”
“Is that not simply a man?”
“That’s what I said!” Relief cracks through him in a peal of laughter. “So then she tried ‘Three Month Old Meatball,’ but by then I thought we had too many food names, so she tried again and came up with— wait for it— ‘Shriveled Nutsack.’”
The ugliest bout of cackling overtakes us. Something inside me snaps then, and, before I can restrain it, a hyena’s shriek, hysteric and shrill, rips loose from my lungs. It sends Steve into such a violent fit of giggles that he folds forward into me, and I catch him without thinking, my hand steadying him as he knocks into my chest. This does not last long. We go down together in a raucous heap, loud and graceless, laughter wrung from us until our chests ache and our ribcages threaten rebellion.
“What did you contribute?” I ask, unable to contain my own morbid curiosity.
“Henry!” He groans. I press him until he relents. I know he had more to offer than ‘Wet Beef Jerky.’
“Fine, fine! But only because you’re taking this way too well.” He shakes his head, features fixed in a dumbfounded grin, “God, I still can’t believe you think this is so funny— don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you do— but I still can’t believe it.”
”I contain multitudes.”
”That you do,” he mutters, and then, resigned to his fate, he recites, with all the solemnity of a parishioner self-disclosing to a priest: “‘Leftover Pizza,’ ‘Moldy Spaghetti,’ ‘Half Digested Sausage’…and ‘Leprosy Victim.’”
As Steve relays his own heinous additions, his white face ripens like a summer strawberry, turning a darker shade of red with each mockery he remembers. I, too, fail to survive his recitation unscathed, for a small, undignified sound slips from my nose by the time he finishes. I take my glasses off and press briefly at my bridge.
“Fascinating,” I manage, “And here I thought I had inspired existential dread.”
”Oh, you did,” he retorts, “You absolutely did! This was just— we were, like, twenty, and running on three hours of sleep. It was, uh, we were using humor to cope. Me and Robin, that’s what we do.”
“You thought I was going to kill you,” I say. “And everyone you loved.”
“…Yeah.”
“A prudent assumption,” I say calmly, “Because I was.”
He flinches.
“So yes,” I continue, not wanting that invidious thought to fully root, “You may call me beef jerky. Wet or otherwise.”
That earns a smile. Mine answers it. We hold each other close on that too-small bed of mine, suspended between what I was and what I am. For once the distance doesn’t feel insurmountable.
“Did you ever think I would hear this?” I ask.
“Honestly? No. And I hate that that’s true.”
“I don’t.”
He frowns, as if I’ve said the wrong thing.
“If I had been who I was then, truly, I would not have cared. And if you had been who you are now, you wouldn’t have needed the list.”
“See, that’s what gets me more than the names,” he says. “That I never thought there’d be a version of you who could hear them.”
I look at him properly then, and feel the pang of it; how he watches me, waiting for rupture, for the moment I split open and reveal teeth, as though monster and man might be reconciled and condemn him in tandem. His shame is written plainly as a sunburn on his face, bright and feverish. Shame, I realize, not because he was cruel to a monster, but because he was cruel to me. My thumb settles against his cheek, and I think about how wondrous it is that I can touch him at all.
“You named the thing in front of you so you could make it bearable. That doesn’t hurt me.”
“What does?” he asks quietly.
“You,” I confess, unguarded as a wound, “if you spoke of me that way now.”
“I would never.” His words are immediate, fierce enough to astonish us both, “Baby, I would never.”
Baby. The word burrows beneath my skin, filling a place that once housed nothing but appetite and absence. I have been called a great many things— most meant to diminish. But never this. Never a diminutive that gathers rather than strips. The transformation is obscene in its tenderness.
“It’s curious,” I say, voice quavering in spite of myself, “To know you once looked at me and saw nothing worth wanting.” I swallow, “And that you were right to.”
Steve looks at me like I have said something fundamentally impermissible.
”You’re wrong,” he tells me. There is no hesitation in it. No mercy, either. Only conviction, as he draws me closer, mouth finding mine with the same stubborn affection. I close my eyes and I am swept to that miraculous country I had previously believed forbidden to my kind; one of heat and touch and the fragile, impossible idea of being wanted.
Later— much later— I will remember the list at some inopportune hour, and I will think of how strange it is to be reduced, and stranger still to be forgiven. But now— Now I am kissed by a man I don’t deserve, who does not care for deserving. He tastes of mint. And, beneath it, the faint sweetness of orange soda, the small indulgence he denies and returns to, again and again.
I follow the sweetness.
Or, perhaps I don’t follow at all. Perhaps I am simply carried, the way sediment is to shore, grain by grain, repurposed for another life.