Chapter Text
1.
‘Hello, Mrs Byers.’
Joyce Byers squinted at him briefly and without much interest. It was clear she was still unsure who he was, but Steve’s grin only lifted higher. Her roughly tied hair did not look overly familiar with a comb. Everybody knew the things people said about Mrs Byers’s sanity, but it was apparent to Steve that she was in the middle of something more important than him, so he stepped up his cheerful salesman’s patter a notch. Lovely day, and have you heard who moved in down the block etcetera. He hadn’t got his foot in the door as such but he did have his hand balanced jovially on the door frame. Before too long his overenthusiastic niceties had bored her enough to relent. She let the door fall open, already desperate to get on.
‘Jonathan! Umm…’
‘Steve,’ he provided helpfully.
‘Steve is here to see – oh there you are.’
Jonathan had frozen rigid where he stood in the hallway, unable to conceal his dismay. Joyce looked between the two boys, assessing.
‘Do you boys need anything or…?’
‘We’re fine,’ Jonathan cut in quickly, with a hastily pasted on smile.
The place was a mess, that much was obvious from a curious glance through the doorways. Cheap and ugly cuckoo clock next to last year’s calender in the hallway; clothes flung haphazardly over furniture; wallpaper, crayon drawings and sticky tape all peeling off the walls.
Byers led the way reluctantly to his own room, closed his bedroom door urgently behind them and stood mutely against it as Steve sat himself on his bed – dishevelled, distinctly unmade. It smelled not unpleasant in there, a little musty and lived in, a little like talc and correction fluid. He crossed one leg over the other and had to enjoy the feeling of trespass; the way Jonathan’s eye twitched and hands trembled at his sides as he itched to get Steve out of there. Steve flattened out a crease in the sheet beside him with the palm of one hand and smiled unnervingly.
‘You don’t need to crap your pants. I’m just paying a friendly visit.’
There was a resounding silence.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that?’ he said a little too loudly, so Mrs Byers would probably hear him.
Jonathan looked up from the floor, expression distinctly pleading.
‘My mum’s here… and Will. Can it – can you just wait?’
But he wasn’t planning on waiting and hurting a second longer. Jonathan shrunk away from Steve as he stood up and kicked a dirty sock across the rug with the distinct aim of embarrassing him.
Only a matter of months left of their senior year and Steve had to spend it on his own, watching his whole world crumble around him and this thing between Byers and Nancy unfold under his nose – I mean, who in their right mind would have seen that partnership coming? Not him a year ago, that’s for sure. He had seen monsters trying to take over the world and no one even had the decency to ask him how he was feeling, let alone fill him in on what they were getting up to behind his back.
‘Nothing heavy, I know you’ve all been through a lot. It would just be nice if someone paid me the courtesy of talking to me.’
Somehow Jonathan’s tacit and silent disdain only fuelled the venom he felt. He threw open the wardrobe in the hope and dread of finding an item of Nancy’s clothing but found only a few flannels.
‘There’s nothing there,’ Jonathan said quietly.
He had moved a little way into the room behind Steve, who whirled and stalked towards him until Jonathan was forced back against the wall beside his shabby cluttered desk. He waited until he had him cornered, eyes darting everywhere to avoid Steve’s challenging stare, which was gratifying. Like the hesitancy of his voice, in that half-whisper he had.
‘What are you doing?’
Steve leaned in, and Jonathan leaned away, like he was expecting a slap across the face.
‘I want to know what she felt like, when she…’
Byers’s whole body went still with shock. What was that science thing about conservation of energy? It was like that now, like he could feel the vibrations of Jonathan’s stillness humming between them while his mind played catch up with the words that’d just come out of his mouth. Steve’s palm was spread against the wall by Jonathan’s head and was slightly sweaty, his arm blocking any exit. He was hot all over actually. And too pumped up to feel guilty for the intimidation tactics. It was all posturing, and Jonathan could look down on him for it all he wanted – what else had Steve got to lose? Big Steve, King of the Roost. Big Steve with his big broken heart. Besides, what was a bit of acting tough, after the things they’d seen? He knew now how steadfast and unafraid timid-looking Jonathan Byers really was when it came to the crunch.
‘I’m sorry,’ Jonathan whispered.
And then the weirdest thing, Steve watched Jonathan’s face tip upward slightly. Half-lidded eyes skittered across Steve’s jawline to his mouth and lingered there. His skin was white and chalky, shadowed under his eyes. Someone needed to give this guy a good meal and a hot bath. A buzz of adrenaline started at the base of Steve’s skull.
His threw a longing look towards the closed door – escape. But he couldn’t make himself move, somehow, held there suspended by the vibrations of stillness radiating off Jonathan. He found he had to know what Jonathan would do. As they slid back across the room, his eyes caught on Lou Reed’s Transformer album leaning against the wall. He didn’t know the music but he didn’t think much of the cover art. Deviant, frankly. Not to mention the oddball arts and crafts junk scattered about the place. Of course he was like this, Steve realised with something like terror.
At the same moment Jonathan’s eyes finally flickered up to his own, and they were soft and deep black at the same time, weirdly fucking intense. The most inscrutable blackest eyes he’d ever seen.
Sounds were muffled in his ears and his heart had slowed to a dull syrupy thud. He could taste Byers’s breath in the air and his hand hung between them like a promise. He knew what was happening, of course he did.
‘I don’t actually– Stop– Nancy– ’
With a ragged breath and a shock of fear, he forced himself to snap out of it and step abruptly back.
‘Don’t– don’t touch me.’
Jonathan looked confused and chastened, like a kicked puppy, lifting a hand through his limp fringe.
‘You said– ’
‘I know what I said, dumbass.’
He didn’t think he’d actually do it, for chrissake. Did the guy not have a mind of his own? What was going through his head the whole time?
‘Do you just not think about that stuff? Going behind people’s backs? Behind her back?’
He just stared at the ground. Steve was at a loss. He threw both hands palms up in the air.
‘Jeez, I do not understand you people. Good luck to you both, or whatever.’
He took the stairs two at a time and practically ran through the front door. At that second you could not have paid him to stay in that freaky house a second longer.
2.
If possible, he was avoiding Steve even harder than ever now, looking extremely uncomfortable any time they happened to be stood in the same hallway. And Steve wasn’t quick to do anything about it, seeing as Byers had stolen his girl and all. Sure, he’d called him a queer before but now there was some substance to it, he guessed. Something he could use to spread the word that Byers was not only a pervert but a molester.
It was the sort of thing that might actually earn him some social capital in this gossip-mongering town, and that was something he no longer had a whole lot of.
It was uncanny, though. It set his nerves on edge. He’d thought they were done with all that wackiness, but he was starting to have new questions that he felt were really none of his concern. Being up close to Byers had brought back feelings of vertigo. And monsters. When the whole edifice of reality had crumbled around him there had been one second of stillness: an urgent face, a hand pressed into his own. These had been the last things before everything had changed. He’d kind of forgotten these small details since, but now he couldn’t get them out of his head. He wanted to ask Nancy if she’d felt this way after the night Barbara had disappeared, like everything was off-kilter and just a tiny bit changed in a way you couldn’t really explain to anyone without sounding like a nut. He was feeling like he understood for the first time why girls got nervous after sleeping with a guy, like the world would suddenly change without you. At the time he’d thought it was cute and silly of Nancy. But now. It was like he expected people to be able to smell it on him, not that he’d… He hadn’t done anything, but the idea was… She would understand, he thought, but he couldn’t ask her.
Byers felt it too, he was sure. He had been calm in a crisis, like Nancy, adaptable to change. When Steve was still completely clueless. But Byers had tried to kiss him. Byers was part of the weirdness too.
Despite the brief notoriety the family had gained in Hawkins, it might as well be as if Jonathan didn’t exist most of the time, practising his disappearing act like a Houdini in training. Hanging behind the crowds when the bell sounded, hustled and pushed around at the lockers when he tried to put his books away. Waiting until the day he could finally walk out of that building forever, no doubt. Well, that made two of them. He watched him like he’d never watched him before, not after finding his stalker photographs, not after seeing him with Nancy, not any of that. Watched how he walked down the school corridor with his hurried gait, like he was trying to squeeze into a very small space. Stiff like he was made of popsicle sticks.
He rounded the corner straight into Steve, eyes popping wide like saucers.
‘What- Sorry-’
And then his eyes screwed up a bit and he yanked up the straps on his satchel and stepped around Steve, who moved to block him.
‘Look, man, this is… you basically saved me from…’ he waved a hand noncommittally, ‘The first time anyway. I’m not about to crap all over you. I’m not a complete asshole.’
Jonathan shuffled his feet.
‘Okay.’
‘So you can stop casting hexes on me with your eyes or whatever. I don’t understand a damn thing about you, but, you and Nance deserve to be happy, so…’
He hadn’t meant to sound that sad, really. He thought he caught a glimpse of regret light up in the back of Jonathan’s eyes but really that could have been any emotion.
He did understand something about Byers. He understood how someone who wasn’t used to getting anything he wanted would grab it with both hands and not think so much about anyone else.
( ‘Steve, I slept with him. I’m so sorry.’
Her big ocean colour eyes had filled up with tears and he had felt his heart turn leaden so that it dragged at his chest like a weight. Thing was, he’d known already, really.
‘Wait, I want us to talk about this properly, I want to explain. I’m sorry, Steve.’
‘I don’t want to talk.’
He heard the words coming out of his mouth but had no thoughts to go with them, and then he was turning around and walking away, leaving Nancy stood at his door in tears. Funny that, him walking away, when it had been her who had finished it. )
After that he and Jonathan began to exchange cold, awkward half-smiles in passing. It was almost civil. He had taken Dustin Henderson under his wing, and that was a whole other story, the reasons for which were obscure to him at the moment. In consequence, the crew he rolled with was a little different these days. More often than not he found himself ferrying half the kid’s in Hawkins around town. He’d drop the boys off at the Byers’s and wave stupidly from the car when Will’s older brother opened the door for them. Sometimes he even got a wave back.
3.
‘Hi, Mrs Byers.’
Joyce brightened at the sight of him and, goddamn, if he wasn’t starting to see something charming about the rough shininess of the whole Byers clan.
‘Steve, isn’t it? Thank you for dropping Will off the other day, that was really sweet,’ she kept talking as she slipped past him where he stood just inside the doorway, hitching a bag onto her shoulder and lighting the cigarette in her mouth at the same time. A haywire static charge and slightly sunken look around the eyes were the only indications she wore of having seen a boyfriend get eaten by a demadog right before her eyes. She turned as if just thinking of something, ‘Oh! Please stay, there’s plenty of food. Jonathan will show you, won’t you Jonathan?’
Steve threw him an apologetic glance. The whole situation was awkward as hell. Joyce was placing a careful kiss on both her son’s cheeks and whispering conspiratorially to them. It was the kind of behaviour that Steve would have found horrifically embarrassing, but the Byers were basically unselfconscious about this sort of thing.
Not that Steve’s opinion meant crap anyway.
‘Uh, really, I was just driving Dustin here…’
Dustin chose that moment to follow him inside and barrelled past him.
‘The secret bunker has been entered!’
Steve snorted. He couldn’t help it, it was a nerves thing.
The whole room quieted, and all five kids stared. Apparently getting psyched out by a bunch of teenyboppers was his life now, which was, you know, kind of depressing. Dustin rounded on him with a look of appalled indignation.
‘What? What’s funny about a secret bunker?’
‘Yeah, really witty,’ Jonathan muttered behind his shoulder just loud enough for Steve to hear.
Steve ruffled the kid’s thicket of hair.
‘When you’re older champ.’
‘… You brought Steve Harrington?’
Nancy’s little brother had inherited her lack of tact, but he was obviously only saying what was on everybody’s minds.
‘Of course I did, dumbass. You’ve seen what he can do with a flame thrower.’
‘Dude, that was not a flame thrower, that was a lighter.’
‘Whatever.’
His stomach did a little flip and he was definitely not gonna cry like a big girl’s blouse but he was suddenly immensely grateful to this goofy little kid who looked like a mop turned upside down and talked him up like he was something. He allowed himself to be dragged through the kitchen doorway by Dustin, accidentally throwing his grin across the room at Jonathan, pallid and ambiguous looking as ever. The grin fell away after he held their eye contact too long, but he didn’t miss how Jonathan’s coldness had started to thaw into a translucent smile.
The kids’ idea of a party was apparently to spend all night playing this nerdy little board game, although it beat him how they could still talk about make-believe monsters now. Wheeler was irritable and distracted because that magic girl was still hidden away, and they weren’t supposed to talk about her. Dustin and Lucas pulled faces in the pictures Jonathan took while Will stood unnervingly still in the foreground. When they were engrossed Steve managed to slip away, wandering down the hall where patches of wallpaper were missing, torn away like someone had been ripping stuff off all the walls and ceilings. The door to Jonathan’s bedroom was ajar and he slipped inside. He popped a cassette out of the deck, but it was blank, just a white label on it saying ‘mix 9’. He rifled through a stack of crumpled paper, pulling out a scrap that had on it a black and white sketch of someone smashing a guitar. He peered, trying to make out the shape of the words crowded around the drawing in the whisky glow from Jonathan’s table lamp. Perpendicular… the shape between the branches is something missing… I live by the river. He couldn’t really make sense of it, disjointed words and phrases, and couldn’t help feeling like someone looking at evidence at a crime scene. Jonathan was exactly the kind of guy who would keep a journal full of stories about strangling cats or something, and his eyes started scanning the room to see if he could see one. You had to admit, this sort of behaviour was odd. If Byers was secretly strangling cats, it was his responsibility to find out and let Nancy know about it, just as a Good Samaritan of course.
‘It’s London Calling.’
‘Jesus. You scared the crap outta me. I’m not, uh, not snooping. I just saw the door was open and…’
‘The Clash.’ Will points at the paper in Steve’s hand, ‘He really likes them.’
He sits at Jonathan’s desk chair and looks back down at the drawing.
‘What do the words mean?’
‘I don’t know. It’s words from songs, and notes for his photography. All sorts of stuff.’
‘Huh.’
‘I think it’s good, that you’re friends now. He’s not very good at showing it, he’s shy with people, but he likes you. And Nancy. You’re good for him, I can tell.’
Jesus, okay.
‘We’re not really… What do you mean he likes me?’
‘I can just tell,’ Will shrugged.
He made a point to try and smile at Junior Byers because he was just a kid, and no kid should have to go through what he had gone through, even if he was undoubtedly much creepier on his own, stood in the doorway with the gloss of his bowl cut hair glistening in the light off the lamp. Steve wished he talked like other kids, who were annoying as hell, but he could deal with Dustin’s excitability or even Mike’s sharp tongue. Will was different to other kids, there was no way around that. He put the drawing back on the pile of papers.
‘You should take it, he won’t mind.’
He opened his mouth to explain to Will that he had no desire to hold onto one of his brother’s scribblings, but said nothing. He couldn’t really explain why he decided to fold the paper over and tuck it into his breast pocket, and when he looked up the kid was already gone.
When he returned all the lights were off and the kids were sat on the floor with a ring of candles like some kind of séance. The board of their game had been upturned on the carpet.
‘What if… there’s more than one upside down?’
‘How can there be more than one?’ Lucas said impatiently, lifting the board to demonstrate, ‘It’s like the board, two sided.’
‘We don’t know that,’ Mike persisted, ‘What if it has, I dunno, a million sides… ’
‘Like a coin spinning through the air,’ Will murmured quietly. Everyone in the room looked at Will and a shiver ran down Steve’s spine.
He searched out Jonathan’s pallid face in the candlelight. It looked captive, pensive.
‘Maybe once you’ve flipped the coin it just keeps turning,’ Jonathan added softly, introspectively, as if the words were meant for Steve, in a voice that fell down on him light and slow and cold like snow.
He was staying so quiet he was practically holding his breath, dizzy with guitars smashing through things and coins spinning end over end. He stared at Jonathan, head fizzing, as Jonathan said:
‘Maybe you’re never the right way up again once you’ve turned the coin over.’
4.
He heard feet on the kitchen tile behind him while he was stood at the snack table picking at a bowl of pretzels. Jonathan was wearing woollen socks and they made only the slightest sound on the floor.
‘Here,’ Steve said, holding out the pretzel bowl lamely, ‘at least there are snacks in this dimension.’
Well that fell flat as a pancake.
God knows he didn’t want to be trapped in any kind of dimension with Jonathan Byers.
‘Nancy couldn’t make it?’
It was the wrong time to mention her, he knew by the look on Jonathan’s face and the sinking in his own stomach. But what else was there? Throwing around for conversation he always fell back on the only thing they had in common.
‘No, she’s busy, I think.’
Right, well, that’s that then. Why in god’s name had he elected to chaperone a tiny nerd tonight and ended up in awkward stalemate at the Byers residence. One of these days he was going to give himself a stern talking to. It occurred to him that Jonathan had never asked why he was in his house.
‘I, uhh, don’t like them to go around alone too much,’ he said by way of explanation, gesturing towards the children in the other room.
The understanding he saw on Jonathan’s face was acute and made him even a little uncomfortable. Something had shifted between them in the company of the kids. A shared responsibility of care maybe.
‘I don’t have to stay though, I could…’
‘No, it’s okay.’
He nodded curtly, acknowledging that they probably both still felt strength in numbers. Jonathan had gone back to being edgy and jittery now that they were alone in a room. He rubbed his hands together agitatedly.
‘You want a beer?’
‘Yes.’ Steve nearly tripped over in his eagerness. Drinking might just make this night manageable. ‘I mean, if that’s cool.’
Jonathan snapped apart a six pack between slender fingers.
‘Sure, yeah, we don’t really drink them much, so.’
‘I didn’t really take you for a beer kinda family.’
‘Umm, it was Bob, mostly.'
‘Ah, mmm.’
Fuck, another awkward bereavement to field with someone he didn’t really like.
‘You don’t have to pretend to be sorry, it hit mom hard but I never really got on with him.’
Wow, Jonathan could be kind of a hard-ass. Steve raised his eyebrows.
‘Cold, Byers.’
But he was smiling. Jonathan shrugged.
‘It was mutual. I don’t think he ever approved of me, really.'
''Yeah, well,’ he popped the can, ‘he wasn’t the only one.’
At that moment one of the kid’s screams cut through the air like a hot knife through butter, followed by Dustin’s muffled voice: ‘It’s just a spider, you guys.’
Spider or not, a pall of fear fell across Jonathan’s whole body like the shadow thrown by something huge and dark, and he wobbled where he stood. Without thinking Steve reached out to support him, feeling the memory of that fear in his marrow.
‘Hey… he’s gonna be alright now. We all are.’
He settled for a hand on Jonathan’s back, which seemed like the least intimate way he could reach out. Not for the first time he wished Nancy was here to do this before realising his mistake. When Jonathan leaned slightly into the support he slid his hand up to squeeze his shoulder, which actually felt less weird.
Jonathan stumbled into a kitchen chair. His forehead was sheened with sweat. Steve lowered himself slowly into another chair a respectable distance away.
‘Should I… call…?’
‘No,’ he interjected immediately, ‘No, I’m fine. I just still get so scared sometimes.’
He dropped his voice to match Jonathan’s thin murmur.
‘Do you really believe that coin thing?’
‘I don’t know. I think Will still knows more than we do. He feels things.’
‘What happened that night?’
It wasn’t as if he’d ever been able to ask. And so, Jonathan told him in lowered tones how they had burnt the evil out of his brother, how they had burnt him until he screeched like an animal and Jonathan had thought he was going to die. How Nancy had branded him with the poker from the fire. His eyes glittered with tears as he spoke, like two black gemstones. Steve imagined Will’s waifish little body and shivered thinking about the force it had withstood.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s… still trying to rebuild his strength,’ he said as if reading Steve’s thoughts. His mouth twisted downwards, voice bitter with fear.
‘He will. Everything’s normal again now,’ Steve repeated redundantly. It wasn’t of course. Byers was with Nancy, Steve was an accidental babysitter, and the world was permanently upside down. ‘Let’s get drunk anyway.’