Chapter Text
The art show was hosted at the community art center.
Steve put together a collection of five paintings for the show because Annalise had insisted on it, and had hounded him about it, and had cornered him at his locker with the sign-up sheet and a, ‘pretty, pretty please with sugar and gumdrops on top.’
She had huffed and stomped her foot, and made a grand show for no one about him signing up for the show because, ‘people need to see these paintings, Steve! They’re too emotional and raw to not be seen by the public eye. It would be a travesty of the highest order!’
She smiled at him with lipstick on her teeth and laid it on really thick in her fake French accent even though Steve didn’t even take her class anymore. She grabbed his shoulders and shook sense into him, crooning softly, ‘some paintings are worth a thousand words and some are worth so much more, your artwork transcends written language, darling. Trust me on that, they are so cataclysmically tragic and bleed through in a way that will resonate within people. The world needs to have art like this in it.’
He didn’t really believe her, but he signed the papers so that she would leave him alone. He didn’t believe her at all, he didn’t even like his own art.
It felt like a mistake when he was filling out the forms, when signed his name at the bottom. It had felt like a bigger mistake when he picked out which pieces he would showcase. It felt like a mistake that was getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger with every passing day until the art show was on him.
It felt heavy.
The art center was all cream-colored walls and shiny marbled floors, trying to be fancier than it had any right to be when it was cluttered up with high school art. Paintings and pictures hung on the walls, stands strategically placed statues in glass boxes, and his parents name and smiling faces were on the donation wall.
It was a nice and clean hell, and it was suffocating him with perfume. Steve hated this.
It was all embarrassingly passionate teenagers cringingly unaware of how awkward and dumb they were while pouring out pointless exposition and bullshit on ‘art critics’ that were really just Annalise’s friends dressed like fancy hobos and French stereotypes. It was painfully awkward conversations between students and their parents about art that didn’t really have meaning, that they were all pretending did.
It was horrible.
It was rows upon rows upon rows of stuff. The walls were lined with pretty paintings and abstract paintings, and boring landscapes of Hawkins’ long faded winter. It was live drawings and fruit drawings, and things that deserved hung on living room walls, and things that didn’t.
It was pots and vases, and little smudgy sculptures trapped in clear boxes. It was rows of black and white photographs of woods, and people, and Nancy Wheeler’s pensive frown from artful angles.
Steve looked away.
In the middle of the mazelike room, in the middle of everything was a wall that was seen as soon as the doors were opened. On that wall, there was Steve’s dark sliced up mess.
The first thing that anybody saw when they walked through the door was thick layering of Upside Down black and slit wrists red, strokes of purples and blues like bruises, like death. It looked like the Upside Down, like the tunnels that narrowed in his vision and wrapped around his dreams, that took over his life and ate at him until all that was left was ugly.
It looked like the Upside Down, but it also looked like scars.
People knew about the scars.
Steve could feel it like claws in his back that everybody that looked at his artwork saw the jagged and crisscrossed manic strokes across old faces and clenched fists, and narrow thin shoulders, and they saw scars. Steve felt sick seeing what he created.
Three of his paints were bought which was crazy.
He didn’t understand it.
His mother didn’t understand it either.
She was only at the art center because she had accepted the invitation that Steve extended to her, which only really happened because he had a new therapist and she suggested it. Dr. Lindsey suggested that he invite his parents to the show as an olive branch, a place to start connecting and growing together.
She somehow thought that it would be good for his closure and his relationship with his parents, but it was awkward. They were both too hyperaware that this only reason that either of them were standing here was because of Dr. Lindsey.
His mother had to fly in from lecturing in Texas for this.
It was so fucking stupid.
Steve never really talked to Dr. Lindsey about his real issues, about the Upside Down and his paralyzing fear that the gate would open again. He never talked about his yo-yoing paranoia about spies coming to get him. She only came to this particular bright idea because they talked a lot about his parents.
They talked about how his parents didn’t really know how to be parents and how he didn’t know how to be their son, as if he had – no.
Bad thinking. Stop.
His mind was trailing off into negative spaces and then it would spiral down into something very dark and breathing, and he was trying to do that less. He was working on changing that aspect of himself because it was dangerous. The world was not ending today.
His mother frowned at his paintings.
He knew that she could see the aimlessness in the brush strokes, that she could see building horror, and hurt, and devastation beneath all the paint with the critical eye of a psychiatrist. She liked art, but Steve could tell that she didn’t like this.
He didn’t even blame her.
Not really.
She pursed her red lips together, ringed fingers resting on her jaw before she pulled her eyes away from the broad strokes. She looked at her son like she was seeing him, saying, “Your father couldn’t make it, he sends his best.”
Steve was not surprised, honestly.
He made a mental note to tell Dr. Lindsey that inviting his parents was a huge fucking mistake like he thought it would be, and sighed, “Okay.”
His mother hummed, waving a hand towards the paintings – three with signs beneath them saying that they were bought and by who. Her eyes narrowed at the placard that stated his name and the title of the collection – Steve Harrington, A Mess. 1985.
She blinked at it like she did not believe that it was his artwork, “What was it that you were feeling when you painted these pieces, Steven?”
A lot, he sighed.
He shrugged his shoulders, nothing at all.
“I don’t know, Ma.”
Three people bought his art and his mother hated it.
Steve hated it too.
He folded in on himself a little, his shoulders curling in protectively and his back hunching forward. He didn’t want to be here anymore. He didn’t want to be seen like this, stared at. Gawked at.
Annalise had been right.
What he created was too raw, it was tearing open his chest and pulled from his lungs, and he didn’t want to be seen anymore. It felt like his mother was walking her stilettos across his exposed nerve endings, was disappointed by the pain.
“Stevie, don’t slouch.”
“Let me get you a drink, Ma,” Steve offered in a breath.
She looked at him but didn’t say anything other than, “Nothing with sugar, dear. I’m on a diet.”
Steve slipped away like a ghost as quickly and quietly as he could, breathing in and breathing out. He reminded himself that there was no rope around his neck, no closed gate in front of him.
No one could keep him in a situation that he didn’t want to be in anymore, he reminded himself even as he bypassed the exit and walked to the concessions table. He could leave if he wanted to.
He tried to remember everything that Dr. Lindsey had reminded him about tonight because he was trying to be better. He was trying really hard.
The art show was good for him because he couldn’t hide away from a ruined reputation forever. He couldn’t keep his head down for the rest of his life and limit his interactions to superficial and miniscule levels because nothing ever blossomed when it wasn’t facing the sun.
His relationship with his mother was getting better and something that they were both trying to improve at the same time. The problem was that it was a process and things were just getting better. It wasn’t good.
There are a lot of steps that have been taken and a lot more that still needed to be taken, but he couldn’t step back over the lines that he had crossed when he attempted suicide. He couldn’t take it back.
It was a part of him now. It was something added to this list of his definitions – Steve Harrington: keg king, handsome son, babysitter, attempted suicide survivor.
It was weathered in stone.
It would never go away.
They couldn’t go back from that and every interaction that he had with his mother was always drowned in this dawning realization that he almost died. His mother was a psychiatrist and she made things worse, and they both knew that. They were trying to come to terms with that, trying to be better, but it was act.
Sometimes it had to be an act before it could be real.
It was all movies scripts and rewrites, and Steve was working on making things flow better. This was supposed to be a step in the right direction. It was supposed to be an olive branch.
“Haven’t seen you around, pretty boy.”
Steve sucked in a breath through his teeth, Billy’s voice was a sudden and solid weight against the back of his neck. It pitched him forward like a ghost in a horror movie breathing down his skin, like the biting cold of harsh metal.
Billy was there, and present, and as real as the soft touch of worn cotton and the half-buttoned dirty shirt under his jean jacket. He was not dressed for the occasion, slipping around Steve to lean against the table.
Billy was there with his burning blue eyes and a paper cup of fruit punch in his hand, smirking something relaxed. He was in front of Steve, very real and very solid, and there with a dumb nametag pinned to his jacket’s collar. Steve blinked.
He blinked again, and Billy was still there, watching him. He didn’t know why he asked, “Are you – working here?”
“Wow, you’re still as smart as ever, Harrington,” Billy said with a sarcastic smoothness in his rough voice. There was bite there but it was like a nibble, like they were just friends joking around. “No, I’m not working this shitshow. I’ve got standards.”
Steve didn’t think that was true at all, but, “….okay?”
“Okay,” Billy repeated, rolling his eyes like Steve was annoyingly stupid. There was a tonal shift in his voice, a forced something that wedged between biting sarcasm and an almost friendliness, “I got a job a month or so back at that auto shop on Main, gonna make enough cash and then blow town back to Cali after graduation.”
Steve shifted on his feet, feeling so uncomfortable by this.
Jonathan was on the other side of the room with his brother and his mother, and his lame black and white pictures of trees and Castle Byers, and Nancy. Steve was so fucking aware that their eyes were shifting towards him and watching, and waiting for Billy to do something or for him to do something.
Steve’s eyes shifted away from their presence, away from the intensity in Billy’s blue gaze to over his shoulder. He nearly choked on his breath because, of course.
Of course, Nancy would be there.
It was really fucking stupid to not have considered that fact considering that she was dating Jonathan and she was on every fucking committee in town trying to keep herself busy. She met his eyes with an almost startled gaze that shifted too quickly and sharp into that cheese grating intensity.
Steve shifted his look back to Billy wearily.
He sighed.
He didn’t talk to Jonathan or Nancy.
He didn’t ever talk to Jonathan and Nancy anymore which was bad according to Dr. Lindsey. She said that it shouldn’t always be that way because moving on meant confront what got you stuck in the first place.
She said that sometimes they built up those kinds of conversations, though Steve was pretty sure that he was never going to build anything high enough to willingly talk to either of them again.
He knew now that Nancy wasn’t the start of his problems and that she wasn’t end of them either. He understood that they weren’t compatible for a healthy relationship and that it wasn’t their breakup that broke him, it was just easy to latch onto a piece in an otherwise complex puzzle.
He had underlying issues, he saw that now.
He didn’t blame her anymore, but he still felt hurt by her.
They weren’t good for each other and got that, but he loved her more than he had ever loved anybody. He doesn’t feel comfortable dealing with that. He didn’t want to confront how badly it hurt when everything fell apart, or how those feelings were still open and raw for him.
He didn’t want to deal with Nancy’s martyrdom, honestly.
He didn’t want to have to sacrifice the shaky progress that he’d made in accepting his own failures and insecurities because Nancy always needed to feel like the victim and the enemy, and have all the guilt dragged to the surface and piled onto her. He couldn’t do that.
He loved her.
A part of him still loved her and would always love her. It was hard to move on from bullshit, bullshit, bullshit and it was easy to fall back into that. It was so fucking easy, and he couldn’t let himself do it.
He had tried dating as a way to push himself farther from Nancy even though he wasn’t really supposed to.
Dr. Lindsey told that progress was the quickest to recede and the hardest to pick back up. She told Steve that he attached himself to people that he knew would leave him. He built foundations where he knew that they would fall apart because it was easier to manage expectations than it was to be blindsided.
Steve built his self-worth on being pretty, and popular, and rich. He built his future on Nancy’s shoulders because she was smart, and he loved her, and he felt devastated when she had shrugged it off.
He fell in love with every girl that gave him attention and felt lost when that attention waned. He tethered too much onto the expectation that he’d find happiness in fading relationships.
She said that he really shouldn’t be dating because a lot of Steve’s problems stemmed from his self-esteem and his self-worth, and a whole list of other self- words, whatever.
Steve hadn’t listened because he met a girl named Dani at the tutoring center three days after getting his stitches taken out.
She was a tutor for college level philosophy courses and had sat down at his table while he was waiting for his English tutor to show up. She had started talking a mile a minute about traffic, and Kant, and the deontological moral theory of right and wrong. Steve kind of fell in love with her on the spot.
She talked so wildly and passionately about Kohlberg’s states of moral development and Kantian theory, and it all kind of just wrapped up into knots in Steve’s head. Her face lit up with fervent excitement as her words tangled together until she stopped to breathe and realized that she was at the wrong table.
He had said, “Hi. I’m Steve.”
And she had said, “Dani.”
And he asked her on a date, saying that he was interested in knowing more about post-conventionalism. She had said yes.
He took her to dinner and a movie, and they made out in his car outside of her apartment. He asked her on a second date and he ate vegan food for the first time and drank so much that he threw up. He asked her out on a third and thought that he fell in love with her, made love to her and woke up alone.
He felt happy for a bit.
He ruined for himself, hunched over her kitchen sink in her little apartment while he was skipping therapy. They were tye-dying t-shirts and talking about out scars, and Steve was close to telling her about his own.
He had been pushing his rubber gloves down his arms when she had asked him in her dreamy philosophical voice, “If you could only have one thing in your life for the rest of it, what would it be?”
He had thought about it and told her genuinely, and softly, “Love.”
It felt like the wrong answer and in reflection, it was too fucking revealing for what was essentially a hang out. Her smile had fell to something too somber and sober and Steve’s eyes had flickered from her hazel ones down the downward slope of her lips.
He had licked his lips, “What would you pick?”
“Yeah, well, I guess that answer is fine, whatever,” She had said dismissively in words that still repeated in his head. “I wouldn’t pick love.”
“Why not?”
“What does that even mean?” She had shrugged. “It’s too – fake, passé. It’s like saying that you want world peace. It’s just a word, there’s no meaning it and anyways, it’s just a good idea to have a backup plan when ‘love’ isn’t what you think it is. It’s overrated anyways.”
Steve could still feel the cold seeping into his fingertips through those rubber gloves. He could still feel the way that his heart had dropped, and stopped, and shattered. He could feel the way his face had burnt, and his wrist had hurt, and how fucking stupid he felt, “I guess – that means that you don’t have love.”
“Maybe I just love everybody.”
“That’s – that’s just the same as loving nobody.”
She shrugged, “Yeah, I guess. Whatever.”
They didn’t break up because technically they were never really together, because only high school boys ask girls to go steady according to Dani. They didn’t break up, but Dani was kissing some other guy in the breakroom at the tutoring center, and Steve started seeing Dr. Lindsey three times a week, so…
“Earth to fucking Harrington.”
Steve breathed in harshly and spat the breath out wet.
Billy’s expression wasn’t quite weary, but Steve couldn’t really read it.
Steve said, “Okay.”
Billy said, “Okay.”
“What are you doing here?” Steve finally asked.
Billy had an answer ready, already saying it before Steve finished his question, “Maxine has some shit to do with this thing. Extra credit or something.”
That wasn’t true.
Steve would have seen Max if she was here because she would have been with Will or would have said hello. What kind of extra credit would Max be getting for coming to some shitty art show at a center that was annoyingly out of the way? It was a lie.
Dr. Lindsey had been right about where Steve built his foundations.
He played Jenga with his hopes and needs, and it always shook to pieces. He built on top of people with shoulders that shook, that wouldn’t stay, that couldn’t help him. He built on top of Nancy, and Tommy, and his own building paranoia.
He built his mental stability on top of Billy’s bullying because it was so easy to do. Billy was there when Steve was at his lowest of lows. He was mean, but he wasn’t always mean.
He had saved Steve on that ice because he had no intention of walking backwards. He would have continued until the ice gave in and the water took him. He knew that he would have.
Steve really did think that broken people attracted broken people, and Billy was broken.
“So, I haven’t seen you around,” Billy repeated in a leading way that Steve knew that he was supposed to respond to. Billy wanted him to respond, actually looking interested in what Steve’s response would be.
It was like Billy actually wanted to hear about why he hadn’t seen Steve around school much. He looked like he wanted to hear about how Steve had an abbreviated school schedule now, so he wasn’t there in the morning or at lunch. He looked so interested in hearing about how Steve always skipped out early, so he could leave before the last bell.
He wanted to hear that Steve wasn’t seeing much of anybody anymore.
Billy raised an eyebrow at Steve like he was waiting because he actually gave a fuck about Steve’s army of tutors, or his therapy sessions, or the dumb therapeutic pottery class he was taking where at the end of it, they got to throw their ‘bad energy’ vases at a wall. He looked like he genuinely wanted to hear about how much Steve was looking forward to throwing his pottery at the wall.
It felt a trap.
It felt like something that he would fall into just to give Billy an excuse to make fun of him because Billy was a bad person.
Billy tried to kill him. Billy broke into his house and threatened him. Billy tried to drown him in gym class and ripped his stitches in front of everybody.
Dr. Lindsey told him that he should stay away from Billy because he was a negative influence. Billy was a trigger, so Steve got his mother some punch and he picked up a cookie.
He took a step back from Billy, shrugging his shoulders before saying dully, “Yeah.”
Billy’s brows furrowed together in the drawing silence between them, ‘So, where have you been then? You obviously haven’t dropped out.”
“I schedule my classes at Indiana State next week,” Steve said for something to say, feeling line slashed across his wrist with burning clarity. He felt like scratching them open again but shut down that thought. “I have to go.”
“Heard on the radio that the ice at the quarry is finally breaking up, practically completely melted now,” Billy continued talking, his hand on Steve’s arm but not gripping it. “That’s how little goes on in this town, they’re reporting that on the radio.”
Steve swore that he could feel the rough callouses of his fingertips through his jacket, but Billy wasn’t even holding onto his arm. It was just a barrier, a touch that was stopping Steve from leaving.
Billy just kept talking because Steve wasn’t, “Reporting on the fucking ice melting in April, like that’s weird. Next, they’ll be reporting on how much the grass is growing. Anyways, been waiting to hear about how they found you face down in the deep part.”
He said it like a joke, but Steve was in no position emotionally to be able to joke about what happened on the ice that night, or in his car, or in the parking lot. It didn’t feel like a joke, not even like a bad one. It was a jab.
“I am doing a lot better now, thanks.”
“Are you?” Is he?
Yes. No.
Shut up.
“Yes,” Steve nodded sharply. He took a step out of Billy’s touch, shivering at the loss of contact. “I – I have to go now. Bye.”
“Look, Harrington,” Billy said, dropping the polite nicety from his voice to something very serious and severe. “I’ve been trying to talk to you for weeks now, but no one has seen head or tail from you since – that day. Maxine said that she doesn’t see much of you either.”
Max said that because she doesn’t.
None of them do, except for Dustin.
Steve didn’t like playing D&D and he had no intention of ever sitting down to play it regardless of how many times they have invited him. He was never stepping foot into the Wheeler’s house again, or the Byers’, or Hopper’s cabin. He only talked to Dustin because the kid was annoyingly persistent about it and had insisted that he needed to teach Steve how to play chess, and insisted that friends helped friends pack up their rooms for college.
“Bigfoot has had more sightings than you have around here,” Billy scoffed. His hand was back on Steve’s arm, still not gripping it but touching him as he moved back into his space. “Things got out of hand in that locker room, that’s what I wanted to say. It shouldn’t have gotten that far but you brought up my mother and you shouldn’t have pushed me like that.”
Because it was Steve’s fault.
It was always Steve’s fault.
It had been his fault that Barb drowned, and Nancy was sad. It was his fault that Nancy left him and cheated on him, and that she felt guilty. It was his fault that Billy beat him up, that he let him push him so far over the edge that he didn’t even know. It was his fault that Billy dug his fingernails into his stitches and tore them open.
It was his fault that – no.
Stop it. Shut up.
He was trying to be better.
He was getting there, but it took a lot of work.
Steve shook his head and he cleared his throat. He looked Billy deep in the intensity of his lightning eyes, and he told him, “No one makes us do anything.”
No one made any of them do anything.
No one made Steve run back into the Byers’ house that night, no one made him pick up that bat and never put it back down. No one made him stand up to Billy, or defend the kids, or climb into that hole. He took all those steps himself.
People pushed, and pushed, and pushed, but so did he. He pushed away logic, and reason, and all the help that offered to him. He took steps in the wrong direction because of his own reasoning but they were his steps. Every step was a new direction, a chance to make better choices and sometimes he did, but other times he didn’t. He…
Steve cut his own wrists.
He did it for a reason that he thought was right and that had turned out to be wrong. He did it because he felt he had no other option, but he did it himself.
There were a lot of factors that lead up to it, a lot of pressure and forces, and paranoia that pushed him in a direction of no return, but Steve took all those steps himself. He fought with Billy. He walked out onto the ice. He cut his own wrists.
He could get better.
They were all things that he did, all things that he was capable of.
Billy made all his own choices.
There were different circumstances and different pressures, and a lifetime of different paths that led to the same points – the Byers’ house, the parking lot, the ice, the locker room. Those were Billy’s choices just as much as they were Steve’s.
Someone messed Billy up.
Somebody put bruises on his neck and took a chunk of skin out from under his jaw, and Steve knew now that it wasn’t just from kids fighting. He knew that it was a lot worse, but he also knew that he didn’t know how to fix that.
Billy held so many secrets that Steve would never willingly tell anybody, that he would never repeat to his parents, or his therapist, or to spies if they tried to torture him. He thought that they were all just jokes, or delusions, or that Steve was just crazy, but he had those secrets and there was nothing he could do to take them back.
He accepted that.
He accepted that fact that if Billy decided to start talking about Demogorgons, if was loud about the Upside Down than spies would come for him. The government would come straight to Steve, but right now he was safe because Billy thought that he was crazy. He accepted that.
The problem with insight was that it went two ways and Steve wasn’t dumb, he was just slow. He opened the worst of himself up to Billy and in doing so, he saw more than he ever wanted to see of his high school bully.
It took too long to notice because Steve wasn’t really looking. It was dumb for him to think that Hopper might have been the one to leave those bruises on Billy’s neck and dumb to just accept Billy’s response about a fight because everybody in school was afraid of him.
Max used to get really quiet when he drove her home from the arcade. He always thought that it was because Billy was there, but he thought that he got that wrong too. He never met Billy’s dad, but he has seen him and…
No one saw what they weren’t looking for.
Decent people knew that it was bad to hit a child but not everybody was decent.
He and Billy were two different sides on the same coin. He was destined to be destroyed at the hands of his bully, drawn in to him and pulled towards him just to violently collide.
He thought that whereas he wanted Billy to destroy him, Billy wanted him to save him, but Steve couldn’t do that. Steve could barely save himself and it was so hard to even manage it.
He took the hand that was on his arm and held it gently by the fingers.
He followed up from beaded bracelets and cheap denim to eyes that were as cold and blue as lightning. He met his gaze for a moment before dropping it, telling their joined fingers, “I’m sorry.”
Sorry, I don’t know how to help you.
Sorry, I can’t.
“You should talk to somebody that can help you.”
He dropped the hand and stepped away, stopping at the soft, “Harrington.”
“It can’t be me.”
His dad drove him to his admissions interview.
His father took a whole Tuesday off just to drive three hours with Steve to a pointless interview that didn’t require him to have a fucking babysitter. His father had insisted that he needed to be there for Steve to schedule his classes and take a tour of the campus. He needed that.
It was just a formality, his father told him.
He needed to be there to take stock of the whole situation. He needed to make sure that the right questions were being asked and that he was paying for a proper education.
Steve rolled his eyes.
He picked at the band-aid adhesive on his arm from what he was dubbing, a ‘bad night.’ He pressed his fingertips into the fresh scabs that had formed where he had dug his nails into the skin and didn’t stop until old scars were beaded with blood. He resisted the urge to scratch off the scabs.
He poked at the red puff flesh around the band-aid, at the old scars and the new ones that were going to form, while his father dictated the interview. He answered every question regardless of who it was asked to and asked a whole lot more, practically telling the woman at the registrar that Steve’s classes needed to be scheduled around his therapy sessions.
Steve wanted to scream.
He flexed his wrists and swore that he could almost feel scars shifting deep beneath his skin. He felt like throwing up, or falling asleep, or leaving. He felt like screaming and scratching open his arms with the blunt end of the pen he was holding.
His father must have sense that because the pen was being taken away from him a moment later. He was asked with an already tired sigh, “Do you know what you want to major in, Steven?”
He shrugged.
His father sighed again like Steve hadn’t spent the last year being a little too busy trying not to kill himself, like Steve even thought that he was going to survive long enough to make it to college. He tapped down on the paper in front of the poor mousy lady at the desk and told her, “Put him down as undecided for now.”
Later, after an hour of his father harassing the women at the Indiana State registrar office into putting Steve in some economic class that was already filled, and an hour of them being showed around campus, and another fucking hour of his father sweet talking his way into meeting the Dean. After that boring dumb conversation that ended in his dad writing a check as a donation, they finally left.
Steve felt drained, and hungry, and too exhausted when he dropped into the booth at a road side McDonalds. He was not in the mood for his father to start digging into him, to start needling at him and judging him, and insisting that he fix his stupid fucking life like he wasn’t trying.
“Honestly, Steven,” He sighed, rubbing his brow. “You need to start thinking about these things.”
“I know, Dad.”
“You should have had a game plan before we drove three hours to schedule your classes,” He scolded. “You need to get your head out of the clouds and start thinking. What has been so time consuming that you didn’t think that maybe you should know, at the very least, what you wanted to major in?”
Steve kind of wanted to laugh.
He kind of wanted to say, I don’t know, Dad, maybe I was a little too busy trying not to kill myself.
He wanted to say, maybe I was too busy saving the fucking world, Dad.
He wanted to say, maybe if my parents didn’t constantly fucking downplay everything I did, if they didn’t pick apart even the slightest flaws than I would know what I was good at.’
But, he didn’t say anything.
He sighed.
His relationship with his mother was better.
Their relationship was getting better but his relationship with his father went from practically nonexistent to nonexistent after that day in his office. They walked into the same rooms and ate at the same table. They existed in the same places, but Steve felt more and more like they lived in different realities.
He wasn’t sure half the time if his father even knew that he had a son, if he remembered, or cared. He spent more time at home, but it was at the request of his mother.
Someone had to be home now.
Someone had to be there to make sure that Steve wasn’t face down in the bathtub, or bleeding on the kitchen floor, or overdosing on pills. His mother had her own paranoias now and they were all because of Steve.
They didn’t talk about the slap ever.
They didn’t talk about Steve running away to the Byers in any way beyond the occasional snide comment about not needing to air their dirty laundry to the likes of Joyce Byers. They didn’t really talk about anything.
His mother was supposed to be home from her trip in a few days and everything could get back to getting better. It was better when they had a mediator between them because otherwise, it was like this.
Steve hated this.
It was kind of sad, sitting across from his dad at a cheap McDonalds and listening to him talk because there was this dawning realization. He realized that his father thought that money was going to fix all of this.
He thought that Steve was just another problem that could be solved if he threw enough money at it. He paid for the therapists and the classes, and all the tutors in the world to keep his grades up.
He paid for the meds and the art supplies, and gave money to his college. He hired a new assistant for when he worked at home just so there was someone around to make sure that Steve didn’t kill himself while his mother was out of town.
Steve wished that he was the kind of problem that money would fix.
But he wasn’t.
His father thought that if they set Steve on a path that they liked, if they made everything really simple and held his hands through the processes than everything would be fine. He thought that if they kept the razor blades at bay and kept Steve too close to breathe – it’s a close enough campus to home that you don’t need to stay in dorms. Your mother will be there, or my assistant. We’ll get you a driver – than they could save him.
So, his father made plans, and his mother made plans, and they planned, and planned, and planned everything down to the last possible detail because then Steve didn’t have to die.
If they planned everything and controlled his life than they didn’t have to lose their son, or their reputations in town as well-adjusted, or their stupid book deals about how great of parents they are. It was really no one’s fault that they still had no idea how to exist around each other.
It was bullshit, but bullshit was a triggering word for him, so he shouldn’t say it. He shouldn’t even think it, but he does.
And it is.
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.
His father paid for things, but he didn’t fix them. He threw cash at problems and got angry when that wasn’t enough, so he threw more cash and paid for more things – for the therapist that Steve picked and the classes that he didn’t want, and the tutoring, and the art – because it was easy to pay for things and to say that you were trying.
It was so fucking easy to talk, but his father didn’t follow any of the rules that were laid out in therapy. He didn’t listen when they had a group session with Dr. Lindsey about Steve’s coping mechanisms, and effective communication, and about letting Steve be his own person not bound to impossible expectations.
He didn’t listen, and his mother didn’t really listen either. She was just better at pretending that she did, that she was trying. Steve didn’t really believe any of it anyways, so it wasn’t like he a right to be angry with his parents for not believing it either.
He still thought that nothing really changed.
The world woke up, went through the motions, and then one day it would die bloody in the teeth of a flower-faced monster. He believed that, but he tried not to think about it too much.
It all just felt like buying time and that was okay.
He could never imagine his life passed tomorrow, but tomorrows kept coming and he kept buying days. He kept getting through them and things were fine.
They weren’t great, but they were fine.
He wasn’t going to slit his wrists because his father was disappointed in him. His father was always disappointed in him.
He couldn’t picture himself ever being thirty, or twenty-five, or nineteen doing anything that really mattered, so he shouldn’t feel hurt that his father couldn’t see it either. He shouldn’t feel bad that his dad wanted to hold his hand through everything because the thought of him grown up with a job and a family, and a future just somehow there was so fucking foreign. It was unnatural, unreal.
Steve couldn’t picture the future and he knew that his father couldn’t either.
His father was saying, “We don’t want to have to take care of you for the rest of your life.”
He was saying, “We want you to be active and useful part of society, not one of the beatnik lowlifes, not a freeloader.”
He was saying, “We want what’s best.”
For them.
Steve thought that his father could see all the strings and the cracks, and how hard it was to just exist in a world so loud and sharp. He thought that his father could see that Steve struggled with being out of sync with the world, could see how lost he was without his archetypes and stereotypes, and his bat.
His mother tried and pretended that she could see his struggling, but she was always so wrapped up in this notion of being better that she failed to see that it was all pretend. His father didn’t.
His father just didn’t care.
He saw the challenge that had been in Steve’s eyes that night in his office, he saw the hopelessness and the recklessness, and how dangerous his son could be to no one other than himself. His father saw the thirst for total self-annihilation, saw how much Steve had wanted him to do so much worse than just a slap.
He saw the lines that couldn’t be crossed twice.
He saw how far over them that they were.
Steve was never going to make it that far and they both knew it.
There was tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, but it was all just treading water over the same monsters. Steve wasn’t fixed, they just slapped a band-aid over top of the problem and doused it in therapy bills and meds.
It was just time.
Nothing stayed locked up forever and Steve prepared himself for that. Nothing stayed gone, nothing stayed down, and the only thing that lasted was misery. They both knew it.
Steve was trying, but for how long?
His dad was talking again about Steve interning at his company and how great of an opportunity that would be, but it was really just another way to assure that he was too busy and too close to kill himself. It was so that he could be nearby without having to pretend to be his father. He didn’t have to actually listen to him if he was Steve’s boss.
It was like Steve was just another thing to attend to.
He was just another book signing, another deadline, another paid in the ass writer with writer’s block and a complex.
It was suffocating how much his father didn’t get it.
Steve wanted to laugh until it fucking hurt sometimes.
He wanted to think positive and be positive, and maybe enjoy the days that he was just trying to get through. He didn’t want to fucking die, but his parents made it so fucking impossible to want to be alive. They made it unbearable.
Steve shook his head and swiped the keys off the table.
He curled his fingers around the cold metal and met his father’s eyes with determination. He breathed out through dry lips, a total and solid resolution, “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
He took step, after step, after step.
Dr. Lindsey said that he didn’t have to trapped in places that he didn’t want to be in. She said to extend an olive branch and his father hadn’t taken it. She said that no one could make him feel bad unless he let them, so he walked across the parking lot.
His father followed, “Steven.”
His father followed, and his hand was heavy on his shoulder. Steve snapped, “Don’t fucking touch me.”
The only reason that Steve was allowed to drive, allowed to stomp out of the place without a too much of a fuss was because he had planted his feet. He refused to be moved, or bullied, or made to feel hopeless.
There was some birthday party happening in the outdoor enclosure like it wasn’t still the cold part of Spring and his dad wasn’t going to make the scene that Steve was fully prepared to have. He wasn’t going to do anything.
So, Steve got his way.
His father got into the passenger seat and Steve got into the driver’s. He started the car and snapped on his seatbelt, and pulled out of the parking lot before his father started nagging.
It was all, ‘honestly, Steve,’ and ‘do you know how embarrassing that behavior is,’ and ‘this has got to stop.’
Steve felt his breath start to drag heavy across his tongue, scrap down the back of his throat and he wanted to gag. He could hear a ringing in his ear that reverberated beneath his father’s stern voice and his vision started to tunnel to something that was dangerous, and trapped, and bad.
His father said, “Honestly, Steven, you cannot keep using these excuses. You’re eighteen and in therapy, start-“
Steve felt dangerous.
He felt bursting at the seams with fatality and violent intention, and he was basically alone on a road where no one would see what happened. It was so fucking hard to climb this much out of depression and suicidal thoughts, out of fear and paranoia, and every moment that he spent with his father was stepping backwards.
He could feel the darkness curling into him, could feel it breath against his face and his neck, and reach for him. He could feel it crawl into his mouth and infect him, and he banked left.
He jerked the car across two empty lanes of traffic and nearly crashed it. It rolled to a bumpy stop against the guardrail, kicking up dust and dirt, and Steve knew that he just scrapped the hell out of the side of his father’s fucking Lincoln.
He sucked in a harsh breath and then burst into tears.
He took his shaking hands off the steering wheel, covering his face with them, and just, bawled his eyes out. He pitched forward with the intensity of it, fell apart in the driver’s seat.
He didn’t notice when the car was jerked into park or the slight rocking as the passenger’s seat was jerked open and slammed shut. He didn’t notice anything beyond the shallowness of his own rapid breathing.
He didn’t even flinch when the driver’s side door was open and there was suddenly light pouring over him, suddenly hands at his side and on his cheek. He didn’t say anything to the questions that he couldn’t understand other than to croak, “Sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Shhh,” His father’s voice was deep and even in his ear. His touch was almost gentle in all the places that they hadn’t been before, stroking his cheek and hushing him, whispering, “Steve, it’s okay. No one is hurt. It’s going to be fine.”
“The car-“
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, it – yes, it does!”
“Steve, it’s okay,” His father told him, voice slipping into something thicker, wetter. When Steve blinked at him, he noticed that his father’s hazel honey eyes were shiny like amber. “No one got hurt, the car is just an object. Why did you do that?”
He licked his lip and swallowed nausea, “You’re mad.”
“I’m not mad, Steven, I’m worried,” He told him. “You could have hurt yourself. Why did you do that, there was nothing in the road.”
“It’ s – It’s not okay!” Steve shouted, jerking his head out of his father’s touch so hard that it slammed into the headrest. He squeezed his eyes shut against the falling tears and shuddered with something almost like a heave. “I – It’s not okay. It’s not okay, we’re just pretending and you – you hate me, and I can’t fix it. Okay? I don’t know how.”
“I don’t – I don’t hate you, Steve. I-“
“You want me to die,” Steve snapped, slapping at his hand when it was rested on his knee. “That – it doesn’t make any sense why you’re so mean to me if you don’t want me to die. You don’t listen to me or Dr. Lindsey, and I’m – I’m so sorry that I messed up, but-“
“I want you to get better, Steven.”
“You make me want to die.”
His father reared back almost violently with the harshness of Steve’s sureness, nearly toppling off his bended knees to the gravel and dirt beneath. His voice was wet and horrified, stern but it didn’t matter, Steve knew he wasn’t listening again because he said, “Steven. I don’t want you to die.”
He said, “I could never want – you’re my son. You’re a part of me and your mother, I am only hard on you because I want the best for you.”
Steve shook his head, “That’s not how it works.”
Steve took a shuddery breath and felt like throwing up, “That’s bullshit.”
Steve changed his major to fine arts.
He wasn’t sure what exactly he was planning to do with a degree in fine arts or if there was anything that could be done with that degree because his parents weren’t too sure about it. He wasn’t even sure if he would keep the major, only picking one because he wanted to be something other than undecided.
He liked some of the art classes because he could do it.
He dropped economics after three weeks.
He didn’t tell his dad.
He drove to the bridge just outside of Hawkins and sat there on the weekends, dangling his feet over the side and watching the rushing water run passed beneath him. He didn’t think about jumping that much anymore, not in any way that felt tangible.
Things were not perfect.
His wrists ached when the winter weather rolled back through Indiana and he had cut his hair a little shorter. He still didn’t date much, didn’t talk much. He wasn’t happy, but he was okay.
He said that, “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m getting better.”
It was a mantra, but he liked to believe in it.
The world was not going to end today and that was enough for him. The gate was shut, the spies were at bay, and the kids were all safe and geeky freshmen in high school. That was enough.
He didn’t go into Hawkins anymore.
He drove up to the outskirts of the town and parked his car on the side of the road a couple times on the weekends. He would get out and walk a quarter mile trek through light forest to the abandon bridge and sit down on the ledge. He would look down at the water.
There used to be an old Hawkins legend about pretty girls with big empty eyes that would stand on the edge of this bridge and jump. The water would sweep them into the currents and they would never be seen again. It was how the bridge got the nickname Free Fall Ridge.
Dustin was nice about it.
He didn’t complain as much about it as he used to when he would bike out to the bridge. He just talked, and talked, and talked about high school problems and girls that didn’t like him like that nowadays. He told Steve about how he had his old locker with the jagged piece of metal and his name carved into the door.
He talked about teenage drama, about Lucas and Max having a fight and El sneaking out. He talked about his new cat and seeing Steve’s parents around town, about Billy leaving town with his belonging packed up in his car.
He talked about visiting Indiana State – it’s never too early to think about college, Steve! – and about Steve letting him stay at his apartment. Steve always said no.
It was kind of like a game now.
He had a studio apartment where the only walls that he had to worry about monsters crawling through were the four around him. He only had to worry about those four walls, two windows, a fire escape, and one front door.
His mother hated it, thought that it was the kind of beatnik nonsense that his grandmother would have loved, but Steve couldn’t handle walls much anymore.
Four walls, two windows, and one door.
It was enough. It was coping. It was avoiding triggers.
He breathed in the chilled air and he breathed out, saying, “I’m drowning in homework, man.”
“You’re always drowning in homework, Steve.”
Monsters were real, and spies were real, but none of them were after him right now. Steve kept fairy lights tacked up around his apartment and he kept his bat in his bed, in the trunk of his car, hanging out of his backpack now.
He always kept the TV on mute and Dustin would hate that. He rarely ever played music inside anymore. His mother thought that the fairy lights were a nice homey touch to otherwise bare walls, but she said that it gave a certain message.
Steve never asked what that message was, but he didn’t want Dustin to figure it out before him. He didn’t want his four walls, two windows, and one door to ever be touched by Hawkins, Indiana.
“How are you actually doing though?”
Steve never really stopped worrying about the spies, or monsters, or Billy Hargrove trying to kill him. He just thought about it differently. He dealt with it differently, reminding himself that people would notice if he went missing now.
He reminded himself constantly that he did tell someone everything about all of it and nothing happened. He reminded himself that he had decertified himself so much that even if he did get loud about the Upside Down and spies, and the government then the only thing that would happen would be a change to his meds. No one would believe him.
He was, for all intents and purposes, free.
Or at least, he had the illusion of that freedom but even that was fine. He was fine with that. He could work with that and live within those confines.
Nothing stayed locked up forever and one day, the gate would open again. He could live with knowing that because he could get through today to a better tomorrow, and he was still working on getting better.
Safety was an illusion, but illusions were nice sometimes.
“I’m – I’m fine, better.