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“Probably had the same look on his face whenever he killed his brother, right?”The world tilts on its axis, and it’s not from Steve’s head injury.
Seriously?
Yeah, okay, sure, Nancy and Jonathan had sex. Jonathan took some - admittedly really damn weird - photos of her. Big deal (and it is a big deal, kind of, because Steve is one hundred percent still viciously angry, but he’s trying here). All of that stings, but it’s not an excuse to- what, to accuse Jonathan of killing his own brother? Hell, it’s not even Tommy who got cheated on, so why’s he so pressed about Jonathan?Two years ago, Steve had bared his teeth and grinned at Joey Torres. Hey Joe, he’d said, faux-casual and cutting, how’s your dad these days? Joey’s dad had died the week before. Everyone knew that, and everyone knew that Steve knew that. But Steve’s friends had hated Joey - he can’t even remember why, now, isn’t that pathetic? - so Steve had hated him too.
Maybe he got fed up with having you for a son, huh? Figured anything was better than staying with you another minute?
Joey’s family skipped town the next summer. Steve doesn’t know if any of them are okay, if his stupid taunts messed it all up. Messed them all up.Now he thinks about it, Tommy was there for that one too. Carol might have been, if she’d hung nearer to the back of the crowd where Steve couldn’t see her.He’s not going to do that again.Carol is in the middle of making some horrendously off-colour joke about Jonathan and Nancy when Steve speaks up. He should probably care more about interrupting if he’s doing the whole good person shtick now, but all he can focus on is how he isn’t going to do this again so the words come out almost before he can stop them, sharp and harsh and angry.“Carol, for once in your life, shut your damn mouth!”Carol acts cute about it, says What? like she doesn’t know exactly why he’s mad right now. Tommy, ever dependable, gets straight into the tried-and-tested How To Get Into A Fight method that Steve and him literally came up with together, man, this is so messed up and honestly kind of lame. Step One: Be confrontational from the get-go. What’s your problem is a classic, because even if they don’t have a problem you can get mad about that too.“Hey, what’s your problem, man?”Steve stops. Considers. He absolutely has a problem, but does he want to get into it? Does he really want to risk toppling the King Of Hawkins High thing he’s got going - the thing he’s been building for years, at this point?Yeah, kinda.“You're both assholes. That’s my problem.”“Are you serious right now, man?”Even knowing that Step Two of the method is escalate, Steve sees red. This is serious. This is so serious. There is so much blood drying on his face right now that it’s absolutely gross, and he’s holding a Coke can to the wounds, and his hair. His hair sucks right now. Tommy thinks he’s going to be unserious while his hair is like this? Ouch, dude.“Yeah, I’m serious,” he says anyway as he slides off the car bonnet and shoves Tommy right in the chest. “You shouldn’t have done that.”Step Three is play dumb. Never fails to make some blood boil.“Done what?”It’s very effective.“You know what.”“You mean call her out for what she really is? Oh, that’s funny, because I don’t remember you asking me to stop.”Okay. That’s it. That is exactly enough. If anyone wants to know where Steve’s limit is in the future, he can point them to this precise moment right here.Steve knows he’s playing right into How To Get Into A Fight by falling into the quiet stage of his anger, but he doesn’t really care at this point - honestly, he welcomes the possibility. Maybe if he gets hit hard enough it’ll stop- everything. All of it. High school, and Tommy, and Carol, and Nancy, and Jonathan, and- Nancy doesn’t deserve this. If nothing else, Nancy doesn’t deserve it.“I should have put that spray paint right down your throat.”For a stupid, vengeful moment, Steve entertains the notion. Imagines holding Tommy down, mouth pried open. Hearing his voice get more and more hoarse from both the yelling and the paint choking his vocal cords. Watching him sputter and flail and Steve getting to be the powerful one, for once, for just one time when it actually matters. “What the hell, Steve,” Carol cries, shocked and confused and angry. The surprise in her voice is a bitter kind of rush. No one is surprised by King Steve these days - maybe all he needed to do was surprise them with Steve Harrington instead.“You know, neither of you ever cared about her. You never even liked her,” Steve says abruptly. It’s a weird sort of realisation, like a classmate who’s stood beside him for ages and is only now deciding to make their presence known. He’s known for a while. It just hadn’t hit him.Naturally, more realisations follow. “Because she’s not miserable like you two. She actually cares about other people.” And so do I, he doesn’t say, because he isn’t quite sure yet if he does. He’s spent a long time caring about other people’s thoughts, but he’s not sure if he can care about other people. (Maybe this whole thing is proof that he can.)Carol, as always, has impeccable timing. Impeccable for cultivating maximum anger, anyway. She shouts another insult at him - and it’s not about him, which would have been fine, but it’s about Nancy. Carol calls her a slut, and that is so much worse than anything else she could have said, because Nancy is a lot of things but she’s not that. Even if she cheated on him, she’s not a slut.“I told you to watch your mouth,” Steve yells back, wheeling on her.Tommy shoves him back into the car door, then - in a feat of overwhelming hypocrisy, wow - says, “Hey! I don’t know what’s gotten into you, man, but you don’t talk to her that way.”Steve shoves him back. “Get out of my face.”One second Steve is standing free, hunching his shoulders and curling his fists; the next, Tommy is crowding him into the side of the car with Steve’s collar bunched into his fists.“Or what?”Steve scrabbles for a hold, tries to find some kind of purchase to get Tommy off of him, but there’s nothing. His attempts die off very quickly.“You gonna fight me now too? Huh? You gonna fight me now too? Because you couldn’t take Jonathan Byers,” Tommy hisses, and the sheer venom in his voice makes Steve freeze up entirely, “so I wouldn’t recommend that.”Steve considers, for a moment, the merits of getting beaten up in a gas station parking lot.There are not very many. Despite the nagging voice that says do it, you deserve it, it can be your recompense, Steve stays completely still as Tommy drops his hands and steps away. Time to leave, he thinks. Definitely time to leave. Thankfully, he’s right next to his car, so that works out nicely, except for the fact that Tommy is also right next to his car and is significantly more rage-filled than him. He rhymes off some canned snide remark and slams the door closed before Steve gets the chance.It’s not a dignified retreat. It’s not even a retreat, really. Steve’s not being tactical, he’s not biding his time. He’s just running. He hears Tommy shout Nancy’s name as he leaves, and he remembers with dawning horror that the graffiti on the movie theater is still there. He needs to- fix that. Right now, preferably.If he’s going to be a good person, he might as well go all in.Steve has been fearing for his life quite a few times in the past three minutes. First because of Jonathan’s literal nail bat, honestly Steve’s genuinely scared of him now, then because of Nancy and the gun, holy hell, and then the-Well. Whatever that thing was.That was the worst one. Fear of the unknown, and all that. Steve is still kind of shaking, and he can hear himself chanting this is crazy under his breath. And you know what? It is crazy! And he’s totally right! So he lets himself get louder and louder until he’s yelling and then he sees the phone- the phone, where he could call for help or- or something, anyway, and he reaches for it, tries to call someone. Nancy rips it out of his hand before he gets the chance - she breaks it, and that just doesn’t make sense, so he asks her what she’s doing and tries not to focus on the fact that he’s about to cry.“It’s going to come back,” Nancy says, all steel eyes and steel voice. Steve has obviously been wildly underestimating her. “So you need to leave. Right. Now.”Steve is more than happy to do that. He’s ecstatic, actually, and he’s pretty sure that both Jonathan and Nancy can tell from the way he scrambles out of the Byers’ house like his pants are on fire. He keeps looking behind him - because what if it’s still out here - and his hands are shaking with so much force that he drops his keys once and fails to get them in the lock at least three times. Maybe all the fighting has knocked something loose in his head. Maybe he’s finally growing a spine like his Dad always tells him he should. Maybe it’s a side effect of him shucking the King label like the ill-fitting coat it is. Maybe it’s none of these, maybe it’s all of them. No matter the cause, something makes Steve pause when he sees the lights flicker again.He should help, right? Logically, he should help.Well- no. Logically, he shouldn't help. He’s got no weapons, and he isn’t fighting that thing with his fists. Jonathan and Nancy know what they’re doing. But he- he wants to help. Feels like he needs to, almost. And it’s not even out of a sense of repayment or self-flagellation or whatever some shrink might tell him. He couldn’t explain it if he tried, but he- he needs to do something. To help.He’s not going to run any more. He’s scared out of his wits, but he’s not running. If he has to fight that faceless thing with his bare hands, he’s doing it. He’s doing it. Jonathan and Nancy shouldn’t have to go through this alone.The Harrington household is empty quite a lot, these days. Steve’s parents are gone, as per usual, and it’s not like anyone would come to a party even if he felt like hosting one. King Steve is gone, and any kind of social credit has vanished along with him.Steve still doesn’t regret that. Really, he doesn’t. But on these days - the days where he can’t look in the direction of the pool unless he wants to throw up - it’s… hard. His hand keeps itching for the phone, but who would he call? Nancy is off-limits, even if she’d understand better than anyone, and Jonathan wouldn’t want to talk to him anyway, so that’s… that’s pretty much everyone ruled out. That’s sad, probably. But at least he knows who he can go to now (even if the answer is nobody) - he didn’t know before. Everyone just kind of blended together in a haze of pleasant, distant acquaintance.The only comfort Steve finds on days like this is alcohol.And he knows how that sounds, okay? He knows how that sounds. Knows that it’s not a good thing to do.But he has to. Because it’s the only thing that stops him from thinking.Thinking, for example, about Barb sitting by the pool last year and then- not. Or about the fact Steve hadn’t even cared. The way he can’t listen to Africa any more without his hands shaking. About Nancy. The way she doesn’t love him, and maybe never has. She’s so strong, and she’s beautiful in every way Steve can think of, and she doesn’t love him. And that’s- hard! That’s really- that’s really awful. And Steve is allowed to think that (maybe not to say it, though). Because it sucks. Because he loves her, still, or at least he thinks he does. He’s not really sure.He hasn’t been sure of anything for the past year.So he’s allowed to drink, he reasons. Not legally, maybe, but who cares? He needs some dollar store beer so he doesn’t do something stupid like drown himself in the pool before tomorrow comes around.The stupid pool. If he concentrates hard enough he can hear Barb’s cut-off shriek echoing around his garden. For some reason he hadn’t thought of it before, but that’s- that’s the last thing anyone ever heard her say. Just a shriek.The worst part is how Steve’s memory of that shriek is overlaid with the sound of shitting Africa playing on cassette. Talk about disrespecting the dead.He hadn’t even thought anything of it. What if- what if there was no monster? What if Barb had just fallen in, and ended up drowning or something? (Would Steve feel better or worse about it?)Steve cracks open another can of dollar store beer. If he can think coherently enough for this, he’s not drunk enough.Hiding in a bus in the dead of night with three middle-schoolers wasn’t exactly how Steve had been planning to spend the night. He’d kind of been hoping for a bit more apologising to Nancy and a lot more making out, y’know? But this is the hand he’s been dealt, because Nancy wasn’t at the Wheeler’s but Dustin Henderson was, apparently, so…It’s not ideal. Nothing about this is ideal. But at least Steve has his nail bat - and it is his, now, isn’t that cool? A year ago, it was Jonathan’s. Not any more. (Some small, sick part of him likes to joke that sure, Jonathan got Nancy, but Steve got a nail bat. Steve still hasn’t figured out which one of them is meant to have come out on top.)He’s got bigger things to worry about, anyway, because there’s a demodog here but-“He’s not taking the bait. Why is he not taking the bait?”Dustin, who Steve has already pegged as an insufferably idealistic optimist, offers the brilliant excuse of, “Maybe he’s not hungry?”Which is so wrong that Steve isn’t even going to respond, but then he gets to thinking. Because from what he remembers of last year, these things are always hungry, or at least they’re always up for a fight when they see something they’ll win against. And maybe- maybe that’s it. Maybe this one wants to sing for his supper.“Maybe he’s sick of cow.”And, see, Steve won’t let the kids be dog-bait. His plan is half-baked at best, but there’s one thing he knows for certain - he’s going to be the one who takes the fall. If any of them get hurt tonight, there’s no telling what will happen. But Steve? If he gets really, really lucky, his parents might call and leave their condolences for the empty house to hear.So yeah, he stands up immediately and goes to find his bat. On the way, he remembers the lighter in his hand - he should give that to Dustin, because someone’s going to need to light this whole thing up and it won’t be the two kids who aren’t even down here. Dustin asks him what he’s doing, and Steve wants to scream I don’t know, wants to yell and hit something and do anything except go outside, but Steve is cool. And all these kids think he’s cool. And that’s probably the only reason none of them are scared out of their minds right now.Cool people handle things. Cool people know what they’re doing. Cool people, Steve has recently figured out, protect others. He can keep pretending to be cool, if that’s what he needs to do right now.(Steve’s definition of cool has changed a lot in the last year. He throws the lighter to Dustin on his way out.)There’s a moment, when the second demodog appears, where Steve is a dead man. Where he realises that he’s going to have to grin and bear it - grin and go down - if the kids are going to be okay.And he makes his peace with that. Really, he does. But then Dustin is screaming at him to abort, abort! and Steve realises that dying won’t do any good. If he dies, the kids will still be in that rickety old school bus, and no one will be there to defend them.So he runs. He dodges, rolls over a car bonnet in a way that is definitely going to bruise, and he runs. Adrenaline courses through him like the worst drug known to man, and Steve thinks it’s probably the only thing that keeps him whacking dogs from the door of the bus for as long as he does. Thinks it’s probably the only thing that keeps him from crying when he runs to the ladder and looks death in its toothy, flower-shaped maw. Afterwards, Lucas asks what happened. What happened to make them all run off. Dustin, ever optimistic (frankly, it’s a little worrying), says, “Steve scared ‘em off?”Steve barely has time to think before he’s replying with a quick, tense, “No.”Then, thinking about it more, “No way. They’re going somewhere.”Now all they have to do is work out where. Despite his worryingly vast experience with supernatural monsters, Steve is still very firm in his assessment that Billy Hargrove is the most threatening thing he’s ever come across. Which is great, and awesome, and a very reassuring reminder when said Billy Hargrove pulls up outside the Byers’.He’d kind of figured, naively, that Billy was a different guy around his family. After all, King Steve and Steve Harrington had been two very distinct people. The fear in Max’s voice shoots that theory down immediately. They’ve all been through too much tonight to joke about something like this, and the frightened look in her eyes is anything but made up.Steve, for the second time tonight, makes a snap decision to try and spare the kids. He goes outside.King Steve is back in town for one night and one night only, folks.The sound of Billy’s car door opening might as well be a funeral bell. Even before either of them speaks, Steve knows he’s not exactly on the top of his game when it comes to intimidation. Not even the kids would listen to him earlier; Billy will hardly be any easier.If nothing else, at least this song and dance is familiar. Familiar in the way a childhood bedroom is, anyway - like trying on your old favourite pair of shoes and knowing they’ll be too small. Like trying to fit an old sheet on a new bed.“Am I dreaming,” Billy says through a mouthful of cigarette smoke, “or is that you, Harrington?”
Showtime.
“Yeah, it's me. Don’t cream your pants.”Taking charge of the conversation is always the hardest part, so Steve starts early and asks Billy what he’s doing here (and, because apparently his mouth has temporarily disconnected from his brain, tacks on amigo at the end).“I could ask you the same thing,” Billy says drily, walking to meet Steve where he’s come down from the Byers’ front steps. Then, after a pause, “Amigo.”Which- great. Yeah. Awesome. Small mercies do exist, though, because Billy doesn’t wait for him to answer before he continues.“Looking for my stepsister. A little birdie told me she was here.”Alright, Steve’s turn now. What’s the grand excuse this time?“Huh, that’s weird. I don’t know her.” What? Why is that the excuse? Is he crazy? There are so many better ways to say the same thing. “Small? Redhead? Bit of a bitch?” Billy says, thankfully completely oblivious to Steve’s inner turmoil. And yeah, that’s pretty much Max in a nutshell, from what he can see - except he gets the feeling Billy isn’t calling her a bitch the way Nancy’s brother might call her a bitch. This feels a bit more malicious.Either way, he has a ruse to keep up, so, “Doesn’t ring a bell. Sorry, buddy.”See, that’s the right answer. For the reality Steve is building, that’s the right answer. But as soon as he says it, his stomach drops for a reason he can’t quite place. Maybe it’s in the way Billy takes his cigarette out of his mouth, maybe it’s something else. Either way, Steve knows.He knows he’s done something wrong.“You know,” Billy says, sighing in a put-upon way that Steve has used a few times himself; a way he knows means trouble, “I dunno, this…”Billy clicks his teeth, stalls. Steps forward two steps.Steve has been in enough fights to know that Billy isn’t suddenly uncertain, he’s not shy. He’s just gearing up.“This whole situation, Harrington, I dunno. It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.”“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”“My thirteen-year-old sister goes missing all day. And then I find her with you - in a stranger’s house - and you lie to me about it.”That’s- that’s what Billy thinks is going on here? No. No. It’s a gross thing to even insinuate. But Steve can’t say that, because then Billy will demand to know why else his sister has been missing, and that’s off the table. It’s so off the table that it’s practically out the door. So Steve has to play it differently, get defensive about being called a liar rather than being called a creep. Ew.“Man, were you dropped too much as a child, or what? I don’t know what you don’t understand about what I just said.”One more twist of the knife, one more statement to (hopefully) get Billy to go away so that Max doesn’t have to worry about getting found out, so that Steve doesn’t have to get into a fight. One more. “She’s not here.”Billy points over Steve’s shoulder with his cigarette, and he tries very hard to stop himself following the movement. “Then who is that?”
Shit.
Oh, this is great. This is- this is great. Really. Those idiots couldn’t keep themselves from the window for five minutes? Why did they think it was a good idea to look right out the front window? Isn’t that covered in like, the first lesson on sneaking about? ”Don’t snoop where someone else can see you”?And now Steve has to cover for them, somehow. Fantastic.“Listen-”His back hits the ground.“I told you to plant your feet,” Billy sneers from above him, before literally kicking him while he’s down and storming off. Steve curls in on himself, groaning. Getting kicked in the stomach hurts.The door to the Byers’ slams open, then closed. Steve can’t think too straight at the minute, but one thing he knows instinctively is that if he doesn’t get in there right now, Billy is going to go after the kids. With that in mind, he tries to get up- okay. Okay. That’s fine. He can just… lie here another second. Just a second. When Steve finally gets up, he has the presence of mind to realise he needs to be silent. If Billy knows he’s up again, much less coming inside, then it’s over. The only advantage Steve has over him will be the element of surprise - in a fair fight, he’d lose, and Billy never plays fair.The first thing Steve notices is that Billy has Lucas backed up against the wall. The second thing Steve notices is Billy telling Lucas that he is so dead, Sinclair, and that’s enough to remove every single atom of fear from Steve’s body because no one talks to these kids like that, not even Billy Hargrove.So he throws a line, and he throws a punch, and even as his head swings back brutally, Billy still laughs like a man possessed and Steve knows he’s already lost. Fight’s over, everyone can go home; one-nil to Hargrove.“Looks like you got some fire in you after all, huh?” Billy taunts. He throws his hands up grandly, steps in close as he continues, “I’ve been waiting to meet this King Steve everyone’s been telling me so much about.”The implied slight of Steve not being King Steve during any of their other meetings stings more than it should. The suggestion that he's only King Steve when he’s fighting is even worse.Either way, Steve recognises the loud drama of conflict-triggered bravado - something he used to fall into habitually - and he almost runs away right then and there. Billy is better at this than Steve has ever been, than Tommy Hagan ever was. Billy was born fighting, and he hasn’t stopped since.The kids, though. Steve can’t let him hurt the kids. So he keeps his cool, pushes Billy away, musters the coldest voice he can possibly manage, and says, very simply, “Get out.”A moment. Silence. Then Steve ducks under Billy’s right hook, and the fight is on. For a while, it seems to be going his way. The adrenaline rush is definitely helping, and so are the supportive yells behind him; they fill his head with yeah, get him, kick his ass, Steve! and don’t leave much room for anything else. But Billy is still laughing, constant and mocking and knowing, like he’s certain he’ll win. He thuds back into the Byers’ sink, and then Steve barely has a moment before-The plate Billy’s grabbed hits his head, and Steve sinks like a stone. He can’t even look up before Billy’s stalking towards him, and his body goes crash into the Byers’ bookcase, and that hurts, ow, and then Billy grabs him and says, “No one tells me what to do.” Then there’s a head banging into his and the world starts spinning.Steve dully registers that he’s sprawled on the floor now, and he can sort of hear Billy yelling something victorious through the ringing in his ears. He feels a weight drop down on top of him - it’s Billy, he assumes, but he can’t really see too clearly. His head hurts and his face stings and really, this whole situation is kind of awful.The punches start again. Steve’s last thought before he passes out is that hey, at least he got Billy away from the kids.