Disclaimer: That '70s Show copyright The Carsey-Werner Company, LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, LLC. The fictional band Degenerate Matter, their albums Vagabondage, Ultrarelativistic, WIMPs and MACHOs, the song "Stargazer," and all the lyrics contained therein copyright to the author of this story (username: MistyMountainHop, maker of Those '70s Comics).

CHAPTER 64
DEATH FRIGHT

May 27, 1995

Foster City, California

Jackie's House
…

"You shouldn't have come here," Jackie said, but her house had opened up with Steven standing in her living room. The walls no longer pressed in on her. "The paparazzi will find you—"

"Risk I'm willing to take." He patted the handle of his rolling suitcase. "And you've got a security team."

"Yeah." She touched the back of her head. Some of her hair had slipped free of its messy bun. Bobby pins stuck haphazardly from it, and she plucked them out. She hadn't cared about her appearance since her final outing with the Blonde Brigade, but with Steven here, she had the urge to jump into the shower. "How did you—" She squeezed the bobby pins in her fist. "How'd you know that I needed you?"

"Heard it in your voice the last few phone calls. You've also been cagey—"

"I have not."

"And whenever you hold shit back, keep your distance, it usually means you're fighting something. Inside, outside, doesn't matter." He removed his Brewers cap. His thick hair fell onto his shoulders in waves and was so long it almost reached his butt. She hadn't seen him in two months, but it might as well have been two years. "So," he said, "what's going on?"

"It's just this tabloid business," she said. Her palm hurt. She'd crushed the bobby pins into her skin. "It's penned me in."

He twirled his Brewers cap on his index finger. "That's not all that's up."

Her fist closed even tighter on the bobby pins, and she yelped. Truths were quaking through her body— about being sent those Dale Fischer articles, how Steven had come to understand her so well, how she craved to connect with him. Her every cell seemed to vibrate with that desire, and she shivered.

"Isn't that bad enough?" she said and crossed her arms in front of her chest as a shield, to stop from shaking apart.

"Jackie, I'm sorry." He pressed his hand against his stomach, and the grief in his gaze uncrossed her arms. "I drop-kicked you into this."

She touched his wrist. "It's not your fault. I think it's my mom's. She hasn't contacted me in months, and the silence is damning." Her thumb swept over his skin, creating starbursts in her chest. The stolen sensation danced up her throat, and she withdrew her hand. "I've got a surprise for you."

He arched up an eyebrow. "A surprise, huh? Let me settle in first."

He dropped the Brewers cap onto his duct-taped backpack. It was lying at his feet, along with his suitcase, guitar, and amp. His luggage surrounded him like a barrier, a few feet from her front door. She hadn't let him in any farther, and heat rushed into her neck.

"Unless you don't want me staying here," he said. "Rented a car, so I can drive out to San Mateo, find a hotel. Wrote down a few, in case you weren't comfortable with me sleeping in your house."

"Steven, there is no one I'm more comfortable with." Her neck burned with the truth, and so did her fist. She stuffed the bobby pins into the pocket of her sweatpants and flexed her fingers. "Sit down, get—well, comfortable. I'll have Patricia prepare the guest room next to my office. Are you hungry? I already had dinner, but you could make yourself something—"

She'd crammed too many words into her last breath, and she stopped talking. He chuckled, like he found her nervousness amusing, but he wouldn't find the cause funny at all. Her feelings for him were complicated and thrilling and horrible.

He rubbed his stomach. "Some chamomile tea would be cool … and I could use the bathroom."

"The solarium." She pointed him in the right direction. He stepped over his backpack and walked off, and she sneaked a look at his backside. His butt still filled a pair of jeans like no one else's, but allowing those thoughts only tortured her.

She rushed into the kitchen, where Patricia was cleaning the counters. "Patricia," she said, hiking up her shoulders, "could you fix up the guest room?" She hated asking Patricia to do more this close to eight at night. Patricia was the hardest working housekeeper in California. Her increase in pay this year wasn't enough to compensate her dedication. "I promise this will be the last request of the evening."

Patricia stood up straight but put her hand to her back. Her gray braid of hair fell over her fingers. "Yes, Miss Burkhart—"

Jackie winced in sympathy. "No. You've been on your feet enough today. I'll take care of it."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Go. Rest."

"Thank you." Patricia tossed a clump of dirty paper towels into the garbage can. She put away the kitchen cleanser and disappeared up the back stairs. Jackie planned on giving her a paid month off, but she couldn't bear to be alone in the house. She'd have to make plans for herself first before Patricia left.

The tea bags were kept in a cabinet above the counter. Jackie found the box of chamomile and put a kettle of water on the stove. Chamomile was good for soothing a cranky stomach. The airplane food must not have agreed with Steven digestion. He was still in bathroom when she returned to the living room.

She left a mug of tea for him on the coffee table. Her impulse was to knock on the bathroom door and ask if he was all right. Instead she darted upstairs and spent twice as long as Patricia would have preparing the guest room bed. She went into her own bedroom afterward. Her surprise for Steven was stashed in her nightstand, contained in an envelope.

"Are you okay?" she said when she was back in the living room. Steven was sitting on one of her sofas and sipping the tea.

"Yup. Just got a weird stomach thing. Nothing contagious."

"Stomach thing?" She sat beside him on the sofa. The envelope in her hands crinkled. "What kind of stomach thing?"

"Stress-related." He cupped her knee when she frowned. "Not you-related. Been an intense few weeks, recording songs for the next album."

"That's not all it is," she said. He still had to be healing from his revelations in Las Vegas. He probably also had other stresses he was keeping from her. "You can tell me. I need a mental vacation from myself."

"The other crap's sorting itself out." He patted his stomach. "This comes and goes."

She slid her finger beneath the envelope flap. "I have an electric heating pad that does wonders for cramps. If you want it, let me know."

"Will do." He nodded at the envelope. "That my surprise?"

"It's what you've been waiting for."

"You're shitting me." Once the envelop was in his hands, he pulled out the sheet of paper inside and unfolded it. "'Stargazer,'" he said, reading the title. "You finished the lyrics."

She scooted across the sofa until she hit its thick armrest. He read through her lyrics, and the air throbbed with her heartbeat. Her palms were sweating, but she was too scared to wipe them on her sweatpants. He could despise what she'd written, think the lyrics were immature or, worse, transparent.

She tracked his eyes. He'd finished reading the lyrics—and his chamomile tea—and was reading through them again.

"Ro digs the music for this song a lot," he said half-way through his second read, "but its too nuanced for her to write lyrics. Said tryin' gave her a headache. These..." He pushed the mug out of the way and laid the lyrics on the coffee table. The paper, though, snapped back into its folded state. "Got somethin' that can keep it flat?"

She hopped off the sofa and dashed to one of her bookshelves. She brought back two decorative paperweights, a pair of crystal pyramids Ann-Marie had given her a few Christmases ago. They did the trick, keeping the lyric sheet flat on the table.

"Gonna try singing it," Steven said. He took out his Martin acoustic-electric guitar from its case and set it up with his Marshall amp.

She moved to the other sofa, the one perpendicular to the TV and the sofa where he sat. It gave her a better view of him and more distance. He was going to sing her words, dredged from the deepest part of herself.

She clutched her knees as he strummed a few chords and did a vocal exercise. His voice sounded better than she'd ever heard it. Its strength and richness seeped into her nerves, and she trembled.

"You ready?" he said.

She wasn't but said she was. His fingers attacked the song's belligerent, chugging riff, and her heart gave off sparks as it struck her ribs. He played the riff several times and hummed to himself, as if he were figuring out the vocal melody. Then he looked down at her lyrics and sang.

"I gazed up at the sky, and found the unexpected: a star so bright it lit my dark crevices..." A phantom smile flickered on his lips. "But I'm just a dull rock."

Jackie tightened her grip on her knees. She fought to close her eyes, but they refused to deprive themselves of him.

"Tried to reach you," he sang, "stretched myself, and the dirt buried me in a premature tomb, ghastly." His voice grew scratchy, matching the emotion of her lyrics. "Your light burned it away, but maybe I don't want to be exposed."

The song crashed into its pleading pre-chorus, and his fingers became a blur over the guitar. "The sun's a star, and the earth is a stone in an eternal orbit, still too far away."

She lifted her feet onto the sofa and hugged her knees to her chest. The music was growing more plaintive. The rusting-over gears of heart begged him to stop, but his eyes shut briefly as he sang the chorus. "Distance is decay. Time and space will defeat us."

Her toes dug into the sofa cushion, but her shoulders stiffened to the point of threatening a headache. Steven was ensconced in her soul, and his presence was too miraculous and too terrible to bear.

The music offered a short break before the second verse began. He approached the next lyrics gently, melodically, and her muscles relaxed a little. "I'm one of a million lost fools," he sang, "who look to you to guide their ships to safety. I'm one of a million, a stargazer, but the stars will never gaze down at me."

He whispered under his breath. It sounded like, "Already do," but she couldn't be sure. He might've simply been clearing his throat.

"Denial is the best defense!" he sang intensely, and his take on that line startled her. Her arms sprang off her knees, and she pressed her feet into the floor. "Shut my eyes and crash my ship so I'm the only thing that splinters. Just a dull rock, breaking up into dirt."

Chills rippled through her chest. His ability to sing so aggressively and maintain such musicality was astonishing. He'd opened up more than she could've possibly imagined, and when he sang the repeated, extended chorus, she laced her fingers over her heart. It was a wordless prayer, one she was barely conscious of.

He was rocking back and forth on the sofa. His knee bounced, and he shook his head. "Distance is decay. Time and space will defeat us. Always so far away—screw that."

Her nails cut into her knuckles. He'd commented on her lyrics, but he sang the end as she'd written: "Distance is decay. Time and space will defeat us. You're a star. I'm just a dull rock."

He strummed the song's final notes. "Beautiful," he said, somewhat out of breath. A lock of wavy hair was stuck to his chin. He pulled it away, but sweat beaded his hairline. "You wrote somethin' beautiful here, Jackie."

"You're beautiful." Her lungs collapsed, forcing out her remaining breath. Inky fingers of darkness streaked her vision, but passing out wasn't an option. She dragged in a deep breath through her nose, and the inky fingers dissolved. "What I mean is your voice. It sounds different."

"That's what quitting smoking'll do for ya." He put the guitar aside and shut off the amp. "Ro and the band are gonna make it sound a thousand times better ... and I'll probably tweak some of the lyrics."

Her nails had done some damage to her hand. The skin by her knuckles was red and, in one place, bleeding. She sucked on the wound. It stung, but she was thankful for the distraction. "I didn't expect you to use the lyrics at all."

"Why the hell not?" he said. "You did a great job."

"Change them however you want—and don't give me a writing credit."

He picked the lyric sheet from the coffee table. "Don't you get how great these are? You've got consistent imagery. Combined metaphors but didn't mix 'em. Told a story—"

"Don't analyze it, okay? Not in front of me." She had to get a Band-Aid for her hand, to escape her colliding emotions. She stood up, but he patted the cushion to his right. The invitation was too tempting to ignore. "I'm serious about the credit," she said, sitting beside him. "Have your lawyer draw up a contract if you're afraid I'll sue you someday down the line."

He laughed. "You and freakin' contracts."

"I'm my father's daughter. He always said to get guarantees in writing."

"If it'll make you feel better, I'll get you that contract." He bent toward the floor and yanked his duct-taped backpack onto his lap. "Got a surprise for you, too."

"For me?" But he'd already surprised her by showing up to her house, by nestling inside her soul and treating it well. "What else could you possibly give me?"

Hyde produced a Band-Aid from his backpack. Jackie's left hand was bleeding slightly. She'd torn into her skin when he'd sung her lyrics, but the experience had ruptured his denial: his love for her was growing impossibly bigger. His body wouldn't contain it much longer, but it had nowhere else to go.

"A Band-Aid?" she said when he stuck the bandage onto her knuckles. "That's your surprise?"

"Sure … and this." He passed a white, palm-sized box into her hands. "From the mineral fair."

"In Chicago." She pulled off the lid and took out the lump of purple goldstone. "It looks like ..." She held the goldstone up to the lamp beside her. "It's the night sky." The star-like particles glittered in the light and reflected in her eyes when she turned back to him. "This is amazing! What is it?"

"Goldstone. A product of man, not nature. Got one for myself, too. Light pollution kills good stargazing." He pointed at the goldstone. "Ain't nothin' compared to the real thing, but it's somethin'."

"It's wonderful." She grasped his hand and kissed his thumb. It was a quick peck, but the sensation of her lips remained in his flesh longer than it should have. "I can't believe you thought of me like this."

"You spent years bugging me for shiny crap. I'm late."

"That was a century ago—and under very different circumstances."

He scratched the nape of his neck. She was right, and bringing up their history had been a mistake. He buried his head in his backpack under the pretense of another search. The canvas bag, filled with the rest of her surprise, was squashed at the bottom. He took it out and handed it over. "Part two," he said.

She opened the bag, glanced inside, then stared at him. "You did not get me this!" She yanked several clear packages from the bag. Strands of purple goldstone beads were inside. "I already know what I'm going to make." She wrapped her arms around his waist with the beads still clutched in her fingers. "Thank you, Steven. Thank you, thank you!"

He broke into a grin. Seeing her so happy was a rare and precious sight. "

Whatever you need, you got it," he said by her ear. "Alls you got to do is name it."

She hit his back playfully, and the beads clacked in their plastic bags. "Don't make an offer like that."

He withdrew from her embrace. "I'm not kidding."

"We all have limits, even you."

"Not sayin' I'd blackmail your obnoxious neighbor out of town—" he mimed flipping pancakes—"but if you want me to go to some Girl Scout Alumni Breakfast..."

She returned the packages of beads to the canvas bag. "How about staying up and watching a movie with me?"

"That I can do."

Jackie paged through the TV Guide. HBO was having a Death Fright Marathon. Death Fright II would start in a few minutes. She hadn't watched a horror movie since she'd starred in Dale Fischer's, but the time had come to confront some of her fears again. The best possible person to do that with, besides her therapist, was sitting on her sofa.

"A horror flick?" he said after she made the suggestion. "So you want to fall asleep."

"Believe me, I won't be sleeping."

"You interested in a horror movie ... this I've got to see." He propped his feet on the coffee table with her permission. He hadn't changed from his T-shirt and jeans, but his boots were off. He appeared comfortable, and she liked that. "Since when do blood and gore do it for you?"

"They don't—" she glanced at the hallway leading to the kitchen—"and I don't have any popcorn, but I've got yogurt with walnuts I could get you."

"So damn healthy." He rubbed his stomach, which was visibly flat beneath his shirt. Although he enjoyed a good burger and fries, he clearly wasn't a habitual junk food eater. Since they'd reconciled a year ago, cigarettes had been the unhealthiest substance she'd seen him put in his mouth. "Tummy ache's gone," he said. "Don't need to test it with food."

"Tummy ache?"

"Spent too much time on the phone with Forman lately. Izzy-speak."

Jackie wanted to pat his knee in understanding and mock-pity, but she was sitting too far from him, on the opposite end of the sofa. With the remote in her hand, she turned on the TV and switched to HBO. Memories shimmered on the border of her consciousness, but she had to approach this movie without bias. The opening scene showed a woman in her twenties going to the dentist. The dentist was supposed to drill a cavity, but he clamped a miniature set of teeth on the woman's nose.

"That looks so stupid," she said, even as her body trembled.

"Damn stupid," he said. "What's the freakin' point of—holy shit!"

The teeth sank into the woman's flesh. They grew double in size after the first bite and grew larger still while eating her face. The imagery was silly, but the dentist's laughter was throaty and high-pitched, and it skittered up Jackie's spine. Dale Fischer's friend, Vince, had the same laugh.

Death Fright II's title flashed onto the screen in huge green letters, and the next scene had a teenage boy accompany his father to an eye exam. The optometrist brought the father inside an exam room and fitted him with a pair of thick glasses. The glasses glowed with an eerie green light, which seeped into the father's eyes. He'd obviously been possessed by the Death Fright, but his son didn't notice.

The movie's first half-hour followed the teenage boy, Justin, and his friends. They reacted to the gruesome deaths occurring in their usually sleepy suburb: a grandmother had been sucked into a giant nose; a teacher drowned in a lake of ear wax. Justin was next, nearly lasered to death by his possessed father's eyes, but Justin escaped.

Steven's laughter filled the living room. It was soothing but not enough. Jackie curled herself into the corner of the sofa. She forced herself to keep watching, despite the flashbacks attacking her body and mind.

Her therapist would tell her to shut the movie off, but Jackie ached to crawl across the sofa and seek comfort in Steven. To bury herself in his body and heart. She'd been deprived of that kind of security for so long, but getting it from Steven wasn't appropriate. Dale couldn't hurt her anymore. He was gone. He'd done lasting damage, and she was healing it … yet he was hurting her again. Or someone was using him to hurt her by sending those articles.

She squeezed the skin of her arm, transforming her emotions into physical pain. People constantly seemed to want to hurt her. But she was hurting herself, too, by watching this movie. By letting it trigger her trauma.

Hyde peered over at Jackie. He'd done it regularly during the movie, catching her gaze, but she'd crumpled into a ball. She clung to the sofa's thick armrest. Her legs were tucked beneath her, and her eyes peeked out from her arms. His stomach had tensed at the gorier scenes, but her reaction made no sense. Horror movies never used to faze her. Blood could splatter all over the screen, and she didn't flinch. She'd yawn.

He slid closer to her on the sofa and eased his hand over her shoulder. She screamed and jumped to her feet. Her face went pale, and she stared at him, unblinking.

"Jackie—I'm sorry. I'm really sorry." He backed up to his corner of the sofa to give her space. "I didn't mean to spook you."

"You have nothing to apologize for," she said, but her breaths were raspy. She snatched the remote and shut off the TV. "I was an idiot for thinking I could do this. I can't … and I can't hide from it anymore, either. "

He hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. Tugging on them helped control his own breathing. The movie had gotten his heart mildly pumping, but Jackie's fear sped it into overdrive. His instinct had been right. She was in more trouble than she'd let on. "Hide from what?"

"'Point of No Return'." She leaned against the sofa's armrest but didn't sit down. "I'm ready to show you what the song means to me, but it'll change everything between us. You have to understand that." She picked at the Band-Aid on her knuckles. "And I have to accept it."

Show him, not tell him. Whatever that meant, he wouldn't play guessing games.

"Steven?" she said.

He scratched his cheek. "I'm not goin' anywhere."

"You will."

Her certainty smashed into his chest like a big rig. He'd left her to fend for herself sixteen years ago. It was an unforgivable act, spurred by an equally unforgivable act: beating Kelso into a coma. She still didn't understand why he'd left. She hadn't puzzled the truth together from his songs, and he hadn't explained it. Never planned to, either.

First, do no harm.

His scratching migrated to his neck and back. Some of his hair fell in front of his face, and he shoved it behind his head. "I stranded you before. I get that, but did you kill anyone I love?"

She squinted at him. "What kind of question is that?"

"I'll take that as a no. Did you almost kill someone I love?"

"Of course not, but—"

"Show me."

Her nails dug at the the Band-Aid on her knuckles. She was stalling and coping with her stress similarly to him. He quit scratching his skin and offered her his hand. She accepted, closing her fingers around his palm.

"Why didn't you ask me to stay close in Alkali?" he said. It had been darker in that dessert than in Truwood Park, Michigan, where she'd begged him not to let her go.

"I didn't have to ask. I knew you'd stay close."

"I was out of my mind that night. Unreliable."

Her grip tightened on his hand. "You weren't out of your heart. I put my faith in that." He raised both his eyebrows in response, and she said, "This will be darker than any desert or forest."

"I'll stay close. Show me."

She withdrew her hand, and her gaze dropped to the floor. She wiggled her socked toes, and he expected her to retreat, but she whispered, "Okay."