Firstly I want to say thank you to those who read i'll feel the sickness less and less - I was very hesitant to return to fanfiction and your reviews and kudos have meant more to me than you could possibly know.
CW for implied/referenced child abuse and use of the word "queer" in a derogatory manner. If I've missed any tags, especially for content that some may find triggering or upsetting, please do let me know!
Title from "Thumbs" by Lucy Dacus. This is for my "Thumbs" and "Kyoto" girlies - I love you.
November 1983
Steve Harrington is not a man of many words.
"Fuck!"
But fuck is one of them.
His headlights illuminate the shiny black exterior of Richard Harrington's Mercedes-Benz. Steve's '83 BMW sticks out like a sore thumb in the Hawkins High parking lot, sure, but on the rare occasion his father parades his own gaudy toy through the streets of Hawkins he risks causing an accident with all the head-turning. Steve hasn't seen it in nearly a week, forgot to expect it, to prepare himself for it.
All too soon, his parents are home.
Steve pulls in alongside the vehicle with room to spare, tires quiet on the pavement, but the blue-white light spilling out of the front window onto the neatly maintained shrubs that frame the porch tells him that slipping up the stairs to his bedroom while his parents sleep, neither of them the wiser, is not an option. Still, he's slow to cut the engine - the clock reads 2:35 AM - and sits in the quiet for just a moment more.
Officer Powell had driven him from the hospital to the Byers' to collect his car, Chief Hopper apparently being MIA and the other parents having already pried their protesting children from Will Byers' bedside. Nancy had shot him an apologetic grin as her mother shepherded her and a brooding Mike to the family Station Wagon. The ride was quiet, thankfully, although Steve would swear Powell kept shooting guilty glances his way in the rear-view mirror. He has an idea of why.
He'd gotten the usual phone call on Thursday, the "we'll deal with this when we get home, Steven" phone call that typically follows a complaint from Hawkins PD or any other reminder of their son back in Hawkins his parents find distasteful. His father's voice is always even, and he never says "goodbye," just hangs up and leaves Steve to his shaking hands.
"Who cares? Screw 'em," he'd told Nancy when she asked if he'd gotten in trouble over the beers. It was easy enough to convince himself that he meant it, with his parents halfway across the country and his girlfriend halfway-mourning her best friend. Now he stares at his split knuckles where they still grip the steering wheel and can't find that attitude within himself.
He's finally still - save for one bouncing knee - for the first time tonight. It doesn't last long; the dark creeps in and unease chases him from the quiet confines of his car and up the drive to the front door. He's never been afraid of the dark, but he is afraid of monsters. Which are, apparently, very real. He's also afraid of what lies on the other side of the door, pauses for a moment as though he can't decide which scares him more. The part of him that's always felt like a guest in his own home whenever his parents are around wants to knock.
Instead, he slips into the house with the ease of a teenage boy who's climbed through his fair share of high school girls' bedroom windows without waking any protective fathers. The door closes with a click. He toes his shoes off, and waits.
He can hear the clink of ice in a glass. He mentally places his parents in the sitting room, but there's a roaring in his ears when he listens too intently. He shakes the echo (the memory) from his head and lets his eyes drift to the staircase landing, but he doesn't move.
Steve feels so much like a child, standing in the entryway with his head tucked, waiting to be scolded. He wishes he could feel embarrassed, but exhaustion is heavy on him like a blanket and instead his chin dips half an inch further.
"Steven?" That's his cue. "Come here, please." Diana Harrington's voice is soft but carries through the house with a ping. Steve thinks of windchimes. He makes his way slowly to the sitting room where he finds her seated in a stiff armchair, a glass of wine held between her thin fingers.
Steve thinks she may have been pretty once, knows she is well-manicured and has slipped into middle age with an expensive grace, but her eyes are clouded glass. Her features are more porcelain than flesh, and he knows she's just as breakable, though she'd never admit so much in words. His mother is a doll his father keeps; you have to be alive to be pretty.
It's showtime.
His cheeks pull up and out, mouth widening into some distortion of his patented King Steve grin. His parents have never been especially charmed by him, though, and the smile isn't fitting his face right anyway.
"Hey mom, dad - look, I -"
"Bit late, isn't it son?" His father's voice is level, there's a practiced calm to it, but Steve can feel there's something brewing beneath. His father spins a glass of whiskey in one hand, the other tucked into his trouser pocket where he leans against the bar, the illusion of casual.
Steve's hand starts for his hair, a nervous habit, but stops halfway and drops to his side before he can be chastised for fidgeting. He focuses instead on propping up one side of his grimace.
"It's late, I know it's late, and I'm really sorry, dad. I was just-"
"Steven, what happened to your face?" his mother's disapproving voice pings again, and he looks at her with something like pleading, as though she'd ever stood between him and his father's anger before. "You're not getting into fights again, are you?"
Steve doesn't "get into fights" - not in the traditional sense, at least. He'll take a punch or two when Tommy gets himself in over his head, or if Carol starts something she can't finish with some jock who won't hit a girl, but he doesn't go around swinging his fists over nothing. He's not a pacifist by any means, but there's a reason he's King; it's not so much that Tommy gracefully stepped aside as that they both realized maintaining a pecking order required some sense of order his restless fists were incompatible with.
Now Steve can feel his parents' eyes rake over his mottled face as if they've only just noticed it had largely changed colors in the week they'd been away. He'd practically forgotten himself, but the bruises throb under their gaze and remind him that his face hurts and his head hurts and his body hurts and his heart is aching and he'd desperately like to crawl into bed and sleep through Christmas at the earliest.
He wants to say I told a boy whose brother maybe died he was a screw-up like his father and I'm scared I would have said anything just to get him to hit me so that I could hit back and isn't it ironic that I'm screwed up in all the ways you are maybe we're all doomed to become our fathers maybe-
But he doesn't. Instead he says, "it's nothing. A misunderstanding."
"A misunderstanding did all this?" His father chuckles, gestures loosely at Steve's face with the hand still holding his glass of whiskey, doesn't spill a drop. "Must have been some misunderstanding."
"We worked it out, we talked." They hadn't, not really. Steve figured fighting monsters together made him and Jonathan - if not quite friends - at least friendly enough to delay an apology by a few days.
"Who's we?" Steve's skin itches.
"Dad-"
"Come on now, Steven, be reasonable. I'm just curious who the kid is, looks like he got a few good hits in, that's all. Who was it?" The smile on his father's face is acidic.
"Jonathan Byers," he says.
Steve meets his father's gaze after a beat and, for just a second, marvels in the anger he finds burning in it. But his father's hand twitches at his side and his lips are curled back and Steve knows the anger isn't protective, it's territorial. He can't help but wonder what his father wouldn't give to have been the one to paint blue and purple and red across Steve's face.
The stare dissolves into a sneer. "Lonnie's boy did that? I always took him for a queer, don't tell me this was over some girl."
"Nancy, dad. Nancy Wheeler. And Jonathan isn't- whatever. It doesn't matter, I smoothed things over." Steve is desperate to end this conversation, though it's hopeless. The mention of Nancy sends his heart fluttering in an unpleasant way.
His father's face returns to something considering, like he's struggling to complete a puzzle. "It doesn't matter? Is that right?"
He wants to say of course it doesn't matter because monsters are real and they're here in Hawkins and I don't mean the human kind I mean the kind of monster that has talons and no face and stands nine feet tall over the girl you think you might love and the boy you worry she might-
But he doesn't. Steve is shit at math but he's weighed these odds enough times to know that silence is usually the right answer, so he says nothing.
"See, I think it matters quite a bit." His father takes a sip of whiskey, watches the amber liquid as he swirls his glass and turns away to walk slowly back towards the bar. "Your mother and I are valued members of this community; my own father worked beneath his father to make something of our family name, and I think I've done a damn good job of upholding their legacy. It means something to be a Harrington. My son, however…" He turns to Steve, points to him with a wagging finger, "my son, whose lifestyle I fund, who treats our home like some kind of frat house while we're away, gets his ass kicked by some limp-wristed nobody. How do you think that makes me and your mother look? The whole town, all of my associates, knowing we raised some sort of imbecile?"
"I- I'm sorry, dad. It wont happen again, promise."
"You're damn right it wont happen again." His voice is low, but Steve flinches as though he's been slapped. "I don't know what's gotten into you lately, but it ends now. Cut the bullshit and start behaving like someone worthy of respect - like a goddamn Harrington, or lose all the perks of being one. I think you'd be in for a rude awakening. Got it?"
"Yes, sir," Steve breathes. He's eyeing the landing again, though, and it doesn't go unnoticed.
"We're not done here," his father growls. "Your mother and I get come home from our business trip, exhausted, and are greeted by one of Jim Hopper's lackeys on the phone, saying he needs to speak to me. Do you have any idea what he needed to speak to me about, Steven?"
Powell's guilt. Fuck.
"Somehow you've tangled yourself up in two separate missing persons cases, not sure how you managed that, including some girl disappearing from our own backyard while you had your way with the Wheeler girl upstairs."
"It wasn't like-"
"Oh?" His father takes a step forward. "Enlighten us, then, Steven. What was it like?"
He wants to say it was like I sent my classmate outside to die but I didn't mean to I didn't mean to you have to believe me I didn't mean-
But he doesn't. Anything he might have said is caught in his throat as it hits him that Barb disappeared just days ago even though it feels like he's lived a lifetime since then. Steve Harrington is an idiot, so nobody tells him much, but Nancy had told him enough - gone - to know that her best friend hadn't just gone missing. It's too much. His head is swimming and he can't help but wonder if she screamed and he hadn't heard.
"Because from what I understand you'd charmed Ms. Wheeler into your bedroom, meanwhile some girl-"
"Barbara."
There's a crack just an inch from Steve's ear and in a moment shards of glass and drops of whiskey are raining down on him.
Richard Harrington had gone to Yale on a baseball scholarship. He boasted at every opportunity about his 101 mph fastball this many years later. Steve knows his father could have struck him square in the middle of the forehead had he wanted to. His father wants him to know it.
Steve shields his face from the sharp spray, some dormant self-preservation instinct awoken enough that he cowers, and he knows this is a mistake immediately.
"Stand up!"
He does. Steve Harrington does as he's told because Steve Harrington is a leader who practically begs to follow. His spine straightens and he looks at his father and feels nothing, even while his body vibrates in place, trembling hands betraying him.
The considering returns to his father's face, replacing the rage so quickly Steve might have doubted it was ever there at all if it weren't for the broken glass. With a hand outstretched, he approaches, and Steve barely contains a flinch. Steady fingers cup his jaw with a certain tenderness, as if he is some precious, fragile thing. He holds his breath, stares dead at the space between his father's eyes when he finally speaks.
"Are you scared of me, Steven? You'll run around town, picking fights with all sorts - batty Joyce Byers' queer son of all people-"
"Don't call them-"
" - but I can see you for who you are, Steven, and that's a goddamn coward."
Pain explodes across Steve's face as his father suddenly digs his thumb into the soft flesh beneath his cheekbone. He practically whimpers, it feels as though the bones that make up his eye socket and nose were knocked loose by Jonathan's fist and are now shifting under the pressure of his father's fingers.
"You take after your mother that way."
And suddenly the hand is gone and his father is arms-lenth away. Steve blinks back fireworks from his vision.
"Get your act together." It's a command and a threat and a dismissal all in one but Steve clings to the latter, nods stiffly and then turns and bolts up the stairs as quickly as he dares. He can hear a new drink being poured but doesn't turn back to check whether his mother is polishing off the bottle of wine or his father found a new glass to hold his whiskey.
Steve leaves the door to his room open because he knows his father will visit to give him his sentencing, and leaves the big light on because he is afraid of monsters - which are real - and not the dark.
He doesn't want to think - not about his father, or Nancy and Jonathan's bleeding palms, or Barb's screams, or the gaping wet mouth of- so he doesn't. He imagines erasing a chalkboard over and over in his mind, a trick Nancy taught him once when he mentioned trouble sleeping, and washes up for bed as best he can without making eye contact with himself in the mirror. He slips between the sheets and waits and erases the chalkboard over and over and over again.
Still, he jumps when his father's knuckles rap against his bedroom door frame.
His father doesn't wait for his wide eyes to narrow. "Three weeks. No friends, no phone calls, no television, no credit card." He swipes Steve's wallet from atop his dresser and pulls out the shiny black card, spins it between his fingers before sliding it into the front pocket of his suitjacket with a pat. Shit, when was the last time Steve stocked the fridge?
"You will leave this house in the morning for school and return home immediately after basketball practice, no stops along the way. In the afternoons you'll be working on your college applications once you've finished any homework or studying that needs to be done. Do you understand, Steven?"
"I usually drive Nancy to school-"
"Do you understand, Steven?"
He swallows. "Yes, sir."
"Ms. Wheeler can find herself another ride to school, I'm sure. Perhaps the Byers boy."
Steve bristles, but doesn't take the bait.
His father reaches for the light switch as he turns to leave, pauses.
"You know I'd never hurt you, right?"
There's bile in Steve's throat. "Yeah, dad. 'Course."
The lights go out.
Bonding and comfort are coming I promise I'll do my best to take care of you!
I cannot express how much I appreciate any kudos or comments, critical or otherwise. I have a few ideas for other works and a longfic I am very excited about is brewing so would love to hear what people do/do not enjoy or would like to see from me.
Take care of yourselves!