Archive of Our Own

Years before, before Eddie and before Robin, before he'd nearly died and miraculously returned. Before Billy and before the hole that made his thoughts sink down deeper to where almost no one could find, Steve had met Jonathan. 

The problem really had been, the way it always happened to Steve, that he hadn’t only met him the once. 

Steve and Jonathan had grown up in the same small town, before everything— the woods back behind their houses connecting in a way that made it easy to play down lazy streams and hide out in muddy banks. They’d maybe been friends, at one point. Back when the fact Jonathan owned a slingshot and could shoot acorns off the trees was the coolest thing any kid in their town had ever done, and when Steve’s penchant to stay out as late as Jonathan was allowed to made him neat and fun. 

(Steve had only had two friends: one his parents had been proud for him to have, who’d maybe started the tear in his brain except for the ways it had always been there underneath; another he wasn’t allowed to tell them he had at all, probably his first friend. His only friend before Robin.) 

They’d both gotten dragged into the program, interestingly. Different times, different reasons. Steve and Jonathan, juxtaposed against the backdrop of woods and river water, tied up now with metal and lakes. It might have been a nice reunion moment in between the overhead lights bearing down on them both and the metal floor grating under their boots— might have been that quick catch breath of relief knowing someone else from Hawkins was here, someone from the same quarry rock side path and tree-lined school yard here in the middle of this impossible war. It might have been. 

Steve and Jonathan didn’t stop being friends because of the monsters, though. Or maybe they hadn’t fallen because of the Kaiju. Something about the way Steve was raised: about the way Tommy was; about the way Steve had been told to shut up and smile, and that Joyce Byers was an unkempt woman who let her hooligan sons do whatever they wanted; about the way his father had found the slingshot Jonathan had let him borrow, carved by the handle with his initials, and grounded him for a month. 

Probably more likely, it was because of that hole at the back of Steve’s mind; that nothing, the unnamable space in him that had crept up and stole things sometimes, constantly decaying outwards, making all the thoughts he couldn’t have spit out like venom. Maybe it was the way that Jonathan had looked at him that day in the park the same way Dustin looked at the monster in the alley way all those years later. Not that it mattered. The point was: they’d been friends once, and then Steve had ruined it by being himself. Or the very next thing to himself, the thing that was more rotted out and hollow but wore his own face perfectly. 

Funny how he’d fit himself into it to make Tommy stay and lost Jonathan with it. Funny how it hadn’t ever been real enough to make Tommy stay either. 

“You two can bunk up,” their director had said, under the overhead lights that made everything feel underwater. Blue and aquamarine and silver. “You’re both from Indiana, makes it easy. One checkbox.” 

Steve had looked over, across the gap, and thought, tiny creeks in the summer time in between the shady spots of the trees, picking dirt out of his fingernails from where they’d scratched up pebbles to load up his slingshot, investigating worms because Jonathan had a book on bugs and they could figure out what types they all were if they read close enough to the pages . He’d thought, sleepovers they never actually got to have, and pretending he didn’t know him in the hallways, and laughing when Tommy shoved him too hard into the railings . He thought of the way most of their hometown was still the same, too far inland, but they were here anyways like Hawkins had turned upside down and shook them straight out. 

Jonathan had looked back, dark eyes hardening and a shadow darkening between them, and turned away. 

The thing was, Steve had lost his only real partner the first time he’d forgotten for a second. The first time he’d chased after a thought. Tommy had seen too much behind the curtain, after fourteen odd years of knowing everything about each other, and decided whatever Steve was underneath wasn’t worth remembering. Transferred out as soon as he got the go ahead. Steve was entirely alone in the underbelly of this facility, tethered down only by the thin line of Nancy and Barb having been through the cadet program with him, too. Nancy and Barb who were so drift compatible they spent more of their time with their heads hunched down and practically fused together, and a Barb who thought he sucked. 

Steve currently, partnerless and functionally useless as a byproduct. So-called Golden Boy, scrapping for whatever came next.

Steve was lonely, was the crux of it. He was shouldering an unknowable threat behind his eyes that had been enough to ruin the only last friendship he had, but neither of those things mattered. What had mattered was that Steve had been in a Jaeger once, and was partnerless, and Jonathan was new and they were both from the same boiled over, bleached dry hometown. Easy paperwork. 

He wasn’t expecting them to be friends, or even talk, really, but— there was a part of him that wanted to show he wasn’t the guy who cared about designer shoes anymore, or how to impress Denise at the end of the hallway, or any of the social ladder bullshit that had dragged that hard line between them in Steve’s mind in the first place. 

Something that wanted Jonathan to see him, again, this new Tommy-less version of him, and validate that it was worth something. 

Their bedroom was as much a metal box as any of the spaces he’d bunked up in since he turned sixteen, but it felt icier with Jonathan’s pointed cold shoulder. Steve sighed as he trailed in, hand on his neck. 

“Look, okay. Can we— can we cut the shit? Are we allowed to do that?” Steve tried, which only made Jonathan’s shoulders lock up higher. “I didn’t— I don’t mean, fuck, I’m starting this all wrong.” 

“What shit , Steve,” Jonathan asked, not really a question at all. “That was high school, this is the end of the world. You don’t need to make sure my feelings weren’t hurt because you didn’t want to sit at the same lunch table as me, alright.” 

“You say that, but I mean— Come on man, you looked at me like I kicked your dog out there.” 

Jonathan snorted; it wasn’t a nice sound. “Whatever.” 

Steve clenched his hand at his side, unclenched it. Thought a thousand insignificant things backwards. “I don’t hang out with Tommy anymore. He kind of thinks I suck, actually.” 

Jonathan’s white t-shirt in the overhead lights looked grey-blue as he pulled things out of his tiny beat up suitcase. There was a tiny stitch at the neck, something that looked homemade. Steve remembered Joyce as being friendly; she’d worked at the general store he bought comics from sometimes. Once, she’d given him a nickel when his had gotten stuck in the candy machine. He wasn’t supposed to like her though, so he hadn’t, but she’d been nice. He remembered hoping, in that moment, that she was alright somewhere out there. That Jonathan hadn’t signed up for all of this because of another grave the end of the world had forced him to dig. 

“Congratulations, Steve. Sorry it took the apocalypse to realize that,” Jonathan said flatly. 

Steve winced. “Harsh, man.” 

Jonathan whirled towards him, eyebags dark and deeply set in the shadows of his face. His glare was electric, though. “Can you just— Can we get through this without the small talk? You feel bad about being the bully? Congratulations, glad it fits in with your complex to be here, you know. Helping people. That’s great, doesn’t mean I have to buy it.” 

That had sucked, a bone-deep-seen-all-the-way-through kind of sucked that he didn’t get too much anymore. No one knew him here well enough to try to see anything about him anymore; he wasn’t sure anyone ever had. His face had felt overly warm, hands useless at his sides. “Right,” he said, stupidly. “I didn’t. Think you would, I mean. Just— sorry.” 

Jonathan stared at him, blank and angry. “Sure. Apology accepted, water under the bridge. Just leave me alone.” 

It started a pattern. Mornings, Steve would get up early— aiming to get a jog in at the gym before genuine training began— and catch the tail end of a completely evil eyed glare from Jonathan on his side of the room. On one memorable occasion, even a thrown sock at his head. 

By breakfast, Jonathan would be dressed and presentable, if not looking entirely displeased in the mess hall. Steve sat away from him when Nancy and Barb weren’t around, as if the both of them could pretend they wouldn’t forcibly be in close quarters less than an hour later. 

Then, training. Typically they walked through hand to hand drills, endurance testing, then up to the labs for readings that Steve never got to actually see. Most of the ‘dome was paired off besides him and Jonathan, but Owens ensured that everyone sparred against each other in the off chance a partner was down. Mainly, this meant Steve didn’t have to actually fight Jonathan. 

It didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t fighting , though. 

“Can’t we move on from basic takedowns?” Steve complained one afternoon to their trainer. “Think we’ve beaten those to death by now.” 

“No.” Their trainer, an older woman with a severely pulled back bun frowned. “Sloppiness is not a skill I intend to have ingrained.” 

Steve rolled his eyes. “Can the people who have it ingrained move on, then?” 

“Leave it, Harrington,” Jonathan said, quietly enough that Steve figured it was really only intended for him. 

“Got a problem, Byers?” he snarked back, loudly.  

Jonathan met him head on, across the training mats and unflinching. “Who even says you have it down?”

“Who says I don’t?” 

Jonathan glanced at Steve’s sparring partner, before raising an eyebrow. “Your form on that last throw says you don’t. You over rotated and threw Heather into her side instead of her back.” 

A flash of white hot embarrassment cracked through him as Heather shuffled beside him, giving him a shrug. “I mean, it still worked!” 

Nancy gave Steve a quick glance, flattened her lips. “It’s not the worst technique,” she tried. 

“But you keep doing that, and you’ll pop out your shoulder in the process. Isn’t that right, ma’am?” He looked up at their trainer, who scratched something sharply on her clipboard before folding her hands behind her. 

“We will run them again,” she said with a nod, which was essentially the same as agreeing. Steve glared at Jonathan, who carefully turned his focus back to his respective partner. Suck up, he thought to himself. Teacher’s pet.   

He threw the next shoulder roll better, though. 

After training they’d get paired off to shadow various engineers sometimes; Owens felt it was important rangers knew how their own bots worked, even if they wouldn’t necessarily have any of the resources to fix shit on the go. 

The way Steve looked at it, he was just the brain of the thing. The suit made up the connectors— the little neurons and linkages, and the rest was all veins and skin and bones. It would be him, though, he knew. The way that drifting and piloting worked, he’d feel it if any part of the wire snapped, if the metal dented. Diving in the way the mechanics did was like analyzing his own heartbeat, in a way. Maybe that was morbid— thoughts like that made Tommy tell him to shut up. He kept them to himself now, mostly. 

Getting paired up with Jonathan at first had been stone cold silence. Terse nods and awkward space. Then once, Steve had reached for a wire that was still live and Jonathan had slapped his hand away so fast neither of them seemed to know what to do. It opened something, though. 

“Can’t you keep your hands to yourself? I’m not here to babysit,” Jonathan grumbled, face red. Steve felt like he’d maybe touched the current anyways, hands flexing like a shock had actually lanced through them instead of just Jonathan’s calloused fingers on his wrist. 

He sniffed, brows crashing together. “We’re going to have to fix these one day, sue me if I wanna help.” 

“Since when can you fix anything?” Jonathan threw back, which— ouch. 

Steve scoffed, “Since I’ve been in the program for five years, that’s when, asshat.” 

“And you grab at a live wire?” 

Steve can feel his face heat up. “I just said they taught me how to fix some stuff, okay? Not that I’m an engineer. I know I’m an idiot, thanks.” 

“Whatever.” Jonathan waved a hand, leaving even though their shift hadn’t actually ended yet. The girl they were shadowing, Eden, he thought her name was, watched them both with a vaguely pleased smile. 

If Steve had been watching, and not pushing back his bangs and focused on his own embarrassment, he might have noticed the way the conversation hit Jonathan, though. The quiet second of an inhale, eyes widening, running the numbers. He might have realized fifteen was an awfully young time to be signed up for pilot training to some people, that not everyone had a postcard in a duffel bag to remember home by. 

“You two are fun,” Eden said, quirking a brow. 

Steve bit his lip, wishing for just a moment about lightning strikes and natural disasters. 

The pattern was this: Jonathan hated him. Snuck in jabs whenever he could, and Steve snarked back. 

It got worse before it got better. Turns out, five years distance and a world shattering monster event didn’t change the fact that Jonathan knew things about him no one else here did— remembered things Steve wished he didn’t. Not that he said them, not that he was ever unkind or awful about it. Steve could see the thoughts like lantern glows behind a tent wall, the way Jonathan was brimming with all this knowing. 

Steve had been a bully, and he’d been bad at school, and his parents had picked him up and sent him off the first chance they had to make him look worth anything. He wasn’t going to be anything without that: he’d have been another asshole who peaked in high school and never learned how to give a shit about anything other than his own sorry state of affairs. It felt like Jonathan knew all these things, could see the Hawkins outline on him where everyone else saw golden boy crowns and capes. 

It infuriated him. 

Jonathan hadn’t been there when Steve met Nancy— she’d been the first person to point out that he maybe had no idea what he was doing, s

aid that he was a good person for staying here anyway. She’d actually wanted to hear the stupid shit in his head, about that strange pull in his mind and the way he used to slide all the way down in the bath just to pretend he was lost, for a while. Jonathan didn’t know that he’d been so fucking startled by anyone caring about his poor little rich boy shit that he’d done everything he could to be the version she thought he was. 

(Not even Tommy, who was supposedly in his head, liked to talk about the part of Steve that played around with drowning. But she had Barb, and Barb knew more than that, and she didn’t like him either, so it didn’t matter.)

Of course Jonathan and Barb had got on fine, and Nancy too. They all had younger siblings, all had homes to go back to, all had something they were fighting for that meant something. Something more than redeeming themselves, because that wasn’t a good enough reason to be here. That was a shitty stupid reason, nevermind that he hadn’t had a choice to begin with. 

Poor little rich boy though, right? None of them had a choice; that was the state of things. 

It does bother him, though, as much as he doesn’t want it to. Jonathan had once looked up at Steve and thought he was half decent. He’d had all these big adventure plans for the two of them drawn out on his pieces of paper. Talked about getting a camera so he could keep all the moments that felt bigger than he could draw, dragging Steve along with him. They were going to go traveling when they were older, all the far off places with the bugs in Jonny’s book. Steve would be an astronaut, and Jonathan would send him pictures, and they’d travel around the world until there were no more pictures left to take. 

He’d always thought about that Jonathan—Jonny—like a kid he kept in a photograph. Immovable even for all the ways the world kept shifting. Jonny and his camera, Jonny and the school paper, Jonny and his little brother who looked at him like he was the world. 

Maybe some part of him hoped there was a younger Steve tucked up in his mind too, a boy who charged into the darker parts of thickets to chase away the scary noises for him, who ooh ’ed and aww ’ed in all the right places and said he’d save up his allowance to help Jonny get the camera he wanted, too. Maybe he’d thought for all the ways he’d been warped and ruined on the outside, Jonathan would get that it wasn’t all the way through. That maybe he’d see Steve, still. 

Maybe he did, was the thing. Maybe Steve’s the one who’d thought any of the saving the world stuff meant anything. 

“Why don’t you just admit you think you’re better than us, huh?” Steve says one day, on the end of an eye roll. Heart bracketed in fucking shards of glass in his chest. He didn’t even know why he was angry, really, except for the way Jonathan had always done everything right and Steve had just been wrong. Except for the fact Jonathan had a home and a mom who loved him, and Steve just had Steve and he didn’t even want him.

Maybe it’s like this: you know a kid your whole life who’s shy and sweet and a little weird. You’re friends with him, you’re his only friend, and you ditch him the moment you’re told you should. It doesn’t make the kid colder, it doesn’t make him mean; you resent him your whole life because it made you worse and him better. 

Jonathan fucking snarls, eyes bright. “Lay. Off. Steve,” he bites, each syllable clear and loaded. Steve’s hands clench at his sides— they’re in the middle of the lunch room and it’s half cleared out, but Nancy and Barb are there. They aren’t alone enough for— for whatever this is, he knows. It makes him more angry. 

“Come on, you walk in here every day and point out a thousand things we’re all doing wrong. That your old ‘dome did better. Like your reason for being here is so much better than all of ours. It’s obvious! Get over yourself, man.” 

“Steve—” Nancy admonishes.

Jonathan steps closer, all waves of thunder and fury in the tight lines of his face. “I said lay. Off. ” 

Steve pushes a hand in the center of his chest, just to knock him back a step. “You wanna be the hero so bad, Byers. You haven’t even been in a real fight yet.” He catches the twitch in Jonathan’s face. “That’s it, isn’t it? You save the day and prove everyone wrong? Man, you pretend you’re here because you’re so much more noble than the rest of us—”

“Shut the fuck up.” Jonathan is furious now. Steve’s tripping into dangerous territory.

He can feel his face melting into something unaffected, vaguely entertained and annoyed all in one. A ghost wearing his own face for just a moment— 

“You’ll still be from the same shitty small town as me, pal. Nothing’s going to change that.” 

Jonathan’s face levels out, going cold. Frozen. “I’m here to save my little brother, you absolute ass . Thanks for proving me right.” 

He turns and slams his way out of the hall. No one moves. 

Maybe it was always like this: you were the school bully, things didn’t go the way you planned. You were always the bully. You never changed. 

Steve wasn’t really mad about it under the surface— hard to be, when it felt like karmic balance there underneath. Steve is a dick, Steve ruins a kid’s life because he’s afraid to lose the last ounce of respect his father pretended to hold for him, Steve eats shit over and over and over in various states until he’s finally dug down deep enough he can start climbing back out. The sun burns on, no one cries home to their parents. The postcard crumples down deeper at the bottom of his duffle bag. 

Jonathan had once been one of the best people Steve knew, and remained still, infuriatingly patient and thoughtful and stuck on being exactly himself even though it won him absolutely no social favors. Not giving a shit about how odd his music tastes were or how he wasn’t invited to any of the big parties or never got a date. And he’d been right about all of it, the most aggravating part, he’d been right to think none of it mattered, because the world had ended anyways. Because being popular with girls and being a shoe-in for the basketball team and being wealthy had meant less than dirt the second he’d walked in those metal doors anyway. Because Steve hadn’t been a good person before this, and probably still wasn’t.

They still share the same fucking bunk at the end of the world, and Steve still can’t be worth a damn.

He stays out as late as he can that night, less because he’s avoiding whatever consequence there is and more because he knows Jonathan hasn’t figured out all the best hiding spots here yet. If he needs to cool off, he’ll be in their room. Might have locked the door from the inside. 

Steve knows he went too far, that it’s his fault— has always been his fault, at the meat of it. Jonathan had asked for a friend, and Steve had told him to fuck off out of nowhere and never looked back. Maybe he just thought it would matter less, with the stakes as they are. Maybe they had, until he’d gone and put his foot right through that stained glass window. 

The door isn’t locked when he gets back, standing in the doorway again in the off blue metal walls of their room. Jonathan’s pretending to be asleep, but Steve can tell he’s tense all over. 

“You were right,” he says softly, like he believes him anyways. He sighs, it’s always too silent down here. No passing cars or clocks ticking— just the hum of electricity and pipes through the walls for company. It feels oppressively loud like this. 

He pads into the room, sitting on his bed with a quiet puff of air. Jonathan still hasn’t moved, but it doesn’t matter. “It sucks that you’re right,” he says with a sad laugh. “I thought you were wrong, too.” 

He’d half-expected the next morning that Jonathan would be missing from their lunch table, but he can see him tucked beside Nancy and Barb first thing. Steve shuffles himself down beside them anyways, because Nancy said she wanted him there for some reason or another, and because it was better than sidling up with the other Rangers twice his age with scars he didn’t much like thinking about. Jonathan hides a disgruntled wince behind a bite of food and pointedly looks away, which is fine because— well. They didn’t know each other anymore, so it was fine if Jonny— Jonathan , hated his guts. Colleagues and whatever, he’d worked with shittier guys. They can tolerate each other, and Steve can pretend to swallow down everything else that comes with it.

“Jeeze, tomorrow is going to be fun,” Barb remarks with an unconcealed eye roll. 

Steve, who’d been mindlessly pushing around the baby potatoes on his plate, blinks up at her, frowns semi-instinctively, then frowns again with genuine confusion. “Tomorrow? What’s tomorrow?” 

Nancy shoves Barb’s shoulder with a faintly apologetic smile. “She just means— the try outs? Did Owens not tell you?” 

Steve stares blankly. Barb scoffs. “For your partner? You can’t just be floating around here forever, you know. There is a point you’ll have to actually be in one of those things.” 

“But I thought—” 

Barb levels him a look, the same one she always leveled him. “Tommy was a dick, okay.” Which was not what Barb usually followed that look up with. Steve stares harder, somehow. “He was a coward and he took the first option out as soon as he could. Doesn’t mean they aren’t going to saddle you up with someone else.” 

“Tommy leaving doesn’t mean you’re a bad partner,” Nancy cuts in. “They know that. Owens knows that. Just… they need to find someone you are compatible with, right? So… try outs. For new rangers, to see who you’d fit with.” 

“And I’m conveniently the only new ranger,” Jonathan says with a very palpably aggrieved sigh.

Steve blinks between them both. Nancy gives him another awkwardly tight smile. “Are they insane?”

Jonathan scowls harder, and Steve scrambles. “I mean— Not like— Okay, that sounded super shitty.” You hate me, he thinks. It’s just that you hate me. 

“I guess you have nothing to worry about then,” Barb adds, unhelpfully. “If they’re insane then you won’t drift.” 

Then Steve will go back to being the lone loser in their trio, again. Plus Jonathan, potentially. 

Jonathan sighs again. “Look, it’s one spar. Then they’ll find you someone that works. Temporary.” 

Right, Steve thinks. Like a bandaid, or a car crash. Then again, not like having someone who already thinks the worst of you in your head could really hurt anything. Marginally better than having someone you thought knew you in there realizing that they don’t know you at all. 

Temporary, except for the fact that the next day, under the aquamarine and metal there was him and there was Jonathan and there was Owens with his clipboard. Just the three of them, and the order to start. Temporary, but for the way that Jonathan actually moves with more muscle and weight than Steve expected, and he’s maybe better at taking a hit than Jonathan had expected. The way they danced around the mat was brutal almost, in how it fit— two waves crashing into each other, something like supersymmetry, the calm in the center. 

Temporary, except for the way there was something there anyway. 

Jonathan swung a hit with his staff, Steve blocks with a loud smack of wood. They stare, a silent realization, a shifting of the order of things. Jonathan’s wide-eyed expression drops back to a glare, but for a moment, there’s a creek and dirt under his fingernails and that pleased and nervous awe when Steve said something right.

He remembers, almost horrifically clear, how easy it had been once— 

— they’d been thick with it, the dew of the summer and the late evening, sweat drying in the cool of the dark, splashing across the trickle of sunbaked water laughing. “You threw it too high!” Steve had laughed. “It’s stuck up there, we’ll never get it down.” 

“It has a string! You can, um, climb up a little and I’ll—” 

“You built your airplane with a string?” 

Jonathan sputtered, shrugging. “I— well, I thought it would be cool, if you could hold on and spin around and let it go?” 

Steve stopped, gaped. “Jonny that’s… such a rad idea. Woah, show me how to do that when we get it down!” 

Jonny grinned back, “You gotta be careful when you pull it though, the branches could break it.” 

“Course,” Steve said, sticking his tongue out in concentration as he started to climb. Bark against his palms, rough and—

— smooth in his palm, as he slid his grip lower. The wood in his hands was heavy, but he could get good leverage on a swing if he flicked it forward at the last second. 

Steve drops low, sweeps his leg up and— Jonathan skips over it, turning into a kick that Steve catches, twists. Throwing Jonathan off-kilter for a moment, enough to bring his staff around. 

“Point,” he says, with a half-shrug. Jonathan pushes his bangs back, shooting a glance over at Owens, who dutifully writes on his clipboard. 

“Last one you’re getting,” Jonathan grinds out, sliding his stance wider. 

Steve can’t help the grin that slides into place. “Cocky, huh?” 

Jonathan gives a barely imperceptible shake of his head, gaze locked. “Just sure that I know your moves, is all.” 

 “Yeah? Think I only got one or two, do you?” Steve squints back, matching his stance, circling each other.

“Think you show your hand too much,” Jonathan says, moving forwards with a swing. Steve met it at the arc, immediately forced to take a step back as Jonathan shifts his grip and turned, pressing in instead of backing out. 

“Shit—” Steve gasps, as the wooden staff halted right above his collarbone. 

“Point.” Jonathan turns to walk back to his side of the mat. 

Steve wipes his brow, frowning. “You’re quick, I’ll give you that.” 

Jonathan just stares back, eyes dark and heavy, intensely serious for— 

— a kid his age. Made his face look haunted a little, like there wasn’t room for anything but the hollows of his bones and the thick fringe above his eyes. “We’re friends, right?” he said, slowly. Carefully, like it was a dangerous thing to even say out loud. 

“Yeah.” Steve shuffled his feet, dust of the gravel making tiny clouds around his shins. “Yeah, we’re friends. Course we are.” 

Jonny’s eyes tracked across his. He swallowed. “Okay. So that means, when school starts again, we’ll still be friends?” 

“Duh, why would school be any different?” 

Jonny looked older somehow, then, Steve remembered. Something pitying in his eyes, or worried, maybe. “It just is sometimes. Your friends don’t like me, so maybe you won’t either.” 

Tommy H was awfully mean about most of the other kids in their class. Especially the ones who weren’t laughing at his jokes, or didn’t care about his hot wheels or have cooler stuff he wanted. Jonny was shy and liked weird stuff and didn’t laugh, so Tommy H hated him. 

Steve scrunched his nose. “Maybe Tommy isn’t right all the time. Sometimes he isn’t very funny, I just laugh cause he wants me to.” 

Jonny shrugged. “Do you always have to do what Tommy wants?” 

He hadn’t thought of that before. “No, I don’t even do what my dad says all the time.” 

Jonny laughed a little. “Me neither. So… you promise? When we go to school? We’ll still be friends?”

Steve thought about the fading heat that meant class would start soon, the way summer always felt so long until you were all the way through it. He wasn’t really ready to let it go, to go back to Tommy at the playground and having to play all the games he thought were all right. He never wanted to play the games Jonny liked, and Steve liked those games. But Tommy was his friend, too. 

“I promise,” he said, easy as anything, the way kids do when they don’t know anything at all. “You wanna know a secret, Jonny? I think you’re my first best friend.” 

“I think you’re mine too,” Jonny smiled back—

—Jonathan looks empty, across from him. Blank and unblinking, careful. His swings are hard, but he telegraphs a lot of them, too. A pause in the wind up, something that was easier to track when you knew how much force would be behind it, too. They’d been circling for what felt like both minutes and hours, all bunched up and watered down. He didn’t know if he’d landed any further points. There were bruises he could feel piling on his arms from missing blocks, but he hadn’t been knocked over. He hadn’t yielded. Owens hadn’t made them stop either, and he didn’t know if that meant anything. 

“Getting tired, Byers?” Steve gasps, shaking his head back to knock his bangs back into place. 

Jonathan echoes the movement; his bangs are heavy, plastered to his skin. “Not a chance, Harrington.” 

Steve moves in this time, a rising tide, a swell of momentum and muscle— just going for the strength hit, just to push him back a step. Jonathan meets the hit, pushes back into it. Crashing together, knocking them both off course. Steve, split second thinking, hooks a foot around Jonathan’s ankle, just as he presses up and in with his staff, knocking Steve off balance. 

They fall into the mat, rolling over each other. Steve trying to throw Jonathan on his shoulders, uncenter his weight, at the same time as Jonathan links their thighs and turns . Throwing Steve sideways all at once.

A headrush, another crash— Steve, flat on his back. Jonathan leaning in and around him, panting, eyes wide. 

Steve lets the staff fall from his hands, wheezes a smile up at him. “Got me fair and square, Jonny.”

Jonathan looks at him owlishly, blinking hard. Suddenly he reels back, knees pressed on either side of Steve’s hips, still heaving with breath. 

“Match,” Owens says, stepping forwards. Jonathan scrambles back to standing, moving a solid few paces away as Owens helps Steve up. 

Steve tilts his head Jonathan’s way. “Good game. Guess you’ll have to look for someone who can keep up, huh.” 

Owens scoffs, “Do either of you know how long you’ve been here?” 

Minutes, he’d have said. Or maybe decades, an entire friendship stretched out and laid thin. Who’s to say, really. 

“It’s been two hours,” Owens continues, tapping his pen with a quiet tink tink tink on the metal clip. “Two hours and you nearly tied.” 

Steve moves over to the towels, rubbing one across his face with his back turned so he doesn’t have to process whatever Owens was trying to say where Jonathan could see it. “So?” 

“So,” Owens sighs. 

“Compatible.” Jonathan’s voice is barely there. Breathless and hushed in the large room, Steve almost misses it. Temporary, except for the way the words lodge themselves in the messy pulpy parts behind his ribcage and worm down his bones. 

Owens hums. “Won’t know until we try you out, but— Pretty damn sure it’s up there kiddos.” 

Somehow it made sense. Somehow Steve had known. Not that it mattered, not that Jonathan would want the leftover scraps of him that weren’t good enough the first go around— not that any part of it had ever been anything other than Steve’s fault anyways. To be matched in that unknowable brain way that the drift made with the one person he’d fucked up the most with. Yeah, it made sense. Karma. 

“What does that mean?” Steve had to ask, bite it out. “We try the drift out and we’re partners then? Jonathan doesn’t get a say?” 

He turns around, towel around his neck and bunched up in his hands, just in time to catch the flash-fire quick burn of Jonathan’s eyes on his before he glances away. 

“He does,” Owens concedes, scribbling something else on the clipboard. “His say was choosing to show up today, wasn’t it, Byers.” It isn’t really a question, Jonathan doesn’t really answer.  

“Get suited up, we’ll run you through the simulation after 19:00.”

There is a problem at the center of this. It’s the same problem— it’s the same story really— all the way down to the roots. Steve Harrington was a kid who chose wrong, and kept choosing wrong, until the world took away all of his choices. 

A riddle: If there’s only one path, and the path is good, does it make the person good? If they have no other paths, is it a choice?

Steve thinks: It matters that I keep walking. He thinks: It matters that there’s a path at all. He thinks he’s probably lying. 

Jonathan is a boy who’d had a field, an infinitude of directions, and he’d ended on the same one. Does it matter how Steve got there? Should it? 

The problem is the one that exists underneath everything. It’s the same problem and Steve can’t do anything to change it. Steve and his crown and his need for approval and his quiet houses. Jonathan seeing all the way through the looking glass. 

“You don’t have to,” Steve tries, standing in the doorway. “I know you and Nance also showed promising results, or whatever. They’d keep you for that reason, as a backup.” 

Jonathan is sitting on the bed again. He’s towards Steve this time. He’s looking at him, eyes heavy and serious and hollowed out by the overhead lights. 

“I know,” Jonathan says, slowly. It feels cautious. Steve’s not sure why. 

“So— I mean, I can tell Owens that it won’t work.” 

Jonathan’s expression doesn’t really change, more like a film settles behind his eyes. Something practically invisible but that reframes the whole image— a context, or a texture. “You want out that bad? They’d make you leave.” 

It doesn’t really matter, Steve thinks. Nancy’s the last person who gives half a damn about him anyways, and she’s got Barb. If he leaves he’ll just be the golden academy boy who couldn’t hold his first partner in a different base; same actor, different set. It wouldn’t mean anything. 

“They might not,” Steve shrugs, uncomfortable. It’s not a chivalrous thing he’s doing, it’s just— Jonathan doesn’t want this. Not to be forcibly refit to a puzzle piece that he’d thrown out years ago, not to be cornered into facing down his own bullies in the quiet of his head. Steve’s not entirely sure he could handle seeing it: that hatred up front and real in the drift, even though he’d deserve all of it. Maybe that’s exactly why he should; why it should be Jonathan’s choice. 

Jonathan does frown then, a split second. He’s leaned forwards with his elbows on his knees like he’s about to give Steve a pep talk, or a counseling session. Steel eyed and framed in shades of grey-brown and aquamarine. 

“You’d do it? Leave, I mean. If I said yes.”

Steve thinks: there’s a path here. There’s a choice, it’s just not mine. He nods anyway. The absolute very least he can offer, a fucking glass of water to a scorched earth. 

It makes Jonathan more unhappy, because of course it does. “Stop doing that.” 

“Doing what.” Steve frowns back, instinctive. 

Jonathan’s bangs swish around his forehead. “I don’t want that,” he says, annoyed. “Listen— okay. It was years ago, right? Highschool bullshit. Don’t act like it’d be some favor to me for you to wreck your whole career. There are lives counting on you doing this, you’re— look, you’re a good fighter. Your charts are insane. They need you. I’m not asking you to give that up.” 

Steve feels pinned down, that eye of the storm shifting and rolling past him. The crashing back down of the wave from limbo— just outside of gravity’s pull, almost reaching all the way up through the sky only to be pulled back down. 

“What— I’m not, I just— It’s your life, too, man.” A weak answer, probably. He doesn’t know what to even say to that or where to start realistically. It feels like an excuse, like he’s removing himself from the picture but stumbling over the dinner table chair on his way out. 

“I made a choice,” Jonathan says, intense eyes on his. “I know what I said yes to. Do you?” 

Steve thinks: I know what I said no to, back then. He thinks: We’re on the same path for very different reasons. He thinks: I don’t want you to know how bad I regret all of it.  

“Sure I do,” he croaks anyways. “Maybe the test was wrong anyways, right?” 

Jonathan looks frustrated. Steve thinks he could fill up his whole damn life with all the wrong things he keeps saying. “Sure, yeah. Could be.” 

The way things go at the ‘dome: you get up, you run tests, you plan out your days, and you hope there’s still a world to save by dinner. 

When the Kaiju alarms ring just beforehand, it makes sense. Barb and Nancy gear up, along with the older teams, and Steve tries not to feel anything about the way he sits behind. Jonathan’s tense at the loading bay beside him, at least. Less being marooned and more not catching the boat in the first place; he’s trying to remember this won’t be it forever, that he won’t always be standing behind. 

“Good luck.” Steve nods at Nancy. She gives him her constant pursed, pleased smile back, and nods. There’s a part of him that wonders if him and Nancy could have been something, once— they aren’t drift compatible, because they test everyone in case of back ups, but he knew sometimes people got together just because there was room in them. His parents probably had. Nancy was the same type of angry and lonely he was, underneath it all— she just chose to handle it the right way and left all the wrong choices for him. Barb and her had something else, anyway. 

They only have three Jaegers at this base, Barb and Nancy’s, and two older creaking things. Viper, a mechanical nightmare more made of dents than screws, is piloted by two near retirees— in as much as anyone retires in this line of work. Steve and Tommy were meant to replace them, with the funding Steve and Tommy’s families brought in enough to get them a newer bot and all. The two Rangers weren’t meant to be on the field anymore. Steve tries not to feel their eyes sliding off him like an indictment as they gear up. 

He clenches and unclenches his hands on the metal railing until the bay is empty. Just metal walls, off-blue lighting, and the tinny warped sounds of commands pumped in through every corridor. 

“You can’t wait here all day,” Jonathan says, semi-gruff. Maybe it’s the stress. It’s a category 3, afterall, which sometimes went either way. 

Steve clenches his jaw, his hands. He struggles to remember what it's like to have control over anything. “Not like I have anywhere else to be.” 

Jonathan sighs, quiet and angry. “Suit yourself.” 

When Steve was new to the program, when his test scores kept coming back sparkling bright and Tommy had made big plans about how many action figures would be made of their Jaeger, he’d gone out to the overhang by the ocean. It had been night, he remembers, because the line between sky and sea was indivisible— just a big long stretch of black in front of him, holes picked right out of it by starlight. 

He remembered telling himself that there was a purpose to all of it. That this was what he was meant to do, what was meant to happen. 

It felt like a promise, or a reassurance, maybe. A way of pretending the current he was stuck in was going to lead him somewhere warmer. 

It feels like a curse, now. To think that there will always be people needing to fight, and that he’ll never have enough of himself to help. 

The lights trip red, the aquamarine drops into danger. “—lost contact. Viper might be out, we have no readings—” 

“Harrington,” Owens voice cuts in. “Byers, down to the load out.” 

Red lights, Steve’s learned, mean a surprise. It means the plan not rolling out the way it was meant to. It means someone not coming home the same way they left. 

(Years later, he’ll start to notice the lights are more red than blue, then the way that they stop changing the colors at all.) 

Steve gets there at the same time as Jonathan, because he hadn’t really moved— evidently, neither had he. Their eyes meet just before Steve slams the doors open, wide eyed and unsure. 

“Suit up,” Owens says, instead of a greeting. He slaps a hand on both of their shoulders. The faces behind him, techs and scientists and training officers are silent, shuffling past in hurried steps even as alarms blare behind them. There’s a board, a picture of Snow Viper to the right, blinking and outlined in red. Barb and Nancy’s Jaeger is in green, heart rates still skipping brightly. He thinks about the near retirees, about the scars and the resigned distance in their eyes, the way Viper creaked when it stepped.

“Are they—” Steve tries, Owen’s lips purse and the hole in Steve’s brain ripples. They were only out on the field because Steve couldn’t— because Tommy—

“Miscategorized. Category four,” Owens says instead. It’s quiet around them— somber, Steve realizes, tense with the knowledge that these things they fight every day evolve back. That every win is also a fucking loss because they can never win the same way twice. 

Steve swallows and squares himself. Nancy and Barb are out there alone, is what this means at the core, against a category four that ripped clean through two experienced rangers. Shit. 

“We’re short handed,” Owens adds, “We’re going to run this; trial by fire. Introductions will have to wait for later. Get ready to drift boys.” 

Shit. 

“No problem,” Steve says, forcing a tilt to his lips as he nods at Jonathan. “We got this.” 

Steve performs best under pressure, after all. The sparring meant they had something worth testing— whatever shit Steve has under the welcome mat of his mind can’t be worth more than saving people to Jonathan, because Jonathan’s here for the right reasons. 

“Yeah,” Jonathan says shakily. “Steve Harrington in my head, what could go wrong.” 

Steve won’t chase anything, Jonathan won’t look deeper. It’ll be just over 50% a match enough to get the job done, and that will be it. It needs to work, so it will. That’s all there is.

They suit up in near silence, the voices overhead through the comms melding into a white static that seems to muffle out inside the head of Slugger. Her official name is something stupid, Rangefinder or Rage Winder, he doesn’t know. She’s old, mechanic in the way most bots aren’t these days, and packs a hell of a punch. Spikes on the outside of her arms like a shield, and aim better than any other Jaeger her generation. Steve wasn’t supposed to pilot her with Tommy; they were supposed to replace this one with the fancier digital interface marks that don’t supposedly shorten their pilots life spans. 

A funny joke, really. As if they have long enough to worry about radiation poisoning or anything other than the thousand foot maw of blue acid coming at them. 

Steve thinks, in a different world, in a universe where he’s actually found the right person to drift with— who he connects with in the same way that Nancy-and-Barb do— he’d think Slugger was perfect. 

Jonathan will have to do. If anything, else at least Jonathan already knows what he’s like. 

“It’ll be easy,” Steve says, sliding his helmet on as one of the techs locks him into place. Right before the connection hits, right before he loses the pretense of Jonathan believing anything he says. It’ll work, he thinks. Or it won’t.  

They’ll keep it separate. They’ll hold until they have to. It’ll be nothing. 

It’s not. It’s not nothing, and it’s terrifying and complete with how much it isn’t . Where Tommy had been a neat set of lines and drawers, Jonathan is a mountain. A natural disaster, a fucking landslide. The drift starts and it jumps into him and it takes— in a way it didn’t with Tommy, the way it never could , apparently. It’s like seeing color for the first time, it’s like seeing a new dimension— whatever he’d done before, it wasn’t this. 

Steve is standing in his suit, on the same side he did with Tommy, locking into the suit and there’s a voice calling for the power up cycle to start, and that they’re stabilized and then— 

He’s in the dark, he’s in a sunbeam; there’s a dried up river bed, the pebbles smooth and dry. It’s dark and his parents haven’t been home for hours and no one will know if he stays all night out there because it’s better than his room he hates and Tommy who tells him the things he likes aren’t cool. He’s somewhere else, a cozy lopsided living room and there’s plates shattering and yelling and giant brown eyes looking up at him from behind the crack of a door. He’s nowhere. 

“Steve,” he hears. He’s somewhere between five and seven, the counter is too tall to reach but there’s cookies up there and he’s determined. He’s in a hallway, leaning down a railing and hearing his father talk about reputations and upstanding decisions and how Steve isn’t anything like his heritage. 

Louder. “Steve!” 

He blinks, he’s in their shared room. Blue and teal and aquamarine trailing off the walls in waves— like he’s at the bottom of the sea looking up at the last bits of sun. Jonathan is still staring at him, heavy and wide eyed. 

“Are you here? You with me?” 

Steve can hear someone talking about destabilizing, about readings falling back into acceptable parameters, he can hear his mother’s tinkling laugh somewhere farther away. He focuses, watches Jonathan’s hands as he presses them into the bed sheets— there’s no crinkle because he hadn’t done that before. Because it’s the drift. 

“Yeah, sorry.” He shakes himself. “Here, got it.” 

Jonathan stands, slowly. Not quite cautious. “Almost lost you for a second there.” 

Steve winces, trying to focus. “Rabbits, man. I don’t even really have good ones to follow but y’know, always been bad at listening. Sorry it’s— Tommy always said it's a lot.” 

“ — percentage is strong, they’re holding, Harrington’s just outside of the green line — ” 

Harrington, they say, and it’s the same way he’s always heard but it’s rough here, like this. Big and formal and blocking out the sun, an anchor at his ankle. He almost wants to shield Jonathan from it, from remembering what Steve is. There’s a quick catch moment— Steve sees it from Jonathan’s perspective, with Steve towering down towards him, backlit in the high school lights acting like they didn’t know each other at all. Tommy’s laughter bouncing around them. 

“Hey—” Jonathan cuts in, moving closer. His feet don’t tap on the metal because they aren’t in their room, they’re in the school but also they’re not because— because— “Hey— don’t go back there. Stop chasing it. It’s okay, you’re not there and I know— I saw it, okay? Your dad and— He shouldn’t have done that to you.” 

“Shit,” Steve thinks— says. “That’s not—”

“Not my problem?” Jonathan says, and it sounds obvious that it should be. That Steve should have been his problem the whole time. The immensity of it— he could bury himself in it, he knows. The way he knows what regret feels like burning at the back of his throat and the way he can’t see an ounce of it in his own face. The way his dad had said ‘enough of this’ and Steve had followed through like the good little soldier he’d always tried to be, except he’d never done it right anyway. He wants to do one thing right at least, though. 

He focuses, sees Jonathan’s hands outstretched in his suit, standing in their room; eyes locked on his. 

“You’re here, you got it.” Jonathan’s voice is softer than Steve’s heard it in a long time. There’s almost an overlay, Jonny’s voice reverberating somewhere else in the room. The last time, that last time, Steve had sneered, he remembers. He’d been trying to build a wall, put this immeasurable distance there and pretend he didn’t care—

Steve gasps. His head throbs. There’s the pit and the room where Tommy went and didn’t come back out the same, and Jonathan’s stepping right through. 

“I’m in your head, Steve. I see it, okay? Stop trying to throw me out, I’m not running. I’m not—” Not Tommy, he means. Not filled up with ideas of Steve filling in the lines perfectly the way he wants, because Steve already fucked that all up. No — he thinks, and it sounds like Jonathan, it wasn’t you. It just wasn’t the right fit. 

“Why is this working?” Steve thinks— says, because it's the drift. Everything’s more real in the drift. “It shouldn’t work, right?” Are we the right fit, is that what this means? Even after everything? 

Jonathan pauses. The drift makes it hard to have questions at all, to not just see whatever the words paint but, it’s important. He needs Jonathan to say it or it’ll just be… thoughts. Imagined things. “I don’t know,” he lies. 

Steve sees it— Jonathan trying to understand the version of Steve who chased down paper boats on the creek bed just for him and the one that sneered at kids in the hallway. Trying to forget the first one ever happened, but it mattering in a way that wouldn’t leave. Steve gets it, an inverse and warped version but the summer had always meant something sadder to him, before the world ended. He sees the way that Jonathan Byers had walked right up to the Shatterdome he knew Steve Harrington was stationed at, and signed his name up. 

“Why would you—” Steve blinks. “Why would you do that? You wanted to work with me? You hate me.” 

Jonathan’s smile is tremulous and small, embarrassed but holding firm. “My brother got taken by one of those things, and I need to get him back. You’re the only asshole I know crazy enough to make that happen.” 

At the end of the world, I looked for you, he means. Steve doesn’t know how to exist in a place where that’s how their paths end up. Somehow, he has to.

“Holding, moving up. In the solid range, we’re go to — ”

“Boys,” Owens' voice cuts in. “Show time.” 

Drifting, with someone who is not Tommy (he’s not sure if it’s supposed to be this way, if it was Tommy, or—), is like a series of locks. Tumblers clicking into place faster than he can think to turn the key, instinctively knowing where the trips and tricks are. 

It’s like a slideshow, etched into your mind. One he’s seen years ago, but is brand new all the same. There is no Jonathan and then also Steve, it’s their space, their room. Their off-color walls in their base. It’s their creek bed, permanently in Indiana summer, trapped somewhere before the war ever started. 

Steve shifts the bot’s hand left, feels Slugger groan with it, and feels Jonathan’s small whipfire smile as he moves too. 

He’s being shown locked doors, milliseconds before they’re thrown wide— he’s not sure if they’re meant to be like this, if he’s meant to, but it’s them. It feels like them. There are truths about Jonathan that he doesn’t have the space to wrap himself around but they burn bright across his skin anyway. 

Loyalty, in the shape of a paper plane he held onto for years. One that existed under his bed even after Steve had tried to ruin his life. In the beds of his fingernails as he tore down their base camp out by the wet earth afterwards, the place Steve never went back to, and felt awful about it for weeks and months later. 

They’re narrowing in on the drop point, it’s a category 3 and they have no idea how strong it is. Would have to be massive to take down two trained vets. They’re speeding like a rocket towards a destination that might be it and it’s suddenly the most important thing to say—

“I didn’t hate you,” Steve’s mind says for him, because he knows what it looked like. How he’d tried to make himself look. They’re in the air, suspended and flying out to the drop point to save the day apparently, but it feels like it matters that he says it anyways.

Jonathan lets out a huff of breath, Steve hears the layers of it, the years and distance and growth underneath. “I know. I saw, in the— you think super loud, you know?” He smiles over at him, in the electric half light of the cockpit. It strikes Steve, then. Jonathan’s trying to smile. He looks sad and worried and he looks relieved.

“Think I was a little obsessed with you,” Steve blurts out. It’s a weird thing to say, it’s the first right thing he’s said. 

Jonathan laughs, wet and small. “Think I was too.” 

“—hold out, few seconds more Nance!” Barb’s voice crackles through, suddenly. Tense, strained but whole. 

“The cannons stuck, I can’t—” There’s a heady noise, wet and gurgling followed by a crack of static as Nancy makes a horrid, drawn out groan of frustration and pain. 

“Dropping,” Owens voice cuts in, just as their momentum slows to a stop. “Bring them back in one piece, alright?” 

Steve can feel Jonathan’s jaw shift, his stance settle. A steel wall, a brick house, something sturdy and stable. 

“What happened with your brother?” Steve asks, doesn’t mean to ask. It’s really not the time, and yet— Jonathan’s mind flashes with thought. Not quite a RABIT, not quite a hole to dig because it’s outlined and reinforced with the idea that Jonathan would tear the world apart to bring him back if he has to. It’s also outlined with this: Steve, and this Jaeger, and every moment they’ve crashed together and pulled apart since he saw Steve’s name on the billboard signs and maybe even before then. 

He knows, then. He’ll help, he’ll get Will back for him. Jonathan’s always known that, too. 

First, though— 

The shift into their free fall feels more like a springboard. The cables drop, they fall hundreds of feet and they’re pressing into motion through the choppy ocean floor before they’ve fully settled. 

“Cavalry’s here,” Steve calls into the comms. “Don’t look too excited.” 

He can see the electric blue of the Kaiju, writhing and frothing the water with its tail. Looks like a crocodile hybrid, almost, pouring neon into the sea and locking its face into the thick metal on Nancy’s side of the Jaeger. Trying to roll them over, he thinks. Or Jonathan thinks, the thought runs through him white hot either way.  

Not going to happen. 

Barb’s voice buzzes back at them first. “Cannon’s stuck in it’s jaw, can’t pull it free without— and it’s jammed, I think. Nance, can you—” 

“I’ll get it in position,” Nancy groans back. “Just cut the damn things head off for me, will ya?” 

They can see the older Jaeger, too. Floating face down— there’s movement on top, which shoots through Steve like a bolt. The pilots, or at least one, still hanging on. 

“With pleasure,” Jonathan growls, and hits the switch. Steve tightens his grip around the sledgehammer that forms into place; knuckles aligned, remember son? Hands by your ear, motion in the pivot of the hips and—

and pulls back into a swing. It’s spiked, electric, and fucking perfect in how it arcs right across the water and bats the asshole’s jaws away from Nancy. It feels like a current connection, superposition with how it crescendos through him— not perfectly looped, the static fuzz of Jonathan’s worry and anger mixing in with Steve’s empty focus, but it’s enough. It’s more than enough. 

With the few feet of space they create, Slugger dives in, twirling the hammer around to arc back into an overhead pummel. Where’d you learn to do that? Steve think-talks, some feral instincts dragging a grin into place— he can feel it echoed back at him. 

Dunno, Jonathan shrugs, his arm of the Jaeger dropping low so they perfectly swing the hammer around it, pulling back into another swing. Feels right though. 

The Kaiju reels; face a mess of blue and white but still snapping at them. Persistent bastards. It tries to dive under, popping back up with a wail and a mess of electric waves and teeth—

Only to get entirely cratered by Nancy’s canon exploding between them. 

“Fuck. This.” Nancy gasps. It’s probably the third coolest thing Steve’s ever seen her do. Barb cheers across the comms as the thing finally stops moving, more blue than scales at this point. Steve and Jonathan move, a sort of mental shrug— 

“Mind shooting it again, Nance?” Steve asks. She shoots it three more times, just to be safe. 

It lingers, is the thing. Steve’s not expecting it to linger. When him and Tommy— he thinks maybe, realizes roughly, that Barb might have been right about him and Tommy. Maybe they were the bare minimum requirement. Maybe that was forty nine percent and this is the other fifty. 

They’re greeted by the cheering staff of the ‘dome when they lug the Viper’s pilots back with them, it’s not enough time to think let alone talk about it, but he can feel Jonathan’s eyes on the sides of his face anyways. There’s something there, something else; a valley and canyon between feeling it and knowing what it is, though. 

It feels like: Jonathan’s rough fingertips across his knuckles as he unclips Steve’s suit for him, a flicker of a full hot sun in a lazy evening sky, Jonathan’s lips curling in the faintest of smiles from across a room. It feels like having somewhere to go home to, someone expecting him. It feels like maybe something that’s not supposed to stay. 

“So, you managed to drift afterall, huh?” Nancy says, nudging him with her elbow as they walk back from the infirmary. Steve just got a preliminary once over, a bandaid over his eyebrow where he must have nicked it in their landing– Nancy has her arm in a sling, more a ghost sensation of it nearly being disconnected in the suit. Barb has to spend a night in observation due to a mild concussion, but is otherwise alright, too. The two retirees— Franklin and Jess, he learned— are recovering alright, too. Jess is more worse for wear and fell unconscious at one point, but the doc said she’d pull through. Miracles upon miracles, Steve thinks. Like how the hell someone like Jonny Byers is drift compatible with him. 

He rubs his neck. “I guess— yeah. Apparently.” 

Nancy hums, tilts her head thoughtfully as they pad around a corner. “You know, the readings I saw were pretty good. Held really well.” She stops in front of him, forcing him to pause also. The lights have a pretty constant hum he can usually tune out, it feels pointed now. 

Steve squints at her, hating already that he can tell where this is going. “Yeah? So… so what. We just, that’s it? Partners now and everything’s fine?” 

She arches a brow at him. He hates when she does that. “I don’t know, Steve. You were in his head, is it fine?” 

That’s a loaded question, it’s stacked sky high with how loaded it is. Precariously balanced and liable to tip out and spill all Steve’s embarrassing history and shit everywhere on everyone in a five mile radius. And yet— 

“I think…. It will be,” he says, half surprised himself. It’s in the lingering, in the sun warmth still pressed on the insides of his eyelids. He blinks. “Is that stupid? Nothing here’s ever fine.” 

Her smile is thin, kind of sad at the ends. “Yeah, but, I dunno. I like to think it’s worth it while it’s happening, right? Or else what’s the point.”

Jonathan is in the room when Steve wanders back. Steve in the doorway, Jonathan at the edge of his bed. They keep meeting in these half-start little ways, pulled back together here. 

“Hey,” Steve starts, trails off. Jonathan is staring down at the metal floor between his feet, hands twisted together, and he’s not sure if this is the end of that good thing Nancy was talking about already. Karma, Steve catches himself thinking, miserably. Can’t quite pretend it doesn’t get smothered out by some other larger feeling. 

Jonathan doesn’t say anything, for a long moment. Steve sets himself down at his bed, matching. 

“Did you mean it?” Jonathan starts, looking up— his eyes meets Steve’s for a second, flickers away with a frown. He grits his teeth. Steve knows, in the way that he keeps knowing— echoes of echoes— that there’s more if he listens. Jonathan’s shoulders hunch up after another moment. “When you— in there, I mean. You can’t really lie, I’d have known but…” 

“About Will.” Steve says, carefully. It’s not a question because he knows the answer.  

Jonathan goes silent again. 

There’s two paths here, he thinks. One where he lies and one where he doesn’t. There might have been two paths, once, is the thing; there’s really only one now. 

“I think, if you pack that kind of a punch every time,” he smiles. “Anyone would be lucky to be your partner.” 

Jonathan blinks up like he’s startled, but there’s no surprise behind his eyes. His hands are still twisting, though, so Steve sighs. He settles himself down on the bed beside Jonathan instead, leaning back on his palms and looking up at the ceiling— aquamarine, blue grey and off kilter. 

“Ask me the real thing,” he says. 

“I don’t know if you trust me the same way I trust you.” 

Hm, there’s a thought. Steve lets it roll through him. He doesn’t say: there’s a hole at the back of me, like a rip in a page that’s getting wider. He doesn’t say: Tommy was scared of it, I pretend it doesn’t exist, I don’t know if you saw it or what you think. He doesn’t say: I’m not sure I trust myself. 

He wants to say: I could, is the thing. I could trust you. I want to. 

He reaches over and squeezes Jonathan’s hand in his instead. “I’ll get your brother back, Jonny. I’m glad you found me.”