TW: past verbal and emotional abuse
The Harrington house is a game of perfection.
Steve has known this fact for as long as he can remember. There is a right way, a narrow way, a rigid way, of doing things. Numbers dictate all: rebounds, points, and assists for basketball, new PRs in freestyle and backstroke for swim. The numbers themselves do not matter; all that does is that they grow and shrink appropriately.
Infinite growth is not sustainable; not for Steve's stats, not for Richard's stocks. Both of them strive for it anyway.
The house must be clean. The parties can't be busted. The people of Hawkins will only say good things about the Harrington family. Gloria strives for these things, day in and day out.
The Harrington house is also a game of Perfection.
Steve hated that game growing up. The one with the little yellow pieces and the blue board. He was never able to get all the pieces in the right spot before the board spit them all back out.
It made a ticking noise, like a time bomb. Steve doesn't know when he started associating that sound with his parents.
It fits. It fits almost too well. They're fine, at least for a little while. The ticking starts quiet, then grows louder and louder until everything blows up.
The thing is, in Perfection, that the board blows up even if you put all the pieces in the right spots in time. The thing is, in the Harrington house, that everything blows up even if Steve does everything right.
The ticking lasts for days sometimes, weeks others. It's impossible, random, and impossibly random.
The only consistent thing is the board blowing up. And when that happens, so does the shouting.
The Party thinks that Tommy and Carol taught Steve to be cruel. That they're the ones who taught him how to bare his fangs and spit venom. That once he left them, the rage left him.
He's okay with letting them think that. It's easier than explaining that Richard and Gloria are the ones who taught him how to snap and shout, how to tear holes in other people with a few well-spoken barbs.
When Steve thinks of his parents, he thinks of fighting. He thinks of his father calling him useless and his mother calling him an idiot. He thinks of his mother calling his father dirt and his father calling his mother a bitch.
There are never any apologies. "I'm sorry" is never said in the Harrington house, even when the board gets reset.
They say "I got you pizza for dinner." "I saw this at the store and thought of you." "Do you want to come with me to get gas?"
And with that, the ticking starts up again.
Horrible things are said when the board blows up. Steve says horrible things when the board blows up. He's called his father an asshole and his mother self-absorbed and apologized without any apology at all.
He cleaned the pool instead.
Steve doesn't want to the board to blow up in the middle of the Munson trailer. It's why he's keeping his mouth shut while Eddie yells at him.
"What the hell, Stevie?" Eddie shouts, arms flying. "I told you that you can’t do that!"
“You told me you don’t want me to,” Steve says, staying calm and measured.
Calm and measured. Not blowing up. Steve isn’t going to snap or shout or bitch. He isn’t.
“Fucking semantics!”
“They were saying-”
“I don’t care what they were saying!” Eddie roars. “I don’t give a shit what they say about me!”
It’s true. Wayne calls Eddie “Teflon,” says that nothing sticks to him, least of all anyone’s opinion. Steve knows that Eddie doesn’t care about what most people in Hawkins think about him.
But he cares very much about what the people who care about him think.
Steve can say a whole lot of things right now. He’s angry, physically biting his tongue to ground himself. He can say a whole lot of things to cut Eddie to the bone, to end the argument and then some.
But he won’t.
Love is knowing how to hurt someone and choosing not to. It’s using a knife to split an apple to share instead of to cut skin to ribbons.
Steve can’t trust himself not to slash Eddie open. He says awful things when everything goes to hell like this, snaps back hard when snapped at first, operates purely on instinct.
He doesn’t want to hurt Eddie, so he keeps his mouth shut.
“I care that you could have gotten hurt when you swung at those assholes,” Eddie continues. “I care that I wasn’t there with you when you defended yourself. I care that you won’t let me take a look at your hands and make sure they’re alright.”
Steve squeezes the knuckles of this right hand in his left. It stings, but he’s fine. Nothing broken. He knows from experience
“Stop it, you’re hurting yourself,” Eddie barks.
Steve lets go of his hands, lets them hang loosely at his sides.
“So, what the hell, sweetheart?” Eddie asks, still loud, still snappish.
A variety of terrible answers surges to the front of Steve’s mind. Eddie’s biggest insecurities, the things he’s only told Steve when he thought he was asleep. Ways to wipe the anger off his face and replace it with stuff easier to manage: shock, hurt, sadness. Things he would say if he didn’t particularly like Eddie, if he were still in high school, if he were still in his parents’ house.
Steve doesn’t say anything. He keeps the knife in its drawer. He closes his eyes tight and breathes in once, then again.
“Hey,” Eddie says, softer.
Steve opens his eyes to find him a step closer, hands up in surrender.
“I’m sorry,” Eddie says.
Oh.
Well.
Steve doesn’t know what to do with that.
He’s said it before. Of course he has. He knows the words, knows that he needed to say them to Dustin and Robin and Max, and he has. He’s stepped too far with jokes and forgot about some things and missed some things they’ve said.
But he’s never yelled at them. They’ve never yelled at him.
This is not how this is supposed to go. Eddie isn’t supposed to apologize. He’s supposed to clean Steve up or make him dinner or invite him along to go grocery shopping.
And Steve was supposed to snap back.
“It’s okay,” he says because that’s what he’s supposed to say, yeah?
Eddie shakes his head. “It’s not. I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”
“It was bound to happen.”
Eddie stares at him, big doe eyes shining, like he has five heads. It makes Steve want to put his bloody hands behind his back, make him shrink.
He swears he can hear ticking, but the board just reset. Didn’t it?
“What?” Eddie asks.
Steve shrugs. “It’s okay.”
“It’s not. I got scared, but that doesn’t mean I get to yell at you. That’s not okay.”
What does Eddie get to do, if not yell?
I deserve it, Steve thinks, but he’s smart enough to know that saying that out loud will just lead to another fight.
There’s been barely any time to put the pieces back.
Steve doesn’t get it. But, he figures he’s always been a little slow on the uptake, so he can watch. Observe. Figure it out later on his own. He’s pretty good at that.
“Okay,” Steve says.
“Okay?”
“Yeah,” he says, and he holds his hands out for Eddie to take.
He’s dragged along to the sink, where Eddie rinses the cuts out with cool water before bandaging them up with the remnants of a box of Band-Aids from the bathroom. When they’re dry and finished, he presses a kiss to each knuckle, feather light.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, looking at Steve very seriously.
“Me, too,” Steve says, voice a little hoarse. “I’m sorry.”
It feels good to say. It feels good to mean.
Standing there in the kitchen of a trailer in Forest Hills, looking at the mismatched furniture and half-full ashtrays of the living room, holding hands with his boyfriend formerly accused of murder and apologizing for the first time and meaning it, Steve feels like he can finally breathe.
The ticking has finally stopped, and silence sounds so sweet.
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Random idea while I'm currently sleep deprived and don't know what to label:
The Ghost would love you like a dog.
Always at your shadow, following you, guarding you. At least he can do that right, good for something, big dumb brute that he is, baring his teeth and growling for you, tearing out throats for you just for a scrap of affection.
Ghost would love you like a dog.
Waiting by the door, by the foot of the bed, by your side, and hoping, silently, that you'll get lonely enough to invite him up. And he'll take care not to show his eagerness, not to be too exited and overplay his hand.
Simon Riley would love you like a dog.
Like his rotten canines are falling out, panting and drooling and messy, desperately to leave marks on you. Because he's a Riley. Everything he's ever loved left bite marks on him. And he'll be dammed if he let's the world take away you too.
Simon would love you like a dog.
You could stab him. Kill him.
Burry his body in the cemetery as a sacrificial lamb, so you aren't forced to linger when you pass.
And he'd forgive you.
Dogs are like that.
Loyal.
Dead dogs are just happy your hand is holding the knife.
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