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helpwherearethedirections · 3 days ago

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prompt for @stonathanweek’s first stonathan sunday: “who protects you, though?”

“Dude,” Steve says. “This can’t be good for you.”

Jonathan peels his eyes open to register two separate things, at more or less the same time. One: Steve Harrington, standing over him with his arms crossed, hip popped, and one of his muddied white sneakers tapping disapprovingly on the ground in near-perfect time to the ticking of Jonathan’s wristwatch. Two: the fact that Jonathan has had to peel his eyes open at all, which can only mean one thing.

He fell asleep.

His stomach drops.

Not good, he thinks, because falling asleep means his reflexes are sluggish now, which means it takes him a few extra seconds to process what Steve is even saying. And this means that Steve has had enough time to notice that Jonathan has woken up, and manages to frown even more, getting in an additional “Dude,” before Jonathan manages to frown, blink, and rub his eyes. Not good, because sluggish reflexes defeat the point. Not good, because—

He reaches an arm out, skimming over the hay-covered ground, frantic, frantic, until his fingers close around his gun and he sighs in relief. Secondary sensations to take note of: the twinge in his neck as he rolls it out, the ache settling in between the knobs of his spine, inelastic tension coiling taut in his shoulders, and Steve’s laser-focused stare burning a hole right through Jonathan’s head.

“What?” he insists, trying to play it off, but it comes out hoarse, sleep-rough, and Steve was here before Jonathan opened his eyes at all, so it’s probably not even worth trying. Still, there’s a look in Steve’s eyes that Jonathan doesn’t love, soft in all the wrong ways, that immediately has his hackles raising. When Steve doesn’t say anything — just lets that weird look in his eyes get even more goopy around the edges — Jonathan sits up straighter against the barn door, frowns, and repeats himself. “What?”

He expects Steve to— well, he doesn’t really know what, actually. Steve’s been surprising him these last few months, which always makes him think about the thing Nancy had said when they’d gotten back to Hawkins — about how Steve changed, in the week he and Nancy had spent fighting monsters together in Jonathan’s absence. Enough for her to go on the defensive when Jonathan asked about him, anyway.

Jonathan doesn’t know about all that. He’s known men like Steve before Steve, and he’ll know men like Steve after him. But where he would have expected the Steve of two years ago to scoff, maybe, to roll his eyes and make some offhand comment about how like shit Jonathan looks right now, the Steve of today does none of those things.

Today-Steve holds his hands out, and gestures for the gun. “Give me that.”

“What?” Instinctively, Jonathan clutches it closer to his body. “No. Why?”

“Because,” Steve says, and then he’s kneeling to the floor, dirt and hay and God-knows-what caking up along his kneecaps, another streak of mud along the sides of those white tennis shoes. Jonathan braces himself for it — you look like shit, you’re gonna take someone out with that thing — but Steve just says, “It’s three in the morning. What the hell are you doing?”

“Keeping watch,” Jonathan says, blinking even more forcefully, as if this will clear away the rest of the disorientation lingering there, in the minute creases of his eyelids, the insides of his mouth, the cracks between his molars. It doesn’t do much to help; he finishes blinking and his eyes are on their way to closing again, stinging against the chill of the night breeze.

“Yeah, no shit,” Steve says, both louder than Jonathan expects him to, and — well, more blatantly than Jonathan expects him to. It startles him just enough to make him look over sideways, at where Steve’s silhouette is illuminated by the porch light they installed by the barn door. He’s not sure what he expects to find there, but it isn’t this: Steve’s eyes simultaneously wide with concern and brows furrowed in what seems like confusion. Jonathan opens his mouth to say something, maybe to defend himself, or say hey, man, what the fuck? when Steve seems to realize how it came off and winces before correcting course. “I mean,” he says, quieter now. “I know, you keep— I see you come out here every night, and you don’t come back in until everyone else is starting to wake up again.”

The hey, man, what the fuck? that had been forming on Jonathan’s mouth makes another attempt to make itself heard, but it’s late, he’s tired, there’s a comfortable breeze blowing through the clearing, and in the end, it comes out without any bite. “What?”

It’s Steve’s turn to blink now, long and slow, like he’s realizing that Jonathan’s not doing a very good job at processing what he’s saying. “Go to sleep,” Steve says slowly, over-enunciating now, like a little bit of sleep deprivation automatically means Jonathan’s fucking stupid now. “Seriously,” Steve says, intonation picking up again, falling back into a normal pitch and speed. “How long has it been since you got a good night’s rest?”

“Not that long,” Jonathan says, but it’s probably undercut somewhat by the yawn that sneaks out around it.

Steve makes a disapproving noise, low in his throat, like he didn’t even really mean to, and Jonathan feels himself exhale in response, exasperated and exhausted, two counts turning into three, into six, seven, eight.

He wants to tell Steve that it’s not his first rodeo. That he’s used to this, a routine that comes to him almost easier than breathing: sitting awake in the dark, heart racing and ears straight for the first indication of a noise of distress. Waiting for the sharp creaking of floorboards, a jolt in the bedsprings, a sudden pause in the snores that had previously been floating their way down the hall. The quiet tap of knuckles against his door, a pair of small hands shaking him awake. The thing about the weed, later, is that it helped him fall asleep, but it didn’t help him stay that way. Left him lurching awake at two, three in the morning, heart pounding and sweating through the sheets, waking up again a few hours later feeling like he hadn’t slept at all.

He knows Will doesn’t sleep much these days. He knows Will sleeps even worse when they’ve had a close call, when the threat of something creeping up on them in the night is marginally more real than it normally feels. Steve pulls his knees up towards his chest, like he has no intention of leaving anytime soon, and Jonathan grips the pistol harder in his hand. “It’s fine,” he says. “I have to— someone has to—”

Watch them, he thinks. Protect them. Jonathan’s learned to sleep light, tread light, dream light. Guard up and bearing down.

“Okay?” Steve says, like Jonathan is simultaneously stating the obvious and also missing the obvious, something bright and glaring, right in his face. He puts a hand out again, and Jonathan hesitates; Steve glances down at the gun, raises his eyebrows again, waggles his fingers, and just for a second, Jonathan gets it — the thing Nancy had seen in him, that change. Something vulnerable and open in his expression, the early morning hour, the hair that’s falling into his face instead of standing coiffed up around it. Jonathan hesitates, and Steve says, “Jonathan, I— you think I don’t know you come out here every day?”

Jonathan opens his mouth. Lets it close. No, he hadn’t known that. “It’s not,” he tries again, and then just, “no one else is keeping watch in there.”

It might be the exhaustion, or maybe the idea of Will or Mike or Robin or Nancy sitting up in their sleeping bags, awake, waiting for something to crawl out from the shadows and reach its long claws until the door, but his voice cracks there, wobbling on the precipice of the last syllable in a way that’s nothing short of mortifying.

“I know,” Steve says, too soft and quiet for the easy target Jonathan is making of himself, and then there’s a hand wrapping around his pistol, pulling it gently out of Jonathan’s grasp. “But, like— shit, dude— what about you? Who protects you?”

An unwelcome, panicked laugh bursts out of him, too sudden and too loud for the early morning silence, but Jonathan can’t help it. He’s seen Steve in action, the way Will’s friends follow him around like ducklings in a row. Him and Robin, bodies angled towards each other, tittering away in the corner. Years ago, the idea of Steve protecting anyone would have made Jonathan throw his head back in laughter. Now, his limbs feel heavy, and there’s something open and warm in Steve’s eyes, wide and brown and dark in the dim lighting of the barn’s lanterns, and Jonathan’s fingers are brushing the palm of Steve’s hand as he passes the gun over. He thinks about that stupid baseball bat, the nails he and Nancy had hammered into it, the sound of the wood splintering around the rusty metal, and blurts out, “Do you even know how to use that thing?”

Steve’s eyebrows shoot up, like he’s surprised, like he wasn’t expecting Jonathan to take this so lightheartedly. “Do you?” he replies.

Jonathan shrugs. “Enough,” he says.

Steve’s lips tilt upwards. “Enough,” he echoes in response. He turns the gun over, holds it up. Squints into the distance and pretends to shoot.

Jonathan’s eyelids are drooping again, but he glances along the firm line of Steve’s hands, thumb and index finger lined up along the trigger, and is reminded of it again: Steve’s changed. How his hands used to be so fidgety, rapping against their front door, twirling that stupid bat back and forth. How they’re steady now. Jonathan heard about Max, heard Lucas and Dustin tell Mike and Will about that day at the cemetery, Steve’s arms around her after she fell twenty feet out of the sky.

Steve lowers the gun, bumps Jonathan’s shoulders with his. “We can stay out here,” he says. Wary, like he thinks Jonathan’s going to put up a fight, even after laying his weapon down. “If that helps.”

It does help. “Okay,” Jonathan says.

“Okay,” Steve parrots.

Sleep still doesn’t come easy. Jonathan has a sneaking suspicion that it never will, for him. But for the first time in months, Jonathan tips his head back against the splintered walls of the barn, weather-worn and chipped red paint, and lets himself try to get there.

#THIS WAS FIREWEEEE #stonathan #love

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