#jfc ugh thank u for giving me the excuse to write this nic i need more of them in my life

[astrobei]

bandaging/stitching up an injury with stonathan PLEASE i need more of them

The first thing Jonathan does when he sees him is let out a long, slow whistle.

“Jesus,” he mutters, crossing the living room in three quick steps. “What’s wrong with your face?”

“Got beat up by a racist piece of shit,” Steve mutters, leaning back against the sofa cushions and holding a bag of frozen peas to his face. Ow. “But don’t tell anyone. It can’t be good for my street cred.”

Steve’s got his eyes mostly closed, still, but he sees Jonathan’s face do a funny twitching thing, like he was about to laugh. “What street cred,” Jonathan says, and he doesn’t laugh, exactly, but Steve hears one in his voice anyway. “Your street cred died out a long time ago.”

“Yeah, okay, very funny. Chuff it up, Byers,” Steve grumbles, adjusting the bag of peas and trying to find another cold spot. It’s mostly room temperature now, sloshing around wetly with each movement, which is more disgusting than anything else. Steve lets out a frustrated noise. “Great. And now my peas are warm.”

“I’ll get you another bag,” Jonathan says, because right, this is his house, and Steve is getting blood all over his couch like the world’s actual worst houseguest. If his parents saw his appalling lack of manners, there would be some words to be said.

Well maybe about the bloody face first. And then the manners.

Maybe.

Jonathan opens the freezer door and stops dead in his tracks. “Steve?”

“Mm?”

“Why is there a– Jesus, I don’t even know what this is, and I’m a little afraid to ask– why is there a thing in my fridge?”

Ah. Right. 

“Listen,” Steve starts apologetically. “Henderson was just shooting me these giant puppy eyes and going on and on about scientific discovery or some shit and honestly I didn’t really want to have to deal with taking it outside. Like, what do you even do with the bodies? Burn ‘em? Bury ‘em? Ritual sacrifice?”

Jonathan peers at him over the refrigerator door, and blinks. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Ritual sacrifice,” Steve says again, waving a noncommittal hand in the air. “You know. You’re always listening to those broody, scary guys with the weird hair and the– uh, the guitars. You know.”

“I think you’re concussed,” Jonathan says simply, pulling a face as he presumably reaches around the Demodog’s body for the peas. “Did you hit your head?”

“I hit a lot of things,” Steve laughs, which is maybe answering Jonathan’s question.

“You ruined the good quilt,” Jonathan frowns, letting the door fall shut. “You owe me a new one.”

Steve extends his arm as Jonathan walks back, pressing the new bag to his face with a relieved sigh as he says, “Sure, yeah, come over to mine and take your pick. My aunt just took up quilting actually.”

Jonathan peers down at him. He’s still standing up, hovering, somehow managing to look uncomfortable in the middle of his own living room. “Did she really?”

“No idea,” Steve admits. “Haven’t heard from her since last December. I think she got cancer and died.”

“Steve,” Jonathan laughs, a little shocked, “that’s morbid,” and, okay, maybe Steve is a little concussed after all.

“Whatever,” he says, then pats the sofa next to him. “Sit down, man, it’s your house.”

Jonathan sits. Steve tilts his head back, presses the peas to the bruise he knows is blossoming a dark and vibrant purple around his eye. Jonathan’s watching him, silently observant like he always is. It should be unsettling. It used to be unsettling, back before Steve exchanged a proper, actual sentence with him. Now it’s kind of comforting, knowing that he doesn’t need to fill up the silence with meaningless blabbering.

Doesn’t mean he won’t do it anyway.

“You look like shit,” he blurts out, eyeing the way Jonathan’s shirt has gone all streaked with dirt and is still a little patchy with sweat. His hair is sticking to his forehead, and he looks like he’s been up for three days straight, but he still seems more awake than Steve is feeling. Alert. The usual slouchiness to his posture is gone, replaced by something less, uh, tortured. A little calmer, maybe. “How much do you sweat?”

“Well, we had to sweat the Mind Flayer out of Will,” Jonathan says casually, like he’s recounting a Saturday afternoon out on the town. “And we cranked the heat up to, like, a hundred thirty or something so yeah, I’m a little sweaty.”

Steve stares. “You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“So he’s– he’s okay then? Where is he?”

Jonathan plucks at a stray thread sticking out of the couch. It’s old upholstery, and Steve can see a smattering of old, faded stains across the cushions, but it’s soft and worn and comfortable, and nothing like the ones in Steve’s own living room. “Well, Owens is hurt so he had to call someone in and it’s a whole mess that basically means the fewer people the better for tonight.”

Steve isn't really sure who Owens is, and he can't really discern from Jonathan’s tone whether or not he’s supposed to be happy about this guy being unexpectedly incapacitated. “Ah,” he says anyway. “Is he okay?”

“Yes?” Jonathan offers. Steve watches him out of the corner of his eye. He fiddles with his thumbs. Steve wants to reach out and grab his hands, just to still them, calm him down. “I can go first thing in the morning, it’s just– Hopper has some pull and my mom is– well, she’s our mom, and– I don’t know, okay, I just look at him and I see this thing that had its hands around my mom’s throat and I think to myself, hey, that’s my little brother. You know?”

Steve feels a little blown away. A little– flabbergasted, maybe. He’s not sure he’s heard Jonathan Byers say this much at one time in his entire life, and as it is, he stops talking suddenly, biting down on his lower lip like he had more to say but just isn’t.

“Yeah,” Steve croaks, even though he doesn’t know. He’s an only child and he’s spent most of his childhood alone and he guesses he has the Henderson kid now, but that’s not the same. Jonathan and Will– they’re something else. He isn’t really sure what to say other than that, so he just reaches out, places a hand on Jonathan’s knee, and squeezes. Like maybe this can say something he can’t. “I’m sorry. He’ll be okay. He’s a tough kid.”

Jonathan looks down at Steve’s hand on his knee and then back up, meeting his gaze. Something flits across his face, lightning fast and then it’s gone. “Thanks,” he says, a little quieter than before. 

Steve wonders if maybe he should move his hand, but Jonathan doesn’t seem to be all that bothered by it and Steve thinks, privately, that he likes the steady weight of him under his palm. Heavy and solid. Strangely anchoring. Maybe it’s the possible concussion talking. Maybe it’s not.

“Yeah,” Steve whispers.

A moment passes like this. The house is quiet. Everyone else has gone home, to the hospital, wherever they have to go, and Steve is here because he’d taken Dustin home and then thought about his own house– dark and empty and wholly more terrifying than any of the monsters or the blood or the douchebag assholes in open-front shirts and mullets– and he’d ended up here.

“Let’s get you cleaned up,” Jonathan says after a second. “You’ve got– it’s a lot of dried blood.”

“Sorry about the couch,” Steve says pathetically, as if he hadn’t been getting his messed up face all over it for the last thirty minutes. “You can get the blood out of it, I think.”

Jonathan is digging something out from under the sink– a first aid kit that looks like it’s been sitting there since the first World War. “Believe me,” he says. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

Steve lifts the bag of peas off his face. This one’s starting to go warm too, and he blinks blearily in the living room light as he peels his particularly sore eye open. “Be honest with me, Byers,” he calls out after Jonathan as he ducks into the bathroom, then pops back out a second later with a clean washcloth in hand. “How many murders have you committed in this house?”

Jonathan laughs at that, sudden and sharp, and then he makes a face like he’s surprised with himself for doing it. It’s unexpected, the sound, and it’s even more unexpected the way something swoops low in Steve’s chest. Like it’s some kind of victory, making Jonathan want to laugh so badly that he surprised himself by doing it, like he really just couldn’t help himself. “Zero,” he says, making his way back to the sofa. “So far. Here– come here.”

Steve isn’t really sure where here is, because then Jonathan is sitting down next to him and their knees are touching and there’s not really anywhere he can go that isn’t already as close as he can physically get to him. So he just leans his head in a little, turns his face up towards the light. “Good?”

“Shit.” Jonathan makes a sympathetic noise in the back of his throat. He cups a hand around Steve’s jaw, tilting his face a little to the right. “He got you good, huh?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Steve mutters, and Jonathan lets out another one of those sudden, quick laughs. Steve bites back a smile. Good, he thinks, a little absently. Good.

“I see what you mean about the street cred,” Jonathan murmurs. “Nice bandaids, by the way.”

“Courtesy of your brother’s idiot friends,” Steve sighs, and then winces as the cloth makes contact with a cut on his cheek. “Shit. Ow.”

“It’s a little one,” Jonathan smirks. “How is it that you can’t deal with a little–”

“It’s the fucking rings,” Steve bemoans, this time focusing very hard on keeping his face neutral as Jonathan dabs the dried blood away. “What kind of asshole wears that many rings on one hand?”

“The kind of asshole that goes around punching people?” Jonathan offers, and Steve rolls his eyes.

“Very funny.”

“I don’t know,” Jonathan continues, ducking his head down and finding a clean spot on the towel. There’s a smile playing on his lips, even if he thinks Steve can’t see him. “I’m pretty sure I remember doing some damage even without any rings on.”

“Congratulations,” Steve says drily, “you’re better than the guy who rubs himself down with body oil before leaving the house.”

Jonathan laughs at this, a real, loud laugh, and Steve thinks, for a fleeting second, that he might like this laugh even better than the other one. “I should hope so,” Jonathan is saying, and then he’s leaning in again and dabbing at Steve’s forehead. “That doesn’t seem like a very high bar.”

“You should do that more,” Steve murmurs, watching Jonathan’s mouth twitch in concentration. 

Jonathan frowns, then glances down, meeting Steve’s gaze. “Do what?”

“Laugh,” Steve says, the single syllable halfway out of his mouth before he has any inclination to, oh, I don’t know, maybe not say that? He’s thinking about the way Jonathan had lit up for a moment there, the way the weariness he always seems to carry around him sloughed off his shoulders, even if for just a second. What comes out of his mouth though, instead of any halfway eloquent manner of saying this, is, “It makes your face look nice.”

Maybe he is concussed. In a very real, serious way, maybe Steve Harrington is currently suffering from a grade-A concussion.

Jonathan looks a little bit horrified, but mostly kind of confused. He shakes his head. “It makes my– okay, you definitely have a concussion,” he says at last, which, yeah, Steve had been coming to this conclusion himself, actually. “So try not to get any major brain damage before we can get you checked out, yeah?”

“I’m trying,” Steve says, and then, “ow, dude, you can be a little more gentle, you know.”

“Sorry,” and Jonathan does sound a bit apologetic as he says this. He’s got one hand still cupped under Steve’s chin, fingers resting lightly against his jaw.

Steady hands, Steve thinks, closing his eyes as Jonathan wipes over them. Steady hands. A more gentle touch than he would have expected from someone so rough-looking. All broad shoulders and frown lines and a piercing kind of stare. “It’s just not coming off too easy.”

“Yeah, it’s dried down,” Steve says, “it’s been a few hours.”

Jonathan hums in acknowledgement and turns Steve’s face towards the light some more. “You should have cleaned it up before,” he says softly. “Your face is all swollen.”

“I told him not to hit the moneymaker,” Steve says in a deadpan. “He didn’t listen.”

Jonathan shoots him an exasperated glare, then hands him the squishy bag of peas again as he digs around in his ancient first aid kit. “Ice.”

“No, those are peas,” Steve says without thinking, and then Jonathan groans and drops his head into both hands.

“When my mom gets back with the car, you’re going to the hospital.”

“I’m fine,” Steve grins, placing the peas back over his eyes. “Seriously. My dad always said I had a thick skull.”

“I’m not sure that’s a compliment,” Jonathan says. He pulls out a tube of ointment, something thick and pasty, and beckons Steve forward again. “Come here.”

The ointment smells about as bad as it looks, and Steve pulls a face. “Dude,” he crinkles up his nose, “what the hell is that?”

“It’s gross but it works,” Jonathan says, frowning in concentration. He smears a thin layer of it over the cut on Steve’s forehead, all cleaned up now that the blood’s washed away. “Trust me.”

“Trust–”

The tube is almost empty. Steve swallows lightly and looks away.

It feels like he’s intruding on something, having Jonathan be so close to him. Being close enough to see the little spots where he’d nicked himself shaving, or how his hair is streaked through with a little blonde, the kind you can’t tell apart from ordinary brown until you’re really, really up close and personal. Which Steve– totally is. Oh, okay.

Steve swallows again, and closes his eyes.

“One down,” Jonathan murmurs, making his way over to a cut on Steve’s temple, “ninety nine to go.”

“He didn’t land that many hits,” Steve whispers, eyes still squeezed tightly shut. “Give me some credit.”

“Mike says you got him really good once,” Jonathan says, “so maybe there’s hope for you after all.”

It sounds like he’s smiling a little. Steve is tempted– so tempted– to open his eyes, just to see that.

He doesn’t. 

“You just got lucky, Byers,” he says instead. “You caught me off guard.”

“And then I caught you off guard again. And again, and again,” Jonathan says, and he’s definitely smiling now. “Two down.”

Steve lets out a long, slow exhale. “At this rate, I’ll have graduated by the time you’re done.”

“You should be thanking me,” Jonathan huffs, but it doesn’t sound malicious at all. He strokes a thumb over Steve’s cheekbone, and Steve fights back a shiver.

“Thank you,” he says, as genuinely as he can muster, then opens his eyes. Jonathan is staring straight at him, eyes a little wide, cheeks a little red. Steve grabs his wrist, the one that’s right up by his face, and says, “That’s– I’m being serious, by the way. I’m not trying to fuck with you.”

“Sure,” Jonathan gets out. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry I made you hit me,” Steve goes on, and if he has a concussion after all, he can blame whatever he’s saying on that. And he must be, because it’s getting hard to think in a straight line, and every train of thought just keeps circling back around to this. Warm fingertips moving over his face. So gently, like Steve is– like he’s something delicate. Something to be handled with care.

“I– it’s okay.”

Jonathan doesn’t blink. It should be more unnerving than it is. He’s got pretty eyes, Steve thinks, from a little bit out of his body. They’ve got some green in them. A little gold, too.

“I was an ass,” Steve says, and Jonathan’s eyes dart between his. Trying to see, maybe, if Steve is trying to fuck with him. If there’s a punchline at the end of this, somewhere, and whether or not that punchline is him.

Whatever he’s searching for, he must not find it, because he sighs and says, “I know.”

“You–! Okay,” Steve mutters. “Low blow, but I guess I’m the one apologizing here, so I should be able to take it and not expect a–”

“I’m not mad,” Jonathan interrupts, and then moves down to Steve’s jaw. He hadn’t even known he got hurt there, but because he’s him, of course he did. “That’s five.”

Steve blinks. “You’re not?”

“We’re different people now.” Jonathan shrugs, dips a finger through the ointment and smears it across the skin there. The smell of something strong and medicinal hits Steve head-on, and he wrinkles up his nose. “You, me. You’re not a total piece of work, and I’m not a–”

“Brooding loser,” Steve cuts in, and Jonathan gives him a look.

“I was going to say guy whose brother went missing,” Jonathan says, and then he rubs the pad of his finger over a particularly tender spot– a deep part of the cut underlaid with a bruise Steve doesn’t even have to see to know is there– and Steve lets out a startled hiss of pain.

“Ah–”

“Sorry!” And he really does sound sorry, and Steve figures they’d just been having a nice little talk so it wasn’t, like, mean or an act of petty revenge or anything. “Shit, yeah, let’s get you a bandaid for that one.”

“No Star Wars?” Steve jokes, as Jonathan comes up with– thank god– a plain beige one.

Jonathan squints at him, peeling the paper backing off. “Have you ever seen Star Wars?”

“Not once,” Steve admits. “No one I know is into that sort of thing.”

“You know me,” Jonathan says easily, running a finger over the bandaid and then pausing. “I mean–”

“Whoa,” Steve laughs. He tries to go for casual, for good-natured, but it comes out a little too overeager, stilted. “Are you asking me out, Byers?”

Jonathan blanches. “I– no.”

Belatedly, Steve realizes that this joke might have been marginally more funny if it came from anyone but him. “I didn’t mean–”

“I know what you meant.” Jonathan traces his thumb over to the last cut, sideways across Steve’s upper lip. “And you didn’t mean it like that.”

Steve shifts uncomfortably. “Hey, man, look–”

“You can probably deal with this last one on your own,” Jonathan says, but doesn’t move his hand away. “Your lip is busted, but it’s not too bad.”

“Okay,” Steve whispers. He doesn’t move either. “Thanks for patching me up.”

“Thanks for being there today,” Jonathan says back. “I saw you with the kids. You’re good with them.”

Steve huffs out a small laugh, and it gets caught there, somewhere along the line between Jonathan’s thumb and wrist, still snagged onto the curve of his upper lip. “Oh that? It was nothing.”

Jonathan shakes his head. It’s minute, barely noticeable. “They look up to you. Dustin, especially. It’s sweet.”

“Yeah, well, someone had to step up. Not everyone can have a–”

Jonathan raises his eyebrows. “A what?”

You, Steve thinks, heart picking up pace suddenly. Not everyone can have you. 

“They can’t all have–”

The word you never makes it out of his mouth, because then Jonathan is kissing him.

Steve gasps, because he has an open fucking wound on his lip and this is probably a thousand different kinds of unhygienic and an excellent way to spread another thousand different kinds of germs. And then Jonathan’s hands cup either side of his face and he’s pressing in so hard that it can’t be fueled by anything other than instinct and desperation, and then all thoughts regarding germs and sanitation and wow I’m glad he washed his hands before getting all up in my busted face fly right out of Steve’s head.

He’s warm, is the first thing Steve notices. The second and third are, in order, that he’s very broad and he’s very solid. It’s nothing like kissing a girl. There’s no give to him, no softness to the rigid muscles of his arms that Steve had no idea even existed. He’s gripping onto Jonathan’s forearms, apparently, which he doesn’t remember doing but he can’t find the state of mind to do literally anything else.

Jonathan’s arms are solid and rough and the muscles flex gently under Steve’s palms. He’s so solid, anchoring, and he’s holding Steve’s face like that again– like Steve is a delicate thing. Something that needs to be handled with a ginger touch, with appreciation, with trace amounts of tenderness.

Jonathan’s lips press into his once, then twice, like he just couldn’t help himself, and Steve makes what is maybe the most embarrassing noise he’s made in his life to date. This is good, he thinks. And he knows good. He’s Steve Harrington, okay, he basically invented it. But where the hell did Jonathan Byers learn how to kiss?

“Okay,” Steve hears himself say the second Jonathan pulls back. “What was–”

“Don’t freak out,” Jonathan says, sounding like he’s on the verge of freaking out himself. “Please don’t freak out. I need you to not freak out.”

“Who, me?” If Steve’s voice cracks, just a little, neither of them say anything. “I would never. Never ever ever ever– um. So why did you– not that I’m– yeah.”

“Like I said,” Jonathan says, “we’re different people now,” and he looks nowhere near as totally and completely thrown for a loop as Steve feels at the moment. His ears are bright red, though, and there’s a light dusting of pink across the tops of his cheekbones, and it feels like another victory, getting Jonathan Byers to blush. 

“Cool,” Steve says faintly. His lip is throbbing, and he brings a hand up to his mouth and pulls it away to see red on his fingers. “Ah, great,” he winces. “Look what you did, man. You fucked my lip up again.”