#stonathan childhood friends au

[steviewashere]

Excuse me for a minute, I'm having platonic Stonathan thoughts (though, if you'd like, you can picture this evolving into romantic Stonathan). (And also I half wrote a fic like I tend to do. Sorry.)

CW: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Abuse

To my understanding, with several maps of Hawkins I've seen and just what I've heard, the Harrington's and the Byers's were neighbors before the canon timeline. And so my thoughts are this:

Steve and Jonathan were childhood best friends before high school. They did everything together. Rode their bikes up and down the street until the sun went down, played card games in one another's driveways, played pirates in the forest, swam together in the summers, etc. Jonathan would take pictures of them growing up—of Steve playing basketball in his driveway, of them at the Indiana state fair, in the Byers's kitchen for dinner, of Steve the morning after a sleepover. Steve would play baseball with Jonathan all the time, he'd ramble on about his sports hobbies, he'd share baseball cards and trade them, too. They'd exchange music tastes for a while. That kind of stuff.

They'd make promises to each other about being best friends forever and ever and ever. That they'd always have each others backs. They'd never forget one another. They'd live next to or with each other until they died. That sort of pact.

And some time before high school starts, things get bad with their families. Jonathan's dad, Lonnie, is verbally and physically abusive towards the whole family. Jonathan constantly throws himself in the line of fire, wanting to protect his mom and his little brother—who, mind you at this moment in time would be like ten years old. He's showing up to school with bruises, with new scars, with heavy eye bags. He's showing up without a lunch packed and without a good winter coat and without his head held high.

Steve won't stand for that. He wants his best friend in the whole wide world to be safe. So he makes that his life mission. He brings extra lunch for Jonathan. Gives him a spare winter coat. Tries to give him confidence boosts. Spends all his waking time with Jonathan, to make sure he's safe.

Then, one night, when his parents aren't home, he sneaks Jonathan and Will into his home while Joyce and Lonnie are hashing it out—Lonnie's threatening to leave for good this time, he's being reamed for gambling, for being a dirt bag (that sort of thing). So, Will sleeps in Steve's good sleeping bag on the floor. And Jonathan shares Steve's bed.

It ends up being a nice little sleepover. A spontaneous one, but a nice one nonetheless. Then, though, Steve's parents come home. His dad barges into his room, invading his privacy almost immediately because he doesn't believe in privacy. And he catches Jonathan in Steve's bed. He's telling them to collect their things, go on home, says that Joyce is looking for them—"I have to have a little conversation with Steve," is what they're told.

After that night, though, Jonathan doesn't see Steve all that often. In passing. On the school bus. At school.

It's not until a day where Jonathan is biking home that he approaches Steve to hang out. Steve is sitting outside in his driveway, sweaty from playing with his basketball, picking grass with his fingers, eyebrows furrowed and wearing a deep scowl. At first, Jonathan thinks maybe Steve had a hard day at school, maybe he's having issues with the words on the paper again, maybe he's mad because he hurt himself playing. But then, Jonathan gets a little closer, startling Steve—and he spots the telltale signs of bruising on one of Steve's biceps, deep and new and in the shape of fingertips. He knows these bruises all too well.

He approaches awkwardly, gently though. He tries to flash a big smile. Tries to make small easy talk. Says a couple things about a baseball game he caught on the radio, it was touch-and-go, but he heard enough to say something.

"I'm not supposed to talk to you anymore," Steve mumbles. His voice wet and raspy. He won't make eye contact. He won't unfurl himself from the knees to his chin, sitting on his bottom, hands to himself way he's on the ground. "Dad said you're a...you're a bad influence on me. That I'm not supposed to talk to people like..."

Like you, goes left unsaid.

"We can keep it a secret between us," Jonathan amends, trying to be optimistic, "we've done it before. We can do it again." He plops down on the driveway next to Steve. Barely bumps their opposite shoulders together. Keeps smiling at Steve's turned away, flushed face. Keeps smiling at Steve's barely concealed sad eyes and his terribly deep frown. "C'mon, Stevie. My mom bought a new pack of chocolate pudding. Let's go get you one, I know they're your favorite."

Steve stiffens. Teeth biting into his lower lip. Eyes closed off, impossibly sadder. "Jonny," he sighs. "Jonny, you're not good...you're not good enough for...me," he says lamely, choppy and awkward, "for my family."

Jonathan then scowls. Jolts away. "What's that supposed to mean? I thought we were best friends, Steve. Forever and ever, man."

"Just go home, Jonathan."

"No," Jonathan firmly objects, "something's wrong and you're obviously...you've got your head turned around or somethin' and I can help you, like you helped me."

At that, Steve turns his head. Eyes aflame. Piercing. Furious. He wiggles his left arm in Jonathan's sight, bruises prominently on display. "This is your fault, Jonathan!" he states, voice raised but not quite yelling, "he came after me because of...because of fairies like you!"

Jonathan's nostrils flare. He stands from the drive in one swift push. He stares down at Steve, covering him in his tall, lanky shadow. "Didn't know you were one of those people," he spits. "And I'm not stupid, Steve. I know who actually did that."

"Does it matter?" Steve squawks. "He did that to me because he"—

"Because he saw me in your bed," Jonathan finishes calmly, seething, yet cold. "I know that your dad is an asshole, Steve." Even pointing out who exactly did it has Steve flinching, Jonathan feels bad briefly, but allows himself to be hurt, too. "Doesn't mean you have to take after him," he states, voice final.

He walks back down the driveway, picks up his discarded bike, and gives one last cold glance to Steve. Steve, who's huddled down on the ground, bruised and battered, pinching his nose so he doesn't cry, sweaty and colored red from playing basketball outside, awkward and boyish the way he always was with Jonathan. Steve, who doesn't feel like Jonathan's friend.

"See you around, Harrington," Jonathan calls out. And as he bikes back home, his resolve crumbles. He already misses his best friend.

—

See? I half wrote a fic because I can't stop myself. But I'd like to think that at some point after canon is done, they do make amends. Somehow. Maybe Steve admits that he did like Jonathan, in that way. Maybe Steve admits that he was an asshole for that comment. Maybe Jonathan admits the same, but because he didn't push harder to have Steve let himself be helped.

Maybe they reconcile because all their past drama—words and relationships and high school bullshit—feels so trivial when the world was constantly crumbling at their feet.

Maybe Steve just wants to apologize. And maybe he just wants to help.

[findafight]

Nebs' Stranger Things Fic Masterlist

I'm finally making a masterlist for my fics/headcanons! hazzah! with brief descriptions) Compiling this I have realized I have written a LOT of stuff?? holy doodles. tumblr fics under the readmore (eventually I'll put them on ao3)

My Writing tag: Finda writes stuff

Ao3 Fics

Robin and Steve's Epic Platonic Soulmate Mixtape WIP. Robin and Steve become friends just after s1, friendship shenanigans as wells as Upside Down s2 (so far) ensues. RaSEPSM tag

Tennessee Ham and Strawberry Jam Complete. Sue Sinclair and Claudia Henderson childhood best friends + Goodbye Earl fic. Standalone but in same series/universe as RaSEPSM

You Don't Fool Me Complete. Steddie, Steve thinks they're dating, Eddie is a bit confused.

Visions of the Things to Be Complete Steddie. Eddie loves M*A*S*H. turns out, Steve also loves it. Eddie's a bit pissed about that.

Starfish on the Beach WIP platonic stobin, steddie. Steve dies instead of Eddie s5 fic, based on my own post

Tumblr Fics

Steddie Focused fics

Stobjargyle and Corroded Coffin au (tag)

Steve's mixtape of government banned songs

Demiro Steve

Addams!Steve (I will def continue this one of these days)

Rockstar Eddie and ~homosexual~ rumours

Human Steve and Spn Human Steve (tags)

Miraculous Au (tag)

Eddie Tweets AU (tag, only one post but will have more)

Baby Eddies checklist to get steve to fall in love with him

BNF Steve ramble

Stobin Focused Fics

Studio Era stobin lavender marraige au (lavender's blue au tag )

Upsidedown death Timetravel au (eventually will continue)

demiromantic steve

QPR stobin in their 40's

Best Hugs

Swimmer Steve au (tag) (possibly stonathan? idk yet tho)

Pjo au (tag)

Post Starcourt haha

Venom!Stobin (tag)

Steve is Seven au

Stobin post order66 au original post (that I'll eventually expand) Dustin realizes Robin and Steve are jedi. Stobin help train Dustin and Eddie is here now

Telepathic Stobin concept

Soulmate Words au snippet

Dream team Steve au prologue p1 (Steve is drafted to the NBA fic with qpr lavender marriage stobin

Misc posts

Steve dragging everyone's taste

Gay Jonathan Byers

Big Brother Steve (tag) original post

He picked up the bat

unrequited Byler p1 (part 2 eventually)

Erica Sinclair post StarCourt

Afterschool care steve

One sided ronance (for Nancy)

Steve doesn't want to be his mum

Bad timeline no Upside Down stancy

[emily-mooon]

@stonathanweek Day Two: Roomates AU/AU

Happy day two of Stonathan Week!

For this day, I give all of you art of my Itazura Na Kiss/Mischievous Kiss AU.

Reference image and blurbs based on summaries on the back of shoujo mangas under the cut.

I used an image from the original manga, Itazura Na Kiss as a pose reference (there are a lot of adaptations for this story. I could make an entire post about them but I won’t cause I have only seen two). I liked the pose better than what I was originally going to use because it would give off that classic shoujo vibe that I wanted.

Now here are the summaries. I wrote two of them. One from a Steve angle, and one from a Jonathan angle. I did this because I thought it would be fun. I hope they sound super cheesy because that is is what I was going for.

Steve’s

Eighteen year old Steve Harrington has it all. He’s the captain of Hawkins Academy’s Basketball team, quarterback on the football team, and the most desired boy in the whole school. But there is one thing he doesn’t have: the heart of his two year long crush, Jonathan Byers. Now that he’s graduating, Steve decided before Jonathan was out of his life forever to confess his deep love in the form of a letter. After pouring his heart out, all he got in return was a hard,flat no. At least it will be easier to leave for college now. But after coming home from hanging out with friends, Steve was surprised to see who was sitting on his couch. It was none other than the handsome Jonathan! Turns out his aunt and Jonathan’s mother were childhood friends and now due to unknown reasons, they will be living with them. Will this new living situation bring Steve closer to his crush? Or will it cause a further split between them?

Jonathan’s

Seventeen year old Jonathan Byers went through his first two years of high school in relative peace, until now when the most popular boy in school, Steve Harrington, confessed that he has a crush on him. Of course Jonathan rejected him, the social construct of popularity was something he hated and wanted to stay far away from. It seems like now that will be impossible. Due to unfortunate circumstances, Jonathan and his family will be living with Steve and his Aunt. With rumours spreading fast, he wants nothing more than to go back to the days when people barely even noticed him. Will Jonathan’s wish of going back to being an outcast come true? Or will the experience bring on new feelings?

Hope you all have a good rest of your weekend!

[andiwriteordie]

not the point of what i’m writing today but suddenly just remembered the byers home and the harrington home are located close to each other and now i’m just imagining a childhood friends to enemies to lovers stonathan au based on the song “come over” by noah kahan 

[fastcardotmp3]

.ficlets

[back to main masterlist]

I've written so many ficlets and blurbs etc for these little weirdos that I could never find again once I posted them, so here's all of (what I could find) in one place! (mostly for my own organization and sanity, but hey, you can use it too mwah!) full-length fic masterlist meta and analysis masterlist ao3

Platonic and/or Pre-Slash

the Munsons' Indy 500 tradition

Max & the Munson family

Uncle Eddie

Spider-Eddie AU

Music Industry Stobin meet Tour Journalist Eddie

He's been here before, he'll be here again

Nancy & Eddie pre-S3 meeting

"The Bear" AU

Nancy & Barb "When your best friend dies young..."

Nancy "Comphet" Wheeler goes to a gay bar

Nancy & Eddie & Barb

Jonathan & El sibling bonding

Robin's second coming out

TLOU inspired apocalypse AU

Truman Show inspired AU

Steve & Barb reunion

college radio AU

The West Wing AU

Conspiracy Theorist outsider POV

Steve & Nancy: Adventurers

Nancy & Mike: No More Secrets

Stobin on the run

Nancy & Eddie: Christmas at the cemetery

Liminal space: Robin, gas station on a long mountain road

Ronance

Ronance meets Immortality (part 2 here)

Ronance Letters AU

Kiki's Delivery Service AU

fool's gold

Good Omens AU

Generational listening

Horror Filmmaker!Nancy

Childhood Friends AU - Femslash Week 1

Getting together at the wrong time (and then the right time) - Femslash Week 2

Steddie

One-Hit Wonder Eddie

the beauty of a steddie slow burn

Steddie non-soulmate soulmate AU

post-S4 memory-wipe AU

Steddie New Years Eve traditions

beauty and tragedy

pre-S4 Steddie, but Eddie still dies

Gilmore Girls AU

Model!Steve

Graphic Novelist!Eddie

Russian Doll AU

here we go again (microfic challenge, July)

butter cake (microfic challenge, August)

wildfire (microfic challenge, September)

more for your money (microfic challenge, October)

rest stop (microfic challenge, November)

fluke (microfic challenge, December)

Guts

long haul trucker Eddie comes home

Dancer!Steve AU

Jargyle

Jargyle and the mortifying joy of Being Seen

Stonathan

How could you think, darlin', I'd scare so easily?

Wheelingham

Wheelingham S3 AU/ Chrissy candy striper AU

Chrissy Comes Back Wrong (1)

Chrissy Comes Back Wrong (2)

post-S2 AU

S4 AU Secret Relationship - Femslash Week 3

[heavencasteel420]

I have a couple of incidentally no-UD AU ideas (the Stonathan college one, the teen film noir one), but there’s one where that’s the main idea (i.e., what would have happened with the characters if there’d been no Upside Down or shady psychic experiments). And one of the things that happens is that Will becomes Yearbook Popular in high school (i.e., not a jock and not one of the rich kids who parties, but the respectable tier after that). It comes about because:

The most obvious, violent bullies of his age (the Troys and Jameses) become less popular in high school and are just regarded as kind of pathetic, even if nobody questions the attitudes behind the bullying.

Having never suffered the horrors of the UD and in large part robbed of the last part of his childhood pre-adolescence, Will is both more ready to put aside “immature” interests to make things easier and less cognizant of life being too short/unstable to cut out a source of joy.

Will also doesn’t have to deal with the social fallout of essentially being the victim of a lurid true crime story.

Girls, especially Nice Girls who do Yearbook and Student Government, like Will, because he’s good-looking and pleasant company and handy whenever a poster needs to be made. He doesn’t make a lot of new guy friends in high school (it is still rumored that he’s gay and people suck) but the approval of the girls means he has a crowd.

Joyce still starts dating Bob when he’s in eighth grade, which papers over some gossip about the family and leads to more stability (and, because of how the family works, Will is always going to be the first beneficiary of any increased stability). So he’s coming from a less obviously poor, dysfunctional family.

He gets a girlfriend, because, while he knows he doesn’t want that and Joyce and Jonathan and Bob are always saying he should be himself, he still lives in a Society. He’s also aware that Joyce and Jonathan are both really anxious that things be good for him, partly because they feel bad about him being bullied previously and rejected by Lonnie, and partly because they don’t want him to go through the stuff they went through. Also, there’s tension in the family because Jonathan’s having a hard time (read: a long-overdue anxiety disorder) and both Joyce and Bob are well-meaning but unhelpful about it for a while because they don’t get what’s going on. So there’s a lot of pressure not to be any trouble.

The Party are all still friendly with each other, but (much like the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) they’re moving in different directions. Lucas still joins the basketball team, Dustin falls in with the super-competitive nerds, and Mike goes the Hellfire route. Will is neither the first nor last to find his own thing, but he sees which way the wind is blowing.

[nburkhardt]

🔀Stonathan?

Modern + Childhood friends AU. Also Steve was the only one who dated Nancy (she didn’t live in Hawkins)

After the heartbreak that Nancy caused, Steve goes back to his home town of Hawkins. He meets back up with his childhood best friend, Jonathan and plays catch up feeling things he hasn’t since he was younger.

So, he takes a chance even if this could break him. Maybe this is it, maybe this is their time.

All Steve knows is this could either break him or bring him back to life.

A little shorter one, but I think it could work.

send me a 🔀 and a pairing, and i’ll shuffle my playlist and make an au based on the first song that comes up

[bottomlessabyssposts]

i’m begging for stonathan content

LMAO HELLO NIC !!

First of all there's a little surprise for you on Discord my dear fellow Stonathan enjoyer!

Second of all I have many concepts I want to exploit ;

Stonathan AU where Steve is a young father due to his recklessness and decides to step up for his child. He navigates through the rough life of a parent and meets Jonathan, a regular in the coffee shop he works at (he is severely sleep deprived) and they begin to talk a lot. Parents Stonathan with a sprinkle of angst and many sweet moments featuring the child ✨️

Stonathan canon compliant (s4 -> s5) where they both learn more about each other, realizing that they are so much different than they thought. Jonathan realizes Steve is not the same douchebag he was before and Steve realizes that Jonathan is so much more than a "nerd". Bonus point ; its late at night when they talk and they fall asleep against each other and no one wants to wake them up.

CHILDHOOD FRIENDS STONATHAN !! CHILDHOOD FRIENDS TO STRANGERS TO FRIENDS TO LOVERS !!! They thought the other became a complete stranger but then they find traces of their old friend !! Jonathan wants to pretend they were never friends but longs for a rekindle of their friendship and Steve fiercely protects their shared past and their memories. He thinks he has no right asking for forgiveness but Jonathan WANTS him to ask.

My brain is rotting

[finperiod]

childhood friends

[jonathanssweatercollection]

Stonathan x Stucky au:

‘Best friends since childhood, Jonathan Byers and Stephen Harrington were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield. Ex-war-photographer turned solider, Byers is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service of his country.’

[andiwriteordie]

WRITE THE STONATHAN FIC ANDI!!!! I know you have a lot of wips but uhhh you have a second devil on the shoulder and it's me--

I'm just kidding.... Unless? Like it's so funny I see so many stonathan on my dash and now I'm like. Well. I could, perhaps, make a stonathan edit. And now I'm spreading the agenda of everyone should make more stonathan content

NO YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO BE A DEVIL ON MY SHOULDER NIC ALREADY BULLIES ME ENOUGH AND WE ALL KNOW THAT I LISTEN TO THE DEMONS TOO OFTEN

also though like. stonathan au where they're childhood best friends, but then the byers move to california and steve and jonathan fall out of touch until they like. meet again at a bar or something when they're adults and don't recognize each other? could be fun could be fun.

alternatively, and hear me out because i know you like the spidey fics: jonathan as spider-man and steve is like a gwen stacy kind of character. like the preppy, popular guy at school who falls for the nerdy photographer. (jonathan is soooo andrew garfield peter parker coded and i said what i said.)