That Shit’ll Make The Pope See Spaceships

“Woah, hey—!” You catch him hard, the impact jarring up your spine as he sags into you. Your grip tightens around his middle, fingers digging into the damp cotton of his shirt.

“Stay with me,” you say, sharper now, breath coming quick as you fumble the key toward the lock. “Steve, just... just hang on, okay? We’re right here.”

He makes a vague sound in agreement, head lolling against your shoulder.   

“Mm... m’kay,” he mumbles.  

You finally jam the key in, shove the door open with your hip.

“I got you. Just watch the step—Steve, watch the—”  

His sneaker catches on the edge of the rug and he pitches forward, dead weight.

You lurch with him, heart jumping into your throat, barely managing to haul him back before he faceplants into the welcome mat. He makes a quiet, confused noise as you pull him upright.

The distance from the door to the couch is nothing. A straight line. Ten seconds, maybe.

It takes close to a full minute.

Steve’s face sinks right back into your neck as you half-drag him toward the living room. He keeps stopping every few steps, gaze snagging on random things like he’s discovering them for the first time: the standing lamp, the coat rack by the wall, the crooked photo of you two at the lake this summer.

“Babe,” he murmurs at one point, voice soft with wonder, pointing vaguely toward the end of the hallway. “There’s… wha... why’re you over there?”

“I’m right here, baby,” you say gently, tugging him forward again. “That’s a mirror.”

“...Oh.”

By the time you reach the couch, your arms are shaking.

Steve collapses into it with a breathy oof, body folding in on itself before going slack. His limbs fall wherever they land—one leg hanging off the cushions, head tipped back, chest rising and falling in uneven pulls.

For a moment he just sits there. Blinking slowly at the ceiling, breathing through his mouth.  

You drop into a crouch in front of him.  

“Steve?” you whisper.

“Mm.”    

The uniform makes it worse.

Bright navy and white stripes, grotesquely cheerful against the splatters of blood that have seeped into the collar, smeared across his side like someone tried to wipe their hands on him.

You start moving before you can think better of it.

Sliding your hands up his arms, across his shoulders, down to his thighs, his calves. You’re not even sure what you’re looking for, just checking for something hidden, something worse, eyes frantically cataloguing every faint scratch you can find on his exposed skin.

Steve makes a quiet noise in his throat when you touch him. Not quite pained—more like confusion, like the sensation is arriving late.

His hand lifts, slow and uncoordinated, missing yours the first time. He tries again, fumbling clumsily until it lands over your fingers.

The second he finds you, he holds on. Threads his fingers between yours, his grip weak but insistent when he squeezes.

You’re about to squeeze back when your eyes catch on something else.

His wrists.

Deep impressions ring both of them, angry red marks already bruising dark at the edges. The skin is rubbed raw, split and abraded in places where he must’ve fought against whatever they used to hold him down.

I don’t know, they took him—woah, dingus look at that! Oh my god, that’s amaazing... huh? Oh, right, right, um... I think they like... took him to another room? But... I don’t know what they did to him.  

You swallow hard against the rising bile, brushing your thumb lightly over one of the marks.

Steve doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Steve, baby,” you say quietly, still inspecting his wrists. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Nothing.

“Steve?”

Your head snaps up, panic cutting sharp through your chest.

He’s looking at you.

Staring, actually—eyes locked onto your face with a strange, heavy focus that doesn’t quite stick, like he’s trying to see you through water, like every second you’re slipping just out of reach.

His hair hangs in damp strands over his face, clinging to his forehead and the bridge of his nose.

“Hey,” you whisper, lifting your free hand to push his hair back.

Your fingers barely graze his skin before he flinches.

And you finally see it.

Up close, it’s so much worse than it looked under the neon glare of the Starcourt parking lot.

Steve’s eye is nearly swollen shut.

The lid is puffed up and dark, deep purples and sickly reds bleeding into his cheekbone. His nose is streaked with dried blood, rust-colored trails cracking against his skin. His lower lip is split wide open, a jagged cut that hasn’t fully sealed.  

You watch, horrified, as he presses his tongue against it, absentmindedly pressing the tip of it against the inside of his cheek. It slides beneath the swollen flesh, prodding the ragged edge.  

“No, baby, don’t… don’t do that,” you murmur quickly, your hand moving on instinct to catch his chin.

The moment your fingers touch him, he freezes completely. His body relaxes, almost unnervingly pliant, and his expression goes slack.

Your hand trembles when you pull it back.

You don’t let yourself think about happened in that room.

All you have are fragments. Dustin Henderson’s explanation outside of Starcourt had been rushed and breathless, a mess of words that mostly made no sense to you—Russians, secret codes, an underground government lab.

Torture. 

It hadn’t sounded real then.

It does now.

The evidence is sitting right in front of you, breathing unevenly on your couch.

Your gaze drops back to his wrists.

“Hey, Stevie?” you ask, voice thin. “Do you know where you are?”

“Mm?”   

“Where are you right now?”

He frowns slowly. His eyes stay on you for another long second, then drift, sliding across the room in a dazed, unfocused sweep.

Whatever drugs they forced into him—truth serum, Dustin had said—it’s still in his system.

You can see it in his pupils—so dilated that the hazel in his eyes is barely visible, just a thin ring of gold swallowed by glossy black. The whites are bloodshot, veins spidering outward.

“...your house,” he murmurs quietly.

Your lungs finally let go of the breath you’ve been holding.

“Okay. Good. That’s good.” You swallow, throat dry. “And what day is it?”

That one takes longer.

You see it, the delay. His lips parting, eyes losing you again as they drift somewhere over your shoulder.

“Mmm… don’t know.”

Your chest tightens.

“Can you try? Just take a guess?”

He squints. Looks down at the coffee table, following the swirls in the wood grain.

“...Wednesday?”

It’s Monday.

“Okay,” you nod immediately, trying to keep your voice from pitching higher. “That’s okay. Um... what about the month?”

He blinks slowly.

“Steve?”

“...July.”

“Yeah,” you breathe, squeezing his hand, clutching to the answer like a lifeline. “Yeah, that’s right. That's good. And tell me what year?”

Something in him changes at that, a sudden restless energy cutting through the drugged haze. 

His nose scrunches, shoulders twitching uncomfortably against the couch. He drops his gaze down to his hands, to where his fingers are still tangled with yours.

“I don’t…” His voice fades, head tilting in a slow, helpless shake. “…sorry.”

Your grip tightens instantly, thumb brushing over his knuckles.

“No, it’s okay. You’re okay, baby. You’re okay.”

You say it like it’s true.

Inside, everything is screaming.

You have no idea what you’re doing.

Nothing but half-remembered warnings from health class, scenes from movies, TV shows, something about concussions and checking someone's pupils, not letting them sleep.

But what if this is something worse?

What if there’s something happening inside his head right now—bleeding, swelling—and you’re just sitting here, holding his hand?

You tried to take him to the hospital. God, you tried.  

He could barely keep his eyes open in the car, forehead knocking softly against the window every time the road curved, but whenever you said the word hospital, he shook his head.

Stubborn as always, even half-conscious.

“Steve—"

“No.”

“Steve, you need—"

“No... no hoss...pital.”

And after what you learned tonight—after everything about Russians and government labs under small-town malls—you understood him enough to hesitate.

But now it’s just you.

And the quiet, suffocating thought that you’re not enough.

What if you miss something?

What if he gets worse and you can’t help him?

What if— 

A sharp, sudden huff cuts through your spiraling thoughts.

Your head jerks up just in time to see him fold forward, arms lifting clumsily, not quite making it.

You catch him immediately.

“Hey, hey, what’s wrong?” Your hands slide up to his shoulders, steadying him before he can pitch all the way down. “You okay? You feel sick again?”

Steve shakes his head.

Looks so distraught, all of a sudden.

The emotion sits strangely on his face, tangled up with the swelling and the fuzzy stupor still dulling his expression. 

He drags his tongue across his split lip, swallows hard.

“Can you... can you hug me?”

He’s nineteen.

You forget that sometimes.

He turned nineteen less than two weeks ago.

You remember the pancakes you made that morning—burnt on one side, stacked too high with a slow-motion avalanche of whipped cream. The surprise party at the lake, Dustin nearly dropping the cake twice before it made it to the table.

The way Steve groaned when you made him close his eyes and make a wish.

Babe, you know I’m way too old for this, right?

Still, he blew out every last candle. Tore open every gift, read every letter. 

And later that night, when it was just the two of you tangled under sheets and summer heat, he told you something you never forgot.   

“Mm… ten years, maybe?”

“What?”

“Yeah, I mean... my parents traveled a lot over the summer, so. Just stopped having ‘em, I guess.”

Stopped celebrating his birthday, he meant.

Your arms are around him before the memory can finish forming.

You pull him in carefully, one hand cradling the back of his head, angling him so he's not putting pressure on his bruised eye.

He crumples into you with a quiet sigh, forehead bumping against your collarbone before he buries his face in the curve of your neck. His breath is warm against your skin, damp where it catches.

For a minute, you just hold him.

Feeling the frantic, unrelenting thud of his heart against your ribs, so fast it makes your own chest ache. You tighten your arms around him, pressing him closer, like you can slow it down that way.  

His voice comes after a long silence, words muffled and heavy.

“…they kept... kept asking questions.”

Your fingers still in his hair, then move again, smoothing back damp strands from his forehead.

“Yeah?”

He nods, dragging his bruised cheek across your shoulder. 

“Same... same ones. Over and over. Didn’t matter what we said. Just... again, again.”

Your eyes squeeze shut, a quiet, nauseating realization washing through you. Maybe your incessant questioning—Where are you? What day is it?— just dragged him right back there.

You feel him shiver into your shoulder, a weak laugh ghosting against your collarbone.

“Hey... you know wha... you know what was weird?”

“What?”

His fingers move against your back, tracing shapes you can’t see.

“They said we were gonna die down there.”

Your throat goes tight.

“And I…” he huffs, another brittle laugh shaking through him. “I just like... kept talking, you know? So they’d look at me ‘n not... not Robin. Saying whatever. Dumb stuff. I work at Scoops! Ice cream... Scoops... Scoops Ahoy.”

He sniffs, tilting his face into your neck. You feel his brows furrow against your skin.

“They got really pissed. Said if we didn’t answer, that was it. Nobody’d find us. Nobody’d even… know we were there.”

He sighs, his weight sinking heavier into you.

“I kept thinking about you,” he whispers.

Your hand stills in his hair.  

“I kept thinking… if I didn’t come back, you’d—” He falters, jaw tightening where it presses into you. “You’d notice. Right?”

The inside of your cheek stings where you bite down. You nod, pressing your lips into his hair so he won’t hear the tremor in your voice.

“Of course I’d notice, Steve,” you whisper.   

He nods, swallowing hard enough you feel it against your collarbone.

“I didn’t... didn’t tell you,” he mumbles, words muffled into the curve of your neck.

“Hm?”

“I didn’t tell you,” he repeats.

A cold thread slips down your spine.

“Tell me what, Stevie?” you murmur, pulling back slightly, trying to see his face.

You feel it before you understand it.

The shift.

The warmth you were holding stiffens under your arms. Muscles locking up all at once, shoulders going rigid.

“Steve?”

It goes from nought to ninety in less than a breath.

One moment he’s heavy, pliant in your arms; the next, his whole body convulses. Tremors wrack him violently, shoving against your chest, jostling you both. Each wave builds, stronger than the last.

“Hey, hey, it’s—it’s okay—” You rush, voice thinning with panic as your hands scramble along his back, trying to grip him, steady him. “I’ve got you, you’re okay—"

His arms clamp around you like steel, brittle fingers digging into your back. His chest jerks with shallow gasps, each inhale too quick to carry air.

“I d-didn’t tell you,” he chokes out, words splintering between breaths. “I didn’t—I didn’t—”

“Steve, baby, it’s okay,” you whisper, sweeping your hand slow and firm along his back, even as your own chest feels like it’s caving in. “Hey, hey, just breathe for me, okay? You’re home, you’re safe.”

He shakes his head, breath hitching against your shoulder.

“No... no, I—” His voice catches in his throat, scraped raw. “I never said it. I never... I never told you. We never...”   

And in the long, ragged, suffocating pause that arrives after, you hear what he’s been trying to say.

What he means.

Two months.

That’s all it’s been.

Barely enough time to learn the shape of each other’s lives, and yet... it’s never felt that way. 

It’s always felt older.

Like you didn’t meet him so much as find him again. Orbiting the same point for years, lifetimes, just waiting to collide.

You used to joke about it. Past lives, red strings. Soulmates, if you were feeling dramatic.

And in those two months—in all the ways you’ve come to learn him—this boy who loves loudly without knowing it, who gives pieces of himself away in quiet, constant gestures, who shows up, who stays, who cares harder than anyone else ever has—

After two months of learning what it means to be adored by someone like him—

There was always something buried just under the surface, left unsaid.

They’ve lived inside you for weeks now. You carried it with you everywhere, pressed close like a second heartbeat.  

Three words you’ve never said out loud.

“I didn’t say it,” he whispers, hoarse, broken. “I didn’t.”

And whatever he’d been holding onto all night—whatever thin, fraying thread kept him upright for Robin, for the kids, through the mall, the parking lot, the drive home, brushing off every what happened? are you okay?—

It finally gives.

Slips clean through his fingers like sand underwater. Gone all at once, nothing left to brace against.  

“I was just... I was so scared.”

You fold him into your chest, arms pressing him closer as a tear slides down your cheek and catches in the damp strands of his hair.

“I know,” you whisper. “I know, baby. I know.”

It isn’t true.

You don’t know.

You weren’t there.

Didn’t see the way they looked at him, didn’t hear their threats.

Didn’t feel what he felt, tied to that chair, not knowing if the next second was going to be the one that ended everything.

Not knowing if nineteen was it.

You don’t know.

But what else can you say?

...  

It’s strange, how life keeps moving after a moment like that.

How something so monumental can implode in your chest while the rest of the world spins on, indifferent.

Your room looks the same—the half-made bed, his jacket draped over your chair from the last time he was here—but nothing feels the same. Your hands tremble, and you flex your fingers, pressing your nails into your palm to ground yourself before you pull open the drawer. You let your fingers trail over the familiar textures of his shirts, his sweatpants—pieces of him he leaves behind on purpose. They still smell like him, even after washing.

You take a shaky breath and turn back.

He doesn’t argue when you kneel in front of him.

Just watches you, sat quietly on the edge of the bed, legs parted to make space as your fingers start loosening the laces of his sneakers. 

You ease them off one at a time, then move to his socks, brushing your thumbs over the warm, soft skin of his ankles. Lingering there, trying to imprint the memory of a touch that doesn’t involve pain.

You glance up at him, hands sliding over to his waistband.

“Gonna get these off, okay?”

He nods, planting his palms into the mattress so he can lift his hips, fingers splayed to brace himself. Your chest tightens at the way his face pinches—just for a second, there and gone, like he’s trying not to let you see. 

You ease his shorts down over his thighs, then his briefs.  

His shirt is the last thing to come off.

He hesitates a little when you reach for the hem, and the moment you lift the fabric, you understand why.

Even in the dim light, there’s no hiding it.

Dark bruises bloom across his sides, wrapping around his stomach. There’s one just under his ribs that’s so deep it’s nearly black at the center, the skin tight and swollen in a way that turns your gut ice-cold.

That's not from a fist.

For a heartbeat, you see him there.   

Head slumped forward, taking blow after blow while he tries to breathe through the blood filling his mouth. You force it down, swallowing the rush of panic before it can break free.

Steve follows your gaze, blinking down at himself.

“Oh,” he breathes. “Yeah, that’s uh… looks worse than it is.”

His speech is clearer now. No longer thick or slurred like it was before. Up close, you see that the glassiness in his eyes has started to lift too, his pupils returning to normal.

But what’s left behind isn’t easy.

His brows are pulled tight, expression pinched from bracing against the pressure building in his skull. He’s clenching and unclenching his jaw to fight off the waves of nausea, worsening with each passing second of clarity. 

You know that he’s lying—that it doesn’t look worse than it is—but you don’t argue.

Instead, you reach for his hands, gently lifting his arms, pulling his shirt over his head. You discard the bloodied uniform to the floor before helping him into a fresh shirt, sliding it over his bruised frame with care.

You reach for his sweats next, guiding him one leg at a time, your hand braced at his shin to keep him steady as you draw the fabric up over his thighs.

You’re adjusting the waistband over his hips when he suddenly goes still.

“You okay?”

He stiffens, jaw working. “Mm—I need the—”  

You drag the trash can over just in time.

He folds forward with a weak gag, body curling in on itself as far as his ribs will allow.

There’s not much left in his stomach. The retching is brief, mostly dry, but it still wrings him out. Leaves him shaking, breath catching in uneven pulls.

You press your hand between his shoulder blades, rubbing slow, firm circles until it passes, until he leans back with a shallow breath.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, lips parted, face gone pale under all the bruising.

You shake your head, reaching for the warm washcloth you’d set aside earlier.

"It's okay. Don't apologize."

You press the cloth gently to his lips, slow, careful strokes as you wipe the corner of his mouth, the faint smear of blood under his nose, along the line of his jaw and down the column of his neck. It comes back faintly pink each time.

Your thumb follows after, catching where the cloth missed.

Then you pause at his mouth.

The cut on his bottom lip is so deep, the edges of it raw, pulled tight every time he speaks. You tilt his chin slightly, angling his face toward the light.

You’re still frowning at it, wondering whether you should clean it now or let him rest, when he says it.

And it’s not what you thought it would feel like, the first time.

It’s supposed to feel bigger than this, isn’t it? Fireworks in the chest, thunder in the ribs. Something that cracks the world open a little—shake the ground under your feet and pull the stars a little close so they can witness it too.   

Instead, it happens in your bedroom at two in the morning, the coppery smell of dried blood clinging to your fingers, sticky under your nails, catching at the back of your throat

“I love you.”

His voice is low, scraped hoarse with exhaustion, yet steady in a way it hasn’t been all night.

It’s almost painful, how much rushes up all at once.

All the times you didn’t say it.

All the almosts. 

All the places it lived instead.

In the center console of his car, watching him belt out the wrong lyrics at the top of his lungs, just to catch your laugh from the passenger seat.

In the sticky vinyl booth of that diner off the highway, knees knocking under the table while you plucked the cherries off his milkshake and debated the dumbest lines from the movie you just watched.

In the space between your pillows, lying on your sides in the dark, sharing half-formed plans and distant, candy-colored versions of the future—nothing guaranteed except for the easy assumption that you’d share it with one another.

It was always there.

Perched on the tip of your tongue, waiting—in the quiet beat after a joke, a kiss.

In all the moments where you’d look at him and just know.

Know with a certainty so sharp it scared you sometimes.

That this boy—this ridiculous, funny, soft-hearted, endlessly giving boy—was it.

You’d always told yourself there was time.

Tomorrow. Next week.

Later.  

Some other night with candlelight and rose petals, when it made sense, when it could be perfect, worthy of the way it feels to love and be loved by him.  

But maybe the truth of it lives here, like this.

Stripped bare, intimate in a way no grand declaration ever could be.

“I…” Your voice catches, and you swallow before trying again. “I love you too.”

Your vision fills with a sudden haze, and you blink quickly, forcing yourself to look away.  

Steve’s eyes droop at that, brows furrowing softly as he shuffles closer.

“Baby… c’mon, don’t…” He raises his hand, brushing his thumb under your eye to catch the second tear before it falls. He lingers there, cradling your cheek in the warmth of his palm. “Don’t cry. Please?”

“I’m not, I’m not,” you sniff, half-laughing, hastily wiping at your face with the back of your hand.

He studies you a long moment, blinking unevenly, before the faintest smile curls his lips. “Does my face look that bad?”

A startled laugh slips past you. You shake your head, pressing a weak palm against his shoulder. “You’re such an idiot.”

His grin softens into a gentle, half-lidded smile, eyes warm and heavy as he lets his gaze settle on you.  

“’M gonna say it every day,” he murmurs quietly.  

Your chest aches at the promise.

You wish he didn’t have to think about it like that.

That he didn’t have to worry. That he didn’t have to carry the weight of those three words on his chest while tied to that chair—wrists raw, blood in his mouth and fluorescent lights burning into his skull—wondering if he’d ever get to say them aloud.

That the last thing on his mind wasn’t the absence of something so small.

Something you already knew.

You’ve always known.

“Steve…” you whisper.

“I know,” he whispers back, nodding slowly, eyes thick with exhaustion but bright with that familiar resolve. “I know you know. I just…” He rubs his thumb gently across your cheek. “I’m still gonna say it.”

You watch him for a moment, taking in the quiet conviction in his gaze, the stubborn tilt of his head. Stubborn in the ways that matter most—clinging to small, sacred truths even after staring death in the face.

You nod, because that’s who he is.

And because you’ll listen every time like it’s the first.

“Okay,” you whisper.

You lean in carefully, tilting your head to avoid the split in his lip, and press a soft, lingering kiss to the unbroken corner of his mouth.