dance me to the end of love

He gets high on low days because he has always appreciated irony. The only book he ever finished in English class was Slaughterhouse-Five, in part because it was so short and in part because it felt like the author was a real guy and not a dictionary. He was sarcastic and funny and genuine, so Steve actually wanted to know what he had to say about things like war and capitalism and people. He trusted Kurt Vonnegut because he knew what evil smelled like and that life was a horrible joke sometimes, but still managed to keep going.

Steve felt like Billy Pilgrim sometimes, like he’s weighed down with a sick narrative he never asked for. Billy survives a plane crash, but his wife dies on the way to the hospital; Steve risks his life to save his girlfriend and she cheats on him anyway. Billy’s unit is condemned to a slaughterhouse but they’re the only ones who make it out of Dresden alive; somebody dies in Steve’s pool and it should be him but it’s not.

He gets high on the low days and sits at the edge of the pool. He watches the light dance on the water and slowly kicks his feet back and forth, listens intently to the record player in the living room and not the sounds from the forest. Sometimes he thinks about jumping in and staying at the bottom – it seems nice and bright and cool down there, if a little lonely.

This is a ghost story.

--

Steve would kill for those kids. Has killed for those kids, would do it again, no hesitation.

Dustin is yelling at him to calm down.

--

There may have been a time when his mother-hen behavior was healthy. Truthfully, he was healthiest when he didn’t care about the kids at all, barely knew what their names were, let alone their favourite comic books and the lore behind their D&D characters and what they looked like when they thought they were going to die. The last time he slept well was when he knew Mike as Nancy’s kid brother and nothing else.

Now that he thinks about it, there was a time after everything started going to shit where he could sleep without knowing where they were. Sure, for a couple of days after Starcourt he forced them all to walkie him when they got home, when they went to bed, if they went off on their own. Dustin did it enthusiastically and abused his walkie privileges mercilessly, using Steve’s insistence that he let him know that he was okay to talk his ear off all the time, about everything: his science project, Batman, his mom, his cat, what his hair currently looks like. (Steve did talk with him about that last one; he doesn’t trust anyone else to give the kid hair advice.) Mike didn’t do it the first night, so Steve phoned the Wheeler house. Nancy picked up, confused, and told him that Mike had been doing almost nothing but sleeping since they got home from the mall. Then she stayed on the phone with Steve, talking in her softer voice that she normally only used on stray cats (and a long time ago, on him, sometimes) until he couldn’t feel his heart in his neck anymore. Will called when asked, and was always sweet and short and perfectly polite, but also sounded like he would have stayed on the walkie for longer if Steve had asked. Steve never asked. Lucas obeyed orders, but only for a couple of days. By the time he forgot for the first time on the fourth day, though, Steve could fall asleep without leaving all the lights on. They had won, after all.

They didn’t win this time.