#*ficlets

It’s what gives him the ability to leave her speechless in the woods. It’s what coils around her heart like barbed wire when she’s scared. It’s what makes her cry into his chest. Or it’s what makes her lash out when she isn’t ready for it. 

The quick burning anger in her resents it with an acidic meanness. “I never would have thought you were a coward,” she tells him as her thoughts clamor to justify the words as they tumble out of her mouth. Because she can’t stand that gaze, needs to disarm him like he disarms her. She just wants him to feel this same helplessness. Loving Jonathan has always meant this excruciating vulnerability. Cost and reward in one. 

It works. The repentance of him turns in a complicated twist of his features. “My mom, my siblings—they need me, Nancy! And I couldn’t risk you giving up your dreams for me, but I can’t just leave them.” 

She scoffs. The answer of a martyr. A better person than her who's never let leaving Mike or Holly behind stop her from pursuing her ambitions. 

But there’s a different kind of fury in her, too. Less sudden, less prone to pass in a few minutes when she'll regret what she's saying. Something different. 

“What about your dreams?” she asks. 

He looks like she slapped him. Actually taken aback. Like this time she's the one who might have exposed him. It’s hard not to find a kind of sickening satisfaction in that. 

“What?” 

“What about,” she repeats slowly, feeling control come back to her, “your dreams? You used to talk about NYU. All the time.” He says nothing. Somehow, it unfurls more of that simmering rage. “You think I don’t know you, Jonathan? You think that I don’t know that no matter what, Emerson or California, you were already giving up?”  

He stares at her, then looks away and she wants to scream for him to face her but the wave of fury she'd felt had broken over her head and everything else was dragging behind in its wake.  

“It was a stupid kid's dream,” he says and Nancy’s heart breaks. He’s never looked young to her before. Most times he reflected her own age, sometimes he'd look older than he should be. Never like this.  

Like a boy who's afraid. Scared out of his mind. Of leaving behind his family for something to befall them. Of not succeeding. Of being left behind. Of falling into a pattern he can’t escape, dragging everybody with him. 

Silence stretches between them and he shrinks in on himself more and more. 

“Jonathan.” She longs to reach out and twist her hands into his shirt to pull him close, but it's not the time. They can do that later and she can wrap her arms around him and card a hand through his hair and mourn for the little boy who felt he needed to leave his hopes behind for other people. “I don’t want you to sacrifice everything for me either. And neither does your mom. Or Will. Or El.” 

Silence, to him, isn’t a comfort. Maybe ever. Max understands it in a way – the Sinclair house is rarely quiet. Erica alone is loud enough to fill any room with life, but Sue isn’t far behind her either, a more comforting but steady stream of chatter she keeps up easy as breathing. Charles is the only reserved one but even he gets animated when the right subject gets brought up. Like planes or Lucas’ biology homework. (Erica once confided in Max that she’s 100% sure Lucas got his “nerd genes” from their father’s side of the family. “You should hear Uncle Jack go off,” she’d said with a long and meaningful look.) 

Spending time at the Sinclairs’ definitely shed some light on Lucas’ constant bickering with Dustin and Mike. There’s no fear in him that a simple argument can shift and shake in a single word. His parents built him and Erica a home where they never have to be truly afraid of their punishments. 

If Max had that, maybe she wouldn’t relish silence either. 

But she did, and so she does, while Lucas gets into his own head. He and Mike can give each other a run for the money in pacing.  

And sometimes, like now, Max can’t take it. She waits for him to pass her and stops him short, tugging at his sleeve. She’s sitting crisscross applesauce on the ground and at this point they’ve done this often enough, so he knows what she’s saying. 

With a sigh he abandons his route and lowers himself to sit in front of her. He spins himself so it’s his back to her and she uncrosses her legs so he can lean back against her while she brackets him, leaving little to no space between them. 

It makes her feel better, knowing that she's someone's resting place. Sometimes it's nice to feel relied on. 

“Do you want the Walkman?” she asks, hands hovering over it at her side. Sometimes that helps, to introduce sound into the dread. They’ve learned to communicate with the lights anyway, he doesn’t always need his ears. 

“No,” he says. “I just wanna get this over with.” 

Max laughs, a little bitter. “You know after this there’s just gonna be another one. And another. And another.” 

He tilts his head back. She’s already looking down at the top of his head, so their noses are almost touching now. The smell of him sits deep inside her chest, an automatic recognition of him. 

“Yeah, but eventually we’ll figure out how to get to the end,” he says and sounds wonderfully confident. Against her better judgment it warms Max from the inside out. His conviction is always so infectious, it’s hard to resist 

Still, she can’t resist challenging him just a little. “What if we don’t?” 

Jonathan tries not to let it show, just watches as Steve closes the distance between them and throws an arm around his shoulder. He smells very Steve-like with an added pinch of sweat and liquor. His cheeks are flushed pink. Definitely on the drunker side of things. “Where are you going?” 

“Home.” 

“Why?”  

Jonathan wonders if alcohol can have the magical effect of Bambi-fying a person’s features. When his father gets drunk, his face only grows more sunken. Not Steve. He’s beaming at Jonathan in that weird way that makes his stomach twist and he could swear his eyes are bigger somehow. And soft. 

“Why do you care?” It comes out crabbier than Jonathan intentioned. He really wants to get out of here and the weight of Steve is distracting and threatening to change his mind.  

Steve leans in closer, bringing their heads together as if they’re sharing a secret. Jonathan hasn’t drunk anything, but in his chest there’s a low fluttering. “Because,” he says, slowly, like he’s contemplating the question very seriously, “I just do.” 

The breath escapes Jonathan. The hum in his chest doesn’t go away, but the tension in his shoulders does, built up in the weighty little pause Steve built into his sentence. 

“Okay,” he says. 

“No seriously,” Steve insists and puts a little more of himself onto Jonathan’s side. He’s not heavy, just warm and close, getting rid of the last spaces between them. “Did something happen? I saw you with Tommy and Carol. They just talk a lot of shit, you know? They’re idiots.” 

Then why are you friends with them? Jonathan thinks and realizes then that he isn’t really. Not anymore. It’s just this kind of party. Everybody comes and it doesn’t mean anything. He hates it. 

“They are,” he agrees. “Just isn’t my crowd, I guess.” 

Steve moves to the side and Jonathan isn’t expecting it. They sway together as one and stumble over their own feet, halfway into the hedge that borders the little stone path leading to the gate. 

“Mh. Okay.” He turns and looks directly at Jonathan who idiotically forgot to avert his gaze in time. Another pause. Jonathan can smell his breath. It’s not great, but he doesn’t mind so much when it’s paired with brown eyes flicking up and down, catching him in place. “Do you wanna go somewhere else, then?” 

It takes a second or two for Jonathan’s brain to process. “With you?” 

Steve grins. “Yeah.” He frowns briefly. Sways again. “But I don’t think I should drive.” 

“Will?” Mike asks, peeking out of the bedroom. His eyebrows lift and his face takes on that expression that makes Will feel like he's at the very center of the universe. “What's wrong?” 

Will wipes under his eyes even though he knows it’s futile. “Nothing,” he says. That’s futile, too. Three years he's been living with Mike and that’s never worked before. 

As expected, he doesn’t let up. “Did you have a flashback?” 

“No.” Will wilts a little. “I can’t find my keys.” 

Mike doesn’t laugh or huff or anything like that. If there’s relief, Will is too busy looking back into the kitchen to catch it. What he does hear is the shuffling footsteps coming after him. “Okay.” When Will turns around Mike is right there, looking focused and intent. As if he <i>were</i> having a flashback. As if it's all the same to him when Will feels bad. 

For a moment, it all pauses in will, pacing stress forgotten because he’s stopped by it. The unquestioning, unrelenting truth of that. That Mike is by his side, at his back. Looking like any problem, no matter how minor, Will is facing, he's taking on, too. 

The ticking clock comes crashing back through, but somehow it’s less daunting than before. 

“Should I look in the bedroom?” he asks, wiping away the rest of Will's tears on his cheeks.  

Will lifts a hand and lets his fingers ghost over Mike's knuckles. Then he nods. 

Eddie is occupying the kitchen when she emerges from her study session. The timer went off and she's done for the day. There's times when she'll force herself to go over but the better days are when she can call it quits when she planned to.  

On her fuzzy socks, she's quiet and Eddie is absorbed in D&D prep. So she pauses in the doorway to sneak a look at him. 

He's sat in the way that'll make his leg fall asleep and biting his nails. There’s ink stains all over his fingers. And she just says it quietly into the air, “I think I might love you.” 

Her heart sinks the first second after it’s out there. Certain and fragile. Wobbling. 

Eddie doesn’t react. 

“Mh?” he says, looking up from his maps and his notes. His eyes are glazed over. He's in a different world, somewhere where dark wizards reign but are always eventually toppled. 

It's perfectly innocent and a complete disaster. If she thought about this happening, imagined it, she would want to disappear off the face of the earth. A nightmare scenario and shameful and so unsuited to all those perfect love stories she was meant to fit into like a cut-out and… And Chrissy finds, she doesn’t mind.  

She hates the thought of being perfect when that’s what she was raised to be. She hates the way guilt caves in on her every time she takes up more space than what people want to assign her. She hates it with an aching, syrupy kind of anger that sits deep in her chest and can’t ever see the light of day in its entirety. 

And it’s Eddie. 

He doesn’t like perfect, either. He likes her clumsy and full of mistakes. Not so bad when you see it in others, too, he told her once.  

She's over being scared that he won’t look at her the same way if she puts a foot wrong. She'd survive it even if he did.  

Chrissy's never been good at making herself heard and she might never be. But maybe that’s okay. 

They have time.  

She smiles. “Nothing. Do you want some coffee?” 

A brief flash of recognition in his eyes, “Coffee!” which means yes.