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Jonathan thinks that perhaps in another life, he could’ve been Steve.
Sometimes – rarely, very rarely – when it’s too late for him to be awake, and his mother’s just called to let him know she’s heading out from work, and he’s poked his head through Will’s bedroom door to find him still there no less than five times, he lets himself wonder about it.
Steve, who is liked and loved and lusted for. Steve, who all his brother’s friends worshipped with starstruck awe lighting up their eyes. Steve, who was Nancy’s first love (he’s not convinced that he still isn’t, but Nancy gets mad when he brings it up). Steve, who that one time, caught up in his false bravado, had called him a queer and insulted his family in the open street. Steve, who he had beaten up, all blind rage and aimless punches and a primal need to connect knuckles with skin, that very same time.
Some other times, he’ll think about being like Brendan Abbott, rich, spoiled and without a responsibility in the world, or like Phil O’Neil, star of the football team and ladies’ man to boot, or even like resident nerds Roger Parker and Sean Bailey, with one friend to call his own.
But those dreams are empty and mocking and most importantly, unattainable, and so, he’s always back at Steve, because Steve isn’t nearly the most popular or the richest or the most pursued, but he’s everything Jonathan could’ve been. That life is just beyond the reach of his fingertips – not to grasp, but to graze, because Steve Harrington is perfect, but not so perfect that Jonathan has given up on comparing himself to him.
He's told Nancy all this – he loves her too much to leave her guessing what monsters creep up on their time together and cause his eyes to glaze over. She had told him, loud and clear, with his head on her shoulder and her hands in his hair, that he was the one she loved. He’d cried, and thanked her, and kissed her with a desperation that had been overwhelming. He’d been so grateful and wished with all his heart that it would quieten the voices in his head. If only it were that easy.
He's back at his brother’s bedroom door now, the dull anxiety that throbs in his veins never staying put for more than an hour, because Jonathan has learned from experience that the moment he lets his guard down is the moment everything goes to shit. He’s still there, asleep on his side, because why wouldn’t he be? He’s tried explaining that to his conscience – too bad that one’s a stubborn motherfucker.
Sometimes he thinks that maybe he should be mad at Will. After all, isn’t he why Jonathan is Jonathan, lonely and far too responsible and already so exhausted of life at eighteen, and not wild, funny, exciting Steve?
He could’ve been the one who made it onto the basketball team in their sophomore year. Maybe he wouldn’t have, but he’d never even had the chance to try. He hadn’t been able to stay back after school for tryouts – his mother had been working, and the Wheelers had taken their son to the orthodontist, and someone had had to stay home with his kid brother.
He could’ve been the one to raise his hand to put together the yearbook last year. He’s pretty sure he’d have done a better job. Except, Will had been hurt and unconscious and he didn’t even want to know what else, and it’d been his fault, and he simply hadn’t had the luxury to give a shit about school.
He could’ve been the one to ask Nancy out first and make her feel as special as she’s always been. But he’d gotten caught up with stuff – family stuff, hysterical mother stuff, Will-presumed-dead stuff, and sure, he’s sorted things out with her now, but it’s come at the cost of the giant shadow that’s taken up permanent residence in a corner of his bedroom, the one that whispers she’d only settled for him.
So, maybe it’s only fair that Will cops some of the blame. Maybe Jonathan should just start yelling at him one morning when he drops him off at school, hoarse voice, pointed fingers and all, and hope that it triggers some dramatic, all-encompassing catharsis in him that will clear out his mind of all the metaphorical trash that has been clogging it up for the better part of his adolescence. Maybe that’s all he needs – someone to place all this baggage on.
But then he thinks about it for more than three seconds, and he feels sick of himself, because Will is not that someone, and he can’t believe he even entertained that possibility a moment ago.
That’s usually when he steps into the room, the guilt trickling through his frame and pooling at his feet, cementing them in place just beside the bed. And he watches the sleeping figure’s chest going up and down and up, and he kicks himself for even beginning to think what he had because Will is his little brother, and the same kid he’d watched grow up before his own two eyes, and Jonathan loves him with a fierceness he doesn’t even realize the depth of.
It reminds him of when they’d both been a little bit younger and Will probably hadn’t even learnt to spell “vulnerability”, much less hide it. Before monsters and possessions and disappearances, way before – there’d been Lonnie, and after him, all the residual nightmares and memories that had sneaked through the door uninvited. They’d left Jonathan alone, mostly, perhaps in part because his scars were so old and so deep, he’d forgotten they were supposed to hurt. In his place, they’d hungrily claimed the easier, softer, more tempting victim down the hall, unarmed and open and used to feeling with all his heart. They’d chased him out of his room and all the way into Jonathan’s, a bundle of sweaty hair, bloodshot eyes and shaking hands slotting into place beside him on his bed. And Jonathan had woken up every single time, gentle and understanding and meticulously patient, because this was Will, who was kind and honest and hadn’t hurt a soul in his life, who was good down to his core, who was still so achingly young, and it was up to him to take away all the horrors.
Quiet promises of safety and tactful coaxing into taking a sip of water would ensure those ghosts were kept at bay for one more night. Will would fall right back asleep soon after, tucked up all snug under Jonathan’s arm, fitting like a missing puzzle piece, because it was the uncomfortable truth of the Byers household that this was Jonathan’s kid as much as his mother’s. Jonathan himself, however, would be deserted by sleep the rest of the night, the poisonous thoughts, of self-blame and of misplaced responsibility, draining out of his brother and seeping into him bit by bit. He would wrestle with a million different what-ifs till the early hours of dawn, till he heard the telltale signs of his mother waking up, till it hurt too much and he wanted nothing more than to end it all…but then the warm, soft, solid something nestled against his side would stir, and he’d be reminded all over again that he still had so much to fight for, and he’d find just enough strength to see off another day.
So, he adjusts the covers and walks out of the room and off this train of thought entirely because Will is the reason he hasn’t taken the last step into that deep dark gloomy chasm he’s teetering on the edge of, and he doesn’t think he can ever look at him and see anything other than a kid who needs to be spoiled and cherished and protected.
The persistent tick-tick-tick of the living room clock echoes around him – loud in a way that only serves to highlight the emptiness of the house, the stillness of the moment, the bottomless well of solitude that he can’t decide is welcome or not. The hour hand is well past one, its journey towards two nearly complete. His mother’s even later than she usually is. It angers him, when he has the time to notice, just how much she works – day in and day out, till he can’t remember what she looks like without those dark circles under her eyes, till she passes out on the couch and he spends way too long debating whether he should let her rest with her neck bent weird or rob her of the treasured few minutes of sleep she gets.
Jonathan doesn’t believe there is a God, because if there was, he would have made sure someone chopped up Lonnie and fed him to his dog by now.
Thinking about it too much makes him want to punch a hole through the already fragile wall, so he doesn’t. Instead, he grabs his Walkman from his room and sneaks out to the porch. There’s no one around to reprimand him (there never has been), so he doesn’t know why he looks over his shoulder or flinches when the door creaks too loud. Maybe a part of him wishes there was.
It's cold outside, and he doesn’t have a jacket, but that’s really how he likes it. With the wind getting under his skin, forcing all that is limp and still and asleep to come alive and The Smiths in his ears, damn near screaming him to deafness, at least he can convince himself that he is still here, he is still real, and the alternate dimensions and big bad evils and black magic fuckery had spared the part of him that could still freeze to death on the verandah of their rundown house and get excited about new underground rock bands. It stings and it zips and it hurts, but pain brings to Jonathan all the comforting familiarity of a childhood friend, so he digs himself deeper and deeper into this hole until he’s not sure he ever wants to get out.
He wonders if Nancy ever feels this way. Or Will. Or El. Or…Steve. Did they all stand around in shadowy corners like deserted islands, convinced their struggles were theirs alone, unaware that if they took two steps to the side, they’d stumble into each other? Did El spend sleepless nights staring up at the rickety roof of Hopper’s cabin? Did Will curl up in front of the television, volume turned up all the way to mask his sobs? Did Nancy ever lock herself in a cubicle in the girls’ bathroom at school, head held in hands, rocking back and forth till she reined it back in again?
Did Steve Harrington, always so poised and polished and put together, infiltrate the spirit cabinet and drink till he forgot it all as often as he did?
Jonathan doesn’t think he’ll ever find out. It isn’t a rule in the sense that they’d sat at a round table and made a blood pact, but he still knows better than to explicitly refer to any of their other-dimensional activities, or their emotional impacts, in day-to-day conversations. They’re all a little bit alike in that regard, he supposes – stubborn enough not to seek help, stupid enough to believe that the others will. He forgets how young they are sometimes.
He stares off into the trees as whatever song is playing (honestly, he hasn’t bothered to notice) peters off. Silence, for a couple beats, until an all-too-familiar guitar riff starts up and he contemplates wrenching off the headset and stomping it to its death right then and there.
Darling, you got to let me know, should I stay or should I go?
It used to be their song – him and his brother’s. Then, for a bit, he thought it became their swan song – the soundtrack to that cold, cold winter of ’83, playing in the background of nasty arguments, and hurt feelings, and shopping for coffins. He couldn’t listen to it for a year after that.
He found his way back to it, a couple months ago, because as it turned out, his love for this song happened to be one of the few things he still had in common with his sixteen-year-old self. Funny how some things never change.
Now, it reminds him not of the past, but of the future. He thinks of the Emerson College application form sitting pretty in his drawer, of all the dreams it holds the key to. He thinks of the community college two streets down, small and modest and serviceable, of all the dreams it was designed to squash. He thinks he’s never been anything more than serviceable in his life. Nancy interrupts his thoughts more than once – the ghost of her blinding smile and her sparkling eyes and her flushed face, all because she’d learnt they could go to college together.
He doesn’t have the heart to tell her. Not yet. He doesn’t know how he can tell her that life had forced him into making a choice, and he hadn’t chosen her. Come fall, beautiful, brilliant Nancy Wheeler would head off to Massachusetts all by herself, and her loser boyfriend would do what he’s always done: make do with the scraps.
He can’t tell her that he’s failed her yet again, so he lies. It’s not easy, it’s never easy, but it’s easier than the alternative. He tells her on the phone for the fiftieth time that month that he’s still waiting for his acceptance letter. Then, he hangs up to go stare at the application he never sent in, and he feels the lies crawling over his skin like ants, and he vows he’ll tell her everything the next day.
The next day, he tells her for the fifty-first time that he’s still waiting for his acceptance letter.
She doesn’t understand. She tries to, so very hard, and he loves her for it, but they both know it’s a bridge she’ll never quite be able to cross. She will never know what it’s like to give up so much of herself to her family that she doesn’t feel like she has an identity outside of it. She will never know what it’s like to do everything in her power and still fall short. She will never know what it’s like to be paralyzed with fear at the mere thought of leaving because her brain has associated being away with bad things happening.
She will never know what it’s like to worry about a million different things before she worries about herself, and that’s okay, because she is meant for great things, and he would never want her to be shackled like he is.
It’s what makes lying that little bit easier – because he tells himself that he’s doing it for her. He’s doing it so that she can be the star he knows her to be without him clouding her up. He’s doing it because he loves her, and when you love someone, you set them free.
Jonathan’s roots extend too deep for him to ever truly be free. It doesn’t matter if he decides to go to college across the country – his mind would never agree to accompany him on that journey. It would buck and struggle and squirm till it found its way back to his modest little family in their sleepy little town, and he’d rather die than drag Nancy down with him.
He wants to believe that such an existence would frustrate him, that he would be burning up at the unfairness of it all, that he would cry himself to sleep thinking of the dreams he’d had to give up. He wants to believe the sacrifice will hurt. If he’s honest with himself, he knows he accepted a long time ago that he’s just not the kind of person who does things for himself, and it’s too late for him to learn how. From the moment his father walked out that door, Jonathan Byers was destined to be a supporting act, guiding others to treasures he cannot possess, and after the last couple of crazy years, he thinks maybe that’s not such a bad life.
Maybe it’s what he wants, after all.
Someday, he’ll talk to the girl he loves about all this, but not before he’s absolutely sure she’s chasing the grand aspirations she was always meant to fulfill. Someday, when she’s the hottest journalist in the business, and he’s sorted his shit out – maybe they would pick up where they’d left off.
Just maybe.
He turns around and slips back inside, taking refuge near the closed window. There’s remnants of last night’s snow stuck in the sill, jammed in positions that render them prisoners in the metal framework. He’ll have to do something about that in the morning.
He can feel the lull of sleep building behind his eyes, slow and heavy. He can (almost) hear the gears in his mind finally grind to a stop, all out of material to worry about, or perhaps practicing some healthy rationing, leaving some for the next sleepless night…and the next…and the next. He can see two slivers of pale yellow light advancing steadily down the driveway. Mom’s home and he’s tired.
He pads back to his room on socked feet and gets under the covers. He closes his eyes just as the front door clicks. He thinks of his mom working ten hour shifts, and Will trudging to school every day even though he hates it, and Nancy’s voice when she called him on the night of Hawkin’s High’s senior prom, and he wishes for a better tomorrow for all of them. Maybe one of these days, he'll find the strength to wish one for himself too.