Work Text:
i.
Here’s what you know, on the eve of sophomore year: it’s your year. You will turn sixteen, you will kiss a boy, you will wish on every eyelash and petal-stripped daisy to be something more than all your pitiful younger selves.
You are different.
You are going to be different.
August winds the clock down; September resets it. Back to school, and you know the boy you want to kiss. Barb cut her hair; you swear you never will. That’s not the kind of change you want.
October, and you catch Steve Harrington’s eye. November, and you catch your breath, fogging the dark of long evenings. You wind the phone-cord around your wrist; you wind Steve around your little finger. Your lips sting with new secrets. Steve tastes like spearmint, and the future.
Your house is too small; for now, school isn’t. The twilit roads you’ve known by the glow of headlights all your life fan out like a deck of cards, ready for your play.
Meet me… choose me… take me…
You convince your mom to take you bra-shopping, again. I swear I’m growing. You tell Barb that you still care about your grades. (Not a lie, just a part of the truth.) You barely remember what it was like to want Mike around, to actually bother with any of his snot-nosed friends.
You are different. You are going to be different.
Going, going, going. From here to the new year, here to tomorrow.
The past has no hold on you.
ii.
Here’s what you don’t know, the year you should have been a sophomore in college: how this ends. You only know that it will.
You are not sleeping, two floors above Jonathan’s restless, inscrutable dreams. You are not breathing, replaying the chance and nameless moments when Steve’s hand brushes yours, when his gaze lingers too long or shifts too swiftly.
Each crawl winds the clock down; each crawl resets it. You are going nowhere. You are going to find Vecna. There is nothing else beyond the end, that you can count on.
(You don’t know when this ends.)
You memorize the military’s checkpoints. Your mom cuts your hair; you color hers. You refurb shotgun shells. You help Holly with her homework. You ask Mike—not for advice, not exactly, but for encouragement. He’s grown surprisingly wise.
So have his friends.
And yours?
Barb is dead, but so is the Nancy who knew her. Jonathan’s your shadow, Steve is the voice in your head.
The wound between worlds is festering. The past twitches dead fingers around your throat, if you let it. (You don’t.)
You’re focused, which matters more than being honest. You’re surviving, which is a state only a little less permanent than death.
You know too much. (Who loves you, who loves you not.) You know too much that doesn’t matter. (You would have been closing in on the halfway-point of a journalism degree, you would have been landing Boston internships, you wouldn’t have stopped until you had what you wanted.)
You know what you want. It’s vanishingly little.
It’s vengeance.
The future holds nothing else for you.