the one where steve harrington is the monster in the woods
Hawkins has never been one of those towns that you could point to on the map unless you were looking for it. Swaddled between the wide expanse of nothingness on either side, the town is less than a town, really. If anything, and Steve had figured this out when he was only young, only tall enough to slide the hard-covered dictionary from its place on the bookshelf into his little, grubby hands, the town was better suited to one of its other synonyms — a village, maybe. It was a little archaic, yes, young Steven had noticed this, but wasn’t their town always a little bit backwards?
It was a well known fact that nobody had tried to dispute for years, that Hawkins wasn’t interesting until you turned of age. A long time ago, before Steven’s parents were born, before Loch Nora had been a place for two-to-three story houses, deep pools, and house parties, that age had been eighteen. Steven had been regaled of stories, through thick books and musty paper, about how you were meant to drink, and fuck, and drive, smoke, party, undress, and press soft hands into softer flesh — feel the pleasures of a lesser man — destroy yourself from within.
Then, there was the accident. And the age had been heightened to twenty-one.
What if it happens again? They’re only children, really, why are we letting them do this? They shall be condemned. Young Steven had read the words on the paper, had squinted his eyes at the accounts of the courts in swirling text that had been ingrained into him from a young age. His script was loopy and small, quaint on the pieces of paper that his father had handed to him. Young men can write in its proper form, his father had said. And he had always said that, called Steve a young man — as if he was never truly anything but a being who was fully formed and grown, from before his first breath.
It had always rubbed him the wrong way. The way that they would leave him as if he were of age, days to weeks to months, alone and alone and alone. The walls of the house used to have this ugly wallpaper, patterned with golds and blues and whites. It was so terribly ugly, Steven had thought, with paintings of oranges and their yellowing leaves, and the stripes of sky-tones that reminded him of summer. His nanny would dust the walls as if he had dirtied them, tutting with that warmth within her skin, that made him want to be swallowed whole. She would dance around the house like a film, humming in that soft voice, skirts making dainty circles as she twirled and cooked.
When they had gone through house renovation number one, the wallpaper was the first thing to go. Ugly, unprofessional, childish, beach-y. Steven didn’t know why he missed it. Why he cried at the sight of the workers peeling and scraping the essence of summer from his house. But as soon as he had been spotted within the dust and the rot, he had been pulled from the construction site, ushered away to the small townhouse that they were staying in.
But, focus, we are not talking about young Steven, or his father, or his house. We are talking about Hawkins. We are talking about how boring, and mundane, and how utterly isolated, and normal, Hawkins is. The people there are ordinary, if not a little bit grating on the psyche if you asked Steve, but wasn’t that the magic of a small town in the middle of nowhere? Everyone knows everybody, every in and every out. Things that they didn’t even tell them in the first place. The best kept secrets are the ones that everyone knows but nobody acknowledges.
If Steve had to give an example of this, it would easily be Eddie Munson. Everybody knew what he dealt. Everybody knew, in a roundabout way, that he didn’t live with his parents, that he could be found in the trailer park, that he was not the most popular of bodies within the town, the village. He should have, could have, easily been busted so many times — dealing to his fellow peers in high school — but why wasn’t he? Everyone was aware. Deeply, intrinsically, as if it were one of the little pieces of knowledge that you were bestowed upon at birth — like how Steve had been branded a young man before he had even the chance to prove himself a boy — people had always just known.
And, the more he thinks about it, the more it seems a little bit silly. And then a little bit smart. And then a little more smart. Munson doesn’t deal anything harder than weed. Or, if he did, he was smart enough to not let it become knowledge in the public domain known as high school gossip. So, the cops know, and the parents know, and the students know, and those that are not buying from him turn a blind eye, because he has not been the cause of an accident, something like the accident, and, in turn, he has been branded as safe. By parents, by buyers, by the gods-damned law enforcement.
(This doesn’t mean that he is liked. Steve has seen, had used to almost-enjoy and participate, in the weird hierarchy pissing contest that came with being proclaimed a teenager, social, King. He had seen the way that people would purposefully shove their shoulders into Munson’s unknowing ones, or the way that people would yank on his long curls.
A small part of Steve thought that it was the same attitude that preteen boys would employ to get a girl’s attention. He had voiced these thoughts to his then-friend, Tommy H. and had been punched — a little too rough — between his shoulder blades in “friendly” warning).
Steve is no exception to the boringness of Hawkins. If he were to describe himself, he might find that he was a little odd, but not enough that he was a pariah, or an anomaly that needed to be taken away and put down. He played his part, just like Munson played his.
He lived in the upper-class part of town — something that used to be a point of pride, but has now turned into one of contention — had average grades, and an average sized friend group (if you didn’t count the kids, of course). He played basketball, no longer the captain after Hargrove had trampled into the village, and was on the swim team. Steve Harrington used to be a party boy, indulging himself on those pleasures that his age should not have allowed him to: alcohol, weed, sex. But these were normal teenaged things, and could be forgiven by parents by the bat of his eyelashes, or a disarmingly apologetic smile. He goes to school, picks up his girlfriend (who he is in love with, he thinks, but who maybe doesn’t love him), has alright attendance, and is loved by those that know him, and those that don’t. This is who he wants to be, and this is who he will continue to portray himself as.
Steve Harrington is normal, and Hawkins, Indiana, is boring, and it will stay that way, if Steve has any say in it.
And so, as any normal teenager does on a Wednesday morning, Steve listens to the radio on his counter as he finishes his piece of buttered toast, and he gets into his car. The maroon colour compliments his skin and his closet in a way that makes him a little more happy than he’d like to admit, but he’s allowed to have this little pleasure, isn’t he? Today, he’s chosen that one deep red-brown sweater that Nancy swears makes him look soft.
When she had first said it, it had made him happy. To believe that he had the opportunity to be soft again — because a man was all hard edges and empty words, and corporate collars, shoving people into lockers for the hell of it, and shotgunning beers because it seemed so easy, or, maybe, that was just his father. What his father had made a man to be.
(There’s a little part of him that wears the sweater because he’s afraid that Nancy is slipping away. He doesn’t know when it happened — nothing at all had happened over the Christmas break, no arguments, or disagreements, fights, spats, whatever they could be branded. But Steve had seen the way that she cast longing glances in the direction of Jonathan Byers, and the way that she was cancelling dates without telling him. He had tried to ask her what was wrong, to try and atone for some sin that he had not even been aware he was committing. And she had just smiled without teeth, and said he was seeing things, and for a moment it felt like he had never known her at all.
So, there is a little part of Steve that wears the sweater because he knows that Nancy likes how it looks on him, as a last ditch effort to try and, he doesn’t know— seduce her into loving him again. To peacock around as subtly as he can, to say please look at me like how you look at him, please look at me as if you love me. There is something there, Steve realises in a bout of self-awareness, about how time is cyclical, and he is stuck making the same mistakes that his mother had fallen victim to).
As he pulls into the Wheeler driveway, Steve picks at a loose thread near his sweater cuff. Nancy is already waiting by the steps of her house, adorned in that turtleneck-jumper combo that she loves to pull out as the weather starts to cool down. Steve reaches over the centre console to open the door before she gets to it — a wide smile on her face as she settles in, and Steve reverses back onto the road.
“Nice sweater,” she huffs, fingers dainty and sure as they hover over his shoulder.
For a while there, it was if they had created their own language together — a call and response type thing that he had learned to love. Certain phrases were meant to be met with other phrases and words in kind, and certain items, objects, events, could trigger the language to be spoken. It was like playing a little game, trying to figure out the intricacies of their maybe-love.
“Nice sweater,” he retorts, takes one hand off the wheel to hold the fraying edges of her own clothing, tugging at the threads that could so easily be weaved with his.
Steve replies in the language they have adorned and forged together, looking down to the warm colours that she wears, the way that their styles have assimilated to be similar to each others, and isn’t that meant to be what love is? To not know where one ends and the other begins? To be tangled in so deep that you are not yourself anymore, that the pieces you had given had been taken in and fostered until something completely foreign had been born? There is a part of him that wishes that he still had parts of himself left to call his own, that Steve hadn’t went all in on this one moment as a teenager, not of age. But what is he supposed to know? He is just young, and boring, and horribly mundane.
When they reach their destination, Nancy mumbles something about having to find her friend — Barbara. They had been close since the day they were born, she had said, and Steve longed for that kind of connection. To be able to call someone your other half. For a little while, he thought that he would be able to call Tommy H. and Carol that — his thirds, really. But then he had wisened up to the way that they were treating people, the way that they had looked to him for some fucked up kind of approval, as if he was the only thing in-between them and popularity.
(He knows that there is a version of those two that had actually been his friends. A part of them that he had loved and been loved, in turn. But it is so much easier, Steve thinks, if he only thought of them as the sum of things they did wrong).
As he watches Nancy walk towards the school building, Steve crumples up the college letter that he had asked her to look over. There’s no point in him trying, really. His future had been set out for him. Steve Harrington was set to work for his father’s company from the same time he was branded as a young man. There was no leaving Hawkins, or living in a share house, or studying late nights, in the cards for him.
Instead of wallowing in his grief (and, no, he would not admit to it if anyone had asked), Steve gets out of his car, tracing Nancy’s long-left steps to the front of the school. This is his last year of high school — then he will need to get a part-time job, as per his future plan, and then slave away in his corporate body of a corporate shell, until the day he dies in a corporate coffin. Wonderful, right? At least he’s eighteen, now.
The halls of the school are the same as always. A little too loud for Steve’s taste, filled with people trying to impress their peers in ways that they will see as embarrassing in a couple years. Steve nods at those that meet his eye, smile polite enough to still be considered a little bit of a heartthrob, despite his fall from kingship last year. He revels a little in the way that people seem to like him, even if it is just the idea of him that enthrals them. Steve reaches his locker, smells the heavy and crazed scent of one—
“Stevie!”
Eddie Munson.
“Munson.” Steve greets, not unkindly.
“Still on last names, I see. Oh, how you wound me!” Eddie says, puts his hands up to his heart as is he had been shot. “I missed you yesterday at gym.”
They are not friends. Not to Steve’s standards, no, and definitely not to Eddie’s. For all intents and purposes, they have nothing in common. Eddie is owned by the public domain of high school as much as Steve’s front of a King is — that is to say that Eddie is an open book, whereas Steve is closed shut. Munson isn’t afraid too blast his music as loud as he can as he screams through the parking lot, trying to drown out the similar tones coming from Hargrove’s car, just to piss him off. His shirt is branded with something that parents whisper as satanic, but really only alludes to the Dungeons and Dragons club he runs through the school.
They have a few of the same classes together, what with Eddie retrying his last year of high school after he majorly, and I mean, majorly, fucked up my exams, Harrington. They are not friends, but they know of each other. Steve is nice to him, cordial, really, and Eddie, despite the way that he acts in the cafeteria, is kind back. Occasionally, they’ll share a smoke when lunch gets too loud, or when Steve doesn’t want to deal with everything that happens in gym (no, he is not avoiding Tommy or Billy, he swears).
“Just felt a little sick, I guess.” Steve says, taking out his English text and absolutely not looking at where Nancy and Barbara and Jonathan have all huddled together at the end of the hallway lined with lockers. They are a unit that seems to flow together, and whenever all four of them go somewhere, Steve feels as if he is a broken fourth wheel — as if there is a final part of the puzzle that is decidedly not him.
“Ah,” Eddie says, a little smile on his face as he leans against the wall, “Trouble in paradise?”
Steve closes his locker with probably a little more force than necessary, because they are not friends, and Steve doesn’t really need other people to know about his love life, thank you every much.
“Something like that,” Steve says, smile tight, and eyes sharp in a way that says step back, think for a second.
And so Eddie does — hands raised and placating, because he knows that he has crossed their imaginary boundaries and imaginary lines that neither of them had fleshed out or set, themselves. The warning bell rings, and Steve mumbles a see you later, and Eddie hums in confirmation, before they are lost to the sea of students that look nothing, and exactly, like them.
— — —
One of the newer additions to the basketball club, Jason Carver, is a little bit annoying, if Steve was being complete honest. He knew that each of the students were meatheads in their own unique ways, what with their rallying members including the ranks of Billy Hargrove (AKA: Grade A Asshole) and Tommy Hagan (self explanatory), but there’s something about this guy that kinda rubs him the wrong way. Maybe it was his wannabe-Tom-Cruise style smile, or the fact that the girl he was dating — a sweet girl called Chrissy — looked so close to his own face. Steve knows that if he cared enough to actually look into it, he would recall something in the ways of Freud. For now, though, he relents that maybe they might be second cousins. And, well, it’s Hawkins. It wouldn’t be exactly out of the norm for their history.
“He’s just such a shithead, Nance,” Steve says, stretching his arms out over the lunchroom table, head pressed lightly against the metal to avoid imprints.
“More or less than Holloway?” She asks, hand rubbing almost-soothing circles into the textured patter of his knit sweater.
At this, he sits up. “Oh, god, did your boss do something again?”
“When has he ever not done something?” Jonathan huffs, chin resting on his palm.
See, unlike Steve, they had aspirations. In their spare time, Nancy and Jonathan would intern at the local newspaper. Sure, it was mostly running to get coffees, and saying yes, sir to everything that their superiors said, but it was still something right?
Barb speaks, her cheeks rosy in the way Steve knows they get when Nancy hasn’t told her something important. “Again? Nance, I really think you need to tell your mum about how he’s treating you, because it’s not—”
“—Okay, yes I know, Barb.” Nancy sighs. “But how would that look on me? I’m meant to be able to prove myself, not just run to my parents when one slight thing goes wrong!”
“But it’s not just one thing,” Steve says, as he mimics her previous movement, his thumb with the small scar catching in the frayed edges of her wool. “Just last week you were telling me about how you overheard him making those comments about— about people in our year, people in his daughter’s year. That’s not okay—”
“You think I don’t know that, Steve?” She hissed. “I am very much aware that his attitudes towards teenage girls is disgusting, but what the hell am I meant to do?”
Her pointed glare is directed at him, and it feels as if she isn’t even looking at Steve. It is as if she is looking through him, pointing her pointy edges in the way of the soft flesh that he has bore for her. It hurts, just a little bit, but isn’t love meant to?
“Nance—” Jonathan starts.
“No. I don’t want to talk about this.” She huffs, turns her gaze away from Steve’s eyes. He doesn’t miss the way that she melts, softens, under the concerned face of Jonathan. “No, we’re gonna talk about the upcoming Halloween party.”
Barb nods her head, just slightly, but with the way that she looks to Steve, as if to ask him please help, he knows that the two will stay up late on the phone, or meetup after Nancy and Jonathan have left, to try and figure out a way to help Nancy, to make sure that she’s actually alright. The piece of paper that Nancy slides across their humble cafeteria space is adorned in bright oranges and deep blacks — a crudely drawn ghost printed on the middle of the page, with a stupid pun being uttered from underneath its sheet-costume.
“I don’t know about this,” Barb says, eyes hesitant behind large glasses. “I’m not really a party gal.”
Jonathan scratches at the back of his neck, smile apologetic in the same way that Steve would use to wish away his past to doting parents. “Yeah, I’m not really one to get sheet-faced, Nance. Plus, I was gonna take my brother trick or treating tonight.”
“You have to, or you want to?” Nancy asks. And she has that twinkle in her eye that says I have set my mind to something, and now you are in my way. It used to be something that she would wholly and only direct to Steve, so seeing it pointed towards Jonathan of all people? Well. He’s gonna bottle up those feelings and maybe (never) go over how that makes him feel.
“Want to.” Jonathan says, a small smile on his face. “But I’m sure Steve’ll say yes, right?”
Steve finds that all the eyes of his friends are on him. And the answer should be easy, really, because is there even any other option for him? A good boyfriend would accompany his good girlfriend to her first party. He would do so willingly and lovingly. So why does he feel so hesitant? As if he had seen this film before, was aware of the things that saying yes would hold.
“Come on, Steve,” Nancy says. “Don’t you want to be stupid teenagers for one more night?”
“Of course.” He answers, places a kiss on her cheek.
“And if Jonathan is taking Will, then that means you’re not babysitting tonight, right? So you’ll come with me to the party?”
It doesn’t take much more convincing than that (externally, at least. Internally, Steve thinks of every possibly outcome and opportunity that he is creating. He was meant to babysit the kids with Jonathan tonight. After Will had been missing, and Steve had learnt about Jane, and the newcomer, Max, had joined, the parents all wanted their kids to be watched over. And who better to do that than Steve Harrington, Hawkins’ Golden Boy? But, no, if Jonathan was hinting at Steve being available, even though he knew that they were looking after the kids together, then surely he wanted Steve to go? Surely this was him hinting that he would be okay with the kids?).
This line of thinking, the questioning, the answering, within his own head, is what leads him to let Nancy choose the costumes, and kiss him on his head, and have him drive to the party. Costumes of characters from that movie that Nancy had liked — Risky Business — are adorned in true Hawkins fashion, ie: every person willing to have a social presence in the student body had raided their parents closets to find something so unlike their own clothes, that it could feasibly be recognised as “dressing up”.
The party is not unlike the ones that Steve was used to. The bodies in the house are all tightly packed together, and there is an indistinguishable scent of alcohol and sweat and sex. It lingers in the air as if it is its job, sticking to every surface it can. Steve is sure that as soon as he leaves this party, it will be imbedded in his hair, stuck to his flesh like a thin film to be washed away with copious amounts of soap and warm water. Slowly, surely, delicately.
The jacket that he is wearing is thick and dark against his shoulders — sweat building up near his shoulder blades with even the most minute amount of dancing that he’s been doing. There are shouts and chants outside about a new Keg King, but Steve couldn’t care less. That popularity contest and dick measuring bullshit was as beneath him as the dirt lacing his sneakers. The only thing that mattered right now was having fun. Trying to have fun.
“Nance,” Steve tries, “Nancy—”
“No!” She says, dips her cup into the punch. “I said that I wanted to be a stupid teenager, so I’m doing everything that a stupid teenager would do, okay? Aren’t I allowed to just have this?”
Steve places a hand between them on the counter, taps his fingers across it. Because he gets it, really, he does. He gets wanting to lash out and drink and party and do all the bad-child things that weren’t in line with their perfectly set out futures. Nancy Wheeler, straight A student and intern at the local newspaper would not drink. Nancy Wheeler, liked well enough to be seen as cute and quiet, not enough to be seen as popular or rowdy. Nancy Wheeler, who would go to university, and study hard, and get a well paying job, or maybe relent to the asks of Hawkins, and live in a little cul-de-sac, and have a nuclear fucking family.
Steve gets it. He gets wanting to lash out.
“Okay,” He relents. “Just— be careful, okay? Take it slow, and I’ll stay completely sober. I’ll try and look out for you.”
She just nods her head as she fills her cup (again? Had she not just went to go fill it?), bringing the white rim of the red plastic to her lips. Nancy tilts her head back in glee, an easy smile slipping over her mouth at the no doubt fruity taste of the punch attempting to mask the copious amounts of alcohol that were poured into the bowl. Steve’s had a bad feeling about this since before the day even started.
And that bad feeling doesn’t alleviate, not even a little, when he hears the door open, when he turns, when he catches a glimpse of the next person to walk through the open door.
Jonathan.
The bad feeling isn’t because of the weirdness that’s going on between his friend and his girlfriend, no. Not because he isn’t wearing a costume. Not because he’s showing up late. The bad feeling rises tenfold, and Steve finds himself taking quick and long strides across the floor, dodging people, using his height to shoulder passed others, because Jonathan was meant to be looking after the kids.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Steve asks, eyes a little too wide, breath a little too short. “I thought you were supervising them?”
“Will said he didn’t want me to,” Jonathan says, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. He shrugs his shoulders as if to say what can you do? As if a single conversation can shirk the month of planning that went into tonight, for the kids. The planning that Steve had so readily skirted, himself, at the lone voice of Nancy, and the promising eyes of Jonathan.
“You know why we were meant to go—”
“—And I think my mum’s being a bit paranoid. Nothing has happened in a year, Steve. What happened with Will, him going missing, it was just,” Jonathan sighs, pushes his shoulders back in that way he always does, “An anomaly. Something weird. Nothing ever happens in Hawkins, right? So what’s one night? Can’t he just have that?”
Aren’t I allowed this? Can’t he have that? It’s as if they are the same conversations, asking for the same things, asking for different things, that he cannot give. As if the gift is something simple, and not something that might, that will, change everything. But, well. Steve doesn’t know that. Not yet.
“Shit, okay.” Steve huffs, mind rattling with endless possibilities of what could happen to the kids, what they could get up to, themselves, when left unattended and uncontactable in the middle of the night, in the middle of Hawkins.
“Steve, nothing is going to happen. Just enjoy tonight. With Nance.” Jonathan says, smile fading as the words exit his mouth.
Shit. Nancy.
“I’ll be right back!” Steve calls, turning as he says it, words being swallowed by the crowd. Nancy, Nancy, Nancy. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to spot her in the sea of costumes? What with how she’s wearing all white, and Halloween usually calls for, well, something a little more dark, a little more scary.
Steve pushes his way through, arms trying to break through pressed bodies. Were there this many people before? Was it always so hot? He pushes the sunglasses up to his hair, not caring for the look, anymore.
“Harrington!” Tommy calls, his freckles more prominent from his flushed face: drunk. “We’ve got a new Keg King!”
Steve turns away from the leers and the cheers of the basketball team, turns away from Hargrove who seems to be trying to make his way over. Steve really doesn’t have the time to be dealing with him right now — right now, all he wants to do is find Nancy. He told her that he’d take care of her, and then at the first sign of something happening, of another person appearing, of Jonathan, he had just abandoned her to the crowd, to these people that she didn’t really know, to these people that had more experience with parties than her, to these people that she—
“You okay there, Stevie?” Eddie asks, hand cold against Steve’s knuckles. “You look like you’re—”
“—Not now, Munson. Sorry, I’m just—” Steve tries to look over his hair, the frizz of the curls seemingly played up more than how they naturally are. “Have you seen Nancy?”
Eddie’s face seems to furrow in thought, and the cool hand that was so expertly pressed against Steve’s knuckles are removed to his own belt loops. “I think I passed her a couple minutes ago in the kitchen. Are you sure you’re okay—”
“Thank you!” Steve says, turning to his left, where he thinks he can see the counter, where he sees the dim yellow light that indicated change. Where hardwood floors and plush carpets stained with red punch turned to tile, and where he sees the back of Nancy’s figure.
“Jesus, Nance, I’m sorry that I left you like that. I just saw Jonathan and got worried about the kids— hey.”
“Mmmmrr?” Nancy mumbles, hand held tight against her cup, wrist limply flicking in and out of the punch bowl, uselessly trying to fill it up, again.
“You— how much have you had to drink?”
“Steve,” She slurs, a happy smile on her face as she dunks the cup under fully. “Not enough.”
“Hey, no, Nance, I said I’d take care of you, so,” Steve places his hand delicately on her wrist, uses his other one to try and pry the drink from her grasp. “I really think that you should wait a bit before you drink again, okay? Let’s get you some water, and sit down over—”
“I don’t want to drink some water—”
“Nancy, please,” Steve says. “Just, let go of the cup for me?”
“No.”
Steve tugs again, trying to slot his fingers under hers. He’d become all too accustomed to this — to doing this with Tommy. And it had worked with Tommy, with Carol, so why—
“Let go of the, the cup, Steve. I want you,” She enunciates, a little too much effort put into each word to be sober, “To let go, of the goddamned cup—!”
He lets go. The bad feeling presses into his skull, down his spine, like an old friend. Like punch staining white shirts. Like the hundred people who have turned, like the music that has been turned down, like Hargrove, making his way over, like Eddie, watching from the corner, like Jonathan, stuck by the door.
Shit.
“What the fuck, Steve?”
“Okay, Nance, let’s just—” She turns around before he can say anything more, and her figure flits in and out of the bodies of the people who had once hindered his trek to her. Now, they part like the ocean, as if she is some God to be reckoned with. Steve supposes that, right now, she is.
He follows the empty trail that she has left for him, nods politely and acutely to the woman who stands in Kiss makeup nodding her head towards the ajar door — the bathroom with golden yellow light and a large mirror by the sink. He pushes his way in, closing the door softly behind him. No more eyes. No more leering.
“Nancy, it’s not coming off. I think it’s,” Steve sighs, doesn’t try to reason with her as she runs the hand towel under the water again, bringing it up to the large red stain down her front. He’ll get the mess out tomorrow. He just needs to get her home, have her get into a change of clothes, and he’ll deal with the rest in the morning. “C’mon, Nance.”
“I know what I’m doing,” She slurs, leans agains the sink countertop with her left arm. “See? It’s— it’s coming off.”
Steve just sighs, goes to take the towel from her limp hand. “Let’s get you home, yeah Nance? How does sleeping sound?”
“I don’t want to!” She said, lurching forward from her standing position. “I wanted to be a dumb teenager and do all the things that— that I’m not supposed to, so why are you—”
“Nance,” Steve whispered, hand on her shoulder, holding up her weight as she presses onwards.
“—trying to take that away from me? You always just ruin everything. You’re— you’re bullshit! I just wanted one simple thing: to act like we were dumb, and young, and in love—”
“Like we’re in love? Nancy, what do you—”
“Bullshit.” She mumbles, then, louder, as if realising that Steve might not have heard it, she speaks. “You are complete bullshit, Steve Harrington. Bull-shit.”
No. Steve wants to say. Because, he realises, there is some truth to what she is saying. Has he ever been a person, has he ever been a subject that was once and truly owned by himself? Could Steve ever remember a moment where he wasn’t just an amalgamation of parts that he picked up over the years? Which parts had come naturally, and which parts had he so carefully chosen? He’s always felt as if he was slipping, from what he never knew, but maybe it was just normalcy. Maybe he was always a fake— a bullshit version of who used to wear his skin.
Steve Harrington has never been boring and normal in the same way that the people of Hawkins were — he had to be hand crafted to try and fit the moulds that were placed upon him. Carve off parts of himself that he realised were undesirable in the long run, because what was he, if not what people wanted? If not something that people had loved?
Nancy had been like a lifeline to him — someone who was trying so hard to break the role that was bestowed upon them. I don’t want to be the dutiful older sister who becomes the dutiful wife who doesn’t get to live for herself. I want to see the world, and travel, and learn, and study, and love. And I want to love you. Had it always been a lie? Was everything so predetermined down to a T, that for Nancy Wheeler to be breaking her mould, she first had to break him? Was there ever a future where they end up together — too similar and too different all at once?
She had been a lifeline. And maybe that is where it all started. That Steve had looked to her for the guidance that he was never given, trying so desperately to please her — to try and revel in that calm that exuded out of her body as if it were endless. It was that feeling that he was chasing, that feeling that made him ache for his own bones to be whole, that made him yearn to stay in his body, for his teeth to stay dull, and his height stay the same.
He feels like he’s losing it. Steve feels as if there are a hundred running words around his head. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. He knew that Nancy was falling out of love with him. He knew it in his bones. Knew it in his shifting form. Why does it hurt, still? Why does it still feel as though she has struck him across the face the way a father does to a child — or is this just another one of those scenarios, Steve asks himself, that are so very abnormal, that he has only known to be true?
Steve’s losing it. He knows he is. He pushes out of the bathroom, stumbles out, really, but the music has been turned back up, and he can feel it in his chest, thump thump thump-ing across the dance floor. He feels as if he is changing right there, in the middle of this stupid fucking house party, where everyone can see him. And if there is one thing that he is good at, if Steve Harrington is only allowed to, able to, be good at one fucking thing in his useless, short-lived life, it is knowing when he is not wanted. Knowing when he has to leave.
So he does. He leaves. Out of the back door — the crowd of people pressing in on his chest, his body, the front door — and into the woods. And it is there that he will change.
(The first thing to go is his sight.
Or, rather, his eyes.
Steve, in his fading consciousness, tries to lift his hands — hands that are too big for his body, that are sharp and grotesque, and so horribly his, with a scar near his left thumb where he nicked it as a child — towards where his eyes are. Where they should be. He turns his hands so that the long nails are pointing as outward as they can, so that they do not touch what he hopes is still his own face. The pads of his thumbs meet the space in which his eyes had occupied. It is textured and puckered, and when Steve tries to blink — because as a human, as a young man, he should be able to blink — he cannot. The expanse of what should be the woods in front of him are just shades of dark, with only the moon to bare witness to this, to him, to the monstrosity that he is becoming.
Where flesh meets bone, and love meets hurt, Steve morphs. Muscle and ligaments stretching and contorting till they are spread thin against a gangly body that tries — and succeeds — to tower above the height that he was gifted from creation. He feels as his vocal chords hum within his throat, a throat that has contracted and elongated to make space for the bones that sprout from his spine. Hind legs break and bend, making Steve fall over himself into the dirt of the woods, jutting out at odd directions, in a misguided attempt at growing into something new.
Where comfort and beauty used to be found in the form of golden-brown hair, something ugly starts to be birthed. Steve can feel as the thudding of something within his brain gets so insistent that he clutches at his ears to plead it to stop. He can feel as his skull starts to fracture. As his scalp is peeled back from his head, he raises his nails to stop it — pleading in the form of scratching at the warm wetness. Bone and blood make way for rotten wood; two spike-like structures ignoring the helpless cries of the boy that they occupy.
And, god, he can feel it. Steve, in the middle of this transformation, can feel as the bones within his body vibrate against his skin, whispering into his breath, let go, let me in, it won’t hurt, I can make it all okay. There is a part of him — the sensible, boring, part of him, that says he should not listen. That he should go back to the Halloween party, and pretend that he cannot taste his own bile mixing with thick blood, that it does not feel like he is being crushed between the worlds.
I don’t want to die, Steve thinks.
The voice within him answers, says: I am not going to kill you).
— — —
Eddie is not having a good night. Like, yeah, there are probably people having an even lesser good night (read: whatever the hell he saw happen with one Nancy Wheeler and one Steve Harrington), especially considering that he has to step over the passed out bodies of other high schooler’s as he traipses out of the back door of the house. His docs were slightly sticky in a way that indicated spilt alcohol, despite his stance on not drinking and dealing. The Halloween party that Tina hosted was meant to be small — only a couple close friends she had said — but it ended up being closer to the entire fucking year group (and then some). He had been bought out almost immediately — familiar faces in the forms of the basketball club, and the band nerds, unfamiliar faces in the forms of people who were usually too shy or too scared to approach him normally — and hadn’t been able to find an opportunity to leave until, well. Until whatever the hell happened with Steve and Wheeler.
See, Eddie was never planning to drink, what with his weirdly strict rules, especially considering his grades, but he still didn’t want to drive his van to the house. This was for a multitude of reasons, with the glaringly obvious one being so that it didn’t get alcohol, or barf, or other bodily fluids splashed across the front, as people drunkenly stumbled down the streets to their homes, or to their one designated driver. Ah, the woes of underage drinking.
That is how he finds himself, leaves sticking to his sticky soles, dirt caking themselves into the tread. It’s not the first time that Eddie has found himself huddled into his own jacket, trying to walk the non-existant path that he had set before him, on the way home. Sometimes it was just easier to walk than to have to pay for your van being keyed by some evangelical lunatics. That doesn’t mean that it makes the walk any easier, though.
The trees are all those horribly gangly and long, old-wood ones. His Uncle Wayne used to talk about how they were “there since the day Hawkins was erected”, but Eddie had been too young to properly take in the cautionary tale, instead snickering at the use of the old man’s use of the word erected. As they loom over him — shadows cast into the almost-mud of the ground — Eddie wishes that he had payed attention.
But he had made this walk all the time! In the daytime, in the afternoon, in the middle of the night. It had never felt comforting, sure, but it had never felt like— like something was watching him. That was absurd, though. It was well known that Hawkins was boring (no matter how hard Eddie had tried to liven it up a little), and most of all, it was safe. The accident was just that — an anomaly of an incident that was recorded in history, and swept away with teachings of how to be a good and proper man, and how to do your times tables. Will Byers was — well. Eddie didn’t know how to excuse that.
But, nobody was here.
Just him.
Eddie trudges forward. There is something within him that makes him clutch at the multitool that Wayne had gifted him, flicking the knife out. Not the dull letter opener section that had never been used, but the sharp, cerated blade that been bestowed upon him as protection.
(“Protection from what?” Young Eddie had asked. There was nothing to be afraid of, here. Because this is the town that Wayne was in, and this is the town that his mother had grown up in. Before everything had changed.
Wayne had shifted in his seat, the couch springs making that dog-whining noise that made Eddie’s noise scrunch.
“Nothing.” He said, hand warm and heavy on Eddie’s shoulders. “Just making sure, is all.”)
Step, step, breathe. Step, step, breathe. He would twirl the knife in his hands if he were not afraid of dropping it — a situation from a shitty horror slasher appearing forefront in his mind: he drops the blade to the ground as the monster runs up behind him, and as the camera pans to the sky, to his eyes, to its teeth, his fingernails encrusted with dirt, Eddie will grab it in the nick of time, brandishing it valiantly, before swinging his arm in a dull strike—
“Who’s there?”
The words leave his mouth before he can stop them. He no longer feels like the final girl who fumbles for the knife in the leaves, and suddenly feels like the expositional first victim. The sound that he had heard — something that he could only really describe as a gurgle has stopped.
“You’re just going crazy, Eddie,” He hums to himself, blows his curly fringe from in front of his eyes. “Nothing to worry about at all. No sir-ee.”
He keeps his back to the direction in which he needs to go; the invisible path that he has crafted towards his trailer. Eddie, horror movie connoisseur, knows that he should not stalk towards the noise — had shouted at his small television set too many times to know that it leads to finding the monster, the horror in itself.
(He finds that maybe there is some truth to the actions. His feet carry him backwards, towards safety, but it feels as if he is walking through sludge, moving ever so slowly, leaning forward, eyes wide, as if trying to gain a view of the thing that made the gurgle).
Back hitting a tree, Eddie turns, for a second, as small of a moment of time that he can spare, before facing forward, again. He cannot look away from the darkness of the woods. He wished that he brought his flashlight. Or drove his van to Tina’s. Or stayed at the fucking Halloween party.
Shifting so that his back is facing open woods, he places a tentative foot back. And then another. And another.
The sound lurches through the expanse of nothing. The wet death-rattle building and building, as if it is getting closer. As if it is running.
“Shit!” Eddie turns on his heel and bolts into the woods. Without a care for which direction his trailer is in — it doesn’t matter if it is behind him, or if it is in front of him, all that matters is that he gets away from the whatever the fuck is making that god awful noise—
He trips.
Eddie has enough self preservation to move his hand with the knife to the side so that he doesn’t stab himself in the eye, but it is a close thing. He feels all the fumbling heroine-final-girl-first-victim adrenaline rise through him as he feel the leaves shake beneath the weight of the thing that is racing towards him.
Get the fuck up, Eddie!
He scrambles and feels his nails catch against the roots of the tree as he pushes himself up — propelling until his palms meet rough bark, and he is pushing himself forward. His lungs feel as though they are on fire. As if they are constricting from inside his self, his body.
In, out, in out. In, in, in, in.
Eddie pumps his legs as fast as he can, tries to think of what he is meant to do in these situations — was it better to go straight? Was he meant to zigzag? Does he make himself tall and raise his arms and snarl right back? Has he condemned himself just by running? Can it smell his fear?
He doesn’t want to die.
Eddie didn’t really think that he had much to live for, before this, and if you asked him yesterday he would have spouted some dogshit about dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse. But now that he is at the brink of death, the thing (bear? Human? Monster?) almost breathing down his neck, he has a hundred — a million — different things that he wants to do, that he wants to say.
It roars. Not the pathetic sounding and out of place death-noise that it was making before. An absolutely pissed off I’m-Going-To-Fucking-Kill-You noise. A You-Are-Not-Final-Girl-Material noise. And the noise? It sounds as if it reverberates through the woods, impossible to tell how close, how far away it truly is.
(He does not want to turn around. Because if he turns around and it is there, Eddie knows that he will stop. He will pause in his tracks, because he is kidding himself into thinking that he is being chased by a fucking bear).
Eddie turns. He doesn’t know what made him do it.
It was like his body had told him you cannot keep running away and had decided for him — not letting his brain rest for even a moment to try and catch up to the thoughts of the heart. Eddie brandishes his knife tightly in front of him, slashing in wide arcs in hopes of— he doesn’t know. Scaring off the beast that is making the forest shake? Yeah. That’ll definitely work.
The air is cold against his clammy hands, and thin against the blade. He keeps his eyes shut, and slashes forwards and outwards, both hands clasped tightly against the handle. It’s obvious when it meets something that is not air. From the drag against what Eddie thinks might be flesh, to the stench of coppery blood that fills the air.
He opens his eyes.
The face that meets his own is not entirely a face. He watches as the blood slowly drips from where a cheek would be if this thing were human. Eddie raises the pocket knife again in his — and the monsters — moment of stupor, and tries to slash again—
Only for the knife to slapped out of his hand.
It lands with a dull thud against the wet woodland leaves. Too far away for Eddie to reach. He slides back, tries to back away as if he had not just tried to harm this monster that towers above him. He creeps back in the same way that the creature creeps forwards, until his shoulders are hitting the sharp outsides of the tree, and he is sliding to his knees, and closing in on himself.
“You’re not real.” Eddie mumbles. “You’re not— there’s no such thing as fucking monsters. None at all. You’re just— going fucking insane, Eddie. Must’ve just— passed out at Tina’s. Having a bad trip. Sleeping it off at home. Something like that. Right. Right?”
— — —
There’s something about the shape in front of him — the way in which it holds itself and begs — that makes Steve’s brain stall. Long enough for him to get back into the driver’s seat of his own body (was this his own body? This prison of flesh and bone that towered over this person? That had terrified them? Was he always a— a monster, in every possible way? Could he never escape it?), and start to back away. Steve tries to hunch in on himself. Tries to hold his hands — his claws — in front of him. Raised and open, trying to communicate without words, words that are stuck in his throat, I don’t mean any harm. I don’t want to hurt anyone.
“Okay, okay. Yeah, just— stay. Yeah, back away. That’s good— just keep— backing away.” The man mutters. Steve can see the frantic look in his eye, the way his hair falls just above his hunched shoulders, how he’s scrambling backwards and backwards, as if he is trying to crawl into the tree itself.
“Now you’ve really done it, Eddie. Real fucking monsters—”
Steve’s vocal chords gurgle at the word. Like a low humming in warning that sounds in the back of his throat without meaning to— without him wanting to. At first, it is at the way that he has been described — a terrible being of his own creation, of the hands of others, himself. But, then, it is at the name. Eddie. Eddie. Eddie. Steve knows Eddie. Maybe there’s a way that he could—
Eddie stops. Dirt encrusted in his fingernails, leaves in his hair, on the forest floor. He stops. And Steve realises that he is not himself. He is not Human Steve Harrington, with eyes and a kind smile, and moles and freckles and golden-brown hair. He is this towering creature that has chased his almost-friend through the fucking woods.
Steve goes to turn — to leave and never come back. Pretend that this was all a nightmare. And maybe it would be. Maybe he would wake up in the morning, and he would pick up Nancy, and he would place a kiss on her cheek, and she would help him with his college application. Maybe he’d wake up earlier — formative years come back to haunt him in the best ways possible — and his mother would card her fingers through his hair, and his father would tell him that he was proud.
(He’s fooling himself. Steve knows it’s not gonna happen).
“Can you… understand me?”
Steve tries to make a noise, then. Something more pleasant and soothing and desperate all at once, that says Yes! Please! Can you hear me? Do you see me? Please, I’m begging you, please, help me!
“Okay! Great. Amazing. You can understand me!” Eddie talks, in such a hushed tone that Steve feels as if he is not meant to hear it. “Fuck, okay? Um.”
Eddie tries to back away again, only to realise that there is nowhere to go. That he will have to shift to the side to get out of the woods. Steve tilts his head forwards, tries to motion towards the side, where Eddie will have to go to get to his home.
“Right! Yes!” He breathes. “I need to… to leave. Can you— will you let me?”
Steve nods. Readily, quickly. He does not want to force him to stay here. He does not want him to look at his figure. This grotesque concoction of things that he has become.
(He wants Eddie to stay. He wants him to help. He wants him to say that he is not a monster. Because if he leaves, if he goes through the woods and never comes back, what will Steve do with himself?).
“Okay— no leaving right now. Got it. Totally. Great.” Eddie says, hands still behind him, knife still cast away. “What do you want from me?”
Help. Steve wants to say. Reassurance. But his mouth does not seem to work like it normally does, like it is supposed to, and so he crouches down as best his bones will let him, and raises his clawed hands to the ground.
“H…e…l— Help! Okay, okay. You need help.”
Steve nods, neck strained and taught against extra bones in his frame. There is that noise at the back of his neck, and he feels the skin around his teeth attempt a smile.
“How do I help you?” Eddie asks. And Steve can sense the way that he moves closer, instinctually flinches away. “Right, no, that’s okay, yeah. No touching. Got it.”
He wishes that he didn’t flinch. He wants to say please, please, please hold me, please tell me I am human, I don’t want to be a monster, I just want to be held, I just want to be normal, I just want to be—
“Do you have somewhere you can go?” Eddie whispers, hushed tones so much more calming than when he was slashing forwards. And Steve does have somewhere to go — his empty house, with bouts of land big enough on either side that no neighbours would be peering out to see him. But he needs to get his car. He needs to get his car that he left at the party. Otherwise he will be found out. Otherwise people will connect the dots about Steve leaving early, and without his car, and the man in the woods—
The man in the woods? The man in the woods?
“Get the hell away from my boy!”
The shot would be accurate if not for the humming beneath his skin screaming at Steve to move. The pellets scatter into the tree-side, making little homes within the bark.
“Wayne, no, it doesn’t mean any—”
“Eddie, get the hell away from that thing—”
The man — Wayne — fumbles confidently with the gun in his hands. He makes a movement with it that has the sounds of mechanics ringing in Steve’s ears, but if there is one thing that he is not, monster or no fucking monster, is stupid. He knows where he is unwanted, an animal, he knows that he is the thing that instills fear into this man, and he knows, Steve knows that he doesn’t want to hurt someone — the he doesn’t want to hurt Eddie — but what is the use of this knowledge if nobody else is aware?
The voice that had once guided him is silent. But as Wayne aims towards his body, as Eddie moves to stop him, Steve feels the warmth and hum of appreciation and praise run through his veins, as he turns to flee.
— — —
As he lets himself down, Steve finds that he is still not himself. He sees in the way that a human is not meant to see: shapes and shades that morph and move as they shift across his vision. Inquisitive, and maybe a little bit afraid, he moves the claws across the features that make up his face. Of course, from the changing that he had experienced — like a second coming of man — he knows that he has no eyes. With long, sallow fingers, he traces his nose — the same — and feels his hairless skin atop his head. It is the same texturised feeling as that of his eyes, something that just screams monster.
When he pulls against the rotten wood that exudes itself from his soul, it offers the same sensation of his hair being pulled, but somehow deeper. As if the rot has attached itself to his spinal cord, his brain. There is a morbid part of him that thinks back to the books of animals that he read as he was a child: about cats and their tails, and how you shouldn’t hold them from it, lest you want their spine to be pulled out in a yelp, and a sopping pool of offal.
(Steve feels as though he should be more terrified. That he has been turned into the monster, like a gods-damned werewolf on the night of Halloween, and that he has chunks of time missing. That there is a voice within his own brain that had offered him some type of salvation from the hurt deep within his teeth, that Steve had so readily accepted without thinking of the consequences).
He stops himself from spiralling — catches it on the tail end of the fall, just like those cats — and pulls himself from the edge. He does not have eyes, yes, he knows this, and he has some type of bark that is growing and protruding from his skull like he is a daemon, and they are his horns. Steve’s hands trail across his features, again, more focussed. He presses as softly he can into the holes that held soft eyes, trails passed his father’s nose, and finds—
A lack of face. A lack of jaw.
Steve doubles over himself. Feels as his stretched stomach contracts within his fleshy vessel of a body, as it attempts to blow chunks of something onto the carpet. Hands clawing at his face again, he feels the absence, again and again. Because there is no way that he is— that there is— that there is not—
Oh god.
If Steve were to describe it to anyone, as he tries to describe it to himself from feel alone, it is as if someone had held a firm hand against his lower jaw, and pulled and pulled and pulled until— pop! There are wisps of his own skin and flesh near the hinges of his face. His upper teeth are bared for the woodland creatures to fear, top lip pulled taught into an impossible snarl that makes Steve keen into the silence. He did not want to be a creature — all he wanted to be was loved.
How do I return? Steve pleads into the silence. Pleads that the voice is still there to tell him what to do. Why do I remember a man in the woods?
You have to figure it out on your own.
The first thing that he thinks is well that’s not fucking helpful, but there is something within his own head that breathes out of him as he thinks the very words. Steve finds that it feels as if he’s just been admonished by his father — or that he’s heard a heavy sigh from his mother. Almost immediately, he tries to back peddle, but all other offers of rapture and guidance from the voice are lulled, and for the first time in the night, Steve is well and utterly alone.
His first idea comes in the forms of reassuring words that are not his own. He is reminded of the girl from the drama class he was mistakenly placed into for a half a term. Her short reddish-brown hair, the snark that nobody else would give him. Steve is reminded of the way that she had approached him when he was huddled up in the storage closet — with none of the remarks to be found, but instead, just soft eyes, and a similarly crouched form in front of him. What can you see? What can you hear? What can you feel? Taste? Smell?
He cannot see anything. And maybe that is the point of this exercise — not the one that the girl had taught him, but the one that the voice is teaching him. That these things, this small moments of calm were only meant for beings that were human. Now that he was stripped of any form of humanity left of him (or had he always been stripped of it? Had those moments with the girl calmed him down, or was he just putting on a front?), he was not allowed to be soothed.
But he can hear the neighbours. He must be home. He must be close. Steve had complained to his then-friends, Tommy, Carol, about how his house was eerily quiet, how he could not hear the people near him. So why could he now? Why could he hear the sounds of Ms Lowe down the street, teetering around the kitchen? Why could he hear the humming of the Sullivan’s pool?
Steve feels his bones re-breaking. Feels the juts of a body retract into his spine to make it whole again. He feels the sickly pleasing correction of his skull, the way that his jaw unfurls at the same time the bone-wood descends into his scalp. He tastes the slime of whatever was coating his skin to try and ease the sickly transformation — something that smells almost like a mixture of bile and something sweet. As his vision fogs, and Steve hears the sounds of what can only be described as moist peeling, the shades of dark turn to thick objects turn to outlines to lights to colours to vision. And as soon as he realises that he is not towering over the woods, over Eddie, that he is in his own home, that the doors are somehow locked shut, he languidly pulls himself to the bathroom, sits under the warm spray of the shower for as long as he goddamned wants.
It chimes then — and it had always chimed at every hour, scaring the ever living shit out of him as he was a child — the cuckoo clock. 12AM.
He has school tomorrow.
How does Steve have school tomorrow?
Doesn’t the world know to stop turning, to pause, for him? He’s a monster. And not in the way that the word was normally directed at him — not in the way that girls would say when he turned them down, or Tommy’s targets would say as he stood, impassive, disgusted, not at them, but at who he called his friend. When did it start to become real? Was he always a monster, always destined to be a monster, because everyone else thought him so? Maybe his skin was now just changing to catch up to what people truly saw.
But that wouldn’t make any sense. Because at the back of his mind — Steve knew. What the truth was, what the truth is, and how he is just trying to avoid coming to terms with it. What is inscribed on his skin, what has been inked into existence from the day that he had first changed. And yet, it is still different. Back then, it was never like this. Back then, it was as if he could hear and smell and react as he could now, regardless of what skin he bore. So why had this thing become him? Why had he become this thing?
It doesn’t fucking matter. What matters is that it doesn’t happen again. That nobody knows what he can become. He will go to school, and the world will continue to turn, and Steve will have to pick up his car in the morning. He’ll call Tina and say sorry! I was upset about what happened with Nance and walked home to clear my head. And she will believe him, because there would be no reason for him to lie.
And everything would be okay. And everything would be normal.
— — —
Breakfast, Steve thinks, is not the most important meal of the day.
It can be skipped so easily, with ready excuses. I woke up late! I don’t have any bread! Sorry, gotta go! It is the easiest to skip, but it is also the easiest to make. Sure, he’s not a fan of breakfast, but he’s a fan of cooking, and with the little amount of sleep that he got last night, he feels as though he has no excuse not to make himself eggs, and toast, and hash-browns, before school. Maybe he’ll even have time to swing by that fancy cafe that Nancy likes — get her favourite coffee as an apology, an olive branch. He’s already got the car, because, really? Did he really need to wait till morning wait to get it and excuse himself?
The radio is turned on to some station that his parents like. Normally, it’ll play jazz, a little bit of soul. Things that he couldn’t really imagine his parents liking, in the first place. He always imagined them to like something they would classify as regal — maybe some type of music they could ballroom dance to, or some orchestral string piece that his mother would cry to. Maybe opera, if they were feeling fancy.
Blues and soul were reserved for happy mornings. The radio was usually turned to the station that played all their favourite tunes — some rerun channel that was run through the school as a student project. The frequency was never changed, and on those mornings that were maybe-less-than-happy, the radio would never be turned on in the first place.
Steve flips the egg in the pan, taps a dash of pepper over the perfectly slightly-runny yolk, before turning up the volume of the radio. He juts his hips to the beat, terribly off-time with nobody to see his mistakes, and hums in perfect pitch against the lulling tones of the women. He deposits his egg onto his toast as the song ends, as he goes to sit at his picture-perfect breakfast, in his picture-perfect house, with his picture-perfect—
“A man has been found dead in the woods. Police are suspecting foul play, what with the condition that the body was left…”
Shit.
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