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skyler-bane · 4 years

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I. Leaving

Up went the sun. All the trees, sidewalks, and cars’ roofs seemed even brighter, still glistening with yesterday’s rain. Another warm morning in New York has just welcomed the residents. But would it be absolutely normal for everyone? Would an undisturbed daily routine be meant for everyone today?

The walls turned painfully white as the first sunrays peered through the window – now one could also notice how empty they looked; no pictures or photographs, but minimalistic interiors had been pretty common for such a long time it wouldn’t make anyone question the owner’s taste. A large sofa had been waiting for so long to welcome any guests if they ever visited this place, there was a desk, along with some blue rug that looked exceptionally soft. A few shelves with books and CDs on them. Nothing more. No item found on the desk looked strange either and yet, it still didn’t seem to belong to a regular citizen, somehow. If one wanted to know why this room looked rather out of ordinary, the answer could be a couple of weird devices nobody but their owner knew what they were for.

And there he was; having fallen asleep so gracefully, with his cheek pressed against the keyboard, Skyler Bane had proudly managed to get his 4-or-so hours of sleep. Feeling how bad his back hurt, he let out a sigh and tried to make his position a bit more comfortable, slowly getting used to the brightness too. “Well, haven’t you mastered this trick…”, he muttered, blinking fast – still too much sun. But coffee wasn’t going to make itself and magically appear on the desk with a lovely “Drink Me” label… At least Skyler’s last commission wasn’t going to bother him anymore and could be classified as finished, a few days before the deadline. This should bring that… low quality sleep to an end, and hopefully the whites of Skyler’s eyes, along with his transparent and disturbingly grayish tone of skin would stop screaming ‘workaholic’. He finally managed to raise himself from the chair and head straight to the kitchen, where he looked outside the window. New York, how could these all people be so awake, smiling, and full of energy?

Skyler had moved to New York so many years ago, he couldn’t even imagine living in any other city now and every single time he actually tried to envision this move, that imaginary city looked… just like NYC. And 'moved'…? No, not really. He’d been brought to this city by his parents, straight from London where he’d spent his first 6 years of life. Not long enough for any strong bonds or friendships to be missed once they crossed the Manhattan Bridge, yet long enough to say his situation was rather difficult and… unappealing. No child would like to find themselves so far from their parents after all, not even with the loveliest grandparents as their new companions and guardians. New York was where Skyler had come to terms with what his parents had done to him, where his grandparents had managed to show him that the world wasn’t as rotten as it seemed to the little boy. But the reason he’d decided to stay in the city wasn’t as romantic as one would think. He’d simply gotten used to NYC, not bothered by his hopeless attempts at looking for some other place to live in. The message about his parents’ fatal accident and how he could move to their newly bought apartment in London - it all sounded like a joke, but sure Skyler could find some finesse in it. And he was going to move there without batting an eye as if they’d owed him much more than that. Which they certainly had. This one thought kept him going, this one thought reassured him that London was a good idea.

A loud beep coming from his coffee machine announced that his drink was ready. It should wake him up, along with a hot shower, breakfast, and...- Another loud noise came from his front door this time. Someone was at the door and Skyler already hated them for coming this early, even though he was the one who had turned his phone off and made it impossible for others to contact him. He opened the door energetically as if he wanted to convince himself that he didn't need coffee to function properly. All his hatred was gone when he saw who his unexpected guest was.

"Hey, I brought your games! Sorry I didn't come yesterday, they called my mom and told her I failed that stupid test, so she got mad. I told her it wasn't because of the games or anything like that, but she never listens..."

Ah, this boy. The list of people Skyler would miss wasn't long, his number one was Max, his neighbor. He was sixteen and lived with his mother and grandmother. Both of them weren't sure if Skyler could be considered a good company for Max, but his grandmother remembered Christine, Skyler's grandmother, and how wonderful a person she was, so eventually, they decided that as long as Max didn't start skipping school or using swear words, the two could hang out together.

"It's okay, come in. D'you want somethin' to drink?"

"Yeah, some juice maybe? Thanks!"

Max came in and put the games on the table. A little bit too late for Bane to hide his bags and a few large boxes? Definitely. The man mouthed 'fuck' and hid his face behind the palms of his hands, so he could add a soundless, yet angry 'you stupid fuck' too. There was no way he could just disappear without saying a word now and he knew that well, he just had no clue how he was going to do that. Hey, I’m leaving and won’t be coming back. How was your day?

Skyler handed the boy a glass of orange juice and grabbed his coffee too, leaning against the window sill in the kitchen. He took a sip of coffee and furrowed his brows.

"Why did you use 'fail' and 'test' in one sentence, though?"

"The questions were dumb! I couldn't understand them, nobody could," replied Max, sounding very disappointed. "I wasn't even the only one who didn't pass! The whole class, except for Josh of course, but it didn't convince my mom. She always says: 'if Josh gets good grades, then so could you'."

Bane chuckled, ignoring Max's little protest that there was nothing funny about that. "Fuck Josh, he won't get any smarter if he's the only kid who understands dumb questions, yeah?" Max liked this part much more. He grinned at the man, as he drank his orange juice, and promised himself that he would use it next time his mom gets mad at his grades. "Don't worry about it, your grades aren't some kind of a mirror where you can see how smart you are. They're nothin' more than some simplified system and once you've finished school..." Skyler shrugged his shoulders and added; "At a job interview they never ask if you were an A student."

"Exactly! That’s what I tell myself but-"

"But you have to study, comprenez vous? Or your mom's gonna kill me, not you," he said, raising a brow even though he wasn't expecting an answer. And now the hardest part... Skyler inhaled deeply, told himself that he had to tell Max about his decision, then looked at the boy. "I’m leavin’. I'm goin' to London soon, I have to be sure you'll be ok, y'know?", then pointed at the boxes and the bags. “I know you’re probably disappointed and that’s not what you expected from me, but I just have to go. Start anew.”

Max opened his eyes wider, desperately looking for any signs that would let him believe his friend was joking. No, there weren't any, even the tone of his voice sounded completely different, unlike Skyler. He was going to leave him here. No more games, no more movies... No more silly adventures to keep secret from mom and grandma. Max hadn't felt that lonely in a long time; how else could one feel if their best friend told them something like this? "You're not coming back," he said flatly, avoiding Skyler's gaze for a moment.

"Not really. I’ve got my stupid reasons... But I will visit you from time to time."

"Is Aria one of the reasons?"

Some of the coffee he drank went down the wrong way and Skyler started coughing, which probably was the worst possible way of saying 'no'. "I know I said 'stupid reasons' but that's not what I meant," he said in a hoarse voice and cleared his throat once again.

"Ok, ok...- Is she going too, then?"

"I don't care 'bout her and you shouldn't tell her anything in case she comes here. She stays in New York and I'm more than ok with that. Don't-"

"-talk to her, I know..." Max paused, giving himself a moment to ponder on his friend's words. He couldn’t just turn on his heel and leave, forget about their friendship. Skyler had helped him so many times and the last thing Max wanted was sound ungrateful. "If you have to... Come on, I'd be a shitty friend if I stopped talking to you or left without saying goodbye, right?"

"All I can say is that it'd be my style," he replied with a light chuckle. "Actually, that was my plan until you came here."

Max knew he wasn't joking but still managed to laugh at his confession. The fact that he eventually told him mattered most.

"And now I better take a shower and get ready to... take care of... this and that." Max didn't have to know all the details about his terribly badly chosen role model - 'computer programmer'. Yeah, sure.

"Sure," he replied with a small smile. Now he was sure that Skyler wasn't going to leave unexpectedly.

"Max? Y'know what, I think you should take the games. I'll be far too busy to play them," he said, raising a brow. Skyler watched as the boy quickly went back to the table where he'd left the games and smiled to himself. He knew that it was probably the best apology he could come up with.

"Too bad I'll only get better at them." Max placed one hand on the doorknob and turned to Skyler, adding half-jokingly, "And you said you didn't like losing, Bane?", before he closed the door behind him.

Skyler finished his coffee in silence and headed to the bathroom. He really needed some time to think and as the kind of person whose brain worked much better in the shower, he really needed one right now. There were some things he needed to get done before he left New York, things that didn't necessarily sound pleasant, and he didn't have much time either.

#sp:skyler #leaving:part I

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setaripendragon · 4 years

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Trapped in the Amber - 1x03

Book 1 :: 01 - 02 - 03 Not a lot to say about this one, except that, on watching this episode for the first time, I was severely disappointed that Sam and Dean went to all that trouble to make those Homeland Security badges, and didn’t even think to use them to, oh, I don’t know, stop a plane from taking off? (Also, ngl, so mad that the continuity didn’t remember that they’d had Dean dealing with poltergeists before when they got to the episode Home.) Also, Moonfiends are completely made up by me, based on this one little bit of folklore I found about young women who look at a blue moon getting pregnant from it and giving birth to monsters. SPN lore is surprisingly limited for a show with hundreds of episodes, so I’m going to be tossing in more of my own lore to fill in the gaps in this story. (This being mostly self-indulgent nonsense, there’s going to be a lot of lore, a lot of ethical debates, and at least some linguistics.) And this chapter is dedicated to everyone who’s liked the last two parts, I absolutely wouldn’t have had the courage to continue posting this without you. Especially @spideypoolalways, and @lyratalus and @millieccino for those lovely comments <3

Allentown, Pennsylvania – Saturday 3rd December 2005

Meira makes Dean tell her about the poltergeist on their way to Pennsylvania. It’s a good story, and it’s also a reminder that John Winchester is a real person, her grandfather by blood. She knew about him, of course, but he was long dead by the time she came into the world, and honestly, she’d never given him much thought. Now, she’s suddenly aware that if it was her in her dad’s place, she wouldn’t be half so composed.

They don’t even stop to find a motel before heading to the airport where Jerry works. He greets Dean with no small amount of relief, and then shakes hands all around. “And this must be Sam, right?” He asks when he gets to Sam.

“That’s right.” Sam confirms. “And this is Meira.”

“Pleasure.” Jerry says, sincere but perfunctory, before leading them inside. He reminisces a little on the way to his office, and Meira listens in fascination, but once they get there, it’s right down to business. “Okay, listen to this.” He says. “It sounded like it was up your alley. Normally I wouldn’t have access to this. It’s the cockpit voice recorder for United Britannia flight 2485. It was one of ours.”

At first, it’s just a crackly recording of a may day signal, and then it fuzzes out to be replaced by a sound that makes Meira reach for her blade on pure instinct. Pain lances through her, and she flinches hard.

“Hey, are you okay?” Jerry asks.

Meira nods. “Took me by surprise, is all.” She says dismissively.

“Alright, well, it took off from here.” Jerry explains. “Crashed about 200 miles south. Now, they’re saying mechanical failure. Cabin depressurised somehow, nobody knows why. Over a hundred people on board, only seven got out alive.”

“Seven people survived?” Meira echoes in surprise.

Jerry’s eyebrows furrow. “That surprises you?” He asks carefully.

Meira shrugs with a grimace. “That sounded demonic to me. Sometimes spirits can affect radios and such, but it’s usually just static, psychic residue. That was way too loud to be residue. And demons aren’t known for leaving survivors.” It isn’t like she can tell them that she understands Hellspeech well enough. It isn’t like human languages, which she’s always been able to understand, but Crowley was one of the few creatures in existence that hadn’t thought she was an abomination. Or, he had, it’s just he didn’t have a problem with abominations, so he’d taught her how to understand his, heh, ‘native’ language.

Yeah, she definitely isn’t telling these two hunters, who aren’t yet her dad and uncle, that the King of Hell, or King of the Crossroads as he is now, taught her how to understand demons. Or that this one is fucking gloating on the radio of a plane it had just caused to crash.

Jerry pales. Sam and Dean both turn to stare at her, eyebrows raised. “Demonic?” Jerry asks, quiet and strained.

“I can’t be sure.” Meira lies. “But that would be my guess, yeah.”

“Well,” Sam says slowly, “we’re going to need passenger manifests, a list of survivors, and-”

“And any way we could take a look at the wreckage?” Dean interjects.

Jerry takes a breath to marshal himself, and Meira is actually impressed by how well he “The other stuff is no problem, but the wreckage?” He shakes his head grimly. “The NTSB has it locked down in an evidence warehouse. No way I’ve got that kind of clearance.”

Dean nods slowly, and then shakes his head in dismissal. “No problem.”

Meira has to bite back a grin, and once they’ve gotten the lists of passengers and survivors from Jerry and they’re leaving, she nudges Dean with her elbow and asks, “No problem, huh?” Dean just grins back, smug and cocky, and, oh, yeah, this is going to be good.

A short drive and an endless wait later, which Meira fills with reading a paperback she picked up from a bookshop across the street, and Sam passes with pacing and frustration until Meira gives in and starts reading aloud in an over-dramatic fashion, Dean returns with brand new fake IDs for all of them. Sam, of course, immediately remembers his impatience, and huffs, “You’ve been in there forever!”

“You can’t rush perfection.” Dean retorts, flipping one of the cards over to Meira, who catches it between the pages of her book, then retrieves it eagerly.

“Homeland security?” Sam asks incredulously.

Meira whoops. “Oh, man. Yes.”

“See?” Dean says to Sam. “She knows an awesome idea when she hears one.”

“The doors this baby is going to open.” Meira agrees in delight. “The prank opportunities will be endless and glorious.”

Sam rounds on her, while Dean bursts out laughing. “Pranks?”

Meira blinks at him in feigned wide-eyed innocence. “Don’t tell me you’ve never wanted to scare the shit out of someone by threatening them with charges of treason or something.” She points out. She wishes Pabbi were here, or Jace. They’ve always been better at coming up with the truly hilarious pranks. Sam just shakes his head and gets back in the car. Meira and Dean share a grin, and then follow to discuss the case and plan their next move.

Which turns out to be interrogating the passenger in the psychiatric hospital. Meira keeps quiet and lets Dean and Sam do most of the talking, wishing she could see the state of the man’s soul. She doesn’t really need to, to know he’s disturbed by what he saw, but it would be nice to know how disturbed. Whether he’d prefer the illusion of normality, or if doubting his own perception is doing more harm than good. In her own, limited, twenty-five years of experience with human souls, she’s never seen anything so damaging as doubting their own perception, but in some cases, she has to admit that the lie does seem to help people hold it together through otherwise traumatic incidents.

“It’s okay.” Sam says, as Meira considers everything she can read from Max Jaffrey’s body language and comes to a decision. She’s pretty sure Sam and Dean are going to hate it, but they can suck it up and deal. “Just tell us what you thought you saw. Please.” Sam entreats, and it works.

Max sighs, and starts, haltingly, to talk. “There was… this- man.” He begins, stops, licks his lips nervously. “And… uh, he had these… eyes.” He gestures vaguely towards his own face.

“Black eyes?” Meira asks.

Max’s head jerks up and he stares at her with wide eyes, while Sam and Dean both turn to stare at her. “Y-yeah. How did you…?”

Meira takes a step forward from where she was loitering, and claims the last open seat, opposite Max. “You weren’t seeing things.” She tells him simply.

“Meira.” Dean growls.

“Man deserves to know he’s not crazy.” Meira replies without looking away from Max, who’s shaking his head.

“That can’t have been real.” He protests. “I saw him-”

“Saw him what?” Sam prompts gently, although the look Meira sees him direct at her out of the corner of her eye is hard.

Max’s next breath shakes. “He- he opened the emergency exit. But that’s- that’s impossible. I mean, I looked it up, there’s something like two tonnes of pressure on that door.” He insists, looking between the three of them, pleading for an explanation, any explanation, that makes sense.

“Do you really believe you were seeing things?” Meira asks him.

He stares at her, then swallows hard. It’s several long, long minutes before he finally answers. “No.” He says, so quiet Meira almost can’t hear him. “Some-something made the plane crash, right? And if it wasn’t- wasn’t what I saw, then… what was it?”

Meira smiles at him, gentle but proud. “It was exactly what you saw.”

“But how?” Max demands.

“The black eyes are a fairly good indicator that the man you saw was possessed by a demon.” Meira informs him, and Max’s eyes widen in belated fear. “Demons do possess far greater strength than your average human, so one could absolutely open the emergency exit while the plane was still in the air.”

“Oh.” Max says thickly. “Demons actually exist.”

“I’m afraid so.” Meira agrees wryly. When it seems Max is too busy processing that to have any immediate questions, she nods. “Do you have your phone with you?” She asks. Max shakes his head wordlessly. “Do you know your number off by heart?” She asks, not hopeful.

But, it turns out, there are some benefits to being stuck in 2005. People aren’t quite so used to their phones doing their thinking for them, and some of them do, still, memorise their own phone numbers. Max rattles his off without a problem, and Meira whips her own phone out to save it. Then she sends him a text. “There. Now, when you get out of here, if you have any questions, you can call me.” She explains.

Max nods. Then he shakes his head. “You’re not Homeland Security, are you?” He asks.

Meira grins at him. “Special branch.” She tells him, then raps her knuckles on the table, and stands. “Don’t worry, Mr Jaffrey, we’ll get the thing that did this.” She assures him, and a little of the fear in him melts away as he nods.

It isn’t until they’re out of the hospital that Sam rounds on her. Meira honestly wasn’t expecting it. “What the hell was that?” He demands. Meira stares at him incredulously. “Why did you tell him that? You scared him half to death!”

“Um, no.” Meira snaps, indignant at this false accusation. “I didn’t. The demon did.”

“And he was perfectly fine thinking he’d imagined the whole thing, so why did you-?!”

“Checking yourself into a psychiatric hospital is the exact opposite of fine!”

“He would have gotten over it! And then he could go home and carry on his normal life, but instead, you had to go and drop demons on him!”

“You have no guarantee that he would have gotten over it!”

“You have no guarantee how well he’ll handle demons, but that didn’t stop you!”

“Oh, so we should have just joined in on gaslighting him, then?”

“Whoa! Okay, time out!” Dad barks, physically inserting himself between Meira and Rob- No, it’s Sam, Sam who is not yet her uncle and Rob hasn’t been born yet. Meira blinks rapidly as she backs up a step, and then another. She didn’t realise how in each other’s face they were getting until Dad intervened. Dean. Until Dean intervened. She closes her eyes for a moment, trying not to feel too much like her family’s been ripped away from her all over again. “Okay, let’s all just chill.” Dean instructs firmly. “What’s done is done, Sam.”

“It shouldn’t have been.” Sam insists through gritted teeth. “People shouldn’t have to deal with all this unless they don’t have any other choice.”

“Hey, man, I agree with you, but there’s no helping it now.” Dean repeats. Sam scowls.

“He already had to deal with it. It nearly killed him.” Meira points out. “I’m not going to go around shouting it from the rooftops, okay. Not least of all because people would think I’m nuts, but… Do you know how hard it is, to have the whole world telling you that you’re the problem? That there’s something wrong with you, not something wrong out there? No one deserves that!”

Sam sighs heavily, pinching the bridge of his nose, and it’s a gesture that’s going to carry through the rest of his life, all the way until he’s in his sixties and a father and an uncle exasperated with his oh so headstrong niece. But instead of patiently and logically ripping all of Meira’s dreams of chaos and glory to shreds, he just shakes his head and heads for the Impala without another word. It leaves Meira feeling strangely like she’s the one who just lost that argument. Or maybe lost something more important by winning it.

“You know, Sam ran away.” Dean says suddenly.

Meira startles, and is half an instant away from saying something really stupid, like ‘yeah, I know, Dad, you’ve told me this story about a dozen times’, but manages to stop herself just in time. “Oh?” She asks instead, her voice wobbling slightly.

Dean glances at her and grimaces faintly in apology. “Yeah. He wanted to get away from hunting, from the supernatural, be normal or whatever.” He shrugs as if to say the notion baffles him. It baffles Meira, too, but then, she never has been and never will be ‘normal’, and she’s never really felt like her life was missing anything. “Then the thing that killed our mom killed his girlfriend.”

“Ouch. I’m sorry.” Meira says, trying desperately to remember that this is supposed to be news to her, not ancient family history.

“Yeah, well, it makes it pretty hard for him to argue that you should’ve let that guy live in ignorant bliss. He tried that, and it came back to bite him, it could come back to bite this guy, too. But I think he wishes the world worked that way. It ought to. People shouldn’t have to be afraid of the monsters in the dark.”

“People shouldn’t have to be afraid of robbers, either, but we still lock our doors at night.” Meira replies softly. “If people knew, if it was common knowledge what was out there, yeah, maybe they’d be afraid, but maybe they’d line their doors and windows in salt, and get anti-possession tattoos, and then go right on living their normal lives.”

Dean huffs a laugh. “Yeah, maybe.” He doesn’t sound like he believes it, though. Meira can’t exactly blame him. There’s a reason the supernatural has stayed more or less hidden for the last several hundred years, and it’s because most people don’t want to believe it’s true, so they refuse to see it. “Still think it was kind of shitty to just drop demons on him and then leave.”

Meira pulls a face, hunching down against a lecture she knows probably isn’t coming. “I gave him my number. And once we’re done with this, I’ll probably call him if he doesn’t call me and give him the full lecture on demons and theology as it applies to reality.” Somewhere Dean and Sam can’t hear her to question her in depth knowledge of the workings of Hell.

“You hunted demons before?” Dean asks in surprise, finally starting towards the Impala as well.

The answer is yes. On a normal day, demons wouldn’t really be difficult for her. She is anathema to them, after all. “No.” Meira lies.

“Then how do you know enough to give the full lecture?” Dean asks, giving her a look as he opens the driver’s door. Meira doesn’t answer until they’re both in the car with a sulking Sam, and once they’re in, Dean doesn’t give her the opportunity. “You said you don’t really hunt, but you’re a freaking encyclopedia. Moonfiends?” He prompts.

Meira sighs, and resigns herself to cobbling bits and pieces of the truth into a coherent whole, because infinite angelic memory isn’t something she’s going to bring up. “Okay, that one is because my best friend is a moonfiend, so I got a first person account.” She defends. “But my aunt and uncle keep- kept a supernatural library, and I read a lot as a kid.”

“Huh.” Dean muses as they pull out onto the road. “Okay, I’m just gonna ask. You best friend is a moonfiend?” He sounds incredulous.

Meira pulls a face at him through the rear view mirror. “Azura.” She confirms defiantly.

“What exactly is a moonfiend?” Sam asks, turning to look at her, putting aside his irritation in favour of academic curiosity. Meira beams fondly at him, because this is why Sam has always been her favourite uncle. “I know you said they’re kind of like mothmen, but mothmen are a really specific type of vengeful nature spirit.”

“Well, no, they’re more like furies. They’re not spirits, they’re corporeal, but they’re born from… desecrated ground. Furies are born from human sins against humans, mothmen are born from human sins against nature.” Meira explains, leaning forward as she gets into explaining. “A moonfiend is actually more like a werewolf in metaphysical characteristics, but like mothmen in physical characteristics.”

“So, they’re subject to the phases of the moon?” Sam checks.

Meira nods. “A moonfiend is born when a virgin, and that’s not just a sexual virgin, but a magical and metaphysical virgin, too, stares too long at an unfiltered blue moon.”

Dean actually takes a moment away from watching the road to turn and stare at her. Sam gapes for several minutes, until he finally manages to ask. “Blue moons happen every three years. Why aren’t they everywhere?”

“Well, half the time the pregnancy kills the mother before the baby is viable. Or the mother kills the baby after she’s given birth because, well, it’s pretty obviously not human. All that on top of just how hard it is to count as a metaphysical virgin these days.” Meira points out. “Or what counts as unfiltered. I mean, glasses, smog, clouds, astral disturbances.”

“Astral disturbances?” Sam questions.

“Okay!” Dean says loudly, interrupting Meira before she can even start to explain. “I’m glad you two have made up, you nerds, but can we figure out our next step here? I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never hunted demon before.” Meira has to sit back and let the weirdness of that statement wash over her. This is her Dad’s first ever demon hunt. Weird. “Are we even sure it is a demon?” He asks, glancing back at Meira and sounding like he wishes he could hope, but he doesn’t. “I mean, this doesn’t exactly seem like demon MO… does it?”

Meira grimaces. “It’s not tempting mortals to sin, sure, but… they like to spread pain and suffering, death and destruction. It’s like a hobby.” She chirps, all dark humour.

“And this one’s hobby is plane crashes?” Dean demands incredulously. “That seems a little… I don’t know, modern.” He mutters, and Meira snickers. “Jesus. Okay. Evolving with the times or not, it’s still gotta be possessing someone right?” Meira nods when Dean’s eyes flicker to her in the mirror. “Great, so it could be anyone right now. How the hell are we gonna find this thing?” He asks, and Meira’s heart leaps into her throat. It’s stupid, she knows that Dean’s never done this before, but he’s her dad and he sounds overwhelmed and that scares her.

“Dean?” Sam asks, obviously picking up on the same thing. “What…?”

Dean sighs. “I don’t know, man, this is kind of out of our league, don’t you think? Demon’s aren’t like the rest of the shit we hunt. Even wendigos, they still- there’s still rhyme and reason to what they do, you know? Demons, man…” He pauses and sighs, hands going white-knuckled on the wheel. “This is… this is big, Sam. I wish Dad was here.”

“Yeah.” Sam agrees quietly, staring intently out of the wind-shield. “Me too.”

Meira swallows and doesn’t say ‘me three’, even though she really wants to. She wants all of her dads. She wants her grace free so that she’s not quite so helpless without them. “Hey.” She says, and ploughs on even though her voice shakes a little. “We can do this. Okay, it might be an entire order of magnitude bigger than a vengeful spirit, but it’s the same basics, right? So, how do we find our monster once we’ve figured out what it is?”

“We figure out what it wants.” Sam says practically. “Because that’s how we’ll know where it’s going to be.” Then he shakes his head. “But if all it wants is to cause plane crashes… I mean, do you have any idea how many flights take off from even just one state every day? There’s no way we could find it.”

That is a good point. Meira grimaces. She’s still trying to figure out how the hell they can do anything about this when Dean slams a flat palm against the wheel, making both her and Sam jump. “Son of a bitch.” He swears sharply, in a tone of revelation. “The survivors.”

Meira blinks. “Dean?” Sam asks, in equal bewilderment.

“The message, on the voice recorder. The demon, it said-”

“‘No survivors.’” Sam echoes. “But there were, there were seven.”

“Yeah, and if this were a vengeful spirit…” Dean trails off pointedly.

“It’d want to finish the job.” Sam realises, nodding along. Then he dives on the bag at his feet to pull out the list of passengers and survivors.

“It was gloating.” Meira interjects, a touch amused. “Prematurely. It’s gotta be so pissed it failed to kill everyone on that flight. I mean, talk about embarrassing.” Dean snorts. “So, now we know what it wants. Now we’ve just gotta figure out where it’s going to be.”

“Do you think…” Sam begins, tapping a finger rapidly on the side of the sheet with the survivors on it. “I mean, if it was a spirit, I’d say for sure, but… Do you think it’ll want to stick to killing them in plane crashes? Because that would be a way to narrow down who it’s going after next.” He points out.

“Sounds like a lead to me.” Dean agrees, and Sam immediately pulls out his phone and starts scanning over the list, before dialling a number.

“I mean, demons basically are vengeful spirits, just ramped up to a thousand on a scale of one to ten.” Meira muses to Dean while Sam hangs up and tries another. “So, yeah, some patterns of behaviour probably do carry over, at least a little.”

“That is so not comforting.” Dean mutters.

“Hey, Jerry, it’s Sam.” Sam greets. “I was just trying to get in touch with the pilot. You said he was a friend, so I thought you might-” He trails off, and then snaps “Dean.” so urgently that Dean automatically takes his eyes off the road to look over at him on high alert. “The pilot’s going up in less than an hour.”

“Shit.” Dean swears, and floors the gas.

“Look, Jerry,” Sam is saying into the phone, “is there any way you can get in touch with him, convince him not to go up?” A pause. “Please try. We’re on our way.” He hangs up, jaw tight. “How soon can we get to the airfield in Nazareth?”

“Forty-five minutes.” Dean announces, then somehow makes the Impala go even faster. “Forty minutes.”

“Okay, so we need to figure out how to get rid of a demon in forty minutes.” Sam states.

“Exorcisms?” Dean suggests.

“Do you know any by heart?” Sam retorts.

“I do.” Meira offers. It’s not exactly hard when one’s fluent in the language of angels and can invoke the name of god in it. Pretty much anything becomes an exorcism then. ‘Go away’ could count as an exorcism, as long as you followed up with ‘in the name of the lord’ or something similar. “Do we have any holy water?” She asks, not daring to hope.

“Uh, no.” Dean replies.

Meira winces, and amends her request. “Do we have water and a rosary?”

“Rosary is in the boot.” Dean tells her, while Sam retrieves a bottle of water from his bag. After about five minutes of bickering, Meira convinces him to pull over so that she can hop out and grab the rosary. Dean’s peeling out of the layby before she’s even got the door closed again, and then she screws the top off the bottled water, dumps the rosary inside, and sets about blessing it. She really, really hopes this works, and isn’t contingent on her grace being able to affect the world beyond her skin. She’s never officially been ordained or anything, but active grace or not, she’s still a fucking archangel.

“That should be holy water now.” Meira says once she’s done, handing the water back to Sam.

“Should?” Dean barks.

“I’ve never done this before, okay?” Meira shoots back, unable to keep a hint of defensive panic from her tone. “I have the qualifications for it, but I never thought I needed to check that it would work!” Dean pulls a face, but lets it go. Meira swallows down her fear. “You should- you should check on the others while we have the time.” She says to Sam, and he nods. He spends the drive going through the list of survivors and pretending to be a United Britannia Airlines survey. While he’s doing that, Meira calls Max, which turns into an impromptu explanation of how to identify demons.

By the time Meira’s off the phone, Sam’s gone through the rest of the survivors. “I still can’t get in touch with the flight attendant.” Sam states, hanging up the phone again.

“Given her job, I’d say that’s a bad sign.” Dean says dryly.

Sam snorts. “Yeah, no kidding. I’m going to call Jerry, see if he can tell me when she’s working next.” He explains, and then does just that. After a brief introduction, he gives Jerry the woman’s name, “Amanda Walker,” and waits a couple of minutes while Jerry does the research he can’t while he’s stuck on the highway. “Oh?” Sam says, an edge to his voice Meira really doesn’t like. “This evening? Look, Jerry-” A long pause. “No, I understand. Okay. Yeah, we’re on our way. Bye.”

“She’s working tonight?” Dean asks in dismay.

“Yeah. Flight leaves at eight. And there’s no way Jerry can ground the flight.” Sam adds in dismay.

Dean takes a bracing breath. “We’re just going to have to stop this son of a bitch before he can get that far.” He announces, and Meira tries to bolster her own confidence with his.

Nazareth, Pennsylvania – Saturday 3rd December 2005

By the time they get to the airfield, there are already two men walking across the tarmac to a small plane. “Shit.” Dean swears, and they all fling themselves out of the car.

“Mr Lambert!” Sam calls as they jog over. Security inevitably tries to stop them, but Dean flashes a badge at them, almost too fast for them to see more than that it looks sort of official, but it is enough to get them past. “Mr Lambert!” Sam calls again, and one of the two men nudges the other, and he turns.

“Yeah?” The second man says, so he must be Jerry’s friend, the pilot.

Meira looks at the other one, who’s watching them with a sort of sceptical hostility. She holds her hand out to him. “Agent Meira Geyad.” She greets, watching him closely, but there’s no reaction except a raised eyebrow as he takes her hand. Oh, hell. She starts to turn, but then a fist meets her face with enough force to send her sprawling.

“Shit!” Dean swears.

“Chuck!” The other man shouts in horror. “Wha-” He’s cut off by an awful crunching noise that makes Meira’s stomach turn over in guilt. It’s followed by a splash, and the hissing of corruption being melted away by a holy blessing. Holy water worked then, thank God, Meira thinks dizzily, finally healing enough to look up.

The demon grabs for Sam, getting him by the throat, and Dean yells his name in desperation. Meira starts to spit out the simplest exorcism she knows, but before she can get more than three words in, the demon has dropped Sam and kicked her in the ribs hard enough to wind her. Hard enough to break ribs, actually, but those heal quickly like her fractured cheekbone did. It takes a little longer to catch her breath, and by then, the demon has abandoned its meatsuit, streaming out of Chuck Lambert’s mouth and leaving him to collapse to the ground.

“Jesus.” Dean breathes. “Sam?”

“Fine.” Sam rasps.

“Meira?” Dean checks, dropping to his knees beside her. “You alright?” Meira groans, and takes the hand he offers her, letting him haul her up into a sitting position. “I’m guessing that wasn’t how an exorcism is supposed to go.”

“No, it realised what I was trying to do and left before I could send it back to hell.” Meira huffs, rubbing at her side just to check that her ribs are back where they’re supposed to be.

“Why’d it flinch at your name?” Dean asks curiously.

“Ge-Iad is one of the names of God.” Meira explains.

“Never heard that one before.” Dean says, eyebrows rising. “I thought you used Christ to test for demons.”

“The more often the name is used without faith, the less power it holds over the demonic.” Meira replies. “You can amp it up by using a language like Latin, which is both dead and stuffed full of religious ritual by now, but, you have any idea how many people say ‘Jesus Christ’ as an invective, without a thought as to why they swear that way?”

“And Ge-Iad, that’s, what? Never used?” Dean asks.

“Never without the proper reverence.” Meira corrects, and then tips her head. “Until today.” She adds with a pointed look, which earns her the best devil-may-care grin in her dad’s arsenal.

“Guys.” Sam calls, solemn. “Chuck’s dead.”

“Oh, that petty son of a bitch.” Meira grouses, flopping back down onto the tarmac.

“Uh-uh. Come on, up.” Dean instructs, getting to his feet and holding out his hand again. “We’ve still gotta stop this son of a bitch before he brings another plane down.” Meira whines, but takes his hand and lets him pull her to her feet.

“And we’ve got company.” Sam adds, as the airfield security descend on them.

Sam and Dean both look like deer in the headlights of a semi, so Meira takes charge. She orders security to inform the police of the incident, flashes her fake ID about, and then leaves with Sam and Dean on ‘important business’ before the police actually arrive. “Back to Allentown?” Dean checks, and Sam nods, already on the phone.

“I still can’t get in touch with the flight attendant.” Sam tells them several minutes later.

“We can’t let her get on that plane.” Dean insists.

Meira thinks about the fake IDs they’ve been using and has a really, really bad idea. She’s pretty sure Pabbi would approve. “I have an idea?” She offers. Sam turns to look at her, and she grimaces as she holds up her fake ID. “But… we’re going to need to look the part.”

Sam blinks once, and then his eyes widen. “Oh, no.” He says quickly. “No, there’s no way we can pull that off!”

“Why not?” Meira challenges.

“What?” Dean asks, glancing in the rear view mirror. “What’s the plan?”

“What’s TSA going to do if Homeland Security shows up and tells them there’s a terrorist on that plane?” Meira asks rhetorically.

Dean stares out the windshield for a long moment. “Okay. Monkey suits it is.” He says in a tone of resignation.

“And then what?!” Sam demands, a little hysterically, in Meira’s opinion. “We ground the plane, that’s great, and then we’re in the middle of an airport, surrounded by TSA, and we’re going to have to produce a terrorist for them!”

Meira shrugs. “Not necessarily. We just say we got a tip, or a suspicion that there might be, and when there isn’t, well, can’t be too careful in the pursuit of terrorists, right?” She points out. “We won’t even be lying if we tell them we have a suspicion that someone on board is planning to sabotage the flight. It’s true.”

“And how are we going to do an exorcism in the middle of all of this?” Sam demands.

“I’m not sure.” Meira huffs. “If it was just a case of getting the exorcism out, that would be one thing, but we have to make sure the demon sticks around for me to use it. Easiest way would be a devil’s trap, but it’d probably be a bad idea to go around scrawling pagan voodoo on the walls in front of TSA, huh?” She muses.

Dean snorts. “Okay, here’s the plan.” He says briskly. “Once we’ve got the plane grounded and all the passengers and staff isolated for interviewing or whatever, we’re going to insist on talking to everyone separately, and then whatever room they offer us, you two are going to keep everyone busy while I put a devil’s trap… on the ceiling, probably. Somewhere that’s not glaringly obvious, anyway.” He pauses, glancing back to make sure both Sam and Meira are on board. Meira nods enthusiastically, and Sam sighs in surrender. “Okay, so, what’s a devil’s trap look like?”

“Pentacle.” Meira answers easily. “You can make them more complicated, if you need to hold a stronger demon or a specific demon or you need to limit specific things within it, but… basic devil’s trap is just a pentagram in a circle.”

“Right, easy enough.” Dean agrees.

They stop to get suits at the first place they see. Dean looks hilariously uncomfortable, and Meira really wishes there was something she could say to help, but given that it’s a feeling that persists all the way through his life, she figures there’s not much anyone could say to make him feel better. “Should’ve got one with a waistcoat.” She says instead.

“Why the hell would I want extra layers of this bullshit?” Dean demands.

“Waistcoats are sexy as hell.” Meira informs him, smoothing down the front of her own.

Dean pauses and looks back at the shop with pained consideration. “Nope, no time.” Sam informs him. Dean makes a face at him, but doesn’t protest.

Allentown, Pennsylvania – Saturday 3rd December 2005

The plan goes off without a hitch. Meira knows that the most important part of pulling a prank like this is confidence, so she turns hers up to the max, channelling her pabbi and every archangel instinct she has, and TSA goes along with it. In fact, Meira is honestly a little shocked by how quickly everyone responds, until she remembers that, of course, it’s been four, not forty, years since the whole 9/11 thing. The flight gets grounded, TSA agents scurry about searching people and, helpfully, dragging them to and from the room they let the three of them conduct ‘interviews’ from. Meira is honestly having a ridiculous amount of fun, playing the scary Homeland Security agent looking for terrorists.

“You’re having fun.” Sam accuses under his breath, once they’re done with the passengers and about to get started on the staff.

Meira flashes him a wild, reckless grin. “I told you the prank opportunities were going to be glorious.” She murmurs back. Sam gives her an incredulous look, but doesn’t say more because the door is opening. Meira gives it a minute before she turns around, because if this is their demon, she doesn’t want to spook him before he’s sitting right on top of Dean’s devil’s trap, which he drew in magic marker on the bottom of the chair.

“I don’t see why this is-” The co-pilot cuts himself off when Meira and Sam turn around, his eyes flashing black as the demon loses control of itself for a brief moment in its shock. Or rage. Either one. “You again.” It hisses.

“Us again.” Dean says leaning back against the door.

The demon tries to lunge upwards, but the chair, conveniently bolted to the floor, doesn’t move, and the demon can’t leave it. It looks down, then back up again in outrage. “Who are you?” It demands, looking directly at Meira.

She smiles. “Zirdo zizop ol Ge-Iad, od lis ip darb ziri.” She informs it, and watches it recoil in horror with no little satisfaction.

“That’s not Latin.” Sam comments, looking at her in surprise.

“Nope.” Meira agrees cheerfully enough.

“You, though, you I know.” The demon adds, looking at Sam. He and Dean both go very still, staring intently. “I know what happened to your girlfriend, and if you let her do this, you’ll never find out why.” It taunts, a nasty smirk curling the host’s lips.

Sam stiffens. “Wait.” He says, and the demon grins.

“Sam.” Dean warns.

“What do you know about Jessica?” Sam demands.

“Let me go and I’ll tell you everything.” The demon promises.

Sam splashes holy water in its face, and it recoils with a yell, steaming. “Tell me, or I’ll-”

“Or you’ll what?” The demon spits, mocking. “What do you think you can do to me that’s worse than that?” It jerks its chin at Meira, who arches one eyebrow. “Let me go, or no deal.”

“Sam, we’re not letting this thing go.” Dean states. “It’s probably lying anyway.”

Sam’s free hand clenches into a fist. After a minute in which he doesn’t move, Meira gently pushes past him to stand in front of the demon. “Bols ma a’aiom, pa’aox il adohi ol Onsamir.” She instructs, and the demon hisses and thrashes, actually cracking the floor where the chair is bolted to it. Meira reaches out and puts a hand on the demon’s shoulder. It stills, tensing, staring at her with wide black eyes. “Niizo i etharzi, ammal, od yinay ma doal.” She says gently. “Oyi gohe Zire.”

Holy light suffuses the vessel, and the essence of the demon pours out of his mouth in the form black smoke even as it’s forced from this plane of existence, vanishing in midair.

Sam turns away and punches the wall. Dean watches him carefully, but when Sam just stands there, breathing hard, he goes to check the slumped co-pilot’s pulse. “He’s alive.” He reports. “So, do we need to carry on this farce, or can we just…?” He jerks his thumb at the door.

Meira takes a moment to hate the demon, because Sam’s mood is going to suck all the fun out of this. “I think we should finish. Let’s not give them a reason to get suspicious straight away, yeah?” She prompts, and Dean reluctantly nods, then shakes the co-pilot awake. He comes awake with a jolt, and immediately panics at the memory of the demon. “Calm down, you’re fine now.” Meira assures him.

“And if you want to stay fine, you’re going to act normal and not talk about this, or the nice TSA agents are going to arrest you for being a terrorist.” Dean adds, which doesn’t exactly help the guy’s fear, but it does redirect it nicely.

It’s a little tedious, going through the same rote questions with the rest of the staff, but there’s few enough left that Meira doesn’t mind. It’s worth it for the opportunity to bitch, in a restrained and professional manner, to the TSA agents about wild goose chases and bad information, and how she’s going to complain to her superiors about their lax fact-checking. The agents are so busy reminding her that ‘better safe than sorry’ and that it’s important work that they don’t even stop to wonder about a whole plane being delayed for what turned out to be nothing. Then the three of them are back in the Impala and driving away clean.

“We should have questioned the demon properly.” Sam says abruptly.

“Dude, Sam, seriously. It probably didn’t know jack shit.” Dean insists. “These things like to play with your mind, you can’t let it.”

“And even if it did know something, torturing information out of demons is hard, Sam. Not to mention ethically dubious given that the host suffers everything you do to the demon, too.” Meira points out, and Sam flinches, but his hard glare doesn’t waver. “Do you really think you can torture someone worse than Hell can, Sam? Someone innocent, just to find out what the demon riding their soul knows?”

Sam whips around to glare at her. “Yes.” He bites out, and then looks away, nausea twisting his expression. “No.” He capitulates. “I don’t-”

“Look, Sam. We will find this thing, alright? We will. And we don’t need to drag innocent people into it to do it. We’re better than that. Better than them.” Dean insists.

Meira smiles, bracing her elbows on the back of the front seats and lacing her fingers together to rest her chin on. “Damn straight.”

Marion, Indiana – Sunday 25th December 2005

It’s stupid, but it never occurred to Meira that Sam and Dean might not do Christmas. When she’d asked, a few days ago, Dean had just shrugged and said sure, they could do a present exchange this year, like that was optional. It’s only just sunk in, lying in the dark in a lonely motel room, that there just isn’t going to be Christmas this year.

No tree, no lights, no elaborate Santa traps, no cake for not-bro Jesus so entirely stuffed with candles that you could kill a wendigo with it, no trip to Scandinavia to have snowball fights in ancient pine forests, no stories of hunting pagan gods through the festivities. She’s alone, bound beneath her skin, with no possible way of finding out who did this to her, never mind what they did, or how to get home. She could pray to Pabbi, but he couldn’t answer, not without revealing himself to the Host, and she won’t do that to him, won’t force him to make that choice.

Midnight comes and goes, and the only way Meira knows is because she’s watching the shitty digital clock on the bedside table. She can’t feel the turn of the earth through the cosmos, can’t feel the ripples of time as billions and billions of humans make choices and change things. All she has is what’s trapped under her skin, and it’s nothing. Nothing compared to what she used to have. A family, and an entire universe to share with them.

Unable to bear it any longer, she rolls out of bed, gets dressed, and heads out. Once there, she goes to the vending machine and buys one of everything that looks like it has a cavity-inducing sugar-content, and carries it all over to the Impala. Then she hops up onto the hood, lies back, and starts in on her stash while watching the stars. “Hey, Granddad.” She says, out loud while opening up a pack of skittles, because who gives a fuck. “Looks like you’re the only family I’ve got for Christmas this year. Well, you and not-bro. How’s the garden, Josh? Sorry about no cake this year. It’d feel like… cheating, somehow, if I tried to get Sam and Dean to do it with me. Like I’m stealing something from their future, you know? Even if I bet Dean would get a kick out of it.”

She takes a deep breath, suddenly finding it hard not to cry. “You know, I always got why you fucked off, Granddad. Why you won’t interfere. I don’t think anyone else in my family really does. Except maybe Jace. He might’ve figured it out, but I bet he’s still stuck on the free will thing. That you won’t interfere because we’ve gotta do it ourselves, we’ve gotta make choices, and we can’t do that if the Father of all Father’s is looming over our shoulder. And that’s part of it, yeah, but it’s more than that, too, isn’t it?”

She has to sit up, because otherwise she’s going to choke on her own tears. Skittles spill across the hood of the Impala, and she doesn’t give a shit. “You won’t interfere because you love us. All of us, even the worst of us.” She says to the sky. “Even the actual devil. Even pond scum and slime mould and every last demon. Even me, even though I’m a blasphemy, an abomination, the devil reborn.” She pauses to gasp a few wet breaths. “I always knew, you know? You weren’t there, because you’re everywhere. But I don’t- Sorry, Granddad, but I don’t feel very loved, right now. I know you don’t like to- to interfere, but… but I could really use a miracle right about now, and I don’t know who else to turn to.”

She waits, but of course nothing happens. The stars don’t move, the world doesn’t shift. There isn’t even a change in the wind. Meira smiles bitterly, blinking tears onto her cheeks, and pulls her knees up to wrap an arm around them and bury her face in them. She gasps for air and lets it out in silent screams, with nothing left to pray for. Somewhere in the motel, a door opens and footsteps crunch across gravel.

“Meira?”

Meira’s head jerks up. Dean is standing there, looking sleep-rumpled and a little bleary, squinting at her in concern. Then his gaze drops to the mess of sweets scattered around her, and he snorts. He shoves them more towards the middle of the hood so that he can hop up to sit beside her, and snags a pack of M&Ms out of the pile for himself. “Can’t sleep?” He asks, and there’s a veneer of carelessness to it, like it’s an idle question and he didn’t just find her bawling her eyes out in the middle of the night, but he’s asking, and he’s there.

Thanks, Granddad. Meira thinks, as she tips over sideways to drop her head onto her dad’s shoulder. “I miss them.” She says quietly. “Never done Christmas without them before. Didn’t realise… how hard it’d hit me ‘til I got here, and suddenly it’s like I’m the last person on earth, it’s so lonely.”

There’s a long silence, but Meira doesn’t mind. She just watches the stars, and retrieves a skittle, and then starts in on the haribo. After a while, Dean shifts, but only enough to get his arm free so that he can put it around her shoulders. Meira shudders with another sob, and is so desperately glad when he doesn’t take that as a sign that he shouldn’t have done it.

“I felt the same, after Sam went to Stanford. Me and Dad were hunting separate, and Sam was gone. I knew I could just drive to Palo Alto, and he’d be there, but… That felt further than the moon, when he’d chosen to be there, instead of here.”

Meira nods a little against his shoulder, to let him know she’s listening, and she understands. “Pabbi used to dress up as Santa.” She says, sniffling and trying to put a little cheer into her voice. Pabbi didn’t so much as dress up as Santa as conjure one out of the ether for them, actually, but close enough. “And he’d have this huge sack of presents, right? But he’d only leave one. The rest, he’d say, we had to get for ourselves.”

Dean bursts out laughing. “He made you steal from Santa?” He asks, delighted.

“No, he made us hunt Santa.” Meira corrects, laughing a little herself. “Traps and tricks. A present would magically fall out of the sack every time we scored a ‘killing blow’.” Dean gasps out a startled curse, laughing too hard for anything else.

Once he’s calmed down a bit, he wipes at his eyes, still chuckling, and steals a few of her haribo. “Man, we never did anything that fun.” Dean bemoans, but not too seriously. “Most of the time Dad wasn’t even there for Christmas, tell you the truth, since monsters don’t stop just ‘cause it’s Christmas. One year Sammy gave me this, though.” He adds, lifting a hand to snag the cord around his neck and lift an amulet out from under his t-shirt. “Best Christmas present ever. Though, if you tell him that, I’ll put itching powder in your underwear.”

Meira catches it in the palm of her hand to draw it closer. It’s dark, but as she peers at it, she recognises it, despite never having seen the actual thing before in her life. Recognises it from her dad’s and qaada’s stories, and from some deeper well of knowledge that’s from the part of her that should have been nothing more than the Angel of Thursday, the remix, and instead ended up a little bit archangel.

And maybe it’s just lingering body-heat, but it feels warm in Meira’s palm. She grins, and lets it fall. “It’s pretty awesome.” She agrees. “And my lips are sealed, I swear.”

Love you too, Granddad.

#Supernatural #time travel #next generation #original character #Supernatural retelling #Dean Winchester #Sam Winchester #SPN 1x04 #Phantom Traveler #Meira Winchester #Trapped in the Amber #I'm so sad I didn't get to include Amanda in this #Enochian is THE WORST #seriously #on a scale of 0 to Tolkien #Dee is about -4 with how well constructed his conlang is #there's NO consistent grammar #there isn't even consistent spelling #'no i's in the angelic alphabet' Dee says #and promptly spells ever other word with an i #STILL I DID MY BEST #So have some translations #'I am a vessel of the lord and you will obey me'#'be not amongst us and return to your kingdom of hell'#'go in peace demon and do no harm'#'thus sayeth the lord'#Is Meira praying to Chuck when she prays to her granddad?#¯\_(ツ)_/¯#Idk I like Prophet!Chuck and God!Chuck about the same tbh #I'm leaning towards Prophet!Chuck for this

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your-iron-lung · 5 years

Text

Survivor Blues

also available to read on AO3 HERE

You call that a scar? A bruise? A tear? Pillow-marks. Souvenirs.

Story Synopsis: 'What doesn't kill you only makes you stronger' is a philosophy Billy's father has been beating into him for as long as he can remember. If you get hurt, suck it up and walk it off. Take the pain and live with it. Grow with it; let it make you a better person.

Surviving the Mindflayer hurt. He should've been able to adapt to the pain; should've been able to let it shape him and make him stronger, but he can't. It's too much. The pain is too great and all consuming, and Billy has far too many things that need to be healed at once.

In the end, what didn't kill him only makes him wish he'd died.

Word Count: 3416

Pairings: Light Harringrove

Genre: Hurt/Comfort, light angst (but with a happy ending- SOMETHING I DONT USUALLY DO)

Notes: this was just supposed to be a small thing, like, 4 paragraphs max, but it blew up and welp here it is. title comes from the song ‘Survivor Blues (the after hours)’. UHHH ENJOY **************

Surviving hurts.

Laying down, standing up; simply existing hurts him immeasurably. It’s like he can’t get comfortable anymore. Walking, talking, resting, sleeping, eating (especially eating) - anything and everything he does causes him more pain than he knows what to do with. But what else can he do? He’s alive, after all. He survived.

He tries to carry on like nothing’s wrong to prove a point, like, by pretending he’s not in constant pain it’ll somehow prove that he’s still as strong as he used to be, but it makes it all worse. Despair creeps in with the hurt, but before it overwhelms him he adopts it; uses his pain as penance, abuses this new sick form of self-flagellation to try and convince himself that he’s only getting what he deserves for all the hurt he’s caused countless others.

The doctors that saved his life had told him that recovery wouldn’t be easy, but still, Billy thinks, maybe he’d have been better off dying. Some days it hurts even to breathe, and if this is the way he’s going to be for the rest of his life, then he hopes he lives a short one, absolution be damned.

His dad still hits him. It hurts.

For a while after he’d been released from the hospital, things had been fine at home. Tense, but no voices raised. No hands raised. Some semblance of peace descending upon father and son until the bills from the hospital come in and Neil just loses it. Rages for hours. Just yelling, at first, but eventually his hands come flying and Billy is too hurt to escape them.

It becomes routine after that, although Billy notices that his father’s fist is a little bit gentler as it collides into him. Almost like he’s mindful of the places he’s already been hurt, as though by striking him in the places he still feels solid he’s showing his son some kind of mercy. It could be worse. Maybe Billy should be grateful. He isn’t.

Redemption is a far off dream that grows dimmer by the day whenever his father finds cause to blacken his eye.

***

He hears about Harrington through Max occasionally. Sees him around town sometimes when his dad drags him out. It hurts.

Part of that hurt stems from the unresolved things he did to Steve that night at the Byers’ place, but most of it actually stems from the night he almost died- should’ve died. It comes from where he’d been lying prone on the floor of the Starcourt Mall, bleeding out corrupted, blackened blood with Max crying over him. He couldn’t move his head after being impaled by so many cruel appendages, but even as his gaze had been fixed firmly upwards, he’d seen that pretty, pretty face of Steve’s looking down at him from over the railing of one of the upper floors. If Billy remembers right (and he does), Steve had appeared stricken. Horror-struck and dumbfounded. Billy pictures that look of terror on his face and feels his chest constrict painfully, because whenever he sees Harrington around town these days, he looks happy. Content. Like nothing ever happened. It pains him to see that he’s somehow made his life livable despite the things he’s seen, but it hurts more when he realizes Steve doesn’t ever look his way, even though he knows, he must know that Billy is near.

They hadn’t been friends before any of this, but rather, they’d been close to being something more.

***

It feels like he has nothing left to live for. It hurts.

He makes a list one day and runs down all the things he used to take stock in before his flaying and can’t find one single thing that stands up. His looks? Ruined; his body riddled with deep, ugly scars and a stomach devastated by irreversible chemical damage that leaves him barely able to eat anything. His car? Totaled beyond repair when Harrington had to T-bone into it to save those kids’ lives (and even the memory of that hurts). His friends? Tommy H. had gotten out of Hawkins while the getting was good and took Carol with him; probably the only smart thing he’d ever done in his life. High school was over, the crown he’d usurped passed on to the next sniveling bastard in line who wanted to be king.

He’s bitter when he comes to terms with the fact that he has nothing. Has no one. Can’t even tolerate looking himself in the mirror to see what being flayed has done to him. He’s too thin. Torn. Unrecognizable and dead around the eyes, haunted by the things his handler made him do.

His gaze is drawn to the necklace that keeps his Saint medal close to his heart and hates the way that it hangs heavily around his neck. It gets heavier every time he remembers it’s there until finally it feels like the chain it’s looped on is digging into his skin. He takes it off when he can’t stand it any longer; doesn’t think ol’ Saint Christopher can do anything to help him anymore. Hasn’t helped him in a long time, actually, when he thinks about it.

***

He almost kills himself one night. Accidentally, but still as an indirect result of all the accumulated traumas and hurts he’s still struggling to contend with months later. It feels good for once.

Max finds him, of all people. Walks right into his room without knocking to ask if he’s seen something of hers she just can’t seem to find but knows is in the house somewhere. She stops talking as soon as she sees him splayed out on his bed, foamy vomit trickling out of his mouth, empty bottles of beer littering the floor and a stomach full of prescribed pain medications that don’t fucking work.

“It wasn’t on purpose, it just never stops hurting. They don’t help,” he tells her later, after his ruined stomach gets pumped and his dad wails on him for that added cost to his already large hospital tab. ��Nothing works. I thought maybe more would.”

She looks at him differently after that. No longer cold. No longer calculated; just thoughtful. Contemplative, but not in the same way where, in the past, she’d had to tread on eggshells around him or he’d hurt her in much the same way Neil hurts him. She becomes surprisingly loyal after that, even after all he’s done to her- done to her friends- and that hurts.

She becomes the support he hadn’t realized he needs. Convinces him to try the recommended physical therapy to hopefully get to a place where it doesn’t hurt for him to simply exist anymore.

“I’ll get a job,” she promises him, knowing full well that whatever place willing to hire a 15 year old won’t pay nearly enough to cover the cost of continual therapy sessions. “We all can; we didn’t know how to help you before, so we didn’t, and I’m sorry, Billy, we were so scared- but we know what we can do for you now. We can help you.”

Her words hurt. At first because she’s confirmed for him what he’s suspected all along: that they hadn’t even tried to help him, but before that old semblance of anger he used to rely on can surface, she’s hugging him, and he realizes that the hurt this time comes from a place of emotional vulnerability too deep within him to pinpoint exactly.

It hurts, is the bottom line- but this time it’s a good kind of hurt. The kind that has him hugging her back.

***

Slowly, he begins to heal. The pain doesn’t lessen, but other things he hadn’t realized were hurt begin to mend.

He gets to know her friends; manages to apologize to Lucas for all the shitty things he’s said and done specifically to him. In turn, they begin to help him, but all the paper routes, lawn mowing gigs, and occasional pet sitting opportunities they take up don’t really amount to much in the long run.

But he still continues healing.

They try to recruit the teens. Nancy gives what she can, but most of the money she makes goes towards traveling costs so she can continue to see Jonathan without having to rely on her parents. Billy refuses to take her money anyway; he’s not a goddamned charity case, but unbeknownst to him she puts what she can afford to spare in Mike’s hand for him anyway. Not that she’d had anything to do with what happened to him, but some people are just good at heart- something Billy hasn’t had a whole lot of experience with.

They don’t hear back from Harrington.

It helps. He heals. It’s close, but it’s not enough.

He still hurts.

They all struggle to get him through the initial assessment appointment with a therapist, and it doesn’t go well. Billy hates it; hates the fact that he has to rely on other people for the betterment of himself, but he doesn’t want to squander all the hard work those damnable kids are doing for him. It drains him. It drains their funds. He doesn’t know what to say when the secretary asks what day she can schedule his next appointment for. He almost tells her ‘never’, but settles for ‘same time next week’ when Max takes his hand in hers and looks up at him with that determined, patented Mad Max gleam in her eye.

She knows as well as he does that they won’t be able to raise enough money in time for it, but he goes anyway when ‘same time next week’ inevitably rolls around. Somehow, miraculously, he’s able to afford it. When he asks Max how that’s possible, she stays suspiciously quiet. A mysterious benefactor has started funding his therapy visits, he realizes.

He hates it. The knowledge that he can’t know who he’s become indebted to hurts what’s left of his pride.

***

Weeks pass and the results of his therapy visits manifest in little ways. He can take deep breaths without his chest and lungs constricting too sharply. It doesn’t hurt as much to walk. On good days he can even laugh without that deep pain blowing up inside him. Not that he laughs all that much anymore.

Max remains quiet whenever he asks her who’s doing this for him.

“A friend,” is all she says whenever he tries to corner her about it.

“I don’t have any friends,” he informs her, to which she shrugs and replies, “You have one.”

He heals. Day by day as he learns the exercises, he heals. But still he wonders who.

Who the hell cares about him that much to help him? Not Neil. Not Susan. Max was already doing her best for him, but her best wasn’t enough. To think that someone out there could care so much about his recovery leaves him feeling oddly funny. He both likes and dislikes it.

The mystery doesn’t stay unsolved for long.

When school starts again, Max can’t go with him to his appointments anymore. She becomes afraid that he won’t go if someone doesn’t go with him to make sure he does (and she might be right about that), and arranges for someone else to take him but declines to say who.

He waits outside on the porch for them, smoking lazily now that it doesn’t hurt him to breathe in deeply anymore. Sunglasses on even though it’s overcast because that fucking thing left its aversion of sunlight in him when it died. Coat on, collar up. Trying to reclaim the air of confidence he used to live by even if he doesn’t quite fill out his clothes like he used to anymore.

He waits until he sees his ride pull up to the curb in front of his house. He lets his cigarette smolder on his lips, lets it burn right down to the filter before he flicks it away as he belatedly comes to understand just who has been helping him.

Harrington honks at him, pokes his head out the window and says, “Shake a leg, Hargrove, let’s get a move on.”

Billy wants to be angry. Wants to be obstinate just because he can, but he’s tired and only has so many spoons left to get through the day with. He goes with him without much of a fuss, but has about a hundred things he wants to say to him as they ride.

It hurts that he can’t get any of them out.

***

Recovery is a slow process.

The drives to his therapist aren’t long, but there’s still room enough to hold a conversation if they ever chose to do so. They don’t.

Neither one of them is able to say anything to the other for days until Steve finally takes the initiative to breach that wide, wide gap that didn’t used to be between them.

“So… I’ve been seeing a guy,” he starts, side-eyeing Billy as he speaks to take stock in his expression.

They’re stuck at a red light that hasn’t turned green for two minutes. It’s divine. It’s torture.

It hurts.

“That’s… nice,” Billy says slowly, unsure of what Steve’s getting at. If it’s relationship advice, he has nothing to give.

“No! No, not like, uh, not like that,” Steve stutters. Drums his fingers against the steering wheel. Nervous. “Not that there’s anything… wrong with that, but, no. Not like that.”

“Okay.”

“More like, your kinda guy.”

“’My kinda guy,” Billy repeats dully.

The light remains red.

“Yeah, like, y’know,” Steve continues, still nervous, face colouring with embarrassment. Still waiting for that light to change. “A therapist, but, like, for my brain, or whatever.”

“A psychiatrist?”

Steve winces at the word, looks away, and rubs the back of his neck.

“Yeah. A psych.”

“Okay,” Billy says again. He doesn’t know where Steve’s trying to take this. A show of solidarity? Some sort of admission?

Steve’s quiet for a moment up until the light finally, blessedly, turns green. The car lurches awkwardly forward in Steve’s enthusiasm to get going.

“Yeah, so, I’ve been seeing a guy.” His fingers never stop tapping, playing out the rhythm of his anxieties. “And we’ve been talking uh, a lot about you.”

“Me?” He’s surprised, then, suspicious. “Why?”

“You keep me up at night.”

But before Billy can ask what the hell that means, they’re there, and Steve’s already wishing him good luck.

***

He’s lying in bed later that night, reveling in the fact that it no longer hurts to do so when Max knocks and enters. She’s holding something big and boxy in her hand and looks kind of confused about it. A little awkward.

“It’s for you,” she says and waits for him to sit up and take the bulky two-way radio from her.

“What?” he asks stupidly, turning it over in his hands.

Max shrugs. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”

“Who?”

“See for yourself. Give it back when you’re done,” she says, and then leaves.

He waits to hear her footsteps pattering down the hall, back to her room, before he presses down on the communication button uncertainly.

“That you, Harrington?”

“Don’t cream yourself. Yeah, it’s me.”

A ghost of a smile works its way across Billy’s face at the familiar words. He takes a seat on the side of his bed, holds the radio close to where his medallion used to hang.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t do this in person,” Steve says, his voice coming through in crackles and static. Still legible. Still determined. Billy ignores the pounding of his heart. “When I said that you keep me up at night, what I meant was…”

Billy hears him sigh before trying to finish his thought.

“What I meant was that I kept seeing your body on the floor at the mall whenever I closed my eyes, and not being able to do anything about it. I started having dreams where you actually fucking died or some shit and I got all fucked up about it when I remembered how close we were to being- well, you know. But I couldn’t figure out why that kept happening; it’s not like any of that shit was my fault, right?”

“No,” Billy agrees, swallowing hard. “Wasn’t your fault.”

He thinks he can hear Steve exhale a sigh of relief.

“Yeah, so, I don’t know why but it just kept sticking with me. I started losing sleep because you were always there. I didn’t even know you were involved at all until-”

“Until I tried to kill those kids.” Billy finishes his sentence for him, trying his best to ignore the lump forming in his throat as he says it.

“That wasn’t you,” Steve says quickly, and gives Billy a moment to collect himself. “It wasn’t. But, I thought maybe if I just, I don’t know, avoided you, then maybe the nightmares would stop.”

A slight blossom of anger. He quickly discards it; that’s not what they need right now. “Did they?”

“No.”

The lump in his throat doesn’t go away. He swallows it down, but then it grows and starts to take up space in his chest. It pushes down the anger, and pushes the hurt he’s been internalizing up and out. His eyes grow wet. He blinks the tears back.

“I ignored you for so long,” Steve says in a hushed whisper.

“I know,” Billy replies and tries to keep the hurt that’s threatening to bubble out of his throat down.

“And then Max told me you tried to kill yourself-”

Steve’s voice catches, and Billy can hear the hurt that starts spilling out of him. He’s crying. Billy sniffs and stops blinking his own tears back.

“It was an accident,” he tries to tell him, but his voice gives out part-way through. “It was an accident,” he repeats as he clears his throat. Hot tears begin to streak down the sides of his face. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I didn’t know what to do. I tried to talk to Robin but she said she couldn’t do for me what a therapist could, but I’ve always heard that that shits for crazy people, and I’m not crazy, just miserable and then Max came to talk to me about you again and I just. Saw my chance, I guess.”

Billy holds the radio in one hand and his head in the other. He can feel a headache coming on. Steve rambles on, about how the guilt he feels manifests the horrific visions of Billy lying dead on the ground in that shitty mall and how his shrink suggested that maybe just talking to Billy about it might help.

“I could’ve killed you that night,” Steve says at the end of his rant, sniffling uncontrollably. His voice sounds hoarse, but at least they’ve both stopped crying. “I almost drove right into you.”

“You kinda did. Eye for an eye, though. Guess that makes us equal,” Billy replies, and Steve laughs.

His laugh is cheery despite the dark tones of their conversation. Light. It lifts Billy up.

“It could’ve been way worse, though.”

“Yeah,” Billy agrees, breathing deeply. His eyes feel crusty with dried tears. He wipes at them and feels how sore they are. “Yeah, you could’ve missed. You wouldn’t be so sorry if you had.”

Steve gets really quiet at that. Billy knows that Steve knows he’s right. He would’ve killed them if Steve hadn’t done what he did, but it doesn’t change the fact that it hurt the both of them when he’d had to resort to such drastic measures.

“But I didn’t.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“You survived.”

“So did you.”

“Fuck it. I miss you, Billy. I wasted so much time trying to get over the part of you I thought had died.”

They stay up all night after that. Just talking. Catching up, making amends. Healing.

The conversation only ends when Billy realizes Steve’s fallen asleep on his end. He’d been slowing down gradually as the hours passed, so it doesn’t come as a surprise, but still Billy wishes they could’ve talked more.

And they can, he understands. They can talk the whole rest of their lives away if they wanted to, because they survived. He sets the radio down on the floor beside his bed and slips in between the sheets. He closes his eyes and smiles. They survived.

When he wakes up, he realizes he no longer hurts.

#harringrove #billy hargrove #steve harrington #harringrove fic #hurt/comfort #light angst #some mature themes #happy ending

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tehnardier · 6 years

Text

Heartbeat — Steve Harrington

Pairing: Steve Harrington x Reader

Words: 3511

Headcanon: “Steve would probably be so great at comforting his s/o” by anonymous.

Summary: Y/N hasn’t been able to sleep because of nightmares for a long time and seeks help of the one person that will be of help.

Warnings: insomnia

A/N: this is a new style of writing i’m trying out bc i wanted to see if i could write flashbacks and write a non gender specific fanfic... well, here’s it is!! feedback is always appreciated :) enjoy!

You woke up startled, sitting up immediately and trying to catch your breath. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, and you were sure it wouldn’t be the last. Ever since you fought off the Demogorgon, you had started getting nightmares. Luckily, you learned to deal with them and didn’t have them as often, but with the recent events with the demodogs, they came back stronger than ever.

You looked at the clock on the wall and sighed, knowing that it was useless to try to go back to sleep. Laying back down on the bed, you felt tears on the corners of your eyes threatening to fall. ‘I’m so weak,’ you thought, ‘who wakes up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and starts to cry? Certainly none of your friends who went through the exact same shit do.’

It had all started when Nancy Wheeler asked your help the year before to rescue your mutual friend Barbara Holland. At the time, you didn’t know that by rescue she meant fight a monster from another dimension with the help of Jonathan Byers and, surprisingly, Steve Harrington. After that, the four of you developed a somewhat close bond, or at least a knowledge that, when and if the time came, you’d be there to help each other. A year had passed since then and, when you least expected it, you were helping a bunch of kids and Steve to capture some kind of tiny Demogorgon (or, as Dustin liked to call it, demodog) called Dart. After that, you somehow ended up in the upside down putting the whole thing to flames, and it was like all the hard work you put into overcoming your nightmares had been burned off with it. There was only one good memory you could think of that stood out from all the bad ones.

It was over. Eleven had closed the gate, and you and Steve had gotten all the kids out safely from the tunnel Chief Hopper had dug to the upside down. Relief flushed through your veins as you looked around and made sure everyone was alright.

Suddenly, there were two arms around you and you felt the familiar scent of one Steve Harrington. You didn’t stop to think twice as you wrapped your arms around his back and breathed him in.

“We made it.” he whispered in your ear, pulling you impossibly closer to his chest. You barely hummed in response, choosing to focus on his heartbeat instead and letting its steady thumps lure you into a state of pure bliss.

You found yourself wondering if hearing someone’s heartbeat would help you sleep better. Deep inside you knew that it wouldn’t, not anyone’s, at least. Steve’s heartbeat would help. Along with his warm eyes and soothing words.

You could admit to yourself that you had grown hopelessly fond of the boy since everything that happened, and could guess that only situations like literally saving the whole town could have made someone like yourself fall for someone like Steve. You suspected that even Nancy had figured it out.

The only reason you accepted to chaperone the middle school Snow Ball was because you missed the kids. But, after watching Jonathan take some pictures, complimenting Dustin’s hairdo (no doubt a consequence of one of Steve’s many terrible advices), giving Lucas a pep talk so he would have the courage to ask Max to a dance and hugging them all embarrassingly close, you had realized that middle school dances were probably the most boring thing you ever attended.

It was during the ninth time you circled the entire gymnasium (you counted) that Nancy called you over to the punch table. You rapidly made your way to her, desperate to have a distraction from watching kids dance and ogle at each other.

“So, where’s Steve?” she asked amicably when you got there as she served punch to a nervous looking boy.

You stared at her, confused as to why she would think you’d know about Steve’s whereabouts. “Uh, I don’t know?”

“You don’t?” Nancy glanced at her, frowning and looking equally confused.

“Should I?” you questioned as you two watched the nervous boy leave with a couple of full cups on his hands. That set something off in Nancy’s brain and her confused look turned into one of embarrassment.

“No!” she exclaimed loudly, making herself busy and filling some random cups with her ‘pure fuel’. “It’s just that... No, it’s nothing, forget it.”

“It’s not nothing, or else you wouldn’t be acting this way.” you said as nudged her shoulder with yours. “Come on, tell me.”

“You seem close, that’s all.” Nancy murmured, shrugging her shoulders. That made you tense up, fearing that your friend was mad at you for being friends with her ex-boyfriend. Nancy seemed to sense that, turning her body towards yours and putting a comforting hand on your shoulder.

“I’m not mad at you, silly,” she let out a giggle, “I just wanted you to know you have my blessing.”

You didn’t think much about Nancy’s words at the time, sure that she was only joking. But now, the more you thought about it, the more fearful you were that your crush was too obvious. You sighed and closed your eyes, trying to make your mind shut up so you could at least try to rest a little.

It was no use. Twenty minutes later you were still tossing and turning in your bed, thoughts of your friends and, most importantly, your crush still on your mind.

You were waiting for your mom to come get you after the Snow Ball when a familiar car stopped in front of the school. You smirked and walked over to the driver seat of the car, tapping on the glass and startling the boy inside.

Steve rolled down the window and gave you his signature grin when he saw it was you. “Y/N! I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“What can I say? I missed those little shits.” you joked, using the nickname Steve had given them.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” he laughed, “I’m here to pick up Dustin.”

You felt your heart get a little warmer when he said that. “That’s really sweet of you, Steve.”

He gave you a small smile. “He’s a cool kid.”

“He is.” you smiled back. A comfortable silence settled between the two of you as you waited for Dustin to come. You shuddered when a gust of wind passed by and wrapped your arms around yourself.

“Hey, are you cold?” Steve asked in concern and rapidly took off his maroon sweater. Before you could even answer him, he was shoving the fabric into your hands.

You tried giving it back to him, but he just shook his head. “You’re gonna get cold, too.”

“I’m inside the car, you’re outside,” Steve shrugged and pouted nonchalantly, “you’re gonna get colder.“

Knowing it was no use to fight him, you thanked him and put the sweater on, cuddling into it. Steve couldn’t help but smile at the sight.

“It’s no problem,” he told you, “I’m here for you whenever you need me, Y/N.”

Your eyes landed on the sweater you still hadn’t given back and you let out a sigh. You stood up and wrapped it in your hands, holding it close to your chest. Steve lived so close to you, only a few minutes walking and you’d be there with him, holding him instead of his sweater. The words he said flooded in your head, had he truly meant them? I’m here for you whenever you need me, Y/N.

Before you could think too much about it, you shrugged the sweater on and put on your shoes, making your way out of the room and downstairs as quietly as you could, not wanting to wake up any of your family members.

Only when you were already outside your house you realized how insane was your idea. ‘I can just appear at someone’s house in the middle of the night because I can’t sleep,’ you thought to yourself, ‘also, why would he want me there? He’ll probably freak out. But then again, he did say that he would be there for me when I needed it. That counts as needing it, doesn’t it? I sure as hell need a good night of sleep.’

You interrupted your little internal monologue with a determined huff and let your feet make the familiar way to the Harrington residence. The walk took about five minutes and soon enough you were looking up to what you knew was Steve’s bedroom window. You started to think what you should do next, quickly discarding the idea of just shouting “Steve, Steve, let down your gelled hair” and hoping for the best.

You looked down to your feet, noticed the little pebbles scattered around the floor and groaned. You absolutely hated how sappy this would look, but it was your only option. So, you kneeled down, grabbed a handful of the pebbles and started throwing them on Steve’s window, missing a few but still managing hit the glass most of the time.

You noticed some movement happening in the darkness of the bedroom, followed by the light turning on. After a while, a disheveled and sleepy Steve appeared. He frowned confusedly when he noticed you and opened the window. “Y/N? What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Hi,” you waved shamefully up at him, “did I wake you up?”

Steve just stared for a few seconds, then pointed his finger at you with determination. “Just wait there.”

He disappeared from the window, leaving you wondering what was going to happen next. A good thirty seconds later, you saw Steve walking outside the house and towards you barefoot and with nothing but an old t-shirt and sweatpants on.

“Are you ok?” he asked when he reached you, looking you up and down in concern. “Did something happen?”

You’re not sure why, but all it took was those two questions for your eyes to well up with tears once again. Steve noticed that, immediately closing the space between your bodies and throwing his arms around you. You didn’t have the energy to replicate the hug, but you let out a choked sob and the tears fell freely down your face as he held you close.

“I’m here,” Steve whispered, running his hand through your hair, “I’ve got you.”

He held you until you stopped crying, carefully stepping back once he felt your breathing go back to normal, but putting one of his arms around your shoulders almost as if he was afraid to let you go completely. “Let’s go inside, yeah?”

You nodded and let him lead you to the house. Once inside, he let go of your shoulders and took your hand instead, murmuring something about his parents being asleep. You two tiptoed your way towards his bedroom and, when you got there, he let out a relieved sigh and closed the door behind you.

You quickly let go of his hand, the brightness inside the room making it too real, making your feelings for Steve too real. There’s something about the darkness that can make you think you can shield or avoid your sentiments with the shadows. But once there’s light, you’re vulnerable again and all those feelings come straight out to the surface.

Steve sensed your discomfort and, not knowing exactly what to do, walked up to his bed and sat on it to avoid just standing there and making you even more uncomfortable. “You can sit, too, if you want.” he said meekly.

You nodded and made your way to the bed, sitting close enough that if you leaned just a tad to the side, you’d touch his arm. Steve looked at you and chuckled, “I was wondering where that went.”

"I, uh... What?” you said and turned your body towards him confused.

“My sweater.” he answered, indicating to your torso with a nod. You looked down and remembered what you were wearing, feeling your cheeks warm up.

“Oh,” you said simply, “yes, I had completely forgotten about that. I can, uh, give it back to you if you want.”

Steve waved his hand carelessly and shook his head. “There’s no need. It looks better on you anyway.”

If your cheeks were warm then, you were pretty sure they were on fire now. You managed to choke out a “thanks” and looked back down, fiddling with your hands nervously. You had come here in the heat of the moment and now you had no idea how to act and what to do around him. Sure, you and Steve were friends, but not friends friends, just, you know, ‘we went through a lot of shit together and now I guess we’re close’ friends. You didn’t know how to hang out with him, or how to start a normal conversation about random stuff.

“So...” you dragged out, hoping he would somehow complete the sentence or start a topic of conversation. “How have you been?” you asked after he said nothing.

“Managing, I guess. You?” he glanced at you and it was the first time you realized how nervous he looked. It was both relieving and unsettling seeing him like this, acting so unlike his usually confident self.

“Yeah, me too.” you mumbled, giving him a small smile.

“Are you?” he blurted out, making you snap your head towards him defensively. “I mean, I don’t want to intrude or anything, but what happened outside doesn’t exactly make me believe that you’re managing it so well.”

You frowned angrily, shooting daggers at him with your eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I didn’t mean it like a bad thing.” he cringed and looked at you apologetically. “I just... I think that you’re maybe not as ok as you’re trying to make it seem. And that’s why you’re here, right? We went through some tough shit, Y/N, it’s normal not to be over it so quickly.”

“Is it?” you spat out. “Because I look around and I see everyone being so strong. People like Jonathan... Considering what he saw his baby brother go through, he should be the one who’s not managing. Not me.”

Steve opened his mouth to interfere, but you continued talking before he could. “Or Will himself, or Mrs. Byers, who had to watch her boyfriend get literally eaten by those things. They’re the ones who should be fucked up, but they’re not. They’re holding up.”

You felt your chest get heavy, guilt taking over your body.

“You think you’re the only one who’s still scared?” Steve asked suddenly, finally being able to stop your little rant. “Y/N, I sleep with my nail bat under my bed every night.”

You couldn’t help but crack a small grin at his confession. He nudged your shoulder with his, happy to have made you smile. “Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean you’re the only one having a hard time dealing with what happened.”

“I feel like I’m being selfish not being able to get over it.” you said quietly, glancing at the boy beside you. “What we saw is nothing compared to what they lost, Steve.”

Silence filled the room for a few seconds before Steve turned his whole body towards you and stared at you with wide eyes. “You can’t be serious.”

“What?” you questioned, looking back at him.

“Y/N, you’re not selfish.” he told you, his voice sounding serious and determined. “You got into all this to save your friend. And even after you lost her, you continued fighting and protecting everyone you could. You’re not only completely selfless, but pretty freaking badass, too.”

“You mean that?” you asked him incredulously. Steve nodded enthusiastically in confirmation.

“You’re also pretty freaking badass and selfless, Harrington.” you said, smiling up at the boy. He blushed and mumbled a “no” in return.

“Yes, you are!” you raised your voice as much as you could without waking up his parents, not sure how they’d deal if they found you in their son’s bedroom in the middle of the night. “Was I the only one who saw you make yourself a prey for those monsters to protect the kids?”

“And you.” he said quietly. “To protect you, too.”

It was your turn to blush, the feelings you hid deep inside you threatening to burst out. “You had no obligation to do that, but you did it anyway.” you told him sighing.

“It felt like the right thing to do, that’s all.” he explained nonchalantly.

“That’s my point. You’re probably the most selfless person I’ve ever met.” you said. A voice inside your head just screamed ‘fuck it’ — you wouldn’t hide your feelings any loner if it meant Steve wouldn’t know how important he was.

“You know, I haven’t slept properly for a long time,” you confessed, “I get these horrible nightmares almost every night. And when I don’t, I don’t sleep anyway because I get scared I will.”

“You had one tonight.” Steve murmured, piecing all the pieces of the puzzle in his head.

“Yeah.” you whispered, taking a deep breath and grabbing his hands. “And I remembered that, when it was all over, you gave me this really tight hug.”

You waited for a confirmation that Steve was following you before continuing. He then interlaced your fingers together. “You held me so close I could feel your heartbeat. And that made me feel safe. You made me feel safe.” you told him. You felt dizzy and breathless as you waited for a response.

“I never thought I’d make someone feel safe just by hugging them.” he said and smiled at you lovingly. You gave him a matching grin, glad to have finally made him understand.

“I feel safe with you, too, you know.” Steve said, holding your gaze. “Back at the junkyard and in the upside down, what kept me grounded was having you there.”

“Seriously?” you asked him disbelievingly.

“Yes.” he confirmed, his smiled getting even bigger. “So, if you want to maybe spend the night... I’ll hold you all night long if it makes you sleep better.”

Looking at Steve in that moment, his eyes shining and a hopeful grin on his face, was when you realized how far gone you really were for this boy. “Ok, I’ll stay.” you said simply, squeezing his hands.

Steve brought your own hands to his lips and gave kissed them before letting you go and standing up to switch the lights off. You took your shoes and his sweater off as he walked up to his bed, laid on it and put the covers over himself. “Come on, bring it in.” he said with a cheeky grin, opening his arms wide open.

You laughed as you got under the covers and threw yourself in his arms. Steve wrapped them around you, holding you safely to his chest. You breathed him in and snuggled closer. “I like this a lot, Steve.” you murmured. You felt his heart start to beat faster and he kissed the top of your head.

“Hey, I need to ask you something.” Steve said after a while, sounding tired but purposeful nonetheless. You lifted your head to look at him.

“What is this between us? Are we only friends or is there something more to it?” he asked, his voice quavering a little.

“After everything I said, you think that what I feel for you is purely platonic?” you questioned him incredulously, your mouth agape and eyes opened wide in a mocking manner.

Steve chuckled and shrugged. “Well, I wanted to check.”

You closed your mouth, stopping for moment to look at him. You felt as if every cell on your body was on fire just by doing so. His eyes held your gaze with nothing but sincerity, and a small and loving smile graced his features. His normally styled hair was down, a few soft strands falling to his forehead, and you thought he looked completely breathtaking. You could feel his heartbeat and his chest go up and down, every consuming thought on your mind being how intoxicated you were by him.

“I can assure you I’ve got very romantic and very real feelings for you.” you told Steve as you closed the space between you two and kissed him hard. He smiled into the kiss and brought you even closer to his chest, kissing you back.

“Good, because I feel the same way about you.” Steve murmured in between kisses.

You leaned back, smirking at him and giving him one last peck before laying back down.

“Good night, Steve Harrington.” you said into his chest, closing your eyes and holding back a smile.

“You’re such a tease.” he moaned, letting out a breathy laugh afterwards and running his hands through your back in a soothing manner. “Good night, Y/N Y/L/N.”

For the first time in a while, you felt completely safe, letting Steve’s warm presence and stable heartbeat lure you to a peaceful sleep.

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