Chapter Text
—
In the eleventh grade, Steve learned in Mrs. Click's history class that in 476 AD, the Roman Empire fell. He did not remember this. The Emperor at the time was a man named Julius Nepos. Steve also did not remember this. But—and this is very important—Robin did.
Steve didn't remember a lot from that class, which according to Robin was not surprising. He spent most of his time flirting with Tammy Thompson, tearing up the edges of his worksheets into tiny little pieces of paper and leaving bagel crumbs all over the floor while he chewed on the tip of his pencil.
In lieu of his fuzzy memory, Robin eagerly filled in the blanks: Julius Nepos was a great leader. He worked diligently, if not unsuccessfully to try and restore the prestige and authority of the Western Empire. He was a man of great self-sacrifice who repelled the Gauls, asserted new and liberal social policies in an attempt to unite the Senate, and levied his power for domestic rivals in an attempt to unite the realm before he fled in self-exile when faced with revolt.
“Sounds like a great guy,” Steve told her sarcastically. He was bored and he didn’t really care about classical history, or history in general.
“He was,” Robin finished with succinctly. “But we didn’t learn about any of that in history class.”
“What?" Steve scoffed. "Then why are you telling me this?”
“We learned that Nepos was the last Roman Emperor,” Robin told him plainly. "That's it." She crossed her arms, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, like what she said should mean something to him, but it didn't. Steve scowled: he still didn’t get it.
“Okay?”
“Nepos was this great man,” Robin repeated a little more insistently, a little more fast-paced. “But none of that mattered, Steve: he was the face of the biggest political failure in the history of the ancient world and that’s it. That’s all he’ll ever be remembered as. Nepos is the man who let the Roman Empire fall.”
“And what does this have to do with Jonathan?” Steve asked her irately, unimpressed by her impromptu history lesson.
“Nothing,” Robin had smiled sweetly, “and everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Bullshit,” Steve fired back.
“Steve,” Robin stressed, “it doesn’t matter how hard you try to create something beautiful, or to leave a lasting legacy, because whatever you destroy in life is what people are going to remember you for.”
Steve paused.
“Are you comparing my relationship with Jonathan to the Fall of the Roman Empire?” Steve then asked her abruptly. “Because even I think that’s a little dramatic.”
Robin snorted.
“No,” she shrugged. "The history between you two is so much less important than the disintegration of European superpowers." She tapped her fingers against the counter of the video store checkout area. “But," she added, "it's hard to forget pain. You want to know what’s even harder to remember?”
Steve sighed.
“What?” he dared to ask.
“Sweetness. We have no scars to remember happiness by. But acts of violence? Of destruction? Of personal moral failings? Those are the things that matter. Those are the things that people carry with them.” Then, she reached over and lifted up his hand, flipping it over to observe his knuckles: there was a long, red line that wrapped up and around his wrist and her thumb brushed alongside the skin where it was silvery and smooth. Steve knew exactly where the mark had come from (a demobat), and so did Robin. “So how many scars did you leave Jonathan with?” she then asked.
Again, Steve paused.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered honestly as Robin’s hand dropped. But if he had to think about it, there must have been a few.
—
The first time Steve saw Jonathan using a skateboard again was about 5 or 6 weeks after his family had relocated back to Hawkins in the aftermath of what they were colloquially calling, "The Time the World Almost Ended…Again". He hadn't even really realized it was him at first until he did a double take in his rear view mirror, then again as he craned his neck backwards, because yep, there he was: Jonathan Byers gliding down Main Street with a red can of Coke in his hand. As Robin liked to remind him, this action nearly got them killed as he had driven them up and onto the curb.
She didn't really understand what was so interesting about seeing Jonathan flying around on a skateboard either, but this was before Robin had likened their relationship to the disintegration of Julius Nepos' legacy. She didn't know. And like most things about Jonathan, Steve didn't really expect her to understand.
"He doesn't have a car anymore, Steve," she had reminded him drolly instead. "You yourself said Dustin confirmed it when you kept bitching about having to do double the brat driving duty with the Byers back in town."
But it was interesting and Steve almost felt giddy seeing Jonathan roll down the sidewalk. He still looked cool doing it too, even though Steve would never admit that to anyone. He did tell Jonathan he looked cool one time though, and the other tried to show off, doing a kickflip. It hadn't worked out and instead the board had gone flying forward, straight into Steve’s shin. Ouch.
That was years ago though now, and Steve hadn't really thought about that memory in a while. He hadn't even really thought about Jonathan in a while now, either. Even after saving the world together for what felt like the umpteenth time in a row, Jonathan had slinked away back into the shadows, resuming his status as an outlier who was not otherwise generally compatible with Steve’s basic human existence. His perusal reclusiveness only worsened with the spoken-of-but-only-in-whispers-breakup between him and Nancy, and it was honestly a rare occurrence that anyone saw him these days beyond catching glimpses of him busing tables at the diner downtown.
So it struck Steve as almost refreshing when he saw Jonathan weaving between people on the sidewalk with a skateboard again. It also struck him as marginally nostalgic, because apparently Jonathan still knew how to skate. Weird had been his first thought, but he guessed it wasn't really a skill you could easily lose.
If anything, it almost made Steve want to jump on his bicycle again just to see if this notion was true. Could he still ride a bike? Did he know how? Had he forgotten? But then he remembered that his dad had tossed out his bicycle years ago with the weekly trash right after he first got his license. It had been a nice bike too, but it had been taking up space in the garage which his father felt was better used as real estate for his golf clubs. Feeling mildly dejected, he supposed he'd just have to take Jonathan's recent re-emergence into skating as the burden of proof that some things in life were hard to forget.
But like riding a bicycle, the memory of Jonathan riding around on a skateboard as a kid was hard to forget too.
—
"Why do you keep trying to talk to him?" Robin asked Steve one time.
Jonathan had just ignored him for the 3rd time in a row that week after he had slowed down his car and tried to make conservation by hollering at him out of the passenger side window. Robin had hated every second of it, slinking down in her seat with an audible grumble, but Steve pushed past her, calling out to Jonathan with a loud, "Hey, Byers!" and a wave.
Jonathan didn't even acknowledge him at first. He was skating down the sidewalk near the old movie theater, ignorant to Steve’s hollering thanks to the yellowing set of headphones he was wearing that were jacked into a walkman that was clipped to his belt. Clutched in one arm against his chest was also what looked like a paper bag of groceries from the Shop N’ Save.
Undeterred, Steve had lightly tapped the horn, waving again, when Jonathan’s shoulder’s jumped and he slowed down on his board. Then, he pushed down his headphones, his expression shooting him a wary, nonverbal: 'What?'
"Want a ride?" Steve grinned.
Jonathan's head turned to his left, only barely, and he frowned at him. It was a big, ugly one too. Then, just to add insult to injury he said: "Uh…I'll pass," in the most disgusted sounding voice ever, as if Steve had just offered him a dead rat. Without blinking an eye, he then slipped his headphones back on and his board weaved right, a foot kicking off on the concrete to pick up speed as he rounded the corner towards Ashmund Street.
So much for trying to do a good deed.
It hadn’t been the first time Jonathan had sloughed off his bubbling kindness with prickly indifference either.
The second or third time he had come across Jonathan riding around on his skateboard, Steve couldn’t help but to slow down and roll down his window, coming to a near crawl as he paced Jonathan’s speed.
“Hey!” he grinned, “Looks like I’m still faster than you!”
He had meant it as a joke—a call back to all the times he used to bug Jonathan when they were kids and Steve biked wide circles around him as they trekked home from school together, just because he could. Jonathan, however, like with most jokes Steve told, did not seem to appreciate it. He startled with a jump, nearly falling off his board, but then shot Steve a dead-eyed stare before he jumped off his board completely, flipping it up with his foot and tucking it under his arm. Then, much like a mangy cat, he took off on foot down the nearest alleyway, skulking off into a space where Steve couldn’t follow or bother him.
At least now, Jonathan was talking to him again, even if his responses were regulated to short, simple sentences.
"Seriously," Robin had repeated. "He's kind of a jerk and he clearly doesn't appreciate you offering him a lift. Let the little weasel get hit by a bus," she snarked. "Doesn't even know how to say 'no, no thank you'."
And even though Steve kind of wanted to argue with her, Robin was right. Jonathan was kind of a jerk and he was definitely acting a little bit like a slinky weasel, but that wasn't fully the right way to describe him either.
You see, the thing about Jonathan was that he was like, like—, like a…
Okay, wait. Stop. He needed to think about it, because Jonathan was sort of hard to explain. He wasn't a jerk and he wasn't a weasel. But he was like—, like…like a…
Ugh.
No, that wasn't right either.
It's like this.
So this one time when Steve was eleven, the moon was out during the day. It was really bright out and the sky was perfectly clear, perfectly blue, except the moon was there too, mirroring the sun like a pale, translucent shadow. It was kind of cool, actually, because it was almost noon and Jonathan had looked up and pointed at it and said, "Hey—what's that?"
And maybe it was because Jonathan was a little naïve and had never seen the moon out during the daytime before or maybe it was because he was just really sensitive, but Steve thought it would be funny to tell him it was the Death Star and it made Jonathan cry.
“What?” Jonathan had echoed. He had sounded more than a little scared.
"Yeah. It's charging up its laser to destroy Earth," Steve had told him gravely. "We're all going to be dead soon."
Jonathan's face just shattered at that and he ran home crying before Steve could even tell him it was a joke. The next day he didn't even want to talk to him and he sulked all afternoon in his room. He told Steve he was mean and that telling him that they were all going to die was a bad joke. The next day too, Jonathan continued to sulk, but this time because he was embarrassed he had been crying. Then, because he had been sulking for so long, he sulked about sulking because clearly this was all Steve’s fault.
So Steve kept going back to his house and knocking on his window and bugging him and bugging him again and eventually Jonathan stopped sulking and came out of his room and they went back to poking at frogs in the stream between their houses until Jonathan told him he should stop that too because it was also mean. So Steve did.
So that is what Jonathan is like. Not that Robin would understand that, he thinks.
"It's fine," is all he shrugs when Robin continues to stare at him expectantly, waiting for an answer. "I'm just messing with him anyways. I know we're not friends...but it doesn't hurt to be friendly."
And they weren't friends, Steve thinks. But they used to be.
In the back of his mind there’s this other thought, too. That maybe if he keeps bugging him, Jonathan will stop sulking again. It had only been like, what—five or six years? Seven, tops? Except the reason why Jonathan was sulking this time wasn’t because Steve told him the Earth was going to be blown up by the Death Star. The reason why Jonathan was sulking was because Steve had—
Well. That’s something he doesn’t think Robin will get either.
—
Steve met Jonathan when he was ten, which must have made him eight or nine, but Jonathan always insisted there was only eight months between their birthdays—just eight—and he never let Steve forget this.
He was this reedy looking kid, paper thin, and he had more holes in the knees of his pants than any of the other kids Steve knew and it wasn’t just because all his clothes were second hand.
You see Jonathan has this penny board—he was probably the only kid in town with one—and while everyone else was riding around on their bicycles, Jonathan Byers preferred mode of transportation involved a lot of falling. His knees were always scabby, always covered in floppy bandaids, but he didn't seem to mind this. As a matter of fact, Steve had seen Jonathan scrape up his knees and elbows and even his wrists more than anyone he ever knew, and unlike when Jonathan got upset with him about his bad jokes, or like the time they saw a dead cat deceased on the side of the road after it had been hit by a car, he never ever cried about it.
Because of this, Steve told him he was the toughest kid around.
Then, when they got older, Tommy saw all the scars on Jonathan’s knees—all the white lines and patches of mismatched, slightly off pinkish skin—during gym class. It was when the ninth graders used the other half of the court for badminton while the tenth graders were running the FitnessGram PACER Test and he made a joke about how Jonathan's knees probably got like that because he was a little weird, if Steve knew what he meant. He nudged Steve expectantly, waiting for him to agree and Jonathan's eyes shot up, waiting for his reaction. Steve didn't really have a choice, or maybe he did, or maybe it didn't really matter because they weren't friends anymore, but Steve laughed, maybe a touch awkwardly, and agreed.
Jonathan was definitely a little bit of a weirdo these days anyways, he thought. He was moody and quiet and he didn't really have many friends, but Steve knew those scars on his knees weren't because Jonathan was weird. They were because Jonathan was a badass who didn't care if his skin touched pavement, didn't cry when he bled, didn't pout when he limped. Jonathan was tough and maybe it was because he was tough that he endured Tommy's scorn so openly, so silently, and never said a word when Steve reluctantly went along with it.
After a while Steve's reluctance turned into easy, habitual bantering. Jonathan was an easy target after all, and making crass jokes about the kid who never bothered to fight back made for cheap laughs.
Like most jokes Steve told, they were always bad, but Steve knew this. Jonathan had told him that he was mean long ago; that his jokes weren't funny. Even now, he wasn't laughing. But as the tenth grade wore on and Jonathan started skipping gym class, Steve decided that it didn't matter. He decided not to know why when he saw that Jonathan had started wearing shirts upon shirts, layers upon layers. It was just a joke, he thought, and Jonathan rarely knew how to take one. And besides, Tommy was kind of right: Jonathan was weird, not just kind of. And Steve?
Steve had…
He had—
Growing popularity, of course.
It was enough to wash away any weirdness that he carried with him (such as his liking of Saturday morning cartoons despite his age, of his reading of his mother's fashion magazines, of poking frogs with sticks, and of course, Jonathan). He could bury it all beneath the welcomed laughter of approval and forget the things he had learned intrinsically, like the Byers phone number, like riding a bike, like the way he and Jonathan used to hold hands back to front walking across the mossy log that crossed the stream in woods in between their houses.
He could forget, he thought, even with Jonathan glowering at him from across the glossy wooden slats of the high school gymnasium floor.
So it was decided that Jonathan was weird because he had scars on his knees and Tommy said that could only mean one thing.
But what Tommy didn't know, however, was that Steve had scars too.
What Tommy also didn't know was that it was actually really, really hard to forget things.
—
Tommy making jokes about Jonathan's knees in the tenth grade wasn't the reason why Jonathan was still sulking.
Factually, Steve reasoned, it was because what Jonathan felt towards Steve was the closest he could get to feeling hate without actually hating him.The reason why he couldn't actually hate him was because of Lonnie.
Lonnie, as Jonathan used to tell him, was the only person he hated in all of the whole entire world. And while Lonnie wasn't even around anymore these days, Steve was sure as he knew the sky was blue and that the grass was green that Jonathan still hated his dad. Sadly, Steve would just have to make due with settling for second place: not hated, but hated adjacent.
It wasn’t always like this though.
They actually used to like each other and if Robin ever asked, he’s not sure how’d he’d explain this either. It was before Nancy, before gym class, before Tommy, before popularity, before he got his license, before his dad threw out his bike, before memorizing the Byers’ phone number, before the dead cat on the side of the road, before poking frogs with sticks, before Jonathan crying about the Death Star, before high school. It was definitely before grade eight graduation too, because yeah, he remembered Jonathan being eight or nine, so that meant…what? The fifth grade? Or the sixth?
He only started talking to Jonathan because of his stupid skateboard, anyways. It had rolled on over towards him near the bike racks at school one day and bumped into his foot. Steve bent over and picked it up and when he did there was this was this wide-eyed, knobbly-kneed boy with a bowl cut staring at him. So Steve brought it back over to him and introduced himself.
“Hi,” he said.
“...hi?” the boy with the bowl cut questioned in return. He sounded confused, like he was nervous or something. He reached out tentatively for his board, but then his fingers curled back in on themselves, settling against his palms like he was expecting Steve to say ‘psych!’ and yank it away from him. Like maybe this had happened before. Like maybe he was expecting for it to happen again.
Steve just smiled and pushed the penny board into the younger boy's hand with a good pat.
“You have a skateboard?” Steve had smiled. “That’s pretty cool, I guess.”
But like Steve had suddenly said something incredibly wrong, the young boy frowned and immediately went on the offensive.
“I don’t just have a skateboard, I ride it," he huffed.
Steve couldn’t help but to peacock in return, pushing out his chest.
“Oh yeah? Bet my bike’s still faster,” he challenged.
“Bet it’s not,” the boy continued to frown.
“Bet it is.”
“Is not!”
"Is!"
But the boy with the bowl cut didn't rise to the bait.
You see Steve was expecting a race to the end of the school parking lot, which he would obviously win by a country mile. The boy with the bowl cut would slowly trail after him, slow and out of breath and only crossing the finish line as he emerged from a cloud of Steve’s dust, huffing as he keeled over against his knees. The boy with the bowl cut would then keep frowning at him even harder than before, declaring it didn’t matter if he had lost: skateboards were still cooler. They were, Steve would agree. And then he would introduce himself, telling him his name, and the boy would introduce himself back and they would be new friends. That's just how things worked.
But the boy with the bowl cut didn't challenge him to a race, and while he did frown, it was only as he took off on his skateboard, wheeling himself far, far away from him.
"Hey!" Steve immediately shouted, calling out to his backside. He felt mildly miffed: didn't this kid know anything? "You're doing it wrong!" Because he was: this was not how you make friends.
And that's when Jonathan looked back, lost his balance, and skinned both his knees on the blacktop.
—
The boy with the bowl cut, who Steve learned was named 'Jonathan', insisted on skating home with bloody knees and all, even though Steve had offered (quite generously, of course) to carry him on his handlebars.
So Steve did the only thing he could do and followed him, just to make sure he got home safe.
It was slow going and Steve took the opportunity to wheel his bike around him in a wide figure eight pattern, ducking in and out of the middle of the road and making Jonathan frown even harder.
"You're going to get hit by a car," he told him.
"There's no cars out here," Steve pointed out. "We're in the middle of nowhere. Where do you even live anyways?"
"Near Loch Nora."
Steve's face had lit up at that.
"Loch Nora?" he repeated, "I live in Loch Nora too! What street are you on?"
Jonathan continued to frown.
"I didn't say I lived in Loch Nora," he corrected, sounding prickly. "I said near it. On the other side of it actually, just through the woods."
Steve nodded, humming thoughtfully.
"Oh—you mean my backyard," he smiled.
"Your backyard?" Jonathan repeated, a touch incredulous.
"Yeah," he nodded again, swinging around him in another wide figure eight. "The woods back onto my property right next to the pool."
"Well the woods back onto my property, too," Jonathan informed him. He was bristling again, this time like a porcupine. "We don't have a pool though," he finished, voice a touch quieter.
"Cool," was all Steve said with a grin. "So it's your backyard too. We're basically neighbours."
Jonathan didn't say anything to this and just shot Steve a long, discerning look, like he was struggling to figure out if actually meant what he said, like he was wondering if it was actually 'cool' that they lived near one another, or maybe he was just internally debating the merits of agreeing to share the woods with him, like he in all his entirety owned them to begin with. Eventually however, he just nodded—he didn't have an argument for once—and Steve was keen to note that his frown had lessened, but only enough to show him that Jonathan didn’t perpetually look like his Grandma’s grumpy old lap dog. It was okay, though—even though Jonathan did kind of resemble a nippy little papillon with a bad haircut, Steve thought his Grandma’s dog was cute. He guessed that meant Jonathan was kind of cute too.
This, he thinks, might be why Jonathan was still sulking after all these years. Steve thought Jonathan was cute and Jonathan knew this.
He remembered he couldn't help it: everything about him was cute, from his holey jeans to the sometimes-sad music he listened to. He bugged Jonathan about this too, telling him that 'maybe you would be able to flip that frown upside down a little more often if you listened to something a little happier, huh Jonathan!' Jonathan vehemently disagreed and made a gagging sound whenever Steve forced his headphones over his ears, torturing him with the likes of Billy Joel and Bob Segar.
"Hey, Steve," he used to say, still making a face. He definitely didn't like Billy Joel, no–siree, but the headphones stayed on even when Steve had stopped trying to torture him. "Rewind the tape to that one song. You know, the one that goes—,"
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Steve would grin, and he would count the seconds, the tape wheel going click, click, click, and All for Leyna would start to play.
He was twelve and Steve decided he really liked the way Jonathan's face looked when he closed his eyes, listening really hard, really intently, to Billy Joel describe the unraveling of his life due to his infatuated obsession with a young woman named Leyna. With Leyna, nothing else mattered. With Leyna, Billy Joel waxed poetically if not urgently about how his life was falling apart.
So Steve kissed him.
This was why Jonathan was still mad at him. Steve had kissed Jonathan while he was listening to Billy Joel's All for Leyna and Jonathan had kissed him back.
He never forgot this. It wasn't like riding a bike or a board or even the Byers phone number: he couldn't even pretend to forget if he wanted to.
Sometimes even now as he sees Jonathan flying down the sidewalk on his skateboard with his old walkman in hand, Steve wonders if he still has that tape he gave to him to go with it. Did he still listen to Billy Joel? Did he still half-smile, humming along to All for Leyna?
He hopes he does, Steve thinks. He still had the walkman, after all. And listening to that song, even if they weren't together, even if they weren't friends anymore, reminded Steve that they used to be happy. That there was a time before when he hadn't messed things up so badly.
But as Robin loved to remind him, people would always be remembered more for what they destroyed in life than for what they had tried to create.
—