Chapter Text
This was bullshit.
A bubble of something approaching hysteria squeezed in his chest, popped in his throat. His shoulders ached where he hunched, neck curved, head smushed beneath the metal shelf where his textbooks happily resided. His knees jutted into his chest, legs already cramping, ankles twisted. It couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes at most, but it might as well have been five hours. He was going to go insane.
Over the course of his impromptu, and most unprecedented sojourn, Steve was forced to come to the conclusion that there were, in fact, no possible comfortable positions to be had when you were 5 '11 and stuffed in the cold, unforgiving depths of your own high school locker.
Fucking fantastic.
Beating the shit out of inter-dimensional monsters with a baseball bat, on more than one occasion, somehow trying to (and failing spectacularly at) corralling a hoard of stubborn brats, nearly getting buried alive and turned into demodog food, and surviving fucking Billy Hargrove , was not enough of a shit sundae. No, his life needed to add an extra can of rancid maraschino cherries and a bucket of tetanus-inducing needle sprinkles because why not. Shitty-ex-boyfriend, No-Longer-King Steve deserved to get stuffed in a locker like a pubescent freshman because he was dumb enough to end up in that position in the first place.
He let out a breath, slow and stuttering, and stuffed down the ever increasingly desperate urge to laugh. His ribs were suffering enough. This was his comeuppance for spending too long waiting for privacy to style his hair following his shower after basketball practice. Sue him for not wanting to broadcast his haircare routine to the whole team. Clearly, the mistake was coming back to his locker to retrieve his textbooks. Homework was the real culprit.
He swallowed around the raw lump in his throat, curling numb, stinging palms over the soft fabric of his jeans. It seemed screaming your lungs out and smashing the crap out of a metal door didn’t make anyone open it for you. Not when the only one left in the school should be the janitor and it was just his luck he was likely plodding around in some distant corner of the school. It was silent, where he sat, curled up into a pretzel, save for the harsh rasps of his breaths.
Old Jim better get his mop over to this hallway within the next hour before he lost his mind from boredom or oxygen deprivation or the overwhelming sensation of suffocation —
He was fine. There was plenty of room, there had to be, for him to fit in the first place without needing to dislocate any limbs, Howdini style. Or Houdini. Whatever.
So Steve sat, breathed, and steadily ignored the fact that he could not move at all , save for a smidge of wiggling and a bit of desperate fist pummeling on either side of his metal box every few minutes or so.
He must’ve lost track of time at some point because it was dark. Steve realized too late the lights had gone out in the corridor, plunging him into complete and utter black . Those three tiny prisoner slats in the locker door hadn’t been much to go by, but now that it was gone, he couldn’t see fucking anything and he was—
—not going to panic. That would be embarrassing. He was calm, rational, and he could handle a tiny crisis. This was a normal school thing to happen, it wasn’t life-threatening or worldview-shattering or anything horribly insurmountable. He fought monsters , for Christ’s sake, he could handle a bit of schoolyard bullying.
God. How far had he sunk, to be reduced to this.
A fucking bullying victim .
He wanted to scream. He had already been trying for (an hour? Two? How long had it been?) and Jim definitely had his Walkman out and was probably locking up the school by now ( or long gone ) so it was completely useless and all it did was tear a hole in his throat but dammit he wanted out.
Let me out let me out let me out letmeoutletmeoutletmeout—
Breathing. That was something he should be doing. Nice and slow, except there wasn’t enough room in his lungs, where his diaphragm squished against his thighs, and his heart was swelling up into a balloon in his chest, thrashing like a wild animal, and he couldn’t fucking breathe—
“Hello?”
Steve choked. His ears were filled with a scraping, wet rattle and a dull pounding, but that was definitely a human voice. Unless he was already experiencing hallucinations. You could have ones that were heard instead of just seen, right? That was a thing? It was so a thing. Maybe Dustin would know.
Not the point.
He knew that voice.
And suddenly, Steve was torn between the paralyzing need to be heard, so this nightmare could end and he would be free , and the soul-shattering devastation of that voice ever knowing he was even in this position and he would rather die than have Jonathan Byers be the one to fish him out of his own locker.
Would he even do it? The thought came, unbidden, ice water dumped down his back. Sure, they’d had their differences in the past, and Steve was a complete asshat and he’d since been trying (failing) to make up for it all but he liked to think that the good old Byers Compassion wouldn’t entirely run dry when it came to Steve Harrington. The Steve from a year ago, maybe. But even then, Jonathan was never like that (like him ).
(If anyone should leave him to his fate, it would be Jonathan Byers.)
“Is someone there?”
Apparently Jonathan was the sort to saunter towards freaky noises in horror films. Steve was grimly reminded that he was the sort to run towards them with a baseball bat, offering himself up as a meal.
“If this place is haunted, I swear.” The squeaky scuffling of sneakers on linoleum came to a jerky halt.
Okay, maybe the panic was rapidly overshadowing the desire to keep his deteriorating ego marginally intact because there was the very real possibility that if he didn’t do anything now he was going to be left all night and it was cold and dark and cramped, and his legs had long since fallen asleep and he needed to pee.
And it would be so much worse to be discovered in front of the whole school in the morning anyways. At least it was just Jonathan. Who would tell Nancy and Will. Who would tell Mike who would tell—
He could handle this.
Right.
He opened his mouth—
A clang reverberated down the hall, and Steve jerked, wincing as everywhere ached at the motion. It was the sound of a locker shutting, followed by the jangle of a lock snapping closed and there was the running of feet getting further away and shit, shit he was going to miss his chance because he was a fucking idiot —
“ Jonathan !”
Or that’s how it was supposed to come out. What he ended up with instead was a half-wheezed garbled mess that, God forbid, teetered dangerously on the edge of a sob and that was it. King Steve was officially dead. No paramedic could resuscitate him. He was Jack, and he had fallen so far down, breaking his crown was the least of his problems, had been for a devastatingly long while.
His head was so stuffed with cotton and self-pity spirals that he nearly missed the shriek Byers let out, and that would’ve been a damn shame.
Lucky him.
“ Who— Who’s there? My girlfriend has guns and she knows how to use them— ”
“ Jonathan.” It still came out as a wheeze but it was perhaps marginally less incomprehensible. “Let me out of here, man.” He punctuated it with another round of locker slamming and ignored the sting of skin splitting on his palms.
“What the— Jesus Christ.”
A bag must’ve hit the floor, filled with textbooks by the sound of it. The shoes came to a stop outside his door.
“Is there someone—”
“ Yes , shit, just, get me out of here, please. ” The crack in his voice was positively horrendous. Death by demodogs didn’t seem so bad anymore.
“Who— wait. Steve? ”
Steve swallowed the urge to scream. A part of him shriveled up like a wilted flower and crumbled to flaky bits.
“Yes. It’s me. Best joke of the century. Haha. Fucking hilarious. Now would you please—” God, coughing hurt. It hurt a lot.
“What the fuck happened, man. Who did you piss off?”
Steve panted, breaths hitching dangerously, tongue desperately trying to wet a dry-as-dirt mouth.
“Can we not have this conversation when I’m stuck in a locker.”
There was a slight pause. And in it, Steve was struck with the very real possibility that he was going to be left to stew in his own long overdo karma for the times he had uncomfortably stood by and done nothing while Tommy H and whichever other tools from their team had decided to stuff poor nerds and freaks (like Jonathan) into their own lockers. And, well, he wouldn’t even blame him for walking away.
“Yeah, sorry, of course, uh.” The door rattled. “What’s your combination?”
Steve let out a sharp breath.
“4-12-18.”
There was an extended fumbling, a muffled curse, more fumbling, and finally, a satisfying click. The door swung open.
He was not going to cry.
“Uh. Jeez.” Jonathan stood, gaping at him like he’d never seen a jock and ex-popularity king stuffed in a locker before, and maybe he hadn’t.
Steve lurched, flailed a bit, and oh god he was stuck.
“You know, instead of gawking you could maybe help me.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Jonathan clasped his hand, flinched a bit, and tightened his grip. “You’re cold.”
Steve didn’t dignify that with a response. Jonathan shook his head, and pulled and shit, everything hurt and nothing was cooperating and—
Eventually, something gave and he was torn out of his kiddie-shaped coffin, back scraping and head smacking against the metal frame. He sprawled on his side, legs stiff, fire steadily licking up his limbs where feeling desperately attempted to return. Surprisingly, Jonathan didn’t leave him to bruise himself on the linoleum on his own, clumsily taking a bit of his weight, and easing him down.
“Jesus, you okay?”
“Yup,” Steve wheezed, pushing himself to his knees and biting back a hiss, “peachy.”
“Uh huh, yeah, stupid question.” Jonathan winced, haltingly taking his hands away but still holding them outstretched at the ready like he was waiting for Steve to make a more permanent reunion with the floor. And he wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Everything seemed a bit on the fuzzy side and his arms shook. He shoved his weight back onto his haunches, and caught himself on the door of his prison. Yeah he was just going to use his car from now on to stuff his crap between classes, so what if he was a little late, he would manage.
“How…” Jonathan crouched with a look of visible discomfort, “how long were you…”
Steve frowned.
“What time is it?”
Jonathan glanced at his watch, squinting in the dim lighting. At least it wasn’t the near pitch black of the locker.
“Around six…were you here the whole time—?”
Steve was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to pass out as soon as he stood up, so he took the leap, metal hinges squealing as he heaved himself to his feet. He wobbled a bit. Jonathan made some sort of aborted half step.
“Hey, take it easy.”
Steve huffed a snort or a laugh, he wasn’t entirely sure, and it probably didn’t sound like either, and fished out his textbooks, homework, bag, and other treacherous crap he should’ve never come back for and slammed his locker shut with a mildly satisfying air of finality. And future inconvenience, but whatever.
“What’re you doing here this late?” Steve was honestly curious, but it was also a good distraction from, well, everything.
Jonathan flapped his mouth a few times, and blinked.
“Uh, Nancy forgot some…thing, thought I would swing by, you know.” And what did it say about the general current state of the universe that Nancy Wheeler was forgetting anything school related. Steve frowned.
“Who even let you in?”
“I bumped into Jim—”
Okay, that stung a little.
“Well…” Steve swallowed thickly, hitched his book bag a little higher on his shoulder. “It was a good thing you happened to be around. I dunno what I would’ve…” Nothing, he would’ve done nothing, except pray Jim didn’t use his Walkman in the morning. And what a mess he’d find. Right, he still had to pee. He was not gonna say that in present company, though.
“You scared the shit out of me,” Jonathan admitted, retrieving his own backpack where it lay crumpled on the floor. Much like Steve’s dignity.
“Yeah, I know. Thought I was a ghost or something.” Steve didn’t hide the smirk curling at his lips. “I’m sure a ghost would be very scared of the guns you don’t even have on you and wouldn’t do shit anyways.”
Jonathan shoved him, and Steve cackled, masking the stumble in his steps.
“Shut up. You could’ve been a murderer for all I knew. Or a rat. Or something.”
“A real shitty murderer.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Jonathan was definitely walking slower for Steve’s benefit and he wasn’t entirely certain how to feel about that. Really, he should be walking faster before Nancy thought Jonathan had died on his little mission. Jonathan was likely anxious to get back to her, and he was slowing him down.
Steve didn’t think very hard about the times it was Nancy at his side as they both headed towards his car after school, arms slung around each other.
No, he wasn’t thinking about that, or the fact that Jonathan and her looked quite cozy and content doing the same thing.
Well, he wouldn’t have to go to his locker anymore and see that, so. That was something.
“Steve,” Jonathan halted, and they were a few feet from his car now. Huh. When did that happen. “Are you okay?”
Steve blinked, fingers freezing in their quest for his keys.
“Uh, yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”
Jonathan only gave him a look.
“I mean,” Steve renewed his key extraction efforts, “I’m fine. As anyone can be after all the bull— all the crap we’ve been through. The kids have it rougher, if anything.”
Jonathan let out a huff, and very much looked like he didn’t want to be having this conversation. Well, neither did Steve.
“Look, man, you were in that thing for hours.” Jonathan’s jaw muscles did a little dance. “And I’m not stupid. Someone put you in there. Who did it?”
Yeah, no. He definitely did not want to be discussing this.
The feeling of hands, once playfully rough, now crude, callous, bruising, chafed at his wrists, his arms. He had been ignoring it, but there was definitely a lot of swelling going on under his sleeves. His head ached where it caught on the shelf in his locker as he was shoved inside, nails twisting in his hair.
Why don’t you get nice and comfy, Stevie boy?
Gonna cry, Harrington?
“Steve?”
His keys. Right, he—
They slipped through sweat-slick fingers, smacking into the pavement. Steve bowed to pick them up, knees buckling slightly, and he tilted forward—
A hand caught his shoulder. Steve would’ve ended up on the pavement nursing a bruised tailbone if it didn’t only tighten when his body decided it wasn’t partial to human contact.
“Hey, woah, Steve, calm down.”
What was he talking about, he was fine.
Jonathan’s worried frown swam in front of him, and wasn’t that surreal. They weren’t friends, not really. They’d entered a sort of awkward truce, but that was about it.
“I—” His throat closed over, squeezed under a rubber band. Jonathan slowly eased his grip, as though checking to see Steve wouldn’t fall before letting go, and bent down to retrieve his keys. They were cold where he pressed them into Steve’s waiting palm.
“Um. Look. I don’t know if,” Jonathan shifted on his feet, glancing studiously at the ground, “if you would feel comfortable or anything, and you don’t have to, but you can hang out, if you don’t want to go home yet.”
If you don’t want to be alone.
The band constricted a little tighter, boa going in for the kill.
“You don’t have to—” Alright, that came out a little more choked than planned. He coughed. “I’m okay.”
His house loomed, a fancier, larger coffin than the one he’d just been stuffed in, but he wasn’t going to crash whatever date night study session was going on with him and Nancy.
“Thanks, though.” He swallowed, gesturing lamely. “For the offer, and…for getting me out.”
“Yeah, no problem,” Jonathan eyed him, like he was an animal about to flee into the undergrowth. “Are you sure? Nance wouldn’t mind, you know.”
Oh, she probably would, but she wouldn’t say, because that would be exposing the bullshit.
Because she’s a nice and good person, who deserved better than the likes of you.
“Yeah. Don’t worry about it. Think I’m just gonna pop an aspirin and pass out on the couch.”
“O…kay…” Jonathan reluctantly nodded, inching a few paces away. Steve’s shoulders both tensed and relaxed in ways he didn’t want to examine too closely. “Take care, then, I guess. And uh,” Jonathan scratched the back of his head, “you let us know, if someone is bothering you, yeah?”
Steve’s chest tightened, twisted and ached a little bit. He dredged up a smile.
“Yeah, sure.”
Jonathan only looked half-convinced, but he relented, giving a stiff nod before heading back to his own car. Steve let out a long, shuddering breath, and shoved his bag in the passenger seat before squeezing behind the wheel. One thing was clear, after this whole idiotic ordeal.
No one else needed to get involved in his bullshit.