Title: Shotgun
Fandom: Stranger Things (SEASON THREE SPOILERS)
Relationships: Jonathan and Joyce Byers, Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler
Rating: PG
Length: ~2500 words
Content notes: Weed is smoked
Author notes: I still love the Byers, all of them
Summary: A post-season 3 coda



He tries, for weeks he tries, as hard as he can. Tries every wheedling suggesting insinuating fulminating trick in the book. In the beginning, he tries and knows he will succeed. In the middle, he tries and knows he might have to compromise. At the end, he tries and knows he will fail. He persists anyway. He doesn’t have a choice. He’s only had this for a few months. It’s far too soon to let it go.

“A new place. A fresh start. No Upside Down. No monsters or powers or mad scientists or government cover-ups. No Russians! No possible way any of us could be a target of anything. I’m less needed.”

She smiles at him.

“I could stay in Hawkins. Finish up school and pick up more hours at work. The continuity would be good for college applications.”

“We’ll never be able to sell our place. Who would buy it? It’s the double-wide equivalent of the Amityville mansion. Seriously, who is going to want to live in Hawkins after all the terrible shit - stuff - that went down? If I stay, I can take care of the house.”

In the beginning, she smiles with sympathy and understanding. She scrunches up her face in that way she has, that makes her look like Thumper. She wrinkles her nose and nods vigorously. Yes, yes, good point, you’re making a lot of sense. She reaches towards him, to brush the hair out of his eyes, even though it’s not in his eyes, and he leans away from her.

“Mom, no. It’s fine. Promise me you’ll think about what I said?”

Then, she finds a broker. In every room she moves the furniture into the middle of the room. She covers it with tarps and splurges on Sherwin-Williams Whitetail. When he offers to help, she brushes him off. “I want this done right.” Afterwards, she rents a steam cleaner and vacuums the house from end to end, until it smells like baking soda and vinegar, soapy water and crisp September air. Until it doesn’t smell like their house.

“Where is the money coming for all this,” he asks. She looks at him with a manic gleam in her eye. “Jonathan, you know what the wise man said. ‘Sometimes you have to spend money to make money.’”

He really hopes the wise man she’s referring to isn’t Murray fucking Bauman.

The house doesn't sparkle, but it’s definitely shinier than it was before. “Be sure to keep your rooms clean. Everything in its place,” Mom constantly reminds him, reminds Will, reminds El. When they ignore her, an unspoken pact, a shared, conspiratorial glance around the dinner table as she pokes around the fridge, wondering where the pickles are hiding, she cleans their rooms herself.

“I’d just get in the way. You’ll have your hands full with Will and El. You don’t need a third kid around, taking up time and space and resources. Four bedroom houses are expensive and scarce, and you know how much I eat. How much I sleep. How messy I am. Not to mention brooding and sullen and, when you think about it, a total buzzkill. Admit it, isn’t everyone a little happier when I’m not around?”

“How am I going to make friends? I’m going to be starting school - my senior year - weeks after it gets under way.”

She smiles at him, but this time, it’s with pinched lips and shining eyes, skin stretched tight across her cheekbones. It’s a smile tinged with more than a little sorrow and pity.

Then, she picks the state and the town she is moving to and informs him of her decision. She doesn’t ask for his advice or his opinion. She pitches him, pitches Will and El on it. Not like someone working on commission, but like someone sitting in the boss’s chair, magnanimously providing them with an opportunity to maintain their dignity, to act like this is their idea. He - all three of them - stare at her, arms crossed. She doesn’t blink.

So he begs and pleads. Fuck the real world. He’s tired of living in it. He and Nancy, together, are going to make their own, better world.

“You know how I feel about Nancy, and she feels the same about me. I’ve never asked you for anything. Not for a better car or better clothes. Not for a camera or cash that I didn’t earn myself. I’ve never questioned, I’ve never complained about anything, about why I have to work late and get up early and cook meals and chauffeur Will around and do the yard work and barely have time to myself. For years, since I started high school. But now I’m asking. I need this.”

So he rants and raves. Egged on by the joint he and Nancy smoked by the quarry. By the sex they had in the back seat of his car and Nancy moaned, clung to him, bit his shoulder and scratched hot, red lines into his back. She covered him with her lips and her smell and her tears while he babbled that he promised, he swore that he’d find a way for them to stay together.

“But you won’t even consider it, not even for a minute. You want me around because I’m useful, because I know my place and don’t rock the boat. As long as I help support the family then you have nothing to say to me. We don’t see each other for days; we barely talk any more. But as soon I want something for myself, you suddenly care what I am doing. How about I promise to visit, to send you money. Will that satisfy you?”

Even as he says it, he knows he sounds ridiculous, like the person he prides himself on not being. Someone childish and petulant, self-centered and entitled.

In the end, she doesn’t smile. The expression on her face is awful: hurt and angry. Disappointed. All big eyes and pale, drawn face. She squares shoulders swimming in a flannel shirt of Bob’s and thrusts her chin out. His stomach clenches.

“You can choose to abandon your family when you’re eighteen,” she says, implacably. “But right now you are seventeen years old. You’ll go where I tell you to. You are my son.” A term of endearment, or perhaps it’s more accurate to call it a commandment, that she hasn’t directed at him in some time.

She’s always been focused and determined. He’s never denied it. Until today, though, her focus and determination have never stood in the way of his heart’s desire.

Mom tugs on it. The thread, thin as spider’s silk and three times as strong, that connects him to her and Will. His Byers-ness, and all that entails: being there for each other; not giving a shit what anyone thinks; sticking to your guns; stepping up; cleaning up the broken pieces - there is always too much to clean up, why is there always too much to clean up. And of course, moving forward, moving on. None of it needs to be spoken. It’s all tucked inside those four words: you are my son. It’s a thread that connects him, he’s beginning to understand, to Eleven as well. (He’s sliced her shin open along the grain; pressed his fingers inside and wiggled them around; almost but not quite, he’s pretty useless that way, grabbed an inter-dimensional demon chunk by the throat. Why the hell not try to think of her as, if not a sister, then at least family?) Mom tugs on the thread with a smile and an arm that reaches for him.

But he doesn’t want to be a Byers; or rather, he does want to be one, but from here. Not from there.

“Nancy and I almost died, and it wasn’t you who saved me. We saved each other. Where were you when we were being attacked by the Flayed, when Will and El were in trouble? With Hopper.”

Shit.

He really has a knack for saying the wrong, absolutely wrong thing. The horrible, most horrible thing. The things you think about your family but never breathe or whisper let alone shout out loud. They’re depressed. They’re angry. They’re grieving, have been grieving for years. They’re constantly on the verge of losing it. They’re not the family they used to be, that they pretend they still are. They’re feeding another mouth they can’t afford to but Hopper left his savings and his pension to Mom, so they’ll get by. They’re going to get their act together one of these days, please, god, please. He wants to be able to walk away without feeling bad about it. He wants to be able to walk away.

Did she ever, even once, blame him for not being there when Will was in the hospital? When the Mind Flayer took his brother over completely, almost killed him, but he was too busy losing his virginity in Murray’s fortress to notice? No, of course she didn’t. Even when he asked her to.

He thinks she’s going to slap him, which is something she’s never even threatened to do. He’d deserve it.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it,” he says. He leans in to hug her and for a second, the barest second, she hesitates. She draws inward, protecting herself, protecting herself from him. He never wants to see that again.

So he packs. So he drives. So he unpacks. So he makes promises that he knows he’s going to keep. Because what’s a thousand miles between you and the one you love when you’ve exposed government conspiracies and faced down monsters together. When you’ve killed, together, walking talking zombies. (Zombies who were once people; horrible people, but people. He murdered what was once a human being with a blade buried deep into the throat. As he did it he felt nothing but rage and relief and triumph. He will never forget that.)

When a song comes on the radio that reminds El of Mike and she sighs and turns pensive; or Mom asks Will if any of the girls in his class are nice and he sneers and turns combative, Mom looks at them fondly, knowingly. She strokes their hair, wraps arms around their shoulders. “You’re so young, give it time,” she orders. “Good things are just around the corner. Good things will happen to you, here. You’ll be happy here very soon. You’ll see.” They roll their eyes and their shoulders shiver away. “Joyce.” “Mom.” They want to believe it, though. They want to believe her.

Mom doesn’t include him in her pep talks. She doesn’t look at him, with gentle significance, over the tops of their heads.

It’s near midnight, but they stay on the line, not talking, just breathing. Neither of them have nightmares, not especially. He’s always been good at compartmentalizing, and Nancy sleeps the sleep of the vindicated. It’s more that, when everyone’s down for the night and all he hears is the quiet, he becomes jittery and unsettled, watchful. He keeps himself awake, fighting sleep for the first time in his life, yet still wakes up too early, ready, needing to move.

He’s started running.

They write letters, pages and pages, rambling and packed with meaningless details: nicknames he’d deny using if anyone found out about them, but are just right when they say them to each other; elaborate promises of what they mean to each other; thick descriptions of what they’ll do when they’re finally together; a calendar of their days; lists of what they’re reading and eating and listening to, what they’re studying and dreaming; verbatim conversations, or made-up ones when he forgets, of who said what to whom. He’ll never be much of a talker, but he’s found that when he picks up a pen and puts it to paper the words flow and flow. They need somewhere to go.

He takes picture after picture. Of school. Of the house. Of Will and El and Mom. Of his room - which he created in its old image until Mom’s eyes, when she stopped by to check it out, give him pause. He reminds himself that he’s not sentimental, and he changes it up. His bed under the window and his dresser against the far wall. His Evil Dead poster inside the door of his closet. Black Flag and Sonic Youth join REM on the wall and curl their lips, are unimpressed. One day he’s exploring the neighborhood and finds a couch on the sidewalk. After giving it a sniff test, an experimental bounce, he cajoles Will into helping him tie it to the roof of his car and drives it home. He gives his chair to El and she grins - like every good thing that happens to her, no matter how insubstantial, is precious and worth taking seriously; like his shitty chair is the nicest gift he could have given her - and he can’t help but grin back.

Thanksgiving falls through, for one reason or the other - distance and bad weather and the Wheelers declaring it far too early for reunions. He counts the days until Christmas.

At first, it’s a lot like it used to be at Hawkins, before Nancy. Ghosting the hallways. Keeping his head down; he’s letting his hair grow out, to facilitate it. Eating lunch on the hood of his car when the weather is nice. Hours and hours in the darkroom. There’s one here, if there wasn’t he’s pretty sure he would have lost his mind. After a few weeks of his steady presence one of the regulars asks him if he smokes. When they’re outside, huddled on the bleachers in the fading afternoon light, the guy - Chris - name drops this band, Felt, that he didn’t know about. He’s high and close to happy. He doesn’t bother faking it.

“You think this place is bad, you should see where I come from. What a dump. Metallica, Metallica, Metallica, with some Ratt thrown in for variety,” he jokes. His eyes twitch in guilt that he betrayed Hawkins so readily, the first time someone invites him over to listen to a record. Metallica isn’t bad, per se. They’re good, really good at what they do, in fact. It’s just not his thing.

He takes pictures on his drive to school, on his drive to work. Stopping every half mile or so to search for a noteworthy landmark, a distinctive object or viewpoint that he can capture, that he can develop and mail to Nancy. It’s different here: the landscape, the buildings, the people, the air. He’s not used to it, but he can tolerate it, for a few months.

And he counts: thirteen more days.