#boy would i love to lean into nonverbal steve but i gotta hit the brakes before i lose complete control

[flowercrowngods]

steve becoming the brooding kind of popular kid in school after he’s been sent back to ‘83. he distances himself from (read: beats up) tommy hagan after he picked one too many fights with eddie and his friends or some other nerds who don’t stand a chance against a bully jock’s superiority complex.

it’s a small mercy that king steve doesn’t fall from grace when he stops indulging tommy hagan, who essentially becomes irrelevant without steve’s company, but he’s too afraid of steve to do anything about it, because steve nearly beat him to death. he’s not proud of that one, but it is what it is. fighting interdimensional monsters for two and a half years has sort of fucked with his strength, and smashing in tommy’s face like he did was almost an accident.

hopper finds them on accident, tommy lying on the ground, barely conscious anymore, his face as bloody as steve’s knuckles. “that’s enough, kid,” he says, pulling steve away from the boy. “he hurt eddie,” is all steve will whisper before finding himself shoved into hopper’s car after he called an ambulance for tommy.

steve doesn’t talk. he doesn’t really smile. he becomes a bit of a loner but in the way that has people admiring him from afar, wondering, and he hears stories about himself, whispered in awe, and he knows the girls kinda dig it. he doesn’t have the energy to tell them all to shove it, and in all honesty he doesn’t mind. being popular and liked in high school is great actually, even when it’s filled with dead people and you can’t speak to anyone without your throat clogging up because you remember their face on a missing person’s poster, or maybe you attended their funeral.

when tommy or some other bully jock shoves a kid to re-establish the food chain, steve is there to help the kid up, collecting their books, before shoving the bully jock into the lockers. he doesn’t speak, because maybe he saw them get ripped in half, or maybe he saw their bones break, their face contorted in death. he just looks at them with that empty stare he has these days, and it’s enough to make them run.

king steve of hawkins high turns into a white knight. or maybe king arthur to king richard lionheart is more accurate, for the crown still weighs on his head after all. it’s a different way to save people, he finds, even as he loses himself