BAD TIMES • STEVE HARRINGTON

17. don't think, don't see

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chapter seventeen

            SOMETIMES DIANA SINCLAIR DIDN'T know how to go on. Sometimes knowledge was a poison that sliced through its victim's veins and left them weak and stagnant, and Diana was sick with it. She believed that if she could go back to a time of ignorance she would know peace, or at least some semblance of it. Maybe then she could rest.

She'd spent too many days lying on her dorm room bed curled in on herself and counting her breaths. Thousands upon thousands of minuscule reminders that she was still alive—that powers stronger than she would ever be hadn't taken all that she was.

Diana had thought she was okay until she was completely and utterly alone, then she knew she wasn't. Without Lucas and Erica—without her parents—without Steve Harrington, she was drowning in visions she wished she could unsee and images she couldn't rid her mind of.

Diana saw a world on fire, which would begin with the incineration of Hawkins, Indiana. She saw burning flesh and charred bones and suffocating smoke on the streets she'd grown up on. In order to save herself from seeing a face she recognized in the midst of the chaos, she'd blocked out all of it. She didn't want to see another second of the future if that was what was in store, but she couldn't escape it in her dreams, so she didn't sleep much.

Steve's sporadic weekend visits had been a reprieve from her entrapment beneath waves of fear and avoidance. He knew that something was wrong, and he'd asked and asked, but she lied to him. She'd told him she'd made friends and claimed that she wanted him all to herself when he asked to meet them. She'd told him she'd looked tired because she spent her nights studying, which was only true because she couldn't do anything else. She'd told him the future was quiet and uneventful.

She cried every time she went home, and the only person who'd ever heard was Erica, and the girl wouldn't leave her side for hours. She didn't see Max as often as she should've or speak with her as often as she should've, and she should've tried harder to do so. As much as Diana tried to ignore the future, clairvoyance wasn't all about visions and when she thought about Max sometimes, something unsettling sank into her veins. Diana assumed that it was just the girl's trouble with her brother's death.

Diana should've made sure.

Winter break was a fucking nightmare. Diana was newly fearful of fireworks, and she'd noticed that Steve wasn't too fond of them either because he held her hand too tightly each time they went off. She sat through a dinner with his parents, her hair pinned uncomfortably and her dress unusually formal. His father was stoic, but he disguised it as politeness, which wasn't extended to his son and hardly even extended to his wife. His mother was nice but quiet. He had the same eyes as her, but he looked like his father. They had the same jaw, and the same nose.

The Harringtons were quite the family around town. Rich, beautiful, and all around untouchable. Yet, Diana could easily see why Steve was so desperate to get away. His parents weren't very warm people, at least not toward him. The house was nice, but there was something too quiet about it. Maybe it was because no one was ever there. She wasn't even sure why Steve'd agreed to the night in the first place. Perhaps for the sake of his mother, considering he'd moved out during the summer against her wishes.

Steve recounted to Diana that his mother had claimed not to want to lose him, but he quickly got angry when repeating the words. Diana remembered him saying, "And I think that's fucking crazy to even think about when she hardly ever had me in the first place."