Secrets // Steve Harrington

Chapter Fourteen - The Upside Down

Word Count: 1,953 words. 

Warnings: None.

I thought about telling Hopper the whole truth. About Eleven and the weird powers I had witnessed. The memories and the experiments, but I couldn't bring myself to. He'd call me crazy. It was enough that he knew Will wasn't dead. The rest could follow once I learned more about the lab. Or rather, I remembered more.

I didn't go home that night, but I was at the Byers' early the next morning. Noticing a vehicle that I didn't recognise in the driveway, I stepped out of my car quietly. Then I spotted the hole in the wall at the front of the house.

"Jesus Christ," I breathed, slamming the door and rushing for the front door. "Joyce!"

The front door was already open when I stepped inside. The woman I was looking for was sat on the living room couch, a glass in her hands. A man sat beside her, arm around her shoulder. It didn't have water in it.

"Thalia," she sighed.

"You're Thalia Munson?" the stranger asked.

"Depends on who's asking," I replied.

He moved around the small table that he must have placed there for Joyce to put her cup onto. "I'm Lonnie. Jonathon and Will's dad." Lonnie held his hand out for me to shake.

I took it out of courtesy. "Nice to meet you."

He smiled, or at least he tried to. "Let me get you a coffee. Do you drink coffee?"

I nodded. "Yeah. Two sugars and no milk."

He made for the kitchen and I hurried towards Joyce, moving to my hunkers in front of her. "Are you okay?"

She nodded slowly. "I thought he was here," she told me, "but I was just seeing things, Lonnie told me that."

I shook my head harshly. "Joyce – "

"You can end this torment for me," she cut me off, tears welling in her eyes as they locked on mine. "Was it him? Did you find my boy?"

"Don't tell Joyce about this." They had been Hopper's last words to me last night. "We can't get her hopes up."

He wasn't dead. I knew that he wasn't because I could feel it in my bones. I heard him on that radio and I had seen him through the lights. He was alive.

"Here you go," Lonnie told me, entering the room again.

I stood to take the cup from him, sipping on it. "Thank you."

He seemed hesitant to speak about but did anyway. "I hate to ask this, but you were the one that found him, weren't you?"

Nodding, I rubbed the porcelain of the cup I held. "Yeah, I did."

"Did it..." he stuttered, swallowing. "Did it look like he... suffered much?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't think he did."

I hated that I knew it was a lie. I had never met Lonnie Byers and so I knew that he wasn't a good man. He was a man that abandoned his family, quite like my own. Despite that, the emotions in his eyes told me that although he might have been the best father, he loved Will nonetheless.

I turned to look at the front of the house. "What happened to the wall?"

"Well..." Lonnie began. "Joyce thought that she saw Will in the wall. She hadn't been getting much sleep."

I turned to the woman in question. She was staring at the hole. "You saw him?"

Joyce shook her head. "It was just in my head."