Love Is A Battlefield (A Stranger Things/Steve Harrington Fanfiction)

Chapter One: You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You

My eyes widened as the barrier of slime gave way, allowing my hand to slip through. I could hear the creature behind me letting out its menacing screech. It sounded closer than it did before, meaning that I had to hurry. My window of escape, my one chance to get back to the life that I had known was going to close, and I had no intention of spending one more second in this hell hole. I dropped fully onto my stomach on the Forrest floor and began forcing myself through the hole that I'd found hidden in the base of a tree. The hole that I'd spent the entirety of the last year searching for.

I clawed my way through, my fingers digging into the grass on the other side, and tears streamed down my face as I desperately hoped I was actually coming out into the real world. I had been trapped in this nightmare dimension for an entire year, I had calculated, and all I wanted more than anything in the world, was to see the real Hawkins, Indiana again.

And to see my Dad...who is probably heartbroken, thinking that I ran away and left him alone.

I had spent many times over the past year replaying my last interaction with him in my head, over and over thinking about all of the things that I would have done differently. For one, I wouldn't have gotten so bent out of shape over something so stupid as him not extending my curfew. We were always arguing about stupid things like that, my Dad and I being annoyingly similar. It always led to us butting heads, but this night was worse than usual. This argument only escalated, getting more and more heated until I finally dredged up the thoughts that had been clogging up my mind for the past several years of my life.

"Oh my gosh, just give it a rest!" I screamed. "Drop the 'concerned father' act and just admit it Dad!"

"Concerned father act?" He asked. "Its not an act, Riley! What am I supposed to be admitting, what's the big secret that's apparently so secret that I don't even know what it is I'm keeping?!"

"THAT YOU WISH I HAD DIED INSTEAD OF HER!" I screamed, tears welling up in my eyes. Suddenly, just like that, the anger in his eyes was gone and replaced with something else entirely. I couldn't identify the emotion in the blue eyes that we both shared, but it didn't really matter. Because he hesitated. He didn't jump at the chance to deny it, he just stood there, staring at me. I nodded, backing away from him as the tears fell. "I knew it...I knew it!"

"Riles-"

"No...don't bother trying to deny it. Its not like I haven't always known, I'm just...thank you for the clarification." I turned around, grabbing my bag and slamming the back door open, taking off running down the street.

"Get back here! Riley! RILEY!" 

I ignored him, my sneakers beating painfully into the asphalt as I ran, angrily wiping tears from my eyes.

My family had always had a very specific dynamic for as long as I could remember. I was my father's daughter, in the sense that I acted just like him so we argued all of the time. My mom would get annoyed at both of us, but was well equipped to deal with our angry outbursts and stubborn attitudes.

And then there was Sara. 

Sara was...an angel. She was the cutest little girl, with blonde hair, an above average intelligence and a beautiful imagination. She was the favorite of the family, hands-down, and I'll be honest, for a long time, I was ok with that.

When she died, I became less ok with it. Because I loved my little sister with all of my heart, and I understood why Mom and Dad preferred her to me...I did too, if I'm being honest. But your perspective changes when someone you care about dies, and I quickly realized after my parents got divorced that I was competing with a girl who wasn't even around anymore...and I was losing. 

Mom didn't want me. She made that abundantly clear, and I'm not entirely sure that Dad wanted me either, but he took me anyways, and we left New York and headed back to his hometown of Hawkins, Indiana. I was not in the least bit excited to leave the big city for hicks and middle class suburbia, but I adjusted ok. I mean, I wasn't Homecoming Queen or anything. Popularity at Hawkins High came from which parties you went to, and people usually weren't too keen on inviting the Police Chief's daughter to get illegally intoxicated with them. But I found my own group of friends in Nancy Wheeler and Barbra Holland. They were the good girls, the preppy girls who found fun in homework and talking about boys, and that was perfectly ok with me. We never did anything crazy.

Which is why the first time I was ever invited to a party, I was going to jump at the chance to go.

Which prompted me to ask my Dad to extend my curfew, since I never do anything ever, and he said no, and we started fighting and that led to me running down the street in the middle of the night with tears streaming down my face and no idea what I was going to do or where I was going to go.

Unfortunately for me, that last part had been decided for me, by a creature of mythological proportions.

Finally, my feet popped through the hole and I stood up, taking a brief moment to examine my surroundings. No creepy vines, no spores, crickets chirping. I looked up to see a night sky full of stars for the first time in a year, and it nearly brought tears of joy to my eyes.

Nearly, because I was not out of the woods yet...literally.

I took off running, knowing exactly where I was going because I had meticulously planned out my escape route as soon as I suspected there was a hole opening back into the real world. Once again, my sneakers pounded the pavement, and once again, tears ran down my face, and it was baffling to me how I could be back in the exact same place I was a year ago as a completely different person. The wind chilled me as it hit my slime-soaked body and the next thing I knew; I was running into the town square. It was practically abandoned, most people having gone home for the night, but one lone car resided there, parked in front of the police station. I recognized it immediately.

I ran up the stairs, yanking the glass door open and making my way towards my father's office. I'd been there plenty of times, both in the real world and whatever horrifying landscape I'd just escaped from, so I knew exactly where to go. I came to a stop in the doorway.

He looked exactly the same as he had when I'd left him: Tired eyes, thinning hair, that same old Hawkins Police uniform. He didn't look up from the papers on his desk. I opened my mouth to speak, but found that the very notion of doing so had me on the verge of a panic attack. Speaking was dangerous where I was before. I'd spent so long hiding, fighting to not draw attention to myself, that I'd forgotten how to do it almost. I settled for knocking on the open door.

"Flo, I told you, I'll go home when I'm ready." He said, still not looking up. I took a small step forward, the slime on my sneakers squelching against the carpet. That caught his attention and he looked up, his eyes widening when he saw me. He stood up, dropping his pen and nearly knocking his desk over in the process. "I...Riley? Is that really you?"

I nodded, still too afraid to speak. He furrowed his eyebrows, taking in my appearance.

"What is all over you?" He asked, prompting me to look down at my clothes, "Wh-where have you been? I looked everywhere for you, I called your mom...its been a year, kid where did you go?!" I opened my mouth again, but the fear had proven to be too much for me. I was terrified, and my father saw this, his eyes flashing with recognition as he realized that I had not disappeared willingly. He walked around the desk, putting his hands on my shoulders, making a sickening squelching sound. "Riles, you gotta tell me what happened to you. I can't help you if you don't tell me."

I wracked my brain, trying to figure out a way to tell him without telling him. I looked over his shoulder, spotting a legal pad and pen. I walked over and grabbed it, scrawling out a message with a shaking hand and turning it over, showing it to him. It read:

You wouldn't believe me if I told you.