Supermassive Black Hole—Muse

Hawkins is a quiet town on paper, but you’ve never been much good at staying quiet.

Being Hopper’s daughter comes with a reputation—part righteous fury, part poor impulse control—and you wear it like a badge. You throw punches when people deserve them, take punches when you think the fight’s worth it, and talk back to authority even when the authority is your own father. Especially when it’s your own father.

Steve Harrington enters the picture like one long, dramatic eye-roll.

Perfect hair, stupid pretty face, golden boy reputation that meant nothing to you. He’s the king of Hawkins High, and you’re the problem child Hopper does his best to ignore. Oil and water. Fire and gasoline. Whatever metaphor fits two people who are constantly three seconds away from ripping each other’s throats out or each other’s clothes off.

You meet in the halls—arguments sharp enough to slice through the noise. Someone bumps into you, Steve tries to play peacemaker, you shove him for getting in the way, he smirks like you’re entertainment. It becomes a pattern: you storm, he steadies; you bite, he bristles; you walk away, he follows. Every insult sounds like foreplay, and every time he rolls his eyes, you want to grab him by his shirt and shove him against the nearest locker.

And sometimes you do.

It doesn’t start with a romantic confession. It starts with a fight behind the gym, voices raised, fingers jabbing, something about him being a reckless idiot and something about you not being as tough as you think.

You shove him.

He shoves back.

You breathe hard, chest heaving, face inches from his—and it all tilts.

One kiss. Hungry. Frustrated. Messy. You don’t talk about it.

Then you do it again. And again.

Steve becomes your accident you keep choosing. The bruised-knuckle boy with too much heart. The one who sees straight through you. You irritate each other into existence, keep each other honest, keep each other alive. He stops pretending he’s fearless. You stop pretending you don’t care. With the Upside Down leaking into everything—blood, shadows, nightmares—he becomes the only person you can’t shake.

Fighting or making out in hallways.

Arguing in the woods, hands in his hair.

Kissing in the backseat of his car after yelling at each other for twenty minutes straight.

Saving each other, repeatedly, because neither of you knows how not to.

You’re chaos; he’s comfort with sharp edges.

He’s the boy who runs toward danger; you’re the girl who runs beside him.

You call him an idiot; he calls you trouble.

Hawkins knows that whenever there’s screaming in the halls, it means the ‘hallway hazards’ are at it again. The teachers have long since stopped trying to separate you two.

It’s the same with your father. He once walked in on you two “arguing” and drank a whole six-pack to forget it.

Steve hooks his finger into your belt loop when you walk away from him, and keeps one hand in your back pocket when you’re beside him. He always brings you a half-melted scoop of rocky road when he comes home from work, paired with a kiss to your cheek. You pull him in for a messy, top-lip one instead.

He calls you “Mrs. Harrington” just to piss you off, and he usually ends up with Maybelline Kissing Potion smeared all over his face. He doesn’t mind. You call him “pretty boy” just to see him grin, and ruffle his hair just to see his eyes flutter.

You’ve been banned from fighting in the Wheeler basement because Holly once walked in on you two pressed up against the washing machine as it tossed around jeans and button-downs and asked Mike why you said Steve was a ‘walking wet dream’.

You can’t go to the arcade together because an argument escalated into a “who’s better at skee-ball” fight that resulted in a black eye that you wore purple lipstick and gloss for a week to match.

You tied him to a chair once for being a jerk, and he said it was the most romantic thing that you’ve ever done to this day.

You love like you fight: fiercely. Loudly. Without apology.

And as long as the fire burns, you’ll never stop.