Steve Harrington takes up journaling.
Look, he's a very traumatised teenager in the 80s. He's got barely any friends, essentially no family worth a damn, and he's definitely not getting a therapist any time soon.
He remembered asking Nancy once, while they were still dating, why girls keep diaries. Why they write shit in them if they don't want anybody to read it.
She told him she likes it because it's like having a friend who can't give you advice you don't want, who won't give you their opinion or judgement on things they don't know enough about.
A diary can't betray your trust the way a human can, so long as you hide it well enough, and if you write something in it that you're not allowed to talk about, you can always tear out the page and throw it in a fire. It's how she compartmentalises. It's a release.
Steve honestly thought it was dumb at first. Leaving all of your secrets conveniently together in one place. If you invited friends over or threw a party and someone found it you'd be socially ruined before you even knew it was gone.
Still, after everything goes down... Steve has no friends his own age, he's sort of responsible for a bunch of traumatised kids, he's for all intents and purposes alone. He feels like he's going to pop if he doesn't tell someone something.
~
He's throwing another tantrum, as his mom would call it. Tearing up and throwing anything he can find, uncaring of the mess he'll have to clean up later. He just can't cope, and it's not like anybody's stopping him.
He turns his attention to a bookshelf, starts tearing pages out of paperbacks and launching them across the room. He picks up an old notebook, probably a spare he got for school and never got round to using.
It makes him pause, remembering an old, old conversation with somebody he used to love.
He figures, what harm could it do to try? It's not like destroying the house for the third time this week is helping much, nor did climbing into his dad's liquor cabinet and falling to the bottom of a bottle of barrel-aged whiskey.
He grabs a cracked biro off the floor, ignoring the way the plastic crunches a little in his too-firm grip.
He opens the book to the first page and begins to write.
He doesn't really know what he's doing, so he just starts putting his stream of consciousness onto the page. At first it's barely coherent scribblings, but once he starts, he finds there's things he wants to say, things he's been desperate to tell someone just to get them out of his head. He couldn't tell the kids, couldn't tell Nancy or his parents, definitely couldn't tell Tommy and Carol, so he tells the book, instead.
He pours out his darkest thoughts, writes things he would never say out loud, about how sometimes he wishes the demogorgon had taken him out, wishes Billy had killed him, how maybe the kids would be better off that way.
He writes about how exhausted he is, how much he hates his friends and the government and everybody who dragged him to this point and then left him hanging. Left him to drown.
Like Barb drowned. When he killed her. When stupid Nancy invited her stupid friend to his stupid party because stupid Tommy and stupid Carol wanted to play in his stupid pool at his stupid house because his stupid parents were on a stupid business trip.
He presses too hard and the paper tears under his pen. He realises he's crying when he tries to put the paper back together and the ink smudges on his fingers.
He writes and writes until he feels empty inside, then he puts it in a shoebox and stuffs it back under his bed, along with all of those feelings and fears and traumas. With his absent parents and miserable little life and everything that he can never show to the rest of the world.
He starts cleaning up in a haze, forgetting all about his diary for the time being. He's got responsibilities, after all. Who else is gonna step up, if not him?
~
End for now, but this could go a number of ways feel free to add on. Maybe someone finds the journal. Maybe they get upset by what they see. Maybe they're insulted, or scared, or worried and horrified about Steve's inner monologue.
Maybe some kind of magic happens and the book is actually connected to someone else in some way, and they're seeing everything he's writing and start writing back soulmates-style.
Maybe the book is someone, and they materialise from it having been created by Steve's thoughts or just summoned to 'fix' him.
Idk, as I said there's a lot of directions this could take.