[ i. the runaway's return ]

october 29th, 1984. monday.

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IN ALL OF CHARLIE'S time out on the open road, bouncing from state-to-state and place-to-place, he still remembered why he got behind the wheel then . . . but he did not remember precisely why he got behind the wheel now.

It had been many months since he had traveled the dark county road 625 highway, and he had expected it to be many more years before he would ever find a reason to come back to this straight stretch of asphalt.  But here he was, and it had only been seventeen months.  Seventeen months since he had left home with no intention of ever returning.

And despite much confusion from local outsiders at the Duke boy's sudden disappearance, he knew exactly why he had left his small, shitty hometown back in 1982.  With a population of less than a thousand, Hawkins, Indiana was never going to grow.  It was a retirement town and nothing more. 

Hawkins was a place to die.  Not a place to live. 

Charlie always knew that there was never, ever going to be anything for him there.  From the moment he was born, everyone knew who he was and who he was going to be, even when he did not want them to.  He had always been trapped beneath a microscope, the world poised with bated breath, waiting to see how long it would take for him to fall.  Then again, microscopes worked both ways.  Charlie knew people, too.  And those people were the reason that he left Hawkins in the first place.

A long time ago, before the world reared its true, ugly colors, Charlie had tried to be the boy that everyone liked.  He had tried to be a friendly neighbor, even when the nearest house from his own was two miles down the dirt stretch that was the Duke family's driveway.  When Charlie was only eight years old, he would walk down that dirt stretch three times a day; once for breakfast, then for lunch, and finally for dinner.  He was always bringing food for their only neighbor, Winnie Maples.  She had recently lost her husband and had shown no signs of wanting to fend for herself after his passing, but Charlie still made sure she was okay when no one else would. 

So many years had passed since then.  Winnie Maples had to be older and smaller now, very likely showing signs of oldened age and nearing retirement.  Sometimes Charlie wondered if she was still teaching down in the Hawkins Middle School—maybe she was even teaching his younger brother.  Hopefully, she was still good to him despite his hardened and guarded heart; so many other teachers in the past had not cared to show the youngest Duke any kindness when he showed no interest in wanting to be kind in return.  Still, Charlie did not blame his little brother for his behavior.  He had learned it from him, after all.

Yet despite his own anger issues, Charlie slowly seemed to grow out of them.  After a while of care-taking his neighbor, though, he kind of grew up, too.  It was inevitable.  More and more often, Charlie found himself distracted and, if he was being completely honest, he slowly forgot about Winnie Maples.  Now, even as he sat alone in the driver's seat, heading straight for Hell, he was not even sure why he was thinking of her now.  Maybe it was because with the direction he was heading, he would have to pass her house eventually, even if it terrified him.

Later on, in Charlie's young life—when he gave up on being a good neighbor—he still, at least, tried to be a good friend.  For a while, he did a pretty good job with that, too, because everyone in the schools, whether they be upper and lower, knew his name—and not just his heavy, ill-fated last name.  They knew Charlie for being Charlie.  They respected him. 

Charlie.  Charlie, the boy you could tell your deepest secret to and not have to worry that he would tell the next person he saw.  Charlie, the boy you could go to if you wanted a good time.  Charlie, the boy who could help you with your math homework if you asked.

But then, slowly, Charlie became just Duke.  Duke, who let his lab partner fail Chemistry when he chose to not come back to school.  Duke, the boy who abandoned his all friends without a single goodbye.  Duke, the runaway who left without even a warning that anything had ever been wrong.

Duke, the asshole who cared only for himself.

Before Charlie dropped out of high school, he had once tried to be a good athlete and an even better student.  He had tried to stay in well with his teachers by always paying attention, asking questions when no one else would, and making sure that his assignments were always done to the best of his capability, and then turned in on time.  All the while he also played three sports: football, basketball, and baseball.  Despite it all, Charlie never got burnt out by the constant activities taking place in his life.  He was driven by a mad desire to be the best, inside and outside of the classroom.

And he was the best. 

Until he stopped doing his assignments.  Until he stopped coming to practice.  Until he sat out an entire basketball game because he was secretly drunk out of his mind.  Instead of feigning an illness that night, he had hoped the vomit on his breath would hide the strong scent of alcohol that had lingered down his throat. 

It had not worked, and that began his inevitable fall into the dark.

But in the end, before the final snap in Charlie's seemingly shattering sanity, he had tried to be his best where it mattered most.  When he no longer had neighbors, or friends, or teammates, or even classmates, he had still had family.  On that final night before he left Hawkins without a single look back, Charlie had tried one last time to be a good brother.  A good son.

From the moment that little Charlie came screaming into this world, he had always had a title to uphold.  He had been named after his father, Charles, after all, so it was only destined that he would follow in his footsteps.  And Charlie had wanted to—for a while.  He had wanted to be a respected and dependable man.  He had wanted to love someone the way his father had loved his mother.  He had wanted to raise a family of his own to one day be proud of.  He had wanted to be a strong worker like his father and bring pride to their name.

Charlie had wanted to be just like his father until Charles—or better known to the prying Hawkins community as Chuck—became everything that he ever feared to become in the eyes of someone that might have loved him.  Charlie had wanted to be just like his father until he watched Chuck take out a flask as his mother was lowered into the ground.  Charlie had wanted to follow in his father's footsteps until Chuck's footfalls became stumbled and messy, slurred and drunken. 

Charlie had wanted to be his father until Chuck hit him, and then Charlie hit him back.

Charlie had only ever let his father lay a hand on him once, but it had only ever taken one time for every tiny crack in the son's demeanor to come together as one.  One blow to his sharpened jaw was all that it took for Charlie's walls to come toppling down and release the beast that had been building inside of me since his mother's sudden death.  The beast Charlie had wanted to keep at bay.  The beast he had wanted to kill before it could kill him instead.

And so, rather than stay and allow himself to become as corrupted as his own father, Charlie left.  He did not let Chuck control him for a moment longer.  With a jaw still stinging and a throat threatening to close with sobs, Charlie had shoved his father so ferociously that he fell to the ground and did not get back up again.  Charlie stole his keys and his wallet, and then he walked out the front door and did not look back.  He got in his father's car and drove.  And drove.

He did not begin to cry until he remembered he still had a younger brother.  His baby brother.  Jason. 

Charlie had left him behind to fend against the wrath of their father and the ghost of their mother alone.  He was only eleven.  For a while, Charlie tried to convince himself that it might be all right.  That Jason should not quite understand yet what was happening, but Charlie could not fool himself.  Jason was smart, and there was a reason he had grown up with a guarded heart.  Without ever seeing his face or hearing his words, Charlie knew that Jason had accepted his abandonment.  He knew that Charlie never went back for him, even when his big brother had once promised to be the one to take him far away from Hawkins forever. 

Now, Charlie was living his dream while his little brother suffered in a nightmare.  He let his little brother continue to grow up in a torturous environment alone when neither his sister nor himself could be there to protect him.

"I'm sorry," Charlie whispered out, speaking to no one in particular.  His cracked voice echoed in front of him, dangling and taunting.  Pathetic.  If it were not for the silent radio, Charlie would not have even heard himself.

He did not know why he even bothered to say the apology aloud.  His brother—the only one worthy of hearing an apology at all—was not there to hear it. 

Then again, Charlie had to practice apologizing now in fear that he would never have the courage to say it to Jason's face.

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IT WAS JUST NEARING seven o'clock in the evening when Charlie finally took the familiar green exit off the highway and felt the car slow beneath him as he entered the outskirts of city boundaries.  The speed limit was much slower here, even though it was still a straight stretch.  As he looked out through the dusty windshield, he could see that the town was still alive with activity, but just barely.  Soon people would have to be indoors for curfew; even after the strange disappearance and rediscovery of that little boy last fall, the town had yet to truly settle back down into comfortable oblivion.

Charlie remembered seeing Hawkins make headlines in the paper back in 1983.  At the time, he could hardly believe it.  There was no way that his shitty hometown could be in a big-name newspaper all the way in New York.  At first glance, Charlie had thought it might have been the usual election of the town mayor making waves, but when he noticed such a young and innocent face on the front page of the paper, he stopped in his tracks and read the paper, even though he had not had the money to actually pay for it.

A year had passed since that incident.  Charlie did not remember the missing kid's name now.  In fact, he did not remember much of the entire story at all anymore.  All he can really remember was being so relieved that it was not the face of his brother, and that the headline was not one of a deceased child.

As Charlie continued to drive through the quiet downtown of Hawkins, he kept his head down and his eyes locked straight ahead.  Thankfully, the stoplight remained green, and he was able to pass the intersection with ease.  Charlie hated that the only way to navigate the town was through the main square.  There had never been any privacy in this town, and he was certain that would never change.  Too many eyes were always watching because people had nothing better to do.  In the back of his mind, Charlie wondered if he were to step out on the sidewalk now, how many would stare.

He hoped to not be here long enough to find out.

From the corner of his eye, his attention soon fell on the small and rundown sheriff's station.  Charlie knew that building all too well, primarily because he had picked his drunken father up from there one too many times.  He hoped Chuck was there now, rotting away in a cell; hell, maybe he was sharing a beer with the town's own alcoholic police chief, Jim Hopper.

In only ten minutes, Charlie's stomach began to drop as he reentered the eastern outskirts of Hawkins, now finding himself on the opposite side of the small town.  Turning down the long, familiar dirt drive, he quickly noticed how the Duke family mailbox has been knocked over and now lay sideways in a small ditch.  By the dust that had gathered on the reddened metal rims, Charlie could tell it had been this way for a long time.  Briefly, he wondered who had knocked it over: his father in a drunken state or his brother in a ferocious rage.

Winnie Maples' house rose quickly along the road not long after.  The gray and staining two-story home had not changed one bit.  The same blue beater car was even still parked in the driveway.  Likewise, the same yellow porch light was on, and so was the light in the living room; both lights had once beckoned to Charlie as he fled home and did not look back.  Now, a part of him wished he could stop at this house and stay here, rather than go down the remaining dead end.

Slowly, yet still somehow all too quickly, Charlie's car—or should he say his father's car—crawled over the Duke family's property line.  The boy's heart was pounding so heavily in his narrow chest that he could hear his own hot blood rushing in his ears as he pulled the car back into its rightful parking space on the front lawn.  Silence beckoned him as he shifted the gear into park.  He was almost surprised that there were no other vehicles around; surely his father had to have gotten another car in his old one's absence. 

Yet maybe the absence of a car meant that Chuck was gone.  Maybe he really was locked away at the sheriff's station.

Charlie's hands remained wrapped tightly around the steering wheel as he stared at his old childhood home.  It was a small, single-story brown shack that looked as if it were on the verge of collapsing in on itself.  The deadened lawn that surrounded the house was tangled with weeds and the dry grass grew high, reaching up in places to the top of the splintering porch that wrapped around the front of the house.  Charlie could feel a soft wind blow through the open driver's window, and he watched as the grass twirled carelessly and a wind chime echoed near the front porch swing.  From memory, he knew that there had once been at least six metal pipes on the chime, but now there were only two.  The remaining pipes littered the porch, mixing together with empty beer bottles that had likely been drained and then forgotten by his father.

Finally, after an unknown amount of time, Charlie forced himself to move.  He quietly and carefully pushed open the car door, all the while wincing at its slightest creak, and then allowed the door to fall achingly loud to a close.  The grass reached up past his ankles and tickled at his bare skin as he made his way towards the house.  He kept his eyes locked on the dirty windows, desperate to see any sign of movement from within.  He needed as much warning as he could get if he was going to have to make a sudden and quick escape out of there.

Charlie held his breath as he stepped onto the porch and approached the front door.  His arms hung stiffly at his sides and his teeth were clenched so tightly that if his tongue had been caught between them, it would be cut in half.  He wanted to raise his arm to knock, to at least attempt to be polite, but his body refused to move any further.  Charlie was frozen in place, and the only part of his entire body capable of any use left was his voice.

"I-Is anyone there?" He cautiously called out.  His voice hardly sounded loud enough.  No one could possibly hear him.  He can barely hear himself.  "Hello?  It's um . . . It's me."

There was no response.  In the quiet of the dying sun over his head, no movements within the shack could be heard.  The house was as silent as it was the night that he had left it.  Slowly, his gaze shifted downwards to the doorknob.  Charlie doubted that it was locked.  There was nothing worth stealing in the house; there never had been.  If there was anything of use on this property to him, it was the lone hammer that was placed idly on the porch swing.

In the following moments, Charlie did not know why he suddenly pick up the hammer because he was almost certain that he did not have that same fire within himself that he had once had that violent night seventeen months ago.  Charlie would not swing this weapon at anyone.  He was not dangerous.  He was not his father.

"Charlie?"

And then the world stopped.

The eldest Duke son's heart stopped beating in his chest and his blood froze to ice in his veins.  With one hand wrapped hesitantly around the chipped doorknob and the other clenched tightly around the rusted hammer, Charlie exhaled a timid breath that he had been holding much too long, and then slowly turned around to face the newfound, yet all-so familiar voice behind him.

Standing mere yards from him was his little brother, Jason.  Charlie could not help it when the hammer dropped from his shaking palm and crashed loudly to the wooden porch below.  Taking a careful step forward, his eyes widened in disbelief as he took in Jason's skinny and lanky form.  To Charlie's relief, his skinniness did not seem to be from a lack of food;  it was simply in the way he was made.  Even before nutrition had ever become an issue in the Duke household, Jason had always been so skinny, taking after their mother in the slim physique.  In only seventeen months' time, Jason looked so much different.  So much taller.  So much older.  Jason's face was now pointed, and his cheekbones were sharp, void of any remnants of a baby face; but his hazel eyes were still the same ones that Charlie had looked into when he was only four years old, holding his little brother in his arms for the first time whilst he sat on their mother's lap.  Those eyes could never change.

Warmth swirled in Charlie's heart at the sight of his younger brother and his feet suddenly, finally, yearned to move, but he ultimately held himself still this time.  He cannot intrude on Jason's space.  The two brothers were like ticking time bombs; it ran in the Duke blood.  One wrong move and they blow, obliterating everything in their wake.

"Uh . . ." He struggled then to find the words that would make the entire situation better.  "Hey, Jase."  He carefully raised an open hand in greeting, but the gesture was not reciprocated, so he immediately let his hand drop again.

Jason Duke did not respond.  In the silence between them, it was then that Charlie noticed his brother was not alone.  Sitting silently on a dirt bike behind Jason is a young, pretty girl with sleek brunette hair that nearly reached down to her waist.  She was staring boldly and openly at me, her eyes squinted in concentration, and Charlie was sure that if she could, she would most definitely be reading each of his thoughts.  Then she curtly looked away from his face and back to Jason.  She whispered something to him that Charlie's ears could not catch, and his brother tensed, but he was almost certain it was not from the young girl's words, but rather from the sight before him.

And then, without another word, Jason was breaking from his trance and was moving again.  He quickly returned to the dirt bike and swung his leg back over, settling into the space in front of the girl.  From this short distance, Charlie could see that his jaw was clenched, and tears danced in his guarded eyes.  Charlie's stomach dropped at the sight of seeing his little brother in such pain, all because of his own doing.

"Jason," He called out, but his voice was quickly lost in the revving of the dirt bike's engine.  "Wait."

Kicking up a cloud of dust, Jason rapidly spun the dirt bike back around, and then he was gone.  Trapped on the porch, Charlie watched the young Duke fly back down the dirt path in retreat.  His head was turned away, facing forward, but the girl still looked back a moment longer, watching and waiting.  For what she might be looking for, Charlie was not sure.

And then, as he watched his brother run away from him, he suddenly remembered why he got behind the wheel that day.  He remembered why he was back home, but now he also was also reminded that his return would not change anything.  He had only made matters worse.  He was not the one that was in desperate need of an escape anymore.  It was his little brother.  But it was already too late.

Charlie Duke let his head drop in shame. 

"Welcome home, Charlie," He muttered to himself in disgust.  It took everything to keep from reaching down to grab the hammer at his feet and bash his own brain in.

Welcome home.

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Ah, hey, hi! Hello! I am happy to introduce you to Jason's mysterious older brother, Charlie Duke! He's so troubled and so confused, and all that pain is only going to get worse. Perhaps, he might have been better off staying away, but now there is no escape.

Anyways, I hoped you enjoyed this first chapter! What do you think of Charlie? What do you hope to see from him? I cannot wait for you all to see what I have planned! So.... What are your thoughts regarding this story?? What do you hope to see in later chapters? I'd really love to hear some feedback!

I appreciate all votes and comments of feedback! They mean a lot to me! Thanks for reading!