Chapter Text
Steve was used to being the stupid one, he assumed he was usually the last one in the know. At least until it came to reading people. A skill of self preservation passed on by his mother. After all, reading people was half the game. The other half was staying unnoticeable. Unnoticeable to humans, that is.
It wasn’t a shocker when Reagan began passing new “anti-monster” legislation. It just meant to many others, like Steve and his mother, that they had to be even more careful than before. Play the game right and you won’t get brutally executed, or shoved in a zoo, or stuffed as a trophy, or turned into a five star meal, etc.
That’s not the point though. The point is, Steve thought it was common knowledge that he wasn’t completely human.
During his relationship with Nancy, Steve was still actively trying to hide his otherness. This may seem contradictory to his King Steve days, but there’s something to be said about hiding in plain sight. After spending all his time babysitting the kids he protected from Billy and figuring out they weren’t human either, with the exception of the Byers-Hopper clan, there wasn’t any need to. Later when Robin and Eddie joined the Hawkins alternate dimension creature slayer squad, he stopped pretending to be normal around them too.
Steve’s big mistake was thinking that all the others would recognize his behaviors as, well, not human.
He couldn’t fault them completely. What self-respecting siren would choose to live in bumfuck Indiana of all places. Also, it’s fair to assume that the people born and raised in bumfuck Indiana don’t even know or understand sirens all that well. Sirens as a whole tended to avoid humanity, with the exclusion of the occasional sailor snack. The hot spots for the population were in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean ocean, Polynesia, and strewn all across the not-so-empty stretches of ocean. There’s also the groups in the Bermuda Triangle, but they tend to be more snackish than the rest. Steve’s mom was originally from the coast of Italy, but like all pretty human sea-creatures she was plucked up by some rich man who wanted a wife.
Not everyone was completely unaware of Steve’s lineage. In all honesty, Mrs Wheeler was the first to know, unless those glances across the table at Wheeler dinners meant something else.
Hopper was the first to approach him. It was terrifying at first, considering that policing included the extra duty of monster hunting. Especially with the surprising amount of monsters that were in his adoptive daughters friend group. However, it’s not every day you find out that one of the people tasked with hunting you down was actively trying to keep the monster population hidden during his tenure as chief.
The Byers clan were the next to know. It was embarrassing how they found out, in his opinion. Sirens are usually in water all the time, they don’t have to worry about the complexities a sudden downpour brings to those stuck on land. Steve had thought it weird to confide in the human family of the guy your ex left you for, but Joyce made it hard not to. Being mothered by Joyce Byers was hardly the worst punishment. Hell, the incident helped Will to open up to Steve and for that lingering weirdness with Jonathan to fade away. Embarrassing, sure, but he doesn’t regret a single thing.
Sometime during Steve’s job at Scoops he told El. She related partly to the way monsters were treated, even as a human girl. Being an ex-government lab rat with superpowers tends to make someone feel like an outsider too. The summer after Vecna’s defeat and Hopper’s subsequent return from Russia, Steve began to take occasional day trips to Lover’s Lake with the Byers-Hopper clan. It’s not the ocean, but it works.
Max probably knew the second she and Steve made eye contact. Being a selkie in Indiana, she already knew a thing or two about being stolen away from the sea. With Dustin it was inevitable the satyr figured it out. The kid’s just so damn smart, and Steve’s never been a prouder pseudo-brother.
And Erica? It’s safe to assume she always knows.
As far as the others were concerned, they probably should’ve noticed by now. Except for Mike, of course. Steve didn’t really expect anything less from the incredibly unobservant middle Wheeler witch. The opposite could be said for Nancy - despite being a witch as well as a journalist, she wasn’t great at figuring out Steve that well. Werewolves aren’t that far removed from humans, so Steve thought it was fair to assume Robin would notice his blatant non-human behaviors. This assumption was clearly wrong.
Most surprisingly, his own goddamn boyfriend didn’t know. Granted that this relationship is still relatively new, but it’s almost glaringly obvious Eddie was unaware. When making out, Eddie had a tendency to cover up the gills on Steve’s neck with his hands. Now Steve knew Eddie was into a bit of S&M with that black hanky in his pocket, but the attempted strangulation was a bit weird. Given Steve can also breathe through his nose, it wasn’t that bad, and past Steve had chalked that up to Eddie having a neck fetish and moved on with his life. He was a vampire after all. There’s less of an excuse for not realizing that Eddie didn’t know when he questioned why Steve’s blood tasted like fish.
Steve’s not going to be the one to question Robin, Eddie and Nancy’s collective intelligence. Though, witnessing your friend bite off the live head of a fish casually in his house is more or less the equivalent of a bright neon Vegas sign that says “that’s not normal human behavior” with a giant arrow. However, it’s a little too late to go back in time and tell Nancy that eating 15 live shrimp is not a normal Italian thing. Let’s just say Steve didn’t expect the completely flabbergasted looks on their face after they threw him into the pool.