Chapter Text
There was only one thing worse than seeing the love of your life crushing hard on a dumb popular boy, and that was witnessing the love of your life crushing on your own brother.
Well, half-brother. Secret half-brother, if you wanted to be precise about it, and Robin absolutely did. It was awful enough to have one biological parent in common with that idiot. She would cling into that he was half-NOT her brother until the day he died. Preferably sooner than later. At least he and Tammy weren’t dating, because again Steve Harrington was a total idiot, and couldn’t even realize the most wonderful girl in Indiana was basically serving herself to him on a silver platter.
Robin was dreaming about lighters at night, now, fantasizing about the acrid smell of burnt hair and King Steve horrified screams as he looked in a mirror and discovered his new baldness.
The rational part of her mind was telling her to ignore the guy, because ending up in prison for setting someone on fire was not what she had planned for the future. And no, the fact that Steve Harrington was the secret half-brother from hell would not help her case in front of a jury.
The rational part of her mind was really hard to listen to when Harrington was fucking everywhere.
Every day she walked in the halls of Hawkins High and had the displeasure of seeing his dumb hair and his dumb face as he made a spectacle of himself. He talked too loud, flirted outrageously with Nancy the Priss Wheeler (another person she would have loved to never see again), and then with other girls (not Tammy, never Tammy, which was both a relief and terribly insulting). And he had somehow managed to find all her nice hiding spots for when everything was too much and she needed a breather away from the high school crowd. It was insane. If he wasn’t so clearly unaware of her existence, she would have called him a stalker.
So Robin was doing her best to avoid Harrington. She had stopped having an occasional lunch on the bleachers, because for some reason Harrington thought too much of himself to even eat with the plebe in the cafeteria and all but haunted to place at lunchtime. She found herself turning around in the halls at the sign of his ridiculous hairsprayed “mane” (and wasn’t it too short to even be called that? Munson the dealer had a mane albeit a really frizzy one. Harrington had a puffy mop at best), or every time she wanted to spend a few minutes on the roof and saw him already here.
Her school year turned into a terrible mix of classes, homework, ignoring that Tammy barely acknowledged her presence, homework, escaping the haunting presence of Harrington, and homework. She blinked and it was summer.
Summer was great, because she didn’t have to spend her day with dozens of other teenagers more popular than her, Harrington was nowhere to be seen, and she had time for things more intellectually advanced than dumb homework.
Summer was terrible, because Tammy was leaving, and today Robin was starting her summer job at a damn ice cream shop of all places.
The mall was too far from her house to walk, and taking the bus would make her wait too long before and after each shift. So she rode her bike to work, hoping no heatwave would hit Hawkins in the next two months. She arrived fifteen minutes early, ridden with anxiety. What if she had messed up the date, or the time of her first day? What if she started blabbering like an idiot and got fired on the spot?
She shook her head. No. She could do it. She just had to enter the shop.
“Oh, you’re here! Buckley right?” She nodded at the guy – her manager, she supposed – and extended her hand awkwardly. He shook it and threw her a nervous smile.
“I’m Daniel, but you can call me Dan! I’m your manager.”
“Hi Dan!” She said, trying and failing to not look weirded out.
Right. So.” He smiled again, somehow looking even more anxious. She could relate. “We’re just waiting for the other guy now. Your future coworker I mean. You’ll spend all of your shifts together. But don’t worry! ” He added quickly, “he’s a nice guy”. She nodded. For once she didn’t really want to fill the silence. Instead she looked at the manager, trying not to look like she was staring. He wasn’t very old, maybe early twenties, with blond hair and an unfortunate array of zits marring his otherwise nice face. He clearly wasn’t from Hawkins, which was a point in his favor. Maybe she could almost enjoy working here if the manager wasn’t an asshole.
After two minutes the silence started to get to her. After ten, she was ready to kill her mysterious late coworker.
“Oh!” Dan suddenly said. “There you are, right on time!”
Robin had been there for fifteen minutes. That guy was late. She took a deep breath. There was no need to antagonize her new coworker right away. Maybe he had run into some trouble on his way to the mall. Maybe he got lost. She could let it go. After all she was going to spend her whole summer working with this guy, she could be the bigger person. Start that shitty job without immediately antagonizing her new coworker.
She turned around.
“Hi!” Steve Harrington said, waving one hand at them.
Oh. So that was what Hell looked like.
Working with Steve Harrington should have been a nightmare. The second she had seen him standing there like an idiot in the middle of Scoops Ahoy, she had thought, “This is going to be the worst summer of my life, and I’ll kill him and end up in jail before July.”
But no. Because somehow, her coworker wasn’t King Steve. He wasn’t an arrogant asshole who thought himself better than everyone else and looked down on people. He didn’t act like a bully. He hadn’t even tried to – ew – ask her on a date.
Every day she walked into Scoops Ahoy to serve ice cream to the mass of Hawkins, and every day she left with the uneasy feeling that she had really, really misjudged Harrington.
Because Steve Harrington wasn’t really King Steve, the biggest asshole in the universe. Steve Harrington was a dork. He made stupid jokes all the time, flirted with all the girls that came into the shop and struck out majorly every single time. He had a gaggle of middle schooler sticking to him like glue and who had him wrapped around their collective little finger, and who received free ice cream and an illegal free access to the movies via their back door.
He was fun. And a bit silly.
It was maddening.
Right now he was on a break, which left Robin a good fifteen minutes to think about the crazy situation she was in, working in an ice cream shop with her secret half-brother who didn’t even know she was his secret half-sister, and somehow starting to develop something that looked more and more like a friendship with him.
She was playing with her scoop, pondering the meaning of life and siblinghood when the door opened. She immediately dropped her scoop and raised her head to great the customer.
The man who had just entered the store was tall, brown-haired, and had the attitude of someone who had majored in “feeling superior” in a very elitist college reserved to generational douchebags.
He was wearing an expensive suit, the kind that every adult man in Robin’s life only took out of their wardrobe for weddings, baptisms and funerals. But he wasn’t wearing it like them, perpetually fiddling with the sleeves and the collar. No. There was a habit there, one that could only be developed by wearing expensive clothes every day for decades. He wore that suit like jeans.
Robin swallowed around the knot in her throat. Rich men were a blight on earth and deserved to be eaten alive by raccoons, but she could manage. She wasn’t going to make herself small because a major asshole had deemed her little frozen corner of the mall good enough for him.
Launching at him the whole “ocean of savor” speech was absolutely out of the question, though. And she was certainly not going to say “Ahoy”.
“Hello, welcome to Scoo…”
“Where is Steven?” The man asked, clearly not caring about the fact he had just cut her mid-speech.
“I…” She tried to interject.
“He barely started two weeks ago and he’s already doing a half-assed job. Typical. I really hope this little idiot doesn’t have the audacity to come crying to me once he gets fired for his incompetence…
“Steve is taking his legally enforced pause.” She threw him her most hypocritical Scoops Ahoy smile and hide her shaking hands under the counter? “Would you like me to give him a message when he’s back on the clock?”
His look of disdain was even worse than principal Higgins’s. Robin bit her cheek.
“I don’t need to leave him a message, no. What are you, his secretary?” He scoffed. “Is he back there?” He asked, pointing at the door behind her.
“I’m not allowed to…”
He suddenly raised his voice. “Steven!”
Steve immediately appeared back behind the counter.
“Dad?” Steve’s voice was like nothing Robin had heard before, a poor attempt at casualness drowning under a shit ton of anxiety. “What are you doing here?”
This, Robin thought, is not King Steve. This is a weirdly nice, funny guy about to be bullied by his own father.
She swallowed down the reflex to curl up and hide that had been crawling up her throat since the man – Richard “Dick” Harrington, her goddamn biological father apparently – had entered the shop. Harr… Steve looked like a little kid right now, and she wasn’t going to let him face down that asshole alone. She took a step in his direction.
Steve’s whole demeanor immediately changed. Robin barely had the time to see his face close before he sidestepped her and put himself between Robin and his – -their? – father.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice hard and his shoulders squared.
“I wanted to make sure you weren’t being lazy at work, and I was right to do so. You need to take your responsibilities more seriously, Steven. If you can’t even manage to serve ice cream in that pathetic little shop without messing up, then how are you going to find a real job? Do you think money grows on trees, Steven?”
Steve opened his mouth to defend himself, but his father didn’t let him speak, raising his voice just enough to stop him without making a scene.
“I don’t want to hear your excuses. You’re already a terrible disappointment, don’t add to it by being disrespectful. Do you know what your mother’s friends are saying about you not being accepted in one single college?”
“I know, Dad.” Steve answered, stone faced.
The man snorted.
“You know how ashamed she is and you don’t even care. Typical. If it’s not girls or your car, you don’t care about anything, do you?”
“Excuse me, sir?” Robin’s heart was hammering in her chest. Steve’s father turned toward her, disdain written all over his face.
“Yes?” he asked.
“If you’re not going to buy, I’m gonna have to ask you to leave. This place is for paying customers only.”
He stared at her, visibly dumbfounded. He was clearly not accustomed to be treated like that by people he saw as inferior to him.
For a wild second, she imagined him buying a scoop of Rocky Road just to spit her.
But no. He scoffed. “I’ll leave you two to your… ice cream responsibilities, then.” He turned back toward Steve. “I’m leaving in a couple of hours with your mother. We should be back at the end of July. You’d better behave, Steven.”
“Yes, sir.”
Steve’s father nodded and left, without even looking at her.
Well.
“Are you okay?” she wanted to say. “Do you want to talk about?” Or maybe “I’m sorry you’re Dad is such an asshole.”
Sensible things to say in these kinds of circumstances. But no.
“I need to tell you something,” she blurted before she could make her mouth and her brain behave coherently.
Ah, shit. Well. Now she had to do it.
Steve’s face…Was he Steve forever, now? Could she stomach that? Actually, could she stomach calling him Harrington ever again?
He had been Harrington for so long, and his their father had been simply “Harrington’s dad”. But now that she had met the man, the name would forever be linked to that odious asshole in her mind. And the idea of using the same name for that tool and for the weirdly dorky jock she was starting to… tolerate? … Appreciate? … for the weirdly dorky jock she was starting to actually like left a sour taste in her mouth.
Alright. Steve it was.
Steve’s face turned apologetic.
“I’m sorry my dad is such an asshole,” he started, echoing her own thoughts, “I didn’t think he would show up here. He doesn’t really care about what I do most of the time, but he did make me take this job so…” He winced in a way that was tragically endearing. Robin was doomed to find him likable, apparently. “I should have seen it coming. Sorry, I guess?”
“Yeah, no. Don’t say sorry for this asshole.”
Steve opened his mouth, clearly ready to defend his father, then closed it. Good. That would have been a waste of spit.
“What do you want to tell me?” he asked instead.
“Not here.” She looked around, suddenly too aware of all the people still lingering in the mall. It was late, near closing time, but she still felt like a zoo animal in a little nautical-themed enclosure.
She grabbed his arm, then winced at her own action, and immediately let go. She hooked their elbows together instead and led him toward the back of the store. It was late, no one was going to try and steal ice cream. Or the register.
She still felt spied on.
“This way.”
“Wait, the freezer?” Steve complained.
“Yes.” She dragged him to the door. “Inside, now.”
“Alright, alright… let’s go inside the cold murder room.”
She pushed him inside and closed the door behind them. “Sit,” she told him, gesturing at a crate full of ice cream tubes.
He sat.
“Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die sitting on a crate of Rocky Road.”
She tilted her head to look at the crate. “It’s not Rocky Road, it’s U.S.S. Butterscotch.”
“Same difference. That’s a lame way to die.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” she huffed.
“Cool.”
Silence stretched out. A full minute passed. Robin was starting to regret all her life choices.
“So,” Steve said. “You needed to tell me something…?”
She took a deep breath.
So. When I was in middle school, I had this friend. Doesn’t matter who she is, we’re not friends anymore. But she got this boyfriend, and wouldn’t do anything with us anymore, and I ranted about it to my mom.
“Okay?”
“Don’t interrupt me. So I’m talking about it with my mom, cause I’m like, ten, and at ten my mom was basically my best friend.”
Steve made a soft sound. She ignored it.
“And she was like ‘Oh your friend has a boyfriend? You’re not dating anyone, right?’ And off course I wasn’t, and I told her so, and she told me…”
She looked back at Steve, only realizing now that she had been avoiding his eyes. He looked a bit lost, but attentive. Good enough for her. She braced herself, and spoke quickly.
And she told me I was never ever allowed to date Steve Harrington.”
“Hey!” He said, clearly deeply offended by her mom’s early distrust of his character.
“And I really didn’t care, you know, because…” She bit her tongue. Shit. She had been so lost in the deep sense of ice cream fellowship that she had nearly told Steve Harrington she was a lesbian. She took a shallow breath. Okay. Maybe throwing this kind of information to him wasn’t very clever. His earnest face was dangerous.
“Because again, I was maybe ten, and guys were all gross. So.”
“So?” Steve was still staring right at her with his big brown eyes, but he was also starting to shiver. They couldn’t stay in this freezer indefinitely.
“So I didn’t care, until we had the same class last year, you know, with Mrs. Click? And I remembered what my mom told me, and I went and asked her why.”
“Great. So, why does your mom think I’m undatable?” He sounded a bit offended, which was understandable. She hesitated. How do you ever tell a guy that you’re half-siblings??
“Your dad had an affair with my mom and she got pregnant. With me.”
… Like that, apparently. Okay. There, she had said it. She could have done it with more tact, but the words were out in the wind now, and Steve Harrington knew the truth. She stared at his bewildered face as silence stretched between them, and all she could hear was the loud staccato of her heart.
“I have a sister?” Steve finally whispered.
“Half-sister.” She said, more to fill the silence than anything.
Steve was staring, and staring, and his eyes were shining in a very peculiar way, and oh no, was he about to cry?
“You’re my sister,” he repeated, his voice wobbling.
Robin's eyes were burning. Somehow, in the years she had known about this, she had never really let herself fully understand what that link between them really meant.
“Yes,” she whispered back, “I’m your sister.”
He jumped on his feet, and a second later, she was engulfed in a bear hug. She tensed for a second, then hugged him back.
It was strange, very different than her parents’ hugs, and she found herself tightening her arms around Steve, feeling the desperation in his embrace and answering it in kind. It was not new to her, but now, clinging to Steve with all her strength, the situation hit her with all its might.
She had a brother.
Steve Harrington was her brother.