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They are in the midst of a heated many-hour campaign when Robin pops the question. Or, rather, the kids are. Steve has been unceremoniously booted from the game due to his frightening tendency to get the other players killed by slime monsters or quicksand or some other shit he doesn’t really understand.
He’d invited Robin along – well, actually, she’d mysteriously appeared at his house just as he was about to leave and demanded to come with – but since she has even less experience with Dungeons and Dragons than he does, she’s been relegated to the Byers’ comfiest and oldest armchair to watch a half dozen or so squabbling preteens argue about every minuscule decision. Shockingly, it appears to Steve that she’s having the time of her life.
“Advance!” Dustin shouts quite suddenly. Will, seated across from him, shakes his head quietly but emphatically. Mike looks about two seconds from exploding into dust and teenage angst.
“So,” Robin says, “you know a lot about hair, right.”
It’s more of a statement than a question, and an ominous one at that. “Uh, yeah,” Steve says.
“Cool,” Robin says. “So do you want to shave my head sometime?”
“What, like El?”
El looks up at the sound of her name. Robin gives her a little wave and receives the tiniest smile in response. “No, dingus,” she says. “I’m pretty sure her hair is longer than mine.”
Sometimes Steve forgets how new to this whole thing Robin is. He can’t fault her for not knowing how El looked when they first met her, back when she was Eleven and terrifying and all but nonverbal, but it’s jarring to think about Robin just… living her normal life while all that scary shit was going down.
“I mean like El back when she was a lab rat,” Steve clarifies. “No offense,” he says to El.
Mike snaps out of his D&D fugue long enough to add, “It was so they could stick electrodes on her head.”
“Thank you, peanut gallery,” Steve says.
“Okay,” Robin says. “Well. Creepy as that all is, uh, yeah. Pretty much.”
“I think it would look badass,” Max says.
“Bitchin’,” El supplies, nodding her head.
Steve shrugs. “Well, I just hope you’re prepared to lose an ear or two,” he says.
-
It turns out when Robin said “sometime,” what she meant was “as soon as possible,” which is how Steve ends up in the Byers’ tiny bathroom approximately a half hour later, Robin sitting on a rickety kitchen chair in front of him with an old, threadbare towel wrapped tight around her shoulders.
(Joyce had dug up a pair of clippers from somewhere in the recesses of the bathroom cupboard, decades-old dust layered thick over the rusted metal. “Will these work?” she had asked while Steve turned them over dubiously in his hands. “Perfect,” Robin had answered all-too-assuredly.
Steve, being the rational, level-headed adult he is, had taken it upon himself to sanitize them as thoroughly as possible after Joyce left the room.)
“So,” Robin says now, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “Have you ever done this before?”
“Oh, now you ask that,” Steve laughs.
She shrugs, towel bunching up around her neck. “You looked nervous.”
Steve flicks her in the ear. “I have never been nervous in my entire life,” he says.
“Even in the presence of evil Russians?” Robin laughs.
“Oh ha fucking ha, Miss Pees-Her-Pants,” Steve replies. “Very funny. Now turn around, I don’t want you peeking.”
Robin obeys, scooting the chair around so its legs squeak horrifically against the bathroom tile. She readjusts the towel on her shoulders and peers up at Steve, expectant.
Steve plugs in the clippers and switches them on, the buzz vibrating up his arms and shaking his shoulders to jelly. “Woah, okay,” he says. “Let’s get this show on the road, I guess.”
He moves to stand behind Robin, his back to the mirror. The clippers jump and growl in his hands like a wild thing with a mind of its own. When he presses them to the base of Robin’s skull, she can feel the vibrations in her teeth.
“Oh shit,” Robin says, teeth chattering ever so slightly. “That’s crazy.”
Steve mhms in reply, pushing the clippers up around the soft curve of Robin’s head in an experimental swipe. He doesn’t ask if she’s ready, doesn’t give any sort of warning, and Robin feels a surge of grateful affection for him. Steve trusts her judgment, ill-informed as it may be at times, in a way that not a single one of her other so-called “friends” ever has.
Robin closes her eyes and lets the buzzy, tingly feeling wash over her scalp as Steve slowly and methodically cuts away at her hair. For all her teasing, she really does trust him too. She suspects that his former friends never did either.
“Shit, Rob,” Steve says after what may have been five minutes or the better part of an hour. “We should’ve cut your hair a little first. I didn’t know it was so thick.”
Robin has been floating somewhere in the ether amidst the white noise of the clippers and the hazy, itchy sensation of her hair falling off her head and onto the floor, so she doesn’t have much to offer in response besides a thoughtful “Hmm.”
She can somehow still hear the kids over the deafening din of the clippers buzzing against her scalp – the clatter of dice against the floor, friendly shouting and cheering and laughing – and thinks she’s starting to understand why Steve hangs out with them all the time. This is the most peaceful she’s felt in weeks, cocooned in the sounds and sensations. She doesn’t know the last time she felt this... light. Unfettered.
“How’s it looking, hotshot?” she asks Steve.
He gives her a thumbs-up by curving his free arm around her body, hand flashing up right in front of her face. Robin laughs. “Both hands back on the wheel, mister.”
“Aye-aye captain,” Steve says, saluting with his hand against her forehead. “Almost done, I think.”
Robin can’t wait to feel it, can’t wait to run her hands all over the little prickly pieces and see if it feels as soft as she’s been imagining. She wonders what her mother will think. God, she wonders what everyone else in Hawkins will think. Robin feels a laugh bubble up in her throat before she chokes it down. She thinks the nerves are finally starting to catch up with her. Too late for that, she thinks.
Another ambiguous chunk of time later, Steve switches the clippers off and Robin startles at the sudden lack of sensation. The resulting silence is deafening in her ringing ears.
“All done,” Steve says, just this side of too loud, not yet adjusted to the quiet. “You wanna feel it or see it first?”
“Feel it,” Robin says without hesitation.
Steve whips the towel off her shoulders with a flourish. “All yours.” Robin reaches up as soon as her hands are free and, oh, it’s nothing like she imagined. “I feel like a carpet,” she says.
Steve laughs. “What the fuck.”
“You know,” Robin says, still running her palms back and forth across her scalp. “Soft when you touch it one way, and then scratchy when you go the other way.” Steve’s hands join hers, tentatively smoothing over what’s left of her hair.
“Oh,” he says. “Yeah, I can totally see that.”
“Right?!”
“That’s wild.”
They both keep up like that for a moment, running their hands back and forth over Robin’s head, until she remembers she hasn’t even seen herself yet. “Okay, okay,” Robin says. “Now turn me around so I can see your handiwork.”
“Hold on,” Steve says, coming to crouch in front of her with a little shaving brush. He brushes a few stray hairs off her shoulders and tickles the bristles across her nose. “Okay,” he says, stepping back. “Perfect.”
Robin’s heart starts to beat a little faster as she turns around in her chair to look in the mirror. She catches a glimpse of herself just as shouts erupt anew from the living room, another successful campaign completed – right on cue.
“Oh my god,” Robin says.
“Good or bad?” Steve asks.
“Good.” Robin leans forward to look at herself more closely. “Definitely good, oh my god.”
She’s a whole new person. Without her hair covering it, she can see more of her face than she’s ever seen in, like, her whole life. Fuck, she has cheekbones. Robin thinks, for the first time in a long time, that she actually looks beautiful. Powerful.
She looks like herself.
“Steve…” she says, quiet.
“I know, right.” He grins at her in the mirror, watching her take it all in. “It looks good, Rob.”
Robin stands up to hug him tightly. “Thank you,” she says into his shoulder. Steve hugs her back just as tightly.
“The ladies are gonna love it,” he says. Usually, that kind of sentence would make her flinch, the words curdling in her chest and settling heavy in her stomach. But Robin is a badass now, and nobody can tell her otherwise.
“Sure hope so,” she says. Steve laughs and Robin feels warm down to her toes.
-
Steve’s kids, incidentally, love the new look.